Do I have to trust past experience because past experience tells me that?

Reply to znajd
Many experiences are repeated through habits. But they are not exact repetitions.
The influence memories have is not independent from an idea about them. Some narrative structures elicit more information than others. Your results will vary.

Past experience means you remember what to expect if the conditions are similar and you remember how to react. If you are satisfied with the previous results then you can act similarly. But you may want to do certain changes to improve the results, then there may be small steps you want to improve every time. We know from experience that nature is reliable, given the same conditions the outcome can be almost exactly the same (only at small scale of quantum effects the outcome can be unpredictable but the probabilities still hold well). That means you can trust prior experience. At the same time making radical changes can lead to a far better result or a far worse one, usually if you don’t have experience and you don’t do something that can be clearly evaluated it has more chances to be worse.
You also have to be very careful of subtile changes where you may think the situation is similar but something important has changed.

Reply to Rotorblade

We know from experience that nature is reliable, given the same conditions the outcome can be almost exactly the same (only at small scale of quantum effects the outcome can be unpredictable but the probabilities still hold well).

But the reason I believe that is true, is because past experience shows me it has always been the case, so again I trust experience because it tells me that it should be trusted - and my problem is that I don't know if that's the only argument there is for trusting it and if it's good enough.
I think all your following advice naturally holds true but only if I trust past experience as reliable for making decisions.

Quoting znajd

And if yes, is there any other way of saying this, other than "I have to trust past experience because past experience tells me that"?

Past experiences don't lie. Past experiences vouch for that. You can trust past experiences therefore.

Unknown future experiences are not going to impact your decisions.

If you live in the present, but your thoughs are built on your life in the past.

Circular reasoning works, except (... the Bible, if you are an atheist) (the evolutionary method of nature, if you listen to an ultra-right religious Southern Baptist gun-slinger bigot supremacist.)

The child is father to the man. -- WS

Sons will be punished for the sins of their fathers.

The sheer weight of millions of years of evolutons justifies the idiocy of man's thinking.

If you try to experimentally get different results than what the past told you, and you manipulate the variables, then you don't understand the philosophy on STEM.

If you trust the past, it will richly reward you with happy events.

Quoting znajd

I trust experience because it tells me that it should be trusted

The reason you trust past experiences is that you believe that the future will be very much like the past. If tomorrow things start falling up instead of falling down, then all your experiences of things falling down will be of no use to you. It is because you believe that things will continue falling down that past experiences can be useful in making predictions and decisions.

Reply to SophistiCat :up:

Reply to god must be atheist

Circular reasoning works

That's good to hear.
The concept of "something works because it works" feels strange and suspicious(?), so it makes me anxious thinking that it may not be right, even if I don't see a way how. Maybe that's because I've been struggling to come to these conclusions for a week now, which involved a lot of doubting of what I know for sure, which caused me a lot of stress and anxiety. So it might be a habit I developed of spotting something hard to wrap my head around -> anxiety. I hope it will go away over time.

I'll also leave some of my notes here:
I have to trust concious decisions that use arguments based on past experience (memories/knowledge).
I cannot deny it, because to do that I would have to trust a concious decision that uses arguments based on experience.
Even if I had only the current reality (what I'm currently experiencing), then why care about doing anything else than trusting my concious decisions?
At the current moment in time I am either:
a) meditating, just taking what's happening in, what I see and how I feel
b) trusting my concious decisions based on past experience
[trying to answer the question above takes me from a to b]
"What if I'm wrong about that" is not an argument, or a reason to search for an argument. I might aswell say "what if I'm right about that".

Feel free if you have anything interesting to add

Reply to znajd

Ayayyayayyay. zNajd, you got the philosophers' blues. Many people don't realize it, but philosophy is more dangeruos than airplane wing walking or lion taming or crocodile wrestling.

You gotta know what you are doing, and you can't just jump in without proper training.

Remember, fight a clean fight, always protect yourself, and obey the referees commands.

No standing 8 count, bell saves the count only in the last round, only the referee can stop the fight.

God bless, and may the best person win.

Quoting znajd

And if yes, is there any other way of saying this, other than "I have to trust past experience because past experience tells me that"?

You can also logically arrive at the conclusion that trusting past experience is reasonable. Since all information about the objective world is given either a priori, or a posteriori through the senses, the senses are your only source of new information. Since you only have access to experiences you made in the past, this makes them your only source of information which you might need to integrate. No other information can be gained. And since judgements made with little information are still better than judgements made with no information, it makes sense to use the information you have to make your judgements, which means using past experience.

Quoting znajd

If the only reason to use past experience (memories/knowledge) for making decisions as to what to do, is because that experience shows me it worked most of the time

Well another reason is a pragmatic one: we know of no alternative.
Deductive logic seems necessary to even be able to reason in the abstract and inductive logic, including the assumption that the future will be like the past / our memories are reliable, seems necessary to do any reasoning in practice.

Without starting with these principles, what reason is there to do, or not do, any action?