the information entering your brain is the same in both cases
And that is clearly true. It doesn’t matter how (or even whether) that information is “processed”.
Note that your re-statement of my claim, “from the brain’s point of view the information in the grooves and the information in the music is the same” is not my actual claim. I said nothing about “the brain’s point of view”. That phrase is non-sensical with respect to an information-theoretical analysis.
If you really want to get technical, there is a “point of view” with respect to information content, and that is the repertoire of distinguishable states that a system can be said to potentially be in. The choice of that repertoire is arbitrary, and so can be said to be a “point of view.” There is an implied “point of view” with respect to music, and that is the ability to reconstruct the audio waveform within the range of human hearing, roughly 20HZ-20kHz. With respect to that “point of view”, my claim is correct, and can actually be mathematically proven to be correct by the Nyquist sampling theorem.
What is not the same—and this is the whole point—is the subjective experience of having the same information entering your brain through different sensory modalities. The intellectual understanding of spiritual experience in terms of neurobiology or whatever is very different from the actual subjective experience, and if you haven’t had the actual subjective experience, your understanding of spirituality is necessarily limited by that.
One is between information structured in such a way as to operate on our brains so as to produce a subjective response, and information that we have to do some work to interpret. (E.g., music in the form of sound waves versus music in the form of a printed score—at least, for people who understand music notation but don’t have the fluency of some professional musicians who can look at a score and “hear” what it says.)
The other is between information we are able to make sense of and information we aren’t. (E.g., the text of a novel, and the same thing after encryption using a cipher I don’t know how to break, with a key I don’t know.)
In practice some things are intermediate. (E.g., the text of a novel, and the same thing after “encryption” with ROT13.)
Giving me a micrograph of an LP’s grooves is much more like the second of those than like the first. Maybe the information is interpretable in principle—I guess I could measure very carefully, and then do a Fourier transform by hand and figure out what frequences are present, etc., etc., etc. -- but in practice, showing me those micrographs is going to convey essentially no information about the music to me. I’m not much better off than if you’d encrypted the data (and certainly worse than if you’d just ROT13ed it.)
So when you contrast music and words, you’re confusing matters because most of the difference you profess to find is not between music and words, but between different degrees of “difficulty” in reconstructing the content in a form we can make use of. If you’d compared “listening to the audiobook of a novel” with “reading the text of the novel, after encryption with a cipher of moderate difficulty” you’d have had something much nearer to the comparison between “listening to music” and “looking at micrographs of a record groove”—and you’d no longer have found so big a difference between words and music.
The thing is, you could have done this right and it would have served your purpose almost equally well. Audiobook versus printed novel; recorded music versus printed score. For all but the very best musicians, the printed score will have far less power to please or move than the recorded music; the relationship here is much closer to the relationship between an audiobook and a printed novel; and you could run with that and draw your analogy with religious/spiritual experiences. But I have the impression that you wanted to stress (I would say, to overstate) the ineffability of those experiences—and as a result you made a bogus comparison instead of a good one.
Well, OK, but this is a very different kind of critique than you were offering before. Before you were making a simple (and wrong) technical claim:
The “information entering your brain” is very much NOT the same in both cases.
Now you’re mounting a critique of my rhetorical choices. It’s a constructive critique, so I thank you for that. But let me explain why I made the choice that I did.
The point I was trying to make is that the subjective sensation of spiritual experience matters. It is too facile to dismiss God as simply “a pernicious delusion” as Dawkins does. There are people for whom a phenomenon that they call “the presence of the holy spirit” (or whatever) is every bit as real and non-delusional as the phenomenon that you call “hearing the music” is for you. Their explanatory theory of this phenomenon is wrong, but their experience is a real experience, not a delusion.
The difference between music and spiritual experience is that all humans have the subjective experience of hearing music (even deaf people!) but not all humans have spiritual experiences. So I had to find a way to illustrate the reality of spiritual experience to an audience which by and large has not had such experiences and is generally predisposed to dismiss them as delusions. I considered and discarded many possible ways of doing this, and finally settled on music because of its universality. But the subjective sensation of reading sheet music depends on how much you have been trained to read sheet music, and I didn’t want to muddy the waters with that kind of relativity. So for the counterpoint I wanted a rendering of music that no human has been trained to process. I picked grooves in the hopes that people would intuitively understand that the music is somehow there, but you can’t “get at the essence of it” by looking. You have to do something else. In the same way, you can’t “get at the essence” of a spiritual experience by understanding the neurobiology of it and calling it a delusion. You have to do something else.
