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Dagon comments on Is Spirituality Irrational? - Less Wrong
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This feels a lot like a Bait and Switch to me. You haven't defined "Spirituality" well enough that I can tell what you're actually claiming, and I suspect as soon as I agree to any of your points you'll shout "a-ha!" and accuse me of some inconsistency.
I have heard nobody argue against enjoying music - I recommend it heartily. I do argue against making decisions based on incredibly wrong probability assignments (say, that there is a human-like judgement and experiences after death).
You seem to be saying that these two recommendations on my part are contradictory. I don't see it.
I'm sorry this feels like a bait-and-switch. Let me try to state my claim as clearly as I can: some people believe in God because they have had first-hand subjective experiences for which the best explanation that they can come up with is that they were caused by God (for some value of "God'). The nature of these experiences cannot be fully rendered into words, but it is of a similar character to that which causes even rational people to characterize the subjective experience of listening to music as somehow fundamentally different from looking at the grooves in a record despite the fact that the information entering your brain is the same in both cases.
This seems a fairly empty claim. I believe in the existence of trees because I have had first-hand experiences (including: walking into a tree) for which the best explanation that I can come up with is that they were caused by the presence of trees.
I don't see how this claim helps your argument.
A large part of this may be that I'm having some trouble seeing exactly what your argument is - it looks like you are claiming that you felt a sense of euphoria while having a religious experience once, and therefore have concluded that all religious experiences consist of nothing more than a sense of euphoria? How is this not a simple case of the typical mind fallacy, that is to say, the assumption that everyone else thinks in exactly the same way that you do?
The point I am trying to make is that some people believe in God for the exact same reason that you believe in trees: they have had first-hand subjective experiences for which the best explanation that they can come up with is that they were caused by God.
No, I'm advancing the hypothesis that such experiences are (at least part of) the foundation of religious belief, just as the first-hand experience of walking into a tree is (at least part of) the foundation of your belief in trees.
I strongly suspect, however, that most of your belief in trees comes not from walking into them, but from seeing them, with walking into them providing only additional confirmation for your prior belief. You don't give this a lot of thought because the vast majority of your fellow creatures also see trees, and so your interactions with them become a network of self-reinforcing confirmations that trees do in point of fact exist. But imagine a different world, where everyone is blind except you, and the only tree is on the other side of a wide, impassable canyon. You can see the tree, but no one else can. Everyone thinks you're insane because you believe in trees, indeed because you believe that the canyon has "another side" (what an absurd notion!)
How would you go about trying to convince your blind peers that you can in fact see the trees? Well, you might start by trying to convince them that you can see. This you can readily demonstrate, because you can do things that your blind peers can't (I'll leave it up to you to devise an appropriate experiment). But you still might have a hard time convincing them about trees. "Yeah, sure, he can do all kinds of cool tricks because of this supposed "gift of sight" that he has. But, c'mon, trees? Really?"
So now go back to 5000 BC and you've got people who think they hear the Voice of God. Some of them say, "God told me there is going to be a drought." And by golly, the next year there is a drought. Can you see how some people might start to believe that there might be something to this God thing?
A while ago I talked to a person studying theology at university to become a minister. I asked him about spiritual experience. He answered that he doesn't have any strong spiritual experiences and most of his classmates also haven't. A few have and he considered them a bit strange because they were than also serious about things like no-sex-before-marriage. He was religious because he was brought up with the rituals of religion and not based on special spiritual experiences. The conversation took place in Berlin with is culturally different than the US, but he still considered himself to be really religious.
On the other hand I do have experience surrounding what most people would call a near-death experience. I do meditate together with nonreligious people who teach not to take visions during meditation too seriously.
It's quite interesting that the spiritual experience of you was at a Christian summer camp and not in a church on Sunday. The Christian summer camp is not a standard institution of Christianity. The church on Sunday's is. To me the church on Sunday is not a system that looks like it's designed to produce spiritual experience. That's how people can work on becoming Christian ministers without having had spiritual experience.
When it comes to the spiritual experience of lay people I Christian's burned women as witches for going in that direction. I don't think focusing on creating spiritual experience is a traditional focus of Christianity.
It is in the American South.
It is very much the focus of charismatic Christian sects.
There are wide variations between the different Christian denominations/groups in terms of spiritual experiences. This includes their occurrence at all and how commonly they occur. Roman Catholics, more vanilla flavored groups (Baptists&Lutherans?), and the charismatic and pentecostal groups have massive variations on this that I've witnessed first hand.
