Michael Polanyi's Contact with Reality: Esther Meek and Ryan Lewis

So Michael Polanyi, the premier scientific discoverer, was the only person who answered my question, which was, how do I know I've made contact with reality? And he was the only person that was even using that lingo.

And he'd say, oh, by the way, you know you've made contact with reality in a discovery because you have a sense, an unspecifiable sense, an inarticulable sense, a felt body sense of the possibility of indeterminate future manifestations, future possibilities that you cannot name.

And that's how it's how you know we we humans say sentences like I think i'm on to something.

Well, that's what he had in mind, right? So you can have this sense that there's possibilities.

You move to a new town because you think there's possibilities there, right? We choose a friend, somebody to be a friend because we think there's possibilities, you know? So we navigate by this all the time.

Well, as I was trying to explain that in longing to know, it became more and more apparent to me that it's almost like the possibilities are another person.

And they're coming after me.

So I said, it's not so much that reality answers your questions, as that it explodes them and asks its own questions.

Which started to move me toward proposing my own uh paradigm of best knowing which is the interpersonal uh face-to-face encounter And so that's my covenant epistemology, I call it, and that's what Loving to Know is about.