Confused about a point

[Cepzeu]

This one question always keeps coming back to me so I thought I'd ask on the forum.

From my understanding of epistemology, everything perceived outside of direct experience is a story.

For example, I have never experienced the earth being round, I've only experienced it being flat. I personally assume that the earth is round because I believe that science has shown us that it's round, but if i dig deeper, then I know that this is just a story I believe. In truth, it could be flat, it could be round, I can't really say.

The reason I ask is that we discuss epistemology on this forum but also there are instances where conspiracy theories are shunned. Now I know that all of this is a distraction from spiritual work but I am asking because I want to know what is correct epistemologically. I can believe that the earth is round, I can believe that the earth is flat. From my direct experience, the earth is flat, so I feel like it would be further from the truth for me to believe the earth is round because that is a belief rather than direct experience, I only choose to believe the earth is round because it sounds rather plausible. But at the end of the day it's the same as a religious person believing in an anthropomorphic god.

Here's another example. In my direct experience I've probably ever seen maybe 10,000 people over my life. Science says there are around 7 billion. Epistemologically, (if I understand it correctly) direct experience is  king compared to stories or beliefs. Which one is more true in this case? Is it true to say that I have only seen ~10,000 people but I choose to believe that there may be more?

I think I might be misunderstanding a part of what Leo says but this point has been coming back to me over and over as a source of confusion.

[Sempiternity]

From what I understand from the teachings (I do not have direct experience of this..yet), is that all we see and experience is all the illusion. All a dream. Possibilities within infinite possibilities. So it doesn't matter if you think or believe the earth is round or flat, or how many people are there in the world, cause those are egoic constructs. Direct experience points to true consciousness, not the dream. 

Great question.

Edited January 26, 2019 by Jed Vassallo

[Truth Addict]

@Cepzeu

For this matter, even everything inside direct experience is an illusion. For example: does your room exist when you close your eyes?

(illusion=relative) (Truth=Absolute).

I think what's best for you now is to know what a thought is, and how it ultimately is no more than a pointer, just like an arrow.

Ask yourself in your direct experience, what is a thought? Really, try to find out. When you do, belief becomes irrelevant.

[Anton Rogachevski]

Hello dear seeker,

I go to great length about the nature of thought here: https://antonsjournal.home.blog/2019/01/01/existence-explained/ 

Hope it helps,

Cheers.

[Shan]

That's a great question and wish someone to clarify further. 

My 2 cents: Despite experience being the king, some level of 'belief' is needed to survive in the daily world. So, I accept the sun rises in the east, we are not in a simulation, there are 7 billion people, global warming is true, the earth is round etc but leave with a hint of skepticism for everything.

Unless my chosen field of mastery is directly related to these areas, I accept them and move along for my time is finite to know everything. Accepting the world is mysterious and I cannot know everything is a realization I recently had and it surprisingly makes me happier and confident. I do not discuss with everyday people that everything is a belief (as opposed to a fact) either.  

@Cepzeu is this curiosity or is this affecting your personal development? 

[Telepresent]

@Cepzeu Ok, the thing I find here is that we mustn't allow the meme of 'direct experience' to stop us from making as accurate deductions and inferences as possible, in order to bring our thinking in closer alignment to what is true, even if ultimately it is still thought/story. Not all thoughts are created equal when trying to find truth. 

So, to take your example of round earth / flat earth: it doesn't remotely have to be a question of faith, belief, or choosing whose statements you trust more. Putting aside for the moment questions of infinity or brahmanic consciousness or whatever: your daily life consists of this space which conforms to a set of consistent patterns of behaviour, which we call laws. These can be expressed through mathematics, physics, etc. The great thing about these laws is that they are PROVABLY  consistent: you don't have to rely on a textbook, you can do as much experimentation as you want to attempt to disprove them (falsifiability is the name of the game: scientific testing in its purest form should always be about trying to prove something FALSE). If you can prove that sometimes 2+2=5, or 3, or banana, then you have to throw all of maths out the window and start again. But nobody has managed it yet. 

