Another Mopologist Bites The Dust, Bryce Haymond Edition

[huckelberry]

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The five senses we have mountains of reasons to think they are receiving stimuli from outside the body. Maybe that is all wrong, but we have great reasons to not think that. Maybe my dreams are accessing stimuli outside the body, but I don't have good reasons to think so. Perhaps people can leave their bodies, but I wonder why they never bring back useful information to reasonably think they were leaving their bodies. All the rest, including your subset of experiences have the same problem. In some ways that subset may be worse. It seems to be based more on feelings then visions and such.

the real question is what about the experience makes it reasonable to believe some part is coming from outside the body? Millions of people believe they have been abducted by aliens, but a more reasonable explanation is a dream state most people don't experience. Thinking about radio waves, at one time no one knew they existed. When someone finally discovered them, they didn't say just believe me. They showed how. They also had to show in ways that did not directly involve seeing, hearing, touching, tasting, smelling, or feeling them. I understand there is lots of reality out their my body cannot perceive, or like radios waves, have not been discovered in other ways.

Themis, when mysticism was broached on this thread Mr Aristotle observed it would be helpful to distinguish what sort of thing was in view. He mentioned theological groups which I thought perhaps not necessary for mystical experience , But then there are disciplines where such things do matter.

It think it is clear Kishkumen is talking about a different sort of experience than you. I gather he is not interested in out of body experiences, journeys to heaven, visions of angels or Virgin Mary or warm feeling showing something you read is true. It may not include sudden realizations of divine understanding such as realizing God cares for the wellbeing of homosexuals.

I think he is speaking more of a perception of the world around us, not some special message from someplace and in fact could reasonable understood as happening inside just as any other perception of the universe happens inside our body.
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I thought I would continue. kiahkumen cuold clarify his view a bit I suppose. I was thinking of bits of the discipline of the mystics. They are concerned with clarifying perception. Making still your desires assumptions and internal noise is important. Visions and special dreams are things to be passed by as of at best llimited usefulness.

It has been more than one decade since I went on a reading journey about different mystical lines of thought. I am left with a sense that there is a unity in such widely divergent traditions as native vision quest. monastic contemplation both Christian or eastern disciplines. It is sure that time has softened in my mind many differences in those different groups of human experience.

Sharing my own personal theological view, these mystic experiences are not direct view and understanding of God. They are instead a perception of the organizing ring vibrating out from Gods presence. I think the perception is there for all sorts of folks in varing degrees fo clarity or awareness. Mystic discipines are to clarify and focus that universally avalable awaremess. g

[Themis]

I think he is speaking more of a perception of the world around us, not some special message from someplace and in fact could reasonable understood as happening inside just as any other perception of the universe happens inside our body.

Sharing my own personal theological view, these mystic experiences are not direct view and understanding of God. They are instead a perception of the organizing ring vibrating out from Gods presence. I think the perception is there for all sorts of folks in varing degrees fo clarity or awareness. Mystic discipines are to clarify and focus that universally avalable awaremess. g

Which is what I have been talking about. I am open to another sense from which we can perceive the universe around us. Some believe their minds are perceiving some new stimuli. There are various groups that have beliefs about that. How do we know it is an actual perception of some stimuli outside the body that the mind is receiving and trying to interpret? I would love if there was. People having experiences through drugs and dreaming, which is thought our brain are producing some of those chemicals, think they are perceiving stimuli outside of the brain. Some don't.

I would add that I don't know that I am a materialist, but I do go with scientific methodology, which is the best way to approach these kind of questions. It's not defining anything in a way to preclude any evidence.

[Kishkumen]

Reminds of Mormons doing the same for their experiences, yet providing nothing to think they are really different or superior.

Not sure what this reaction is for. If you are talking about candy, and I am talking about a particular kind of candy, then I am talking about a narrower category. That’s all. The polemical attitude is unnecessary. You are welcome to study Orthodox hesychasm or Plotinian unity with the One, if you are interested in learning about mysticism in the sense I am using the word, and not in chatting about visions of talking cacti or alien sightings.

