More reinforcement for the idea that religious belief is a sort of overspill from key brain adaptations — adaptations that were selected for improved social functioning.
We got better at being social animals by evolving brain processes for guessing our way into other people’s minds. Those processes unfortunately overlapped with older structures for handling the physical world. Hence:
Tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,
Sermons in stones, and good in everything.
I’m curious to know how a religious person processes these news items from cognitive science.
Obviously the fact that the varieties of religious experience can be explained from brain phylogeny does not exclude the possibility that religious experiences are apprehending something that exists as other than brain events, something real in the world outside the skull. Binocular vision has an explanatory pathway from brain phylogeny, but the things we see are real (mostly).
Yet if the possibility isn’t excluded, isn’t it at least weakened? Do religious people feel this? Well, I’m sure they don’t! — but what do they feel? Perhaps one of them could tell us.
The reaction I always get from scientifically literate religious people of a philosophical bent is that, whether or not God took an active hand in evolution to bring about people, he was at least aware from the beginning that the universe he was creating would give rise to people. The possibility of a long-term divine plan lets them say that there’s a causal link between our perception of the supernatural and the existence of the supernatural despite evidence that perception of the supernatural emerged from other capacities. To shake that kind of belief, you’d have to find evidence that supernatural perception developed by chance by chance, if that makes sense.
But even most educated people probably haven’t really internalized the idea that their own perceptions could be illusory or that they could be succumbing to a cognitive bias. For most, it doesn’t matter what explains a perception – the fact of perception implies the existence of perception’s object, and the fact of a “feeling” that something is so is sufficient reason to believe that something is so. And this is held true unless there’s quite a lot of evidence that one’s thinking is unreliable in this particular instance. This isn’t limited to the supernatural – how many people have beliefs about economics, psychology, or medicine, say, just because those beliefs “sound right”? Almost nobody questions whether or not their perception of soundness is reliable.
To clear up my first paragraph: the reason this kind of evidence isn’t very persuasive to religious people is that they tend to fall into two categories. There are those that have no respect for modern science unless it’s blindingly obvious that a particular finding materially improves their lives (so aerospace engineers get respect, but biologists who study evolution and whose work ends up resulting in better medications in a very roundabout way don’t), and they don’t care what your science says about their brains. And there are those who already think that man evolved, while perception of the supernatural doesn’t have an obvious survival advantage, so of course God had to make sure that the capacity to perceive the supernatural fell out of other properties seemingly by chance. Their claim would be that this finding is exactly how they’d expect God to bring about this capacity, since obviously he wouldn’t just instill it in people directly (as that would be ignorant creationism).
Semi-OT, The Onion: “I brought my baby to touch the wall, so that the power of Darwin can purify her genetic makeup of undesirable inherited traits”
Why would this be surprising? Religious experiences and thinking have to light-up some part of the brain—why not regions related to social intelligence? After that the article goes into a sort of typical evolutionary-psychology mishmash. “Grafman suspects that the origins of divine belief reside in mechanisms that evolved in order to help primates understand family members and other animals.” Color me unimpressed by what Grafman “supects”.
As I said—why would we (the religious) be surprised? Even as we believe in mind-brain dualism, it is more of a logical dualism. That is, any religious person would acknowledge that it you damage a person’s brain, you will necessarily damage their “mind”.
Meh. In physics we repeat (well some of us do, half-jokingly—or maybe 1/3 jokingly) the old adage that “any discipline with the word science in its name, isn’t.”
To a religious person nothing happens “by chance”, this is the very essence of religiosity, a paranoid streak!
We have only our 5 senses to learn about our material world. I believe there is something beyond all that. Science can provide us with fascinating information about the world around us. But there is still a great mystery that I don’t think humans will ever be capable of proving or disproving or even fully understanding. I would actually be a little sad if all puzzles could be solved.
This is NOT a coincidence, religiosity is “emotional masturbation”, adressing social affects to fictitious entities instead of actual people, “love” of/from God, yeah, sure!
