Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10.2 9/18/84; site ames.UUCP Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!burl!ulysses!unc!mcnc!decvax!genrad!panda!talcott!harvard!seismo!hao!ames!barry From: barry@ames.UUCP (Kenn Barry) Newsgroups: net.religion Subject: Re: Logic based on ...(mysticism) Message-ID: <953@ames.UUCP> Date: Mon, 22-Apr-85 22:28:16 EST Article-I.D.: ames.953 Posted: Mon Apr 22 22:28:16 1985 Date-Received: Wed, 24-Apr-85 04:31:15 EST References: <886@pyuxd.UUCP> <936@ames.UUCP> <911@pyuxd.UUCP> Organization: NASA-Ames Research Center, Mtn. View, CA Lines: 188 >> = me > = Rich Rosen >If, by "internal (as opposed to external) deity", you mean some sort of >self-determiner evincing free will, the same things really do apply. See >my discussions with Ms. Creighton on the subject. Well, I do believe in free will, but let's deal with one disagreement at a time. My belief in free will and my suggestion of an internally perceived deity are unrelated. All I was suggesting was that the notion of deity can be a useful organizing principle for describing one's perceptions of reality. If it were proved to me that I had no free will (probably impossible - free will, or the lack of same, look like untestable hypotheses, to me) my "internal deity" suggestion would be unaffected. The concept is a difficult one to get across, I know, so I hope you'll be patient with me. What I am trying to suggest is that it is possible to attach concepts like "meaning" or "purpose" to existence, without necessarily concluding there is some conscious entity, external to ourselves, that provides that meaning and purpose; that we could have intuitions about the nature of reality that were true, even if they lacked the support of either strict deductive argument *or* an external divinity. I think we'd agree that concepts like meaning and purpose are constructs that we overlay on the external world, and (probably) have no meaning in the purely objective sense. Where we disagree is in the conclusions we draw from this. You argue, in standard reductionist fashion, that the subjectivity of such notions renders them trivial and purely personal. You also seem to conclude that the rest of us recognize this as true, in that you seem convinced that we must somehow be arguing for the existence of an external deity, or at least a personal will that is unbound by cause-and-effect constraints. But I, at least, am *not* arguing for this. I am instead suggesting that you underrate the personal and subjective, without disagreeing that the matters we are discussing are, indeed, subjective. Our experience of existence is a meld of the subjective and objective. It consists of our minds receiving sense-impressions of an external reality, and creating from this a model of what that external reality is like. I see in my model an order, unity, and purpose that I may even call God (on alternate Tuesdays :-)), since I don't have a good name for it, and "God" is a very flexible term that needs less bending to suit my needs than most other terms would. But what I'm really trying to do is to work *around* the unanswerable question of the existence/nonexistence of an external deity by asking myself, "Why do you want to know?"; "What's the purpose of your question?"; "What are you *really* asking?". In Hegelian terms, I'm looking for a synthesis of the theist/atheist dialectic. What I've concluded is that the central mystery is my *own existence*; what I am, and why I exist (related questions). Scientific materialism does rather well at answering my questions about external reality. But because it must assume an observer external to the object of study, it cannot be trained on the observer, itself. By definition, I cannot study subjective experience objectively. Thus I seek for other ways of understanding it, and am willing to examine religious notions for whatever contribution they can make, just I am willing to examine scientific notions for whatever help they can offer. >> But I think there can be times when we meet reality through the >> lowest possible number of intervening curtains, and it is these experiences >> which we call "mystical". >It would seem just the opposite to me: such experiences would seem to have >even more additional intervening preconceptive curtains, not fewer. An interesting assumption. But perhaps you are confusing mystical *experience*, which is what I am discussing, with the interpretation and communication of that experience. When one attempts to explain such experiences, one inevitably re-engages those analytical and rational faculties which were bypassed in the original experience, and thus subjects the experience to the distorting effects of forcing it into a rational framework which is not large enough to contain it. The resulting explanations have the same flaw as verbal explanations of music: if you've never heard music, you just won't get it. >> If someone, a Deist or >> pantheist perhaps, claimed that there can be no physical evidence for their >> claims, because no claims were being *made* about the workings of physical >> reality, then the lack of objective evidence for their claim is *part* of >> their claim, and does not argue against it. >Nor does it offer support---it merely makes it into nothing BUT a claim. Agreed, but it also means that counterclaims by others about non-testable aspects of reality are nothing but claims. All non-testable claims are simply speculation, even logical positivist claims that reality consists only of testable truths. >They would claim "no physical evidence", yet their own physical bodies (their >brains at least) are affected). By a "mystical source", or by their own >imposition of interpretation on their physical experience? This paragraph is a bit unclear to me, but if I correctly interpret you as asking if mystical experience presupposes a