(April 19, 2012 at 8:58 pm)FallentoReason Wrote: I'd say that the furthest we can go in knowing the truth is knowing the nature of the information that we are receiving. Like how we know that black holes distort the trajectort of light itself therefore we can know that our observations might not entirely reflect the truth.
That is where I disagree. By knowing how the information was altered, we can correct it for it and get closer to the truth.
(April 19, 2012 at 8:58 pm)FallentoReason Wrote: Let's go with the 8 minute delay again because it's a real life case. So we've established that the information we receive was true 8 minutes ago. Now, if we make the statement 'the sun just imploded then' what evidence do we have of this? The evidence confirming your baseless assertion is yet to come in 8 minutes. Therefore you can only think you know the truth but you won't know that you know the truth, if this statement was even correct. See the problem? You just won't know until after 8 minutes which will then either confirm the statement as true back then or false. It's impossible to know simultaneously that it imploded. You're at the mercy of time.
Aren't you missing something? The only thing you can say about the 8 minute gap is that the information you are getting now is outdated by 8 minutes. It says nothing about the information yo already have.
Here, you ignored my statement about "any other perception regarding imminent implosion". Suppose, we know from the observation of other stars that exactly an hour before the implosion, the start turns blue. So, as soon as the sun turns blue, we start our timers and when there are less than 8 minutes left on the timer, we can safely say "the sun has imploded", even though we still see the blue sun in the sky and the visual confirmation of implosion is yet to come. That does not mean that our assertion was baseless or that it was impossible to know.
