Agrippan Skepticism (Humans)

by dhw, Wednesday, November 09, 2011, 17:19 (4562 days ago) @ xeno6696

MATT (quoting Agrippa, 08.11): The only thing we can be sure of is that we know nothing.

Dhw (07.11): ...in the epistemology thread you and I agreed to distinguish between knowledge (relative, but I won’t repeat our definition), and truth (absolute)…

MATT: The challenge offered by the Agrippan trilemma is that we cannot claim knowledge, if the claim suffers from any of these three challenges [...]

Dhw: (08.11): If we are sure that we know nothing, ultimately it doesn’t matter what challenges have been met, as we still can’t acquire knowledge.

MATT (08.11): You’re running down the wrong rabbit hole. You are equating truth with knowledge here. […] Everything man claims he knows, he knows in relation to something else […] Knowledge is ultimately relative.

You spend the rest of your post proving to me what was already agreed back in January, namely that knowledge is relative (repeated on 07.11 as above). In fact it is the first Agrippan quote that equates truth with knowledge, which is why your arguments are contradictory (we know nothing...implicitly, we can only claim knowledge if we meet the three challenges). You continue to ignore the agreed definitions:

Truth is absolute and unknowable.
Knowledge is: “information which is accepted as being true by general consensus among those who are aware of it.”
Belief is: “information which individuals accept as being true although there is no general consensus on its truth.”

This definition of knowledge allows for all the flexibility you need even in science, since new discoveries can change the general consensus, and it also allows us actually to have knowledge, which your Agrippan quote does not. And so to psychic phenomena:

MATT: Take David’s example of the woman who had the NDE where she floated outside of her body and discovered a shoe. What’s really so remarkable about this situation? If it had been seen inside of a dream instead on in a state of near death, the immediate weight of the story’s power seems (at least to me) to diminish.

The shoe was on the roof. How did she know? Even if she dreamt it, why should the unconscious mind perceive material realities to which the material body has no access? How do NDE-ers learn that someone else has just died? There are countless cases in which NDE-ers, OBE-ers, people asleep, people awake have been given information to which they had no normal access. By all means dismiss some as frauds or illusions. Just concentrate on those that have been corroborated by witnesses or events. Explain them.

You ask to what end a psychic explanation serves the purpose of gathering knowledge, and “how we can meaningfully assimilate them [the stories].” Every quest for knowledge entails collecting the available information and assimilating it in a pattern that will gain general consensus as being true. This is an ongoing process. At present there is no consensus, i.e. no knowledge as to the source of consciousness. Materialists think the source is the brain cells, but millions of people think the source is some form of energy which CONTROLS the brain cells – they equate it with “mind” or “soul” or spirit” or “will”. At present we only have belief (see the above definitions). Knowledge will need to explain experiences (e.g. the shoe on the roof) which appear to defy the materialist theory. Until they have been explained, they can be meaningfully assimilated as POSSIBLE evidence of an unknown form of energy, and you will only exclude them if you’ve already made up your mind that the source of consciousness, emotion, memory, imagination, will etc. is the brain cells. If you can’t explain these cases, my suggestion is that you suspend judgement, and that does not allow for exclusion of ANY possible evidence for either theory.