Abstract: In this debate, Philosopher Philip Goff, human rights activist Shami Chakrabarti, and physicists George Ellis and Carlo Rovelli debate the role of faith and belief in politics and science.

Ellis argues an element of faith is necessarily required to navigate our everyday lives, but we must question those beliefs – in science and politics as in anything else.

Chakrabarti agrees that being human necessarily involves both faith and reason – emotion and logic – and argues we must examine and interrogate the intersection of those drivers, claiming the dichotomy between science and religion does not map onto the divide between emotion and reason.

Rovelli argues it makes no sense to draw a line between so-called blind faith and provable facts. Instead, our views about the world should always be up for debate in an effort to find the best possible answer. The best of humankind, he claims, is bourn of openness and a willingness to be convinced your ideas might be wrong.

Goff claims that the only thing we have direct access to is our own conscious experiences, and that in trusting our sensory experiences we must deploy and element of faith. While he advocates for this leap of faith, he argues it’s a contradiction of trust our sensory experiences to tell us something about the world in a way we do not trust our moral, or emotional experiences, to reveal something about the world.

I like Rovelli’s point. But the headline is interpretive. I don’t believe it requires a leap of faith to trust your sensory experiences. It takes knowledge and understanding and perhaps empathy to understand that you view the world not only through your eyes but through your emotions. You will have a much different perspective of an event if you’re feeling sad or if you are feeling elation. Same event, different visceral reaction. Knowing this is an absolute you can try to view the event as objectively as possible despite your emotional state in order to come to as clear an understanding of the situation as possible. This is no small effort but it is also no leap of faith.

Of course it takes a leap of faith. There’s no good argument against external world skepticism. Sensory experiences do not necessarily logically reflect a world out there - they could very well be akin to a mirage. In fact, this is a core question examined in thousands of years of Eastern philosophy.

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There doesn't need to be evidence against external world skepticism to make a good argument. It just wouldn't make much sense for reality to be made up by just myself right now and nothing to exist. And even if something as extreme as that were the case, what would change about my reality? There is no leap of faith required to trust my senses or emotions, that is literally the default behavior of a human.

>he argues it’s a contradiction of trust our sensory experiences to tell us something about the world in a way we do not trust our moral, or emotional experiences, to reveal something about the world.

what if i have experiences that tell me that my sensory experiences should be treated in a different way to my emotional ones in how they relate to the world? seems like the statement about what goff said oversimplified things.

 

obviously the knowledge we hold and act on knowledge doesnt require infallibility and so, when we think about it, its hard to actually rule out that any of our beliefs could be contradicted in the future (and this seems more likely for some beliefs than others); however, rovelli is right that anyone who wants to make sure their knowledge is as accurate as it can needs to have their ideas open for debate. neither do i think many everyday acts and things we do are adequately described psychologically or cognitively as a leap of faith.

In that case, are you sure I’m not a bot just responding to this thread, or worse, an AI struggling to achieve consciousness? There’s no good argument against the belief in God to religious believers because there’s no empirical evidence of His existence or lack thereof. I can’t tell if this is all a dream so I will let Descartes spend his life answering that question for me. Whether a dream in the 1600s or a computer simulation now is the same concept just with better internet. Is it a leap of faith for me to accept reality? I can pursue this rabbit hole thinking until I am insane. So for my own sanity I accept that I am real and that the world is not a simulation. I accept I am real and not in an elaborate dream.

Your point, though, is well taken because I have to think of a response. Or am I just collecting data from my confined environment and spewing it out mindlessly?

>Sensory experiences do not necessarily logically reflect a world out there - they could very well be akin to a mirage.

This is one of the most basic questions of philosophy famously presented by Descartes. He answers it by saying that even if our sensory experience is a mirage, our experience of the mirage is real, and so there has to be "a" world.

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>There’s no good argument against external world skepticism.

"External world skepticism" denies the very platform of logic on which it stands asking to be dispelled.

I think the leap of faith Goff is claiming is pertaining to the principle of induction rather than our sensory experiences. I don't need faith to smell a guava for example. But I do take it on faith that the sun will rise tomorrow because it has done so every day in the past.

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you give one example of the failure of a single sensory ability from a certain distance under a certain set of circumstances and you claim that invalidates all sensory experience

nonsense

You can accept that it's a leap of faith and still not drive yourself crazy over it. We rarely have perfect information on anything in this world, yet we still need to ultimately make conclusions. It's nothing new.

>It just wouldn't make much sense for reality to be made up by just myself right now and nothing to exist.

