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hnumpah

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Four philosophical questions to make your brain hurt
« on: November 20, 2008, 03:35:12 PM »
Four philosophical questions to make your brain hurt 

It's World Philosophy Day - an opportunity to contemplate one's very existence and whether computer monitors really exist, says David Bain.

People expect different things of philosophers. Some expect us to be sages. When these people meet me, my heart sinks, since I know theirs is about to. Others expect us to have a steady supply of aphorisms up our sleeves, such as that love is never having to say you're sorry (something no partner of mine has ever been persuaded of).

They too are disappointed when they meet me, especially when I say that the glass so beloved by optimists and pessimists is both half full and half empty.

Others expect of us not sagacity, but madness, or at least outlandish beliefs. And here, it must be said, some philosophers really have delivered. Thales believed that everything is made of water, for example, while Pythagoras avoided eating beans because he believed they have souls. 

As Princeton philosopher David Lewis once said: "When philosophers follow where argument leads, too often they are led to doctrines indistinguishable from sheer lunacy."

But beware. this is the same David Lewis who believed that, for each of the ways things might have been but are not, there is a world at which they are that way, eg a world at which your counterpart is spending today with the world's greatest sex god or goddess.

And, reassuring though it can be to think that at least that counterpart is having fun, even those impressed with Lewis's towering intellect have often found these other worlds of his hard to swallow.

Not all philosophers pin such striking colours to the mast, but there is a good reason why people associate the subject with surprising views. Philosophy involves standing back and thinking - intensely and rigorously - about aspects of our lives that are at once ordinary and fundamental.

And when the surface is scratched, what you find below is extraordinary - or, rather, extraordinarily difficult to make good, clear sense of. Lying in wait are arguments that lead to, if not sheer lunacy, then bullets we're loathe to bite.

So, with World Philosophy Day upon us, here are some pesky arguments to apply your minds to:


1. SHOULD WE KILL HEALTHY PEOPLE FOR THEIR ORGANS?
Suppose Bill is a healthy man without family or loved ones. Would it be ok painlessly to kill him if his organs would save five people, one of whom needs a heart, another a kidney, and so on? If not, why not?

Consider another case: you and six others are kidnapped, and the kidnapper somehow persuades you that if you shoot dead one of the other hostages, he will set the remaining five free, whereas if you do not, he will shoot all six. (Either way, he'll release you.)

If in this case you should kill one to save five, why not in the previous, organs case? If in this case too you have qualms, consider yet another: you're in the cab of a runaway tram and see five people tied to the track ahead. You have the option of sending the tram on to the track forking off to the left, on which only one person is tied. Surely you should send the tram left, killing one to save five.

But then why not kill Bill?


2. ARE YOU THE SAME PERSON WHO STARTED READING THIS ARTICLE?
Consider a photo of someone you think is you eight years ago. What makes that person you? You might say he she was composed of the same cells as you now. But most of your cells are replaced every seven years. You might instead say you're an organism, a particular human being, and that organisms can survive cell replacement - this oak being the same tree as the sapling I planted last year.

But are you really an entire human being? If surgeons swapped George Bush's brain for yours, surely the Bush look-alike, recovering from the operation in the White House, would be you. Hence it is tempting to say that you are a human brain, not a human being.

But why the brain and not the spleen? Presumably because the brain supports your mental states, eg your hopes, fears, beliefs, values, and memories. But then it looks like it's actually those mental states that count, not the brain supporting them. So the view is that even if the surgeons didn't implant your brain in Bush's skull, but merely scanned it, wiped it, and then imprinted its states on to Bush's pre-wiped brain, the Bush look-alike recovering in the White House would again be you.

But the view faces a problem: what if surgeons imprinted your mental states on two pre-wiped brains: George Bush's and Gordon Brown's? Would you be in the White House or in Downing Street? There's nothing on which to base a sensible choice. Yet one person cannot be in two places at once.

In the end, then, no attempt to make sense of your continued existence over time works. You are not the person who started reading this article.


