How Is Definitive Knowledge Possible?

[Human Mint]

On 30/9/2024 at 8:54 PM, r0ckyreed said:

How is definitive knowledge possible? Knowledge is such a tricky beast. There seems to be no reliable way to discern and differentiate truth from falsehood. Rationality can lead you astray, science can lead you astray, your own senses can deceive you, other people can deceive, and of course my own self, intuition, and emotions deceive me. I can even be deceived through "false insights." So how can I know that any "insight" I have is true understanding? I can smoke 5me0 or meditate and attain an insight or a feeling of conviction that I understand something completely when I don't.

A lot of the times when I bring up this problem of knowledge, people say, awaken and you will find out. But this begs the question. How do you know you are awake when every facet of your mind and reality is against you to deceive you? I hear people claiming to have awoken to this or that, but what I am really seeing is that they are very confident that they understand something deeply when they actually might be mislead by their emotions. When a person claims they have awoken, I feel like they are being deceived by their feelings. How do you know that you have totally understood something to the deepest level? How do you know you are not being deceived at all by your insight? What method did you use to discern truth from falsehood and how did you counteract self-deception? You can take 5me0 or meditate and still be deluded, so even meditation and psychedelics aren't a reliable pathway to truth and true knowledge.

To fully awaken and reach true knowledge, I think you need to answer definitively of whether anything can exist independently of the mind. If there is such a thing as a mind-independent phenomenon, then notice that you could never awaken and know definitively because all knowledge and awakening are mind-dependent. 

The feature of knowledge is that it is mind-dependent. It is impossible to have knowledge of anything outside of your mind because the function of knowledge itself is dependent on the mind! But this does not mean that what you do not know doesn't exist. I find it interesting that there seems to be things that exist independent of my knowledge of them even though my knowledge is dependent on my mind. For instance, when I learned about cults for the first time it is implied that they have always existed despite my mind not knowing about it. There can in fact be things that exist right now that I do not even know now but yet still exist it seems. The earth was still round even before I knew anything about it. However, there is no escaping that knowledge is dependent on the mind. But we should not mistake the limits of knowledge for the limits of reality. What if reality is larger than our mind? What if there actually are mind-independent phenomenon but we could never know of it because it is mind-independent? Could you conceive of that possibility?

In addition, we also have to take into account that relativism also presents us with another problem in that how can we know anything definitively if all of our methods of trying to know the Absolute are themselves relative? Meditation is relative to the mind, so are psychedelics, and so is contemplation and rationality and science. In fact, you can use all those methods listed to delude yourself into conspiracy theories and nonduality nonsense. But if reality is absolutely relative, how could we say that conspiracy theories are false? 

I understand that at some degree radical open-mindedness defeats itself because then you expose your mind to all kinds of nonsensical worldviews and toxic ideologies. At some point, you need to close your mind off to perspectives you have definitively understood to be false. But the method for knowing something definitively seems itself to be undefinitive. How do you reconcile this problem?

Any knowledge closest to Love you can be certain is ultimate. So "awaken and you will find out" is not foolish at all. Also is very sketchy to expect someone answers everything for you as you want.

If you don't think for yourself then you're cooked.

Edited October 2 by Human Mint

[r0ckyreed]

10 hours ago, Someone here said:

Cool.

What is it that creates a lucid dream ? What makes you go "oh,this must be a dream "?

It’s an insight. The only reason I was able to have an insight was because I had clear defined rules. I practiced reality testing and when I was driving my car in my dream, I hopped out of my car and the road was still moving. That’s when I had my insight. Other times, it was me doing other reality testing techniques. 

[r0ckyreed]

I don’t think this question really has been answered. How is my conscious experience all there is if there are things that happen outside of it such as a thief stealing my car. I can go find my car out beyond what I currently perceive. It’s not like my car has vanished into nothingness until I perceive it. A thief can scratch the car even though I’m not there to observe it. How else would you explain how the scratches got there?

[Breakingthewall]

35 minutes ago, r0ckyreed said:

. It’s not like my car has vanished into nothingness until I perceive it.

