Kantian Naturalist and I have been hopscotching from thread to thread, discussing the nature of religious language. The main point of contention is the assertoric/disclosive distinction: When is religious language assertoric — that is, when does it make claims about reality — and when is it merely disclosive, revealing attitude and affect without making actual claims?
I’ve created this thread as a permanent home for this otherwise nomadic discussion.
It may also be a good place for an ongoing discussion of another form of religious language — scripture. For believers who take scripture to be divinely inspired, the question is when it should be taken literally, when it should be taken figuratively or metaphorically, and whether there are consistent and justifiable criteria for drawing that distinction.
Kantian Naturalist conscious and self-conscious sensitivity to suffering, despair, gratitude, and joy.,
You forgot guilt, feelings of superiority, self-immolation, expectations of lots of willing virgins after death, and hair shirt purchasing choices.
Not to mention the joys of telling other people what to do and what to believe.
I think that’s something of a red herring in this context. I’m trying to think through what spirituality is (and can be), not religion per se. There are many religions that are not terribly spiritual, and quite a few that are downright anti-spiritual — and there are many forms of spiritual expression that are independent of any established religion.
The key difference is that spirituality is (I am suggesting) whatever social practices promote or enhance of what happens in the flow of conscious, lived experience as the boundaries of the self slacken or attenuate. (Going to back to my citation from Kovel last week.)
In this broad sense, spiritual practices can include prayer, meditation, dance, music, political activism, sex, cooking, making art, and so on. (Just a few examples.) Religions are complex social, political, and economic institutions that play many functions, including that of providing a home for spiritual practices.
A religion can be anti-spiritual (I’d say that the “Christian Right” in the US is a prime candidate), and spirituality doesn’t need a religion: one can meditate, do yoga, etc. on one’s own or with a plurality of small communities.
Now, remember what the question was. The question was: What does spirituality consist in?
Your answer is a random list of things. The same as others here, my objection to your list is that you have no common denominator there, so anything can be randomly added or removed from the list. In short, it’s a non-answer.
In fact, you admit it yourself,
Yes, you are trying to answer. Not succeeding though.
In high school writing classes we were taught to avoid sentences like “There were many Russians, lawyers, and women among the audience.” The problem with the list in the sentence is that it lacks a common denominator and therefore it’s not a list of something.
Your attempted list of characteristics and things that you associate with spirituality is like that. It doesn’t tell why or based on what you associate those things with spirituality. The best I can come up with is “These things are commonly assumed to be associated with spirituality.” Well, in that case we are clearly not talking about the same thing. You are talking about what is commonly assumed, but I am talking about spirituality. Different things.
I clearly identified in what way to associate things with spirituality: sensus divinitatis. There is a spiritual nature or dimension to things which is uncovered through sensus divinitatis. To fail to use it means to not understand spirituality, and therefore one ends up being non-spiritual. Just like when you don’t use your intellect you are non-intellectual. And to fail to use sensus divinitatis when reading means to fail to extract the spiritual sense of the text, to fail to determine whether it is there at all. So we are not talking about the same thing.
I already gave, not a ‘random list’ or ‘non-answer,’ but this response:
It is this ‘openness’ and holding-oneself-open — a willingness to be vulnerable, to let go of egoism and certitude — that is central to the conception of spirituality that I am pursuing here.
And from this it follows that a spiritual text will be any text that is written in order to express or communicate that kind of experience, and the spiritual interpretation of a spiritual text will be an interpretation that explores that dimension of textual meaning in the lives of those who read that text.
That in turn is why spiritual interpretations will involve, as I remarked earlier.
Whatever the inadequacies of this conception of spirituality, of spiritual texts, and of spiritual interpretations of texts, they have not yet been brought to light.
But not guilt, self-immolation, dreaming of virgins, feeling superior, self-flagellation, etc. Why not? I think you’re just taking a list of stuff you think is ok and omitting stuff you think isn’t ok. But there’s no basis for the exclusion that I can see.
