Does materialism preclude spirituality?

[Cosmo]

No, I am not a "spiritual" person. I can't think that small any more.

Beautiful post, Merc. Nominated.

 

[Earthborn]

No, I am not a "spiritual" person.

Sounds to me like you are. Prove me wrong, skeptic!

 

[Cosmo]

Sounds to me like you are. Prove me wrong, skeptic!

Your definition of 'spiritual' is so broad and vague as to be useless. Prove me wrong, Earthborn!

 

[Dancing David]

I like that perceptive comment ....

Do you think we can ever share my perception of, say, green? Or of course for that matter, anything else?

I kind od doubt it, because the brain is very complex and grows in place, the ability to translate one image or perception from one human to another would be rather daunting. So i would say no. We can't really know what another person percieve. I know that when my best friend and I look at the color purple, he sees more red in it than I do, or i see more blue in it than he does. This could be from the number of receptors, the way the sensations are turned into perception, or the words we use. But he calls things pink that I call purple.

 

[Dancing David]

I'm sorry, you have completely done a fly by for me - right over my head. Please explain.

Well for starters auditory hallucinations are perceptions, they are actual perceptions for many of the people who have them. They will describe the experience as an external voice talking to them, others will describe them as 'loud thoughts'. So perception can be false from the get go.

Then there is the blind spot in the viusal field, look at a complex visual field and close one eye. You see a continous visual field. You brain makes up the stuff in the hole where the optic nerve goes through the retina.

And those rae the perceptions of physcical stimulation creating sensation.

Perception can include more abstract entoties like "I think that person is happY, it is a perception that is tue for us but the validity of it (IE the actual match between reality and the perception) will vary.

 

[Dancing David]

"Spirituality" is a remnant of a world view that preceded the telescope, the microscope, plate tectonics, Darwin, even Copernicus. Before electrodes, CAT or PET scans, before the discovery of neurotransmitters. "Spirituality" is the experiential equivalent of "heere be dragones"; it should come as no surprise that we have difficulty agreeing on "spiritual" experiences. There are no referents to point to; for hammegk's "green", we have any number of things in the real world that define it. Hammy learned the word without anybody who taught him having access to "his perception" nor he of theirs; the things in the real world defined his, my, and your "green". But "spiritual"?

What is worse, the things that used to be so amazingly incredible that they deserved to be called "heavenly", "angelic", or "spiritual", have long since been eclipsed by, say, the Hubble's deep-field pictures. The "miraculous" cure of an individual is dwarfed by the thousands of iron lungs no longer needed because of a vaccine for polio. The "divine" story of where people came from--reaching back an unthinkable several thousand years--has been overtaken by fossil finds and dna evidence that tells a far more marvelous story.

No, I am not a "spiritual" person. I can't think that small any more.

Very nice.

And that is why I conceptualize of 'spirituality' as being a way of identifying and understanding the non-rational parts of human life. A way as it were of communicating with the emotional , intuitive parts of ourselves. That way it is a lot like cultural anthroplogy where the symbols are just symbols that are used to communicate stuff. Like death is sad and happens to us all, this is one way of coping with it.

Without the constrainst of the need for magical entities that make miracles occur.
I find the universe miraculous in just terms of scale and detail.

 

[hammegk]

If you perceive green differently than me, what does it matter anyway?

Good question. I don't have an answer. Do you?

"Spirituality" is a remnant of a world view that preceded the telescope, the microscope, plate tectonics, Darwin, even Copernicus.

Interesting, yet you appear to understand the term and assign some meaning you consider, what? Illogical? Erroneous? Old-fashioned?

Before electrodes, CAT or PET scans, before the discovery of neurotransmitters. "Spirituality" is the experiential equivalent of "heere be dragones"; it should come as no surprise that we have difficulty agreeing on "spiritual" experiences.

A meme, perhaps?

Many have noted that measurement of correlates do not equal perception for any of us.

There are no referents to point to; for hammegk's "green", we have any number of things in the real world that define it. Hammy learned the word without anybody who taught him having access to "his perception" nor he of theirs; the things in the real world defined his, my, and your "green". But "spiritual"?

The fact that 'green' can be assigned to an arbitrary frequency range of the spectrum is not in dispute.

Spiritual? Yeah, it's in your world a private behavior, in mine a quale.

