Humans of Allen: Sophie Reyes

Theory of Knowledge is basically a class built on the premise of “What do we know, and how do we know we know it?” So, essentially, it’s a lot of metacognition and philosophy. I wasn’t as excited by the concept of the theory of knowledge when I was a junior—I had a different idea about it, and I had a lot of different goals regarding the class. I didn’t think I was going to enjoy thinking about philosophy in such a structured way because there’s areas of knowledge and ways of knowing. How do you take the entirety of the idea of human consciousness and cognition and try to streamline it into only two methods of assessing information? But honestly, it’s opened up a lot of different avenues. I’ve become someone who questions the idea of the truth a lot. I now am an adherent to the belief that the truth avoids simplicity, and because it avoids simplicity, it must be so infinitely complex. For someone who wants to be a storyteller professionally, that idea of the truth building upon other layers of itself when it comes to creating knowledge is…It’s really exciting, actually. It’s started to affect a lot of the ways I think, and it’s reached out into the way I do my work and how I talk and handle with other people, it’s subtly impactful.