and I need to plan is after my fall travel season, we can aim for one podcast or webcast per month, in 2012? Michel On Tue, Sep 13, 2011 at 9:41 AM, Amaia Arcos <[email protected]>wrote:
Hehe, no obligation, it was just an idea. Audio would do too..
On 12 September 2011 20:10, Poor Richard <[email protected]> wrote:
** Oh my. I haven't ever used my webcam, and don't know from skype. I'm camera shy and people shy, too. But I'll think about practicing some and see how it feel.
PR
On 9/12/2011 9:36 AM, Amaia Arcos wrote:
What about a Skype based video-conference? We can make our own coffee and sip along, as if we were physically in the same place?
I think this sort of discussion is more fun "in person" :)
It could be recorded for archival and publishing purposes..
On 12 September 2011 16:26, Michel Bauwens <[email protected]>wrote:
thanks Richard, very 'enlightening' stuff, but this time, I'm just reading ... it's a bit of time question for me now, as I'm preparing a lecture tour ....
If you had time, I'd be interested in some kind of summary of our discussions, that is readable for outsiders,
just a suggestion,
perhaps one day, when I'm back from my travels, we can have an organized, publishable, email-based discussion, less tit for tat, more an extented dialogue,
Michel
On Mon, Sep 12, 2011 at 9:13 PM, Poor Richard <[email protected]>wrote:
my comments as usual are interlinear
On 9/12/2011 3:56 AM, Michel Bauwens wrote:
On Mon, Sep 12, 2011 at 3:01 PM, Poor Richard <[email protected]>wrote:
My comments are interlinear
But what makes the term "spirituality" even more problematic than "love" in many contexts is that it is indeed a "hot button" word for many in the atheist/agnostic/skeptic/free-thought/science community.
yes, but that is exactly because they have chosen for an impoverished understanding of the world, and thus the world challenges that ...
I do not believe such a description fits me nor a substantial portion of the communities in question.
for me it's very easy to recognize the people who have either gone through this inner transformation, or not,
I somewhat agree, but for me it may not be as easy as for you. I am often surprised by what extended dialog may unearth.
and the acceptance of the word 'spirituality' seems like a good indicator for that.
To me the word spirituality, when used in a non-sectarian universalist or new-age sort of way, is lately an indicator of a sort of intermediate phase of development, although few that I encounter actually seem to pass beyond it. That may sound superior or arrogant but I think it best that I don't sugar coat it with euphamisms or sneak it in sideways. I base this on my own life trajectory as well as my last few years of study and re-analysis of myself and those I have known.
You are one of the few exceptions, i.e. having clearly having experiences but not using the concept.
Yes I will stack up the quantity and intensity of my religious, mystical, and shamanistic experiences (with and without psychoactive substances) against anybody's. I'm no slouch as an amateur scholar of comparative religion and other wisdom traditions, either. I used the concept of spirituality most of my life. It has only been in the past decade that I have abandoned the concept of supernaturality and only in the past few years have I questioned the implicit associations of supernaturality (and other connotations I consider doubtful or fallacious) with the word "spirituality". It may be telling that I titled my blog post, "Is spiritual the new supernatural?," with a question rather than a statement. I am still agnostic as to the existence of anything logically and qualitatively distinct from everything else in the natural world, i.e. anything supernatural or non-natural) but I have completely abandoned the idea in my own thought pending some startling future revelation). One might think my aforementioned experiences would have provided just that revelation and indeed I interpreted them that way once. But gradually over the past couple of decades, concurrent with my deepening practice of introspection and my further assimilation of neuroscience and other life sciences I have come to interpret them in naturalistic ways that are much more satisfying to me than my former spiritual interpretations. My naturalistic interpretations are more satisfying because they are more intellectually parsimonious (spirituality no longer "adds value" to my interpretations--if it did I would retain it); because they expand rather than shrink the horizons of my mind; and because they fractally interdigitate with all the rest of my knowledge as my previous interpretations never could. The silver lining of spending years in extreme depression during which as much as half my time was spent in a semi-trance-like, semi-meditative state interspersed with long periods of careful and lucid examination of my thoughts, my beliefs, and my entire body of knowledge and experience-- was that I was able to sort, cross-index, and integrate all that content and process it to an extent I think that few people ever experience. This has given me an intellectual rebirth. I would say that my new brain is about two years old.
But from the above, your choice seems politically and socially motivated by the acceptance of that said community.