You're conflating "making sense" with "able to be proven." It doesn't have to "make sense" to you when nothing else can be proven in any way, shape, or form... But that doesn't mean you have to act based solely on what can be proven.

I definitely concur w/ accepting it.

In cognitive theory, emotional experience is a consequence of interpreting sensory experiences. E.g, sensing threat=feel anxious.

Trusting anything requires a leap of faith but it's easy to see that our feelings will be skewed to the extent that our interpretations is skewed. Feeling anxious doesn't prove that a threat is there since we have limited access, through our senses, to what is really there.

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There is also no good argument for external world skepticism. It is nothing more than a hypothetical possibility, with zero empirical evidence to support it. Nor, is there any good reason to believe it to be the case.

I've been really disconnected from my emotions due to CPTSD. I recently reconnected and man this is so true. There's a whole subtle world based on emotions out there that I've never been able to truly see and understand. I never even knew that because this missing piece was not an actual part of my reality since I was a kid. It's been an absolutely wild experience.

This is why when indoctrinating kids there is usually long conversations about faith and what it means. As someone who was sent to church through childhood I was not alone in being confused by the concept. To use the word faith in relation to external stimuli voids that word it's current meaning. Faith is a concerted effort to believe; a kid doesn't need faith to know fun, nap time, the colour green, but a kid needs to be told to have faith in an omniscient being and to have faith in a man they have never met.

While I understand the point being made here regarding the word, using it interchangeably in this fashion is lighting a pedantic rage inside me. To me it would make more sense to say you believe your senses than to say you have faith in them.

(belief: an acceptance that a statement is true or that something exists.
"his belief in the value of hard work")

(faith: complete trust or confidence in someone or something.)

Do you really have faith in your sensory perception? Mine tricks me al the time. However I do believe my senses most of the time.

No, I am not conflating anything. I am just saying that such a ridoculous idea does not require evidence in order to be discarded.

Example: You can't prove I am not actually a raccoon pretending to be a woman online, but the idea is so silly it does not deserve serious consideration.

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From a scientific perspective, the world as you experience it is unambiguously made up by your brain. There's no directly experiencing the world. Only taking the electrical and chemical inputs from your sensory organs and interpreting them to create a model of what the world most likely is. It is a flawed and imperfect guess at reality based on the best available data. That is why illusions exist.

It is a slightly flawed interpretation of reality, not a guess. And we use the scientifc method to measure things, even obvious ones, to better understand the world. Our perspective is not limited at all, illusions are fun and they show our brains can be tricked, but we are still pretty damn good at experiencing the world.

You do need some amount of faith that it is, actually, a guava that you're smelling, if you were blindfolded and made to smell a variety of fruits, would you confidently be able to pick out whether any of them is guava? Or more specifically, which one it is? If you ate them all, or better yet, took the blindfold off, then you'd know for sure, but you'd actually have to look, which is the leap of faith, not a big one by any means in this case, but if you were trying to pick out, say, a political ideology that you believe in, you wouldn't be able to find it by believing that all politics are dumb, and a waste of time, youth average to take the leap and entertain the idea, whether you find what you're looking for within it or not. You've gotta open the box to find out what exactly is inside, this extends to emotional boxes as well.

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This legitimately blew my mind

> It's entirely possible that this train currently running over me is an illusion. There is no objective proof it's really happening

It's basically just a stupid thing for people like lex Fridman to wax eloquent about in podcasts. No one actually can or does live their life as if it might be true

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True. The last decade or so I've seen an argument emerge around the value and role of emotions as a source of truth with most proponents seemingly more interested in validating emotions as equally valuable, equally capable, as reason. I've always been wary of these argument as they seem like an attempt by emotionally indulgent people to justify being indulgent, especially if they aren't considered particularly intelligent in the normal sense.

'Emotional Intelligence' is a phrase that makes me cringe for similar reason. I'm still not even sure what that's supposed to be as every definition sounds more like a skillset for, or knowledge base of, emotion, not intelligence. We wouldn't say a physicist is Physics Intelligent or a doctor Medical Intelligent or an athlete is athletics intelligent. The choice of calling it intelligence seems a disingenuous attempt to equate emotions with intellect, as emotion is much maligned as a trustworthy system of assessing truth. One could make a similar case for being culturally aware and call it Cultural Intelligence, and it would seem equally inaccurate. It's a bit confusing tbh.

Then we are acting in order to impact that simulation, and we often think we see the results and consequences of our actions. Still no leap of faith, we are just not looking at what we thought we were.

What metric are you using to determine how close our experience is to objective reality?

