The Truman Show Q3

Question 3 - 5. “There is no more truth out there than in this created world.” This quote was said by the shows director just before Truman left the dome. What point do you think he was trying to make?

The director is trying to say that in our reality, or what we believe is reality, people lie, cheat and put up illusions as much as a world in which the entire population is actors. Everyone is always putting on a face, pretending to be someone they are not. He wants to explain to Truman, that there is no escape from lies and deciet. No one is completely honest and truthful and that is something that is true in every reality we are presented with. Honesty itself is an illusion, how can someone be truly honest without even knowing themselves what they really think. Often people fool their own minds to think one way, when the truth is, deep down they feel another way about something. Sometimes the person doesn't even realise themselves that what they say is a lie. Not to mention, we only know thinks shallowly, we do not truly know everything we say is true. We believe it is true, but if you say to someone, "I met this beautiful lady the other day." That person may seem beautiful to you, but maybe to others she is not. Or, "Tom is not a liar" perhaps you do not believe that person is a liar, but they may be. Lies are everywhere, and that is just the way the world is, so is a world filled with actors, told to follow certain roles, really all that different from a world where everyone is putting on a different face?

The Truman Show Q2

Question 2 - 3. “We accept the reality of the world with which we are presented”
Bearing in mind this quote from the film, what does this film teach us about perception? Consider our discussions surrounding the concept of illusion.

This film clearly shows that we accept the reality that we are told is true. Our only way to really learn and understand is by what others teach us of our reality, meaning that if we are told the world is square, unless we find out for some other reason it is round, we will believe it is square. Much as we believe that currently there are no other planets with life in our solar system as we are told that, from other scientists. How do we know this? Our reality may be something quite different. We often believe in certain religions, as we are told them from our parents and families. Because we are raised to believe that this is what reality is, that is often how we end up believing ourselves. We do not know whether or not the world really is how it is taught in classrooms, or whether what we see around us is all there is, but because that is what we are told to believe, we are less inclined to question it. Humans are naturally social creatures, we travel in packs, and carry the herd mentality. A popular saying is "if all your friends were to jump off a cliff, would you follow them?". Now we know that we should not follow them, in that particular example, but what if it was, everyone in the world believes that that cliff is solid ground, therefore they all jump off it, if you are told to believe that that is solid ground, would you not go there too? If you truly believed that there was no cliff and you were safe, you would not hesitate to go past it. That is what is meant by that quote. We believe what we are told, and what we can see, although it would be difficult to not believe in everything we were told and saw. Then we would not know what to believe at all.

The Truman Show Q1

'The Truman Show' is about a man who's entire life is really a controlled television show, and he just doesn't know it. His world is a set and everyone around him, including his wife and best friend, is an actor. Nothing is real and he has no idea, until...

Question 1 - 2. Give three examples from the film where Truman’s perception of reality is deliberately manipulated.

1) When Truman starts to fall for the rouge actress and she begins to stir up the director's plans of a romance with a pre-planned actress as well as gives Truman hints on the falsity of his world, she is constantly whisked away to remove the threat, first by being taken away during a dance, and the second time being removed on the beach by her 'father' who says she is mentally ill. The producers of the Truman Show want to be able to continue to make Truman not question his surroundings, which means that anyone who does not fit into his perception of the world, must be removed before he realises the truth. They get rid of the actress in order to prevent Truman from realizing the truth of his reality.

2) The second time is when Truman starts to try to leave his world, so at first he goes to a travel agency, and they tell him there are no flights available for months. Then he goes to the bus station and the bus breaks down as soon as he goes on. Finally he gets fed up with everything and tries to escape by car, with his panicking wife in shotgun. Cars move in the way, his wife constantly tries to deter him and a nuclear plant apparently leaks at the end of the road. Truman ends up running into a forest but the police officers stop him and make him unconscious. Eventually his wife tells him that he is getting mentally ill, and the police officers were just trying to make him safe. In reality, the producers just want to prevent Truman from attempting to leave his world, in order to maintain the illusion of his reality.

3) The third time Truman's perception is deliberately manipulated is when his 'father' dies in the sea. A natural explorer, Truman insists his father takes him out into the water on a sailboat. A storm hits, which was already prepared, and his father drifts off, seeming dead to Truman. That leaves Truman with a fear of open water, which leads to further containing him in his prison of reality, as he lives on an island. He is too scared to pass the water, so he ends up being trapped by the limits of the island. The producers also bring his father back, saying he never died, in order to distract Truman from his recent string of escapes. This ends up backfiring, as Truman sees loses his fear of water, therefore allowing him to end up escaping on boat. The whole concept of his fathers death was just an invention to prevent Truman from leaving his reality, using his own fears to ground him to his world.

