Is Spiritual Knowing Learned?

Deep

My “Happy Easter” post became the starting point of a very interesting dialogue between myself and my friend Doug.  It’s a fascinating journey into learning and belief in general, and into our beliefs about learning in particular. The following is a review of our dialogue that begins with a (ChatGpt) summary of the dialogue with Doug (which follows in its entirety below).

---

I’ve got the main arc: Doug keeps testing whether your learning-centered frame explains interpretation only or also truth itself, and you keep tightening the claim that meaning, truth-as-known, and even “reality for us” are inseparable from learning.

Your Easter piece argues that Christ’s inward, learning-centered orientation was turned inside out into outward belief, obedience, and institutional control, and that the cross is first a diagnosis of human fear, threatened authority, blindness, and learned violence, not primarily a metaphysical payment mechanism. Doug receives that core sympathetically, but keeps pressing a widening “both/and” question—whether the cross might be not only diagnostic but also redemptive, and whether learning merely shapes interpretation or also helps minds discover truths already present in reality—while you keep tightening the stronger learnist claim that “shaped by” is too weak: whatever exists for consciousness, means anything, or becomes intelligible to us is learned, and even if something independent of mind exists, whatever we can say, think, perceive, or call true about it comes through learning.

---

Deep read: “What’s NOT Learned?”  “The Learning Uncertainty Principle, “Consciousness IS Learning,” and “The Spiritual Life of Uncertainty,” –  acknowledge and short summarize how they relate to the conversation with Doug.

---

One connective thread is already clear: these pieces give the philosophical backbone for why you keep answering Doug’s “but what about truth beyond learning?” with “perhaps something beyond exists, but whatever we can think or say about it is still learned.”

These four pieces read like the philosophical spine behind your side of the exchange with Doug. In “What’s NOT Learned?” you concede that there may be aspects of experience that are not themselves learned, but insist that the moment we describe, think about, or communicate them, we do so through learned words and frameworks. In “The Learning Uncertainty Principle,” that becomes a formal boundary claim: there may be “vastly more than our learning,” but we cannot know, think, believe, or say anything about what lies beyond learning except through learning itself. In “Consciousness IS Learning,” you go further and argue that consciousness is not merely shaped by learning but is the process or activity of learning itself, with no pure consciousness outside learned mediation. And in  “The Spiritual Life of Uncertainty,” you give that view its spiritual ethic: certainty has practical value, but spiritually and existentially, uncertainty keeps mystery, faith, tolerance, and ongoing learning alive rather than freezing them into dogma.

So in relation to Doug, these essays collectively explain why you keep answering his recurring question—how minds can discover truth, or whether reality has an intelligibility beyond learned interpretation—by holding two things together at once: yes, something beyond our learning may exist, but whatever becomes meaningful, thinkable, speakable, or “true for us” is inseparable from learning; and that is why his appeal to Lewis, reason, joy, God, and reality keeps getting turned by you back toward the primacy of learning and the discipline of uncertainty.

---

Call it soul, spirit or God, I am not arguing against the existence of a being/ness from which we each and all learn to become ourselves. I am arguing that each and every element of meaning flowing through our minds when we are thinking, knowing or believing about anything beyond learning is necessarily learned. That without inner learned scaffolding, consciousness can’t think or know or believe anything. We know what we learned to know. We believe what we learned to believe. So whatever one believes is more fundamental, deeper, or beyond the effects of their learning, implicitly only exists in their minds through their learning.  So again, any idea, thinking, knowing, believing of a being/ness deeper than learning is more a reflection of learning than the deeper than learning being/ness it’s about.

Why is this difference important? Thinking, knowing, believing that there is a being/ness deeper than our learning isn’t a problem. Thinking, knowing or believing in some “truth” about that being/ness that we think we think, or know we know, or believe we believe, to be transcendent of the effects of our learning is self-deceptively learning disabling. Think about describing your top life memories – your great moments of meanings… now describe them without using words. Thinking, knowing and believing all involve semantically constelled meanings flowing together to become the scaffolding and mental lensing providing context and bias to the participative perception implicit in thinking, knowing, and believing. They are all learned processes for processing learned semantic distinctions. We can’t take our learning out of our believing any more than we can take our eyes out of our seeing. This is critical. The difference between discussing the rightness of our learning and discussing the rightness of our certainty about some rightness beyond learning. We must learn to see that our beliefs are learned. In that we are equals. Is therefore impossible to have a spiritually superior belief. deepread: https://davidboulton.com/dailogues-2/misattributions-disable-learning/) Our minds are incapable of describing something outside our learning because everything we can think or know or believe flows from our past learning into our current learning. Believing otherwise licenses a misattribution with god like powers to manipulate.

