I think the OP is referring to the fact that, while mystical experiences are usually thought by non-practitioners as being random bouts of subjective insight with no objectivity at all, hence fundamentally little more than noise, that isn’t actually the case. Mystical experiences follow structured patterns, which is why schools of mysticism develop over time with a well established progression system so that more advanced practitioners can evaluate and teach less advanced practitioners. Basically then, while all of those practitioners are having strictly subjective experiences, those experiences are similar enough they can be objectively discussed by, and worked upon, by those others who also have had close or similar enough ones, including those from outside that particular school.
This means those experiences are neither purely subjective, as is the case with someone suffering from schizophrenia or other mental illness, nor purely objective, in the sense of someone who knows nothing about electricity being able to use electric devices thus extrinsically validating the physics on which electrical engineering is based. Rather, they’re in a category of their own, which for lack of a better term some call “subjectively objective”.
The field of subjectively objective experiences is scarcely studied by modern science, which focus heavily on the other two. There are some initial efforts in that direction, with brain scans of mystics during deep meditation, that kind of thing, but those still focus much more heavily on the strictly objective side of things (what’s physically going on in the brain) than on the specifics of the experiences. This happens, I think, because there aren’t well developed and agreed upon hard scientific methodologies for dealing with problems that are impossible to study via double, much less triple, blindness. Rather, this category of problems isn’t evaluable even via single blindness. To study it researchers would have to go “zero blind”, becoming practitioners themselves and examining it from within, which so far is a huge no-no for anything evidence-based.
So, to go back to the OP, when he says mysticism can observe ethics in absolute terms, I infer they mean ethics itself is neither objective, nor subjective, but rather a subjectively objective field, hence why it can be evaluated only by means of mystical practices, which for now are still the only ones directly addressing this third category of problems.
I don’t understand how do you get from “mystical experiences follow structured patterns” to “mystical experiences have implications on ethics”. Btw I think that mental illness also follows structured patterns.
Ethics is a construct of the mind. Mysticism is a suite of techniques designed to observe the constructs of your mind in absolute terms. Therefore mysticism can be used to observe ethics on its own absolute terms. The “structured patterns” part provides the intersubjective consistency necessary for productive dialogue about these subjective experiences.
Btw I think that mental illness also follows structured patterns.
You are not wrong. Mystics can be considered mentally ill within the Western paradigm. Psychiatrist Scott Anderson writes about this in his post Gupta on Enlightenment.
Living in the condition of having no internal dialogue, no flow of thoughts, no flow of images, just Smack, into the present is quite an abrupt thing. For the first couple of weeks I thought I’d gone completely mad. Oh my god I’ve totally broken myself. I’m fucked. And I discovered that I could still go to work, and I could still socialise with people and I could cook and get through all the basic things of life. Nobody outside of me seemed to notice any particular change in my behaviour, even though I was lost in this rapturous state of total absorption with the world. Wow, this is amazing, woah! And then life continued.
I’d run right off the edge of every reality map that I had because if you go to a psychologist or a psychiatrist and say, by the way I did really a lot of meditation and my internal dialogue has totally stopped. Any ideas what I do now? Nobody ever winds up there in the West because nobody does enough meditation, at least they don’t do it right.
Actually, sometimes people do come to psychiatrists with these kinds of complaints. I usually try to explain what’s going on, and they usually tell me they were just meditating because someone said it relieved stress, and nobody warned them they could actually have mystical experiences, and this was not what they signed up for. Symptomatic treatment and a hard ban on further meditation successfully de-mysticize most of these people, and they are able to go back to their regular lives. I assume if there’s an afterlife some sort of cosmic wisdom deity is going to be very angry at me – but hey, I’m just doing my job.
Mysticism is a suite of techniques designed to observe the constructs of your mind in absolute terms.
I am skeptical. Designed by who, and how? Why do you think this design is any good? What makes it so much better than Western philosophy at understanding ethics?
It has been designed by many people all over the world (but mostly in Asia) over thousands of years through extensive trial and error. I think some of the methods are very good and have tried them out myself. I persevered with my favorite technique and it produced fascinating results for me. Mysticism has the advantage over Western philosophy in that it allows a practitioner to observe ethics unfolding in the mind directly. This brings ethics down from philosophical word games into the empirical reality of consciousness.