3. IS THAT REALLY A COMPUTER SCREEN IN FRONT OF YOU?
What reason do you have to believe there's a computer screen in front of you? Presumably that you see it, or seem to. But our senses occasionally mislead us. A straight stick half-submerged in water sometimes look bent; two equally long lines sometimes look different lengths. 


Are things always as they seem? The Muller-Lyer illusion indicates not

But this, you might reply, doesn't show that the senses cannot provide good reasons for beliefs about the world. By analogy, even an imperfect barometer can give you good reason to believe it's about to rain.

Before relying on the barometer, after all, you might independently check it by going outside to see whether it tends to rain when the barometer indicates that it will. You establish that the barometer is right 99% of the time. After that, surely, it's readings can be good reasons to believe it will rain.

Perhaps so, but the analogy fails. For you cannot independently check your senses. You cannot jump outside of the experiences they provide to check they're generally reliable. So your senses give you no reason at all to believe that there is a computer screen in front of you."


4. DID YOU REALLY CHOOSE TO READ THIS ARTICLE?
Suppose that Fred existed shortly after the Big Bang. He had unlimited intelligence and memory, and knew all the scientific laws governing the universe and all the properties of every particle that then existed. Thus equipped, billions of years ago, he could have worked out that, eventually, planet Earth would come to exist, that you would too, and that right now you would be reading this article.

After all, even back then he could have worked out all the facts about the location and state of every particle that now exists.

And once those facts are fixed, so is the fact that you are now reading this article. No one's denying you chose to read this. But your choice had causes (certain events in your brain, for example), which in turn had causes, and so on right back to the Big Bang. So your reading this was predictable by Fred long before you existed. Once you came along, it was already far too late for you to do anything about it.

Now, of course, Fred didn't really exist, so he didn't really predict your every move. But the point is: he could have. You might object that modern physics tells us that there is a certain amount of fundamental randomness in the universe, and that this would have upset Fred's predictions. But is this reassuring? Notice that, in ordinary life, it is precisely when people act unpredictably that we sometimes question whether they have acted freely and responsibly. So freewill begins to look incompatible both with causal determination and with randomness. None of us, then, ever do anything freely and responsibly."


IN CONCLUSION
Let me be clear: the point is absolutely not that you or I must bite these bullets. Some philosophers have a taste for bullets; but few would accept all the conclusions above and many would accept none. But the point, when you reject a conclusion, is to diagnose where the argument for it goes wrong.

Doing this in philosophy goes hand-in-hand with the constructive side of our subject, with providing sane, rigorous, and illuminating accounts of central aspects of our existence: freewill, morality, justice, beauty, consciousness, knowledge, truth, meaning, and so on.

Rarely does this allow us to put everything back where we found it. There are some surprises, some bullets that have to be bitten; sometimes it's a matter simply of deciding which. But even when our commonsense conceptions survive more or less intact, understanding is deepened. As TS Eliot once wrote:

"?the end of our exploring,

Will be to arrive where we started,

And know the place for the first time."

David Bain is a lecturer in philosophy at the University of Glasgow

 
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/7739493.stm
"I love WikiLeaks." - Donald Trump, October 2016

Xavier_Onassis

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Re: Four philosophical questions to make your brain hurt
« Reply #1 on: November 20, 2008, 03:52:45 PM »
But then why not kill Bill?

========================
In the case of the runaway train, you are forced to make a decision to kill someone: whatever caused the train to become unstoppable is to blame.  In the case of Bill, you are not forced to do anything. The five ill people will die and no one can blame you, because you took no action. It is as if you were not there. You are not FORCED to kill the five afflicted people or Bill, so you would tend to do nothing.

In the second case, you can never put the same foot in the same river twice. Everything is constantly changing. So no, you are not the same person who started reading the article, but you are closer to the person that started than anyone else.
 
In the third case, I can never be entirely sure of anything, but the odds are that I am sitting in front of my computer screen.

In the fourth case, it seems to me that I chose to read this, but again, if every event is preordained, I really can't know the difference. So I can't say free will exists or it doesn't.
« Last Edit: November 20, 2008, 04:22:26 PM by Xavier_Onassis »
"Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana."

