Wednesday, September 16, 2009

Response to Banach's ideas

The main thing that comes to mind while reading Banach's ideas on reality somewhat resembles Plato's allegory of the cave. For those who don't know, Plato's allegory of the cave shows a group of cavemen chained to the wall. All they can see is a shadow against the wall(they don't know it's actually a shadow of another object) and they percieve that as reality. One day, one of the cavemen somehow becomes free and begins to make his way through the cave. He comes to learn that the shadow is really just a shadow of another object. The Caveman continue until he finally sees the exit and comes to see the real world. After exploring he returns to tell his fellow cavemen. However since his fellow cavemen are still stuck to the wall, they become hostile towards him because the chained cavemen still believe that the shadow is reality and that the unchained caveman is crazy.

To connect it back to Banach's ideas, it appears as if he's saying that we're dependent on our senses to make sense of the world, basically, our reality. However when everyone's form of reality is challenged, we'd think that person is crazy and doesn't know what they're talking about according to Plato's allegory of the cave. In a sense, this occurs all the time and often the cause of conflict. And since we're an a species with a great mind(or so it seems), the human race's perception of the world varies from person to person with a few similarities between groups of individuals. But do to the effects as shown as Plato's allegory of the cave, various ideas can almost never be agreed on. But perhaps if all our ideas would become one then we might have a closer definition of our world.

Perhaps we can relate back to chemical structure. You can draw a chemical structure various ways on a piece of paper. However our world exists to us in the third dimension so the true visual of the chemical structure is mearly a mix of all of those. Like a the problems with the chemical structure, reality is actually a mix of everyone's and everything perception of it. In other words, everyone and everything has some truth in their perceptions of reality but at the same time there's also some lie.

2 comments:

  1. Bryam- I like how you connected Banach's ideas to Plato's theory, it was an interesting connection.

    So you were basically saying that we depend on our own senses to interpret the world in the ways that we do.

    Connecting to a conversation that we had in Ms. Chen's class back in 9th grade when we were learning about the eye. We connected the human eye to other animal's eyes, they view the world completely differently than we do just in a physical visual way because their senses vary from ours, there could be so many things in this world that we cannot simply simply because of how our eyes are created, affecting our ideas of what reality is and how we see the world through our own eyes.

    To develop your ideas maybe you could make the connections you made a little more clear, it was a little confusing for me so it would help if it was more defined.

    This post makes me wonder how other people view the world, how one perspective can vary from another and how it affects their thought proccess which prevents us from understanding each other in a clear way.

    This was a very interesting post. -Sandy

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  2. I thought your connections to Plato's allegory about the cave were outstanding. It shows that you have a deeper outstanding of the text by connecting to something we've learned in the past. Also, the connection to Plato is very valid by saying we must view the world through our own senses.

    I also think for you to make such a vivid connection to another complicated text as you did, it further enhances Banach's ideas. It made me realize that there are a countless amount of ways to view this text just as there are countless amount of ways for us to view the world. It's simply mind boggling for me to see it first hand so quickly since we've been reading about it all week.

    I think for you to develop your ideas more, you should make include an opinion in your post and try to make it clear. You had wonderful ideas but most of them were just begging for some personal input from you.

    This post was as interesting as they come. It made me reflect and realize how we all view things differently on a smaller scale. Banach is absolutely right. Our minds are truly our own and Bryam, my good man, you made this apparent.

    - Brandon S.

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