Edit: I'm asking in good faith.

I've never heard that we can find the difference between our experience and objective reality beyond comparing our personal perspectives with each other.

There's a difference here. If you want to make sure that a fruit you are holding is what was described to you as the guava fruit, then yes, you do make a certain leap of faith. But you do not need faith to actually experience a guava if that makes any sense. The sensory experience is the most certain and vivid experience that we all have.

Yes, "I think therefore I am" is the famous quote by Descartes which illustrates his ideas about reality. Even if everything is a dream, there remains the fact that he is dreaming, and so there must be something to contain that dream.

Is that faith, or is it just an estimate using probability? Do I have faith that I can steal candy from a baby, or do I just suspect the chances are good?

To me, I don't have faith that my sensory experiences are reporting what is "real", I have just noticed if I try to impact the environment around me, it usually has a noticable effect.

To support this, think of a worm. They likely do not have a concept of faith, or the mental faculties to have faith. But they get sensory information that they use. Not because they have faith that their senses are reporting the truth, but because it their senses are the only source of ostensibly outside information that they have available, and they seem to be working correctly.

From a personal side, I had a giant retinal tear in each eye that made it look like tiny dot-like gnats were flying everywhere at all times (it was actually lots of floaters). While it was obnoxious, it did not shake my faith, I just learned to ignore the inputs that didn't seem to be correct. Then, when I actually came across a cloud of gnats, I relied on my other senses to confirm that they were, in fact, real. I didn't have to change my faith at any point, I just reacted to the inputs.

Right?

Bet all these big brains brush and floss to prevent cavities.

>It is a flawed and imperfect guess at reality based on the best available data. That is why illusions exist.

And persistent objective reality is why you can test and find illusions even though they deceive your senses.

> is unambiguously made up by your brain.

Unless you wanna fit the universe inside your brain you're limited to your model but that's very different from external world skepticism.

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This is just a ad, look beyond the message and you'll see it's reference faith in some form of belief. You don't need belief to be human you just are human.

"Emotional intelligence": have you ever heard someone say "i don't know how / what to feel about something" ? At first it baffled me, for me it was something obvious, like an instant reaction. But then i understood they have no IDEEA about it and with the lack of an ideea came the lack of an apropriate emotional response.

Some of us have that "gut feeling" or intuition or some other predictive, associative mechanism that drives our emotions for us beyond learned experience.

As an excercise think about this: how would you feel / percieve the news that an alien ship landed on Earth but no communication has been established? What would your emotion default to?

Somehow you would have to think about it first. Are you intelligent enough to extrapolate instantly with the information you have ? Would your current knowledge drive you to joy? Fear?

Why?

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>And persistent objective reality is why you can test and find illusions even though they deceive your senses.

Interesting, I wasn't aware there was proof of what objective reality is like to compare to, other than comparing to other flawed models.

There could be some crossover in pattern recognition behaviours that may be construed as 'leap-of-faith' adjacent. This possibly points more towards skewed expectations due to life events with a high impact influencing interpretations of stimuli, good or bad, perhaps more profoundly on the bad interpretations as a matter of experiential response.

I think we hit cognitive blindspots at times, where some thing like the idea of a 'leap of faith' has a specific impulse associated with it. Sometimes these ideas aren't so much a conscious thought process, but more of a 'taking for granted' that the next step is always there and positively reinforcing. An example might be thinking unconsciously 'I have been safe at all times in my life, therefore all times are safe' and pushing boundaries that can seem like leaps of faith in the everything-is-going-to-be-alright category, even though never consciously made.

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Why would you think you're looking at anything unless you believe there is something there to look at?

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Interesting I wasn't aware I said there was proof of what objective reality is like to compare to something other than models.

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Yeah, the argument seems to be that a mind cannot exist without a universe to contain it but that assumes we know the nature of the mind/universe, unless I'm missing something.

Then what did you mean by that quote? Are you simply assuming there is an objective reality?

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What would proof of objective reality look like to you?

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I don't know that there is such a thing, that's why I ask

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There is no such thing because you could always be in the Matrix or whatever. It's a stupid thing to take seriously and I doubt many people do.

Let me know when "you" stop paying your bills because objective reality isn't provable. You should check out the incompleteness theorem if you're interested in unprovable truths.

It's just not that simple.

Eating something that destroys my guts reduces my serotonin levels to depression levels. The serotonin levels control my emotions.

This in turn changes how I experience the same exact sensory input.

So, it's both. Not one or the other. There's no theory here. There's only pretending to interpret reality through one of the inputs that lets us experience life.

