TOK: Sir Arthur Eddington noted that the world is "a strange compound of external nature, mental imagery and inherited prejudice." How accurate a description is this of everyday experience?

Essay by KeirCollege, Undergraduate November 2005

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I think Arthur Eddington's notion of an ordinary view of the world is very accurate because when I open my eyes, what I can see is also external nature, mental imagery and inherited prejudice. For example, when it is time to eat something, I initially see the food (external nature), I am going to eat and then I decide whether I am going to eat it or not by using my taste, which is perception. For eating food, I am not sure that if we use mental imagery or not. We probably use it for imagining the taste by smelling the food. Therefore, I think Arthur Eddington's notion of an ordinary view of the world is very accurate and also what we initially see is external nature, then the next one is mental imagery and the last one is inherited prejudice. However, could it be something else is there?

I do not think there are more than external nature, mental imagery and inherited prejudice. For instance, I saw news such as the Indian earthquake happened on October 8th of 2005, I initially saw the fact that the earthquake actually happened in India and it killed about 2000 on October 8 (the number of people died now are over 70,000). After I knew that 2000 people died on that day, I imagined that there would be more people dying and this is because I knew the earthquake in Indonesia was the same. And my inherited prejudice was that I thought 2,000 people were not enough to die by such a big earthquake and also, I thought that this is a natural disaster, so this kind of terrible thing should happen sometimes. Maybe some people thought in different way. They probably thought it was very terrible and they...