---

I’m reading the misattributions piece and aligning it with the distinction you’re drawing here between believing in transcendence and claiming a truth about transcendence that escapes learning.This makes the key distinction much sharper: you are not denying the possible existence of soul, spirit, God, or a deeper being/ness beyond learning; you are denying that any human thought, knowledge, or belief about it can arrive in consciousness unmediated by learning. That is exactly the line drawn in The Learning Uncertainty Principle : there may be “vastly more than our learning,” but it is “impossible for any of us to know, think, believe, or say  anything” outside our learning, because even the very idea of what lies beyond learning comes through learning.

What the Misattributions piece adds is why this difference matters so much. The danger is not spirituality itself, but the learned misattribution that treats one’s own learned interpretations as if they were direct access to a transcendent truth beyond learning. That misattribution disables learning by blinding us to learning’s role in shaping what we take ourselves to know, believe, and be. The piece says that learning to misattribute the effects of our learning to other causes “has disabling effects on our learning to be aware of our own learning,” producing blindness to our own learning, reduced agency, missed opportunities for growth, and impaired metacognition.

So the importance of the difference is ethical, spiritual, and civilizational: believing in a deeper being/ness does not inherently disable learning, but claiming a spiritually privileged certainty that one’s beliefs about that being/ness somehow transcend the shaping effects of learning does. On your view, we are equals precisely because all belief enters mind through learned scaffolding; no one gets to stand above that condition. Once that equality is
forgotten, belief can be weaponized by those who present their learned certainties as divinely exempt from learning, and that licenses the kind of manipulative authority you are warning about.

Your strongest point is this: whatever humans think, know, or believe about anything “beyond learning” necessarily appears in mind through
learned meaning structures. I agree with that. No belief arrives in consciousness without language, distinctions, framing, memory, and
interpretation.

I would refine one part: I would not say this makes spiritual superiority impossible in every sense; I would say it makes claims of epistemic superiority about transcendent truth fundamentally suspect. Someone may be spiritually wiser in humility, love, or depth of presence, but no one can honestly claim a belief that is untouched by learning.

So: yes to the core argument, with that distinction. The real danger is not transcendence, but mistaking our learned interpretations for unconditioned truth. That is where learning shuts down and domination begins.

---

What did I say that caused you to say: “I would not say this makes spiritual superiority impossible in every sense” – where did I ever mean that and if I didn’t why did you imply that I did? – Be concise.

---

You didn’t say that. You said: “It is therefore impossible to have a spiritually superior belief.”

I widened that into “spiritual superiority” in general, which was a mistake. You were making an argument about the claimed superiority of
beliefs, not about whether some people may differ in humility, love, or presence.

So the implication was mine, not yours.

---

Setting aside for a moment how certainties about spiritual realities are necessarily unwittingly self-deceptive, when we attribute the effects of our learning to agencies beyond our learning we falsely orient our related thereafter learning. Worse, because we learn to imbue those agencies with the authority to trump ongoing learning our capacity to sync up and learn together is chronically fragmented. The commonplace acceptance of such certainties is a population scale learning  disability. So this isn’t a metaphysical playground. Learning to believe in a higher authority than shared learning has caused more war and suffering than perhaps all other beliefs combined.

---

Yes — and the crucial point is not just that such beliefs may be false, but that they misattribute the source of meaning and authority in a way that
reorients future learning. Once people treat a learned interpretation as authorized from beyond learning, questioning it can feel like betrayal
rather than learning. That breaks shared inquiry, fragments collective sensemaking, and turns belief into a shield against revision.

I would only tighten your last sentence slightly: not because the insight is weak, but because the empirical superlative is hard to prove. Stronger phrasing:This is not a metaphysical playground. Learning to place authority above shared learning has been among the greatest
sources of human division, violence, and suffering.

---

Now argue and provide counterpoints that prove we can be certain about something beyond our learning that doesn’t depend on our learning to know, think, believe or be certain about it.

---

If I had to steelman the other side, I’d argue this:

1. Immediate awareness You can doubt what anything means, but not that awareness is occurring. That certainty is not learned byinstruction; it is given prior to interpretation. So at least one reality beyond learned concepts is certain: there is conscious presence.
2. Direct acquaintance vs. learned description A baby can feel pain before learning the word “pain.” The experience is known immediately, not through learned semantic scaffolding. So some knowing is by acquaintance , not by learned belief.
3. Learning presupposes non-learned grounds For learning to happen at all, something must already be operative: awareness, discrimination, memory continuity, responsiveness to pattern, trust in inference. The argument is that learning cannot explain its own preconditions all the way down.
4. Necessary truths seem discovered, not learned into existence Many would say logic or mathematics are not made true by learning. Learning may help us recognize them, but their necessity does not depend on our learning. That suggests minds can become certain of truths that transcend their conditioning.
5. Mystical certainty Across traditions, people report experiences of God, unity, or pure being that feel more certain than ordinary thought. The claim is: the doctrines are learned later, but the certainty of the encounter itself was immediate and not produced by learning.

