I think most of woo is patently anti-epistemic: tarot, modern witchcraft, Buddhism, New Ageism, astrology, chiropractic, homeopathy, metaphysical “energy”, spirit guides, &c. &c.
The few, rare things that do seem to work (mediation, acupuncture..) work in spectacularly different ways to the ways the woo practitioners claim they work. It’s pretty clear the pioneers of these practices had no clue why they worked but had hit upon them through trial-and-error, and just constructed arbitrary post-hoc narratives about how they imagined they might work: this isn’t just ‘failing to wear the attire of science’, it’s essentially the opposite of the scientific method.
All of those have anti-epistemic forms but disagree that they’re necessarily all innately anti-epistemic (though homeopathy and astrology might be, I haven’t looked into them in any detail); even if many of their specific hypotheses are wrong, they’re still pointing to correct observations. Ms. Blue, meet Mr. Green has some good discussion about how many of things start making more sense if you stop treating them as making reference to external reality and read them as making reference to your own mind.
In general, if you translate all mystical statements to be talking about the internal experiences, they’ll make a lot more sense. Let’s take a few common mystical concepts and see how we can translate them.
Energy—there are sensations that form a feeling of something liquid (or gaseous) that moves within or outside of your body. When unpacked, it’s likely to be made up of sensations of light (visual), warmth, tingling, and tension (physical). “Channeling energy” is adjusting your state of mind so as to cause these sensations to “move” in a certain way, to appear or disappear.
Chakras—points in your body where it’s particularly easy to feel certain types of energies. It’s also particularly easy to visualize / feel the energy moving into or out of those places. “Aligning chakras” is about adjusting your state of mind so as to cause the energy to flow evenly through all chakras. (Chakras are a great example of a model that pays rent. You can read about chakras, see what predictions people are making about your internal experience when you explore chakras, and then you can go and explore them within yourself to see if the predictions are accurate.)
Koans—“A mountain is a mountain. A mountain is not a mountain.” While you read a koan, you are supposed to carefully watch what’s going on in your mind. Often your mind will stumble at some point. By looking at the details of that stumble, seeing all the sensations that it’s made of, one can progress in insight. (More on insight later.)
(Compare this with a mystical definition: “You’re supposed to understand the koan and by understanding it, forget what you think you understand and free your mind, which then leads to a progress of insight.”)
Tarot—again, this is about carefully watching your mind. (Have you noticed a pattern yet?) You don’t need to understand or believe what the psychic or the cards tell you. Just watch what’s happening in your mind. If you ask: “Is my relationship going to work out?”, notice what sensations arise in that moment. Is there hope? Fear? Warmth? Tension? Black void? Untranscribable sensation #72? How do the sensations change when you’re told that the card that just came up represents opportunity? What are you hoping for? What are you quietly trying to push out of your mind? How do you feel when you notice how you feel? [...]
Many words in mystical speech are indirect pointers to some experiences. If you follow those pointers, you can often induce those experiences inside your own mind so you can take a look at them, or so you can use them as tools to achieve some goal. And at higher levels, mystical speech can actually induce certain experiences in your mind with little effort on your part.
I would add that many descriptions of “energies” also seem to me like they’re just a different word for felt senses.
As for Buddhism, while some of the stuff about reincarnation and divine beings and such is of course nonsensical, there are empirical claims within it about e.g. the functioning of the mind that seem to me correct, valuable, and straightforwardly expressible within a mechanistic framework. I’ve written about this at length: 1, 2, 3.
Thanks most awfully for the detailed reply! It’s an interesting debate for me and I’m grateful for your effort.
I think most of what you quote from “Ms Blue and Mr Green” is true: “energy” is a more useful concept if you think of it as managing your internal sensations; tarot is more useful if you think of it as a random-number generator to help you think of things or consider possibilities you wouldn’t have come up with by yourself.
...you might not be surprised to hear that I have several problems with it, nevertheless!
Firstly, it seems to work for literally anything:
Ghosts: You don’t need to believe that Anne Boleyn walks around Hampton Court Palace in transparent form; just understand that your instinctive fear of death interacts with your cultural understanding of the intense passions (love, betrayal, power) and emotionally charged, extreme stories (the king has his wife beheaded) represented by medieval palaces, and explore what Anne Boleyn can teach you about your own fear of death, and how she can help you relate to the brutal-seeming world that your own world and culture is built from and closely related to.
Thor: You don’t need to believe a great big muscly man with a hammer causes thunder; examine your own feelings when you think of thunder: fear and awe, yes, because you can sense forces at work far greater than the mundane forces you yourself are master of—but also exhilaration, and excitement: being in a thunderstorm excites some part of you that you can’t easily access any other way. Thor is simply a human representation of both the immense forces and the mysterious internal excitement, which is helpful to you because giving these things a name and a face (and a hammer) helps you recognise them within yourself.
Dracula You don’t need to believe in vampires; just to recognise your own fear of death, recognise your own shame about your deepest sexual urges, and come to terms with the fact that there’s a monster inside all of us and the wrong encounter with the wrong person can bring it out.
π = 3.0: You don’t need to literally believe that Pi is exactly 3; you just need to look inwards and see your desire for an orderly universe amenable to human understanding, to understand your mind’s need to organise and categorise and define everything precisely. The spiritual belief that Pi = 3 helps you neatly order your world and keep your head above the water and stops you from downing in a sea of unfathomable complexity. It empowers you to draw the line (or circle) where you see fit, at whatever level of complexity of nature speaks to you personally, instead of forcing your mind, wherein anything is possible and you are master, down the narrow, dull, undending paths demanded by the geometers.
