"Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact. Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth." - Marcus Aurelius

this

a little off the mark

You don't see gravity. You just see things falling. You infer that there is a force pulling them down, that you call gravity.

Actually, if you think you're being funny because what we call gravity "happens", you're missing the bigger point that we really have no fucking clue "why". His statement might specifically refer to smart-ass reasoning,

The sophists were into post-modernism before. They denied that any objective truth could ever be obtained and thought conflicts primarily arose out of the ambitigiuity of language, something wittgenstein would argue more than 2,000 years later. Arguably Heraclitus also understood perspective if you look at a few of his aphorisms, although he thought there were fundmental metaphysical truths uniting everything.

Our perception and ability to communicate are limited by its nature. No matter how good you experience such kind of perfection, you will never be able to define a absolute truth.

Literally just don't trust your what people tell you to be true, and don't trust your own eyes and ears.

>you can't know nuffin`

He's bit outdated. He didn't understand the difference between his own opinion and the facts that are coming straight at him.

Thats no fault of his own. The ideas back then weren't developed enough for him to grow.

Even so, most people in modern day are dumber than him. So he'd still be a fairly above average today.

Yes

>solipsism

>I can hear gravity
Lay off the drugs, man.

That's not what that means.

ffs OP do you hear the laws of gravity?

>facts that are coming straight at him
Such as?

Gravity wasn't even a concept in his time.

This implies that the types of questions being asked in philosophy have changed in the past 3000 years. They haven't. You can find post-modernist thought going all the way back to prehistoric times.

gravity didn't exist back then you idiot

>all these retards with the shit arguments about gravity

OP: yes, the law of gravity is also "opinion," or rather, an interpretation. It is NOT fact.

Want to know why? Because in order to perceive it, in order to talk about it and entertain it as an idea, there requires many presuppositions: one, to have a physical body, one capable of our senses, with a human brain; two, to have the proper education and understanding of language in order to convey such an understanding; three, to exist on a planet in which the galactic circumstances have brought into existence the very nature of the phenomenon we call gravity...

Do you see where I am going with this? It is all reliant on these presuppositions, which make up your perspective at this moment — it's not FACT. It's circumstantial and transitory. Like everything else.

Truth is a foreign concept to us, it always will be. An imagination like the notion of Nothingness is, a dream, a hope, as real and concrete as Plato's forms. We create these models because they are useful to us, because we find out new ways to seize control of the world with them, but that is not at all evidence of their truthfulness, since the essence of this very world is not of truth, but of transitory circumstance.

he didn't say opinions and perspectives can't be accurate

This is true, but some people perceive more wisely than others, objectively so. There decisions simply have more success because their worldview is more grounded in reality.

Do us all a favor and step out of a second floor window and try flying.

I would fall to my "death" (I put death in quotes because what dies is a fabrication of being that we create known as the ego, a small piece of the flux that we solidify in order to communicate) because I'm a human living on earth, a soft organism incapable of flight on a planet in which the law of gravity takes effect. Still presuppositional, still dependent on circumstance, not fact at all.

Gravity really isn't a great example: minus gravitational waves there is no real objective evidence to support gravity's existence. Mass attracting mass has never been proven according to a scientific standard, period. The Cavendish Experiment attempted to, but was full of logical errors due to controlling variables poorly.

To say there is no objective truth simply isn't true in my opinion, at least not from my perception. Kant argues that since all perception is internally processed, there is no way to understand the thing itself. What does an object look like before eyes have evolved to see certain wavelengths of light, for instance? How can you conceptualize what you have no experience of?

But I digress, empiricism is still valid, I think. If something falls, that doesn't mean gravity is correct, since that isn't provable; it simply means something fell—that is the only statement that can be made with 100% confirmable and repeatable certainty. Physics is based off of this confirmable certainty, so it is hard to argue in my opinion in anything other than semantics. Does it matter if our conception of electron theory is correct? No, electricity works no matter what, no matter how incorrect our model is. Does the theory of lift generation have to be correct? No, it's been changed many times; that still doesn't change the fact that airplanes and birds are objectively flying, even if we don't understand the exact mechanism and variables.

