Corpus evidence — top 10 passages

Most-relevant passages from the entire indexed corpus (67,286 paragraph chunks across YouTube transcripts, PubMed, arXiv, archive.org, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, OpenAlex, and more) ranked by semantic similarity (bge-small-en-v1.5).

1. 01 · _intake0.864

   > very austere beginning in a Big Bang that was just these principles driving us to this point we are pretty sure we exist because after all consciousness is the only thing we're really sure of true

   _intake/claims-allbranch/curated-low/big-bang/003-very-austere-beginning-in-a-big-bang-that-was-just-these-pri.md

2. 02 · blog0.778

   As Descartes himself writes, In order to philosophize seriously and search out the truth about the things that are capable of being known, we must first of all lay aside all our preconceived opinions, or at least we must take the greatest care not to put our trust in any of the opinions accepted by us in the past until we have first scrutinized them afresh and confirmed their truth. Next, we must give our attention in an orderly way to the notions that we have within us, and we must judge to be true all and only those whose truth we clearly and distinctly recognize when we attend to them in th…

   blog/plato-stanford-edu/descartes-modal-metaphysics.md

3. 03 · gutenberg0.768

   After making those matters clear, I should, in the next place, have desired to set forth the grounds for holding that the true principles by which we may reach that highest degree of wisdom wherein consists the sovereign good of human life, are those I have proposed in this work; and two considerations alone are sufficient to establish this--the first of which is, that these principles are very clear, and the second, that we can deduce all other truths from them; for it is only these two conditions that are required in true principles. But I easily prove that they are very clear; firstly, by a…

   gutenberg/PG-4391-selections-from-the-principles-of-philosophy/PG-4391.txt

4. 04 · yt0.763

   I want to make sure we fold some of that in, but the Vedics, according to previous interviews I've heard with you, they say that the higher realm of pure consciousness is governed by love. It is a choice to be in love. If it's not a choice, it's not real love. That's force. So, if our consciousness chooses an alternative, non-love, then we can't be in that realm. So, we go to a place where we can work that out. Our hedonism or our selfishness or our egotistical desires and we act that out in this plane with a lot of other people acting it out, too. And then we can return. And the human body is…

   yt/pn7JOpDyCKM-michael-cremo-extreme-out-of-place-artifacts-more-forbidden-/transcript.txt

5. 05 · gutenberg0.763

   And if they did discover any truth, this was due to one or other of the four means above mentioned. Notwithstanding this, I am in no degree desirous to lessen the honour which each of them can justly claim; I am only constrained to say, for the consolation of those who have not given their attention to study, that just as in travelling, when we turn our back upon the place to which we were going, we recede the farther from it in proportion as we proceed in the new direction for a greater length of time and with greater speed, so that, though we may be afterwards brought back to the right way, …

   gutenberg/PG-4391-selections-from-the-principles-of-philosophy/PG-4391.txt

6. 06 · yt0.760

   But I do think that there that this transformative process is something that for many of us only happens when we I think Jordan Peterson used the phrase we meet the transcendent when we err. But basically, the idea of that is we meet the transcendent when we're at the end of our rope. When when there's nothing else left. And uh and that reality often discloses itself to us in consequences that are not something that we search for, and yet those consequences teach us something that help us to transform, help us to become more and to grow. And um I think there's something about this idea that at…

   yt/1Lm3y_4a--0-wolfgang-smith-and-john-vervaeke-the-perpetual-promise-inexh/transcript.txt

7. 07 · yt0.759

   Uh I won't go into that in detail, but we also have the opposite. We have that right? The real is what what surprises us, what shocks us. As you said, Karen, what startled us. And I think what we need to do is we need to and this is what Drew Hyland argues in his interpretation of Plato is we need to be able to live, not just believe, but live a stance in which we understand human beings as finite transcendents. We are finite. We are always limited. We are always prone to error, and that is a fundamental part of who and what we are. And one of the ways reality discloses itself to us is in our …

   yt/1Lm3y_4a--0-wolfgang-smith-and-john-vervaeke-the-perpetual-promise-inexh/transcript.txt

8. 08 · blog0.755

   Our “knowledge of the truth of such things [located outside of us] seems to belong to the mind alone, not to the combination of mind and body” ( ibid ., AT 7:82–83, CSM 2:57), and what the mind perceives clearly about bodies are non-sensory qualities like extendedness and flexibility (The Second Meditation, AT 7:30–31, CSM 2:20). Or as he says elsewhere, the certainty that we seek in metaphysical inquiry “occurs in the clear perceptions of the intellect and nowhere else” ( Second Replies , AT 7:145, CSM 2:104). He adds: “certainty does not lie in the senses but solely in the understanding, whe…

   blog/plato-stanford-edu/descartes-modal-metaphysics.md

9. 09 · gutenberg0.754

   It will be said that, even so, we do not transcend our intellect, for it is still with our intellect, and through our intellect, that we see the other forms of consciousness. And this would be right if we were pure intellects, if there did not remain, around our conceptual and logical thought, a vague nebulosity, made of the very substance out of which has been formed the luminous nucleus that we call the intellect. Therein reside certain powers that are complementary to the understanding, powers of which we have only an indistinct feeling when we remain shut up in ourselves, but which will be…

   gutenberg/PG-26163-creative-evolution/PG-26163.txt

10. 10 · blog0.754

    Most of us are inclined to affirm that what we know best we know through the senses, along with the other falsities already mentioned, but in addition: our conceptions of mind and God represent mind and God as sensible when they are not; we think and speak by way of terms that we do not understand or that may have no corresponding idea; and what we take to be the paradigm of a distinct perception is hardly distinct at all. [ 5 ] We take in information against the background of our current commitments and conceptions, and so are primed to reject what conflicts with them. [ 6 ] When we work thro…

    blog/plato-stanford-edu/descartes-modal-metaphysics.md