The only thing that one can be absolutely sure of is that one percieves. Do you agree?, and if not why?

Question

Provide deductive reasoning and/or justification for your answers.

Answer 1

That's a bit deep for me! The only thing I ever thought one could be absolutely sure of is that you will die. That's not a perception. That is an irrefutable fact!! Plus, perception can be an illusion. Perception is the translation of external stimuli through our senses. However, these perceptions can be faked by directly manipulating our brain. An example would be scientists using electrodes to cause a patient to smell burning or chocolate.

Answer 2

Are you really seeking enrichment (of knowledge) or just looking for materials/ideas on an assigned paper? Having to provide deductive reasoning for what we believe in is a dead give-away!!! Nice try!

Still, I'll give my 10cents worth -----------

"The only thing that one can be absolutely sure of is that (which) one perceives."

If you limit perception to what you actually see - I disagree with the above statement.

But if you define perception to include the total process of acquiring, interpreting, selecting and organizing more than the sensory information, then I agree with the statement.

And I'd leave it at that. Oh, here's something else for you - "reality is merely a popular consensus of perception."

SMILE!

Answer 3

Your saying that no matter how many times we witness an apple falling toward the earth from an apple tree, that we can't be sure that the next time an apple won't fall upward away from the earth. I agree, but once we apply the scientific method to determine why an apple fell upward rather than downward, we'll have more complete knowledge of how apples can fall from trees. That's the way science works. We perceive and postulate as to how things work. Then we wait and see if they always work that way or not. Every time an apple falls from a tree toward the earth, we become more convinced that it will always happen that way. You may be a "doubting Thomas", and for good reason.

Answer 4

hallucinations are perceived, both sight and sound and touch-so they seem unreal to everyone--except the one that experiences them.
our conscious perceptions are just our interpretation of electrical impulses in the brain
Know yourself-when you are unsure of your perceptions ask someone you trust
for example= does the moon cease to exist if we do not see it at night due to a new moon or clouds? no, it is simply hidden from our sight for a time.

I can not see the air around me but the air of the breeze makes itself known in the bending and waving if the grass and trees.

I cannot see individual germs or virus' or bacteria with the naked eye but I know they exist-science has proved it-- but at this moment in time our science cannot replicate the birth of the universe or create life from lifelessness. And as for faith in a higher power-how arrogant for a man to think that mankind is the pinnacle, the end all and be all in the vastness of the universe.
I don't know but I believe is the wise man's answer.
I enjoy the mystery of life and keep an open mind. Look how far mankind has come in the last 5,000 years, how much we have learned. Imagine, if you can that what we call "fact" now we might call fiction in another 5,000 years.
peace to all

Answer 5

I think that even your statement can be doubted in a reasonable fashion. I put forward that the only thing we can know beyond a shadow of a doubt is that experience exists.

Now you may ask how can there be experience without an experiencer. Imagine for a moment, that the world as we see it is a misinterpretation of how it acutely is. It only seems like there is a "self" perceiving an "other" but truly you integrally connected to your surroundings.

Now you skeptics out there may say, that this situation is absurd and no one would perceive things that way. The vast majority of mystical experience involves a feeling of intimate connectedness to the world as a whole. This data is enough to make me doubt the existence of the self enough to say that we can only know for sure that there is experience and not that there is an experiencer.

Answer 6

First, I perceive a major typo in your headline question.

Second, your question is self-defeating, or it's a trick question. If the only thing you can be absolutely sure of is that you perceive (which I suppose is another way to say "you think"....although there has been objections that Descartes should have said "there is thinking going on" without presuppposing that there is an "I" which exists and is doing the thinking), then we cannot be sure that the statement "the only thing you can be absolutely sure of is that you perceive" is itself true!

Answer 7

I disagree. Sometimes what we perceive is only a ruse to make us think that what we saw happened. Take a magic show for instance. If we go by what we perceive the man performing the magic tricks is doing the impossible. Our perception is deceived in some manner to cause us to believe from our perception that the trick actually happened.

Answer 8

Completed acts of perception involve complex cognitive skills. Without these, there is only stimulatedness without any interpretation, and without meanings. This includes recognition of objeccts in the world. We would not "perceive things" without the attachment of meanings to sense-data.
___"Absolutely sure" is a tricky phrase. One can be absolutely sure that 1+1=2, and so on, because statements like this are contained in fully-closed and empty systems. And in another very different way, one can be absolutely sure when one is hit in the head with a 2x4 that some worldly event has happened that can't be doubted, since it disables our capacity for doubt. But even this sort of description of what we are sure of is too filtered by intelligible conventions of linguistic expression to be "proved". We're sure of something, but the act of putting it into words overspecifies it.
___The latter sort of certainty is unconscious, and is not subject to the devices by which we construct intelligible "proof".
___Your asking for deductive reasoning to justify certainty shows a misunderstanding of certainty of the latter sort. Mathematical, geometric, and logical proofs are derived by deductive reasoning, but these are proofs that hold only in empty domains, and make statements only about empty systems, and say nothing descriptive about the world. They only talk about the structure of reasoning, and this has bearing on the world only insofar as the world's objects CAN BE TREATED as distinct objects similar to those presupposed in math and logic. But this similarity is relies on the convenient fiction of absolute distinctness that suppresses causal connectedness among the world's objects, and this convenient fiction has to be compensated for by bringing in the suppressed connectedness via devices like "invisible forces" (gravity) and causes posited as distinct from the objects of causation.
___So descriptive statements about the world are always only contingent, when we subject them to questions like this, but if we stand back from the limitations of intelligibility, and consider that much certainty is felt unconsciously, and can't be rendered fully intelligible, we should see that the contingency of such statements is no reason for hysterical skepticism.

Answer 9

Yes you are correct. To be crass, who's to say that I am not back in 1965 with Timothy Leary and some acid. All we can know to be true, is the first postulate, Cogito Ergo Sum, and build from there. But all is assumption after that.

Answer 10

No. Example: mirage, delusion and dreams. Absolute truth is not grounded in perception, but rather reality. Perception is potentially a distortion of reality, skewed by personal limitations of understanding and experience.