The 3 Theories of Reality are:
a.) Common sense realism -
It can be summarized as 'what you see is what is there'. It essentially says that our common senses give us a direct awareness of objects as the way they are.
However, since our ability to perceive things comes from our senses and it can't always be truthful, many reject this theory.
b.) Scientific realism -
This theory states that the world exists as an independent reality, but it is very different from the way we perceive it. The meaning can simply be referred to as 'atoms in the void'. Physicist Sir Arthur Eddington explains this in a clear way. He described how a chair, which according to common sense realism would have color, extension, and be comparatively permanent and substantial, would instead in scientific realism look like atoms buzzing around in that sparsely scattered emptiness called the table. Instead of perceiving things through your senses, you perceive them as atoms moving around in empty space.
c.) Phenomenalism -
Phenomenalism states that matter is the "permanent possibility of sensation" and that it is illogical to say that the world exists independent of our experience with it. It can be generalized to mean that we can only know about the world from the way we perceive it, and that we have no right to claim things about the ultimate reality of the world. Philosopher George Berkeley summarized it simply as "to be is to be perceived".
Answering questions based on Sense of Perception:
Q1. How does your mood affect your perception of things?
Your mood has a big influence on the way you perceive things around you. We often associate things with the way it evokes emotion within us. We might view certain things to be 'nice' or 'bad' depending on our past experiences and the emotions that accompany it, and this might influence our overall perception of the thing. For example, our perception of color, specifically our favorite color, is influenced from the emotions it evokes within us and the experiences we associate with it. The world's favorite color is known to be blue, and the reasoning done by psychologists behind this is that many people view the color blue with a positive emotion due to them associating the color with positive experiences in their lives. They might have been exposed to mostly positive things about the color blue, such as the sea or the sky, and thus associated blue with a happy emotion. This is also a reason why people's color choices keep on changing, because their perceptions over a specific color is influenced by their mood.
Q2. What is a more reliable source of knowledge, perception or reason?
From my interpretation on both the topics, I believe that reason is more of a reliable source of knowledge. While we utilize our sense and perception to gain knowledge on many things around us, we must be aware that our senses can be easily tricked, and that our perception is often based on our experiences with certain things, and therefore becoming subjective. The empirical nature of perception makes it less reliable due to the variability, whereas reasoning is more consistent, and is often supported with hard evidence. Reasoning aims to provide knowledge on an issue with evidence rather than providing knowledge based on experience.
Q3. Should we trust eye-witness evidence?
This question comes down to how reliable our senses are. Although we depend on our senses, especially the visual information we get from our eyes, to guide us around all the time, there are certain limitations of the sense. Optical illusions are good example of how the brain does not interpret the visual information it gets correctly and creates a discrepancy between it. However, there is a study that portrays how visual working memory can influence your perception on things. Visual working memory refers to our ability to hold and retain short amounts of information for a limited time. It was found that brain mechanisms responsible for visual working memory and our perception are closely linked, and so the small amount of information we retain from our visual working memory can influence our perception. In this case of eye-witness testimony, the brief glimpse of a suspect that was retained in the visual working memory can get altered, and so would their perception of who exactly was the suspect. This can lead the eye-witness to make an incorrect choice and cause someone to go to prison. Therefore, we must treat eye-witness evidence with caution, and perhaps look for alternate and more accurate ways to find a culprit.
Q4. How does the way we describe something affect the way we see it?
Many might not notice it, but language has the power to influence our thoughts and our perception on things. When something is regarded using negative words, we are inclined to perceive it in a negative light until we ourselves change the way we speak about it. Not only that, but languages overall affect our personalities and our way of interpretation. Frame shifting is a psychological phenomena where multilingual speakers tend to switch between personalities as they switch between languages, and subjects were shown to have different interpretations of the same thing in the two different languages.
Resources:
https://www.theguardian.com/science/neurophilosophy/2011/aug/17/memory-contaminates-perception
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