As a believer, I like the way this post turns the focus of belief away from “feeling” – what a previous comment calls “emotional masturbation” – and toward the imagination, toward the kind of “knowledge” that occurs, for example, in poetry. Are “tongues in trees” fictitious entities in the same way that God is a fictitious entity? Are cathedrals never “sermons in stone?” Does the broadside against religious belief also intend to splinter poetry? Is there a more-than-evolutionary value in metaphor? When Heather Mac Donald repeats that we don’t need to believe in God to be “crushed” by the beauty of art, does she understand being-crushed as a kind of knowledge that ought to last, that is part of some human essence?
heddle: Given that some of the most intense religious experiences are attained in complete and prolonged solitude — see for example the one in Arthur Koestler’s autobiography — it doesn’t seem to me at all obvious that religious experience is essentially social.
And you may sniff at cog-sci all you want, but we know stuff about thinking that we did not know 50 years ago — enough to make Steven Pinker a bundle from popularizing it. It may not be materials science (say what?) but it ain’t astrology either. Much less theology.
As a religious believer, I always look at such stories with tremendous interest and a good deal of curiosity. That there is a material explanation for human behavior isn’t something threatening in the least — we are material beings, after all. Christian theologians at least as far back as Thomas Aquinas believed that there were material conditions necessary to human reasoning and thought and understanding — one even finds this idea in the Bible (in the KJV the “reins” — or kidneys in modern English — were thought to be the seat of human thought and emotion). Just because there is a material explanation for a function doesn’t necessarily exclude that function serving a genuine spiritual purpose. In fact, it is precisely what someone who holds a traditional Christian or Jewish view of the human person would expect.
I have a friend who is not religious but nevertheless loves the idea of “mystery” in the universe. Occasionally I’ll mention some interesting factoid about cognitive psychology and she’ll say something like “why do you want to analyze it? Can’t you just embrace the wonder of it?” Probably a similar process at work.
I’m the exact opposite, naturally, because I’m an INTJ.
Taleb says, “Religion might have started as a Fooled by Randomness problem (of seeing false patterns to chart uncertainty). [a.k.a. “the narrative fallacy – our tendency to create explanations to give ourselves the illusion of understanding the world.”] But soon, later it developed into 1) theosis [“personal communion with God ‘face to face'”](Orthodoxy, Buddism, and mystical Sufi Islam), 2) golden rules (’don’t do to others…’).”
http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/conversation-on-literature.pdf
“What makes us human,” Wolpert explains, “is causal beliefs. What makes us different from other animals is that we have a concept of cause and effect in the physical world.”
http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2007/05/origin_of_relig.html
I don’t find the two view above to contradict each other, but I’m not sure how a Christian would view either. It also seems to me that one thing this site fails to present is religious views other than Christian.
“Obviously the fact that the varieties of religious experience can be explained from brain phylogeny does not exclude the possibility that religious experiences are apprehending something that exists as other than brain events, something real in the world outside the skull.”
Why would theism be a problem here? To the contrary, you’re going to need something more than theism to get to the position you’ve already assumed, i.e., that there is “something real in the world outside the skull.” The religious have lots of ways to account for the existence of an objective external world–some being better than others, of course. Atheists don’t have any, aside from epistemological fiat.
Well, Bradlaugh, can you look inside your own brain and see what it is doing? Our private experience simply cannot be rendered wholly congruent with what other people [scientists or not] see about us from the outside, or what we see about them from the outside.
The great golfer Jack Nicklaus is color blind. When he was playing professionally and endorsing products, he had to have someone else choose his clothes for him every day of the tournament so the colors wouldn’t clash. The story goes that he discovered this in college when he remarked to a partner he was playing with, “They should make the flag on the pin a different color from the grass. Then you could see it better.”
I sure he sees it just the same way today. And he can have no real clue what either “red” or “green” actually looks like to the rest of us. And while we can imagine “red” looking merely like a different shade of “green” or “green” looking like a shade of “red”, we have no clue whether either of these imaginary alternatives are really what Nicklaus experiences.
Knowing the physiological explanation doesn’t give him any better access to this and it doesn’t give us any better access to it, either. But matters are even worse than this. The mere fact that you and I agree that red is different from green and, in addition, have no obvious differences in physiology in regard to the matter doesn’t mean in the least that I “know” how you experience either color or you “know” how I experience it.
