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...
with 100% certainty, no one will exhibit a working perpetual motion machine today
100%? Really? Not just "close to 100%, so let's round it up" but actual complete certainty?
I too am a believer in the Second Law of Thermodynamics, but I don't see on what grounds anyone can be 100% certain that the SLoT is universally correct. I say this mostly on general principles -- we could just have got the physics wrong. More specifically, there are a few entropy-related holes in our current understanding of the world -- e.g., so far as I know no one currently has a good answer to "why is the entropy so low at the big bang?" nor to "is information lost when things fall into black holes?" -- so just how confidently would you bet that figuring out all the details of quantum gravity and of the big bang won't reveal any loopholes?
Now, of course there's a difference between "the SLoT has loopholes" and "someone will reveal a way to exploit those loopholes tomorrow". The most likely possible-so-far-as-I-know worlds in which perpetual motion machines are possible are ones in which we discover the fact (if at all) after decades of painstaking theorizing and experiment, and in which actual construction of a perpetual motion machine depends on somehow getting hold of a black hole of manageable size and doing intricate things with it. But literally zero probability that some crazy genius has done it in his basement and is now ready to show it off? Nope. Very small indeed, but not literally zero.
the sun will not rise in the west. [...] I will not be the president of the United States
Again, not zero. Very very very tiny, but not zero.
Do you believe that a thermostat makes decisions?
It does something a tiny bit like making decisions. (There is a certain class of states of affairs it systematically tries to bring about.) However, there's nothing in what it does that looks at all like a deliberative process, so I wouldn't say it has free will even to the tiny extent that maybe a chess-playing computer does.
For the avoidance of doubt: The level of decision-making, free will, intelligence, belief-having, etc., that these simple (or in the case of the chess program not so very simple) devices exhibit is so tiny that for most purposes it is much simpler and more helpful simply to say: No, these devices are not intelligent, do not have beliefs, etc. Much as for most purposes it is much simpler and more helpful to say: No, the coins in your pocket are not held away from the earth by the gravitational pull of your body. Or, for that matter: No, there is no chance that I will be president of the United States tomorrow.
Where are you heading with these questions? I mean, are you expecting them to help achieve mutual understanding, or are you playing to the gallery and trying to get me to say things that sound silly? (If so, I think you may have misjudged the gallery.)
perfectly reliable prediction of some things (in principle) is clearly possible.
Empirical things? Do you not, in fact, believe in quantum mechanics? Or do you think "in half the branches, by measure, X will happen, and in the other half Y will happen" counts as a perfectly reliable prediction of whether X or Y will happen?
is possible by definition.
Only perfectly non-empirical things. Sure, you can "predict" that a given Turing machine will halt. But you might as well say that (even without a halting oracle) you can "predict" that 3x4=12. As soon as that turns into "this actual multiplying device, right here, will get 12 when it tries to multiply 3 by 4", you're in the realm of empirical things, and all kinds of weird things happen with nonzero probability. You build your Turing machine but it malfunctions and enters an infinite loop. (And then terminates later when the sun enters its red giant phase and obliterates it. Well done, I guess, but then your prediction that that other Turing machine would never terminate isn't looking so good.) You build your multiplication machine and a cosmic ray changes the answer from 12 to 14. You arrange pebbles in a 3x4 grid, but immediately before you count the resulting pebbles all the elementary particles in one of the pebbles just happen to turn up somewhere entirely different, as permitted (albeit with staggeringly small probability) by fundamental physics.
[EDITED to fix formatting screwage; silly me, using an asterisk to denote multiplication.]
Where are you heading with these questions? I mean, are you expecting them to help achieve mutual understanding,
I'm not sure what I "expect" but yes, I am trying to achieve mutual understanding. I think we have a fundamental disconnect in our intuitions of what "free will" means and I'm trying to get a handle on what it is. If you think that a thermostat has even a little bit of free will then we'll just have to agree to disagree. If you think even a Nest thermostat, which does some fairly complicated processing before "decid...
[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.