How do we really know anything for sure?

[V37E00E]

How do we really know anything for sure?

 

What I mean is, in life we all try to at least get a rough glimpse of the "biggest picture", as in what is the general nature of reality, truth, and existence.. where is our own place in the universe and in the world and the grand scheme of things.. and also how all this relates to each of us, how it matters and affects our individual subjective inner lives and worlds within a world existence..

 

We want to know the bigger picture, to get the general direction correct so everything else that we believe, think, feel, act, behave and do in life isn't wasted or do for nothing..

 

But yet how do we know anything for certain? How do we actually know when we have arrived at that formation or discover of the "largest most general abstract model of life and existence?"

 

How can we know things that we do not know? And does it matter or are the distinctions even significant if we will never know them in this lifetime? But what if perchance they are accidentally discovered? What if we bump into these epiphanies when not even looking for them and this fractures and shatters the worldviews that we already deeply hold most dear to us and have tethered to them our most real and cherished identities and emotional attachments?

 

Like a guy who wants to find a good girl for himself.. He thinks he's found the one, but what if someone "better" latter comes along and he's already settled down with her? By better I don't just mean physical attractiveness, but a personal and interpersonal qualitative difference in being..

 

Or someone who thinks he's already figured out what life is all about.. One who has experienced the full range of emotional experiences and felt the entire spectrum of human consciousness and canonical and or higher order qualia.. and formulated his own subjective opinions on what "life is really all about" and which first hand emotional experiences (such as a certain type of beauty, love, lust, pleasure, happiness, comfort, etc) is the "best" way to spend his life..... BUT.... then later on discovers by accident a whole new "world"/"realm"/"domain" of experiences and emotional states that he didn't even know existed!

 

What then?

 

How do we know when we have "reached the top"? Why is there no ultimate supremum "set of all sets"? Can we know anything for sure? Is the universe in its entirety a closed or open system? Ultimately at this level do such distinctions even matter? Why does existence itself seem like an impossible contradiction? Why do humans have the compulsion to know the best states of existence and to touch the infinite?

[prometheuspan]

How do we really know anything for sure?

 

we don't, we live in subjective experience, "sure" is objective reality.

 

 

What I mean is, in life we all try to at least get a rough glimpse of the "biggest picture", as in what is the general nature of reality, truth, and existence.. where is our own place in the universe and in the world and the grand scheme of things.. and also how all this relates to each of us, how it matters and affects our individual subjective inner lives and worlds within a world existence..

 

I can give you my best answers to all of those questions, but i can't provide any proofs for my answers.

I think thats the same boat most of us are in.

 

 

But yet how do we know anything for certain?

 

we don't. We must accept the odds that even the fundamental assumptions are wrong. We could be

just hanging out in a matrix pools goo, or, you could be just a figment of my imagination. Theres no knowing anything, just approximations which we assume to be true because that assumption tends

to play out as we test it.

 

 

How do we actually know when we have arrived at that formation or discover of the "largest most general abstract model of life and existence?"

 

There is not such model, just models of increasing complexity in an infinitely complex universe.

 

 

How can we know things that we do not know?

 

generally, by learning about them, more exotically, by accessing the collective unconscious.

 

 

 

And does it matter or are the distinctions even significant if we will never know them in this lifetime? But what if perchance they are accidentally discovered? What if we bump into these epiphanies when not even looking for them and this fractures and shatters the worldviews that we already deeply hold most dear to us and have tethered to them our most real and cherished identities and emotional attachments?

 

that often happens.

 

 

Like a guy who wants to find a good girl for himself.. He thinks he's found the one, but what if someone "better" latter comes along and he's already settled down with her? By better I don't just mean physical attractiveness, but a personal and interpersonal qualitative difference in being..

 

paradigms unlike girls can't complain if you just sort of keep them around at arms length and play the field. That what i do and i highly recommend it.

 

Or someone who thinks he's already figured out what life is all about.. One who has experienced the full range of emotional experiences and felt the entire spectrum of human consciousness and canonical and or higher order qualia.. and formulated his own subjective opinions on what "life is really all about" and which first hand emotional experiences (such as a certain type of beauty, love, lust, pleasure, happiness, comfort, etc) is the "best" way to spend his life..... BUT.... then later on discovers by accident a whole new "world"/"realm"/"domain" of experiences and emotional states that he didn't even know existed!

 

Yes, thats tends to happen to everyone in cycles.