Secondly, it seems at-best unhelpful, at-worst dishonest to take a plausible idea (“a randomly generated story can help you think about some things you wouldn’t have thought of without the unpredictable stimulus”) and wrap it up in mysticism (“These tarot cards reveal mysterious truths about the universe that are uniquely personally relevant to you and you can gain an advantage in life by listening to what they say”). If people are willing to accept the underlying idea then there’s no need for the woo it comes with, and if people aren’t willing to accept the underlying idea then smuggling it in by wrapping it up in woo seems dishonest. I think this is a big part of why woo is an effective vehicle for these ideas, and just telling people the ideas honestly and straightforwardly isn’t even remotely popular: the woo wrapping is what makes them attractive. People who’re attracted to the woo aren’t judging or debating the ideas on their own merits. Even if some idea is true, wrapping the idea in layers of metaphor and mysticism and ambiguity does not help us think clearly about it, judge it on its own merits, or reliably connect it to other relevant ideas.
Thirdly, I think even though you can discern some legitimate ideas wrapped in woo, for the most part they mostly are just mind games: yes, you can conceptualise “energy” moving around your body centered around some specific focal points - but so what? There isn’t actually any energy moving around any actual focal points—it’s just a mind game. If you’d never heard of this system and some suitable tradition/authority told you about completely different focal points you could just as easily imagine your body moving around those instead. The focal points are *arbitrary*. Similarly with the tarot: if you’d never heard of it and an authority told you the cards all had different meanings, you’d have no trouble accepting that. The claims, definitions, rules, the entire catechism of the belief is entirely arbitrary.
What’s wrong with things being arbitrary? Nothing at all—I play all sorts of bizarre mind games inside my own head all the time; I’m sure most of us do—this is perfectly fine ..if practitioners are open about it just being an interesting and rewarding mind-game. If, however, practicioners are authoritatively telling people “There absolutely are precisely 7 chakras and they are located at these exact positions within your body and they mean these specific things are happening inside you”, or “This tarot card absolutely represents Opportunity and if you draw it from the deck it means Opportunity really will feature in your really life in some way” then that would seem dishonest to me and that’s what I’d object to.
Fourthly (directly following from the above point) I fear there’s a marketing exercise where a woo practitioner tells somebody like me “It’s all just ways of conceptualising difficult-to-otherwise-think-of things in your head”—but then when they talk to a true believer it’s “Wow, your aura really is very purple today”. If the woo genuinely is about ways of conceptualising things that aren’t intended to ever be literally true, this is exactly the sort of thing that should be front-and-centre, should preface every discussion, and should be constantly referred back to, lest people’s fancies run away with them and they start believing it is literally true. It should be a point of honour for woo practitioners to raise this with everybody they talk to, so as not to accidentally mislead people into thinking the stuff they’re saying is supposed to be taken literally. But this is very much not what I see. In my experience of woo, its practitioners, and its disciples, I have never heard anybody say any of this before talking to you (though I must say I’m grateful to you for the novel, interesting, and entirely welcome experience—thanks!) Everything I’ve ever seen of the “woo world” leads me to believe that many, if not most, woo followers do consider it to be literally true, and if practitioners know it’s not, they don’t seem to do much to disabuse people of this idea.
Fifthly: “even if the hypotheses are wrong, they’re still pointing to correct observations”. This seems to me just another way of saying “anti-epistomology”. I want my beliefs to be actually true, not just to be vaguely indicative of some ambiguously-true observations.
Sixthly: “if you stop treating them as making reference to external reality and read them as making reference to your own mind”. I know I can’t truly and wholly think of my mind as part of external, material reality, even though it is, because my instinctive, hard-coded priors against this are just too strong—but I want to at least try! Just “going with it” and allowing myself to think and act as though my mind were somehow separate from external reality, that things that happen in my mind are somehow “on a different level” to reality, feels like giving up, to me. If some ideas are only believable if I imagine my mind to be outside of reality, I am very suspicious of those ideas.
Seventhly (and finally..!) where there are real phenomena with woo explanations as well as non-woo explanations, the non-woo explanations just seem more …useful? Have more predictive power? (I’m not sure of the best way to put this..) For example: If I have to choose between “Paying attention to people’s subtle body language cues, tone of voice, minutiae of their appearance, etc. can give you insights about their personality and help you understand or even predict their actions” and “People have auras of different colours that represent their personalities and internal states”, the former seems like a more useful thing to be aware of? You can start paying conscious attention to body language, start deliberately looking for the minutiae, you can even study it scientifically if you really wanted, whereas trying to interpret arbitrary mappings between what aura I imagine somebody to have and their personality seems a highly error-prone extra step to add in front of “notice body language”. (Or in other words, I think “conscious mind interprets body language” is a more reliable process than “subconcscious interprets body language → subconscious converts body language into auras → conscious mind interprets auras” – once you know that it all comes from body language. I agree that if you’re a 12th century Yogi and it’s either the aura process or nothing, then you may as well go with the aura process)
Similarly if I have to choose between “There are certain parts of the body wherefrom nerve signals don’t seem to reach the brain properly and sticking needles into these parts causes my brain to temporarily block off other sources of pain to focus on the pain signal it expects from the needle—which because of the weird nerves there never actually arrives, giving me temporary pain-relief from the other sources of pain” and “My body has chakras which I can manipulate with needles to redirect my energy flows and heal arbitrary maladies”, the former seems more useful, both for A) locating the safest , most effective needle-sites and B) for understanding whether my maladies genuinely are cured or whether pain from them is merely temporarily blocked. (But again, if I were a 12th century Yogi and it was either chakra-based pain relief or nothing, of course I’d go with the chakras)
I think I’m going to start by looking at the arbitrariness point.
As an analogy, consider chess. The rules of chess are, in a sense, totally arbitrary. You can change them any way you want, and indeed there exist plenty of chess variants.
And at the same time, they’re not totally arbitrary, in that chess has evolved through 1,500 years of play, with occasional changes to the rules to make the game more fun and interesting. Various other games that existed during that time but weren’t equally interesting have been forgotten. There is something about that specific configuration of rules that has been thoroughly play-tested and optimized for a particular kind of play. While you can come up with any other kind of game, there’s still a point in playing chess in particular, because that will get you a solid game without having to spend a lot of time play-testing your alternative to make it equally fun and balanced.
