ontological_realist said:
Speakpigeon said:
All I can say is that the idea that one knows something about the kind of material world we seem to believe in is self-contradictory. This is not a psychological fact about people having this idea, it's a logical point."
EB
Very interesting! Would you please explain it?
If we believe we perceive the material world through our organs of perception and as mental representations of it somehow processed within our brains then whatever we come to be aware of is mediated by this process. There is this process between whatever fact is to be perceived and the actual perception of it we come to be aware of. So, what we know is the percept produced by our brain not the fact perceived. This follows from our basic belief about the material world that we perceive it through our body and from our belief about the process of perception. Maybe these beliefs are wrong but we have no other that I know of.
EB
Most of your questions are irrelevant to the question at hand. Our layman's belief, awareness as you seem to put it, is immaterial since we know that whether we are aware or not we perceive and act on such. Before brains organisms acted with respect chemical, mechanical, and photic stimuli. By the time of chordates sufficient organization existed that shape, direction, and magnitude of external stimuli could be and were responded to by those beasts. We don't need awareness to demonstrate perception was being accomplished since appropriate actions were generated with respect to these stimuli by these beasts without forebrain which can be measured.
My view of whether the precept is the fact becomes whether the precept leads to a life saving or enabling act by the one perceiving. That the act in response to precept generally becomes better over the course of evolution is testimony as to the correctness of my assertion about fact.
This is not to argue the general notion about whether we can know everything - I agree we can't simply because we can't know everything b y the mere fact of our limited spatial temporal nature - but, that for the notion of precept the notion of fact is reduced to the process leading to improved quality of response over evolution. Otherwise the question about whether we can know anything reduces to an armchair exercise leading nowhere. Fact, by humans, can be approached in no other way. Given that most of us here are not theists a discussion of fact on that plain is, as I already said, moot.
Obviously we have differing bases for belief. It seems your the notion of all knowing plays a significant role, in mine, only better approximations confirmed by where we are are necessary.
