Yuku free message boards

misterpessimistic: What is 'direct access' then?

In terms of the 4000 year old debate over epistemology, direct access is a requirement for knowing a thing as it is, not as it appears. All of our senses are indirect. Sight doesn't encompass the thing itself, but rather interprets the light reflected from an object. That involves several levels of removal from the object itself. For instance, if light is reflected from an object in an unaccustomed way (unaccustomed, that is, to us), then it may result in a distorted perception of the thing -- as with the foreshortening of an image viewed through water.

Another level of removal rests with the actual mechanism of our sensory organs. The eye receives images by use of a photo-sensitive chemical that reacts by producing a chemical signal to the brain. That signal can go wrong in a number of ways, and even when it's functioning properly, there are limitations to what it can receive and translate. Moreover, biologically speaking, it's a very specific tool -- not only is it only geared for one form of perception (you can't hear with your eye), but it's only geared for particular applications of that perception (eg. we can't see infrared, even though it's a visual phenomenon).

And at a third remove, all of our visual perceptions are conditioned at the cognitive level. We only see a chair because we've been culturally conditioned to recognize a thing as a chair. It's easy to see that at work with a cultural artifact like a chair, but it's debatable whether or not we'd intuitively arrive at a category like, say, red. In fact, other cultures categorize color in different ways, such that they'd find our distinction between green and blue difficult to understand without a great deal of practice.

Those are three levels of remove operative in every visual observation we make. That doesn't mean that sight is useless, but keeping these things in mind does check our hubris to some degree.

I am a little tired of the totally made up assumption that somehow, we are so isolated from reality and that our senses are just not good enough!!

They're patently not good enough for some tasks, and I think you'd recognize as much if you thought about it. If they were good enough, we wouldn't have had to extend our senses with the objects of scientific technology, like the microscope or the x-ray. And while those tools have been incredibly useful, we'd do well to remember that they put our senses at a further remove. If the naked eye is indirect to a power of three (because of the three removes I listed above) then an observation made through a microscope is indirect to a power of four. That's four levels at which things could go wrong.

The question implicit in this whole thread -- and to some degree, in this forum as a whole -- is whether or not there are some things that our senses, even extended by our tools, are insufficient to perceive with any confidence.

It slaps doubt upon anything we can possibly present as evidence and keeps the door wide open for superstitious and religious ways.

I'd say it's healthy to maintain some doubt. Without that doubt, the thing you consider knowledge moves closer and closer to being religion in its own right. I'm perfectly content in supposing that modern science is right about the evolutionary origin of humanity, but I don't hold it as certain beyond a doubt. And on a more personal level, I feel pretty safe in assuming that the floor of my second story apartment is as solid as it looks, but I still leave room for doubt on the matter.

misterpessimistic: But that does not leave room for us to just invent gods and the supernatural.

It's pretty rare that someone just "invents" a religion. I've studied a lot of history of religion, and while there are a few examples of people just spouting off theology off the top of their heads, that usually isn't the process.

Nor is it a process born of scientific method, and that seems to be the real point of conflict around here. What can I say? I don't defend religion on that point. I think religion is a groping towards something that might be true. That doesn't justify the sheer bulk of beliefs encompassed by religion, but it at least takes into account the limits of our epistemic position.

But it is plain that the rest is just speculative blah blah. Whether or not someone CALLS blue and green by those specific names, the colors still have a different quality on the eye.

What's speculative about it? I'm not denying that there's some measurable effect that the reflected light in any image has a specific effect on the normative human eye. And unless there's some perceptible difference in the structure of the human eye from one group of humans to the next, it seems likely enough to me that the sheer physical effect is the same from person to person.

What I'm saying is, that how we understand any given phenomenon is susceptible to our social conditioning. The fact that people in difference cultures don't make the same distinctions between colors is not speculative -- it's anthropologically observable. And that impacts the way that they perceive the world; it impacts, more to the point, what they consider knowledge. So is our knowledge of the color "orange" objective, while a !Kung bushman's knowledge of an identical shade of "red" subjective? Both forms of knowledge are specialized to the specific set of cultural and social requirements that necessitate conscious distinctions between colors, and that makes both of them, within the realm of culture, subjective -- or at the very least, relative.

