...let’s start with a little thought experiment...
The two cases are non-analogous. Grooves in a phonograph record are not designed to be read by a human. Perhaps a better analogy would be reading sheet music, but most people are not trained to do that either. The reason people show such a strong preference in the latter case is that most people will get nothing at all from the record (or sheet music, for that matter).
just because some people can’t see colors doesn’t mean that colors aren’t real.
The same is true for spiritual experiences.
This is a truism. Moreover, it is often argued that colors, flavors, &c. are of the map, not of the territory. If this is the case, colors may not be “real”, even if the experience of colors is.
...one cannot render into words the subjective experience...
The attempt to losslessly transmit a complete subjective experience would be futile, although I’ve read some poets who took a good stab at it. Experience is one of the media that make up the map. Two people, given exactly the same stimulus, would have two different subjective experiences. It would certainly be easier to compare similar experiences with a similar reference frame but it is far from impossible to transmit one, even if some of the nuance is necessarily lost.
Finally, religiosity and spirituality are neither identical concepts nor even close synonyms, though they are treated as synonymous in the post. If you could define the two as you intend for us to read them it might be less confusing.
I strongly agree, and in fact when I read the OP I nearly stopped when I saw this argument. (Because it’s so transparently wrong that if someone finds it a good analogy, that’s evidence that they aren’t thinking clearly about this stuff.)
I think we may be referring to different analogies. There are two going on, and lisper is making a third analogy between them.
Between vinyl records and books.
Between vinyl records and spiritual experiences.
The first pair, lisper intends to be importantly non-analogous, on the grounds that the difference in immediacy and intensity and so forth is so much greater for the records than the books. The second pair, he intends to be importantly analogous, the idea being that the difference between having spiritual experiences and merely hearing about them is as profound as that between hearing music and looking at the groove on a vinyl record.
But a problem (at least as it seemed to both kithpendragon and me) is that the disanalogy between records and books isn’t just a matter of greater immediacy and vividity; it’s that most of us are literally unable to interpret the groove on a vinyl record even theoretically, and this is an important part of what’s going on in the comparison between records and books. And this (so I think and I guess kithpendragon does too) is not the case for spiritual experiences; even people who have nothing resembling the experiences some profoundly religious people have can get a reasonable understanding of what sort of thing they’re experiencing, even if it’s a dry and theoretical understanding. Which, to my mind, means that the analogy between analogies doesn’t work the way lisper intended it to.
A correct analogy between records and books would be the phonograph and the text of the book written in ASCII hexadecimal. Both are designed to be interpreted by a machine for presentation to humans.
Not a bad analogy, but for me at least interpreting hexadecimal ASCII is much, much easier than interpreting images of vinyl records.
[EDITED to add:] More explicitly, I can do the former, though it would be boring and greatly reduce my enjoyment of reading, but I’m not at all sure that I can do the latter at all without electronic assistance.
I would also have an easier time with ASCII, but that’s because I (and presumably you also) have been trained in how to produce instructions for machines. This is a negligible chunk of humanity, so I thought it was equally discountable.
I suppose the spiritual analogy would be an ordained priest praying on behalf of another person!
I reckon I could teach anyone of average or better intelligence to read books in hexadecimal ASCII codes in a day.
I suspect a substantial majority of highly intelligent and musically inclined people could not learn to “read” pictures of vinyl records in a day, no matter how well taught.
colors may not be “real”, even if the experience of colors is.
Yes, that is the whole point. The experience of God may be real even if God isn’t.
Also, the reason I didn’t choose sheet music as my analogy is that the information content of sheet music is different from the actual music. To get from sheet music to music you have to add information (in the information-theoretical sense) like the waveforms of the individual instruments. That is not the case with the grooves on a record. They contain all of the same information as the audio waveform, but simply rendered in space rather than in time.
The experience of God may be real [like that of color is] even if God isn’t.
The difference here is that there is something in the environment that causes the experience of color to appear consistently in many, many human minds. We can measure the waves that could enter the eye and trigger the “color” experience. The same cannot be said of God. “Spiritual” seems likely to be the best word to name the experience you have described. Religion need not be involved at any level.