Is the “red” really in the flag? If I tell Nicklaus that red is “really” different from green, and the difference is “really” in the flag, and if he can’t see that difference, how can he know it is so? For that matter, how can I know it? Even if we both understand the physiology involved, which of us has the priviledged position of knowing how the flag “really” looks? Or whether the red is “really” there?
If we can’t establish the objectivity of our experience of a red flag on the golf course even when we know the physiology involved, how can we deny the objectivity of someone’s vision of the Virgin Mary even when we know the physiology involved?
Now, having said that, I’ll mention that I happen to be a Buddhist, and, as a Buddhist, this sort of analysis is my starting point in religion, and this is radically different from that of a Christian or a Muslim.
Consider your two names. When you say Bradlaugh are you referring to the same thing as when you say John Derbyshire? If you are, what is that thing really? Is it “really” Bradlaugh, “really” John Derbyshire, really “me”, really “my mind”, or really “my self”? Which of these labels is more real than all the others? Can we actually establish that there is anything even there for the labels to refer to?
If someone sees me and understands my physiology, what part of what he sees and understands from the outside is “really” Bradlaugh, John Derbyshire, me, my mind, or my self?
So let’s assume that “me” is real, a seeing subject that perceives objects in the world. Then look at your hand. Is your hand part of the seeing subject or is it merely a perceived object? It appears to be the latter when we look at it. But when you pick up your coffee cup is your hand still merely a “perceived object” or is it now part of the perceiving subject.
Just where is the boundary between “me” and what “me” perceives? If we can’t answer this question, how can “me” actually be anywhere? But if there is no “me” anywhere, who is doing the perceiving? Who are we really calling Bradlaugh?
Now if we can’t find any definite reality to the perceiver, how can we assert any reality exists in what it perceives? And if we can’t establish that the hand I see or the coffee cup I pick up is real, how can we establish that our elaborate physiological explanations for it are real?
And if we can’t establish these, how can we deny the reality of someone’s experience of the Real Presence of God in the Holy Eucharist, merely because we have a physiological explanation for it?
In other words, any critique we may make of the “reality” of religious experience is the same critique we can make of the “reality” of scientific knowledge. There is no way to establish a starting point in one for the critique of the other.
Medical materialism seems indeed a good appellation for the too simple-minded system of thought which we are considering. Medical materialism finishes up Saint Paul by calling his vision on the road to Damascus a discharging lesion of the occipital cortex, he being an epileptic. It snuffs out Saint Teresa as an hysteric, Saint Francis of Assisi as an hereditary degenerate. George Fox’s discontent with the shams of his age, and his pining for spiritual veracity, it treats as a symptom of a disordered colon. Carlyle’s organ-tones of misery it accounts for by a gastro-duodenal catarrh. All such mental over-tensions, it says, are, when you come to the bottom of the matter, mere affairs of diathesis (auto-intoxications most probably), due to the perverted action of various glands which physiology will yet discover.
And medical materialism then thinks that the spiritual authority of all such personages is successfully undermined. * –
* For a first-rate example of medical-materialist reasoning, see an article on ‘les Varietes du Type devot,’ by Dr. Binet-Sangle, in the Revue de l’Hypnotisme, xiv. 161.
Let us ourselves look at the matter in the largest possible way. Modern psychology, finding definite psycho-physical connections to hold good, assumes as a convenient hypothesis that the dependence of mental states upon bodily conditions must be thorough-going and complete. If we adopt the assumption, then of course what medical materialism insists on must be true in a general way, if not in every detail: Saint Paul certainly had once an epileptoid, if not an epileptic seizure; George Fox was an hereditary degenerate; Carlyle was undoubtedly auto-intoxicated by some organ or other, no matter which,- and the rest. But now, I ask you, how can such an existential account of facts of mental history decide in one way or another upon their spiritual significance? According to the general postulate of psychology just referred to, there is not a single one of our states of mind, high or low, healthy or morbid, that has not some organic process as its condition. Scientific theories are organically conditioned just as much as religious emotions are; and if we only knew the facts intimately enough, we should doubtless see ‘the liver’ determining the dicta of the sturdy atheist as decisively as it does those of the Methodist under conviction anxious about his soul. When it alters in one way the blood that percolates it, we get the methodist, when in another way, we get the atheist form of mind. So of all our rapturer, and our drynesses, our longings and pantings, our questions and beliefs. They are equally organically founded, be they of religious or of non-religious content.
