Methods Of Inquiry

I would say the true X is a matter of experience, opinion....etc.......It could be the greatest thing ever for Y but not for Z.....neither Y or Z are wrong.....so the truth would be it is subjective and y's experiences are just as real as z' are and to accept that that is the way it will always be.

 

We are not all carbon copies of each other......and to me, that is a wonderful thing.

 

The Scientific Method is perhaps the most useful method for ascertaining truth because its specificity garners accuracy. Using the scientific method, one sets parameters, controls variables, notes limitations of the study and produces falsifiable assertions.

This means that unlike the other methods we have listed so far, in theory the individual can essentially replicate the exact conditions of the study they are testing the veracity of, placing them on equal ground with the scientist, authority or figure who formulates the study.

 

The title of your thread seemed really interesting to me. It seems really beautiful and intelligent. I thought it would be about ways people get answers out of people. (Interrogation). -I don't mention that to criticize your choice of title.

 

I think the strongest aspect of the scientific method is its in built error correcting mechanism. This is also the prime source of why faith based thinking is fundamentally corrupted and should not be engaged with seriously. There is no way to correct a faith based statement, except by a future faith based statement, and there is no mechanism through which one can guarantee correction by said future faith based statement (it can just be ignored, because you dont feel like believing it).

It still makes my head spin that people use a method of knowing (faith) for arranging their lives and their passions around certain supernatural claims, but that method is absolutely inexcusable in any other walk of life, whether shopping for food, or serving in a jury, or diagnosing and treating pathology, or making business decisions, and on, and on. Literally no where in life is faith acceptable to use, except, and here's the punch line, in the single most important area of all. It's amazing to me that people don't see an issue with this, that they are not struck down to the ground by the sheer weight of cognitive dissonance warping their mind.

"I'm going to eat this fish. I found it in the fridge, I don't know how old it is, and I won't be testing it in any way. I choose to have faith that it is good for me." <--- fool

"I'm going to pray in church, which means i'm going to say things to a being that I have no evidence exists. Prayer has been shown in countless experiments and observations to not work, and I don't understand why I need to go to a building to talk to a being who is apparently everywhere. I choose to have faith that this is all true and valid." <--- a thoughtful and respected community leader

I really, really hope that science finds a way to correct the neural circuitry which allows for this kind of thinking, and that we develop a method to correct this quickly, and in the young.

Imagine a world where every child born was guaranteed to not set this life as #2, because he thought that the next life is more important. Where people didn't waste all this time, energy, and resources on talking to ourselves and wishing hard that someone is listening. Imagine a world where none of the stupidity and horrors of faith based thinking were displayed by a whole new generation. What progress we could make . . .

 

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No the true thing that can be said are that the experiences appear to be the same in detail. Again I am calling truth a true statement not something that exists by itself absent comparison.

Data comes from the biofeedback loop. What I suggested is the agreement reached is with the data. How people respond to us and naturally appearing examples like whether or not the fruit is wholesome. Why are you seeking to validate what is in fact real as in validating experience? What we seek to do is understand it not validate it. I am attempting to replace suspicion of the veracity of subjective experience with learning how to apprehend things without distortion. I think our sensory equipment is supremely suited to what concerns us. Curiously the distortion can always be found in the narrative that describes. These distortions can be sensed in feelings of superiority and inferiority and views of inequity of all kinds. All exchanges of energy are equal unto themselves. There is no imbalance or energetically unequal exchanges. We are energy behaving energetically. To conceive there is fault or guilt in energetic behavior is the mother of all distortion in being able to accurately quantify energetic forces.

To give an example of the types of things that contribute to distorted apprehension from the perspective of subjective experience, personal insecurity is one. Instead of applying yourself to apprehending the environment clearly you find yourself wondering how you measure up in the eyes of others or wonder if you are equal to the situation. You may even resist applying yourself to actually finding out what you long to know. You suddenly become lost in a day dream and in such a state have lost your truly discerning mind. You may find yourself hazarding all kinds of guesses about what my transpire in the future and things like that when the only way of knowing is to wait and see or ask a question of the principal and this is unlike the application of the scientific mind. So much of what man does with his mind is shadow box with his own verdicts about this that and the other thing while thinking all the while that the energetic direction of his struggle comes from the outside, that he is the victim of one thing or another.

On the subject of bringing in synonyms, i was making a true statement. X is not Y unless X and Y do not represent different values but are synonyms. The actual characters X and Y being symbolic forms. If X represents a feeling of fear and Y represents a feeling of trepidation then X and Y could be the same.

 

I mean there are the things that we can correctly distinguish and these are taxonomic quantities and only these can we make true statements about. We determine truth exactly if you confine your truth saying to the observable sameness difference or function. I do not confuse truth with ontological theory. We can observe that the sun prescribes an arc across the sky. To say that the sun revolves around the earth on the basis of that limited direct observation is conjecture and never was the truth by comparison. It was something that people believed without the benefit of direct comparison. Same with flat earth. Something people believed based on limited direct observation, without venturing to the horizon to see what actually happens. These profound upsets in world view dissemble conjecture or beliefs about, not true comparisons. So we can dispense with the idea of changing truths.