What is worse, the things that used to be so amazingly incredible that they deserved to be called "heavenly", "angelic", or "spiritual", have long since been eclipsed by, say, the Hubble's deep-field pictures.

Or we might say the awe some name spirituality is re-inforced by those pictures.

The "miraculous" cure of an individual is dwarfed by the thousands of iron lungs no longer needed because of a vaccine for polio.

At this you reach for irrelevencies regarding the spiritual.

The "divine" story of where people came from--reaching back an unthinkable several thousand years--has been overtaken by fossil finds and dna evidence that tells a far more marvelous story.

And now you shift the blame to religion, which may or may not contain a component we would agree to name spiritual.

No, I am not a "spiritual" person. I can't think that small any more.

Or perhaps you can't think (well, in your case, behave) large enough?

 

[Mercutio]

The fact that 'green' can be assigned to an arbitrary frequency range of the spectrum is not in dispute.

I could dissect the rest of your post, too (and may, later), but lack the time at present.

I, for one will dispute that "green" can be assigned to a frequency range. This is only the case if you are speaking of a monochromatic wavelength. Trick is, by mixing just two wavelengths, one above and one below that monochromatic green band, I can match monochromatic green with a dichromatic mix that you will perceive as the same color. [eta: and with just three wavelengths, you get all the colors of your computer screen or television set!] Psychophysicists have been using this trick to map out spectral sensitivities for nearly a century. In fact, if I can vary the intensity of one of those two wavelengths (from bright to dim to using it to fatigue your retina and produce an afterimage) I can very nearly use any two wavelengths to produce the sensation of any one other wavelength. The perception of "green" does not correspond to any one particular "arbitrary range of the spectrum".

What is more, through these nifty tests, I can tell you that my perception of green is quite likely different from yours--I am not color-blind, but I am color-anomalous. My mix of photopigments is different from yours (unless, by chance you are also anomalous). The "qualia of green" is not the defining feature of green; it cannot be, if we agree on what green is in the world, and yet our percptions of it are different "qualia". Green is defined by agreement in our language community. It is defined by publicly available referents. We learn to respond to whatever characteristic it is (wavelengths, as translated through our visual systems--which is a very different thing than wavelengths alone) that allows us to agree.

And you are right, hammy, that I understood "spirituality" well enough to respond. Like a lot of words, there is sufficient agreement to get by, until we start looking more closely. Even within this thread, Diamond claims we cannot give examples of it. Any two people might be in complete agreement, each with a completely different "qualia", as it were, of spirituality. If our "green" differs and yet we can talk about it, we can talk of spirituality. But when we examine it closely, we can point to examples of green. And we can point to examples of spirituality. I think, though, we would be surprised to find how much the latter differ from person to person. Earthborn takes my flat-out rejection of spirituality to be evidence of spirituality.

To quote the great philosopher Kermit the Frog, "It's not easy being green."

 

[hammegk]

I could dissect the rest of your post, too (and may, later), but lack the time at present.

I hope you find the time to do so.

I, for one will dispute that "green" can be assigned to a frequency range.

Er, yup. I didn't say that I provided the only definition of green.

And you are right, hammy, that I understood "spirituality" well enough to respond. Like a lot of words, there is sufficient agreement to get by, until we start looking more closely.

Looked at closely enough, most words encounter that problem.

To quote the great philosopher Kermit the Frog, "It's not easy being green."

I've never talked with a frog. What else do frogs tell you?

 

[NeilC]

If I have had spiritual experiences it has been in the long past. I am not referring to seeing things or speaking with god or something like that. We are talking about a way of feeling. A sense of the rightness in all things and the connectness of all things. That experience is transcendent relative to the typical daily way of feeling. I have felt that way only very rarely and only in the distant past. Now this may not be what Jerry Falwell or a yogi or a zen master means by a spiritual experience, but it is what I take it to mean and I would suppose there are varying degrees of this sort of experience just like there are varying degrees of almost every other kind of experience. I don't believe that attributing such an experience to changes in brain chemistry diminishes the significance of such an experience. I believe you can induce the experience by deliberately altering the brains chemistry - say with magic mushrooms and such - and the experience remains just as significant as if someone had meditated or prayed to Allah for days on end to get it.

As soon as I read this I thought "psilocybin"! - been there obviously.

I think it's a bit of a reach to state that it's not down to altered brain chemistry when, in order to induce the state, you deliberately altered your brain chemistry.

