Steve3007 wrote: If I do not believe in such higher levels of existence, that doesn't stop them from existing for you.The difficulty here is the collapse into relativism. What is true 'for you' may not be true 'for me'. I guess from the viewpoint of a pluralist society, that is also a pragmatic attitude to take, and necessary. But your reply doesn't offer the possibility of what I would call 'Capital T Truth', that is, a level of truth that is not simply 'true for me' or 'true for you' but actually true.
It is interesting how, on the one hand, you can then say 'well, I don't believe in such a thing as 'higher truth', but on the other, if you do, that is OK'. It seems to me that this essentially reduces truth statements to matters of opinion. It is very neighbourly, as it were, but seems unsatisfactory regardless. Of course, this simply reflects the moral dilemma of modern life. Our 'criteria for truth' is, after all, scientific and logical, which doesn't evaluate 'ought' statements (cf Hume).
For example, what does it mean to "understand" something, in the sense that we are using it here? One definition of the word involves knowing of an underlying mechanism for something by which you can, to some extent, predict its behaviour. But people often like to think they mean something "deeper" than this.I would take 'some people' to include 'philosophers'. The issue is that since the Enlightenment, the meaning of philosophy itself has changed.
I will acknowledge I have a somewhat religious view of the nature of philosophy. It is not religious in the sense of defending a particular dogmatic faith, but in the sense that it understands 'the transcendent' as being something which can only be grasped by the intuitive ways of knowing that are associated with religion, namely, meditation and contemplation, and that the attempt to understand such things, constitutes a kind of spiritual discipline. To try and make that relevant to this particular conversation, let's consider it in terms of 'reality and appearance'. This was, in a very real sense, the underlying impulse of Greek philosophy, in general. It is also the origin of what you identify as 'the ability to perceive patterns in nature and make predictions on that basis'. This actually was central to Pythagorean science, for instance.
But with the Greeks, this also was associated with a somewhat religious view of life, insofar as 'the philosopher' was one who was able to 'penetrate appearances' and understand 'the underlying reality', whether in terms of 'the ratios' or 'the forms', or whatever. This is one of the factors that gave rise to science in the first place.
At the time of the Enlightenment, it was believed that the discovery of Newton's laws provided science with a way of accessing 'the underlying reality behind appearances', namely, the reality of the interactions of mass and so on. This is the origin of the modern outlook of scientific materialism. By and large we're still in that view, often unknowingly.
This is why the Copenhagen interpretation was such a challenge to science. It undermined the very idea of an 'observer-independent reality'. This has still never been resolved.
Going back to the Greeks, the best-known allegory of 'higher truth' was Plato's Analogy of the Cave. This presents the notion of a complete re-orientation of perception, analogous to the difference between living in a cave, and emerging into the outside world and seeing by the light of the sun.
I don't think modern philosophy has any analogies for that idea. I can see analogies in Buddhist and Hindu philosophy, but none in (for instance) Bertrand Russell or A J Ayer.