So back to the earth. It may be that your visual experience appears to be that it looks flat, but you can apply understood laws and rules (and frankly logic) to ask yourself what the laws of geometry tell you about what must be happening when you see a ship disappearing over the horizon from the bottom first. Or about the ways the sun and moon behave relative to the idea of the earth being a sphere or a disc. You could choose to extend your direct experience, travel to the southern hemisphere and see if the moon appears 'upside-down', or if the constellations differ (or vice versa). In this way, you don't have to choose who to believe, but you can USE your direct experience in order to draw meaningful conclusions about what the best model must be. 

Now I know I'm being naughty here: I'm talking about the physical world and using thought to build models and ideas! But the point is that you can actually use your ability to think, investigate, imagine and abstract to your advantage. And then it gets really interesting because you can turn it in on itself.  Use that same process of simple verification of observable laws of self, thought, experience, etc., and check whether your 'geometric-model-of-self' stands up to scrutiny

Edited January 26, 2019 by Telepresent

[Nahm]

@Cepzeu Looking for the Truth in relativity, is like playing the three cups and a peanut game, until you start to realize there’s no peanut. 

[Forestluv]

1 hour ago, Nahm said:

@Cepzeu Looking for the Truth in relativity, is like playing the three cups and a peanut game, until you start to realize there’s no peanut. 

Nice analogy. It got me thinking of a never-ending game of “whack-a-mole”.

[Nahm]

@Serotoninluv “Whack-em-whole”? 

Meh. Too monomolecular.

[Aakash]

its more like you haven't even seen the 10,000 humans, you think thats what you've seen. but its just yourself reoccuring over and over again with subtle differences i.e skin colour 

[Forestluv]

1 hour ago, Nahm said:

@Serotoninluv “Whack-em-whole”? 

Meh. Too monomolecular.

I was thinking as each mole pops up, it appears as a seperate entity to the player, which generates angst in the player. To protect the self, the player whacks down “other”. Yet each mole is within one whole, so it’s a delusional game of continuously whacking One’s self down.

[Matt8800]

8 hours ago, Cepzeu said:

This one question always keeps coming back to me so I thought I'd ask on the forum.

From my understanding of epistemology, everything perceived outside of direct experience is a story.

For example, I have never experienced the earth being round, I've only experienced it being flat. I personally assume that the earth is round because I believe that science has shown us that it's round, but if i dig deeper, then I know that this is just a story I believe. In truth, it could be flat, it could be round, I can't really say.

The reason I ask is that we discuss epistemology on this forum but also there are instances where conspiracy theories are shunned. Now I know that all of this is a distraction from spiritual work but I am asking because I want to know what is correct epistemologically. I can believe that the earth is round, I can believe that the earth is flat. From my direct experience, the earth is flat, so I feel like it would be further from the truth for me to believe the earth is round because that is a belief rather than direct experience, I only choose to believe the earth is round because it sounds rather plausible. But at the end of the day it's the same as a religious person believing in an anthropomorphic god.

Here's another example. In my direct experience I've probably ever seen maybe 10,000 people over my life. Science says there are around 7 billion. Epistemologically, (if I understand it correctly) direct experience is  king compared to stories or beliefs. Which one is more true in this case? Is it true to say that I have only seen ~10,000 people but I choose to believe that there may be more?

I think I might be misunderstanding a part of what Leo says but this point has been coming back to me over and over as a source of confusion.

The only thing you can know for sure is that you are having a subjective experience in the present moment. All other knowledge is based on varying levels of estimated probability. Epistemology deals with how to attribute probability to a belief.

[Nahm]

@Serotoninluv Nice. 

[Cepzeu]

Thank you all for your answers  

It is really a question in the realm of survival, because ultimately as @Nahm said, the peanut doesn't exist.

@Shan To answer your question it is purely for curiosities sake. It's just a thought that keeps returning to me as I try to reconcile it. Ultimately you do take on belief in order to survive and yes, if you want to have a somewhat good model of understanding of the world, it's about expanding your direct experience and seeing which model of reality fits best, as @Telepresent said.  Ultimately its ok to hold a belief, but not forgetting it's a belief.

