“The power of the core materialist worldview comes from its adoption by intellectual elites and its amplification by the mainstream media. Social validation is often crucial to our ability to truly hold onto a belief system, both consciously and ‘subcon-sciously.’ And no form of social validation is stronger than the validation provided by the segment of society that has become perceived as the learned elite. The reason for this is simple: our progress in understanding the complexities of nature is now so great, entailing such proliferation of evidence and details, that it has become completely impossible for any single person to study and evaluate all the relevant evidence on her own. We fundamentally depend on a collective, distributed effort to develop a critical opinion regarding what is going on. We need to share the task of studying and evaluating the relevant evidence. We have become dependent on others in the process of converging to a personal worldview. Intellectual specialization and a certain form of narrow-mindedness have become the norm in our epistemology in a way analogous to how the division of labor became the norm during the Industrial Revolution. In this sense, trust is now a crucial ingredient of the whole process, since we must be able to trust the conclusions of others in order to put together the whole jigsaw puzzle. And it is in this regard – trust – that the intellectual elite holds the cards, whether we admit it to ourselves or not. If we cannot trust the recognized specialists in different domains, who can we trust?" 1/2
>>2171836412/2"The problem is that the specialists in the intellectual elite – in our age, mostly scientists – are people like you and me. They, too, need the validation of a group to develop and hold onto a worldview. No specialist can hold the whole jigsaw puzzle in his mind so they, too, lack the all-important overview. But instead of receiving collective validation from the outside, the validation emerges organically and iteratively from within the group of specialists itself. This process is only partially guided by evidence, and largely by psychosocial dynamics, as Thomas Kuhn cogently showed.3 Each person plays the dual role of, on the one hand, contributing personal insights to the emerging consensus and, on the other hand, calibrating her own opinions based on the validation (or lack thereof) she gets from the emerging consensus. Once the system has evolved to a point where a strong consensus has emerged, and all serious dissenting views have been purged, most members of the intellectual elite begin to see it as their job to reinforce and promote this reigning consensus. Individuals who attempt to question the consensus at this stage become traitors primed for debunking, for their efforts, if successful, could deprive everyone of the collective validation they need to ground their intellectual and emotional lives. Nobody fancies falling back into the dark abyss of intellectual chaos and uncertainty that, according to our modern account of history, characterized the pre-Enlightenment years.”
Good morning saaar
redeem samsara sir
>>217183683>>217183964Nice try, my Hindu friends, but materialism is jeetism.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charvaka
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