It's the extrapolation of models that we've created in the present, but those models are only our best guess at the truth. They may be revised in the future or simply not hold for the past.
> It was factual that the earth was 6000 years old, until it wasn't.
This is the opposite of the example you seem to think it is. The Earth has always had the same actual date of origin. If it is not factual now that the Earth is 6,000 years old, then it wasn't before either. The whole argument here is that people's perceptions and reality can in fact be different.
I would argue that factual past is unprovable without some sort of visual evidence, and even that can be manipulated...especially with AI on the rise. The problem with your point is that EVERYTHING is parsed through your perception, and you can just as easily make the point with the same logic that you can't prove that what you are currently experiencing is present reality.
What actually happened is unprovable without some layer of trust once the event leaves the affected. For example, I ate a grapefruit for breakfast. That is a fact. However, I have tossed the peel away and I am communicating that I ate it with a stranger over the internet. For all you know, I could have eaten cookie crisp. If you and enough people get together and collectively believe that I ate cookie crisp, the public belief will be that I ate cookie crisp. However, that does not change the fact that I ate a grapefruit.
Given that, there are two, and only two possibilities:
Either
-my perception of reality is inherently opposed to objective reality
or
-the world, for some reason, is gaslighting me into thinking I ate a sandwich and the objective reality is that I ate a grapefruit.
See, my problem with this "philosophy" that objective reality does not exist is that it enables abusers. Have you ever seen the movie Gaslight? Its a classic. This poor woman lives with an abuser...someone who is committed to making her think that she is crazy. He contradicts everything she does and says, sets up evidence to objectively prove that she only imagined herself doing it, and keeps her under his thumb through those means. In the end of the movie, its revealed that none of the evidence is real and that she is sane. To combat against these types of people, its important to be sure of your own reality and only change if evidence is overwhelmingly pointed in the opposite direction. Even then, question these changes in belief heavily. Otherwise, you will believe just about anything anyone says.
No, that was never factual. Radiocarbon dating gives us evidence, factual without the lense of perception or opinion. Saying the earth is 6000 years old is just repeating propaganda.
You're begging the question. You started with: assume there is a factual past of where you were. And then argued: there is a factual past.
I'm not enough of a skeptic to say "don't trust the models of the past"; memory turns out to be a pretty good model. So does carbon dating.
But the reason you say "you were not there and did not commit the crime" is because you don't remember being there. Maybe you even remember being elsewhere. But that doesn't mean it's true, memory is fallible.
You might say that you even have photos of yourself somewhere else at the time. But if there were photos of you at the crime scene, would that change what the past was? Maybe your memory is shoddy, or maybe the photos are fake.
My eyes are a fairly reliable map, but they're still not the territory. That we are only able to perceive reality by proxy doesn't mean that it doesn't exist, though, it just means that we have to get used to using maps, while remembering that they can be flawed.
> My eyes are a fairly reliable map, but they're still not the territory.
This seems.....paradoxical...ironic?
> That we are only able to perceive reality by proxy doesn't mean that it doesn't exist, though....
True, but potentially misleading/misinformative.
> ...it just means that...
Are you sure? Are you referring to the territory here, or the map?
>...we have to get used to using maps, while remembering that they can be flawed.
We've been using maps since the dawn of man, and a lot of people have substantial, abstract knowledge that this is what we're doing....and yet, look at the mess all around us, and the conversations we have about that mess (though: during these conversations, are the participants discussing the map, or the territory: a) in fact? b) in perception?).
Thats pretty dangerous thinking though. Adolf Hitler famously said "a lie told often enough eventually becomes the truth" and then used that way of thinking to commit horrible atrocities.