 

I said still debating about authority, i.e. how do you determine what is true, particularly in regards to subjective experience. I didn't mean to suggest you were doing something wrong or that you were being unfair. In fact you are quite patient with me.

As far as the elemental philosophical breakdown I challenge it's meaningfulness and I can do this because I am not attached to the academic view. While it appears that authority comes in different guises our actual experience is we agree or disagree with whatever is going on. No measure ultimately substitutes for our own and diverse views of authority reflect a persons changing alliances. I also commented on intuition and desire as playing an elemental role in the formation of perception. So the effort to discount these elements as unreliable only denigrates the power of our own mind and the aptitude of the personal experience.

Obviously being curious is not the same as having anxiety in a negative sense. If your specific comparison causes you anxiety then you have misapprehended what is so. A clear vision of reality always lends a sense of security or the correct answer appears as some form of peace because we are only fearful of what we don't know and I am talking a bout mental anxiety in the absence of any definite existential threat which elicits the fight or flight response. I am not talking about an overall malaise although this does have it's source in misapprehension as well and reflects unexamined assumptions. I am speaking specifically to those conscious comparisons we make.

 

Well as debilitating as some views are I am not amazed that they persist as cultural programming is insidious. We are taught to care for things more or less and this comes out in the way we investigate life. We assume the rightness of our own culture and question only the things that seem strange to it. Very little attention is given to teaching children how to apprehend the world. All the effort is in teaching them how to conform to established authorities. To correct in the young we quit teaching them to look for crap. Correcting neural circuitry involves changing the mind or thinking differently. I have had some success reaching even the dimmest by first honoring the capacity for changing the mind that exists and the sincere desire of persons to be right.

Psychedelics are good mind jolters. Generosity and kindness toward the concerned is a good mind loosener. Truth saying or consistent example penetrates the crap.

 

I disagree that "no where in life is faith acceptable to use, except, and here's the punch line, in the single most important area of all. " Faith is acceptable in many areas of life, but it isn't always recognized as such. It is probably the ultimate tribute to faith that it is often not thought to be faith at all, but "truth", "reality" and "science". Take, for example, the assertion that "Prayer has been shown in countless experiments and observations to not work"--that being an example of the faith known as scientism. One of the recognized attributes of true science is that it deals only with refutable or falsifiable hypotheses and cannot legitimately address irrefutable ones. Science can't tell us whether or not ghosts are real. A scientist could set up a series of experiments in supposedly haunted houses, but the failure of such methods to detect ghosts could never be taken as proof that there are none. It might be the case that ghosts abhor scientists and refuse to reveal themselves to a skeptical audience. Does this mean that I think belief in ghosts is reasonable? Not at all. I am pretty confident that there are no such things, despite numerous documentaries on the Discovery Channel, Fox News, and the Sci Fi Channel to the contrary. How do I know this? I don't. I'd be the first to admit that my judgement isn't scientifically grounded. I exercise judgment based on a combination of personal observation, reason, intuition, and experience, laced with wisdom my mommy told me. And I place an educated bet based on the best evidence available--and not contrary to logic and science. Faith, as Luther said, is a "joyous bet." But I'm not into blind faith. Instead of the leap of faith, I prefer a hop. Obviously, others who claim to use the same faculties come to the opposite conclusion, but I conclude that they're wing nuts. Same for those who think Sara Palin would be a wonderful president. Carl Sagan was able to dismiss alien abductions, despite the testimony of large numbers of eyewitnesses. Carl Sagan was a distinguished scientist, but he came to his conclusions about aliens and other paranormal phenomena discussed in Demon Haunted World on the basis of nothing stronger than his judgment, which impresses me because it was informed by a powerful intellect. Of course, the consequence of this is that I can't really say I "know" for sure that there are no ghosts or alien abductors. I have to live with the possibility that I'm wrong about these judgments, and possibly ninety percent or more of my other judgments. Unfortunately that's life--an informed crap shoot! But at least I admit it.

Now getting back to those "countless experiments and observations" that show prayer not to work, my conclusion is even more skeptical than yours. There are indeed several published studies performed by people with impressive scientific credentials purporting to show the inefficacy of prayer. But at the very outset, these investigators should have been aware that they weren't doing science. God and the power of petitionary prayer are irrefutable, unfalsifiable propositions comparable to ghosts. The "countless experiments" proceed on the assumption that God will co-operate in the experiments. If God is Yahweh or Allah, that is an assumption contrary to the very nature of the Entity in question. That the studies were done and published is evidence of the unshakable faith on the part of some members of the scientific community that there is no area beyond the reach of science.

