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

nxdefiant , 6 months ago

Observation isn’t reliable, that’s why science depends on falsifiability: I have observed things and drawn conclusions from those observations Here is an experiment that, given a specific outcome, will prove me wrong, please do your best to show that my conclusions do NOT adhere to your observations.

bogdugg , 6 months ago

is all knowledge based on faith

It’s based on assumption, not faith. If we can trust our senses, and if things will continue to be as they have been, then the things we are learning have value. As long as you can recognize that everything could in theory end or completely change at any moment, it’s not blind belief.

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.

Berttheduck , 6 months ago

I know my universe is at least internally consistent from experience. I think therefore I am after all.

Not all science relies on our senses but it does rely on our interpretation of results which is why we often use meta analysis looking at multiple studies to try to control for as much human bias as possible.

The top comment currently is about null hypothesis, you don’t prove your assertion you disprove it under specific measured circumstances, it’s really hard to prove the existence of, well anything really, but we can at fairly reliably show we are at minimum sharing a simulation as people can have the same experiences of events.

comrade_pibb , 6 months ago

I just gotta trust myself

anothermember , 6 months ago

Because anything truly outside of our senses (or ability to measure) is non-falsifiable, so if it can’t impact us it’s essentially meaningless. If it can impact us then it can be measured and become science.

jinarched , 6 months ago (edited 5 months ago)

Might interest you:

iep.utm.edu/witt-epi/

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epistemology

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.

CannotSleep420 , 6 months ago

So is all knowledge based on faith?

Yes.

If all knowledge is based on faith, then is science reliable?

Reliable for what? It might not solve the issue of the objective/subjective gap, but unless you want to live as if you actually are a brain in a jar or whatever there’s no denying the scientific method gets results.

If all knowledge is based on faith, then what about ACTUAL faith? Why is it so illogical?

How is “actual” faith different from faith?

sooper_dooper_roofer , 6 months ago

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

sooper_dooper_roofer , 6 months ago

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

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.

rufus , 6 months ago (edited 5 months ago)

It’s really simple. We’re past the fundational crisis in mathemematics.

Same with the Scientific method

You need to abide by the scientific method and form a hypothesis that is falsifiable. Your’s isn’t. So we can’t tell. But science delivers the goods. So unless you assume knowledge exists, you’re kind of in a useless theoretical argument, while I can form a model of the world and build smartphones and rockets with my approach. And have logic and mathematics and computers. So if your incentive is to get anywhere… Science it the way to go.

And as far as I know there is no alternative to the scientific method that’s even close.

420stalin69 , 6 months ago

I think the idea of “truth” and “reality” is being reified here, and by reifying the concept of reality you divorce it from reality. Like, you create this abstract notion of what reality is, you put it on another plane, a kind of Platonic concept of what reality is. And at that point it’s no longer reality that you’re actually talking about because you’ve separated the concept of reality from reality.

Reality is what it is and it exists outside the mind since the mind experiences reality, and knowing is an abstracted model of reality. The abstracted model is not reality itself but a model of reality, and that model of reality contains the concept of reality which is what you’re talking about here but that concept of reality is not reality.

AmberPrince , 6 months ago

Does it matter? Endlessly pontificating about the true nature of reality serves no purpose. If I'm driving and I'm about to hit a tree, reality doesn't give a single fuck if I consider "well maybe the tree isn't really there. How can I truly know?"

Like, I was talking with a guy and he was saying shit about how can we truly know that what I say is the color green is the same as what you see? It just feels mastubatory. It's what words are for. If that guy asks me to go to the store and buy forest green paint from a certain brand and I come back with forest green paint from that brand he's not going to worry about whether or not we see the exact same shade.

Nemo , 6 months ago

Not all knowledge is based on faith. The flaw in this chain comes early on.

Look, I’m a Stoic, I know that my senses and the inputs they give me are flawed and those flaws are out of my control. I know that my mind is flawed and those flaws are out of my control. I also know that they’re the only tools I have to perceive the world and I have to do my best with them.

BUT.

Confidence intervals are a thing. It’s not a binary between the poles of “I know for certain” and “I don’t know at all”. We can say, “I am confident, based on multiple observations by myself and the reported observations of others, that the sun will rise tomorrow, water boils at the same temperature adjusting for altitude, and the traits of the parents and grandparents can predict the traits of the offspring via Punnett squares.”

The virtue of the scientific method is that the experiments must be repeatable. We don’t have to take it on faith. We can repeat variations of the experiment to raise or lower our confidence to acceptable levels.