So, lots of people are talking about spirituality. What do I think it is, if anything? Below the fold.
I'm a naturalist. This means, in a philosophical context (i.e., neither a scientific nor a religious context) that I think that phenomena can be given a naturalised account. I think this also of spirituality.
I had something of an epiphany when reading Alfred Wallace's essays on Spirit. For those who do not know, Wallace had an argument that ran roughly thus:
1. All humans are roughly as intelligent and capable as each other (Wallace was a true racial egalitarian, even when Darwin wasn't quite).
2. The intelligence needed to make a living as a primate was about that of a gorilla's (i.e., in cultural terms, not much).
3. However, all humans can do math if taught, make music, paint pictures and do all the other "elevating" activities of human culture.
4. Natural selection cannot make a trait better than it needs to be.
ERGO: Intelligence is not the outcome of natural selection. Since intelligence must have evolved, it must be the outcome of something else. What could that be? It must be Spirit (he always capitalised the word).
Wallace's argument is flawed for several reasons. One is that he thought that natural selection only affected survival. He refused to accept sexual selection due to mate competition, and he refused to accept that selection had an effect on reproduction as well as survival. Another is that he ignored the effects of culture as part of the selective environment. Those who follow Gould and Lewontin on the notion of a "spandrel", or a part co-opted for a task in virtue of being a side effect of other processes, think that intelligence (or the supernumerary kind above the gorilla level) is a spandrel.
But as it stands, if you grant the premises, it is a sound argument. So was Wallace right to conclude that the human mind was the outcome of Spirit? He thought, incidentally, that Spirit was a natural thing, amenable to empirical investigation just like energy, a view widely held at the time.
You will note a false dichotomy in the conclusion - IF not selection for survival, THEN the effect of Spirit. Why this dichotomy? It is clearly a cultural choice of the day, and this gives us a clue as to how to read Wallace's argument. Not Spirit. Society.
Spirit is largely the corpus of societal influences and knowledge, standards and norms, fashions and institutions, that we spend 15 years or so getting acculturated into, without being aware that we are doing so, often. In short, Spirit = Society. Societal selection is one of the main driving forces in the within species adaptation of a social organism. Your individual fitness directly depends on how well you fit into that corpus, and how well you can employ it. Selection on those who can employ and acquire culture more effectively is ongoing. It is ongoing even today.
Wallace's notion of spirit as social knowledge suggests that much of what we call spiritual is actually (or is best elaborated as) connection with the culture - the ideas, myths, meanings, goals, and morés. This has a definite psychological experiential element to it, as all cognitive activities do, and I am sure there is an element to spirituality that is mostly experiential, but I believe that the experience only has spiritual meaning in the context of the culture. This is why Near Death Experiences always have the divine beings of the individual's culture (if Hindus and Jews saw Jesus, I'd be more impressed with the objectivity of the experience, and more-so if they all saw Mary).
The term "spirit" and its cognates in Greek (psuché) and Hebrew (ruach) meant "breath", and we talk about a "breath of fresh air" for a new style or institution. Culture invigorates us, motivates us, and is the context in which we experience the world. No wonder we tend to think it is something set apart. But it's not - culture is the combined activities and knowledge of a certain kind of ape, which has its own evolution and exigencies apart from the biology of those apes. It seems to the apes to be independent of them, something that comes, as it mostly does, from without, and if an individual makes a major contribution to it, often as not they interpret that as something moving through them. It is not surprising that we do with it what we so often do, and hypostasise it (look it up. It's part of my $2 word for the day project). But spirituality is entirely natural, in my view - it's just the effect of being social, big brained, and language users. Birds, though they have culture, will not experience spirituality, nor will chimps. I'm not sure about whales, though I doubt it.
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Speaking as a lay-ape, "spirituality" carries the notion of being detached from the material world and largely concerned with matters of the spirit which, in this context, is akin to the soul. In other words, it is the non-corporeal repository of the sublime essence of the individual which may or may not include conscious intelligence and is generally assumed to survive the death of the body (think Noel Coward's Blithe Spirit).
Associated with this, it can also include ghosties, ghoulies and things that go bump in the night, in other words, disembodied intelligent agents often of malevolent intent that are precisely the sort of insubstantial and unsubstantiated 'supernatural' entities to which PeeZed Mayazz and his fellow aspiritualists object so strongly.
It's also clear that, for many people, "spirituality" in its much broader sense encompasses emotions of amazement and awe when contemplating the physical Universe or various aspects thereof. But if that is all that is meant then we have much better words like 'wonderment' to describe such reactions, so why not use them? I have to agree with the aspiritualists here that the answer is that "spirituality" in this context is being used as a place-holder to hold open the prospect of some as-yet-undefined religious explanation and which reveals an unstated and possibly unacknowledged religious yearning in the user of the word - which can be almost as bad as a craving for tobacco.