Brassmask

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Re: Four philosophical questions to make your brain hurt
« Reply #2 on: November 20, 2008, 04:14:00 PM »
More article like this, please.

Plane

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Re: Four philosophical questions to make your brain hurt
« Reply #3 on: November 20, 2008, 05:52:31 PM »
http://newt.org/MyiBelong/iBelongProfile/tabid/97/pid/1589/upmid/3742/Default.aspx

Quote
MEMO TO SELF


WHERE THE HELL ARE YOU -

AND HOW THE HELL DID YOU GET THERE?


    You’ve lived through a depression, several recessions, 12 presidents (6 of whom you voted for), a world war, a ‘cold war’, several other declared and undeclared ‘hot’ wars and a ‘police action’ in which you participated. You’ve witnessed the space race, men walking on the moon, little man-made vehicles traversing the Martian landscape as well as little Japanese-made vehicles traversing the American landscape. You’ve seen the malevolent influence of the drugs and sex driven zombies of the 1960’s anti-war, America-hating left, the crowd which dragged this country through the disgraceful retreat/defeat in Vietnam, and whose influence and progeny will continue to pollute our politics for generations to come. You’ve watched the rise and fall of communism and its related collectivist ideologies all over this planet and you now sense the very real possibility of their rebirth, in the United States, of all places. You’ve no way of knowing what else may be in store, but nothing really surprises you anymore.

    Now, two days after your 76th birthday, and one day after casting your vote for John McCain and watching him lose to Barack Obama, you sit there pondering the future of America under President Obama. You sit there wondering what the hell has happened over the last two years and, more importantly, what might happen in the next four. Has your country become a place where emotion has completely replaced reason, where respectful disagreement has been replaced by harangue, where all the failed collectivist ideologies of this planet’s history will find a new home?

    You’ve given up analyzing this presidential campaign, trying to understand why a thoroughbred with the track record and credentials of a John McCain was unable to win the race against an untried and unproven individual with no track record and a long list of questionable relationships. You feel you know the four reasons for McCain’s loss. First, the liberal-oriented mainstream press has been telling the country for almost eight years how George W. Bush is a disaster, a stupid man, the worst president ever. The fact that he was re-elected 3+ years ago means nothing to them. Is it any surprise then, with the constant battering of the media, that Bush is held in low regard? All Obama had to do is wrap Bush around McCain’s neck, even though McCain often disagreed with Bush. Secondly, the Republicans behaved like Democrats for the past six years, helping to spend us into the deficit mess we now enjoy. Thirdly, and very importantly, about seven weeks before the election, the economy tanks as a result of the Democratic Party’s meddling in the mortgage market, using Freddie Mae and Freddie Mac to pollute the market with sub-prime mortgages. The Democrats, in effect, converted home-renters into home-owners into homeless as the mortgage market tanked and took the rest of the economy with it. The fact that it happened on George Bush’s watch, along with the fact that the Democratic controlled congress had neither the desire nor the will to address the problem at its source and endanger their presidential candidate, was a killer for McCain. Finally, and most importantly, the Democratic candidate proved to be one of the most capable and adroit politicians ever to seek the Oval Office, was able to raise and spend unheard of amounts of money and ran a masterful campaign.

    However, you now hear esteemed members of the mainstream media admitting that they are hard-pressed to predict what our new President will do because they just don’t know the man, have no sense of who he really is.

    Perhaps, you think, if they hadn’t spent all their time and effort pulling Obama’s bandwagon and avoiding any examination of the man, his associations, his voting record or his campaign promises, they might have attained some knowledge of the man behind the charisma. If they had replaced some of their adulation with the slightest bit of journalistic integrity and curiosity they might have achieved some sense of what they were enabling.

    Perhaps, on reflection, you really can’t blame the young for voting the way they did. It is no surprise that the young are idealistic. It is also no surprise that many have been influenced by their teachers and professors and, to a large extent, by peer pressure. But, they voted honestly and in great numbers. And if, as they mature, they are able to maintain some of their idealism and factor in some degree of wisdom gained from experience, it could auger very well for our future.

