Yup, that’s an ability. It’s a thing you can do when you want to do it and avoid when you don’t, and things with those characteristics we generally classify as abilities. Having “spiritual experiences” is not, for most people who have them, an ability in that sense—and if it were, I think they should (and perhaps even would) for that very reason doubt that God (the gods, the life-force permeating all things, the ancestral spirits, whatever) had much to do with it.
I repeat: why classify “having spiritual experiences” as an ability rather than, say, a susceptibility? Why is it more like having ideas than like having colds? Why is it more like having orgasms than like having sneezes?
it can be learned and developed by conscious effort
If true, that would be (1) interesting and (2) a reason for seeing it as an ability. But let’s be a bit more careful. Having spiritual experiences on demand would be an ability (and, in the same way, if you had the rather peculiar superpower of catching a cold any time you wanted, that would be an ability although not a very useful one). But I don’t see that that makes the term “ability” appropriate for people who have them involuntarily.
I’m pushing this point because it seems to me that a lot of the work in your argument is actually being done by your choice of the word “ability” and your use of analogies (blindness...) that are only appropriate when talking about the absence of an ability, but it doesn’t seem to me that you’ve justified those choices. Maybe “ability” is a good term; maybe actually something with a different spin on it like “liability” or “susceptibility” would be better; maybe we need something more neutral. But when the choice of terminology and analogies matters, let’s have some actual support for it.
Yes, I understand. It’s a perfectly reasonable thing to push back on.
But I don’t see that that makes the term “ability” appropriate for people who have them involuntarily.
I certainly agree with that, and so this reduces the issue to an empirical question: are spiritual experiences something that people can (mostly) control? I think they are. I don’t see a lot of evidence of people having spiritual experiences outside the context of certain deliberate practices and rituals like attending church, reciting prayers, singing, laying on of hands, sweat lodge ceremonies...
But it’s an “ability” that is more akin to “the ability to enjoy sex” or “the ability to appreciate modern art” than it is “the ability to fly an airplane” or “the ability to run a four-minute mile.”
I think they should (and perhaps even would) for that very reason doubt that God (the gods, the life-force permeating all things, the ancestral spirits, whatever) had much to do with it.
I think that people who believe in God by and large don’t really think it through to that level of detail. Those that do tend to come to the conclusion you’d expect them to. And, BTW, this is why people don’t think it through. Losing the ability to commune with God can be very painful for some people. It’s rather like if you think too hard about the biological realities of sex you can lose the ability (sic!) to enjoy it.
I don’t see a lot of evidence of people having spiritual experiences outside the context of certain deliberate practices and rituals
I don’t see a lot of evidence of people getting venereal diseases outside the context of having sex, or getting hangovers outside the context of drinking a lot. Are those “abilities”? I don’t think so. If you agree, what’s the relevant difference?
Sure, why not? Someone who can drink heavily without getting a hangover can be said to have “the ability to hold their liquor.” It’s a little harder to find a commonly used phrase to refer to someone who can have unprotected sex without contracting venereal diseases. This would probably be referred to as an “immunity” rather than an “ability.”
If you want to speak of people having “immunity” from spiritual experiences I certainly won’t argue with you.
Sorry, I wasn’t clear and you ended up interpreting my question as almost the exact opposite of what I intended, so let me try to clarify.
You argue (if I understand right) as follows. Spiritual experiences generally occur only in certain contexts that people can voluntarily put themselves in. To that extent, they are voluntary. So, those who have spiritual experiences have some ability to choose whether to have them or not. So, having spiritual experiences is an “ability”.
But exactly parallel things are true of some things we don’t generally classify that way, like getting venereal diseases or having hangovers. Both of those things occur only in particular contexts that people can voluntarily put themselves in. (Having sex; drinking a lot of alcohol.)
I guess you would not generally speak of “the ability to contract gonorrhea” or “the ability to get a raging hangover”, any more than I would. So why does the fact that spiritual experiences generally occur in special contexts give good reason to speak of “the ability to have spiritual experiences”?
Ah. Well, one difference is that spiritual experiences feel good, and so many people seek them out. No one seeks to have a hangover or contract gonorrhea.
I am still not convinced, for reasons I’ll give in a moment, but actually I think this would be a good time to exercise some rationalist skills. We have a difficulty over definitions, so let’s taboo the term “ability” and perhaps take some cues from Yvain’s excellent post about “disease”.
So, can you state your thesis without using the word “ability” or anything equivalent? Can you make explicit what specific features of “spiritual experiences” are relevant and how they lead to the conclusions you want to draw?
I should fulfil my promise to explain why the combination of “only in some situations that we can seek out” and “feels good” isn’t enough to justify calling something an “ability”, at least as I use the word. Let me quote from Jonathan Franzen’s book The Corrections. “Him” here is an elderly man, Al, whose mental function is beginning to go downhill.
Still looking at the window, he raised his head with a tentative joy, as if he thought he recognized someone outside, someone he loved. [...] “There are children,” he said, sitting up straighter. “Do you see them?” [...] “Al, those are sunflowers, she [sc. his wife] said, half angry, half beseeching. “You’re seeing reflections in the window.”
Al has had a pleasant experience (thinking he saw children playing) which will occur only in certain circumstances that perhaps he could seek out (there being sunflowers around to confuse with children). Would you want to talk about the ability to confuse sunflowers with children? I wouldn’t.
So, can you state your thesis without using the word “ability” or anything equivalent?
Well, I’m actually defending two theses here, one of which is that “ability” is an appropriate term to use, but I’m happy to just agree to disagree about that.
Here’s a restatement of my other (hypo)thesis, making my best effort to avoid loaded terms:
There exists a kind of subjective experience that is analogous to but distinct from other subjective experiences like seeing a sunset, tasting food, hearing music, etc. It is a real subjective experience, not a delusion nor an indication of any kind of mental pathology (though it can be associated with some pathologies, particularly in its more extreme forms). It is induced not by light nor chemicals nor sound, but rather by engaging in certain behaviors (like prayer) and approaching those behaviors with a certain mindset. The mindset is difficult to describe without using loaded words (I want to call it “faith”) so I’ll just call it the opposite of (or an absence of) skepticism (I presume that’s not a loaded term?)
Some people do not have firsthand experience of this subjective sensation, either because they have not engaged in the behaviors that produce it, or because they are unable or unwilling to enter the mindset that produces it, or because their brains are wired in such a way that they are simply do not (I originally wrote “are unable to” here) experience it even with the right behavior and mindset. It is a situation completely analogous to the well-known phenomenon that some people cannot distinguish the colors red and green, and therefore cannot have the same subjective experience of seeing a tree and a sunset as someone who can (“is able to”) distinguish red and green.
It is this difference in firsthand subjective experience that accounts at least in part for the seemingly intractable differences among people when it comes to questions about the existence of deities. Some people believe in deities because they have had real subjective experiences that they believe in good faith (no pun intended) can best be explained as a firsthand interaction with a deity.
I advance this hypothesis because if it is true then it seems plausible that disagreements over the existence of deities will become less intractable and more fruitful if those who have not had these subjective experiences nonetheless acknowledge the possibility that their interlocutors might have had such an experience, and that this is not necessarily symptomatic of any kind of pathology or mental deficiency. To the contrary, it might be an indication of a normal part of the wiring of the human brain that is missing from their brains, or at least a normal part of the human experience which they have simply never experienced. Moreover, the explanation of the experience in terms of an encounter with a deity may be deeply meaningful to the person that holds this belief, and that presenting them with evidence that this belief is false may be intensely painful, even traumatic, because (among other things) it might make them think that they are suffering from a pathology or otherwise be mentally deficient.
Finally, though I didn’t make this explicit, I’m suggesting that all this should be taken into account when deciding how to interact with someone who believes in deities. Throwing logic at religion might not be the best move.
There exists a kind of subjective experience [...]
I think the only part of that paragraph that is in any way controversial is the bit where you say the experience in question is “not a delusion nor an indication of any kind of mental pathology”—but I think most even of the most fire-breathing atheists wouldn’t claim that religious experience as such is a delusion (I think that would be a category error) or pathological. So: so far so good, but not much of substance yet.
