the most important thing in Buddhist thinking is seeing reality just as it is, unmediated by the “thinking” mind, by which we really mean the acts of discrimination, judgement, categorization, and ontology. To be sure, this “reality” is not external reality, which we never get to see directly, but rather our unmediated contact with it via the senses.
The “unmediated contact via the senses” can only give you sensual inputs. Everything else contains interpretation. That means, you can only have “gnosis” about things like [red], [warm], etc. Including a lot of interesting stuff about your inner state, of course, but still fundamentally of the type [feeling this], [thinking that], and perhaps some usually-unknown-to-non-Buddhists [X-ing Y], etc.
Poetically speaking, these are the “atoms of experience”. (Some people would probably say “qualia”.) But some interpretation needs to come to build molecules out of these atoms. Without interpretation, you could barely distinguish between a cat and a warm pillow… which IMHO is a bit insufficient for a supposedly supreme knowledge.
It’s even worse than that, ‘raw’ sensory inputs already have ontological commitments. Those priors inform all our interpretations pre-consciously. Agree that the efficiency of various representations in the context of coherent intents is a good lens.
The “unmediated contact via the senses” can only give you sensual inputs. Everything else contains interpretation. That means, you can only have “gnosis” about things like [red], [warm], etc. Including a lot of interesting stuff about your inner state, of course, but still fundamentally of the type [feeling this], [thinking that], and perhaps some usually-unknown-to-non-Buddhists [X-ing Y], etc.
Poetically speaking, these are the “atoms of experience”. (Some people would probably say “qualia”.) But some interpretation needs to come to build molecules out of these atoms. Without interpretation, you could barely distinguish between a cat and a warm pillow… which IMHO is a bit insufficient for a supposedly supreme knowledge.
It’s even worse than that, ‘raw’ sensory inputs already have ontological commitments. Those priors inform all our interpretations pre-consciously. Agree that the efficiency of various representations in the context of coherent intents is a good lens.