Philosophy Discussion Forums | A Humans-Only Club for Open-Minded Discussion & Debate

[Pattern-chaser]

In trying to nail down reality into something understandable there's the risk of throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Richard Feynman pointed out that knowing the name of something tells you absolutely nothing about it. We need words to articulate and communicate but we also cannot take them too seriously. A huge amount of trouble has been caused by literal interpretations of ancient texts, with no consideration of the metaphorical and allegorical tendencies of ancient minds, using comparisons to describe phenomena in lieu of scientific terminology.

Nicely put, although comparison is how humans describe things. In this sense, metaphor is nothing but comparison. We describe new discoveries in terms of old stuff we already know about — comparison. Scientific terminology only allows us to compare a bit more consistently.

But your main points eclipse these details. It is obviously (to me) a mistake to treat Paddington Bear as we would Special Relativity, and that applies in both directions. Ancient religious texts are not scientific text books, and they aren't meant to be. If science and its terminology had been available back then, they still would not have been used to express religious or spiritual 'truths'. Horses for courses. So we must, as you say, understand what a sacred text is, and the approximate mindset of its author(s), before we can work out what it's saying, and why.

[Pattern-chaser]

Maria Popova presents cognitive philosopher Andy Clark’s exploration in “The Experience Machine: How Our Minds Predict and Shape Reality,”

...

The full article is here: https://www.themarginalian.org/2023/06/ ... iYWBV3i36Q

On the basis of the Marginalian article, I got hold of Andy Clark's book. I've barely started reading it, but it's full of interest so far...

[Pattern-chaser]

The value of poetry to access our minds in ways that hardly any other perception manages is undervalued in the modern world, and yet when predominantly young people capture current situations in their poetry wrapped up in their emotional experience, we suddenly experience its power. In Germany, there have been several young women present their poetry for example captivating the degradation of patient and nurses in the momentary staff shortages and high expectations. Everyone I have spoken to, especially those who have been nurses, expressed an explosion of emotion when listening, because our task is about preserving dignity in situations in which illness threatens self-esteem, and renders people into humiliating dependency. You can’t express that in prose adequately.

...

This is especially poignant, because we are using translations of scriptures in which the original power of poetry is removed, whether in the Psalms or the Qu’ran, the Bhagavad Gita and the Rigveda, the Tao Te Ching, or the many other religious traditions and texts, such as the Pali Canon in Buddhism or mystical poetry in Sufism, which also contain poetic elements in their scriptures or spiritual literature.

I have long considered poetry to represent the most sophisticated use of words and text that humans have achieved. And I agree with you that it has long been neglected, undeservedly so. But I hadn't thought directly about losses due to translation, until you just mentioned it. Yes, I think it's nearly impossible for a translator to capture and pass on the poetry with the text. I have read some English translations of Hesse that seem to me to approach retention of the poetry, but how much better must his books be in the original German?

There are some things that, if language can express them at all, only poetry can portray. Hearty agreement.

[Pattern-chaser]

If this thread is an argument, it seems to me one between those like yourself who are too scornful and dismissive of religion. And those who are inclined to paint it as too rose-tintedly benevolent, who skip too easily past the dark side.

Yes, there is always a middle line to be walked by the wise, but there are always extremes to tempt us from the righteous () path.

[Sculptor1]

I think the following quote sums up why you can never trust a religious person..
Whether or not they be good or evil, controlling or permissive. A religious person has to, at some point, continue to abandon reason and logical judgment to preserve their faith.
It is simply an indelible truth of religion and why you have always to be on your guard for fake arguments from them..

“Reason is a whore, the greatest enemy that faith has; it never comes to the aid of spiritual things, but more frequently than not struggles against the divine Word, treating with contempt all that emanates from God.”
― Martin Luther

[Fanman]

Good_Egg,

Seems like what you're doing here is limiting actuality/reality to what is objective.

No, I’m just saying that if God exists, it would be an objective entity. Subjective experiences are also a part of reality.

And relegating everything that is subjective or inter-subjective to a lower category "matters of faith" which might achieve reality-for-me but can never be "really real".

