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"The fact is, there’s nothing infallible about “direct experience” either. Indeed, experience is never direct. It is a sort of virtual reality, created by our b
by hughdbrown 12y ago
"The fact is, there’s nothing infallible about “direct experience” either. Indeed, experience is never direct. It is a sort of virtual reality, created by our brains using sketchy and flawed sensory clues, given substance only by fallible expectations, explanations, and interpretations. Those can easily be more mistaken than the testimony of the passing hobo. If you doubt this, look at the work of psychologists Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons, and verify by direct experience the fallibility of your own direct experience. Furthermore, the idea that your reminiscences are infallible is also heresy by the very doctrine that you are faithful to."
This is skepticism raised to the nth degree -- brain-in-a-vat-ism. I'm not even sure I read the article now.
- GuiA 12y agoIf you play videogames, you may have noticed the phenomenon where you lose the game because you failed to press the button at the right time - but you are 100% sure that you did in fact press the button at the right time. Apparently this is a well documented phenomenon (even though you pressed the button a few hundredths of a second too late, your brain is persuaded you pressed it correctly), and it blew my mind when I first read about it. Now when it happens to me I'm deeply aware of it, but it's still a little surreal (and frightening) to realize that our brains are indeed very fallible.
- pixl97 12y agohttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality_tunnel http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality_tunnel >The idea does not necessarily imply that there is no objective truth; rather that our access to it is mediated through our senses, experience, conditioning, prior beliefs, and other non-objective factors. The implied individual world each person occupies is said to be their reality tunnel.
- vanderZwan 12y agoAnd after that, kick things up a notch with the Boltzmann Brain paradox: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boltzmann_brain http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boltzmann_brain > The paradox states that if one considers the probability of our current situation as self-aware entities embedded in an organized environment, versus the probability of stand-alone self-aware entities existing in a featureless thermodynamic "soup", then the latter should be vastly more probable than the former.