I’m a person who believes that true knowledge is possible.
Some people believe that all knowledge is subjective and not absolutely true.
My argument is this:
I can kick a rock and feel it solidly against my food.
I can see and hear the rock also.
My many senses confirm one-another, so that by many different senses
i can come to a unified conclusion about what i am sensing.
Animals can sense things too.
We can sense the same things and react to them.
We aren’t alone in our perceptions of reality.
Because all of the evidence that we have, aswel as other people and other species,
all of these can come to the same conclusion about a rock.
Therefor when i see a rock on the road, i believe that there is truly a rock on a road.
Some people may think that’s nieve, but i think it’s true.
How can you disprove all of the senses and the consensus between human and animal senses?
The argument that things are not truly knowable contradicts itself,
because if a truth is impossible, then it’s not true that truth is impossible. (if you get what i’m saying)
Consciousness comprises memory and the association of what‘s out there to what should be in you.
What exactly do people mean when they talk of consciousness? There is no such thing as unconsciousness. Medical technology can find out the reason why a particular individual is unconscious, but the individual who is unconscious has no way of knowing that he is unconscious. When he comes out of that unconscious state, he becomes conscious. So do you think you are conscious now? Do you think you are awake?
It is your thinking that makes you feel that you are alive, that you are conscious. That is possible only when the knowledge you have about things is in operation. You become conscious of things only when the knowledge is in operation.
You become conscious only through the help of thought. But unfortunately it is there all the time. So, the suggestion that it is not possible to experience anything makes no sense to you at all, because you have no reference point there when this movement is absent. When this movement is absent, all those questions about consciousness, knowledge and reality are not there.
There is light. If the light is not there you have no way of looking at anything. The light falls on that object, and the reflection of that light activates the optic nerves, which in turn activate the memory cells. When the memory cells are activated, all the knowledge you have about that object comes into cooperation. It is that process which is happening there that has created the subject. And the subject is the knowledge you have about it. There is no subject there at all at any time. There is no subject creating the object. The knowledge of things out there creates “you.”
First of all, there is an assumption on your part that there is a reality, and then, that there is something that you can do to experience that reality. Without the knowledge about reality, you have no experience of reality, that is for sure.
collective subjectivity yeilds objective truth - if enough conscious beings confirm that there is a rock in the road then we can say that we “know” the rock is there -and we need to trust our senses because that’s ultimately the best we can do - but then by the same token it’s still ultimately a form of trust or faith upon which we are relying when we draw conclusions from sense data - so there is no fundamental empirical basis for why we draw conclusions from sense data, and we must accept faith in our senses as a mode of “knowing”, in addition to the empirical understanding that there is a rock in the road, if we want to say that we can “truly know” that fact about reality - it’s this aspect of faith involved in knowing that might lead some people to criticize the belief that the rock is there as naive, because faith is guesswork - but i think they are wrong to say it is naive because trusting our senses IS really the most effective means of navigating reality - it doesn’t ALWAYS work, but it works more often than not, and it works better than anything else - you might even say that we have sensual confirmation that we should trust our senses - that’s circular reasoning - but no more so than claiming it is true that we can’t know whether or not anything is true.
it’s not a naive faith, because there’s no way around it - faith in sense data is one of the fundamental tautologies that holds together reality as we understand it, but it’s still just faith, and it’s still just reality as we understand it (as opposed to it being reality as it is prior to our arrival on the scene)
so in a way it IS all subjective, while at the same time being the closest we can come to knowing anything truly
again, it becomes more a question of how we talk about the issue - do we SAY we know something truly even though that knowledge involves a certain amount of unfounded trust, or do we SAY, because of that unfounded trust, that everything is just subjective belief - ultimately these are just contrasting labels for the same epistemic situation
Of course reality is knowable. What else is it?
All that I know is reality. All that I am not sure of, is possibility.
I know that, theoretically, when I kick against a stone, the stone could disappear. This knowledge is also reality. The event, which has not occurred, isn’t, it is a possibility. The reality is that this possibility is small, compared to the possibility of the stone flyhing away and me hurting my foot. But even though the latter is more probable, it is not a reality until it happens.
“If I kick that stone it will fly and I will hurt my foot” is not a statement of reality. “I kicked that stone and it flew and I hurt my foot, so probably if I do it again, the same thing will happen” is.
But, ugly and Dan~ - you are talking here like humans.
Platonism/Kantianism, which is the usual alternative being bandied about, relies on the suspicion that we are inferior to some mythical being or beings - but also that these beings exist, or “potentially” exist.