 

[Mercutio]

"Spirituality" is a remnant of a world view that preceded the telescope, the microscope, plate tectonics, Darwin, even Copernicus.

Interesting, yet you appear to understand the term and assign some meaning you consider, what? Illogical? Erroneous? Old-fashioned?

I do understand the term, well enough anyway. I ought to; most of its usage is historical. I understand the four humours, and phlogiston, though the larger theories using those terms have gone the way of the Great Irish Elk. (I actually did hear someone not too many years ago saying "there are 4 kinds of people--sanguine, choleric, melancholy, and phlegmatic. I can tell you are a sanguine type, which tells me..." It was part of a cold-reading spiel, but the audience was perfectly prepared to accept it.) A word may retain some common usage well after it is Illogical, Erroneous, and Old-fashioned. Hell, we'll just call it "quaint".

Before electrodes, CAT or PET scans, before the discovery of neurotransmitters. "Spirituality" is the experiential equivalent of "heere be dragones"; it should come as no surprise that we have difficulty agreeing on "spiritual" experiences.

A meme, perhaps?

Many have noted that measurement of correlates do not equal perception for any of us.

Nor should they. Especially for these private experiences. Even a description of something as public as walking does not equal the perception of walking; we know what it feels like to actually walk, and that is missing from the correlates. The trick is, we have no sensory neurons in the brain itself. We cannot feel what it feels like to perceive; we just perceive. We lack the equipment to introspect that part of perception, so our subjective experience will always disagree with a description of the correlates. Even as we tease apart the various parallel processes involved in perceiving what seems to us a unitary percept, we will (I think) never be able to have a description equal to perception. Of course, this is as much due to the inaccurate picture our subjective awareness gives us as the inaccurate picture our objective study gives us. (It does not matter which we say is the fundamental truth--either way, the two disagree and it is our futile task to try to explain the one with the other, or to show where such an explanation is impossible.)

There are no referents to point to; for hammegk's "green", we have any number of things in the real world that define it. Hammy learned the word without anybody who taught him having access to "his perception" nor he of theirs; the things in the real world defined his, my, and your "green". But "spiritual"?

The fact that 'green' can be assigned to an arbitrary frequency range of the spectrum is not in dispute.

Spiritual? Yeah, it's in your world a private behavior, in mine a quale.

This part, if memory serves, I responded to.

What is worse, the things that used to be so amazingly incredible that they deserved to be called "heavenly", "angelic", or "spiritual", have long since been eclipsed by, say, the Hubble's deep-field pictures.

Or we might say the awe some name spirituality is re-inforced by those pictures.

We could.

We could also measure the distance between stars (or between galaxies) in miles. At these distances, though, a new vocabulary would not be amiss. For me (YMMV), there is simply too much baggage attached to that old language. The way the words were used was for these extreme, unexplainable (rather than simply unexplained) phenomena, but the world-view containted in those words was one of "therefore it is something of a wholly different plane than our existence". That baggage remains. If one wants to keep that baggage, the word "spiritual" is there for them.

The "miraculous" cure of an individual is dwarfed by the thousands of iron lungs no longer needed because of a vaccine for polio.

At this you reach for irrelevencies regarding the spiritual.

I am painting this world-view with a broad brush, I will admit. To me, this is part of the "wholly other plane of existence" bit, and I argue that it is neither irrelevant to the language-baggage, nor irrelevant to the families who saw this change. Salk's vaccine was "a miracle", yes--but "miracle" was a word left over from curing a single leper. And it is not merely a case of expanding the definition of "miracle"; curing a leper was somehow supernatural, whereas Salk's vaccine was the product of hard work. To call it a miracle is a bit of a slap in the face to the researchers whose efforts paid off so richly.

The "divine" story of where people came from--reaching back an unthinkable several thousand years--has been overtaken by fossil finds and dna evidence that tells a far more marvelous story.

And now you shift the blame to religion, which may or may not contain a component we would agree to name spiritual.

I agree, but only to an extent. I do not "blame" religion, but I do include it in that world view. I think it belongs there; it is only in recent use of the word that we divorce "spirituality" from religion. As I am arguing that the word retains baggage from its earlier usage, I of course look at its historical usage.

No, I am not a "spiritual" person. I can't think that small any more.

