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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Replying to
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.
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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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re: foundational experiences creating contrasting sets of views, the ones that seem the most irreducible in their disagreement are emergent from various circumstantially specialized cognitive architectures being scaled to totalities that they’re not sufficient to manage alone
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most don’t have the desire or ability to fully immerse into the other perspectives that they’d need to integrate to actually build an appropriate picture of the whole. it’s not a mystery why either, it can dredge up loads of past experiences that were never fully integrated
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I’ve been trying to come up with a term for this effect, something along the lines of cognitive “splash damage,” “fallout,” or “resonance.” it also happens a lot when one groks a new math concept and experiences unrelated epiphanies as a result. I live for that shit!
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It's like inverted cognitive dissonance. I wouldn't be surprised if this was already a term and just not widely employed.