Why It’s Good to Be Wrong | Hacker News Reader

Why It’s Good to Be Wrong

nautil.us

46 pointsdnetesn6 comments

"The fact is, there’s nothing infallible about “direct experience” either. Indeed, experience is never direct. It is a sort of virtual reality, created by our brains using sketchy and flawed sensory clues, given substance only by fallible expectations, explanations, and interpretations. Those can easily be more mistaken than the testimony of the passing hobo. If you doubt this, look at the work of psychologists Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons, and verify by direct experience the fallibility of your own direct experience. Furthermore, the idea that your reminiscences are infallible is also heresy by the very doctrine that you are faithful to."

This is skepticism raised to the nth degree -- brain-in-a-vat-ism. I'm not even sure I read the article now.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality_tunnel

>The idea does not necessarily imply that there is no objective truth; rather that our access to it is mediated through our senses, experience, conditioning, prior beliefs, and other non-objective factors. The implied individual world each person occupies is said to be their reality tunnel.

And after that, kick things up a notch with the Boltzmann Brain paradox:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boltzmann_brain

> The paradox states that if one considers the probability of our current situation as self-aware entities embedded in an organized environment, versus the probability of stand-alone self-aware entities existing in a featureless thermodynamic "soup", then the latter should be vastly more probable than the former.

If you play videogames, you may have noticed the phenomenon where you lose the game because you failed to press the button at the right time - but you are 100% sure that you did in fact press the button at the right time.

Apparently this is a well documented phenomenon (even though you pressed the button a few hundredths of a second too late, your brain is persuaded you pressed it correctly), and it blew my mind when I first read about it. Now when it happens to me I'm deeply aware of it, but it's still a little surreal (and frightening) to realize that our brains are indeed very fallible.

And at the conclusion, David disappears in a puff of logic.

First off, if the Pope said that, it wouldn't count.

Therefore, faithfully adhering to the tradition received from the beginning of the Christian faith, to the glory of God our savior, for the exaltation of the Catholic religion and for the salvation of the Christian people, with the approval of the Sacred Council, we teach and define as a divinely revealed dogma that when the Roman Pontiff speaks EX CATHEDRA, that is, when, in the exercise of his office as shepherd and teacher of all Christians, in virtue of his supreme apostolic authority, he defines a doctrine concerning faith or morals to be held by the whole Church, he possesses, by the divine assistance promised to him in blessed Peter, that infallibility which the divine Redeemer willed his Church to enjoy in defining doctrine concerning faith or morals. Therefore, such definitions of the Roman Pontiff are of themselves, and not by the consent of the Church, irreformable. http://www.ewtn.com/library/COUNCILS/V1.htm#6

Second, we don't have time to become experts in every subject, so we defer some decisions to existing experts.

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