Thread: Are feelings and intuitions a valid source of knowledge?

So you agree with Juroara that you can never really tell if intuition is correct or not, especially when it concerns something outside of yourself?

I provided several examples of how the evidence of the senses can be verified - such as one person holding up a shoe and asking the others if they see it the same way he does, or pointing to a red car across the street and asking what they see there.

How could you verify intuitions?

I know you're going to say "But the other people who verify could just be illusions"- of course that whole argument goes nowhere. If we live in an illusion then obviously we can't really know anything, including through intuition. But if we assume as we all do that reality is at least for the most part as we percieve it (it does have a incredible consistency after all, much more than dreams do) then the evidence of the senses IS verifiable.

Even if you want to insist on the fact that we can't really be SURE, the evidence of the senses is much more verifiable than intuition, at least within that illusion, which we have no evidence is actually not reality. So unless you can provide some reason to really doubt reality, then it makes no sense to live your life assuming the reality we sense around us doesn't actually exist. If you truly believed that then how could you live at all? You wouldn't sit in chairs because they could just be illusion, and yet you do sit in chairs, and you drive your car, and you live your life in absolutely every way as if you honestly beliefe this so-called "illusion" is actually reality, don't you? Therefore your argument that you don't believe it is real falls flat.

I posit that even though there is some reason to wonder whether reality is exactly as we perceive it, we all live our lives as if it is absolutely real, and furthermore we have no other choice really. If you try to ignore any pressing matter presented in this possibly false reality, such as paying bills or stopping before you go in front of an oncoming bus that's about to hit you, then you will suffer the consequences of those actions just as you would if reality actually is an illusion. Therefore it's really only a nifty philosophical question that has no actual bearing on how we live our lives.

TLR

If reality IS an illusion, it's so consistent and so persistent that we are still forced to live in it as if it's reality, so for all practical intents and purposes it is our reality. When it's impossible to tell illusion from reality then what meaning is there in calling it illusion? It is our reality.