An interesting claim, but I have not seen anyone provide that definition, or another definition that would be provide good reasons think something is coming from some other source outside the body. Especially since you seem to think certain spiritual experiences don't count, but some small subset does or is superior. What about this subset makes it superior?

Why are you injecting the idea of superiority? I just told you we were talking about different things. Experiences often do originate from phenomena outside the body. We already went over that. The difference here is that mystical experiences have no clear material origin outside the body.

The problem is this can be used for any claim you want. It's another poor analogy because if someone created a TV then they can easily show it to anyone and how it works. No need to have faith. If someone has figured out how to access some new experience or information then they should be able to share maybe how, and maybe provide new information that shows to be accurate. It really doesn't seem much different than my own experiences in dreaming and feelings of knowing, understanding, etc.

People have had mystical experiences without faith. LOL! It’s actually another decent analogy. Your issue is that you are so stuck in this ideological bent that, as I said, you will always reject arguments and evidence that fall outside of your materialistic ideology. Hesychasm is a technique for achieving unity with the Divine. People have used it successfully for centuries. That makes it a technology, if you follow, to encounter the Divine. You can’t replicate that experience by hooking a monk up to sensors to see what happens to his body when he enters into the mystical state. You just see the reactions of the body, not the experience itself. The difference is self-evident. The analogy is perfectly adequate.

We can continue to go the rounds on this, but the results will not change. You will continue to insist on an entirely materialistic paradigm for judging the immaterial, and I will continue to argue that this is the wrong way of going about things.

[Physics Guy]

I call myself a materialist in the sense that I am not a substance dualist; I think we have souls in the way books have stories, not in the way they have ink. But in practice it's not always easy to distinguish form and substance like that. Our fundamental laws of nature are formal, and naïve intuitions about what matter must be like are often actually wrong.

It seems to me that ultimately the only reason we trust our senses and their ordinary perceptions of the world around us is that the story that sensory experience tells us, over days and years, is a coherent interactive story. If I touch that tall cylindrical thing it feels solid, hey it feels like I can grab onto this horizontal bit, look over there is a round red thing, I can grab it, it smells good, hey it even tastes good. And I can experience a very similar sequence many times, day after day, if I want. Pretty soon I take it for granted that climbing a tree to pick an apple and eat it is a real thing that happens in the real world, but the ultimate basis for this, it seems to me, is just that the pattern of experiences is consistent and seems to make sense.

Some patterns of experience are really robustly reproducible for most individuals. Some even seem to be common to most people; I can talk with other people about apples and their experiences usually jibe well with mine. Other experiences are rarer or more personal.

Experiences can be rare and personal, or consistent and common, to really high degrees that are hard to gloss over as unimportant. So much stuff is consistent and common that it makes sense to talk about a single real world in which we all live. I don't see how one can really take the kind of wildly subjective attitude that some people claim to take, without falling down holes and getting eaten by badgers.

But I can't really say that there's a sharp line of qualitative difference that separates rare and personal experiences from commonly shared ones. Even within a completely materialist and determinist view of what is actually happening, it is in principle possible that whatever power chooses the initial conditions of the universe does so in a way that sends a message to one little thinking blob of matter on a little planet at some particular moment fourteen billion years into the run. If that happened, then whatever happened to that thinking blob would be a bunch of material events, to be sure; but they would also be a personal message from the controller of the universe, in the same way that the blips of light you're seeing right now are a message from me. That would be a very rare and personal experience. But okay, mystical experiences are supposed to be like that.

How would you be sure that something like that had in fact happened to you? I don't know. I'm not inclined to be impressed by anyone's claim to have a message from God. The circumstances of the claimed message would make little difference to me. But the content of the message might.

[Kishkumen]

Experiences can be rare and personal, or consistent and common, to really high degrees that are hard to gloss over as unimportant. So much stuff is consistent and common that it makes sense to talk about a single real world in which we all live. I don't see how one can really take the kind of wildly subjective attitude that some people claim to take, without falling down holes and getting eaten by badgers.

