How can we trust our senses if we experience hallucinations?

[WannabeSaint]

I’m sure every one at some point in their life had a hallucination or read something wrong or misheard something.

Knowing this, how can we trust that our sense perception are objectively accurate?

 

[0Scarlett_nidiyilii]

…byreality checking with another trustworthy person. (“Did you see that? Did you hear that?”)

I had a patient where part of his disease process involved hallucinations, and he would ask us “are there really buffalo out the window? That doesn’t seem right”.
We’d set him straight and he’d sort of laugh over it.

 

[Thom18]

Our senses sometimes deceive us, not always. We can recognize hallucinations as being abnormal, and so we must acknowledge that there is normal sense perception which can be reliable.

 

[po18guy]

You know, I grew up in the 60s, but never took acid. As to trusting our perceptions, that is between us, our doctor/counselor/psychiatrist and God. Oh, and our loved ones will tell us when we are off base.

Reality may bite, but it’s true.

 

[Beryllos]

I think we can establish trust in our senses according to functionality. If our senses deceive us, we will have difficulty moving, eating, doing our work, communicating, and so on. Someone who hallucinates all the time would not be able to survive long without constant help.

 

[Theo520]

I’m sure every one at some point in their life had a hallucination or read something wrong or misheard something.

One thing is not like the others

You can’t bucket “read something wrong or misheard something” with hallucinations.

 

[Dave1]

From a realist perspective, a false sense perception is corrected with another more accurate sense perception. This is because as humans we are part of and directed toward understanding reality. All things tend towards their nature and that includes human nature, which, among other things, consists of sense perception.

I like the way Dr. Mortimer Adler explains this:

“Except for the mental act of perception, all other acts of the mind, such as imagination, memory, and conception, present us with objects concerning which we must ask whether, in addition to being objects of the mind, they also exist in reality. But in the one case of [sense] perception, we cannot separate our having the perceptual object before our minds from asserting that it also really exists.

If that were not the case, there would be no distinction between hallucinating and perceiving. Hallucination is pathological. Normal perception is always the perception of something that has existence in reality.” (Adler’s Philosophical Dictionary)

With hallucinations, there is no object present at all, or objects that are present are embellished in way that do no correspond to any of their attributes in reality. Hallucinations, then, are not perceptions, and there is no apparent reason to think they will tell us anything about how sense perception actually works.

 

[Erikaspirit16]

I thought David Hume pretty much covered this in the 1780s…

 

[PJH_74]

I’m epileptic, I don’t get seizures often now so long as I don’t miss my medication. But the few times I have missed and it did not result in a full on seizure, my perception of reality is surreal. Not that I necessarily hallucinate or completely lose contact with reality, but I can end up dumbfounded about the world around me. You can only trust your senses as much as your brain can process what they are saying. In my case this ability can become so impaired that I lose complete control of my body for a few minutes and even then it might take 20-30 minutes before my perception of reality returns.