Stephanie's+Project


 * Stephanie Rice

My truth project follows the idea that an absolute, universal truth does not exist. But rather, each person lives by their own unique personal truth. Each one of us lives in a world where we are the center of our own realities. Therefore, all of our opinions and views of life are going to be greatly skewed by personal experiences and what we are see and are told. However, all of these experiences skew what is at the core: our personal truths. When you eliminate all of the bias and events that sway our beliefs I feel that you can find a single personal truth that you know exists. However, this is basically impossible seeing that in order to go through life you have to listen to other people's opinions on subjects and have to go through both sad and happy events that change your opinions. However, I still believe that the ultimate goal is to eliminate any bias from your thoughts to achieve a personal truth. I agree with Spinoza's assertions that humans have the capacity to make choices based on reason, and I think that a person's personal truth is based almost wholly on reason itself. So any philosopher that agrees with the idea of "truth by reason" would correspond to my project.

In my demonstration I had a teddy bear with headphones and sunglasses on. My goal was to show the class that every day we are persuaded to do things and we hear and watch current events and see and hear everybody else's opinions before our own. So, by the time each of us draws our own opinions they are basically a big conglomeration of what our families, peers, and newscasters have been telling us. It is very difficult to sit down and come up with a conclusion on a subject without hearing or seeing what everyone else has to say about it first. Therefore, if you lived your whole life not listening to anyone else or seeing anything, then you would only truly know your own thoughts.

So, one idea for my project is to maybe have a place where people are blindfolded and given headphones for two minutes and I ask them to think about anything in their life that they think they have made a decision about based solely on their own opinions and thoughts. Then I would have them write it down and try to show them where they were influenced or how their opinion could have been biased, which further proves just how hard it is to make a truly uninfluenced decision. **