Exactly. A related deep millennia old observation is that no one has actually seen the real world. Everything we’ve ever experienced has been filtered through our minds. Every experiment, every measuring device, every meticulously crafted model of reality… it is all inescapably limited by what we are able to experience.
One could and many have argued that the reality we’ve been observing and operating in is consciousness. The “real” world could be entirely different and largely inaccessible.
These kinds of thought exercises don’t have much practical utility, apart from one very important feature; they humble you. At the end of the day we don’t fundamentally know anything, and should always recognize that at its most basic root level, everything we do is an educated guess. A fundamentally skeptical and curious outlook that acknowledges our perceptual limitations is how we got all of the sophisticated models of very difficult to observe phenomenon in the first place. If we want to continue to get the best understanding of whatever it is we’re experiencing, I think it’s very important to stay humble and ensure our knowledge is treated as a hard earned set of well reasoned guesses rather than unquestionable dogma. 99.9% of objections to well established ideas and models might be a waste of time entertaining, but you never know what might turn out to be the seeds of a whole new universe of understanding that invalidates huge swaths of our existing corpus of knowledge.
Most of what I’m saying here is probably obvious to a lot of readers, and I don’t think anyone in this thread is being particularly arrogant or dogmatic, but I think it’s worth reiterating. If people who understand the limits of knowledge aren’t constantly emphasizing the fact that we don’t know what we don’t know, that creates fertile ground for both dogmatic assertions and unreasonable skepticism, and I think a huge amount of dysfunction in the culture at large is explained by insufficient well calibrated humility amongst otherwise very intelligent people who set an example for others.
One could and many have argued that the reality we’ve been observing and operating in is consciousness. The “real” world could be entirely different and largely inaccessible.
These kinds of thought exercises don’t have much practical utility, apart from one very important feature; they humble you. At the end of the day we don’t fundamentally know anything, and should always recognize that at its most basic root level, everything we do is an educated guess. A fundamentally skeptical and curious outlook that acknowledges our perceptual limitations is how we got all of the sophisticated models of very difficult to observe phenomenon in the first place. If we want to continue to get the best understanding of whatever it is we’re experiencing, I think it’s very important to stay humble and ensure our knowledge is treated as a hard earned set of well reasoned guesses rather than unquestionable dogma. 99.9% of objections to well established ideas and models might be a waste of time entertaining, but you never know what might turn out to be the seeds of a whole new universe of understanding that invalidates huge swaths of our existing corpus of knowledge.
Most of what I’m saying here is probably obvious to a lot of readers, and I don’t think anyone in this thread is being particularly arrogant or dogmatic, but I think it’s worth reiterating. If people who understand the limits of knowledge aren’t constantly emphasizing the fact that we don’t know what we don’t know, that creates fertile ground for both dogmatic assertions and unreasonable skepticism, and I think a huge amount of dysfunction in the culture at large is explained by insufficient well calibrated humility amongst otherwise very intelligent people who set an example for others.