The real red herring is trying so hard to be religious, accepting and tolerant on the one had, and secular, scientific and skeptical on the other–all at the same time. I know that from your perspective it’s an unfortunate thing and you will resist, resist, resist. But, for good or ill, sometimes you just have to choose, KN.
Which I expected you to expand on, because you said you would write a longer response. Until then I had no idea what to do with it.
Now, what is the self? Is it not the totality of (one’s own individual) psychology? If yes, and we have a comprehension of it slackening or attenuating, then this answer affirms the sensus divinitatis that you have been denying.
Namely, the ordinary five senses, such as sight, hearing, touch, etc. do not provide any sense of slackening or attenuating the self. These senses have their specific organs and if the organ cease to function, the flow of the relevant data stops. The sense doesn’t tell you that the dataflow in this channel stopped, it’s the higher faculty (mind or intellect) which detects this, if you pay attention. Similarly, the slackening or attenuating of the self is relevant if and only if we have a means (a sense) to detect this, to interpret the event and to react if appropriate. You have denied that any such sense is there.
The other possibility is that you had something completely else in mind when you gave this answer, something akin to “trying to think through…”
As I see it, the antithesis of genuine spirituality is idolatry — which I take here to be worshiping an inflated version of oneself. Idolatry is the antithesis of spirituality because spiritual experience is about the transcendence of the self. As the old line has it, you’re worshiping an idol when your version of God has all the prejudices that you do. I don’t know if self-immolation fits that category — I suspect it doesn’t, in fact — but the others do.
It is true that I am torn — as every good pragmatist is — between a verificationist and an existentialist reading of ‘experience’. Peirce is the most verificationist, and James the most existentialist, of the classical pragmatists. Dewey and Lewis try to strike a balance, and so do the neopragmatists (Sellars, Rorty, Putnam). My own view is to lean towards verificationism when it comes to matters that enter into the public space of reasons and towards existentialism when it comes to the interiority of one’s private, personal life.
In other words, I’m leaning on the public/private distinction to justify my view that I do not, in fact, have to chose between science and religion. Now, if the public/private distinction itself were problematic (as some radical Marxists have argued) or if it were insufficient to bear the weight I’m placing on it, then I’d be in trouble. But only then!
I would say that the self is, to use Dennett’s metaphor, a ‘center of narrative gravity’ — it’s the attractor that holds together the various stories we tell (or better: the various stories that we are) about how we have come to be what we are (or: take ourselves to be). In moments when those narratives get shaken loose, when the shaking loose is not utterly traumatic, there is an experience of transcendence of the self or ego. One feels oneself to be intimately connected with far more than what there is. Whether one interprets this ‘more’ as “nature” or “the universe” or “God” is dependent on a whole host of additional factors, including — but not limited to — one’s attitudes towards institutionalized religion.
I don’t accept this conception of the mind as “senses + intellect”, so it’s difficult for me to engage with you in terms of this conception.
Firstly, I think that organism-relevant expectation and prediction play a huge role in how the play of energy across sensory receptors is taken up into conscious perceptions, so there’s a very thin and fuzzy line between perceiving and acting in everyday life. The brain doesn’t passively take up sensory information and then process it — there’s no discrete “input” and then subsequent “processing”, thereby generating “output.” The brain isn’t organized according to a serial processing architecture.
Instead, it now seems, there’s a lot of ‘top-down’ processing from cortical areas involved in planning and movement to cortical areas devoted to sensory processing — brains actively predict what sensory information to expect, and sensory cortex actively samples information conveyed by sensory receptors to gauge (roughly) the degree to which predictions were adequate or inadequate — that is, adequate or inadequate for the next round of action.
To a striking degree, I find, the new picture of neurocomputation coming to the fore these days confirms, at the subpersonal level, what phenomenologists of embodiment like Merleau-Ponty, Todes, and Dreyfus have been describing at the personal level in terms of “skillful coping.”
(Meditation is interesting because it suspends the connection and focuses awareness on very minimal sensations, such as the interoceptive awareness of one’s breathing. The neuroscience of meditation, prayer, and yoga is still in its infancy.)