To plead the organic causation of a religious state of mind, then, in refutation of its claim to possess superior spiritual value, is quite illogical and arbitrary, unless one have already worked out in advance some psycho-physical theory connecting spiritual values in general with determinate sorts of physiological change. Otherwise none of our thoughts and feelings, not even our scientific doctrines, not even our dis-beliefs, could retain any value as revelations of the truth, for every one of them without exception flows from the state of their possessor’s body at the time.
From the varieties of religious experience by William James.
A while back hererI saw some sort of link to something by that Harris guy who wrote something about how neurology, as he saw it, made the religious thought of any man quite unlikeley to have anything to do with reality, not realizing that one could very easily could have, per his reasoning, scratched out ‘religion’ or ‘theology’ and stuck in ‘mathematics’ or … ‘neurology’! just as easily. The bottom problem of materialism, as James points out, is that if materialism is true, it would be insane to care what a materialist thinks… about basically anything.
Don’t forget Luther’s blocked colon as being responsible for his belief in justification by faith alone.
Joseph: “And if we can’t establish these, how can we deny the reality of someone’s experience of the Real Presence of God in the Holy Eucharist, merely because we have a physiological explanation for it?”
The short answer is: because it’s useless. I really don’t care all that much about the metaphysical validity of my experience of redness, but it’s obvious to everyone (Jack included) that Jack Nicklaus is failing to perceive a reliable way of distinguishing between the flag and the grass. If anyone thinks that we can’t guarantee the meaningfulness of color differences, I’d be glad to provide him with two pieces of paper, one (that I call) red and one (that I call) green. He can draw an X on one side of one of them while I watch, and then he can take them behind his back and shuffle them around before laying them face-down in front of me. I’d happily bet him that I could pick out the piece of paper with the X on it (I’d take some pretty unfavorable odds too). I’m not sure that the statement that “the color is really in the paper” makes sense (much less that it’s either true or false), but I can make accurate predictions (from everyone’s perspective) about the future while Nicklaus, in this case, can’t. On the other hand, people of faith have yet to demonstrate that religious experiences allow them to make predictions about the future that are unavailable to the non-religious. If they’ve got two pieces of (what I call) red paper, they’re insisting that one is a different color than the other, but they only pick the piece with the X on it half of the time.
I’d go further and suggest that this sort of inter-subjective predictive usefulness is precisely the test that people apply in most instances in order to determine objectivity. I’m not sure what you mean by the words “objectivity” and “reality”, and I doubt that you know what you mean either. We have a long tradition of using phrases like “but what is it really” with a special inflection that gives them added weight such that we think that we’re getting at something, but this is faux-deepness. We simply don’t have access to the sorts of concepts that we claim that these words refer to. Or, at least, there are large numbers of people who don’t have access to these concepts, and the significance of these concepts hasn’t yet been demonstrated in such a way that people like me can see that there’s clearly something there even if I don’t have access to it.
Of course, as a practical matter, no one doubts the “reality” of scientific knowledge. It’s all well and good to construct a hypothetical agent that denies the validity of our material experiential reality, but it’s curious how very difficult it is to find someone willing to jump into the bear pit at the zoo. Further, this is difficult just because everyone firmly believes that bad material consequences will follow from it (it’s not that there are skeptics who refrain for other reasons). The existence of material reality simply isn’t controversial – since no one actually doubts it, what’s the point of arguing for it? On the other hand, lots of people are quite willing to act in ways that some other people believe will doom them to eternal torment (and some of them are willing to act in these ways just because other people think that these actions bring punishment). These are the ideas that are actually controversial and these are the ones that actually need defending. I’m perfectly happy to concede that I can’t justify my uses of induction, but I have yet to meet anyone who can in good faith demand that I do so.
