Banno wrote:
By all means, doubt whatever you like. But to doubt everything is senseless - literally meaningless. How do you know you have used the correct meaning of the words in which you express your doubt?

Banno wrote:
One cannot believe false truths. Truths cannot be false. One can believe false statements.

Banno wrote:
What does "the correct truth" mean? Are you suggesting that there may be incorrect truths? What does it mean for a statement to be "absolutely correct", as opposed to just "correct"? If we were wrong, wouldn't it simply be the case that we were incorrect? That what we thought was true, wasn't? Is being wrong such a big problem that you want to throw out any opportunity to be correct?

Nonblack Raven wrote:
Well, I was pretty sure that I am not a kudzu vine.

I have yet to see any argument whatsoever that I am a kudzu vine, and certainly not an argument that does not grant some other proposition, even more bizarre than that I am a kudzu vine, that might be true.

Nonblack Raven wrote:
But let me try another.

Tonight I fixed hot and sour soup, a dish I have never fixed before, hypothesizing I might enjoy it.

I did in fact enjoy it, at the time I ate it (no matter what the after affects might be) as I undertand the term enjoy.

Exactly how am I wrong in thinking I enjoyed hot and sour soup? Exactly how am I wrong in thinking I was right in thinking I would enjoy hot and sour soup?

If there are ways I could be wrong about both, what did you assume was right in order to explain this, and why should this be right?

GDA wrote:

No, we (the human race) may be correct, and I'm fine with that I just feel that to simply accept things as 'True' (which implies that they are correct) assumes that we can be sure of our surroundings, which I disagree with, and I have defended this viewpoint with logic, as you have defended yours.

GDA wrote:


We accept that what we call a 'human' has what appears to be a brain, which science accepts as the organ that controls the body. Unless 'plants' have a mind separate to their body (as humans would also have if this were the case with 'plants'), we could not convince a 'plant' that it is 'human', because to do so would either require magic to exist (and for plants and humans to have minds separate from their bodies), or for 'plants' to have brains.

If 'plants' had brains my Supercomputer argument would apply. Indeed, how could we know what a 'plant's' brain looked like? (A 'plant's' brain needn't look similar to ours). Maybe we do not notice what an active 'plant' brain looks like, and do not realize that 'plants' actually have brains.

If magic existed and 'plants' had minds separate from their bodies, then a magician could take the mind of a 'plant' and create a false 'human' casket to put it in, erasing any previous memories of being a 'plant' that it once had. Thus 'human' casket would look and react like any other 'human', except that the mind would be of a 'plant', as we would be supposing that all living things had minds.

If the above supposition were actually correct, then how could we know if our minds originated from a plant or not?

And if 'plants' actually did have brains, then what is stopping us from attaching it to the Supercomputer, then stimulating it's brain like we do to the rest of the people whom we attach to the supercomputer?

GDA wrote:

You felt a feeling (or had the illusion of feeling a feeling, but either way, there was a stimulus of some kind, even if artificial, the 'taste' of the food, for example) that you interpreted as 'enjoyment' or 'pleasure' (or both). So although you would be somewhat correct in that you reacted to a stimulus that you labeled as 'enjoyment', you still cannot be sure that you were not being stimulated by said supercomputer to make you think you were creating soup and consuming it, (as opposed to actually making the soup in reality). Although the stimulated pleasure could still be 'enjoyment', it would not have been caused by a real physical object or stimulus, it would be caused by artificial stimulation, (from the supercomputer).

GDA wrote:


If we simply accepted things without justifying them or questioning them then we would still believe that the earth was flat. At the time, it was an unquestioned 'fact', it was 'true'.

Do you see what I mean? Science itself would be pointless and inane if we did not question and justify our hypotheses.

'Fact' is created by using induction (as deduction assumes truth, and truth assumes it's own correctness, which is like us assuming God's existence) induction is incredibly flawed. To use the cliched defense:

A chicken wakes every day to be fed by a farmer, due to this, the chicken assumes that it will be fed again the next day (this is induction). However, one day, the chicken wakes and is swiftly killed by the farmer.

Induction is inherently flawed in this way, and any conclusion reached by induction should not be accepted unquestioningly. Whilst God's existence may seem an obvious fact to devout Christians, to Atheists it is nonsense. What is an 'obvious fact'?

Nonblack Raven wrote:


Beside Banno’s objection, which seems to me very telling, let me add some problems of my own.

I think you are failing to understand that any skeptical story can only work if it grants as true vast amount of what I believe. I may be wrong that I fixed hot and sour soup, but the matrix like story you tell cannot deny another thing I believe, that I perceived myself to fix hot and sour soup.

Nonblack Raven wrote:
The same can be said of every other statement I made.

There is no logically consistent set of skeptical arguments that do not leave large portions of what I believe in tact. To paraphrase Banno, a skeptical argument can only work if it leaves much of what I much I believe in tact.

As a result, I have many true beliefs, even if I may be quite uncertain as to which are true. If this is the point of your skepticism, than I have no disagreement, as I have said several times, but you seem to be after bigger game.

There is a huge difference between that nothing we believe is true (no possible sceptical argument can accomplish this), and saying that we could be wrong about any single statement (obviously reasonable).

Nonblack Raven wrote:
I agree that a kind of skepticism has enormous pragmatic value. It is certainly incredibly useful to contemplate how one could be wrong about a given statement. Even where it is not useful, as in the kudzu vines with disembodied brains attached to super computers, it can be amusing. (Surely you would not hold this is a scientifically interesting hypothesis given the data available to us today?)

However, unless one sets up a system that finds some statements have, in some sense, greater correctness or usefulness or interest than others, then skepticism cannot lead anywhere but to pointless doubts that do not lead to more correct, interesting or useful statements.

Added on edit: If the only thing one can say about any statement is that it could be wrong, then there is no path forward from scepticism to more interesting and better hypotheses. You cannot justify scepticism as leading to fresher and better ideas unless there is a way to show that the fresher ideas are in some way better.