I think there's more to spirituality than awe and wonderment, and that is why I identified as the cause of this difference the cultural and social. People do not need to be aware of this when it hits them. Our sense of connectedness is something that evolved almost certainly as a way of strengthening social bonds. In some it is absent and we call them psychopaths or sociopaths. In some it is stronger than usual. But almost anyone who has it may have an experience of connectedness, and identify it as a "mystical" spiritual experience. Drugs can help - my mystical experience was done with the advice and advocacy of Dr Timothy Leary. But the basic mechanism has to be there for it to work.
"my mystical experience was done with the advice and advocacy of Dr Timothy Leary"
How does it go again? "Turn on, tune in, drop dead!"
Lately it occurs to me what a long strange trip its been.
Doesn't this imply that if you want a spiritual experience, you'll have to go to the MCG?
For me, Spirit and spirituality are individual things, not societal. Of course, their expression are influence by society and culture, but I think you've got cause and effect the wrong way round.
My informal comparative religion studies suggest that they have very similar concepts of spirituality, despite coming from very different cultures. This suggests to me that there's something more than it just being culture: there is a sense of oneness there.
Bob
I think you misunderstand. What is shared between all cultures? Our biology. We all have pretty much the same sort of equipment up there between our ears, and so we all process cultural influences and social bonding much the same way, despite the differences in cultural detail.
Of course, if you are something of a dualist, you may say there is a processing of something non-natural, but I find no need of that hypothesis.
Nonetheless Bob has a point, I think. Wallace's third premise was that "all humans can do math if taught" and so it may be that he was making the point that we have something that enables us to do math. That is, the cause is the Spirit, the effect (which is evidence for the existence of its cause) is Society.
Incidentally, you need not need a hypothesis for it to be the most scientific, i.e. the most promising way to proceed empirically, and also the least presupposing metaphysically. (I sketched an argument for dualism on your Reduction and Water.)
So we can do math because of spirit? I find this an odd hypothesis. We do math because we have a neurological structure that allows us to manipulate symbols, and math is about manipulating symbols according to rules. What makes it possible for us to do better math than, say, a crow that can count (and they can), is not spirit, but brainpower.
I began by setting out my basic position: "I'm a naturalist. This means, in a philosophical context (i.e., neither a scientific nor a religious context) that I think that phenomena can be given a naturalised account. I think this also of spirituality."
So to claim that I have the cart before the horse (or, in this case Descartes before the hippocampus) is to reject my basic assumption. You may do that, but I take this approach on the basis of parsimony - the less you have to assume, the better the explanation. What reason do I have for thinking there is something that "spirit" refers to? If I can explain what seems to be inexplicable using the ordinary facts of biology, surely that is a worthwhile project?
Dualism is not, in my view (contra Chalmers) an attractive metaphysics. I will remain a physicalist until I see good reason to abandon it, and while physicalist research such as this continues to make progress.
No, because of caffeine.
*ahem*
I agree with you that spirit and spirituality should be approached naturalistically, but I just don't agree with your approach (hm, or I don't understand it, of course).
This would then suggest that, if spirituality is a common feature across societies, then it's biology, not culture, that is responsible. You seem to be implying that everything is cultural/societal (a sort of anti-Thatcherite proposition).
It strikes me that spirit might be best explained at the psychological (or neurophysiological) level, and is really just a part of the whole issue of consciousness. And that's a debate I run away from.
Bob
There's a tendency, which I believe I share, to think of everything people do or suffer as a kind of knowing as if spirituality (for example) had to be knowledge of a special kind of thing. But maybe the difference between a scientific outlook and spirituality is less like the difference between ornithology and botany and more like the difference between theorizing and dancing or observing and grieving. Now people use the word "spirituality" to refer to a great many things, but at least some of them--I'm thinking of the kind of experience reflected in the Psalms, for example--involve contemplating death and injustice or feeling overwhelming gratitude towards life, forms of consciousness that don't obviously center on knowing anything.
"What is the nature of spirit?" may be the wrong question, if understanding what's going on isn't a matter of finding some special object and describing its characteristics but rather a matter of finding ways of talking about different dimensions of human life. To me it sounds as if both believers and nonbelievers think that the universe is a large box with stuff in it like nick-nacks in a cupboard so that if there isn't anything to point to, there's nothing to talk about. One bad consequence of this mind set is that it makes it seem that not believing in gods and spirits implies an extremely narrow scientism, a super-positivism that doesn't so much deny the significance of most of what human beings have ever cared about but doesn't seem to know about anything outside the lab, the metaphysics of clueless nerds.
I would argue that the word "spirituality" is a personal thing, just like consciousness. In it's usage, it seems to have more properties or qualia associated with it than bare consciousness. Like consciousness, you can analyze the possible physical underpinnings of it ad nauseum (reductionism), but that does not approach the experience of it, which is where the mystery is. That's not necessarily a dualistic view.