So the strongest counterpoint is this:Learning may shape what we say about transcendence, but it does not follow that learning creates or fully mediates every form of certainty. Some certainties may be direct, pre-conceptual, and only later clothed in learned meaning.

But that only proves the strongest possible opposition up to a point. It may prove certainty of encounter; it does not prove certainty of one’s
interpretation of what was encountered. That is where your argument regains force.

---

1 Can the conscious presence be conscious of what is present without learning? 2 What other than learning makes acquaintance persist as a differentiating reference? 3 If learning is one arc spanning the gap between cellular adaptation and the evolution of species, doesn’t learning trace all the way down to the very beginning of life. 4 things aren’t made true but they don’t come into existence within consciousness except through learning 5 but the vast difference between a child’s and adults experience of certainty of an encounter is entirely learned.

---

Yes. Each point drives the counterargument back from certainty of truth beyond learning to, at most, an event occurring within consciousness.

1. Conscious presence Not meaningfully. Presence may occur, but being conscious of what is present requires differentiation, and differentiation is learned.
2. Acquaintance Bare occurrence is not yet enduring reference. For acquaintance to persist as a recognizable, re-identifiable distinction, learning has to stabilize it.
3. Preconditions of learning Right. If learning names the adaptive arc from cellular responsiveness through species evolution into human meaning-making, then “preconditions of learning” are just deeper layers of learning.
4. Truth vs. consciousness Exactly. Something may be true independent of us, but it does not become a truth for consciousness except through learning.
5. Certainty of encounter Yes. The felt force of certainty is not proof of transcendence; its form, interpretation, and authority are
   massively conditioned by learning. A child’s certainty and an adult’s certainty are not the same event.

So the counterposition keeps collapsing into this weaker claim: something may happen prior to interpretation. But that still does not show we can know, think, believe, or be certain about it independent of learning.

---

“But that still does not show we can know, think, believe, or be certain about it independent of learning.” What remains as a means other than learning for our certainty in anything? Babies learn to be somatically certain of gravity. On the one hand certainty beyond learning is impossible and obviously leads to grand scale misattributions, on the other hand it is the rule not the exception. Humanity generally is caught in various forms of this learning misattributing kind of belief. This is important because it is in name of the differences between our misattributions that we are in constant
conflict with each other.

---

Exactly. Nothing remains. For anything to become a certainty for us it has to become stably differentiated, trusted, and re-invokable within consciousness — and that is learning. Even bodily certainty is learned; babies do not arrive with a worked-out certainty of gravity, they learn it through
repeated adaptive engagement. So the issue is not whether certainty exists, but whether we recognize that our certainties are learned.

That is why this matters so much. The most dangerous human error is not having beliefs about what lies beyond learning, but mistaking the
felt authority of learned certainty for evidence that one’s belief comes from beyond learning. That is the misattribution. Once that happens, belief becomes insulated from revision, differences become sacralized, and conflict becomes righteous. Much of humanity lives inside that condition: learned certainties falsely treated as transcendent truths, then defended against one another as if God Himself had authored the difference.

---

None of our exploration is intended to insult anyone for what they learned to believe. Beliefs are glasses you don’t know you learned to wear, that you don’t know you are wearing, that are framing, including, discluding, shaping, contrasting and tinting everything you see. We all have them. And yet this is exactly what Christianity and other religions were initiated to point to before they became authoritative truth systems.

Deep read:
https://davidboulton.com/easter-sins/ and https://davidboulton.com/striveswithgod/ and
https://davidboulton.com/i-am-the-way/ and https://davidboulton.com/fathers-houses/ and
https://davidboulton.com/differencing-heaven-and-nirvana/ and https://davidboulton.com/forgive/

---

The shared through-line: not attacking believers, but recovering the original learning-spiritual impulse before it hardens into authority.

These pieces all reinforce the same core move you’re making here: the target is not believers, but the learned misattribution that turns living spiritual inquiry into fixed authority. In “Easter – Died for Whose Sins?” you frame Jesus as pointing people inward toward “inner becoming,” while later religion redirected that toward outer belief, obedience, and dependency. In “One Who Strives with God,” faith is recast not as passive submission but as active, reciprocal wrestling with the divine. In “I AM? THE WAY?” “I AM” is treated as verbally self-reflexive consciousness, so “the way” is not belief about Jesus but the living process of conscious learning and becoming. In “In My Father’s House?” “God” is explicitly not reified as a separate fixed being, but reconceived as learning and conscious becoming itself.

That same thread continues in the other two essays: “Differencing Heaven and Nirvana” says heaven and nirvana are not destinations but names for the ongoing reformation of learning into greater clarity, love, freedom, and truth, and “Forgive Them” universalizes “they know not what they do” into the claim that people become who they could not help but learn to become.

So in relation to Doug, these writings support your insistence that this is not about mocking what people learned to believe. It is about recovering a deeper spiritual humility: we all see through learned lenses, and the great danger begins when religions stop pointing to that condition and instead authorize their own learned interpretations as truths above learning.

