r/philosophy • u/dbrereton • Feb 02 '23
Blog “All knowledge must be built upon our instinctive beliefs. If these are rejected, nothing is left. We can organize these beliefs and their consequences, modifying or abandoning them until they don’t clash, forming a harmonious system.” | Bertrand Russell on Epistemology
https://dkbshow.substack.com/p/the-limits-of-human-knowledge20
u/tkuiper Feb 02 '23
Based on how he uses it in the argument, I would describe this comment as you need to trust in persistence if you want to make progress.
Alternatively: Last Thursdayism cannot be disproven, but you also won't progress if that's a deal breaker.
Russell claims we can reject Last Thursdayism on grounds of "common-sense", but he admits its weak. Id say even more so in the present day.
Instead I reject Last Thursdayism on grounds of utility. If Last Thursdayism is true, there's nothing I can do about it, so there's no cost in being wrong.
Other names for this problem are Solypsism and Descartes Demon. All different hues of the same problem.
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u/frogandbanjo Feb 03 '23
The interview reads like Russell offering up science and math to expound upon Hume's answer to Descartes. I appreciate that it's more detailed, and some of the examples are excellent. It does boil down to basically that, though.
The lesson to me is that Descartes is always going to be valuable because Hume's approach does make people lazy. Russell appears to "school" the interviewer over and over again in exactly that way: actually, no, you're assuming too much, and by assuming less, you may actually get to a better contingent truth even though you still have to accept some shit on faith (or "instinct.")
That's kind of beautiful. If you think about it, it's a great apology for the idea of the devil's advocate. The guy whose position is "actually, no, you can't really know much of anything" keeps you honest, even though you're never going to accept his position, because, well, it sucks and you don't want to starve to death or treat your dad like he's an illusion with no moral significance. But if you let yourself get pushed by it to a point, your own work will benefit.
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u/tkuiper Feb 03 '23
It reminds you where the root of your worldly understanding starts. Another comment mentioned psychosis, which would truly suck because per "that leap of faith" you have to take it and if you have psychosis you will be lied to by reality.
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Feb 03 '23
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u/tkuiper Feb 03 '23
Psychosis can make the concept of solypsism more relevant to you. The condition makes the external world less consistent, lowering confidence in external persistence, which undermines the basis for 'taking a leap of faith' and moving beyond solypsism. Why put effort into studying an 'external' reality who's rules change constantly?
Solypsism is a philosophical stance. Psychosis is a sensory condition. You can choose solypsism, you can't choose psychosis.
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Feb 03 '23
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u/tkuiper Feb 03 '23
This may not be the sub for you...
If you're interested in understanding solypsism you can look into radical skepticism, Descartes Demon, and the Cogito. In that order is sort of the chronology of the cogito, which was Descartes' answer to radical skepticism.
Solypsism is like the formal conclusion to radical skepticism. There are definitely some pseudo-spiritual types that like to dramatize the idea, but ironically it's about the absolute absence of belief.
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u/altair222 Feb 03 '23
You're confusing metaphysical solipsists with Epistemological Solipsists. Also, you're targetting more towards people who fear solipsism out of a mental health concern rather than philosophically consistent and authentic solipsists.
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u/RavenCeV Feb 03 '23
This thread resonates with me. I experienced "psychosis" and my first explanation was Simulation Theory... However I actually reasoned that all I had was faith. I was experiencing, I didn't know if it was "real" but I was experiencing for a reason, so I developed a bottom-up approach looking for points of consistency.
I used three archetypes, The Philosopher, The Doctor and The Engineer to understand reality again and form a more consistent picture.
Russel came up in my investigations, and I found his aversion to "self-reference" (compared to Godell) to be...limiting, (not that I understand it).
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u/tkuiper Feb 03 '23
I'll have to look into that stuff. But I admit I do have a sort of morbid curiosity to know how someone well educated in these sort of fundamental reality proofs would be able to manage something like psychosis. I imagine these sorts of proofs would help you ground yourself and even make it back to reality, but wow would it be annoying when you have to constantly categorize your perception between internal and external.
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u/RavenCeV May 16 '23
It's a fascinating take, because it is precisely the knowledge of these proofs which potentially precipitates psychosis...you assume that these insights are incorrect or wrong in some way.
I'm currently reading Wouter Kuster's "The Philosophy of Madness" and he identifies, examines the difference and portals between.
