Kristine
Posts: 3061
Joined: Sep. 2006
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| Quote (Jim_Wynne @ Oct. 13 2007,14:56) | | Was it you who was cautioning us to be careful about questioning people who seem to believe that "epiphanies" might have some sort of mystical basis? What you posted seemed like a bunch of weak-kneed woo to me. |
No. I think they have no mystical basis. That's the point. I think I stated that succinctly. They are called "mystical" because they are still not understood, as all unknown things are. Dismissing them because religious hucksters got there first leaves the research doors shut. It's like deciding not to study the brain because believers have already called it a "soul" and you don't want to be laughed at for studying "the soul."
Harris is saying that, instead of dismissing these experiences, which seem to have real psychological and medical benefits, let us study them. That presents certain difficulties, not the least of which is, at what point are we studying successive samples of one that are nevertheless, in departure from normal research methods, valid for research?
That's the real question, not woo.
| Quote (Jim_Wynne @ Oct. 13 2007,14:56) | | If you want to just blather rather than explaining wtf you and Harris are on about, go right ahead. |
Why, thank you. I'll let Harris blather instead. Unfortunately I cannot find Harris's speech, but I did find a partial transcript of it in Newsweek: | Quote | for thousands of years, contemplatives have claimed to find extraordinary depths of psychological well-being while spending vast stretches of time in total isolation. It seems to me that, as rational people, whether we call ourselves "atheists" or not, we have a choice to make in how we view this whole enterprise. Either the contemplative literature is a mere catalogue of religious delusion, deliberate fraud, and psychopathology, or people have been having interesting and even normative experiences under the name of "spirituality" and "mysticism" for millennia.
Now let me just assert, on the basis of my own study and experience, that there is no question in my mind that people have improved their emotional lives, and their self-understanding, and their ethical intuitions, and have even had important insights about the nature of subjectivity itself through a variety of traditional practices like meditation.
Leaving aside all the metaphysics and mythology and mumbo jumbo, what contemplatives and mystics over the millennia claim to have discovered is that there is an alternative to merely living at the mercy of the next neurotic thought that comes careening into consciousness. There is an alternative to being continuously spellbound by the conversation we are having with ourselves.
Most us think that if a person is walking down the street talking to himself—that is, not able to censor himself in front of other people—he's probably mentally ill. But if we talk to ourselves all day long silently—thinking, thinking, thinking, rehearsing prior conversations, thinking about what we said, what we didn't say, what we should have said, jabbering on to ourselves about what we hope is going to happen, what just happened, what almost happened, what should have happened, what may yet happen—but we just know enough to just keep this conversation private, this is perfectly normal. This is perfectly compatible with sanity. Well, this is not what the experience of millions of contemplatives suggests.
Of course, I am by no means denying the importance of thinking. There is no question that linguistic thought is indispensable for us. It is, in large part, what makes us human. It is the fabric of almost all culture and every social relationship. Needless to say, it is the basis of all science. And it is surely responsible for much rudimentary cognition—for integrating beliefs, planning, explicit learning, moral reasoning, and many other mental capacities. Even talking to oneself out loud may occasionally serve a useful function.
From the point of view of our contemplative traditions, however—to boil them all down to a cartoon version, that ignores the rather esoteric disputes among them—our habitual identification with discursive thought, our failure moment to moment to recognize thoughts as thoughts, is a primary source of human suffering. And when a person breaks this spell, an extraordinary kind of relief is available.
But the problem with a contemplative claim of this sort is that you can't borrow someone else's contemplative tools to test it. The problem is that to test such a claim—indeed, to even appreciate how distracted we tend to be in the first place, we have to build our own contemplative tools. Imagine where astronomy would be if everyone had to build his own telescope before he could even begin to see if astronomy was a legitimate enterprise. It wouldn't make the sky any less worthy of investigation, but it would make it immensely more difficult for us to establish astronomy as a science.
