A little tidbit about me and my relationship with knowledge...
What is knowledge?
Knowledge is the point where who we are and the world around us combine to create certainties. Knowledge can be widely accepted or can simply be a personal truth. Knowledge is absolutely up for debate and evolves at a much faster rate than our species.
In terms of IB's Ways of Knowing, I generally gravitate towards memory, reason, imagination, and emotion for the Ways of Knowing I use to shape my view of the world. When considering memory as a Way of Knowing, I find that I often use what I have learned from my own past experiences as well as those of others when I am considering the world. One example of this is how I perceive danger. In the past, I had an altercation involving my sister and a water fountain, resulting in me losing blood. From that experience, I now know that running with scissors is fine so long as you are careful around water fountains (just kidding kids: don’t run with scissors, but do be careful around water fountains). Reason is also a way of knowing that I often favour. It is my personal belief that reason is one of the most evolved human instincts. Though many refuse to listen to it (humour credit Jamie Nagel), reason allows us to not only make decisions on food or survival, but also to develop intelligent reactions to situations that would have never occurred before the invention of the wheel. I find that I often initially react to a situation with nothing but passion and emotion. It is with reason, though, (after several minutes of course) that I can step back, and fully consider the situation from many different angles (ex. mitochondria transplanting: from criticising one view point to the opposite). In terms of imagination, it has been an integral part of my life since my childhood that helped me become more that I could ever be in this world and come to accept this world for what it is- a round ball of dirt (humour credit to Jamie Nagel). I find that the imagination has made our world what it is today. Somebody sometime had to dream up all of the technology and beliefs that we rely upon today. After all, how would we function without our IPhones? The last Way of Knowing upon which I have shaped my view of the world is emotion. Like with reason and imagination, emotions are an integral part of what makes us humans. Not just humans, but people. Emotions stop us from making “reasonable decisions”, like decimating half of the world’s population to enable it to sustain the human race, and help us make human choices and human mistakes. Despite what it has done to the world, I still treasure greed (more the everyday kind of greed, but you must take the good with the bad): it is one piece in the beautiful mess that is humanity. In my life, an eternity in seventeen years, the infinite wisdom that I have accumulated has led me to believe that emotions can make or break our experience as human beings. The way that we interpret our emotions and carry on after them makes us who we are. Fear, sadness, and anger can destroy a person, or the fire and ice of thse emotions can forge a human being.
When considering IB’s Areas of Knowledge, I tend to focus on ethics, religion, human sciences, and history the most. These are also the areas that I tend to enjoy most. As you may have determined from my Ways of Knowing paragraph, I really enjoy human beings and studying what makes us what we are in more than a physical sense. I find that all of these areas of knowledge go together and are interconnected in many ways. Wars have been waged over religious beliefs throughout history, people living today judge yesterday’s actions through their own ethical lenses, through the study of psychology among other human sciences, people have learned so much about the human mind and humanity itself. While I enjoy the other areas of knowledge, I neither have the background knowledge or a sufficient level of comfort in those subjects to be able to argue and debate with the same level of passion as I do in the more human areas of knowledge. In regards to art, I truly enjoy the arts and the opportunity to be artistic and creative, but I have always felt inferior in that area and am therefore- unfortunately- less comfortable contributing to a conversation about the arts. I am working on breaking out of my shell, but I still have a ways to go.
On that note, I am required to discuss the challenges I am expecting while looking at TOK. The greatest challenges that I will face while studying TOK will be looking at things through various different perspectives, communicating my ideas, and being comfortable with my own ideas. Out of my challenges, communicating my ideas will be my easiest challenge to face and (hopefully) overcome. While I am very vocal about my ideas, I find that I am often unable to communicate exactly what I mean with these cursed English human words. To overcome this challenge, I will continue to speak in class. I will consider my words carefully as the situation permits before I speak them, and, in some cases I will even write them down to keep my ideas clear and on track. The most important personal challenge as an IB TOK student is to be able to look at a situation from multiple perspectives. As mentioned in my Ways of Knowing paragraph, my initial reactions to situations often entail pure in-the-moment passion and emotion rather than the consideration of all aspects of the problem. While I do not wish to change my initial self-based reaction, I do wish to become better at considering issues from other points of view. During the TOK portion of my IB experience, I will try to draw a mental spider web chart in which I will organize opposing viewpoints. The final challenge that I will work to overcome during my study of TOK will be the acceptance of my own ideas. In my classes, or any venue where I debate or discuss ideas for that matter, I always find myself listening to the ideas of others and thinking “why can I not think like that?” or “why can I not be that smart?” Self-confidence is something that everyone has to face at one point or another in their lives; I am no exception to this rule. I believe that TOK is a personal experience above all other things, so I intend to reap everything it has to offer. During TOK, inside and outside of class, I will consider my ideas and explore myself as a person. I will learn what I currently believe, the root of those beliefs, and how I can apply those beliefs to TOK and my life.