that’s a pretty strong claim. Why would your priors favor “the laws of physics allow for mystical experiences” over “I misinterpreted sensory input / that’s what my algorithm feels like from the inside, I guess”?
Why would your priors favor “the laws of physics allow for mystical experiences” over “I misinterpreted sensory input / that’s what my algorithm feels like from the inside, I guess”?
Why are you contrasting “mystical experiences” and “that’s what my algorithm feels like from the inside”? It’s like claiming consciousness has to be non-material.
I don’t follow. Mystical experience implies ontologically basic elements outside the laws of physics as currently agreed upon. I’m asserting that mystical experiences are best explained as features of our algorithms.
Mystical experience implies ontologically basic elements outside the laws of physics as currently agreed upon.
Why? I don’t need to have any particular interpretation of a mystical experience to have a mystical experience. Map-territory errors are common here but they certainly aren’t inevitable.
There’s a cluster of experiences humans have had throughout history, which they’ve talked about using words like “seeing God” or “becoming one with the universe” (but again, let’s carefully separate the words from a particular interpretation of the words), and that have been traditionally associated with religions, especially with people who start religions. They can be induced in many ways, including but not limited to meditation, drugs, and sex. Fuller description here.
Sure, I’d agree that those sensations can be very real. Thanks for the explanation—I had read the term as “mystical experiences and their implied physical interpretations are real”.
Mystical experience implies ontologically basic elements outside the laws of physics as currently agreed upon.
I don’t see why. “Oness with the universe” is a fact implied by physcialism—we are not outside observers. Conscious awareness of OWTU is not implied by physicalsim, but that’s because nothing about consciousness is implied by physicalism.
When is something a misinterpretation of sensory input? When the interpretation is not rendered in terms of the laws of physics which your alternative implies or...?
A better hypothesis is “in a metaphysics which takes Being as primary, which is not in any way contrary to science (since science does not imply a metaphysics like scientific realism or reductive and eliminative materialism), mystical experience is permissible and not contrary to anything we know”.
Crushing what I say into some theory of bayesian epistemology is a great way of destroying the meaning of what I say.
But to try to fit it into your theory without losing as much information as your attempt: humans, by the evolved structure of our brains, especially by the nature of human perception and decision making, have a built in ontology—the way we cut out things in our perception as things, and the way we see them as being things which are relevant to our involvements in the world. You can’t get rid of it, you can only build on top of it. Mistakenly taking reductionistic materialism as ontology (which is not an action you can take short of completely changing the fundamental structure of your brain) only adds its complexity on top of the ontology that is already there. It’s like using a windows emulator to do everything instead of using the OS the emulator is running in.
If you tried to turn your statement into an actual mathematical statement, and tried to prove it, you would see that there is a large gap between the mathematics and the actual psychology of humans, such as yourself.
I can offer a couple of points on why I consider it a subject of great significance.
[1] On a personal level, which you are of course free to disregard as anecdotal, I had such an experience myself. Twice to be precise. So I know that the source is indeed experiential (“mystical experiences exist”) though I would not yet claim that they necessarily point to an underlying reality. What I would claim is that they certainly need to be explored and not disregarded as a ‘misinterpretation of sensory input’. My personal observation is that (when naturally occurring not chemically induced!) they accompany a psychological breakthrough through an increase in experiential (in contrast to rational) knowledge.
[2] Ancient foundational texts of major civilizations have a mystical basis. Good examples are the Upanishads and the Teo Te Ching but the same experiences can be found in Hebrew, Christian and Sufi mystics, the Buddha, etc. A look at the evidence will immediately reveal that the experience is common among all these traditions and also seems to have been reached independently. We can then observe that this experience is present in the most ancient layers of our mythological structures. The attempt of abstracting the experience into an image can be seen, for example, in symbols such as the Uroboros which point to the underlying archetype. The Uroboros, Brahman and the Tao are all different formulations of the same underlying concept. If we then take seriously Peterson’s hypothesis about the basis of morality in stories things get really interesting; but I am not going to expand on that point here.
These are by no means the only reasons. Indeed the above points seem quite minor when viewed through a deeper familiarity with mystical traditions. But we have to start somewhere I guess.
that’s a pretty strong claim. Why would your priors favor “the laws of physics allow for mystical experiences” over “I misinterpreted sensory input / that’s what my algorithm feels like from the inside, I guess”?
