The truths of General Relativity cannot be conveyed in conventional language. But does one have to study the underlying mathematics before evaluating its claims?
Just as there exists a specialized language that accurately conveys General Relativity, there similarly exists a specialized language (mythological language) for conveying mystical truths. However, I think the wrong approach would be to try to understand that language without having undergone the necessary spiritual preparation. As St. Paul says in 1 Corinthians 2:14
The natural person does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are folly to him, and he is not able to understand them because they are spiritually discerned.
This echoes countless similar statements in other traditions, the most famous (and probably oldest) being “the Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao.”
That is not to say that one cannot approximate the truth by means of analogy, You can approximately capture the truth General Relativity in the statement, “gravity bends space.” This approximation of the truth is useful because it allows you to understand certain consequences of that truth, such as gravitational lensing. Hence, even someone untrained in physics can be convinced of General Relativity, because they understand an approximate version of it, which in turn intuitively explains phenomena such as the Hubble Space telescope photo of a horseshoe Einstein ring.
Likewise, approximations to the Truth abound in the various spiritual traditions. “God exists, and is the only entity that exists. I am God, you are God, we are all one being” is one such approximation [1]. It is an approximation because the words “you” and “God” are not well-defined. My own definition of these terms has been continually evolving as I progress in spirituality.
One consequence of this approximation is that the feeling that we are separate individuals must be flawed. I will take another analogy from physics: the four fundamental forces are in fact different aspects of the same unified force, but they become distinct at lower energy levels. At higher energy levels, they become clearly unified.
Similarly, I have experienced that at high levels of awareness, my feeling of distinctness from other people and from the rest of the universe is reduced. It starts to seem like “my thoughts” and “my feelings” are not mine, they are just the thoughts generated by one particular mind, and furthermore I feel like I can start to feel what others are feeling. I have encountered others who appear to be even higher on the “energy scale.” One day I was greeted extremely warmly out of the blue by a homeless man who was just working on the street. I responded to him in kind.
A consequence of the statement “we are all One” is that we should be able to experience this unity. If there exist people who experience this as a reality (and not just as an altered state,) they should be able to detect the thoughts and feelings of others around them. I find it plausible that such people exist, both from my reading and my encounters with people such as the homeless man. But it does bother me that there exists no known scientific mechanism that would enable us to read each other’s minds, other than some very speculative ideas about consciousness being based on quantum phenomenon.
I do not expect that this particular example should be particularly convincing to a skeptic. I know that there exist non-mystical theories for explaining non-dualistic states, for instance Jill Bolte Taylor’s theory that it is caused by a switch in dominance from the left to the right hemisphere. What ultimately convinced me to ‘cross over’ was not a single experience or insight but rather the aggregation of many experiences: listing all of these would distract from the point I am trying to making. I suggest any curious individuals to consult the much richer collection of data on personal experiences that exists in the religious studies literature; my own experiences are nothing special in comparison.
My aim for now was just to address your question about how a claim can be evaluated in the absence of the necessary cognitive framework to understand its content. To summarize, one limited form of evaluation can be obtained by learning of the different approximations of the truth, and then evaluating consequences of those approximations in comparison to empirical data.
That said, at a certain stage of maturity, one who is seeking the truth should stop bothering with approximations, because the approximations will not give you that necessary cognitive framework to really understand the truth. Reading popular science books can never give you the understanding that a Ph. D. physicist has obtained from rigorous training. You have to “sit down and learn the math”, or in the case of spirituality, to follow your chosen path. If the approximations have any value, it would only be in giving the hope that the skeptic needs before they can make the commitment to seek the real thing.
[1] Another approximation, equally valid in my view, would be that “God created you and loves you.” Note that combining with the first approximation yields the near-tautology that “You love yourself.” Still, even a statement such as “God loves you” which might be parsed to something logically trivial can take a new profoundness to one who has undergone the proper cultivation.
Another approximation is “there is no self.” Or that “everything is nothing.” Combine those two, and you get “everything is self.” The name of the Hindu god Shiva, literally means “No-thing.”