Basically, the scientific method only deals with empirical results. No theory is scientific by definition, or it would no longer be a theory, but instead observable reality. You can still argue that our perception has flaws in it, but that won't make jumping off a cliff any less objectively life ending.

>How can you conceptualize what you have no experience of?
You can't. The real point of this discussion and any empiricist who says something along this line isn't to make us wonder about what that unprocessed, unaltered thing is, but to have us continue to interact with the world while keeping us cognitively grounded far away from dogma, a damaging hindrance on the human mind.

Also, does anything "fall" from the perspective of a plant with no means of sensing such a phenomenon? Are there even "things", "space" and "time" from the perspective of such a thing, or something like an amoeba, or an oxygen molecule, etc? You can't forget that everything we communicate is based on OUR language. That, to me, dismisses any notions of "objective" anything.

Subjective vs. objective is an outdated dichotomy though. It is still commonly used, but it is outdated in philosophy, having been killed by Nietzsche and cremated by Baudrillard.

>>But I digress, empiricism is still valid, I think.
TO be an empiricist means that you do not cling to your speculations, no matter their degree of formalization, and you cling even less to your fantasy of reality and explaining reality and communicating your explanations. You do not even cling to your sensations, because those changes constantly against your will. sensations changes, just like your thoughts and tastes change. it is all rubbish.

what you call empiricism is empiricism done by rationalists, aka people who love to speculate, know more or less that their speculations are sterile, are always disappointing, more so once they compare them to their fantasy of the ''empirical world'' through their other fantasy of ''empirical proof'' and ''thought experiment'', but still choose to cling to their speculations in claiming that they are not able to stop speculating, therefore that ''not speculating is impossible, it is mandatory to speculate'' (plus we are paid for this now) so let's continue.
What they say is that their rationalism remains bounded by their hedonism, even though they love to claim otherwise, and yet always fail to justify that their speculation goes beyond hedonism...

3deep5me

>Subjective vs. objective is an outdated dichotomy though. It is still commonly used, but it is outdated in philosophy, having been killed by Nietzsche and cremated by Baudrillard.

I agree. By objective, I simply mean that it is so from our perspective. Take my falling example, for instance. If I fall from a great height, from my human sensory perspective of course, I will die. It makes no difference if what I am perceiving isn't an accurate portrayal of "the thing itself," I'm still dead. There is no way to argue this within the context of human experience. If I cut off my hand I lose all of its capabilities; if I get hit over the head I lose consciousness, etc.

To use the height example again. Gravity could be disproven tomorrow, it doesn't matter. Does everyone who fell come back to life if Newton's theory of gravity is proven wrong? Of course not, that's ridiculous. So in that sense falling empirically kills you. It may not be what is really happening, but I'll be damned if it isn't good enough for me to not give jumping off a cliff a try. It is only relative to our own subjective sensations, though, you are right.

Also, if you extrapolate evolutionary theory to Kant's argument, you inevitably end up with interaction between objective reality, i.e., the thing itself, and subjective reality.

Evolution works a lot like the scientific method: success is the only concern, theories are irrelevant. A cliff as we perceive it may not exist, but there is some correlation to reality, or evolution wouldn't have developed senses to work around it. Again, there may be biases in our perception (there almost certainly are) and it may be out of context if we really had all of the variables (impossible to know); still, Kant is being disingenuous when he says that there is no way to know objective reality at all. Realistically, all evolution is designed around "the thing itself," giving our senses a high correlation with objective reality, if not so much impressions that are actually objective.

I don't think empiricism is really as illogical as Kant would claim, although there are plenty of people who claim to be empiricists that claim more than they can prove.

I think it's important to remember that Marcus Aurelius wasn't trying to form a coherent philosophy, he was basically writing notes to himself. He was probably thinking about a conversation he had had in court that day when he wrote that, and trying to remind himself that what one person emphatically states is the truth is just that person's belief of the truth.

I don't know jack shit man