SubscribeJuly 8th, 2011
warning bells: arguments presented as either/or
I got a copy of Why God Won’t Go Away: Brain Science & The Biology of Belief from the library. It’s a book written for the general public and so is easy to understand (terminology at a minimum). That’s all good. However…
Before I get to that the book is published by Ballantine Books which is part of Random House. It’s a for-profit business, so some of what comes next may be at their request. The book is targeted to the US market and I suspect the publishers may have wanted material in the text reassuring American religious persons that just because neurology can explain the god experience, this doesn’t mean that god doesn’t exist. Whether the American public actually requires such overtly silly reassurances, is a question I cannot answer.
The problem started when I hit paragraph three on page 9.
A skeptic might suggest that a biological origin to all spiritual longings and experiences, including the universal human yearning to connect with something divine, could be explained as a delusion caused by the chemical misfirings of a bundle of nerve cells.
Ahuh – clang, clang, clang. “Misfirings”? Oh ho, I thought. Read that word choice along with “a skeptic” and the suggestion is that this is a silly thing to believe.
Then the next paragraph:
But the SPECT scans suggested another possibility. The orientation area was working unusually but not improperly, and we believe that we were seeing colorful evidence on the SPECT’s computer screen of the brain’s capacity to make spiritual experience real. After years of scientific study, and careful consideration of our results, Gene and I further believe that we saw evidence of a neurological process that has evolved to allow us humans to transcend material existence and acknowledge and connect with a deeper, more spiritual part of ourselves perceived of as an absolute, universal reality that connects us to all that is.
So either the brain is misfiring or humans can “transcend material existence”?
I nearly gacked. It’s also when I went to the cataloging information in the front of the book and realized that the book was published by a popular press, not necessarily dedicated to decent argument. Either/or arguments should always make you sit up and ask “what the fuck are they trying to shove down my throat.”
“…the brain’s capacity to make spiritual experience real…” What does “real” mean in this context? What if I say, “the brain’s capacity to make dream experiences real”. What if I say, “the brain’s capacity to make sensory experiences real”. Does “real” mean the same thing in both sentences? Are they really saying that there is no difference between the experience of a kicked shin and a dream?
“…after years of scientific study, and careful consideration…” This is the bit that made me feel like gacking. I really hate it when people use scientifically based authority to support something that is essentially narrative. It’s a bit like saying science proves that science isn’t real. If you need science to be “just another narrative” then why use science as the source of legitimacy?
“…evolved to allow us humans to transcend material existence…” Using “evolve” in this sentence does the same thing as “after years of scientific study” in that it suggests a physical basis in reality and that there are evidential reasons for believing in the rest of the sentence. (There aren’t.) They tack on “allow us humans to transcend material existence”. Allow! Allow! Who, exactly is doing the allowing here? Talk about salting the mind. Transcend! Jeez dude. Why don’t you assume what you want to prove.
Breathe, Mary. Just breathe.
The book proceeds by presenting data and interspersing this relevant information with silly analysis. Chapter two, for example, gives you lots of good, simply put, information on the “brain machinery” that enables the various types of awareness and perceptual experiences of which we are capable. Good stuff. Then chapter three (Brain architecture: how the brain makes mind) goes into the various states (hyperarousal and hyperquiescence and the limbic system) – again – good stuff.
But to start chapter three the authors blast argumentative shit out of the book’s universe into ours. It’s horrifying in the extreme.
The idea that our experience of reality—all our experiences, for that matter—are only “secondhand” depictions of what may or may not be objectively real, raises some profound questions about the most basic truths of human existence and the neurological nature of spiritual experience. For example, our experiment with Tibetan meditators and Franciscan nuns showed that the events they considered spiritual were, in fact, associated with observable neurological activity. In a reductionist sense, this could support the argument that religious experience is only imagined neurologically, that God is physically “all in your mind.” But a full understanding of the way in which the brain and mind assemble and experience reality suggests a very different view.
Imagine, for instance, that you are the subject of a brain imaging study. As part of this study, your have been asked to eat a generous slice of homemade apple pie. As you enjoy the pie, the brain scans capture images of the neurological activity in the various processing areas of the brain where input from your senses is being turned into the specific neural perceptions that add up to the experience of eating the pie…In a literal sense, the experience of eating the pie is all in your mind, but that doesn’t mean the pie is not real, or that it is not delicious.
