“Our reality is what we see.”

— Shawn Martin, Math Teacher

As human beings, our dominant sense is sight. We have three different kinds of photo-receptors in our eyes. That means we have three colors to mix and create all the colorful images we see. Dogs have two kinds. They see what a color blind human would see.

If a person was to comment to a dog about how red a red apple is, they’d both agree that it is pretty red. What’s strange here isn’t the talking dog. It’s the fact that dogs can’t see frequencies from 430–480 THz, which is red. Dogs see brown apples.

A human with un-diagnosed red color-blindness would see the same, and without realizing it, would think that apples look the same color as a tree trunk. This would all seem perfectly normal until that person experienced seeing the red section of the spectrum. This leads to the next question: since we all think what we see is normal, and color-blind people think what they see is normal, how do I know that I’m not color blind? How do I know if what see as normal is actually what’s going on beyond my eyes?

The thing is, nobody knows what’s happening beyond our minds besides what we perceive, at least not yet. We could be experiencing completely different sensations and not know it. We only know the world as what we see, hear, feel etc.

Jason Mormolstein, an English teacher at Niles North, says: “Reality as we know it goes beyond our understanding. We have our senses but there are other things that we can’t comprehend. Although I think that there can be other things in the universe, my reality is what I can observe. Since there is no way to know then we just have to accept what’s on front of us.”

Individually, we only sense a small part of the world, that leads to teacher William Shermach’s conclusion that “the world is what we see, plus smell and all our senses. Reality is the sum total of all our perceptions.”

My thoughts are that there’s also a possibility that there is nothing beyond our minds. We interpret our senses as the world around us, but we could be creating these senses. Senses are only just electrical signals our body sends to our brain, so why wouldn’t it be possible to create these signals out of nothing, like a dream? How would we know the difference?

It’s still the same answer: nobody knows yet; but here are some student opinions:

“I think if we couldn’t feel than there would be this big nothing and we would basically be in our own imagination, stuck in our own mind,” says senior Allen Nou.

Senior Naram Bithyou thinks that “life is only as we know it. Everyone is in their own universe.”

Senior Tyler Naelgas believes that “if we weren’t living in this reality, we would be able to make up our own reality. Like living in our mind.”

Descartes, a European philosopher, said: ” I think, therefore I am.” Now, if I were to go even deeper, I could say that I don’t think, that something else is creating my thoughts, that I am puppet or a character in a book.

Some believe in alternate realities like senior Martyna Zukowska’s “If this weren’t reality, we would have more freedom than we do right now.” or senior Jonathan Reyes’s spiritual reply that “The world is like a quarter. There’s good and evil and they’re the same. We just have to take the good with the bad.” Since we are all in the dark about this topic, everybody’s idea is a real possibility.

Consider all the philosophies out there, my point is to not take things for granted. Think and grow. The reason science has been able to explain the universes phenomenons better and become more popular than other beliefs is that it isn’t fixed. The only rule that’s set is that nothing is certain.