From Use Of Which Of The Following Can You Obtain Knowledge? Feelings, Intuition, Prayer, Reason, Hope, Emotions Or Faith.

Comment

Comment by MCT on January 26, 2011 at 1:51pm

DS, 

Not bad at all. Almost completely reasonable, I think. Almost. For how is it that you are certain about this inability to be certain?

 

I am 100% sure that circles have no right angles.

 

I think Descartes' piece de resistance is certainly wrong. Perception is awareness of someTHING. The thing must exist in order the stimulate the sense organs, which came many many years after the evolution of life began. You might say all I have is knowledge of my perception. This is wrong, perception is simply evidence of the world we are a part of and interact with. We use this information from the world to build knowledge with the noncontradictory integration of this evidence. The word perception entails a causal link between my retina and whatever the photons bounced off. This is a process of receiving, not creating. The world must exist first, for consciousness to exist and we could not perceive it if there was nothing to perceive. If we perceive it, it has identity and is subject to causal law. Objectivity is real, our understanding of it is imperfect. Reality is the gold-standard and is therefore perfect, but our mental representation may not be perfect. Hydrogen is turned into helium in the sun in the same exact way in respect to all of us. It is a metaphysical absolute that the sun is in the center of our solar system in respect to the other planets. I may not be able to see to the exact zillimeter, but it is a metaphysical absolute that the planets orbit around the sun.

Comment by MCT on January 26, 2011 at 1:33pm

I do appreciate everyone's comments!!!

Comment by MCT on January 26, 2011 at 1:30pm

JD and LM,

You can have feelings yes, but you cannot use them to verify something as knowledge. This is why people believe in God, it makes them feel good (they think). Your 'gut' or an imprecise thought can guide you to a solution, but it is not a solution until it is verified by use of reason and logic. Certainty is in now way an emotion. You can have an emotional response to being certain, but certainty comes from the noncontradictory integration of an idea into your knowledge base, by means of logic. Again you can have thoughts about your emotional responses. Emotions are guides that roughly and quickly give us information about our bodies. Our autonomic nervous system, both sympathetic and parasympathetic, evolved from more primitive animals in the past, it is something that allows action through instinct, these bodily changes cause feelings that when properly integrated can lead to information and knowledge about what is going on in your body, i.e., how you feel and this might lead you to change your thoughts and eventually come up with a logical knowledgeable choice, but emotions are much less precise than reason and not all able to verify knowledge. If a perception makes us feel good, it is something that is quickly imprecisely judged to be as a value. If a perception makes us feel bad, it is something that is quickly imprecisely judged to be an anti-value, or harmful. Our emotions can of course, and often are, wrong. To stay alive and prosper a human must use reason and logic to manipulate reality, get shelter and food. Try crossing the street or building a house or hunting rabbit with your feelings, instead of reason and logic.

Comment by MCT on January 26, 2011 at 1:12pm

OK, I'm  not so sure that information and sense perception are different. Wait, yeah they are. I can have information, but I must receive it through my senses. Information that I have just won the lottery may come in the form of perceptions like the sound of someone's voice or an image on the TV. But the information and the perception of it are different.

Comment by MCT on January 26, 2011 at 1:05pm

JC,

You still haven't checked your premises. You need to.

I did not write that perceptual evidence IS our knowledge base. Proof consists of reducing a concept to perceptual evidence, by means of logic. Our perception is the means with which we interact with our environment. We group perceptions into concepts by objective definition with essential qualities only with omission of the measurements of these essential qualities. It matters not if two things are alike in insignificant ways, like your snake and fish. Fish have gills, they are essential to the definition of fish (I'm not an evolutionary biologist and don't technically know what makes a fish a fish, but something does) and snakes are reptiles for another reason. It might be interesting, but it does not matter for the purpose of this conversation that they look alike. 

 

Again, YOU use metaphor to describe how something is like something else and because it is not exactly like that thing, you say, see, nothing is real, how can we know anything? I don't care if you have seen different chairs than I, it doesn't matter. A chair is still objectively defined as something made by humans to be used for sitting. I don't care if your chair is green and mine is 43 inches high. Only that it has a color and a height. There are objective qualities that make a chair a chair. Objective definition is how we distinguish pieces of our world and communicate to each other. Do you reach for your toothbrush without knowledge that it is a tool to clean your teeth?

 

The law of identity only fails, if at all, in the subatomic realm. Entities have borders and character, otherwise we would not perceive them!!! How could one perceive something without noting how it is different from nearby structures? They wouldn't. We can perceive because of the law of identity. Identity as well as consciousness and existence are the primaries of cognition. That which is subsumed by and part of all thought. Percepts are formed into concepts by mentally holding groups of patterns with same essential characteristics and omitting their differences. We then use reason and logic to integrate these concepts without contradiction into a knowledge base. Then and only then can we talk about what we know and apparently, you are telling me that you know nothing.