Yeah, it’s wacky stuff. But such is the power of metaphysical lust.
I read your two posts.
I’m not sure what you are trying to say.
Things like brain cells and optic neurves are seen as true objects of the reality which we experience.
Such things are only valid concepts if true knowledge exists.
Growing from a child up into a man is all about trust.
that’s true.
Your explanation makes me think that you describe
a place where we must look beyond the artificial dualities of the “subjective” and the “objective”
in order to cling to the most fundamentally useful processes of our psychological nature.
Super beings are irrelavent in the subject of human experiences unless God is controlling and influencing our minds on a regular basis.
When all five of our senses compliment eachother and confirm a single object, that’s how we survive and that’s how all of the other animals survive, too. Survival is a will to a certain kind of enduring power or force, and that force is also how one truth becomes higher than other truths. Truth is a part of our body, something complex and integrated with existence. I see truth not as a transcendant force, but as the most fundamental and common natural phenomenon.
Sorry to be the first to disagree. I don’t believe that reality is truly knowable.
Energy inherent unto itself being attracted to like-minded energy and through science being named your consciousness and five senses (more like 6 senses and beyond) is not any real kind of truth or even the highest truth. We have no real truths about anything, but we accept what we have to work with as reality until bah-dah-bing lots of freaky stuff happens. Your posts make it seem like reality is a stable thing. Reality is in flux all the "time". Reality=Energy=Change=No truths. We can't even say that energy is constant because we can't grasp what energy is. Awe, I'm just rambling now.
reality is truly knowable because the concept of reality truth is the certainty of absolute positive present
than it is easy to identify what is real and what is not according to positive absolute abstractions reference
so any element that is said being existing if it generate a rejection to it or act as an agressor to anything, that element cannot be existing according to reality concept truth, it cant be true in any sense of its existance
that is how life freedom abstraction can be perceived as true too when objectively reality truth is known being its ends and sources
To a large extent, I would say we experience the world via sensory input as real and, in regards to that, we function the same. Do you think we all interpret sensory input the same exact way? Confining the meaning of ‘interpret’ to an association with nothing more than raw data from sensory input then again most likely. But when it comes to what we know or think ABOUT reality (when there is no demand upon the independent careers of the senses at the moment for purposes of translation) probably not. In that situation, reality becomes a discussion. …. As if you didn’t know that
yes there is two realities perspectives, they call it subjective and objective one, but i would say it is existance positive whole absolutely and life free reality of conscious one, people need objective existance from what it is the base of their free life realisations but also from what they can gain from as being existing too
so reality is easily identified in truth, but the issue is what all realities are based on creations lies wills, breaking reality truth of zero absolute freedom reality into opposites justifications as existance lies inventions life
Well the philosophy of perception goes on and on and gets weirder and weider it seems, with time. |I like your intuition Dan~ of moving away from this subject (internal) object (the world) division in thinking which seems
Not how we see, describe or, importantly interact (2 way) with reality in any real sense.
Leads to scepticism and bizareness all the way to Descarte’s demon
Increasingly I reckon whats needed is something previous to subject/object - either whats described as “niave realism” or some variation of Phenomenolgy - that we exist in a world of fully articulated meaning way previous to having to think, conceptulise and divide it out - the stanford as ever is a good start!
When we are growing up, we learn what to trust and what not to trust.
Maturity is a state in which we know what part of ourself deserves the most trust.
We learn about ourself as we grow up and learn what works and what doesn’t.
Each of those situations involves a method of trust and distrust.
I do agree that there is some manner of object reality that we can observe and/or experience aspects of. However, experience doesn’t necessarily = knowledge – it is just the closest we can get. If perception of an experience can be doubted under nearly any circumstances, the conclusions we draw from our perceptions should be as well. Not to mention the arrogance and stubbornness of the human mind in regards to presuppositions, or the capacity to deceive both ourselves and others.
I think ‘reality’ can be experienced to some degree, and tenancies can be recognized and predicted in the natural world. Though I don’t think any aspect of the natural world, or perceived reality, is exempt from the notions of ‘movement’ and ‘change’. Therefore, I think reality can be estimated but little to nothing is ‘known’ with certainty.
How could we ever really ‘know’ that such a consensus exists? We have no way of perceiving the world as any organism other than a human being. I would have to assume that a perceived “consensus” of that nature would be a result of theorizing, experimentation, and interpreted conclusions – in other words, estimations.
