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by IIAOPSW
1121 days ago
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I think there's a legit line of inquiry in trying to develop a "top down" picture of reality rather than "bottom up". Eg instead of taking the physical laws and objects as fundamental and ourselves as something that can be constructed within it, what if we instead recognize that whatever argument you make is in fact made to convince myself and others, and therefore the existence of myself and other conscious entities is an irrefutable axiom of the argumentation based reasoning we use. Given just conversational conscious entities and the words they pass around as the only a priori existent things, can we use these as tools to construct a picture of the familiar physical sort of reality. In other words, failing constructing consciousness from the bottom up, can we construct our picture of the physical from the top down? |
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I think it is possible to build up a rational case for an objective universe starting with just perception. Firstly if the only thing that exists is conscious awareness, where does the informational content of the world you perceive come from? It doesn't come from your awareness, because you are not aware of it until you perceive it. You can say it comes from the subconscious, but the subconscious is not part of your conscious awareness. It's external to it, in the same way that your hand is external to your conscious awareness. There has to be an origin for perceptions that is external to conscious awareness of those perceptions.
From there we observe that these perceptions are of a consistent and persistent form, so it’s rational to conclude that they have an origin in a consistent and persistent source. From there, and taking into account our ability to test our perceptions through action, we can build up knowledge about the world of our experiences.
As for trusting logic and rationality, does it give consistent and useful results? Test it and see if it continues to work reliably over time. If applying logic provides random, contradictory or unreliable results that’s a problem, but maybe you can correct that by modifying how you reason about things and trying again. That’s learning. So I think we do have the cognitive tools we need to build up a robust account of reality starting from base perception.
We didn’t start off human society and civilisation with scientific laws as our founding axioms. We inferred them from sense data, including the process of physically testing our ideas in the world.