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Why Our Deepest Certainties Can Be Completely Wrong — Transcript

by Doug's Dharma · 4,383 words · 818 segments · language en · Watch on YouTube

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0:00You know that sensation of a inner click
0:02when an idea snaps into place and just
0:05feels right?
0:07Not I think that this is so, but I can
0:09see that this is so.
0:12We treat that feeling as evidence.
0:15That inner clarity itself seems to vouch
0:19for its own accuracy.
0:21And the clearer the insight, the more
0:23that we trust it.
0:26Now, I'm going to be making an
0:27uncomfortable claim in this video.
0:30That that feeling, no matter how deep,
0:33how clear, how hard-won, it's not an
0:36infallible indicator of accuracy and it
0:39never was.
0:41Not because feelings like that are
0:43worthless,
0:45but because there's no inner position
0:47that can certify itself.
0:50There's no private vantage point from
0:53which our knowledge is going to be
0:55guaranteed.
0:57Around the world for thousands of years,
1:01people have looked for just such a
1:03guarantee and the search keeps failing
1:06and the failures can teach us something.
1:11The upshot of this all is not despair
1:13though. It It only means a change in our
1:16perspective.
1:18So, here's going to be the plan for this
1:20video.
1:21First, we're going to pin down what a
1:23privileged epistemology would even be.
1:27Then we're going to see three brilliant
1:30Western thinkers, Descartes, Kant, and
1:33Kepler,
1:34each trust their own inner certainty and
1:37each get things wrong in the same way.
1:42We'll look at why that keeps happening.
1:45Then we'll turn that same question on
1:47meditation and on the Buddha himself
1:51and ask whether deep contemplative
1:53insight fares any better.
1:57And we're we'll end with where this all
2:00leaves us, which is not quite as bad as
2:03as we might fear.
2:08Okay, what do we mean by the phrase a
2:11privileged epistemology? It's it's a
2:14mouthful. It's something philosophers
2:16say.
2:17But plainly speaking, it's the idea that
2:20there is some way, some method, some
2:22kind of access, some faculty,
2:25some state we can get ourselves into
2:29that must deliver truths to ourselves in
2:32a way that is self-evident, that's
2:34obvious.
2:37That's to say this state or place or
2:39whatever it is
2:41uh is somewhere where we could certify
2:43that those truths are true from the
2:46inside all by ourselves.
2:50Now, the appeal to looking for this kind
2:52of thing is is obvious. If we had it,
2:55we'd have a firm foundation for knowing
2:59things, everything perhaps.
3:01Someplace that we could stand where we
3:03couldn't be wrong.
3:05And upon which everything else we know
3:09could be built perhaps.
3:11It's one of the oldest dreams in
3:14philosophy to find this kind of
3:16foundation for knowledge.
3:20And we're going to see three of the most
3:22brilliant attempts to secure something
3:24like this and watch each of them fail at
3:26the same place.
3:31Now, René Descartes was a brilliant
3:33French philosopher who took it upon
3:35himself to undermine what he believed
3:39were outdated beliefs about the the way
3:41the world is, that the West had
3:43inherited in particular from Aristotle
3:46and other earlier thinkers.
3:49And once he demolished all of that to
3:52then rebuild all of knowledge on what he
3:55thought were firmer foundations.
3:59He did this primarily through an
4:02internal method of rejecting any belief
4:05that he felt left any room for doubt at
4:09all.
4:11For example,
4:12it seemed quite obvious to him that he
4:14was sitting in his room in front of the
4:16fire.
4:17But he asked himself,
4:19"What if I were just dreaming? What if I
4:21were asleep?
4:22What if I had been deceived by an evil
4:25demon of some kind?"
4:28Well, even in those cases, at least at
4:31the very least, Descartes said he knew
4:34he would know that he was thinking.
4:38And he thought, "If I think, then I must
4:41exist."