Perceptions are not flawed. Humans can, however make errors in judgement, but the senses do not lie. I cannot communicate my perception to you perfectly, but so what? That does not mean knowledge is flawed. Humans can learn about reality and teach each other shit about it. It's called progress. We can communicate knowledge, not perfect knowledge, but knowledge none-the-less. It happens all day long, every day. We successfully manipulate our reality with our knowledge. It really is so stupid to suggest that we can send space probes outside our solar system, but we cannot have knowledge. Just plain stupid.

 

Knowledge is information that has been conceptually integrated without contradiction. It is not the same thing as just any old information. 

 

We both know what a chair is. We don't have to see all of them! That's how we are so damn smart. We can group perceptions into concepts by noting the likeness and differences about patterns of perceptions, retain their essential characteristic and disregarding their differences. Smell is, under no circumstance, an essential characteristic of a chair. One does not need knowledge of the smell of an object to know if it is a chair.

 

You are still asserting that knowledge is not possible and telling me you know this somehow. You make no sense.

 

I have no Science God, if anybody does, it's you! I uphold intellectual honesty and reason. If something in my knowledge base contradicts something else, I honestly check my premise. You've got contradiction all over the place and I mean in almost every one of your sentences, mostly because, imo, because you worship your precious quantum physics. That's just a metaphor, what I think is you have a negative emotional reaction about being wrong and struggle to find reason. You should simply read what I have written and attempt to understand. If you succeed it will make you happier, because there is no contradiction. 

 

No entity can act over a distance instantaneously, despite whatever metaphor you glean from your fancy quantum instruments. If I wish to influence a person or object from across the room I cannot do it instantaneously. It takes the time for all the mater and energy to get there.

 

"Adding information does not mean adding sense."

-I completely agree, adding information is definitely not the same thing as adding sense. Perceptions and information are different. Stimulation of the senses is how we gain information. And if by adding sense you mean adding knowledge, then I also agree.

Comment by Daniel Smith on January 26, 2011 at 12:46pm

If one seeks metaphysical certainty about anything (with the possible exception of Descartes observation), one is doomed to be disappointed. But by tempering ones ideas with evidence it is possible to arrive at a picture of a particular part of the universe that, while it is almost certainly not wholly correct, is closer to being an accurate picture of what is actually going on than an idea that is conceived without reference to our admittedly inaccurate perception of phenomena. Our species ever increasing ability to successfully manipulate the physical universe in ways that would have been inconceivable to our ancestors is due not to achieving complete certainty about any particular phenomena, but rather to the ongoing process of improving the accuracy of our ideas by testing them against what we can observe, however flawed those observations may be. Some wrong ideas are demonstrably less wrong than other wrong ideas. Objectivity is a goal, not a state of being.

Comment by Loren Miller on January 26, 2011 at 8:18am

Depending on HOW you define intuition, it may be arguable that intuition may be a source of knowledge, though the reliability of said knowledge may be disputable.

 

There have been times as a troubleshooter when I "had a feeling" regarding a piece of equipment I was troubleshooting which was later borne out by objective investigation into that device.  It may be that I was subconsciously integrating data I was seeing but that process hadn't reached the conscious level at that time.  Still, as a disciplined troubleshooter, I treated that data as a possibility and NOT as a certainty.

 

I treat intuition as peripherally useful, NOT as a primary tool.

Comment by John Camilli on January 26, 2011 at 6:03am

How do you figure? Do you think just because it sounds witty that it proves itself? As far as I'm concerned, all wrong answers may as well be equally wrong. There are plenty of examples of something nearly correct that looks very far from it, and things very far from correct that look very near to what is. There are fish that look like snakes, there are pieces of toast that look like Jesus, and there are all kinds of near-miss theories that can fool you into thinking whatever there is to think. Adding information does not mean adding sense. Gather all the data you want, it will always be an infinitessimal chunk of the information that's out there.

Comment by Daniel Smith on January 26, 2011 at 5:13am

"Errors using inadequate data are much less than those using no data at all."

 

Charles Babbage

Comment by John Camilli on January 26, 2011 at 4:35am

You are saying that perceptual evidence is our knowledge base. It is too simple to show that perception is flawed, that memory of perception is flawed, and that communication of perception is flawed. So even if your archaic, human system were capable of incorporating all its experiences into an accurate model of reality, you would not be able to remember it or speak of it accurately. How can this be knowledge?

 

All you have is information. You know that a chair is comfortable, is sturdy, is part of a hierarchy called furniture, and such, but there are lots and lots of perceptual experiences of "chair" that you have not had; may not ever have. There are other people who have those experiences you lack, who will have a slightly different description of "chair." So how is that knowledge, if you could not even get a straight answer from everyone about what a chair is, does, looks like, smells like, tastes like, is made of, etc?

 

The law of identities fails. The leaders of your Science God say that there is no such thing as "space;" that everything that exists is connected, and effects everything else instantaneously over any distance. Something could not do that if it were what you call "apart;" if it were a discrete thing A, or thing B. So A doesn't =A, and there are no rocks with which you can build knowledge hierarchies and such nonsense.

 

• ‹ Previous
• 1
• …
• 3
• 4
• 5
• Next ›
• Page