(September 3, 2008 at 10:41 pm)Pete Wrote: I was also asking about sources of knowledge in more general terms too. For example; if you were on a jury then you might have to make decisions based on eye witness accounts. You might have to rely on expert witnesses for things like explanations of a persons health or wha the surgical risks are in an operation. If you were diagnosed with cancer then you'd literally have to place your lives in the hands of onclologists who might have to fill your bodies with poison (i.e. chemo) to kill the cancer etc. Sometimes we must base decisions on what certain authorities say. Thus some of our knowledge will come from experts. Brick-Top just described what a virtual particle is. I assume that he learned that somewhere. Typically we learn from authoritative sources like text books, science teachers etc. You know that the sun is 93 million miles from the Sun because scientists have worked hard to figure this out. We trust that they did their job right and we trust that the system works, i.e. one scientist might lie or make a mistake but we can't imagine that they all do.
Eyewitnesses are highly unreliable. They only paint a blurry picture of an occurence. This is where my concept of observation and testing comes into play. You can observe a crime scene and work out what happened by reenacting the events and forensics. Like for example a corsp. For the exception of the decomposition stages you can determine how long they have been dead from the insects eating a dead body. However this is not enough, they want to make sure so they use a pig in very similar conditions and see how long it takes for insects to find the body and reporduce.
If all the attempts to find the time of death point to one time then that's the most likely time.
I trust medical science wholeheartedly. However I dont trust it's method of supply.
I study, however I'm the biggest scientific illiterate on this site.
We know the distance of the sun through triangulation. I noticed it's very similar to our natural ability of this method with our eyes.
Of course people in the scientific community lie and make mistakes. However Peer review and the scientific method should remove deception.
(September 3, 2008 at 10:41 pm)Pete Wrote: If you're married then consider whether you would have got married if you believed that your wife would cheat on you. Its impossible to know that before you say I do so, based on our knowledge and experience with this person, we trust them. That means that we assume they won't do something when we can't really know for sure that they won't. That's an example of faith too. If a man gets up to go to work then he has to assume that won't die before he gets there. That's usually true, but not always. Sometimes we have to make assumptions in life because it would be too difficult to live otherwise.
This is interesting. Uncertainty and a lack of knowledge on an occurence. However I'm under the assumption that everything will eventually be acuratly measured.
