Just looking for other answers to this.
How do you know that you know anything? How do you know you can rely on your senses? (As in: I know the rock exists because I can see the rock. How do you know you can see it?)
If knowledge is reliant upon our senses and reasoning (which it is), and we can't know for sure that our senses are reasoning are valid, then how can we know anything?
So is all knowledge based on faith?
If all knowledge is based on faith, then is science reliable?
If all knowledge is based on faith, then what about ACTUAL faith? Why is it so illogical?
Solipsism vs Nihilism
Solipsism claims that we know our own mind exists, where Nihilism claims we don't know that anything exists.
Your thoughts?
Original from reddit
Not all knowledge is based on faith. The flaw in this chain comes early on.
Look, I'm a Stoic, I know that my senses and the inputs they give me are flawed and those flaws are out of my control. I know that my mind is flawed and those flaws are out of my control. I also know that they're the only tools I have to perceive the world and I have to do my best with them.
BUT.
Confidence intervals are a thing. It's not a binary between the poles of "I know for certain" and "I don't know at all". We can say, "I am confident, based on multiple observations by myself and the reported observations of others, that the sun will rise tomorrow, water boils at the same temperature adjusting for altitude, and the traits of the parents and grandparents can predict the traits of the offspring via Punnett squares."
The virtue of the scientific method is that the experiments must be repeatable. We don't have to take it on faith. We can repeat variations of the experiment to raise or lower our confidence to acceptable levels.
I know my universe is at least internally consistent from experience. I think therefore I am after all.
Not all science relies on our senses but it does rely on our interpretation of results which is why we often use meta analysis looking at multiple studies to try to control for as much human bias as possible.
The top comment currently is about null hypothesis, you don't prove your assertion you disprove it under specific measured circumstances, it's really hard to prove the existence of, well anything really, but we can at fairly reliably show we are at minimum sharing a simulation as people can have the same experiences of events.
how do you know your senses are valid and not solipsistic
if I'm the only real person on earth and everyone else is NPCs that means my senses are even more reliable and valid
and senses are real bc they're reproducible
I see john get cut and he says owie
I get cut and it also feels like owietherefore if john shoots himself and dies I can expect that to do the same thing
unless you're saying that my very conception of john, my visual image of him, is all solipsistic and derived from my own mental dreamworld, as are everything else in my life. In that case I would say damn I'm heckin smart and got a big brain. I used to think about this when I was little and I would imagine myself sitting on a big rock in space, and I'd wake up and realize that everything (my family friends etc) were all a dream, and the reality was just me, this moonrock I was sitting on, and the black galaxy around me
I don't need to validate my disbelief in a made-up being. Science works. Math works. Good enough.
I think the idea of "truth" and "reality" is being reified here, and by reifying the concept of reality you divorce it from reality. Like, you create this abstract notion of what reality is, you put it on another plane, a kind of Platonic concept of what reality is. And at that point it's no longer reality that you're actually talking about because you've separated the concept of reality from reality.
Reality is what it is and it exists outside the mind since the mind experiences reality, and knowing is an abstracted model of reality. The abstracted model is not reality itself but a model of reality, and that model of reality contains the concept of reality which is what you're talking about here but that concept of reality is not reality.
I think that my senses can be backed up by empirical and reproducible evidence.
If i dont want to burn my hand, I can measure the objects temperature. Even if I don't trust my reasoning and senses, a hot object will still burn me. I could have no senses to perceive the outside world, and I would still be burned by that object.
The reason I know I will get burned is not based on an absolute knowledge of how hot that object is, but that I and others have been burned before. The evidence is reproducible and most everyone agrees that a hot object will burn them.
Although I agree that knowledge is based on faith, not all faith are equal. That's why testing/defying our current knowledge is the basis of science.
So is all knowledge based on faith?
Yes.
If all knowledge is based on faith, then is science reliable?
Reliable for what? It might not solve the issue of the objective/subjective gap, but unless you want to live as if you actually are a brain in a jar or whatever there's no denying the scientific method gets results.
If all knowledge is based on faith, then what about ACTUAL faith? Why is it so illogical?
How is "actual" faith different from faith?
First of all, sorry for bad english. I found this post from browsing google because of curiosity and suddenly stumbled upon this post. I think I might have the same question albeit with a bit difference in which i wonder if all knowledge is based on faith. I mean how can we so sure about our sense? Have you ever done empirical test to validate your senses? This become even more weird when we include subjective experience. I don't know. Maybe it was just that I found people's answers to these questions interesting.
I do not think, we can guarantee our senses to sense reality. But what distinguishes science from faith to me, is ultimately a principle known as Occam's Razor.
Essentially, it says: When trying to find an explanation for something, prefer the explanation that requires fewer assumptions.So, in regards to our senses sensing things, there's two possible explanations:
- What they sense is real.
- Or what they sense is some imagination, simulation etc..
And with 2), you have to make the assumption that your entire perception is somehow being imagined/simulated and you presumably have some other form of existence, too. Because well, if you wouldn't exist, why would you be imagining things?
So, on the basis of that, 1) just seems less far-fetched. You're just perceiving what's real.
If we ever find evidence that this isn't actually the case, then of course, we should change our minds, but until then, there's no point in seriously considering 2).It can be argued that Occam's Razor isn't inherently guaranteed either. My preference for it certainly comes from what I have perceived.
But well, if there's a religion that assumes everything exists in all places all the time, and that every time I lift my finger when typing, there's an invisible coffee table there with Santa, the tooth fairy, Big Foot and a pink space unicorn, I would be down for that religion.Things that I've had to come to grips with when I figure out that it was okay to be an atheist.
Human beings are not logical or rational. We can do logic and rationalizations but we are not fundamentally logical or rational creatures.
Its okay to think things and not have some ironclad sentential logically correct argument as to why you think a thing. When a kid is asked by somebody "Why did you do that?" and the kid answers "I don't know" and the person keeps pushing for the kid to have some cause/effect conforming answer, its the person who's wrong not the kid.
I mean, my eyes are shit and getting worse by the year. My brain has had issues remembering certain things and processing human speech into meaning for as long as I've been an adult. I've been in enough situations where I suddenly realize that I have no actual active memory of how I got here and yet the world still functioned. It just became something that I no longer felt any pressure or need to justify. Things can just be (maybe I'm wrong, maybe I'm right, maybe I'm in some inbetween state) and I still exist.
I once tripped hard and believed I died. When I came out from the trip, I still had no evidence I hadn't finished tripping, and am actually still dying as my mind fires its dying circuits in my deathbed.
But that doubt interferes with my ability to live a normal live which I am used to and strive for, so I ignore the doubt, mostly. I check myself with little tests now and then.
Same with other existential doubts in general. If you want some official names of philosophies, Nagel's absurdism, Buddhism, Vedanta, and maybe pragmatism would be applicable. Basically: don't kill yourself with doubt, keep on living with some sensibility in your senses, though keep a curious mind to keep yourself in check now and then.