HOW DO YOU KNOW WHAT YOU KNOW?????????????? (My fourth speech which I delivered in toastmasters club)
I see in front of me bright and sunny faces radiating the waves of excitement. I assume the reason behind the excitement is nothing other than the. 1st ever Speech Evaluation Contest for the Orators Club…but are you all sure that Today is the speech evaluation contest??? HOW DO YOU KNOW?? If I ask you all in which conference room you are all sitting now….you will all answer unanimously “Gurukul”….But I ask you again…HOW DO YOU KNOW???
Ladies and gentlemen…
HOW DO YOU KNOW WHAT YOU KNOW??????????????
For 5-6 seconds there was an awkward silence right…I purposely did that? Do you want to know why???I did that because only then the evaluators while evaluating can say….The speaker’s deliberate pause at the beginning made the audience ponder on the topic!!...but again HOW DO I KNOW evaluators may say that???....I mean technically how I know...let us try to understand…1st time I attended a toastmaster’s session…I saw evaluators evaluating the speeches. The information of how the speech evaluation is done got stored in my memory in the form synaptic stimulation between neurons…one neuron sends an electrochemical signal to another neuron…and this firing of signals between the neurons creates a memory…2nd time I saw the way evaluation is done that signal got stronger. It became stronger and stronger each time I attended a toastmaster’s session and saw the evaluators doing their job. The information of “way of a evaluating a speech” got cemented in my brain and this process is something which is called as long term potentiation.
I repeat… long term potentiation. In similar ways there are many such memories and information stored in our brain…and this is the reason we know things…but let us see what we all know is really correct or not?
We have five senses right??…we can see, we can hear, we can smell, we can taste and we can touch. At this moment your mind is telling you that you are seeing me, you are listening to me. Again how do you know???…do you all trust your mind…???? If your answer yes! Please try this...Not now… at home…turn your tongue upside down. If can’t do it. Try to twist it with your fingers…then run your finger along the outer edge of your upside down tongue. your tongue will be able to feel your fingers but in the wrong place…I mean when you touching the left side which is now on the right side, you will feel as if you are touching the right side of the tongue….if you don’t believe me…just try it out yourself at your home or in washroom…and I bet you will believe me…so there are loopholes in our mind…it is not always showing us the real world….now let me ask you is this world real??...how do you know???
You will say. Come on. The world is out there in front of you. We live in earth which revolves around sun which is one many stars which belong to Milky Way galaxy. And there are millions, billions and trillions of galaxies in universe. It’s all proven using science, maths and what not. Proven right?? Do you know the definition of proven?? Look there established, accepted, proved, confirmed, tried, tested, checked, reliable, valid, definite, but not true…proven is not a synonym for true…it was once proven that vacuum means absolute vacuum…but last year through the discovery of so called god particle..higgs boson.. its proven that there is a higgs field everywhere…what was proven before and thought to be true is not true now....and like this why is it not possible that one day it will be proven that this world is not real…one thing that really exist is your mind and all these things around you, people around you can be just figments of your imagination…is it not possible??....what I am trying to explain you is something called as egocentric predicament or a more accurate word is solipsism. Solipsism is an idea that only one's own mind is sure to exist and anything outside one's own mind is unsure. The external world and other minds cannot be known, and might not exist outside the mind. And the more followed theory which we all believe is called realism i.e. that everything exists even if you don’t exist….world is independent of your mind. This theory is much simple, easy and not freaking theory like solipsism…and lets all be believers of realism…but we can never really know whether the world is real or not. Can we? Let me leave you all with this thought…
I won’t conclude my speech but I would like to thank toastmasters club and all of you because it is the only place where I can deliver such weird ideas in the form of speeches without people calling me mad.
Thank you
Hey!! This is awesome Deepthi!
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