The point is realizing that there is not you perceiving that the car is vanished, but "you" are the whole thing, the realization that your car is vanished. For that you have to be able to totally remove the meaning to this moment for a while. The meaning build the self. I use often this like a mantra when Im walking in the street: nothing means nothing. Nothing means nothing. Until the only thought that appears in your reality is this, and this dissolve any other though, because it's difficult to make your mind still, if it has to move, it can do just this movement: nothing means nothing.  Then, trough this thought the reality without any meaning manifest itself. There is no self, no perceptor. Just the reality, and the real substance of this is perceived by itself, because it's usually veiled by the meaning 

Without meaning, only a thing remains: you. And you are the existence, the heart that opens in the limitless now and flow like a dance. That's the only thing that you could know, anything else are just illusions, ideas. 

Edited October 4 by Breakingthewall

[Someone here]

On 03/10/2024 at 4:32 AM, r0ckyreed said:

It’s an insight. The only reason I was able to have an insight was because I had clear defined rules. I practiced reality testing and when I was driving my car in my dream, I hopped out of my car and the road was still moving. That’s when I had my insight. Other times, it was me doing other reality testing techniques. 

Nope. The answer is consciousness.  You become conscious of the true nature of that qualia of a dream .

Likewise...entertain the possibility that you simply can grasp directly what this qualia of this moment actually is . 

20 hours ago, r0ckyreed said:

I don’t think this question really has been answered. How is my conscious experience all there is if there are things that happen outside of it such as a thief stealing my car. I can go find my car out beyond what I currently perceive. It’s not like my car has vanished into nothingness until I perceive it. A thief can scratch the car even though I’m not there to observe it. How else would you explain how the scratches got there?

No.it has been answered .but it's so radical and mind bending that you cannot accept it .

"It’s not like my car has vanished into nothingness until I perceive it"

That's ⬆️ literally the case . This requires deep carful inspection of "whats actually happening "vs what you think is happening. 

[r0ckyreed]

9 minutes ago, Someone here said:

No.it has been answered .but it's so radical and mind bending that you cannot accept it .

"It’s not like my car has vanished into nothingness until I perceive it"

That's ⬆️ literally the case . This requires deep carful inspection of "whats actually happening "vs what you think is happening. 

How do you explain that it still exists outside of my awareness? For instance, my friend could video record it being inside of the thief’s garage. If it really vanished into nothingness, then how is it the case that I can find my car and that my car could be stolen in the first place? My car is literally nothingness right now, so how can it be stolen? You see this idealism is bullcrap. It is not in alignment with how reality works. By this logic, there is no murderer because he is nothingness. But if we really believed this, then we wouldn’t bother to search. We would just say that our qualia shows us a dead person and that’s it. When you throw rationality out the window, you are left with delusion.

Edited October 5 by r0ckyreed

[Someone here]

43 minutes ago, r0ckyreed said:

How do you explain that it still exists outside of my awareness? For instance, my friend could video record it being inside of the thief’s garage. If it really vanished into nothingness, then how is it the case that I can find my car and that my car could be stolen in the first place? My car is literally nothingness right now, so how can it be stolen? You see this idealism is bullcrap. It is not in alignment with how reality works. By this logic, there is no murderer because he is nothingness. But if we really believed this, then we wouldn’t bother to search. We would just say that our qualia shows us a dead person and that’s it. When you throw rationality out the window, you are left with delusion.

Look.. It's impossible to prove an objective external world outside of your imagination due to the nature of conscious experience only having the ability to exist as experience. Consciousness is all you have to prove a world. So you are always using consciousness as the actual substance of inquiry and you cannot step outside of consciousness to verify is something outside of consciousness. Got it ?

When you give your back to the world your mind assumes there is a world behind you.. You do this because you need to create reality.. Because If you don't create it.. It doesn't exist. If you stop assuming anything on top of what is "actual".. You would see the only actual thing is nothing.     You think the phone that you are holding is actual.. It's not.. There is no phone.. Each moment there is a changing appearance but your mind comes in and create out of this groundless flow an illusion of "object". There are no objects. Each moment you are holding a new phone

[r0ckyreed]

52 minutes ago, Someone here said:

Look.. It's impossible to prove an objective external world outside of your imagination due to the nature of conscious experience only having the ability to exist as experience. Consciousness is all you have to prove a world. So you are always using consciousness as the actual substance of inquiry and you cannot step outside of consciousness to verify is something outside of consciousness. Got it ?