Secondly, I don’t think that “the intellect” can be neatly separated from language and from culture, with their complex sedimented histories. (This may commit me to some version of relativism, though I don’t know yet.) What we can think, and how we can think, is a reflection of the semantic resources embedded in the language we acquired in becoming encultured primates. Though these resources are also experimented with and modified over the course of our subsequent experience and education, they do form as a platform on which the experiments and modifications take place.
Given these criticisms, I find it more helpful to focus on the phenomenology of spiritual experience as a slackening or attenuating of the center of narrative gravity than in terms of the activity of a cognitive capacity for which we have no evidence.
@KN
It should be a matter of concern to you how your answers to me diametrically differ from answers to others. When you respond to walto, you have no problem with transcendence etc., but when you respond to me, you mention Dennett (who is absolutely unauthoritative given the topic) and you say things like “neuroscience of meditation is still in its infancy”.
When you respond to others, you invite them to consider the authority of transcendental experience, whereas when you respond to me, you refuse to accept the actual transcendental experience, the concrete experience that people are actually known to have. You deny the experience of the meditator and you think it’s somehow relevant to neuroscience (:verb) the meditator. Which brings us back to the point that you believe that a neuroscientist tinkering with someone’s brain knows the mind of the person better than the person knows his own mind. It was funny the first time years ago when I discovered that physicalists actually believe this, but it’s not funny any more.
Being as inconsistent as you are, you can always find a way to wiggle away anywhere, but this is not the kind of discussion I am interested in.
Yeah, that’s the slithery philosophistry. KN’s slippery personal meaning of ‘spiritual’ reminds of that from another atheist Jew, Ayn Rand (whom KN, though way, way socialist-environmentalist-LGBTist ‘left’ of her, nevertheless seems to echo in his ‘secularism’).
KN is basically a ‘flat earth’ philosopher when it comes to human depth and breadth today.
Yet just like Rand, KN likes to feign ‘spiritual’ (welcome ‘spiritual interpretations’) in a deeper sense when it suits his social purposes, e.g. being ‘wanted’ at TA/SZ, apparently his major ‘voice’ platform as a private scholar.
This is sad, lowly denial of ‘religious language’ and token ‘spiritual’ (just naturalistic, empirical view of consciousness, mind/brain) embrace within a depressing atheist worldview.
Rand is somehow capable of deceiving pretty serious people. I have seen a fairly accomplished practising mystic speaking favourably of her “philosophy” and “logic”. Is it really because she’s a Jew and the mystic is also a Jew? Is this all that is required? Must be one of those things again that only Jews would be able to get, I guess.
For me it’s plainly obvious that Rand’s philosophy (ideology, more properly) is soaking with the same elements as Bolshevism. Socially, the same totalitarian attitude. Conceptually, the same tactical conflations making the system more imposing ideologically, diverting attention from its practical inutility. Rand’s philosophy is the same thing as the so-called dialectical materialism (official school of philosophy of Soviet Union), but where collectivism is replaced with individualism. No other changes.
Yes, Rand’s ‘objectivist’ ideology. She called it a ‘philosophy.’ Just as crackpot philosophistic as KN, only coming from a novelist rather than an academic.
The Bolshevik’s took her ‘self-made’ father’s pharmacy. She definitely wasn’t a Bolshevik, even socially. She loved Alexander Kerensky as a hero.
Rand was not dia-mat though. Maybe N.I. Kareev overcame this for her during his lectures at SPbGU. She was a rationalist (anti-mystic), individualist (anti-collectivist) and egoist (anti-altruist). Her ‘secularism’ seems not to differ much from KN’s (though he philosophistically rejects ‘materialism,’ preferring to call himself instead a fuzzy ‘naturalist’ who is not a natural scientist). And likewise, as a secular Jew, his notion of ‘spirit’ is such a flat, horizontal impoverished display. Rand simply avoided speaking about her Jewish ethnicity in public, while thrashing at many fellow atheist Jews in private. Apparently she could only face religion ‘rationalistically’ and thus superficially, impersonally and, in the end, sadly. Money, money, dollar sign floral arrangement on her coffin!
