Saturday, February 4, 2012

We know...

Nothing

What can we actually say that we know, as a fact? We cannot know things for certain from a "second hand" source, as the information may be skewed in its transferral. So what we would only know for certain is what we experience. But can we not be deceived by our eyes and our ears? Our senses are flawed in themselves, we cannot hear everything correctly or see everything perfectly. Even when we do we usually distort it with our own perspective, our own judgement. 


It amazes me how well everything works in the world despite this chance of being mistaken.

10 comments:

  1. I think we can know in the moment we experience something, after that it's just a vague reconstruction.

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  2. Solipsism is quite a disconcerning idea at first. then you have to get used to it. You can't know anything for a fact, until you accept that the term 'fact' is also based around a framework of human subjective observation. I personally feel secure in the knowledge that two people can never experience the same hallucination.

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  3. Solipsism is not a natural state for humans, look how we clamor to share delusions to feel connected. Sure, in a Humean or Cartesian sense we can't "know" anything beyond ourselves for certain, but we have reason to believe with 99.999999% certainty that there is an objective world external to us that we all interact with in a universal manner that can be discovered through science.

    One brief argument against solipsism that I came to when first considering the matter. If your mind, which I suppose in this framework would have to be separate from your brain, part of your body that exists in the material world, is creating rather than interpreting the world around you, then you would expect the world constructed in dreams would be just as vivid. I mean really, there would be no reason to be any different from your waking life. Even if someone claims to have had a very vivid dream... it still fell short in a couple of ways I'm certain, time now to unveil my brief example - dynamic lighting. We can't do it, that's why light levels don't alter in a dream, our brain isn't capable of doing all the math to make the lighting and shading consistent with the real world, where nature does the math and your brain interprets it.

    Anyway, this could go on for days, so I'm going to stop myself.

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  4. Read my last sentence, I'm not talking about Solipsism. I quite agree with you, Solipsism is an "interesting" idea but only one person in the world can be a solipsist and be correct in their belief. If two Solipsists ever meet, one of them are wrong in their belief. That's just one of many paradoxes in this philosophy.

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  5. A short memory is why I write things down.

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