Earlier I talked about the problems of misunderstanding. In this article I want to reveal the first, philosophical level.
Antiquity
In antiquity, the philosopher Socrates was very fond of demonstrating contradictions to his students by asking people simple questions. For example, a simple question what is rain?, people responded very differently depending on the current weather conditions: during the dry period, people defined rain as something positive, and on rainy days - negative. So Socrates showed the limitations, the impermanence of people's perception of the phenomena of the surrounding world. To put it in a more modern language: people evaluate the surrounding reality subjectively based on the current state of affairs. The constant change of subjective assessment entails unpredictability and chaos. For Socrates, the only way to avoid chaos is to search for the true, deep meaning of things through dialogue with other people, or in modern terms, the search for objectivity. For example, to try to objectively answer the question what is rain, you need to abstract from your feelings, try to generalize so that everyone can agree with this.
According to my observations, little has changed since then: people still mostly reason subjectively. And lately it's even becoming a kind of fashion.
Middle Ages
In the Middle Ages, the Bible was the main source of knowledge about the world around us. There were several approaches to its study and interpretation. Representatives of different schools often argued among themselves about the causes and consequences of different events. They tried to find out the role of God, angels, demons and other entities in certain events. Often in such disputes, everyone remained with their own opinion. This continued until the intervention of the English monk William Occam, who formed the principle known to this day as Occam's Razor : "it is not necessary to breed entities unnecessarily." In other words, if we can explain a phenomenon with a simpler explanation, then we should use this simple explanation instead of a more complex one. So all students will concentrate their efforts on studying a simpler idea of the world, and will abandon it only if there is some kind of inexplicability.
For a better understanding, I will give a modern example: if we can explain why a person falls using only the law of gravity, then there is no need to add additional factors such as magic or alien intervention.
Rebirth
Occam's razor has raised many questions about the possibility of obtaining true knowledge. Over time, two main currents formed: empiricists and rationalists. A prominent representative of the empiricists was Francis Bacon (the "father" of the word experiment). Bacon argued that it is possible to understand the essence of things through feelings and experience, and constructs that came from the mind should be questioned. On the other hand, Rene Descartes was a prominent representative of the rationalists (do they remember the Cartesian coordinate system from school?!). Descartes argued that the mind is the main source of knowledge, and the senses can be misleading.
Representatives of these two directions argued long and hard among themselves, each of them gave quite reasonable arguments in their favor. Modern people are well aware of optical and other illusions when our senses deceive us: for example, if you drink sweet water for a long time, then at some point a person ceases to perceive it as sweet. There are also many examples when mathematical and logical hypotheses predict something that does not happen in the real world: for example, according to the law of gravity, the earth and the sun should be attracted to each other before a collision, but in reality we do not observe a decrease in distance.
Perhaps the debate would have continued to this day if it had not been for Immanuel Kant (who coined the word a priori and "thing in itself"). Kant, with his book The Critique of Pure Reason, reconciled empiricists and rationalists. The main idea: people are born with a priori knowledge (knowledge before gaining experience), for example, with a sense of space and time. This knowledge determines the subsequent perceived information, on the one hand, and limits the knowledge of the surrounding world on the other. To know the world, we are forced to use both a rational approach and the experience gained from the real world.
Another German philosopher Hegel continued this idea by showing the cyclicity of our knowledge: a person is born and perceives the world around him, which is constantly changing and his perception of this world changes after him. When his children are born, they are already in fact in another world and the cycle repeats. A priori knowledge of a child differs from generation to generation, and hence its perception and development.
The beginning of science
Armed with the knowledge described above, it is possible to formulate a pattern of cognition of the surrounding world:
- It is necessary to abandon subjectivity in favor of objectivity. It is not the perception of a particular person that is important, but the knowledge that has value for all people, ideally for many generations.
- Not to breed entities unnecessarily. If there are several hypotheses, first of all it is necessary to study the simplest one.
- Build empirical models using experiment and rationalization.
All this is what science does: collects a certain amount of knowledge, forms hypotheses, puts experiments, forms theories.
New time
But that's not all. Another revolution in the world of philosophy was made by Wittgenstein, whose main idea is: "what we cannot talk about, we must be silent about." In a narrow sense, what cannot be talked about is a subjective view of the World, and in a broad sense, everything that can be perceived differently by different people. In other words, bringing your thought to the interlocutor, you need to choose words that you both perceive unambiguously. Only in this way will the listener be able to accurately perceive what is being said to him. This rule seems simple, but in fact it is practically unattainable: even the word chicken evokes different associations in a 4-year-old girl and a 40-year-old cook, although there is nothing subjective in this word. Even science, which seems to consist only of things that can be talked about , contains a lot of things that cannot be talked about. And there have been several attempts in history to "purify" science from this, but it all ended in complete failure. The main problem has always been the exact transmission of meaning: the spread of understanding among different people in exact concepts is small, but when abstractions are added, the spread increases quite a lot. Even if some scientist solves the mystery of the universe, this mystery will be lost in its transmission.
Conclusions:
A person is very limited by his senses and mind, and the world around him is very complex and unpredictable. We have to build models (simplified representation) in order to predict at least something. This often helps a lot, but sometimes it is very disastrous.
I myself have a position supported only by faith. I often talk about the correct behavior and delusion of others. But sometimes, when I notice that the interlocutor has a different idea of the world, I do not enter into an argument, because it makes no sense: we proceed from different principles, which each of us is not able to prove. In a sense, I live with faith in a World that may turn out to be false and I am aware of it.
To seed the reasoning on this topic, I can advise you to look:
- debate "Islam or Atheism"
- film "Contact" or his review on the channel "EPISODES"