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Comment by ErotemeObelus | Hacker News Reader

Sometimes I get the dawning suspicion that everything we're told is the truth is really just consensus reality. And every time we think we get a realization of the truth, it's really just our mind resyncing to consensus reality. And that the point of education is to recognize consensus reality.

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Well, many have sought absolute truth and "I think therefore I am" or simply "I am" is about as close as we've come.

Scientific truths are really useful for everyday life, but they're not guaranteed to be true into eternity.

There are countless examples of scientific consensus being overturned with new data, observations and experiments.

It doesn't mean we should ignore scientific consensus, but rather that scientific consensus by itself is not the most compelling argument.

> It doesn't mean we should ignore scientific consensus, but rather that scientific consensus by itself is not the most compelling argument.

One should not ignore scientific consensus as a suggestion of what beliefs to examine.

But one should ignore it as evidence in favor of a belief once you've decided to examine it. Scientific consensus is not an argument at all.

"science advances one funeral at a time" ~ Max Planck

Reality is a subjective experience, shared yet interpreted differently by each, irregardless of the real truth

Other than mathematics, I think what you say is sense. Still, you can make a good approximation even if it is not the real truth; that is how you can make something useful with science.

I remember a computer science professor working on something called "belief spaces", where instead of having a database of facts like "all mammals have four legs", it was more like "joe believes all mammals have four legs".

I kind of wonder if that is actually the way to a more accurate representation of reality.

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