My personal experiences have lead me to feel differently about things than others do. This really stood out to me in my early teens when alcohol and sex became more and more concurrent. All my friends embraced it as normal teenage culture; I on the other hand had grown up in a very religious household and had been told to stay away from immoral activities, and as a result viewed these worldly acts in a very different way to the majority of my peers. Furthermore, I have noticed that my day depends greatly on the way I feel when I wake up.
If something happens in the morning that compels me to feel angry or frustrated, I will be aggravated by things that would not normally affect me, and vice versa for happiness or joy. Once I realised this effect that my emotion had on me, I also realised that I could choose how to feel. For example, I did poorly on my physics exam last term and instead of letting it bring me down, I saw it as an opportunity to improve which gave me a great deal of drive. As mentioned earlier, by stating that the knowledge claim is true, I am also stating that everything in this universe has one true state.
A counter claim to this idea is the question of whether or not some things would exist without human bias. For instance, the previously mentioned perceptual set depends on an individual’s past experiences; therefore an image cannot exist without bias, which indicates that things do not possess an absolute, true form. Furthermore, I have also learnt that humans possess innate qualities, with emotion being one of them. I moved from Japan to Australia when I was seven and noticed that the way people feel and show their emotions is exactly the same despite the very different cultures.
Babies cry when they are sad and smile when they are happy, which indicates that the same emotions are felt amongst all humans despite their personal experiences, upbringing, culture or lack thereof. We see and understand things not as they are but as we are rings true in the case of emotion as a way of knowing but not sense perception, in my personal opinion. I believe that we can only utilize our senses objectively as everyone sees, hears, feels, smells and tastes in the exact same way.
This being said, there are rare cases present in which the five senses can be utilized in order to reveal a subjective truth about an individual. Perception set was used as an example. Emotion on the other hand is very subjective as we as humans do not all feel the same way about ‘things. ‘ Furthermore, we as the knower can choose to feel a certain way in many instances which again, is a very personal or subjective way of ‘understanding and seeing things. ‘ However, natural science has suggested that emotions are innate qualities and all human’s possess the same ones. ??
