It is my understanding that mystical experiences, experiences of oneness with the universe and stuff like that, can be brought on by severe injury, fasting, sensory deprivation, etc. I, admittedly, have not read the articles saying how this comes about; I really should fix that at some point. However, I have been thinking about how this should affect whether one can take mystical experiences seriously, and whether these indicate some evidence that our mental states supervene on the physical.
The first reaction is to say that mystical experiences are simply caused by trauma and such, and are not valid. They are simply the result of neurons firing, so how could they signify anything else? But this is too simple. One standard argument in response seems to be that everything which you sense is mediated by neurons firing as well, with all of that physical stuff thrown in. But we think that our senses tell us something about reality, whatever that may be. So the fact that mystical experiences are mediated by brain activity is not in itself a mark against them.
But that doesn't seem to be a complete answer either. There appears to be something ad hoc about these experiences, unlike sensory experience. Holding an object in front of my eyes should correlate to me seeing it; that's what seeing is. Suffering trauma does not seem to be connected to mystical experience in the same way. The mystical experience appears to be some accidental byproduct from chemical stimulation.
But then I turn around again. Why do I take sensory experience to be valid? Because (1) I have plenty of opportunities to test it, (2) different senses correlate with each other (it's much less likely that all are ad hoc in tightly corresponding ways), and (3) there are general features which the senses pick out that relate to what they sense (sight has light, hearing sound, etc.); ad hoc-ness comes from specific instances matching up without any underlying general principles.
But mystical experiences don't seem to happen regularly enough to test them. Even mystics do not appear to have them all of the time; I think Plotinus for example only ascended to the One four times in his life. And the fact that there is no other type of mystical sense by which to test mystical experiences is no mark against them. And finally, there may be a general principle which causes these experiences: these causes are all activities which push away the material world, which would explain fasting, sensory deprivation, and severe trauma, while cohering with the nature of the world given in mystic's accounts.
But back again: there also seems to be a commensurability between sensing and the physical processes involved. What is sensed is finite and differentiated, and causing similarly finite and differentiated brain signals. There is room for some sort of mathematical isomorphism between the two, copying the information in one process to the other. But a mystical experience suddenly realizes the entire oneness of everything in the universe; how does any single object of "sense" yield this?
And again back: mystics themselves have realized the opinion that their experiences could all be hallucinations. Either Al-Ghazali or Suhrawardi (I can't remember which) brings this up, and notes that anyone who has had these experiences would clearly know that they are not hallucinatory. It's not like it took modern science to figure out that mystical experiences could be misguided. Even though aware of the possibility, mystics have denied it. Without having such experiences myself, what could I say against them? Or for them, for that matter.
So that is my line of thinking, most of which I am working on clarifying. It seems that there are broadly three options (perhaps not mutually exclusive) which one could take. First, the material world in its diversity is primary, and mystical experience are simply the odd result of certain neurons firing. Second, the mystical/mental/ideal/spiritual/psychic/etc. world is primary; either the mystical experience is the result of leaving behind the physical, or there is some deeper structure involved in which the physical event triggering the experience is itself an effect/emanation/manifestation/etc. of some previous mental/etc. cause/etc. which is directly connected to the mystical experience in the mental/etc. plane (ao, physical event A seems to cause mental event B, but mental event C caused physical event A and mental event C; the physical supervenes on the mental). Third, we're simply looking at two different levels of explanation. Mystical experiences may not give us any scientific knowledge of the world, but are real enough and legitimately understood on their own terms regardless of what neuroscience teaches.
7 comments:
So, do you have any personal inclinations towards any of the three options there? Assuming you're still in the (broadly construed?) camp of Idealism, or at least thereabouts loitering, I would think you'd eliminate (1), but (2) and (3) seem to be able to fit with an idealist understanding, at least if we conceive of them in a certain way.
It seems, though, that in a certain way, (1) and (3) might be compatible, if the philosophical materialism in the background is of a somewhat nuanced nature that's willing to accept, or even promote, either God or at least some facsimile of Him (that is, really only a Richard Dawkins-style hard-line "this is all there is" atheism would outright make these compatible).
