Cogito

How does an empiricist prove to him/herself that s/he exists? Hume concluded that our senses could be deceived, and that we could not prove whether the world we experience is the actual reality or merely an illusion of the mind. How do we know that our senses are reliable?

[ January 09, 2002: Message edited by: Cogito ]</p>

Kachana

Whether the reality we experience is merely an illusion of the mind is a separate matter than whether we exist or not.

Existence is usually taken as axiomatic, in that to deny it leads to contradiction, as the denial is contingent on your existence.

We may well all be decieved, experiencing an illusion, or a brain in a vat, but everything seems pretty real to me, so I see no reason to live as though it isn't, especially since there is no ostensible method of determining what the alter-reality is.

scilvr

Cogito,

I think how you answer questions like these is going to depend on what kind of attitude, or general philosophical outlook, you adopt in your philosophical inquiries. If you were to adopt a sort of innocent-until-proven-guilty attitude, you might find it premature to question the reliability of your sense perceptions without first being confronted with compelling reasons to do so. On the other hand, if you were to adopt a guilty-until-proven-innocent outlook on life, then the question would be a live one for you regardless of whether or not you have actual reasons to be skeptical.

Personally, I tend to adopt the former and therefore am not really concerned with the question,as I have yet to be provided any compelling reasons to doubt the reliability of my sense perceptions. How about you?

99Percent

The senses constantly confirm previous memory of past perceptions. Existence has a logical persistence. If your life experience where like in a dream where things don't make sense from one moment to the other, memory would be lost as it cannot be constantly confirmed.

Senses can be temporarily deceived, yes, but this is irrelevant anyway because deceived senses are lost in memory as this memory is not constantly refreshed. That is why dreams (or hallucinations) are mostly forgotten.

Theophage

Pedantic point here: not all false sensory input is so dismissed. Consider the case of optical illusions. They are not simply forgotten, but they do surprise us since they contradict what we expect. And yet, they don't surprise us past the point where we canot figure them out and understand why they fool us.

Jane Marple

They live on the incertain... Is this real? What's real? Can anyone say whats is reality? No! We all see what surrounds us according to our phisical support and our conceptions of the world. What I see is not what you see. Plato says that this world is not real, it's something covered by the veil of Maya. He uses an interesting image to discribe manking (on "Fedon"): we are like fishes looking at the sky under water, seeing the real thing through a distorting glass.
Should we bother if this is real? No! It's too spooky to think that what we have for certain doesn't exist... It's too... Matrix

<img src="graemlins/boohoo.gif" border="0" alt="[Boo Hoo]" />

NialScorva

I'm trying to take a sabbatical, don't taunt me with Hume threads.

Hume said something like this, but you miss the point. I think the thrust of Hume was that the senses could be deceived, but it didn't matter because the deception is the only reality we could know. The act of experiencing itself implies existence because the very act of experiencing is an experience. Hume departed fro Descartes' cogito by pointing out that the act of experiencing is not proof of existence in permenance, but a brute fact in the instant. At this moment, every memory and experience is real, but we only assume that it's always been this way. Our assumptions of consistency are based off the instantaneous memories that imply consistency. However, this is all good enough. In the instant of my consciousness, everything seems consistent and whole. If the next instant, if there is one, is different then I will come to a conclusion based upon that instant. This is a rough outline of his bundle theory, that we are solely our experiences in the instant which is a brute fact, and that all assumption about constancy and consistency are nothing more than assumptions of that instant.

Vorkosigan

Crudely put, evolution.

The "problem of empricism" is twofold -- not only "how do we know," but "how do we appear to know so successfully?" If we assume the second part, that our experience of success actually reflects reality, we soon come to discover the process of natural selection, which guarantees a strong link between our emprical experience and the actuality of the world, hence answering the first question.

Michael

jordan_tar

1. It's axiomatic - even if you deny that you exist, there's still a "you" to deny it.
2. You talk of the senses being deceived - but deceived on what basis of comparison? To say that they're being deceived, you've got to compare them to another state of nondeception.

jordan_tar

But optical illusions aren't false sensory input. Our senses don't warp the way that they're presented; rather, they present them accurately, which is a testament to the reliability of the senses.