That is not my thinking at all. I have spiritual beliefs based on my subjective experiences. Some of them; have crossed over (so to speak) into the objective or measurable realm. I’m not the type of person that dismisses people’s subjective experiences out of hand.

If this thread is an argument, it seems to me one between those like yourself who are too scornful and dismissive of religion. And those who are inclined to paint it as too rose-tintedly benevolent, who skip too easily past the dark side.

I’m not scornful of religion. I see what I perceive to be its limitations and problems - I think having personal faith and an open-minded attitude towards things is better than being part of a religion – that’s my opinion.

[whateverist]

In Maria Popova’s weekly “Marginalian”, an article with the title, The Experience Machine: Cognitive Philosopher Andy Clark on the Power of Expectation and How the Mind Renders Reality Maria Popova presents cognitive philosopher Andy Clark’s exploration in “The Experience Machine: How Our Minds Predict and Shape Reality,” which she says is “an illuminating investigation of the human brain as a prediction machine that evolved to render reality as a composite of sensory input and prior expectation, replete with implications for neuroscience, psychology, medicine, mental health, neurodiversity, the relationship between the body and the self, and the way we live our lives.” She quotes Clark as saying:

Contrary to the standard belief that our senses are a kind of passive window onto the world, what is emerging is a picture of an ever-active brain that is always striving to predict what the world might currently have to offer. Those predictions then structure and shape the whole of human experience, from the way we interpret a person’s facial expression, to our feelings of pain, to our plans for an outing to the cinema.

Useful article! I enjoy her weekly summary on Sundays but missed this one, so thanks. I liked this part from the very beginning of that article too (my bolding):

We are never simply seeing what’s ‘really there,’ stripped bare of our own anticipations or insulated from our own past experiences. Instead, all human experience is part phantom — the product of deep-set predictions.

It reminds me again of how McGilchrist describes belief in God in TMAHE as

having an attitude, holding a disposition to the world, whereby that world, as it comes into being for me, is one in which God belongs. The belief alters the world but also alters me..

He goes on to say that every human being must have a disposition to the world but none can be shown to be verifiably true. But since, as this article you've shared argues, we are hard wired to perceptually select for what we expect to see, it might make some difference what expectation we harbor.

So an important question might be: should a society or family deliberately attempt to implant in its young a disposition to the world? And, if so, what criteria ought guide the selection of disposition to be aimed at, if we decide it is too important to leave to chance.

So religious belief might be viewed as a culturally selected for expectation held and encouraged not because it is true (that not being really applicable), but because it encourages societal coherence and individual flourishing. I would think those would be the characteristics most prized for any wisdom tradition.

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Thinking more about how philosophy helps and possibly hinders a fair investigation of religious practice and experience, I happened to read this in Iain McGilchrist's The Matter With Things last night about the writing of Henri Bergson. (My bolding.):

Bergson sees the key move that philosophers – and all thinking people – need to make as ‘turning this attention aside from the part of the universe which interests us from a practical viewpoint and turning it back toward what serves no practical purpose’. But, of course, by this he doesn’t mean abandoning a sense of purpose. He means not being caught up in the utilitarian purposes of the left hemisphere; instead aiming to attend in a way that is not already committed or attached (‘stuck’ in the case of the left hemisphere) to a particular focus selected for its usefulness. ‘This conversion of the attention’, he says, ‘would be philosophy itself.’60 The mistake that is made by many traditional philosophers, he suggests, is to believe that freeing one’s attention up in this way necessitates turning one’s back on practical life, rather than, in fact, embracing it.61 ‘One should act like a man of thought’, he wrote, in a memorable formulation, ‘and think like a man of action’.62

I take that last sentence as emphasizing that what we act on should reflect a careful evaluation of all the salient facts but that in what and how we think we should be practical or even strategic. Later he quotes Bergson as writing:

Change, if they consent to look directly at it without an interposed veil, will very quickly appear to them to be the most substantial and durable thing possible. Its solidity is infinitely superior to that of a fixity which is only an ephemeral arrangement between mobilities ... if change is real and even constitutive of reality, we must envisage the past quite differently from what we have been accustomed to doing through philosophy and language.63

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Once again there is more of interest I might respond to in your post but life intrudes.

