I find it hard to put in a clear way this though that has been striking me lately. I am not experienced in posting in my second language and that is a limitation I hope I will overcome.
How can we trust our sensory experience as the primary way of knowing things when our biological sensory apparatus are evolving? They were once not senses at all, and, before they evolved to the current human format of sensing, they have been through many other different formats of perceiving reality. Shape, colour, sense of time and space as we sense today are all dependent on the settings of our brains and the way it is currently wired. But what is to say that our position in the evolutionary time-line process is the one that correctly filters reality into consciousness? Given the right amount of time, wont our eyes cease to see “as they see” now won’t then reality (colours/shape/space… and all the data that we processes) be something totally different? Ironically, I would suggest an experiment where any of our senses is physically changed, either by taking mind altering chemicals or by, supposedly, having a brain injury. The machine is changed, the medium is changed, the data (with what we define reality) will be different. From an evolutionary perspective, how do we trust our current settings and wiring are filtering the right data that we call knowledge and reality?
That’s an interesting question. According to some philosophers here, reality doesn’t exist. Others say our consciousness is the only reality. I have no experience with mind-altering chemicals, but wouldn’t someone have to be in some sort of on-going ‘high’ in order to have his/her sense perceptions permanently changed?
As for injury and/or surgery, the mind/brain is full of redundancies–and there’s no single area responsible for the sense of touch, for example. So I think a lot of areas would have to be altered before that entire sense was wiped out. As I said, it’s interesting.
Reality exists, but our consciousness is the only thing that can define reality, our senses are part of reality so our consciousness defines them as it does everything else.
I would like to clarify that my question does not doubt reality, as it is (kant, noumena), neither as we perceive it (phenoumena). I am trying to discuss the reliability of scientific phenomenological knowledge (reality as we perceive it, the only one passive of empirical reasoning), when against the deductive axiom of the random mutability of our sense perception, which generates that knowledge.
Now,
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I used it just as an example of that, when the positions and workings of our sensory system assume a different state, the phenomena is altered. Obviously in my example, that is not permanent. But, as my question posits, the evolution of the senses, within the framework of evolutionary theory, presents us with the deductive axiom that, ours sense perceptions does randomly change, and that change is not as temporary as the one in my example.
Doesn’t that axiom undermine the reliability of our scientific phenomenological knowledge?
The only way you can trust the deliverance of reason given evolution is to assume evolution is aiming towards truth-apprehension and that we exist in a universe in which that’s an accomplishable aim. Plantinga actually writes about this concern of yours (or a very similar concern) in his Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism. I think I’ll write a paper on the ‘world in which’ side of the argument, since it’s not something I’ve seen him develop.
“evolution aiming towards truth-apprhension”. That is an interesting idea. Or evolution accidentally achieving truth-apprehension (both unfalsifiable).
Thanks for the comment and I will look into Plantinga’s work and argument on the subject. Also a paper with the conclusions you draw would be very interesting as well.
(Hi Stuckonspinoza, just an off topic side note, when I first started here I could have named myself, stuckonsartre, it still wouldn’t be too inappropriate. May I ask, what other philosophers have you studied?)
your eyes are lying , skin is lying ,ears are lying , over all your brain is lying.
you and your brain… may be you have reached the stage to distinguish between your body and your ‘self’.
Most theories state you reside in brain.
How and what way are you resided in there?
If you are capable of distinguish between your self and your brain… what will happen ?
As someone say ,
your body is not you ,
you are just carrying body , which is full of bones,flesh and blood.
How much necessary is body that you carry through out your life of existence in this way.
What is stage of evolution , that one’s brain has to evolve to recognize concept ‘self’ .
Can lower species do this. Do they know about their ‘Existence’ ?
The OP seems to assume that evolution is the only causal force which shapes our lives.
All kinds of things don’t have anything to do with survival.
A sense for music. The ability to make music. Comedy. The process of laughing. All sorts of sexual deviations. ‘Religious’ tendencies. Etc.
Also there is the assumption that new information of genes is only created with random mutations.
That is also false. We create information all the time. It’s very non-random. It also isn’t based on mutations.
If we were truly built for survival, we wouldn’t have old age, and we would be allot stronger.
Humans are an alien race which got screwed with and dumbed down.