    Perhaps the overwhelming number of blacks voted along racial lines. That shouldn’t surprise you or distress you. If you were black, you very well may have done likewise. Human nature is an integral ingredient of the political process.

    Barack Obama was not your choice but he will be your President. So, pray for him and his family, pray that the Lord give him wisdom and strength to lead us through the current financial and economic mess. Pray that he fully recognizes the need for us to be strong in the face of our enemies. Pray that he sees the wisdom (if not the necessity) of governing from the center. Pray that he adheres to his campaign promises to do just that and does not allow the far left faction of his party to drag him (and us) closer to socialism or into the self-destructive sewer of capitulation, recrimination, retaliation and vengeance.

    So there, self. I hope that closes the book for you on this election. Go on with your life, fight the good fight and do whatever you can to help your party reclaim its principles, if not its very soul.

Regards,

Me

JACK DEENEY
from: IN THE REAR VIEW MIRROR - http://jdeeney.blogspot.com

Plane

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Re: Four philosophical questions to make your brain hurt
« Reply #4 on: November 20, 2008, 06:49:30 PM »

1. SHOULD WE KILL HEALTHY PEOPLE FOR THEIR ORGANS?
Suppose Bill is a healthy man without family or loved ones. Would it be ok painlessly to kill him if his organs would save five people, one of whom needs a heart, another a kidney, and so on? If not, why not?

Consider another case: you and six others are kidnapped, and the kidnapper somehow persuades you that if you shoot dead one of the other hostages, he will set the remaining five free, whereas if you do not, he will shoot all six. (Either way, he'll release you.)

If in this case you should kill one to save five, why not in the previous, organs case? If in this case too you have qualms, consider yet another: you're in the cab of a runaway tram and see five people tied to the track ahead. You have the option of sending the tram on to the track forking off to the left, on which only one person is tied. Surely you should send the tram left, killing one to save five.

But then why not kill Bill?

Because Bill has a right to exist no less than yours, as soon as Bill hears of your plan, he is likely to nominate you as a donor also . There should not be a greater right to exist for one than another nor a greater right for two than for one.
[/quote]

2. ARE YOU THE SAME PERSON WHO STARTED READING THIS ARTICLE?
Consider a photo of someone you think is you eight years ago. What makes that person you? You might say he she was composed of the same cells as you now. But most of your cells are replaced every seven years. You might instead say you're an organism, a particular human being, and that organisms can survive cell replacement - this oak being the same tree as the sapling I planted last year.

But are you really an entire human being? If surgeons swapped George Bush's brain for yours, surely the Bush look-alike, recovering from the operation in the White House, would be you. Hence it is tempting to say that you are a human brain, not a human being.

But why the brain and not the spleen? Presumably because the brain supports your mental states, eg your hopes, fears, beliefs, values, and memories. But then it looks like it's actually those mental states that count, not the brain supporting them. So the view is that even if the surgeons didn't implant your brain in Bush's skull, but merely scanned it, wiped it, and then imprinted its states on to Bush's pre-wiped brain, the Bush look-alike recovering in the White House would again be you.

But the view faces a problem: what if surgeons imprinted your mental states on two pre-wiped brains: George Bush's and Gordon Brown's? Would you be in the White House or in Downing Street? There's nothing on which to base a sensible choice. Yet one person cannot be in two places at once.

In the end, then, no attempt to make sense of your continued existence over time works. You are not the person who started reading this article.

[/quote] I am the same person that I was twenty minutes ago and five and thirty years ago even though probly only a few atoms of my body have stayed with me this long and many of my opinions  have evolved and many of my thoughts have been forgotten, this is unimportant to my self being the same self.

I am a dynamic phenominon and a dynamic thing can be named even if its makeup is constantly changeing , is France still France after Charles DeGaulle dies? Of course it is because the definition of France is not a particular person or a particular group of persons , it is a group of persons in a place who have agreed to be France even if the membership is always being added to and subtracted from.
 A storm can be named even if it is made of new rain every few hours , a river grows old even if the water is refreshed in it constantly , The Colorado runs through the greatest rut in all the world and defines itself largely by its habit.

