>Sensory experiences do not necessarily logically reflect a world out there - they could very well be akin to a mirage.

This is one of the most basic questions of philosophy famously presented by Descartes. He answers it by saying that even if our sensory experience is a mirage, our experience of the mirage is real, and so there has to be "a" world.

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>There’s no good argument against external world skepticism.

"External world skepticism" denies the very platform of logic on which it stands asking to be dispelled.

There is also no good argument for external world skepticism. It is nothing more than a hypothetical possibility, with zero empirical evidence to support it. Nor, is there any good reason to believe it to be the case.

There doesn't need to be evidence against external world skepticism to make a good argument. It just wouldn't make much sense for reality to be made up by just myself right now and nothing to exist. And even if something as extreme as that were the case, what would change about my reality? There is no leap of faith required to trust my senses or emotions, that is literally the default behavior of a human.

In that case, are you sure I’m not a bot just responding to this thread, or worse, an AI struggling to achieve consciousness? There’s no good argument against the belief in God to religious believers because there’s no empirical evidence of His existence or lack thereof. I can’t tell if this is all a dream so I will let Descartes spend his life answering that question for me. Whether a dream in the 1600s or a computer simulation now is the same concept just with better internet. Is it a leap of faith for me to accept reality? I can pursue this rabbit hole thinking until I am insane. So for my own sanity I accept that I am real and that the world is not a simulation. I accept I am real and not in an elaborate dream.

Your point, though, is well taken because I have to think of a response. Or am I just collecting data from my confined environment and spewing it out mindlessly?

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Then we are acting in order to impact that simulation, and we often think we see the results and consequences of our actions. Still no leap of faith, we are just not looking at what we thought we were.

You might want to look into reliabilism and/or the work of GE Moore.

Descartes is not the endpoint of epistemology.

> There’s no good argument against external world skepticism.

There's also no good reason to accept it

Not when it's consistently reinforced by everyone around us.

The definition of knowledge is justified true belief (Pierce i think). So we don't have acces to the world in itself. But we do create justified arguments and conclusion. Human brains simultanious create the world around us as well as the feeling of being a self (Joscha Bach). I would say that we are bound to belief or faith but we have to back it up by justified logic or feelings.

you give one example of the failure of a single sensory ability from a certain distance under a certain set of circumstances and you claim that invalidates all sensory experience

nonsense

I don't mind whatsoever. Here is a decent overview I wrote. The two links in it are how I've interpreted the schema I'm using along with the ketamine sessions that instilled the belief in me on such a ridiculously deep level.

Not OP, but I've been doing somatic therapy twice a week for over a year. It has radically changed my life for the better. I finally found a good therapist that I trust and connect with (after 3 previous attempts that didn't really help...). For me, the somatic aspect was *really* important, as reconnecting with your body will also reconnect you to your emotions.

My therapist helps me feel safe enough to engage with my emotions and helps me accept them and understand them. She helps me make sense of what I've experienced during my life. She also helps me find new ways of looking at the world, at myself, and at my relationships with those around me.

"Emotional intelligence": have you ever heard someone say "i don't know how / what to feel about something" ? At first it baffled me, for me it was something obvious, like an instant reaction. But then i understood they have no IDEEA about it and with the lack of an ideea came the lack of an apropriate emotional response.

Some of us have that "gut feeling" or intuition or some other predictive, associative mechanism that drives our emotions for us beyond learned experience.

As an excercise think about this: how would you feel / percieve the news that an alien ship landed on Earth but no communication has been established? What would your emotion default to?

Somehow you would have to think about it first. Are you intelligent enough to extrapolate instantly with the information you have ? Would your current knowledge drive you to joy? Fear?

