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lisper comments on Is Spirituality Irrational? - Less Wrong
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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.
Well, I'm actually defending two theses here, one of which is that "ability" is an appropriate term to use, but I'm happy to just agree to disagree about that.
Here's a restatement of my other (hypo)thesis, making my best effort to avoid loaded terms:
There exists a kind of subjective experience that is analogous to but distinct from other subjective experiences like seeing a sunset, tasting food, hearing music, etc. It is a real subjective experience, not a delusion nor an indication of any kind of mental pathology (though it can be associated with some pathologies, particularly in its more extreme forms). It is induced not by light nor chemicals nor sound, but rather by engaging in certain behaviors (like prayer) and approaching those behaviors with a certain mindset. The mindset is difficult to describe without using loaded words (I want to call it "faith") so I'll just call it the opposite of (or an absence of) skepticism (I presume that's not a loaded term?)
Some people do not have firsthand experience of this subjective sensation, either because they have not engaged in the behaviors that produce it, or because they are unable or unwilling to enter the mindset that produces it, or because their brains are wired in such a way that they are simply do not (I originally wrote "are unable to" here) experience it even with the right behavior and mindset. It is a situation completely analogous to the well-known phenomenon that some people cannot distinguish the colors red and green, and therefore cannot have the same subjective experience of seeing a tree and a sunset as someone who can ("is able to") distinguish red and green.
It is this difference in firsthand subjective experience that accounts at least in part for the seemingly intractable differences among people when it comes to questions about the existence of deities. Some people believe in deities because they have had real subjective experiences that they believe in good faith (no pun intended) can best be explained as a firsthand interaction with a deity.
I advance this hypothesis because if it is true then it seems plausible that disagreements over the existence of deities will become less intractable and more fruitful if those who have not had these subjective experiences nonetheless acknowledge the possibility that their interlocutors might have had such an experience, and that this is not necessarily symptomatic of any kind of pathology or mental deficiency. To the contrary, it might be an indication of a normal part of the wiring of the human brain that is missing from their brains, or at least a normal part of the human experience which they have simply never experienced. Moreover, the explanation of the experience in terms of an encounter with a deity may be deeply meaningful to the person that holds this belief, and that presenting them with evidence that this belief is false may be intensely painful, even traumatic, because (among other things) it might make them think that they are suffering from a pathology or otherwise be mentally deficient.
Finally, though I didn't make this explicit, I'm suggesting that all this should be taken into account when deciding how to interact with someone who believes in deities. Throwing logic at religion might not be the best move.
Maybe I should make this a whole 'nuther post.
I think the only part of that paragraph that is in any way controversial is the bit where you say the experience in question is "not a delusion nor an indication of any kind of mental pathology" -- but I think most even of the most fire-breathing atheists wouldn't claim that religious experience as such is a delusion (I think that would be a category error) or pathological. So: so far so good, but not much of substance yet.
(But, on that just-infinitesimally-controversial point -- I remark that the word "real" that you use is at least a little bit loaded, and it's not really clear to me what it means. I mean, what's the alternative? They have this experience but it's a fake experience? What would that even mean? The obvious thing for it to mean is that the experience doesn't have the meaning they think it has; that although it seems to them that what they've experienced is being touched by an angel or spoken to by God or whatever, the real cause of their experience is something very different. But that's the position you yourself have taken, so you surely can't mean "real" in opposition to anything like that.)
Again, true and uncontroversial.
Bzzzzt! I think it's very interesting that even when deliberately trying to state your thesis without loaded terms, you apparently just can't help equating not having religious experiences with a deficiency. I suggest that unless religious experiences are actual perceptions of non-natural realities -- a position that AIUI you explicitly reject -- the two things are demonstrably not "completely analogous". Why? Because probably the single most salient thing about that inability-to-distinguish, the thing that explains why it's sometimes called "colour blindness", is that it involves an actual perceptual deficit. In "colour-blind" individuals, an extremely important channel by which information about the external world flows into their brain has substantially less sensitivity, substantially less bandwidth, than in individuals with normal colour vision. The colour-blind get less information about the world through their eyes than the not-colour-blind, and you can measure how much less. Whereas those who don't have "spiritual experiences" ... don't have a particular kind of experience, which by your own account conveys no information about the outside world, no genuine insight into the nature of reality -- it's just an experience that some people have and some people find enjoyable or moving or motivating.