 

 

How do we know when we have "reached the top"?

 

there is no top.

 

 

Why is there no ultimate supremum "set of all sets"? Can we know anything for sure? Is the universe in its entirety a closed or open system?

 

Closed, and actually non infinite, if you mean the cosm shell thats inflated here locally. Infinite and open

if you mean hyperspace and the set of all universes.

 

Ultimately at this level do such distinctions even matter? Why does existence itself seem like an impossible contradiction?

 

It doesn't seem that way to me. Most of these questions don't really matter. I answer them because you do.

 

 

Why do humans have the compulsion to know the best states of existence and to touch the infinite?

 

The highest need class is a homing signal which compels us always towards waking theta states of consciousness. Thats not infinite per sey, but thats what your really talking about in factual science terms.

[coberst]

Objectivity is our shared subjectivity. There are no absolute truths.

 

 

Absolute truth is our blanky. DickandJane become very anxious when their security blanket, i.e. absolute truth, is not in hand.

 

Objectivism is a fundamentalist philosophy. It believes that reality is something external to the brain and that the task of the brain is to gain knowledge about this external reality.

 

Right/wrong and true/false are considered to be objective criteria rather than subjective criteria. Objectivism posits perfect knowledge and assumes such knowledge is obtainable. I think that such views have been discredited.

 

The myth of objectivism says that: the world is made up of objects that have properties completely independent of those who perceive them; we understand our world through our consciously constructed concepts and categories; “we can say things that are objectively, absolutely true, and unconditionally true and false about it…we cannot rely upon subjective judgments…science can ultimately give a correct, definitive, and general account of reality”; words have fixed meaning that can describe reality correctly. To be objective is to be rational.

 

The myth of subjectivism informs us that our senses and intuition is our best guide. Feelings are the most important elements of our lives. Aesthetic sensibilities and moral practices are all totally subjective. “Art and poetry transcend rationality and objectivity and put us in touch with more important reality of our feelings and intuitions. We gain this awareness through imagination rather than reason…Science is of no use when it comes to the most important things in our lives.”

 

The new paradigm of cognitive science rejects both objectivism and subjectivism. I believe in this new cognitive science, which theorizes that objectivity is a shared subjectivity.

 

Objectivity is shared subjectivity. Objective truth is a misnomer; there is only shared truth/false and there is only shared good/bad.

 

Objectivity is shared subjectivity. We create reality in our brain. If you and I create the same reality then we have a shared subjectivity. We cannot know the thing-in-itself, as Kant informs us and is easily recognized if we focus upon it.

 

I would say that reality comes in two forms; the thing-in-itself is the reality that Kant informs us that we cannot know and then we have the reality that our brain creates. This reality we create is aided by the senses and is congruent with how our body interacts with the thing-in-itself. If the interaction between the thing-in-itself and the creature’s embodied mind is too far off--the creature quickly becomes toast.

[Eclogite]

The new paradigm of cognitive science rejects both objectivism and subjectivism. I believe in this new cognitive science, which theorizes that objectivity is a shared subjectivity.

This is hardly new. Philsophers have been playing with these seeming paradoxes and spectrums for generations. I think you would attract a lot more positive interest if you toned down the claim of novelty. I am sure there are some new aspects to SGCS, but you seem to be going much to far in your claims for it and that just turns people off.

[coberst]

This is hardly new. Philsophers have been playing with these seeming paradoxes and spectrums for generations. I think you would attract a lot more positive interest if you toned down the claim of novelty. I am sure there are some new aspects to SGCS, but you seem to be going much to far in your claims for it and that just turns people off.

 

Many things that I say turn many people off. However, in the land of the blind the one-eyed man must take up the role of Dutch uncle.

 

Cognitive science argues for an embodied realism as opposed to philosophy’s metaphysical realism. Embodied realism provides us with a link between our ideas and the worlds we experience. “Our bodies contribute to our sense of what is real”.

 

Spatial-relations concepts are not part of the world but are embodied and provide us with our ability to make sense of the world. “They characterize what spatial form is and define spatial inference.”

 

We do not see neither nearness nor farness but see objects in the world as they are and attribute the characteristic of nearness or farness to them. “We use spatial-relation concepts unconsciously, and we impose them unconsciously via our perceptual and conceptual systems. We just automatically and unconsciously ‘perceive’ one entity as in, on, or across from another entity. However, such perception depends on an enormous amount of automatic unconscious mental activity on our part.”