4:44What he was left with
4:46was a kind of general method
4:50that only whatever he could perceive
4:52clearly and distinctly as true
4:56must be true.
4:58Everything else, everything that he
5:00couldn't perceive that way would be
5:02doubtful and so rejected.
5:05So, clarity to our reasoning faculty
5:08became the mark of truth to him.
5:11Now, notice what has happened here.
5:14Descartes has named an inner feeling
5:16that is clarity, distinctness,
5:20and made it the certifier
5:23of truth.
5:25And this is what we mean by a privileged
5:27epistemology.
5:30But this
5:31process left Descartes certifying
5:34knowledge of himself
5:36as a substantial, existing, persisting
5:40soul.
5:42Now, he said that he had seen that
5:45clearly and distinctly.
5:48But other thinkers like David Hume for
5:51instance and for us the Buddha
5:53would have strenuously disagreed with
5:56Descartes.
5:58They would say that Descartes had only
6:00seen various thoughts, but he had never
6:03seen a substantial thinker as well who
6:06owned those thoughts.
6:09And anyway
6:11even that even thinking of himself as a
6:14as a thinker wouldn't have taken
6:16Descartes very far.
6:18Further knowledge
6:21uh only would have become available to
6:23Descartes on the supposed proof
6:27that God existed.
6:29Which Descartes also felt that he knew
6:32clearly and distinctly
6:35but which has also proven less than
6:37convincing to many others around the
6:39world.
6:42Notice that the problem here isn't just
6:44that people disagree.
6:47It's that that very same inner feeling
6:51that supposed clear and distinct
6:54luminosity
6:56certifies a substantial soul and a God
6:59for Descartes and no such soul and no
7:03such God for David Hume.
7:06And a feeling cannot be the mark of
7:08truth if it shines just as brightly on
7:11incompatible claims.
7:17Now Immanuel Kant took the problem of
7:21epistemic validation very seriously.
7:25His project was to map the way that the
7:28structure of our thinking imposes itself
7:33on our experience, on what we
7:34experience.
7:37He argued
7:39that we could know that Euclidean
7:41geometry was true of the world in
7:45advance of any possible experience that
7:48we might have.
7:50Because that geometry described the
7:53necessary structure of any possible
7:56experience that we might have.
8:00That is Kant believed that we could know
8:02intuitively without fear of error
8:06that in our world parallel lines would
8:09never meet.
8:11That the angles of a triangle would
8:13always sum to exactly 180°
8:17and so on.
8:19But then
8:21the ground moved.
8:23Non-Euclidean geometries were discovered
8:25to be perfectly consistent.
8:29And further
8:30Albert Einstein showed in the early 20th
8:33century that actually our own universe
8:37is not Euclidean at all. Spacetime is
8:40actually curved. It's not flat as in
8:45Euclid's picture.
8:48So the structure that Kant said he knew
8:50had to be true
8:52not only wasn't true, it wasn't even the
8:54geometry of the world that we live in.
8:58Now it was the same problem that
8:59Descartes had earlier.
9:02His thinking that I can't conceive
9:04otherwise
9:06got mistaken for it can't be otherwise.
9:14The case of Johannes Kepler is perhaps
9:17the most vivid because it isolates that
9:19feeling quite cleanly.
9:22At the time that he was active there
9:25were only six known planets in our solar
9:28system.
9:29And Kepler asked, "Why are there only
9:32six?
9:33Why aren't there five or seven or a
9:36hundred planets.
9:39The answer that he came up with was
9:41ingenious and breathtaking.
9:44Now, Kepler knew that it followed from
9:47that very same geometry we just
9:48discussed, Euclid's geometry,
9:50that there were only five of what are
9:53the so-called Platonic solids.
9:56That is, there are only five perfect
9:58three-dimensional shapes made up of
10:00identical regular polygons.
10:04Kepler asked himself,
10:06"What if we nested each of these
10:08Platonic solids inside of one another
10:10like a set of Russian dolls, so that
10:14they could
10:15rotate freely?
