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Lumifer comments on Is Spirituality Irrational? - Less Wrong
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I don't find that useful at all.
Let's say I took some magic mushrooms, ran naked around the desert for a while, and experienced certain somethings. On the basis of what would I decide whether my experience was "spiritual" or "not spiritual"?
Well, generally people call things "spiritual" when they do all that other stuff you mentioned, and then think that the resulting states of mind are about the world in some reliable-causal-link sense.
If it is different from other experiences you had?
Maybe you could go thru this list and look whether anything looks unknown to you:
http://www.unexplainedstuff.com/Mysteries-of-the-Mind/Altered-States-of-Consciousness.html
Yes, sure :-D It certainly qualifies as an "altered state of consciousness". But does it qualify as "spiritual"? How do I decide?
Might be helpful to check out the definition of spirituality :-)
Still not useful.
Presumably, lisper, being the author, means something by that word, other than vague handwaving in a vague direction like Wikipedia does.
Yeah, I mean something slightly more specific, but still hard to get a linguistic handle on. I mean a kind of subjective experience that can be induced by certain practices (prayer, meditation, walking in the woods...) that manifests as feelings ranging from a kind of euphoric awe to a palpable sense of the presence of supernatural forces. It is distinct from alcohol intoxication, love, lust, the qualia of eating delicious food or listening to music and a host of other things that are part and parcel of the human experience (at least for most humans).
So, going back to my question, how do I decide whether my altered state of consciousness was "spiritual"?
Answering that is kind of like trying to tell you how you can decide if you're in love. If it was spiritual, you'll know.
The traditional comparison is to how do you figure out what's porn -- "I can't define it, but I know it when I see it" :-D