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!