j mct,
I found the basic idea there very interesting, but I think we do have something like a “psycho-physical theory connecting spiritual values in general with determinate sorts of physiological change”. I think you’re setting the bar too high here – we don’t need to be able to exactly model the chemical processes involved. The theory is evolution – the idea is that the human brain is an evolved device for dealing with the material world (certainly the general hypothesis that parts of organisms are evolved devices for dealing with the material world has been extraordinarily successful). It’s not clear that there is (or how there could be) a reproductive advantage to having correct beliefs about the supernatural, and we can tell plausible stories that have supernatural beliefs falling out of other adaptations. It’s not controversial to say that if we have reason to think that there’s no causal link between a belief and the truth of that belief, then there’s reason to think that the belief isn’t justified.
This clearly isn’t also an attack on materialism, since the theory allows for (it requires, even) a causal link between the material world and beliefs about the material world. The theory predicts that our beliefs will tend to be useful for guiding our actions in the physical world. But, as I noted above, predictive usefulness is pretty much what we all mean in practice when we use the word “truth”.
I don’t think that works either. One can pencil in ‘the theory of evolution’ where above I penciled in math or neurology and you pencil in religious beliefs, why should the theory of evolution get an exception?
When Dawkins came up with all that ‘meme’ stuff, the men were ‘meme machines’ obviously religious beliefs, as far as any reason to think they might be true, go poof. But if men are meme machines, then all their notions, as far as truthiness is concerned, go poof, including the theory of evolution. I remember somewhere reading where someone somewhere in some interview points this out to Dawkins, and let’s say his response is not an example of clear and lucid thinking to say the least. But, why stop there? Memes and memology are memes, aren’t they? The whole thing sort of disappears and thinking itself goes poof.
Materialism leads to some sort of liar’s paradox situation where, unless the guy pushing materialism exempts himself, which he usually does, materialism is a theory about other people you see, where the last word on the materialist’s part would be “Don’t agree with anything I say”.
John, without taking anything away from the Wired article, I’m beginning to be more suspicious of how much can be explained by ‘adaptation.’ You might want to check out Larry Moran’s site. Even if you don’t agree with him, he is refreshingly critical about how much can be explained just by natural selection.
It looks like you didn’t read or didn’t understand Gotchaye’s argument:
If anyone thinks that we can’t guarantee the meaningfulness of color differences, I’d be glad to provide him with two pieces of paper, one (that I call) red and one (that I call) green. He can draw an X on one side of one of them while I watch, and then he can take them behind his back and shuffle them around before laying them face-down in front of me. I’d happily bet him that I could pick out the piece of paper with the X on it (I’d take some pretty unfavorable odds too). I’m not sure that the statement that “the color is really in the paper” makes sense (much less that it’s either true or false), but I can make accurate predictions (from everyone’s perspective) about the future while Nicklaus, in this case, can’t. On the other hand, people of faith have yet to demonstrate that religious experiences allow them to make predictions about the future that are unavailable to the non-religious. If they’ve got two pieces of (what I call) red paper, they’re insisting that one is a different color than the other, but they only pick the piece with the X on it half of the time.
M
It looks like you didn’t read or didn’t understand Gotchaye’s argument:
If anyone thinks that we can’t guarantee the meaningfulness of color differences, I’d be glad to provide him with two pieces of paper, one (that I call) red and one (that I call) green. He can draw an X on one side of one of them while I watch, and then he can take them behind his back and shuffle them around before laying them face-down in front of me. I’d happily bet him that I could pick out the piece of paper with the X on it (I’d take some pretty unfavorable odds too). I’m not sure that the statement that “the color is really in the paper” makes sense (much less that it’s either true or false), but I can make accurate predictions (from everyone’s perspective) about the future while Nicklaus, in this case, can’t. On the other hand, people of faith have yet to demonstrate that religious experiences allow them to make predictions about the future that are unavailable to the non-religious. If they’ve got two pieces of (what I call) red paper, they’re insisting that one is a different color than the other, but they only pick the piece with the X on it half of the time.
M
Oops, truncated comment, one missing line:
Materialism is THIS, nothing more, no liar’s paradox involved.
I’m not sure what you mean by the words “objectivity” and “reality”, and I doubt that you know what you mean either.
