What is it that makes us question everything?

Antibuddha, does your phrase--"We can never know everything for certain. Yet we can get pretty damn sure"--differ at all from the phrase, "We can feel 99% convinced"?

Well, I probably wouldn't go so far as to quote a specific number but no, I don't think it differs much at all.

Why do you ask? Did I accidentally repeat a point that had already been made? Or did you wish to clarify my description into more plain english to avoid confusion? Something else I haven't thought of?

AntiBuddha, your statement that we cannot know if we are or are not living out a cosmic "computer simulation" with absolute certainty, but we can be "pretty damn sure" seemed to require assurance that you realize that is still a subjective state of mind. Not a criticism at all. I was just expressing my view that the only thing we know with certainty is our immediate experience, and as no more than the immediate sensory experience that it is. Everything else is interpretive supposition, some useful, some just for fun, some downright destructive.

Nobody

Yes, but that immediate sensory experience is already an interpretation. While I am writing this message my senses are being stimulated by a large number of external stimulus. But I don't hear the cars in the street, I don't seek the chair next to me, I direct myself, even without thinking it, in the computer. And the computer as external stimulus is not present in me as "what is a computer?" but as something I use to write a message to you. Our experience is an experience of relations within our intentionality.

Val, no doubt you are right, as far as you go. Much of our experience is submerged, what we may call sub-conscious (not to be confused with repressed unconscious experience). Right now you are consciously aware, or WERE not consciously aware, of the sensations of your fanny on your chair. Now you are, perhaps. It is no doubt the case that perceive our experience as if it comes to us already meaningful. But the reality is, if you look very carefully, that our raw, pre-reflective, BASE is instantly categorized/interpreted according to our cultural conditioning. This is done so quickly and so automatically that we are not aware of the cooking process. As such, we do not factor it into our epistemology. Meditation is one way to become aware of the actual foundation/nature of experience.

Another way to perceive our experience, in the raw, as it were, is by the use of certain drugs such as LSD. But I would not recommend them. It is too scary for many of the unprepared to experience reality without the intermediate process of cultural interpretation.

Are we attempting to equate verbal questions with curiosity? There's a big difference.

As both a user and someone relatively familiar with the process by which hallucinogens operate, I find the idea that it creates an unfiltered view of reality to be unlikely in the extreme.

Perhaps so. I've never taken psychotropic drugs, natural or artificial. I'm just going by the reports of people like Ram Dass, Timothey Leary, Aldous Huxley, and others.

Just remember:

A) Those people are usually part of the advocacy for drug use and one of the best advocacy methods these days is to make it a religion.
B) These people want to sell books and more people buy "the magical mind-expanding properties of drugs" than "hey I got really high".
C) These people are usually shameless hippies who take everything way too spiritually.

Nobody



I think we are talking about the same thing. Any perception is already a configuration, and in part that has to do with language/concepts. As we have noticed weeks ago, we do not see stars, only bright little lights in darkness. But, as you say, in fact we do not only see those little lights: once the stimulus affects our eyes we "see" immediately stars. An human being 3.000 thousand years ago would, no doubt, "see" something else.

But there is another thing in our experience. I use the computer right now not in the sense of "what is a computer" but as something that is a tool to my intention of sending this message. I don't even think of the computer as a computer.
But, if the computer fails, then I become aware of something new: the computer becomes something strange to me, something that resists me. It is not anymore a part in a intentional relation.
It's the same when we stumble in a stone, or when our car doesn't start. Suddenly we are forced to face the thing, not as a tool among other tools - the car, the road, the signals - not as a thing "to be used for this and that" but something that just stays there, strange to us, independent of our intention.
This is an example of what I think to be the most interesting part of our experience.
There are others. A sudden fire in your room, a unexpected pain in your body, an earthquake. You become isolated from the world of things-related-to you, your "manual" doesn't work anymore. Those are the limit experiences.

As for meditation or LSD although I never tried none of them, I don't think possible to "kill" our interaction in the presence, in order to free the sensations - our sensations - from our being.
In the end, the result would be something like a coma: but in coma you have no experience, no interaction with the world.

Anti-buddha, your cynicism ("These people are usually shameless hippies who take everything way too spiritually") may apply to Leary and Ram Dass (the latter to a lesser extent), but it is clearly inappropriate where Aldous Huxley is concerned. He was chagrined at the response of "hippies" to his descriptions of his drug-assisted mystical experiences.

Val, I do not have time to give your last post the attention it merits. But I do want to suggest that when you say that "Any perception is already a configuration", meaning, of course, a culturally constituted meaningful experience replete with learned assumptions and categorizations, you are right. I say that you are right because that is what you mean by a "perception". You acknowledge the existence of experiences that are meaningless or ambiguous, which is part of what I mean by pre-reflective, pre-cognitive, "raw", "uncooked", or not-culturally-mediated-experience. This is what one experiences sometimes in really good abstract (completely non-representational) painting. It is the aesthetic immediacy similar to what we experience in non-descriptive music. A keen awareness of this side of life is at the heart (the immediacy) of artistic and mystical bliss. What I am saying in no way contradicts what you have said about the intentional and culturally constructed nature of "perception."

Thus my usage of the word usually.

One of my all time favorite authors C.S. Lewis said something that i always liked...

If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. Dark would be without meaning.

Discreet

Not if the meaning is in us.
See, in History, how many meanings human beings gave the universe.

Sorry to go back to this, but what Val said earlier is completely on target. To quote:



It seems obvious to me that the very reason why earlier people had religions was to give explanations to the myriad questions they were faced with. They speculated the same way we do. They just didn't have the problem solving strategies that we now employ. It is the differences in our technology and our thinking strategies that have changed since "primitive" peoples. The physiology of the brain has not changed fundamentally in so short a time, only the way we use it. We *have* evolved to question everything, but it happened much earlier in history. Other primates certainly exhibit curiosity, as do many animals. We are simply better at questioning than any other organism on earth (that we know of?).

Can't argue with that, Fredjones.

We might also ask why people ACCEPT so much. I think part of the answer is found in anthropological studies of enculturation and socialization.

JL, you are right on. Despite our ability to question, we do accept far too much. There are so many abject falsehoods that people believe without question. I am of course just as guilty of this as anyone else. (sigh)