I had an experience of Cthulhu a few nights ago. He was wearing pajamas with small black kittens printed on the fabric. Of course I was dreaming, but, nevertheless, neurologically I had the experience of sitting with Cthulhu clothed in kitten PJs. In a literal sense, the experience of sitting with Cthulhu was all in my mind, but that doesn’t mean Cthulhu is not real. Really?
Then there’s the end of the first paragraph – But a full understanding – that’s cheeky given the book is written for a general audience. The authors are claiming the right of might based on their authority as scientists who are capable of understanding and providing themselves a bat to batter anyone who disagrees. They can just say, “well if you understood the way the brain works…” Cheeky, and a sign of a poor grounding in evidence. I mean why would anyone who had decent evidence resort to such patently manipulative tactics?
Here’s the deal. The book has lots of good basic information in it but the authors’ argument for the existence of god sucks. This “analysis” left me wondering if they were “asked” to include bits to allay the fears of the god-fearing American public or if they just stop thinking once they are outside the realm of actual data. I’d love to know.
April 25th, 2011
deeply irritating, but why? faith, belief and argument
I’m an irritable kind of person, this is true, but some things really do deserve one’s disapprobation.
Amongst bits of behaviour that fall into this category are people who criticize new software programs without first having opened them, let alone used them, academics who write religious apologia as an academic rather than as a person of faith, people who critique books they haven’t actually read, and those who speak knowingly about subjects they don’t understand but don’t like (intuitively?) using broken logic and other acts of self-righteous justification.
What set this particular bout of irritation off? You should well ask.
Several years ago now I took a philosophy class in which a co-student gave his end of term paper presentation on the topic of why it is so difficult to be a man of faith in these times, and why it is so easy to be an atheist.
OK, so I actually really liked the guy. He was a techie, and they tend to be my favourite kind of person. He was kind, thoughtful, caring and devoted to his family. All of these things are good things, at least to me. His particular religion doesn’t matter at all. Nor does the the fact that he sees faith as a difficult thing to maintain. I suspect that’s actually very true given most of his life was dependent upon understanding the world of fact and science, which, of course, is one of the things continually eroding the ground on which faith is built.
What pissed me off was the fact that he thinks it’s easy to be an atheist without ever having attempted to understand what the world-view entails, and that the ease or difficulty of some position has anything whatsoever to do with its veracity. I mean Jeez dude, think. But it wasn’t my class, and I wasn’t going to step on the teacher’s toes and call him on it in class. I just let it go.
But then I ran into the very same argument yesterday on a blog. I’m not going to name it; I don’t really care what the blogger believes in, nor that s/he can’t summon up the will to think through his/her justifications for finding it difficult to maintain faith in supernatural powers. I don’t care what the blogger believes but I do care about how the blogger behaves; and the two seem clearly connected.
The obvious fact that atheism is still embattled, that one’s ability to hold a public position is compromised if one is not some sort of theist, seems to bely the position that it is easy. But this is a social sense of the word “easy.” By this sense being a Christian in North America is a much easier proposition. I suspect even being some sort of “deeply spiritual” person is easier than being an atheist in this sense.
But that word “easy” can be used in more than one way, right? I am sure that that some atheists find it easy in the way the blogger and my erstwhile co-student meant it—being a man of faith requires so much energetic creativity today, at least in the part of the world where all the facts central to our lives deny the likelihood of the objects of said faith, and none of this creativity is required of an atheist.
I do suspect it’s true that the rise in atheism of late has much to do with the hero worship inundating the four horsemen. With a mouth like the one on Hitch, what’s not to adore? Certainly our social and cultural dependency on science has much to do with the rise in athesim, as does the accumulation of data and video on the terrible behaviours of a whole historical bevy of men of faith. I mean really, how many dead gypsies, Jews and broken towers do we need to see before that real-life horror story gets old?
Sorry. I really am irritated. I tend to rant when that happens.
Philosophy classes, like the internet, are full of people who don’t seem to understand that sliding between word meanings endangers the validity of the argument. Just because the terms “easy” and “easy” look the same doesn’t mean that their various meanings are equivalent. What is socially “easy”—as in conforming to the public sense of what is acceptable—is not the same as what is rationally “easy”— as in something so well supported by data that it’s plain silly not to “believe” in it.