10:17And suppose each of them supported a
10:19sphere that touches that touched its
10:22vertices,
10:23as well as there was an innermost sphere
10:25that touched the centermost solid?"
10:30That arrangement would explain why there
10:32were exactly six planets
10:35and nothing more.
10:38The shape of the cosmos seemed to fall
10:41out of pure geometry.
10:45Now, Kepler was a serious thinker, and
10:47this was not a lazy idea of his. It was
10:50mathematically elegant.
10:52And it gave him the feeling of having
10:54touched the mind of God.
10:57His insight felt to him like a kind of
10:59revelation.
11:01And he spent years trying to make it
11:03square with the observational data.
11:07But he never could.
11:09The reason why is that Kepler was
11:11completely wrong.
11:13There, as we know now, aren't only six
11:15planets.
11:17The spacing between each planet does not
11:19correspond to that between nested
11:22solids.
11:24And so Kepler's whole project was a
11:27beautiful coincidence dressed up as a
11:29kind of potential proof.
11:34What was so great about Kepler
11:37is that he himself is the one who
11:39noticed this.
11:41Even before his book on the subject
11:43called the Mysterium Cosmographicum was
11:46finished,
11:47Kepler had already realized that the
11:49solids didn't quite fit these real
11:53orbital distances of the six planets
11:55that he knew.
11:57And years later, when he was working
11:59with
11:59Tycho Brahe's observational data, which
12:03is the best in the world at the time,
12:06Kepler found that the planets weren't
12:08even moving in circles at all, but in
12:10ellipses.
12:13A discovery that finished off this
12:15nested solids model for good.
12:19So, the this kind of felt rightness of
12:22Kepler's insight
12:24came apart from the measurements. And
12:27we all know now that his his
12:30measurements were actually what was
12:32right.
12:33So, what do we learn from these examples
12:35and particularly from the example
12:37of Johannes Kepler?
12:40We learn a general principle.
12:43That the phenomenology of insight,
12:46this felt sense that we have that an
12:48idea must be true,
12:51is not a perfectly reliable indicator of
12:54truth.
12:56A false idea, such as idea of these
12:59nested solids,
13:01can feel exactly as luminous
13:04as a true one.
13:06From the inside, we can't tell them
13:07apart by their feelings alone.
13:11Descartes, Kant, Kepler, all of them
13:14were absolutely brilliant thinkers,
13:17all with the same sincere felt sense of
13:21clear insight.
13:22And all were in error.
13:29So, that idea of inner certainty that we
13:32all know, that eureka moment. I'm sure
13:35that we've all had it from time to time.
13:37Maybe when we're working on some hard
13:39problem that we had in school or
13:41something that we've
13:43figured out for ourselves in daily life.
13:47One of the most incisive philosophers of
13:49the 20th century was a man named Ludwig
13:52Wittgenstein.
13:54In his posthumous work called On
13:56Certainty,
13:57he discussed the gap between feeling
14:00certain on the one hand and being right
14:04on the other.
14:06One of the most famous lines from that
14:08book of his
14:10is misleadingly obvious in a way, but in
14:13fact quite profound.
14:15It's this.
14:17He said,
14:20"One does not infer matters of fact from
14:23one's own certainty.
14:25Certainty is, as it were, a tone of
14:28voice
14:29in which someone states facts.
14:32But one does not conclude from the tone
14:35of voice
14:37that he is justified."
14:41That is, a feeling of certainty is not
14:43something that we can always take to the
14:45bank.
14:46It points at the depth of our inner
14:48convictions, not necessarily out at the
14:51world.
14:53This move of treating our own certainty
14:56as itself self-certifying
15:00had already been given a name by the
15:03philosopher Wilfrid Sellars earlier than
15:06the what what Wittgenstein had said.
15:09Sellars called it the myth of the given.
