What is a fact?

Kinfonet Discussion
164

It sounds to me that your question is concerned with motives, with what motivates people to act in different ways.

What motivates people to play sport even when they are often on the losing side? What makes people start new companies? What makes some people choose violence as a solution to their problems? etc.

This is a complex question which has to take into account the whole of person’s conditioning, their influences, their background, their culture, their parents, their education (or lack of it), their personal experiences, their genetic predilections, and so on. There is no ‘one-size fits all’ answer. Motives come in all different shapes and sizes, and most of them are probably unconscious to the person acting from them.

The only way of finding out one’s motives is through self-awareness, self-knowledge. It is difficult - if not impossible - to really know for certain what other people’s true motives are.

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165

Traces of mental processes/events may show up in scans, but little to no indication of the content or qualia of those events.

Devices can be ‘fooled’ by trained subjects. Or, more accurately: The people/programs interpreting the measurements can be fooled. Lie detectors, for example.

You are assuming I knew where I was headed earlier and could have described it more directly. But that’s not how these kinds of inquiries usually work for me. I tend to begin in a state of WTF? and gradually move towards figuring out what I’m really getting at. Joie de groping.

How can it be established:

  1. If a proposition is a fact or not?

Assuming it is a fact, how can it be established:

  1. If it is a real or unreal fact?

  2. If it is a fact for the proposer alone or others/universally?

I am still trying to find a way to feel okay with the definition of ‘fact’ we’ve come up with. At some point I might just have to go along with the majority view and keep my reservations to myself. But I guess I’m not quite ready to do that yet!

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Doesn’t this just mean : make my images of the world seem less conflicting?

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I am talking about the practicality of accepting the majority understanding of a key concept for the sake of communication. If I go along with the Kinfonet take on ‘fact’ it doesn’t mean I abandon my take.

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In the example we were discussing - i.e. Pablo’s experience - weren’t talking about whether its qualia could be directly shared by another, but rather whether or not it is a fact only for him.

We said that, at one level - i.e. from the first-person point of view - Pablo’s experience can obviously only be a fact for him:

But aspects of Pablo’s experience can exist for others - from a third-person perspective - in the form of its impact on his brain (his neurology), and on his body (his chemistry).

Obviously, the technology of observing the brain’s activity (through EEG, fMRI, etc) is in its infancy - but it is already clearly established that different parts of the brain become activated by different human activities; and by studying how these different parts of the brain become active when a person solves mathematical equations, feels frightened or affectionate, or sees an image of a well-known face, etc, scientists are beginning to reliably predict - from the mere image of the brain - what its contents actually are. Where this takes place (and, as I said, such technology is still in its infancy), this constitutes genuine third-person access to what is otherwise a wholly private first-person experience.

The objections you raise to this are a part of any interpersonal science, and are naturally factored into the study of any third-person experience. But the body doesn’t lie - or, in the name of a well-known book on the subject - the body keeps the score. Whatever happens to the brain (and body) leaves a mark, a trace. This is the way that causality works in the physical world (and the brain is clearly physical).

As I wrote in reply to Sivaram (and as we talked about a few weeks ago), we are not talking about absolute certitude. Such certitude would only exist (if it exists anywhere) in truth; and unless you - or Pablo - are claiming to have had a direct insight into truth, we are not talking about that order of fact.

So we are only talking about ordinary facts that we claim to know. To repeat what I said above:

I believe that New York is a city in North America, but I do not know this for certain, because:

I have never been to New York; and
I am not currently in New York myself.
So, in some sense, my knowledge of New York is a belief that I have, based on widespread consensus, video evidence, the independent reports of people I know, etc. All knowledge involves this kind of pragmatic or functional belief.

If something is factual, actual, then it obviously exists independently of what I think about it, what I believe - like the sun above my head as I write this sentence. But I do not have access to all the facts that exist in the world, and so for most scientific, historical, geographic facts I depend to a great extent on third-person evidence, on consensus, on some kind of reasonable justification for believing something to be a fact…

I have never looked inside a black hole directly, so I have to rely on what scientists have to say about black holes - i.e. on scientific consensus. That consensus can change as scientists make new discoveries, but I have no strong reasons to doubt my belief that black holes exist.

This is why Bohm said that facts are more limited than truth:

True facts are established through empirical evidence, testing by many people, and the consensus picture which results. But such consensus-made ‘facts’ are subject to revision and so are not absolute.

