A common fallacy is that if you and I are smart then we will agree. Conflicts of interest and personal value systems and world views provide easy inlets for various counter points.
I've seen your post below about your bad trip. I fully respect your position, but that is not my experience. I realised I can't access things I find important through my reason. I'm just too dependent on my body for my mind to function, so I just followed what my body was telling me.
But I agree that you don't need to take drugs. That's why my advice wasn't a definitive one. It's an invitation for people to consider what they want in their lives.
You don’t need to take drugs to know things, but reason only covers a portion of what can be known. Reason doesn’t really help one understand the nature of experience itself. That’s a whole different kind of meta-factual knowing, an infinite subject that some people approach through meditation (and psychedelics too).
Reason can know the entirety of all necessary truth. There are experiential contingent things such as what I ate for breakfast that it of course cannot know. But it can know all universal truth, such as all metaphysical and philosophical truth
I like this because it immediately accounts for truth not arrived at though reason and then just slaps on the word “universal” as the descriptor for the subset of truth reachable through reason. It is convincing because universal is a big word
I think we're talking past each other (or maybe mysticism and Hegel don't mix!). These mystical experiences touch at something on a different level than reason, a little closer to base metal. I mean that no reason or representation can capture that most fundamental reality of being, the fundamental experiential truth. Reason can try to explain it, and reason can help guide some people to the experience of it (jnana yoga, getting a satori from reading Eckhart), but it cannot itself know it. Meditation, psychedelics, dance, or whatever else are the typical pathways to it. All reason, all facts, are subordinate to it and less true than it. Or can being be contained by reason?
No, but LSD helped me see things that couldn't be learned from outside. For some reason, it helps me recall childhood memories better. Sure maybe there's some guided therapy session that could have done that, but LSD gives it to me for free, along with a whole lot of other stuff.
All knowledge that can be gained through LSD is contingent and experiential, not universal and certain
I’m well aware through my own testing
EDIT: I’m not saying it is useless information for your life but it is particular to your life, not truths of the universe like the person I replied to claimed
Oh, of course, nothing about LSD can give me access to things that my brain just doesn't have access to. It can help with the things that already are in my brain though.
Doesn’t this effectively hand wave away the hard problem of consciousness?
i.e. even a purely reason-based understanding of truth must acknowledge that the only thing we can be certain actually exists is the mind. With no true understanding of how the mind functions, and giant gaps in our understanding of existence, the idea that universal truth can even be comprehended — much less mapped wholly onto humans capacity for reason - is just a belief. An article of faith.
It seems to me that a purely reason-based worldview must by definition acknowledge that a statement like “the truth is fully reasonable” is untenable at worst and at best just a prediction.
This makes sense because experience doesn’t affect how a person reasons. This is why all truth is agreed upon
I know you’re being sarcastic but indeed if we reasoned properly we would all agree
A common fallacy is that if you and I are smart then we will agree. Conflicts of interest and personal value systems and world views provide easy inlets for various counter points.
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> know you’re being sarcastic but indeed if we reasoned properly we would all agree
We would also lose everything that makes us human and will find no satisfaction in knowing.
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I've seen your post below about your bad trip. I fully respect your position, but that is not my experience. I realised I can't access things I find important through my reason. I'm just too dependent on my body for my mind to function, so I just followed what my body was telling me.
But I agree that you don't need to take drugs. That's why my advice wasn't a definitive one. It's an invitation for people to consider what they want in their lives.
Wish you all the best truthfully.
You don’t need to take drugs to know things, but reason only covers a portion of what can be known. Reason doesn’t really help one understand the nature of experience itself. That’s a whole different kind of meta-factual knowing, an infinite subject that some people approach through meditation (and psychedelics too).
Reason can know the entirety of all necessary truth. There are experiential contingent things such as what I ate for breakfast that it of course cannot know. But it can know all universal truth, such as all metaphysical and philosophical truth
I’m a Hegelian though so I’m biased
I like this because it immediately accounts for truth not arrived at though reason and then just slaps on the word “universal” as the descriptor for the subset of truth reachable through reason. It is convincing because universal is a big word
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I think we're talking past each other (or maybe mysticism and Hegel don't mix!). These mystical experiences touch at something on a different level than reason, a little closer to base metal. I mean that no reason or representation can capture that most fundamental reality of being, the fundamental experiential truth. Reason can try to explain it, and reason can help guide some people to the experience of it (jnana yoga, getting a satori from reading Eckhart), but it cannot itself know it. Meditation, psychedelics, dance, or whatever else are the typical pathways to it. All reason, all facts, are subordinate to it and less true than it. Or can being be contained by reason?
No, but LSD helped me see things that couldn't be learned from outside. For some reason, it helps me recall childhood memories better. Sure maybe there's some guided therapy session that could have done that, but LSD gives it to me for free, along with a whole lot of other stuff.
Did it let you recall childhood memories, or invent new ones? How would you know the difference?
Historic events can be corroborated.
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All knowledge that can be gained through LSD is contingent and experiential, not universal and certain
I’m well aware through my own testing
EDIT: I’m not saying it is useless information for your life but it is particular to your life, not truths of the universe like the person I replied to claimed
Oh, of course, nothing about LSD can give me access to things that my brain just doesn't have access to. It can help with the things that already are in my brain though.
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Reason is overrated. Knowing that smoking is unhealthy is not sufficient to stop oneself from smoking.
It’s not overrated if you want to know the universal truths of reality, which is what the person I replied to spoke of. The truth is fully reasonable
> The truth is fully reasonable
Doesn’t this effectively hand wave away the hard problem of consciousness?
i.e. even a purely reason-based understanding of truth must acknowledge that the only thing we can be certain actually exists is the mind. With no true understanding of how the mind functions, and giant gaps in our understanding of existence, the idea that universal truth can even be comprehended — much less mapped wholly onto humans capacity for reason - is just a belief. An article of faith.
It seems to me that a purely reason-based worldview must by definition acknowledge that a statement like “the truth is fully reasonable” is untenable at worst and at best just a prediction.
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Qualia. Black and white room.