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Politics : Sharks in the Septic Tank -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Dayuhan who wrote (37641)	11/20/2001 9:13:06 AM
From: one_less	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 82486

"I know that I do not know certain things." What do you know and how can you determine, "...I think it a bit sily when people claim that they do know" without personally knowing something. "Knowing" should be defined. Some people are convinced by a substantial body of scientific evidence. Some people also need personal confirmation of the scientific evidence through some sort of experience. Some people are convinced of things they are told (the word) because it seems sensible for the human condition. Some people need to triangulate evidence among all of these circumstances to be convinced that they know something. Some people except that nothing can be known.

To: Dayuhan who wrote (37641)	11/20/2001 10:58:25 AM
From: The Philosopher	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 82486

Don't you think that it is ridiculous for a person to claim to know what obviously cannot be known? First, I'm not sure that there is anything that, ultimately, cannot be known. So I assume you mean cannot be known at this present time. If we invent time machine that can send a camera back in time and take video of any event we want to see and samples of the environment, we may eventually know what caused the death of the dinosaurs, how they built the pyramids, whether the Mayans truly engaged in human sacrifice, and many other things on which we now merely speculate. But on a different scale, the reality is that we can never truly KNOW anything except definitions. Everything is theory. Some theories work out better than others, like the theory that the earth revolves around the sun, but it's still a theory, which might some day be exploded by new scientific discoveries. So it really is the simple question of what grounds you prefer to base your theories on -- pure science, pure religious belief, some combination of these to, or something entirely different from or in addition to these two.