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Our perception is the perception of what's beyond it -- the world is the direct cause of our experiences which present that world. " but by definition we can'

Our perception is the perception of what's beyond it -- the world is the direct cause of our experiences which present that world. " but by definition we can't perceive what's beyond our perception " This is one of those sceptical propositions I'm talking about. All these sceptical claims which follow "by definition" follow only by the definitions of sceptics -- definitions held (with no sense of self-awareness) with certainty. How I would define "perception" would make such a claim incoherent or trivially false. The light which hits a camera from a tree does not travel via some daemon. And a camera so-positioned can indeed photograph its own mechanism. We have for at least half a century being using perception, without trouble, to perceive the mechanism of our own perception (visual cortex, retina, lenses, etc.). All these alleged impossibilities begin from the premise that we are not within, part of, and directly causally engaged with, the world. This is the most outrageous of all 'philosophical' propositions, the most naive, the most absurd --- and yet lies as the undoubted presumption of nearly all scepticism.

mrguyorama 3y ago
So much of knowledge in everything is just something some guy asserted in a book a few hundred years ago. Most of every field is just a guy saying "I think this because (argument based on rhetoric)", and a hundred years later we still just take that at face value. The only exception is physics, where people realized many hundred years ago that you should probably check these assertions against reality. Aristotle's claim that heavy things fall faster than light things was gospel for a thousand years, despite pretty much anyone being able to do a version of his thought experiment to conclusively disprove it, but nobody did, because it was thought you could just rationally argue your way to an accurate understanding of the world. Physics finally started pushing back against that in like the 1600s, and chemistry did a little too, though mostly by accident, but even psychology, born basically in the 20th century, was still based on whatever rhetorical arguments you put in your book, with that only changing, slowly, nowadays. The idea that we should discount science based on rhetoric vs science based on evidence still isn't a popular one in the lay community. People hate being told that there are things they may never understand, because the human brain is just a really good monkey. There is no evidence in rhetoric, and a more convincing argument should not be considered a more realistic one.

mrguyorama 3y ago

So much of knowledge in everything is just something some guy asserted in a book a few hundred years ago. Most of every field is just a guy saying "I think this because (argument based on rhetoric)", and a hundred years later we still just take that at face value. The only exception is physics, where people realized many hundred years ago that you should probably check these assertions against reality. Aristotle's claim that heavy things fall faster than light things was gospel for a thousand years, despite pretty much anyone being able to do a version of his thought experiment to conclusively disprove it, but nobody did, because it was thought you could just rationally argue your way to an accurate understanding of the world. Physics finally started pushing back against that in like the 1600s, and chemistry did a little too, though mostly by accident, but even psychology, born basically in the 20th century, was still based on whatever rhetorical arguments you put in your book, with that only changing, slowly, nowadays. The idea that we should discount science based on rhetoric vs science based on evidence still isn't a popular one in the lay community. People hate being told that there are things they may never understand, because the human brain is just a really good monkey. There is no evidence in rhetoric, and a more convincing argument should not be considered a more realistic one.