Hypnogogic and hypnopompic hallucinations are another excellent example of this. Many, many people have them, and the experience is often pretty much the same (a feeling of paralysis, a feeling of some kind of being ominously hovering over you, often a feeling of fear, and often with sexual overtones). Despite the phenomenological similarity of all the descriptions, the attributions of the "cause" (when that cause is considered something other than neurology) is radically different: It's the Grim Reaper, it's God or Jesus or Vishnu, it's an incubus or succubus, it's a demon or angel, it's an alien abduction (w/ anal probe), it's a visit from the ghost of a dead loved one, it's a mysterious invader, it's some kind of spirit, or whatever.
Same experience each time, radically different interpretation. What's the same in every instance? Human neurology. What differs in each instance? Culture, personal beliefs/interests, context.
Re "the less you have to assume, the better the explanation", why assume that anything lies behind such experiences as seem to be of an objective world? We have the sense-data (so to speak), so why assume more? Explanation has to stop somewhere: if it has to stop at physics anyway (we cannot ask why the Big Bang, or what lies behind the superstrings) then why go that far, why not stop at our primary data? Of course, then there would be no explanation. All explanations involve positing obscure entities, whose existence would explain our observations.
Why nucleons and electrons, when we observe coloured objects? Why not little coloured balls (like the dots on the TV)? Well, chemistry (and its underlying quantum mechanics) is a fantastically simple explanation of so much, how could it be false? The fact that further physical investigations can take us to the bizarre complications of superstrings does not threaten the truth of chemistry. And nor did the bizarre conjectures of alchemy, which were once (at the crucial, formative moments) easily confused with those of chemistry.
And to postulate both objective and subjective entities in order to find the most realistic explanations in biology, psychology, sociology and so forth, is hardly extravogant. In fact, since one of the few things that we can be absolutely sure of, in a completely justified way, is that there are subjects, we ought to reject, if one of those two, objects!
Wherever we stop, it has to warrant our explanations. Those who do what you suggest are called positivists (Ernst Mach's view) but there is no principled way one can identify sense-data (a long debate in the early 20th Century - Google on "protokolsatz") and the existence of a physical world is as good a place to stop as anywhere. Moreover, there are anumber of other reasons than elegance for think physical theories are true (ish) - for a start in allows us to manipulate things in ways we didn't previously know how. As Hacking said of electrons, if you can spray them, they are real [enough].
Besides if all knowledge is subjective, then we need to explain the remarkable coincidence of our shared intersubjective experience of ... what?
So you agree that sometimes the more we assume the better the explanation, e.g. if what we have so far assumed fails to explain stuff that we are sure exists?
Re "of electrons, if you can spray them, they are real", it's more a matter of, if you think that you can spray them then you probably think that they are real. I mean, some spiritualist might think that they can spray sparklets of aura!
And electrons are pretty weird things, being wavey and all. Suppose some child knows (from experimentation in the bath) that splashing causes droplets to spray about. He might postulate that the waves caused by stones being thrown into a pond were sprays of fine droplets, being thrown out horizontally much as larger drops are clearly thrown up by the same event. In defence of his hypothetical droplets, he might say "if you can make the stone spray them, they are real enough!"
If someone wants to play the "everything is subjective" card and think that the reality of things depends on what we believe, I cannot argue with them. The reason I cannot argue with them is I am at a loss to know what would ever count as an argument they'd accept on anything. But they will not convince me of that. So far as I am concerned, such sophomoric speculations are uninteresting - science is where the knowledge is gained (at least - if anything deserves to be called knowledge, what science delivers is it. There may be other sources of knowledge, although I am yet to be convinced of it), and defining it away is a cheap trick. So is making the "episteme" of auras of a par with science. Believe that if you like - I never will.
We can do things with electrons we can't do with auras and hypothetical droplets. You can make a cathode ray screen, and electron microscope, and a computer using electrons. This has to count for something.
As to simplicity, Enigman - simplicity for its own sake is just self-aggrandisement. Simplicity that is competent to account for the empirical facts is what we want. No more complex than it has to be, and no less.
Incidentally, my point was not that everything is subjective, but that there is such a thing as a subject; if someone said to me that everything was subjective, I'd ask him how he expected me to know what he had just said!
So I think that we are in broad agreement, because the reason I mentioned spraying auras was because of the absurdity, within a reductio that I mentioned only because of course if you can spray X then X is real (that is practically a logical deduction because X has to be real for that to be real spraying), which is why for Hacking's comment to be more than an amusing exageration, for it to be an argument for the reality of electrons, there must be more - as you mention - it is the sheer amount that they can explain, in such a mathematically tidy way (as opposed to the way that epicycles explain).