Alternate Reality Movies

Movies often touch on alternate reality and conspiracy theories to intrigue the audience, a good example of this is "Stranger than Fiction" starring Will Ferrell.

This movie is about a man who lives a boring life, as an accountant, who is meticulous and always follows a routine, and then starts hearing a strange narrative omnipotent voice speaking as he does actions. The voice says that he will die soon, so he hurries and gets the help of a narrative expert and ends up realising that his entire life has been dictated and written by an author who always kills off her main characters at the end of the book. His whole life is at the mercy of a lady who writes trageties. He finds the author and convinces her to re-write the ending, which saves his life and allows him to be with the girl he loves, who he only met due to the narrator's influence.

This movie just shows how our reality is a fragile thing, and can often be changed. If someone was in control of your life, it could be ended on a whim or the best things in the world could happen to you for no reason whatsoever. This can be worrying as who really wants to think that their life balances under the control of someone they cannot influence or speak to, although in this movie, it was possible for the character to escape from the author and write his own path.

It's Reality, Or Is It?

My gosh these really cryptic questions are giving me a headache but nonetheless, what is reality for specific groups of people, why do they believe that is the real way things are and why is it so different? TOK is one of those classes where all you ever get is more and more questions, and never get a straight answer, or at least, not an answer you can be satisfied with, so I will try to explain as much as I can from an unbiased third party about the beliefs of some particular 'cultures'. Of course, if I misrepresent them, please by all means leave a comment for me to revise a statement, as I cannot truly know the belief systems of a 'society' which I am not a part of and therefore cannot give a proper perspective on the matter. But I will try...

Drugs -
What is the purpose of taking mind-altering and reality-changing drugs? Some people believe that doing such things can give them a heightened sense of reality or an escape from reality. Is what you see in a drug-haze what is really happening, or is it instead a distortion of your senses which changes your perspective so all you really see is the mind's altered look on things that you partially imagine as well as see. Although I have never taken drugs myself, I have been told that hallucinogenics can give strange visions and make reality into something totally different. Does that mean that those visions are the real deal? I guess no one really knows...

Spiritualism -
Beliefs such as karma, deja vu, in some cases reincarnation, and other such beliefs sometimes connected to religions, could be the reality, we just haven't realized it yet. How do you know that karma really doesn't exist? You really can never know whether something you cannot see, hear, smell, touch, taste, or feel can really be there. But some people do believe in such things, which is a different reality from what scientists and some religious leaders believe.

Esotericism -
The belief in spirits, ghosts, and mystical powers that can be transferred into objects may seem far-fetched to a level-headed realist, but there are those that believe that there is a lot more in the world than what we can just see and mystical forces are working all around us. Another unprovable belief (for the most part) but still a possibility as our senses limit how much we can actually notice and process in the world. Too much is slipping between the cracks of our minuscule knowledge.

Those are just three main relative beliefs but there are many more, each provided a different perspective on reality, mostly based on something we cannot use our senses to interact with. It really shows that if there was more in the world than what we can actually sense, we would remain oblivious. Who knows, perhaps something totally different than the illusion of reality we constantly grasp is hiding in the blanks we cannot look at. We may miss something really important if we focus on just what we can sense. But if we spend too much time looking for another reality which we cannot access with our human senses, we will just waste time that we should be living, if living is real at all. ;) Blows your mind doesn't it???

Ghosts? True or False??

To say you believe in ghosts is a very loaded statement. To believe in ghosts, you must first believe there is life after death. That itself is something I am personally unsure of. Hypothetically, if there was life after death, why would spirits stay on the earth, how would that work, and what would happen to them. Those are all really complicated questions which all have to be thought of before you can say that you truly believe in ghosts. I personally think that there are things you cannot explain, whether those are ghosts or simply failures of perception and senses, I am unsure.

One instance is this; when I was about 8 or 9 years old, I clearly remember a time, when I was staying at a neighbours house, who was several years older than me. She had an old Ouija board, and if you know what those are, those are boards with a small arrow which points at letters on the board to speak to the dead. I didn't believe in such things at the time, but she put it on the ground, we did not touch the board, as this one was supposed to work without it, but we asked it a simple question, "What is around us?". It answered by spelling out a-c-h-a-i-r. Then we asked "What else?" and it put a-d-o-l-l. now, beside my friend, was a rocking chair and on top of it was an old doll. We got so afraid that we made her put away the board and left. She tried to come up with excuses afterwards, like there were magnets and cameras in the board, but it was completely irrational now, looking back on it. I still cannot come up with a proper explanation for it.

