Question #3 for Atheists.?

Question

Are our senses trustworthy?

Anticipating certain a few negative answers, I'll try to give my defense of the trustworthiness of the senses (even if damaged):

Since all knowledge comes through the senses, if we deny their trustworthiness, we deny our ability to know anything with certainty. However, the man who admits we cannot know anything with certainty admits certain knowledge that certain knowledge is impossible. We cannot know both something and nothing at the same time, for the proposition fails when tested by itself. Further, the man who distrusts his senses does so because of perceived past failures of his senses, meaning he learned from his senses (seemingly) that they were untrustworthy, thus nullifying the potency of the initial cause of distrust.

I assert that the senses, even damaged ones, give us accurate information about the world around us, but our intellect has difficulty interpreting that information in an absolutely accurate way, especially in such cases as bad eyesight, when the intellect has less information from which to construct an idea of what is being sensed.

Windom Earle...what kind of knowledge is he asserting it with, then? Obviously if I assert something, then I implicitly assert its contrary as being false.

oozɐƃ ʇɐǝɹƃ ǝɥʇ...on the contrary, everything we really "see" is there; maybe within our eye, or on it, or between the connection of our sense to our brain, which the brain (not the eye) then interprets as visual information. It wouldn't be there if there wasn't some real thing causing it to be there.

knyghtze...if you had never sensed anything (as I brought up in the first question in this series) your intellect would have nothing from which to form phantasms or ideas: you would not "know" anything. You wouldn't even know what you were (or that you were). You have deduced (intellectively) from experience with your senses that they are untrustworthy. However, since without them your intellect would never have developed to deduce anything, you seem to admit that the senses have led you (if only in a roundabout way) to accurate knowledge. If this wasn't the case, the word "knowledge" would be empty of meaning, as would its synonym "science". Your argument undermines the very basis of doing science.

Answer 1

You pick on sight asif you know what it is to be imperfect, but really you aren't addressing any points to actual experiments of sight. So lets change to an easier example before we lose you.

Pick an easy one- sight. What of hearing? You know that language is spoken too fast to be heard in the way we hear other sounds so we have special processes to interpret these. We mishear and then rehear due to echoic loops the words we missed, because we have now interpreted them as correct.

In other words, we pick the meaning out because we are used to hearing corrupted information. We do not anticipate rightness in our hearing, but anticipate we will have difficulty. We accept imperfection and our senses are developed to cope with this.

Furthermore as a baby is, so we are not. While almost any American baby searching fro meaning can tell teh difference between two Czech vowels, an American psychologist cannot. So the baby should trust its senses better: but what is the point? The adult in childhood lost the ability as it wasn't relevant to it's interpretation of the world. To be human is to acept our place in the world, biologically, and not have perfect hearing, or sight, just accept that generally it does us well enough most of the time.

Answer 2

Are our senses trustworthy?
Of course not, but we are the ones who decide if we trust them,
indeed all our perceived experience might be just an illusion, but you are asserting that there is contradiction("we cannot know anything with certainty admits certain knowledge that certain knowledge is impossible") while there is none, cause what we perceive comes from external sources, and what we deduce comes from internal sources, thus i trust my mind over my senses, and if my mind is flawed then searching for a truth is naught.
In fact that statement(we cannot know anything with certainty) is completely false, the reason is that "I" am therefore i exist, therefore there is at least one undenying and certain fact.

Edit
"Your argument undermines the very basis of doing science"
Philosophically speaking science is useless, it is the same as tinkering with illusions and finding the why of illusions, yet reality is a rather pesky illusion, and quite persistent on top of that, so we might as well play along and entertain ourselves.

Btw i am a nihilist, so i find this quite a natural view, even if it looks strange to you.

Answer 3

No.

Senses are easily fooled if you want to.

You need to look into how our senses actually work and how much is software in the brain doing pre-processing before our cerebral cortex gets to review it.

Face it, magicians and illusionists do this every day. Acupuncture relies on the fooling of the senses of touch and pain. For a very quick trick look at:

http://www.moillusions.com/2006/03/find-your-blind-spot-trick.html

Your eye has a blind spot, but instead of 'seeing' a black dot, the pre-processing in your vision centers smear the plain background around it to fill it in.