Frank 013: I am trying to figure out where you are going with this

Where am I going with it? I'm illustrating what, in epistemic debate, is meant by "direct knowledge" of a thing, and why our sense organs don't provide us with direct access to any object that we might seek to know.

true our senses give us incomplete information especially when separated out like your example. But they are not known for giving "mostly" false positives (although that does happen)

This business about "false positives" is derived (as far as I can tell -- it may have a more original source) from the epistemologicalic theory of Karl Popper. Popper's interest was in providing an epistemic foundation for science that was impervious to invalidation, and he handled that task mostly by providing a schematization of knowledge that reduced it to a true/false switch. But knowledge doesn't necessarily work that way, and even if it does, we have no objective way of checking hits on a true/false scale.

Even assuming that knowledge could be reduced to axiomatic points that are objectively verifiable as true or false, what's our access to the key? You say that our senses don't often register "false positives". How do we know that? The only way to check those false positives is via our senses. So we're verifying the reliability of a tool with the very tool in question. That one person is checking the reliability of another's person's senses does little to solve the theoretical problem unless we can be certain that the person administrating the test already has reliable senses. And we have no objective way of ensuring that.

We're much more capable of checking the consistency of the human apparatus from person to person -- that is, checking to make sure that one person's senses are comparable to another person's senses -- than we are at deciding whether or not human sense perception is adequate to the task of knowing any thing as it really is.

Furthermore while our technically extended senses have expanded our view of our reality they have confirmed it more than anything else.

And how, praytell, do they do that?

So based off of these limitations you are prepared to completely deny our reality then?

I love this rhetorical tactic. Dismiss a statement I've made by associating it with a position that I've never espoused. Very clever.

We must have gotten some stuff right or we would not have survived to this point.

Why do you think that? History is full of examples of things that people have gotten wrong, but which we have nonetheless benefitted from indirectly.

We also enhance these senses with acquired knowledge which is something that has been neglected in these conversations.

Knowledge acquired by those very same senses.

This seems like a sensible/practical philosophy based off of your sensory input and knowledge.

It is. But it isn't objective, and it certainly isn't direct knowledge of anything. It's a surmise, as is most of what passes for knowledge.

So why misrepresent our sensory input so badly and try to shed doubt on our most basic of knowledge?

Because too liberal a faith in our senses and in our current scientific, political and cultural dogmas makes us less capable of considering alternate possibilities and of compassing social change when it does come. The history of science is full of episodes in which an old guard is so entrenched in the established science of the time that they're incapable of accepting the revisions sweeping the new guard. There were reputable scientists who died without having accepted the ground offered by Newton, or Bacon, or Darwin. There are scientists living now who will never accept the revolution in scientific thought that the new generation of scientists is even now cooking up.

Frank: I think that because we as a species are not extinct, any flaw in our senses as fundamentally bad as you seem to want to make them sound, would have doomed us to extinction the first time we were faced with a physical challenge.

I'm not saying that our sense are flawed. I'm saying that they're evolved to meet those specific physical challenges. But more and more we're presenting them with new challenges, which they weren't evolved to meet.

According to you there is no rational, so what do we do now?

I've never said there's no "rational" -- by which I suppose you to mean reason. What I've said is that it's a far more precarious, problematic faculty than people on this site -- and people generally -- tend to recognize.

So how do you propose that we act? Like nothing is confirmable?

I would say that the most prudent way to behave is to habituate ourselves to scaling our confidence to the circumstances. If I'm hungry, and there's food in front of me, I'll treat it as relatively safe to assume that eating the food will satiate my hunger. But information coming out of scientific research is of a different order. The immediacy of that information is different; my epistemic access is different; the part the information plays in by decision making is different. And there's every reason to moderate my confidence in and certainty about that kind of information.

The whole argument still sounds like a thinly veiled attempt to legitimize the mystical.

That's your bias against my theism. There are plenty of secular humanists that have pointed out the same limitations.