I'm confident that there are Christian groups who have zero or next to zero spiritual experiences ever while there are also groups like the charismatic church within 5 km of my house where everyone in the entire church exhibits glossolalia and believes they are being gifted special fruits/powers via direct spirit possession by the holy spirit/ghost every single Sunday. That church has at least 300 members and is not an uncommon denomination in my area either. (And yes, watching a massive room full of >300 people stand around convulsing and making weird nonsense noises while they believe they're being taken over by a non-human entity is about as disturbing as it sounds.)
The fact that people have stronger spiritual experiences at summer camps doesn't surprise me based on what I've seen. The stuff that happened at a related church's summer camp that I witnessed was even stranger and more discomforting that what I wrote above.
This person sounds like an atheist who wants to cosplay as religious and considers the people who are actually religious to be "strange".
That's religion in Germany for you.
Or, to put it another way, some people believe in God because they have seen evidence of God.
Well... okay. I don't really think that can be argued against. In fact, looking at the bible, Phillipians 3 verse 3:
suggests that there was at the very least rejoicing, which is what one might expect from a sense of euphoria.
Also, climbing them.
Okay...
I think I'd be more interested in trying to convince them that the other side of the canyon exists, and there's more space for houses and farms there and thus this "bridge" idea that I keep going on about is not as stupid as you think it is you idiots!
...I might lose my temper with them on occasion.
But it's really the same question, at the heart of it. How do I convince someone of the existence of something that they cannot directly observe, and that, indeed, they have a strong social pressure against admitting the existence of? I can tell them about it; they will laugh and shake their heads. I can describe it in detail - someone will ask what lies behind the little hill, and when I cannot tell him, he will laugh and say that that is why this 'sight' I keep going on about cannot possibly exist, because it is no harder to feel on one side of the hill than the other. I can attempt to build a bridge - and the Blind will work to stop me, describing how no such structure has ever succeeded in the past, even when I managed to persuade others to help me (in vain will I point out the width of the canyon, the crumbliness of the far edge, or the fact that letting a blind man lower the bridge was why it fell into the canyon last time) and it is all a waste of resources.
Yes. Exactly.
Religious people have a similarly intricate web of self-reinforcing evidence for their beliefs. The "evidence" of God's handiwork is all around you, even in the trees. In fact, it is so difficult to see why all of the intricacies of nature are not evidence of an intelligent designer that it took humans many millennia to figure it out, and it is considered a major intellectual accomplishment. Evolution is only obvious in retrospect.
OK, but now consider this question: what evidence could your blind peers offer that would convince you that what you think you are seeing is not in fact real, but is actually just an epiphenomenon of some neurobiological process going on entirely inside your brain?
Hmmmm. Tricky.
I can see it. Without trees on this side - and specifically, without wood - I presumably can't build a bridge over to the other side. (And if I could, then I'd have plenty of proof that it exist and I break the metaphor) So, we can't go over there and observe it directly (by means of touch, a sense that everyone shares). The only evidence I have for the existence of the other side of the canyon is sight - I can see it.
I imagine that if the blind people could somehow convince me that sight is really hallucination - that is to say, what I "see" is entirely an internal process within the brain and not at all related to external reality in any way (except perhaps insofar that I only "see" what I expect to "see") - then that would be sufficient to make me question the reality of the other side of the canyon.
...I guess I could throw a rock at it and listen for the impact
Cool, then you get it.
Note that it is not necessary for all of your visions (sic!) to be hallucinations to sustain this puzzle. It's enough that faraway things are illusory. Maybe you're living in a "Truman Show"-style virtual reality, where the far side of the canyon is actually a projected image. (A mirage is a real-world example of something that looks very different from its true nature when viewed from far away.)
Hmmm. True, but now we're talking about a world specifically designed to produce the appearance of the opposite side of the canyon even when it doesn't exist. I think that we can, at least tentatively, discount active malevolence as an explanation for why I see the opposite side of the canyon.
Mind you, I'm not saying it can't be a mirage. If I'm short-sighted - so that everything beyond a certain distance is blurry and unrecognisable - and there just happens to be a large reflective surface partway across the canyon - then I may see the reflection of this side of the canyon, fail to recognise it due to the blurring, and claim that there is an opposite side to the canyon. (This can be recognised by a simple test, should anyone manage to produce prescription spectacles).
