The experiential hierarchy of reality

[Carl-Richard]

15 minutes ago, Someone here said:

Ok my  bad. 

Then can you summarize your point so that I can see what to do with it? 

Also, a tangent question..isn't the same mechanism of looking at the rock and blinking applies to your nightly dreams as well? 

Let's assume both of us have thoughts. Why can I not read your thoughts? Why can I not see through the wall? Those are examples of the limitations of perception and cognition. The thoughts inside your mind and the things behind the wall are technically all "experienceable", but for some reason our access to them is limited. 

If you don't want assume that both of us have thoughts, or that there is something resembling an objective reality that exists independent of our perception, then you're stuck with solipsism, and your ability to conceptualize reality becomes very flat. That's not what I'm talking about here. I'm talking about a very rich way of conceptualizing reality.

Edited April 11, 2023 by Carl-Richard

[Someone here]

3 minutes ago, Carl-Richard said:

Let's assume both of us have thoughts. Why can I not read your thoughts? Why can I not see through the wall? Those are examples of the limitations of perception and cognition. The thoughts inside your mind and the things behind the wall are technically all "experienceable", but for some reason our access to them is limited. 

I'm not saying" to exist is to be perceived " like what  George Berkeley said.. But you don't actually know if these things are experienceable. You just assume so. And that's the first word you said "let's assume". See? 

8 minutes ago, Carl-Richard said:

If you don't want assume that both of us have thoughts, or that there is something resembling an objective reality that exists independent of our perception, then you're stuck with solipsism, and your ability to conceptualize reality becomes very flat. That's not what I'm talking about here. I'm talking about a very rich way of conceptualizing reality.

It's not so much about what is more convenient or more practical or more rich and flexible. It's about what is actually True. Is there an external objective universe that exists out there independent of my perception of it? I don't know. I get tricked every night that my dreams are objective and independently existing outside of my direct experience.. But eventually I wake up and discover that it's just a fucking dream. 

Maybe real life is just the next level of dreams. Maybe there is no end to dreaming. 

Again I'm not advocating solipsism. I remain agnostic. 

[Carl-Richard]

10 hours ago, Someone here said:

Again I'm not advocating solipsism.

Well, it certainly sounds like you are when you keep looping like this. There are good reasons to discard solipsism, but it requires exactly that: reasoning. If you just want to stick to what is immediately apparent and doesn't require any reasoning, you're stuck with solipsism. That is why it's a thought-terminating cliché, because it doesn't want to do any thinking. It's a cop-out of thinking.

Edited April 12, 2023 by Carl-Richard

[Breakingthewall]

The thing is that I will never in the eternity of existence leave my point of view, so my pov is the absolute. Inside my pov are the others. do they have the other povs? if they have it, it has to be my pov. How? I don't know, it's irrelevant. The reality is that I am reality and outside of me there is nothing. maybe the others are me in the future, or in the past, or just images. all these are just thoughts. the others are real when I imagine them and disappear when I stop imagining them. think: yes, but they exist when I don't think about them, it's just a thought. It is necessary to differentiate between real and concept. the others are concept, the reality is me. We could focus in the real and go deep or in the concept and walk around. Is the concept false? No, it's just a concept. Are the others real? Conceptually, I'd say yes, but it's jus a concept, it worth nothing in the realizing of the absolute truth.

[Carl-Richard]

1 hour ago, Breakingthewall said:

The thing is that I will never in the eternity of existence leave my point of view, so my pov is the absolute. Inside my pov are the others. do they have the other povs? if they have it, it has to be my pov. How? I don't know, it's irrelevant. The reality is that I am reality and outside of me there is nothing. maybe the others are me in the future, or in the past, or just images. all these are just thoughts. the others are real when I imagine them and disappear when I stop imagining them. think: yes, but they exist when I don't think about them, it's just a thought. It is necessary to differentiate between real and concept. the others are concept, the reality is me. We could focus in the real and go deep or in the concept and walk around. Is the concept false? No, it's just a concept. Are the others real? Conceptually, I'd say yes, but it's jus a concept, it worth nothing in the realizing of the absolute truth.

