What you all seem to be missing is that on a T-shirt, “Real Men Wear Pink” is a pun. In this context, Pink is not a color, it’s a brand name: http://www.thomaspink.com/
lisper
Karma: 269
Is Spirituality Irrational?
But here in the real world, actual religious people tend not just to say “I had this amazing experience” but to go further and say “I believe in God, the Father Almighty, creator of all things seen and unseen, and in one Lord Jesus Christ”
Yes, of course I don’t deny that. The point is that the reason that they say these things (and maybe even actually believe these things) is because of subjective experiences that they have personally experienced which people who do not believe have not had (and who do not believe because they have not had those subjective experiences).
In this sense, we are all Spartacus.
This piece was originally written for a different audience than the hard-core rationalists that hang out here on Less Wrong. I probably should have taken that sentence out before posting it here. Sorry about that.
colors may not be “real”, even if the experience of colors is.
Yes, that is the whole point. The experience of God may be real even if God isn’t.
Also, the reason I didn’t choose sheet music as my analogy is that the information content of sheet music is different from the actual music. To get from sheet music to music you have to add information (in the information-theoretical sense) like the waveforms of the individual instruments. That is not the case with the grooves on a record. They contain all of the same information as the audio waveform, but simply rendered in space rather than in time.
Of course, just as when most people say, “The apple is red” they don’t simply mean that they had the subjective experience of seeing a red apple. Most people mean that the apple is in fact red. But the reason they believe that the apple is red is because they had the subjective experience of seeing a red apple with their own eyes. Likewise, many people believe in the reality of God because they had a subjective experience that they believe to have been the presence of the holy spirit or something like that.
I’m sorry this feels like a bait-and-switch. Let me try to state my claim as clearly as I can: some people believe in God because they have had first-hand subjective experiences for which the best explanation that they can come up with is that they were caused by God (for some value of “God’). The nature of these experiences cannot be fully rendered into words, but it is of a similar character to that which causes even rational people to characterize the subjective experience of listening to music as somehow fundamentally different from looking at the grooves in a record despite the fact that the information entering your brain is the same in both cases.
A “spiritual experience” is an altered state of mind, but not all altered states of mind are spiritual experiences.
I’ve gotten a lot of pushback on my use of the word “spiritual”, and I am mindful that this word has a lot of irrational baggage associated with it. And I’m open to suggestions, but so far no one has been able to come up with a suitable alternative.
Do you truly think that most of spirituality is an attempt to communicate a feeling of belonging that one gets also when giving up after being bullied for a week? And that this feeling is both incommunicable and easily induced with some practice (you give meditation as an example)?
That’s a little bit of an oversimplified caricature, but yes, I do more or less believe that this is true. Moreover, I think there is evidence to support this position beyond just the intuitive argument I’ve presented here. The idea that religion evolved as a way of maintaining social cohesion is hardly original with me. I’m frankly a little bit surprised that I’m getting pushback on this; I had assumed this was common knowledge.
I will take your advice to heart in the future. This was my first post to LW, and was actually a little unsure about how appropriate it was. Now I know.
when the stories found in the Bible were first told, were they claims of truth or mostly persuasion tricks?
I have no idea. Things were so vastly different back then I can’t possibly even mount an educated guess about that. What difference does it make how it started? Today, at least in the U.S., I think it’s a defensibly hypothesis that what people call “spiritual experiences” are largely about community and shared subjective experience.
spirituality also claims to have insight into some factual matters (history, for example) and moral dilemmas.
Sure, but that’s not the subject I’m addressing. The subject I’m addressing is the belief that many people in the rational community seem to hold (Dawkins being the most prominent example) that the only possible reason anyone could even profess to believe in God is because they are an idiot.
this doesnt look at all like the spirituality found in the world around us.
Yes, that’s mostly true (though I am personally acquainted with a number of people who profess to believe in God but who are otherwise seem perfectly rational). I’m not saying that the conclusions reached by religious people are correct. I’m simply advancing the hypothesis that religious people reach the conclusions that they do is in part that they have different subjective experiences than non-relgious people.
That’s true, sorry about that. I actually wrote this piece many months ago, and it’s a topic on which I have written extensively elsewhere. I’ve made the social-cohesion argument elsewhere, and I just forgot that I hadn’t made it here. But here is the argument in a nutshell: we are social creatures, and many (if not all) of our social interactions are fundamentally based on shared subjective experiences: sharing the same meal, watching the same sunset, understanding the same proof. The religious trappings that tend to surround spirituality—the holy texts and the prayers and the rituals—can be understood as attempts to create social interactions anchored by the kinds of euphoric experiences I describe in my piece, the kind of experience that is hard to render into words beyond something like “Feeling the presence of the holy spirit” or something like that. It’s the difference between looking at the grooves (which is what rational people tend to do when the look at religion), and listening to the music (spiritual experience), and going to a concert and getting carried around in the mosh pit (going to church).