For an audio illusion see:

http://www.moillusions.com/2006/05/audio-optical-illusions.html



For most of what we do our senses are trustworthy enough, but they are definitely not absolute.

The rest of your post is philosophical twaddle. To not know something is not the same as knowing nothing, so your entire argument falls apart.

I may not be able to see what is in my blind spot, but I am certain that 2+2=4. So is my 'knowledge' certain, or uncertain? Just because I know my vision can be fooled some times does not mean that I ignore everything I see. It means that I have to accept the possibility that what I think I am seeing is not really what is happening, I must be open to change my perspective in what my 'eyes' tell me in light of other information, allowing me to get a more accurate perception of reality.

Answer 4

Our senses are all we have. They do have limitations, including a blind spot that the brain fills in. But they are all we have.

We can expand our knowledge of reality by using scientific instruments to help us read and see things we could never have possibly seen before. Like a multimeter telling us what the voltage coming out of a wall electric outlet is. We could not know that just by our senses alone.

As science and technology grows I can envision a world where we can change our genetics to expand our senses and intelligence. In that way we will understand the nature of reality more completely. We may even develop artificial bodies, as some technology is all ready pointing that way.

What evolution has brought about is just the beginning, hopefully soon we can evolve our selves more purposefully for our design.

Answer 5

Our senses are reasonable trustworthy but not totally so, for example we see a combination of blue and green in an additive color system as yellow and blue and yellow as green in a subtractive one - this means that our senses are "flawed" in some regards. Another example is that there are some people that can not smell body oder and others that perceive it to smell like vanilla.

But given that our senses are trustworthy understanding their limitations, how our mind interprets them is not necessarily so trustworthy as it tries to make sense of the information it receives. This is why science uses measurement and repeated tests to limit erroneous interpretation and also why personal testimony or experiences are not considered proof.

Answer 6

Yes, but to explain why (and also the level of trustworthiness) would literally take an entire Epistemology class. (If not 2 or 3).

EDIT:
"However, the man who admits we cannot know anything with certainty admits certain knowledge that certain knowledge is impossible"
Your argument falls apart here because his statement relies on a misunderstanding of inductive reasoning. The person who asserts that we cannot know anything with certainty is asserting that based on the inductive hypothesis. This person's assertion is inductively strong based on previous experiences of making mistakes. However, that person is not asserting that claim with "certain" knowledge. I don't feel like explaining more. Go read a book on Bayesian Epistemology (I think they should explain it.)


EDIT 2: The person asserting the claim that "observation is fallible" is asserting it in a probabilistic sense. He/she makes no claims as to the guaranteed truth of his/her statement, it's simply the best explanation given the available evidence. This is why I told you to read up on Bayesian epistemology. For a Bayesian, all beliefs are uncertain. They are simply verifiable (and therefore justified) to a degree.

Answer 7

Most of the time.

I can see that my computer is on. I both sense it, and it's true.

That doesn't mean senses are infalible (the bent stick in water, the "I thought I heard..." what you didn't, etc.).

Yeah, I had the feeling you were going to want to bring certainty into it.

You might want to consider starting a 360 account. You could post things there for people to respond to, then post later blogs, responding to them.

Though I still think you really want a discussion group of some kind.

Answer 8

This is hardly a black-or-white question, as you have phrased it. Senses have allowed our species (and other species) to survive through the eons by both alerting us to food and mates while also warning us of danger. If they failed, then the individual (and perhaps the species) entered oblivion.

Of course, there are many times that our senses, when mitigated by our interpretive brain functions, lead to faulty conclusions, but so long as we continue to check them out via the scientific method, our senses (and our tools created to enhance our senses) remain beneficial and have the ability to predict events and outcomes.

^v^ ^v^ ^v^ ^v^ ^v^ ^v^ ^v^ ^v^

Answer 9

Not totality, some times you have to combine the senses with memory and experience to come to a reasoned conclusion

Answer 10

Look you can't totally trust your senses. Evolution has us wired to see all kinds of patterns that aren't there. That is why you NEED the data to be measurable and repeatable.

If you are insinuating that there is a god that has no measurable effect on the universe, that is possible. But I am hard pressed to come up with a way that matters.