Let me give you an example of rationally easy: I “believe” in the notions of force and cause and effect in the material universe. That is, I “believe” that if I throw a rock through my window I am going to break it. I don’t think that the spirit of the glass just happens to shatter itself as the spirit of the rock manifests in the space that used to be occupied by my window. It’s not only silly not to believe in force and in cause and effect in the material universe, not believing in such things bespeaks a mental discombobulation, and frankly, I’d challenge any sane person to behaviourally display such a disbelief. I mean what? They walk directly in front of speeding cars to prove that cause and effect doesn’t exist?
Gads! Such disingenuousness. Still, negotiating the divide between normal human behaviour and the proposed lack of belief in cause and effect does require enormous creativity. Some of the explanatory narratives that result are really quite interesting. Leibniz, for example.
So there’s the problem with the blogger’s lack understanding of the slipperiness of language and the frankly silly assumption that because something is difficult to maintain it is therefore more valuable. Under that guiding hand, we should still be struggling to reconcile Ptolemy with NASA’s need to get scientific instrumentation to places like Mars. Imagine, Ptolemaic rocket science! That makes me smile. Never heard of Occam?
But it doesn’t answer my question of why such normal internet thinking irritates me so deeply.
To be honest I don’t like atheism via hero-worship any better than faith by fallacious argumentation. Both are irrational. Not that there isn’t value in the irrational. Of course there is. I mean I interpret dreams, read tarot, read Leibniz and Deleuze for goodness sake. But one “belief” is not like another. The belief in cause and effect in the material universe is not the same as a belief in supernatural forces. It’s one of those slippery words, like “easy” or “theory”.
It’s “just a theory“…. that one is getting really old since it displays such a willful ignorance and the deeply disrespectful act of not even attempting to understand that which you repudiate. And this is what bothers me, I suppose. It’s the blatant disrespect, not only of me—which doesn’t matter since the blogger doesn’t know me, and my erstwhile co-student was intent on defending himself from my perspicacity—but also illustrates a deep disrespect of himself and his attendant beliefs.
You really care so little about what you believe that you cannot be bothered to think it through cleanly? I value what you believe more than that, and I don’t share in it.
But I suspect what is even deeper, and why the thorn of it still lingers after several years, is that it appears like my co-student and the blogger don’t value reason at all. They don’t reason because they don’t trust it. They think feeling is a better guide to human happiness. Romantics they are, alive and well long after Wordsworth climbed that particular mountain. Of course the problem is that reason and feeling are not seperable functions in the human mind and so such contemporary Romantics, untutored in sound logic because of culturally received distrust, use an ill-formed and non-viable “logic” to support their faith in their feeling – what the blogger called common sense. But still it comes down to a lack of respect of their own mind, of the very feeling function they so assiduously defend. Without sound reasoning feeling abhors human life. Just ask Phineas Gage. Or Heinrich Kramer and James Sprenger.
Feeling, like reason, is critical to human life. This is why I am so fascinated by religiousity. It is a primary site of feeling in human beings and a site where narrative, feeling, reason and the material world meet. Religion might be wrong in its analysis of the material world, but it is still vastly important because it is a key part of the human analysis of human life. It is a phenomenological database. Religion and our metaphysical concepts of reality are, along with art, by far the best source of data that we have for what it feels like to be a human being.
Because of the importance of religion and spirituality in the human universe, just because you believe it to be materially true as well as narratively true, doesn’t give you a pass on treating the phenomenon with respect. Religion is dangerous and deeply human. Treating it with the disrespect attendant upon your use of faulty logic is like a cat fancier turning her back on a ravenous lion. Stupid, man. Stupid.
And that’s what bothers me the most. It’s so deeply stupid to take your life so lightly.
March 13th, 2011
what “evidence” means and human narratives
I’m still thinking about what evidence means for people who don’t ground the word on an empirical, checkable basis. Essentially what “evidence” comes to mean is the fit the particular datum makes within the narrative that drives the person seeking the evidence. The kind of “evidence” that rests finally in the physical evidence I will call material evidence. The kind that rests finally in the story being questioned I will call narrative evidence.
There’s a pretty big difference between material and narrative evidence. Using Wittgenstein’s language, these are vastly different language games. It is important to note that all human beings used both “games”, but they are never given equal authority. Some of us come down hard on the side of material evidence and some on the side of narrative evidence. Each group lives in a very different social world.