The truths of General Relativity cannot be conveyed in conventional language. But does one have to study the underlying mathematics before evaluating its claims?
Yes. Of course you do.
You can approximately capture the truth General Relativity in the statement, “gravity bends space.”
The delusion that such statements “approximately capture the truth” of things like GR is pervasive, but no less a delusion for it.
This approximation of the truth is useful because it allows you to understand certain consequences of that truth, such as gravitational lensing. Hence, even someone untrained in physics can be convinced of General Relativity …
Once again, this is delusion. Eliezer wrote an entire sequence about this.
Basically your entire set of claims and comments is mostly “mysterious answers to mysterious questions”.
The delusion that such statements “approximately capture the truth” of things like GR is pervasive, but no less a delusion for it.
Not sure whether we disagree here, my guess is I am slightly unsure what you intend to say. I do think there are statements like “time will pass more slowly relative to a stationary observer if you move close to the speed of light” that are highly specific predictions that can be verified (given sufficient investments in experiments) without deeply understanding the theory of relativity. Such a statement does definitely capture some aspect of the truth of general relativity.
If some process (like a physicist or a research lab) repeatedly generates highly surprising predictions like this that turn out to come true, someone might be said to meaningfully be “convinced of the veracity of general relativity” without a concrete understanding of the underlying theory.
> The truths of General Relativity cannot be conveyed in conventional language. But does one have to study the underlying mathematics before evaluating its claims?
Yes. Of course you do.
I was surprised to hear this from you. In other threads you have seemed rather quick to dismiss mystical claims without trying to master the underlying “language”.
The truths of General Relativity cannot be conveyed in conventional language. But does one have to study the underlying mathematics before evaluating its claims?
General Relativity makes testable predictions. Conversely, whenever I hear descriptions of “nonduality”, it is not at all clear that these claims make any predictions at all. Most statements I have heard about nonduality seem like non-statements with no ramifications. But I might be wrong.
You do bring up one example of a potentially testable prediction of nonduality:
A consequence of the statement “we are all One” is that we should be able to experience this unity. If there exist people who experience this as a reality (and not just as an altered state,) they should be able to detect the thoughts and feelings of others around them.
Why merely “others around them”? If “we are all One”, I would think it should also be possible to detect the thoughts and feelings of people on the other side of the Earth.
Likewise, approximations to the Truth abound in the various spiritual traditions. “God exists, and is the only entity that exists. I am God, you are God, we are all one being” is one such approximation [1]. It is an approximation because the words “you” and “God” are not well-defined. My own definition of these terms has been continually evolving as I progress in spirituality.
Hm, I think there might be something really interesting here.
If I were to try to phrase this claim about God in terms of LDT’s synchronicity, and the incoherence of the notion of any metaphysical continuity between observer-moments (or, vessels of anthropic measure), would you agree that we’re talking about the same thing? (Are you familiar with these terms?)
Basically: LDT is the realisation that we should act as if our decisions will be reflected by every similarly rational agent that exists, it is one way of saying “all is one, you are not separate from others”. It could even be framed as a paraphrasing of a constrained notion of karma, in a way (“your policy will be reflected back at you by others”). What’s extraordinary about it is it says these things in the most precise, pragmatic terms.
Metaphysical continuity of measure.. you’re probably familiar with the concept even if you wouldn’t have a name for it.. like.. you know how people worry that being teleported would be a kind of death? Because there’s an interruption, a discontinuity between selves? And then one may answer, “but there is a similar, perhaps greater discontinuity every night, during sleep, but you don’t seem to fear that.” I don’t know how many of us have noticed this, I’ve met a few, but we’re starting to realise that anthropic measure, the substance of experience or subjectivity, there isn’t some special relationship between observer-moments that’re close in time and space, there’s just a magnitude, and the magnitude can change over time. If we want to draw a line connecting observer-moments, it’s artificial.
