

Why It’s Good to Be Wrong - dnetesn
http://nautil.us/issue/20/creativity/why-its-good-to-be-wrong-rp

======
hughdbrown
"The fact is, there’s nothing infallible about “direct experience” either.
Indeed, experience is never direct. It is a sort of virtual reality, created
by our brains using sketchy and flawed sensory clues, given substance only by
fallible expectations, explanations, and interpretations. Those can easily be
more mistaken than the testimony of the passing hobo. If you doubt this, look
at the work of psychologists Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons, and verify
by direct experience the fallibility of your own direct experience.
Furthermore, the idea that your reminiscences are infallible is also heresy by
the very doctrine that you are faithful to."

This is skepticism raised to the nth degree -- brain-in-a-vat-ism. I'm not
even sure I read the article now.

~~~
pixl97
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality_tunnel](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality_tunnel)

>The idea does not necessarily imply that there is no objective truth; rather
that our access to it is mediated through our senses, experience,
conditioning, prior beliefs, and other non-objective factors. The implied
individual world each person occupies is said to be their reality tunnel.

~~~
vanderZwan
And after that, kick things up a notch with the Boltzmann Brain paradox:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boltzmann_brain](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boltzmann_brain)

> _The paradox states that if one considers the probability of our current
> situation as self-aware entities embedded in an organized environment,
> versus the probability of stand-alone self-aware entities existing in a
> featureless thermodynamic "soup", then the latter should be vastly more
> probable than the former._

------
seanwoodward
And at the conclusion, David disappears in a puff of logic.

------
current_call
First off, if the Pope said that, it wouldn't count.

Therefore, faithfully adhering to the tradition received from the beginning of
the Christian faith, to the glory of God our savior, for the exaltation of the
Catholic religion and for the salvation of the Christian people, with the
approval of the Sacred Council, we teach and define as a divinely revealed
dogma that when the Roman Pontiff speaks EX CATHEDRA, that is, when, in the
exercise of his office as shepherd and teacher of all Christians, in virtue of
his supreme apostolic authority, he defines a doctrine _concerning faith or
morals_ to be held by the whole Church, he possesses, by the divine assistance
promised to him in blessed Peter, that infallibility which the divine Redeemer
willed his Church to enjoy in defining doctrine concerning faith or morals.
Therefore, such definitions of the Roman Pontiff are of themselves, and not by
the consent of the Church, irreformable.
[http://www.ewtn.com/library/COUNCILS/V1.htm#6](http://www.ewtn.com/library/COUNCILS/V1.htm#6)

Second, we don't have time to become experts in every subject, so we defer
some decisions to existing experts.

