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Amily shaw

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Can we think without any presumptions?

Questions arised from one of the conversation and a reminiscence of a old lady who said:"nobody is right but me."

Are we free of personal bias when we think?
how reliable it is for us ourselves to judge if we are free of personal bias or not ?

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  • Atanaa Inquisitive

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    Mar 3 2013: Let’s think what it would mean to think without presumptions. At it’s most extreme it would seem to mean “to think only using ideas that are logically justified”. The problem then becomes “Which ideas can be logically justified?”.

    There are certain things that we (nearly?) all agree on and depend on as the foundation of out thinking, yet I am unsure can be proved logically from the available evidence. Certainly I would not know how to prove them. For example, “The physical world I experience is real”. I could in theory be a brain in a tank being given artificial stimulation to mimic the real world – or a computer simulation of a brain also being stimulated.

    The possibilities seem endless. If that is the case then the process of thinking even a simple thought without presumption would be equally endless and therefore impossible on practical grounds.

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