I’m not sure if I made the right choice. But I think I made a defensible one.
you were making a simple (and wrong) technical claim
No, that wasn’t me, it was Lumifer.
Now you’re mounting a critique of my rhetorical choices.
That doesn’t seem to me like a good description of what I’m doing. In particular, my criticism is not mostly about the rhetorical effect of what you wrote, but about its logic.
Their explanatory theory of this phenomenon is wrong, but their experience is a real experience, not a delusion.
The boundary between experience and explanation is fuzzy and porous, but it seems to me that when (say) Richard Dawkins calls belief in God a pernicious delusion, what he is saying is precisely that believers’ explanatory theory of their experiences is wrong, not that they didn’t have the experiences. The same goes, I think, for most other atheists who loudly criticize theism and theists. So I fear you may be tilting at windmills.
But I must say a few words about the fuzziness and porousness of that boundary. Suppose I have a hallucination, think I see my dead grandmother, and conclude that I have seen a ghost. And suppose you don’t believe ghosts are real. I say to you “I saw the ghost of my dead grandmother”. You say “No, you didn’t”. Are you denying my experience, or my interpretation of it? I think you might reasonably deny two things I would claim, while accepting a third. You accept that I had an experience as of seeing my dead grandmother. You deny that I actually saw an actual thing that resembled my dead grandmother. And you deny, more specifically, that I saw a ghost. Something similar—though of course it needn’t involve outright hallucination—may happen with religious experiences. I feel an overwhelming sense of love and acceptance and majesty; I conceptualize this as experiencing the presence of a divine being; I conclude that Jesus loves me and wants me to go and be a missionary. Richard Dawkins may reasonably accept that I felt those things; deny that I felt the presence of a divine being; deny in particular that I learned that Jesus wants me to be a missionary.
And the difficulty is that if you ask me in either of these cases to say what my experience was then—quite aside from the possibility that it may have been somewhat indescribable—I may well think of it, and describe it, in terms that already have some theorizing built into them. I may say, in the first case, “the experience I had was that I saw a ghost”; in the second, “the experience I had was of feeling the presence of God”. If you disagree with the inbuilt theorizing, are you denying the reality of my experience? I think that’s mostly a matter of definition; in any case, I see no reason why skeptics shouldn’t do it. (Though sometimes it might be impolitic to do it out loud.)
You have to do something else.
If you want a deep understanding of the experience, yes you do. But I’m not convinced that skeptics are under any sort of obligation to want that. I feel quite comfortable saying that, at least to a good first approximation[1], no experience could actually give all that much evidence for the things that some believers infer from their experiences. And if, for whatever reason, the question actually at issue is whether our universe was created by a superbeing of vast power and goodness, or whether men who have sex with other men should be stoned to death, it may suffice to say “your experiences can’t possibly be much evidence for that” rather than getting an intimate understanding of what those experiences are like.
[1] The hedging is because maybe there are exotic ways for an experience to convey a lot of evidence; e.g., perhaps when you think you hear God speaking to you he tells you some very specific piece of information you couldn’t reasonably have known or worked out, and it turns out to be correct; that’s at least evidence of something, though it’s hard to see how you could know it was God. So far as I can tell, nothing like this is going on in the great majority of religious experiences.
I say to you “I saw the ghost of my dead grandmother”. You say “No, you didn’t”.
I wouldn’t say that. I would say, “I believe that you think you saw the ghost of your dead grandmother. And it’s not entirely out of the question that it was in fact the ghost of your dead grandmother. But I think it’s more likely that there’s some other explanation.”
And actually, I probably wouldn’t even say that. I would probably say, “I’m sorry your grandmother is dead. She must have meant a lot to you.”
I’m not convinced that skeptics are under any sort of obligation to want that.
“Obligation” is an odd word to use here. If you believe that having a more complete model and accurate model of the world is a good thing, then it seems to me that it follows logically that having a better model of why some people believe the things they do is a good thing. Does that constitute an “obligation”? I don’t know, but I don’t want to quibble over terminology.
no experience could actually give all that much evidence for the things that some believers infer from their experiences
If prayer’s to a particular god were answered more often than prayers to some other god, that would be pretty convincing evidence (at least to me) that that god existed and the others didn’t. Many religious claims are in fact falsifiable (and falsified) theories.
if, for whatever reason, the question actually at issue is whether our universe was created by a superbeing of vast power and goodness, or whether men who have sex with other men should be stoned to death
Oh, yes, of course. I’m not suggesting that we disarm against the fundamentalist wackos. What I’m suggesting is that some people who profess to believe in God are actually our (non-believers) intellectual allies in many other matters, and so having a better theory of how that happens (or, at the very least, employing less inflammatory rhetoric towards them) might make the world a better place for everyone. That’s all.
