We will never find a satisfying conceptual answer to “why should I believe it?” within the systems that we are questioning.
Satisfying to whom? Plenty of people are perfectly well satisfied with various answers to this question within all sorts of systems.
Other people have some doubts, and I strongly suspect that a large fraction of those always will.
Personally, I nearly always reserve some sliver of weight to the possibility that my senses, memory, and thought processes cannot be trusted. There’s not much I can do about it, so it has little practical application except to make me slightly more risk-averse in some situations.
That aside, I think that on theoretical grounds empiricism is a bit more well-founded than the “first enigma” section makes it sound. While fundamentally there is no reason for the future to follow the same rules as the past, there does seem to be some reasonable justification that it’s unlikely to suddenly change right now. Okay, maybe it didn’t happen while you were reading that last sentence, but maybe it will happen right now instead.
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.
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.
Satisfying to whom? Plenty of people are perfectly well satisfied with various answers to this question within all sorts of systems.
Other people have some doubts, and I strongly suspect that a large fraction of those always will.
Personally, I nearly always reserve some sliver of weight to the possibility that my senses, memory, and thought processes cannot be trusted. There’s not much I can do about it, so it has little practical application except to make me slightly more risk-averse in some situations.
That aside, I think that on theoretical grounds empiricism is a bit more well-founded than the “first enigma” section makes it sound. While fundamentally there is no reason for the future to follow the same rules as the past, there does seem to be some reasonable justification that it’s unlikely to suddenly change right now. Okay, maybe it didn’t happen while you were reading that last sentence, but maybe it will happen right now instead.
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.
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.