I note that you are very ready to impute a lack of knowledge to someone whom you have never met and merely disagree with. You “doubt” it even though you haven’t bothered to ask me what I mean.
What I do mean is this: “reality” and “objectivity” are mere mental concepts that we impute to experience just like you have imputed a lack of knowledge on my part about “what you mean by reality.”
If we look at the start of an auto assembly line we have a complete set of car parts from the warehouse, if we look at the same set of parts at the end of the assembly line we have a “car”. As what point did it become a car and cease to be a pile of parts?
We can impute a supposedly real “carness” arbitrarily and at will at any point of the process: The warehouse of parts is full of “cars” as well as full of “parts”. Is this the case or not? If so why can’t we exercise our “inter-subjective predictive usefulness” and drive them? If the warehouse is short of eight pistons, does it mean that it’s also short of two cars? If there are only eight pistons left, does that mean that the warehouse is short of the 20 cars it can hold when it’s completely full?
Two/thirds of the way down the assembly line I say that we have a “car without an engine and wheels”, and you say we merely have a 2/3 assembled pile of parts. Am I correct or not? What kind of test can we use to establish an “inter-subjective predictive usefulness” that would bring us to agree whether a “car” is really there?
When the assembly is complete and the car is sitting outside the assembly building we can breathe a sigh of relief. It’s all assembled and we know we really have a “car” because now we can exercise our “inter-subjective predictive usefulness” and drive it away.
But, wait a minute, the car has no gasoline in it. So how can we drive it away? And is it still a “car” at this point even though we still can’t drive it? If it is, we still don’t have our “inter-subjective predictive usefulness” quite yet. And if we don’t have it, we can justify calling the parts in the warehouse a “car”, and, as long as we know where all the parts are, we can justify calling it a “car” even if the parts are scattered across the city.
So now we have a “car” that nobody can possibly see. Not even us.
To recapitulate, “car” is a mere mental concept, a mere label that we give to a piece of our experience. And there is no such as thing “carness” that makes a car a car. In the same way “being real” or “being objective” is also something we arbitrarily impute to experience, and the imputation is just as arbitrary when we are wrestling with the bear as when we are standing at the top of the bearpit.
The mere fact that we [separately or together] impute this label to experience does not mean that we can see this same label stuck to everything, everywhere we go.
I’d go further and suggest that this sort of inter-subjective predictive usefulness is precisely the test that people apply in most instances in order to determine objectivity.
The test doesn’t test anything except our own pre-existing beliefs because the reasoning behind the test is circular. If both you and I experience it, it must be real. Why? Because if it’s real you and I can both experience it, even if Jones can’t. If you strip away the high sounding latinate words “inter-subjective predictive usefulness” the form of your argument appears to me to be this: If you think something is the case and I think something is the case and we agree that something is the case then any individual person who doesn’t think it must obviously be wrong.
This is essentially the same argument even if 6 billion people think it is the case and one person doesn’t. How many people does it take to establish that there is such a thing as “inter-subjective predictive usefulness”. Merely 2? 5? 10? 1000?
Now, Bradlaugh here made a request to know what religious people feel [or think] about the notion that changes in physiology can explain religious experience. Well, I’m religious. I’m a Buddhist, and I have presented exactly the Buddhist analysis of “reality” in the way that I have been taught it. This particular type of analysis is called Prasangika Madymika or, tranlated liberally, the balanced approach of systematic doubt. It is at least 1800 years old and has developed independently of any philosophical or religious argument from Europe.
So what I feel or think about the notion that changes in physiology can explain religious experience is that there is no objective standpoint from which to even ask the question, let alone answer it. Therefore the question is circular. The moment you ask it, you covertly, and without warrant, are asserting its truth.
And the analysis I have given is the reason I think and feel it.
