forum for week of 2 October

I can understand the views of both authors, but I think the more appropriate and reasonable position is that held by Bargle, who also offers a bit more to the conversation than simply trying to write off personal perception as a source of knowledge. Below is my rant concerning my views of the topic:

Certainly our primary method of discerning beliefs from reality is our own personal experience. We are naturally and inescapably social creatures who rely heavily on not only our sense data and the intuition which works at a feverish pace to try and make sense of it. To illustrate this with an example, when we 'feel' or 'sense' that someone is angry with us, we often arrive at this idea before we go home and sit and meditate on it. Rarely would we only realize someone's displeasure with us long after the fact by the means of careful analyzing. Our view of reality is also extremely subjective--when you're hungry you can often have a pessimistic view of the world, and then rather quickly after a hearty meal we can find ourselves completely turned around and feeling once again in a good state of mind. Thus, we can slowly see that the mind is fined tuned to a certain type of consciousness--that which will ensure our survival and replication. Most of our senses help ensure this--we feel excited and anxious when we see a fight, or are jolted awake when we hear something we think may pose a danger.

Now, when we are aware of this, we can obviously see where there would be issues in trying to use this human, biological mind to try and ascertain certain facts and truth about the world. But to say that is it flawed is not to say that we must throw it out and write it off as a means of garnering information. Indeed, unless we create artificial intelligence that is more capable than ourselves, we will only have the means of human perception to view the world. Certainly a blind, deaf man with no sense of feeling, taste or smell will be less helpful in collecting evidence for beliefs than will an average person.

Certainly human perception is fallible and unreliable to a certain degree, but if we can measure and be aware of our biases, and make a conscious, constant effort to account for them, we can use it, like Bargle said, as a helpful starting point.