There’s a trivial sense in which this is false: any experience or utterance, no matter how insensible, is as much the result of a real cognitive process as the more sensible ones are.
There’s another, less trivial sense that I feel is correct and often underappreciated: obfuscation of correspondence does not eliminate it. The frequency by which phenomena with shared features arise or persist is evidence of shared causal provenance, by some combination of universal principles or shared history.
After puzzling over the commonalities found in mystical and religious claims, I’ve come to see them as having some basis in subtle but detectable real patterns. The unintelligibility comes from the fact that neither mystics nor their listeners have a workable theory to explain the pattern. The mystic confabulates and the listener’s response depends on whether they’re able to match the output to patterns they perceive. No match, no sense.
I actually do have the beginnings of a workable theory of what mystical experiences are in the brain and where they come from and how best to interpret them, but I am not ready to try to explain it yet. I need to learn more neurology. Honestly “learn more neurology” seems to be a prerequisite for a lot of things I want to do.
I definitely agree about the confabulation, but at the same time, it’s worth looking at the pattern among confabulations. There are reasons why people interpret these experiences in the ways that they do, and across cultures, the interpretations, and the theologies built around them, are somewhat similar. I’m not going to overstate that—they are also wildly different—but as you say, similarities exist.
There’s a trivial sense in which this is false: any experience or utterance, no matter how insensible, is as much the result of a real cognitive process as the more sensible ones are.
There’s another, less trivial sense that I feel is correct and often underappreciated: obfuscation of correspondence does not eliminate it. The frequency by which phenomena with shared features arise or persist is evidence of shared causal provenance, by some combination of universal principles or shared history.
After puzzling over the commonalities found in mystical and religious claims, I’ve come to see them as having some basis in subtle but detectable real patterns. The unintelligibility comes from the fact that neither mystics nor their listeners have a workable theory to explain the pattern. The mystic confabulates and the listener’s response depends on whether they’re able to match the output to patterns they perceive. No match, no sense.
I actually do have the beginnings of a workable theory of what mystical experiences are in the brain and where they come from and how best to interpret them, but I am not ready to try to explain it yet. I need to learn more neurology. Honestly “learn more neurology” seems to be a prerequisite for a lot of things I want to do.
I definitely agree about the confabulation, but at the same time, it’s worth looking at the pattern among confabulations. There are reasons why people interpret these experiences in the ways that they do, and across cultures, the interpretations, and the theologies built around them, are somewhat similar. I’m not going to overstate that—they are also wildly different—but as you say, similarities exist.