this post was submitted on 30 Dec 2023
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Fellow atheists: How do you know your senses and reasoning are reliable and valid? How do you know that you know anything? Solipsism vs Nihilism (lemmy.ml)
submitted 10 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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Just looking for other answers to this.

How do you know that you know anything? How do you know you can rely on your senses? (As in: I know the rock exists because I can see the rock. How do you know you can see it?)

If knowledge is reliant upon our senses and reasoning (which it is), and we can't know for sure that our senses are reasoning are valid, then how can we know anything?

So is all knowledge based on faith?

If all knowledge is based on faith, then is science reliable?

If all knowledge is based on faith, then what about ACTUAL faith? Why is it so illogical?

Solipsism vs Nihilism

Solipsism claims that we know our own mind exists, where Nihilism claims we don't know that anything exists.

Your thoughts?

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[โ€“] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago (1 children)

how do you know your senses are valid and not solipsistic

if I'm the only real person on earth and everyone else is NPCs that means my senses are even more reliable and valid

[โ€“] [email protected] 6 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

and senses are real bc they're reproducible

I see john get cut and he says owie
I get cut and it also feels like owie

therefore if john shoots himself and dies I can expect that to do the same thing

unless you're saying that my very conception of john, my visual image of him, is all solipsistic and derived from my own mental dreamworld, as are everything else in my life. In that case I would say damn I'm heckin smart and got a big brain. I used to think about this when I was little and I would imagine myself sitting on a big rock in space, and I'd wake up and realize that everything (my family friends etc) were all a dream, and the reality was just me, this moonrock I was sitting on, and the black galaxy around me