In Indian philosophy, “Samskaras” are emotional biases we hold on to due to past experiences. Samskaras essentially skew our perceptions of reality. Therefore, the practice of a Yogi is to let go of Samskaras in an effort to be present with what’s actually taking place bring one closer to pure awareness.

I’m not Indian or a yogi, but this idea brought me a lot of clarity and is a good reason why I am in an effort to not judge the world based on my knee jerk emotional state.

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I pay my bills because evidence supports the idea that it's what keeps me warm and dry, but that's still a leap of faith I'm making, I don't actually know it to be true.

I know all about the incompleteness theorem, I'm not sure what you mean by unprovable truths, maybe my definition of truth is too rigorous for this conversation.

It is not a "leap" to accept that paying bills keeps you warm and dry. There might be a infinitesimal sliver of faith required but that is the level of faith required with all truths.

If you know all about incompleteness then you know incompleteness is the fact that we cannot construct a formal logical system that can prove all true statements.

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How did you go about reconnecting, if you don't mind me asking.

Why not accept both of them as they are along with their epistemological uncertainty? Why even bring faith into the picture? You can't know anything with absolute certainty other than the fact of existence.

"And to live without belief in anything at all would be considered empty and meaningless". This is an unverified belief in itself and the whole framing of the discussion is based on shoddy assumptions like this. It presupposes that one cannot live a meaningful life without beliefs, which is not true once you dive deep into what a meaningful life would entail. Beliefs give you the illusion of knowledge, which lead to a distorted perception of reality. Thus, I'd argue you can't live a meaningful life with beliefs as you are no longer perceiving reality as it is and accepting the uncertainty of your sense perception. The "leap of faith" acts more like a defense mechanism of your brain for psychological security, a security that is not necessary for living.

As someone with diagnosed psychotic symptoms attached to my diagnosed autism, sensory experiences are ABSOLUTELY a leap of faith at times.

No, do not have bugs crawling on my skin even though I feel them sometimes, because I can't see them. No one else can either because no one is addressing them.

No, people aren't calling my name in 50 different directions, and I know because no one else is looking around or at me with expectations.

So I don't react, because despite the legitimate-feeling sensory experience no individual is going to take kindly to me screaming and running around scratching myself or yelling "who said my name".

So no, the title is correct.

I don't mind whatsoever. Here is a decent overview I wrote. The two links in it are how I've interpreted the schema I'm using along with the ketamine sessions that instilled the belief in me on such a ridiculously deep level.

Are you trying to explain what 'Emotional Intelligence'(EI) is? Or just discussing the topic in general? I'm a little confused what you're trying to explain.

It’s a loaded and misused word and it makes me so angry when people use it so freely. Also raised strictly religious and left that system, but as a child faith was obedience to authority and accepting everything they told you as fact without questioning or rationale.

Contrast that to faith that a partner is honest with you, or faith (or lack thereof) in a justice system and we can quickly see that that type of faith is based on an evaluation of prior actions to determine a level of confidence. Nothing is infallible so sure, confidence requires some predictive “leap of faith”

That’s so different from faith in an unknowable, unseeable, inscrutable deity rewarding you after death, or faith requiring subservience or disregarding evidence.

> 'Emotional Intelligence' is a phrase that makes me cringe for similar reason. I'm still not even sure what that's supposed to be as every definition sounds more like a skillset for, or knowledge base of, emotion, not intelligence.

I was trying to explain the link between emotion and intelligence in the expression itself and how to test for it.

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So, just to recap a little here. The principle of induction is a principle that animals have as well as humans and it is precisely that we trust or believe that if things happened a certain way repeatedly, then they will continue to do so in the future. There is not really a "reason" to expect that but there is the fact that when things happen repeatedly, we expect them to keep happening the same way.

>Why not accept both of them as they are along with their epistemological uncertainty? Why even bring faith into the picture? You can't know anything with absolute certainty other than the fact of existence.

This! Pretty much where the line should have been drawn. Both our sensory information and our emotional experiences reveal things about the world with different degrees of certainty. Period.

Serotonin causing depression has never been proven despite a lot of research.

Have a look at Dependent Origination, the steps in the process.

You might want to look into reliabilism and/or the work of GE Moore.

Descartes is not the endpoint of epistemology.

> There’s no good argument against external world skepticism.

There's also no good reason to accept it

> There's no directly experiencing the world.

You say that as if there is some possible world where we experience it "directly" and our current world falls short somehow.

That's a pretty odd view - how much more "directly" could we experience the world?

