I simply want to convince you to entertain the possibility that people might profess to believe in God for reasons other than indoctrination or stupidity.
Why do you think any convincing is necessary?
arguing against religious beliefs on logical grounds [...] spirituality is not about logic. It's about subjective experiences [...]
Religious beliefs and subjective experiences are quite separate things, at least in principle. If someone simply says "I went to church and had this amazing experience", I don't think even the strawmanniest Spockiest stereotypical rationalist would have much quarrel with that. But here in the real world, actual religious people tend not just to say "I had this amazing experience" but to go further and say "I believe in God, the Father Almighty, creator of all things seen and unseen, and in one Lord Jesus Christ", or "Hear, O Israel: the Lord is our God, the Lord is one", or whatever.
(They not infrequently go further still and say "you must do X and not do Y, because God says so", or attempt to get laws made requiring X and forbidding Y, or in very extreme cases blow things up in an attempt to intimidat...
I have started writing a comment multiple times, only to remove what I wrote mid-sentence. I think I figured out why that is: your post is tempting us to argue against the existence of experiences that cannot be communicated (do you mean: 'not perfectly communicated' or 'not even hinted at that they exist'? Communication is not binary), and with the sentences:
The reason I want to convince you to entertain this notion is that an awful lot of energy gets wasted by arguing against religious beliefs on logical grounds, pointing out contradictions in the Bible and whatnot. Such arguments tend to be ineffective, which can be very frustrating for those who advance them. The antidote for this frustration is to realize that spirituality is not about logic.
you attempt to ban a whole class of arguments that might well be relevant. Your post is a wonderful piece of rhetoric (although some of the analogies get stretched a bit thin), but it hardly communicates anything. Other than
people might profess to believe in God for reasons other than indoctrination or stupidity. Religious texts and rituals might be attempts to share real subjective experiences
there doesn't seem to be a single claim in the whole text. Do you truly think that most of spirituality is an attempt to communicate a feeling of belonging that one gets also when giving up after being bullied for a week? And that this feeling is both incommunicable and easily induced with some practice (you give meditation as an example)?
...let's start with a little thought experiment...
The two cases are non-analogous. Grooves in a phonograph record are not designed to be read by a human. Perhaps a better analogy would be reading sheet music, but most people are not trained to do that either. The reason people show such a strong preference in the latter case is that most people will get nothing at all from the record (or sheet music, for that matter).
just because some people can't see colors doesn't mean that colors aren't real. The same is true for spiritual experiences.
This is a truism. Moreover, it is often argued that colors, flavors, &c. are of the map, not of the territory. If this is the case, colors may not be "real", even if the experience of colors is.
...one cannot render into words the subjective experience...
The attempt to losslessly transmit a complete subjective experience would be futile, although I've read some poets who took a good stab at it. Experience is one of the media that make up the map. Two people, given exactly the same stimulus, would have two different subjective experiences. It would certainly be easier to compare similar experiences with a similar reference fr...
Your observation is valid, but spiritual experiences of that sort are extremely rare. I was raised in an evangelical church, in a very serious, I might say fanatical, Christian family, and went to church, Bible study, and other church events regularly for many years. Spiritual experiences were a common topic of discussion. But no one in my family ever had one, nor any of my friends. They were things visiting missionaries from Africa talked about. So it doesn't explain the great bulk of religion.
Even if I am not setting out trying to disparage a spiritual person's spiritual experiences—even if I am trying to be as charitable to them as possible—it is difficult to see how I could have a conversation with them about information (their own subjective spiritual experiences) that is not publicly accessible to me. It boils down to them telling me about their private experience and me replying, "Cool story bro." Once again, not because I WANT to sound flippant or dismissive...but what else can I say about it? I'm glad they had their experien...
The reason I want to convince you to entertain this notion is that an awful lot of energy gets wasted by arguing against religious beliefs on logical grounds, pointing out contradictions in the Bible and whatnot.
LessWrong isn't a place that spends a lot of energy on arguing against religious beliefs. I don't think it makes much sense to copy every article from Intentional Insights to this place (even when Gleb isn't doing it himself) if the article is written for a different audience.
Spiritual is a word is a variety of different meanings:
1) Refering t...
Some comments ask what spiritual experience is supposed to be and what kind of perception or altered state of mind it is.
