DrTorch Wrote:2 problems w/ this. First is your misunderstanding of the word "faith".
Second is the circular reasoning that you employ: that you can validate your senses by data received by your senses.
Curiously, you allude to that here:
Quote:Even if we aren't real, even if you're just a brain in a vat & I'm just electrical signals being shot into your brain, the scientific method still works. It would still be the best method for you to find out about the artificial environment that you are "living" in.
Why? Frankly, in the situation you describe your senses provide no help in describing the real world you live in.
How do you define the word faith, then? Instead of just telling people they are misunderstanding the word, it would be more beneficial if you would explain what you mean by it.
I am more than happy to conceed that sensory input might not reflect the "real" world. I'm afraid that certainty is not a luxury we are affoarded. There's always a possibility, however remote, that this could all just be one big joke (it would help explain some things). It's not faith that allows me not to worry about this possibility, it's indifference.
Are you really trying to argue that we could realistically be brains in vats? Because other than taking it to that level, arguments about using sense data to validate our senses is rather weak. First, sense data is the only way to get information about the world around us. Really any information at all - even the rules of logic are taught through sensory experience. Additionally, there is an a priori argument in their favor - if they didn't reasonably represent the world we lived in we would be unable to long exist. Finally, there are five different senses, all of which can be used to corroborate the others. There is no more reason to group the five together than there is to view them independently (particularly given that they developed separately & are governed by different areas of the brain).
But if you are willing to argue that there is a real possibility that we are indeed just brains in a vat so therefore are senses are unreliable, I say so what? If I'm just a brain in a vat "living" in an imaginary world, what do I care? What matters to me is the world I'm "living" in, not the one that my physical manifestation happens to exist in. I'd certainly rather be able to move around my imaginary world, to laugh & love, than simply be a blob of gray goo in a jar on the desk of a post-doc student at some intergallactic university, even if it isn't real. And even if the post-doc is the one who sets the parameters of my existance, the scientific method is still the best way for me to find out what those parameters are.
In fact, in the brain in a vat example, in many ways it is more true to say that the created world is the real one, at least for the person in question. In this case "I" don't exist in the real world because "I" am not just a brain in the vat.