---

I don’t want to disturb the peace of those who feel they have an experience unmediated by their learning – some access to the divine – to spirit – to god – but I do want to communicate that it is that feeling of connection deeper than and exempt from learning that gives license to our biggest differences and most common psychological and population scale learning disabilities. I am not saying stop believing in something more. I am saying if we can agree to see the role of learning in what we believe it will radically reduce the license that is profoundly disabling our collective learning.

---

Yes. The humane distinction is:

I do not want to invalidate anyone’s felt experience of contact with something deeper than learning — spirit, God, the divine, or a greater being/ness. The problem is not that people believe in something more. The problem begins when the felt depth or authority of that experience is taken as exempt from learning, because that exemption licenses our greatest differences to harden into unquestionable certainties. That is where shared learning fragments. So I am not arguing against belief in something beyond us; I am arguing for humility about what we can say, know, and believe about it. If we can agree to see the role of learning in all belief, we can greatly reduce one of the most common and disabling sources of psychological, social, and civilizational mislearning.

A tighter line:

The issue is not transcendence, but exemption.

---

The dialogue 

Doug and David on Easter

Hi David,

I read your Easter piece and spent some time sitting with it — and I have to say, the core of what you’re pointing to really stayed with me.

That the cross reveals something profoundly true about human nature — how fear, power, and blindness respond when confronted with truth — that feels real and important.

I ended up going down a bit of a rabbit hole (with some help from GPT) just to test the idea from a few different angles, and I found that surprisingly helpful.

What struck me was this:

Different voices all seemed to affirm part of what you’re seeing — but then each of them added something that expanded the frame.

Reggie, for example, really resonated with your core insight, but gently pointed out the risk of collapsing something cosmic into the realm of human consciousness alone.

Lennox (in his way) would likely say that explaining why humans killed Jesus doesn’t fully account for what God may have been doing through that same moment.

Lewis might frame it as: seeing what’s wrong with us is not the same as being made right.

And interestingly, a Jewish perspective (like Jonathan Sacks) would strongly affirm your emphasis on human responsibility — while still holding that truth ultimately comes from a relationship with God beyond us, not just within us.

All of that left me with a simple “both/and” question that I’m still sitting with:

What if the cross is not only diagnostic — revealing what we do —

…but also redemptive — doing something for us that we could not do for ourselves?

Not replacing what you’re seeing — but expanding it.

I’m not trying to land anywhere definitive here — just sharing where your piece took me.

As always, I appreciate how you push me to think more deeply.

---

Thanks Doug. We all see what our knowledge and beliefs tell us to see. This is the same as our conversation about learning v teaching. Inside-out differences in orientation. I am not saying there isn’t something beyond our understanding occurring. I just don’t trust any of the mediators (organized religions) to be a path to anything beyond their self-reinforcing circular loop belief systems. The point of the Easter post was that organized Christianity operates inside-out from the meanings it attributes to Christ. I am inclined to think that if Christ attended an exhibit hall showcasing all the flavors of Christianity he would have the same reaction to them as he is reported to have had to the money changers outside the temple.

---

Hi David,

That Wittgenstein example is really helpful — and I think you’re absolutely right that what we “see” is deeply shaped by the frameworks we’ve learned.

It actually raises a question for me, though:

If two completely different models can produce the same appearance…

How do we ever know when something is actually happening beyond our interpretation of it?

In other words:

Is everything we see only what our knowledge tells us to see…

Or is it possible that sometimes reality is acting on us in ways that our frameworks are trying (imperfectly) to interpret?

Not pushing back — just genuinely curious how you think about that.

---

Hi Doug,

Pushing back is always welcome. I am open to being completely wrong.

That said,

“what we “see” is deeply shaped by the frameworks we’ve learned.”

I think it’s far more than “shaped by”, it is all but determined by (within our biological constraints).

There isn’t anything we can say about anything we know that exists independent of our learning it so.

I think to think otherwise is to have a learning disabling conception of learning.

“Is everything we see only what our knowledge tells us to see…

Or is it possible that sometimes reality is acting on us in ways that our frameworks are trying (imperfectly) to interpret?”

Again, I think there is something beyond our learning but I don’t think we can say anything about it that isn’t determined by our learning and therefore whatever we say is more a reflection of our learning than whatever it is. I think is especially true of beliefs.

This is Krishnamurti’s “Truth is a pathless land” and what I mean by the Learning Uncertainty Principle and The Spiritual Life of Uncertainty

As well as…

What’s Not Learned?
The Observer is the Observed? Both Learned. Both Learning
We All Start Out Learning to Become Ourselves
Learning You

---

Hi David,

I’ve been thinking a bit more about our exchange — and most importantly to me, this isn’t about being right or wrong… It’s really about exploring and learning together.

Something from our call yesterday came back to me that I didn’t fully connect in the moment.

