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
I just gotta trust myself
How do we know the world isn’t a simulation created by an omnipotent trickster? How do we know that all memories aren’t implants and we’re all exactly 30 seconds old?
It takes no faith to accept your perceptions as reality, because what is the difference? If there is evidence that anything is wrong with our senses, then observations will not be internally consistent. If that is the case, then such inconsistencies will be discovered and revealed. But any trickster or simulation capable of perfectly recreating reality is functionally identical to reality.
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 owie
therefore 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
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.
I don’t need to validate my disbelief in a made-up being. Science works. Math works. Good enough.
