Despite the fact that one of the most widely used clichés when someone is skeptical about a certain issue is that "you only believe in what you see" or "if you saw it as I would also believe", seeing something first hand is not enough to believe in it .
In fact, since our senses are fallible and fail more than a fairground shotgun, we should rather be much more careful when deciding to purposely believe something we have seen or experienced.
Don’t believe what you see
Much of what we see and process through our brains is an illusion, partially overriding the maxim "seeing is believing." Naturally this idea defies our common sense, because in turn in an uncommon sense: after all, we only see 1% of the electromagnetic spectrum and we hear 1% of the acoustic spectrum .
Generally speaking, our senses receive about ten million bits of information per second, but as Jennifer Ackerman points out in A Day in the Life of the Human Body : "We consciously process only between seven and forty bits."
We don’t even see X-rays, gamma rays, infrared or ultraviolet light are completely invisible to us. To tell the truth, our eyes only detect red, green and blue, as the theoretical physicist Michio Kaku explains in his book The Future of Our Mind :
That means we have never seen yellow, brown, orange, or many other colors. These colors exist, but our brain can only get an approximate idea of each of them by combining red, green and blue in different proportions.
There are some rules that we can follow when the compass breaks down, like those put forward by Carl Sagan. But they are very difficult to carry out all the time, because we are human beings, not perfectly rational machines. You can elaborate on it in the following video where you are urged not to believe in anything whose foundation cannot be explained in order to achieve the closest thing to a handful of models that describe the most ontologically similar to Truth:
This is precisely why science developed as recently as the seventeenth century . Because science is something like a mechanism, a procedure, a machine, a check list , which allows to discard a mountain of assumptions that are not capable of exceeding its demands.
It is a procedure that is beyond ideologies, religions, very marked cultural patterns or even the vagaries and vagaries of scientists’ brains. A good scientist, in fact, is not a good person, but a person who follows the scientific method . And everything that bends to this method is automatically science. That is precisely why, do you know what alternative medicine is called when it proves that it works? Medicine