Q&A: Sense Perception as Evidence
Sense Perception as Evidence
Question
In the fourth talk in The First Existent, you wrote, as one of the answers to the challenge from evolution, that there is no reason to think evolution would specifically produce reliable senses. But seemingly one could answer this by saying that it is still reasonable that evolution would produce for us senses that are reliable to some degree, even if not completely reliable, since otherwise we would not survive at all. And then each one can be corroborated by means of the others.
Answer
The question is why our trust in the senses is absolute. When there is an anomaly, we immediately look for an explanation.
Discussion on Answer
I explained, and I’ll repeat it one last time. You cannot know that they are completely reliable. At most, you can know that they are reliable. But you assume that they are completely reliable. Beyond that, checking them by means of other senses is problematic, because my question concerns all of our senses as a whole.
We checked each one of them by means of the others and found that they are completely reliable. And you can’t say we’re living in a movie, because if that were so, we wouldn’t have survived.