this post was submitted on 29 Mar 2024
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Agh presump logic. Belief is not required prior to methodology, belief in the effectiveness of methodology stems from results.
When things evolved to swim they didn't have apriori knowledge that swimming would benefit them. You knew how to eat long before you even learned that eating got rid of stomach pains well before you took a nutrition class.
This whole idea that you need a metaphysics before you have a physics which you need before you have engineering which you have before any technical skill is a reversal of cause and effect. Put another way we didn't start with reasonable is rational, develop the big 3 of logic, spend decades developing set theory just so we could add, so we could develop the tensor equation for kinematics, which in turn led to Newton's laws, which branches into material science, and spend a century testing until the wheel came out.
I don't have to defeat Kant to know how to fry an egg.
That's not the point. The point is whether or not the fried egg is real. You eat because you're hungry because you choose to believe the sensation is real. Your senses.
So yes, senses existed before science, but science said "hey let's use these senses to reason"
Incorrect. The vast majority of life are single celled organisms and arguing that they have any sorta belief at all is very hard to do. Especially since they function perfectly fine without it. They find food, they eat it. No room for belief. To claim that humans don't work (action comes prior to belief) that way is just begging for me to ask at what point in evolution the sequence of events got reversed.
The fried egg is real. You should have vastly more confidence in the material world vs your thoughts about it. Which is more likely to be true?
A. Sticking your hand in fire will hurt you.
B. There is no largest prime number.
Everything went wrong with the early Greeks. They figured out your senses can be wrong sometimes. So instead of acknowledging this and moving on they demanded that it had to be right all of the time or wrong all of the time. No surprise this black and white thinking led them down to useless skepticism. It is so bizarre it is like noticing your speedometer isn't perfectly calibrated so the best idea is to go as fast as you feel like.
Stop reading Kant you are wasting your time.
You're making assumptions about what I'm saying.
We only find out our senses were wrong when we gather more information. More data. More observations. Stuff you acquire using your senses. You can't measure without senses. You can't question nature without observing it. Observe means father information. The only way to gather information is using senses.
That's the BASE. Yes, we then have to question and experiment and question more. But we can only do that with new information. The only new information we get is through senses.
A fact is only verifiable with observation. Observation, by definition, is information gathered using senses.
Again, I fully believe our experience is real. But science begins at the assumption that our senses are real.
I didn't know fuck all about Kant. This is just simple, basics of scientific inquiry.
This is my point of contention. Assuming our senses --> science is not supported historically. What I say is results of science --> science --> assuming our senses. Because something works we choose to explain how it works, we don't start with the assumption that it works and get it do so.
Kant basically argued that we can't be justified in our empirical knowledge because even if our senses were always correct we have hidden assumptions about the world that clouds them. For example that things happen in sequences, cause before effect. That space between things is real instead of all the same thing churning. And thus having defeated both reason and observation he declared God to be the basis of all human knowledge. It really is just Plato but in German and somehow more confusing.
Make an observation of a something, then explain it, right? Observe it working. Observe using senses. That was step one?
Think of a mathematical proof. List the givens. So when you explain your results, you start with "given that senses are real and not a simulation..." I agree that questioning senses came later, but it doesn't change that we always assumed they were real.
I see the frustration with those philosophers. I assure you I'm not trying to discourage or discount science.
Fine let's think of math. Did you learn to add and subtract in first grade via proofs or by counting? This is not only true as an individual this is true as a species. Someone noticed a pattern and only later did someone else write a proof. And then in the late 19th to early 20th century when set theory became a thing, when there was an attempt to justify all of math via itself endlessly problems popped up. Pretty much all math, according to some, depends on consistency of arithmetic which we don't know is true in the formal sense. Maybe one day someone will break that and get 2 = 3 and it won't matter. Because addition will still work.
I think I understand you're saying senses existed before science. Science and philosophy helped us to get to a place where we can say "are senses real?"
Like "wow we were using our senses the entire time! That's how we observe! But how do we know senses are real? Oh we can't"