But let us say that my blind peers bring me incredibly convincing evidence for the idea that there is no other side of the canyon. They are very persuasive in that this "sight" business is a brain disease caused by being out and about in the heat of the day, making my brain overheat, and only in the coolness of night, when all is dark, am I sane. (And, sure enough, when it's dark then it's too dark to see the other side of the canyon).
But none of this is evidence that there is no other side. The other side could still be there - even if every argument advanced by my blind peers is true - and while I am sitting here questioning my sanity, the other side continues to sit there, perhaps visible to me alone, but nonetheless visible, and I should not throw that evidence away.
Not necessarily. That just happened to be the case in "The Truman Show." We actually have a real-world version of this scenario going on in cosmology right now. There are two "trees" on the far side of the canyon: dark matter and dark energy, both of which are just labels for "the mysterious unknown thing that causes the observed data to not match up with the currently best available theories". (Note that in the tree scenario you would not have the word "tree" in your vocabulary, or if you did, it could not possibly mean anything other than "The mysterious unknown thing on the far side of the canyon that looks completely unlike anything nearby.")
BTW, have you ever seen a mirage? They look very convincing at a distance, even with sharp vision.
Your blind peers can't bring you convincing evidence that there's no other side to the canyon unless there actually is no other side to the canyon. It's like asking "what if homeopaths provided you with incredibly convincing evidence that homeopathy worked, would you still cling to what science says?" (The answer is that if it was possible to produce incredibly convincing evidence for homeopathy, we would be in a very different world than we are now, and science would be saying different things.)
Not that it should matter in a debate, but I find a metaphor that characterizes rejection of the spiritual as a form of blindness very offensive.
That surprises me. Why?
Please note that "spiritual" != "supernatural". I'm using "spiritual" here to describe a particular kind of subjective experience that some people have and others don't. So there's no such thing as "rejection of the spiritual" -- that's a category error.
It shouldn't. Unfortunately, "taking offense" is some people's standard reaction to arguments they can't refute.
It's also some people's standard reaction to being insulted. And an argument can be irrefutable (1) by being right, (2) by being too vague and allusive to get a grip on, or (3) by being nonsense. Or (4) by there actually being no argument to refute. In this case, lisper hasn't made any actual argument for characterizing not having "spiritual experiences" as a kind of blindness, he's just gone ahead and done it.
(There's no shame in being colour-blind, says lisper. Quite true. There should be no shame in being unintelligent either, but most people here would be greatly displeased at being called unintelligent. There should be no shame in being ugly, but most people -- perhaps fewer here than in most venues -- would be greatly displeased at being called ugly.)
True, and unfortunately polymathwannabe seems to regard any implication that the identity he likes to dress as is less than perfect to be a personal attack on him.
Being stupid or ugly is not quite the same as being color-blind or spirituality-blind because stupidity and ugliness have a more direct impact on your reproductive fitness,
Of course it's not quite the same. Neither is being stupid quite the same as being ugly. But do you really think a thing is only a real insult if it's about something that directly impacts your reproductive fitness? That seems a very odd idea to me. (And I question whether being intelligent -- as opposed to unintelligent, rather than outright stupid -- is a net benefit to reproductive fitness; I would guess that typical reproductive fitness is no worse at IQ 100 than at IQ 140. If you think "unintelligent" implies stupider than that, feel free to pretend I said "not especially intelligent" instead of "unintelligent".)
And because stupidity have more direct impact on IQ score, uglyness on actor profession opportunities, color-blind on painter options and spirituality-blindness on inner feeling of well-being perhaps?
Have you had spiritual experiences? How do you explain them? How would you convince others of the reality of those experiences?
The blindness metaphor presents spiritual sensitivity as an ability that rationalists lack.
Your definition of "spiritual" is still not fully detailed here, but does it contradict the proposition "spiritual" ∈ "supernatural"?
That is exactly the hypothesis I'm advancing. I'm sorry if you find it offensive.
That's because spirituality is a subjective sensation, a quale. Those are notoriously difficult to define with precision.
Spiritual experience is no more supernatural that any other subjective experience. But it can feel that way because of the manner in which it is induced.
Why do you characterize having spiritual experiences as an ability?
They happen to some people and not to others. For some such things (seizures, heart attacks, lapses of memory, panic attacks) we generally prefer not to have them happen to us, and wouldn't call them "abilities". For some (moments of insight, orgasms, restful nights' sleep) we generally regard them as good things, and might call them "abilities". Why should spiritual experiences -- in particular, spiritual experiences of a kind that very strongly predispose the people who have them to draw incorrect conclusions about the world -- be put in the latter category rather than the former?
