Fellow atheists: How do you know your senses and reasoning are reliable and valid? How do you know that you know anything? Solipsism vs Nihilism

pelletbucket , 13 days ago

I don’t. we could be living in a simulation, but acting as if we were isn’t going to help me any

nycki , 5 months ago

I have no absolute knowledge, but I have lots of probabalistic knowledge. I update my priors in response to new evidence, therefore I probably am.

BalabakGuy OP , 6 months ago

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.

DessertStorms , 6 months ago (edited 6 months ago)

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.

Rivalarrival , 6 months ago (edited 5 months ago)

Have you ever done empirical test to validate your senses?

Every pilot has empirically tested their sense of balance and orientation, and found it to be deeply flawed and completely untrustworthy.

Pilots are trained to distrust both their senses and any particular instrument, in favor of reality and a general consensus of all instruments. When an altimeter reads a rapidly decreasing altitude, a compass is spinning in circles, an airspeed indicator is rising, but an attitude indicator reads straight and level flight, they are trained to ignore both their own senses and the attitude indicator telling them everything is alright, and trust the other instruments that are telling them they are in a spin and about to die.

Our pilot friend has no “perfect” sense or instrument available to him. Each of his senses can lie to him. Each of his instruments can lie to him. He knows that none of his instruments are perfectly infallible, but he flies anyway. Even though they are not absolutely perfect, the data they provide is sufficient to develop a reasonably accurate, functional worldview.

Physics can provide a much more accurate model of his flight, by considering many more factors than his onboard instrumentation can measure. For example, our pilot lacks the instrumentation necessary to determine how his aircraft will be affected by the change in gravitational pull induced by tidal forces, or the non-uniform nature of the earth’s geologic composition. He has no instrumentation to measure the effects of centripetal force from the earth’s rotation against the acceleration of his aircraft due to gravity.

But, does it really matter that his 560-ton aircraft is a pound heavier at the poles than at the equator? Will that difference have enough of an effect on the flight that he needs to consider it? Or is this inaccuracy something he can simply ignore, as it will not significantly affect the operation of his aircraft?

The theoretical limit of our empirical knowledge is the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. We can rationalize beyond that point, but we cannot empirically test such rationalizations. Long before we reach that point, though, the possible effects of our rationalizations will be far less than the “noise” in the system being tested, and thus indistinguishable from that noise.

intensely_human , 5 months ago

I know my senses are reliable because the information coming from them follows stable patterns.

I know my senses are valid because the information they provide is successfully processed by the conceptual models in my mind.

zbyte64 , 5 months ago

Not sure how Solipsism contradicts atheism or anything else for that matter… I see it more as punting the question. If my mind is the only way for me to know what exists, and my experience is such that atheism is true, then that’s the end of the discussion. Not sure why I am arguing with myself on this one. /S

HipsterTenZero , 5 months ago

i mostly dont care to check

ada , 6 months ago

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.

luthis , 5 months ago

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.

ada , 5 months ago

Our models are imperfect, because ultimately, they are simply models of the real thing. And the fact that the model is useful and consistently effective means that despite being imperfect, they’re still pretty close.

watson387 , 5 months ago

I don’t claim to know what exists after you die because I don’t know and nobody else does either. Until any religion can prove anything or kick tapes I will disregard them all.

luthis , 6 months ago

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.

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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.

rufus , 6 months ago (edited 5 months ago)

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.

some_guy , 6 months ago

I don’t need to validate my disbelief in a made-up being. Science works. Math works. Good enough.

D61 , 6 months ago

Things that I’ve had to come to grips with when I figure out that it was okay to be an atheist.

Human beings are not logical or rational. We can do logic and rationalizations but we are not fundamentally logical or rational creatures.

Its okay to think things and not have some ironclad sentential logically correct argument as to why you think a thing. When a kid is asked by somebody “Why did you do that?” and the kid answers “I don’t know” and the person keeps pushing for the kid to have some cause/effect conforming answer, its the person who’s wrong not the kid.

I mean, my eyes are shit and getting worse by the year. My brain has had issues remembering certain things and processing human speech into meaning for as long as I’ve been an adult. I’ve been in enough situations where I suddenly realize that I have no actual active memory of how I got here and yet the world still functioned. It just became something that I no longer felt any pressure or need to justify. Things can just be (maybe I’m wrong, maybe I’m right, maybe I’m in some inbetween state) and I still exist.

FanonFan , 6 months ago

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.

muddi , 6 months ago

I once tripped hard and believed I died. When I came out from the trip, I still had no evidence I hadn’t finished tripping, and am actually still dying as my mind fires its dying circuits in my deathbed.

But that doubt interferes with my ability to live a normal live which I am used to and strive for, so I ignore the doubt, mostly. I check myself with little tests now and then.

Same with other existential doubts in general. If you want some official names of philosophies, Nagel’s absurdism, Buddhism, Vedanta, and maybe pragmatism would be applicable. Basically: don’t kill yourself with doubt, keep on living with some sensibility in your senses, though keep a curious mind to keep yourself in check now and then.

bunkyprewster , 6 months ago

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.

andyburke , 6 months ago

Solipsism is not disprovable.

It also isn't a framework under which you can do any interesting and widely relevant philosophical thinking, so even if it is the case, proceeding like it's not seems the best strategy unless you just want to sit in a dreamworld alone until it ceases.