(But, on that just-infinitesimally-controversial point—I remark that the word “real” that you use is at least a little bit loaded, and it’s not really clear to me what it means. I mean, what’s the alternative? They have this experience but it’s a fake experience? What would that even mean? The obvious thing for it to mean is that the experience doesn’t have the meaning they think it has; that although it seems to them that what they’ve experienced is being touched by an angel or spoken to by God or whatever, the real cause of their experience is something very different. But that’s the position you yourself have taken, so you surely can’t mean “real” in opposition to anything like that.)
Some people do not have firsthand experience of this subjective sensation [...]
Again, true and uncontroversial.
completely analogous to the well-known phenomenon that some people cannot distinguish the colors red and green
Bzzzzt! I think it’s very interesting that even when deliberately trying to state your thesis without loaded terms, you apparently just can’t help equating not having religious experiences with a deficiency. I suggest that unless religious experiences are actual perceptions of non-natural realities—a position that AIUI you explicitly reject—the two things are demonstrably not “completely analogous”. Why? Because probably the single most salient thing about that inability-to-distinguish, the thing that explains why it’s sometimes called “colour blindness”, is that it involves an actual perceptual deficit. In “colour-blind” individuals, an extremely important channel by which information about the external world flows into their brain has substantially less sensitivity, substantially less bandwidth, than in individuals with normal colour vision. The colour-blind get less information about the world through their eyes than the not-colour-blind, and you can measure how much less. Whereas those who don’t have “spiritual experiences” … don’t have a particular kind of experience, which by your own account conveys no information about the outside world, no genuine insight into the nature of reality—it’s just an experience that some people have and some people find enjoyable or moving or motivating.
Some people believe in deities because they have had real subjective experiences that they believe in good faith [...] can best be explained as a firsthand interaction with a deity.
Again, true and close to 100% uncontroversial. (Aside from the caveat stated above about the word “real”.)
disagreements [...] will become [...] more fruitful if those who have not have these subjective experiences nonetheless acknowledge the possibility that their interlocutors might have had such an experience [...]
So far (I acknowledge that your sentence isn’t over yet) this seems true but pointless: so far as I can tell, pretty much everyone acknowledges that. So let’s continue and see whether it gets more contentful as the sentence continues.
and that this is not necessarily symptomatic of any kind of pathology or mental deficiency.
Still 100% uncontroversial; so far as I can tell basically no one claims that having religious experiences is necessarily symptomatic of pathology or mental deficiency.
(So, so far, it seems to me that the thesis you’re advancing is true but—my apologies! -- utterly uninteresting. It’s as if you were earnestly enjoining us not to punch believers in the face while discussing religion with them: sure, it’s good advice, but whatever makes you think we need it? I think this explains some of the negativity in the responses you’ve had: if you earnestly tell people not to punch believers in the face, they’re liable to get the impression that you think they would be punching believers in the face without your advice, and that would be a stupid thing to do, and no one likes being told they’re stupid.)
it might be an indication of a normal part of the wiring of the human brain that is missing from their brains
You’re really not trying all that hard to avoid loaded terms, are you? :-) I’m getting the impression that for some reason it’s really important to you to portray skeptics, or at least some skeptics, as abnormal people with bits missing from their brains that cause them to be in a certain sense blind, like those who cannot distinguish colours. But I’m not sure what that reason is. A cynical hypothesis would be that you like feeling superior to those skeptics, but I bet the truth is more interesting than that. Any idea what it might be?
the explanation [...] may be deeply meaningful to the person that holds this belief [...] presenting them with evidence that this belief is false may be intensely painful
Yup, it may. This is perhaps the least obvious thing you’ve said, but—sorry, again—it’s still pretty damn obvious.
although I didn’t make this explicit
I think you did. Right back in the OP, you wrote: “The antidote for this frustration is to realize that spirituality is not about logic. It’s about subjective experiences that not everyone is privy to. Logic is about looking at the grooves. Spirituality is about hearing the music.”
So after all this, I think my conclusion is this: with the value-laden bits stripped out, what you’re saying is common knowledge, to such an extent that the suggestion that skeptics reading it could be forgiven for feeling a bit insulted at the suggestion that they need to be told it. That feels like a really uncharitable and negative conclusion, which I regret. Perhaps I’m missing something that’s genuinely non-obvious, or perhaps I’m overoptimistic about the actual understanding and knowledge of skeptics. If so, perhaps you can point out some bit of what you’ve said that I should be more surprised by, or something?
I’d like to say a few words on one other point that’s maybe getting a bit overlooked in this discussion, which is that there are plenty of religious people who don’t have much in the way of religious experiences, plenty more who do but who don’t take them to be the main support for their beliefs, and also plenty of skeptics who have very similar experiences but interpret them very differently; and that having such experiences doesn’t seem to make skeptics any less abrasive. For instance, Sam Harris (author of, e.g., “The End of Faith”, one of the “Four Horsemen” of the New Atheist movement) is a practitioner of meditation, which he says provides him with mystical experiences, but he’s every bit as antireligious as, say, Richard Dawkins. On the other side: well, every now and then you get religious “revivals” characterized by fairly widespread religious experiences, often manifesting as things like “speaking in tongues”, and what makes them notable is precisely the fact that this is not the usual state of affairs in the churches where they happen. For instance, back in the mid-1990s when I was an evangelical Christian, there was something of a to-do in the UK’s evangelical Anglican churches about the so-called Toronto Blessing, and I’m pretty sure that in the churches I frequented this was mostly because most of the people there, most of the time, did not have dramatic religious experiences at all, and they were excited at the prospect of such experiences becoming more common.
So, if plenty of religious people seldom or never have these experiences, and quite a few very vigorously anti-religious people do have them, it seems to me that the difference between having them and not having them can’t be that large a part of what makes some people skeptical about religion and others not. I dare say it plays a role sometimes, but it seems like you’re suggesting that it’s more than that, and I find that unlikely.
you apparently just can’t help equating not having religious experiences with a deficiency.
That’s right, because I think it is a kind of deficiency, though I would not have used that word if you had not introduced it into the conversation.
There’s a lot of controversy within the deaf community about whether being deaf is a deficiency or just another way of being, kind of like being gay. Personally, I think being deaf is a deficiency, but there’s a significant faction of the deaf community that would take offense at that. Your pushback on this has a similar feel to it.
it involves an actual perceptual deficit
Fair enough. Let me choose a different analogy then: some people have a subjective experience called “empathy” which manifests as a visceral revulsion at, for example, deliberately inflicting pain on another person even in situations where inflicting such pain might provide a net benefit to the inflicter. Some people don’t experience empathy. This is widely considered pathological.
Note that this has nothing to do with any objective judgement about the state of the world. Sociopaths and psychopaths know that other people experience pain, they just don’t care.
it’s really important to you to portray skeptics, or at least some skeptics, as abnormal people with bits missing from their brains that cause them to be in a certain sense blind, like those who cannot distinguish colours
The truth is important to me, yes. But the word “abnormal” is really heavily loaded, so I wouldn’t use it, just like I wouldn’t use “deficiency” without being prompted. Most people are straight, so technically being straight is normal and so one could argue that not being straight is “abnormal”. But by that standard, having red hair is abnormal. That is not what most people mean when they say “abnormal.”
You seem to want to read a value judgement into my choice of words which I do not intend. So let me try this: If you’re white you have a deficiency in skin pigmentation, and this deficiency leads to an inability to tolerate a lot of sun exposure without injury. Despite using the words “deficiency” and “inability” this is intended to be a mere statement of fact, not a value judgement. That is the sense in which I intend such words to be read when it comes to the “ability” to have spiritual experiences. Having spiritual experiences (or not) is neither good not bad, just different.
skeptics reading it could be forgiven for feeling a bit insulted at the suggestion that they need to be told it
What can I say? I’ve met many people who vehemently deny it. In fact, I’ve had a personal conversation with Richard Dawkins where he vehemently denied it. That’s one of the things that motivated me to start writing about this.