More simply, I’m sure these experiences exist. But there is good reason not to name the experience God. That word, and the set of words it often stands for, is far too laden with other meanings and contexts to be a helpful label in this context.
...the information content of sheet music is different from the actual music...
The information on sheet music is compressed, but an individual trained to read it can, with practice, decompress all of it into an experience of the composition. Ask any orchestra conductor of sufficient experience what that is like. Some conductors even prefer to experience the music that way; they find that the orchestra can get in the way of experiencing what the composer intended. That is, in fact, the job of a conductor.
The phonograph record, on the other hand, is a representation of a single performance of a composition, interpreted by the conductor and the orchestra. And the point stands that a phonograph record cannot be read by (nearly all) humans. It is not analogous to the text of a book, it is analogous to the medium (tape, CD, MP3, &c.) on which the audiobook is recorded.
For that matter, the audiobook holds the same “additional information” as the recorded symphony: that added by the performer(s) translating the text/music into sound.
The difference here is that there is something in the environment that causes the experience of color to appear consistently in many, many human minds. We can measure the waves that could enter the eye and trigger the “color” experience. The same cannot be said of God.
That’s not necessarily true. It’s possible that we could find the mechanism in the brain which is responsible for spiritual experiences. But that’s kind of missing the point. Most human interactions don’t drill down this deep. Even rational people have conversation that go, “Did you see that cool fnorble?” “Yeah, wasn’t that awesome?” without citing the peer-reviewed academic literature that establishes the objective existence and material properties of fnorbles. Religious people do the same: they say, “Did you feel the presence of the holy spirit?” “Yeah, I did, wasn’t that awesome?”
The information on sheet music is compressed, but an individual trained to read it can, with practice, decompress all of it into an experience of the composition.
Sure, but such people are rare. You can probably also train yourself to have spiritual experiences.
a phonograph record cannot be read by (nearly all) humans
Fine, how about this then: display the audio waveform on an oscilloscope. The point is that having music come into your years is a fundamentally different subjective experience than having it come in to your eyes even if the information content is the same in both cases.
I think the crux here is to avoid arguing against people’s experiences when trying to raise the sanity waterline. If one argues against their deep experiences, there’s a big danger of the backfire effect. If one acknowledges the experience of God as something real, but delineates that from proof of an actual God existing, this may go further with religious people.
The two cases are non-analogous. Grooves in a phonograph record are not designed to be read by a human. Perhaps a better analogy would be reading sheet music, but most people are not trained to do that either. The reason people show such a strong preference in the latter case is that most people will get nothing at all from the record (or sheet music, for that matter).
This is a truism. Moreover, it is often argued that colors, flavors, &c. are of the map, not of the territory. If this is the case, colors may not be “real”, even if the experience of colors is.
The attempt to losslessly transmit a complete subjective experience would be futile, although I’ve read some poets who took a good stab at it. Experience is one of the media that make up the map. Two people, given exactly the same stimulus, would have two different subjective experiences. It would certainly be easier to compare similar experiences with a similar reference frame but it is far from impossible to transmit one, even if some of the nuance is necessarily lost.
Finally, religiosity and spirituality are neither identical concepts nor even close synonyms, though they are treated as synonymous in the post. If you could define the two as you intend for us to read them it might be less confusing.
I strongly agree, and in fact when I read the OP I nearly stopped when I saw this argument. (Because it’s so transparently wrong that if someone finds it a good analogy, that’s evidence that they aren’t thinking clearly about this stuff.)
When I read it, it was so strongly non-analogous that I was entirely unsurprised to find that their being anti-analogical was precisely the point.
I think we may be referring to different analogies. There are two going on, and lisper is making a third analogy between them.
Between vinyl records and books.
Between vinyl records and spiritual experiences.
The first pair, lisper intends to be importantly non-analogous, on the grounds that the difference in immediacy and intensity and so forth is so much greater for the records than the books. The second pair, he intends to be importantly analogous, the idea being that the difference between having spiritual experiences and merely hearing about them is as profound as that between hearing music and looking at the groove on a vinyl record.