However, if someone believes themselves to be Napoleon, this is clearly an unreal or untrue fact, even though it may be a fact for them that they feel this way. Their belief that they are Napoleon is not supported by any third-person evidence, even though the experience they are having (of believing themselves to be Napoleon) will show up in an fMRI scan - most likely sharing the brain-imaging of persons with dissociative identity disorder (or schizophrenia).

But if you are asking whether non-ordinary experiences - such as those we might find in meditation - can exist for others or only for oneself, then maybe I could draw your attention to the way that different first-person styles of meditation (which produce observably different third-person brain structures, ascertainable through neuroscience) are currently studied?

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I think this is the real question. How can I tell whether what I am experiencing is a true fact, or an illusion (an unreal fact)?

Isn’t this where self-knowledge, self-awareness, and the mirror of relationship all come in? If I am living in an illusion then the only place/s this can show up is in the mirror of my own awareness, and in the mirror of my relationship with others.

If my experience is tainted with projection - with unconscious wishes, desires, and other unconscious assumptions and motives - then this is only discoverable through self knowledge and relationship. Right?

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170

Is it not for this very reason that anyone, including yourself, who claims to have a full insight should be considered very unreliable?

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Did I claim to have “full insight”? Just to be clear: I am not claiming to have had “full insight.”

But yes - in general, anyone who claims to have “full insight” must be regarded with suspicion, as such insight (if it exists) is both very rare and impossible to verify (except very indirectly - i.e. by their behaviour, the way they live, etc). Although there are a great many people who claim to have had “full insight”!

This is why K said to doubt, to question, even what he himself had to say.

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172

Just to be clear!
I’ll better had writen myself instead of yourself to avoid any misunderstanding😗

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173

We can’t help but believe in ourselves because we are conditioned to do so. But we can see that this is a harmful, foolish belief that we can’t support or approve of, despite the fact that we can’t stop believing in ourselves until we see clearly how we’re doing it.

Why should we believe and what makes us to go in that direction?

As was explained, much useful, practical, necessary knowledge is based on what experts have found to be true and is supported by evidence, and any other kind of belief is suspect or just wishful, dreadful thinking.

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Equally or even more interesting for me is how we can tell whether what another person is proposing (sharing, reporting) is a fact, and if so if it is a real or unreal fact, and the scope of the fact’s factuality.

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I dunno, that’s a pretty sweeping statement. It sounds like a spin on karma. Who knows what role causality plays in subtle levels of the body and mind? Maybe in some situations, for some people, there is no trace experience leaves behind.

What I get from this is: Facts can be fuzzy. Their factuality, their realness or unrealness, their scope. Which makes me wonder what the pros and cons are of working with ‘facts.’

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Why does this matter in particular? Are you referring to spiritual teachers, like K, etc? It’s a bit difficult to know (from what you’ve written here) what your target is.

Surely it is impossible to ever know for sure - I mean, beyond what is obvious - whether what another person says about their experience is true or not.

We only have a direct or ‘privileged’ access to our own mind - so surely this is the central question for us?

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In what situations does the universal law of cause and effect no longer apply?

As with so much of what you write, Rick, there seems to be something unsaid in what you say! What is your real beef with facts? From where does this curiosity or doubt or concern about facts actually spring?

What did facts ever do to you to make you so skeptical about them?

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Epistemology! How is knowledge arrived at? What’s true, what’s false, what’s unknown/unknowable?

Teachers and their teachings, sure. Anyone really who purports to know something 100%-ish.

Ja. It matters though, doesn’t it, if an ‘external’ proposition, one made by another, is true or not.

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Ok - I’m beginning to understand you a little more. To be continued…

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What happens in one’s brain is a fact, even when it’s distorted, delusional, paranoid, fanciful, nonsensical, but being a creation of thought, it’s not an actual fact.

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Yes. If the ‘fact’ is a series of thoughts, or an experience created by one’s thinking (such as anger), then we can say:

it is a fact, an actuality, that thinking is taking place. And - in the case of anger - it is a fact, an actuality, that there is the emotional reaction we call “anger” taking place in the brain-body (which involves biochemistry, adrenaline, etc).

But the content of the thinking - the reasons that my mind is giving to justify or sustain the anger - may not be an actuality.

So, for instance, a person is cut-off in traffic, and becomes enraged. “He shouldn’t have done that, why did they do that, how dare they, how did this happen to me, I deserve more respect than this, they should know better”, etc.

And then the person realises that it was an ambulance rushing to get to the scene of an accident, to save lives, and the anger immediately subsides.