Not at all. I neither accept nor am I accepted by those communities (I mentioned several) to any extent that would influence me. My brief interaction with people in the local atheist community in N. Alabama was quite contentious. My acceptance of science is not of the community but of the methods, philosophies (with exceptions), and discoveries of science. I merely mentioned the various communities in question because they are well-represented in internet fora. I run across them all the time, but usually in open discussions of activism, politics, economics, ethics, conservation, general philosophy, and life sciences. I get the impression they are well-represented in the ranks of public intellectuals, internet geeks, and social activists. Very few of them seem to specialize in hyping their atheism, skepticism, etc. to the exclusion of the general spectrum of issues and ideas, any more than most gender-atypical or neuro-atypical people or handi-capable people are obsessed with talking just about their special community ad nauseum.
I understand that position perfectly, for the same reason I do not use the loaded s- and c-words .. but rather p2p to start a fresh investigation of emancipatory possibilities
If I slant my language for any audience (which is seldom), it is usually the "mainstream" audience. But if I were in your position I would probably avoid loaded words, too. From that frame of reference I might be fairly neutral on spirituality, since it is so popular, but I think I would avoid constructing many articles (with occasional exceptions, of course) that didn't allow some room or comfort level for bright, non-spiritual and anti-spiritual people to feel safe about participating.
We can say that "all is part of life", but again, isn't there a sea
of difference between understanding this mentally, i.e. still separately as a watching and conversing mind, and/or to experience this directly, as a shaman might.
I behold a sunset. I am moved esthetically and emotionally, and perhaps in other ways for which "naturalistic spirituality" might serve as a place holder for other words we don't have for responses of our organism that are still insufficiently examined. I'm not even saying that we can't value the sunset without examining our experience at all. But if someone tells me the sunset moves them spiritually, I probably know less than if they say it moves them esthetically or emotionally. Most people would just accept the spiritual explanation as if that meant the same thing to everyone. If you said you love the sunset, depending on the context I might say "yeah, me too" or I might ask "why?", or "what do you love about it?," or "what do you mean?, or "why don't you marry it?"
The sunset is not a good example, as anyone can 'easily' experience that, but what about shamanistic, mystical, gnostic and other experiences, that are not reducable to an external input from nature, but are rather inner events, from problematic origins (your 3 mind theory) . THere is more to life than nature 'mysticism' ..
I want to say a bit about eroticism and then I'll discuss shamanism. A lot of artful lovers (I include myself of earlier years) have had so-called spiritual erotic experiences--merging with the cosmos kind of stuff. The thing is, all kinds of hormones get flowing in the nervous system that are capable of producing hallucinations and there is ample evidence of the interaction of bio-elctromagnetic fields that probably affect the proprioceptive nervous system in exotic ways. I myself became fairly adept at the latter, and for years I considered various spiritual interpretations. Gradually I worked out naturalistic hypotheses that were more plausible to me. This does not exhaust the possibilities for evoking spiritual-like erotic experiences but I think it probably characterizes the whole spectrum of the phenomena.
I'm not sure how you might distinguish mystical and gnostic, but one of the few experiences I have no good naturalistic hypothesis for is my occasional ability to correctly visualize the interior construction of a machine I have never worked with before. One example is the case of a WWII vintage Willys Jeep that wouldn't start in the middle of the wilderness. Although I was not likely to have ever seen a schematic of a Willys starter, much less ever disassembled one, I had a vision of the construction of the starter which actually included the problem. I disassembled the starter and found the problem exactly as I had seen it. Its possible that I had disassembled maybe one other starter, possibly that of a 1949 Jaguar, before. So go figure. I've had similar experiences with other machines. Leaky mind?
What shall I say about shamanism without fearing for my life? Here again I think the proprioceptive nervous system and the bio-electromagnetic fields of living organisms are recruited in exotic ways, often with the aid of psychoactive substances, music, chants, rhythmic movements, sleep deprivation, and many other devices that alter or reconfigure the neural networks and the electrochemical state of the brain and the entire nervous system of the practitioner and sometimes other participants. Even though a lot of real stuff, including very exotic biophysical and biochemical stuff, is actually going on, the other dimension of it is that memory contents (not just the conscious memory but the eidetic lifetime memory of every sense perception you ever had and every Hieronymus Bosch<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_paintings_by_Hieronymus_Bosch>-esque image you ever imagined or dreamed in your life) are recruited to wrap the real physiological phenomena in a "virtual reality", or a sort of channeled hallucination that relates in a meaningful way to the shamanistic activity being conducted. The deal is that stuff happens that seems like magic, but is actually very natural despite its being truly unusual, mind-boggling, and poorly understood by science. That is not to say that all practices considered as shamanism, such as so-called psychic surgery, are legitimate. But there truly is real shamanic "magic", healing, and communication with nature in the manner I characterized above. I am fairly convinced I have communicated with plants and animals shamanistically, but a large part of what I thought I experienced was probably amplified and elaborated by my brain. Lets say one percent of the communication was real and 99% was brain-generated virtual reality (to be very conservative).
