Another Mopologist Bites The Dust, Bryce Haymond Edition

[Themis]

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.

Sure. Could the mode of life and training one gets work to make them interpret the experience differently than another person who does not have the same mode or training?

[Themis]

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.

I accept science may never be able to work it out, but then I don't see other ways to. I am open to both sides. Many philosophical arguments seem to start with unproven assumptions that even if wrong, can never be proven wrong. Substance dualism appears to do that, but I admit I am not well versed in philosophy.

[Physics Guy]

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.

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.

Sure, I just pictured of the controller of the universe embedding individual personal messages into the initial conditions of the universe as an example of how mystical experiences could be perfectly consistent with current physics and yet remain meaningful messages from a higher power. I think one could certainly extend this notion to something less personal. There could very well be some kind of consistent pattern of meaning embedded within the laws of nature and the initial conditions, rather as a symphony can be embedded within acoustics.

Nothing about music violates any of the laws about how sound waves propagate. Nothing about music is even additional to acoustics, in the sense that the music is something you have to add to the sound. Symphonies are simply a subset within the set of possible acoustic events, indeed a tiny subset of all possible sound sequences, which we nevertheless sometimes hear even though they would be incredibly rare as random events.

Never mind whether or not that implies the existence of intelligent musicians or composers. We can simply focus on the fact that symphonic music has its own set of coherent rules and patterns, which one can observe within the music itself regardless of how it got made.

In one sense music remains reducible to acoustics, inasmuch as all sounds are acoustics, but in another sense it is not. All kinds of horrible dissonances are perfectly allowed by acoustics but forbidden in music, and you cannot find out why they are forbidden from acoustics alone.

Anyway I don't see any reason, within materialistic and deterministic science, why there couldn't be many things that are kind of like music that way: embedded within material reality and following all of its rules, but following their own additional rules, too. Conceivably there are whole worlds of that stuff going on all the time all around us, and in us, which we do not normally perceive any more than we perceive ultraviolet or infrasound. Or perhaps we are not even deaf to this music, just tone-deaf; perhaps we are like hearing people seeing sign language without seeing the meaning.

[Kishkumen]

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.

As is my what? I don't follow.

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

Unless this is one of them, and I am not aware that it is, then your observation is beside the point. Moreover, dreams are routinely influenced by environmental conditions or sensations of the body, so, once again, the body is not merely manufacturing things. Memories and sensations are processed by the composition of dreams.

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.

Which part of it have you been saying all along? That the body is involved? Yes, I don't think we have ever disagreed on that point. I have no doubt that someone could think that a mystical experience is all in their head, just as Mormons can come around to a perspective in which they believe all of their spiritual experiences were just bodily phenomenon. Point taken.

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

Yep. This is an important question. My inclination at this point is that perhaps the skepticism that leads us to think people are incapable of interpreting their own experiences with any accuracy is mistaken. I don't know what their experiences mean, I'll admit, but the absolute denial of their interpretation and imposition of a purely material explanation strikes me as arrogant.

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

Please share when you find some from "long before." I tend to think of long before being, Oh, before the Early Modern Period. My area of expertise is antiquity, wherein there were no movements of which I am aware that utterly rejected the possibility of divinities of any kind. The problem we have is one of framing the questions properly.

Can you define absolute?

The timeless, irreducibly simple cause upon upon which all other things that exist are contingent.

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.

To be more specific and direct, their (Platonists') arguments in favor of the absolute are highly logical and rational.

[Kishkumen]

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.

Welcome to the party, Stak! I wish any one of us really had the wherewithal to really engage you in a way that would be interesting for you. Obviously you are way out of our league here.

[Kishkumen]

Sure, I just pictured of the controller of the universe embedding individual personal messages into the initial conditions of the universe as an example of how mystical experiences could be perfectly consistent with current physics and yet remain meaningful messages from a higher power. I think one could certainly extend this notion to something less personal. There could very well be some kind of consistent pattern of meaning embedded within the laws of nature and the initial conditions, rather as a symphony can be embedded within acoustics.

Nothing about music violates any of the laws about how sound waves propagate. Nothing about music is even additional to acoustics, in the sense that the music is something you have to add to the sound. Symphonies are simply a subset within the set of possible acoustic events, indeed a tiny subset of all possible sound sequences, which we nevertheless sometimes hear even though they would be incredibly rare as random events.

Never mind whether or not that implies the existence of intelligent musicians or composers. We can simply focus on the fact that symphonic music has its own set of coherent rules and patterns, which one can observe within the music itself regardless of how it got made.

In one sense music remains reducible to acoustics, inasmuch as all sounds are acoustics, but in another sense it is not. All kinds of horrible dissonances are perfectly allowed by acoustics but forbidden in music, and you cannot find out why they are forbidden from acoustics alone.

Anyway I don't see any reason, within materialistic and deterministic science, why there couldn't be many things that are kind of like music that way: embedded within material reality and following all of its rules, but following their own additional rules, too. Conceivably there are whole worlds of that stuff going on all the time all around us, and in us, which we do not normally perceive any more than we perceive ultraviolet or infrasound. Or perhaps we are not even deaf to this music, just tone-deaf; perhaps we are like hearing people seeing sign language without seeing the meaning.