So the incident wasn’t personal, the whole angry response was a concoction of the person’s thinking. The content was not itself actual, but a fiction - even though it is a fact, an actuality, that it took place in the person’s brain.

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182

You are talking about valid cognitions (pramanas), right? A valid cognition is any means of knowing, of understanding, that can ascertain the actuality or truth of something.

So maybe if we take the most important ways of knowing:

  1. sense-perception
  2. inference from sense-perception
  3. and the word or testimony of reliable others

Nagarjuna famously rejected all means of knowing, arguing for an extreme skepticism of no-thesis, non-knowledge. But Nagarjuna was still a Buddhist, and wrote of the importance of faith in the Buddhist path, ethical living, etc - so despite his extreme skepticism he did apparently accept the testimony of others (in the form of Buddhist scripture, the words of the Buddha, etc). Moreover, the fact that he used reasoning - in the form of tetralemma - to deconstruct any positive statement of knowledge, implies that he did accept some form of inference (or logical reasoning) as a valid form of cognising.

The other notable Buddhist approach to this - that taken by Dignana and Dharmakirti - accepted sense-perception and inference as valid tools of knowing, but rejected the testimony of others.

The testimony of others was rejected by them because no one can ever know for certain that another person - such as the Buddha - is telling the truth. The Buddha’s behaviour - for those who knew him - might give people confidence that he was authentic, genuine, honest, etc, but appearances can be deceptive, a person’s behaviour is not always a guide to their inner condition, and a person can change: someone who one could trust yesterday, may today be completely unreliable; they may be mistaken about what is happening now even though yesterday they were speaking the truth. So verbal testimony is out.

But sense-perception is undeniable. The senses can be confused (by optical illusions, drugs, intoxication, ill health, defect, etc), but the fact, the actuality of sense-perceiving is as close as we can ordinarily get to direct knowledge of the world.

Dignaga contrasted our essentially non-conceptual and instantaneous perception of perception-particulars (svalaksana), with the secondary knowledge we derive from these, in the form of generalised mental concepts or concept-universals (samanya-laksana).

Perception-particulars are always and ever only fleeting, momentary, but they are what is most real, most actual in our experience. Whereas the generalised concept-universals they give rise to in the mind - the abstractions and inferences we draw from these sense-perceptions - is always secondary, unreal (relatively speaking), non-actual, even though concept-universals make up the entirety of what we call scientific knowledge.

So we might say that an actual fire burns and cooks. If I see this actual fire with my eyes, my vision will be presented with an intense perception of colour and movement. If I touch the actual fire with my hand, my hand will get burned. (Btw, as a Yogacara, Dignana was agnostic about whether the actual fire exists, but the sense-perception of “fire” he took to be real, actual).

But if I close my eyes and walk away from the fire, the fire that I have in my mind (i.e. in my memory) does not burn or cook. The image that I have of it in my memory is a secondary echo, a mental generalisation of the actual fire, and so lacks true vividness, particularity, and presentness.

So for Dignana, despite the flaws that sense-perception can have, it is our most fundamental tool of knowing, and is in fact the basis for all other knowledge (i.e. science, logical inference, etc).

Interestingly enough, Dignana and Dharmakirti did accept one further epistemological tool: what they called “yogic perception”. By this they seem to have meant a special, non-ordinary form of perception (i.e. not through the senses, but something which can happen in meditation) that can perceive a thing as it truly is, without any division of a perceiver and a separate perceived.

We can see that there are some similarities here with Krishnamurti’s approach to perception. For Krishnamurti true perception can only take place when the perceiver is the perceived, or - expressed differently - when the perceiver is absent, and there is only perception.

More generally Krishnamurti accepted the place of science (and therefore inference generally), but only as a secondary, functional form of establishing knowledge. The only pramanas he really accepted were sense-perception (the sensitivity of the senses themselves) and awareness, attention, perception and insight (which he distinguished but did not fundamentally separate).

When it came to his own words, he did, it seems, accept - to some extent at least - the testimony of others. Because he said that if one could listen, completely, without any resistance, to the words being spoken from a person who has seen truth, then such listening can be liberating (i.e. constitute true knowing, true insight). But in other contexts he also said to doubt the verbal testimony of others, including himself, so this last pramana seems equivocal to me.

What do you think of all this? :slightly_smiling_face:

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Say thought thinks: All things are impermanent. Is it both non-actual (because it’s thought) and actual (because it’s true)? Kind of a silly question, I know, feel free to ignore. :wink: