The Truth; You Exist

[FallentoReason]

Rhythm and genkaus:

I think you have both raised points that lead us further into better understanding how we can know we know the truth, so I've combined your posts and replied to them.

The trouble with this as an analogy is that you are choosing something for which you have created a scenario that would exclude our ability to "know" in the manner you describe along fairly predictable lines. The analogy falls apart for the observer literally sitting on the sun, doesn't it? When this observer gives you the sitrep on what state the sun is in, he doesn't have to wait to see if it's true. He cannot communicate this to the observer on the earth any faster than the lightshow will reach the observer on earth, but this is not a limitation of his ability to know the state of the sun, nor is his ability to know the state of the sun at the "mercy" of the universe or time in the manner in which you have presented for the observer on the earth. Again, it's communication that is limited in this analogy, not "knowing".

I simply chose this example because it's easy to understand. I know that we are intelligent enough to know what's happening and where the complications are. I think the sensible direction to go from here is this:

By knowing how the information was altered, we can correct it for it and get closer to the truth.

So because we know the nature of light we are more correct in saying that what we observe about the sun isn't necessarily true about it at this instant which is the more correct position than say 500 years ago when we didn't know much about light at all and so we would have been oblivious to the fact that we are observing the past.

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.

Ah ok, I was having trouble before making sense to what you were essentially getting at, but I see what you mean. From what I said above, I guess as we start to understand better the impairments we have, we can then adjust our understanding of the information we're receiving and therefore get closer to the truth, as you mentioned.

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I think we've sort of gone off on a tangent and got too caught up on just one aspect of knowing the truth which relies on a physical property. I wanted this to be more on the philosophical side but I'm not too sure how to really go about it. I just downloaded Rene Descartes' Discourse on the Method where his starting point for what is true is that he exists, then through logic starts to reassemble reality and what is true. Should be a good read.

[genkaus]

So because we know the nature of light we are more correct in saying that what we observe about the sun isn't necessarily true about it at this instant which is the more correct position than say 500 years ago when we didn't know much about light at all and so we would have been oblivious to the fact that we are observing the past.

Ah ok, I was having trouble before making sense to what you were essentially getting at, but I see what you mean. From what I said above, I guess as we start to understand better the impairments we have, we can then adjust our understanding of the information we're receiving and therefore get closer to the truth, as you mentioned.

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I think we've sort of gone off on a tangent and got too caught up on just one aspect of knowing the truth which relies on a physical property. I wanted this to be more on the philosophical side but I'm not too sure how to really go about it. I just downloaded Rene Descartes' Discourse on the Method where his starting point for what is true is that he exists, then through logic starts to reassemble reality and what is true. Should be a good read.

I guess that as far as application of epistemology goes - that is, what is knowledge, how do we know it and how much of it do we know, etc. - we are in agreement. Let's try to get this thread where you wanted it to be.

Going back to the philosophical side, this position relies on two metaphysical axioms - reality exists and I exist. As I was saying in the parent thread, without first accepting these two axioms, even implicitly, no statement about knowledge or truth can be made. As the name suggests, these axioms cannot be proven or disproven, because the very concept of proof is derived from them. Basically, with regards to these axioms, ideas such as "reliability", "questioning them", "how do you know" etc are inapplicable because all of them have already implicitly accepted these axioms as true.