supernatural cause for the experience, my answer is no. A mystical experience just *is*. All explanations come after the fact, and will be incomplete. Purely causal explanations like "brain chemistry", while perhaps correct at the level of explanation they strive for, don't explain, they explain away. >> Well, I, for one, don't assert *anything* supernatural, yet I'd still >> describe some of my ideas as "mystical". And if I choose to believe there are >> meaningful aspects of reality which are beyond my ability to apprehend >> rationally, this is not meant to gainsay materialism, but to augment it. >What does it mean to "augment materialism"? Are you adding things to the >"lists" of things that ARE existing beyond those listed as "material"? Why >weren't they in the list of "material" things? Because we couldn't perceive >them? Be careful what you're leaping into here. I'll try. By "augmenting materialism", I mean to suggest that there are facets of existence which materialism fails to deal with. It is not that material things have been left out, but that some of the relationships which exist between things may have been left out. How, for instance, can I explain the fact of my own self-awareness? Reductionist explanations of it seem to suggest it is an epiphenomenon, an unnecessary assumption for explaining "objective" reality. I could assume that all you other humans out there are mindless automatons (though very complex ones), without the subjective experience of self-awareness, and my picture would be as adequate as anyone's in explaining the behavior of all these biological mechanisms. The only thing it would fail to explain, for me, is my *own* awareness of existence. Materialism is a tool for understanding the objective aspects of existence. It doesn't seem very useful for explaining subjective experience. As I've stated before, it only explains how, not why. All answers to the question, "why", including the answer, "there is no why", are untestable speculation, which science and materialism are of little help in answering. Science can exclude some answers that make falsifiable claims about objective reality; scientific method is a good way for getting the right answer to a lot of questions. But it can be deceptive if we try to use it to help us decide what questions to ask. It will influence us to think that the only meaningful questions are those which it can answer for us (testable claims). So I augment my materialism and arrive at some non-testable hypotheses which seem to have greater explanatory power in understanding subjective experience. However, I recognize the tentative and speculative nature of these suppositions, and realize that they may not be even classifiable as "right" or "wrong", but only as useful (helps me understand my experiences in a holistic way) or not useful. My problem with the points of view you present on these questions is not that they're necessarily wrong, but that they're presented with too much certainty. You try (pretty successfully, I think) to make the minimum number of assumptions necessary for a complete understanding of reality. That's fine. What I think you fail to do, however, is to remember that, while your assumptions are minimal, they are assumptions, nonetheless. I would reject the claim that you seem to make, that your world-view has more support from our knowledge of objective reality than those of all your competitors. I, too, try to make minimal assumptions, but because I may have found more questions worth answering, I may have had to make more assumptions than you. But how do I decide whether my system is excessively elaborate, or yours is incomplete? >> my point >> is that it may not always be clear if claims *are* supernatural. >Good point. Still, we must distinguish between your presumption that those >people are somehow closer (fewer intervening layers) to reality, and mine >(yes, it's a presumption, though I think a far more reasonable one) that they >are further (more layers) because they add in their preconceptions. I partially agree. We all seem to end up presuming things when we total up our experiences, and come to conclusions. But I think it's important to emphasize that, in the case of mystical experiences, at least, the presumptions come after the fact. Having had such experiences (all too rarely :-(), I *know* that I was simply *experiencing* at that time, without attempting to analyze or understand. Maybe calling such experiences closer to reality is too strong, but I would say that they at least are an alternate way of perceiving reality, and can be complementary to our normal analytical approach. Rather than saying that these experiences offer a better look at reality, let me amend my statement to say that the combination of such direct, unfiltered experience *and* the more usual analytical approach, combine to produce a richer, fuller, more complete picture of existence, than either can achieve, alone. The trick is in combining these two modes of perception in such a way that neither contradicts the other. Subjectivity without objectivity leads to mere superstition and (dare I say it?) wishful thinking. But objectivity, alone, leads to a world view confined to the Procrustean bed of the measurable and testable, and asserts completeness only by the circular reasoning of discarding all questions which are not answerable by the only tools that the objectivist will recognize as valid. I believe this is the longest article I've ever posted. My compliments to Rich Rosen, for being stimulating enough to evoke so many words from a normally taciturn fellow like myself, and my apologies to everyone else. I'll try to be more succinct from now on. - From the Crow's Nest - Kenn Barry NASA-Ames Research Center Moffett Field, CA ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- USENET: {ihnp4,vortex,dual,hao,menlo70,hplabs}!ames!barry