This is why I’m an advocate for allowing emotional pain to teach us how to manage ourselves and formulate healthy beliefs about reality.

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Not when it's consistently reinforced by everyone around us.

Are they equivocating on "faith" here or do they just mean "trust" and not "religious faith"?

Awesome! Thank you.

That's an expectation derived from evidence. Thus, at least using the definitions I use, it is an antithesis of faith. Faith requires a belief in spite of a there being a lack of evidence or contradictory evidence.

The difference being, if a repeatable phenomenon does not repeat, a person's expectations simply change as the new evidence is included. This is based in proof, not faith, as faith requires some sort of apprehension or trust in something beyond the evidence. Thus, for a person using probability to influence their expectations, their understanding of the world is far more robust and flexible than one using faith.

I don't get on an airplane because I have faith in the pilot. I do it because the repeated phenomenon of planes landing safely allows me to adjust my expectations accordingly. I'd a plane crashes somewhere in the world, I would still probably be willing to get on a plane the next day, as the probability barely changes. If I had faith that airplanes don't crash, that faith would be far more shaken, as it seems that they do.

Similarly, I do not have faith that the sun will rise tomorrow, as I understand that the sun is a celestial object that could be subject to any number of extremely rare astrological phenomenon that would destroy it. I do, however, expect the sun to rise, as I understand the probability of such an event is low.

I don't trust I'm looking at something. I just have personal evidence that within my own experience, be it solipsistic or not, that interacting with the things identified by my senses has been effective at modifying my experience, solipsistic or not.

I do not have faith that I'm looking at something, I just do not have any evidence to suggest I am being misled. In the cases that I DO have evidence of being misled, such as optical illusions, I actively do not think I am looking at what I am seeing. And in such cases, no belief or trust is undermined, as it never existed in the first place.

Not OP, but I've been doing somatic therapy twice a week for over a year. It has radically changed my life for the better. I finally found a good therapist that I trust and connect with (after 3 previous attempts that didn't really help...). For me, the somatic aspect was *really* important, as reconnecting with your body will also reconnect you to your emotions.

My therapist helps me feel safe enough to engage with my emotions and helps me accept them and understand them. She helps me make sense of what I've experienced during my life. She also helps me find new ways of looking at the world, at myself, and at my relationships with those around me.

Other commenters are telling you nonsense about how Descartes argues for an external world.

His argument in the Meditations first establishes, as you and others said, that he exists but then goes from there to establish that he has an idea of an infinite being, an idea that he argues could only come from an actual infinite being that exists independently of his own mind (basically, the idea's content is too much to have ever come from any finite being like himself).

From there, he establishes that this being must have created him and must be good, so would not have created him with mental faculties that would be unable to detect their own errors. Since a systematic falsity of perception would be an undetectable error, our senses must not be systematically false. Therefore, at least some of the external objects we perceive must exist and any mistakes we make about what objects are actually out there must be able to be corrected, as we do in natural philosophy.

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i dunno, maybe we or i have a different definition of 'leap of faith' but the 'taking for granted' thing almost seems opposite to the idea of a leap of faith to me. this is kind of why i dont like the word faith in this context. its such a loaded and inflated term when what people mean about what is being discussed in this thread could be expressed with much clearer and more neutral words.

totally agree. most of the time i was thinking about this thread was about what "faith" actually means in this context. its such a loaded term when what has been talked about in this thread could use more neutral and straightforward terms. i wonder if part of the use of the word is just to make the discussion seem more exciting.

>if you were blindfolded and made to smell a variety of fruits, would you confidently be able to pick out whether any of them is guava?

hundred percent

How does any of that relate to the original comment?

>Sensory experiences do not necessarily logically reflect a world out there

Linking your personal experience to the model of reality your mind has created is not in question here.

I'm about to go down the somatic path to try to strengthen this connection. Any suggestions on good books? I really love that you are believing in yourself. That's some really good shit. You fucking rock man!

>Similarly, I do not have faith that the sun will rise tomorrow, as I understand that the sun is a celestial object that could be subject to any number of extremely rare astrological phenomenon that would destroy it.

Yes, but why do you expect astrological phenomenons to be the same tomorrow? Why do you expect gravity to function as it functions today tomorrow?

Hahaha

There might not be any meaningful distinction between the two

Some have suggested emotions, in some sense, are a sensation of our internal homeostasis

Evidence and my fallible estimate of probability.

Okay. The emotion part is pretty apparent but where is the intelligence part?

I have no issue with the quote you included. My only issue was with the idea that faith is a necessary part of having said sensory experiences. Whether or not it reflects a "real" world is immaterial.