Post-Soviet ‘religious language’ is fascinating as one realises that post-atheist attitudes are/can be socially-beneficial and economically transformative. The resurgence of theology in Russia over the past 3 decades would strike most ‘skeptics’ here as incomprehensible (and therefore to be dismissed from their shallow perspectives). Compare it with pre-atheist legalistic USAmerica nowadays and one can more easily understand the anger, arrogance, cynicism, self-righteousness and yet ultimate despair of quite a number of the posters on this blog.
Yes, Rand was capable of deception; a strange, exotic, uncompromising figure. But I doubt if KN is deceiving anyone here. They just like the lick he lubes them with.
Knock it off, Gregory.
I respond differently to you than to walto because I have a coherent position that is positioned dialectically between your and his. When I respond to walto, it’s to talk about the reality of the experience of transcendence. When I respond to you, it’s to talk about how best to understand that experience.
One point worth making here is that the sensus divinitatis is itself already an interpretation of the spiritual experience. As I understand it, the concept was introduced by Calvin; it does not play any significant role in Catholicism, or in non-Christian theism, or in any Eastern philosophical/religious traditions.
For one thing, the Catholic philosophers I read — particularly MacIntyre and Taylor — would not deny that our interpretations of texts are always grounded in some tradition or other (a point that I learned from them as well as from Gadamer. not from Kuhn, as you suggested above).
Among the philosophers I read, the ones who seem to come closest to anything like a sensus divinitatis are Martin Buber and Emmanuel Levinas. (I say this because I haven’t read their Christian counterparts, Gabriel Marcel and Jean-Luc Marion.) In Buber’s I-You encounter and Levinas’s enigma of the Face of the other (at the limit of phenomenology), there is certainly a transcendence of experience. More precisely, one undergoes a lived experience of transcending; it is a transcending-experience, not an experience of something that is transcendent. But neither Buber nor Levinas would be tempted by Calvin’s analogy between this dimension of experience and sense-perception, and neither am I.
I don’t understand why you think I’m a physicalist, since I’ve previously denied it. I don’t even think that mind-brain identity is remotely viable as a philosophical project. But why think that I am committed to physicalism (mind-brain identity) simply because I think that neuroscience is relevant to understanding mindedness?
In case this passed by too quickly in a previous exchange, here is my view about philosophy of mind: the ultimate goal of philosophy of mind is to integrate phenomenology and cognitive science. It’s not about choosing between them, but about how seeing how both are necessary forms of understanding. Arriving at an integrated view will require revising each in light of the other.
If our phenomenology tell us something about the mind that is biologically impossible, that’s a good reason to go back to the phenomenology and see if the experience was misdescribed. It would take an extremely compelling phenomenological description to give us a reason to insist that mindedness involves something that can’t be understood in biological terms. On the other hand, if cognitive science can’t explain something that is central to our experience of ourselves as perceivers, thinkers, and agents, then there’s a problem in the cognitive science.
Again, and to repeat, my view is that we shouldn’t chose between phenomenology and cognitive science, but try to integrate them into a single perspective (to the extent that this is possible). There’s been some exciting developments in neurophenomenology. In particular I’m interested in the conceptual foundations of neurophenomenology as developed in Michael Wheeler‘s rather intriguing attempt to synthesize Heidegger and Dennett. I find this approach remarkably congruent with recent work in pragmatism in cognitive science (e.g. Neither Brain Nor Ghost).
I agree with that assessment. “Totalitarian individualism” is a nice way of putting it.
Gregory,
As a point of info I’m not persuaded by what little I have read by Ayn Rand to read any more.
Alan Fox,
No surprise. I don’t find much of KN’s ‘academic’ philosophistry worth reading either.
If he would eventually demonstrate that he actually *wants* to try to understand and ‘sense’ beyond his comfortably numb, disenchanted horizontalist secular Judaism, that may open a different chapter. But that’s just fantasy now, while he strokes his ‘naturalist’ knowledge.