[whateverist]

I think the following quote sums up why you can never trust a religious person..
Whether or not they be good or evil, controlling or permissive. A religious person has to, at some point, continue to abandon reason and logical judgment to preserve their faith.
It is simply an indelible truth of religion and why you have always to be on your guard for fake arguments from them..

“Reason is a whore, the greatest enemy that faith has; it never comes to the aid of spiritual things, but more frequently than not struggles against the divine Word, treating with contempt all that emanates from God.”
― Martin Luther

Not much to argue with there as who one trusts will depend on what you want to trust them to do. If you want someone to collude with and so prop up your own unsupported biases, then what and how they think might matter a great deal. I don’t need religious people to believe as I do so I find there are many I can trust to be reasonable on their own terms compatibly with my own non theistic expectations regarding what I deem reasonable. However I have to concede that here in the US where fundamentalist Christianity seems rampant there may well be more I can’t trust than ones I can.

[whateverist]

I do not believe it is an error of thinking to believe that a god can exist objectively.

I quite agree. But is it an error of observation (?) to believe that God does, in actuality, exist "objectively"? Yes, it is. All believers believe that God has *some* form of existence, but only the most extreme and blinkered of them assert God's *objective* existence. To do so says, among other things, that God can be observed and measured, as a scientist might do. This is clearly not the case. So we have to be careful to express clearly what we do believe, and what we *know*. [Hint: the latter is a very short list.]

That is an important point but one I'm more accustomed to making to theists. Not knowing what exactly the 'something more' actually is should be common ground between both sides. Unfortunately there are plenty of theists who are happy to feed the idea that believers know a whole lot more than anyone can know in this life, and plenty of non believers are happy to argue about the plausibility of those details. I wish more on both sides could appreciate and acknowledge that however that is called to mind for a person of faith can only ever be a finger pointing at the moon. The Christian finger may not look like the Hindu, Jewish or Islamic finger but each is pointing to something more than can be explicitly described and no finger is the moon itself.

[Stoppelmann]

I have long considered poetry to represent the most sophisticated use of words and text that humans have achieved. And I agree with you that it has long been neglected, undeservedly so. But I hadn't thought directly about losses due to translation, until you just mentioned it. Yes, I think it's nearly impossible for a translator to capture and pass on the poetry with the text. I have read some English translations of Hesse that seem to me to approach retention of the poetry, but how much better must his books be in the original German?

There are some things that, if language can express them at all, only poetry can portray. Hearty agreement.

Your mention of Hesse's writing style is absolutely spot on, which was particularly evident in Siddhartha, even if it wasn't poetry, but still had a captivating style that drove the story. I am fortunate to enjoy poetry in two languages, which gives me a command of language not typical of my humble beginnings, and which my brother and I happened to be talking about recently when we met in France. But, as we were saying, it also gives another perspective.

The translation of any poetry is difficult to do, because is not only to convey the literal meaning of the words but also to capture the essence, tone, and artistic qualities of the original work, and transporting the use of language, rhythm, meter, rhyme, wordplay, and cultural nuances. Without these elements, the aesthetic and emotional impact of the poem loses part of its “message”.

What Iain McGilchrist points to is that poetry often thrives on ambiguity and multiple layers of meaning, not least in epic “religious” texts. Translators must navigate these complexities and find appropriate equivalents or strategies to retain the richness of the original work, which in ancient languages is especially difficult. Imagine Hebrew, already having multiple layers of meaning, used in poetry, giving it even more layers, being translated into English, which is an international language because it is least complex. If you read English classical poetry, you realise how rich our language is in synonyms, which gives us multiple ways of saying something, whereas in other languages you often find that single words have multiple meanings.