15:13The given is the supposed bedrock of
15:16knowledge.
15:18A layer of experience that's supposed to
15:21be, on the one hand immediately
15:24available to us
15:26and on the other hand able to justify
15:29our beliefs about the way that things
15:31are.
15:35In a nutshell, Sellars' argument is that
15:37nothing can do both of these jobs at the
15:39same time.
15:42To give justification to our beliefs
15:45a state has to have conceptual content.
15:49It's got to say something to us.
15:53It has to be the kind of thing that
15:55could be right or wrong.
15:58That could stand in logical
15:59relationships to other claims that we
16:01might make or other people might make.
16:05But anything with this kind of
16:07conceptual content
16:09is already going to be shaped by the
16:11framework of concepts that we've learned
16:14and that we could in principle decide
16:18need to be revised.
16:21That is
16:22data that's presented to us like this is
16:24not actually immediately available to us
16:28at all
16:29although it might seem that it is.
16:32In fact, it needs it needed
16:34interpretation.
16:36Even if that interpretation from our
16:39minds seemed automatic or effortless to
16:41us.
16:43And any interpretation like this could
16:46be in error.
16:51>> [snorts]
16:51>> Now, every contemplative tradition
16:53carries some version of this same dream.
16:59That is to try to find a state that's
17:01deep enough that it can deliver truths
17:04to us directly
17:05in a way that is self-certifying and
17:08incapable of error.
17:11That is to find a state that needs no
17:14outside authenticity check because the
17:17seeing itself is
17:20the authentication.
17:22This kind of state
17:24is among the most powerful experiences
17:27that anyone can have.
17:30It's often life-changing to believe that
17:33we have seen things like this.
17:36That is, this kind of clarity is real
17:38clarity,
17:39and the temptation to treat clarity as a
17:42as something self-validating
17:45can be overwhelming.
17:49But, let's step back for a minute and
17:51consider the descriptions
17:53of realizations that we find across
17:56contemplative traditions, the
17:59very ones that contemplatives take to be
18:02self-certifying.
18:05Deeply realized practitioners
18:08across traditions
18:10describe what they are awakened to in
18:13flatly incompatible ways.
18:18The Advaitan from Hinduism reports
18:22identity with an absolute transcendent
18:25self,
18:26the Atman, who is Brahman.
18:30The Buddhist reports the opposite.
18:33A feeling of non-self, of no permanent
18:36unchanging self to be found anywhere.
18:41Theistic mystics report finding union
18:45with a personal God, which is something
18:48different yet again.
18:50And on and on.
18:52We might expect to find that if direct
18:55meditative seeing delivered truth to us,
18:59the reports of deep meditators would
19:01converge.
19:03And sure, there are some real
19:05similarities that they all point to,
19:07such as stillness and so on.
19:10But, as descriptions of reality, they're
19:13all radically different. And this is all
19:15deeply unsettling to many of us.
19:19Now, it could of course be true that
19:22most everybody's wrong.
19:24And that one group has the monopoly on
19:27truth because only they
19:30have found the true practice, the true
19:33route towards meditative realization.
19:37This is something that the Buddha
19:38himself believed in and argued for in
19:40the suttas.
19:42That is that rivals who claim to found
19:45their own truths
19:47only seem to lead to freedom.
19:50But in fact, all of them left some
19:53residue of craving
19:55in their wake.
19:57And perhaps the Buddha was right.
20:00But the deeper problem is that as we've
20:03already seen,
20:04experience itself is concept-laden.
20:09And the Buddha knew all about that.
20:12The concepts that we bring to our
20:13practice don't just label experiences
20:16after the fact, they actually help shape
20:20what it is that we experience.
20:23This is a point that scholar and
20:25monastic Bhikkhu Bodhi made a while back
20:27in a lecture of his when when it came to
20:30working with a teacher.
20:32That is the confidence we place in our
20:35teacher
20:36is going to color the very experiences
20:38that we have under their guidance.