One possible answer is that spiritual experiences are, well, nice. (Of course "nice" has exactly the wrong sorts of connotation here. Too bad.) But, e.g., falling wildly in love is nice too, but if you find that it happens every time you meet a new person-of-the-relevant-sex then any impartial observer would consider it more a liability than an ability. So that answer seems like it's applying a wrong criterion.
Another possible answer is that spiritual experiences really are what many who have them say they are: actual perceptions of a transcendent reality. You feel like you're in the presence of God? That's because you actually are. I agree (of course) that if that's so then having (the right sorts of) spiritual experience is an ability, and not having them is a disability. But you've already said you're not yourself a believer, and if there is in fact no god then spiritual experiences that give the very strong impression of being encounters with a god are actively misleading. So that answer doesn't seem to work.
The Christian tradition is very fond of a metaphor very much like the one you're using here: "I once was lost but now am found, / Was blind, but now I see", etc. But what Christians generally mean by it is not that the "blind" don't have spiritual experiences, but that the "blind" don't perceive the presence and activity of God in whatever experiences ("spiritual" or not) they have. That's a very reasonable usage (if we grant the Christians their premises). Yours seems quite different, and much less reasonable. If "spiritual experiences" are not perceptions of a transcendent reality, but endogenous brain phenomena, why is blindness a good metaphor for not having them, and more than for, say, not having ASMR?
I think you're reading too much positive connotation into the word "ability". Some people can roll their tongues, other's can't. It's not unreasonable to recast that as: some people have the ability to roll their tongues, others don't.
There's actually some evidence that the ability to have spiritual experience is adaptive, and that it can be learned and developed by conscious effort, so it might even be fair to characterize it is a skill. But again, don't read too much endorsement into that. The ability to hang a spoon off your nose is a skill too.
If I understand you correctly, you're saying that people who strive to discipline their thinking process to constantly improve themselves, become sharper, make fewer mistakes, notice and correct their own biases, revise their opinions, and mercilessly seek their own weak points somehow lack awareness of an entire and tremendously important field of human experience?
Rationalists are the last group of people I'd expect to miss something so crucial, if it were real.
Yes, that's pretty much correct, except for one very important thing.
You didn't actually say it, but there's a subtle implication in the way you framed my position that the causality runs in a particular direction, i.e. rationalists strive to discipline their thinking etc. and AS A RESULT lack awareness of an entire field of human experience. That is wrong. In fact, it's exactly backwards. (And I can now understand why you might have found it offensive.)
The causality runs in the opposite direction: some people lack (first-hand) awareness of this important field of human experience, and because they lack this awareness they tend to become rationalists. So this "lack of first-hand awareness" is not necessarily a deficit.
Here's an analogy: some people feel addictive cravings more than others. Someone who doesn't experience addictive cravings might have a hard time empathizing with someone who does because they can't imagine what it's like to have an addictive craving, never having had one of their own. So they might imagine that kicking an addiction is a simple matter of "exercising more self control" or some such thing, and have a hard time understanding why an addict would have such a hard time doing that. In an exactly analogous manner, someone who is not sensitive to spiritual experience might have a hard time understanding or empathizing with someone who does. It does not follow that not feeling addictive cravings is a bad thing.
That depends a great deal on who you consider "rationalists." I've met a lot of self-identified rationalists but who are not even willing to consider the idea that spiritual experience varies across the human population as a hypothesis worthy of consideration. Heck, this article got so many downvotes early on that it almost cost me my posting privileges here on LW! Harshing on religious people seems to play a very important role in the social cohesion of many groups of people who self-identify as rationalists, and so it's not too surprising that the suggestion that there might be something wrong with that is met with a great deal of hostility. Even self-identified rationalists are still human.
I don't see that as a controversial claim, it looks obviously true to me.
You should drop this analogy. The "information entering your brain" is very much NOT the same in both cases.
It seems obviously true to me too. And yet I seem to be having the very devil of a time convincing some people that it is true.
Yes, it is. This is a technical claim, and it is demonstrably true. I mean "information" in the information-theoretical sense, i.e. the log of the number of distinguishable states a system can be in. That the information is the same in both cases can be shown by showing that either system can be reconstructed from the other. The grooves can be reconstructed from the audio (this is how the grooves were created in the first place), and the audio can be reconstructed from the grooves (this is what happens when you play the record.)
If you want to challenge this claim, please mount an argument. Don't just proclaim that it's false.