It’s funny, I have a very similar experience when I talk to people about quantum mechanics. The world bifurcates rather neatly into two camps: those who think what I’m saying is obvious and common knowledge, and those who think I’m a category 5 loon. And there are card-carrying physicists in both camps.
I was aiming for “funny” rather than “rude”; I’m sorry if I missed. (But personally I think your continued insistence on applying negative-valence terminology to Those Who Do Not Have Spiritual Experiences is much ruder than anything I’ve said in this discussion.)
Your pushback on this has a similar feel to it.
Deafness, like colour-blindness, involves an objectively measurable loss of sensory function. Whether that justifies using terms like “disability”, or whether e.g. membership in the Deaf community is a sufficiently important counterbalancing good to make such terms inappropriate, is perhaps debatable; but again it seems to me that you are drawing an analogy where the central feature of the thing on one side of the analogy is not present on the other.
My pushback consists mostly of pointing that out. It therefore doesn’t seem very similar to me.
Some people don’t experience empathy. This is widely considered pathological.
I think what’s usually “officially” reckoned pathological, if you look in the DSM or whatever, is not lack of empathy as such but psychopathy, a condition identified not merely by lack of empathy but by other underlying characteristics and outward effects including lack of concern for the welfare of others. Perhaps lack of empathy itself should be reckoned pathological, though, so let’s proceed with that stipulation.
So let’s consider why not having empathy is (or might be, or should be) considered pathological, when (e.g.) not having much melanin in your skin, or not having an appendix, is not. It seems to me that there are two reasons. First: not having empathy not infrequently leads to severe adverse consequences for other people: psychopaths are greatly overrepresented in the criminal population, for instance. Severe adverse consequences are an important part of what leads things to be reckoned pathologies. Second: not having empathy is rare. That’s not a necessary condition for calling something a pathology, but it helps; in doubtful cases, things present in a large fraction of the population are more likely to be reckoned just “normal variation” rather than pathology.
I mentioned “not having much melanin” as an example earlier, and actually it’s an informative one. If you merely have rather little melanin, you’re called “white-skinned” and that’s regarded as a normal condition. If you have none at all (and other things that tend to go along with having none at all) you’re called “albino” and that’s regarded as a pathology. Why? I think for the same reasons as I gave above: albinism is worse for you than merely being “white”, and much rarer.
Can we bring that parallel back to the case of psychopathy? I think so. Psychopathy is what you get when someone has no empathy at all, along with other unusual features that tend to coexist with absence of empathy, and there are substantial bad effects. (Just as albinism is what you get when someone has no melanin at all, along with other unusual features that tend to coexist with that, and there are substantial bad effects.) There is substantial variation in empathy within the “normal” population, though (just as there is substantial variation in amount of melanin and hence in skin tone) and people who are merely rather low in empathy are not generally considered pathological, though they might well be considered not very nice.
(There’s an important difference; so far as I know, there aren’t mostly-discrete populations with substantially different empathy levels, in the way that there are mostly-discrete populations with substantially different melanin levels.)
OK, enough preparatory stuff. How does this apply to the sorts of transcendent experiences we’re talking about? How close is your analogy? Let’s see.
First of all (dammit, more preparatory stuff; sorry) I think we need to clarify a thing or two about those experiences, because you’ve written about them in a rather black-and-white way: religious people have these experiences, skeptics don’t have them, and that’s why one group is religious and the other is skeptical. I’ve already suggested that actually both the “discordant” categories have plenty of people in them, but I want to draw attention to another relevant fact: having-these-experiences isn’t a binary thing. Not only because the frequency of such experiences can vary continuously, but also because there’s a continuum of experiences of this type, ranging from transcendent life-changing brain-buggering ones down to minor ones you might barely notice. The less dramatic ones are more common, and I suggest that what you might call “low-grade” spiritual experiences—a sense of great awe at something like the Grand Canyon or the starry sky, a passing feeling of exhilaration for no particular reason, briefly losing your sense of individuality at a concert or political rally, etc., etc., etc. -- are quite common even among the actively anti-religious. Even, e.g., everyone’s favourite skeptical punching bag, Richard Dawkins. Unless, of course, you define your terms so that those who don’t interpret their experiences as encounters with a non-natural reality are ipso facto not having that kind of experience; I hope you can see the problems that that would raise.
Now, exactly what I want to say about the analogy between spiritual experiences and empathy depends on exactly what we count as “having transcendent experiences”. How often? How dramatic?
If you mean having quite dramatic ones quite often: In this case, my impression is that even among the actively religious most people don’t have dramatic spirtiual experiences often. So not-having-the-experiences would be not merely within the range of normal variation, but actually the majority situation. What about the adverse-effects criterion? Well, on the one hand, dramatic spiritual experiences are generally greatly treasured by those who have them, so not having them seems like it involves missing out on something valuable. On the other hand, dramatic spirirtual experiences seem to be systematically misleading: those who have them are disproportionately likely to embrace factually incorrect metaphysical theses with enough enthusiasm that it redirects the course of their lives, so having them seems like a dangerous business. This all looks to me to have rather the same shape as taking mind-altering drugs: the effects can be pleasant or overwhelming or life-alteringly overwhelming, but pursuing them can take over your life and lead you to situations you really wouldn’t have wanted to be in before you started. I think it’s far from clear that the adverse consequences of not having the experiences are worse than those of having them.
If you mean having low-grade ones not so often: In this case, my impression is that very many of the people you’re taking aim at (including the one target you’ve mentioned twice by name, Richard Dawkins) do “have the experiences”, so the question of whether not having them should be considered pathological is kinda irrelevant.
But the word “abnormal” is really heavily loaded, so I wouldn’t use it
But you were perfectly happy to use its opposite, “normal”, in a way that makes it clear you consider Those Who Do Not Have The Experiences to be not-normal: “a normal part of the wiring of the human brain that is missing from their brains”. Saying “group A lacks a normal part of the human brain” may not use the word “abnormal”, but it most certainly uses the concept.
You seem to want to read a value judgement into my choice of words which I do not intend.
If you don’t intend such a value judgement, then I am at a loss to understand why even when you say you are trying to avoid loaded terms you are so insistent on, er, using loaded terms.
I’ve met many people who vehemently deny it. In fact, I’ve had a personal conversation with Richard Dawkins where he vehemently denied it.
What, specifically, did Richard Dawkins deny?
If you mean only that he wasn’t willing to use the loaded language you prefer, to treat Not Having The Experiences as a deficit, an abnormality, a thing like psychopathy and colour-blindness—yeah, sure, I dare say he wasn’t, but (as I thought I’d made very clear) that isn’t what I’m saying is commonplace.
If you mean something else: what did he deny? That some religious people have dramatic religious experiences? That some skeptics don’t? That having dramatic religious experiences tends to make people more inclined to believe in a religion? (These are all things I would be surprised to find him denying, but he’s done surprising things before.) Or what?
It’s funny, I have a very similar experience when I talk to people about quantum mechanics
I wouldn’t generally advise being worried on account of being called a loon by Luboš Motl, who has rather eccentric ideas about what constitutes lunacy. But, without making any comment on whether either his complaints or those of the unspecified other people who think what you’re saying is boringly familiar are correct, it seems to me that there’s no inconsistency. Motl says you’ve misrepresented exactly what the Copenhagen interpretation says and have made a mistake about polarization of light. As to the former, if you say “Copenhagen says X but actually Y” then Motl can be right if actually Copenhagen says something other than X, and the other guys can be right if every practising quantum physicist already accepts Y. As to the latter, what you say can be mostly correct and obvious even if there are a couple of mistakes in there.
So I’m not seeing the inconsistency there any more than here.
(In any case, I hope it’s clear that being attacked from both sides is no guarantee of being right.)
I was aiming for “funny” rather than “rude”; I’m sorry if I missed.
OK, I’m sorry if I was being humor-impaired.
Deafness, like colour-blindness, involves an objectively measurable loss of sensory function.
You’ll have to take this up with someone in the deaf community because I’m on your side of this particular issue. Nonetheless, the fact is that there exist deaf people who vehemently disagree with both of us on this.
