Submitted by thelivingphilosophy t3_yt6m03 in philosophy
Reply to comment by DarkMarxSoul in A cross between an Existentialist and an Old Testament prophet, Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard urged his "single individual" reader to follow the "highest passion" of faith rather than becoming one of the stereotyped pseudo-individuals of "The Crowd" by thelivingphilosophy
>The problem is that you only know what you feel, you don't know what causes that feeling in actuality or if those feelings are accurate analogues to reality.
Perhaps you only know that. Be careful asserting what others understand - you have no awareness of what they experience.
Since you just went on a paragraph & change about that exact perspective... maybe we ought to apply that approach to your statement, & start over?
||There are many things we feel that are complete fabrications or distortions of reality.||
You say that as if that's the final step. For you, it may be. For others, there may be other approaches... so you may want to slow down a little.
||Knowledge may be primarily based on the writings of others, but the power of those writings is that they meticulously document their process and ergo you can analyze that process for accuracy. ||
You're assuming they aren't lying. Since people practice lying all the time, especially to themselves (as you've just pointed out) should anyone trust what another wrote without verifying it for themselves?
||For things like science experiments, you can see when those experiments have been reliably duplicated and you can duplicate them on your own id you put in the effort. That is the foundation of our science classes in school.||
You've skipped a couple of steps - you are now equating "science" with "knowing" which is has not been established, so your statement is unsupported.
Particularly when science classes are precluded from teaching things that make "average" people emotionally uncomfortable, not because of the accuracy of the science, but because of the feelings of the people who know better.
As such, our perception of the world you describe in practice is that knowledge is dismissed by ignorant people whose feelings are disrupted by new things they are being told... because the average person is mostly disconnected from understanding what their feelings are, due to their lack of practice in managing them.
Are we understanding each other at this stage?
> Perhaps you only know that. Be careful asserting what others understand - you have no awareness of what they experience.
No, it is literally impossible for anybody to know what is causing their own experiences or if their experiences accurately reflect reality, without engaging in suitable external examination. If you're only going by your own internal experiences, by definition you cannot verify your internal experiences. Internal experiences cannot verify themselves. It is a fundamental epistemic limit and anti-philosophical to imply otherwise.
> You say that as if that's the final step. For you, it may be. For others, there may be other approaches
Every person alive is fundamentally the same kind of person and their experiences draw from the same neurological basis, unless your brain is literally broken. There is no experience that is valid for one person that is not valid for another. Either things are windows to reality we can reasonably trust, or they aren't. There is no case-by-case basis on this.
> You're assuming they aren't lying.
Yes, that's what the peer-review and reproducibility elements of the process are about. People can fabricate evidence, or they can simply make mistakes, their bias can blind them to flaws, so that means other people then step in to reproduce the results or critique the method. And, at the end of the day, if you have an issue with somebody else's writing, you can follow their method and see what happens. Nothing is ever perfect, and all "knowledge" has a degree of uncertainty, but that uncertainty is not equal for all methods or all claims.
> You've skipped a couple of steps - you are now equating "science" with "knowing"
I was using science experiments as an example of how to examine the world in predictable ways in order to establish facts about the world, I wasn't equating anything.
> As such, our perception of the world you describe in practice is that knowledge is dismissed by ignorant people whose feelings are disrupted by new things they are being told... because the average person is mostly disconnected from understanding what their feelings are, due to their lack of practice in managing them.
What ignorant people's feelings are has no bearing on whether or not faith is a valid metric for reliable truth.
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