Locked in the dogma

[Angrboda]

You climb the mountain. When you get at very top you enjoy a beautiful feeling (the vision and all other inner feeling and the satisfaction to be there).
When you get dawn to earth your friend ask you...........WAS IT NICE TO BE THERE AT THE VERY TOP?
You try your best to describe how nice was to be there.
Unfortunately your friend can only grasp less then 1% of what you where feeling when you were up there.
That is how the system works.
Unless you climb up there yourself there is no way in the world that you can feel that magical feeling to be up there.
At the same time unless you practice what i am talking about there is no way i can demonstrate or make you feel what i feel.
This of course does not mean that what i am talking does not exist.
In other term refusing to understand this point is a clear sign of locking oneself into the dogma.

I tell the blind man, "climb upon my back, and I will take you to the beautiful mountain." And so he does, and we journey many hours, and finally I stop and set him down. I say to him, "Isn't this beautiful, the cool mountain air blowing over you?" He agrees, and I have him climb once more upon my back, and many hours later we arrive in the tavern. Inside the tavern, the blind man regales the people with a tale of his journey up the mountain, and how wonderful it was to experience the summit. The people believe he went to the top of the mountain, for such things are not unheard of, but none can feel what he feels. After he is done telling his tale, I tell mine. The truth is, the blind man never went up the mountain. I had many accomplices, who, used fans to make wind, lights and glowing coals to manipulate wind and temperature, and people and devices to imitate the sounds of nature that one might hear upon ascending a mountain. The fact is that we never went far from the village, and never even approached the mountain. The blind man is unconvinced. He declares, "I know what I felt, it was the mountain, I felt the cool mountain air. I heard birdsong in the air." We clap him on the shoulder and order another round of drinks.

Why did the blind man believe he was on the mountain? Surely the tricks they had played on him, the breezes, the sounds, these made it easy for him to believe, surely. But the key ingredient was what the blind man was expecting. He expected to be taken to the mountaintop, so he interpreted these things he experienced as a part of being taken to the mountain top. If he had been told that he was being taken to a stream in the woods, he would have interpreted the same feelings and sensations as evidence that he had visited a stream. It was his expectations which led him astray, not the wind, or the noises, or anything else. How do you know your expectations about this mountaintop are not also leading you astray. You insist that you can clearly tell that they aren't, just as the blind man insisted he was on the mountain. The truth is, you have nothing but your "feeling" that you are right, and your confidence in its truth, so you have no way of knowing that you are not like the blind man. And all your protestations simply tell us that you are ignorant of how we fool ourselves about these things, and fail to take that into account. It's not that I don't "understand" your point as you say, I don't agree with your implicit point that my "feelings" and "experience" of such a climb can be reliably depended upon not to lead me astray. I can't, because after studying psychology for many years, it's clear that the mind can easily lead itself astray in this manner.

In Robert Burton's book On Being Certain, he gives the example of returning to your hometown 20 years after you left in order to take part in a high school reunion. You arranged over the phone to meet at Izzy's house, and you'll all take Izzy's minivan to the reunion. Since this is your home town, you don't bother with maps, you just drive straight into town. You pull up in front of the house that you think is Izzy's and stop. You're sure this is Izzy's house. It's the same as it was 20 years ago, and you have a feeling of confidence that you are right. There's no way you could be mistaken. It just "feels" right. So you go and knock on the door, and a strange woman answers the door. She explains that this is not Izzy's house, and moreover it has never been Izzy's house — she has lived there alone for 40 years. So what went wrong? How could you have been so wrong about which house was the right one? The problem lies in how our brains tell us that we have the right answer. When we arrive at the right answer, our brains generate a feeling, and it is the presence of that feeling alongside the answer which we trust to indicate the answer is right. If we're reasonably intelligent, the bulk of the times we have that "feeling" we will also have the right answer. But not always. Sometimes, the feeling is generated in our brains accompanying the wrong answer, and perhaps at times generated for any answer. (People on certain drugs may report that everything "made sense." Is it possible that things did not actually make sense, but rather that the "feeling" that things "make sense" was stuck in the on position? I don't know, but it seems a distinct possibility.)

There is a neurological disorder known as Capgras delusion in which the patient can experience the sight of a loved one, a spouse or a parent, and believe that they are not that person's real spouse or parent, they just "look like" the person's spouse or parent, but really are simply insidious doubles. No matter how you reason with them, they're convinced these people aren't their real loved ones. For some Capgras delusion patients, you can have their loved one talk to them over the phone, and they will recognize and believe them to be the genuine article. V.S. Ramachandran has a theory about this. It is known that facial recognition in the brain travels through, not one, but two separate systems. The neural pathways proceed a ways, and then the signal is split. One goes to a visual processing center, the other goes to an emotional processing center. Ramachandran's theory is that the pathway to the emotional center is disrupted in Capgras delusion patients such that the visual processing center recognizes the visual similarity of the loved one, but because the pathway is cutoff, the brain never generates the feeling that this is the right person. So they see the person as identical, but they don't identify them as being the same as their loved one because the brain never generates the signal that they are "the right ones."

This has been a lot of information at once, but the ultimate question is, how do you know these experiences you have that you "feel" are important and truthful are in fact important and truthful? If you say that you feel that you can't be mistaken, you've fallen into a clever trap. Your brain determines right or wrong by generating such feelings, sometimes in the absence of being right. Perhaps these experiences of your are simply conditioning your brain to generate a "feeling" of rightness and meaning to accompany them, and they have no intrinsic rightness to them at all. Can you tell me how you tell the difference between experiences that have intrinsic rightness, and which generate the feeling of rightness, and those that generate the feeling, but have no intrinsic rightness? I don't think you can.

Moreover, believing that these experiences lead to truth because someone else has told you that they do is more dogmatic than being skeptical of the truth of these experiences. Saying that your beliefs are true, that no evidence will convince you otherwise, and not allowing the possibility that you might be wrong, that's dogmatic thinking; saying that these experiences are interesting, but you're not sure they tell us anything real, and you'll wait for some real evidence, that's not dogmatic; it's just sound reasoning. I think you are mistaken about who is engaged in dogmatic thinking here. Prove me wrong. I think you are letting your expectations lead you to a confidence in the truth of these things when you should be considerably less confident about them.