Speakpigeon
Contributor
- Joined
- Feb 4, 2009
- Messages
- 6,317
- Location
- Paris, France, EU
- Basic Beliefs
- Rationality (i.e. facts + logic), Scepticism (not just about God but also everything beyond my subjective experience)
No, it's an example of a good reason to believe we don't know and we can't know some things about the physical world. Whether the representations our perception system builds for us are correct representations of what is represented is unknown to us, yes. But whether those perceptions are correct is just an example; it's not the sum total of what is available to be known about the world. There are other things available that your argument doesn't touch.Are you seriously under the impression that giving examples of things we can't know about the physical world qualifies as evidence we know nothing about it? That's illogical. You might as well try to prove man can never fly, because he has no wings, and try to prove it by presenting a list of wingless animals that can't fly.Such as?It just happens that for a very long time we believed we knew the physical world. It's only recently, with science, that we have now more reasons to believe we now nothing about it.
For example that we believe we are entirely biological organisms and that we can only interact with our environment through a perception system whose processes are entirely unconscious and therefore unknown to us except for the final representations we get within our mind of this environment. We know the representations, not what is represented. That's a fundamental fact about us. And whatever science we can do about our perception system cannot change this fact.
EB
This is getting painful to watch...
My example wasn't an example of "things we can't know about the physical world". It was an example of the evidence we have that we don't know things. It's an example of a good reason to believe we don't know and we can't know the physical world.
It didn't touch them because that's irrelevant. As we believe our situation is, all we could possibly know about anything about the world has to go through our perception system. So, yes, we believe that the sum total of what we could possibly know depends on our biological organism, something we don't control.
How the heck do you figure that the fundamental fact about us that we are entirely biological organisms and that we can only interact with our environment through a perception system whose processes are entirely unconscious qualifies as a reason that we can't know, for example, that the physical world contains processes that are unconscious to us? We don't need to know what's on the other end of our perception processes to know that much.
Any idiot can understand he doesn't know anything about the world as soon as he can figure out any possibility that he be wrong about everything he believes about the world. Descartes already explained how it goes. And so of course, once you admit you don't know, you also admit the obvious that you don't know you even have perception organs to begin with. It's a logical argument. A simple reductio ad absurdum. I'm sure you could try it.
Or consider the example I gave you earlier. The physical world contains simulations. By systematic doubt, how do you figure we could be wrong about that? Either it contains the simulations we think we see from our perception system, or else the world is somehow simulating them.
Sorry, I don't understand your point here. You seem to start by assuming something we don't know, that there is a physical world. And how do we get to think we see "simulations"?!
EB