But, this is crucial, just as we cannot reduce the 'meaning' of skakespeare by the physical qualities of the ink on paper,
This is a bad example for your position. Meaning is only a relevant word in the context of a conscious entity. The ink on paper only has meaning when it is given such by the reader. We have learned a great deal about how all that works, and have no good reason to think that any of the stuff we don't know about it yet is not just as naturalistic as what we already know. When it comes right down to it, there is no good, logical, persuasive way to assert that anything unknown or mysterious is unnatural, because of the very lack of explanatory evidence that makes it a mystery. I have been experiencing and witnessing real mysterious phenomena for decades and have not seen, heard, nor read any convincing evidence that anything that exists or anything that is real is unnatural. Thus one of my objections to the very prevalent "supernatural" or dualistic connotation of the word spiritual.
ok again, there is no need to accept the supernatural at all; but here is a crucual difference, you seem to argue that one day, we'll know enough of the brain to explain the inner experiences of shakespeare lovers and tibetan monks, and that is the reductionism I object two. These are entirely different planes or aspects. No matter how much we know about how the brain works, that does not say anything about the hermeneutic aspects of Shakespeare. For that you would need psychological and social sciences but even more: intersubjective dialogue, irreducible to any 'science'.
Not yet. That will require full visibility into all levels of brain function and a way to "play back" these recorded correlates into another brain to verify that the experience induced by the recording is as complete as the original. I predict that some day it will be demonstrated so. I'd guess that to occur around 2040. I hope I'll live to experience high-fidelity brain recordings.
again, for me that has no bearing on understanding the phenomena in question, physical correlates are just physical correlates, they do not exhaust the issue at all
How can you say that does not exhaust the issue if you record the correlates and play them back in an actual brain to reproduce the original experience? I put that in specifically because it would confirm that the correlates + brain were in fact sufficient to reproduce the full subjective experience. You can say that's impossible and will never happen, fair enough, but if it did happen why wouldn't it exhaust the issue?
Besides, there is all the evidence from brain damage, stimulation, etc. that the brain creates the subjective experience because when you damage or stimulate it you alter or extinguish a specific category of subjective experience or cognition.
I consider this just as well-settled as an election where 40% of the votes are in and every single one of them is for the same candidate. In other words, I don't believe in miracles even though there is still a small possibility they could happen. If and when one happens I'll reappraise the situation. This is not so much reductionism as a tendency to conserve ones resources by concentrating on the most probable pay dirt.
We are all reductionists. That is built in to the nature of our brains and it offers certain economies and efficiencies. That is why we have to be so vigilant for habitual cognitive biases and why all our beliefs, even about our own first-person experiences, have to be provisional and have to be regularly examined, tested, and revised. The issue is whether one's reductionism is reasonable in a given context. For example, if you are even remotely fundamentalist about anything, including science, that is excessive reductionism. Many religious people have some of the most reductionist views of reality of all. I would say that one's world view must be at least 50% based on the best available science or it is a reductionist world-view. By that standard probably 90% of the human species has a pathologically reductionist world-view. Most of the remaining 10% would be some approximation of a scientist-shaman.
Hence the dialogue is always between those three levels, that of understanding material laws, that of understanding human meaning, and that of experiencing directly the transformative power of spiritual experiences.
In that scenario I'm not sure I see any difference between direct spiritual experience and, say, direct experience with a microscope. Experience with microscopes is also transformative. Direct experience is integral to science, and science is transformative, too. So is torture. (Different strokes....)
well it is the difference between physical torture, mental torture, and what it all means to the human being doing and experiencing it ... multiple levels of reality, not reducible to the physical correlates ... each new level of complexity is based on the lower level and cannot exist without it, but brings new 'laws' to the table .. i.e. emergent realities
Not reducible to the physical correlates -- I haven't said that. It is correlates + living brain. But if we can play the brain like a player piano, it means we don't need anything else (except more detail) to explain it. That's not irrational reductionism, that is rational parsimony. An Amazon tribesman might wonder what kind of spirit animates a chain saw or an excavating machine, but we don't. We understand the machine performs its function without requiring a spirit. In my opinion there is no credible evidence that we are anything but amazingly subtle and complex machines. That is not a reductionist position unless I hold it in the face of reliable contradictory evidence.