So what I’m getting at is, that substance of experience can’t really be divided into a bunch of completely separate lines of experience. If we care about one being’s experience, we should generally care about every being’s experience. We don’t have to, of course, because of the orthogonality thesis, but I think most people will once they get it.
I am familiar with the concept of superrationality, which seems similar with what you are describing. The lack of special relationship between observer moments—let’s call it non-continuity—is also a common concept in many mystical traditions. I view both of these concepts as different than the concept of unity, “we are all one”.
Superrationality combines a form of unity with a requirement for rationality. I could think that “we are all one” without thinking that we should behave rationally. If I thought, “we are all one” and and also that “one ought to be rational”, the behavior that results might be described as superrational.
Non-continuity is orthogonal to unity. I could think “we are distinct” and still think “I only exist in the moment”. This might have been the view of Heraclitus. But I could also think “we are one” and also think “we only exist in the moment.” This might be a natural view to have if you think of the universe as an amplitude distribution over a large number of quantum states that is evolving according to some transition function. If you identify with a particular quantum state, then there is no sense in which you have a unique “past” or “future” path, because all “moments” (states) are concurrent: the only thing that is changing is the amplitude flow.
This sort of “everyone who understands my ideas agrees with me, and everyone who doesn’t agree just doesn’t understand” is never not annoying, even if you tack on a “most” or “almost”. Even if the ideas you describe were perfectly sensible, it would still be highly irritating to be faced with such a smug presentation of them.
However, in this case, what you say also seems incoherent.
In particular:
LDT is the realisation that we should act as if our decisions will be reflected by every similarly rational agent that exists
In this description of LDT, the phrase “similarly rational” is being forced to do almost all the work; and it is much too vague to be up to the task. The specific claim of LDT is:
Logical decision theory asserts that the principle of rational choice is “Decide as though you are choosing the logical output of your decision algorithm.”
That is very far from any notion of karma, any notion of “all is one”, etc. So even if we find logical decision theories to be attractive, and their claims convincing, that does not get us to any of the “spiritual” claims you seem to want to make on those theories’ basis.
I don’t know how many of us have noticed this, I’ve met a few, but we’re starting to realise that anthropic measure, the substance of experience or subjectivity, there isn’t some special relationship between observer-moments that’re close in time and space, there’s just a magnitude, and the magnitude can change over time.
This does not actually seem to be a coherent sentence, much less a coherent thought, so I assume that you’ve accidentally omitted some words; I’ll comment on this once you’ve had a chance to rewrite it.
If we care about one being’s experience, we should generally care about every being’s experience.
This in absolutely no way follows from logical decision theory or anything related to it.
There are a lot of assumptions you’re making about the purpose/subtext of that comment. The comment is like, three exchanges into a conversation. It was not written for you. Its purpose was to name some ideas for snarles that they’re probably already largely familiar with. It isn’t supposed to teach or to expound enough detail that someone who didn’t know a lot of what I was talking about would be able to refute any of it. That is not what we’re doing in this thread. There is a time and place for that. Seriously, I’m probably going to have to write about this stuff properly at some point, and I hope you’ll find it precise and coherent enough to engage with without frustration, when the time comes.
We are still a long way from arriving at the “interesting” thing that I alluded to, if we’re ever going to (I’m not even totally sure I’ll be able to recover that thought).
In this description of LDT
I wasn’t really trying to give an accurate description/definition of LDT, it’s an entailment.
That is very far from any notion of karma
The easier we can make it for people to step from a superstition or a metaphor to a real formalised understanding, the better. If you say it’s a long walk, a lot of them wont set out.
This in absolutely no way follows from logical decision theory or anything related to it.
That paragraph was about anthropic measure continuity, not LDT
There are a lot of assumptions you’re making about the purpose/subtext of that comment. The comment is like, three exchanges into a conversation. It was not written for you.
I read the ancestor comments as well (and every other comment on this post, too). Whatever purpose or subtext was contained therein is available to me also, and to anyone else reading this public forum thread. If you prefer that something you write be read and responded to only by a single recipient, Less Wrong does have a private messaging system.