In the spirit of What Universal Human Experiences Are You Missing Without Realizing It I propose a poll for exactly such states of mind. I think indeed we might learn something about parts we may be missing.
OK, I take the list from here:
ADDED: Sorry this is rendered longer than I expected.
ADDED: When answering myself I noticed that some rules for the answers are in order. I suggest this: Never really means never. Seldom means at least ...
This feels a lot like a Bait and Switch to me. You haven't defined "Spirituality" well enough that I can tell what you're actually claiming, and I suspect as soon as I agree to any of your points you'll shout "a-ha!" and accuse me of some inconsistency.
I have heard nobody argue against enjoying music - I recommend it heartily. I do argue against making decisions based on incredibly wrong probability assignments (say, that there is a human-like judgement and experiences after death).
You seem to be saying that these two recommendations on my part are contradictory. I don't see it.
I'm not clear why this is downvoted so much. I think the point it is making ("some people believe in God because 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") is not obvious (except likely in hindsight) and the path via analogy and such seem suitable for people who have not had these kinds of experiences. But maybe it does target the wrong audience.
Let's tease that out with a poll:
I have had spiritual experiences [pollid:1101]
Spiritual experiences exist ...
As people have mentioned, your starting analogy is bad :-/
Otherwise, do you think that replacing "spiritual experiences" with "altered states of mind" throughout your post would change things?
my parents sent me to a Christian summer camp
I have (to my shame) been one of the leaders of a Christian summer camp, though possibly a geekier and broader-minded one than your Kentucky one. I guarantee you that when the leaders of the camp you went to declared their belief in God, they did not simply mean that they had had euphoric religious experiences.
Here's a firsthand account of someone having the sort of spiritual experience I'm referring to in the main article.
Hello everybody!
Thank you for this post! I enjoyed following the suggested analogy between spirituality and hearing music. I do not, however, totally agree with considering spirituality as "believing in God". I am an atheist and rationalist. Personally, I define spirituality as the endeavour towards discovering oneself and understanding his/her life purpose. For me, spirituality is tightly bound to aiming towards achieving a high-consciousness state. And I believe that along this journey, the person would experience the so-called subjective exper...
There is a specific emotion which can be induced by some types of trailer, classical and religious music, meditation, long distance running, psychedelics, natural beauty, some types of art and thinking about certain abstract topics (especially consciousness, theoretical physics, pure maths, meta-ethics, economics) - an emotion that might be described as 'cosmic sadness', 'intense euphoria' or 'being profoundly moved'.
It is rational for a hedonist to seek to experience this emotion even though experiencing it often causes irrational beliefs, because it is t...
Archeological evidence of spirituality goes back tens of thousands of years or maybe more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_origin_of_religions#Prehistoric_evidence_of_religion
My reading of cognitive science suggests to me that spirituality is hard wired, but how that wiring manifests itself varies from person to person. As this discussion points out, listening to music is spiritual for some people. But, for millions of Christian Americans spirituality manifests as a deeply held belief that the bible is to be taken literally and, e.g., the Earth...
It seems interesting that a lot of spiritual experiences are something that happens in non-normal situations. To get them people may try denying food or sleep, stay in the same place for a long time without motion, working themselves to exhaustion, eating poisons, going to a place of different atmospheric pressure or do something else they don't normally try to do. The whole process is suspiciously similar to program testing, when you try the program in some situations its creator (evolution in case of humans) haven't "thought" much about. And th...
I grew up speaking Hebrew, so I can tell you that the original is ambiguous too. The GNT translation interpolates the word "Then". That word ("az") does not appear in the original. The KJV translation is pretty good, but here's an interesting bit o' trivia: the original of "a tree to be desired to make one wise" is "w'nech'mäd häëtz l'has'Kiyl" which literally means, "and the tree was cute for wisdom." (Actually, it's not quite "wisdom", the meaning of "l'has'Kiyl" is broader than that. A better translation would be something like "smartness" or "brainpower".)
Huh. Maybe I've been playing too many role-playing games, but I tend to think of "wisdom" and "smartness" as somewhat but not entirely correlated; with "smartness" being more related to academics and book-learning and "wisdom" more common-sense and correctness of intuition.
