taleon
Posts: 48
Joined: 4/20/2007
From: The Netherlands
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ORIGINAL: Musicmystery
You went from "way of knowing" to absolute truth, a claim I never made. Then you mentioned using methodology to move to predictive power--and this is indeed a way of knowing.
A claim you never made, but a claim many religions do make. And therein science and religion are opposed. Science doesn't claim to be the guardian and defender of the truth, but religion, in my experience, often does exactly that.
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Even when Einstein superseded Newton, apples, when dropped, fall, and I can rely on this information as certain within my local gravitational field---even though we have no idea what gravity is or how it works, just that it's there and related to mass.
True.
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I then clearly moved to things we know from experience. You question who decides this is "valid"--clearly, the one with the experiential knowledge. Seriously, do you doubt all experiences you haven't tested? How would you function? We can and do rely on experience as a guide--and reasonably so.
On a day to day basis, I don't doubt all the experience I haven't tested. Indeed, I wouldn't be able to cross the street if I did. But, as I've noted in another post in this thread, I know that my experiences are not the best standard to judge the world with. Your mileage may vary, but some of my experiences turn out to be spectacularly misleading or even flat out wrong, when I do test them. The link I posted earlier had a few examples of visual illusions. I find that a rather shocking way of illustrating how incredibly deceiving your experience can be. Understanding that my experiences aren't all that reliable to explain the world around me, I gladly fall back on methods which I think do a better job.
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A concept like Tao, which I first learned and studied seriously as a young musician--I can tell you that there is more than ourselves, or that at least it seems that way, and that by letting go one can learn to access and even direct it to accomplish more than one can do unaided. I can even teach other musicians how to do this. Accomplished T'ai Chi practitioners can do the same, demonstrating amazing feats, which I've also witnessed and, to a lesser degree than as a musician, experienced.
What do you mean by "letting go"?
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Now, to turn this to science, we'd need a hypothesis about measurable causality. At least at present, we don't have that, only the observable phenomena and the duplicable experiential results. Yet it's a way of knowing that we can use practically.
Back to Newton. You mentioned it yourself, we can experience his laws first hand, and we can test his equations. It would be great if the same applies to the experience you describe. If you can write down how to duplicate that effect, I'll try to duplicate it.
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The point is, the dichotomies presented are assumptions, not established reality.
If you feel that personal experiences are a way of exploring the world, just as the scientific method is a way of exploring the world... then you'd find no disagreement from me. But you mentioned that "Religion and science are not diametrically opposed". I still can't agree, and I can't see how shared and repeatable experiences have anything to do with, say, Christianity. Or Judaism. Or Islam.
It could be that we just have different definitions of the word religion. For me, religions explain the universe based on a certain set of basic assumptions. These assumptions are not to be questioned, but rather they are presented as truths. You need faith to accept these assumptions. Some of these assumptions may resonate with personal experiences, but that doesn't make these assumptions true (as you yourself, if I remember correctly, have noted somewhere already). And there is my beef with religion.
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RE: Critical Thinking & Logical Deduction Are Becoming ... - 
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