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

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.

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.

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.

ArcaneSlime , 6 months ago

“God is real because I see rocks” is a pretty wild take ngl.

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 , 6 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 , 6 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.

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.

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.

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.

some_guy , 6 months ago

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

HipsterTenZero , 6 months ago

i mostly dont care to check

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

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 6 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.

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.

Ephera , 6 months ago

I do not think, we can guarantee our senses to sense reality. But what distinguishes science from faith to me, is ultimately a principle known as Occam’s Razor.
Essentially, it says: When trying to find an explanation for something, prefer the explanation that requires fewer assumptions.

So, in regards to our senses sensing things, there’s two possible explanations:

1. What they sense is real.
2. Or what they sense is some imagination, simulation etc…

And with 2), you have to make the assumption that your entire perception is somehow being imagined/simulated and you presumably have some other form of existence, too. Because well, if you wouldn’t exist, why would you be imagining things?

So, on the basis of that, 1) just seems less far-fetched. You’re just perceiving what’s real.
If we ever find evidence that this isn’t actually the case, then of course, we should change our minds, but until then, there’s no point in seriously considering 2).

It can be argued that Occam’s Razor isn’t inherently guaranteed either. My preference for it certainly comes from what I have perceived.
But well, if there’s a religion that assumes everything exists in all places all the time, and that every time I lift my finger when typing, there’s an invisible coffee table there with Santa, the tooth fairy, Big Foot and a pink space unicorn, I would be down for that religion.

hexthismess , 6 months ago

I think that my senses can be backed up by empirical and reproducible evidence.

If i dont want to burn my hand, I can measure the objects temperature. Even if I don’t trust my reasoning and senses, a hot object will still burn me. I could have no senses to perceive the outside world, and I would still be burned by that object.

The reason I know I will get burned is not based on an absolute knowledge of how hot that object is, but that I and others have been burned before. The evidence is reproducible and most everyone agrees that a hot object will burn them.