forum for week of 2 October

I would argue that one of the best reasons to believe that our perceptions are reliable sources of evidence is in our everyday lives. We go through most days without hurting ourselves, or doing anything particularly dangerous or outrageous all because of our perceptions. We generally have a belief about when it is safe to cross the street, when to reach for a door handle and hundreds of thousands of other actions we do every single day, all because we can perceive the world around us, form a belief about how best to act, and react accordingly to it. We find an incredible degree of success in this. On the whole, our perceptions are fairly reliable. Of course, there are occasions where our senses fail us and we fail to perceive something obvious (this is discussed in length throughout "The Invisible Gorilla", Chabris & Simons) or our perceptions deceive us through hallucinations, but generally, we perceive everything we need to in order to get through our lives successfully. I would argue that due to the amount of success we seem to find in our beliefs based on perception, that they are a reliable source of evidence.