In Touch with The Five Senses: Truth Or Deceit

The world we live in is so huge, and is ours to discover. We were born with a set of tools to touch, feel, see, hear, taste, and smell the world around us, but are those tools sufficient enough to establish an adequate map of the reality we live in? Do our senses report the truth to us? People have been building up their knowledge of the world by working their senses. The reason the sky is blue is because our eyes see it as blue. The reason we know honey is sweet is because we have tasted it before. It is difficult for us to accept the thought that our senses are deceiving us because we have been relying on nothing but them to roam around and obtain knowledge about everything around us. But, if the senses sometimes deceive us, does that mean we can know nothing? To investigate further in whether our senses are deceiving us or not, we have to look at their origin. 

The five senses function the way they do by design, and the creator, God, has given us the perfect set of tools to explore and get a touch of the world around us. As Descartes questions in his first meditation, “if God is supremely good and the source of truth”, how is it possible that his creation could turn out to be one of faulty and deceit? We have used our eyes to identify colors around us, our ears to distinguish our mother’s voice from our grandma’s, and our noses to enjoy a rose’s scent. All of these senses have helped us map out the world around us, and become familiar with its works of art, and that does not make it difficult, but impossible for us to deny the fact that our senses have been reporting anything but the truth. Nevertheless, looking at the idea from a different perspective shows us that our senses are mere receptors that have no filters or identifiers to what is truly there. For instance, a color blind perceives the green color as yellow, and thus is looking at the world from a totally different lens. In the same sense, blind people have enhanced hearing abilities, so they perceive sounds and vibrations in a much rigorous fashion than normal people. Descartes articulates this through a wonderful example where he considers a piece of wax. The honeycomb, as he describes, has a taste of honey, retains the scent of flowers, has a golden color, is made up of hexagonal shaped combs, and has a certain texture when felt. All these attributes are picked up by our senses, helping us identify this piece of wax as a honeycomb. Descartes then moves on to explaining how, if he put the wax by the fire, the taste is eliminated, the scent goes away, the color changes, the shape of the combs gets distorted, and the once solid wax now becomes liquid. So, according to our senses, this no longer identifies as a honeycomb based on its current attributes, yet the wax remains. This takes us to our second point, which aims to determine if the body and mind are related in any way, and a major question arises here, and that is, would Descartes have recognized the honeycomb if he just looked at the melted wax without knowing its previous form? 

Going back to the previous example of the wax before and after it was placed next to the fire; the senses just translated it to be identified as a honeycomb. However, did Descartes’ senses really identify it as a honeycomb after it melted, and even after its attributes were completely altered, or was it his brain? In this sense, his brain has learned that this wax was once a honeycomb, and the only way he would recognize the melted wax was through experience that was provided by the senses. In another brilliant example presented in the second mediation, Descartes describes a scene where he sees men crossing the square. How did he know they were men? It is his knowledge provided through past experiences that allowed him to identify what he’s seeing as walking men. Otherwise, if he were to rely solely on his senses, he would merely observe a couple of hats and coats in motion, nothing more nothing less. The brain in this case would be totally cut out of input without the senses, yet, at the same time, the senses didn’t provide false, rather vague information had the brain been absent to clarify that input. This, therefore, allows us to understand how our senses and our brains are an integral constitution within our body that allows us to get in touch with the world outside. 

In the journey of learning whether or not we are able to know everything or, as Descartes questions, know nothing, judging our senses are deceiving us, I think it is safe to say that it is the power of the brain and the senses combined that is allowing us to develop this knowledge and explore the world around us. It is the knowledge that developed to be what we refer to now as “common sense”, that we know the sky is blue, that fire burns, and that coats and hats in motion are actually walking men. But, if our senses are deceiving us in the first place, doesn’t that mean that our knowledge is totally false to begin with? Doesn’t it mean that we have been learning the world around us through a deceitful lens? Doesn’t that make us believe that we might seem like we know everything, while in fact we are null of knowledge?