Comment by ctoth
4 days ago
> I immediately become suspicious of anyone who is very certain of something, especially if they derived it on their own.
Are you certain about this?
4 days ago
> I immediately become suspicious of anyone who is very certain of something, especially if they derived it on their own.
Are you certain about this?
All I know is that I know nothing.
How do you know?
Socrates told me.
Well you could be a critical rationalist and do away with the notion of "certainty" or any sort of justification or privileged source of knowledge (including "rationality").
Your own state of mind is one of the easiest things to be fairly certain about.
The fact that this is false is one of the oldest findings of research psychology
Marvin Minsky wrote forcefully [1] about this in The Society of Mind and went so far to say that trying to observe yourself (e.g. meditation) might be harmful.
Freud of course discovered a certain world of the unconscious but untrained [2] you would certainly struggle to explain how you know sentence S is grammatical and S' is not, or what it is you do when you walk.
If you did meditation or psychoanalysis or some other practice to understand yourself better it would take years.
[1] whether or not it is true.
[2] the "scientific" explanation you'd have if you're trained may or may not be true since it can't be used to program a computer to do it
said no one familiar with their own mind, ever!
no
Suspicious implies uncertain. It’s not immediate rejection.
Isaac Newton would like to have a word.
I am not a big fan of alchemy, thank you though.