Yes, you figured it out. We all live in Descartes' dream.

There's not a 100% certainty of the world not being a creation of my own mind or a mirage of some sort, but that conclusion leads to a bit of a dead end in terms of further philosophizing or further anything really... It would involve too many mental gymnastics and isn't a very "evident" idea... Can I suggest a reading?

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The definition of knowledge is justified true belief (Pierce i think). So we don't have acces to the world in itself. But we do create justified arguments and conclusion. Human brains simultanious create the world around us as well as the feeling of being a self (Joscha Bach). I would say that we are bound to belief or faith but we have to back it up by justified logic or feelings.

You can still have all the knowledge and not connect the dots, just like a toddler that has the knowledge yet still throws a tantrum. Or racists that insist in theyr hate while having all the needed knowledge. Or hate towards those different ... you get the gist.

Theyr feelings are primal, uneducated. They hate just because they picked some cues here and there while they grew, emotional cues that now are defaults and bypass even routine checks.

Why do we need to trust our emotional experience, can't we just experience it without coloring it with what we think it is? We add false data to it if we try to develop a faith-based opinion on it. Real trust and fact will emerge with time almost unwittingly when certain unbiased data occur recurringly, we don't need to give special attention to trust it.

My exact same thought!

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In those cases emotion has overwhelmed reason. Higher reasoning and analysis are literally not functioning when emotions are so strong. I would argue they don't have access to most of their knowledge in those moments.

All emotions are primal, though, as the limbic system is one of the oldest parts of the brain, developing much earlier than the faculties of reason. Are you suggesting only emotional responses you deem 'bad' are primal and uneducated?

They hate because their experiences trained those coping responses and those coping systems worked effectively to protect them. Those responses are often still protecting them. They didn't just mimic others to learn deeply held responses, they almost certainly had traumatic experiences that provoked the creation of strong defenses the rnateojg motivators to keep those responses. Any attempt to highlight those defenses, triggers them.

I don't see how any of that relates to intelligence, though. Self awareness and emotional management skills would be more accurate in my mind, neither rof which are intelligence. Intellect is not a characteristic of emotions at all, it's a characteristic of reason, a faculty that is often in directly competition with the emotions of the limbic system for driving behavior.

This is why I think people who are easy to emotion, or mostly drive by emotion, may use 'emotional intelligence' as a term to gain validation and elevate emotion to the same level of respect and value as reason, especially when they may not possess much of capacity for reason.

They also reveal illusions

If you trust those experieences as they are, there is no need to leap any faith.

Natural steady state... Your choice of words here is remarkable. Are you into spirituality as well?

It only took me one trip on dissociatives to realise how much my sensory experience is dependent on small changes in my brain chemistry. Kind of shattered the illusion of reality being this stable, objective thing. Everyone is different and it makes sense therefore that their subjective experience of reality is at least somewhat different to mine.

Even from a physics perspective we know that what we experience is at best an approximation of reality. Vision is basically just radar with high resolution. There’s a lot missing.

Not the OP or even the person you've been discussing this with, but I enjoyed Descartes in undergrad philosophy, but regret not digging further into Meditations, so would love a rec from someone more schooled in this realm.

This is not the realm of philosophy, really. But even a psychologist will tell you that trusting your emotional instinct wouldn't be helpful all the time.

>To me it would make more sense to say you believe your senses than to say you have faith in them

Yes, but let's draw a line in the sand here. Even though your senses probably do not accurately reflect objective reality, your experience of your senses is absolutely certain. So there would not be much "believing" involved.

After that... Things get a little fuzzy in terms of certainty... Less and less certain... Emotions and thoughts are the runner-up... Immediate memories... Further memories... Universal laws... And so on...

I've actually not read Descartes myself, and I'm due to! But I was going to suggest Russel's chapter on Idealism from The Problems of Philosophy. Most of everything I said here was really regurgitated Russel.

I found your cat, call me if you want it back

Nope. After all this I believe even less in any kind of spiritually. I fully believe that none of that is real. But that's not entirely accurate, it's absolutely real to some of us depending on the strength of our belief. It's all in our brains and I find that amazing and remarkable. I think of it as I found gods grace within me and it didn't require belief in anything but myself. It's within us all because at the core of each of us is a beautiful person full of joy and wonder and hope. It's the world and it's experiences that drags us all into the dark and keeps us from seeing the light within our selves.

So yea. I worship at the altar of self now. All of this made me a true believer in each of us. I went my entire life without even knowing about half of it. Even the fact that that is possible is amazing. Now that I've found myself it's even more amazing. Humanity is so beautiful and so ridiculously complex and we have our brains to thank for all of it.

