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CCC comments on Is Spirituality Irrational? - Less Wrong
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
On the contrary, it is quite possible to come up with some very convincing arguments for something that is false. There are many ways to do this, either by means of flawed argument, logical fallacy, carefully selecting only the evidence that supports a given theory, and so on. If I am sufficiently cautious in examining the arguments, I may identify the flaws and expose them - but it is also possible that I may fail to notice the flaws, because I am not perfect.
A homeopath can provide a convincing argument by providing a very long list of people who were ill, took a homeopathic remedy, and then recovered; and accompanying it with a very long list of people who were ill, took no homeopathic remedy, and got worse.
Anyone who notices the cherry-picking of evidence will see the flaw in that argument, but it will nonetheless convince many people.
I don't consider "evidence which would convince at least some people" to be "incredibly convincing evidence". Even poorly convincing evidence will convince someone--poorly convincing evidence isn't the same as nonconvincing evidence.
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.
Yes, but if the universe is an intentional simulation, then someone is running it. (I haven't seen the film myself, but I understand that someone was actually running the Truman Show). The atheist hypothesis is that there is no-one running the universe - claiming that the universe has been designed, by someone, to give the impression of having been designed by someone when, in actuality, there was no designer of the universe is somewhat self-contradictory.
Not quite the same thing. There's no debate on whether or not those trees exist, there's merely debate on exactly what those trees are.
Yes, the type where you look along a long, straight road on a hot day and the more distant portion of the road appears to vanish, leaving the sides of the road apparently delimiting a patch of sky. Mirages can be convincing, but they can't look like anything, and they're very dependent on where the observer stands and the air temperature on the day, so they can be tested for.
I think you're conflating the features of a hypothetical universe that I conjured up to make a point with what I believe to be the case in the world we live in. In the world we live in, there is no evidence that we are in an intentional simulation. All the evidence is that everything we can see arises from simple processes (where "simple" is meant in the technical sense of having low Kolmogorov complexity ).
I'm not sure that's really what you meant to say, but that is not the "atheist hypothesis." The atheist hypothesis is that the appearance of design can come about in ways other than having a designer (like natural selection or anthropic bias), and so the appearance of design is not slam-dunk proof of the existence of a Designer.
Of course. Analogies are never perfect.
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?
If we're being very charitable, spirituality-blindness might mean something like "low trait absorption)" which would imply a reduced ability to benefit from placebo effects.
edit: Sorry, I didn't figure out how to make a link that includes a closing bracket work in this comment syntax.
Replacing it with %29 will do. I'm not sure whether preceding it with a backslash does. Let's see.
URL-encoding with percent signs: trait absorption.
Backslashes on parentheses:trait absorption.
Looks like they both work.
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.
Yup, that's an ability. It's a thing you can do when you want to do it and avoid when you don't, and things with those characteristics we generally classify as abilities. Having "spiritual experiences" is not, for most people who have them, an ability in that sense -- and if it were, I think they should (and perhaps even would) for that very reason doubt that God (the gods, the life-force permeating all things, the ancestral spirits, whatever) had much to do with it.
I repeat: why classify "having spiritual experiences" as an ability rather than, say, a susceptibility? Why is it more like having ideas than like having colds? Why is it more like having orgasms than like having sneezes?
If true, that would be (1) interesting and (2) a reason for seeing it as an ability. But let's be a bit more careful. Having spiritual experiences on demand would be an ability (and, in the same way, if you had the rather peculiar superpower of catching a cold any time you wanted, that would be an ability although not a very useful one). But I don't see that that makes the term "ability" appropriate for people who have them involuntarily.
I'm pushing this point because it seems to me that a lot of the work in your argument is actually being done by your choice of the word "ability" and your use of analogies (blindness...) that are only appropriate when talking about the absence of an ability, but it doesn't seem to me that you've justified those choices. Maybe "ability" is a good term; maybe actually something with a different spin on it like "liability" or "susceptibility" would be better; maybe we need something more neutral. But when the choice of terminology and analogies matters, let's have some actual support for it.
Yes, I understand. It's a perfectly reasonable thing to push back on.
I certainly agree with that, and so this reduces the issue to an empirical question: are spiritual experiences something that people can (mostly) control? I think they are. I don't see a lot of evidence of people having spiritual experiences outside the context of certain deliberate practices and rituals like attending church, reciting prayers, singing, laying on of hands, sweat lodge ceremonies...
But it's an "ability" that is more akin to "the ability to enjoy sex" or "the ability to appreciate modern art" than it is "the ability to fly an airplane" or "the ability to run a four-minute mile."
I think that people who believe in God by and large don't really think it through to that level of detail. Those that do tend to come to the conclusion you'd expect them to. And, BTW, this is why people don't think it through. Losing the ability to commune with God can be very painful for some people. It's rather like if you think too hard about the biological realities of sex you can lose the ability (sic!) to enjoy it.
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.
There is a third option; the third option is that there is correlation but not causation, in either direction. That the rationalist community started out top-heavy enough with atheists that atheism has become something of an in-group bias; strongly and vocally religious people tend to be shunned to some degree, not enough to force all out, but enough to maintain the atheistic dominance in most groups that call themselves rationalist.
That is indeed a third possibility, but I think it can be safely ruled out. If there were a shred of actual evidence that spiritual experience was anything other than a neurophysiological phenomenon then I'm pretty sure the rational community would welcome religious people with open arms. The problem is, there is no such evidence, so there's a limit to how welcoming rationalists can be to someone who insists that God is an actual deity.
No, I didn't think your metaphor was meant to imply we failed to see the spiritual because of all the mental discipline. What I found offensive was the idea that we failed to see the spiritual despite of all the mental discipline.
Your example with addicts can backfire. Ex-addicts become good sobriety counselors the same way ex-believers become good advocates for reason. And the whole idea of comparing spirituality with addiction... it's like you're making my arguments for me.
OK, then I'm back to being puzzled about this. There's no more shame in not having spiritual experiences than there is in being color blind.
Well, I'm pretty sure that when the dust settles it will turn out that we agree on more than we disagree. In fact, it's a theorem ;-)