Yeah, so? Some people just don't want to be convinced, why should you spend your time and effort on them?
Information in the information-theoretical sense does not "enter the brain". The audio can be reconstructed from the grooves, but not by the brain.
Simply put, the brain does not have the same information in those two cases. In particular, the brain does not care about some abstract theoretical information equivalence. It's just a brain, not an idealized infomation-processing agent.
I'm really beginning to wonder.
Of course it does. That too is easily demonstrated.
Maybe your brain doesn't care, but mine does.
Enlighten me, please.
This:
is irrelevant to the question of how the information flows. The information that comprises music is stored on the record, not the record player. The player merely transduces that information from one format (grooves) to another (sound). The brain can't do that transduction process, but it can (and does) process the information. The proof is that a brain equipped with suitable tools could make a copy of a record (and hence the information on that record) by looking at and making measurements of the grooves.
That's not what "processes information" means. A photocopier does not "process information" when it makes a copy of a document. It just makes a copy. Similarly, a brain could peer at the grooves all it likes, and, presumably, could make a copy of them, but that makes it no better than a record-producing machine.
Your claim is, essentially, that from the brain's point of view the information in the grooves and the information in the music is the same. However the brain cannot convert the grooves to the music (or the music to the grooves). It requires the transformation be made externally before it can process the information.
I really don't want to quibble over the meaning of the word "process". The original claim was:
And that is clearly true. It doesn't matter how (or even whether) that information is "processed".
Note that your re-statement of my claim, "from the brain's point of view the information in the grooves and the information in the music is the same" is not my actual claim. I said nothing about "the brain's point of view". That phrase is non-sensical with respect to an information-theoretical analysis.
If you really want to get technical, there is a "point of view" with respect to information content, and that is the repertoire of distinguishable states that a system can be said to potentially be in. The choice of that repertoire is arbitrary, and so can be said to be a "point of view." There is an implied "point of view" with respect to music, and that is the ability to reconstruct the audio waveform within the range of human hearing, roughly 20HZ-20kHz. With respect to that "point of view", my claim is correct, and can actually be mathematically proven to be correct by the Nyquist sampling theorem.
What is not the same -- and this is the whole point -- is the subjective experience of having the same information entering your brain through different sensory modalities. The intellectual understanding of spiritual experience in terms of neurobiology or whatever is very different from the actual subjective experience, and if you haven't had the actual subjective experience, your understanding of spirituality is necessarily limited by that.
1) (snarky response) I'm not sure why their lack of imagination should influence my beliefs. 2) (real response) the value of "God" matters a whole lot in this discussion. The bait and switch I worry about is that any personal experience gets used to justify extremely unlikely belief clusters. I don't think someone's hallucinations justifies my rejection of Occam's Razor.
I think this is a stretched analogy, but even if I accepted it, nobody who enjoys music is telling me to accept a bunch of other supernatural bullshit.
I'm not suggesting it should influence your beliefs about the world. I'm suggesting it should influence your beliefs about them.
This is exactly what I'm talking about. By choosing to call it "supernatural bullshit" rather than "a not altogether unreasonable (though nonetheless mistaken) attempt to account for real subjective experiences that they have had and I have not (and in the absence of education and information that I possess that they might not)" you miss a very important truth: you are dealing with a fellow human being who might be making an honest attempt to make sense of the world in the face of subjective experiences and other background that may be very different from your own. By choosing to label their beliefs "supernatural bullshit" you might be shutting down possible avenues of communication and the opportunity to make the world a better place, even if it is supernatural bullshit.
I debated with myself about whether to use the inflammatory or reconciliatory framing. It really can go either way, depending on what other parts of the spiritual/supernatural belief cluster is being dragged along with the personal experiences, and what the spriritualist is asking me to accept beyond just "some difficult-to-describe experiences have occurred".
You can enjoy the feelings of spirituality, and refrain to base your decisions on them. Just like you can enjoy alcohol without making important decisions while drunk.
I like the analogy of alcohol and decision-making! In addition to "Don't Drink and Drive," here's a new slogan "Don't Drink and Decide."
I think that what Viliam was implying was, "Don't Spiritualize and Decide." Don't get drunk on the holy spirit and then make important decisions about what you believe or how you should live your life. I'm pretty sure Viliam was comparing spiritual experiences to alcohol. They might be fun, euphoric, and they might seem meaningful, but do they give good, reliable information about the world that you can use in use in repeated fashion for positive outcomes?
That would be a nice slogan as well :-)