I think he’s just acknowledging the minute(?) possibility that our apparently flawless reasoning could have a blind spot. We could be in a Matrix, or have something tampering with our minds, etcetera, such that the implied assertion:
David_Bolin said (emphasis mine): “He is saying that in the subjective sense, people don’t actually have absolute certainty.” I am interpreting this as “people never subjectively feel they have absolute certainty about something” which I don’t think is true.
You are saying that from an external (“objective”) point of view, people can not (or should not) be absolutely sure that their beliefs/conclusions/maps are true. This I easily agree with.
You can phrase statements of logical deduction such that they have no premises and only conclusions. If we let S be the set of logical principles under which our logical system operates and T be some sentence that entails Y, then S AND T implies Y is something that I have absolute certainty in, even if this world is an illusion, because the premise of the implication contains all the rules necessary to derive the result.
A less formal example of this would be the sentence: If the rules of logic as I know them hold and the axioms of mathematics are true, then it is the case that 2+2=4
I think he’s just acknowledging the minute(?) possibility that our apparently flawless reasoning could have a blind spot. We could be in a Matrix, or have something tampering with our minds, etcetera, such that the implied assertion:
If this appears absolutely certain to me
Then it must be true
is indefensible.
There are two different things.
David_Bolin said (emphasis mine): “He is saying that in the subjective sense, people don’t actually have absolute certainty.” I am interpreting this as “people never subjectively feel they have absolute certainty about something” which I don’t think is true.
You are saying that from an external (“objective”) point of view, people can not (or should not) be absolutely sure that their beliefs/conclusions/maps are true. This I easily agree with.
It should probably be defined by calibration: do some people have a type of belief where they are always right?
Self-referential and anthropic things would probably qualify, e.g. “I believe I exist”.
You can phrase statements of logical deduction such that they have no premises and only conclusions. If we let S be the set of logical principles under which our logical system operates and T be some sentence that entails Y, then S AND T implies Y is something that I have absolute certainty in, even if this world is an illusion, because the premise of the implication contains all the rules necessary to derive the result.
A less formal example of this would be the sentence: If the rules of logic as I know them hold and the axioms of mathematics are true, then it is the case that 2+2=4