So, we each have a subjective perception of the World, so what else is new?
You are just repeating what Descartes said, “I think therefore I am.”
So I have a subjective reality and you have one, big deal. Now from this perception, we need to develop a value system that will allow you to thrive and allow me to thrive, that’s the challenge.
Since we are still shooting and killing each other and live in the U.S. which has the most “weapons of mass destruction,” I would say that we haven’t been very successful.
“One-to-one correspondence” is bi-directional; it is more than just passive perception of the world, it also includes our ability to inject our beliefs into it. My belief-system (in the broadest possible sense) doesn’t just interpret sensory data, it makes predictions about how reality will operate (i.e. what will my future sense-perceptions will be) under certain conditions.
Moreover, criticizing a belief-system solely on the faults of perception ignores the fact that we have a meta-congnition which can be educated to recognize potential lapses in my understanding of reality. In short, my many, many faults can also be perceived (in my experience most often via message board comments) and subsequently corrected in order to have a “better” perception of reality.
It is utterly impossible to verify that a belief system has a “one-to-one correspondence with reality”.
Our ability to ascertain reality is dependent on a tower of beliefs, each built in large part on previous beliefs. Loosely speaking, some of those towers and the beliefs of which they are constructed seem to have been built with more dependence on verifiable hypotheses, but it’s absolutely 100% impossible to built your tower without a lot of postulates. Things you decide to just go with as a “given”.
If you were to say (for example) “People who believe that the behavior of the universe is described by Einsteinian elaborations on the Newtonian theories of physics hold a one-to-one correspondence with reality in a way that people who believe that the behavior of the universe is determined by what astrological sign the pink fluffy bunny was born under in her previous life as a space alien from the race that populated the earth using the chariots of the gods do NOT have a one-to-one correspondence with reality”, I would nod, and I would understand what you mean by that, and it would be a general operating attitude supported within my OWN tower of beliefs.
I do NOT think “reality is unknowable” or “reality is just whatever you conceive it to be, man”. But your tower of beliefs, like mine, is built with a lot of intuition and makes use of a lot of leaps of faith. Each individual time that you decide that a specific instance matches a pattern, that mental act of pattern-recognition is not, itself, something that can be boiled down to rule-following or derived strictly from empirical data. Hence, you can’t ever acquire totally empirical data. The difference between our towers and the fluffy bunny towers is a meaningful difference, but you can’t establish that yours is better without building an argument on things beyond the assertion that “mine is based on reality”. The fluffy bunny folk think THEIRS are, too (or else they don’t believe there’s a “REAL” reality that’s superior to any other and hence have chosen their beliefs for what we’d consider silly-ass reasons). You have to develop an explanation of what is valid and superior about insisting that one’s tower of beliefs yield some expectations and hypotheses and predictions that are later borne out by events. Defend your way of establishing and building upon a belief system as more USEFUL than theirs. etc.
One might say that parts of reality are unknowable; we can never know everything. Goedelian undecidability is part of it. Simply being overwhelmed by the volume of data is another part. We can model the earth’s atmosphere on a resolution of a few cubic meters (and that is one very impressive accomplishment!) but I suspect we’ll never model it down to every individual molecule. You’d need another planet just to store the data!
There actually are philosophers who doubt there is “the truth.” They think that, while we seem to be approaching the truth asymptotically – “Science is a process of successive approximations to the truth” – they reject this idea (which, by and large, is the consensus) and suggest we’re always going to be insulated from the truth by a barrier. Plato’s cave was one early version of this idea.
The fact that many (certainly not all*) cognitive scientists and neuroscientists interpret their findings in the light of a philosophical framework developed in the 17th century is not strong evidence that that framework is correct, or the only possible one through which the empirical evidence can be interpreted. By the same token, the fact that the “hard problem” seems so impossibly hard when viewed from within this framework might reasonably be taken as a pretty solid hint that the framework is seriously defective.
*Have a look at the scientific work of Walter Freeman, J.J. Gibson, J.K. O’Regan, Mary Hayhoe, M.R. Bennett, Rodney Brooks, Rodolfo Llinás, Stefano Nolfi, or Dana Ballard, to name but a few.