What this comes back to is that self-actualization is a personal path and you have to verify everything that's talked about here in direct experience, as Leo reminds us. I just see that a lot of thing he talks about, I take on as a belief which is a very big trap. It was only when I had an awakenign experience that the belief was substantiated by direct experience. 

 

 @Anton Rogachevski thank you! I will have a look

[EvilAngel]

@Cepzeu You've seen many pictures of the world as a spherical organism right? So, although you haven't verified it's reality for yourself (say, by going into space) you can use your rational mind to deduce that in all likelihood this is the case. 

To discount something completely because you don't have the direct experience is unwise. 

I've talked about Near Death Experiences before, and I want to use that as an example: There are MILLIONS of NDE accounts that have been recorded in the last century alone, which suggest strongly that there is an afterlife. Now, the question is, do you believe the millions of people who report these experiences, or do you think they are making it up?

If you believe they are making it up, then you are just like a flat-earther, who only trusts his own direct experience.

[Nahm]

@Cepzeu ? Just maybe for the record though, “survival” is not how I’d go about the ‘three cup game’ of life. It’s a dream, so I’d suggest there is alignment & unification and therefore peace of mind & joy, in attending to life as such. Dream big, and then dream bigger. Dream so big you could never accomplish it. Uncondition “done” from the mind. The juice is always in the now, the journey. 

[Cepzeu]

@EvilAngel Yes, I understand completely. I do think it's important to deduce the likelihood of something and separate wheat from the chaff

@Nahm Yes, I probably wrote it a bit wrong, sorry my English is not the best. I completely agree.

[Leo Gura]

@Cepzeu You are missing a few important points:

Firstly, not-knowing. It is okay to say "I don't know". In fact, that is the truth in 99% of cases. So in the case of the Earth or a conspiracy theory, the correct answer isn't to grasp at straws, pretending to like you know something you don't. Just admit, "I don't know if the Earth is round." That is the truth! This is not at all the same as being a FlatEarther. The problem with FlatEarthers is that they definitely believe the Earth is flat and that a round Earth is a vast evil conspiracy by elites.

Secondly, learn to distinguish more clearly between belief, experience, inference, and not-knowing. Find the referents of each of these in your experience. Notice when something is a belief for you, when it is an experience, and when you genuinely don't know. For example, how many pounds do I weigh? The truth is, you don't know. So notice that, rather than trying to guess or make shit up.

The key mistake that people make when it comes to epistemology is that they refuse to admit not-knowing because it seems like a bad thing. Culturally we are expected to know, otherwise we are told we are bad or stupid. Well, this is just bullshit. Most people who claim to know things actually are in a worse position than not-knowing, they have wrong knowing.

P.S. Reality cannot really be known. Being is prior to knowing. So get used to a lot of not-knowing. Not only is not-knowing not bad, it's the Truth!

Notice that nothing you know about reality is what is (by definition). Knowledge is that which separates you from what is. All knowledge is conceptual. All concepts are symbols. All symbols are not what is. Truth is found non-symbolically.

All scientific and social knowledge is relative, probabilistic, partial, and highly fallible. Nobody actually knows how many people there are on this planet. Nor is it really possible to know because by the time you finish counting them, some of them will have died and new ones born.

[Cepzeu]

 

@Leo Gura Yes, this is exactly what I was thinking. The truth is that I don't know in most cases and this is where my questioning arose, because during self-inquiry I realized that a lot of the models I've heard I hold to be true and build my world-view around. The truth is most of my knowledge is second hand and inferred and for most things the true answer is "I don't know"

P.S. 156 pounds. Not a guess! I just know it

 

 

[Leo Gura]

3 hours ago, Cepzeu said:

P.S. 156 pounds. Not a guess! I just know it

Not even close.

Practice more not-knowing.

The greater the model, the bigger the problem.