This is why I opened the thread with "how reality is conceptualized and experienced". You need to make sense of things like why when you leave your car in the garage, you still find it in the garage the next day. You can't be 100% certain that the car sits in the garage when you're not watching, but you're very certain that it is, and in fact you believe that it is until you see that it isn't. If you want to throw these kinds of observations out from your epistemology because it's not 100% certain, then fine: everything is infinite consciousness; there is no causality, no time and space, no subjects or objects, etc. But that is just not very useful for understanding how the world probably works.

Edited April 12, 2023 by Carl-Richard

[zurew]

2 hours ago, Breakingthewall said:

The thing is that I will never in the eternity of existence leave my point of view, so my pov is the absolute. Inside my pov are the others. do they have the other povs? if they have it, it has to be my pov. How? I don't know, it's irrelevant

There are a lot more other options as well. Just because its impossible to experience anything outside of your pov, that doesn't mean that it is impossible that something can actually exist outside of your pov (you have no way of validating this). A Lack of ability to validate something doesn't make it automatically true, you have to have foundational assumptions to make it true. Imagine an insect using a same kind of epistemology and then say: "fuck, I cannot experience anything outside my own pov, and my pov is absolute, therefore nothing exist outside my pov", and now realize how limited their pov of the world is, and how much things that we have experiential access too, they have none of that, but could still claim that those things don't exist.

Also its different to say that you can only experience everything from your own pov vs actually claiming that everyone's pov is your pov. In the first, you are essentially saying that you experience everything through your own pov, but in the second you make further steps and have to claim that no one has their own pov because there is only your pov.

Having an epistemology, where you limit  your ability to know to - your ability to experience / to something be directly in your pov - is just as if not more limited to having an epistemology where you limit your knowing ability to reasoning. Clearly both have their own limits, and it would be dishonest imo to say otherwise.

2 hours ago, Breakingthewall said:

it worth nothing in the realizing of the absolute truth

You assume a few things here: 1) that your experience can actually lead to Truth 2) That thinking and or reasoning cannot lead to Truth. 

If you define Truth as something that can only be directly experienced, then of course your definition will automatically lead to using experience as the ultimate epistemic tool, but what if you have a wrong definition of Truth in the firstplace, and how could you possibly know for sure, that you have the right definition of Truth?

The "just test it for your own self" unfortunately won't solve this deep epistemic problem and here is why: If I start with the assumption that direct experience will lead to Truth, then of course I will use direct experience to validate if my assumption is true or not (but thats a circular way of validating something, because in this case your ability to test or to check a claim's truth value is purely limited to the method of direct experience, and even if it leads to falsehood you will not detect it, because your detection ability in this case is purely limited to your direct experience and you would need a different tool to see the flaws and limitations of your method).

The same problem would come, if I would say "only pure reason will lead to Truth, don't believe me guys, just use pure reason and check my claim!". Here your ability to check/test my claim is limited to the method of reasoning - so its also a circular way of validating something.

[Breakingthewall]

18 minutes ago, zurew said:

you define Truth as something that can only be directly experienced, then of course your definition will automatically lead to using experience as the ultimate epistemic tool, but what if you have a wrong definition of Truth in the firstplace, and how could you possibly know for sure, that you have the right definition of Truth?

It is quite simple since there is a qualitative difference: pure reason is within your direct experience, therefore reason cannot encompass or define direct experience, it can try making a small sketch that does not mean anything.  

direct experience is the highest, nothing is above because nothing else exists. therefore your direct experience is the absolute truth

Edited April 12, 2023 by Breakingthewall

[Breakingthewall]

2 hours ago, Carl-Richard said:

But that is just not very useful for understanding how the world probably works

It could be said that there is only one certainty: existence exists, and I am. the rest is speculation. You can't know if your car will be in the garage or if the universe will collapse into a black hole in 5 minutes. but you can look within yourself and see that all these are ideas that are within you, that you are the existence that exists and that you are unfathomable

[zurew]

1 hour ago, Breakingthewall said:

direct experience is the highest, nothing is above because nothing else exists.

*nothing else exists in your direct experience.

