424. How To Discover What's True

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BdrmdMhf_sY

"If you are unable to find the truth right where you are, where else do you expect to find it?"

• -Dogen

Every century there's new stuff discovered that disproves old models of the world

How do we know? There are so many different philosophical, religious, and scientific systems. Different teachers teach different things.

How do you know science is true unless you have done a deep investigation into the foundations of what science is and how science works?

We have to be careful to not assume anything. We have to be willing to investigate how it actually is. (Objective and unbiased)

And if the way that it really is contradicts the way that I want it to be or how I think it is, I need to be willing to admit that I have been wrong. Have wrong assumptions or that the way that I want it to be is false.

If we assume science is the method to arrive at truth, then which science? Which scientists, from which era? Scientific theories are constantly disproven every century.

You are not playing favorites and not trying to defend any worldview.

We have to be totally neutral, and indifferent to the result. Maybe it'll be beautiful, maybe it'll reveal something unpleasant.

In doing this inquiry we're denying ourselves reliance on external authority. Investigating reality from scratch. No hearsay.

We have to take 100% responsibility here. We don't know what methods are valid for discovering the truth.

No knee-jerk assessments. You have to be very serious about being introspective and very conscious of your own biases, preferences, psyche, fears, attachments. (What do I want it to be?)

Did the idea that science obviously is the method to start with come from yourself or was it the result of cultural programming?

If something is true, it must be true independent of someone else telling it to me.

It's external to human activity. And perhaps if we could find the truth, perhaps we could ground ourselves in the truth rather than always navigating by human constructions. (Books, science, universities, experts, masters, religions. They have to be grounded to something outside of that, something prior to all that. Or maybe not.)

Assumptions: Make assumptions to bootstrap the inquiry process. Every assumption we make, we don't really know if it's true or not. It might seem likely, reasonable, obvious, but again, how do we know what's obvious, likely, etc.? We're judging based on the cultural background we're in.

Every time you make an assumption, make a note. If you get the first floor of a skyscraper wrong, the 100th floor is gonna be way wrong.