This is a philosophical question and a convuluted one, forgive me.
We live day to day,relying on our senses. For practical reasons we rely on them for most purposes. With the advances in science we realize more and more that our concept of reality is an interpretation with flaws. (we could very well be a 5 year old kid trying to paint a picture of his grandmas house) . In an everyday way we make assumptions to what we assume is real, and this works well of course in a practical sense.
We know that when we look at the moon, we are actually seeing what the moon looked like some 5 minutes ago, even though this is in some sense in conflict with our common sense This is of course concerning time and the speed of light. We all pretty know this and accept it in everyday life (even though this would have sound crazy 500 years from now).
Most of us realize that a brick wall , that looks solid is in fact made up by mostly hollowness held togheter by magnetic forces.
Its tempting to come to the conclusion that our senses and intuition, are less and less to be trusted. As science advances (for practical reasons it makes a whole lot of sense)
What Im getting at is : what other realizations will hit the mainstream many (?) years from now and work itself into the collective.
Of course the universe is square but how will we look at the world in the future when we know that our senses (however practical) are not to be trusted very much at all, will common sense be less important, and will this also affect everyday life on a much bigger scale than today. How will we handle concepts such as time, dimensions, etc etc etc…
(I know that theoretical physicist could be handling this as we speak, I guess Im more interested in what could enter the “public” and perhaps even the realms of “common/intuitive knowledge”)
convoluted question I admit, appreciate your views!
The important thing to remember about our senses is that, for the most part, the world behaves as if they were correct. Even though that brick wall is ‘mostly hollow’ and ‘only held together by weak & strong forces’, it still behaves as a solid brick wall when we interact with it.
What you’re ignoring is that although our knowledge is based on sensory data, it doesn’t stop there. The important thing is what we do with that data. For example, our sense of vision tells us that the sun and the moon appear to be the same size. But our rational mind tells us that in reality the sun is immensely larger. But what is that knowledge based on? If you trace that knowledge back, it’s still based on our senses. So our sensory knowledge is self-correcting.
You ask a very interesting question. Our senses are our primary means of gathering information about everything, and our brains are used to interpret that information: tell us if and what it means. For many purposes you cannot trust your senses and brain. Magic used for entertainment delights in tricking your senses and brain.
How did we get our senses? They evolved through accident and natural selection, so the senses we have are those which helped our ancestors survive. We weren’t nocturnal, so our night vision is not so good. They didn’t evolve in support of driving 65 or dodging traffic.
Plus, there is a mapping between the raw data and the model of the data which is in our brain, which no doubt improves processing speed. That explains why we don’t see the gorilla on the basketball court. Scientific and other instruments map things we cannot sense into things we can, which then get mapped into our models. Many people, for example, can look at a big stream of data coming from a run and just sense that there is a problem. In the old days of non-digital telephone signals there was a blind guy who could listen to the sounds of calls being switched, on his phone, and hear problems. When I took basic telephony we were told that it was common for those working in the old electromechanical central offices to hear problems just from changes in the sounds of relays connecting.
Not only that, but in the larger philosophical context, they are products (as is our ability to process the information) of the same forces which produced the phenomena we are sensing. Therefore, IMO, solipsism and human exceptionalism are silly. We are a part of what we observe, and there’s no real reason to doubt the accuracy of our senses, at least on the macroscopic level, especially when there is a consensus.
Well, no, but these tasks aren’t really all that difficult. It’s not like you’re doing highway speed through a dense jungle (i.e. like the speeder bikes in Return of the Jedi), but rather the roads on which 65 mph is a common speed are smooth, mostly straight, free from obstructions, and being used by other vehicles whose speed (ideally) is not too far removed from 65, so their speed relative to your own isn’t that problematic.
Similarly, dodging traffic is possible because unlike cheetahs, the vehicles aren’t trying to get you. The drivers, you trust, will follow their lanes in a predictable manner, allowing you to be missed by inches as you try to cross the street. If anything, you’re making the drivers nervous because as a (relatively) stationary potential obstruction, you’re violating their expectations of what the road should be like.
There would have been a lot fewer cheetahs than cars (at least around here.) The same senses that evolved in a way to keep us from getting eaten are more or less accidentally useful for traffic. More or less since we designed cars and roads in a way our senses could handle. I suspect we’d have problems with flying cars with three degrees of freedom - problems we wouldn’t have if we had been descended from bats.
Um, OP? What’s your question? In your entire OP the only question mark is in the title, aside from one in parentheses for emphasis.
Addressing the one question presented, “Our senses: the ultimate scam?”: to be a scam, there must be a scammer. Basically Descartes’s evil magician: somebody or something deliberately feeding us misinformation.
Personally I see this as unlikely, though I can’t prove it’s not happening. If it is, though, then the magician is very careful about the details.
the blind spot - where your optic nerve attaches to your retina you do not see anything at all so your brain fills in the gap for you. A really good demonstration can be found here.
similarly - our native language sounds nicely split up to us, while other languages sound like unbroken gibberish. However analysis indicates that the nicely parsed language we hear isn’t what we are listening to, we make adjustments because we know how the language works.
If you want to learn about how little we know about what is happening in our lives read Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert. It’s good fun, I promise.
A valid point indeed, thats why I admitted that the question was convoluted and is probably in the realm of philosophy 101. Its very hard to phrase a solid question. But lets say that we had a complete alien species to compare with, how infantile could our perception of reality appear. Could you make an analogy of we being in a sense being deaf dumb and blind.
I guess part of my question is, how queer could reality really be? Will ordinary people ever be able to grasp things outside the world of 3 (or maybe 4) dimensions, etc etc.
We are of course using a limited brain trying to grasp what the is going on around us. But this picture that we have must be incredibly limited to lets say an imaginary alien species that has evolved for a million of years.
No question marks again I admit, but what would be a good way for a non scholar to get my head around this, to get a grasp of what the hell reality really is. You could probably regress these kind of questioning further, and say what is anything. So Im wondering how do scholars tackle these kind of questionings?
In theory, everything we observe could be a completely faked simulation - all of it. If so, there might be an entire other reality that we have no awareness of, with the same relationship to our reality as our reality has to one of Pac-Man’s mazes - which is to say, essentially none.
ETA: And to answer your second question, there is little chance that Pac-Man will ever become aware of our reality, and no reason to think that if there is a reality outside of ours that we ever could become aware of it. After all, when a contrived sub-reality is completely defined by the external one, there is no compelling reason that the external reality has to allow any aspects of their reality to effect the sub-reality in any way. And that which doesn’t effect us, we can’t possibly detect.
