Knower p2

“It is not because the truth is too difficult to see that we make mistakes... we make mistakes because the easiest and most comfortable course for us is to seek insight where it accords with our emotions - especially selfish ones.”

"Alexander Solzhenitsyn Quotes." Find the Famous Quotes You Need, ThinkExist.com Quotations. Web. 06 Jan. 2011. <http://thinkexist.com/quotes/alexander_solzhenitsyn/>.

In ToK we started off discussing which way of knowing was more convincing to each of us(the students). I picked Reason. And a majority of the class did as well. About a fourth picked Perception, and four students picked Emotion. Nobody picked Language. We have spent a great deal of time on Reason.My word was Emotion. I gave my two definitions and the sources. A kid that sits next to me get really annoyed when people say "Like when I like...like... you know, like experienced this situation it like was like really like... like it had a great impact on me". Unfortunately we have about five kids in the class that do that, and they all love to talk. So this kid to distract himself brought in a book to read. One of the teachers(we have two for this class) told him to put it away when she walked by very politely, and he did so, but you could tell that he was getting annoyed with the "Likers". We have talked about different dimensions(all the way up to ten) and how religion has an effect on knowing, and knowing on religion. Today we were finishing(trying to anyways) our definitions of the Areas of Knowledge, Ways of Knowing, and Linking Questions/Words. Mine was Emotion.

Whomever had Experience sparked a large conversation that lasted a while and got me thinking. One of my teachers has a degree in Anthropology and she said that culture is defined as something learned. By that token I drew other comments saying that we learn by experience.

When you say experience you don’t really mean experience. It's not truly what you think it is. Is it you learn from experience, or you know from experience, or is it knowing, or learning that leads to experience for example, what is experience and can we "know" anything without having experience, and if it actually fits in an area of knowledge, but not a way of knowing what is its significance?

The reason why I quoted "know" is because I had to come up with 3 statements that disproved the statement "I am the knower."(which my teachers claim to be true, and our assignment was to come up with 3 statements disproving it) The question is what do we know, and maybe we know everything, but on the flip side we know everything. The only issue with that is it leaves a gray area to be said maybe we only know certain things, and we are back to square one. If we take that and then analyze it we may not know what we actually know, while we don't know what we don't know, or know what we don’t know. But how we can relate or even translate one word that actually has a different meaning to another individual is something that can't accurately be done. Just as we can't translate emotions across species.

An animal can have a feeling, but how we are to define it as relative among humans shouldn't transfer across lines of different understanding, and how different species may have different neural and nervous systems and thus, that different ways of translating how an animal might experience an emotion, but to what effect and how influential they are on the individual's actions. If we as human beings can't even accurately translate or transfer the meaning of one person's emotions to another then why should it be acceptable to do so with other organisms?