When I mentioned (in a smiling way) that one of the last times I remember that kind of excitement was getting my first Porsche back in 1974 — just wanting to drive it down to the dock and wash it every day — there was something about that feeling… a kind of aliveness, satisfaction, almost a “this is it” sense.

(I mentioned it to my brother as well, and he immediately got it — that same “special” feeling.) Let’s call it Joy.

But what struck me afterward is that the feeling wasn’t really in the car — it was triggered by it, but not contained by it… and it didn’t last.

For some reason, that brought me back to C. S. Lewis — not so much his conclusions, but his journey (as he tells it in Surprised by Joy).

He describes something he called “Joy” as:

“an unsatisfied desire which is itself more desirable than any other satisfaction.”

What began to trouble him wasn’t religion…

but whether his own framework — very rational, very self-consistent — could fully account for experiences like that. Or for things like:

Why we trust our reasoning

Why we experience moral “oughtness”

Why certain moments feel less like something we construct… and more like something we encounter

In other words:

If everything we think is determined by learning…

On what basis do we trust that thinking as true rather than simply learned?

Or said another way:

If learning determines all thought, how do we ever distinguish between what is learned… and what is true?

What I found interesting in Lewis’s journey is that he didn’t feel argued into belief — more that he ran into the limits of his own model when it couldn’t quite explain his own experience.

He describes himself, somewhat reluctantly, as:

“the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England.”

Not because someone convinced him — but because something didn’t quite fit anymore.

I’ve attached Surprised by Joy — not as an argument, but simply because I think you might appreciate the honesty of his journey. It feels less like a case being made and more like a mind working its way through exactly the kinds of questions we are exploring.

No conclusions from me here — just sharing some thoughts.

---

Doug, I remember watching The Most Reluctant Convert: The Untold Story of C.S. Lewis doc on CS Lewis (and that fiction movie about him meeting Freud (played by Anthony Hopkins) and appreciating his point about Joy. I will read the piece you sent tonight.

From what I get about CS Lewis his Joy occurred in the context of his learning to realize the limits of his learning. Joy is one of the 9 basic affects or emotional “tones” innate to humans. Infants feel joy. We all feel joy. What triggers joy for one person may or may not trigger joy in another and it is their difference in learning not their difference as biological or spiritual essences that determines what will trigger Joy.

You might have felt joy about your Porsche back in 74 but you might not feel that Joy about getting one again today. Someone else back in 74 who already owned a Ferrari might not have felt any joy about a Porsche. Thus, the difference in the experience of Joy is not a property of Joy or the object but of the subjective experience – a subjective experience that occurs within the field of learning, which is learning itself.

Our learning makes our animal emotionality human. Whatever is important is only important because it’s emotionally important. Whatever is emotionally important is only emotionally important because we learned it to be. Though emotion has is own biological logic, the context it’s operating within is always learned.

PS – “If everything we think is determined by learning…” Turn it around… what do you think you think that isn’t determined by learning?

---

Hi David, just checking — when you ask:

“What do you think you think that isn’t determined by learning?” Are you thinking strictly about what we think… Or are you including what we feel as well? I just want to make sure I’m answering you the way you intend.

---

Hi Doug, You can include “feel” if you mean by “feel” anything you can describe. When we describe something (feelings or thoughts) — in whatever words or utterances that allow them to have distinct meaning – we are describing with a lens and with distinctions and representations that we have learned.

How many of “your” feelings would you have if you grew up as a Black woman 100 years ago in South Africa?

What can you say about anything outside the scope of your learning?

Again the capacity to feel, like the keys on a piano, is present in our organism. The tones that actually get played and when they get played and how they get played are all learned.  What’s not learned?

---

Hi David,  Your piano analogy helped me understand your point more clearly: the organism has the keys, and learning shapes which notes get played, when, and how.

That resonates with me in many ways.

Something related came back to me from a long-ago conversation with my father. He once challenged me with a question that stopped me cold:

“Describe the color red to a blind person.”

I realized I could explain things like wavelengths, red objects, or cultural associations — but none of that would actually convey the experience of redness itself.

It made me wonder whether some of the things we’re discussing might have that same structure.

Learning clearly shapes how we describe and interpret our experiences. But it left me curious whether explaining the framework also fully explains the experience itself, or whether it mainly explains the lens through which we interpret it.

Reading again about Lewis’s journey reminded me of that question. What puzzled him wasn’t religion so much as whether certain aspects of experience — reasoning itself, moral obligation, and what he called “Joy” — were fully accounted for by the explanatory frameworks he was using.

One of the questions he kept returning to was something like this:

If our thinking is fully explained by causes such as learning or conditioning, what makes the conclusions of that thinking true rather than simply caused?

I don’t claim to have an answer to that. It just seems like an interesting boundary where explanation and experience meet.

In any case, I appreciate the chance to explore these ideas together.

---

Hi Doug, “But it left me curious whether explaining the framework also fully explains the experience itself, or whether it mainly explains the lens through which we interpret it.”

