Jim Cross wrote: ↑Fri Aug 20, 2021 3:54 pm
cog·ni·tion
noun
the mental action or process of acquiring knowledge and understanding through thought, experience, and the
senses.
There isn't a sharp dividing line between senses (if you want to exclude it) and cognition. For example, our perception of a table. Is that purely a matter of light reflecting off something? Or, does it also involve an understanding that it is something we can sit at for dinner? Does our perception of lion include the thought that we might be prey? Obviously, if it doesn't, there would be no reason to run from it.
Aside from that, if ability to create models about the world that are to some degree accurate evolved, then why would it necessarily be true that our senses would evolve to be totally inaccurate?
Notice that all our senses can do is to sense the "behavior", the patterns of what nature
does. "Sitting at a table" means a specific behavioral pattern of sensual data that we observe. With out cognition we can study these patterns and recognize certain regularities in them, and then apply math models to approximate these regularities, this is what we do in natural sciences. Again, all of that only applies to what reality
does. So yes, our cognition allows us to acquire certain degree of veridical knowledge about the
behavior of reality. But none of it, neither senses, nor math models, can give us any veridical knowledge of what reality actually
is.
Now, there is a special area of cognition called "philosophy" where we try to extend our cognition to "metaphysically" study what reality actually is. However, (at least so far) all we got from it is a variety of metaphysical models and hypotheses with no way to prove with certainty which one is actually "true" even to a small degree with respect to what the reality
is. We can be certain that Schrodinger equation at least to a good level of accuracy describes what nature does when it comes to patterns observable with senses. But we cannot be certain that materialistic or idealistic or neutral monistic metaphysical model of reality have any relevance to reality
as it is at all: they may be quite accurate or they may be totally inaccurate and false. But we can still combine them with our math models and develop the encompassing models of what reality both is and what it does, and compare these models both on the ground of their numerical prediction/description accuracy and logical consistency and explanatory capabilities (lack of contradictions or explanatory gaps). That is what materialistic and idealistic sciences are trying to accomplish.