Why are you contrasting “mystical experiences” and “that’s what my algorithm feels like from the inside”? It’s like claiming consciousness has to be non-material.
I don’t follow. Mystical experience implies ontologically basic elements outside the laws of physics as currently agreed upon. I’m asserting that mystical experiences are best explained as features of our algorithms.
Why? I don’t need to have any particular interpretation of a mystical experience to have a mystical experience. Map-territory errors are common here but they certainly aren’t inevitable.
I suspect I have a different understanding of “mystical experience” than you do—how would you define it?
There’s a cluster of experiences humans have had throughout history, which they’ve talked about using words like “seeing God” or “becoming one with the universe” (but again, let’s carefully separate the words from a particular interpretation of the words), and that have been traditionally associated with religions, especially with people who start religions. They can be induced in many ways, including but not limited to meditation, drugs, and sex. Fuller description here.
Sure, I’d agree that those sensations can be very real. Thanks for the explanation—I had read the term as “mystical experiences and their implied physical interpretations are real”.
I don’t see why. “Oness with the universe” is a fact implied by physcialism—we are not outside observers. Conscious awareness of OWTU is not implied by physicalsim, but that’s because nothing about consciousness is implied by physicalism.
When is something a misinterpretation of sensory input? When the interpretation is not rendered in terms of the laws of physics which your alternative implies or...?
A better hypothesis is “in a metaphysics which takes Being as primary, which is not in any way contrary to science (since science does not imply a metaphysics like scientific realism or reductive and eliminative materialism), mystical experience is permissible and not contrary to anything we know”.
That’s a long way of saying “theory with a strictly greater complexity and exponentially smaller prior probability than reductionism”
Crushing what I say into some theory of bayesian epistemology is a great way of destroying the meaning of what I say.
But to try to fit it into your theory without losing as much information as your attempt: humans, by the evolved structure of our brains, especially by the nature of human perception and decision making, have a built in ontology—the way we cut out things in our perception as things, and the way we see them as being things which are relevant to our involvements in the world. You can’t get rid of it, you can only build on top of it. Mistakenly taking reductionistic materialism as ontology (which is not an action you can take short of completely changing the fundamental structure of your brain) only adds its complexity on top of the ontology that is already there. It’s like using a windows emulator to do everything instead of using the OS the emulator is running in.
If you tried to turn your statement into an actual mathematical statement, and tried to prove it, you would see that there is a large gap between the mathematics and the actual psychology of humans, such as yourself.
I wasn’t trying to be rude, I just thought you were claiming something else entirely. My apologies.
I still don‘t understand the point you’re making with respect to mystical experiences, and I’d like to be sure I understand before giving a response.
I can offer a couple of points on why I consider it a subject of great significance.
[1] On a personal level, which you are of course free to disregard as anecdotal, I had such an experience myself. Twice to be precise. So I know that the source is indeed experiential (“mystical experiences exist”) though I would not yet claim that they necessarily point to an underlying reality. What I would claim is that they certainly need to be explored and not disregarded as a ‘misinterpretation of sensory input’. My personal observation is that (when naturally occurring not chemically induced!) they accompany a psychological breakthrough through an increase in experiential (in contrast to rational) knowledge.
[2] Ancient foundational texts of major civilizations have a mystical basis. Good examples are the Upanishads and the Teo Te Ching but the same experiences can be found in Hebrew, Christian and Sufi mystics, the Buddha, etc. A look at the evidence will immediately reveal that the experience is common among all these traditions and also seems to have been reached independently. We can then observe that this experience is present in the most ancient layers of our mythological structures. The attempt of abstracting the experience into an image can be seen, for example, in symbols such as the Uroboros which point to the underlying archetype. The Uroboros, Brahman and the Tao are all different formulations of the same underlying concept. If we then take seriously Peterson’s hypothesis about the basis of morality in stories things get really interesting; but I am not going to expand on that point here.
These are by no means the only reasons. Indeed the above points seem quite minor when viewed through a deeper familiarity with mystical traditions. But we have to start somewhere I guess.