How do you know??

Question:Our knowledge of the world around us is based on our subjective experiences, but how do we know that our experiences truly represent the way the world is?

Best Answer - Chosen by Asker: Our knowledge of the world around us is based on our subjective experiences, but how do we know that our experiences truly represent the way the world is?

The short answer is, we don't. Our brains are built to collect and interpret information about our surroundings, but there are ways this could lead to incorrect assumptions about the world. We could misinterpret the information our brain gives us, or maybe our brain doesn't give us accurate data, or any data at all. Maybe we just believe our interpretation of existence because it is convenient and natural for us to believe it.

The reason most people believe this is not so is because, first, there are not really other ways for us to understand the world. If a person who had always been blind was asked to describe what "red" means, they could not tell you on their own, because they have never had a subjective experience of "red." If we can't trust our experience, what can we trust? Information we gather is meaningless, since it is colored by our personal experience. This leads to a world where nothing is fact and all we can do is make blind guesses. Trusting our experience is much more useful in life, though we must be aware that our experiences are not always common to every person.

NEVERMIND

Perhaps we don't really.
Maybe some things are illusions.

hmm.

We really don't know... unless you based your experiences on something that is absolute and filter those experiences through that.

that's where bias and all comes into play. And it is also why everyone perceives the world differently. Because if there are 3 people seeing or experiencing the same event each indiviual will come out thinking and percieving and reacting to what ever happend differently. So, our experiences do not truly represent the world the way it is, but rather represent what we want to make of it.

Read the philosopher Kant.
He theorised that we ONLY know subjective things ("phenomena"). The real world is beyond our awareness or comprehension ("noumena").

Our senses create a mapping of reality onto our perceptions. The world must be such that it gives rise to our perceptions. We are justified in believing the most natural theory that justifies these perceptions. The most natural theory is to take all evidence at face value whenever possible. In some cases, like the Michelson-Morley experiment which demonstrated that the speed of light is a constant, there is a perception which runs counter to our natural theories. Einstein then created a new theory which explains that new perception and accounts for why our perceptions generally run counter to it. Thus Einstein's view became the new most natural explanation for our perceptions. Any new theory that runs counter to our perceptions must explain why we have such counterintuitions and why our perceptions are wrong. It must further convince us that the new theory more naturally fits all our perceptions than any theory it attempts to surplant.

Relativity, Quantum mechanics, and even superstring theory all say that we will perceive the world according to Newtonian mechanics most of the time. Any new theory that surplants relativity or quantum theory must say that we will get the same results to the same experiments as we have had before.

The result is that our theories of the world approach reality as we increase our experiences and explain our perceptions. However, we never perceive reality directly.

We don't. We can't. Our experiences are as individual as snow flakes, and so our way of seeing the world is individual, as well. However, it's the things that we can broadly agree on that we might choose to acept as "the way the world truly is." Things like rain is wet, fire burns, what goes up must come down...

My world is in some large measure, what I make of it. There's a great saying, "pain is inevitable, suffering is optional." I choose to be cheerful and to look for the good and the hopeful. I don't ingore the suffering in the world, but I look for solutions to problems rather than dwelling on them. I truly believe that everyone chooses the sort of world they live in, although we may not choose the position we occupy in that world.

What is "the way the world is?" Is the world a hard, cold place full of evil people who are motivated only be greed? Some certainly say so. Is the world a freely giving, nurturing place full of flowers and puppy dogs and fluffy bunnies? Some seem to think so. I myself figure the truth, or the TRUTH, even, tends to be somewhere in between.

True. We just THINK that our experiences truly represent the way the world is. But that's just only OUR world. A very tiny part of the real World. Everything differs everywhere and what we know must be important to us rather than even your next door neighbour. That person has some other experiences that help him make believe what the world actually is, only in his eyes. The only conclusion I come to is; reading and knowing about various people and finding out more about how the worlds works will make us ACTUALLY see the way how our world is.

Your world is only real to you. We create our own reality.

Our senses and experiences may be subjective and variable, but we come to understand the world in spite of this through the use of two tools: objective standards and reason.

If you have trouble eye-balling the distance between two objects what do you do? You grab a ruler. And the same goes for anything else you want to objectively describe. Clocks, thermometers, scales, odometers, photometers, chromatographs, spectrometers... there are an endless variety of tools all designed to avoid your subjective senses and provide hard data that is exactly the same no matter who is doing the measuring.

Then you can take all that objective hard data and look for patterns. This is what the human brain is BEST at - better than any computer ever designed or any other neural system we have ever discovered. Those patterns give you ideas about what causes those patterns. And then you can try and figure out if your ideas are true or false by taking more measurements.

THIS is the scientific method. And I should hope that it is beyond dispute that it has worked better than any other philosophy or system at producing RESULTS. That it is so effective at doing what it says it can do suggests that it actually does have an accurate picture of the way things work and what they are.

Now philosophically speaking, one could argue that maybe all the scientists just got lucky and all their ideas about how the universe works are completely wrong. This is not impossible. But it is also not likely. So what we can say with confidence is this: if there exists a better system than science of describing the world objectively, then we have no idea what that system is.

That's my take anyway, for what it's worth. Peace.

Well, our experiences DON'T truly represent the way the world is, because chances are those experiences and how we see them won't match someone elses experiences. The best example of this is if you have two sisters, who grew up in the same house, only a year apart. One sister may believe that the mother was horrible, and the father was great; whereas the other sister might believe the father was horrible and the mother was great.

So naive!0!

How do you know our knowledge of the world around us is based on our subjective experience?

Good luck!

we don't. but if the majority of people say that something is the way the world is and there is not anyone that says otherwise then it is probably the way the world is until something proves otherwise. everything is a theory nothing is a true law.