And yet you lube both Rand’s and KN’s secular Judaism, Alan, which appears as ‘fun’ Anglo-French atheism in despair. Self-absorbed. Silly. Skeptic.
If you want to show us what we are missing, Gregory, at some point you need to set out your stall. I have asked a couple of times now, which religious path would you suggest we tread. Or are you a follower of Billy Graham?
I’m a live-and-let -live person, Gregory. All I demand (and would fight to support, if it threatened my environment) is true secularism, where all are free to follow the tenets of their beliefs without the interference of religious (or anti-religious) bigots and authoritarians.
I moved two comments by Gregory to Guano for violating Lizzie’s not terribly onerous rules. Usually I don’t bother noting this kind of housekeeping, but since the insults were directed at another moderator I want to make it clear who did it.
Ayn Rand was an arrogant, power-hungry, neurotic asshole of average intelligence.
Her views were nothing at all like KNs–in any respect. But of course it’s important to team-player types to make conflations so they have one evil pole to fight.
I disagree with KN about a bunch of things, but he’s a kind and intelligent man (nicer, smarter and better read than the two schmucks here who are getting so much pleasure in attacking him), and neither his views nor his personality resemble Rand’s in any respect whatever. Throwing them together is indicative of the limited abilities and understanding of both Erik and his sycophantic know-nothing follower.
walto,
Thank you! Though note that only Gregory thought that bringing up Rand was relevant to a discussion of my views. I’d be surprised if Erik believes likewise, since it is perfectly obvious that my views have nothing in common with Rand’s.
No, of course not. 2 secular, disenchanted atheist Jews, who ‘reduce’ spirit to consciousness, have *nothing* in common. Oops. Hmm….
Calling someone ‘moronic’ is apparently against the rules, according to ‘neutral’ moderator Alan Fox, but calling someone ‘know nothing’ or ‘sycophantic’ apparently passes. Nice unjust atheist ‘rules’ here, guys! 😉
Look walto, I haven’t addressed you for a long time because you seem uninspiring and unknowledgeable even in the subject you claim to teach. You showed recently (http://theskepticalzone.com/wp/noyau/comment-page-14/#comment-84536) that you are deemed “not a professional philosopher” by “an apparent high school student” at a journal where you wanted to be published. Colour me not surprised.
It’s obvious that you wish to attack me personally and with contempt in your heart. It is juvenile, though I’m perhaps 20 yrs your junior. TA/SZ permits such behaviour because it privileges atheists like you. Yet, for all my criticisms of him, KN looks like an actual philosopher compared to you, while he is sadly only a philosophist who may still have hope to rise.
I stand by this:
Gregory, as I said, your abilities are very limited. Comparing KN to Rand because they both had Jewish parents is indicative of that. It’s also racial stereotyping.
Also, as you think publication records are indicative of professional skills, I’m happy to put mine up against yours any time you’d like.
No? (Didn’t think so.).
walto,
Get a grip, walto. It’s not “racial stereotyping” to repeat what a person has said about themselves. And I said more about the similar philosophy/worldview between KN and Ayn Rand than just their shared Jewish ethnicity. Both are disenchanted, secularist, spirit reduce to consciousness, add ‘naturalists’. What evidence do you have to suggest otherwise?
And I don’t really care what you have to say ever about ‘my abilities’.
Don’t make me laugh, walto, in defending what you call ‘philosophy’ in the USA. KN’s h-index is there, but that’s about all. You’ve got just over 300 total views (definitely bottom 10%, maybe bottom 5% or 3%) on academia.edu. Wake up to reality.
Guy, you’re like 20 yrs older than I am. You’re a bureaucrat ex-insurance salesman pretending to understand history, philosophy, and theology/worldview wrt ‘science’. Can’t submit a coherent Introduction to a credible journal with 6 months to prepare it. Good luck.
