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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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?
I just gotta trust myself
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.
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.
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.
Have you ever done empirical test to validate your senses?
Yes, every time you go to, say, an optometrists/ophthalmologists, or audiologist. There are even things you can test yourself, like colour blindness. These test were designed by comparing the experiences of large groups of people and finding a shared base line or some other commonality, and the exceptions to those.
Humans are millions of years of evolution in the making, we would never have got to this point if we weren’t at least perceiving the basics of the world around us (what we can see, hear, smell, taste, feel) in the same way, if we didn’t, communication would be impossible - never mind language couldn’t develop, but just think about even with language, how heated some people can get about the things we don’t perceive the same, like taste, the best example being coriander/parsley being soapy to some but not to others (people could, and have argued over this for years, not imagining that this plant that tastes delicious to them could ever taste too horrible to eat to others. It is only recently that a genetic factor has been discovered that actually proves that some people taste these plants differently).
You can see this even in our interactions with animals - pets will smell our food, cosy up on our comfy blankets, and even if they instinctively think it’s prey (at first anyway), that doesn’t change that they’re playing with the toys we give them. They clearly communicate with each other, studies show that this is in much more depth than previously assumed by many, which proves they also share at least some perception of the world not only with each other, but with us, because they communicate about our surroundings with us too.
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’ve been thinking about this also lately. It occurred to me that our sense organs and nervous system are shaped by external reality (both through evolution and individual development). Thus the ways we perceive are determined in some ways by the things we are perceiving.
We can and do create mathematical frameworks that accurately describe the world we live in, and you want me to believe in your two thousand year old game of telephone about a sky wizard? Hard pass.
I mean, a person’s senses aren’t supposed to be infallible, but I see no utility in elevating baseless conjecture above them. The “brain in a vat” problem is fun and all but it’s based on zero positive evidence, just a lack of negative evidence. On the other hand the senses are giving us continuous and reproducible and interactible information about the world around us, which despite its inherent subjectivity can be communicated with other people’s perspectives to approach and approximate an objective understanding of things.
Now when you start shifting from abstract to concrete epistemology, things like symbols and language games and power structures and ideology become important facets to examine. What filters and tensions are influencing a person’s perspective? What mechanisms might be elevating or silencing their perspective socially?
We can and should be skeptical of our senses, but in a productive or dialectical manner, testing them against reality and other perspectives in efforts to approach a more concrete understanding.
“God is real because I see rocks” is a pretty wild take ngl.
