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DeVliegendeHollander comments on Open thread, Apr. 01 - Apr. 05, 2015 - Less Wrong Discussion
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I have a small problem. My girlfriend (that I've been with for almost a year, and hope to be with for more years to come) has something of a New Age/unscientific worldview, which I find slightly disturbing, but I don't know how to attempt to "convert" her to something, well, less wrong, without upsetting her or making her feel stupid or something like that, or even how to react to her talking about her more "unusual" experiences.
A trivial example: She once mentioned that a certain kind of stone (it may have been hematite) had "healing powers". I expressed vague skepticism but didn't press the issue any further.
More seriously, my girlfriend has told me stories about seeing and interacting with "spirits", although she's asked me not to repeat any of them, and I've had to reassure her that no, I don't think she's crazy. For example, she said that whenever she goes to a particular railroad crossing, she always sees a woman riding a bicycle along the tracks that nobody else sees, and that one side of the woman's head looks horribly injured. There's another spirit, which she says reminds her of me, that usually hangs out on the roof outside her second-story window on nights when I'm not there, and sort of stands guard. He's asked to come in, but she says that spirits can't come in if you don't let them and she's always said no, except once when she was in a hotel and he spent the night on the side of the double bed she wasn't sleeping on.
I'm not sure how to react or deal with this. She feels kind of fragile emotionally to me, so I have to tread lightly; her father died when she was seven and her mother died when she was thirteen, and she says she's always afraid people are going to leave her. She also has something of an inferiority complex and is hypersensitive to perceived slights. She worries that, because didn't do well in school, people (including me) will treat her like she's stupid. She's also fat and she thinks it makes her ugly. I, of course, think she's beautiful and sexy, but she doesn't quite believe me when I tell her that.
Any advice? ("Break up with her" will be ignored.)
Stone of healing powers: I think what you need to do here is not necessarily suggesting empirical testing, but more along the lines of explaining the map-terrain problem: that a medicine merely changes the body, and whether we call that change healing or harming is a map thing, a thing in the human mind, an interpretation. Nothing has healing properties as such, not even official medical treatments, they just have body-changing properties which we interpret as beneficial i.e. healing. Healing is a mental thing, and it is reducible to causal chains of changing bodies out in the terrain plus the value judgements we associate with them here in the map. Thus ascribing generic healing properties to a stone is the category mistake of putting a mental, map property to a piece of terrain. You can explain it this way: a natural disaster does not harm people and is not evil, it merely changes things around and we interpret this change as harmful and bad. Same for healing.
Anyway, a more pragmatic idea. Get her on Zen. This is vaguely in the same cultural category as New Age and similar things, she will probably not dislike the idea, but it is an excellent rationality tool as it creates precisely this kind of distance in the mind, to see the map-terrain problem, to see the difference between reality and intepretations etc. Make her read Alan Watts. He was a hippie god. He was no the best Zen teacher around, but culturally compatible with New Age stuff and then she can go to a proper Zen meditation center.
Osho is another idea, he is a huge mystic and and easy for purely-rational people to dislike, but again he is that kind of mystic who is good at explaining map-terrain problems and this really helps in such cases.
That's a debate of semantics. If the store would empirically create health benefits than it doesn't matter much whether the label of "healing powers" is semantically correct.
I would be vary of bringing a person who sees spirits to spend more time meditating. I wouldn't do anything that encourages the girl to detach from reality.
Those benefits would have to be specific instead of a general healing potency. It had to work for migraine and not work for diarrhea.
Same way how "eating vegetables is healthy" is only a broad approximation. It does certain things, that are useful in certain circumstances, those circumstances being largely general unless one has specific medical conditions when not, such as undigestible fiber cleaning out the guts (not a good idea for Chron's), such as slow digestion meaning a slow insuline release (useful in general for most modern people, not so useful for eating directly before a hard workout), and so on.
Meditation doesn't detach from reality. Where did you get this idea from? It detaches one from one's interpretations of reality. Like you meditate and hear a sound. It teaches you to not instantly go and think "hey, that is a dog barking" and thus replacing the experience of a sound with a concept, with a mental category, but simply experiencing the sound directly without attaching any label to it.
A variety of experiences.
The effects of meditation a bit more complex. I don't want to go to much in the detail here because that would mean that I would have to use words like "energy" with I don't use on LW.
Meditation is a beautiful thing, but it has effects. When it comes to a person who already sees spirits I would treat very careful.
The problem is related to the definition of "supernatural" as referring to ontologically basic mental things. "Healing" is a very high level human concept, but involves a variety of different low-level things happening under a variety of circumstances. A stone that does "healing" would be like having a type of acid that only dissolves shirts--it has no way to know whether something is helpful or harmful any more than the acid has a way to know that something is a shirt.
And since it doesn't know that something is helpful or harmful, there will be situations in which it is harmful. It's not going to "empirically create health benefits" all the time--that's impossible. Frankly, any stone that was powerful enough to "heal" is something I wouldn't trust since pretty much any singificant "healing" effect could cause really bad harm under the wrong circumstances.
Not everyone who believes that a stone is healing power believes that they are ontologically basic.
If you have an ill person telling them to get a good nights sleep, helps them heal in a fairly diverse set of circumstances. The advice isn't helpful in every case.
The question whether or not you trust the stone is irrelevant to the question of what's a useful way to check to CronoDAS girlfriend.
In practice she might tell you: "Duh, of course I check with a trustworthy spirit whether the stone is right for the particular occasion."
A quick googling for hematite suggests that it's supposed to grounding and balancing energy. Given that the girl is ungrounded to the extend that she sees spirits, from her perspective getting a stone to ground herself makes a lot of sense.
But she is actually treating healing as an ontologically basic concept, even if she doesn't understand that she is doing so. That's enough.
She thinks it's possible for a stone to heal and do nothing else. It's not possible, unless the stone contains an intelligence that can determine whether a physical change made by the stone is "healing". It's every bit as absurd as having an acid that only dissolves shirts.
Does she believe that the stone causes harm if used in a way that doesn't match the judgment of the spirit?
She likely doesn't. It's something you project into her without good reason.