Likewise for Tarot. I just picked a totally random Tarot card from Wikipedia: The Emperor. Here’s how it’s described:
As a symbol of authority, stability, and structure, he represents order and discipline in contrast to the intuitive, nurturing qualities of The Empress.[1] The Emperor is associated with masculine energy, leadership, and the enforcement of law and tradition. [...]
When drawn upright, The Emperor signifies leadership, responsibility, and structure. It suggests stability and protection, highlighting a time of strategic action and discipline. The card often appears in readings concerning career, finances, and governance, reinforcing the idea of an established and authoritative influence. It may also represent a father figure or an external force providing guidance and order.[2]
Reversed, The Emperor can indicate excessive control, tyranny, or rigidity. It may point to an abuse of power, struggles with authority, or an inability to establish order. In some cases, it signifies weakness in decision-making or a resistance to necessary structure, warning against stubbornness or oppressive leadership.
This description is at the same time general and specific. Suppose that you ask yourself “what should I do about this problem” and you draw an upright Emperor. There are now lots of ways you can interpret that. Maybe you need to be disciplined to meet your goals. Maybe you need to seek out an organization that provides you with discipline. Maybe you will do strategic planning to get to your objective. Maybe you will find yourself a mentor. Maybe you yourself will act as a mentor to someone else. Maybe...
There are enough possibilities that your intuition can probably find something that fits your current life situation and gives you an interesting angle to consider. “Oh hmm, I should do some strategic planning, now that I think of it.” But the list of interpretations is also sufficiently constrained that it doesn’t just say “anything can happen”, which would be so broad as to not give you any ideas.
And as I said, I picked this card at random. All Tarot cards are like this—their meanings have been, through gradual development, optimized for that combination of generality and specificity that makes them evocative. You could develop an alternative system that did the same thing—maybe one that incorporated ghosts, Thor, Dracula, and π = 3.0 - but you’d be solving the same kind of engineering problem.
So just as the rules of chess are arbitrary, but it still makes sense to talk about The Rules of chess, the meanings of Tarot cards are arbitrary but it still makes sense to talk about The Meanings of the cards. If you assume that a certain card really does represent opportunity and opportunity really will somehow show up in your life—which is a bit of truism, because opportunity is a general enough concept that of course it will feature in your life in some way—then that will make your mind consider things from angles it wouldn’t have considered otherwise.
Now, about whether practitioners should be open about it fundamentally being a mind game—yes, of course. Many of them are! alexei, who wrote the Ms. Blue and Mr. Green article, said it directly. And I’m also saying that “Tarot is basically a random concept table for evocative ways of seeing your life” because that’s how it was explained to me, by various people in my life who were into Tarot.
Here we get to the thing that there tend to be several kinds of people involved in woo. There are people who go “it’s all psychology”, people who go “it’s genuinely supernatural”, and people who go “idk either way, I just know that it seems to work”. The people who think it’s all psychology or who are agnostic will tell you that directly, but the people who think that it’s supernatural tend to be more excited and loud about it. The psychological-minded might also hang out with other psychological-minded folks who might look down on Tarot, so they stay quiet about their interest.
Also, if you are trying to make money out of it, you’re incentivized to sell it as a thing that definitely predicts the future and isn’t just a mildly interesting technique for coming up with novel ways to view your life. Which means that a lot of the public messaging about it that you’ll encounter is selected for overselling its significance.
But I’ve seen various woo-type communities—modern Neo-Pagan witchcraft ones especially—where the “it’s psychological” and “it’s supernatural” people genuinely co-exist and have agreed to disagree, in part because for many people, it’s not all that important which one it is. The same practices will still bring the same results regardless of whether they’re of psychological or supernatural origin. So the two camps can still talk shop about what seems to work and participate in the same rituals, while agreeing to keep their phrasings sufficiently general that neither side needs to get too icked by the other’s metaphysics. Or failing that, just stick with the crowd that shares their commitments and avoid the camp that seems deluded to them.
That said, tarot is probably on the extreme end of the arbitrariness scale for woo. Something like chakras and energy seem to me less arbitrary.
Here a better comparison than games might be martial arts. There are many systems of martial arts, but all of them are constrained by what the body is physically capable of. And if you didn’t know any formal systems of martial arts, but just spent a lot of time fighting people (for real or for sport), you’d probably stumble on some of the same moves on your own.
You might have seen this image:
It’s from a study where people from three different countries were asked to indicate where in their body they experienced different feelings. The sensations for different feelings tend to cluster in different places.
Does it then seem totally implausible that sensations related to different psychological properties might cluster around particular locations in the body, as suggested by various chakra systems?
It is actually my experience that many scientifically-minded people working with something like a somatic therapy will at some point, much to their chagrin and annoyance, go “fuck, the chakra people are right” as a result of doing something different that then starts producing similar results as a chakra model.
Tucker Peck, a meditation teacher whose retreats I’ve been on and who I consider reasonably sensible, writes in his book:
I’m not sure why, because I’ve never worked in technology, but everywhere I teach in the world, the majority of attendees at my retreats and workshops are tech workers. These students almost always arrive at Dharma practice with a materialist, atheist worldview. It would be a huge turnoff to them if I gave a lecture about energy in the body. I like to joke that, within six to twelve months of beginning a meditation practice, all my students now have their Reiki master texting their Ayahuasca shaman about the direction that their chakras are rotating. The reason is that most people, if they sit quietly long enough, start feeling energy moving through the body. Even though there isn’t any scientifically known mechanism regarding what energy and chakras are made of or how they operate (at the time I’m writing this book), my students need some language to talk about the experience that they’re having. Chakras and energy seem like pretty good words to use.
My first experience of “energy sensations” was after I had done a lot of meditation, when I started getting weird energetic feelings in my forehead and right eye that were very distracting, and which made it hard to meditate. Again, I didn’t intentionally try to create them; they just appeared. This happened before I had heard of anyone experiencing anything like that, and I didn’t yet know Tucker at the time. Still, he explicitly mentions something similar in his book:
One association I’ve seen with the area in the center of the forehead is with excess striving in meditation. Quite commonly, students will get pain in their forehead when they meditate, and it’s worse when meditating on a small object such as the breath at the nose. Sometimes the pain persists outside of the practice—so much so that their heads hurt all the time. I’ve also heard multiple people use the same very specific analogy: Rather than feeling pain in their foreheads, it feels as though there’s an octopus on their forehead.
