Is Seeing Believing?

I think I may have posted this before but having searched for it I can't find it on TOTJO anywhere :whistle:

Its a documentary about perception and how our perceptions of reality are often 'augmented' by what our brains believe to be happening - rather than what is:

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x1y2uep_e04-is-seeing-believing_tv

There are good Darwinian reasons for the brain to do this but it is easily tricked and this means we miss things that might otherwise be obvious and we imagine things that aren't actually there!

Reminded me of this on many occasions :laugh: :

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oDIrOE_fnl8

If we get the wrong end of the stick with our physical senses - what are the chances that we run into similar problems with with far less obvious things such as understanding other people, their motivations, their thoughts and their beliefs. Worth bearing in mind when we think we know what is going on!

I am not the brightest crayon in the box but I do know this one thing, I know nothing some days. I see things every day. some of them by all accounts shouldn't be. I mean the math and logic just don't pan. Some days im glad I don't have to know everything, ill go stark mad! Some times its ok not...to have explanations. Not all the time but some times, just sometimes you gotta just be in the mindset of "Foolishness yet..wisdom" Gotta have a good balance.

Am I the only one who can tell at a glance that this clip is from the 1997 special edition or re-releases thereof? I suppose it's one of those things that once they are pointed out to you, you can never unsee again. Oh well.

So, at any rate, yes, there is this general problem with natural selection that tends not so much to push a gene pool towards something more favourable or advantageous but rather to favour what ever happens to survive. It is - to use a popular creationist mockery - "survival of those that survive" and thus we end up with perceptory organs and brains that have within past generations been surviving at greater rates rather than those that are fundamentally better suited to discover truths about the world.
It is this folly, this imperfection that makes critical thinking and skepticism so necessary if we ever want to get any closer to anything genuinely accurate or useful. This begets a scientific method quite naturally and inescapably, as we try to eliminate as many biases as we can. Far from an expression of arrogance some would love to portray it as, it is instead a result of the recognition and acceptance of the limitations of our monkey brains and an attempt to carefully though boldly move on.

If you've seen it before please dont give spoilers...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJG698U2Mvo

To be quite literal about the subject, seeing is knowing. To believe requires some measure of not knowing. Therefore believing in something means having no proof but you think it's real anyway. Like Santa Claus.

Hade_Daemon wrote: To be quite literal about the subject, seeing is knowing. To believe requires some measure of not knowing. Therefore believing in something means having no proof but you think it's real anyway. Like Santa Claus.

Says who? As far as I understand, mostly when people say they know something they mean that they really believe it strongly and confidently. And when they say they believe something it appears that they mean that they think of the given assessment as... well, accurate. It seems then to me that unless we define knowledge in ways that are much different from how people typically use it, knowledge would be a subset of belief. And given the actual OP (as opposed to the title alone), the issue here is that our senses can and do deceive us, and so the question naturally forms of whether or to what extent we should have confidence in them. Certainly, we do not know everything that we see, but should we even so much as believe them, much less claim to be certain of them?