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.
is all knowledge based on faith
It’s based on assumption, not faith. If we can trust our senses, and if things will continue to be as they have been, then the things we are learning have value. As long as you can recognize that everything could in theory end or completely change at any moment, it’s not blind belief.
Observation isn’t reliable, that’s why science depends on falsifiability: I have observed things and drawn conclusions from those observations Here is an experiment that, given a specific outcome, will prove me wrong, please do your best to show that my conclusions do NOT adhere to your observations.
How do you know that you know anything? How do you know you can rely on your senses?
Consistency and predictability. My only access to the world is through my senses, and my ability to navigate that world depends on my ability to understand and predict things in it.
The consistency of that model means it’s an amazingly good model of the way the world really is.
It’s an amazingly good model of the way the world behaves.
You could turn Pacman into a linear game with branching and looping paths instead of a grid, and still be able to play. You’ve just removed the invalid options to turn left or right when up and down are the only option. But both are still not accurate models of the world as it is which is instructions running on a processor.
Our models are imperfect, because ultimately, they are simply models of the real thing. And the fact that the model is useful and consistently effective means that despite being imperfect, they’re still pretty close.
Half of dozen thiests have asked me this same question pretending to be athiests.
Everything in science is a model. Clockwork that function like the reality and produces similar results, so we can make predictions about the reality, but it’s still a model. You can have several of them that function differently, but long as they produce the same results that match reality, all are equally correct.
Your perception of reality is also a model. Produced by your brain using input from your senses. “Construct” for you to live in.
Science is about probing elements that remain consistently same for everyone and using those to build more extensive models. Belief is not a component of any value.
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.
“God is real because I see rocks” is a pretty wild take ngl.
Does it matter? Endlessly pontificating about the true nature of reality serves no purpose. If I’m driving and I’m about to hit a tree, reality doesn’t give a single fuck if I consider “well maybe the tree isn’t really there. How can I truly know?”
Like, I was talking with a guy and he was saying shit about how can we truly know that what I say is the color green is the same as what you see? It just feels mastubatory. It’s what words are for. If that guy asks me to go to the store and buy forest green paint from a certain brand and I come back with forest green paint from that brand he’s not going to worry about whether or not we see the exact same shade.
Because anything truly outside of our senses (or ability to measure) is non-falsifiable, so if it can’t impact us it’s essentially meaningless. If it can impact us then it can be measured and become science.
I don’t need to validate my disbelief in a made-up being. Science works. Math works. Good enough.
Firstly, I would just like to refute ‘If all knowledge is based on faith, then is science reliable?’ because I’ve seen it been made before to argue [random-bullshit-thing] is worth considering. Science isn’t based on knowledge, it’s based on experimental results, models, and extrapolation. Actual faith is not based on that.
There’s a really good argument to be made that our senses are not telling us the truth, they just tell us what is beneficial to survive and reproduce. However, this is not the case for instruments that measure, say, gravitational waves.
There is a real reality out there, and it’s unlikely we can perceive it. Perhaps the universe happened all at once, but our brain processing happens in consecutive slices of reality, so we perceive time.
Personally, my (pessimistic) gut feeling is that we don’t exist. How could anything? It’s that Prime Mover argument. Because the Big Bang, because multiverse bubbles colliding…
I think the universe might not actually exist, nothing does. But the potential possibilities make it exist relative to the baseline of nothing. Just like when you climb Everest, your total altitude change is 0 because coming down cancels out going up. The universe is just a potential that is cancelled out by something else, so existence remains at 0 in total.
Well, our senses and brains have evolved to make us able to form a model of our surroundings and the reality around us. So while that happened to not get us eaten by cheetahs, it ended up providing us with the model-making and predicting thing that is our brain. Sensing reality and making predictions accidentally happens to be the same thing that also helps with survival and reproduction.
Sometimes I feel it wasn’t made to judge high velocities, large numbers or exponential growth. But with a little bit of practice, it’ll get you a long way.
It’s completely impossible to prove, without making any assumptions, that anything other than one’s own mind exists. However, it’s also completely impractical not to assume one’s own perceptions are generally valid (them being invalid is the exception rather than the rule).
Belief in things seen (accepting the validity of perception) is fundamentally different than faith which is the belief in things unseen (equating imagination with perception). The former is necessary to function in the world. The latter is not necessary to function, even if some people derive value from it.
Edit: I probably should have said “a mind at a moment” rather than “one’s own mind”. But perhaps identity is a topic for another day.
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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 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.