So let’s consider why not having empathy
You’re getting too far into the weeds here. I brought up empathy not because it’s exactly the same as spiritual experience sensitivity (I’m going to start abbreviating that as SES) but because it’s a purely internal subjective experience and not relatable to anything that is objectively measurable outside the individual brain that is experiencing it. Of course many of the salient details are different, that’s why I didn’t choose it as my primary example.
religious people have these experiences, skeptics don’t have them
I’m not sure whether you wrote that as a statement of your position or a re-statement of what you think my position is, but either way I don’t agree with this statement. In fact, I rather belabor the point that I am a skeptic who has spiritual experiences, so I myself am a counterexample.
I also think that a fair number of religious people don’t have spiritual experiences. Mother Theresa, for example, probably never had one.
But you were perfectly happy to use its opposite, “normal”, in a way that makes it clear you consider Those Who Do Not Have The Experiences to be not-normal
No, that really is an unjustified extrapolation on your part. Being heterosexual is normal. It does not follow that being homosexual is abnormal.
Saying “group A lacks a normal part of the human brain” may not use the word “abnormal”, but it most certainly uses the concept.
Again, no. Some people are lactose intolerant. They lack the ability to produce the enzyme that digests lactose. This is actually the “normal” state of affairs; the ability to digest lactose arose very late in human evolutionary history. But the ability to digest dairy products is not “abnormal.”
You really are reading more into these words than I intend or that is justified by common patterns of usage.
If you don’t intend such a value judgement, then I am at a loss to understand why even when you say you are trying to avoid loaded terms you are so insistent on, er, using loaded terms.
Because English doesn’t have enough value-neutral words. How would you describe lactose intolerance without using words that make implicit value judgements? The very name “lactose intolerance” has a value judgement built into it: intolerance.
What, specifically, did Richard Dawkins deny?
I was on an Antarctic cruise with him so we had a lot of conversations over the course of about three weeks. I got to know him quite well on a personal level. He specifically denied a lot of things. The overall tenor of his denials was to make clear that he didn’t believe any concession whatsoever should be made to the proposition that some people have firsthand subjective experiences that cause them to believe in the supernatural, even if those beliefs have a net benefit to them. For example: at one point I argued that belief can have demonstrable benefits through the placebo effect. So even if God wasn’t real, the idea of God was real and had real and potentially beneficial effects for some people, and so dissuading them of these beliefs was not necessarily a good thing to do. His response was (and these are his exact words—I will never forget them): “But it’s not true.” Meaning: it doesn’t matter if dissuading people from their belief might send them into existential despair or even cause them actual harm; allowing someone to believe in something that is not objectively true is the greater evil.
you’ve misrepresented exactly what the Copenhagen interpretation says
Well, there is no universally agreed upon definition of what the Copenhagen interpretation is. But there is no question that the elements I presented are commonly associated with the Copenhagen brand, even if that’s not what Motl thinks of when he uses the term.
and have made a mistake about polarization of light
What mistake would that be?
being attacked from both sides is no guarantee of being right
Certainly true, but when one of those attacks is, “What you’re saying is so obvious it’s insulting for you to think we didn’t already know this” and the other is, “What you’re saying is so obviously false that it’s not even worth a respectful debunking” then I actually feel pretty good about having had something worthwhile to say, even if I might not be right.
I’m not sure whether you wrote that as a statement of your position or a re-statement of what you think my position is
Actually, not quite either; it’s intended as a restatement not of your explicitly taken position (which I know it is contrary to) but of what seems to me to be implicit in how you write about these things. You say (and I agree) that some skeptics have “spiritual experiences” and some religious people don’t; but I think no one reading the rest of what you write would get that impression.
Being heterosexual is normal. It does not follow that being homosexual is abnormal.
I am not saying “lisper says X is normal; therefore lisper says not-X is abnormal”. Not at all. I am pointing at an instance where you wrote something more specific. I quoted it before; let me quote it again. “it might be an indication of a normal part of the wiring of the human brain that is missing from their brains”. (Emphasis yours.) What would count as “abnormal”, if having a normal part of the wiring of the human brain missing from your brain doesn’t?
But the ability to digest dairy products is not “abnormal”.
Again it seems that you’re taking me to argue that if you think something is normal then you have to think its opposite is abnormal. I agree that you needn’t do any such thing, and that is not the argument I was making. (See above.)
How would you describe lactose intolerance without using words that make implicit value judgements?
“Some people get sick when they consume dairy products” would do pretty well. If more detail is required: “Children’s bodies produce an enzyme called lactase that breaks down one of the constituents in milk. Many adults’ bodies don’t, and if those people drink milk or eat things made from milk they feel ill afterwards. Some adults’ bodies do, especially in Western Europe and places colonized by Western Europeans. Those people can digest milk products without feeling bad.”
Or, if we need a brief technical-sounding term: “lactase nonpersistence”.
He specifically denied a lot of things.
You know, I was hoping you might be specific. (I see that you give one specific example below, on which I will comment in a moment; it doesn’t seem to me that it actually supports what you’re saying.)
he didn’t believe any concession whatsoever should be made to the proposition that some people have firsthand subjective experiences that cause them to believe in the supernatural
I hope you won’t be offended by my saying this, but given your apparent inability in this discussion to state your thesis without using terms that (so it seems to me, and so it might plausibly have seemed to Richard Dawkins if you did the same in conversation with him) represent these believers as being better than skeptics who don’t share their experiences, it seems plausible to me that what Dawkins actually took exception was those value judgements, rather than the bare assertions that, e.g., religious people sometimes have religious experiences and see those as evidence for their religion.
The specific example you give seems, actually, quite clearly not a matter of Dawkins disagreeing with the factual statements you’ve been making about spiritual experiences (as opposed to the value judgements you’ve been making, which as I already said are not obvious and uncontroversial). He didn’t—at least, those words you will never forget didn’t—deny that the idea of God can have beneficial effects. He just indicated that, as you put it, “allowing someone to believe in something that is not objectively true is the greater evil”.
I wonder whether I’ve failed to communicate effectively what it is in what you’re saying that I think is commonplace and obvious. I suggest that you’re saying two main things. (1) Some religious people have religious experiences, and these are part of why they believe what they do, and the experiences are real experiences and very important to those people, and non-religious people talking to religious people should bear all that in mind. (2) These experiences are valuable and positive, and people who have them are normal and people who don’t have them are not normal and have something missing from their brains and are like colour-blind or deaf people.
I think #1 is obvious and commonplace. I think #2 is a matter of values and definitions more than of facts, and I do not think you have given us good reason to agree with it.
The specific thing you quote Richard Dawkins as saying contradicts neither #1 nor #2 as such (though I bet he disagrees with #2) but a further claim you haven’t explicitly made in this discussion (though you’ve made some gestures in its direction): that belief (as opposed to spiritual experiences) can have sufficiently positive consequences to make it a good thing even when incorrect. I think that’s a more plausible claim than #2 and a more controversial one (especially around here) than #1. But it isn’t what you’ve been saying here so far.
[...] Copenhagen interpretation [...]
I have the impression I didn’t make it clear enough that I am not endorsing any of Motl’s criticisms. I haven’t watched your Google talk and therefore have no opinion about the correctness of any specific claims you made there, and I think Motl is a buffoon.
What mistake would that be?
The one Motl claims you made in the blog post you linked to. (Again, for the avoidance of doubt, the only thing I am saying about his claim is that it’s consistent with the “opposite” criticisms you say you’ve received. I have no idea whether any of the criticisms from either side are correct because, again, I don’t know any of the details of what you have said about quantum physics.)
when one of those attacks is [...] and the other is [...]
… you should consider the possibility that they are addressing different things you’ve said. Compare the old joke: “There is much in X’s book that is new, and much that is correct. Unfortunately, the new parts are not correct and the correct parts are not new.”
I repeat that I have no idea what you’ve said about quantum physics, and therefore no idea whether any complaint of that sort has any validity. But I might level a similar complaint at what you’ve been saying here about spiritual experiences.