20:42In just the ways that we discussed.
20:46That is to say, if if we're studying
20:48under a Hindu Advaitan, we're going to
20:51learn to see that unity with Brahman.
20:55If we study under a Buddhist,
20:57we're going to learn to see non-self or
20:59emptiness and so on.
21:02This implies that direct seeing,
21:05so-called, is not a concept-neutral
21:08window onto reality.
21:11We're not given the world even during
21:13our deepest meditation.
21:17Now, one standard rejoinder to this is a
21:20form of what's known as perennialism.
21:24That is that the experiences that we're
21:26having are all the same,
21:28only their descriptions differ.
21:31That is that all these diverse
21:33traditions are really experiencing that
21:36same given,
21:39but laying their own descriptions on top
21:41of it, which muddies the waters.
21:45Now, there are various problems with
21:48this perennialist viewpoint.
21:52First, we have to be clear it itself is
21:54a substantive doctrine.
21:56That is that what is directly given to
21:59us in deep meditation is actually some
22:01sort of indescribable experience.
22:06Second,
22:08this kind of perennialism tends to lead
22:10us nowhere.
22:12That is if these experiences are in fact
22:15literally indescribable,
22:18then there's nothing that we can
22:19conclude from them.
22:20I did a video about this in the past
22:22that I'll leave down below in the notes
22:24where I talked more about that.
22:27In fact, perennialism of this kind
22:30cannot even support its own central
22:33claim.
22:35That is to say that two or three or a
22:38dozen practitioners' experiences are the
22:41same is itself
22:44a description,
22:46which is exactly what we were told these
22:48experiences can't bear.
22:51That is if nothing can be said about
22:54these deep meditative experiences,
22:57then neither can we say that they are
22:59all the same.
23:03As to the case of Buddhism in
23:04particular,
23:06one place of some significant friction
23:10involves the night of the Buddha's
23:11enlightenment and his claim to have
23:13gained these three knowledges through
23:16direct insight.
23:20That is knowledge of his own past lives,
23:22of the workings of karma,
23:25and of the complete destruction of the
23:27taints.
23:29Now, the first two knowledges, that of
23:31past lives and of the workings of karma,
23:35are claims about the way the world is,
23:38arrived at by the Buddha's own direct
23:40seeing.
23:43The third of these claims is subtler and
23:45so it's worth pausing a moment on.
23:49To know that the taints, our own taints,
23:51are destroyed
23:53is not to report that we are
23:56presently calm.
23:59It's to claim that greed, hatred, and
24:01delusion will never arise again under
24:05any provocation, in any circumstance,
24:09ever.
24:11That's a claim about a future of
24:14infinite possibilities.
24:17How could any present experience,
24:19however deep its certainty,
24:21truly certify a claim like that?
24:26And the tradition itself is is aware of
24:28this.
24:30The Buddha himself taught that the
24:32underlying tendencies, so called, can
24:35lie dormant.
24:37Recall the story of the housewife of the
24:39Dehika,
24:41who was famed as being sweet and
24:43even-tempered, right up until her maid,
24:46Colly, put that reputation to the test,
24:50and then the rolling pin came out.
24:53I did a video on that on that uh
24:55story in the past, and I'll leave a link
24:57to that one down below if you don't
24:58remember it.
25:00So,
25:02the the peace that we feel at present
25:03does not provide prove to us that our
25:07deep tendencies are gone forever.
25:11And we know that overestimating our own
25:13attainment is a recognized mode of
25:16failure in Buddhism.
25:20So, the claim to have seen that
25:22unshakable is my liberation
25:25is not really an exception to this
25:27pattern that we're talking about.
25:30Claims like these amount to just the
25:32kind of privileged epistemology that
25:34we've been talking about.
25:36Insight into the way the world works
25:39by a kind of direct seeing.