Many missionaries, who gave us the first translations of religious verse from other cultures, needed not only linguistic skills but also a deep understanding of the source and target cultures, literary traditions, and artistic sensibilities. It required a delicate balance between faithfulness to the original and creative adaptation in order to capture the beauty and essence of the poem in the translated version, which, as it transpires, was not the case.

[Stoppelmann]

I think the following quote sums up why you can never trust a religious person..
Whether or not they be good or evil, controlling or permissive. A religious person has to, at some point, continue to abandon reason and logical judgment to preserve their faith.
It is simply an indelible truth of religion and why you have always to be on your guard for fake arguments from them..

“Reason is a whore, the greatest enemy that faith has; it never comes to the aid of spiritual things, but more frequently than not struggles against the divine Word, treating with contempt all that emanates from God.”
― Martin Luther

This sounds a lot like, "I met a German once, I hate them ..." but having heard of what you have been through, you have built a bias that is more complex than that. I can feel with you, even if you don't want me to, but life does strike us in many ways that influences our outlook, and given the inconsiderate statements of some religious people, especially Christians, I understand your resentment.

[Sculptor1]

I think the following quote sums up why you can never trust a religious person..
Whether or not they be good or evil, controlling or permissive. A religious person has to, at some point, continue to abandon reason and logical judgment to preserve their faith.
It is simply an indelible truth of religion and why you have always to be on your guard for fake arguments from them..

“Reason is a whore, the greatest enemy that faith has; it never comes to the aid of spiritual things, but more frequently than not struggles against the divine Word, treating with contempt all that emanates from God.”
― Martin Luther

This sounds a lot like, "I met a German once, I hate them ..." but having heard of what you have been through, you have built a bias that is more complex than that. I can feel with you, even if you don't want me to, but life does strike us in many ways that influences our outlook, and given the inconsiderate statements of some religious people, especially Christians, I understand your resentment.

Spoken like a true Christian. Meet someone you don't like then accuse them of racism. Smooth!

Luther was the key founder of all Protestantism; a creed that swallows up, it is reckoned 2.5 billion persons.

As for "bias" or "resentment", I did not write the quote - that was your founding father. Live with it.

[Stoppelmann]

This sounds a lot like, "I met a German once, I hate them ..." but having heard of what you have been through, you have built a bias that is more complex than that. I can feel with you, even if you don't want me to, but life does strike us in many ways that influences our outlook, and given the inconsiderate statements of some religious people, especially Christians, I understand your resentment.

Spoken like a true Christian. Meet someone you don't like then accuse them of racism. Smooth!

Luther was the key founder of all Protestantism; a creed that swallows up, it is reckoned 2.5 billion persons.

As for "bias" or "resentment", I did not write the quote - that was your founding father. Live with it.

But I still understand you, I just disagree.

[Sculptor1]

This sounds a lot like, "I met a German once, I hate them ..." but having heard of what you have been through, you have built a bias that is more complex than that. I can feel with you, even if you don't want me to, but life does strike us in many ways that influences our outlook, and given the inconsiderate statements of some religious people, especially Christians, I understand your resentment.

Spoken like a true Christian. Meet someone you don't like then accuse them of racism. Smooth!

Luther was the key founder of all Protestantism; a creed that swallows up, it is reckoned 2.5 billion persons.

As for "bias" or "resentment", I did not write the quote - that was your founding father. Live with it.

But I still understand you, I just disagree.

No, you do not understand me at all.
You just avoid the issue.

[Stoppelmann]

Useful article! I enjoy her weekly summary on Sundays but missed this one, so thanks. I liked this part from the very beginning of that article too (my bolding):

We are never simply seeing what’s ‘really there,’ stripped bare of our own anticipations or insulated from our own past experiences. Instead, all human experience is part phantom — the product of deep-set predictions.

Aha, another area of mutual interest. Yes, Maria does have a talent of capturing the essence with few words, which makes her weekly offering so good and worth more than the contribution I make.

It reminds me again of how McGilchrist describes belief in God in TMAHE as

having an attitude, holding a disposition to the world, whereby that world, as it comes into being for me, is one in which God belongs. The belief alters the world but also alters me..

