(July 26, 2013 at 10:40 am)wandering soul Wrote: Yet I mentally moved out of my familial reality structures when I was a teenager in the 1960s and found there were many other realities - cohesive, consistent, rational, empirically verifiable, providing verifiable explanations of the universe, humanity, life and everything. The one thing none of them were, and I realized could never be, was comprehensive. To get the whole picture I would have to start finding and collecting them.
I find I can be inside each of these, experience life through that reality, find it satisfying, meaning-creating, aesthetically pleasing, socially supporting, etc etc. I can also step outside of them and see them as others see them and see all of them interacting in relation to each other.
Interesting. By contrast, from a similarly young age, I realized that my opinion, worldview, 'reality' -call it what you will- was not coterminous with myself. I realized my understanding was like a fish. If a better explanatory system came along, it would eat the one I was operating under but that would diminish me not one bit. Instead, I would merely start operating under the 'larger fish' explanatory system. So ideas are not something to identify with and needn't be defended. That is why I don't enjoy debate as such. I'm much more interested in discovering what to think on a topic than in defending any particular formulation even if that describes what I currently believe to be true. I'd always prefer to take on the larger fish.