To judge the empirical claims of contemplatives, you have to build your own telescope. Judging their metaphysical claims is another matter: many of these can be dismissed as bad science or bad philosophy by merely thinking about them. But to judge whether certain experiences are possible—and if possible, desirable—we have to be able to use our attention in the requisite ways. We have to be able to break our identification with discursive thought, if only for a few moments. This can take a tremendous amount of work. And it is not work that our culture knows much about.
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That's "WTF Harris and you are on about."
| Quote | One problem with atheism as a category of thought, is that it seems more or less synonymous with not being interested in what someone like the Buddha or Jesus may have actually experienced. [For the record I don't think a single person named "Jesus" really existed.]In fact, many atheists reject such experiences out of hand, as either impossible, or if possible, not worth wanting. Another common mistake is to imagine that such experiences are necessarily equivalent to states of mind with which many of us are already familiar—the feeling of scientific awe, or ordinary states of aesthetic appreciation, artistic inspiration, etc.
As someone who has made his own modest efforts in this area, let me assure you, that when a person goes into solitude and trains himself in meditation for 15 or 18 hours a day, for months or years at a time, in silence, doing nothing else—not talking, not reading, not writing—just making a sustained moment to moment effort to merely observe the contents of consciousness and to not get lost in thought, he experiences things that most scientists and artists are not likely to have experienced, unless they have made precisely the same efforts at introspection. And these experiences have a lot to say about the plasticity of the human mind and about the possibilities of human happiness.
So, apart from just commending these phenomena to your attention, I'd like to point out that, as atheists, our neglect of this area of human experience puts us at a rhetorical disadvantage. Because millions of people have had these experiences, and many millions more have had glimmers of them, and we, as atheists, ignore such phenomena, almost in principle, because of their religious associations—and yet these experiences often constitute the most important and transformative moments in a person's life. Not recognizing that such experiences are possible or important can make us appear less wise even than our craziest religious opponents.
My concern is that atheism can easily become the position of not being interested in certain possibilities in principle. I don't know if our universe is, as JBS Haldane said, "not only stranger than we suppose, but stranger than we can suppose." But I am sure that it is stranger than we, as "atheists," tend to represent while advocating atheism. As "atheists" we give others, and even ourselves, the sense that we are well on our way toward purging the universe of mystery. As advocates of reason, we know that mystery is going to be with us for a very long time. Indeed, there are good reasons to believe that mystery is ineradicable from our circumstance, because however much we know, it seems like there will always be brute facts that we cannot account for but which we must rely upon to explain everything else. This may be a problem for epistemology but it is not a problem for human life and for human solidarity. It does not rob our lives of meaning. And it is not a barrier to human happiness.
We are faced, however, with the challenge of communicating this view to others. We are faced with the monumental task of persuading a myth-infatuated world that love and curiosity are sufficient, and that we need not console or frighten ourselves or our children with Iron Age fairy tales. |
Dennett also took issue with the necessity of contemplating for so long a time as I recall.
For the moment, I can only think of one such epiphany as an example, and that was, when I was ten or so and thinking about centrifugal force being used to simulate gravity for space stations (I was a member of the L-5 Society then) and why people were weightless in space, I suddenly realized that weight was a measure of the pull of the earth's gravity on a person. Okay, no big deal, later I went to science class and read "A person's weight is really a function of gravity" so no huge discovery, but that was an intuition at which I arrived while trying to think logically about a related, but separate, question.
I was in the fifth grade, incidentally. And I've never done drugs, CCP. (I do remember that a poet who was sure that he would hate mathematics, and with whom I got into a fight about because I suggested he reserve judgement until he actually took the class, had a similar experience in Trig, and ended up writing a poem about the square root of negative one. I don't know if the poem was any good, but least he was enthusiastic about mathematics from then on.)
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Which came first: the shimmy, or the hip?
AtBC Poet Laureate
"I happen to think that this prerequisite criterion of empirical evidence is itself not empirical." - Clive
"Damn you. This means a trip to the library. Again." -- fnxtr
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