Hahaha

>Similarly, I do not have faith that the sun will rise tomorrow, as I understand that the sun is a celestial object that could be subject to any number of extremely rare astrological phenomenon that would destroy it.

Yes, but why do you expect astrological phenomenons to be the same tomorrow? Why do you expect gravity to function as it functions today tomorrow?

I'm about to go down the somatic path to try to strengthen this connection. Any suggestions on good books? I really love that you are believing in yourself. That's some really good shit. You fucking rock man!

How does any of that relate to the original comment?

>Sensory experiences do not necessarily logically reflect a world out there

Linking your personal experience to the model of reality your mind has created is not in question here.

"Teach it phenomenology, Doolittle! Phenomenology!" - Dark Star, 1974

Everything you perceive, or experience, comes through your sensory apparatus, your eyes, ears, sense of touch, proprioception, and so on. Your brain processes this information, and in this way, you think you live in a world, have a body, and so on.

Nothing you experience is real.

When you see something - my words, here, on the screen you are watching - you are seeing how things were about a hundredth of a second after the fact. It takes time to process sight and understand what you see. But more than that, you are not actually seeing 'reality' - your brain constructs what you see and projects it for you as a waking dream.

This is partly because your vision center is made of modules, each which does one specific task: one clump of neurons only processes horizontal lines, another vertical, one processes contours, another processes light values, and so on. But there is more: your brain is constantly filling in gaps with virtual reality - things that are not there at all.

Of course, your 'blind spot', the place in your retina where your nerves blossom out into the retina itself, no vision occurs there, so the brain just 'paints over' the region with whatever was close to it. And yes, your peripheral vision - anything just a ways to the side of the center of your sight - is all in black and white. No color at all. But, your brain makes you think you are seeing color, because it paints it in - sometimes falsely. And, of course, your macula - the tiny spot in the very center of your vision, about the diameter of a dime at arms length. That's the only part of your vision that is sharp or clear - everything else is low resolution. Yet, you think you are seeing a detailed, colorful world - all a waking dream, created by the same part of your brain that actually dreams. You live, constantly, in biological virtual reality. Most of what you see is... made up.

This is why optical illusions work, by the way. They work because they are images that break your brain's virtual reality system and show you how the visual hamburger is made.

And there is the matter of saccades. Constantly, your eyeballs are twitching - moving, scanning, flicking from one spot to another - as you read these words, as you look around your room. If you actually could see with your eyes, the world would look like the jerkiest of badly-filmed music videos, with the camera jumping around so rapidly that nothing made any sense, and everything was a smear.

Fortunately, your brain has a solution: you don't actually see anything (it's a waking dream based on input from your eyes) and the good thing about that is that your brain can just turn it off. When your eyes flick and jitter and jump from spot to spot constantly, your vision just... shuts off. You are completely blind for about a 40 minutes (!) of every day. It's just that this total blindness happens during the tiny moments when your eyes jerk about. Your brain just shuts off vision, then convinces you that it didn't do that. That lie makes you think you are seeing this page, your room, whatever, as a constant movie of your life. It ain't so. Not even close.

And all of this is true of all your other senses, too, in various ways. You - your 'self' is forever living in a virtual reality recreation of the world outside your brain, computed by your brain, based on information your nerves report. But it is not actual reality. You will, from birth to death, never see actual reality. You will only touch, taste, feel and see a model of it constructed, projected, and edited by your brain modules.

What it 'really' is, your senses cannot tell you. And lest you think this mere semantics, consider the issue of the weird divide between quantum scale reality and large scale reality - they don't agree. At all. Yet, our senses paint us a cohesive reality that is very useful for an animal surviving on earth. But mathematics and technology give us more senses, and they describe a reality a bit stranger than that, one we cannot ourselves directly see.

And so it goes.

With that stated, we get to phenomenology.

If the only way you can know the world is through your senses, and your senses lie to you and you exist only within a waking dream your brain invents to help you survive, what do you really know about literally anything? I mean actually, really, truly know?

And if you cannot know anything about actual reality, then what is left? What do you have that you can still call real... to you?

You. Your self. That is all that you have left. Just you. Somebody is experiencing this illusion, this lying set of sense impressions. Who is that somebody? It is you. You are that somebody. Your self is the only thing you can truly hold real. Because you... are the experiencer and the entity thinking about all of this.

You think, therefore you are. You are the only thing you can ever be certain is real.

Make sense?

