My Skepticism

G0W51

Standard methods of inferring knowledge about the world are based off premises that I don’t know the justifications for. Any justification (or a link to an article or book with one) for why these premises are true or should be assumed to be true would be appreciated.

Here are the premises:

“One has knowledge of one’s own percepts.” Percepts are often given epistemic privileges, meaning that they need no justification to be known, but I see no justification for giving them epistemic privileges. It seems like the dark side of epistemology to me.
“One’s reasoning is trustworthy.” If one’s reasoning is untrustworthy, then one’s evaluation of the trustworthiness of one’s reasoning can’t be trusted, so I don’t see how one could determine if one’s reasoning is correct. Why should one even consider one’s reasoning is correct to begin with? It seems like privileging the hypothesis, as there are many different ways one’s mind could work, and presumably only a very small proportion of possible minds would be remotely valid reasoners.
“One’s memories are true.” Though one’s memories of how the world works gives a consistent explanation of why one is perceiving one’s current percepts, a perhaps simpler explanation is that the percepts one are currently experiencing are the only percepts one has ever experienced, and one’s memories are false. This hypothesis is still simple, as one only needs to have a very small number of memories, as one can only think of a small number of memories at any one time, and the memory of having other memories could be false as well.

Edit: Why was this downvoted? Should it have been put in the weekly open thread instead?

Here are the premises:

“One has knowledge of one’s own percepts.” Percepts are often given epistemic privileges, meaning that they need no justification to be known, but I see no justification for giving them epistemic privileges. It seems like the dark side of epistemology to me.
“One’s reasoning is trustworthy.” If one’s reasoning is untrustworthy, then one’s evaluation of the trustworthiness of one’s reasoning can’t be trusted, so I don’t see how one could determine if one’s reasoning is correct. Why should one even consider one’s reasoning is correct to begin with? It seems like privileging the hypothesis, as there are many different ways one’s mind could work, and presumably only a very small proportion of possible minds would be remotely valid reasoners.
“One’s memories are true.” Though one’s memories of how the world works gives a consistent explanation of why one is perceiving one’s current percepts, a perhaps simpler explanation is that the percepts one are currently experiencing are the only percepts one has ever experienced, and one’s memories are false. This hypothesis is still simple, as one only needs to have a very small number of memories, as one can only think of a small number of memories at any one time, and the memory of having other memories could be false as well.

Edit: Why was this downvoted? Should it have been put in the weekly open thread instead?

You can think of what the points mean in the technical sense and try not to read anything more into them.

1) You sense something, your brain state is conditional on atleast some part of the universe. Do not make assumtions on whether it's a "fair" or "true" representation. At the most extreme you could have a single bit of information and for example no insight on how that bit is generated (ie by default and from epistemoligcal first grounds our behaviour is opaque).

2) We move from one computation state to another based on non-vanishingly on what state we were previously on. Ie our thoughts go in trains, it does matter what we thought before on what we will think next. Do not make any assumtion s that these trains have any "fair" or "true" representation about anything. We simply work in a not the way. We don't know how sane we are but we know that there is a method to our functioning, it is not adequately modeled as dice throws.

3) Our current computational state is the result of our past computations. Again no guarantees of "representing" or being "faitfull" to the past states are given.

Now your reservation about 1) does a photoreceptor need any other basis to fire rather than triggering? Is it possible for it to fire in "error"? For what we see is preciously how it fires. Then compared to a tactile sensor does a photoreceptor or it behave more "right" than other? From the inside we might not be able to distinguish which is which. So from the inside it seems taht mystery sense X fires sometimes and mystery sense Y fires sometimes. What would it even mean for these senses to be "misleading" or "false"?

The gripes about 2 can be framed as if you are able to grasp a situation one way then you can work on that. If you have no grasp of anything that would be equivalent like being like a dice. There need not be an all encompassing competency. Even if you have a basic abiity to imagine alternatives and then pick one you can work forward. What woudl be bad would be the inability to try a solution or being unable to be mentally stimulated by ones experience. Even if you begin with a flavour of madness you can come to know that flavour of madness and take into account it continuing forward. Ie you could have that when you think you see green you actually see red. If you then install a color reversal you can be more compatible/succesull with your surroundings/qualia-jungle. There is no "innate color ability" but being able to contextualise your thoughts with other experiences gives them a certain class of practicality (such as such-and-such perception being involved with a noun with letters R, E and D) .

About 3 your memories aqre not given by some outswide actor. They were crafted by you so you know their format and the circumstances where you would create them. If you call a hitpoint a smeerph, it doesn't still make memories about smeerphs "false". It has to be given also that memories are also one possibly confusing and distracting part of qualia-jungle. Maybe you are experiencing your feelings of anxiety when you are remembering an object as big. But how can it be said that such a memory would be wrong when there is no strict demand to interpret memories to only be about physical size? Ie given proper relation to what mental mechnisms generate them memories can only be correct because mental notekeeping strategies are freely chooseable.