Sure, but 1) I don't grant your premise and 2) the order of events is ambiguous, so even if I grant the premise the possibility remains that Eve didn't know it was evil except in retrospect.
I'll trust you with regards to the Hebrew and abandon this line of argument in the face of point 2.
That's the Ethan Couch defense, and it's not entirely indefensible. We don't generally prosecute children as adults. However, it is problematic if you use it as an excuse to game to system by remaining willfully ignorant. A parent who denied their child an education on the grounds that if the child remained profoundly ignorant then it would be incapable of sinning would probably be convicted of child abuse, and rightly so IMHO.
Granted. Those who are not ignorant have a duty to alleviate the ignorance of others - Ezekiel 3 verses 17 to 21 are relevant here. (Note that the ignorant man is still being punished - just because his sin is lesser in his ignorance does not mean that it is nothing - so education is still important to reduce sin).
You have to be careful to distinguish what is computable in theory vs what is computable in practice. Even now, computers can do many things that their creators cannot.
Granted. I was talking computable in theory. If we're considering computable in practice, then there's the question of why there was a several-billion-year wait before the first (known to us) computing devices appeared in this universe; that's more than enough time to figure out how to build a computer, than build that computer, then calculate more digits of pi than I can imagine.
Time travel, like omniscience, is logically incompatible with free will for exactly the reason you describe.
I can think of quite a few arguments that time travel is impossible, but this is a new one to me. I can see where you're coming from - you're saying that the idea that someone, somewhere, might know with certainty what I will decide in a given set of circumstances is logically incompatible with the idea that I might choose something else.
I'm not sure that it is, though. Just because I could choose something else doesn't mean that I will choose something else. (Although that gets into the murky waters of whether it is possible for me to do that which I am never observed to do...)
Time travel is impossible because your physical existence is an illusion, (See also this and this.
Okay, I've had a look at those. The first one kind of skipped over the math for how one ends up with a negative entropy - that supercorrelation is mentioned as being odd, but nowhere is it explained what that means. (It's also noted that the quantum correlation measurement is analogous to the classical one, but I am left uncertain as to how, when, and even if that analogy breaks down, because I do not understand that critical part of the maths, and how it corresponds to the real world, and I am left with the suspicion that it might not).
So, I'm not saying the conclusion as presented in the paper is necessarily wrong. I'm saying I don't follow the reasoning that leads to it.
Maybe. But if, as you have already conceded, the quale of motion can exist without motion, why cannot the quale of free will exist without free will?
I will concede that there is no reason why the quale of free will can't exist without free will. I will, however, firmly maintain that the quale of free will (along with many other qualia, like the quale of redness) can be and has been directly observed, and therefore does exist.
Coming to the realization that free will (and even classical reality itself) are illusions doesn't make those illusions any less compelling. You can still live your life as if you were a classical being with free will while being aware of the fact that this is not actually true in the deepest metaphysical sense.
Fair enough, but that seems to be the case when you are not using the skill of being certain that your free will is an illusion.
But it's much more useful than just that. By becoming aware of how your brain fools you into thinking you have free will you can actually take more control of your life. Yes, I know that sounds like a contradiction, but it's not.
This is a contradiction. If you don't have free will, then you have no control and cannot take control; if you do take control, then you have the free will to, at the very least, decide to take that control.
I'm not saying that the certainty can't improve the illusion. I'll trust you on that point, that you have somehow found some way to take the certainty that you do not have free will and - somehow - use this to give yourself at least the illusion of greater control over your own life. (I'm rather left wondering how, but I'll trust that it's possible). However, the idea that you are doing so deliberately implies that you not only have, but are actively exercising your free will.
But why don't you go read the book before we go further.
We would probably need to put this line of debate on hold for some time, then. I'd have to find a copy first.
Not just degrees. Existence is not just a continuum, it's a vector space.
Okay, how does that work? I can see how existence as a continuum makes sense (and, indeed, that's how I think of it), but as a vector space?
I tend to think of "wisdom" and "smartness" as somewhat but not entirely correlated
Well, they are. Maybe "mental faculties" would be a better translation. But it's neither here nor there.
the ignorant man is still being punished
That hardly seems fair. That means that if Adam and Eve had not eaten the fruit then they would have been punished for the sins that they committed out of ignorance.
education is still important to reduce sin
Indeed. But God didn't provide any. In fact, He specifically commanded A&E to...