I finished When Prophecy Fails this morning and it is this that prompted this post. Essentially, the book tries to discover why, when a prophecy has failed, do some of the believers believe even harder, proselytize ever more fiercely? Why doesn’t the discomfirmation of their belief make them question their belief? In my terms, what cultural and social conditions prompt some people to finally go with narrative evidence instead of with the stone stubbing against their toe?
First it should be said that some of the Seekers (what the study’s group called themselves) did abandon the story once the prophecy failed to come to pass. Ultimately, they chose material evidence over narrative. So being in a group like this one—in this case believers in space aliens to the rescue—where something outside the known material world will rescue a small group of select human beings is not in itself enough to say that material evidence doesn’t count for those persons.
What the researchers did is show that there are five things that need to be present for a person to refuse the material evidence of a failed prophecy and stick what they established as narrative evidence of belief confirmation. (For example, It’s not that the aliens aren’t real, and the aliens didn’t fail us. They were just testing our faith.)
1) A belief must be held with deep conviction and it must have some relevance to action, that is, to what the believer does or how he believes.
2) The person holding the belief must have committed himself to it; that is, for the sake of his belief, he must have taken some important action that is difficult to undo. (Like selling his house, and giving away all him money.) In general, the more important a such actions are, and the more difficult they are to undo, the greater is the individual’s commitment to the belief.
3) The belief must be sufficiently specific and sufficiently concerned with the real world so that events may unequivocally refute the belief. (This is interesting. Here’s where the person who comes down on the side of narrative evidence grips onto the world and probably one of the reasons why creationists keep trying to ground their-out-of-the-world origin stories on material evidence and why their repeated failure doesn’t diminish the number of future attempts.)
4) Such undeniable disconfirmatory evidence must occur and must be recognized by the individual holding the belief. (Here’s Comfort apologizing for the banana blooper and then continuing on to the next bloody great misreading of the origins of the material world.)
The first two of these conditions specify the circumstances that will make the belief resist to change. The third and fourth conditions together, on the other hand, point to factors that would exert powerful pressure on a believer to discard his belief. It is, of course, possible that an individual, even though deeply convinced of a belief, may discard it in the face of unequivocal disconfirmation. We must, therefore, state a fifth condition specifying the circumstances under which the belief will be discarded and those under which it will be maintained with new fervor.
5) The individual believer must have social support. It is unlikely that one isolated believer could withstand the kind of disconfirming evidence we have specified. If, however, the believer is a member of a group of convinced persons who can support one another, we would expect the belief to be maintained and the believers to attempt to proselyte or to persuade nonmembers that the belief is correct. (Can anybody say “Tea Party”?)
These five condition specify the circumstances under which increased proselyting would be expected to follow disconfirmation.
(Note: the italic additions above are mine.)
That’s a lot to think about, really. All humans are prey to this social pressure (number 5 above), including those of us who are atheists. That’s why I think having material evidence as one’s base line is so incredibly important. It’s the only thing we can tether to outside the incredible power of human social narrative.
March 10th, 2011
what is “evidence”
I’ve been thinking about what the word “evidence” means. This relates to my current reading of Dawkins’ book and to a comment by QunQun talking about Wittgenstein and the idea of language games.
Evidence as a term means that which tends to prove or disprove something, or it can be grounds for the belief of something. What a definition like this does is make anything potentially “evidence” for any proposition you care to make. I could say, for example, that the Wingabonga lives in the winter jasmine in my garden and cite as evidence for that belief my dream about the Wingabonga, and the fact that I found the Wingabonga’s favourite food near the plant. This counts as evidence because the dream and my finding orange peel on the pavement in my yard are the grounds upon which my belief in the Wingabonga’s residence took hold. They are also evidence for the existence of the Wingabonga. Does this really count as “evidence”? Sure, why not? It meets the limits of the definition.
Looking at the term “proof” doesn’t help because all it means is “evidence sufficient to establish a thing as true”. Ambivalence: that’s the nature of words.