I am the product of my former self and the environment and the teaching that my former self has adsorbed , I will produce my future self and no future me can be created without reference to me now.
Quote

3. IS THAT REALLY A COMPUTER SCREEN IN FRONT OF YOU?
What reason do you have to believe there's a computer screen in front of you? Presumably that you see it, or seem to. But our senses occasionally mislead us. A straight stick half-submerged in water sometimes look bent; two equally long lines sometimes look different lengths. 


Are things always as they seem? The Muller-Lyer illusion indicates not

But this, you might reply, doesn't show that the senses cannot provide good reasons for beliefs about the world. By analogy, even an imperfect barometer can give you good reason to believe it's about to rain.

Before relying on the barometer, after all, you might independently check it by going outside to see whether it tends to rain when the barometer indicates that it will. You establish that the barometer is right 99% of the time. After that, surely, it's readings can be good reasons to believe it will rain.

Perhaps so, but the analogy fails. For you cannot independently check your senses. You cannot jump outside of the experiences they provide to check they're generally reliable. So your senses give you no reason at all to believe that there is a computer screen in front of you."
So what if it isn't?
What if everything is absolutely an illusion because all of my senses are being spoofed?
Nothing changes if it is or isn't , my choices and my responsibilitys are real to me and they can't get realer.
Illusions really abound and I should rejoice when I find a way to see through one , but looseing one illusion I might replace it with another just as easily as I learned the first illusion.

My thinking is based on my best knoledge that I can get .

It is worthwile to attempt to  spot illusions and be aware that everyone harbors a few as a normal thing , but is shouldn't be paralizeing to realise that at least a few of my observations are not true , it is better to accept the best availible and continue than to spend the day in circular iteration replaceing one illusion with another with no means of knowing which illusion isn't.

Quote
4. DID YOU REALLY CHOOSE TO READ THIS ARTICLE?
Suppose that Fred existed shortly after the Big Bang. He had unlimited intelligence and memory, and knew all the scientific laws governing the universe and all the properties of every particle that then existed. Thus equipped, billions of years ago, he could have worked out that, eventually, planet Earth would come to exist, that you would too, and that right now you would be reading this article.

After all, even back then he could have worked out all the facts about the location and state of every particle that now exists.

And once those facts are fixed, so is the fact that you are now reading this article. No one's denying you chose to read this. But your choice had causes (certain events in your brain, for example), which in turn had causes, and so on right back to the Big Bang. So your reading this was predictable by Fred long before you existed. Once you came along, it was already far too late for you to do anything about it.

Now, of course, Fred didn't really exist, so he didn't really predict your every move. But the point is: he could have. You might object that modern physics tells us that there is a certain amount of fundamental randomness in the universe, and that this would have upset Fred's predictions. But is this reassuring? Notice that, in ordinary life, it is precisely when people act unpredictably that we sometimes question whether they have acted freely and responsibly. So freewill begins to look incompatible both with causal determination and with randomness. None of us, then, ever do anything freely and responsibly."

Fred is a funny thing to call God.
But it is impossible to know God fully so whether God accepts being named Fred or not I can't say.
Only a totally omniscient God could have Freds job here , even if there were several Gods running around, one who had the universe figured out this completely would be the preeminant one.
And this is a poor approximation of predestination.

If I watch you choose your pants at Sears , watch you choose your shirt at K-mart , watch you choose your shoes at Wall Mart , I am not makeing you choose how you dress , even if I am driveing you from store to store.

What if I were able to watch you choose the previous day? Not a diffrence , it is still your choice even if I know about it already. What If I know that you always buy Black shoes of a particuilar brand? I will then understand your choice completely , but it is still you that is makeing the choice.
Quote
IN CONCLUSION
Let me be clear: the point is absolutely not that you or I must bite these bullets. Some philosophers have a taste for bullets; but few would accept all the conclusions above and many would accept none. But the point, when you reject a conclusion, is to diagnose where the argument for it goes wrong.