Relax, go get a Big Mac, Whopper or TB Burrito and mull over your personal cache. Stop fighting unnecessarily against many, many, many good, respectable people around the world who pay no attention to your angry anti-religious attitude.
We believe, walto, and even until your death you will not change that.
Gregory,
Perhaps not always, but it does violate the rule of “Address the post, not the poster.” Your predilection for including personally identifying information in your comments rather than simply addressing the arguments being made approaches the ad hominem fallacy and frequently skirts the rule against outing. Frankly, I consider it quite distasteful.
Patrick,
You may consider it that way, Patrick, but communication is a human thing, not something robotic or ‘objective.’ Others are free to disagree with you and your pro-atheist ‘moderation’ at TA/SZ. One can never *completely avoid* the poster, even if only naming them in the salutation. Get used to it, if you ever want to have a conversation with a social scientist (which perhaps psychologically you never do). Reflexivity is a boon for diplomatic communication, not an obstacle.
And if you’re trying to have a conversation with someone about ‘religious language,’ don’t you think it helps, nay, is imperative to know if they are a theist, an agnostic or a flaming, disrespectful angry atheist?! Far too many atheist-skeptics here are characteristically obtuse to this basic human understanding.
For example, you have stated here that you are an atheist. Do you think that is communicatively unimportant?
As I said, gregory, ‘didn’t think so.’ Publication history is important except when it isn’t…like in, um…you know, your own case.
Typical no-talent blowhard. Got nothing but a bunch of boring, idiotic, repetitive, adolescent insults. Some scholar.
Gregory,
Nope. And it certainly doesn’t matter what their real name, age, race, gender, location, employment, or religious upbringing are. Yet you bring all of those into your comments.
The focus should be on the ideas and the arguments. If yours were strong enough, you wouldn’t need to bring in the extraneous personal data.
Patrick,
You’ve told TA/SZ of your physical history of infirmities (if you prefer another name, be welcome). Please don’t try to be a robot, unfeeling, uncaring, inhumane. As if only ‘ideas and arguments’ are *important*. In your case, clearly they are not. Ideas and arguments do not complete ‘religious language’; there is more.
Conversing with robots is boring. Erik has shown quite clearly that atheists don’t want to or don’t know how to (usually lack of education to) face his comments. Mung sometimes shows this too. You atheists are over-confident and oftentimes ignorant.
But you’re still ‘persons.’ So please shut your silly ‘dehumanising’ moderation at that and leave open the possibility that theists might be able to show you something new that’s important, perhaps even more important than you previously realised. Or, just go on hating, skeptic, cynic, glum.
Careful, Patrick, Gregory will huff and he’ll puff and he’ll gas(bag) your house down. It’s all he’s capable of., so I guess nobody should blame him too much. He’s not exactly a deep thinker.
walto,
You have slightly over 300 views. Bottom 10%, perhaps 5% or 3%. Do you that much hate or avoid reality?
Btw, Gregory, I believe Patrick actually IS a Randian. But, naturally, since he’s not Jewish, you’re not interested, and likely wouldn’t be capable of noticing that anyway. What you care about and what you’re capable of discerning is utterly shallow. No more than is needed for your superficial insults. Sadly (from your vantage), however, insufficient for publications in reputable journals.
Gregory,
Hahaha. Views. Justin Bieber stuff.
walto,
Hello, walto, wake up. We live in a different era than you grew up in. Computers, internet, y’know?
Obviously very few people care about what you think is important in your outdated ‘philosophy’. So, please go ahead and insult me as if I’m guilty for that. It won’t bother me.
No need to say anything against your aggressive, despairing arrogant attitude. So, I’ll stop responding to your bottom-dwelling atheism again. Moderators will probably tolerate any anti-theist comments you make here, no matter how over-the-top flaming they are. Rest easy decadent dud…
Gregory,
I think your dossier on me must be inaccurate.
Nothing you’ve said addresses the fact that your insistence on bringing personal information into comments where it is not pertinent is, for lack of a better word, creepy.
walto,
No, but I have more sympathy for some of her views than do many others here.