Trial and error assumes an objective, measurable loss function. What is the loss function here, and why is it relevant to ethics? Also, can you give some examples how this method allows solving questions debated in Western philosophy, such as population ethics, the moral status of animals, time discount or nosy preferences?
What is the loss function here, and why is it relevant to ethics?
This is a very complicated question and lots of other people have written about it already, in depth and in better places than eight comments deep into an online forum. If you are sufficiently interested in this subject, I recommend reading a book by Dharma Dan, Brad Warner, Thích Nhất Hạnh or the 14th Dalai Lama. You may prefer Dharma Dan to the others as he is the most secular of this group.
If you are curious about how ethics can exist without a loss function, you may find interesting The Chrysanthemum and the Sword by Ruth Benedict. (I listed this book in the footnotes to the original article.) This book describes a real-world ethical system where internal coherence (an abstract well-defined loss function) was not a value. I hope in the future to write a future about Daoism that expands upon this idea.
I think that mental illness also follows structured patterns.
Yes, but not shared ones. To use LW’s terminology, consider the map vs. territory distinction.
In a strictly objective scenario, all or almost all individuals agree that their respective maps agree with all others and correlate with the territory mostly the same way. At most individual maps differ in precision and resolution, but they all overlap in such a way that overlap is clear to most everyone.
In a purely subjective scenario, the opposite happens. Individual maps differ radically from each other, and hence either one map (or a set of overlapping maps) correlates with the territory, the other mutually contradictory maps not correlating to it, or in the extreme none of the maps correlates with the territory.
A subjectively objective scenario is an in between situation. You have a wide set of individuals from many different backgrounds who all share a set of clearly overlapping maps, differences between those individual maps also clearly being only in precision and resolution, as is the case in the strictly objective scenario. At the same time, however, this set of overlapping maps isn’t shared with all/ almost all individuals.
From the perspective of mystics, the set of overlapping maps they share among themselves doesn’t contradict the set of overlapping maps everyone else shares. They see theirs as the wider map of which everyone else’s is a subset, and understand themselves and their techniques as means to access and map more of the territory, areas others usually don’t draw into their own maps because they don’t look that way often, or even don’t look at it at all, and therefore these maps cover a smaller territory.
From the perspective of non-mystics though, the map mystics share among themselves correlates to nothing, as it’s talking about a section of the territory that doesn’t exist, there being nothing “there” to be mapped. Rather, at most mystic techniques activate some weird neurological pathways which, being present in all human brains, work similarly when active, and that would better explain the shared similarity among their maps than the supposition that there’s a large section of the territory most everyone doesn’t perceive unless they train to perceive it.
Occam’s Razor favors this second take, but the shared nature of the map mystics hold remains intriguing, and there’s always the possibility it may indeed refer to existing territory.
There are “shared” phobias, and common types of paranoia. There are also beliefs many people share that have little to do with reality, such as conspiracy theories or UFOs. Of course in the latter case they share those beliefs because they transmitted them to each other, but the mystics are also influenced by each other.
There are “shared” phobias, and common types of paranoia. There are also beliefs many people share that have little to do with reality (...)
These analogies relate to surface similarities. Individual mystic schools provide methodologies that provide highly repeatable sets of results in a progressive sequence, and the ability for advanced 3rd party practitioners to evaluate said progression. If you enroll in one and follow the program you’re almost guaranteed results, in the sequence that method delineates. Hence, even if these experiences don’t correlate to something extrinsically real, they point to some interesting cognitive features that are little explored. At a minimum there’s an entire area of “psychological engineering” waiting to be properly developed under those methods.
(...) the mystics are also influenced by each other.
True, but the practices at the earlier “grades” tend to be very different between different schools even if high level practitioners from different schools can easily dialogue with each other. For example, a high level mystic trained in the Isma’ilic method can at some sit down and talk with a high level mystic trained in the Advaita method, both having a quite productive discussion about their respective experiences while still rejecting each other beliefs, but when it comes to what beginners and mid-level practitioners of either school do in practice, there isn’t little similarity. Any such influence then, if it does indeed trickle down from those high level discussions, happens at some meta level once or twice removed from the concrete practices.