But I can't really say that there's a sharp line of qualitative difference that separates rare and personal experiences from commonly shared ones. Even within a completely materialist and determinist view of what is actually happening, it is in principle possible that whatever power chooses the initial conditions of the universe does so in a way that sends a message to one little thinking blob of matter on a little planet at some particular moment fourteen billion years into the run. If that happened, then whatever happened to that thinking blob would be a bunch of material events, to be sure; but they would also be a personal message from the controller of the universe, in the same way that the blips of light you're seeing right now are a message from me. That would be a very rare and personal experience. But okay, mystical experiences are supposed to be like that.

How would you be sure that something like that had in fact happened to you? I don't know. I'm not inclined to be impressed by anyone's claim to have a message from God. The circumstances of the claimed message would make little difference to me. But the content of the message might.

I am struck by the thought, and perhaps this is because you talk about the wildly subjective attitude, that I should clarify that I am not talking about having a wildly subjective attitude. As I mentioned above, I do not personally guide my life's decisions by the claims of this or that mystic just because I inclined to think it is rational and logical to accept the reality of an Absolute or "Being" writ large that is the ultimate cause of existence and that the experience of mystics in various traditions seems to support that kind of state of affairs.

Honestly, I don't particularly like the word "God" and I don't think the existence of such a state of affairs demands that one believe in the dogmas of a particular philosophy or group. I am of a mind to isolate all of those questions from the more fundamental issue of an underlying cause to all things that humans might experience, indirectly or otherwise, through certain methods. Try as one might, the discussion usually devolves to the same insipid and worn out anthropomorphic metaphors. You have provided what I consider to be a very sober, lucid, and thoughtful post, and yet here we are referring to "personal messages from the controller of the universe."

Instead of imagining this state of affairs as a person that decides to talk to an individual human being, perhaps it is better to think of the methods whereby someone is able to access the experience of that state of existence, hence my use of the metaphor of tuning in a radio or tv. Could someone drop acid and have a taste of that experience? I don't see why not. If we are talking about a state of mind that allows one to access a particular experience far beyond regular perception, then it should be a matter of flipping a switch and not appeasing a person.

What the person who takes acid lacks is the kind of honed abilities to enter this experience regularly. Chemicals would get you there, but they would not be an actual substitute for the mode of life that one develops around cultivating the ability to experience this higher mode of perception.

[Kishkumen]

I would add that I don't know that I am a materialist, but I do go with scientific methodology, which is the best way to approach these kind of questions. It's not defining anything in a way to preclude any evidence.

Science obviously is not the best way to approach these kinds of questions. The human mind itself is the best way to approach these questions. It sufficed to get the Early Greeks there, as well as many others in other cultures. The human mind is far more sophisticated an instrument than any tool it has devised to assist it with material problems/investigations, i.e. science.

[Themis]

Experiences often do originate from phenomena outside the body. We already went over that. The difference here is that mystical experiences have no clear material origin outside the body.

Sure we know drugs can cause the same kind of experiences you are talking about. We also know people can have these experiences without any apparent outside stimuli. Dreams can crate all kinds of experiences, and people don't have to be dreaming to have these experiences. The mind creating them on their own has not been eliminated as reasonable.

People have had mystical experiences without faith. LOL!

Of course. The mind and body is extremely complex and we still have a lot to learn on how it works.

Your issue is that you are so stuck in this ideological bent that, as I said, you will always reject arguments and evidence that fall outside of your materialistic ideology.

This seems your curse to bear. I don't have a materialist ideology interfering with being open about something else going on. I'm not sure materialism would be closed to the possibility. This is why I brought up scientific methodology as the best way to look at these questions. Your problem is lack of good evidence even for the person experiencing what they interpret as unity with the divine. I just recognize that we haven't collected evidence that strongly supports outside stimuli or collected evidence the brain could not create the experience on it's own. We still know too little the capabilities of the brain. While a person may believe something else is going on, it is still reasonable for them to consider other possibilities like the brain creating it.

Hesychasm is a technique for achieving unity with the Divine. People have used it successfully for centuries. That makes it a technology, if you follow, to encounter the Divine. You can’t replicate that experience by hooking a monk up to sensors to see what happens to his body when he enters into the mystical state. You just see the reactions of the body, not the experience itself. The difference is self-evident. The analogy is perfectly adequate.