He goes on to say that every human being must have a disposition to the world but none can be shown to be verifiably true. But since, as this article you've shared argues, we are hard wired to perceptually select for what we expect to see, it might make some difference what expectation we harbor.

If I may, I would expand that quote to the whole paragraph:

This helps illuminate belief in God. This is not reducible to a question of a factual answer to the question ‘does God exist?’, assuming for the moment that the expression ‘a factual answer’ has a meaning. It is having an attitude, holding a disposition towards the world, whereby that world, as it comes into being for me, is one in which God belongs. The belief alters the world, but also alters me. Is it true that God exists? Truth is a disposition, one of being true to someone or something.
McGilchrist, Iain. The Master and His Emissary (p. 170). Yale University Press. Kindle Edition.

It is more than an opinion, he says, but rather a tendency towards a behaviour, an attitude, and you can’t be without. It is just a question of which disposition we choose, and they all have benevolent or malevolent consequences, depending on how we implement them in our lives. So you can be a compassionate or malicious theist, just as you can be a kind or spiteful atheist, depending on the focus or orientation of our disposition. So in answer to your question:

… should a society or family deliberately attempt to implant in its young a disposition to the world? And, if so, what criteria ought guide the selection of disposition to be aimed at, if we decide it is too important to leave to chance.

The disposition towards a particular behaviour depends on your interpretation. There are Christians who focus on the judgemental and punishing God of the OT, rather than the benevolent redeemer, which reveals the reason why the Roman Catholic church was built on the foundations of the Roman empire, and employed the jurisdiction that they inherited, rather than spreading the message of non-duality, unanimity, and love. We still see this division in the various Christian groups.

Just as throughout history, there have been instances where the implementation of materialist philosophies has been associated with negative consequences which we can perceive as malevolent, for example communist regimes in the 20th century, such as in the Soviet Union, China, and others who adopted Marxist-Leninist principles, which were influenced by materialist ideas. I am quite convinced that Marx would have turned in his grave if he knew what had become of his manifesto and his concern for the working class. But authoritarianism, human rights abuses, suppression of dissent, and other malevolent consequences have been caused by other ideologies as well.

The disposition must find interpretation, and we know of multiple examples of the second-generation conflicts that have arisen despite the initiator of a movement having clear benevolent ideas.

So religious belief might be viewed as a culturally selected for expectation held and encouraged not because it is true (that not being really applicable), but because it encourages societal coherence and individual flourishing. I would think those would be the characteristics most prized for any wisdom tradition.

While I think this is extremely important, I see many religious traditions having a primordial beginning in one prime idea, that of the unanimity of humanity – indeed of all organic life – despite the cultural diversity. An idea which contradicts much of what humanity has done historically (which is why many sages and thinkers, prophets and saviours, were fugitives, incarcerated and killed). Indeed, the diversity should be understood as a gain, rather than a loss, if we have the prime idea that we belong together and are all expressions of the mysterious life-force that we give various names, connected by compassion and consciousness.

Thinking more about how philosophy helps and possibly hinders a fair investigation of religious practice and experience, I happened to read this in Iain McGilchrist's The Matter With Things last night about the writing of Henri Bergson. (My bolding.):

Bergson sees the key move that philosophers – and all thinking people – need to make as ‘turning this attention aside from the part of the universe which interests us from a practical viewpoint and turning it back toward what serves no practical purpose’. But, of course, by this he doesn’t mean abandoning a sense of purpose. He means not being caught up in the utilitarian purposes of the left hemisphere; instead aiming to attend in a way that is not already committed or attached (‘stuck’ in the case of the left hemisphere) to a particular focus selected for its usefulness. ‘This conversion of the attention’, he says, ‘would be philosophy itself.’60 The mistake that is made by many traditional philosophers, he suggests, is to believe that freeing one’s attention up in this way necessitates turning one’s back on practical life, rather than, in fact, embracing it.61 ‘One should act like a man of thought’, he wrote, in a memorable formulation, ‘and think like a man of action’.62

Yes, this last sentence has wisdom in it. I often come across people who are one or the other. I admit to being not as pragmatic as my wife and more the analysist, but those who apply themselves to thought and action normally have an advantage. Although it grew more out of confusion and less an act of wisdom, the fact that I have been both soldier and a nurse, or that I left school with little to show for the time spent there and later rose to become a regional manager over 600 staff, has inadvertently given me an outlook by which I take much into account that others don’t and given me a somewhat different attitude, which I assume has to do with the balance between left and right hemispheres. Having started MBSR in 2002, this also trained my concentration, and contemplative practise has helped me in my studies.

