How do we know what we know?

Black Swan · 29-06-2016 1:01am #1

Epistemology is a conceptual term in philosophy that addresses this issue of knowing. What are the necessary and sufficient conditions of knowledge? How do we know what we know? Karl Popper suggested that knowledge results from a process of problems and solutions guided by theories, and such theories were continuously subject to be falsified or corroborated by rigourous empirical research. Theories and their scientific measurement only suggest, and do not prove anything, and have merit so long as they receive support.

I laugh every time I hear a product advertisement on the telly that states "numerous clinical studies have proven," when science proves nothing, only suggests.

Comments?

Torakx · 29-06-2016 4:22am

I think true knowledge is knowing from the "God's eye view".
Having no method or apparatus to know it, is true knowledge.
Therefore, considering our limited senses and brains, we can't know anything truly.

I like the idea of the phenomenal and noumenal world. I think Kant wrote about this.
The phenomenal is the material world we experience with our senses, and the noumenal is the reality we cannot experience.

With this in mind, I like the idea of new discoveries in science and physics, bringing the noumenal world into our own phenomenal reality.
Of course these two worlds only exist because of human consciousness, so they are just representations of a whole, split in two.
Again the "God's eye view" is the whole, which is unreachable.
But seems to be the long term goal of science.

Black Swan · 29-06-2016 7:22am

Torakx wrote: »

I think true knowledge is knowing from the "God's eye view". Having no method or apparatus to know it, is true knowledge.
Therefore, considering our limited senses and brains, we can't know anything truly.

Is this "God's eye view" a metaphor in the Gareth Morgan sense used to foster discussion, and being metaphor in-and-of-itself a potential distortion of reality? In order words, not "true knowledge" per se, rather something that is suspected to exist outside our current phenomenological perspectives and limited empirical measures?

Torakx wrote: »

I like the idea of the phenomenal and noumenal world. I think Kant wrote about this.
The phenomenal is the material world we experience with our senses, and the noumenal is the reality we cannot experience...

Of course these two worlds only exist because of human consciousness, so they are just representations of a whole, split in two.
Again the "God's eye view" is the whole, which is unreachable.

Immanuel Kant compared and contrasted noumenal, or the thing-in-itself, with the phenomenon, or the thing as it appeared to the observer. Is this a dichotomy? If so, I would exercise caution before accepting Kant's differentiation between noumenal and phenomenon at face value, especially if it suggested nominal, mutually exclusive categories to where phenomenon knowledge will never reach noumenal knowledge, and thereby ruling-out becoming one-and-the-same in a distant (perhaps very distant) Hegelian synthesis. A similar caution about dichotomies was advanced by Jacques Derrida to where they may be an over-simplistic view of nature, and subtly function to limit our examination of a multiplicity of perspectives and measures to advance knowledge.

Torakx wrote: »

With this in mind, I like the idea of new discoveries in science and physics, bringing the noumenal world into our own phenomenal reality.

A positive goal for advancing philosophies, theories, and scientific empirical methods towards the acquisition of knowledge, which contradicts the spirit and intent of the metaphor that "the God's eye view... is unreachable?"

Torakx · 29-06-2016 4:35pm

Black Swan wrote: »

Is this "God's eye view" a metaphor in the Gareth Morgan sense used to foster discussion, and being metaphor in-and-of-itself a potential distortion of reality? In order words, not "true knowledge" per se, rather something that is suspected to exist outside our current phenomenological perspectives and limited empirical measures?

I looked up Gareth Morgan very briefly, but don't understand the reference.
It's a bit of a paradox maybe.
From what I read online, the "God's eye view" is knowledge of something from every perspective. Seeing it all from every angle as it were, without needing tools or methods to abstract the forms for understanding.
But how do we know when we have reached the limits of perspective on any thing?
I don't think we can know this.
There is no way to confirm we have a God's eye view on anything.
But maybe we can confirm that we don't have a God's eye view, by the fact that we experience things we cannot yet explain empirically.

