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.
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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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Getting comfortable with our simian origins is so, so important.
We are very much not up to the task, as far as most reasoning goes.
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Yeah, accepting apeness is perhaps my most fundamental discomfort when I consider my own existence. I (and many others, I imagine) desperately want to transcend this. And yet...
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oh, you guys are taking a bit of different angle than I intended, though it’s just as true, if somewhat tangential. I refer to cognitive structures that exist on a self-conscious/aware level (in many cases) that are optimal for perpendicular or inverse applications
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Not so sure those structures are any more aware than your average neural network, actually. But that's a bigger topic than this one.
I don’t mean that the structures themselves are aware, I mean that they exist, and can operate on, the level of conscious awareness. You could also frame it as an isomorphism between thought structures and cognitive structures, but that might be a largely semantic distinction.
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Analogous to the structural similarities between an empty clothesline and a full one, yes.