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The Illusion of Truth - Sam Harris

We can never stand outside of human conversation and talk about reality as it is or truth as it is. We never come into contact with the naked truth. All we have is our conversation and our
tools of augmenting our conversation. All we really have that the currency of truth is whatever successfully passes muster in a conversation. So I say something that I think is true and it seems to work for you. We are playing similar language game and some people disagree they criticize what we are claiming to be true and we go back and forth. And all we ever have is this kind of ever-expanding horizon line of successful conversations that allow us to do things that are very persuasive.

We are designed by the happenstance of evolution to function within a very narrow band of light intensities, physical parameters. The fact that we are able to succeed to the degree that we have been in creating a vision of scientific truth and the structure of the cosmos at large that radically exceeds those narrow parameters, that is a is a kind of miracle. It's an amazing fact about us that seems not to be true, remotely true of any other species we know about.
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read more - The Power of Belief

It's possible for everyone to be mistaken. It's possible for there to be a consensus around truths that are in fact not true. It's possible to not know what you're missing. There's a horizon of cognition beyond which we can't currently see and we may be right or wrong about that exceeds our grasp at the moment. Consciousness is the one thing in this universe that can't be an illusion. It is the only thing that you can be absolutely sure exists at this moment.




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