With other points in the body, I suggest focusing on the pain as a way of converting physical pain into psychological content. However, if you have this sort of pain in your head, it’s best not to focus on it. The reason is that the pain is caused by using meditation to try to control things in ways that they can’t be controlled, and when you focus on the pain to try to make it go away, you’re continuing to try to control something in the wrong way. This becomes what one Dharma teacher calls “obsessive concentration.” Students who experience the most extreme cases of obsessive concentration might need to take a break from meditating. (I’ve only seen it get that bad in two or three people, who recovered after several months without practice.)
I wouldn’t describe my energy sensation as pain or an octopus, but I did find them unpleasant and nauseating. I also found that the sensations got worse if I did concentration practice focused on a small area, and that trying to look at them just made them worse. In line with what Tucker writes, I found that “do-nothing” style meditation, where you don’t try to control your mind but just let it do whatever, produced the least of these sensations. Also in line with what he wrote, the sensations would also persist outside meditation, and e.g. sometimes cause me insomnia.
Here’s another example. If you are nervous and tense, it’s difficult to feel any other emotions. And the tension often has a strong physical element that interacts both ways with the mental aspect of it. When there’s a stressful event in your life, that can cause the body to concretely tense (mind → body). At the same time, things like going on a run or weightlifting that exhaust your muscles and force them to eventually relax can also temporarily take the nervousness off (body → mind).
Now, a friend of mine found a breathing exercise that helped him release a persistent tension he’d had in his solar plexus, which then made various emotions easier to feel. And it was only afterward that he made the connection that this could reasonably be described as “unblocking your heart chakra”.
It does not seem crazy to think that if the muscles around your solar plexus are chronically tense, then this would make it harder to breathe naturally, which would act as a kind of chronic low-grade stress, which could then make positive emotions easier to feel if this was released.
Or take the throat chakra. Many people who have difficulty with confidence find that when they try to speak up, it feels physically hard. Like words literally “get stuck in their throat”, or they lose their voice, or feel like they have to struggle to get the words out. Mechanistically, you could see this being a result of two different subsystems sending conflicting bids to the muscle system. An anxiety-related one sends a command for the throat muscles to tense up in order to block self-expression (due to a prediction that talking up would be dangerous), and that competes against a system that tries to force the words out. This would be a very logical thing for evolve: since throat muscles are a critical bottleneck for speech production, tensing them would be the obvious way for a competitive subsystem to attempt to veto it.
I once had a therapeutic/meditative experience where I found my attention spontaneously going into my throat and I became aware of an unpleasant choking sensation in it, like there was some imaginary object lodged inside my throat that was making me suffocate. I hadn’t done anything to intentionally look in this area; rather heightened sensitivity to what was happening in my body made me more aware that there was something unpleasant there. Repeated cycles of my attention going there, feeling terrible, and it slightly relaxing eventually led to the feeling mostly going away. Afterward, I found myself being more relaxed and having an easier time expressing myself in social situations, a difference which a couple of other people also noticed.
I don’t claim to have a rigorous understanding of what exactly happened there. My guess is something like, extended anxiety can cause muscles to become chronically tense in a way that disappears from awareness, and bringing that tension into awareness can cause the nervous system to adjust something in a way that relaxes the tension, which then feeds back to the mind as a smoother mental state. (Mike Johnson has an elaborate theory of “vasocomputation” and of how the vascular system might vary the degree of tension in various muscles as a form of memory storage that through the mind-body link freezes various neural patterns in place. I don’t understand it very well but something like that would make sense based on my experiences.)
In any case, while I did not do any explicit energy work practice or investigation of the throat chakra—the sensations just came up on their own when in the right state of consciousness—I bet that if I had done some kind of energy work practice aimed at investigating the throat chakra, that could have surfaced it as well, with similar results.
This gets us to the thing where you said
I fear there’s a marketing exercise where a woo practitioner tells somebody like me “It’s all just ways of conceptualising difficult-to-otherwise-think-of things in your head”—but then when they talk to a true believer it’s “Wow, your aura really is very purple today”.
Thing is, “your aura really is very purple today” probably is the practitioner’s literal experience. When I had the sensation of energy in my forehead, or the sense of having a blockage in my throat, my experience wasn’t “right now my body is doing vasocomputation and activating some stored neural pattern which causes my forehead/throat to tense in a way which I could describe as energy”. That’s an interpretation I thought of later. My actual experience was “fuck, there’s a bright energy in my forehead that makes it impossible to focus on my breath” or “THERE’S A THING RIGHT IN THE CENTER OF MY THROAT AND I CAN’T BREATHE [RAW TERROR] [RAW TERROR] [RAW TERROR]”.
My guess is that energy stuff is probably bundling together a number of things that nonetheless appear subjectively unified. What happens when someone sees another person’s aura is that their subconscious parses a lot of things about the other person’s body language, which then gets overlaid on their perception as a signifier of the other person’s emotional state, like a video game might draw icons or numbers on top of various units in order to make that information available at a glance. And if this is the thing that they literally see, then… well, it makes sense to just say that.
I also tried an energy work exercise once, where you first move your attention back and forth your arms—with the metaphor that you are moving a ball of energy back and forth—and then you hold your palms apart and imagine moving the ball of energy across the gap, from one palm to another. If I practice this, I can in fact get the feeling that there is something that moves through the space, from one palm to another. And my guess of what happens is something like, the brain notices what it is like when you move your attention across parts of your body and then extrapolates what it might feel like if you continued that motion and could feel some of the intervening distance, and then you feel that extrapolated projection.
But I’m also guessing that if somebody uses that kind of a technique to, say, “channel loving energy” toward someone else, then that might genuinely be making them more empathetic toward the other person in a way that shifts the state of their nervous system. And since people subconsciously register the other’s emotional state—there are people who I tend to automatically feel relaxed around, with it feeling like my body responds to something in the way they hold their body—this may genuinely make the other person feel more relaxed in turn.
