The epistemic problem of "deriving truth from scratch "

[Someone here]

I've been contemplating this recently and I wish to share this with you guys .

Anything I come to know from the external world is prone to error and falsehood . It can never be trusted as an absolute truth.. Because of the very fact that it is derived from the outside world ..which automatically means it has been known by others and now delivered to you..but if it is not derived by you personally..how can you trust it ? Even if Leo or your Guru tells you something.. you should never trust it but you should validate it in your own direct experience..including this very advice from me right now..and this just goes on in a circle and becomes obsessive and meaningless. Like "this statement is false".

 I think it's a very nasty epistemic problem. This entanglement of everything . just the fact that obviously everything everywhere across all places..and in all dimensions or times or whatever ..everything is interconnected. Like for example you cannot separate the observer from the observed..Or this moment from the next moment . Etc .

If you ask AI or Google about any question or information then you have to be skeptical ..because what the hell is the very origin of that information and how was it known at all ? Likewise you can't trust other people. Truth has to be derived personally. But aren't I creating a false duality here which is just circular and absurd?  Because there cannot be a personal experience without an other experience..and the two are tied Togther. And if you push this inquiry further to the ultimate end you arrive at the conclusion that since self =other or at least interrelated then it doesn't matter whether you go through the work of discovering truth or whether your Guru spoon-fed you it . It's tricky. 

Edited 9 hours ago by Someone here

[Carl-Richard]

Even contemplating for yourself is like buying a sandbox from Walmart and digging in it. You're probably not going to hit the motherload. Your words, your concepts, your semantic web, is just bland Walmart sand. Everybody basically has it, only varying quantities of it. And your starting assumption should be that any sandcastle you build, has by any reasonable certainty already been built, perhaps using slightly different sand (what is Walmart in India?).

Edited 9 hours ago by Carl-Richard

[Someone here]

9 minutes ago, Carl-Richard said:

Even contemplating for yourself is like buying a sandbox from Walmart and digging in it.

Can there be contemplating for myself from scratch ? I think it is impossible and nonsensical. I have to use a certain language like English. Even the logic I go through is borrowed from other resources..like books I've read or videos I've listened to.  But also in the other side what's wrong with having presumptions while contemplating? 

[Sincerity]

1 hour ago, Someone here said:

And if you push this inquiry further to the ultimate end you arrive at the conclusion that since self =other or at least interrelated then it doesn't matter whether you go through the work of discovering truth or whether your Guru spoon-fed you it . It's tricky. 

No. It absolutely does matter.

True knowledge is derived through walking the journey. It will never be the same as just hearing something.

34 minutes ago, Someone here said:

Can there be contemplating for myself from scratch ?

Of course you can.

When you observe attention itself, for example, you don’t need no language.

The greatest contemplation is simply observation. That plus wanting to understand - but not through language. Language is second-order, used for explaining what you understood on the first-order.

Edited 8 hours ago by Sincerity

[Someone here]

4 minutes ago, Sincerity said:

True knowledge is derived through walking the journey. It will never be the same as just hearing something.

The true knowledge you come to know personally can never be 100% independent from everything that you've heard from others. 

6 minutes ago, Sincerity said:

When you observe attention itself, for example, you don’t need no language.

The greatest contemplation is simply observation.

I will think about this . Needs testing. 

[Sincerity]

4 minutes ago, Someone here said:

The true knowledge you come to know personally can never be 100% independent from everything that you've heard from others. 

It can be. If we’re talking about the most fundamental knowledge, which is regarding Consciousness/God/etc..

In fact, TRUE knowledge MUST be recognized through consciousness on your own. That is its attribute. This knowledge is what you see, what you know, what you are. If you „know” it from hearsay, you don’t really know it. It’s just belief.

You cannot know God through belief. It’s impossible.

Edited 8 hours ago by Sincerity

[Someone here]

@Sincerity an example of that absolute independent knowledge you're speaking about is the raw qualia I'm experiencing now (stripped of all interpretation and conceptualization ) ?