Black Swan wrote: »

Immanuel Kant compared and contrasted noumenal, or the thing-in-itself, with the phenomenon, or the thing as it appeared to the observer. Is this a dichotomy? If so, I would exercise caution before accepting Kant's differentiation between noumenal and phenomenon at face value, especially if it suggested nominal, mutually exclusive categories to where phenomenon knowledge will never reach noumenal knowledge, and thereby ruling-out becoming one-and-the-same in a distant (perhaps very distant) Hegelian synthesis. A similar caution about dichotomies was advanced by Jacques Derrida to where they may be an over-simplistic view of nature, and subtly function to limit our examination of a multiplicity of perspectives and measures to advance knowledge.

The dichotomy is false I think(empirically), and is created by our lack of knowledge, or more precisely our awareness of lack of knowledge.
But as you mentioned, useful discussion. To have abstract forms, and yes, a distraction too maybe. But i don't think much of a distraction if we are open to altogether new interpretations of any thing.

This God's eye view is only "there" because we don't have it and because we have a thing called knowledge who needs a counterpart from our perspective. It needs a counterpart in order to gain power.
Nietzsche believed the will to power ran through us, and therefore drives our thirst for knowledge in this case.
Hmm.. I visualize it as a line with a moving marker/point somewhere along the middle, with phenomenal and noumenal at each end.
When one reaches the very end I am not sure if it flips or consumes the other.
What happens when the universe fully expands or collapses?..
Maybe the birth of something new. Or a reset?

I guess I wouldn't agree with Kant on those two worlds being apart.
I'm not sure now what Nietzsche thought in this regard, I would guess he would agree with me, he usually does. haha
He saw the will to power as being noumenal in nature I am sure, but acting in the phenomenal reality as well as noumenal.
If we were in a simulation, noumenal might be the hardware and software working together to spawn and run a virtual world.
God is reborn

OR.. he/she never really was dead. Maybe he died and she is awakening...never mind lol I'm sidling accidentally into an existential perspective on feminism.

Black Swan wrote: »

A positive goal for advancing philosophies, theories, and scientific empirical methods towards the acquisition of knowledge, which contradicts the spirit and intent of the metaphor that "the God's eye view... is unreachable?"

Even scientists need to dream

Or if I think of the will to power, I would say it is a natural drive for the scientist.

mzungu · 29-06-2016 5:53pm

Black Swan wrote: »

Epistemology is a conceptual term in philosophy that addresses this issue of knowing. What are the necessary and sufficient conditions of knowledge? How do we know what we know? Karl Popper suggested that knowledge results from a process of problems and solutions guided by theories, and such theories were continuously subject to be falsified or corroborated by rigourous empirical research. Theories and their scientific measurement only suggest, and do not prove anything, and have merit so long as they receive support.

IIRC Popper asks us to consider the falsification of the scientific method not as a 'falsehood', but merely something we know to be true at that moment in time. Taking his analogy of the rising sun: the sun coming up everyday; but if one day this does not happen then a new theory would then take its place. Essentially, we have no real reason to believe that just because something has always happened up until now, that it will always continue to do so. Popper's main example of this being when Newtonian physics was displaced by Einstein, and then that became the truth that we still accept today.

I guess I can't argue against his logic there. I am fairly sure the sun will continue to rise but I really can't give 100% guarantees....nobody can.

Grover Maxwell's response to Popper is interesting. He says that using Popper's logic, we can say that 'all humans are mortal' but this itself cannot be deductively falsified.

Grover has a good point there, I think.

Interesting to note that Popper was first inspired to theorise demarcation when he saw that proponents of Marxism and Psychoanalysis were responsible for interpreting random events and occurrences as evidence that these theories worked. Both Marxism and Psychoanalysis were treated in some circles at the time as being a science. Hence Popper's demarcation being a way to highlight the falsehoods in those theories. The scientific method, however, was always far more robust than the two aforementioned theories, and conflating them with science was a wrong turn for Popper, I think.