When you give your back to the world your mind assumes there is a world behind you.. You do this because you need to create reality.. Because If you don't create it.. It doesn't exist. If you stop assuming anything on top of what is "actual".. You would see the only actual thing is nothing.     You think the phone that you are holding is actual.. It's not.. There is no phone.. Each moment there is a changing appearance but your mind comes in and create out of this groundless flow an illusion of "object". There are no objects. Each moment you are holding a new phone

Conscious experience is all you have, but that doesn’t mean it is all there is. Truth is prior to proof. There are things that are true that you could never know and experience. Just think about this, whenever you learn something new, what was that before you knew about it? It’s not like Mars doesnt exist before you become aware of it. It was there before you were aware of it. But think about this, there are millions of colors that exist right now that your conscious experience doesn’t have access to. Don’t confuse the limits of your mind for the limits of reality. We are perceiving the world through our senses, but that doesn’t mean the world is just our senses. Our senses can delude us. You’re not considering that things could exist but our human brains could never access them since they are part of the universe. You think our nervous system has total access to reality? Human experience is one relative experience out of many. There’s postmodernism for ya.

[r0ckyreed]

I don’t mean to sound harsh or rude. I just get frustrated when people think their consciousness/perspective is absolute. My perspective is only relative out of many in comparison to the universe. My brain depends on the universe. The universe doesn’t depend on my brain. Of course, I could never know for certain whether something exists outside of my consciousness, but I cannot equally say that my consciousness is all there is. My consciousness is all that I am aware of. My consciousness also tells me that there are things that seem to exist outside of it such as when watching a video of someone stealing my car.

Edited October 5 by r0ckyreed

[Someone here]

@r0ckyreed yeah sure sure surrrrrr..

I'm talking direct experience and you are talking concepts and fantasy land .

This just ain't gonna work .

Drop the whole inquiry and go grab some ice-cream. 

[r0ckyreed]

Just now, Someone here said:

Drop the whole inquiry and go grab some ice-cream. 

But ice cream doesn’t exist because I’m not aware of it right now.  
You see the issue I’m pointing to? How could you even have the idea of me getting ice cream without inferring into some objective reality. Your statement already assumes that ice cream exists outside of my current experience.

[Someone here]

5 minutes ago, r0ckyreed said:

But ice cream doesn’t exist because I’m not aware of it right now.  
You see the issue I’m pointing to? How could you even have the idea of me getting ice cream without inferring into some objective reality. Your statement already assumes that ice cream exists outside of my current experience.

Nice one Einstein.  I already addressed such objections .

First of all... Recognize that all this is your imagination.  You're imagining ice cream and objective world.  None of them exists in your direct experience. Right now.

My point again .. is if you try to pinpoint what is actual vs what is imaginary in your direct experience.. Notice that you can't. Because whatever you say isn't actually "there".. It's what your mind is constructing. Get that?  An ice cream is not an "ice cream". 

[Yimpa]

[r0ckyreed]

34 minutes ago, Yimpa said:

What Leo means by imaginary isn’t the same as what is colloquially meant by imaginary. By imaginary, I think he means mental construct. A horse is more mentally constructed because it is something you actually experience whereas a unicorn is just an idea in your mind. 

[Nemra]

45 minutes ago, r0ckyreed said:

What Leo means by imaginary isn’t the same as what is colloquially meant by imaginary. By imaginary, I think he means mental construct. A horse is more mentally constructed because it is something you actually experience whereas a unicorn is just an idea in your mind. 

I think he could mean that we can imagine a unicorn like we are imagining a horse. But our imagination of a unicorn in our current level isn't equal to the imagination of a horse.

[r0ckyreed]

1 hour ago, Nemra said:

I think he could mean that we can imagine a unicorn like we are imagining a horse. But our imagination of a unicorn in our current level isn't equal to the imagination of a horse.

Thats what I’m saying. The only difference is that a unicorn exists only in your mind, whereas a horse exists not just in your thoughts but out in the world.

[r0ckyreed]

If I go blind and deaf right now, is it that the visual and auditory world doesn’t exist or that I do not have access to those senses?