I am actually in a fair degree of agreement with the thrust of your OP, but your second post is naïve, and, even if it were not, would provide little if any support for the claims in the OP.
I’m not sure why you say his second post is naive. The proposition that the world we experience is a mental construct is pretty well supported by neuroscience. Our brains take the disparate trickles of data we receive from out senses and use them to construct a virtual reality that allows us to quickly make predictions about how the world around us will unfold. The world we experience, our human umwelt, is a computational convenience, not an ontological fact.
For detailed information on the science underlying this claim, see Computing the Mind by Shimon Edelman, or Being No One by Thomas Metzinger.
I don’t pretend to understand much of what has been said in this thread, but would it be fair to simplify it as saying “We understand as much as we’re able to with the physical and psychological equipment we have”?
I’d go farther (I have!) and say “We understand a hell of a lot.” The sum of our understanding is remarkably close to the real world; close enough that we can actually make meaningful measurements of the error.
To some small degree, we will always be isolated from each other, unable to communicate, because our brains re-interpret what other people say and write, modifying it away from what the original message was intended to be. But, again, we’ve built a planet-wide civilization, and are sending these miscommunications at nearly the speed of light, with multiple-checksum accuracy. We’re doing pretty well, for people living inside an illusion!
None of this is a problem if you maintain a healthy level of skepticism. Or as someone once told me, “Don’t believe anything you hear, and only half of what you see”. It should be obvious that things are not always the way they seem, but they usually are.
Be a little bit practical here, who cares whether or not some day we are going to discover the truth. All you need to decide is whether the truth will be discovered within our own lifetimes or within the next hundred years or so. I doubt very much I’m going to get very close to the truth within this time period.
Now assuming that you believe that it’s not likely that you will know the truth any time soon. We need to decide if it’s worth developing a value system that takes this into account. I have no problems living life with a certain degree of uncertainty because I’m starting to admire people like Helen Keller. One of her famous quotes was, “Life is an adventure or it’s nothing at all.”
For me, her statement was incredibly courageous. Helen Keller was basically saying that certainty actually takes some of the fun out of life…I have to agree with her about that.
It depends on what kind of belief system you are talking about. Some belief systems are very narrow in scope and can have a one to one correspondence with reality.
“Faith is the assured expectation of things hoped for, the evident demonstration of realities though not beheld.” --Hebrews 11:1. (For example, the impending birth of a baby; dawn; tunnel-building crews knowing they will meet under a river.)
Chew on THAT for a while.
If it weren’t for the fact that a great many of life’s uncertainties are appallingly hideous, I might agree more. I still do agree, to a large extent. Life’s surprises can be wonderful. We live in fascinating times. We’re on the cusp of Quantum Computing, and it may be that this will knock our entire civilization into a cocked hat. Good? Bad? Unpredictable!
Tricky; when you talk about things for which we have very strong statistical models, it’s more evidence-based than faith-based. Yes, babies sometimes turn up stillborn, and tunnel-building crews blunder in their measurements. (So far, the dawn has had a perfect record.) Faith is better used to refer to events without a solid foundation of evidence: faith in religious tenets, faith that one will receive justice, faith that the cosmos is based on a principle of unity, etc.
At the utmost bottom of all knowledge, yes, we have to have faith that we aren’t in the midst of Cartesian deception. The world might be a sim, and there isn’t a damn thing anyone can do to prove it isn’t. Science itself only works when it tacitly accepts principles such as “cause and effect,” and such principles can only be taken on faith. Who knows? A non-causal science might be developed, like non-Euclidean geometry. I’m betting against it, though. On faith.
Tricky? I guess what THAT depends on is the specific definition of the Greek word pistis as Paul uses it here. (cf. Strong’s Concordance.)
I particularly like the definition as given in Louis Armstrong’s song “Faith”:
You is old as your doubts, but Brother,
You is young as your faith.
Faith! Folks who lend cash all have it,
Faith! Folks who save trash all have it!
It’s undeniable that [Verse 1] folks who order hash all have it!/[Verse 2] Gamblers on their knees all have it!