This paragraph from *Nicholas Dykes (2003) illuminates it nicely:

One can understand the importance of the distinction to the young Popper. Fascinated by science, he was surrounded by true-believing Marxists and Freudians all of whom claimed science on their side while espousing doctrines which seemed to Popper obviously false. Nonetheless, 'refutability' seems to miss the mark. The ideas of Marx or Freud stand or fall on their conformity to logic and the available evidence - in exactly the same way as the ideas of Newton or Einstein. Marxism and Freudianism failed to survive as viable theories due to myopic concentration on a narrow range of data, false interpretations of evidence, and logical inconsistency. They never were 'irrefutable.' They failed precisely because they could be, and were, refuted; either by contrary evidence, by exposure of contradictions, or by the resolute refusal of reality to conform to their predictions. It wasn't refutability which made them unscientific, it was inaccuracy and/or illogicality.

Science is distinguished by its strict adherence to physical evidence. Non-science, on the other hand, is invariably characterised by preconception, followed by a cavalier disregard for, or rationalisation of, anything that doesn't fit into the preconceived schema. In one sense, this is what Popper was saying. But, due perhaps to his dislike of definitions, he homed in on the wrong identifying characteristic.

That said, I do think Popper's demarcation theory is still important whether one agrees with him or not.

I laugh every time I hear a product advertisement on the telly that states "numerous clinical studies have proven," when science proves nothing, only suggests.

This is one of the staples of the advertisement industry. It is not too dissimilar to the Asch effect first posited by Solomon Asch in 1951. The idea being that authority figures can get a subject to agree to something that they know to be false. This is where Popper's demarcation is needed, the amount of mistruths and propaganda contained in adverts is scary. A healthy skepticism is never a bad thing! This is essentially what I think Popper asks of us, to be skeptical, but not dismissive of what is portrayed as the 'truth'.

*Dykes, N. (2003). Debunking Popper: A Critique of Karl Popper’s Critical Rationalism. Philosophical Notes, 65.
Chicago

Torakx · 30-06-2016 4:17pm

I stumbled across an interesting character today.
Chris Langan, "Americas smartest man" who put forth a theory of everything.
I was reminded of this thread when I read some of his thesis covering this very topic.
It's some heavy reading for me, but I'll post a screen shot of a part that highlights why it might be worth checking the theory out.
The website that lead me to the pdf of his thesis: http://www.ctmu.org/
Thesis: http://www.megafoundation.org/CTMU/Articles/Langan_CTMU_092902.pdf

Black Swan · 01-07-2016 7:21am

Torakx wrote: »

I looked up Gareth Morgan very briefly, but don't understand the reference. It's a bit of a paradox maybe.

Gareth Morgan (1997) in Images of Organization, 2nd Ed., Part I, "On the nature of metaphor and its role in understanding organization and management," pp 4-5, suggests that "all theory is metaphor," yet inherently paradoxical. Metaphors stimulate imagination and insights about a phenomenon, but are distortions of reality in that they can be incomplete, biased, and potentially misleading. The "God's eye view" is a metaphor that has no substance in empirically science-based (Kantian phenomenon) reality, but it may be useful to encourage imagination and discussion.

The "God" in this metaphor I think unfortunate, in that some persons reading and participating our discussions here may attribute something beyond what was intended; e.g., a theological faith-based unscientific and sometimes superstitious explanation. Rather than "God's eye view" (Kant's noumenal) could it be otherwise labelled as "The Unknown?" And the mission of science is, and has been "to boldly go where no [wo]man has gone before" (Star Trek, 1966) in the quest of new knowledge by empirically exploring "The Unknown."

mzungu wrote: »

Interesting to note that Popper was first inspired to theorise demarcation when he saw that proponents of Marxism and Psychoanalysis were responsible for interpreting random events and occurrences as evidence that these theories worked. Both Marxism and Psychoanalysis were treated in some circles at the time as being a science. Hence Popper's demarcation being a way to highlight the falsehoods in those theories. The scientific method, however, was always far more robust than the two aforementioned theories, and conflating them with science was a wrong turn for Popper, I think.

Grand examples of Karl Popper's demarcation, and something that would have been useful in another Philosophy thread to illustrate the falsehoods exhibited by the Freudian psychoanalysis tripartite id, ego, and superego paradigm, especially as pertains to concept superego.

