Originally posted by arnold ... But our senses are our only direct cognitive contact with reality and, therefore, only source of information. Without sensory evidence, there can be no concepts; without concepts, there can be no language; without language, there can be no knowledge and no science. Aristotle looked to the outside world for answers, St Augustin looked for truth in the Bible.
By undercutting the validity of the senses we cut ourselves off from the real world. Try to disprove the evidence of sensory perception without using data obtained from such perception.
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That's why I say that our mental models comprise an interface to the real world. We've got a pretty good system for data acquisition, and as you point out, reasonably accurate as far as it goes. But we don't see ultraviolet as bees do. We don't see infrared as pit vipers do. We don't hear things much above 22,000 cycles per second, as dogs do, or below about 18 cps as elephants do. We don't even experience reality in real time: when the fielder snags the ball, it's about a tenth of a second for the fact to become reality in his mind, due to the propagation delay imposed by the nervous system and the time it takes in the brain to process the data so acquired. My "fielder" example is selected precisely because it demonstrates what a marvelously wonderful system of perception and modeling we've got. But it's still just a model, as a plastic model of a fighter plane lacks salient details of a real full-sized one.
By the way, the word, "comprehend" doesn't primarily mean, "to understand" - that's only an analogical usage - it means to fully grasp, literally to wrap one's hand fully around the object. In order for us to comprehend the Universe, we would have to have one-to-one correspondence between elements in our mental database and items of the greater reality, and at both ends of the span between the subatomic and the supra-galactic.
Nothing I've said in any way undercuts the value of sensory perception: the fact that it is acquiring data in an incomplete way doesn't mean that it has no value, simply that we're really only sampling the data in a narrow bandwidth determined by our ancestral heritage and shaping by the changing environment. But the understanding that your worldview is only that, and different from that of every other single person on the planet is the beginning of awareness.