Now I don’t expect you to know about Prasangika Madymika, but I don’t expect you not to know about it either. You might just not wish to trouble my little punkin’ haid with it. The monks I learned it from, who really do know it, spend years memorizing texts, studying commentaries, and honing their skill at using the method in open and very contentious debates. So I can’t honestly say that I really know it either.
j mct: I’m going to need you to explain that a bit more, because I’m not following. Why does an idea being a meme mean that the idea is unlikely to be true? It’s my understanding that there’s an implicit premise in the argument that religious beliefs as memes are unjustified, which is that memes have material causes, whereas this isn’t a problem for beliefs about the material world because those ought to have material causes. I should note that I’ve been reading you as making something like Alvin Plantinga’s argument against the reliability of beliefs formed by an evolved brain, but I think the move from capital T Truth to truth as predictive usefulness defangs it – he says that, while an evolved brain would have beliefs useful for action, there’s no guarantee that what it’s believing is true. But if truth just is a measure of predictive usefulness, the problem goes away.
Joseph – I’m sorry if that sounded arrogant. I was borrowing from a non-cognitivist account of religion, and wasn’t implying that you in particular were talking nonsense but that all people have a tendency to fool themselves into thinking that they have access to certain concepts when they really don’t. And I note that I did back-peddle on that at the bottom of the second paragraph and allow that all I can really say is that I see no reason to believe that you have access to something that I don’t (in contrast with Nicklaus, who has a lot of reason to believe that you have access to something he doesn’t).
I agree with a great deal of your post. But it’s still not clear to me what “reality” and “objectivity” mean to you. I can operationalize “redness” in such a way that we can all (including Jack Nicklaus) agree that something is red. Yes, there’s an arbitrary element to this, just as with “car-ness”, and I don’t believe that there’s a Form of Car “out there” in some sense. We define what a car is, and it’s possible that we use subtly different definitions such that we disagree at exactly what point a pile of parts becomes a car. But if we get a chance to sit down and talk it over, we can define a “Joseph-car” using your definition of “car”, and we can both independently determine when a pile of parts becomes a “Joseph-car” – and we’ll agree on when that occurs. The mere fact that we’re vocalizing the same sounds doesn’t imply that we mean the same things, so there’s no contradiction in saying that we would each think that the “car” came into being at different points in time. Similarly, it’s not a problem for my view that you can point to a star actor as “the lead” while someone else points to one of a number of piles of metal on the stage as “the lead” (let’s pretend that you’re writing and not talking). Entirely different things are meant in each case by “the lead”, and I don’t expect the two of you to agree in your ascriptions unless you’re using a mutually settled on definition.
The question, then, is what mutually agreed upon definitions we can attach to “reality” and “objectivity”. I’ve suggested that reality should be taken as a measure of inter-subjective predictive usefulness of beliefs. But you still haven’t told me how you’re defining these words. As you say, they’re just mental concepts that we impute to experience. They have no meaning apart from that which we give them. But you’ve given me no guidance as to what meaning you’re giving them. How do you tell whether or not something is “real” or “objective”?
You’re exactly right that my definition is arbitrary, and that it can only be justified (if someone were interested in justifying it) circularly, but I don’t see what better definition we might choose that would be actually evaluable. Yes, it means that, for lack of a better way, we’ll conclude that the one guy who perceives Godzilla raging through downtown Tokyo is just hallucinating. I think my definition has the advantage of being the definition that almost everyone applies in practice (in the same way, it’d be rather silly for me to define “car” as something with feathers and which quacks – no one would understand me). What definitions are you offering? I don’t see where in your posts you’ve analyzed “reality”. I just see an analysis of language, which included the statement that “reality”, as a concept, is like all other sorts of concepts like “red” and “car” (which I agree with). I still don’t know what concept you’re picking out by use of the word “reality”, though.
Actual religious texts, a sort of codified religion, were not written by idiots. Nor were they written by scientists. Anyway the religions evolved over time to serve the purposes of the respective societies. Those who would codify/modify and promote such beliefs surely were aware of their social implications. These writers wanted to control society. What faith they had may largely have been in the power of belief to manipulate and control the masses into cooperating. Certainly a discussion of religion should include the possibility that the leaders were smarter than the followers. Those leaders likely realized that reason was not the way to promote productivity among masses of unreasonable people. Intelligence seems to lead to reason and atheism, but atheism does not lead to reason and intelligence.
