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Comment by DonbunEf7 | Hacker News Reader

"As a psychologist, I am very interested in the question of how we know whether we are seeing reality or not. Everything we know about the world is based, to some extent, on these very crude sensations, so we always have to be epistemically vigilant. Don’t believe what you see."

Finally, somebody gets it.

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Finally? Somebody? In philosophy this is about as normal a statement as "always check your return values" is in programming.

"By Kant's account, when one employs a concept to describe or categorize noumena (the objects of inquiry, investigation or analysis of the workings of the world), one is employing a way of describing or categorizing phenomena (the observable manifestations of those objects of inquiry, investigation or analysis)."

Kant 1781

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noumenon#Overview

The ancient Hindus were talking about the illusory nature of what we perceive around us, and the reality underlying this illusion thousands of years before Kant lived.

Reality is a loaded word, and I suspect it is a graduated spectrum rather than a single point. What one sees as the 'reality' very much depends on how deeply one can probe and the associated limits in observation.

Sure, but the probability we're hallucinating goes down quite a bit when all (or most) of our 5+ senses agree that a thing is really there and happening. If it weren't we wouldn't have lasted long in the real world.

Hallucinations are the addition of something which isn’t there, we work more by heavy filtering. We see a narrow slice of EM radiation, what we see is at best, only part of what is real. That doesn’t imply magic, but it does about the incompleteness of our senses.

There's also distortions that can mess up our evaluations of the world. We've got some majorly flawed equipment, but it still seems to work just enough so enough of us can reproduce.

That presupposes what it's supposed to prove.

Let's minimize the loss

Argument from redundancy? Nice.

statistics provides that tool, so it’s an argument from math

Statistics don't come with premises we don't put in them.

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