Sensors are not for replicating the experience, but to see what is happening when one is having the experience. Certain drugs or techniques are used to replicate or create the experience though, and research is going on to try and answer many questions surrounding the experiences.

We can continue to go the rounds on this, but the results will not change. You will continue to insist on an entirely materialistic paradigm for judging the immaterial, and I will continue to argue that this is the wrong way of going about things.

No materialistic paradigm. The problem is maybe around how we define good evidence. We both agree we have good evidence for people having experiences. We disagree maybe whether it should be considered good evidence for people's interpretations of the experience as well as whether the experience has outside stimuli. Also I don't think you have provided in what way how I or others should be going about things. How should someone go about evaluating these experiences?

[Kishkumen]

Sure we know drugs can cause the same kind of experiences you are talking about. We also know people can have these experiences without any apparent outside stimuli. Dreams can crate all kinds of experiences, and people don't have to be dreaming to have these experiences. The mind creating them on their own has not been eliminated as reasonable.

I notice you sneak dreams in there, but I am not aware of one such report that is a dream. I could be mistaken. That said, most such experiences occur in a meditative state, not in a sleeping state. Also, certain drugs have triggered such experiences, but they do not do so all the time. Expert mystics don't need to take drugs to have these experiences, so it is not at all clear that drugs "cause" the experiences, or account for them in any meaningful way. Of course, the body is involved because the body is part of the human being, but this experience is not necessarily reducible to the body.

That said, I think that materialists can be reasonable people, even if their philosophy is fundamentally incoherent and does not account for existence as such. What I don't care for is the fact that it is often reflexively and exclusively equated with rationalism. Reasonable and rational are not equated with materialism, and people who do not hold a materialist worldview can be just as reasonable and rational as materialists, if not more so.

Of course. The mind and body is extremely complex and we still have a lot to learn on how it works.

I agree, and in agreeing I include that the complexity could include the ability to have the higher perception I have been referring to.

This seems your curse to bear.

LOL! Uh, no. It is your perspective, not my burden at all.

I don't have a materialist ideology interfering with being open about something else going on. I'm not sure materialism would be closed to the possibility. This is why I brought up scientific methodology as the best way to look at these questions. Your problem is lack of good evidence even for the person experiencing what they interpret as unity with the divine. I just recognize that we haven't collected evidence that strongly supports outside stimuli or collected evidence the brain could not create the experience on it's own. We still know too little the capabilities of the brain. While a person may believe something else is going on, it is still reasonable for them to consider other possibilities like the brain creating it.

And here we go again. First of all, because some use the language divine, and I acknowledge that it is regularly used, is not to concede that the phenomenon is reducible to certain theological frameworks. It is just a commonly used term that is applied by some to the experience. I don't have a lack of evidence at all. There is plenty of evidence. The existence of mystics who have had these experiences over centuries is evidence. I agree that we know too little about the capabilities of the brain, but knowing more about the brain's capabilities does not really solve the problem. The underlying problem is the rejection of a fairly considerable aspect of the human experience based on recent ideological developments.

In my view there is adequate philosophical and experiential support for the view that there is an Absolute that causes existence as we know it. From that springs a lot of further speculation that is a lot shakier, and perhaps further work in the future will help us clarify this area. Science has a role to play in helping us understand the human organism, but at a certain point one probably either will have to accept that the experiences are connected to something outside of the human being or just return to the tautology of materialism. "The brain did it." I agree that the brain is capable of a lot of things, and there is a lot of room for disagreement, but I don't see that acknowledgment of an Absolute or One that underlies existence is in any way the risible position that in our era it is depicted as.

That said, I don't think that the acknowledgment of an Absolute upon which all else is contingent demands of one a particular religious practice or belief in a particular dogma. It is not the gateway drug to hunting fairies for their gold under hills or preaching flat earth. To the contrary, those Platonic philosophers who taught and practiced methods whereby they attained the experience of unity with the One were far more rational than most of us.

Sensors are not for replicating the experience, but to see what is happening when one is having the experience. Certain drugs or techniques are used to replicate or create the experience though, and research is going on to try and answer many questions surrounding the experiences.