Similarly with "the less you have to assume, the better the explanation", my positivistically nonsensical comments were also part of a reductio - as you just wrote, "Simplicity that is competent to account for the empirical facts is what we want. No more complex than it has to be, and no less." The theories of physical science are doing so well that I for one am confident about (to say the least) the quantum-mechanical foundations of chemistry. (And I expect that much more will come from evolutionary explanations of the facts; so long as we have a sufficiently broad input into the evolving structures of our models!)
I would merely emphasise how the "no more complex than it has to be" concerns more than present pragmatics. Cf. how Newtonian astrophysics is simple, and might account even for our current space-faring needs; whereas modern astrophysics cannot yet account for dark matter etc. Consequently it is of some scientific interest (at the level of what kinds of entities you will have to accept in order to be realistic) that physicalism cannot account for the subject (as previously mentioned). By itself that failure is not much (less impressive than the famous failure to account for a deflection that is only visible during an eclipse), but if subjects are real (as they clearly are) then what else might find a better explaination in some future, trans-physicalistic theory? The recent history of physical science indicates that it may be a surprising amount.
What it "needs to be" is adequate to the observations. Newtonian theory is not adequate to the observations, and wasn't even before Einstein.
But a trans-physicalist theory is something for which there is not the slightest indication there are observations it is needed for. So far, phsyicalism is doing just fine - it is making progress, surprising progress, and we are explaining things that used to be thought inexplicable on physical grounds.
Physicalism accounts for the subject thus: Any observation is experienced from a location in time and space. So what?
So I agree that physicalistic scientists are doing good work, in physical science; but regarding the socio-political conflict between the IDers and the Naturalists (which I merely observe, from over an ocean away), I fear that full-bodied physicalism may be a problem for the right side (i.e. yours). I'm not arguing that physicalistic scientists ought to change either their methodology, or their ideals; but within that conflict they might benefit from having a more philosophical (or agnostic, or precise) bottom line (or metaphysics). I fear that otherwise the IDers could say, with some (whereas it ought to be no) justification, that their opponents believe that we are all machines; and clearly, many could then conclude that both sides have good points (giving the IDers what they want). That is, both sides would seem to be using beliefs that are prima facie unrealistic and technically unjustified.
Nit-picks: (i) Einsteinian theories are also inadequate to the observations; so what? (ii) I'm not really talking about a trans-physicalistic theory, or even scheme (or sort) of theories; that is too far ahead. As you say, so far physicalism is doing just fine (in that scientific arena), but (iii) while I experience the yellow ball from the points of view of my eye-balls, to go beyond those organs is to get to the aforementioned problem (what sort of structure of what sort of stuff could possibly give rise to subjects). I'll bet you know more about that philosophical problem than I do, so I'll spare you what I see as its details; but the problem (as I see it) is that the IDers won't, once they notice physicalistic Naturalism's Achilles' heel (which fortunately may not be very soon, as they seem very unreflective). But of course, additional benefits to scientists (qua scientists) could be expected to follow from having taken a step towards a more realistic system of possible explanations (e.g. in the fields of psychology, and human evolution), if dualism is but true, for all that dualism might never be absolutely necessary for the accurate modelling of any set of observations
It is comments like this...
"Believe that if you like - I never will." (John Wilkens in an above post)
That make me smile.
Such absolute conviction; yet coming from a man who for sure has changed his mind many times over through the years.
It's in small things like this that I see a whole lot of what science is unable to show me.
Re "I find no need of that hypothesis" (#5 above), perhaps such needs differ in science and in philosophy? Anyway, I hope you find the following caption amusing (the picture was presumably of a Victorian ticket-Inspector, so perhaps it also relates to "self-aggrandisement" (#16) :)
Cats is 'dogs' and rabbits is 'dogs' and so's Parrats, but this 'ere 'Tortis' is a insect, and there ain't no charge for it. (Punch 1869: volume 56, page 96)
Which goes to show that British Rail has been a Kafkaesque absurdity for a long time...
Which goes to show that British Rail has been a Kafkaesque absurdity for a long time...
It wasn't British Rail in those days and isn't anymore now.
"And nor did the bizarre conjectures of alchemy, which were once (at the crucial, formative moments) easily confused with those of chemistry."
Enigman
My natural reaction to this statement is "bullshit" but maybe I don't understand what it is that you are trying to say so could you please elucidate or even better give a concrete example of such a confusion having taken place?
Not really; maybe it is bullshit, the point of the passage that ended with those words was pretty independent of it. And now that I think about it, that reference to alchemy was just distracting. Nonetheless, I wonder how you should tell a good posit from a bad posit (if you do not even know how it should all turn out). Maybe chemistry just evolved, with the bad alchemists blowing themselves up, and the good chemists surviving to call them bad.