Again, true and close to 100% uncontroversial. (Aside from the caveat stated above about the word "real".)
So far (I acknowledge that your sentence isn't over yet) this seems true but pointless: so far as I can tell, pretty much everyone acknowledges that. So let's continue and see whether it gets more contentful as the sentence continues.
Still 100% uncontroversial; so far as I can tell basically no one claims that having religious experiences is necessarily symptomatic of pathology or mental deficiency.
(So, so far, it seems to me that the thesis you're advancing is true but -- my apologies! -- utterly uninteresting. It's as if you were earnestly enjoining us not to punch believers in the face while discussing religion with them: sure, it's good advice, but whatever makes you think we need it? I think this explains some of the negativity in the responses you've had: if you earnestly tell people not to punch believers in the face, they're liable to get the impression that you think they would be punching believers in the face without your advice, and that would be a stupid thing to do, and no one likes being told they're stupid.)
You're really not trying all that hard to avoid loaded terms, are you? :-) I'm getting the impression that for some reason it's really important to you to portray skeptics, or at least some skeptics, as abnormal people with bits missing from their brains that cause them to be in a certain sense blind, like those who cannot distinguish colours. But I'm not sure what that reason is. A cynical hypothesis would be that you like feeling superior to those skeptics, but I bet the truth is more interesting than that. Any idea what it might be?
Yup, it may. This is perhaps the least obvious thing you've said, but -- sorry, again -- it's still pretty damn obvious.
I think you did. Right back in the OP, you wrote: "The antidote for this frustration is to realize that spirituality is not about logic. It's about subjective experiences that not everyone is privy to. Logic is about looking at the grooves. Spirituality is about hearing the music."
So after all this, I think my conclusion is this: with the value-laden bits stripped out, what you're saying is common knowledge, to such an extent that the suggestion that skeptics reading it could be forgiven for feeling a bit insulted at the suggestion that they need to be told it. That feels like a really uncharitable and negative conclusion, which I regret. Perhaps I'm missing something that's genuinely non-obvious, or perhaps I'm overoptimistic about the actual understanding and knowledge of skeptics. If so, perhaps you can point out some bit of what you've said that I should be more surprised by, or something?
I'd like to say a few words on one other point that's maybe getting a bit overlooked in this discussion, which is that there are plenty of religious people who don't have much in the way of religious experiences, plenty more who do but who don't take them to be the main support for their beliefs, and also plenty of skeptics who have very similar experiences but interpret them very differently; and that having such experiences doesn't seem to make skeptics any less abrasive. For instance, Sam Harris (author of, e.g., "The End of Faith", one of the "Four Horsemen" of the New Atheist movement) is a practitioner of meditation, which he says provides him with mystical experiences, but he's every bit as antireligious as, say, Richard Dawkins. On the other side: well, every now and then you get religious "revivals" characterized by fairly widespread religious experiences, often manifesting as things like "speaking in tongues", and what makes them notable is precisely the fact that this is not the usual state of affairs in the churches where they happen. For instance, back in the mid-1990s when I was an evangelical Christian, there was something of a to-do in the UK's evangelical Anglican churches about the so-called Toronto Blessing, and I'm pretty sure that in the churches I frequented this was mostly because most of the people there, most of the time, did not have dramatic religious experiences at all, and they were excited at the prospect of such experiences becoming more common.
So, if plenty of religious people seldom or never have these experiences, and quite a few very vigorously anti-religious people do have them, it seems to me that the difference between having them and not having them can't be that large a part of what makes some people skeptical about religion and others not. I dare say it plays a role sometimes, but it seems like you're suggesting that it's more than that, and I find that unlikely.