...and I came out the other side having first hand experience of how flawed human reasoning is. Since then I got really interested in the topic of epistemology, the study of knowledge and how it's acquired and justified...
This is a bit of a tangent, but I wanted to touch on it, as I've been down that road myself. When you really examine what *can* be known, when you tear things apart as much as possible, you come to realize how frail our grasp of any potential "reality" truly is, how fragile our hold on things may be.
As a hypothetical thought experiment to reveal the limitations and unreliability of perception, we could ask ourselves, "What if the universe was birthed into existence 1 hour ago with all facets fully expressed in all their variety and subtlety at that point, including your "memories" of the life that you'd lived with all the people, memorabilia and trinkets pointing to those events along with all other aspects of all things - like a needle on a record being dropped in the middle of a song? Would you be able to distinguish that nothing had existed prior to an hour ago?"
Of course, we would have no way of knowing. In fact, the same pattern could repeat where the universe with all its fine detail is "switched on" and then turned off again for endless ages, trillions of years and then turned back on again eons later, and you'd be none the wiser for the intervening gap, thinking that there was a continuity because in your experience all the memories seem to indicate an uninterrupted procession of events.
And while one might say that's unrealistic, that's only due to an idea of what reality ought to be as it exists within the mind. Some substances humans consume can alter perception to the point that the idea of the self they always knew themselves to be vanishes altogether, transporting awareness to another reality as another being, utterly removed from the life and circumstances which birthed this alternate "reality" - a total sea change that obliterates identity, if only for a time.
When you look at what can be truly
known without any dispute, when you search for truth that is utterly inarguable, the only reality that can be known is what *IS* in this singular moment, unattached from any language or interpretation, the truth of unlabeled observation without any inferences, memories, symbols or attached "meaning". What is,
IS, and that is all that can be realized without assumptions born of thought, without layers of abstraction assigned by the mind.
Sorry for the tangent, but your post prompted this out of me, as epistemology has been the focal point of much of my own life.