Page 30 - Knowing The Truth

28 KNOWING THE TRUTH

signals communicated to us by our senses. Apart from the information of
those signals carried to the brain, we can never give an answer to
questions like, ''What is the reality of these things like?", "Does reality and
what we perceive have exactly the same quality?'' It's not possible to go
beyond our senses and get outside them. For this reason, throughout our
whole lives, the world we see in our brain is perceived by the sense
organs. Look, what the famous philosopher Bertrand Russell in his book
The Problems of Philosophy emphasizes in situations which results from
grappling with this problem.
Before we go farther it will be well to consider for a moment what it
is that we have discovered so far. It has appeared that, if we take any
common object of the sort that is supposed to be known by the
senses, what the senses immediately tell us is not the truth about the
object as it is apart from us, but only the truth about certain sense-
data which, so far as we can see, depend upon the relations between
us and the object. Thus what we directly see and feel is merely
'appearance', which we believe to be a sign of some 'reality' behind.
But if the reality is not what appears, have we any means of knowing
whether there is any reality at all? And if so, have we any means of
finding out what it is like? 3

AISHA: I can give an example. I'm studying in the computer
department, so this subject is a familiar one and I find the topic
interesting. In countries where technology is highly developed, a lot of
entertainment and education media have been created. And you know
computer programs make up a great part of it. These are able to create a
three-dimensional image in the brain. Today the principal aim of these 3-
D computer games, so fascinating for children, is to give the illusion of
real life in an imaginary setting by stimulating the five senses. Education
in some professions from NASA astronauts to architects and engineers is
done by the use of three dimensional imaging, called simulation. In
simulation flight training, a pilot can't tell the difference between real