Comment by JumpCrisscross
6 days ago
> Are you arguing against the existence of an objective reality?
I’d argue against absolute certainty in any knowledge. That isn’t a statement about reality, just our measure of it.
6 days ago
> Are you arguing against the existence of an objective reality?
I’d argue against absolute certainty in any knowledge. That isn’t a statement about reality, just our measure of it.
I can be absolutely certain of my perception and recollection of what my consciousness is experiencing and has experienced.
Note that the truth of this statement does not depend on any certainty about external reality, nor does it depend on certainty that what I perceive or remember is happening or actually happened.
> nor does it depend certainty that what I perceive or remember is what is
It absolutely assumes a unitary conscious experience versus what increasingly seems to be the case, a bunch of narratives our brains thread into a cohesive story ex post facto.
Put another way, there very well may be hard limits to how much a human-like consciousness can understand itself.
> a bunch of narratives our brains thread into a cohesive story ex post facto
That is exactly the reality I am asserting, whether or not they actually describe an "external" reality
2 replies →
> I can be absolutely certain of my perception and recollection of what my consciousness is experiencing and has experienced.
There's abundant evidence to the contrary — at least as far as your recollection of what your consciousness previously experienced.
(IOW: Memory is extremely fallible.)
Way to miss the point.
I said I can be sure of what I am recollecting, not whether the my recollection actually matches what happened.
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There is of course absolute certainty and there is a lot of it, absolute and unquestionable
About abstract notions, maybe. About anything physical or emergent from physical processes, I don’t think so.