I am not even an amateur on mysticism, but I doubt the “shared maps” hypothesis. What I’ve known of religions certainly are contradictory maps. Another hypothesis I advance is that mystics generally speak with vague terms. I.e., they share very rough templates of their maps that can then be retrofitted to many a different map. Mystics who seek other disciplines out also have an incentive to make themselves seem united and similar. (My propaganda Islamic textbooks often labor on how all religions are essentially the same and Islam is their latest version in a linear space.) It might even be that the process of extracting those vague templates from their maps somehow produces similar templates. Their maps almost certainly share several constraints of medium making them more similar, like the constraint of human appeal and allowing hierarchical growth (so that the novice can always “aspire” to the master’s level.).
What I’ve known of religions certainly are contradictory maps.
Yes, but this is a separate issue. Indeed, mystical practices are very often religious and expressed through a conceptual framework based on theistic and supernatural ontologies, but they can be practiced without any of that, and still yield the same subjective experiences, which means these don’t depend on those. In fact, mystics of different schools, while they agree one the validity of each other experiences, still usually argue about whose interpretation of those experience is right.
For example, while a Muslim mystic, a Yogi mystic, a Buddhist mystic, and a Neoplatonic mystic may all agree they experienced their self-identities stopping under such and such circumstances and restarting afterwards, the Muslim one, who interprets their experiences as “uniting with Allah”, won’t be keen on the Yogi one’s interpretation of it as “dissolving in the Brahman Supreme”, who in turn won’t be keen on the Buddhist one interpreting it as “manifesting the Buddha Nature”, who also won’t be keen on the Neoplatonic one interpreting it as “ascending to the One”, and so on and so forth.
So, while the experience may be shared, it doesn’t actually offer any kind of concrete answer about what is really going on. This is where modern scientific approaches would, I suppose, provide something more concrete, specially if more skeptics were to practice those techniques to completion and then frame them within more down-to-earth notions.
Thank you for your comment about “structured patterns”. I think you did a great job of explaining ideas I had not delved deep into within my original post. I like your metaphor about how mystics map “more of the territory” too. I think some schools (vipassana especially) map the territory in finer detail as well.
I feel like Eliezer Yudkowsky’s argument about Bayesian complexity in his Quantum Physics and Many Worlds sequence favors the mystics’ perspective. Why do you think Occam’s Razor favors the second perspective? Are “weird neurological pathways” not part of the territory of consciousness?
Why do you think Occam’s Razor favors the second perspective?
Because assuming there’s a larger territory means, within a reductionist perspective such as the one favored by LWers, assuming a larger set of first principles, while assuming it’s an incorrect perception retains the same set of first principles. Hence, Occam’s Razor favors the second alternative. But only as long as there’s no further evidence for the first, at which point the likelihood for both hypothesis would slide accordingly.
I think the OP is referring to the fact that, while mystical experiences are usually thought by non-practitioners as being random bouts of subjective insight with no objectivity at all, hence fundamentally little more than noise, that isn’t actually the case. Mystical experiences follow structured patterns, which is why schools of mysticism develop over time with a well established progression system so that more advanced practitioners can evaluate and teach less advanced practitioners. Basically then, while all of those practitioners are having strictly subjective experiences, those experiences are similar enough they can be objectively discussed by, and worked upon, by those others who also have had close or similar enough ones, including those from outside that particular school.
This means those experiences are neither purely subjective, as is the case with someone suffering from schizophrenia or other mental illness, nor purely objective, in the sense of someone who knows nothing about electricity being able to use electric devices thus extrinsically validating the physics on which electrical engineering is based. Rather, they’re in a category of their own, which for lack of a better term some call “subjectively objective”.
The field of subjectively objective experiences is scarcely studied by modern science, which focus heavily on the other two. There are some initial efforts in that direction, with brain scans of mystics during deep meditation, that kind of thing, but those still focus much more heavily on the strictly objective side of things (what’s physically going on in the brain) than on the specifics of the experiences. This happens, I think, because there aren’t well developed and agreed upon hard scientific methodologies for dealing with problems that are impossible to study via double, much less triple, blindness. Rather, this category of problems isn’t evaluable even via single blindness. To study it researchers would have to go “zero blind”, becoming practitioners themselves and examining it from within, which so far is a huge no-no for anything evidence-based.