Or perhaps you can't think (well, in your case, behave) large enough?

I dunno...the thing about a "spirituality of the gaps" is that we keep filling in the gaps. And the stuff we keep filling them in with so far has been so much more amazing than the imaginary dragons we had there before. Maybe you are right, and it is my lack of imagination. Maybe I am too easily over-awed with the real world, and not enough with what has passed for "spirituality" historically. Either way, too big or too small, I am not a spiritual person. No matter what Earthborn says.

 

[billydkid]

Well for starters auditory hallucinations are perceptions, they are actual perceptions for many of the people who have them. They will describe the experience as an external voice talking to them, others will describe them as 'loud thoughts'. So perception can be false from the get go.

Then there is the blind spot in the viusal field, look at a complex visual field and close one eye. You see a continous visual field. You brain makes up the stuff in the hole where the optic nerve goes through the retina.

And those rae the perceptions of physcical stimulation creating sensation.

Perception can include more abstract entoties like "I think that person is happY, it is a perception that is tue for us but the validity of it (IE the actual match between reality and the perception) will vary.

Well, ok, but I am not getting the connection between what you are saying and anything I wrote.

 

[billydkid]

As soon as I read this I thought "psilocybin"! - been there obviously.

I think it's a bit of a reach to state that it's not down to altered brain chemistry when, in order to induce the state, you deliberately altered your brain chemistry.

I'm sorry, I don't think I said anything like that. This is, in essense, what I meant to say. That I believe the "transcendent" experience (notice I am not using the word spiritual anymore and if anyone read my following posts they would see where I admitted that use of the word "spiritual" was probably a mistake realizing it would lead directly to the fruitless confussion and debate which has followed.) is, in fact, directly the result of brain chemistry and that brain chemistry can be altered in a variety of ways and that the fact that a transcendent experience is attributable to changes in brain chemistry does not diminish its significance.

In as much as I believe the "supernatural" is a meaningless concept, it could not be any other way - transcendent experiences like any other experience has to be due to chemistry. I think that people who believe in the "spiritual" believe that what makes spiritual experience meaningful is their "other worldliness" and to suppose that they are the results of actions and reactions - mechanisms and such - diminishes such experiences and renders them not meaningful. To suppose that the only way something can be meaningful is for it not to have its origins in physical reality leaves those of us who are materialists, but still believe life is meaningful in an untenable position.

If the only way something can be deeply meanful is for it to be "other worldly" suggests that nothing truly meaningful can happen at all. I don't believe that. I believe that the transcendent experiences people DO indeed have are the result of physical mechanisms, but are no less meaningful than if they were somehow otherwise. After reading some of the posts I have to say I wish some people would learn to read more carefully.

 

[billydkid]

Very nice.

And that is why I conceptualize of 'spirituality' as being a way of identifying and understanding the non-rational parts of human life. A way as it were of communicating with the emotional , intuitive parts of ourselves. That way it is a lot like cultural anthroplogy where the symbols are just symbols that are used to communicate stuff. Like death is sad and happens to us all, this is one way of coping with it.

Without the constrainst of the need for magical entities that make miracles occur.
I find the universe miraculous in just terms of scale and detail.

Magical is a good choice of words, I wish I had used it in my posts. But you have hit on exactly the crux of what I am trying to get at. That the universe need not be magical to be miraculous or meaningful. Likewise, we can have experiences which are transcendent versus everyday experience and these experiences can be deeply meaningful and enlightening without needing as their source some sort of magical explanation.

 

[Apathia]

Billydkid wrote:

If the only way something can be deeply meanful is for it to be "other worldly" suggests that nothing truly meaningful can happen at all. I don't believe that. I believe that the transcendent experiences people DO indeed have are the result of physical mechanisms, but are no less meaningful than if they were somehow otherwise. After reading some of the posts I have to say I wish some people would learn to read more carefully.

I understood your use of the word 'spiritual' from you OP.
It's just that we live in the age of soundbyte. People grab the nearest buzzword. I've found this especially true in the context of E-mails and forum posts.

The popular soundbyte assumption is that Atheists don't and can't have any 'spiritual' aspect to their lives. This is way untrue, and if they could read some of the stories Athest, Non-Theist, Naturalist, and Deist members of this forum, they would realize that we are not without Heart.