[Originally published at Intentional Insights in response to Religious and Rational]
Spirituality and rationality seem completely opposed. But are they really?
To get at this question, let's start with a little thought experiment. Consider the following two questions:
1. If you were given a choice between reading a physical book (or an e-book) or listening to an audiobook, which would you prefer?
2. If you were given a choice between listening to music, or looking at the grooves of a phonograph record through a microscope, which would you prefer?
But I am more interested in the answer to a third question:
3. For which of the first two questions do you have a stronger preference between the two options?
Most people will have a stronger preference in the second case than the first. But why? Both situations are in some sense the same: there is information being fed into your brain, in one case through your ears and in the other through your eyes. So why should people's preference for ears be so much stronger in the case of music than books?
There is something in the essence of music that is lost in the translation between an audio and a visual rendering. The same loss happens for words too, but to a much lesser extent. Subtle shades of emphasis and tone of voice can convey essential information in spoken language. This is one of the reasons that email is so notorious for amplifying misunderstandings. But the loss in much greater in the case of music.
The same is true for other senses. Color is one example. A blind person can abstractly understand what light is, and that color is a byproduct of the wavelength of light, and that light is a form of electromagnetic radiation... yet there is no way for a blind person to experience subjectively the difference between red and blue and green. But just because some people can't see colors doesn't mean that colors aren't real.
The same is true for spiritual experiences.
Now, before I expand that thought, I want to give you my bona fides. I am a committed rationalist, and an atheist (though I don't like to self-identify as an atheist because I'd rather focus on what I *do* believe in rather than what I don't). So I am not trying to convince you that God exists. What I want to say is rather that certain kinds of spiritual experiences *might* be more than mere fantasies made up out of whole cloth. If we ignore this possibility we risk shutting ourselves off from a vital part of the human experience.
I grew up in the deep south (Kentucky and Tennessee) in a secular Jewish family. When I was 12 my parents sent me to a Christian summer camp (there were no other kinds in Kentucky back in those days). After a week of being relentlessly proselytized (read: teased and ostracized), I decided I was tired of being the camp punching bag and so I relented and gave my heart to Jesus. I prayed, confessed my sins, and just like that I was a member of the club.
I experienced a euphoria that I cannot render into words, in exactly the same way that one cannot render into words the subjective experience of listening to music or seeing colors or eating chocolate or having sex. If you have not experienced these things for yourself, no amount of description can fill the gap. Of course, you can come to an *intellectual* understanding that "feeling the presence of the holy spirit" has nothing to do with any holy spirit. You can intellectually grasp that it is an internal mental process resulting from (probably) some kind of neurotransmitter released in response to social and internal mental stimulus. But that won't allow you to understand *what it is like* any more than understanding physics will let you understand what colors look like or what music sounds like.
Happily, there are ways to stimulate the subjective experience that I'm describing other than accepting Jesus as your Lord and Savior. Meditation, for example, can produce similar results. It can be a very powerful experience. It can even become addictive, almost like a drug.
I am not necessarily advocating that you go try to get yourself a hit of religious euphoria (though I wouldn’t discourage you either -- the experience can give you some interesting and useful perspective on life). Instead, I simply want to convince you to entertain the possibility that people might profess to believe in God for reasons other than indoctrination or stupidity. Religious texts and rituals might be attempts to share real subjective experiences that, in the absence of a detailed modern understanding of neuroscience, can appear to originate from mysterious, subtle external sources.
The reason I want to convince you to entertain this notion is that an awful lot of energy gets wasted by arguing against religious beliefs on logical grounds, pointing out contradictions in the Bible and whatnot. Such arguments tend to be ineffective, which can be very frustrating for those who advance them. 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.
The good news is that adopting science and reason doesn’t mean you have to give up on spirituality any more than you have to give up on music. There are myriad paths to spiritual experience, to a sense of awe and wonder at the grand tapestry of creation, to the essential existential mysteries of life and consciousness, to what religious people call “God.” Walking in the woods. Seeing the moons of Jupiter through a telescope. Gathering with friends to listen to music, or to sing, or simply to share the experience of being alive. Meditation. Any of these can be spiritual experiences if you allow them to be. In this sense, God is everywhere.