Can you trust what you see?

[quaz]

What do you think?

[Pedro Alonso Lopez]

No but you must in order to percieve reality. You are human and are thus prone to mistakes.

[BOZG]

As Geist said.


If you do not at least implement what your senses take in, regardless of whether you can really trust them, what else do you have in order to create the environment you live in.

[revolutionary soldier]

in the province of the mind, what one believes to be true either is true or becomes true.

[Pedro Alonso Lopez]

Unless of course its objectively wrong ;)

[Louis Pio]

Well unless a person has been doing to much acid or E I would say yes.
Of course one never knows what the reason is for the episodes one encounter

[Lardlad95]

Originally posted by [email protected] 30 2004, 07:52 PM
Unless of course its objectively wrong ;)
Even if you prove something objectively wrong some guy will find a way to still believe it's true. Truth is an opinion, technically. Objective truth is only true if you are objective.

[Rasta Sapian]

I am not one to judge anybody, but I know what I see! :ph34r: ya dig?


peace yall

[Pedro Alonso Lopez]

Rasta I dont dig but anyway.

LardLad we all have a general objectivity, what Kant called the Universal subjectivity.

If there is a general concencus that chairs exist then we have a universally subjective basis or a kind of limited objectivity.

[BOZG]

I would find it difficult to believe somebody to argue chairs dont exist for them on the basis of solipsism etc.

Well obviously the chair does exist in their "reality".



As for subjective consensus, it's a shame no one has ever come up with that for why the chicken crossed the road.

[Pedro Alonso Lopez]

I'll take that out, it was a hasty post.

[revolutionary soldier]

have none of you read 1984?

i think that explains my point

2+2=5

[Pedro Alonso Lopez]

Originally posted by revolutionary [email protected] 31 2004, 07:50 PM
have none of you read 1984?

i think that explains my point

2+2=5

It would help if we knew what your point was in the first place.

And yes, yes I have read 1984.

[SittingBull47]

no. mistakes happen and perception of the senses is very easily blurred in times of anything less than absolute concentration. You awake from a dream and think you see a body. You can't tell what you saw, but automatically you think somebody is around you really didn't. Lucid dreams are tricky, and things like this account for many ghost stories.

[Solace]

This reminds me of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave.

Plato compares humans as the prisoners chained in the cave. The prisoners only see the shadows on the wall, that is their sole reality. The same way, humans follow their senses even if the perception is imperfect. Plato says that as humans, we do not understand fully reality, only the part we can perceive.

Therefore, we should use our minds instead or relying completely on our senses.

An example of this can be the contradictions between some physics principles and our perception. Though I don't have a specific case in mind.

[Essential Insignificance]

I have for my element, speculated fervently if what I see is reality or just an abstraction of reality in itself. Never really coming to an unambiguous commencement of it…nor to I anticipate too.

In the end it really doesn’t get you any were, except for assortments of assumptions and conjectures.

Not to say that it is not enjoyable to supposition, self proposals.

Its best to conceive it as you do…and take from there.

[Wenty]

Hume had some great ideas when it came to this topic. Philosophy appeals to our reason and shows us the senses are not to be trusted, i.e. a table from far away looks a different size but when we get up close it is another size, the tables 'actual' size never changes in the objective world (that somehow exists beyond our realm), however, nature is too strong for reason, we cannot go around thinking like this constantly.

We have to accept what we see although we know we can pour skepticism over it.


what one believes to be true either is true or becomes true.


Truth is an opinion, technically. Objective truth is only true if you are objective.

These two opinions could have come from Kierkegaard himself! I definitely agree with them both though.

[Nickademus]

what are we trusting our senses to do? how can we not trust them. if you subscribe to the idea of sollipcism (as I do ... see earlier thread), we as humans cannot know truth we can only know subjectivity .. we only have our senses to rely on to ' learn'. so why wouldn't we trust that we are seeing etc. the things the way we perceive them .. it doesn't mean we are seeing what is actually there ... but we as humans (subjective beings) can never see what is actually there anyway.

and i don't deny the existence of a chair because of sollipcism, but my concept of the chair may differ slightly from your concept of the chair. while we both refer to the chair as such, we may perhaps be seeing rather different things, though using the same term. i use the analogy of colour to illustrate more clearly. there are two people in a room and there is an apple on the table. both people look at the apple and say it is red. one person's concept of red, the result of language, which is a human creation, is actually a blue. the other person could be seeing green but still refer to the apple as red. thus, both could be referring to the apple is red but see different colours.