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lisper comments on Is Spirituality Irrational? - Less Wrong
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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.
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.
Sorry, I wasn't clear and you ended up interpreting my question as almost the exact opposite of what I intended, so let me try to clarify.
You argue (if I understand right) as follows. Spiritual experiences generally occur only in certain contexts that people can voluntarily put themselves in. To that extent, they are voluntary. So, those who have spiritual experiences have some ability to choose whether to have them or not. So, having spiritual experiences is an "ability".
But exactly parallel things are true of some things we don't generally classify that way, like getting venereal diseases or having hangovers. Both of those things occur only in particular contexts that people can voluntarily put themselves in. (Having sex; drinking a lot of alcohol.)
I guess you would not generally speak of "the ability to contract gonorrhea" or "the ability to get a raging hangover", any more than I would. So why does the fact that spiritual experiences generally occur in special contexts give good reason to speak of "the ability to have spiritual experiences"?
Ah. Well, one difference is that spiritual experiences feel good, and so many people seek them out. No one seeks to have a hangover or contract gonorrhea.
I am still not convinced, for reasons I'll give in a moment, but actually I think this would be a good time to exercise some rationalist skills. We have a difficulty over definitions, so let's taboo the term "ability" and perhaps take some cues from Yvain's excellent post about "disease".
So, can you state your thesis without using the word "ability" or anything equivalent? Can you make explicit what specific features of "spiritual experiences" are relevant and how they lead to the conclusions you want to draw?
(By "your thesis", I mean what you described before as "exactly the hypothesis I'm advancing".)
I should fulfil my promise to explain why the combination of "only in some situations that we can seek out" and "feels good" isn't enough to justify calling something an "ability", at least as I use the word. Let me quote from Jonathan Franzen's book The Corrections. "Him" here is an elderly man, Al, whose mental function is beginning to go downhill.
Al has had a pleasant experience (thinking he saw children playing) which will occur only in certain circumstances that perhaps he could seek out (there being sunflowers around to confuse with children). Would you want to talk about the ability to confuse sunflowers with children? I wouldn't.
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.
That's wrong. Something that couldn't be neurophysiological would be not merely evidence but proof (not necessarily of a deity, of course, but of some external cause). I suggest that, e.g., Srinivasa Ramanujan's experience of having mathematical insights given to him by the goddess Namagiri was evidence that he was in contact with a supernatural being -- but, of course, far less evidence than it would take to convince me that he really was in contact with such a being.
For A to be evidence of B, all it takes is that A is more likely if B than if not-B. Dreams of goddesses handing out what turn out to be genuine (and highly unusual) mathematical insights are more likely if there are in fact goddesses able to hand out such insights than if there are not, because the existence of such goddesses would provide one more mechanism by which such dreams could occur.
I would suggest that Ramanujan's experiences might be as much as 10:1 evidence for the existence of the goddess Namagiri Thayar. But, of course, every other mathematician who has insights without any sign of gods and goddesses getting involved is evidence against, quite apart from all the other reasons not to believe in Namagiri Thayar or any other goddess.
Perhaps you are using the term "shred of evidence" to denote something more than that. Fair enough, I suppose, but then I'm afraid I think you chose your words badly.
Very well, I concede the point. I should not have said that "there is not a shred of evidence." Still, AFAICT the evidence favors neurobiology by a very substantial margin.
It's http://www.patheos.com/blogs/unequallyyoked/2012/06/this-is-my-last-post-for-the-patheos-atheist-portal.html
I provided a link. Scott writes that Bem's meta-analysis in favor of paranormal phenomena makes the conclusion that paranormal phenomena exist with standards of evidence that are higher than those standards for a lot of phenomena we expect as real.
That doesn't mean that you have to convinced by Bem's evidence but claiming that it isn't a shred of evidence is wrong.
Interestingly you speak of deity's while I haven't said anything about deities. The question of whether deities exist is a different question then whether they are real spiritual experiences exist.
Again that's a problem with the muddled notion of spiritual under which you wrote the opening post. You link ideas together that can exist independent from each other.
It isn't. The amount of people investigating paranormal effects is quite small.
In a world where there are no cultural forces that make people not want to accept such evidence that might be true.
It took till 2008 till a Cochrane study concluded that chiropratics techniques have an effect on reducing back pain. Decades for recognizing a fairly ease to produce effect. Nobody got the Nobel Prize.
Paradgim change is really hard. It's nothing that you get by someone making a new discovery that can easily conceptualized in the old ways of seeing the world and then newspapers convincing everybody that it's true. Reading Kuhn might be useful to understand how scientific change works.
OK, I concede the point. There may be a shred of evidence (but not much more than a shred, at least AFAICT).
Only because "deity" is easier to type than "supernatural phenomenon."
Well, yeah, that was actually my whole thesis: spiritual experiences are real even though the deities (or whatever) that some people ascribe them to are (almost certainly) not.
In general scientific writing doesn't use five letter words that are easy to type but longer more precise words.
In Bem's meta analysis case we are talking about extrasensory perception. Information transfer for which our existing theories don't account. Not just experience.
The quality of the reasoning involved is debatable, and Leah's apparent reluctance to say more about just how the reasoning went doesn't seem like a good sign. (For the avoidance of doubt, I firmly agree that Leah is very intelligent and I'm sure she was trying to reason well. But even very intelligent people trying to reason well perpetrate bad reasoning sometimes.)