First, I want to thank you for continuing to engage on this. Your feedback is very much appreciated. But we may need to agree to disagree on this.
“Some people get sick when they consume dairy products” would do pretty well.
Some people derive a net benefit from believing in deities, notwithstanding that their beliefs are objectively false. How’s that?
Dawkins
If you want to formulate a question to direct to Dawkins that is phrased in a way that you would accept his answer as definitive, I will forward it to him, thought it’s possible that his recent health issues might prevent him from replying in a timely manner.
In my conversations with him he more than once disagreed categorically with statements that were essentially equivalent (though not word-for-word identical) with the formulation I just gave.
Some people derive a net benefit from believing in deities [...]
Aha, a much more objectively stated thesis. It seems quite different from the one we started out discussing, though. This one I agree is neither obviously true nor obviously false. Since it still has the value-dependent word “benefit” in, disagreement about it might stem mostly from differences in values—e.g., how to trade off being happier against having more accurate beliefs. (FWIW I think I would agree with the statement, but I suspect my estimate of what fraction of religious people really are better off on net because of their beliefs would be lower than yours.)
his recent health issues
Yeah, I think he has other more important things on his plate than clearing up a side-issue in our discussion.
It seems quite different from the one we started out discussing
It is different, and I argued with myself over whether to include the explanation of how to get from A to B, but decided not to because the waters were muddy enough already. It’s one of these things that I thought would be obvious, but obviously (!) my intuitions about what is obvious are failing me in this case.
In any case, if you want to pursue this, I’m happy to elaborate. (Maybe I should write a followup post?) But this thread is already pretty long, maybe we should call it a day. Your call.
I have no trouble seeing a connection. If you think there’s more—an actual implication—then I may be missing something. (Or we may merely disagree, which I think is more likely.)
Feel free to elaborate or not as you please. I have no objection to calling it a day.
Yup, that’s an ability. It’s a thing you can do when you want to do it and avoid when you don’t, and things with those characteristics we generally classify as abilities. Having “spiritual experiences” is not, for most people who have them, an ability in that sense—and if it were, I think they should (and perhaps even would) for that very reason doubt that God (the gods, the life-force permeating all things, the ancestral spirits, whatever) had much to do with it.
I repeat: why classify “having spiritual experiences” as an ability rather than, say, a susceptibility? Why is it more like having ideas than like having colds? Why is it more like having orgasms than like having sneezes?
If true, that would be (1) interesting and (2) a reason for seeing it as an ability. But let’s be a bit more careful. Having spiritual experiences on demand would be an ability (and, in the same way, if you had the rather peculiar superpower of catching a cold any time you wanted, that would be an ability although not a very useful one). But I don’t see that that makes the term “ability” appropriate for people who have them involuntarily.
I’m pushing this point because it seems to me that a lot of the work in your argument is actually being done by your choice of the word “ability” and your use of analogies (blindness...) that are only appropriate when talking about the absence of an ability, but it doesn’t seem to me that you’ve justified those choices. Maybe “ability” is a good term; maybe actually something with a different spin on it like “liability” or “susceptibility” would be better; maybe we need something more neutral. But when the choice of terminology and analogies matters, let’s have some actual support for it.
Yes, I understand. It’s a perfectly reasonable thing to push back on.
I certainly agree with that, and so this reduces the issue to an empirical question: are spiritual experiences something that people can (mostly) control? I think they are. I don’t see a lot of evidence of people having spiritual experiences outside the context of certain deliberate practices and rituals like attending church, reciting prayers, singing, laying on of hands, sweat lodge ceremonies...
But it’s an “ability” that is more akin to “the ability to enjoy sex” or “the ability to appreciate modern art” than it is “the ability to fly an airplane” or “the ability to run a four-minute mile.”
I think that people who believe in God by and large don’t really think it through to that level of detail. Those that do tend to come to the conclusion you’d expect them to. And, BTW, this is why people don’t think it through. Losing the ability to commune with God can be very painful for some people. It’s rather like if you think too hard about the biological realities of sex you can lose the ability (sic!) to enjoy it.
I don’t see a lot of evidence of people getting venereal diseases outside the context of having sex, or getting hangovers outside the context of drinking a lot. Are those “abilities”? I don’t think so. If you agree, what’s the relevant difference?
Sure, why not? Someone who can drink heavily without getting a hangover can be said to have “the ability to hold their liquor.” It’s a little harder to find a commonly used phrase to refer to someone who can have unprotected sex without contracting venereal diseases. This would probably be referred to as an “immunity” rather than an “ability.”
If you want to speak of people having “immunity” from spiritual experiences I certainly won’t argue with you.
Sorry, I wasn’t clear and you ended up interpreting my question as almost the exact opposite of what I intended, so let me try to clarify.
You argue (if I understand right) as follows. Spiritual experiences generally occur only in certain contexts that people can voluntarily put themselves in. To that extent, they are voluntary. So, those who have spiritual experiences have some ability to choose whether to have them or not. So, having spiritual experiences is an “ability”.
But exactly parallel things are true of some things we don’t generally classify that way, like getting venereal diseases or having hangovers. Both of those things occur only in particular contexts that people can voluntarily put themselves in. (Having sex; drinking a lot of alcohol.)
I guess you would not generally speak of “the ability to contract gonorrhea” or “the ability to get a raging hangover”, any more than I would. So why does the fact that spiritual experiences generally occur in special contexts give good reason to speak of “the ability to have spiritual experiences”?
Ah. Well, one difference is that spiritual experiences feel good, and so many people seek them out. No one seeks to have a hangover or contract gonorrhea.
I am still not convinced, for reasons I’ll give in a moment, but actually I think this would be a good time to exercise some rationalist skills. We have a difficulty over definitions, so let’s taboo the term “ability” and perhaps take some cues from Yvain’s excellent post about “disease”.
So, can you state your thesis without using the word “ability” or anything equivalent? Can you make explicit what specific features of “spiritual experiences” are relevant and how they lead to the conclusions you want to draw?
(By “your thesis”, I mean what you described before as “exactly the hypothesis I’m advancing”.)
I should fulfil my promise to explain why the combination of “only in some situations that we can seek out” and “feels good” isn’t enough to justify calling something an “ability”, at least as I use the word. Let me quote from Jonathan Franzen’s book The Corrections. “Him” here is an elderly man, Al, whose mental function is beginning to go downhill.
Al has had a pleasant experience (thinking he saw children playing) which will occur only in certain circumstances that perhaps he could seek out (there being sunflowers around to confuse with children). Would you want to talk about the ability to confuse sunflowers with children? I wouldn’t.
Well, I’m actually defending two theses here, one of which is that “ability” is an appropriate term to use, but I’m happy to just agree to disagree about that.
Here’s a restatement of my other (hypo)thesis, making my best effort to avoid loaded terms:
There exists a kind of subjective experience that is analogous to but distinct from other subjective experiences like seeing a sunset, tasting food, hearing music, etc. It is a real subjective experience, not a delusion nor an indication of any kind of mental pathology (though it can be associated with some pathologies, particularly in its more extreme forms). It is induced not by light nor chemicals nor sound, but rather by engaging in certain behaviors (like prayer) and approaching those behaviors with a certain mindset. The mindset is difficult to describe without using loaded words (I want to call it “faith”) so I’ll just call it the opposite of (or an absence of) skepticism (I presume that’s not a loaded term?)
Some people do not have firsthand experience of this subjective sensation, either because they have not engaged in the behaviors that produce it, or because they are unable or unwilling to enter the mindset that produces it, or because their brains are wired in such a way that they are simply do not (I originally wrote “are unable to” here) experience it even with the right behavior and mindset. It is a situation completely analogous to the well-known phenomenon that some people cannot distinguish the colors red and green, and therefore cannot have the same subjective experience of seeing a tree and a sunset as someone who can (“is able to”) distinguish red and green.
It is this difference in firsthand subjective experience that accounts at least in part for the seemingly intractable differences among people when it comes to questions about the existence of deities. Some people believe in deities because they have had real subjective experiences that they believe in good faith (no pun intended) can best be explained as a firsthand interaction with a deity.