Doing this in philosophy goes hand-in-hand with the constructive side of our subject, with providing sane, rigorous, and illuminating accounts of central aspects of our existence: freewill, morality, justice, beauty, consciousness, knowledge, truth, meaning, and so on.

Rarely does this allow us to put everything back where we found it. There are some surprises, some bullets that have to be bitten; sometimes it's a matter simply of deciding which. But even when our commonsense conceptions survive more or less intact, understanding is deepened. As TS Eliot once wrote:

"?the end of our exploring,

Will be to arrive where we started,

And know the place for the first time."

David Bain is a lecturer in philosophy at the University of Glasgow

 
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/7739493.stm

These are not the heavyweight philosophy questions as advertised , but they are important ones because they are historicly important .

  Every generation gets asked some version of these questions , each one has been answered several diffrent ways.

Xavier_Onassis

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Re: Four philosophical questions to make your brain hurt
« Reply #5 on: November 21, 2008, 04:44:20 PM »
These are not the heavyweight philosophy questions as advertised , but they are important ones because they are historicly important .

  Every generation gets asked some version of these questions , each one has been answered several diffrent ways.

=====================================================
There are no new serious philosophical questions, other than the ones technology presents, such as the one abut transplanting the organs of a healthy person into five ill ones. The question has appeared before in  different guises before transplants were technical possible.

Free will is definitely a serious philosophical question. So is the one about the entire universe being in a state of constant change. Is life what we perceive, or do our perceptions deceive us to the point that nothing we think we know is true.? That is also a serious philosophical question.

"Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana."

Plane

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Re: Four philosophical questions to make your brain hurt
« Reply #6 on: November 21, 2008, 07:36:08 PM »
These are not the heavyweight philosophy questions as advertised , but they are important ones because they are historicly important .

  Every generation gets asked some version of these questions , each one has been answered several diffrent ways.

=====================================================
There are no new serious philosophical questions, other than the ones technology presents, such as the one abut transplanting the organs of a healthy person into five ill ones. The question has appeared before in  different guises before transplants were technical possible.

Free will is definitely a serious philosophical question. So is the one about the entire universe being in a state of constant change. Is life what we perceive, or do our perceptions deceive us to the point that nothing we think we know is true.? That is also a serious philosophical question.



You just have to reduce the complex to its simpler components and solve the simpler parts .

That our perception is imperfect is objectively true and proveable , but the result is the same whether you can perceive well or poorly , you have to do what you think is best based on what you have , not on what you might know with the perfect senses no one has, this would be the same if our senses were twice as dependable as they are or ten times as dependable .

Xavier_Onassis

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Re: Four philosophical questions to make your brain hurt
« Reply #7 on: November 21, 2008, 07:46:08 PM »
I agree, but this is the basic epistemological question: How do we know and how reliable are our senses?

It isn't a trivial issue, nor is it one that has a clear answer.
"Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana."

Plane

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Re: Four philosophical questions to make your brain hurt
« Reply #8 on: November 21, 2008, 07:50:07 PM »
I agree, but this is the basic epistemological question: How do we know and how reliable are our senses?

It isn't a trivial issue, nor is it one that has a clear answer.


I tought it was clear , but not trivial.

Our senses are imperfect , and they can't be made perfect.

Improved , even a lot , you still have to realise that illusion and error will be present and accept it as unavoidable.

Xavier_Onassis

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Re: Four philosophical questions to make your brain hurt
« Reply #9 on: November 21, 2008, 08:08:55 PM »
I tought it was clear , but not trivial.


The image we have of reality is not perfect, or clear, but the issue itself is clear.

WE have to act on the image that our senses provide, or not act at all.
"Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana."

Plane

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Re: Four philosophical questions to make your brain hurt
« Reply #10 on: November 21, 2008, 08:17:05 PM »
I tought it was clear , but not trivial.


The image we have of reality is not perfect, or clear, but the issue itself is clear.

WE have to act on the image that our senses provide, or not act at all.

Yes ,but even chooseing to act not at all is a choice , a choice made on the basis of perception.

Knoledge of imperfect perception encourages humility , but doesn't releive one of responsibility.