Of course, now that you’ve said that, it’s no doubt made it’s way into Gregory’s copious notes on every participant here and he’ll bring it up at some time in the future when he’s, again, unable to address an argument or criticism directly.
I think that much of this recent discussion belongs in Noyeau, but I don’t believe there’s a rule that allows me to move it. I’ll try to respond there henceforth.
The fact that anybody agrees with you about anything is a powerful prima facie reason to believe they’re wrong. I’m tempted to get your football choices for tomorrow so I’ll know who to bet against. You’re about the best living, breathing (if not actually thinking) argument against theism I think I’ve seen.
The more you write, the more adherents you’re likely to lose. So….please keep it coming!
No. When you respond to me, you clearly do your best to assure me that there’s no way to comprehend what we are talking about, that the neuroscience has not advanced far enough so we could make sense of it, or something like this.
And the fact that you change tactics and switch to a whole different line of argument with each new response is not making it any better. Now you bring up Calvin. Why? Just to annoy me, for sure, and to implicate me by association in the eyes of others. Well done.
It plays a central role in every single mystical tradition all over the world. I didn’t say esoteric earlier for nothing. I actually mean what I say.
But from Kuhn you learned that you interpret texts within the framework in the paradigm where you are, and you cannot change the paradigm, your perspective. This you could not have learned from MacIntyre or Taylor. They surely understand what conversion means, and how it can be eyes-wide-open conscious, even if not outright voluntary.
The analogy predates Calvin and is in fact straightforwardly present in scriptures themselves. “Eyes of the heart” are there, “listen to God” and “hear His call” is there, spiritual truth as light (i.e. as something to see) is there, spiritual ignorance is likened to a veil, etc.
For what possible reason do you assume that neuroscience could be relevant at all?
Sure, if they both make sense and are logically sound. But in my view current mainstream cognitive science is unabashed phrenology, contemptuous of its own moral and educational effect.
Biologically impossible? Now, how can I avoid the impression that you insist that e.g. intellect must have biological/neural basis a la mind-brain identity theory? Can you help me out here?
The only reason I see you say things like this is that you have not yet grasped that these things cannot be reconciled. You hope they can be reconciled, you don’t know how, but your optimism cannot be deterred. I respect your faith, KN, but I also clearly understand that you simply have no clue.
Yes, your life seems to be as simple-minded ‘black and white’ as that. But sadly, still full of hatred for people of faith.
Aw. I want you to keep responding! Every dimwitted post of yours is bound to lose another few adherents of whatever your insipid religion might be. And as for collecting ‘views,’ may your hopes to be sociology’s next Bieber find fruition. Maybe you should try posting naked or wearing a clown nose–as I said the more views you get the more I like it! You’re even likely to get a few ‘reads’ as well as views, since your posts never get past an 8th grade level.
Please don’t stop!
We can certainly make sense of the phenomenology of meditative or spiritual experience without any neuroscience. But I find the prospect of synthesizing phenomenology with neuroscience quite exciting!
This strikes me as a bit odd. I brought up Calvin because he was — if I understand correctly — the first person to coin the phrase sensus divinatis, which is the phrase you brought into our conversation. If you didn’t want to associate it with Calvin’s own use of the phrase, why bring it up in the first place?
It is true that MacIntyre and Taylor do understand that discursive practices are not isolated from each other as if they were hermetically sealed, though that’s not Kuhn’s picture, either. In any event, I only brought up MacIntyre and Taylor as reference-points for my insistence that interpretation of sacred texts is always internal to some tradition or other.
I would call that a metaphor rather than an analogy, and the difference is important. The scriptural phrases are metaphors, or bits of poetry, that express or disclose a kind of experience. They aren’t part of a conceptually articulated theory of the experience.
I think it certainly could be relevant for explaining spiritual experience, since cognitive and affective neuroscience are relevant for explaining ordinary experience of perceiving, remembering, willing, acting, inferring, and so on.