And then, saying that “I channeled loving energy toward the other person” might just be the most accurate description of what the woo practitioner experienced themselves as doing. It’s quite possible that a more accurate description would be something like “I did a set of mental exercises that relaxed my body in such a way that the other person subconsciously picked it up”… but that’s not a description that you could use to produce the same effect. Probably imagining that you are literally sending loving energy toward someone will make you feel that you are sending loving energy toward them, which then has those effects in your body.
In that way, it’s similar to abstractions in any other discipline. If we’re playing a boardgame and I say that I’m “sending my units to attack”, I don’t state that actually there are no real-world units and we’re just moving pieces of cardboard around a table. The units are cardboard, but within the formal system defined by the game’s rules, they do have a particular function defined as an “attack”. Or when I’m writing this message to you, I don’t say “actually there is no message, there are just numbers in a database somewhere”. There are numbers in a database, but they also have a causal effect on the world that corresponds to sending a message.
And if someone is “sending loving energy”, then there is a certain mechanistic story of how that is implemented, but if you define energy as “something that can be sent from one person to another and affects the receiver’s emotional state” (among other properties), then within that framework and under that definition it’s not wrong to say that you are sending loving energy to the other person. (Your body being in a different state that they can pick up does send information to the other person, that they might experience as you being “loving”.)
(Of course, it then gets problematic if you conflate it with “energy” as it is understood in physics, and many people do go astray when they make that conflation.)
Or in other words, I think “conscious mind interprets body language” is a more reliable process than “subconcscious interprets body language → subconscious converts body language into auras → conscious mind interprets auras” – once you know that it all comes from body language.
Maybe. I do agree that reading a book on body language is probably more effective for getting started than trying to read auras. My impression is that something like aura reading often emerges as a side-effect of something like meditation that makes you generally more sensitive to intuitive stuff, though I should note that I’ve never looked into aura stuff.
But generally, I tend to think that trying to read body language consciously is a bit like trying to compute things on a CPU rather than on hardware specialized for it. It can work, and if the person’s intuition is blocked for one reason or another (e.g. autism), it can be the only alternative. But reading body language is a thing that evolution has spent a lot of time optimizing intuitive circuitry for, so it’s generally faster and more reliable if you can shift more of your processing to that.
I think most of woo is patently anti-epistemic: tarot, modern witchcraft, Buddhism, New Ageism, astrology, chiropractic, homeopathy, metaphysical “energy”, spirit guides, &c. &c.
The few, rare things that do seem to work (mediation, acupuncture..) work in spectacularly different ways to the ways the woo practitioners claim they work. It’s pretty clear the pioneers of these practices had no clue why they worked but had hit upon them through trial-and-error, and just constructed arbitrary post-hoc narratives about how they imagined they might work: this isn’t just ‘failing to wear the attire of science’, it’s essentially the opposite of the scientific method.
All of those have anti-epistemic forms but disagree that they’re necessarily all innately anti-epistemic (though homeopathy and astrology might be, I haven’t looked into them in any detail); even if many of their specific hypotheses are wrong, they’re still pointing to correct observations. Ms. Blue, meet Mr. Green has some good discussion about how many of things start making more sense if you stop treating them as making reference to external reality and read them as making reference to your own mind.
I would add that many descriptions of “energies” also seem to me like they’re just a different word for felt senses.
As for Buddhism, while some of the stuff about reincarnation and divine beings and such is of course nonsensical, there are empirical claims within it about e.g. the functioning of the mind that seem to me correct, valuable, and straightforwardly expressible within a mechanistic framework. I’ve written about this at length: 1, 2, 3.
Thanks most awfully for the detailed reply! It’s an interesting debate for me and I’m grateful for your effort.
I think most of what you quote from “Ms Blue and Mr Green” is true: “energy” is a more useful concept if you think of it as managing your internal sensations; tarot is more useful if you think of it as a random-number generator to help you think of things or consider possibilities you wouldn’t have come up with by yourself.
...you might not be surprised to hear that I have several problems with it, nevertheless!
Firstly, it seems to work for literally anything:
Ghosts: You don’t need to believe that Anne Boleyn walks around Hampton Court Palace in transparent form; just understand that your instinctive fear of death interacts with your cultural understanding of the intense passions (love, betrayal, power) and emotionally charged, extreme stories (the king has his wife beheaded) represented by medieval palaces, and explore what Anne Boleyn can teach you about your own fear of death, and how she can help you relate to the brutal-seeming world that your own world and culture is built from and closely related to.
Thor: You don’t need to believe a great big muscly man with a hammer causes thunder; examine your own feelings when you think of thunder: fear and awe, yes, because you can sense forces at work far greater than the mundane forces you yourself are master of—but also exhilaration, and excitement: being in a thunderstorm excites some part of you that you can’t easily access any other way. Thor is simply a human representation of both the immense forces and the mysterious internal excitement, which is helpful to you because giving these things a name and a face (and a hammer) helps you recognise them within yourself.
Dracula You don’t need to believe in vampires; just to recognise your own fear of death, recognise your own shame about your deepest sexual urges, and come to terms with the fact that there’s a monster inside all of us and the wrong encounter with the wrong person can bring it out.
π = 3.0: You don’t need to literally believe that Pi is exactly 3; you just need to look inwards and see your desire for an orderly universe amenable to human understanding, to understand your mind’s need to organise and categorise and define everything precisely. The spiritual belief that Pi = 3 helps you neatly order your world and keep your head above the water and stops you from downing in a sea of unfathomable complexity. It empowers you to draw the line (or circle) where you see fit, at whatever level of complexity of nature speaks to you personally, instead of forcing your mind, wherein anything is possible and you are master, down the narrow, dull, undending paths demanded by the geometers.