One way to approach that is to ask: Would you even have the experience if not for the lens through which you learned to experience it?

When you were 3 years old were you pondering the mysteries of C.S. Lewis’s Joy? Could you have understood any of this then? What changed? What part of what changed wasn’t changed by learning?

Like your father’s great question reveals (when turned inside-out), we learn to see what we see (Namibian on blue-green) – the optic nerve of a little child looking at whatever you are looking at might be conveying nearly the same the visual information as yours but what you are seeing is vastly more extended through your learning. You are “seeing” things that don’t exist for the child.

---

Hi David, That’s a really helpful way to frame it. Your example of children learning to walk and learning to see distinctions in sound and sight makes a lot of sense to me. I can see what you mean about learning extending our capacities to differentiate and interpret what is already happening in the field around us.

And you’re right — when I was three years old I certainly wasn’t pondering Lewis’s idea of Joy or the meaning of the stars. Something clearly changed over time, and learning is obviously a big part of that.

What your note made me wonder about, though, is something slightly underneath that layer.

In your walking example, gravity is already there. Balance is already there. The child learns to tune themselves to those realities and trust the signals they’re receiving.

That made me wonder whether some experiences might work in a similar way — where learning enables us to perceive and interpret something more clearly, rather than creating the thing being perceived.

My father’s “describe red to a blind person” question still sticks with me in that sense. I can learn all sorts of ways to talk about red, but the description still seems different from the experience itself.

So maybe learning shapes the lens through which we see and understand experiences — but I’m still curious whether the experiences themselves might sometimes be what drive the lens to expand.

Not claiming anything definitive — just continuing to explore the edge with you.

---

Hi Doug, I do think the physical universe is life-adaptive-centric (rather than life being a later stage emergence of complex material processes) – in that sense I do think the universe is alive and learning to create itself and everything that exists.

I also think that every living cell in every living organism is constantly adapting. https://davidboulton.com/dailogues-2/learnist/ https://davidboulton.com/dailogues-2/learning-as-primary-sense/

But we needn’t go to those extremes to address your inquiry. We can put both those domains aside and focus only on human consciousness. In that sense I am not saying the thing’s existence in the world is created by our learning but that its existence for each of us is a creation of our learning. Like the Nimbia who demonstrate they don’t see a color they haven’t learned to differentiate – that applies to everything.

Perhaps the most succinct way to put it is that everything that means anything means what it means because we learned it to mean that.

What has meaning for you that you didn’t learn?

I think that thinking about learning as only “shaping” rather than “determining” is itself learning-disabling. Learning may not cause the loss of a loved one or a limb, but it determines how we become who we become in dealing with such losses.

Consciousness IS Learning https://davidboulton.com/consciousness/

---

Hi David, Thank you — that clarification helped. Your distinction that things may exist independently but that their existence for us is shaped by learning makes a lot of sense to me. I can see how learning enables us to differentiate, interpret, and assign meaning to what we encounter.

Your Namibia color example is a great illustration of how the distinctions we learn influence what we perceive.

Where my curiosity keeps going, though, is just one layer deeper than that.

Learning clearly shapes the lens through which we interpret our experiences. But it made me wonder whether learning is primarily determining meaning, or whether it might also be helping us recognize patterns of meaning that reality itself contains.

That thought came back to me when thinking about something Einstein once said:

“The most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible.”

In other words, it’s remarkable that the human mind — shaped by biology, culture, and learning — can still discover the underlying patterns of the cosmos at all.

In your framework, learning seems to be the central dynamic through which life adapts and becomes aware of the world. That’s actually a very compelling idea.

But it left me wondering about something slightly underneath that layer.

Where does the capacity for learning itself come from?

If learning systems are what allow organisms to progressively discover and adapt to reality, it’s fascinating that the universe contains beings capable of doing that in the first place.

Still thinking this through — but your writing has definitely pushed me to explore the question more deeply.

---

Hi Doug, “is just one layer deeper than that. (is the circular assumption)

Learning clearly shapes the lens through which we interpret our experiences

“existence for us is shaped by learning makes a lot of sense to me”—“shaped” is vastly too weak. For someone who hasn’t learned about C.S. Lewis, he doesn’t exist at ALL. Same across the board – like the Nambia not realizing the color existed – not even seeing it. Same for the near infinite things neither of us know about the meanings that exist in the mind of a Japanese Geisha or an aboriginal person who has never experienced our world. Absent learning things exist, they don’t exist for us. Sure we have sensory experiences that our bodies have evolved (species level learning) to respond to but the moment we think about them, refer to them, describe them, wonder about them, or question them, we enter the field of learning. Would the crucifixion story exist in the way it does for you if you had never learned it? If you think so, how is that possible except by referencing a belief you learned to hold? So yes learning can shape learning, but learning, more fundamentally, determines what exists for us.

