How much of the whole fetishizing over ultimate truth in cults and other forms comes down to nothing more than "I had an experience in this particular way, so it must be the True Way(tm)"?
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I think a lot of belief is based on experience. I got into an ontological discussion once with a theoretical physicist.
We spent a few hours working backward and eventually found that my experiences (using psychedelics) provided me with a basis for belief that diverged from his.
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Oh, totally.
The problem (in my experience - gawd I'm so funny) is thinking that's something very special and particular to oneself.
Put differently: we take our experiences and create an entire ontology around them. We note that everyone else is doing the same thing, getting wildly divergent ideas.
Then, like idiots, we start working on justifications for why our own ideas are particularly superior.
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Yeah, I agree that few have Totally Unique experiences.
More interesting to me is which experiences are so foundational as to lead to different beliefs, esp politically. I wonder if there's a core set of experiences that are common to the left but not the right and vice versa.
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I actually rather meant in thinking that our experiences carry special ontological status (except to ourselves, where clearly they do).
As to the second concept, a lot of research seems to indicate it does, from the mundane to the more esoteric.
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