25:44Whatever exactly this direct seeing is,
25:48if it works as a kind of a perception,
25:52that is a state that presents truths to
25:54us,
25:56then it runs into this point that
25:58Sellers made before.
26:00To certify such claims, the seeing has
26:03to have conceptual content. It's got to
26:06tell us something.
26:10And anything, any experience that that
26:12tells us something
26:14is already going to be shaped by the
26:16framework of concepts that we bring to
26:19that experience. It's not raw
26:22experience, and it's not
26:24self-certifying.
26:26That would be the kind of mythical given
26:29that Sellers mentioned.
26:31So, knowing what we now know about these
26:33claims, we've we've got a a principled
26:35reason
26:37to hold them lightly.
26:39Now, that's not to say that they're
26:41necessarily false, not at all.
26:43But simply to say that similar pathways
26:46to knowledge
26:48have indeed, as as we've seen, proven
26:51unreliable in the past or lead to
26:53different conclusions.
26:56The mere fact that somebody in the past
26:58has taken them as convincing
27:00should not by itself convince us.
27:05All that said, it does not mean that our
27:07practice is somehow therefore worthless.
27:10Instead, what we have to do is to
27:12relocate the value of practice.
27:17Relocate it where?
27:20Well, not to another private certainty
27:22about our own minds.
27:25But even lacking such certainty, we can
27:28still come to see how practice does tend
27:33to lower reactivity,
27:35to loosen the grip of self-centered
27:37stories, and to quiet our motivated
27:40reasoning.
27:42And that tendency, or those tendencies,
27:45are checkable in one place that we can
27:48trust more.
27:50That is, they're checkable from the
27:51outside, in how we actually behave over
27:56time, as witnessed by other people.
28:00And I'll have more about this in an
28:01upcoming video.
28:07So, let's think back to our examples.
28:10Reasoners like Descartes, Kant, Kepler,
28:15deep meditators like the Advaitins,
28:18Buddhists, certain theists,
28:21they push us in the same direction, or
28:24their conclusions do anyway, namely that
28:27there's no privileged position, either
28:30rational or meditative,
28:32from which we can validate our own
28:34beliefs.
28:36That view from inside
28:38is never going to be enough.
28:42One conclusion that's tempting to many
28:45people
28:46is just to say then that nothing can
28:48ever be known about anything
28:50and that we should just therefore
28:52believe whatever we like.
28:55But that goes way too fast and leaves
28:57out what is the most important single
29:00feature we have when it comes to
29:02knowledge, which is I'm going to argue
29:04intersubjectivity.
29:08Knowledge is and and must be has to be
29:12intersubjective.
29:14It's never something that we can possess
29:16all by ourselves,
29:19but rather is going to be something that
29:20we have to build together
29:23like the blind men in that early story
29:26who discover the elephant.
29:29In that early Buddhist story, each of
29:32these blind men grasps at their own
29:34version of reality, their own part of
29:37the elephant,
29:38and they all discuss and come to blows
29:40because they disagree.
29:42But had they all in instead been willing
29:45to work together and compare their
29:48notes,
29:49they might have together over time
29:52discovered a bigger picture.
29:56And the errors that we discussed from
29:58Descartes, from Kant, from Kepler
30:01were caught mostly by others treading
30:04along the same roads.
30:06Kepler indeed did catch his own error,
30:08which makes him a relative giant in the
30:11field,
30:12but even Kepler never saw the whole
30:15picture.
30:17To be fair, even we've never seen the
30:20whole picture.
30:22The point is that corrections, when they
30:24come,
30:26they're going to come from outside of
30:27these feelings of our own certainty.
30:31Even Kepler himself resisted his own
30:35most famous discovery.
30:37That is, he discovered that the planets
30:40went in ellipses,
30:42but rejected it at first because he
30:44didn't think it was elegant enough.
30:48Another related question might be
30:51what about the claim that there's no
30:53privileged access to the truth?