I’m not sure I agree. I think we can acknowledge and accept the fact that the reality we experience is incomplete. For example, we understand that our “visible spectrum” is different from other animals’ and insects’ visible spectrum, and that other animals can hears sounds we can’t. Who knows how many other dimensions exist that we’re not able to perceive?
All of which suggests that our “reality” isn’t nearly the entirety of what’s out there. I wouldn’t say that is necessarily cause to distrust what we do experience, but I think we have to be aware that even if what we’re experiencing is “real,” our interpretation of that reality would likely be different if we had a larger capacity for perception.
We have experiences, and these experiences are very much as upright primates with the sensing systems we have. What these systems choose to focus on out OF ALL THEIR INTERPRETIons of stimuli is then narrowed down even more downstream in the nervous system. Downstream there are all sorts of ideas and models that not only have strong effects on what the already interpreting and necessarily primate sensory systems are focusing on but even how these experiences are experienced.
I also am not sure there is much digital about this - trust or not - we are triangulating, refocusing, coming back to things, trying other angles, senses, gathering info about our experiences from others and much more.
I totally agree with this. I often say that our senses don’t tell us “this is reality,” they tell us “this is reality…” ← they always add that …
But I didn’t mean to convey that we shouldn’t trust the reality we’re given. I meant to say we have a choice… and their are skeptics and anti-realists after all.
In fact, I’m inclined to say that everything we experience is real, and I have a weird logic with which I can argue that even those beliefs we have which turn out to be false were still true when believed.
Well, of course it’s all more complex than I let on in what you quoted of me. I was being terse with stuckonspenoza.
BTW, did you get my PM? I sent you a link where you can download a “gift”.
If you do not know what you are looking at, can you experience it?
If you do not know what you are listening to can you experience it?
If you do not know what you are smelling can you experience it?
You are trapped in the knowledge you have of reality. After all, if what you call real is what your senses are detecting, then they are no more or less than electrical signals interpreted by your brain. Interpretation is the act of translating the sensory perceptions by means of your experiencing structure which is totally dependent on the knowledge you have of things and without which there would be no experiencing at all. So, if the knowledge is not there about reality, then the question of reality is not there anymore for you. Questions and assertions about reality arise from this knowledge, which is still interested in finding out the reality of things, and to experience directly what that reality is all about. When this knowledge is not there, the question is also not there. Then there is no need for finding any answer. Assumptions about reality are born out of this knowledge you have of and about the reality.
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. Further, if the knowledge you have been given about ‘real’ things does not belong to you (and I think this is where gib is going), then you have been put in a position where you take it for granted and trust that it is reality.
sos, Your OP here and your OP for the thread “How to Conciliate Empiricism and Biological Evolution” are very similar. Here’s my response to the latter thread:
In the OP to this thread, you ask:
I think my answer to that is in my answer to your first OP, but I’ll expand it a bit. We don’t need to experiment since we already know of people without sight or hearing. We can’t really ‘know’ their world, but we do know that other senses are heightened in order to compensate. Helen Keller is an example.
Anyway, the other posters have valid thoughts that go beyond my rather clinical way of looking at things. I hope, among us all, you’ve found some answers.
One answer would be to say that an alien sentient fungus should be careful how it uses our knowledge. But since our knowledge is about our experiences and how to repeat them, we can trust it fairly well. Evolution plays a very slight role because it is so slow. We haven’t evolved much since Newton, for example, and the changes in knowledge are much more likely based on changes through other means that evolution. Our senses are not changing rapidly. If we were mutating all the time, that would be a different story.
IOW even if our embodied knowledge is hysterically biased to the way our, as the particular animals we are, sensory systems and embodied minds work, it’s OK, since the results of our knowledge are for us. We want to know that if we do A in conditions B, C will happen. Now maybe what we think A, B, and C are from some objective perspective are all wrong, but as long as we end up experiencing C, we don’t really care.
Now I’ve oversimplified your OP to respond to it and I have other responses more critical of what we call knowledge and empiricism, but this was one reactions.
Through Logic and Science, we can determine all of the possibilities.
Yes, they screw up at times, but they still narrow it all down considerably despite those errors.
Further Logic can narrow it all down with 100% accuracy.
At which point, all of the alternatives are covered.
