That’s my short little question. What if everything that we (or you) have learned or found, even studied is wrong? What would that kind of thing be like?
By saying wrong, i meant that all that stuffs human have come across are actually differ from what the human perceived as fact.
And this is not a field-specific thing, I meant EVERYTHING.
Would this even matter? I know lots of people who couldn’t care less about this, but I’m just being curious. Will being entirely, utterly, systematically wrong matter anything?
Welcome to the boards, thaelmax. I’m moving your question to the Great Debates section of the site instead of General Questions, which is for questions with factual answers.
But if everything we knew turned out to be wrong? I’d be a little embarrassed. If atomic theory was wrong I would be hesitant to touch anything and if gravity was wrong I’d be a bit nervous about going outside.
Well, I think I should put in another word to be more specific.
What if everything we know is theoretically wrong? If what we perceived are just illusions, and suddenly someone pointed that out. All those astronomy, planet, solar system, and all those yadda yadda stuffs.
For example: at my young age of five, I thought that when people talked about the expiration date of a bottle of Coke, they were talking about the expiration date of the bottle, not the Coke. It was hilarious when I found out the truth…
I’m not sure about you but I don’t assume that there is not some higher or lower level to what I perceive daily. Simply recording the details of repeatable phenomena and predicting what will happen does not preclude that possibility.
There really is no difference between something that for all demonstrable purposes acts like an electron and something that really is an electron.
Plato examined this in the Republic with the Allegory of the Cave. He seems to believe that people would eventually acclimate to the new truths of their observations and experiences through reason.
Now if reason itself is simply an illusion, or the foundations of cause and effect, that way lies madness for all.
There are a minority of people who believe the universe and everything in it (including us) is a computer simulation, and not “real” in the way we assume it to be. For the most part, these people live their lives normally and go about their business just like everyone else.
It’s hard for me to understand exactly what you’re asking, but does that answer your question?
Our understanding of everything is almost certainly incorrect, in the same way that Newton’s Laws are simply a good simulation of physics at very slow speeds. We’re simply narrowing in on the actually correct formulas for everything, possibly to never arrive at a final point.
I suspect that that’s not really what you’re looking for though. Yes, it’s possible that all of reality is, for example, the dream of a giant pink elephant who is soon to awake. Unless there’s something we can do about that, though, all that matters is what is actually relevant to us. It might be that the laws of physics are simply the momentary whims of space hobgoblins, but until they decide to change those laws, the parameters of those laws are still the ones we have to live by, day-to-day.
If literally everything we know is revealed to be wrong, we would not be able to function at all in whatever the ‘real’ world is - we would at best be like newborn infants (or whatever is their equivalent in whatever the real world is) - because none of our experiences, thoughts, memories, reactions, senses, etc would be any use at all.