Again your ability to check whether something exists or not is limited to your direct experience, but your direct experience is also limited. (I know from your pov you can't step out from your pov/frame but just because you can't do something , or detect something that doesn't mean that that does not exists)

1 hour ago, Breakingthewall said:

pure reason is within your direct experience

No these are fundamentally different ways of knowing something.  Direct experience won't tell you about a lot of things and there are many examples where your ability to know is not coming from direct experience , but coming from using logic and reason (especially stuff related to your survival).

There are many things that you can't or haven't experienced and yet you know about those things.

For example your ability to know what will kill you isn't coming from your direct experience, because you haven't experienced death yet and you haven't directly experienced all the possible ways you could die; The same goes to you ability to know what is dangerous and what is not - you haven't directly experienced getting attacked by lions and sharks and yet you still know (using logic and reason) that if you get close to them in an unprotective way, you have a high chance of getting injured or killed.

There are a million other examples could be given, but the point is that these are fundementally different ways of knowing. But if you really want to say that direct experience is above everything because nothing is outside of your direct experience, in that case everything is Truth even using logic and reason and conceptualizing  are all Truth because all of those things could be in your direct experience.

[Moksha]

Direct knowledge is deeper than epistemology. The mind can dance circles around it, but it will never understand it. It is the absolute realizing itself, beyond thoughts, beyond emotions, beyond sensations, beyond perceptions, and beyond experiences. There is no language to express it, only holy silence.

Direct knowledge is not limited to the form through which it is realized. It dissolves boundaries, and expands from the initial locus to resonate with the absolute within and beyond all forms. It is the stone of absolute solidity which is tossed into the cosmic lake and creates ripples extending outward and beyond the lake.

[Breakingthewall]

2 hours ago, zurew said:

There are many things that you can't or haven't experienced and yet you know about those things.

direct experience goes beyond that. It's not like: I have the experience of riding a bicycle, so I know how to do it. On the other hand, I have taken a theoretical course on flying helicopters and it is different. no, the theoretical course is also direct experience. Mental marturbation is a direct experience of mental masturbation. its content is irrelevant. there is no direct experience vs. reason, there is direct experience and nothing else, and everything, absolutely, is within your direct experience. "outside" does not even exist as an idea, it is non-existence, which does not exist. direct experience is this, the now, and it is reality aka god. is the absolute total infinite. This is awakening, to realize the now, the direct experience without outside, of unfathomable depth. 

Every time you think in terms of "outside" you are fragmenting yourself, getting into the dream, into deception.  

you can say: yes, well, that's very good, but the others really have a conscience. ok, you have to realize that your direct experience is thinking about others and what they are have conscience. they are just something within your direct experience, a concept. Is the concept right or wrong? it is indifferent about the reality that it is a concept within your direct experience, and nothing more than that. Different quality. Reality and idea inside the reality 

 

[zurew]

@Breakingthewall In that case it doesn't matter how I get to know something because everything is in my direct experience. If I conceptualize about enlightenment thats the same as enlightenment(because both are and happening in my direct experience, and I can't escape my direct experience ) if I imagine riding a bike thats the exact same as actually taking action and riding a bike. Using your thoughtprocess all of those has to have the same level of realness or if not, then what is the process that is used to realize/arrive at Truth/real?

7 hours ago, Breakingthewall said:

It is necessary to differentiate between real and concept. the others are concept, the reality is me. We could focus in the real and go deep or in the concept and walk around. Is the concept false? No, it's just a concept. Are the others real? Conceptually, I'd say yes, but it's jus a concept, it worth nothing in the realizing of the absolute truth.

Using your own argument 'everything is in your direct experience including concepts', but in the post above, you clearly make a difference between real and concept, so it seems that 'direct experience' has nothing to do with arriving at real/Truth, because the way you previously defined it, everything is inside your direct experience, so what is the requirement or what epistemic process is used to realize that something is more real/True?

[Breakingthewall]

2 hours ago, zurew said:

so what is the requirement or what epistemic process is used to realize that something is more real/True?

the only really valid requirement would be what is occurring in your direct experience now. the second, what has happened in the past, the third, the deductions based on this, but knowing that all this is just ideas, although useful to mentally process in a cleaner way, since it is inevitable to mentally process.