Quote:
Originally Posted by bodi  No. I know the front door will lead outside.
No. I know that colored thing is a car.
etc.
Knowledge consists of verifiable fact. Beliefs and knowledge are not the same thing. |
You actually don't know any of that, for certain. What you have are beliefs based on the presumption that past experience will remain true in the future. But that isn't an absolute fact, it's an educated guess. For example someone could have bricked up your door or you could be having the hallucinations of cars or be dreaming, any of which would make what you think you know, false. Therefore, they are beliefs, not facts.
Then you have the whole realization that the things you see are in fact only mental images or representations of sensory data and don't have to relate in any absolute way to an external world. So in a very real and honest scientific sense, cars don't even exist as such. It's only a mental picture in the human mind.
There's a whole field of psychology dealing with perception and the main conclusion is that people are just really dumb. Not some of us, but all of us by the nature of our mind. There are just stacks upon stacks of biases of perception we engage in constantly. Conscious beliefs are only one aspect of that.
Quote:
Originally Posted by bodi That's true. So i guess you still use windows 3.5 because it uses the same underlying machine code as 7?
and I still love you... |
Haha, and I you.
The content of the code is irrelevant. The point is the CPU just executes code, whatever it is.
Likewise your beliefs just execute as a perceptual filter regardless of what they are, even if they are in a very complex scientific or tolerant style.
Just as a so-called dogmatic Christian won't be able to process without distortion that "The Bible might not be true," a so-called tolerant agnostic won't be able to process without distortion that "The Bible is definitely infallible."
Beliefs will filter perception regardless of what those beliefs are.