Also, most of us on the Forum have a tendancy to be talking heads. Any affirmation a poster makes is first seen in an intellectual frame and the picked apart. It's what were here for. The downside is that many of us don't communicate our personal values and the language we use to express them in this forum context.

Often it's hard not to use language provided by contemplative religious tradition. Buddhist language doesn't have Theistic attachments, but coming to a skeptics forum, one might have to kill the Buddha first before expressing the Dharma. God often needs a good burial. And you can't speak of the Tao without first declaring it a load of dingos' kidneys.

 

[hammegk]

I do understand the term, well enough anyway. I ought to; most of its usage is historical.

Yes, and that does characterize words.

Of course, this is as much due to the inaccurate picture our subjective awareness gives us as the inaccurate picture our objective study gives us. (It does not matter which we say is the fundamental truth--either way, the two disagree and it is our futile task to try to explain the one with the other, or to show where such an explanation is impossible.)

Unfortunately, that impossibility cannot be demonstrated under any logical worldview.

..."therefore it is something of a wholly different plane than our existence". That baggage remains. If one wants to keep that baggage, the word "spiritual" is there for them.

As you know I do not suscribe to a "wholly different plane of existence", and note that as yet the fact that you find 'spiritual' nothing more than a retreat to such a view is one man's opinion.

As I am arguing that the word retains baggage from its earlier usage, I of course look at its historical usage.

As do all of us.

Maybe I am too easily over-awed with the real world, ...

I'd say "not enough".

 

[Mercutio]

As you know I do not suscribe to a "wholly different plane of existence", and note that as yet the fact that you find 'spiritual' nothing more than a retreat to such a view is one man's opinion.

I am aware that you are not a dualist. I would have thought that you would agree, though, that the language that historically frames "spirituality" is dualist. You and I can each interpret it differently if we like, but if you argue that it is not dualistic language, I'd like to see how.

I'd say "not enough".

Hmm...perhaps your worldview holds the same "closet dualism" you accuse others of, but in reverse: the things we see as the real world are not mundane to you. (yes, I am yanking your chain.)

 

[Earthborn]

Earthborn takes my flat-out rejection of spirituality to be evidence of spirituality.

No, I don't. It is not your rejection of spirituality that make appear spiritual, but rather it is the fact that you seem to have a sense of awe and wonder for the world. Whatever spirituality is (and I doubt it can objectively be defined), that sense seems to me to be necessary.

I would have thought that you would agree, though, that the language that historically frames "spirituality" is dualist.

I don't think that is necessarily true. I think the concept of dualism you are refering to here is the idea that mind and matter are seperate things. A behaviourist may claim that the concept of 'mind' is meaningless to objective science and prefers to explain mental processes as physical processes. Someone who claims to be spiritual will most likely explain physical processes, even those outside the human body, as mental -- spirited -- processes. Such a person personifies things that happen in the world as the work of spirits, entities that have mental characteristics.

There is a strange similarity between this spiritual and behaviouristic way of saying things: both assume that there is no fundamental difference between the physical and the spiritual. That makes them, I think, compatible, even if they are different ways of looking at things. A dualist believes that there is a difference, that some things are spirited while others are not.

 

[Mercutio]

There is a strange similarity between this spiritual and behaviouristic way of saying things: both assume that there is no fundamental difference between the physical and the spiritual. That makes them, I think, compatible, even if they are different ways of looking at things. A dualist believes that there is a difference, that some things are spirited while others are not.

If I read him right, this is what hammy is getting at when he makes his "not enough" comment.

I could be wrong, of course...

 

[Mercutio]

I don't think that is necessarily true. I think the concept of dualism you are refering to here is the idea that mind and matter are seperate things. A behaviourist may claim that the concept of 'mind' is meaningless to objective science and prefers to explain mental processes as physical processes. Someone who claims to be spiritual will most likely explain physical processes, even those outside the human body, as mental -- spirited -- processes. Such a person personifies things that happen in the world as the work of spirits, entities that have mental characteristics.

Oh, I get this--and Hammy and I have argued on this before, and (I think) have a very good understanding of one another's positions.

My point on this was about the verbal baggage, though. Yes, a ~materialist view may be described as you do above, and be perfectly compatible with modern usage of "spirituality"; I still would argue (and invite anyone to change my view) that the language emerges historically from a dualistic view, and does speak of "spirituality" as somehow essentially different from mundane "earthly" life.