I advance this hypothesis because if it is true then it seems plausible that disagreements over the existence of deities will become less intractable and more fruitful if those who have not had these subjective experiences nonetheless acknowledge the possibility that their interlocutors might have had such an experience, and that this is not necessarily symptomatic of any kind of pathology or mental deficiency. To the contrary, it might be an indication of a normal part of the wiring of the human brain that is missing from their brains, or at least a normal part of the human experience which they have simply never experienced. Moreover, the explanation of the experience in terms of an encounter with a deity may be deeply meaningful to the person that holds this belief, and that presenting them with evidence that this belief is false may be intensely painful, even traumatic, because (among other things) it might make them think that they are suffering from a pathology or otherwise be mentally deficient.
Finally, though I didn’t make this explicit, I’m suggesting that all this should be taken into account when deciding how to interact with someone who believes in deities. Throwing logic at religion might not be the best move.
Maybe I should make this a whole ’nuther post.
I think the only part of that paragraph that is in any way controversial is the bit where you say the experience in question is “not a delusion nor an indication of any kind of mental pathology”—but I think most even of the most fire-breathing atheists wouldn’t claim that religious experience as such is a delusion (I think that would be a category error) or pathological. So: so far so good, but not much of substance yet.
(But, on that just-infinitesimally-controversial point—I remark that the word “real” that you use is at least a little bit loaded, and it’s not really clear to me what it means. I mean, what’s the alternative? They have this experience but it’s a fake experience? What would that even mean? The obvious thing for it to mean is that the experience doesn’t have the meaning they think it has; that although it seems to them that what they’ve experienced is being touched by an angel or spoken to by God or whatever, the real cause of their experience is something very different. But that’s the position you yourself have taken, so you surely can’t mean “real” in opposition to anything like that.)
Again, true and uncontroversial.
Bzzzzt! I think it’s very interesting that even when deliberately trying to state your thesis without loaded terms, you apparently just can’t help equating not having religious experiences with a deficiency. I suggest that unless religious experiences are actual perceptions of non-natural realities—a position that AIUI you explicitly reject—the two things are demonstrably not “completely analogous”. Why? Because probably the single most salient thing about that inability-to-distinguish, the thing that explains why it’s sometimes called “colour blindness”, is that it involves an actual perceptual deficit. In “colour-blind” individuals, an extremely important channel by which information about the external world flows into their brain has substantially less sensitivity, substantially less bandwidth, than in individuals with normal colour vision. The colour-blind get less information about the world through their eyes than the not-colour-blind, and you can measure how much less. Whereas those who don’t have “spiritual experiences” … don’t have a particular kind of experience, which by your own account conveys no information about the outside world, no genuine insight into the nature of reality—it’s just an experience that some people have and some people find enjoyable or moving or motivating.
Again, true and close to 100% uncontroversial. (Aside from the caveat stated above about the word “real”.)
So far (I acknowledge that your sentence isn’t over yet) this seems true but pointless: so far as I can tell, pretty much everyone acknowledges that. So let’s continue and see whether it gets more contentful as the sentence continues.
Still 100% uncontroversial; so far as I can tell basically no one claims that having religious experiences is necessarily symptomatic of pathology or mental deficiency.
(So, so far, it seems to me that the thesis you’re advancing is true but—my apologies! -- utterly uninteresting. It’s as if you were earnestly enjoining us not to punch believers in the face while discussing religion with them: sure, it’s good advice, but whatever makes you think we need it? I think this explains some of the negativity in the responses you’ve had: if you earnestly tell people not to punch believers in the face, they’re liable to get the impression that you think they would be punching believers in the face without your advice, and that would be a stupid thing to do, and no one likes being told they’re stupid.)
You’re really not trying all that hard to avoid loaded terms, are you? :-) I’m getting the impression that for some reason it’s really important to you to portray skeptics, or at least some skeptics, as abnormal people with bits missing from their brains that cause them to be in a certain sense blind, like those who cannot distinguish colours. But I’m not sure what that reason is. A cynical hypothesis would be that you like feeling superior to those skeptics, but I bet the truth is more interesting than that. Any idea what it might be?
Yup, it may. This is perhaps the least obvious thing you’ve said, but—sorry, again—it’s still pretty damn obvious.
I think you did. Right back in the OP, you wrote: “The antidote for this frustration is to realize that spirituality is not about logic. It’s about subjective experiences that not everyone is privy to. Logic is about looking at the grooves. Spirituality is about hearing the music.”
So after all this, I think my conclusion is this: with the value-laden bits stripped out, what you’re saying is common knowledge, to such an extent that the suggestion that skeptics reading it could be forgiven for feeling a bit insulted at the suggestion that they need to be told it. That feels like a really uncharitable and negative conclusion, which I regret. Perhaps I’m missing something that’s genuinely non-obvious, or perhaps I’m overoptimistic about the actual understanding and knowledge of skeptics. If so, perhaps you can point out some bit of what you’ve said that I should be more surprised by, or something?
I’d like to say a few words on one other point that’s maybe getting a bit overlooked in this discussion, which is that there are plenty of religious people who don’t have much in the way of religious experiences, plenty more who do but who don’t take them to be the main support for their beliefs, and also plenty of skeptics who have very similar experiences but interpret them very differently; and that having such experiences doesn’t seem to make skeptics any less abrasive. For instance, Sam Harris (author of, e.g., “The End of Faith”, one of the “Four Horsemen” of the New Atheist movement) is a practitioner of meditation, which he says provides him with mystical experiences, but he’s every bit as antireligious as, say, Richard Dawkins. On the other side: well, every now and then you get religious “revivals” characterized by fairly widespread religious experiences, often manifesting as things like “speaking in tongues”, and what makes them notable is precisely the fact that this is not the usual state of affairs in the churches where they happen. For instance, back in the mid-1990s when I was an evangelical Christian, there was something of a to-do in the UK’s evangelical Anglican churches about the so-called Toronto Blessing, and I’m pretty sure that in the churches I frequented this was mostly because most of the people there, most of the time, did not have dramatic religious experiences at all, and they were excited at the prospect of such experiences becoming more common.
So, if plenty of religious people seldom or never have these experiences, and quite a few very vigorously anti-religious people do have them, it seems to me that the difference between having them and not having them can’t be that large a part of what makes some people skeptical about religion and others not. I dare say it plays a role sometimes, but it seems like you’re suggesting that it’s more than that, and I find that unlikely.
Oh, come on. I thought we were being civil here.
That’s right, because I think it is a kind of deficiency, though I would not have used that word if you had not introduced it into the conversation.
There’s a lot of controversy within the deaf community about whether being deaf is a deficiency or just another way of being, kind of like being gay. Personally, I think being deaf is a deficiency, but there’s a significant faction of the deaf community that would take offense at that. Your pushback on this has a similar feel to it.
Fair enough. Let me choose a different analogy then: some people have a subjective experience called “empathy” which manifests as a visceral revulsion at, for example, deliberately inflicting pain on another person even in situations where inflicting such pain might provide a net benefit to the inflicter. Some people don’t experience empathy. This is widely considered pathological.
Note that this has nothing to do with any objective judgement about the state of the world. Sociopaths and psychopaths know that other people experience pain, they just don’t care.
The truth is important to me, yes. But the word “abnormal” is really heavily loaded, so I wouldn’t use it, just like I wouldn’t use “deficiency” without being prompted. Most people are straight, so technically being straight is normal and so one could argue that not being straight is “abnormal”. But by that standard, having red hair is abnormal. That is not what most people mean when they say “abnormal.”
You seem to want to read a value judgement into my choice of words which I do not intend. So let me try this: If you’re white you have a deficiency in skin pigmentation, and this deficiency leads to an inability to tolerate a lot of sun exposure without injury. Despite using the words “deficiency” and “inability” this is intended to be a mere statement of fact, not a value judgement. That is the sense in which I intend such words to be read when it comes to the “ability” to have spiritual experiences. Having spiritual experiences (or not) is neither good not bad, just different.