Torakx wrote: »

I stumbled across an interesting character today.
Chris Langan, "Americas smartest man" who put forth a theory of everything.
I was reminded of this thread when I read some of his thesis covering this very topic.

Interesting content and source Torakx, but I'll need a bit more time to examine it before sticking my neck out to comment (i.e., if I am to fall on my face, I would like to do it gracefully).

Joe1919 · 01-07-2016 2:54pm

Black Swan wrote: »

... Metaphors stimulate imagination and insights about a phenomenon, but are distortions of reality in that they can be incomplete, biased, and potentially misleading. The "God's eye view" is a metaphor that has no substance in empirically science-based (Kantian phenomenon) reality, but it may be useful to encourage imagination and discussion.
The "God" in this metaphor I think unfortunate, in that some persons reading and participating our discussions here may attribute something beyond what was intended; e.g., a theological faith-based unscientific and sometimes superstitious explanation. Rather than "God's eye view" (Kant's noumenal) could it be otherwise labelled as "The Unknown?"

Domestic animals expect food when they see the person who feeds them. We know that all these rather crude expectations of uniformity are liable to be misleading. The man who has fed the chicken every day throughout its life at last wrings its neck instead, showing that more refined views as to the uniformity of nature would have been useful to the chicken. (Bertram Russell, On the problems of philosophy, On Induction, http://www.personal.kent.edu/~rmuhamma/Philosophy/RBwritings/ProbPhiloBook/chap-VI.htm

The empiricists (e.g Hume) argue that there are certain regularaties/uniformities in nature and these lead to a certain ideas of expectation and for us to make certain inferences. These expectations and inferences are really only 'ideas' that are a product of our imagination and we accept them as true or accurate if they are consistent or useful or satisfy us in some way.
Hence, I would see imagination as playing a large part in filling the gaps that exist in our knowledge and I see this as compatible with fallibilism to some extent. I would probably go further in saying that knowledge in terms of inferences, theories, associations etc as a product of the imagination is 'constructed'.
You could argue that all these 'ideas' (inferences, theories, associations etc ) compete with one another (something like Richard Dawkins 'memes' survival of the fittest) in terms of consistency or utility or public approval or even desirability. The fact that knowledge is not absolute may be a good thing in terms of creating diversity of opinion and a certain competitiveness of ideas and movement in a changing world.

Black Swan · 11-07-2016 5:38pm

Joe1919 wrote: »

Hence, I would see imagination as playing a large part in filling the gaps that exist in our knowledge and I see this as compatible with fallibilism to some extent. I would probably go further in saying that knowledge in terms of inferences, theories, associations etc as a product of the imagination is 'constructed'.

During my course of study I took a class on theory construction, and it suggested that grand theory should identify all the necessary and sufficient conditions for it to describe, explain, and predict phenomena. Robert Merton, a skeptic of grand theorizing, suggested that in most cases middle-range theories should be proposed today, rather than to attempt flawed grand theory constructions (see Merton, RK, 1949, On Sociological Theories of the Middle Range, Social Theory and Social Structure, pp 39-53).

Often when developing PhD dissertations a conceptual framework was used to guide causal-correlational research, which borrowed concepts from one or more theories, this framework resembling what Merton called middle-range. Such constructions occur frequently in researches today, and I would agree that "imagination" was certainly useful when "constructing" these educated guesses called theory.

Joe1919 wrote: »

You could argue that all these 'ideas' (inferences, theories, associations etc ) compete with one another (something like Richard Dawkins 'memes' survival of the fittest) in terms of consistency or utility or public approval or even desirability. The fact that knowledge is not absolute may be a good thing in terms of creating diversity of opinion and a certain competitiveness of ideas and movement in a changing world.

