Asklemmy

44145 readers

1077 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy 🔍

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

Open-ended question
Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

Lemmyverse: community search
sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
!lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

-12

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 11 months ago by BalabakGuy@lemmy.ml to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml

41 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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?

Original from reddit

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] D61@hexbear.net 3 points 11 months ago

Things that I've had to come to grips with when I figure out that it was okay to be an atheist.

Human beings are not logical or rational. We can do logic and rationalizations but we are not fundamentally logical or rational creatures.

Its okay to think things and not have some ironclad sentential logically correct argument as to why you think a thing. When a kid is asked by somebody "Why did you do that?" and the kid answers "I don't know" and the person keeps pushing for the kid to have some cause/effect conforming answer, its the person who's wrong not the kid.

I mean, my eyes are shit and getting worse by the year. My brain has had issues remembering certain things and processing human speech into meaning for as long as I've been an adult. I've been in enough situations where I suddenly realize that I have no actual active memory of how I got here and yet the world still functioned. It just became something that I no longer felt any pressure or need to justify. Things can just be (maybe I'm wrong, maybe I'm right, maybe I'm in some inbetween state) and I still exist.