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polymathwannabe comments on Is Spirituality Irrational? - Less Wrong
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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.
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.
I think there a lot wrong with that paragraph. Mostly again stemming from confusing rational!new-atheist with rational!LW.
This community does welcome religious people with open arms in the sense that it doesn't treat them badly just for being religious. One person converted from being atheist to Christianity while being employed by CFAR based on good reasoning.
From a Bayesian perspective there evidence that Zeus exist as Tyrrell McAllister writes in What Bayesianism taught me.
There's definitely a shred of evidence as Scott describes in The Control Group Is Out Of Control. The core question is whether that's enough to counteract our scepticism against those claims being true and most people in this community don't think the evidence is strong enough for that.
That's interesting. Is this "good reasoning" recorded anywhere? I'd love to see it.
Really? What is it?
Before you answer, pay close attention to the wording of my claim: there is no evidence that spiritual experience is anything other than a neurophysiological phenomenon. Such evidence would have to be more than just something that could be caused by a deity, it would have to be something that could not be neurophysiological. And AFAICT, there really is not a single instance of such evidence. If you disagree, please cite the evidence you think exists and we can discuss it.
BTW, this is not an extreme claim. There is zero evidence that quantum mechanics is false. There is zero evidence that general relativity is false. This is so despite the fact that we know that one or the other (possibly both) must in fact be false because they are logically incompatible with each other, so they can't both be true. And it is so despite the fact that the entire physics community is actively looking for such evidence, and that finding it would be considered a major breakthrough. Anyone who finds such evidence will almost certainly win the Nobel prize. Likewise, anyone who had actual evidence of a spiritual phenomenon that could not be (or even had a very low probability of being) neurophysiological will have made a major scientific breakthrough. So the fact that the headlines are not filled with stories of someone being feted for finding this evidence is evidence that such evidence does not exist.
What convinced you?
What convinced me of what? That my spiritual experience was a neurobiological phenomenon and not evidence of a deity?
There have been a few shreds, here and there. Few, far between, and next to impossible to repeat.
That's one of the many things that theists seem to have a hard time explaining: why is God so fleepin' cagey?
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 ;-)
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.
I don't see a lot of evidence of people getting venereal diseases outside the context of having sex, or getting hangovers outside the context of drinking a lot. Are those "abilities"? I don't think so. If you agree, what's the relevant difference?
Sure, why not? Someone who can drink heavily without getting a hangover can be said to have "the ability to hold their liquor." It's a little harder to find a commonly used phrase to refer to someone who can have unprotected sex without contracting venereal diseases. This would probably be referred to as an "immunity" rather than an "ability."
If you want to speak of people having "immunity" from spiritual experiences I certainly won't argue with you.