Perhaps a variation of the earlier "survival of the fittest" maxim attributed to Herbert Spencer (1894) in his Principles of Biology, which had been a social-economic domain extension of Charles Darwin's (1859) On the Origin of Species, would agree in spirit with today's Richard Dawkins memes? Or perhaps we could also refer to Johann Fichte's or Georg Hegel's dialectical conflict resolution paradigm of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis as an ongoing process of how "inferences, theories, associations, etc" evolve overtime?

cloudatlas · 15-07-2016 8:08pm

Consciousness. What is consciousness?

mzungu · 16-07-2016 12:05am

cloudatlas wrote: »

Consciousness. What is consciousness?

Michael Graziano, a nueroscientist at Princeton, believes consciousness is a trick the brain plays on us. He says the brain is a computer programme that has evolved to the point of creating a complex simulation of the world. It can even simulate itself as 'a crude approximation of its own neurological processes' and this creates a consciousness that we can sense instead of just neurons and synapses. We make the mistake of thinking consciousness means something, when it is just like any other data processor running away in the background.

It is Graziano's take on the simulation hypothesis.

Black Swan · 16-07-2016 2:58am

cloudatlas wrote: »

Consciousness. What is consciousness?

You are encouraged to elaborate more on your question here in this forum, perhaps providing more details, examples, and even better, referring to a philosophical perspective or philosopher. Please explore, compare, and contrast what you have read with your thoughts in discussion with us.

Not sure how to elaborate on concept consciousness myself, and how it relates to "How do we know what we know?" It may depend upon how you define consciousness for discussion sake, but be mindful that there has been a lot of philosophical disagreement as to what consciousness was, aside from the popular beliefs found on the street, all too often making a simple comparison between consciousness and unconsciousness as if these concepts were obvious in-and-of-themselves and beyond dispute.

Treating the conscious-unconscious dichotomy as a given may suffer from being an over-simplistic nominal categorisation, such either/or categorisations not accounting for the multiplicity of factors that may be at play, including potential interactions between the two (or more factors), which Jacques Derrida cautioned us about.

Does lucid dreaming confound the strict differences between conscious thought and unconsciousness? Have you ever wanted to to continue dreaming about something pleasurable, but unfortunately woke up? You then drift-off to sleep and resume your pleasurable dream? Stephen LaBerge (2008) in Lucid Dreaming suggested that you can increase the likelihood to continuing such pleasurable dreams from where you left-off, but his perspectives and methods may be problematic from an empirical standpoint. If there was some merit in lucid dreaming, to what extent did conscious control of dreams confound its boundaries with the unconscious?

When did conscious behaviour emerge? Clark, G. and Riel-Salvatore, J. (2001) in “Grave markers, middle and early upper paleolithic burials," Current Anthropology, Vol 42 (4), pp 481–490, examined paleolithic burial artifacts and suggested that those peoples differentiated between conscious life and otherwise, once again depending upon how you define consciousness.

05eaftqbrs9jlh · 16-07-2016 3:16am

Sorry to butt in, was just looking at some of my philosophy notes from college and thought they might be of interest here.

" Newman is trying to figure out where to place religious belief on the spectrum. With Plantinga and Wittgenstein, they reject the traditional approaches to justifying belief in God but they are interested in religion as phenomenon. Newman reconciles both of these schools as he comes out of the reform tradition which is where Plantinga is coming from. Religion is not really about proofs. He also has the Catholic openness to various aspects of scholastic philosophy.

Newman is a thinker who never wants to lose anything. He wants to get to the heart of things and see what is making it tick but doesn't want to lose anything that could potentially serve his purposes.

On the way to developing a phenomenology of religious belief, he develops theories relating to knowing and how one knows; "The Grammar of Assent".

Firstly, we can believe something which we cannot understand. We do this all the time. We don't necessarily know how a car works but we know that it works. It's a different type of belief.

Assent then is unconditional and personal.

Not all understanding is purely deductive. Some is inferential.

Assent requires understanding but this can be either concrete or notional. Sometimes there is different kind of understanding and assent. When you have a grasp of acceptance of facts or truth concerning concrete reality, you have real assent. This is inextricably linked into experience, which is imitation. One's own experience is inevitably going to be limited. What you understand on the basis of your own experience is understood deeply and thoroughly but you're limited to your own experience in that regard. Real assent has this limitation.