Thoughts?
I'm not sure. My Idealist proclivities would push me toward 2. But, on the other hand, I'm not entirely settled on the Idealist explanations of the matter (I guess pun intended), or of the mystics either, and so I could see a materialist account at least for this instance. I think that 3 should coexist with either, as the ontologically uncommitted version; anyone who disagrees with it is simply being stubborn. 3 doesn't say that such experiences point to an objectively existing God, or oneness w/ the universe, but simply that such experiences have their own structure and impact our lives as some reality independently of what ultimately causes them. The mystic would be wrong in taking them to be evidence for anything (assuming they do, and this seems to me to be a debatable point), and the scientist would be wrong in pushing them aside in favor of their own explanations on a different level of reality.
Hmm, good point that I hadn't considered on (3)'s compatibility with either. Of course, I'm not especially sympathetic to the stubborn materialist in any event*, but it does seem that the materialist has to account for something mental that at least sort of transcends the physical plane, if he/she wants to account for concepts like morality. Would the best option be some sort of phenomenology such that mental states are caused by physical ones, but don't have the ability to cause anything in the physical realm? But even this doesn't destroy (3)'s "levels of description" concept.
*Am I missing something, in that materialists would almost all want some sort of rigorously empirical epistemology (at least, that seems to be the grounds on which to reject religious belief), but don't exact have a lot of empirical ground for rejecting belief in God outright? I'm generally not a follower of Stephen Jay Gould's NOMA thought, but it seems like the basic concept ought at least to apply here.
Why would a materialist not believe in God? Well, they might take the stance of a non-committal nonbelief. They simply don't see the evidence now; if evidence came in, they'd be fine with changing their minds.
But even those more rabid atheists like Dawkins seem to be working in this way: there are sociological and biological explanations which seem to explain the phenomenon of religion, while on the other hand the religions' own explanations seem to come short. Since religions also appear to cause harm, everything seems to point toward atheism, based on both evidence and practicality.
I'm not sure that there needs to be anything transphysical to explain morality, though there would have to be to explain it in the traditional Christian sense. But the materialist could simply say that morality is about living well in society, and this is empirical based on the world and on human wants and needs.
Epiphenomenalists do actually say that mental states as caused by the physical, while the physical states are the ones actually doing the causing (though I may not be doing them justice - I was taught phil of mind by a staunch dualist). One could be an emergentist, and say that mental substances actually arise out of physical ones, but this would go a step beyond materialism. It would still subordinate the mental to the physical, in a way. Or one could be a reductivist, in which case everything is physical and terms like "consciousness" carry as much weight as astrology. Or one could be a functionalist, treating the mind (whatever it is) as a black box which we can't explain (or at least need not).
By "levels of descriptions", I mean something like the following: even if every single chemical proposition were reducible to physics, chemistry as a field would not cease to be a useful way of describing reality for us. It's simply using a different coordinate system. There may be more to different levels of description, such that they cannot be changed into one another via coordinate transformations, but there wouldn't be less.
Okay, so I'm still a little confused on this point: chemistry and physics, to my mind, don't use so much a different coordinate system as just a radically different scale, in the sense that it seems our understandings of chemical reactions are basically shorthand for very complicated physical interactions). A 7th grader can understand that two hydrogen atoms bond with an oxygen and it makes water; a 10th grader might be able to take electron shells and so forth into account, but it's pretty much Ph.D. level p-chem to actually do the math showing how electrons move and the electromagnetic fields that draw atoms to each other and so forth. So it's just a bird's-eye view. Is this how a hard-line materialist would view mental operations? (I'm not saying this in a charged way; I just truly don't know.)
Well, there are many kinds of coordinate transforms. This one, for the materialist, may just be an expansion or contraction. But the materialist would probably want to reduce mental states to physical in the same way as chemistry would reduce to physics; my point is that it takes serious physics to explain chemistry, and such physics never attains to the elegance of a simple chemical equation. The phenomenon of consciousness would be the same on a much larger scale.
Okay, perfect - that answered my question. Ahh, one day I'll get this thinking like a philosopher down!
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