Sorry, I wasn’t clear enough: the “you” and “I” there were so called just for convenience. I wouldn’t say the things “I” say in that paragraph, either. (And, for the avoidance of doubt, I agree that both the answers you say you might give are better than a flat “No, you didn’t”. Of course.)
“Obligation” is an odd word to use here. [...] I don’t want to quibble over terminology.
Well, the whole point of what you’ve been saying here seems to be that skeptics who argue against religious beliefs are (or at least many of them are) doing something wrong, that instead of arguing over religious beliefs they should be empathizing with religious experiences or something like that.
I agree that understanding things is better than not understanding them. But understanding any specific thing is not always a high priority.
If prayers to a particular god were answered more often than prayers to some other god, that would be pretty convincing evidence [...]
Of course. Perhaps I was unclear: I didn’t mean “nothing that could possibly happen would constitute strong evidence”, I meant “no purely internal religious experience would constitute strong evidence”. (With the proviso I stated, of course.) In other words, the sort of “experience” that I thought this whole discussion was about.
fundamentalist wackos
Plenty of people who are not in any useful sense fundamentalist wackos believe that the world was created by a superbeing of vast power and goodness. And while wanting gay people stoned to death is probably in wacko-only territory, there are plenty of non-wackos who want gay people not to be allowed to marry one another for reasons that are ultimately pretty similar to the wackos’ reasons.
some people who profess to believe in God are actually [...] allies in many other matters
Yup, absolutely true. I don’t think this is as little understood as I think you think it is.
less inflammatory rhetoric
If all you’re saying is that in many contexts it is better not to insist on talking about sky fairies and telling religious people they’re crazy—why, yes, I agree. And, again, my impression is that most people here do too.
Although LW is on the whole a pretty unreligious place, there are active members here who are religious believers, and I don’t think they get abused for it. And from time to time someone comes along and says, more or less, “hi, I’m a believer but sympathetic to rationalism; can we talk?” and the responses mostly seem pretty respectful and polite to me. See, e.g., this post from a believer leaning towards agnosticism and wanting thoughts on miracles, though of course the “I might deconvert” framing may have made people nicer.
Well, my OP was not written specifically for LW, and it’s possible that posting it here was not appropriate, at least not without some significant revisions. If so, I apologize. I’ll try to do better next time.
I really don’t want to quibble over the meaning of the word “process”. The original claim was:
And that is clearly true. It doesn’t matter how (or even whether) that information is “processed”.
Note that your re-statement of my claim, “from the brain’s point of view the information in the grooves and the information in the music is the same” is not my actual claim. I said nothing about “the brain’s point of view”. That phrase is non-sensical with respect to an information-theoretical analysis.
If you really want to get technical, there is a “point of view” with respect to information content, and that is the repertoire of distinguishable states that a system can be said to potentially be in. The choice of that repertoire is arbitrary, and so can be said to be a “point of view.” There is an implied “point of view” with respect to music, and that is the ability to reconstruct the audio waveform within the range of human hearing, roughly 20HZ-20kHz. With respect to that “point of view”, my claim is correct, and can actually be mathematically proven to be correct by the Nyquist sampling theorem.
What is not the same—and this is the whole point—is the subjective experience of having the same information entering your brain through different sensory modalities. The intellectual understanding of spiritual experience in terms of neurobiology or whatever is very different from the actual subjective experience, and if you haven’t had the actual subjective experience, your understanding of spirituality is necessarily limited by that.
You’re collapsing two distinctions.
One is between information structured in such a way as to operate on our brains so as to produce a subjective response, and information that we have to do some work to interpret. (E.g., music in the form of sound waves versus music in the form of a printed score—at least, for people who understand music notation but don’t have the fluency of some professional musicians who can look at a score and “hear” what it says.)
The other is between information we are able to make sense of and information we aren’t. (E.g., the text of a novel, and the same thing after encryption using a cipher I don’t know how to break, with a key I don’t know.)
In practice some things are intermediate. (E.g., the text of a novel, and the same thing after “encryption” with ROT13.)