30:56Is that itself a claim about which we
30:58can be certain?
31:00Sort of like asking
31:02is emptiness
31:04a solid claim of its own?
31:07And the answer must be no.
31:10The claim itself is fallible. It's open
31:12to future revision.
31:14And that's not a weakness. It's simply
31:16submitting itself to the very checking
31:18that it recommends. Again, much like the
31:20claim that emptiness is itself empty.
31:25So, what's going to be our positive
31:27thesis here?
31:29It's that knowledge
31:31wisdom
31:32have irreducibly social dimensions.
31:36And then
31:37that's not because the group is going to
31:39be always right. Crowds are wrong
31:42consistently.
31:44Instead, it's because there's not going
31:46to be any shortcut around the shared
31:49process of correcting one another.
31:53And as much as some Buddhists like to
31:55think of epistemology as
31:58inherently a subjective process
32:01even within Buddhism, there's a sense of
32:04intersubjective correction.
32:08For example
32:10a recent example
32:12when it comes to what counts as deep
32:15states of meditative absorption, the
32:17jhanas.
32:18Two meditators will say that they've
32:20touched the jhanas, the states.
32:23But arguments will persist among them
32:25about which of them really counts.
32:29I did a video about that in the past.
32:31Again, I'll leave it down below in the
32:33notes if you want to hear about that
32:34controversy.
32:36>> [sighs]
32:37>> And the Buddha himself famously invited
32:39scrutiny and investigation even of
32:43himself and his own behavior
32:45to know whether he was speaking
32:47legitimately.
32:49And this is all humbling in the right
32:51direction.
32:53It does not tell us that we can't know
32:55anything,
32:57but it says that we can't know things
33:00wholly alone by the private light of our
33:02own convictions.
33:04We always need cross-checking.
33:10And wake up here. This matters.
33:13The social fabric of knowledge in the
33:16country and in our world is under steady
33:18attack right now by people who have a
33:21reason to do so.
33:24Shared standards for testing of claims
33:27have been actively eroded for social and
33:30political ends.
33:33The claim to do your own research
33:36too often now means find somebody on the
33:39internet who agrees with you
33:42or trust your gut over any community of
33:45experts.
33:47The casualty of this kind of position
33:51is going to be our only mechanism that
33:53protects us from the errors
33:56of our predecessors and indeed our own
33:57errors.
34:00This myth of privileged epistemology and
34:03the destruction of our shared epistemic
34:06standards that follows from it
34:09gets us to the same place from opposite
34:11sides.
34:14One side says
34:15my inner certainty is enough.
34:19The other side says nobody else's check
34:22is worth trusting over my own internal
34:26instincts.
34:28Both of these sides deny that knowledge
34:31and wisdom are shared and correctable
34:33achievements.
34:35And so, both of these leave us alone
34:38with our own feeling of certainty.
34:41This same feeling that has fooled some
34:44of the best minds in history time and
34:47again.
34:48Now, that click of certainty, that click
34:51of insight is still going to come to us
34:52and
34:54honestly, it's a great thing to
34:55encounter. It's a It's a beautiful
34:57feeling and and sometimes it's it's even
34:59right. Let's be serious.
35:01But, let's let it propose
35:04rather than conclude.
35:07Let's not simply surrender ourselves to
35:10it or enshrine it somewhere.
35:13Instead, let's take what we've learned
35:16from these kinds of experiences out into
35:19the world, into the light, and let them
35:20be tested.
35:22That's where tourism comes from.
35:26Now, I've said a lot in this video. What
35:29do you think about all of this? What do
35:31you think about these inner convictions
35:33of yours? Let's hear about it. Here Let
35:36us know in the in the comments below.
35:37I'd be interested to know and I'm sure
35:39everyone else around here would be as
35:40well. Let's do some cross-checking.
35:43I hope to catch you all in the next
35:45video and meanwhile, all of you, please
35:48be well.

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