What can I say? I’ve met many people who vehemently deny it. In fact, I’ve had a personal conversation with Richard Dawkins where he vehemently denied it. That’s one of the things that motivated me to start writing about this.
It’s funny, I have a very similar experience when I talk to people about quantum mechanics. The world bifurcates rather neatly into two camps: those who think what I’m saying is obvious and common knowledge, and those who think I’m a category 5 loon. And there are card-carrying physicists in both camps.
I was aiming for “funny” rather than “rude”; I’m sorry if I missed. (But personally I think your continued insistence on applying negative-valence terminology to Those Who Do Not Have Spiritual Experiences is much ruder than anything I’ve said in this discussion.)
Deafness, like colour-blindness, involves an objectively measurable loss of sensory function. Whether that justifies using terms like “disability”, or whether e.g. membership in the Deaf community is a sufficiently important counterbalancing good to make such terms inappropriate, is perhaps debatable; but again it seems to me that you are drawing an analogy where the central feature of the thing on one side of the analogy is not present on the other.
My pushback consists mostly of pointing that out. It therefore doesn’t seem very similar to me.
I think what’s usually “officially” reckoned pathological, if you look in the DSM or whatever, is not lack of empathy as such but psychopathy, a condition identified not merely by lack of empathy but by other underlying characteristics and outward effects including lack of concern for the welfare of others. Perhaps lack of empathy itself should be reckoned pathological, though, so let’s proceed with that stipulation.
So let’s consider why not having empathy is (or might be, or should be) considered pathological, when (e.g.) not having much melanin in your skin, or not having an appendix, is not. It seems to me that there are two reasons. First: not having empathy not infrequently leads to severe adverse consequences for other people: psychopaths are greatly overrepresented in the criminal population, for instance. Severe adverse consequences are an important part of what leads things to be reckoned pathologies. Second: not having empathy is rare. That’s not a necessary condition for calling something a pathology, but it helps; in doubtful cases, things present in a large fraction of the population are more likely to be reckoned just “normal variation” rather than pathology.
I mentioned “not having much melanin” as an example earlier, and actually it’s an informative one. If you merely have rather little melanin, you’re called “white-skinned” and that’s regarded as a normal condition. If you have none at all (and other things that tend to go along with having none at all) you’re called “albino” and that’s regarded as a pathology. Why? I think for the same reasons as I gave above: albinism is worse for you than merely being “white”, and much rarer.
Can we bring that parallel back to the case of psychopathy? I think so. Psychopathy is what you get when someone has no empathy at all, along with other unusual features that tend to coexist with absence of empathy, and there are substantial bad effects. (Just as albinism is what you get when someone has no melanin at all, along with other unusual features that tend to coexist with that, and there are substantial bad effects.) There is substantial variation in empathy within the “normal” population, though (just as there is substantial variation in amount of melanin and hence in skin tone) and people who are merely rather low in empathy are not generally considered pathological, though they might well be considered not very nice.
(There’s an important difference; so far as I know, there aren’t mostly-discrete populations with substantially different empathy levels, in the way that there are mostly-discrete populations with substantially different melanin levels.)
OK, enough preparatory stuff. How does this apply to the sorts of transcendent experiences we’re talking about? How close is your analogy? Let’s see.
First of all (dammit, more preparatory stuff; sorry) I think we need to clarify a thing or two about those experiences, because you’ve written about them in a rather black-and-white way: religious people have these experiences, skeptics don’t have them, and that’s why one group is religious and the other is skeptical. I’ve already suggested that actually both the “discordant” categories have plenty of people in them, but I want to draw attention to another relevant fact: having-these-experiences isn’t a binary thing. Not only because the frequency of such experiences can vary continuously, but also because there’s a continuum of experiences of this type, ranging from transcendent life-changing brain-buggering ones down to minor ones you might barely notice. The less dramatic ones are more common, and I suggest that what you might call “low-grade” spiritual experiences—a sense of great awe at something like the Grand Canyon or the starry sky, a passing feeling of exhilaration for no particular reason, briefly losing your sense of individuality at a concert or political rally, etc., etc., etc. -- are quite common even among the actively anti-religious. Even, e.g., everyone’s favourite skeptical punching bag, Richard Dawkins. Unless, of course, you define your terms so that those who don’t interpret their experiences as encounters with a non-natural reality are ipso facto not having that kind of experience; I hope you can see the problems that that would raise.
Now, exactly what I want to say about the analogy between spiritual experiences and empathy depends on exactly what we count as “having transcendent experiences”. How often? How dramatic?
If you mean having quite dramatic ones quite often: In this case, my impression is that even among the actively religious most people don’t have dramatic spirtiual experiences often. So not-having-the-experiences would be not merely within the range of normal variation, but actually the majority situation. What about the adverse-effects criterion? Well, on the one hand, dramatic spiritual experiences are generally greatly treasured by those who have them, so not having them seems like it involves missing out on something valuable. On the other hand, dramatic spirirtual experiences seem to be systematically misleading: those who have them are disproportionately likely to embrace factually incorrect metaphysical theses with enough enthusiasm that it redirects the course of their lives, so having them seems like a dangerous business. This all looks to me to have rather the same shape as taking mind-altering drugs: the effects can be pleasant or overwhelming or life-alteringly overwhelming, but pursuing them can take over your life and lead you to situations you really wouldn’t have wanted to be in before you started. I think it’s far from clear that the adverse consequences of not having the experiences are worse than those of having them.
If you mean having low-grade ones not so often: In this case, my impression is that very many of the people you’re taking aim at (including the one target you’ve mentioned twice by name, Richard Dawkins) do “have the experiences”, so the question of whether not having them should be considered pathological is kinda irrelevant.
But you were perfectly happy to use its opposite, “normal”, in a way that makes it clear you consider Those Who Do Not Have The Experiences to be not-normal: “a normal part of the wiring of the human brain that is missing from their brains”. Saying “group A lacks a normal part of the human brain” may not use the word “abnormal”, but it most certainly uses the concept.
If you don’t intend such a value judgement, then I am at a loss to understand why even when you say you are trying to avoid loaded terms you are so insistent on, er, using loaded terms.
What, specifically, did Richard Dawkins deny?
If you mean only that he wasn’t willing to use the loaded language you prefer, to treat Not Having The Experiences as a deficit, an abnormality, a thing like psychopathy and colour-blindness—yeah, sure, I dare say he wasn’t, but (as I thought I’d made very clear) that isn’t what I’m saying is commonplace.
If you mean something else: what did he deny? That some religious people have dramatic religious experiences? That some skeptics don’t? That having dramatic religious experiences tends to make people more inclined to believe in a religion? (These are all things I would be surprised to find him denying, but he’s done surprising things before.) Or what?
I wouldn’t generally advise being worried on account of being called a loon by Luboš Motl, who has rather eccentric ideas about what constitutes lunacy. But, without making any comment on whether either his complaints or those of the unspecified other people who think what you’re saying is boringly familiar are correct, it seems to me that there’s no inconsistency. Motl says you’ve misrepresented exactly what the Copenhagen interpretation says and have made a mistake about polarization of light. As to the former, if you say “Copenhagen says X but actually Y” then Motl can be right if actually Copenhagen says something other than X, and the other guys can be right if every practising quantum physicist already accepts Y. As to the latter, what you say can be mostly correct and obvious even if there are a couple of mistakes in there.
So I’m not seeing the inconsistency there any more than here.
(In any case, I hope it’s clear that being attacked from both sides is no guarantee of being right.)
OK, I’m sorry if I was being humor-impaired.
You’ll have to take this up with someone in the deaf community because I’m on your side of this particular issue. Nonetheless, the fact is that there exist deaf people who vehemently disagree with both of us on this.
You’re getting too far into the weeds here. I brought up empathy not because it’s exactly the same as spiritual experience sensitivity (I’m going to start abbreviating that as SES) but because it’s a purely internal subjective experience and not relatable to anything that is objectively measurable outside the individual brain that is experiencing it. Of course many of the salient details are different, that’s why I didn’t choose it as my primary example.