Giving me a micrograph of an LP’s grooves is much more like the second of those than like the first. Maybe the information is interpretable in principle—I guess I could measure very carefully, and then do a Fourier transform by hand and figure out what frequences are present, etc., etc., etc. -- but in practice, showing me those micrographs is going to convey essentially no information about the music to me. I’m not much better off than if you’d encrypted the data (and certainly worse than if you’d just ROT13ed it.)
So when you contrast music and words, you’re confusing matters because most of the difference you profess to find is not between music and words, but between different degrees of “difficulty” in reconstructing the content in a form we can make use of. If you’d compared “listening to the audiobook of a novel” with “reading the text of the novel, after encryption with a cipher of moderate difficulty” you’d have had something much nearer to the comparison between “listening to music” and “looking at micrographs of a record groove”—and you’d no longer have found so big a difference between words and music.
The thing is, you could have done this right and it would have served your purpose almost equally well. Audiobook versus printed novel; recorded music versus printed score. For all but the very best musicians, the printed score will have far less power to please or move than the recorded music; the relationship here is much closer to the relationship between an audiobook and a printed novel; and you could run with that and draw your analogy with religious/spiritual experiences. But I have the impression that you wanted to stress (I would say, to overstate) the ineffability of those experiences—and as a result you made a bogus comparison instead of a good one.
Well, OK, but this is a very different kind of critique than you were offering before. Before you were making a simple (and wrong) technical claim:
Now you’re mounting a critique of my rhetorical choices. It’s a constructive critique, so I thank you for that. But let me explain why I made the choice that I did.
The point I was trying to make is that the subjective sensation of spiritual experience matters. It is too facile to dismiss God as simply “a pernicious delusion” as Dawkins does. There are people for whom a phenomenon that they call “the presence of the holy spirit” (or whatever) is every bit as real and non-delusional as the phenomenon that you call “hearing the music” is for you. Their explanatory theory of this phenomenon is wrong, but their experience is a real experience, not a delusion.
The difference between music and spiritual experience is that all humans have the subjective experience of hearing music (even deaf people!) but not all humans have spiritual experiences. So I had to find a way to illustrate the reality of spiritual experience to an audience which by and large has not had such experiences and is generally predisposed to dismiss them as delusions. I considered and discarded many possible ways of doing this, and finally settled on music because of its universality. But the subjective sensation of reading sheet music depends on how much you have been trained to read sheet music, and I didn’t want to muddy the waters with that kind of relativity. So for the counterpoint I wanted a rendering of music that no human has been trained to process. I picked grooves in the hopes that people would intuitively understand that the music is somehow there, but you can’t “get at the essence of it” by looking. You have to do something else. In the same way, you can’t “get at the essence” of a spiritual experience by understanding the neurobiology of it and calling it a delusion. You have to do something else.
I’m not sure if I made the right choice. But I think I made a defensible one.
No, that wasn’t me, it was Lumifer.
That doesn’t seem to me like a good description of what I’m doing. In particular, my criticism is not mostly about the rhetorical effect of what you wrote, but about its logic.
The boundary between experience and explanation is fuzzy and porous, but it seems to me that when (say) Richard Dawkins calls belief in God a pernicious delusion, what he is saying is precisely that believers’ explanatory theory of their experiences is wrong, not that they didn’t have the experiences. The same goes, I think, for most other atheists who loudly criticize theism and theists. So I fear you may be tilting at windmills.
But I must say a few words about the fuzziness and porousness of that boundary. Suppose I have a hallucination, think I see my dead grandmother, and conclude that I have seen a ghost. And suppose you don’t believe ghosts are real. I say to you “I saw the ghost of my dead grandmother”. You say “No, you didn’t”. Are you denying my experience, or my interpretation of it? I think you might reasonably deny two things I would claim, while accepting a third. You accept that I had an experience as of seeing my dead grandmother. You deny that I actually saw an actual thing that resembled my dead grandmother. And you deny, more specifically, that I saw a ghost. Something similar—though of course it needn’t involve outright hallucination—may happen with religious experiences. I feel an overwhelming sense of love and acceptance and majesty; I conceptualize this as experiencing the presence of a divine being; I conclude that Jesus loves me and wants me to go and be a missionary. Richard Dawkins may reasonably accept that I felt those things; deny that I felt the presence of a divine being; deny in particular that I learned that Jesus wants me to be a missionary.
