What Is Your Epistemology?

April 16, 2026

Or maybe I should say, “What is YOUR epistemology?”

I.e., how do you manage? control? integrate? interface the connection? division? between what’s inside you and what’s outside you?

And when I say “you,” I mean your “mind.” Your conscious mind, the I that you think you are, and as Descartes said, “I think, therefore I am.” (Corollary: “therefore only my thinking is me.”)

And yes, the question assumes a division between inside and outside, something that (we are indoctrinated to think?) newborns have to learn!

This is me, that is not me. Epistemology 101. Or maybe, proto-epistemology, that which is necessary before anything else is possible.

For Descartes, epistemology and metaphysics? ontology? psychology? were separate, divided, not recognized as two different realms?

Or maybe, for Descartes, the body was simply another object in the room.

 

As a doctorate candidate in Philosophy at Boston University, back in the late 60’s and early 70’s, my focus was decidedly epistemic.

I had undergone a crisis that broke my mental world wide open. And yes, it occurred with my first dose of LSD. For me, psychedelics were a teaching tool, not instruments of pleasure or escape.

That first dose suddenly catapulted me into “another world.”

WHAT?

My strongly held, dogmatic Roman Catholic world-view had just been relativized, to become one among many.

For if there is more than one world, than there are many worlds.

That instantaneous INTUITIVE conclusion opened, indeed electrified my right brain/heart.

Thank you, LSD (which I took only once more and also for what it could teach me.)

 

So there I was, suddenly broken open into awareness of many worlds. My former Cartesian epistemology shattered into an infinity of dimensionless points, any combination of which could be used to “frame up” a space to be filled with ideas.

Aside: For an astrological treatment of epistemological relativity, you might want to check out my e-book:

Saturn/Uranus in Sagittarius

 

In other words, what I wanted to “believe,” was up to me!

In other words, my LSD experience in my mid-20s anticipated the current, ongoing, and dynamically escalating crisis that has thrown both humans, and our history and institutions into an epistemic morass.

What is real? What is not? By what measure? Whose reality? What’s reality? And how does AI figure into all this?

 

Yes, here we are, over 60 years later, approaching the singularity, thanks to AI which not only mimics/duplicates the function of the left brain but is now exploding exponentially into infinity.

But the right brain/heart connection? Ignored. Sacrosanct. It’s the one Descartes epistemology doesn’t mention, except to say that “God (since God is “perfect”) guarantees that what I think I know is true.”

Okay, fast forward to NOW. Where in hell, or in heaven, or on earth, or in my body, or in my consciousness, increasingly sensed as paradoxically both alone and all-one ARE WE???

Time to balance the left and right brains, folks. Time to allow our intuition its own escape velocity.

Which reminds me: back when I was beginning to question everything, I asked my teacher, Joseph Agassi — a Popperian, and ultimately positivistic philosopher who however, sensed that positivism was a dead end — about “intuition.”

“Intuition?” Agassi sniffed dismissively: “There’s no way to prove it!”

Yep,  intuition has to be stuffed back where it belongs, lest it upset  the left brain dominance that still infects our scientistic society.

BORING!

Walking Reflections on the Future of Education: Indiana University (with photos)

April 15, 2026

Scampi and I took a walk through the mile-long IU campus today (its eastern edge about 6 blocks from where I live) and I brought my phone along for photos. Most people walking also carry phones. . . but it’s rare for me.

Since “spring is busting out all over” I decided it would be a good time to show off the IU campus from a walker’s perspective. Plus, it turns out:

So I took 45 photos, and will drop a few of them here today, and again tomorrow.

But really, what’s been preoccupying me periodically ever since the covid con, and before that really, having counseled my brilliant inventor son Colin Cudmore (now 60, and for the last 2.5 years paralyzed from waist down, with horrible nerve pain 24/7) NOT to go to college, because it’s likely to disturb, even wall off, his natural intuitive reach. He did go, but for only one semester, and said later that he learned more from interacting with dorm mates than in any class.

Oops. Back to the original point of the above paragraph . . . I have been aware especially since covid, when so much “learning” went suddenly remote, and when so many used the so-called “mandated” “lockdown” to rethink their entire lives, that sooner or later, and probably sooner, college and college campuses are going to lose their function.

Just noticed today: Hampshire College to shut down after fall semester.

So yes, and especially due to the explosive, exponential growth of AI, and its ramifying implications, that time is likely, basically, NOW; now, when we are collectively, atmospherically immersed in volatile FIRE (Neptune, Saturn in Aries) and mental AIR (Pluto in Aquarius). Dreamy, imaginative Neptune (165 years) and primally powerful Pluto (248 years) are both long-cycled planets, so working in the deep unconscious level of everyone alive. Their recent entrances into these signs are just about to be joined by a third outer planet, eruptive Uranus, when it leaves steady, stubborn, security-oriented, slow-moving Taurus to enter quick thinking, airy Gemini, for the next seven years.

Then there’s a post by Elon I found on X this morning, reiterating what he’s been saying for a long time, and proving it with his own protocols for life: basically, each of us is a unique individual, and traditional schooling tries to turn us all into one and the same. Just the layout of a traditional classroom — identical desks in neat rows, horizontal and vertical — speaks volumes!

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From this morning’s walk: early springtime, IU campus, Bloomington IN. Most of the buildings feature famous Indiana limestone.

So, if campus life disappears, what will college campuses be used for and by whom? I can’t help but imagine entire villages occupying each of its magnificent, multistory limestone structures, with gardens all around. But, yeah, that’s just me. See greenacresvillage.org.