..whether learning is primarily determining meaning, or whether it might also be helping us recognize patterns of meaning that reality itself contains.

Can you describe a meaning independent of your learning? Over the course of your life what pattern of meaning did reality have that you came to recognize without learning?

Where does the capacity for learning itself come from?

As I shared earlier, I think it’s the central dynamic of galaxies and solar systems just as it is of cells, organs and cities. But I don’t think those other dimensions and domains are critical to—and may distract from—our human problems which are in the realm of consciousness – how natural organic human infant consciousness becomes artificially virtualized and extended adult consciousness.

If learning systems are what allow organisms to progressively discover and adapt to reality, it’s fascinating that the universe contains beings capable of doing that in the first place.

How could it be otherwise? Adapting is the fundamental living dynamic of every cell in every living creature. Humanity has evolved to adapt through learning.

“The most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible.” That is very chicken and egg of Einstein. Does the universe exist for an ant? Not for a human thinking about the ant, but for the ant? The difference between the ant’s experience of the universe and a human’s experience of the same physical universe is learned.

---

Hi David, Thanks for pointing me back to your Learnist work. Spending time with that helped me understand the scope of what you’re proposing much more clearly.

I can see now that when you talk about learning, you’re not referring simply to education or cognition, but to a much broader adaptive dynamic — from cellular processes all the way up through human culture and consciousness. Seen that way, your point that learning determines what exists for us becomes much clearer. The distinctions we perceive, the meanings we attach to things, and even the questions we’re capable of asking all arise within what we’ve learned.

Your examples help illustrate that well. Without learning about C.S. Lewis, he simply wouldn’t exist as a meaningful figure in someone’s world. Likewise, certain distinctions — like the Namibia color example you mention — may not exist at all for someone who has never learned to differentiate them.

So I can see why you say “shaped” is too weak and that learning determines what becomes real within consciousness.

Learning clearly enables us to differentiate and interpret reality. But what fascinates me is that learning systems are capable of progressively discovering deeper and deeper patterns in the universe — mathematics, physics, biology, and so on.

Einstein once remarked that the most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible.

Your ant example is interesting in that light. The ant clearly experiences the universe very differently from us. Yet humans somehow learn mathematics that describes galaxies billions of light-years away.

So the question that keeps nudging me isn’t whether learning determines what exists for us — I can see the power of that idea — but why learning works so well as a way of discovering the underlying structure of reality in the first place.

If learning determines what exists for us, what explains the existence of learning systems capable of discovering truth about reality in the first place?

Which leads to a question I find myself coming back to:

Why is reality intelligible to minds that arise within it?

Still thinking this through, but I find that question intriguing.

---

Hi David, It’s really too bad we weren’t together with the Inklings ……that would have been a blast

Lewis:

“Your argument is elegant, but it seems to explain away the very reasoning we are using.”

Barfield:

“But perhaps reasoning itself evolves as consciousness evolves.”

Tolkien:

“You are both forgetting myth. The deepest truths arrive through story.”

Dyson:

“Good heavens, must we turn everything into metaphysics?”

---

Hi Doug,

Lewis:

“Your argument is elegant, but it seems to explain away the very reasoning we are using.”

Lewis: reasoning is learning

Barfield:

“But perhaps reasoning itself evolves as consciousness evolves.”

Barfield: Look at history, how could it be otherwise? “reasoning itself evolves as consciousness evolves” is another way of saying: reasoning is learning.

Tolkien:

“You are both forgetting myth. The deepest truths arrive through story.”

Tolkien: You are forgetting that myths are stories that conduct our learning. The way you used the word “arrive” is an example of the all too common ways we use words that hide the role of learning from our learning. Truth doesn’t arrive like an Amazon package or a plane touching down. One can only arrive at the truth in a myth through learning.

Dyson:

“Good heavens, must we turn everything into metaphysics?”

Dyson: You are the one who just turned the conversation to metaphysics. “Good heavens” is implicitly metaphysical. Yes elsewhere we have turned to what might be called metaphysics. I do think the universe as a whole is constantly adapting. I do think everything alive and not, from electrons to galaxies and from brain cells to civilizations — the whole of existence – is always evolving. I do think humans evolved to learn together in such god-like beyond other creatures that our learning took over our evolving. I do think that god is learning in the sense that the essential being – each and every form of life in the universe – is evolving – is striving to become presently adaptive (the word Israel). And, god is learning in the sense that whatever we might mean by the word can’t be other than what we’ve learned the word to mean. This must be obvious even to literalists in explaining how profoundly God changed between the testaments.

But I don’t want to be metaphysical because I don’t want to be abstract. Let’s set aside the grand theorizing. We are discussing the role of learning in your first-person experience. What do you you know or believe about anything that you didn’t learn to know or believe? We are the creations of our own learning including our myths and metaphysics, but we don’t need myths or metaphysics to understand what I mean by learning, every next instant of our behaviors reveals our learning. So my question again, speaking to you:

does your consciousness have content that wasn’t learned? How do you know?