There is also the possibility of taking a reality that we know and abstracting it into a concept; taking a fact and making it into a generalisation.

Newman's concept of notional assent is very much linked to discourse about things. It is typical of a particular type of mind; the intellectual one. These people take lived experience and transform it into some linguistic entity, discourse. It is related to experience in that it is drawn from experience and sometimes you can go back to experience.

Real assent is the dynamic one, you know you have it and you go ahead and act. In ordinary, day to day terms, that could work in interesting ways. There has to be real assent of some form present before you act on a notion.

Your imaginative faculties are what present the real world to us. This is how real assent is formed; the synthesising faculty which we use as a means to access truth. It helps us to conceive of things as real and then we have real assent. "

Black Swan · 16-07-2016 3:35am

Sadie Quaint Cowboy wrote: »

Sorry to butt in, was just looking at some of my philosophy notes from college and thought they might be of interest here.

You Sadie Quaint Cowboy (with John Henry Newman) are most welcome to our discussions here when exploring "How do we know what we know?" Please join us and elaborate upon your notes further. It might be interesting to include how Newman's Idea of a University may apply to knowing, and if your notes have already suggested this, which notes apply?

mzungu · 17-07-2016 1:07am

Black Swan wrote: »

Not sure how to elaborate on concept consciousness myself, and how it relates to "How do we know what we know?" It may depend upon how you define consciousness for discussion sake, but be mindful that there has been a lot of philosophical disagreement as to what consciousness was, aside from the popular beliefs found on the street, all too often making a simple comparison between consciousness and unconsciousness as if these concepts were obvious in-and-of-themselves and beyond dispute.

Treating the conscious-unconscious dichotomy as a given may suffer from being an over-simplistic nominal categorisation, such either/or categorisations not accounting for the multiplicity of factors that may be at play, including potential interactions between the two (or more factors), which Jacques Derrida cautioned us about.

Karl Popper (In: Eccles & Popper 1977) proposed the theory of the three worlds. He had been formulating this for a good deal of his academic life. World 1 is the world of facts; World 2 is of mental processes and events and world 3 is the products of the human mind, which he labels 'objective knowledge. It is not too far off Descartes dualism, and as such, I would not be so sure about it. The mind is independent of the brain, whilst also being able to interact with it. Although at points Popper does contradict himself by saying world 3 has full autonomy, but then states it is made by us. In later lectures Popper concedes that there may even be a world 3,4,5,6,7,8 etc. Philosopher John Searle does not agree, for him there is just one world, and getting bogged down in multiple worlds is not the correct way forward.

Does lucid dreaming confound the strict differences between conscious thought and unconsciousness? Have you ever wanted to to continue dreaming about something pleasurable, but unfortunately woke up? You then drift-off to sleep and resume your pleasurable dream? Stephen LaBerge (2008) in Lucid Dreaming suggested that you can increase the likelihood to continuing such pleasurable dreams from where you left-off, but his perspectives and methods may be problematic from an empirical standpoint. If there was some merit in lucid dreaming, to what extent did conscious control of dreams confound its boundaries with the unconscious?

From what I can gather, LeBerge based his findings off eye movements during REM sleep. The pre requisite being that the subject needs to be aware that they are dreaming. This happens to everybody at some stage, however, it is fair to say not very often. Usually a dream is forgotten as soon as you wake up, with no real conscious memory of it. I find the test interesting, and it does suggest that there might be a level of consciousness involved even while we sleep. That said, a large scale trial of a few thousand people would be interesting to see how results compare.

When did conscious behaviour emerge? Clark, G. and Riel-Salvatore, J. (2001) in “Grave markers, middle and early upper paleolithic burials," Current Anthropology, Vol 42 (4), pp 481–490, examined paleolithic burial artifacts and suggested that those peoples differentiated between conscious life and otherwise, once again depending upon how you define consciousness.

Hurd (2014) believes the modern human brain has been around for 50,000 years and believes there is no reason to think they were not able to carry out the same metacognition that we can do. This includes thoughts, feelings and being aware of the social moves and roles.

