Plenty of people are perfectly well satisfied with various answers to this question within all sorts of systems
Yeah, I’m interested in this. If you have time, what are some of the answers that you see people being satisfied by?
While there’s nothing fundamentally wrong with supposing that things may well change right now when they don’t appear to have changed in at least the past few billion occasions of right now, it does seem to privilege the observer almost to the point of solipsism.
Right yeah it seems like empiricism follows from a certain kind of humility. It’s like, if I don’t see the world as having any nature of its own then it basically makes no sense to pay attention to anything beyond myself because how could I possibly look carefully at a tree or a bird or a waterfall without some kind of background view that there is something out there to look at.
And it does seem that when I look at some system for a while, like rain falling on a lake or a rabbit hopping around on the grass, that I just naturally start to discern some cause and effect. It’s almost as if a kind of intuitive empiricism is the default, and that it would take some effortful resistance to say “no no none of this is justifiable”
But now we are trusting something about own nature that has this tendency towards an intuitive empiricism, and it really comes down to the question of what it is about our own nature that is trustworthy, because it sure isn’t the case that everything we do intuitively has beneficial consequences.
Yeah, I’m interested in this. If you have time, what are some of the answers that you see people being satisfied by?
Right yeah it seems like empiricism follows from a certain kind of humility. It’s like, if I don’t see the world as having any nature of its own then it basically makes no sense to pay attention to anything beyond myself because how could I possibly look carefully at a tree or a bird or a waterfall without some kind of background view that there is something out there to look at.
And it does seem that when I look at some system for a while, like rain falling on a lake or a rabbit hopping around on the grass, that I just naturally start to discern some cause and effect. It’s almost as if a kind of intuitive empiricism is the default, and that it would take some effortful resistance to say “no no none of this is justifiable”
But now we are trusting something about own nature that has this tendency towards an intuitive empiricism, and it really comes down to the question of what it is about our own nature that is trustworthy, because it sure isn’t the case that everything we do intuitively has beneficial consequences.
Interested in your thoughts on this.