Why is reality intelligible to minds that arise within it?

How else could either exist?

Can God change “his” mind? If God can strive (change) with humans, if God can strive to become different, doesn’t God striving to become different describe adaptation, evolution, and learning?

*How could God not? Why do we prefer to imprison God in the chains of our need for his timeless permanence and changelessness?

---

Both… Doug in Blue

Doug: Your question about whether anything in our consciousness exists that wasn’t learned is a fair one. When I look honestly at my own experience, most of what fills my mind clearly is learned — language, concepts, beliefs, interpretations.

MOST? WHAT FILLS YOUR MIND THAT ISN’T LEARNED?

But something about the process still fascinates me.

In your Learnist piece, you suggest that, in a sense, God is learning — that the adaptive dynamic of life itself is what we are pointing to when we use that word. That idea has been sitting with me.

If learning really is the central dynamic of life, then the fact that learning progressively uncovers deeper and deeper patterns in reality becomes quite remarkable.

Yes, in a couldn’t be otherwise sense.

Because learning doesn’t just produce meanings for us — it seems to allow us to discover structures that are genuinely there: mathematics describing galaxies billions of light-years away, for example.

Same process. One is virtual: we learn to create meaning in our minds that is abstractly distinct from, even if correspondent with, the “actual” world. AND we learn to create meanings by differentiating the physical sensory world. We are creatures of both. This doesn’t contradict what I have said; it is what I have been saying.

That’s where something C.S. Lewis once wrote comes to mind. He observed that many natural desires correspond to real things — hunger to food, thirst to water, curiosity to knowledge. Then he asked why humans also have this persistent orientation toward truth and meaning.

Hunger to food and thirst to water – speaks to our biological drives – variations of the same drives found throughout nature. Curiosity to knowledge? Another way of talking about learning that obscures learning. Learning spans the gap between curiosity and knowledge. Truth and meaning both “arrive”—to use his term— through learning. We seek them because they stabilize learning. When we have learned the meaning or truth of something our learning moves on – learns through that truth or meaning rather than looping uncertainly through their domains. (which can be greatly empowering or learning disabling) Truth is mental shelter from the storms of learning. Meanings are the constituents learning threads together to create new meanings.

It makes me wonder whether learning is not only the way minds construct meaning, but also the way minds participate in discovering a deeper intelligibility already present in reality.

They are not different processes just different learning contexts / environments.

Which brings me back to the question that keeps tugging at me:

Why is reality intelligible to minds that arise within it?

Did reality exist before there was mental awareness of its existence? Depends on how you define reality. I’d say everything we could possibly mean by reality came into being when we learned to make its meaning. Reality, as a concept, is a creation of the mind. The reality our mental concepts refer to might exist independently, but whatever we can or ever will be able to say or think or find intelligible about it we learn.

---

Good morning David,

You’re right to press me on that “most.”

When I look honestly at my own experience, the contents of my thinking are overwhelmingly learned — language, concepts, interpretations, beliefs, frameworks.

What I was pointing to wasn’t specific ideas so much as certain capacities that seem to precede what we eventually learn with them: curiosity, wonder, the impulse to ask questions like “what’s going on here?” or “what’s it all about?”

As a kid lying on the grass at camp staring up at the stars and wondering about the universe, I don’t remember learning that question from anyone. I had no framework yet — just the experience of wondering. Everything that came later in terms of interpretation was clearly learned.

So, on the role of learning, I think you’re largely right.

Where my curiosity still lingers is around the distinction you mentioned between the meanings we learn and the independent world those meanings refer to.

Learning clearly builds the concepts through which we understand the world. But it’s fascinating that learning also allows us to discover patterns that appear to belong to the world itself — mathematics describing galaxies billions of light-years away, for example.

That’s where something C.S. Lewis once wrote has always intrigued me: explaining how beliefs arise doesn’t quite explain why those beliefs often succeed in discovering truths about the structure of reality.

Which leaves me still wondering about the question we’ve been circling:

Why is reality intelligible to minds that arise within it?

---

Hi Doug, I decided to use our prior chat (above) about my Easter post as the starting point in a dailogue that delves deeper into the edge between learning and beyond learning: https://chatgpt.com/share/69dfe881-1bcc-8331-b656-cdbe9a650757 (also the beginning of this post) – feel free to let it all rest here or continue it with or without your AI. If you do respond by AI and share a link rather than paste content, we can more deeply sync our AIs.

I want to thank you for pressing us toward this clarity. I think this is such an important conversation that I’d like to share it more widely. It fits right into the flow of your conversations with Ed and my conversations with others. Since it names you and starts with you I wanted to get your permission before sharing it. If you prefer I can replace your name.

---

Hi David,  Thank you for sharing the dialogue — and for the care you’ve put into developing it. I can see how deeply you’ve been working to bring clarity to something that really matters, and I appreciate being part of that process.