>True. The last decade or so I've seen an argument emerge around the value and role of emotions as a source of truth with most proponents seemingly more interested in validating emotions as equally valuable, equally capable, as reason. I've always been wary of these argument as they seem like an attempt by emotionally indulgent people to justify being indulgent, especially if they aren't considered particularly intelligent in the normal sense.

i mean separating the two isnt possible.

what one considers rational and logical comes from emotion, so much so that anyone who successfully separates the two would have no opinions on anything other than simple cause an effect.

is it ok to hurt people? is welfare good? is abortion ok? is morality useful? what defines 'good' or 'bad'?

literally all of these start in emotion and use logic to justify it (its how all human cognition works, emotion first and logic to justify it)

I would hesitate to say that any chemical "controls" our emotions. If it was so simple depression would be a thing of the past.
Truth is we barely know anything about how the brain functions. The belief that we do is based on pure hybris. The replication crisis in medicine and psychology can attest to that.

Serotonin causing depression has never been proven despite a lot of research.

This is why when indoctrinating kids there is usually long conversations about faith and what it means. As someone who was sent to church through childhood I was not alone in being confused by the concept. To use the word faith in relation to external stimuli voids that word it's current meaning. Faith is a concerted effort to believe; a kid doesn't need faith to know fun, nap time, the colour green, but a kid needs to be told to have faith in an omniscient being and to have faith in a man they have never met.

While I understand the point being made here regarding the word, using it interchangeably in this fashion is lighting a pedantic rage inside me. To me it would make more sense to say you believe your senses than to say you have faith in them.

(belief: an acceptance that a statement is true or that something exists.
"his belief in the value of hard work")

(faith: complete trust or confidence in someone or something.)

Do you really have faith in your sensory perception? Mine tricks me al the time. However I do believe my senses most of the time.

Is that faith, or is it just an estimate using probability? Do I have faith that I can steal candy from a baby, or do I just suspect the chances are good?

To me, I don't have faith that my sensory experiences are reporting what is "real", I have just noticed if I try to impact the environment around me, it usually has a noticable effect.

To support this, think of a worm. They likely do not have a concept of faith, or the mental faculties to have faith. But they get sensory information that they use. Not because they have faith that their senses are reporting the truth, but because it their senses are the only source of ostensibly outside information that they have available, and they seem to be working correctly.

From a personal side, I had a giant retinal tear in each eye that made it look like tiny dot-like gnats were flying everywhere at all times (it was actually lots of floaters). While it was obnoxious, it did not shake my faith, I just learned to ignore the inputs that didn't seem to be correct. Then, when I actually came across a cloud of gnats, I relied on my other senses to confirm that they were, in fact, real. I didn't have to change my faith at any point, I just reacted to the inputs.

You do need some amount of faith that it is, actually, a guava that you're smelling, if you were blindfolded and made to smell a variety of fruits, would you confidently be able to pick out whether any of them is guava? Or more specifically, which one it is? If you ate them all, or better yet, took the blindfold off, then you'd know for sure, but you'd actually have to look, which is the leap of faith, not a big one by any means in this case, but if you were trying to pick out, say, a political ideology that you believe in, you wouldn't be able to find it by believing that all politics are dumb, and a waste of time, youth average to take the leap and entertain the idea, whether you find what you're looking for within it or not. You've gotta open the box to find out what exactly is inside, this extends to emotional boxes as well.

There could be some crossover in pattern recognition behaviours that may be construed as 'leap-of-faith' adjacent. This possibly points more towards skewed expectations due to life events with a high impact influencing interpretations of stimuli, good or bad, perhaps more profoundly on the bad interpretations as a matter of experiential response.

I think we hit cognitive blindspots at times, where some thing like the idea of a 'leap of faith' has a specific impulse associated with it. Sometimes these ideas aren't so much a conscious thought process, but more of a 'taking for granted' that the next step is always there and positively reinforcing. An example might be thinking unconsciously 'I have been safe at all times in my life, therefore all times are safe' and pushing boundaries that can seem like leaps of faith in the everything-is-going-to-be-alright category, even though never consciously made.