When I say good reasoning then I mean using the ideological turing test to decide which experts know most about the subject and then copying the judgement of those experts.
That's not the only thing that Leah did, but bootstraping priors in that way is a pretty sophisticated way to reason. It's an impressive example on focusing more on using a reasoning technique than focusing on achiving the generally accepted results that your social circle wants you to achieve.
As far as relucatance goes, I think most people aren't fully transparent about all reasoning that goes into major belief changes in written articles.
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?
Let's consider briefly the opposite case. Let's assume that there's some miracle that can be called up on demand. It's simple, straightforward, and experimentally verifiable.
In fact, drawing inspiration from the Miracle of Lanciano, let's say that bread and wine turn to flesh and blood every time the priest consecrates it. Every time. It always has the same DNA, which matches what one might expect of a Nazerene aroundabout 10A.D. Repeatedly. Assume that this has always been the case, as long as anyone can tell, ever since the early years A.D. (and, as far as anyone knows, nobody tried it before then).
What happens? Well, presumably, a group of scientists investigate the phenomenon. They take measurements. They show how momentum and energy are conserved in the process. They check very thoroughly for any form of trickery, and find none.
Eventually, one of them comes up with some long, complicated, barely plausible theory involving spontaneous chemical reactions in organic substances, suggests that this is the same process by which the bread you eat turns into part of you, and concludes that bread is an excellent food for growing children as it is easily converted to human muscles.
In short, because it is a repeatable miracle, someone tries to fit it into the realm of things that are explainable without postulating the existence of God. If he is successful, then it looks like God is being cagey, and if he is not, then it looks like we are merely awaiting someone able to figure out a successful explanation (and God is being cagey).
I think your prediction is wrong. I think that if that happened, the scientific-and-skeptical community would go through something like the following steps:
First, everyone would strongly suspect fraud of some kind. So there'd be a lot of attempts to check this -- from scientists and from Randi-type debunkers. Ex hypothesi these would not in fact detect fraud.
At this point we would have a very well verified phenomenon that's fabulously difficult to fit into the standard naturalist/reductionist framework -- the only way we know of for whether someone has been validly ordained as a priest to influence what happens is via some kind of mind that's able to work with concepts like "priest", "ordained", and "valid". So somewhere around here I would expect the great majority of scientific skeptical types to conclude that something is paying attention to human religious rituals. Might be God, might be aliens with eccentric interests, might be some sort of superpowered AI whose existence we never noticed, etc., etc., etc., but it seems like it has to be something with a mind and with abilities that go way beyond ours.
It would be worth checking a few more-reductionist things. For instance: just what changes to the process of priest-making suffice to make transubstantiation not work? (In many traditions, and in particular in those traditions that believe in transubstantiation in our world, priests have to be ordained by bishops, and bishops have to be ordained by other bishops, and the process involves a ceremonial laying on of hands. Is it possible that there's some thing that gets transferred when that happens? That would be interesting, and might make some of the more-natural options look a bit more plausible. On the other hand, does success depend essentially on intent everywhere down the line? That seems to require non-human minds watching.)
If someone comes up with an actually-working theory about chemical reactions, that would be very interesting indeed -- but it would need to be a theory that explains why the process only works for priests, and only when they are performing a eucharistic ceremony. Otherwise, it's going to be much less plausible even to the most thoroughgoing skeptic than "a god did it" or "superpowered aliens did it".
Distinguishing between the various kinds of superpowered nonhuman intelligence that might have done this thing would be tricky. It seems like it would need to be either something rather like the god of Christianity, or else something deliberately masquerading as the god of Christianity. That might already be enough to justify adopting Christianity as at least a working hypothesis.
I couldn't have said it better myself. I'll just add that you don't have to get anywhere near this level of improbability (converting wine to blood and bread to human flesh requires nuclear transmutation, not just chemistry) to get convincing evidence of the existence of a deity. It would be enough to show that people who prayed to a particular deity could produce any measurable effect that could not be accounted for by a placebo effect with statistically higher probability of success than those who prayed to some other deity. It can be something as prosaic as asking God to speak to two believers and tell them something -- anything -- but have it be the same thing in both cases. The two believers write down what God tells them without communicating with each other, and then you check to see if they match. If people who prayed to Jesus matched more often than people who prayed to Allah under otherwise identical circumstances, that would really get my attention.
When I suggest things like this to believers, the response is invariably a citation of Matthew 4:7 or some variation on that theme.
(BTW, Jesus actually got this wrong. It was not in fact written that thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God. In fact, the Old Testament specifically calls on people to apply the scientific method to prophetic claims in Deuteronomy 18:21-22.)
Perhaps you are right. It's not easy to be certain of this sort of hypothetical - I have a lot of confidence that there will be some people who react as per my prediction, and that there will be some people who react as per your prediction, but which group (if either) will gain enough backing to be considered the mainstream opinion is difficult, perhaps impossible, to tell.
What convinced you?
What convinced me of what? That my spiritual experience was a neurobiological phenomenon and not evidence of a deity?
What convinced you that your spiritual experience is more than purely neurobiological?
You mean, at the time? When I was twelve? I have no idea. That was a long time ago. I can't reconstruct all the details of my thought processes back then. I suspect I just didn't think it through.
If that isn't a mammoth-sized red flag for the solidity of your case, you and I inhabit separate conceptual universes.
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 ;-)