Consider this possibility.

While walking through the desert with two friends, I spot
a strange white stone on the ground. It is about the size
of my hand, nearly perfectly round, like a globe, and two
perfectly straight holes pass straight through the object
at almost right angles to each other.

The object is so strange that I ask my two friends to
inspect it, while I rummage through my knapsack to find
my camera. During this interlude, one of my companions
reports back that the only unusual stone he can see is
black and has no such holes.

My second friend searches the ground, turning over rocks
and sand, but states that he can see no unusual stone at all.

By the time I return with my camera, to take a snapshot,
I see nothing usual -- just a lot of distubed desert ground.

I BELIEVE I saw such a stone, but can I KNOW that it is real?

Possibilities:

1. I saw no such stone -- I imagined the whole thing

2. I saw an unusual stone, but my perceptions were mistaken

3. I saw the round white, pierced stone, but my friends did not

Does such a real object only exist when/while I perceive it?

Does it cease to exist if others perceive it differently?

UD

In a real world practical sense you and your friends would "know" if you saw the white stone if all three of you saw it and described it essentially the same way. Otherwise, it would seem you hallucinated it, since your friends reported differently. You could claim you "believed" you saw a white stone. KNOWING would be if you had corroborating proof (your friends stories).

KNOWING the LDS church is true was never, ever, the correct thing to say. I knew it at the time I said it, I even said so in a Sunday School meeting one time ("I think we are using the word KNOW incorrectly, we BELIEVE..." stunned silence. I was being sincere and was a TBM at the time).

elciz Wrote:
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> In a real world practical sense you and your
> friends would "know" if you saw the white stone if
> all three of you saw it and described it
> essentially the same way....

I suppose that is about as close as we can get to coming
up with an answer that generally fits such situations.

There is an entire branch of Philosophy that deals with
knowing, what is real, knowing what is real, etc., but
we need not get into all those details.

Even if three guys agree in their testimony that they saw
and experienced the same thing, their perceptions may not
have conveyed true, objective facts to their minds. A religion
can be fabricated based upon the supposed sincere testimony
of three eye-witnesses.

Getting back to my strange stone example -- I might later
read in a book how exactly that sort of a stone was used
by early land surveyors working in the desert long ago --
as markers and as plumb-bobs. If I show this discovery to
my friends they may....

1. Agree with me -- I really saw the stone -- they overlooked it

2. It's just a coincidence that the history matches my delusion

3. That I unconsciously remembered this historical tidbit from
some otherwise forgotten source and that memory caused my
seeing a mirage in the desert.

I suppose that I might go on gathering what I think is objective
evidence, until the complied information becomes so great
that my final doubt in my ability to correctly perceive real
things is overcome.

But, in daily life we don't operate that way. We either know
or we do not know, for certain, and rely instead upon belief.

UD

What happened was your friends hid the stone from you, and then made up conflicting stories to confuse you, and to make you question your reality.

They later take the stone and use it to make predictions about the future while staring at it in a hat.

They then start a religion that has all the answers based on their predictions, which you join because you are confused and questioning reality.

As you move your way up through the heirchy of the religion, you are eventually allowed to see the stone that started it all, the one that they convinced you was your imagination all those years ago. They tell you it was a vision.

You now realize it is all bullshit, but you have invested your whole life into the new religion, so you continue to move through the heirchy and eventually run their church.

You realize your reality is whatever you want it to be, and as long as it exists for you, who gives a flying fuck what anyone else thinks.