Thanks for your reply, hen.
I guess I don’t think you’re making a truth claim when you say that the car you see is cream-colored. You’re just reporting an empirical observation. If, however, someone sitting next to you objected that the same car was red, then there would be a problem to sort out, i.e. there would be some doubt as to what was being observed, whether one of you were color blind, etc. And in that case I think you would desire your perception to be the accurate one, not because cream-colored is better than red, but because humans, I think, generally need to believe that their direct experience of the world is reliable.
For practical purposes, intuition is of course indispensable. I prefer to distinguish between “beliefs” and “perceptions” when it comes to one’s immediate environment (I wouldn’t say I believe I’m sitting in front of my computer right now; I’d simply say that I am sitting in front of my computer), but there are also limits to what can be perceived immediately (e.g. by the naked eye) which can destabilize perceptions one would otherwise be happy to take for granted.
So: for most intents and purposes, I have no interest in challenging your report of what was seen out the window. But it seems to me that in making your report you already have some interest in its accuracy.
Hello everyone.
I go by bouilhet. I don’t typically spend much time on the Internet, much less in the interactive blogosphere, and I don’t know how joining LessWrong will fit into the schedule of my life, but here goes. I’m interested from a philosophical perspective in many of the problems discussed on LW—AI/futurism, rationalism, epistemology, probability, bias—and after reading through a fair share of the material here I thought it was time to engage. I don’t exactly consider myself a rationalist (though perhaps I am one), but I spend a great deal of my thought-energy trying to see clearly—in my personal life as well as in my work life (art) - and reason plays a significant role in that. On the other hand, I’m fairly committed to the belief (at least partly based on observation) that a given (non-mathematical) truth claim cannot quite be separated from a person’s desire for said claim to be true. I’d like to have this belief challenged, naturally, but mostly I’m looking forward to further investigations of the gray areas. Broadly, I’m very attracted to what seems to be the unspoken premise of this community: that being definitively right may be off the table, but that one might, with a little effort, be less wrong.