>if you were blindfolded and made to smell a variety of fruits, would you confidently be able to pick out whether any of them is guava?

hundred percent

totally agree. most of the time i was thinking about this thread was about what "faith" actually means in this context. its such a loaded term when what has been talked about in this thread could use more neutral and straightforward terms. i wonder if part of the use of the word is just to make the discussion seem more exciting.

i dunno, maybe we or i have a different definition of 'leap of faith' but the 'taking for granted' thing almost seems opposite to the idea of a leap of faith to me. this is kind of why i dont like the word faith in this context. its such a loaded and inflated term when what people mean about what is being discussed in this thread could be expressed with much clearer and more neutral words.

>But now I am curious, do you think the individuals inside Nazi Germany are "selfless" then?

Fascism is an ideology that does not respect the individual self in favour of the group. It's brutally selfish towards outsiders, and brutally selfless within.

A biologist will say a cell has a goal—but they don't mean it in the same way that a person has a goal nor do they mean it in the way an organization has a goal.

If this is applicable, translating concepts from one culture to another is incredibly difficult because so much of the context is lost. if you're putting an argument forwards, it's valuable to try and define every important term you use. Doubly so if you're translating ideas across cultures. The more central a concept is to your essay, the more of the essay I'd spend defining exactly what you're talking about.

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Other commenters are telling you nonsense about how Descartes argues for an external world.

His argument in the Meditations first establishes, as you and others said, that he exists but then goes from there to establish that he has an idea of an infinite being, an idea that he argues could only come from an actual infinite being that exists independently of his own mind (basically, the idea's content is too much to have ever come from any finite being like himself).

From there, he establishes that this being must have created him and must be good, so would not have created him with mental faculties that would be unable to detect their own errors. Since a systematic falsity of perception would be an undetectable error, our senses must not be systematically false. Therefore, at least some of the external objects we perceive must exist and any mistakes we make about what objects are actually out there must be able to be corrected, as we do in natural philosophy.

Not OP, but I've been doing somatic therapy twice a week for over a year. It has radically changed my life for the better. I finally found a good therapist that I trust and connect with (after 3 previous attempts that didn't really help...). For me, the somatic aspect was *really* important, as reconnecting with your body will also reconnect you to your emotions.

My therapist helps me feel safe enough to engage with my emotions and helps me accept them and understand them. She helps me make sense of what I've experienced during my life. She also helps me find new ways of looking at the world, at myself, and at my relationships with those around me.

I don't trust I'm looking at something. I just have personal evidence that within my own experience, be it solipsistic or not, that interacting with the things identified by my senses has been effective at modifying my experience, solipsistic or not.

I do not have faith that I'm looking at something, I just do not have any evidence to suggest I am being misled. In the cases that I DO have evidence of being misled, such as optical illusions, I actively do not think I am looking at what I am seeing. And in such cases, no belief or trust is undermined, as it never existed in the first place.

That's an expectation derived from evidence. Thus, at least using the definitions I use, it is an antithesis of faith. Faith requires a belief in spite of a there being a lack of evidence or contradictory evidence.

The difference being, if a repeatable phenomenon does not repeat, a person's expectations simply change as the new evidence is included. This is based in proof, not faith, as faith requires some sort of apprehension or trust in something beyond the evidence. Thus, for a person using probability to influence their expectations, their understanding of the world is far more robust and flexible than one using faith.

I don't get on an airplane because I have faith in the pilot. I do it because the repeated phenomenon of planes landing safely allows me to adjust my expectations accordingly. I'd a plane crashes somewhere in the world, I would still probably be willing to get on a plane the next day, as the probability barely changes. If I had faith that airplanes don't crash, that faith would be far more shaken, as it seems that they do.

Similarly, I do not have faith that the sun will rise tomorrow, as I understand that the sun is a celestial object that could be subject to any number of extremely rare astrological phenomenon that would destroy it. I do, however, expect the sun to rise, as I understand the probability of such an event is low.

Awesome! Thank you.

Are they equivocating on "faith" here or do they just mean "trust" and not "religious faith"?

Not when it's consistently reinforced by everyone around us.

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Exactly this. It isn't saying "don't be sad that your car will someday not be here." Instead, it's that the sadness you experience will be easier to deal with rather than the sadness caused by the loss AND clinging to what you no longer have.

This is why I’m an advocate for allowing emotional pain to teach us how to manage ourselves and formulate healthy beliefs about reality.

> There's no directly experiencing the world.

You say that as if there is some possible world where we experience it "directly" and our current world falls short somehow.

That's a pretty odd view - how much more "directly" could we experience the world?

You might want to look into reliabilism and/or the work of GE Moore.

Descartes is not the endpoint of epistemology.

> There’s no good argument against external world skepticism.

There's also no good reason to accept it

That's false, saving the day and being proud of it is not a bad thing nor will it ever be.

Have a look at Dependent Origination, the steps in the process.