Yes, certain things can trigger a perception, but that does not mean that the experience is a mere product of the chemical or technique. We are in any case talking past each other, revisiting the same points again and again. The body has always been involved in my formulation. The question remains one of whether it is just the body or there is perception of something outside the body. If we are talking about perception of something outside the body that cannot be measured by current scientific tools but something that requires an instrument as sophisticated as the human brain to perceive, then it will probably be a very long time before there is a tool adequate to the task, if there ever is one.

No materialistic paradigm.

Your responses are representative of a materialist paradigm. Your mere denial is meaningless.

[Themis]

Your responses are representative of a materialist paradigm. Your mere denial is meaningless.

As is yours. I have been very clear I am open to many possibilities.

I notice you sneak dreams in there, but I am not aware of one such report that is a dream. I could be mistaken.

The point is just that brain in a dream state seems capable of producing a wide range of experiences.

Of course, the body is involved because the body is part of the human being, but this experience is not necessarily reducible to the body.

I've been saying this all along. The point is how do we tell the difference. How do we know people have the same experience and the same interpretation. Can people have the same experience while having different interpretations. We see this when it comes to sight, sound, etc. Can some have the same experience as the mystic and think the experience was just in their head.

That said, I think that materialists can be reasonable people, even if their philosophy is fundamentally incoherent and does not account for existence as such. What I don't care for is the fact that it is often reflexively and exclusively equated with rationalism. Reasonable and rational are not equated with materialism, and people who do not hold a materialist worldview can be just as reasonable and rational as materialists, if not more so.

I think they can be reasonable and rational.

I agree, and in agreeing I include that the complexity could include the ability to have the higher perception I have been referring to.

I've said the same thing, but have been asking how we might know to a reasonable level.

The existence of mystics who have had these experiences over centuries is evidence.

Yes evidence that experience happened. Not necessarily good evidence of the accuracy of the interpretation of the experience.

I agree that we know too little about the capabilities of the brain, but knowing more about the brain's capabilities does not really solve the problem. The underlying problem is the rejection of a fairly considerable aspect of the human experience based on recent ideological developments.

I think we can find people rejecting it long before any recent ideological developments you think are going on.

In my view there is adequate philosophical and experiential support for the view that there is an Absolute that causes existence as we know it.

Can you define absolute?

To the contrary, those Platonic philosophers who taught and practiced methods whereby they attained the experience of unity with the One were far more rational than most of us.

I'm sure they could be very rational about a lot of things. Atheist's can and many times are very irrational. Even for their reasons not to believe in God. People can come to the right conclusions for all the wrong reasons.

Yes, certain things can trigger a perception, but that does not mean that the experience is a mere product of the chemical or technique. We are in any case talking past each other, revisiting the same points again and again. The body has always been involved in my formulation. The question remains one of whether it is just the body or there is perception of something outside the body. If we are talking about perception of something outside the body that cannot be measured by current scientific tools but something that requires an instrument as sophisticated as the human brain to perceive, then it will probably be a very long time before there is a tool adequate to the task, if there ever is one.

I've been saying this from the start. To me this means being uncertain is the better position. I think we may agree a lot more then you think but are using different and imperfect language to describe what we are talking about. It's been interesting for me.

[DrStakhanovite]

This seems your curse to bear. I don't have a materialist ideology interfering with being open about something else going on. I'm not sure materialism would be closed to the possibility. This is why I brought up scientific methodology as the best way to look at these questions. Your problem is lack of good evidence even for the person experiencing what they interpret as unity with the divine. I just recognize that we haven't collected evidence that strongly supports outside stimuli or collected evidence the brain could not create the experience on it's own. We still know too little the capabilities of the brain. While a person may believe something else is going on, it is still reasonable for them to consider other possibilities like the brain creating it.

I think Kishkumen has a strong point from a Philosophy of Science perspective. You have basically been articulating a soft view of causal eliminativism, which more or less states that causal relations are exhausted by the descriptions provided by physics. Appeals to methodology are of little use to you here because there isn’t anything about triggering brainstates with magnets or observing oxygen consumption in discrete areas of the brain via computer models that suggests contemporary physics is some kind of causally closed system; you have to engage in some pretty heavy metaphysics (like the defenders of substance dualism) to achieve that, not the scientific method.