I wasn’t really trying to give an accurate description/definition of LDT, it’s an entailment.
What do you mean by “it’s an entailment”? What entails what?
The easier we can make it for people to step from a superstition or a metaphor to a real formalised understanding, the better. If you say it’s a long walk, a lot of them wont set out.
Are you suggesting a strategy of publicly professing positions we do not actually hold, and making claims we do not actually believe, in order to better persuade people (whom we believe to be in the grip of a supersition) to accept our ideas?
I hope I do not have to enumerate the profound problems with such a plan. I will name only one: it’s fundamentally dishonest and deceptive, and intellectually disrespectful of one’s interlocutors. I strongly urge against attempting to employ any such tactics.
The truths of General Relativity cannot be conveyed in conventional language. But does one have to study the underlying mathematics before evaluating its claims?
Just as there exists a specialized language that accurately conveys General Relativity, there similarly exists a specialized language (mythological language) for conveying mystical truths. However, I think the wrong approach would be to try to understand that language without having undergone the necessary spiritual preparation. As St. Paul says in 1 Corinthians 2:14
This echoes countless similar statements in other traditions, the most famous (and probably oldest) being “the Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao.”
That is not to say that one cannot approximate the truth by means of analogy, You can approximately capture the truth General Relativity in the statement, “gravity bends space.” This approximation of the truth is useful because it allows you to understand certain consequences of that truth, such as gravitational lensing. Hence, even someone untrained in physics can be convinced of General Relativity, because they understand an approximate version of it, which in turn intuitively explains phenomena such as the Hubble Space telescope photo of a horseshoe Einstein ring.
Likewise, approximations to the Truth abound in the various spiritual traditions. “God exists, and is the only entity that exists. I am God, you are God, we are all one being” is one such approximation [1]. It is an approximation because the words “you” and “God” are not well-defined. My own definition of these terms has been continually evolving as I progress in spirituality.
One consequence of this approximation is that the feeling that we are separate individuals must be flawed. I will take another analogy from physics: the four fundamental forces are in fact different aspects of the same unified force, but they become distinct at lower energy levels. At higher energy levels, they become clearly unified.
Similarly, I have experienced that at high levels of awareness, my feeling of distinctness from other people and from the rest of the universe is reduced. It starts to seem like “my thoughts” and “my feelings” are not mine, they are just the thoughts generated by one particular mind, and furthermore I feel like I can start to feel what others are feeling. I have encountered others who appear to be even higher on the “energy scale.” One day I was greeted extremely warmly out of the blue by a homeless man who was just working on the street. I responded to him in kind.
A consequence of the statement “we are all One” is that we should be able to experience this unity. If there exist people who experience this as a reality (and not just as an altered state,) they should be able to detect the thoughts and feelings of others around them. I find it plausible that such people exist, both from my reading and my encounters with people such as the homeless man. But it does bother me that there exists no known scientific mechanism that would enable us to read each other’s minds, other than some very speculative ideas about consciousness being based on quantum phenomenon.
I do not expect that this particular example should be particularly convincing to a skeptic. I know that there exist non-mystical theories for explaining non-dualistic states, for instance Jill Bolte Taylor’s theory that it is caused by a switch in dominance from the left to the right hemisphere. What ultimately convinced me to ‘cross over’ was not a single experience or insight but rather the aggregation of many experiences: listing all of these would distract from the point I am trying to making. I suggest any curious individuals to consult the much richer collection of data on personal experiences that exists in the religious studies literature; my own experiences are nothing special in comparison.
My aim for now was just to address your question about how a claim can be evaluated in the absence of the necessary cognitive framework to understand its content. To summarize, one limited form of evaluation can be obtained by learning of the different approximations of the truth, and then evaluating consequences of those approximations in comparison to empirical data.