Hah! Could say this to be my opinion too. I was religious, lost faith completely, then found spirituality that's unrelated to religion. That spirituality is entirely based on Self-knowledge. The reason why I found your choice of words remarkable is because it is the verbatim description given by the teacher I follow. If you're ever inclined to read, do check out 'I Am That' by Nisargadatta Maharaj. It's available online for free.

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Ah, I don’t have any book recs. But I wish you the best! Somatic work is definitely worth trying. Good luck on your path :)

I would hesitate to say that any chemical "controls" our emotions. If it was so simple depression would be a thing of the past.
Truth is we barely know anything about how the brain functions. The belief that we do is based on pure hybris. The replication crisis in medicine and psychology can attest to that.

I'm not sure how you came to the conclusion in your second sentence. It's simply illogical outside of major assumptions, in a vacuum.

Your second paragraph also does nothing to support it. In fact, it borders on countering your initial conclusion.

Maybe you're getting tripped up on the word "controls" though. Reality is a set of various systems that come together to produce something. What I'm saying is that hormones, which are known to be tightly controlled to emotions, have an equal or sometimes greater input than raw, real-time senses.

Now, if you want to call memories "senses", or learned behaviors "senses" (not sure why you would), then there might be some play there. But the way the words were stated that I initially responded to, I fully disagree that sensory input is the lone, key driver of how we interpret reality in the moment, and react the next.

Even our human-built computer systems are not that naive.

Neat, thanks! I named an old car after Russell, and yet, hypocrite that I am, I've never actually had the pleasure of reading him... better late than never, I guess.

I just read the synopsis and that's exactly in line with what I have been thinking. I love the validation I'm feeling here. Just ordered the book. Thanks!

To go a bit further it's like we're this perfect being that has the ability to believe and that belief is responsible for reality as we know it. That belief is shaped by the experiences we go through, the processes and interpretations in our brain. That ability to believe is our self. It's shaped by the sum total of everything we have ever experienced up to that moment in time. That moment we experience. The total experience is the being we present to the world. It's the beauty of humanity. It's the human condition shaped by the human experience. It's belief filtered through a brain and presented through a body and it's all intermeshed on a level that is truly incomprehensible.

It's ultimately all powered by our self and the power of the belief in our self. That's why I worship at the altar of self. The more secure I am in my self the stronger I can be for those that really need me. I need to find people that can help support me living my authentic self by helping them to do the same.

You truly strengthen the belief in self by living our authentic selves and showing understanding and acceptance for the experience that led us to that moment. Showing comfort and care. Kindness and respect. Showing love. You strengthen the belief in self by showing love to yourself. You strengthen the belief in others by showing love to them. By helping them to live their authentic selves. Showing them understanding and acceptance and kindness and care. The stronger the belief in self the stronger we will all be and the stronger will be our love. I would much rather live in a world full of love rather than the darkness I have known my entire life. That really strengthens my belief.

You could say it's my religion if I believed in that. It actually feels like at it's core we're all these perfect beings going through the belief/doubt sim. I think that's amazing and I can't wait to discover what's next. We will all benefit from the power of belief in self regardless if we believe in it or not. The stronger each one of us believes in ourselves the quicker it will happen. That's why its so beautiful.

I don't see anything "illogical" about it. Perhaps you can elaborate? If chemicals controlled our brain, like the medical field and psychiatry has believed (and appears to largely still believe), depression which, in this reductive view, is purely a chemical imbalance. This is why anti-depressants are often quickly given to anyone suffering from depression. But if this was actually true, the anti-depressants must be hyper-effective. The direct effect is however relatively miniscule.
Hesitating from saying that our brain works in any highly specific way (chemicals controlling our brain) and stating that we barely know how the brain functions is hardly contradictory. Also, the support in my small 3-sentence paragraph is the replication crisis: Somewhere around half of all studies published within psychology and medicine is proven false within 1 year after publishing. That is not a healthy and normal figure in science, it is abyssmal, and that's only the studies being tested. This attest to the fact that there are major fundamental misunderstandings and fundamental assumptions within each field which are completely incorrect. Fruit from a sick tree, you could say. That is the support in my short paragraph, it was just summed up by "the replication crisis".

It's definitely the word "control" I react on. Again, it strikes me as overly reductive. There is a significant difference between saying that hormones can control, i.e. dictate, our emotions, and saying that they play an important role in how our emotions emerge and function.