Secondly, it seems at-best unhelpful, at-worst dishonest to take a plausible idea (“a randomly generated story can help you think about some things you wouldn’t have thought of without the unpredictable stimulus”) and wrap it up in mysticism (“These tarot cards reveal mysterious truths about the universe that are uniquely personally relevant to you and you can gain an advantage in life by listening to what they say”). If people are willing to accept the underlying idea then there’s no need for the woo it comes with, and if people aren’t willing to accept the underlying idea then smuggling it in by wrapping it up in woo seems dishonest. I think this is a big part of why woo is an effective vehicle for these ideas, and just telling people the ideas honestly and straightforwardly isn’t even remotely popular: the woo wrapping is what makes them attractive. People who’re attracted to the woo aren’t judging or debating the ideas on their own merits. Even if some idea is true, wrapping the idea in layers of metaphor and mysticism and ambiguity does not help us think clearly about it, judge it on its own merits, or reliably connect it to other relevant ideas.
Thirdly, I think even though you can discern some legitimate ideas wrapped in woo, for the most part they mostly are just mind games: yes, you can conceptualise “energy” moving around your body centered around some specific focal points - but so what? There isn’t actually any energy moving around any actual focal points—it’s just a mind game. If you’d never heard of this system and some suitable tradition/authority told you about completely different focal points you could just as easily imagine your body moving around those instead. The focal points are *arbitrary*. Similarly with the tarot: if you’d never heard of it and an authority told you the cards all had different meanings, you’d have no trouble accepting that. The claims, definitions, rules, the entire catechism of the belief is entirely arbitrary.
What’s wrong with things being arbitrary? Nothing at all—I play all sorts of bizarre mind games inside my own head all the time; I’m sure most of us do—this is perfectly fine ..if practitioners are open about it just being an interesting and rewarding mind-game. If, however, practicioners are authoritatively telling people “There absolutely are precisely 7 chakras and they are located at these exact positions within your body and they mean these specific things are happening inside you”, or “This tarot card absolutely represents Opportunity and if you draw it from the deck it means Opportunity really will feature in your really life in some way” then that would seem dishonest to me and that’s what I’d object to.
Fourthly (directly following from the above point) I fear there’s a marketing exercise where a woo practitioner tells somebody like me “It’s all just ways of conceptualising difficult-to-otherwise-think-of things in your head”—but then when they talk to a true believer it’s “Wow, your aura really is very purple today”. If the woo genuinely is about ways of conceptualising things that aren’t intended to ever be literally true, this is exactly the sort of thing that should be front-and-centre, should preface every discussion, and should be constantly referred back to, lest people’s fancies run away with them and they start believing it is literally true. It should be a point of honour for woo practitioners to raise this with everybody they talk to, so as not to accidentally mislead people into thinking the stuff they’re saying is supposed to be taken literally. But this is very much not what I see. In my experience of woo, its practitioners, and its disciples, I have never heard anybody say any of this before talking to you (though I must say I’m grateful to you for the novel, interesting, and entirely welcome experience—thanks!) Everything I’ve ever seen of the “woo world” leads me to believe that many, if not most, woo followers do consider it to be literally true, and if practitioners know it’s not, they don’t seem to do much to disabuse people of this idea.
Fifthly: “even if the hypotheses are wrong, they’re still pointing to correct observations”. This seems to me just another way of saying “anti-epistomology”. I want my beliefs to be actually true, not just to be vaguely indicative of some ambiguously-true observations.
Sixthly: “if you stop treating them as making reference to external reality and read them as making reference to your own mind”. I know I can’t truly and wholly think of my mind as part of external, material reality, even though it is, because my instinctive, hard-coded priors against this are just too strong—but I want to at least try! Just “going with it” and allowing myself to think and act as though my mind were somehow separate from external reality, that things that happen in my mind are somehow “on a different level” to reality, feels like giving up, to me. If some ideas are only believable if I imagine my mind to be outside of reality, I am very suspicious of those ideas.
Seventhly (and finally..!) where there are real phenomena with woo explanations as well as non-woo explanations, the non-woo explanations just seem more …useful? Have more predictive power? (I’m not sure of the best way to put this..) For example: If I have to choose between “Paying attention to people’s subtle body language cues, tone of voice, minutiae of their appearance, etc. can give you insights about their personality and help you understand or even predict their actions” and “People have auras of different colours that represent their personalities and internal states”, the former seems like a more useful thing to be aware of? You can start paying conscious attention to body language, start deliberately looking for the minutiae, you can even study it scientifically if you really wanted, whereas trying to interpret arbitrary mappings between what aura I imagine somebody to have and their personality seems a highly error-prone extra step to add in front of “notice body language”. (Or in other words, I think “conscious mind interprets body language” is a more reliable process than “subconcscious interprets body language → subconscious converts body language into auras → conscious mind interprets auras” – once you know that it all comes from body language. I agree that if you’re a 12th century Yogi and it’s either the aura process or nothing, then you may as well go with the aura process)
Similarly if I have to choose between “There are certain parts of the body wherefrom nerve signals don’t seem to reach the brain properly and sticking needles into these parts causes my brain to temporarily block off other sources of pain to focus on the pain signal it expects from the needle—which because of the weird nerves there never actually arrives, giving me temporary pain-relief from the other sources of pain” and “My body has chakras which I can manipulate with needles to redirect my energy flows and heal arbitrary maladies”, the former seems more useful, both for A) locating the safest , most effective needle-sites and B) for understanding whether my maladies genuinely are cured or whether pain from them is merely temporarily blocked. (But again, if I were a 12th century Yogi and it was either chakra-based pain relief or nothing, of course I’d go with the chakras)
Ooh, this is a great reply! Appreciated.
I think I’m going to start by looking at the arbitrariness point.
As an analogy, consider chess. The rules of chess are, in a sense, totally arbitrary. You can change them any way you want, and indeed there exist plenty of chess variants.
And at the same time, they’re not totally arbitrary, in that chess has evolved through 1,500 years of play, with occasional changes to the rules to make the game more fun and interesting. Various other games that existed during that time but weren’t equally interesting have been forgotten. There is something about that specific configuration of rules that has been thoroughly play-tested and optimized for a particular kind of play. While you can come up with any other kind of game, there’s still a point in playing chess in particular, because that will get you a solid game without having to spend a lot of time play-testing your alternative to make it equally fun and balanced.
