By “subjective” I mean that ethics is not meaningful without an observer. There can be no meaningful ethics in a lifeless, brain-less world without actors. By “relative” I mean taking the measure of an ethical system relative to another ethical system. “Differences in degrees Celsius” is a relative measure but “degrees Kelvin” is an absolute measure.
As someone with experience meditating, I don’t think these are religious Barnum statements at all. But this is not obvious if you have not had certain experiences for yourself.
Finally, how can contemplation in the wilderness be an experiment in observing anything but individual human psychology?
It isn’t. But we are all the same species and tend to be similar to each other in the most fundamental ways. Study one mouse thoroughly enough and you will learn a lot about mice in general. I would love to see a wealth of scientific data on the effect of mystical practice on happiness and other metrics like default mode activation, but such data does not exist right now.
By “subjective” I mean that ethics is not meaningful without an observer. There can be no meaningful ethics in a lifeless, brain-less world without actors. By “relative” I mean taking the measure of an ethical system relative to another ethical system. “Differences in degrees Celsius” is a relative measure but “degrees Kelvin” is an absolute measure.
As someone with experience meditating, I don’t think these are religious Barnum statements at all. But this is not obvious if you have not had certain experiences for yourself.
It isn’t. But we are all the same species and tend to be similar to each other in the most fundamental ways. Study one mouse thoroughly enough and you will learn a lot about mice in general. I would love to see a wealth of scientific data on the effect of mystical practice on happiness and other metrics like default mode activation, but such data does not exist right now.