Thanks, Gunnar! Reading the other comments (and watching my karma sink below the threshold for future submissions) I was starting to feel some despair.
The difference here is that there is something in the environment that causes the experience of color to appear consistently in many, many human minds. We can measure the waves that could enter the eye and trigger the “color” experience. The same cannot be said of God.
That’s not necessarily true. It’s possible that we could find the mechanism in the brain which is responsible for spiritual experiences. But that’s kind of missing the point. Most human interactions don’t drill down this deep. Even rational people have conversation that go, “Did you see that cool fnorble?” “Yeah, wasn’t that awesome?” without citing the peer-reviewed academic literature that establishes the objective existence and material properties of fnorbles. Religious people do the same: they say, “Did you feel the presence of the holy spirit?” “Yeah, I did, wasn’t that awesome?”
The information on sheet music is compressed, but an individual trained to read it can, with practice, decompress all of it into an experience of the composition.
Sure, but such people are rare. You can probably also train yourself to have spiritual experiences.
a phonograph record cannot be read by (nearly all) humans
Fine, how about this then: display the audio waveform on an oscilloscope. The point is that having music come into your years is a fundamentally different subjective experience than having it come in to your eyes even if the information content is the same in both cases.
I don’t see that as a controversial claim, it looks obviously true to me.
It seems obviously true to me too. And yet I seem to be having the very devil of a time convincing some people that it is true.
The “information entering your brain” is very much NOT the same in both cases.
Yes, it is. This is a technical claim, and it is demonstrably true. I mean “information” in the information-theoretical sense, i.e. the log of the number of distinguishable states a system can be in. That the information is the same in both cases can be shown by showing that either system can be reconstructed from the other. The grooves can be reconstructed from the audio (this is how the grooves were created in the first place), and the audio can be reconstructed from the grooves (this is what happens when you play the record.)
If you want to challenge this claim, please mount an argument. Don’t just proclaim that it’s false.
I’m not sure why their lack of imagination should influence my beliefs.
I’m not suggesting it should influence your beliefs about the world. I’m suggesting it should influence your beliefs about them.
supernatural bullshit
This is exactly what I’m talking about. By choosing to call it “supernatural bullshit” rather than “a not altogether unreasonable (though nonetheless mistaken) attempt to account for real subjective experiences that they have had and I have not (and in the absence of education and information that I possess that they might not)” you miss a very important truth: you are dealing with a fellow human being who might be making an honest attempt to make sense of the world in the face of subjective experiences and other background that may be very different from your own. By choosing to label their beliefs “supernatural bullshit” you might be shutting down possible avenues of communication and the opportunity to make the world a better place, even if it is supernatural bullshit.
Yeah, I mean something slightly more specific, but still hard to get a linguistic handle on. I mean a kind of subjective experience that can be induced by certain practices (prayer, meditation, walking in the woods...) that manifests as feelings ranging from a kind of euphoric awe to a palpable sense of the presence of supernatural forces. It is distinct from alcohol intoxication, love, lust, the qualia of eating delicious food or listening to music and a host of other things that are part and parcel of the human experience (at least for most humans).
Answering that is kind of like trying to tell you how you can decide if you’re in love. If it was spiritual, you’ll know.
why should you spend your time and effort on them?
I’m really beginning to wonder.
Information in the information-theoretical sense does not “enter the brain”.
Of course it does. That too is easily demonstrated.
the brain does not care about some abstract theoretical information equivalence
Maybe your brain doesn’t care, but mine does.
Could you taboo...
Sorry, that didn’t parse.
But why would you write a long metaphor-riddled piece about this,
Because not everyone believes it to be true. And because metaphor can be an effective rhetorical device for some audiences.
and give it the clickbait title “Is Spirituality Irrational?”
Because it was written in response to an article entitled “Religious and Rational?”
Most importantly your final claim doesn’t seem to help in answering my ‘core conflict’ above.
I’m not sure what you’re referring to as my “final claim.” But my intent here is not to reconcile religion and rationality; that can’t be done. My intent here is just to try to provide an alternative explanation of how people arrive at religious conclusions than the “they are all idiots” hypothesis, with the hope that this might lead to more constructive dialog.
“Your beliefs causally determine with branch of the multiverse your conscious perception is aware of. If you believe in God (any God) you end up in a branch of the multiverse where that God exists. Of course, once you cement your beliefs and end up in a branch of the multiverse where there is a God or there is no God, you cannot then go back and retroactively change which branch “you” are in (except through quantum reversal, which is for all intents and purposes impossible). So if you don’t believe in God, you are in some sense “right”, but in a deeper sense you are wrong, because you had an opportunity to exist in a branch of the multiverse where God “really” exists, but you chose not to. Now that choice is irreversible, and you are condemned to live in this branch of the multiverse. Theologians call this branch Hell.”