Likewise for Tarot. I just picked a totally random Tarot card from Wikipedia: The Emperor. Here’s how it’s described:
This description is at the same time general and specific. Suppose that you ask yourself “what should I do about this problem” and you draw an upright Emperor. There are now lots of ways you can interpret that. Maybe you need to be disciplined to meet your goals. Maybe you need to seek out an organization that provides you with discipline. Maybe you will do strategic planning to get to your objective. Maybe you will find yourself a mentor. Maybe you yourself will act as a mentor to someone else. Maybe...
There are enough possibilities that your intuition can probably find something that fits your current life situation and gives you an interesting angle to consider. “Oh hmm, I should do some strategic planning, now that I think of it.” But the list of interpretations is also sufficiently constrained that it doesn’t just say “anything can happen”, which would be so broad as to not give you any ideas.
And as I said, I picked this card at random. All Tarot cards are like this—their meanings have been, through gradual development, optimized for that combination of generality and specificity that makes them evocative. You could develop an alternative system that did the same thing—maybe one that incorporated ghosts, Thor, Dracula, and π = 3.0 - but you’d be solving the same kind of engineering problem.
Still, there are many different Tarot decks, because people do enjoy making alternative ones. Here is a deck that seems to have Thor. Here’s one with Dracula. (I looked if there’d be a Pi Tarot, but only found an AI Tarot-reading site.)
So just as the rules of chess are arbitrary, but it still makes sense to talk about The Rules of chess, the meanings of Tarot cards are arbitrary but it still makes sense to talk about The Meanings of the cards. If you assume that a certain card really does represent opportunity and opportunity really will somehow show up in your life—which is a bit of truism, because opportunity is a general enough concept that of course it will feature in your life in some way—then that will make your mind consider things from angles it wouldn’t have considered otherwise.
Now, about whether practitioners should be open about it fundamentally being a mind game—yes, of course. Many of them are! alexei, who wrote the Ms. Blue and Mr. Green article, said it directly. And I’m also saying that “Tarot is basically a random concept table for evocative ways of seeing your life” because that’s how it was explained to me, by various people in my life who were into Tarot.
Here we get to the thing that there tend to be several kinds of people involved in woo. There are people who go “it’s all psychology”, people who go “it’s genuinely supernatural”, and people who go “idk either way, I just know that it seems to work”. The people who think it’s all psychology or who are agnostic will tell you that directly, but the people who think that it’s supernatural tend to be more excited and loud about it. The psychological-minded might also hang out with other psychological-minded folks who might look down on Tarot, so they stay quiet about their interest.
Also, if you are trying to make money out of it, you’re incentivized to sell it as a thing that definitely predicts the future and isn’t just a mildly interesting technique for coming up with novel ways to view your life. Which means that a lot of the public messaging about it that you’ll encounter is selected for overselling its significance.
But I’ve seen various woo-type communities—modern Neo-Pagan witchcraft ones especially—where the “it’s psychological” and “it’s supernatural” people genuinely co-exist and have agreed to disagree, in part because for many people, it’s not all that important which one it is. The same practices will still bring the same results regardless of whether they’re of psychological or supernatural origin. So the two camps can still talk shop about what seems to work and participate in the same rituals, while agreeing to keep their phrasings sufficiently general that neither side needs to get too icked by the other’s metaphysics. Or failing that, just stick with the crowd that shares their commitments and avoid the camp that seems deluded to them.
That said, tarot is probably on the extreme end of the arbitrariness scale for woo. Something like chakras and energy seem to me less arbitrary.
Here a better comparison than games might be martial arts. There are many systems of martial arts, but all of them are constrained by what the body is physically capable of. And if you didn’t know any formal systems of martial arts, but just spent a lot of time fighting people (for real or for sport), you’d probably stumble on some of the same moves on your own.
You might have seen this image:
It’s from a study where people from three different countries were asked to indicate where in their body they experienced different feelings. The sensations for different feelings tend to cluster in different places.
Does it then seem totally implausible that sensations related to different psychological properties might cluster around particular locations in the body, as suggested by various chakra systems?
It is actually my experience that many scientifically-minded people working with something like a somatic therapy will at some point, much to their chagrin and annoyance, go “fuck, the chakra people are right” as a result of doing something different that then starts producing similar results as a chakra model.
Tucker Peck, a meditation teacher whose retreats I’ve been on and who I consider reasonably sensible, writes in his book:
My first experience of “energy sensations” was after I had done a lot of meditation, when I started getting weird energetic feelings in my forehead and right eye that were very distracting, and which made it hard to meditate. Again, I didn’t intentionally try to create them; they just appeared. This happened before I had heard of anyone experiencing anything like that, and I didn’t yet know Tucker at the time. Still, he explicitly mentions something similar in his book:
I wouldn’t describe my energy sensation as pain or an octopus, but I did find them unpleasant and nauseating. I also found that the sensations got worse if I did concentration practice focused on a small area, and that trying to look at them just made them worse. In line with what Tucker writes, I found that “do-nothing” style meditation, where you don’t try to control your mind but just let it do whatever, produced the least of these sensations. Also in line with what he wrote, the sensations would also persist outside meditation, and e.g. sometimes cause me insomnia.
Here’s another example. If you are nervous and tense, it’s difficult to feel any other emotions. And the tension often has a strong physical element that interacts both ways with the mental aspect of it. When there’s a stressful event in your life, that can cause the body to concretely tense (mind → body). At the same time, things like going on a run or weightlifting that exhaust your muscles and force them to eventually relax can also temporarily take the nervousness off (body → mind).
Now, a friend of mine found a breathing exercise that helped him release a persistent tension he’d had in his solar plexus, which then made various emotions easier to feel. And it was only afterward that he made the connection that this could reasonably be described as “unblocking your heart chakra”.
It does not seem crazy to think that if the muscles around your solar plexus are chronically tense, then this would make it harder to breathe naturally, which would act as a kind of chronic low-grade stress, which could then make positive emotions easier to feel if this was released.