What Wittgenstein showed with his language games concept is that what the word “evidence” actually means is how it is used within a specific language community. So Dawkins, being a scientist, has an idea of what evidence means that is established by how “evidence” is used in the science language community. This involves, amongst other things, checking to see if Wingabongas actually exist in the empirical world. This fact checking with respect to the empirical world acts as a guide to whether a Wingabonga can possibly live under my winter jasmine. My dreams and my orange peel evidence are secondary to the empirical fact of the Wingabonga’s non-existence. This empirical fact (the Wingabonga’s non-existence) negates the evidence of my dreams and the orange peel detritus. It doesn’t say I didn’t have the dream and that I didn’t find the orange peel, just that the dream and the placement of the orange peel mean something other than what I thought.
This is the kind of empirical evidence Dawkins wants for god. And of course there isn’t any.
So what counts as evidence for a theist? There are a good many, but most of them have to do with the human community. There are things like the fact that all human cultures worship some form of divine, for example. Why isn’t this good enough for Dawkins? Because it is like my orange peel evidence. Sure the orange peel is there. Does that mean a Wingabonga lives in my winter jasmine? No. There will be another explanation, although I may not be privy to it.
Then there are the arguments for god that try to base themselves on empirical evidence. I think these kinds of arguments have arisen (like creationism) because science and its idea of evidence is clearly successful and powerful. Science and empirical evidence has become the one to beat. The problem with that is that the natural “territory” of religious language includes the word “evidence” but it isn’t the kind based on empirical data. That word has rules, and one is to test the hypothesis for empirical validity, and, because of that, the god test keeps failing.
What appears to me, though, is that those who keep bashing up against the empirical wall don’t seem to realize that there is a fundamental difference between what they took as “evidence” for the existence of god (their church, their feelings, their family belief, their assessment of odd events as they relate to their story of origin) is not the same thing as the “evidence” that supports things like evolution. So they keep doing silly things like the banana proof without any apparent clue to how foolish they appear.
So which “evidence” is right? Neither of course. However, if you use the theistic form of the term in the scientific language community you’re going to get intellectually smashed. Expecting otherwise is not a mark of intelligence.
March 9th, 2011
What’s all the fuss about? The God Delusion
I finally picked up a copy of The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins and started reading it today. Normally I wouldn’t have read it. There are two reasons for this. The first reason is that I don’t need any convincing with respect to the mythological nature of god. Second, in my experience, books that create terrible fusses are usually far more mundane than the amount of hysterical posturing would lead one to believe. So I assumed that this would be the case for Dawkins’ book.
I’m only a couple of chapters in but really, my second reason stands. What is all the fuss about?
All he really says is that:
1) a) the existence of god is an empirical proposition, b) which means that evidence can be used to test the proposition, and c) there is resoundingly little evidence in the favour of god’s existence.
2) People have a great deal of ready-made meaning when it comes to religious terminology, including terms like “god” and “religion” and because of that we should be careful how we use those terms, especially when we mean something fundamentally different from those assumed meanings.
Really, what is there to argue with that?
And if the fuss is because of the evidence Dawkins recounts of the harm religious believers and movements have done historically, surely, surely, this is not a surprise to anyone living today?
Anyway, the reason I picked up the book finally (despite my normal reasons) was because Bron Taylor (in Dark Green Religion) speaks rather disparagingly about Dawkins in the book and those passages rang false to me. So I’m checking out what Taylor says. I’m doing this because I like Taylor’s book, but suspect that his own need to maintain his belief system with respect to this project has got in the way of what is valuable and necessary research. I want to understand that and how to unweave the false notes from an otherwise golden web of research and analysis.
February 1st, 2011
Am I a not-man?
There has been one heck of a battle on twitter between PZ and his crew. There’s a post by PZ trying to be clear about what he is saying and I have to say I’m glad he was driven to it because I really did enjoy it (and the comments, which are yaaaaaaaaaards long).To tell you the truth, I’m not really sure why some people are so upset by his antipathy for what he calls “dictionary atheists.” It’s got to be clear that how one defines a thing has real power.
Let me give you an example: am I a not-man?
Well, as a woman it is true that I am not a man. But if you try to define me as a not-man to my face, you are going to rapidly have one less eye-ball. I mean men have been trying really hard for a long, long time to define women as not-men. It’s called misogyny. When you set up a definition as a negative, you set the terms of the discourse in the hands of your “opponent.” If I defined myself as a not-man, I have then said that men are the “norm” and I am to measure myself against that standard – even if I rebel, fight, hiss and spit.
Men do not get to define me. Not no how. I define myself based on my own experiences, my own behaviours, my own desires, my own society.
