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Fellow atheists: How do you know your senses and reasoning are reliable and valid? How do you know that you know anything? Solipsism vs Nihilism (lemmy.ml)

submitted 11 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Just looking for other answers to this.

How do you know that you know anything? How do you know you can rely on your senses? (As in: I know the rock exists because I can see the rock. How do you know you can see it?)

If knowledge is reliant upon our senses and reasoning (which it is), and we can't know for sure that our senses are reasoning are valid, then how can we know anything?

So is all knowledge based on faith?

If all knowledge is based on faith, then is science reliable?

If all knowledge is based on faith, then what about ACTUAL faith? Why is it so illogical?

Solipsism vs Nihilism

Solipsism claims that we know our own mind exists, where Nihilism claims we don't know that anything exists.

Your thoughts?

Original from reddit

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[–] [email protected] 17 points 11 months ago (1 children)

How do you know that you know anything? How do you know you can rely on your senses?

Consistency and predictability. My only access to the world is through my senses, and my ability to navigate that world depends on my ability to understand and predict things in it.

The consistency of that model means it's an amazingly good model of the way the world really is.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

It’s an amazingly good model of the way the world behaves.

You could turn Pacman into a linear game with branching and looping paths instead of a grid, and still be able to play. You've just removed the invalid options to turn left or right when up and down are the only option. But both are still not accurate models of the world as it is which is instructions running on a processor.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago

Our models are imperfect, because ultimately, they are simply models of the real thing. And the fact that the model is useful and consistently effective means that despite being imperfect, they're still pretty close.