What Is the Truth? A Guide to Rhetorical Analysis
Hanson Wen, Year 10, Peel House
Is There a ‘Real World’? Humans are curious animals who seek the truth. Our nature has pushed us to develop science, religion, literature, and other fields of study. But at times our curiosity fails to identify inaccuracies and discern what is real. Without recognising what is real, we may rely on unfounded information in our everyday decision making. Sometimes, world leaders make this mistake too. For example, Ronald Reagan, the 40th president of the United States, frequently relied on astrology in his decision making. Before exploring the importance of seeking the truth, we must first define it. I believe that, in reality, we can never find the so-called truth. Are we even sure this is the real world? For all we know, we could be living in the Matrix, or in an illusion broadcasted into our brains by an evil scientist. There are infinite possibilities of ‘real worlds’ that we could be in. There is no definitive way of knowing the truth about something, as there is no definitive starting point: we do not know what is real. What we do
know is how to reach conclusions from observations, though these still may not be the full truth. Imagine this: A Goldfish Scientist is in your room watching you bounce a ball. You wake up every morning at 6:00 and bounce a ball for 30 minutes. The Goldfish Scientist observes this phenomenon for 3 months and concludes that this is yet another natural law, like how the earth rotates around the sun, that you will wake up every day at 6:00 and bounce a ball for 30 minutes. He also discovers that depending on where he positions himself in the goldfish bowl, the movement of your ball changes. We know this is because of light refraction in the water, but the Goldfish Scientist does not. He therefore formulates a highly complex equation of ball movement and believes this is the truth, and that all movement beyond the bowl follows this equation. Now, suppose one day you did not wake up as usual. This would break the foundations of truth for this goldfish, and as a result, the entire system of science that he built around his daily observations would have to be reconstructed. The Goldfish Scientist represents
how we humans observe the world around us and make conclusions from them. We think that what we observe and the equations we formulate are the ‘truth’, but there are infinite possibilities. We could be in a computer simulation, where a small malfunction could break all the fundamentals of physics that we know of. We only say that our world is physical because all our gathered evidence points to it, but that does not negate the possibility of us being in a simulation. The ‘truth’ (or theory) that we believe in is merely a truth which has a better explanation and stronger supporting evidence than all of the other theories: The heliocentric theory has a better explanation of the orbits of the planets we observe than the geocentric theory; Einstein's relativity theory has a better explanation of the ether theory and why we cannot find ether, because it doesn't exist; the modern medical system has a better explanation of the body than humorism and the Chinese medical theory of yin-yang. In theory, however, any of these theories can be disproved and replaced if we discover better ones.
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