Through the readings this week, we saw an evolution of ideas in the history of psychology, driven mainly by neurological and sensational research, and the dawn of the Enlightenment. We moved from Descartes and an emphasis on rationalism to John Locke and his emphasis on empiricism. I agree with Locke that we are probably "blank slates" when we are born and that our environment and the people around us fill in the blank spaces in our minds. He argued that we have no original ideas, that all our knowledge comes from experience, from sensation and reflection. But Locke believed that we have innate faculties, such as our senses and our brain, that allow us to learn about the world, and these faculties are "provided by God in ensuring that man would have the ability to gain knowledge about His good works," (Petryszak, 37). In this way, I don't think that Locke and Descartes are all that different. Descartes, in his meditations, wanted to find a foundation for our entire body of knowledge. He claimed that our senses can be deceived, and therefore we cannot trust them, and if we cannot trust the information of our senses, what can't know anything, not even that we exist. But we think and being aware of this thinking mind is how we know that we must exist, and this mind and existence are from God. Descartes and Locke both emphasize our thinking capacities as a way to gain knowledge about the world, and both acknowledged God as the root of this. So I don't think it's necessarily fair to say that Locke was denying the Church or religion because he wasn't. And I think it's easy to share Descartes' suspicion of our sensations and our knowledge of the physical world. We read about psychophysics and Fechner's insight that the physical world and the psychological world are not the same, but that the relationship can be measured. We do not necessarily experience the world as it is. As with a JND, and difference in the physical world does not exactly translate as a psychological experience. While we have the same senses, our specific sensation sensitivities and physical make-up differ such that our experience of the world is not quite the same. Although we all live in the same world, we do not experience it in the same way. In this way, we cannot trust our senses to give us an objective, or common, view of the world. This makes me wonder if there truly an objective reality. I mean, I know in my head that there is, but how different is it from the one that we experience?