I've never heard the term before, but in context I'd guess it means something like "an explanation that implies we're less important than the previous explanation did". Heliocentrism vs. geocentrism, evolution vs. a supernatural creation narrative culminating in people, etc.

Happiness can mean quite a lot of different things to different people. Even in the a single culture like the US the average 25 year old means something different with the term than the average 50 year old.

The article makes it even more worse by conflating joy and happiness. Furthermore translation of words over cultural boundaries is going to add additional challenges.

Congratulations, you're smarter than a Harvard professor. I noticed the same thing, so I'm also smarter than a Harvard professor. I would hope that everyone on this site is smarter than a Harvard professor. A Harvard professor who got his B.A. and M.S. from Yale and his Ph.D. from Harvard.

This is sociologically interesting: is it an isolated incident that a Harvard professor -- an award-winning one, no less -- would so loudly fail to comprehend how science and statistics work? That doesn't seem likely, for two reasons. First, he probably talked it over with other people in the field, or at least mentioned why he thought replication was bad and wrong, and no one talked him out of it. Second, the system he came through produced him, and it's unlikely that that sort of error would only be produced once, since education is fairly standardized. So: what does this say about the relevant institutions? (The social sciences, HYP, academia, etc.)

This is why we can't have social science. Not because the subject is not amenable to the scientific method -- it obviously is. People are conducting controlled experiments and other people are attempting to replicate the results. So far, so good.

So, you say people are trying the scientific approach. My guess is, the nature of the problem is such that nothing much came out of these attempts. No great insights were gained, no theories were discovered. Real scientists had nothing to show for their efforts, and this is why the these fields are now not owned by real scientists, but by people with other skills.

For an imperfect analogy, say an ancient civilization left a lot of incomprehensible texts. Say a lot of effort went into deciphering these texts, and to everyone's surprise it was discovered that some of these texts were English encrypted with some cyphers that the cryptographers cracked. So people skilled in the mathematics of cryptography started working on other texts, and many of them were consequently decrypted. But there were some classes of documents that the cryptographers were helpless against. Maybe these texts were really random garbage, or maybe they were encrypted with cyphers which are well beyond the current reach of our technology.

Now imagine a crook comes and says he has found the true meaning of a text. He calls himself a cryptographer and produces an "explanation" which is drivel but which superficially sounds like what the cryptographers say. If he tries that with one of the texts that have been decrypted for real, it will be hard for him to compete with the actual solution. But for the texts that remain a mystery, crooks will be the only game in town.

Calling Luboš Motl a string theorist is reaching. He hasn't done any research in forever. His contrarian opinions have more chance of being wrong than right and so can be safely ignored. His blog is mostly of entertainment value if you enjoy reading putdowns. I would wait until real QFT/GR/Cosmology experts chime in.

Calling Luboš Motl a string theorist is reaching. He hasn't done any research in forever. His contrarian opinions have more chance of being wrong than right and so can be safely ignored. His blog is mostly of entertainment value if you enjoy reading putdowns. I would wait until real QFT/GR/Cosmology experts chime in.

I believe them. I don't believe in God, but I do believe that it's possible to have the subjective experience of a divine presence -- there's too much agreement on the broad strokes of how one feels, across cultures and religions, for it to be otherwise. Though on the other hand, some of the more specific takes on it might be bullshit, and basic cynicism suggests that some of the people talking about feeling God's presence are lying.

Seems reasonable to extend the same level of credulity to claims about enlightenment experiences. That's not to say that Buddhism is necessarily right about how they hash out in terms of mental/spiritual benefits, or in terms of what they actually mean cognitively, of course.

I think I see what you mean; if I mentally substitute "is closer to an" for "involves the", and "that state would have" for "that state has", the practice the quotation describes makes more sense to me. (I'm leery of the idea that it's better to head in the direction of less mediation — taking off my glasses doesn't give me a clearer view of the world — but that's a different objection.)

Context: The quotes here are taken from the C.S. Lewis sci-fi novel Perelandra in which protagonist, Ransom, goes to an extremely ideal Venus to have philosophical discoveries and box with a man possessed by a demon.

These quotes come from the beginning of the novel when Ransom is attempting to describe the experience of having been transported through space by extraterrestrial means which had augmented his body to protect it from cold and hunger and atrophy for the duration of the journey.

This discussion (taking place in a debate over the Christian afterlife) touches upon certain sentiments about how the augmentation (or, for Lewis, glorification) of modern human bodies does not lessen us as humans but instead only improves that which is there.

'Oh, don't you see, you ass, that there's a difference between a trans-sensuous life and a non-sensuous life?'

What emerged was that in Ransom's opinion the present functions and appetites of the body would disappear, not because they were atrophied but because they were, as he said, 'engulfed.' He used the word 'trans-sexual' I remember and began to hunt about for some similar words to apply to eating (after rejecting 'trans-gastronomic'), and since he was not the only philologist present, that diverted the conversation into different channels.

I was questioning him on the subject and had incautiously said, 'Of course I realise it's all rather too vague for you to put into words,' when he took me up rather sharply, for such a patient man, by saying, 'On the contrary, it is words that are vague. The reason why the thing can't be expressed is that it's too definite for language.'

C.S. Lewis, Perelandra, p. 29.

Because? People who claim it are lying? You dont have it, and your mind is typical?