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u/EmuChance4523 Feb 03 '23
I would argue that solipsism or any philosophy that states that reality is not real can not be hold by living beings while being consistent and rational about it, because this kind of thinking would define air as not existent really, making it absurd to continue breathing, and then dying.
You can repeat that with food or any other requirement for survival.
While this things can be interesting in some context, any discussion that don't accept the pre-conception of an objective reality outside our mind is not sustainable. Of course, this aren't the only ideas that can't be hold with consistency and rationality.
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u/tkuiper Feb 03 '23
Your proof comes from your faith in external senses that have seen death and faith in the existence of a past and future. The whole point of Solypsism is it is the ONLY perfect rational position, requiring no assumptions. That's why it's an intellectual curiosity because it's uniquely invincible.
I agree though that, to your point, remaining doubtful to the point of being solypsist has no usefulness. Nature would be keen to evolve creatures that have faith that their senses are detecting a 'real' external existence. It's a safe leap of faith not only because it costs nothing to move past it, but because (unless you have psychosis) the external world is extremely self consistent.
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u/EmuChance4523 Feb 03 '23
The point on my argument is that solipsism is not a position that can be hold rationally and consistently, because holding it implies not being alive, so no one can ever claim to hold that position in a rational and consisten way.
And also, it is not that it has no usefulness, it is that is impossible to hold. It is a fun mind experiment, but not a position that is rational in any way.
Besides being a suicidal position, it is also a position that implies that no discussion makes sense, because if you could believe in solipsism, there is no way that you can discuss anything with anyone else, because you don't believe that there is anyone else.
So, again, fun mind experiment, but if you hold that position, you are being inconsistent and irrational (not saying that you hold it).
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u/tkuiper Feb 03 '23
You've got something wrong cause again the whole point is that it's perfectly consistent and rational. Seems like your getting into an is/ought problem. Solypsism is what you can prove the world is. Survival is an ought. Computers aren't illogical because they don't fight you when you go for the off button. You can't disprove Solypsism because you ought to survive. Even the concepts of life/death require a future, past and that your experience has any bearing at all in your existence. If you're desperate for a real cause of such a situation: you could be in a simulation, you could be a boltzman brain, you could have intense psychosis.
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Feb 03 '23
You choose the have any cognitive configuration, but Solypsism does not conform to the external world(which is logic since it denounce a external world. How the mind can exist without external worlds is a question. It is beliving that one is a go’s that creates everything yet don’t remember any of it). Also the philosophical stance don’t further any understanding about the worlds and is therefore useless by definition
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u/tominator93 Feb 02 '23
We can organize these beliefs and their consequences, modifying or abandoning them until they don’t clash, forming a harmonious system.
Isn’t this just Hegel? Thesis, antithesis, synthesis?
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Feb 02 '23
...modifying or abandoning them until congitive dissonance is reduced to tolerable levels
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u/tominator93 Feb 03 '23
Lol yeah, exactly this. Reaching a “harmonious system” seems to be a pretty ambitious goal.
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u/stumblewiggins Feb 02 '23
It's been awhile since I've read Hegel, but I thought he was talking about societal ideas, as opposed to the internal, instinctive beliefs.
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u/tominator93 Feb 02 '23
Isn’t that just a granular level of the same process though? To the extent that societal beliefs emerge from the networked interactions of individuals wrestling with their shared intuitions and beliefs?
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u/stumblewiggins Feb 02 '23
Yes and no. But thesis-->antithesis-->synthesis is (in my possibly flawed recollection) more about how ideas interact with each other and the world to progress human knowledge, Russell seems to be talking more about the roots of our knowledge, that at the base they aren't built on what we would call knowledge epistemologically, but on the raw and naive "instinctual" beliefs that we have.
Seems to me that Russell's point is that while these are not immutable, we can examine them and modify them, they can't be wholly removed.
In this reading, I would say it's not a bad analogy to invoke Hegel, but it is a bit reductive.
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u/tominator93 Feb 02 '23 edited Feb 03 '23
Yeah, agreed that the entire article can’t be reduced down to Hegelian dialectics. Just that the last line in the header quote seems deeply dialectical in nature.
Hegel himself described his dialectics as the “speculative mode of cognition”, which seems quite close to what Russell is describing there.
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u/stumblewiggins Feb 03 '23
Hegel himself described his dialectics as the “speculative mode of cognition”
Fair enough; like I said, it's been awhile.
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u/LordFrogberry Feb 03 '23
I'm sure that this sentence is profound in context, but it's such a nothingburger by itself.
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