 

We might see a butterfly ‘in’ the garden. We conceptualize a three-dimensional container that is bounded by the garden and that which contains the butterfly. We locate the butterfly as a figure relative to that container. “We perform such complex, though mundane, acts of imaginative perception during every moment of our waking lives.”

 

Spatial relations have built in “logics” by virtue of their image-schematic structure:

Given two containers, A and B, and an object, X, if A is ‘in’ B and X is ‘in’ A, then X is ‘in’ B. Such is self-evident and requires no deduction. A container is a gestalt structure, its parts make no sense without the whole, it has an inside, outside, and a boundary.

 

“Container schemas, like other image schemas, are cross-modal. We can impose a conceptual container schema on a visual scene.” We can impose it on something we hear, on music perhaps to separate components, on our motor movements such as breaking down our movements in a tennis stroke and deal with these parts as within the whole.

 

Another important schema commonly used in perception and conception is the source-path-goal schema, which has an internal spatial “logic” with built in inferences”:

*If you have traversed a route to a current location, you have been at all previous locations on the route.

*If you travel from A to B and from B to C, them you have traveled from A to C.

*And so forth.

 

“Our most fundamental knowledge of motion is characterized by the source-path-goal schema…One of the important discoveries of cognitive science is that the conceptual systems used in the world’s languages make use of a relatively small number of basic image schemas…The spatial logics of these body-based image schemas are among the sources of the forms of logic used in abstract reason.”

 

The embodied mind hypothesis “radically undercuts the perception/conception distinction. In an embodied mind, it is conceivable that the neural system engaged in perception (or in bodily movement) plays a central in conception. That is, the very mechanisms responsible for perception, movements, and object manipulation could be responsible for conceptualization and reasoning.”

 

Quotes from Philosophy in the Flesh by Lakoff and Johnson

[Pyrotex]

Take a look at the writings of Alfred Korzybsky, Polish/American philosopher.

 

He came up with the idea that we know what we know because we build a model, a simulacrum, a simulation, a "Map" of the Real World in our brains. It is this Map that we know and live in.

 

He went on to conclude that this Map in our brains is a semantic structure, that is, a structure built out of semantic components; these components are the basic units of Languaging. And so, as we experience the world, this experience is added to our internal Map. And we know whatever it is that we know about the external Real World by knowing our Map.

 

And what is the "we" ("I") that knows its Map? The conscious Mind is, itself, another semantic structure, that reads and lives in and updates the Map.

 

Very heady stuff. ;)

[Eclogite]

Coberst,

your reply didn't really address my point that what you are saying is not new. It just offered more details about cognitive science gleaned, it seems, from your off quoted Lakoof and Johnson. I can't move forward with that till you deal with my concerns about the claimed novelty. Would you do that for me please? View it as a belated May Day present.

[coberst]

Coberst,

your reply didn't really address my point that what you are saying is not new. It just offered more details about cognitive science gleaned, it seems, from your off quoted Lakoof and Johnson. I can't move forward with that till you deal with my concerns about the claimed novelty. Would you do that for me please? View it as a belated May Day present.

 

 

The mind/body dichotomy, i.e. the disembodied mind permeates Western thought. I am not qualified to write such a book about this permeation but the libraries are full of them. One can acquire a “Friends of the Library” card from a local college for a small yearly fee of about $25 and thereby acquire access to great libraries.

[Pyrotex]

Well, in Descartes' day, the disembodied mind was a reasonable conclusion, given the absence of other fundemental concepts. Descartes (and his fellows) knew nothing of the conepts of: programming, simulation, information storage and retrieval, languaging, semantics, symbolic modeling, emergence, resonance, chaos, bifurcation, attractors, distributed functionality, Fourier transforms, spectral filtering, et al...

Now that we DO understand these concepts, the rationality of the embodied mind as semantic structure is becoming clear.

[Eclogite]

I would argue that many philosphers, for example Hume, had views wholly consistent with this integrated view. This is why I am challenging coberst to demonstrate that this is a novel approach. IT may be a development of the idea, but it is certainly not novel.coberst, how say you?

[coberst]

Well, in Descartes' day, the disembodied mind was a reasonable conclusion, given the absence of other fundemental concepts. Descartes (and his fellows) knew nothing of the conepts of: programming, simulation, information storage and retrieval, languaging, semantics, symbolic modeling, emergence, resonance, chaos, bifurcation, attractors, distributed functionality, Fourier transforms, spectral filtering, et al...