I was actually not talking at all about what you initially replied to regarding emotional experience.

Then you need to take an official logic course or buy a book on it.

> It just wouldn't make much sense for reality to be made up by just myself right now and nothing to exist.

this is why no one takes Solipsism seriously at all.

>True. The last decade or so I've seen an argument emerge around the value and role of emotions as a source of truth with most proponents seemingly more interested in validating emotions as equally valuable, equally capable, as reason. I've always been wary of these argument as they seem like an attempt by emotionally indulgent people to justify being indulgent, especially if they aren't considered particularly intelligent in the normal sense.

i mean separating the two isnt possible.

what one considers rational and logical comes from emotion, so much so that anyone who successfully separates the two would have no opinions on anything other than simple cause an effect.

is it ok to hurt people? is welfare good? is abortion ok? is morality useful? what defines 'good' or 'bad'?

literally all of these start in emotion and use logic to justify it (its how all human cognition works, emotion first and logic to justify it)

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My fucking god man. This dude is in my brain! Just the first chapter is making me feel so much validation! I have been sitting here wondering if I'm just making all this shit up to make myself feel better but no. This is actually it. Thank you so very much for this book!

The nature of I, experiencing and experiencer, connecting to myself by disconnecting from what isn't real, the nature of reality, the power of love that is under it all. It all really jives with me. Two minds that I call my thinking Self and the other I call my emotional Self. The emotional Self is where we are all connected. It's where beauty and joy and hope lives. It's why when I get close to it I want to connect with others. The thinking Self is isolation. It's where judgement and blame and hate lives. It's why when I get close to it I want to be alone.

The more I read this the more I start thinking there are multiple realities. Each moment, each experience, is composed of the reality of the thinking Self and the reality of the emotional Self. It seems like he managed to exist in the emotional reality by denying the thinking reality. I lived my life in the thinking reality by denying the emotional reality. The thinking reality was extremely logical, constant awareness of the outside, and full of hate. It was the epitome of control. The emotional reality denies logic, concentrates awareness on the inside, and is full of love. It is the epitome of surrender. Living competely in the thinking reality and suppressing my emotional Self I was depressed and suicidal. Right now I'm leaning heavily into the emotional reality and as a result I'm full of laughter and hope. I'm also intentionally suppressing my thinking Self so I'm naive and vulnerable. This shift is how I have experienced life over the past few weeks. It is a war between my thinking and emotional Self. I was fully on the thinking side and I'm now struggling to stay on the emotional side. I'm doing trauma therapy.

There is something above this though, another reality. The place where belief and doubt lie. Those beliefs determine the reality we experience. Beliefs are also changed through experience. Experiences that can come entirely from my Self. With sufficient connection to my Self I can experience whatever I want. If I can experience whatever I want then I can change my beliefs. If I can change my beliefs then I should be able to willingly believe anything. But if I can willingly believe anything that makes an infinite loop, or redundancy, idk the words to explain this. It immediately breaks down. I would experience everything and nothing. I would exist everywhere and nowhere. If this were possible it would have already happened and it would always be happening. I feel like that all describes a singularity. Ultimately that's what we all are. What he calls the shining light. The best way I can describe it is we are the ability to believe and doubt. That is the true nature of Self. We are an unimaginable being going through the belief sim.

You can have an emotion or thought, an experience, without understanding it so understanding is a component of all this too. You need knowledge to get to an understanding. Knowledge and understanding is somewhere between experience and belief. Experiences grant knowledge which becomes understanding and (with enough of them? sufficient strength of them? I feel like understanding is binary) eventually belief. So it's Experience -> Knowledge -> Understanding -> Belief. Which is painfully obvious when I write it out like that.

So to willfully change a belief you have to change the understandings that compose it. You need to experience to gain knowledge to change the understanding. Ultimately, specific experiences can result in a specific belief. But this new belief has to fight with all existing beliefs. So it takes a sufficiently powerful experience or a great many smaller ones to change a belief, all while knowing and understanding. Again, this seems pretty obvious.

It's like a stack. My thinking reality affects my emotional reality, and vice versa, and they both roll up to affect my belief reality. So by having control over my experience I should be able to control my beliefs. But then control is a thinking concept while surrender is an emotional concept. I have to control my thoughts while surrendering my emotions. That's how I connect to Self. With a pure connection to Self I have complete control over my experience and with complete control over my experience I can directly control my beliefs. With a strong enough belief I become the singularity. I become Self.

Now I understand how people can spend their lives in meditation.

I just had an epiphany. I am an Idea. Shaped by belief that is built from experience.