 

[Sincerity]

15 minutes ago, Someone here said:

@Sincerity an example of that absolute independent knowledge you're speaking about is the raw qualia I'm experiencing now (stripped of all interpretation and conceptualization ) ?

Yes, and awakening to the nature of this experience. Realizing that everything you see is God, for example. When you genuinely awaken to it (eg. on a psychedelic), it’s first order knowledge.

”Experience is God” is not necessarily an interpretation. You can know it. But until you don’t, it’s indeed a concept/belief.

Contemplate from scratch. For example, „What am I?”. Don’t settle for anything but deep shift in consciousness - ideas are not it. Psychedelics make the shift easier.

Edited 7 hours ago by Sincerity

[Someone here]

3 hours ago, Sincerity said:

Yes, and awakening to the nature of this experience. Realizing that everything you see is God, for example. When you genuinely awaken to it (eg. on a psychedelic), it’s first order knowledge.

”Experience is God” is not necessarily an interpretation. You can know it. But until you don’t, it’s indeed a concept/belief.

Contemplate from scratch. For example, „What am I?”. Don’t settle for anything but deep shift in consciousness - ideas are not it. Psychedelics make the shift easier.

Thank you . Guide me through an example of contemplating from scratch about "what am I?".

[Someone here]

Thinking itself can never be 100% original. I made this point before . Observe yourself thinking ..you are always moving through concrete pathways and spefic lines of reasoning...all of which are not coming from within you from scratch but from others or external sources...not necessarily all of it .I conclude the only thing that is self-evident is raw qualia . 

[Leo Gura]

It's a hell of a problem.

[Xonas Pitfall]

You can definitely derive truth from scratch, but you first have to define what “from scratch” means. If it means starting from fundamental principles or from reality itself, then the only truth left, I would say, is A = A, or correspondence. That is all you need for truth; in a sense, that is truth itself. From there, you can try to derive other aspects of truth. A = A implies Solipsism. A = A also implies Love. A = A implies Purity, Truth, Unity, All, and God. It also implies Identity, the Self, and the “I am.”

However, when you deal with more relative notions, it becomes more difficult. Then questions of preference arise: which biases should survive? Should the more truthful bias even survive, and how would you determine what counts as more truthful? How do you filter for a truthful bias when you do not have all the available information, intentions, or self-awareness and clarity? This is definitely problematic.

[Willy Phallicus]

The guru can't give you truth.  Nor can anyone else.  They can only point to it and hope you do your homework.

All of us are in the dark on many matters and all of us are always barking up some wrong tree in some area of our thinking and perception - it's guaranteed - but sentience is not about knowledge of the external.  So if you're going in circles its because you're still in the dark.

[vibv]

@Someone here Contemplate language.

One of the greatest traps is conflating language or concepts (which require language to communicate) with Truth.

This is one of the greatest achievements of this Cosmos: A language that allows us to communicate without understanding each other too intimately. Only that way it's possible to have this kind of separation & individuality.

This is not obvious at all. Individuality is only possible because language exists.

But we're united on the level of emotion.

[LastThursday]

Truth requires some amount of persistence of some aspect of experience. Persistence is just a kind of memory. A truth which is always persisting is an absolute truth, by some measure of "always".

A lot of what can be understood in experience are constructions (or interpretations) in experience: chairs, people, sky, air, food, self. The constructions are a kind of truth by virtue of the fact that they are a kind of memory. I understand a chair, and chairs exist, because the chair construction persists as a form of memory, and that construction is applied whenever something in raw experience matches the "template". 

Constructions are fluid and so don't persist absolutely: chairs are not absolute truth. Constructions given to you by other people, are not absolute truth either.

To get at a different truth then, you have to deal with the non-constructed parts of experience. One such thing is that experience exists all the time, it's hard to deny that something is there, something is happening; it is an absolute truth.

I would say it is potentially impossible to know if you're dealing with a construction or not, maybe everything in experience is a construction, it's hard to tell. Is the colour red a construction or not? Certainly the word "red" definitely is, but is the direct experience of it a construction, where does red start and end in experience? What about, nearly red? Anything that delineates reality, is almost certainly a construction of some type. But isn't reality just distinctions?