Now that we DO understand these concepts, the rationality of the embodied mind as semantic structure is becoming clear.

 

Well said:

 

An ancient contradiction that lives on today:

 

While my education and my career was in engineering I also had some interest in philosophy. My first philosophy course was Descartes' "Meditations on First Philosophy". I suspect this is an introductory course for most students studying philosophy. Descartes has left Western tradition with a gigantic legacy that only now is this legacy being undermined by cognitive science.

 

Descartes goes through a sequence of analysis in an effort to find an absolute truth upon which to build his philosophy. He settled on "Cogito, ergo sum". "I think therefore I am". The conclusions of this series of analysis by Descartes have set the course, more or less, of Western philosophy. What are the fateful conclusions derived from the work of Descartes?

 

"I am, I exist, that is certain. But how often? Just when I think; for it might possibly be the case if I ceased entirely to think, that I should likewise cease altogether to exist...But what then am I? A thing that thinks."

 

The Folk Theory of Essences

Every kind of thing has an essence that makes it the kind of thing it is.

The way each thing naturally behaves is a consequence of its essence.

 

Descartes knows he exists because he thinks. Because he exists he has an essence. He assumes nothing else causes his thinking but his essence. Conclusion: thinking must be at least a part of the human essence.

 

"Just because I know certainly that I exist, and that meanwhile I do not remark that any other thing necessarily pertains to my nature or essence, excepting that I am a thinking thing, I rightly conclude that my essence consists solely in the fact that I am a thinking thing."

 

"It is certain that this I [that is to say, my soul by which I am what I am], is entirely, and absolutely distinct from my body and can exist without it."

 

To have reached that last conclusion Descartes must assume an additional:

 

The Folk Theory of Substance and Attributes

A substance is that which exists in itself and does not depend for its existence on any other thing.

Each substance has one and only one primary attribute that defines what its essence is.

 

The following is the contradiction that his introspection has made him “see”:

 

There are two kinds of substance, one bodily and the other mental.

The attribute of bodily substance is extension in space.

The attribute of mental substance is thought.

 

Thus philosophy gave the mind/body dichotomy (contradiction) its theoretical substance, which determines much of what we think today.

[coberst]

I would argue that many philosphers, for example Hume, had views wholly consistent with this integrated view. This is why I am challenging coberst to demonstrate that this is a novel approach. IT may be a development of the idea, but it is certainly not novel.coberst, how say you?

 

I am certainly no expert in such matters but I suspect you would have a difficult time demonstrating that Hume was an advocate of embodied realism.

[Eclogite]

So you are maintaining that a view contrary to Descartes did not exist prior to SGCS? That is what you appear to be saying, but since the evidence does not support this I feel I may be misunderstanding your position. Would you please directly and simply give that clarification. Is it or is it not your position?

[Pyrotex]

I would argue that many philosphers, for example Hume, had views wholly consistent with this integrated view. This is why I am challenging coberst to demonstrate that this is a novel approach. IT may be a development of the idea, but it is certainly not novel.coberst, how say you?

I'm not sure that Coberst has explicitly claimed this is a novel approach. :shrug:

It appears to me that he is just saying that modern concepts are now sufficient to overturn Descartes--and should, given the powerful affect that his "disembodied" mind (or body-mind duality) has had on modern culture.

 

I have read only a little of Hume, but I failed to see anything there that explicitly attacked Descartes' reasoning. Even if Hume claimed that Descartes' philosophy was "inadequate" to explain Hume's observations, I'm not sure that Hume could have made a case for the "embodied mind".

[Rade]

To V37.... please define what you mean by "to know". Cannot answer your OP question until I have this definition. You will see that to do this, you will need an axiom, and the axiom you select will shape your philosophy and thus how you answer your question. This question has been asked and answered by philosophers for many years now--you need to get a book on introduction to philosophy to see all the different answers.

[lawcat]

I think the time has come on this forum to put all posters who claim that we know nothing, and those who raise the question: how do we know anything, in the rubric of strange and silly claims. It's utter madness.

[clapstyx]

A strategy to consider..cant say it works for sure always.

 

If I realise something once I count it as probably true. If I realise the same thing a second time via a different course of contemplation then I accept it as the truth. By experience its then possible to evaluate whether it is the truth based on everything you know or understand to be possibly true.