I’m not sure whether you wrote that as a statement of your position or a re-statement of what you think my position is, but either way I don’t agree with this statement. In fact, I rather belabor the point that I am a skeptic who has spiritual experiences, so I myself am a counterexample.
I also think that a fair number of religious people don’t have spiritual experiences. Mother Theresa, for example, probably never had one.
No, that really is an unjustified extrapolation on your part. Being heterosexual is normal. It does not follow that being homosexual is abnormal.
Again, no. Some people are lactose intolerant. They lack the ability to produce the enzyme that digests lactose. This is actually the “normal” state of affairs; the ability to digest lactose arose very late in human evolutionary history. But the ability to digest dairy products is not “abnormal.”
You really are reading more into these words than I intend or that is justified by common patterns of usage.
Because English doesn’t have enough value-neutral words. How would you describe lactose intolerance without using words that make implicit value judgements? The very name “lactose intolerance” has a value judgement built into it: intolerance.
I was on an Antarctic cruise with him so we had a lot of conversations over the course of about three weeks. I got to know him quite well on a personal level. He specifically denied a lot of things. The overall tenor of his denials was to make clear that he didn’t believe any concession whatsoever should be made to the proposition that some people have firsthand subjective experiences that cause them to believe in the supernatural, even if those beliefs have a net benefit to them. For example: at one point I argued that belief can have demonstrable benefits through the placebo effect. So even if God wasn’t real, the idea of God was real and had real and potentially beneficial effects for some people, and so dissuading them of these beliefs was not necessarily a good thing to do. His response was (and these are his exact words—I will never forget them): “But it’s not true.” Meaning: it doesn’t matter if dissuading people from their belief might send them into existential despair or even cause them actual harm; allowing someone to believe in something that is not objectively true is the greater evil.
Well, there is no universally agreed upon definition of what the Copenhagen interpretation is. But there is no question that the elements I presented are commonly associated with the Copenhagen brand, even if that’s not what Motl thinks of when he uses the term.
What mistake would that be?
Certainly true, but when one of those attacks is, “What you’re saying is so obvious it’s insulting for you to think we didn’t already know this” and the other is, “What you’re saying is so obviously false that it’s not even worth a respectful debunking” then I actually feel pretty good about having had something worthwhile to say, even if I might not be right.
Actually, not quite either; it’s intended as a restatement not of your explicitly taken position (which I know it is contrary to) but of what seems to me to be implicit in how you write about these things. You say (and I agree) that some skeptics have “spiritual experiences” and some religious people don’t; but I think no one reading the rest of what you write would get that impression.
I am not saying “lisper says X is normal; therefore lisper says not-X is abnormal”. Not at all. I am pointing at an instance where you wrote something more specific. I quoted it before; let me quote it again. “it might be an indication of a normal part of the wiring of the human brain that is missing from their brains”. (Emphasis yours.) What would count as “abnormal”, if having a normal part of the wiring of the human brain missing from your brain doesn’t?
Again it seems that you’re taking me to argue that if you think something is normal then you have to think its opposite is abnormal. I agree that you needn’t do any such thing, and that is not the argument I was making. (See above.)
“Some people get sick when they consume dairy products” would do pretty well. If more detail is required: “Children’s bodies produce an enzyme called lactase that breaks down one of the constituents in milk. Many adults’ bodies don’t, and if those people drink milk or eat things made from milk they feel ill afterwards. Some adults’ bodies do, especially in Western Europe and places colonized by Western Europeans. Those people can digest milk products without feeling bad.”
Or, if we need a brief technical-sounding term: “lactase nonpersistence”.
You know, I was hoping you might be specific. (I see that you give one specific example below, on which I will comment in a moment; it doesn’t seem to me that it actually supports what you’re saying.)
I hope you won’t be offended by my saying this, but given your apparent inability in this discussion to state your thesis without using terms that (so it seems to me, and so it might plausibly have seemed to Richard Dawkins if you did the same in conversation with him) represent these believers as being better than skeptics who don’t share their experiences, it seems plausible to me that what Dawkins actually took exception was those value judgements, rather than the bare assertions that, e.g., religious people sometimes have religious experiences and see those as evidence for their religion.
The specific example you give seems, actually, quite clearly not a matter of Dawkins disagreeing with the factual statements you’ve been making about spiritual experiences (as opposed to the value judgements you’ve been making, which as I already said are not obvious and uncontroversial). He didn’t—at least, those words you will never forget didn’t—deny that the idea of God can have beneficial effects. He just indicated that, as you put it, “allowing someone to believe in something that is not objectively true is the greater evil”.
I wonder whether I’ve failed to communicate effectively what it is in what you’re saying that I think is commonplace and obvious. I suggest that you’re saying two main things. (1) Some religious people have religious experiences, and these are part of why they believe what they do, and the experiences are real experiences and very important to those people, and non-religious people talking to religious people should bear all that in mind. (2) These experiences are valuable and positive, and people who have them are normal and people who don’t have them are not normal and have something missing from their brains and are like colour-blind or deaf people.
I think #1 is obvious and commonplace. I think #2 is a matter of values and definitions more than of facts, and I do not think you have given us good reason to agree with it.
The specific thing you quote Richard Dawkins as saying contradicts neither #1 nor #2 as such (though I bet he disagrees with #2) but a further claim you haven’t explicitly made in this discussion (though you’ve made some gestures in its direction): that belief (as opposed to spiritual experiences) can have sufficiently positive consequences to make it a good thing even when incorrect. I think that’s a more plausible claim than #2 and a more controversial one (especially around here) than #1. But it isn’t what you’ve been saying here so far.
I have the impression I didn’t make it clear enough that I am not endorsing any of Motl’s criticisms. I haven’t watched your Google talk and therefore have no opinion about the correctness of any specific claims you made there, and I think Motl is a buffoon.
The one Motl claims you made in the blog post you linked to. (Again, for the avoidance of doubt, the only thing I am saying about his claim is that it’s consistent with the “opposite” criticisms you say you’ve received. I have no idea whether any of the criticisms from either side are correct because, again, I don’t know any of the details of what you have said about quantum physics.)
… you should consider the possibility that they are addressing different things you’ve said. Compare the old joke: “There is much in X’s book that is new, and much that is correct. Unfortunately, the new parts are not correct and the correct parts are not new.”
I repeat that I have no idea what you’ve said about quantum physics, and therefore no idea whether any complaint of that sort has any validity. But I might level a similar complaint at what you’ve been saying here about spiritual experiences.
First, I want to thank you for continuing to engage on this. Your feedback is very much appreciated. But we may need to agree to disagree on this.
Some people derive a net benefit from believing in deities, notwithstanding that their beliefs are objectively false. How’s that?
If you want to formulate a question to direct to Dawkins that is phrased in a way that you would accept his answer as definitive, I will forward it to him, thought it’s possible that his recent health issues might prevent him from replying in a timely manner.
In my conversations with him he more than once disagreed categorically with statements that were essentially equivalent (though not word-for-word identical) with the formulation I just gave.
At least we can agree on that! :-)
Indeed :-).
Aha, a much more objectively stated thesis. It seems quite different from the one we started out discussing, though. This one I agree is neither obviously true nor obviously false. Since it still has the value-dependent word “benefit” in, disagreement about it might stem mostly from differences in values—e.g., how to trade off being happier against having more accurate beliefs. (FWIW I think I would agree with the statement, but I suspect my estimate of what fraction of religious people really are better off on net because of their beliefs would be lower than yours.)
Yeah, I think he has other more important things on his plate than clearing up a side-issue in our discussion.
It is different, and I argued with myself over whether to include the explanation of how to get from A to B, but decided not to because the waters were muddy enough already. It’s one of these things that I thought would be obvious, but obviously (!) my intuitions about what is obvious are failing me in this case.
In any case, if you want to pursue this, I’m happy to elaborate. (Maybe I should write a followup post?) But this thread is already pretty long, maybe we should call it a day. Your call.
I have no trouble seeing a connection. If you think there’s more—an actual implication—then I may be missing something. (Or we may merely disagree, which I think is more likely.)
Feel free to elaborate or not as you please. I have no objection to calling it a day.