(If you are a man reading this – try defining yourself in public as a not-woman for a week. Just a week. See what happens.)
In just the same way, theists should not get to define the terms of discourse for all of us with respect to interpreting human life. And that is what happens if you define yourself as their opponent.
I am not a not-man. I am a woman. There is a profound difference in power with the two definitions. Take a lesson from feminism; define yourself as something positive and not as someone else’s opponent, because if you do that you are going to have to carry them everywhere for fear that you will cease to exist should they go away.
January 31st, 2011
humor on the nasty side
So much of humor is on the nasty side. We dis ourselves and others and by doing so we expose wounds and allow the air of attention to do its (hopefully healing) work. The problem is the need to hate others and the need to heal the fear that underlies it come out in the same nasty ways: racist jokes, cultural slurs, etc. The key is not to suppress the nastiness but to see it for the fear it is.
So I found both of these cartoons hilarious but think that the second comes a lot closer to self-awareness than the first. What do you think?
via funnyatheism
August 6th, 2010
Silence: discernment and reality
I am struggling with a book by Sara Maitland called A Book of Silence. I actually quite like it and there are parts that resonate deeply with my own experience of silence. The problem I am having is that the book is so resolutely Christian.
Actually I am not sure that is the real source of the problem but it is the only thing I can think of that explains what I am experiencing when reading the book. Let me give you an example. In the chapter called “Desert Hermits” she wants to discern and then understand the difference she perceives between two forms of silence. She has come to understand the two forms as the kind of silence that allows the Self to emerge (or create Itself) and the other is the kind of silence that abnegates personal identity, emptying one out until all that is inside is the Silence. The first (silence) she exemplifies with Kafka and then the Romantics and the second (Silence) with the those (usually Christian or at least religious) who seek an emptiness that is to be filled with God (or in the case of Buddhism, the loss of illusion).
She uses two quotes as reference points.
You said once that you would like to sit beside me while I write. Listen, in that case I could not write at all. For writing means revealing oneself to excess, that utmost of self revelation and surrender…that is why one can never be alone enough when one writes, why can there can never be enough silence around one when one writes, why even night is not night enough. (Kafka, Letters to Felice)
We must cross the desert and spend some time in it to receive the grace of God as we should. It is there that one empties oneself, that one drives away from oneself everything that is not God and that one empties completely the small house of one’s soul so as to leave all the room free for God alone…it is indispensable: the soul needs the silence of it, the inward retirement, this oblivion of all created things. (Charles de Foucauld, from Ann Freemantle’s book Desert Calling)
Of course I can feel the difference between the way Kafka and de Foucauld sought – and the difference between what it is they sought. This sense of becoming empty (whether to release Self or destroy self) is one all essentially quiet people can intuitively grasp, even one like me who does not require a god to explain the sense of unbearable intimacy that comes from being overwhelmed by that which is infinitely large. And the thing is that both the Self and the Silence are that – infinitely large.
The fact that I can identify either way is part of the problem I have with Maitland’s silence/Silence. I do know what “both” feel like. I know Kafka’s need as well as I do de Foucauld’s and they are not different, not really. They are both about the loss of the sense of separation. That which Maitland calls solitude/silence (evoking the Romantics) approaches the identity of self and universe by expanding self until it explodes in a kind of ecstatic sense of enfolding of the universe – not humanizing reality but including more and more into what it is to be “human,” so that “to be human” becomes ultimately meaningless — there is nothing that isn’t “to be human.” This is what Robinson Jeffers was going for in his inhumanism (or should have been if he wasn’t so pissed off at our inveterate stupidity). The Silence that the hermits sought, that is also achieved through making “to be human” meaningless. It is found by eliminating elements of what “to be human” means until one’s self/identity implodes — and that black hole of the Void (longed for by Simone Weil) is finally found to be at the center of the universe — where one’s self used to be.
Both paths lead to the same experience/event. There one finds a singular identity. It is universally encompassing and inexpressibly minute; monolithic and multitudinous, and our normal sense of isolation, incompleteness, finitude and threatened meaninglessness is utterly vanquished.
I suspect that my problem with what feels like an artificial division in Maitland’s book is compounded by the fact that even with her quotes she can’t seem to hold up the division. Near the end of this same chapter she gives us the words of an Egyptian hermit.