But a problem (at least as it seemed to both kithpendragon and me) is that the disanalogy between records and books isn’t just a matter of greater immediacy and vividity; it’s that most of us are literally unable to interpret the groove on a vinyl record even theoretically, and this is an important part of what’s going on in the comparison between records and books. And this (so I think and I guess kithpendragon does too) is not the case for spiritual experiences; even people who have nothing resembling the experiences some profoundly religious people have can get a reasonable understanding of what sort of thing they’re experiencing, even if it’s a dry and theoretical understanding. Which, to my mind, means that the analogy between analogies doesn’t work the way lisper intended it to.
A correct analogy between records and books would be the phonograph and the text of the book written in ASCII hexadecimal. Both are designed to be interpreted by a machine for presentation to humans.
Not a bad analogy, but for me at least interpreting hexadecimal ASCII is much, much easier than interpreting images of vinyl records.
[EDITED to add:] More explicitly, I can do the former, though it would be boring and greatly reduce my enjoyment of reading, but I’m not at all sure that I can do the latter at all without electronic assistance.
I would also have an easier time with ASCII, but that’s because I (and presumably you also) have been trained in how to produce instructions for machines. This is a negligible chunk of humanity, so I thought it was equally discountable.
I suppose the spiritual analogy would be an ordained priest praying on behalf of another person!
I reckon I could teach anyone of average or better intelligence to read books in hexadecimal ASCII codes in a day.
I suspect a substantial majority of highly intelligent and musically inclined people could not learn to “read” pictures of vinyl records in a day, no matter how well taught.
Yes, that is the whole point. The experience of God may be real even if God isn’t.
Also, the reason I didn’t choose sheet music as my analogy is that the information content of sheet music is different from the actual music. To get from sheet music to music you have to add information (in the information-theoretical sense) like the waveforms of the individual instruments. That is not the case with the grooves on a record. They contain all of the same information as the audio waveform, but simply rendered in space rather than in time.
The difference here is that there is something in the environment that causes the experience of color to appear consistently in many, many human minds. We can measure the waves that could enter the eye and trigger the “color” experience. The same cannot be said of God. “Spiritual” seems likely to be the best word to name the experience you have described. Religion need not be involved at any level. More simply, I’m sure these experiences exist. But there is good reason not to name the experience God. That word, and the set of words it often stands for, is far too laden with other meanings and contexts to be a helpful label in this context.
The information on sheet music is compressed, but an individual trained to read it can, with practice, decompress all of it into an experience of the composition. Ask any orchestra conductor of sufficient experience what that is like. Some conductors even prefer to experience the music that way; they find that the orchestra can get in the way of experiencing what the composer intended. That is, in fact, the job of a conductor. The phonograph record, on the other hand, is a representation of a single performance of a composition, interpreted by the conductor and the orchestra. And the point stands that a phonograph record cannot be read by (nearly all) humans. It is not analogous to the text of a book, it is analogous to the medium (tape, CD, MP3, &c.) on which the audiobook is recorded.
For that matter, the audiobook holds the same “additional information” as the recorded symphony: that added by the performer(s) translating the text/music into sound.
That’s not necessarily true. It’s possible that we could find the mechanism in the brain which is responsible for spiritual experiences. But that’s kind of missing the point. Most human interactions don’t drill down this deep. Even rational people have conversation that go, “Did you see that cool fnorble?” “Yeah, wasn’t that awesome?” without citing the peer-reviewed academic literature that establishes the objective existence and material properties of fnorbles. Religious people do the same: they say, “Did you feel the presence of the holy spirit?” “Yeah, I did, wasn’t that awesome?”
Sure, but such people are rare. You can probably also train yourself to have spiritual experiences.
Fine, how about this then: display the audio waveform on an oscilloscope. The point is that having music come into your years is a fundamentally different subjective experience than having it come in to your eyes even if the information content is the same in both cases.
I think the crux here is to avoid arguing against people’s experiences when trying to raise the sanity waterline. If one argues against their deep experiences, there’s a big danger of the backfire effect. If one acknowledges the experience of God as something real, but delineates that from proof of an actual God existing, this may go further with religious people.