I take that last sentence as emphasizing that what we act on should reflect a careful evaluation of all the salient facts but that in what and how we think we should be practical or even strategic. Later he quotes Bergson as writing:

Change, if they consent to look directly at it without an interposed veil, will very quickly appear to them to be the most substantial and durable thing possible. Its solidity is infinitely superior to that of a fixity which is only an ephemeral arrangement between mobilities ... if change is real and even constitutive of reality, we must envisage the past quite differently from what we have been accustomed to doing through philosophy and language.63

At least since Heraclitus we could have known that the world is in a constant state of flux and transformation, "everything flows, nothing stands still." We need to accept change is an inherent and universal characteristic of existence and recognise that all things are in a perpetual process of becoming, constantly evolving and shifting. But McGilchrist goes on to talk about depth, and how Bergson wanted to see things from the philosophical “point of view of eternity” and “grasp afresh the external world as it really is, not superficially, in the present, but in depth, with the immediate past crowding upon it and imprinting upon it its impetus.”

The flow of change is inherently visible in religion, although you wouldn’t think so if you listen to Christians. The development visible as the OT proceeds is pointing to a change of paradigm, which becomes visible in the Prophets and in particular in Jesus, who continues in that paradigm. It is a movement away from the blood sacrifice, which had become a mindless slaughter, towards observing the widow whose two farthings are a greater sacrifice. It was about a change in the mind of God, for example in Hosea 6:6, the prophet speaks on behalf of God, saying, "For I desire steadfast love and not sacrifice, the knowledge of God rather than burnt offerings."

The prophets challenged and reinterpreted existing religious practices and beliefs, introducing new ways of understanding and relating to the divine, and in the case of Jesus, his teachings emphasized the inner disposition of the heart, love for God and neighbour, and the importance of justice, mercy, and compassion. This paradigm shift can be understood as a progression from a primarily external and ritualistic understanding of religion to a more inward, ethical, and relational approach. Owen Barfield, known as "the first and last Inkling" who had a profound influence on C. S. Lewis and an appreciable effect on J. R. R. Tolkien, wrote that the human experience of life shifts fundamentally over periods of cultural time.

Our awareness of things evolves. Our consciousness changes dramatically across history.

He proposed that it happens in three phases. The first, he called “original participation” – the word “participation” referring to the felt experience of participating in life. Original participation dominates when there is little distinction between what’s felt to be inside someone and what’s outside because the boundaries of individual self-consciousness, which today we take for granted, are not in place. Life is therefore lived at the level of the collective. It’s experienced as a continuous flow of vitality between what is “me” and “not me,” between mortals and immortals, between past and present, and also between other creatures and the human creature. The inner life of the cosmos is the inner life of the people. “Early man did not observe nature in our detached way,” Barfield writes. “He participated mentally and physically in her inner and outer processes.”

It determined life in ancient times and can sometimes be glimpsed today. It’s in the waves of emotion that sweep across a crowd as, then, there’s a temporary dissolution of the boundaries between the individual and others. It’s an experience that’s akin to stepping back in time. A second phase away from original participation is marked by what he called a “withdrawal of participation.” It happens when there’s a shift from the sense of being immersed in the life of others, nature, and the gods. An awareness of separation, even isolation, is felt. A person will begin to sense that they have an inner life that is, relatively speaking, their own.
Vernon, Mark. A Secret History of Christianity (p. 3). John Hunt Publishing. Kindle Edition.

I think I had better stop here, since I have been getting carried away.