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Originally Posted by Mightyboosh
Sure, I could be a brain in a vat imagining all of this or being fed it by an external source that's manipulating me, etc etc etc... I have no answer to that, because there isn't one. It's also not useful for making sense of what we think is real to say 'you can never know what's real'. It's just a pointless rabbit hole that doesn't prove that anything is real or not real.
You can only know what's real if you can trust your perceptions.
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What I can know is true though is that we can't trust our perceptions, they regularly throw up easily identifiable errors.
If you can't trust your perceptions, how do you know they are "identifiable?" How do you identify them? Obviously
not with your perceptions, since you've said several times they can't be trusted.
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The cognitive mechanisms for this are known and easily understandable, cognitive biases have a survival advantage so it's easy to understand how we evolved them.
You can't know any of that if you can't trust your perceptions.
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And given that we know we can't trust our cognitive processes, we engage in methods to check our reasoning (or we should), we use logic to test our deductions, to try to ensure that we don't hold false beliefs.
How do we know that our methods are valid if we can't trust our perceptions? How do we determine which of our methods are valid and which are not? Obviously
not with our perceptions, since we can't trust them (or so you've asserted about five times).
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What do you do to ensure that you don't hold false beliefs?
That's, as they so, a short question with a long answer.
What can I know? is the question that Epistemology deals with.
For now, I'll give a short answer which I will expand on later since its getting late here (3:55 am):
Without having all knowledge, something you don't know could contradict what you think you know. In order to know anything, you would have to know everything, OR have revelation from someone who does. Only God knows everything.
The above quote is from a tract by Sye ten Bruggencate. It's kind of a short version of what is sometimes called
Revelatory Epistemology. Will expand on that later.
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Or is that not important to you? I'm aware that there are many reasons for holding beliefs and them actually being true might not be one of them
It is impossible to
believe something that you do not also
believe is true. (That's what
belief means.) It would be nonsensical to say , "I believe that capitol of California is Fresno even though I think that Fresno is
not the capitol of California.