Think about this: There are senses that you do not have access to right now, which is called ESP. How would you know it exists? Would it be true to say that ESP doesn’t exist because you don’t experience it? It would be foolish for a person born blind and deaf to say that sight and sound doesn’t exist. They may not have access to sight and sound, but that doesn’t mean they don’t exist. What if we are all blind to an objective reality or ESP? We would be fools to say that the qualia we have now is all reality is. That is a fallacy. It is more accurate to say that the qualia we have is what we currently have access to and we can’t know if we have full access to all the senses/perceptions possible.

[zurew]

6 hours ago, r0ckyreed said:

If I go blind and deaf right now, is it that the visual and auditory world doesn’t exist or that I do not have access to those senses?

None of these people will provide you a non-question begging argument that can establish that the hypothesis of (that there is no external world) is more probable compared to the hypothesis that there is an external world.  

Just as you mentioned - Talking about consciousness isn't enough to make one more probable compared to the other, more work and thinking needs to be done.

 

It would be cool though, if people would lay down what they mean by direct experience and by knowledge, because its not clear at all whether people have the exact same definitions in mind when they use these terms. 

If knowledge just means justified true belief, then there is a further investigation needs to be done what is meant by justification and then after that we need to investigate whether people accept intuitions or seemings to be justificatory or whether people only accept inferences to be justificatory.

If knowledge used as " a proposition that you cannot be wrong about" or " a proposition that is true in all possible worlds (or in other words , it is logically necessary)  " then the discussion will be vastly different compared to the other definition of knowledge.

Edited October 6 by zurew

[r0ckyreed]

Yeah. People do question beg this. But knowledge is mind-dependent. Consciousness is my access to reality. Consciousness itself points to things existing outside of my awareness such as learning new things. If I can watch a video about my car being stolen, then I have learned something new that was previously outside of my experience. 

Im not trying to strawman idealism, but I don’t think George Berkeleys arguments can hold up with the technology that we have that can give us more objective measures. If I can walk around and have a camera recording the world behind me, I can see the world in front and the world behind me. It’s not like the world behind me ceases to exist when I stop recording behind me, it is just that I do not have access to it.

I mean this stuff is basic object permanence that you should have developed as a baby. Even dogs know that if I put a bone behind my back, it doesn’t just cease to exist. It honestly seems so stupid that I cannot believe people believe this.

The only steel man I can think of is that whatever we refer to as existence has always been an experience. The bone is made out of an experience of my sight, sounds, tastes, and touch. My sight of the bone is not any more real than the sound, touch, or taste of the bone. Humans have a sight bias where we take our sense of sight to be more true/real than our other senses. We have only ever interacted with the world through our experience and yet our experience points to things that seem to exist outside of our experience, such as the experience of object permanence and the experience of an object being moved outside of one’s experience. The question really comes down to what is an object? Is object just raw experience or is that just our interpretation? What if an object has an existence outside of our experience/interpretation? But then if it does, then what do we mean when we say something exists? How could we say anything exists without referring to the experience or potential experience of it? What does it even mean to say something exists but cannot be experienced? So, I see how the objective reality view has its own problems, that if an objective reality exists, then what exactly is that? Objective reality couldn’t be an experience or even just an idea. 

But like I said, knowledge is mind- dependent. So if there is an objective reality, it could never be known. An objective reality itself cannot be defined very easily because it points to a world outside of our experience. What I find interesting is that we have this idea of an objective reality at all. How do we have this idea if we have never experienced and can never experience objective reality?

[Princess Arabia]

1 minute ago, r0ckyreed said:

Consciousness is my access to reality.

Who's the "Consciousness", who's the "my" and what is the "reality". The trifecta of reality. Just pointing this out so you realize that stemming from this place all other insights, concepts and ideas you have about reality and whatever perspectives you have about it and beliefs will be false and only what you believe to be true. It can't be; only from a relative point of view which is also just an appearance.

I say this because of the nature of your post; and of course, we don't go around saying or living as if there's no separation in our human form and while we navigate the world, but the point of this discussion it becomes necessary so you're aware that the moment you split reality into pieces, everything else said after that will be false in accordance with the existential nature of things and how reality actually is.