Another paranormal experience was done to a close friend of mine and her family. They had purchased an old house that was centuries old, and had once been on a cemetery. She said that the place had often been used as a hospital as well many years after it was built, during the war, for soldiers. As you can tell, it was a perfect mixture for the paranormal. She stayed there with her family for a while and said that there were several times where they could see people, in older clothes, who seemed like they were real and right in front of them, but those people were gone before they could check. Another time they would wake up in the middle of the night and find people in their bedrooms, walking through walls and doors, not paying attention to them. My friend had a little sister and apparently, this one guy would go into her room every night, and hover over the bed. Then parents could even sometimes see the person, walking near the room. These people were very normal, and didn't look like ghosts, except for their strange behavior and odd clothes. My friend swore that this was true and see had seen it with her own eyes, and that was why they never used that house anymore, and instead rented it out to thrill seekers and tourists in England.

One other story, that my mother still does not feel comfortable telling me all about, but has mentioned briefly several times, was, when she was a young child, she had practically watched her great uncle die in front of her. When she had visited him, he had been near death, and you could apparently see his life flashing before his eyes. He had been very sick with some sort of lung disease, and was bed ridden. He died shortly after she last saw him and the following events happened afterwards. My mother begun getting sick, she had strange dreams, and kept seeing her uncle around her room, his footsteps in the night, and she constantly felt a doll he had given her when she was young, was with her in the bed when it was not. She started having trouble breathing, getting ill and having a hard time sleeping, and the doctors said she was showing signs of the same illness her great uncle died from, but that had been caused by constant smoking, and my mother was too young to be showing signs of it. Then she ended up getting a physic, who was a friend of a friend in this case, and had heard about this, to tell her her great uncle was possessing her. My grandmother called a priest to speak with my mother, and he gave her a blessing, and told her that she needed to make peace with the ghost. She spent sometime reflecting and 'talking' to the ghost of her great uncle, and she remembers feeling a wave of calm go over her, and she never got bothered by the ghost again.

One of the same things, although much more negatively, happened to my mother's childhood friend. Her friend started to hear voices and act like a different person when she reached high school. Eventually everyone could hear voices speaking to the girl, and she became a totally different person when possessed. Her parents tried everything, physics and priests, but nothing could fully cure the girl. She ended up having to go to an asylum because she became too dangerous to be around. Everyone was frightened that she was possessed by a ghost.

Still, even with all this happening to people around me and to me as well, I still have a hard time believing that there are ghosts among us.

When it comes to ghosts in movies, I think that movies are just different interpretations of ghosts and fears. There is no right or wrong on something that no one is sure that exists. Each person has a different perspective on what a ghost really is, and therefore we just have to accept each person's individual views and enjoy the movie for what it is, fiction!

Response To "Plato's Allegory of the Cave"

If you have ever read Plato's "Allegory of the Cave", you would know that it is about a group of prisoners, who, from infancy, have been chained to a wall, with the only source of 'life' is moving shadows on the wall of the cave, caused by a fire which makes shadows of puppets appear. And that, one day a prisoner escapes from his chains and leaves the cave, and when exiting it, is overwhelmed by the 3D shapes and life around him, illuminated by the sun. He realises that there is more to life than all he knew when he was in the cave, and, overjoyed by his discovery, returns to the other prisoners to share the news. The prisoners, shocked and ignorant, do not believe in a more complicated life then they have had and kill the prisoner for
his 'insanity'.

When reading this story, you cannot help but think, wow, this could actually happen. If you take the literal meanings of the actual story, and turn them into metaphors, you can really see what Plato was trying to say. I can only assume that he wanted the people who read this to realize that you cannot fully trust your senses and those who are ignorant usually do not believe they are ignorant and are happy with their own reality. But is that reality a real reality? What he means is that we should be open to new ideas and not shut them out because they are different than we first believed. It is basically all about what TOK is about, to think about thinking and how we think, and try to make our thinking broader and more accepting and to always question our realities and to decide for ourselves, what our realities really are.


We can often see the examples of societies or cultures condeming those who have come to know a different reality than we do. Religion is probably the most common, as there is no solid proof of existance for every religion, and therefore, it relies solely on our faith, therefore making it a personal issue when others question it. Jesus Christ (in Christian religions) was considered a prophet and son of God, but was stoned to death by the Jews, who believed that the prophet of God had yet to appear. Often, great geniuses were condemned by others until there was solid proof of their theories, and sometimes even after that. Leonardo Da Vinci created amazing flying machine diagrams which were later discovered to be possible, as well as several studies on human anatomy, which were only truly appreciated after his death. So many people suffer from percequetion from others not believing that reality could be so much different than how they have been brought up to believe. Only with time and study are these discoveries truly noticed and accepted. It really isn't all that fair!

Humans are giving the gift (or curse) of consious thought. If we did not use it, it would truly be a shame and waste. We can learn so much from others as well as ourselves and it is always important to allow other opinions into our way of thinking, to become more balanced and knowledgable. Another point I have is that we can never truly trust our senses, but if we didn't trust them a bit, what could we trust at all? We have to understand that sometimes our senses can be fooled, but still know that at least some of what we sense is our own reality, and if a new reality is made, we should accept that and move on then.