“What is there to love about the desert?
“We love the peace, the silence…You can pray anywhere. After all God is everywhere, so you can find him everywhere.” He gestured to the darkening and dunes outside. “But in the desert, in the pure clean atmosphere, in the silence – there you can find yourself. (Dalrymple, From the Holy Mountain)
This last is supposed to be an example of the second kind of seeker and yet, what the Silence provides is nevertheless the Self.
It is not, I think, the the goal of the querent that decides between the “exploder” or “imploder” as Maitland’s book implies, but something to do with cultural expectations and probably basic personality. A bit like solace sought…an extrovert will seek it in the company of others; an extrovert, no. Yet it is still solace that is sought, and found. It is these implications that bug me about the book and, to be honest, I associate this kind of rhetoric with the proselytizing tendencies of religious folk. Not fair perhaps, but there you are.
Does Maitland’s division matter? I think it does. For the same reason that it is important to realize that ecstatic experiences are artifacts of the human brain and body and not artifacts of mythological beings (i.e. we have some power in the situation), the false division of silence and Silence obscures — and the whole point of seeking is to actually find.
June 26th, 2010
Dreams and bodily prophecy
A short while ago I had a dream that prophesied some potential problems to come. And what’s true is that one of those “whales” from the dream smacked me nearly senseless as it went by only a few days after I had the dream. I won’t bore you with the details, but what may be of interest is how I cope with such things as “prophecy” given my atheism.
I know enough to realize that while dream images may be random firings of the brain, so, essentially is much else we experience. The point is what the brain does with those electrical and chemical impulses not just how they originate. There are many theories about how we achieve meaning and while many are interesting, I lean toward embodied cognition. The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy defines embodied cognition this way:
The general theory contends that cognitive processes develop when a tightly coupled system emerges from real-time, goal-directed interactions between organisms and their environment; the nature of these interactions influences the formation and further specifies the nature of the developing cognitive capacities.
In other words, as Wittgenstein said, “The human body is the best picture of the human soul.”
(I would add another phrase to make it: “The human body (as it comes to be through trying to accomplish things in the world) is the best picture of the human soul. Not as catchy of course, but more accurate.)
This idea is where I begin thinking about how dreams accomplish meaning. Because language and concepts are so blazingly important in our recent development, they drown out much of our older forms of communication. Things like “my skin is crawling” or “my gut tells me no” are messages now largely consigned to the realm of spirit and intuition. They have become all but inaudible in the time it has taken to move from Erectus to Sapiens. We have developed technologies to listen for those “messages” – meditation and the like – and now, given our conceptual dependence, we create stories to explain their origins. Since those zaps of insight often feel as if they are not like us (i.e. rational and conceptual), those “communications” are often thought to originate in the outside-us — in the spiritual world. I understand the impulse to consign the conceptually unknown to outside-us but I think it unnecessary to posit another world when our own will do as an explanation.
Our bodies, living and developing in the world provides enough of an explanatory net. Where do dreams come from? The bodily (non-conceptual) systems as they co-develop with the larger set of (non-conceptual) environmental systems.
The body is the model (think of it as a biological non-conceptual framework) which guides the activity of organizing those random impulses into meaningful episodes. Impulses fired because of events in the body in interaction with its environment, are organized into packets based on past experiences. Like rain flowing down a dry stream bed, where a particular rain drop falls may be random, but the pattern the water creates as it moves across the earth is not. Because those body/brain firings originate and are released into a fairly tightly organized set of pathways, many of which result in (and have been caused by) meaning construction of the waking mind, it seems silly to assume that dreams would not have just as much meaning potential as other waking mental events.
March 20th, 2010
Bad mood or just funny?
Now I’m in a bit of a bad mood, but I don’t think that is why I find this deeply amusing.
A little story: I was asked to catalog a small 1-room school house library so they could get back their accreditation from the state.
I knew that it was small enough that I could do it myself so I agreed without checking out the collection. When I got there, over their spring break, it was so appalling that I really had to laugh. Amongst other egregious errors, they had most science books cataloged as fiction (along with a copy of the Torah) but the Bible was in there as “non-fiction, history.” It was kind of nice putting things to rights but I know that once they had that bit of paper, it would all go back the way it was. Probably a good thing the kids didn’t learn much of anything for those years.
Thanks peardg for the link.