Back to the beginning: the cave

[vulcanlogician]

I think what Rob was getting at is that we are limited in our perceptive abilities. For instance, if there lay a garden outside your window, you could simply look outside and know what was there. But what if you didn't have a window? What if you could only peer through a tiny hole in the wall and observe a patch of green? Could you ever figure out that a garden was on the other side of the wall? Maybe it's a forest... maybe something else... after all, a patch of green doesn't tell you much.

That adequately describes our predicament as knowledge-seeking beings. With time and effort, we can perhaps learn that there is an assortment of different plants on the other side of a wall. But so much else is hidden. 

Our capacity to know is finite. Can we ever discover the ultimate nature of the universe/reality? Probably not. We may never come to know a great many things. In some cases, such knowledge may simply be impossible.

No, that is a poor analogy.

It's akin to the falsehood of "if a tree falls in the forest and no is around to witness it, does it still fall?"

Of course, it still falls.  Logic and what we know of trees falling dictates this.

It is no different than any other perceptions we know to be realistically accurate.  

Therefore, equating what we know to be perceptively accurate with faith-based interpretation just doesn't fly.

Not really. Keep in mind that I was more responding to Rob's statements (or what I interpreted his statements to mean) and also adding my own elaborations.

I was was talking about the limits of human knowledge, not the accuracy of our perceptions. In quantum mechanics there are several types of phenomena which will forever remain beyond human apprehension--not just because they are utterly divorced from our intuitions --though this is the root of the problem.

I think it's pretty reasonable to postulate that there could be a great many phenomena that will forever remain outside the detection of our instrumentation, not to mention our sensory perceptions. And though Plato thought otherwise, it is even quite possible that certain phenomena can't be quantified by mathematics.

As to others' comments on Plato's cave, I have something to say about that too. But I wanted clear up what I said before. Just because I say that there are limits to knowledge, doesn't mean that I have a "faith-based interpretation" concerning things that lie outside outside the grasp of our apprehension.