Beautiful Person Q3

My third task is:
Has your concept of beauty changed as you have grown?

When I was younger, beauty was not quite a physical factor, I believed that those who were beautiful were people that I really cared about, or people I admired. Some friends that I had, who would seem plain looking from a neutral perspective, I really thought looked beautiful because they had such confidence or a kind way of carrying themselves. It became a lot different as I grew older although not quite. But now I also take into account the looks of a person when I describe them as beautiful. Simply because the people and society that I have surrounded myself with all believe that beauty is more physical than mental. I may not fully agree but it is true that some of my naivity on the subject has gone and I have been forced to face reality in the fact that beauty is about the look of a person as well as personality. But especially on first empressions, the look of a person is by far the most important, despite how much I disagree with that outlook.

Beautiful Person Q2

The second task is:
Does the concept of beauty change over time? Space? Culture?

Beauty has always seemed to change as time passes, in fact, long ago, certain fashionable looks would seem completely ridiculous now as some of our ideal 'beautiful' looks would seem truly ugly to those people. Up till about a century ago, a woman was supposed to have a solid figure, some meat on the bones was considered a sign of being healthy and wealthy enough to recieve a lot of food, therefore it was one of the most desirable looks (for men to be chubby was also desirable although the contrast to now is not nearly as strong). Nowadays, a person slightly overweight is considered uglier than a skinny person with the same facial features or look. In fact, supermodels, people who are well reknown for being 'beautiful' are so skinny that it becomes seriously dangerous and unhealthy. Women never become truly happy with their body type or look because the look is so focused on a virtually impossible body shape which only a few can naturally obtain. It almost becomes ridiculous!

It also depends on where you are in the world, for what is the ideal, as mentioned in my previous post, societies in a country will appreciate rare looks for their particular race rather than the more common looks simply because they are different and less reoccuring. In a lot of cultures, where the hair is dark, lighter hair is a sign of beauty, while in some cultures where the hair is lighter, sometimes a darker hair tone is better appreciated and more sought after. Once again, humans always seem to want what they cant have and appreciate looks that they would not be able to suit on themselves.

Cultures also play a large part in this as well, for some cultures believe that certain looks are 'healthier' or 'better looking' like fairer skin for some while other prefer tans and bronze coloured skins. It all depend on the cultural preferences as well as the previously mentioned factors.

Beautiful Person Q1

The first task is :
Describe the characteristics of a beautiful person.

Wow. That really is a hard question to ask. There are so many different levels of beauty. I could think of three different main levels that I take into account to describe a beautiful person just when i first meet someone. First, I take a look at how they look physically, I try to see whether that person has a pretty face, nice eyes, etc. The second thing I look at is how that person comes across in their actions and way of speaking, are they charismatic, do they have something unique about them that interests me personally? The third thing that I look at is their personality. I truly cannot like someone or think of them as beautiful unless they really have a good personality, or at least, are not cruel or mean. That to me, distorts the person's looks to the point that it really doesn't matter how physically pretty they are or charismatic, and just makes them seem disgusting and hard to be around. But even so, how do you really decide whether some one's personality is good or bad, or looks are pretty or not.

Part of the problem is that everyone has their own idea of beauty, physical and emotional, and it depends partially on the culture and that own person's preferences. I really like people with a nice bone structure in their face, soft hair (black is personally my favourite, although it does depend on the skin tone) and lovely eyes (i am a sucker for dark blue eyes ;) ) and that partially has to do with how i was brought up, surprisingly, in Canada, those looks are hard to find. But most of it has to do with the fact that those looks would never suit me, so i appreciate it more on someone who it does, because that would not look good on me. That is another factor that is important. People always seem to want what they cannot have, therefore, they rarely choose looks or appearances similar to their own. My brunette friends are always saying that they wish they were blond. My blond friends always complain that black hair looks nicest. People with brown eyes always want blue or green, people with green eyes, say that brown or blue looks better. The cycle goes on. Straight-haired people always seem to like curly hair and vice-versa. Really, it is interesting whenever I have a variety of people surrounding me and the topic goes to looks, everyone seems to be jealous of each other, and not appreciate their own looks.
Which is why, it is really hard for a large group of very different people to decide out of another group of varying people, which is really "beautiful". In fact, there is a reality show based on that purpose where a group of people in a house try to fill challenges to last the longest, and all the tasks are to fit features of being an overally beautiful person. These qualities that they test range from personality, to looks, to perspectives. Overall, the show seems pretty stupid, the original message is meaningful. It really all depends on what you are looking for in a person.