Eccles, J. & Popper, K. (1977) The Self and Its Brain: An Argument for Interactionism. Berlin, Heidelberg, New York: Springer-Verlag,

Hurd, R. (2014). Unearthing the Paleolithic mind in lucid dreams. Lucid Dreaming: New Perspectives on Consciousness in Sleep [2 volumes]: New Perspectives on Consciousness in Sleep.

solo1y · 13-02-2017 12:02am

You can’t. We could all be wrong about everything. Get over it.

Philosophy is like art; we are forever in search of perfection. Where artists are searching for perfect beauty, philosophers are searching for perfect knowledge (very unrelated to the economic sense of the term). Artists know that perfect beauty is impossible, and philosophers know that perfect knowledge is impossible. We’re not stupid, but we’ve seen enough Werner Herzog movies to know that there’s nothing wrong with aspiring to an impossible goal.

You can divide information into two categories: opinions and facts (you can of course interpret both). Opinions are subjective judgments often based on emotional responses. Facts are used as evidence to demonstrate propositions because they have been in some way verified. You are entitled to your own opinions, but you are not entitled to your own facts.

These seem to be divergent concepts, but a brief luck at the current news cycle will reveal that 306 out of 538 Americans can’t tell the difference.

So, you can’t know for certain if something is true. You can, however, maximise your chances by making an educated guess. There are many others, but here are four ways to educate your guesses:

:1: Likelihood: What’s the simplest explanation?
This bit of common sense is often called Occam’s Razor: usually the simplest, most likely explanation is the correct one. This is not always the case, but it’s a good start. Ask yourself: “Is this compatible with what I know about the world?”

:2: Falsification: Can you be proved wrong?
If you can’t even imagine a situation where your opinion could be proven wrong, then it’s not worth talking about, is it? This often comes as a surprise to people (and they are legion) who confuse an inability to address an argument with apodicticity.

“But if you can’t prove me wrong, surely that’s a good thing?”

No. It’s a bad, bad, bad thing. Think about it. Take all the time you need.

: Evidence: Do you have any reason to believe your idea?
If you don’t think you need reasons to believe something, we’re done here; you can go now.

For everyone else, the best way to gather reasons for believing something is the scientific process. Some religious people believe science requires as much faith as a religion, but facts are non-negotiable. Religion is to science what opinion is to fact.

When religions gets into science, things can get very stupid, very quickly. Conversely, when science gets into religion, you get anthropology.

:4: Irrelevancy: Does it matter?
“It happened to my aunt’s friend” is irrelevant. No one cares about your aunt’s friend, and in any case, the plural of ‘anecdote’ is not ‘data’.
“It’s just something I feel is right” is irrelevant. Expecting people to ‘feel’ the same way you do is an arrogance bordering on solipsism. I’m not a therapist, but I understand why someone has to be paid by the hour to pretend to give a **** about your “feelings”.
“You can’t think of anything better” is irrelevant. If I don’t know something, it in no way implies that your crazy idea must therefore be true. Criticism of an idea does not require a replacement idea.
“You need to be more open-minded” is irrelevant. Believing everything you read/hear/see doesn’t make you open-minded; it makes you an idiot.
“You don’t know everything” is irrelevant. I don’t need to know everything to know you’re wrong.

TL;DR It's a process.

bnt · 15-05-2018 3:57pm

mzungu wrote: »

Michael Graziano, a nueroscientist at Princeton, believes consciousness is a trick the brain plays on us. He says the brain is a computer programme that has evolved to the point of creating a complex simulation of the world. It can even simulate itself as 'a crude approximation of its own neurological processes' and this creates a consciousness that we can sense instead of just neurons and synapses. We make the mistake of thinking consciousness means something, when it is just like any other data processor running away in the background.

It is Graziano's take on the simulation hypothesis.

For those interested - Prof. Graziano is in Dublin this Thursday, giving a talk at the Science Gallery: details here. It's free, but you have to register.

Black Swan · 15-05-2018 4:06pm

Makes me wonder how Graziano's attention schema theory would help us understand how we know what we know?