That said, at a certain stage of maturity, one who is seeking the truth should stop bothering with approximations, because the approximations will not give you that necessary cognitive framework to really understand the truth. Reading popular science books can never give you the understanding that a Ph. D. physicist has obtained from rigorous training. You have to “sit down and learn the math”, or in the case of spirituality, to follow your chosen path. If the approximations have any value, it would only be in giving the hope that the skeptic needs before they can make the commitment to seek the real thing.
[1] Another approximation, equally valid in my view, would be that “God created you and loves you.” Note that combining with the first approximation yields the near-tautology that “You love yourself.” Still, even a statement such as “God loves you” which might be parsed to something logically trivial can take a new profoundness to one who has undergone the proper cultivation.
Another approximation is “there is no self.” Or that “everything is nothing.” Combine those two, and you get “everything is self.” The name of the Hindu god Shiva, literally means “No-thing.”
Yes. Of course you do.
The delusion that such statements “approximately capture the truth” of things like GR is pervasive, but no less a delusion for it.
Once again, this is delusion. Eliezer wrote an entire sequence about this.
Basically your entire set of claims and comments is mostly “mysterious answers to mysterious questions”.
Not sure whether we disagree here, my guess is I am slightly unsure what you intend to say. I do think there are statements like “time will pass more slowly relative to a stationary observer if you move close to the speed of light” that are highly specific predictions that can be verified (given sufficient investments in experiments) without deeply understanding the theory of relativity. Such a statement does definitely capture some aspect of the truth of general relativity.
If some process (like a physicist or a research lab) repeatedly generates highly surprising predictions like this that turn out to come true, someone might be said to meaningfully be “convinced of the veracity of general relativity” without a concrete understanding of the underlying theory.
I was surprised to hear this from you. In other threads you have seemed rather quick to dismiss mystical claims without trying to master the underlying “language”.
https://xkcd.com/808/
(Also, https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ZawRiFR8ytvpqfBPX/the-hard-work-of-translation-buddhism#DM8CCgSb3KvyjknqH )
General Relativity makes testable predictions. Conversely, whenever I hear descriptions of “nonduality”, it is not at all clear that these claims make any predictions at all. Most statements I have heard about nonduality seem like non-statements with no ramifications. But I might be wrong.
You do bring up one example of a potentially testable prediction of nonduality:
Why merely “others around them”? If “we are all One”, I would think it should also be possible to detect the thoughts and feelings of people on the other side of the Earth.
Hm, I think there might be something really interesting here.
If I were to try to phrase this claim about God in terms of LDT’s synchronicity, and the incoherence of the notion of any metaphysical continuity between observer-moments (or, vessels of anthropic measure), would you agree that we’re talking about the same thing? (Are you familiar with these terms?)
LDT doesn’t seem to be an abbreviation that’s common enough to make it to Wikipedia. Can you spell it out?
I added a link https://arbital.com/p/logical_dt/?l=5gc
I am not familiar with those concepts. References would be appreciated. 🙏
I’m not sure if these articles try to convey the personal, spiritual dimension of LDT’s claims about agency, but they describe what it is https://arbital.com/p/logical_dt/?l=5gc
Basically: LDT is the realisation that we should act as if our decisions will be reflected by every similarly rational agent that exists, it is one way of saying “all is one, you are not separate from others”. It could even be framed as a paraphrasing of a constrained notion of karma, in a way (“your policy will be reflected back at you by others”). What’s extraordinary about it is it says these things in the most precise, pragmatic terms.
Metaphysical continuity of measure.. you’re probably familiar with the concept even if you wouldn’t have a name for it.. like.. you know how people worry that being teleported would be a kind of death? Because there’s an interruption, a discontinuity between selves? And then one may answer, “but there is a similar, perhaps greater discontinuity every night, during sleep, but you don’t seem to fear that.” I don’t know how many of us have noticed this, I’ve met a few, but we’re starting to realise that anthropic measure, the substance of experience or subjectivity, there isn’t some special relationship between observer-moments that’re close in time and space, there’s just a magnitude, and the magnitude can change over time. If we want to draw a line connecting observer-moments, it’s artificial.
