"That willingness to dive completely into the unknown is an act of a true seeker of truth."
The question would be: What if the unknown remains unknown, can we still call it the truth?
There is a famous thought experiment written by philosopher Frank Jackson called "Mary The Super-Scientist." It is meant to be a knowledge argument in regards to physicalism. If knowledge is physical, then wouldn't it have to interact with any phenomena before we could know that phenomena, as opposed to be mental and can be derived through non-physical means such as direct observation? The thought experiment goes like this:
Mary is a brilliant scientist who is, for whatever reason, forced to investigate the world from a black and white room via a black and white television monitor. She specializes in the neurophysiology of vision and acquires, let us suppose, all the physical information there is to obtain about what goes on when we see ripe tomatoes, or the sky, and use terms like "red," "blue," and so on. She discovers, for example, just which wavelength combinations from the sky stimulate the retina, and exactly how this produces via the central nervous system the contraction of the vocal cords and expulsion of air from the lungs that results in the uttering of the sentence "The sky is blue." What will happen when Mary is released from her black and white room or is given a color television monitor? Will she learn anything or not?
Ultimately, this question was answered by explaining that there are two truths. Unfortunately for the western philosophers, no one bothered to give the Buddhist philosopher, Nagarjuna, the second Buddha after Siddhartha Gautama, credit for this discovery. Making them look kind of stupid. But nonetheless, the doctrine of two truths is instrumental in explaining both experiment, and answering the question.
There are two truths. The first is the truth of experience. This is everything that you observe objectively or subjectively by which you can affirm that in terms of reality, it has no fault. If you drop a stone, and it hits the ground, you can say to a reasonable certainty that stones hitting the ground when you drop them, barring any unusual circumstances, is a truth of reality.
Then there is the truth that lies beyond what is known or knowable. That is the truth that is unknown and unknowable.
Mary has the first truth about color. But she doesn't have the second truth about color, because color is out of the scope of her experience. So will she be in possession of new knowledge when she finally sees color? Well, yes and no. She will have new knowledge in the form of experience, but that won't necessarily tell Mary anything more about how color works than what she already knows. In fact, it may even tell her less. Because just experiencing color doesn't tell you, in a reductively logical way, what is color. Just that it is a thing.
So using this information, what could we say about a person who lived in darkness all their lives, and never saw light. Like a blind man. Does this mean he cannot define darkness? Does this mean that he cannot conceive of light? Like, have you ever been dead? So not experiencing death means you can't understand life for what it is? Saying someone else experience death, or even light, and told you about it, doesn't really deliver knowledge, does it? Other than knowledge of the other person (objective) rather than their perception (subjective).
Blind people have actually defined their darkness before. The difference being that they did not define it in relation to light. They defined it in relation to their own experience. As their existence. As not-light, whatever light is suppose to be.
If you think about it, all humans do this, as well. No human has ever experienced absolute nothingness or non-existence. We don't even have a way to define it besides saying it's not existence. But we can still imagine it in a way. But this is only because we make use of other dualities we can model after. So while we may not be able to see light, we can still conceive of a thing called light. And understand darkness for what it is. A thing that is to us a singularity. It is not alone in being singularities. Though most of them are abstract.
What is God? How are we able to define and understand it if we cannot experience it? We certainly don't define it objectively. Just conceptually.
The funny thing about blind people and color blind people is that there exists some technologies that now allow people who have been blind from birth to see. Or color blind people to see color. In many of the videos, mostly children, their reaction to seeing for the first time is often surprising reserved. Their reaction is usually one of curiosity rather than shock.
And oddly enough, many color blind people can tell the difference between different colors, and even name them, never having actually experienced them before that moment. Because what we have become accustom to as color, they have become accustom to as shades of gray. More shades of gray than we ever notice. So for them, the experience of color can really be a little more underwhelming than we would expect.
In a more modern context of truth relativism in logic theory, we'd call the practical truths, relative truths and the greater truths absolute truths. Relative truth are the truths of the world as we can know them in terms of objective and subjective knowledge. Absolute truth is the truth of ontological abstraction. Like the truth of the form of a circle. Typically expressed only logically (mathematically), not materialistically.
Truth (satya) can be divided into two categories: What Nagarjuna usually teach as truth (samvrti), which is a practical kind of truth, and greater truth (paramartha), which is the truth that has greater affect on our existence. According to the two-truths doctrine, all truth ultimately doesn't matter because the one truth of reality .. that it has as its foundation a state of absolute emptiness that cannot be logically determined (shunyata); renders all truths we have to say about reality meaningless.
An often misunderstood term regarding Nagarjuna's understanding is the term "emptiness." This term does not imply a denial of the world / substratum nihilum. Rather it is an absence of svabhava or the essence of the self.
The Muslims had all similar to this in Sufism.