I’ll take a chance and step into those regions of the Madyamika where I really could use professional help. There are four extremes of thinking that are wrong: saying that something is “real”, saying that something is not “real”, saying that something both is and is not “real”, and saying that something neither is nor is not “real”. If you apply the procedure of “systematic doubt” or Prasangika, to each of these alternatives, they lead either to circularity of reasoning or contradiction.
Here is where I get out of my depth. I cannot elaborate the arguments that show each of the four extremes to be circular or contradictory, I simply don’t have the training or, now, the youthful flexibility of memory and mind. But I have listened to them often from monastic teachers and I have found them to be convincing.
But for all this to make sense, you have to understand that Buddhists don’t just do this for the philosophical trapese artistry. From the Buddhist point of view, life is suffering. The reason we suffer is that we misperceive the world. believing that there is a permanent and real subject or “self” inside of us which perceives permanent and real objects outside of us.
But is not so, and our unquestioning belief that it is so is merely the result of deeply ingrained patterns of habit from previous lives. We keep acting like we have a self that must interact with a world of objects and this generates “conflicting emotions” of aversion, craving, and willful ignorance.
This constant unsettled emotivity causes us to act in ways that, sooner or later, make us suffer pain, either physical, mental, or both. Buddhism asserts that it is possible to first erode the habitual patterns to the point where we directly experience the “emptiness” of both self and other. This is known as “realization”. Then it is possible to completely obliterate all such habits, even the subtlest of them, so we are completely unable to be deceived that things are real and permanent ever again. This is called “complete and perfect awakening”, or Buddhahood.
So what is meant by emptiness? If we watch television, we appear to see and hear people scurrying around in the little box or behind the flatscreen on the wall. But there really are no people there. It is all “mere appearance”. When we step out the door and go shopping we also see people, as well as hear them, smell them, touch them, and taste them if we kiss them passionately.
But all these extra sensory experiences are also “mere appearance”, just like seeing and hearing the people on television. Adding extra sense data doesn’t make our experience more “real”, it simply makes it more complicated.
Now I personally cannot say that I have had more than a glimpse of the possibility of realization and experiencing emptiness directly. But the Madyamika dialectic [along with other types of meditation] has definitely eroded much my naive habitual beliefs about the “reality” of anything. That’s what its there for–to make you constantly question your unquestioning assumption that you know what the world is and what you are. Because none of us really do.
And, occasionally, my constant and habitual mental process of self–other–aversion–craving–ignorance–action–suffering simply ceases for a moment. Perhaps no longer than for the snap of a finger. And when it does, I get a flash of something rather like the moment when scratching the itch causes the itch to cease–an immense and blissful relief that I’ve stopped trying to push the river, stopped trying to jam “mere appearance” into my preconceived and unexamined opinions about it.
Only for the snap of a finger. But that’s enough to convince me that it might be possible to let that painful inner process go permanently. It’s not so much “faith” as Christians would speak of, but, rather, trust, like trusting that there is a sun beyond the clouds even on the greyest days, because sometimes you’ve seen it peek through for a moment.
I really can’t take it too much further than that.
Gotchaye:
I think we’re talking past each other and the exact place we are is that you seem to think that the theory of evolution is and can be established and or demonstrated without arguement, like a proposition from physical chemistry or Jack Nicklaus looking at colored paper. That is not so. Where you metaphorically draw a line between capital T and little t truth, the theory of evolution quite clearly lies on the capital T side of the line, not that there is anything wrong with that either, such is the nature of theories about natural history, which is what the theory of evolution is (it also makes no predictions either, it makes postdictions).
You get into problems before you get there, in that the place your head must metaphorically be in order to decide where to draw your line between capital T and little t truth as you define it, is on the capital T side.
If we are not agreeing as to ‘who is right’ which would be about whose arguement is the better one, that’s on the capital T side of your line too.
All this ‘pragmatism’, ironically so since W. James himself is probably the most famous pragmatist of his or any day, and I’m pretty sure coined the term, err… works, as long as it’s a “this is what I care about and I’m not wasting my time thinking about other stuff, like God, Truth…, other people can get into that”, though I have a hard time thinking that someone who would discuss the problem of universals with a budddhist is all that practical a fellow, where is the cash value in that?