That’s quite different from my own perspective of cognitive science, though my preferred paradigm of cognitive science — embodied-embedded cognitive science — is hardly mainstream.
In mind-brain identity theory, each mental state or process is either type-identical or token-identical with some neural state or process. Hence mind-brain identity theory entails that nothing going out outside of the brain has any mental content. And that is what I deny: I think that mental processes range across brain/body/environment interactions, and cannot be identified with neural processes alone. (Put otherwise: a brain in a vat would not have any thoughts or feelings unless it were connected to a computer sophisticated enough to simulate with astounding precision both the actual world and the actual body.)
I think that pessimism about the eventual integration of phenomenology and neuroscience is a judicious and sober assessment, given the apparently insuperable barriers. But I also think that it matters a great deal just what we’re talking about here, to determine if the barriers are really as insuperable as they appear to be.
If we think about the brain as a kind of computer — as mainstream cognitive science does — and then think about lived experience as Husserl does, then the two are poles apart and the prospects for reconciliation are dim. However, if we think about the brain as massively complex self-organizing dynamical system, and then think about lived experience as Merleau-Ponty does, the two perspectives can be brought closer together.
Ultimately, each kind of understanding has to succeed or fail on its own terms — Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology is better than Husserl’s only if it is a better description of lived experience, and embodied-embedded cognitive science is better than mainstream computationalism only if explains and predicts better.
Rules can evolve. I am utterly convinced that Lizzie’s idea of rancour-free exchange of views is an objective worth striving for. For those that don’t agree, Noyau is a reasonable alternative. I’d like to be able to move comments there rather than just having the guano option which is fine for black-and-white issues.
ETA this is a bit off-topic. Admins feel free to move! 🙂
I’d like to hear any coherent refutation of this statement. Can we imagine such a scenario? Of course! Are we convinced that we exist in such a scenario? Does only one of us exist in this scenario and is everything else a simulation?
I’m sticking with the pragmatic idea that reality is what there is and that stone I’m about to kick is really going to hurt my toe.
Alan Fox,
I disagree. They are intelligently designed by Lizzie (PBUH).
Alan Fox,
I do as well, but what reality is is another question. I find Bostrom’s Simulation Argument interesting and somewhat compelling.
We are definitely not talking about anything related to Calvin or Calvinism. His coined term is simply too appropriate to ignore, and it’s quite straightforwardly impplied in scriptures, so it’s not like he was inventing something out of nothing.
Yes, interpretation is always internal to some tradition or other. If it weren’t, it would not be interpretation in the relevant sense, because it would be unmethodical, inconsistent, without perspective. However, we can deliberately select the appropriate angle given our specific aim of interpretation and this makes all the difference. It’s not just tradition – it is (i.e. can be when you know what you are doing) a scientific method.
The theory has been developed precisely as I describe it. It’s just a matter of reading up. However, I am very reluctant to refer to authorities and I won’t now either. Not Calvin anyway.
Except that you deny that there’s any analogy between sensus divinitatis and other senses, because you deny sensus divinitatis altogether, and you deny the epistemology I described in terms of sense-data and sense-organ, the connection from the sense to the mind (intellect), etc.
So, how is cognitive science relevant again, when we have no common ground here at all? How can it help? How is it not a dead end?
What is embodied and it’s embedded in what?
Sure, except that when you say “If our phenomenology tell us something about the mind that is biologically impossible…” then I cannot help but conclude that you indeed identify mental processes with biological/neural processes alone and there’s nothing else you consider them to be, because you are not saying what else they could be. So the question remains.
Well, if this matters, I can in fifteen minutes concoct a theory that reconciles the two seamlessly. Unfortunately I am not interested in theories of convenience. I am interested in truth.
(i) What makes a person “pretty serious”?
(ii) What is a “fairly accomplished mystic”?
(iii) Was the the getting Rand iff you’re Jewish a joke of some kind? Do you think there’s a sensus jewinatus?
(iv) What the hell are you talking about, exactly?
FWIW, your posts on this subject remind me of Fechner (which is not necessarily a bad thing).