Very interesting perspective, there, PG. I have to give that more thought.

[Aristotle Smith]

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[Kishkumen]

My philosophy of science is rusty, but if some form of eliminativism is being suggested here, then there are much bigger issues than religious experience that get left behind. On that view, you can't even say non-controversial things like "I'm happy today" or "I enjoy my job" without having to cash that out in terms of brain states and neurotransmitters, at least theoretically. And if one insists on some form of proof or evidence, then the theoretical isn't sufficient, you have to produce the goods experimentally. Good luck with that anytime soon.

My understanding, sketchy as it is, is that you are exactly right.

[Themis]

Unless this is one of them, and I am not aware that it is, then your observation is beside the point. Moreover, dreams are routinely influenced by environmental conditions or sensations of the body, so, once again, the body is not merely manufacturing things. Memories and sensations are processed by the composition of dreams.

Sure, and we have good evidence for many of them, although they don't have to be there in order for the mind to dream. Dreams are an important spiritual experience for many and they believe they are receiving some kind of stimuli from other sources we don't have good evidence for. Just like other spiritual/mystic experiences. I think the difference we have is with how we view what is good evidence which is fairly subjective.

Yep. This is an important question. My inclination at this point is that perhaps the skepticism that leads us to think people are incapable of interpreting their own experiences with any accuracy is mistaken. I don't know what their experiences mean, I'll admit, but the absolute denial of their interpretation and imposition of a purely material explanation strikes me as arrogant.

I don't think people are incapable. I just see that we are not perfect and do get it wrong sometimes. Correctly Interpreting the world around us with sight is usually better than the other senses. The spiritual experience as I see it doesn't suggest people are very good at some of their interpretations in reference to the nature of the universe. And yes that doesn't mean they are all wrong. I only suggest material explanations have not been eliminated.

[Physics Guy]

I got bored with philosophy of science years ago. I liked what there was but it seemed to have stalled so I stopped following it. I may well have missed good stuff in the past twenty-odd years.

One thing that frustrated me back then was that philosophy of science as I then knew it seemed unnecessarily clumsy about elimination and reduction. Problematic as it was that so much philosophy of science seemed to be based on theoretical physics, I felt they could use some more theoretical physics on these points. Or at least some more abstract, mathematical language, instead of relying on vague and emotionally loaded vernacular terms. Because science itself is full of examples of reductionism (if I even know what philosophers mean by that) without elimination (ditto).

I mentioned music above. A simpler example is temperature. You can feel that air is warm or cold. The temperature of air is quite exactly nothing but the average kinetic energy of the air molecules.

(Temperature is expressed in special units, degrees of some kind rather than Joules, just because we like to use special units for this particular kind of energy, the way British professionals used to charge fees in guineas rather than pounds even though a guinea was exactly 1.05 pounds. There's a similarly exact conversion factor between temperature degrees and units of energy.)

Are we somehow obliged by this understanding of temperature to stop using it as a concept and start describing the weather in terms of average molecular energy? Hardly. Once we know what temperature means in terms of molecular motion, continuing to use the concept of temperature is just a convenient abbreviation.

It's not even a matter of retaining the familiar words while changing our thoughts from intuitive notions of warmth to a more accurate picture of molecules. We can perfectly well retain all our intuitive notions of warmth and keep on using the term "temperature", and thinking about it, just as we did when we were kids. Those intuitive notions of warmth are all still quite true. The molecular picture just explains them in terms of the same kind of motion and collision that you can see on a pool table, only smaller and faster and more. It doesn't remove any of the properties of temperature, though.

Most of the time in fact it's highly recommended to keep using the intuitive notion of temperature, and not bother trying to think about molecules, because most of the time all that molecular stuff is just going to boggle your mind with huge numbers of tiny little things while telling you nothing new about anything that matters to you at the moment. Maybe it might be a nice scientific ideal to always think about everything in the most accurate possible way, but that's impossible for human brains, so forget it. Science is all about using higher-level languages whenever we can.

Zooming in closer by switching down to a more fundamental theory is what you do when you're forced to do it because something goes wrong at the higher level. It's important to have that fall-back option. As long as the higher-level description works, by all means use it; if something goes wrong you can pop open the hood but until then, just drive. Pinning down the relationships between different levels of description is important in science, and in a logical sense that does mean that you could replace the higher-level language with the lower-level. Nobody says you have to do that, however. Most of the time it would be pointless and stupid.

Temperature is the simplest example I know of that kind of non-eliminative reductionism, but it's a pattern that repeats throughout science everywhere. We're a long way from understanding things like happiness microscopically, the way we understand temperature of an ideal gas. But the default scientific expectation is that whatever happiness is, it will be something that is like temperature in this respect: it will ultimately be explainable in microscopic terms but that won't change what it is. Nothing is going to get eliminated when we understand it.

And by the same token I see no reason to say that we should refrain from higher-level explanations until we have "eliminated" microscopic mechanisms. That's like saying we should distrust thermodynamics until we are sure that temperature isn't just molecular motion. Temperature is molecular motion, just described at a higher level, and as such it is perfectly true. In the same way it's very likely that we will always want to describe happiness in psychological terms even if and when we have a complete neurological understanding of it.