The Paradox of the Senses

This won't be a lengthy post, as I hate writing.

I was thinking the other day about how blindly we trust our senses. Touch, Taste, Smell, Sight, and Hearing provide (almost) all of the information we think we know about the accepted physical world around us. Yet our senses cannot sense themselves; so why do we trust them? The mind is just the CPU for this information, yet it's like a CPU that doesn't know it's own speed. Just some thoughts.

I wouldn't ponder long on whether or not you can trust your senses, instead think about this.

Someone can find the exact numbers I'm sure but were are only consciously aware of a small percentage of the information our brain processes. I often wonder what the rest could be, aside from the obvious things like breathing.

None-the-less you can't really trust your senses since they don't even pick up the whole spectrums...

reply to post by SeeingBlue


So what, just kill yourself? Nothing "picks up the whole spectrums."

We don't have any alternative. If you want to live you have to use your senses. You can talk about trusting them or not all you like, but when you get hungry you aren't gonna just sit there wondering what to do, because maybe you're hallucinating, or maybe your sense of hunger is not to be trusted. Heck, you might not even be hungry at all! You might be dreaming, or in the matrix!

All this is nothing but a game. Since Descartes wrote his meditations in the 1600's people have been aware that there is no way around this problem. But, so what? Asking whether or not we "can" trust our senses is trivial, because no matter what, we will.