So, to go back to the OP, when he says mysticism can observe ethics in absolute terms, I infer they mean ethics itself is neither objective, nor subjective, but rather a subjectively objective field, hence why it can be evaluated only by means of mystical practices, which for now are still the only ones directly addressing this third category of problems.
I don’t understand how do you get from “mystical experiences follow structured patterns” to “mystical experiences have implications on ethics”. Btw I think that mental illness also follows structured patterns.
Ethics is a construct of the mind. Mysticism is a suite of techniques designed to observe the constructs of your mind in absolute terms. Therefore mysticism can be used to observe ethics on its own absolute terms. The “structured patterns” part provides the intersubjective consistency necessary for productive dialogue about these subjective experiences.
You are not wrong. Mystics can be considered mentally ill within the Western paradigm. Psychiatrist Scott Anderson writes about this in his post Gupta on Enlightenment.
I am skeptical. Designed by who, and how? Why do you think this design is any good? What makes it so much better than Western philosophy at understanding ethics?
It has been designed by many people all over the world (but mostly in Asia) over thousands of years through extensive trial and error. I think some of the methods are very good and have tried them out myself. I persevered with my favorite technique and it produced fascinating results for me. Mysticism has the advantage over Western philosophy in that it allows a practitioner to observe ethics unfolding in the mind directly. This brings ethics down from philosophical word games into the empirical reality of consciousness.
Trial and error assumes an objective, measurable loss function. What is the loss function here, and why is it relevant to ethics? Also, can you give some examples how this method allows solving questions debated in Western philosophy, such as population ethics, the moral status of animals, time discount or nosy preferences?
This is a very complicated question and lots of other people have written about it already, in depth and in better places than eight comments deep into an online forum. If you are sufficiently interested in this subject, I recommend reading a book by Dharma Dan, Brad Warner, Thích Nhất Hạnh or the 14th Dalai Lama. You may prefer Dharma Dan to the others as he is the most secular of this group.
If you are curious about how ethics can exist without a loss function, you may find interesting The Chrysanthemum and the Sword by Ruth Benedict. (I listed this book in the footnotes to the original article.) This book describes a real-world ethical system where internal coherence (an abstract well-defined loss function) was not a value. I hope in the future to write a future about Daoism that expands upon this idea.
Yes, but not shared ones. To use LW’s terminology, consider the map vs. territory distinction.
In a strictly objective scenario, all or almost all individuals agree that their respective maps agree with all others and correlate with the territory mostly the same way. At most individual maps differ in precision and resolution, but they all overlap in such a way that overlap is clear to most everyone.
In a purely subjective scenario, the opposite happens. Individual maps differ radically from each other, and hence either one map (or a set of overlapping maps) correlates with the territory, the other mutually contradictory maps not correlating to it, or in the extreme none of the maps correlates with the territory.
A subjectively objective scenario is an in between situation. You have a wide set of individuals from many different backgrounds who all share a set of clearly overlapping maps, differences between those individual maps also clearly being only in precision and resolution, as is the case in the strictly objective scenario. At the same time, however, this set of overlapping maps isn’t shared with all/ almost all individuals.
From the perspective of mystics, the set of overlapping maps they share among themselves doesn’t contradict the set of overlapping maps everyone else shares. They see theirs as the wider map of which everyone else’s is a subset, and understand themselves and their techniques as means to access and map more of the territory, areas others usually don’t draw into their own maps because they don’t look that way often, or even don’t look at it at all, and therefore these maps cover a smaller territory.
From the perspective of non-mystics though, the map mystics share among themselves correlates to nothing, as it’s talking about a section of the territory that doesn’t exist, there being nothing “there” to be mapped. Rather, at most mystic techniques activate some weird neurological pathways which, being present in all human brains, work similarly when active, and that would better explain the shared similarity among their maps than the supposition that there’s a large section of the territory most everyone doesn’t perceive unless they train to perceive it.