Or take the throat chakra. Many people who have difficulty with confidence find that when they try to speak up, it feels physically hard. Like words literally “get stuck in their throat”, or they lose their voice, or feel like they have to struggle to get the words out. Mechanistically, you could see this being a result of two different subsystems sending conflicting bids to the muscle system. An anxiety-related one sends a command for the throat muscles to tense up in order to block self-expression (due to a prediction that talking up would be dangerous), and that competes against a system that tries to force the words out. This would be a very logical thing for evolve: since throat muscles are a critical bottleneck for speech production, tensing them would be the obvious way for a competitive subsystem to attempt to veto it.
I once had a therapeutic/meditative experience where I found my attention spontaneously going into my throat and I became aware of an unpleasant choking sensation in it, like there was some imaginary object lodged inside my throat that was making me suffocate. I hadn’t done anything to intentionally look in this area; rather heightened sensitivity to what was happening in my body made me more aware that there was something unpleasant there. Repeated cycles of my attention going there, feeling terrible, and it slightly relaxing eventually led to the feeling mostly going away. Afterward, I found myself being more relaxed and having an easier time expressing myself in social situations, a difference which a couple of other people also noticed.
I don’t claim to have a rigorous understanding of what exactly happened there. My guess is something like, extended anxiety can cause muscles to become chronically tense in a way that disappears from awareness, and bringing that tension into awareness can cause the nervous system to adjust something in a way that relaxes the tension, which then feeds back to the mind as a smoother mental state. (Mike Johnson has an elaborate theory of “vasocomputation” and of how the vascular system might vary the degree of tension in various muscles as a form of memory storage that through the mind-body link freezes various neural patterns in place. I don’t understand it very well but something like that would make sense based on my experiences.)
In any case, while I did not do any explicit energy work practice or investigation of the throat chakra—the sensations just came up on their own when in the right state of consciousness—I bet that if I had done some kind of energy work practice aimed at investigating the throat chakra, that could have surfaced it as well, with similar results.
This gets us to the thing where you said
Thing is, “your aura really is very purple today” probably is the practitioner’s literal experience. When I had the sensation of energy in my forehead, or the sense of having a blockage in my throat, my experience wasn’t “right now my body is doing vasocomputation and activating some stored neural pattern which causes my forehead/throat to tense in a way which I could describe as energy”. That’s an interpretation I thought of later. My actual experience was “fuck, there’s a bright energy in my forehead that makes it impossible to focus on my breath” or “THERE’S A THING RIGHT IN THE CENTER OF MY THROAT AND I CAN’T BREATHE [RAW TERROR] [RAW TERROR] [RAW TERROR]”.
My guess is that energy stuff is probably bundling together a number of things that nonetheless appear subjectively unified. What happens when someone sees another person’s aura is that their subconscious parses a lot of things about the other person’s body language, which then gets overlaid on their perception as a signifier of the other person’s emotional state, like a video game might draw icons or numbers on top of various units in order to make that information available at a glance. And if this is the thing that they literally see, then… well, it makes sense to just say that.
I also tried an energy work exercise once, where you first move your attention back and forth your arms—with the metaphor that you are moving a ball of energy back and forth—and then you hold your palms apart and imagine moving the ball of energy across the gap, from one palm to another. If I practice this, I can in fact get the feeling that there is something that moves through the space, from one palm to another. And my guess of what happens is something like, the brain notices what it is like when you move your attention across parts of your body and then extrapolates what it might feel like if you continued that motion and could feel some of the intervening distance, and then you feel that extrapolated projection.
But I’m also guessing that if somebody uses that kind of a technique to, say, “channel loving energy” toward someone else, then that might genuinely be making them more empathetic toward the other person in a way that shifts the state of their nervous system. And since people subconsciously register the other’s emotional state—there are people who I tend to automatically feel relaxed around, with it feeling like my body responds to something in the way they hold their body—this may genuinely make the other person feel more relaxed in turn.
And then, saying that “I channeled loving energy toward the other person” might just be the most accurate description of what the woo practitioner experienced themselves as doing. It’s quite possible that a more accurate description would be something like “I did a set of mental exercises that relaxed my body in such a way that the other person subconsciously picked it up”… but that’s not a description that you could use to produce the same effect. Probably imagining that you are literally sending loving energy toward someone will make you feel that you are sending loving energy toward them, which then has those effects in your body.
In that way, it’s similar to abstractions in any other discipline. If we’re playing a boardgame and I say that I’m “sending my units to attack”, I don’t state that actually there are no real-world units and we’re just moving pieces of cardboard around a table. The units are cardboard, but within the formal system defined by the game’s rules, they do have a particular function defined as an “attack”. Or when I’m writing this message to you, I don’t say “actually there is no message, there are just numbers in a database somewhere”. There are numbers in a database, but they also have a causal effect on the world that corresponds to sending a message.
And if someone is “sending loving energy”, then there is a certain mechanistic story of how that is implemented, but if you define energy as “something that can be sent from one person to another and affects the receiver’s emotional state” (among other properties), then within that framework and under that definition it’s not wrong to say that you are sending loving energy to the other person. (Your body being in a different state that they can pick up does send information to the other person, that they might experience as you being “loving”.)
(Of course, it then gets problematic if you conflate it with “energy” as it is understood in physics, and many people do go astray when they make that conflation.)
Maybe. I do agree that reading a book on body language is probably more effective for getting started than trying to read auras. My impression is that something like aura reading often emerges as a side-effect of something like meditation that makes you generally more sensitive to intuitive stuff, though I should note that I’ve never looked into aura stuff.
But generally, I tend to think that trying to read body language consciously is a bit like trying to compute things on a CPU rather than on hardware specialized for it. It can work, and if the person’s intuition is blocked for one reason or another (e.g. autism), it can be the only alternative. But reading body language is a thing that evolution has spent a lot of time optimizing intuitive circuitry for, so it’s generally faster and more reliable if you can shift more of your processing to that.
(Now posted the sibling comment in significantly expanded form as Taking woo seriously but not literally.)