So what I’m getting at is, that substance of experience can’t really be divided into a bunch of completely separate lines of experience. If we care about one being’s experience, we should generally care about every being’s experience. We don’t have to, of course, because of the orthogonality thesis, but I think most people will once they get it.
Thanks for the link MakoYass.
I am familiar with the concept of superrationality, which seems similar with what you are describing. The lack of special relationship between observer moments—let’s call it non-continuity—is also a common concept in many mystical traditions. I view both of these concepts as different than the concept of unity, “we are all one”.
Superrationality combines a form of unity with a requirement for rationality. I could think that “we are all one” without thinking that we should behave rationally. If I thought, “we are all one” and and also that “one ought to be rational”, the behavior that results might be described as superrational.
Non-continuity is orthogonal to unity. I could think “we are distinct” and still think “I only exist in the moment”. This might have been the view of Heraclitus. But I could also think “we are one” and also think “we only exist in the moment.” This might be a natural view to have if you think of the universe as an amplitude distribution over a large number of quantum states that is evolving according to some transition function. If you identify with a particular quantum state, then there is no sense in which you have a unique “past” or “future” path, because all “moments” (states) are concurrent: the only thing that is changing is the amplitude flow.
This sort of “everyone who understands my ideas agrees with me, and everyone who doesn’t agree just doesn’t understand” is never not annoying, even if you tack on a “most” or “almost”. Even if the ideas you describe were perfectly sensible, it would still be highly irritating to be faced with such a smug presentation of them.
However, in this case, what you say also seems incoherent.
In particular:
In this description of LDT, the phrase “similarly rational” is being forced to do almost all the work; and it is much too vague to be up to the task. The specific claim of LDT is:
(From “Introduction to Logical Decision Theory for Analytic Philosophers” on Arbital. Italics in original.)
That is very far from any notion of karma, any notion of “all is one”, etc. So even if we find logical decision theories to be attractive, and their claims convincing, that does not get us to any of the “spiritual” claims you seem to want to make on those theories’ basis.
This does not actually seem to be a coherent sentence, much less a coherent thought, so I assume that you’ve accidentally omitted some words; I’ll comment on this once you’ve had a chance to rewrite it.
This in absolutely no way follows from logical decision theory or anything related to it.
There are a lot of assumptions you’re making about the purpose/subtext of that comment. The comment is like, three exchanges into a conversation. It was not written for you. Its purpose was to name some ideas for snarles that they’re probably already largely familiar with. It isn’t supposed to teach or to expound enough detail that someone who didn’t know a lot of what I was talking about would be able to refute any of it. That is not what we’re doing in this thread. There is a time and place for that. Seriously, I’m probably going to have to write about this stuff properly at some point, and I hope you’ll find it precise and coherent enough to engage with without frustration, when the time comes.
We are still a long way from arriving at the “interesting” thing that I alluded to, if we’re ever going to (I’m not even totally sure I’ll be able to recover that thought).
I wasn’t really trying to give an accurate description/definition of LDT, it’s an entailment.
The easier we can make it for people to step from a superstition or a metaphor to a real formalised understanding, the better. If you say it’s a long walk, a lot of them wont set out.
That paragraph was about anthropic measure continuity, not LDT
I read the ancestor comments as well (and every other comment on this post, too). Whatever purpose or subtext was contained therein is available to me also, and to anyone else reading this public forum thread. If you prefer that something you write be read and responded to only by a single recipient, Less Wrong does have a private messaging system.
What do you mean by “it’s an entailment”? What entails what?
Are you suggesting a strategy of publicly professing positions we do not actually hold, and making claims we do not actually believe, in order to better persuade people (whom we believe to be in the grip of a supersition) to accept our ideas?
I hope I do not have to enumerate the profound problems with such a plan. I will name only one: it’s fundamentally dishonest and deceptive, and intellectually disrespectful of one’s interlocutors. I strongly urge against attempting to employ any such tactics.