Occam’s Razor favors this second take, but the shared nature of the map mystics hold remains intriguing, and there’s always the possibility it may indeed refer to existing territory.
There are “shared” phobias, and common types of paranoia. There are also beliefs many people share that have little to do with reality, such as conspiracy theories or UFOs. Of course in the latter case they share those beliefs because they transmitted them to each other, but the mystics are also influenced by each other.
These analogies relate to surface similarities. Individual mystic schools provide methodologies that provide highly repeatable sets of results in a progressive sequence, and the ability for advanced 3rd party practitioners to evaluate said progression. If you enroll in one and follow the program you’re almost guaranteed results, in the sequence that method delineates. Hence, even if these experiences don’t correlate to something extrinsically real, they point to some interesting cognitive features that are little explored. At a minimum there’s an entire area of “psychological engineering” waiting to be properly developed under those methods.
True, but the practices at the earlier “grades” tend to be very different between different schools even if high level practitioners from different schools can easily dialogue with each other. For example, a high level mystic trained in the Isma’ilic method can at some sit down and talk with a high level mystic trained in the Advaita method, both having a quite productive discussion about their respective experiences while still rejecting each other beliefs, but when it comes to what beginners and mid-level practitioners of either school do in practice, there isn’t little similarity. Any such influence then, if it does indeed trickle down from those high level discussions, happens at some meta level once or twice removed from the concrete practices.
I am not even an amateur on mysticism, but I doubt the “shared maps” hypothesis. What I’ve known of religions certainly are contradictory maps. Another hypothesis I advance is that mystics generally speak with vague terms. I.e., they share very rough templates of their maps that can then be retrofitted to many a different map. Mystics who seek other disciplines out also have an incentive to make themselves seem united and similar. (My propaganda Islamic textbooks often labor on how all religions are essentially the same and Islam is their latest version in a linear space.) It might even be that the process of extracting those vague templates from their maps somehow produces similar templates. Their maps almost certainly share several constraints of medium making them more similar, like the constraint of human appeal and allowing hierarchical growth (so that the novice can always “aspire” to the master’s level.).
Yes, but this is a separate issue. Indeed, mystical practices are very often religious and expressed through a conceptual framework based on theistic and supernatural ontologies, but they can be practiced without any of that, and still yield the same subjective experiences, which means these don’t depend on those. In fact, mystics of different schools, while they agree one the validity of each other experiences, still usually argue about whose interpretation of those experience is right.
For example, while a Muslim mystic, a Yogi mystic, a Buddhist mystic, and a Neoplatonic mystic may all agree they experienced their self-identities stopping under such and such circumstances and restarting afterwards, the Muslim one, who interprets their experiences as “uniting with Allah”, won’t be keen on the Yogi one’s interpretation of it as “dissolving in the Brahman Supreme”, who in turn won’t be keen on the Buddhist one interpreting it as “manifesting the Buddha Nature”, who also won’t be keen on the Neoplatonic one interpreting it as “ascending to the One”, and so on and so forth.
So, while the experience may be shared, it doesn’t actually offer any kind of concrete answer about what is really going on. This is where modern scientific approaches would, I suppose, provide something more concrete, specially if more skeptics were to practice those techniques to completion and then frame them within more down-to-earth notions.
Thank you for your comment about “structured patterns”. I think you did a great job of explaining ideas I had not delved deep into within my original post. I like your metaphor about how mystics map “more of the territory” too. I think some schools (vipassana especially) map the territory in finer detail as well.
I feel like Eliezer Yudkowsky’s argument about Bayesian complexity in his Quantum Physics and Many Worlds sequence favors the mystics’ perspective. Why do you think Occam’s Razor favors the second perspective? Are “weird neurological pathways” not part of the territory of consciousness?
Because assuming there’s a larger territory means, within a reductionist perspective such as the one favored by LWers, assuming a larger set of first principles, while assuming it’s an incorrect perception retains the same set of first principles. Hence, Occam’s Razor favors the second alternative. But only as long as there’s no further evidence for the first, at which point the likelihood for both hypothesis would slide accordingly.