You're correct that there are lots of otherwise seemingly intelligent people who seem to believe that God will alter the natural course of events if they ask Him nicely. I'm in enough prayer groups to know this is the case. There are even otherwise rational people who believe that they get messages back from God. Comedienne Lily Tomlin once got laughs for her line:" When you talk to God, it's prayer. When God talks to you, its schizophrenia." In my part of the country, at least, people no longer get that joke. But talking to God isn't always what it seems. The form of prayer is that of talking to Someone Else, but the function is often to focus thoughts--affirmations, as New Agers call it, or talking to our "Higher Selves"(The kingdom of God is within you", Luke 17; 20-21). Emperor Marcus Aurelius said that instead of asking god for stuff, we might do better to ask Him to make us not to want stuff. I think that's good practical advice. My favorite petitionary prayer is: "Thy will be done on earth as it is in Heaven." That prayer is always granted, since God always gets His way.

 

I wanted to add that to not allow for this kind of thinking is not to allow for thinking and is yet another suggestion of how to program peoples trip.

 

Absolutely, especially when we define god as a truism. "God is that which in fact happens". Oh look, something happened. God!!!

How is it that you quote from biblical scripture, a religion which follows a god which is, for all intents and purposes, a kind of super-person, and yet you define god in this amorphous epiphenomenal way "God is the mystery of the universe" or whatever.

I feel you are wanting to have your cake and eat it too. You want inclusion with a particularly powerful social lobby (christians) and you want immunity from the ridicule of holding the actual beliefs that christians hold. So when it suits your purposes, you say you love jesus and follow his way and read the bible. And when the dialogue gets a little heated and a little intellectual, suddenly god is NOT the yaweh who is the father of jesus . . . suddenly "god is love". Well I'm not sure how "love" floods the world and kills 99% of all beings, or how "love" destroys two cities because some of their inhabitants were having the wrong kind of sex that rubbed "love" the wrong way.

I don't just mean to point out the ridiculousness of saying that somehow the embodiment of love can perform such heinous acts and make such terrible statements.

I mean, how in fact, does "love" perform any of these tasks, like physically? How does "love" or "mystery" or "the transcendental" speak in a voice to a prophet and tell him to revolt against his rulers?

Why, if your definition of god is so new and titilatingly inexact, do you then have your go-to holy book be the Bible? Why not just the same faculty of reason which you used to differ from this religion in the first place, by making god whatever fits into your god-shaped hole?

 

Whether they are leaps, hops, skips, jumps, bets on or slides into faith, there is no reason in jumping to or gambling on conclusions ahead of experience. And really trying to maintain a leap of faith gets in the way of processing ongoing emerging information. Trust that we can indeed discover something is adequate faith to make the effort. Having faith does not excuse the necessity of seeking results. Seek and you shall find.

 

I don't understand this. How do you impute synonyms? Synonym is a function of common meaning of words by definition. Potential multiple meanings can be refined through question and answer and attending context.. What is true experience? Experience is real being experience.

I agree. Without saying exactly what you mean and without the effort at communication to get a handle on what meaning is being conveyed, no exactness of meaning can be imparted

If subjective and object are the same then there is no disparity. The disparity comes when you think the objective is somehow more real than the subjective or assign a false polarity, i.e. different versions of reality. No difference in reality between subjective and objective. Thou art that.

"This can only mean and but not limited to is a contradiction of terms. We are not alone in shared experience, to say that we are alone in shared experience is another contradiction of terms. This is an example of the, same different, comparison. We all have the same experience of human creaturehood although we may count details differently. We all have the same thoughts although not necessarily at the same time. The fact that we can articulate a position and have it be understood demonstrates this. It is the visible evidence of separate body that gives the impression you are cut off but this doesn't account for the low level electromagnetic fields that can't be seen and extend some distance from the body. Nor does it account for quantum entanglement or the fact that minds join in sharing a thought. The body as it is recognized, as a space that confines, creates conceptual tension.

 

Messages sent and received are not always ambiguous. Exactness can be communicated.

The study of meaning, semantics, informs meaning. The only meanings we can communicate with language are linguistic or mathematical.

You may interpret as you described but the only will be interpreted about it is your own. The fact is as we discuss things meaning becomes clearer. It remains that we may not understand one another but there is no reason we cannot become familiar which each others vernacular. It is a matter of how important the communication is to you. To what length will you go to become intimate.

The scientific method does consistently allow for refinement but intuition and desire play a role in the method. We cannot escape the effects of our own thinking.

There are no supposed truths, within the scientific method, those are called conjecture or hypothesis or beliefs.

Intuition in the way I use the term in this instance is not a vague guess, a suspicion, or even a supposition that occurs to you but describes the process of becoming informed. The lessons of intuition are in the self reflective conclusions. We are self taught or we learn what we want to learn. We may learn how to apply scientific method to self reflective conclusions. That is we can use our attention in such a way that we view ourselves as objects to be inspected. We don't take any sensation as a personal affront.because if we do we automatically find ourselves defending a personal or prejudiced position instead of applying our truth saying to things that can be mutually verified.