And the difficulty is that if you ask me in either of these cases to say what my experience was then—quite aside from the possibility that it may have been somewhat indescribable—I may well think of it, and describe it, in terms that already have some theorizing built into them. I may say, in the first case, “the experience I had was that I saw a ghost”; in the second, “the experience I had was of feeling the presence of God”. If you disagree with the inbuilt theorizing, are you denying the reality of my experience? I think that’s mostly a matter of definition; in any case, I see no reason why skeptics shouldn’t do it. (Though sometimes it might be impolitic to do it out loud.)
If you want a deep understanding of the experience, yes you do. But I’m not convinced that skeptics are under any sort of obligation to want that. I feel quite comfortable saying that, at least to a good first approximation[1], no experience could actually give all that much evidence for the things that some believers infer from their experiences. And if, for whatever reason, the question actually at issue is whether our universe was created by a superbeing of vast power and goodness, or whether men who have sex with other men should be stoned to death, it may suffice to say “your experiences can’t possibly be much evidence for that” rather than getting an intimate understanding of what those experiences are like.
[1] The hedging is because maybe there are exotic ways for an experience to convey a lot of evidence; e.g., perhaps when you think you hear God speaking to you he tells you some very specific piece of information you couldn’t reasonably have known or worked out, and it turns out to be correct; that’s at least evidence of something, though it’s hard to see how you could know it was God. So far as I can tell, nothing like this is going on in the great majority of religious experiences.
Oh, sorry, my mistake.
I wouldn’t say that. I would say, “I believe that you think you saw the ghost of your dead grandmother. And it’s not entirely out of the question that it was in fact the ghost of your dead grandmother. But I think it’s more likely that there’s some other explanation.”
And actually, I probably wouldn’t even say that. I would probably say, “I’m sorry your grandmother is dead. She must have meant a lot to you.”
“Obligation” is an odd word to use here. If you believe that having a more complete model and accurate model of the world is a good thing, then it seems to me that it follows logically that having a better model of why some people believe the things they do is a good thing. Does that constitute an “obligation”? I don’t know, but I don’t want to quibble over terminology.
If prayer’s to a particular god were answered more often than prayers to some other god, that would be pretty convincing evidence (at least to me) that that god existed and the others didn’t. Many religious claims are in fact falsifiable (and falsified) theories.
Oh, yes, of course. I’m not suggesting that we disarm against the fundamentalist wackos. What I’m suggesting is that some people who profess to believe in God are actually our (non-believers) intellectual allies in many other matters, and so having a better theory of how that happens (or, at the very least, employing less inflammatory rhetoric towards them) might make the world a better place for everyone. That’s all.
Sorry, I wasn’t clear enough: the “you” and “I” there were so called just for convenience. I wouldn’t say the things “I” say in that paragraph, either. (And, for the avoidance of doubt, I agree that both the answers you say you might give are better than a flat “No, you didn’t”. Of course.)
Well, the whole point of what you’ve been saying here seems to be that skeptics who argue against religious beliefs are (or at least many of them are) doing something wrong, that instead of arguing over religious beliefs they should be empathizing with religious experiences or something like that.
I agree that understanding things is better than not understanding them. But understanding any specific thing is not always a high priority.
Of course. Perhaps I was unclear: I didn’t mean “nothing that could possibly happen would constitute strong evidence”, I meant “no purely internal religious experience would constitute strong evidence”. (With the proviso I stated, of course.) In other words, the sort of “experience” that I thought this whole discussion was about.
Plenty of people who are not in any useful sense fundamentalist wackos believe that the world was created by a superbeing of vast power and goodness. And while wanting gay people stoned to death is probably in wacko-only territory, there are plenty of non-wackos who want gay people not to be allowed to marry one another for reasons that are ultimately pretty similar to the wackos’ reasons.
Yup, absolutely true. I don’t think this is as little understood as I think you think it is.
If all you’re saying is that in many contexts it is better not to insist on talking about sky fairies and telling religious people they’re crazy—why, yes, I agree. And, again, my impression is that most people here do too.
Although LW is on the whole a pretty unreligious place, there are active members here who are religious believers, and I don’t think they get abused for it. And from time to time someone comes along and says, more or less, “hi, I’m a believer but sympathetic to rationalism; can we talk?” and the responses mostly seem pretty respectful and polite to me. See, e.g., this post from a believer leaning towards agnosticism and wanting thoughts on miracles, though of course the “I might deconvert” framing may have made people nicer.
Well, my OP was not written specifically for LW, and it’s possible that posting it here was not appropriate, at least not without some significant revisions. If so, I apologize. I’ll try to do better next time.