That doesn't require anyone to believe anything said by such
experiencer, but only, if we want, to follow the injunctions that may lead to those occuring in us as well. There is no obligation, but in my mind, there should also not be a rejection.
I disagree. Many (perhaps all) altered states of consciousness can be induced by secular means free of any association with religious or spiritual trappings. What the religious and spiritual terminologies, narratives, rituals, sacraments, art, architecture, etc. mostly seem to contribute is to make a practice or procedure more interesting, entertaining, or emotionally compelling (sometimes frightening) to many. This is a way of exploiting human nature.
well again, "a means of exploiting human nature" "hoaxes", instead of : different cultural and historical ways to experience human and other realities
That is not a fair characterization of my position. However it would be foolish not to acknowledge that a great portion of what most people (including modern, educated westerners) actually believe is contradicted by fact, and that (a separate issue) there are many people in all cultures who exploit human nature and perpetrate hoaxes.
... there is a sea of difference between the dead western funerals I experienced in Belgium (for my father) and the lively, communal, rich funeral rites I experienced here in Thailand (for my mother). An incredible difference in effectiveness, psychological, social, spiritual ..
There are many levels on which traditional funeral rites comfort the living and assist in their adjustment and I don't quarrel with that at all (with some possible exceptions) because at that point people are generally not in a balanced, integral state. By the same token prayer is known to help many people recover from illness, although there is also evidence that non-religious guided imagery has a similar impact. In the absence of other evidence I attribute these to a type of placebo effect. The downside of the spiritual versions of psychoneuroimmunology and suggestion is that false belief systems or biases may be reinforced which could have negative as well as positive consequences at some point int the future. For example, a person convinced that gods had healed them my become fundamentalist or apocalyptic. Of course if the interventions are truly life saving I suppose future consequences can be damned.
there is really a sea of difference between artificially creating a altered states through drugs and machinery, and the collective process that goes on through a spiritual path. Which is not to say we could not develop and are developing, contempary methodologies, such as John Heron's Cooperative INquiry and many others, http://p2pfoundation.net/Category:Spirituality#Key_Articles
I strongly agree that good collective process is often more powerful than individual practice, though of course they are complementary, and that altered states achieved without drugs or machinery, if possible, are preferable--or perhaps I should say they reflect a greater achievement.
However, altered states acheived au naturale do not escape my scrutiny. I have had many unassisted "mystical/religious" experiences for which at the time my highly educated, practiced, and subtle mind had little recourse but to spiritual interpretations. Drugless, in prayer, I was once enclosed in two giant, cupped hands that were a translucent, glowing greenish-blue color. This was visible to my open eyes. I was certain they were the hands of Jesus. Another time while meditating (drugless) in a group of experienced meditators in a very special, highly conducive place, I watched myself as I lay in a small rowboat floating across a smooth, silvery blue lake towards a far shore that was not visible at first. As the far shore just became visible, I heard the unmistakable voice of Jesus --not in my mind but speaking softly in my ears--giving me a blessing. I realized that the far shore was the threshold of the heavenly world where my wife (dead for two decades) might be. As I began to anticipate reaching that shore, I was told in a different voice, unfamiliar but nonthreatening, that it was not permitted. My consciousness gradually returned to the room and I felt better than I ever had in my life. Was this a spiritual experience? In form and content, perhaps; but in time I came to consider it a self-induced hallucination. Curiously, the experience was so incredibly remarkable that I did not feel disappointed to think of it as an hallucination. I was very impressed with my brain. Despite its past injuries and some genetic handicaps, it is a very fine brain and I gotta love it.
Apart from the rejection of the semantics of the concept of spirit
and spirituality, it is now a historical time to go beyond the rejection of 19th century rationalism against anything that is not purely 'rational', to a time of integration and dialogue between the various levels of the human being.
That's what I'm all up in here about. My rational arguments would not be what they are without decades of practical experience and observation of all things mystical and shamanistic from a highly open and sympathetic point of view. I do not reject the experience, but I do reject many of the common interpretations of it.
Understood, so do I, but I believe what is needed is participant observation, not a superior condemnation from a morally higher vantage point (i.e. rational thinking vs. hoaxes and human exploitation)
I understand. Despite what I said about loving my brain, I don't think my interpretations are ecessively ego-based. But I agree that is not always the case for others who object to spiritual interpretations. In the past I was often a sympathetic participant-observer of many cultural traditions and practices. In the present, my aim is not condemnation but cognitive emancipation and evolution. I only reject (for myself) beliefs that are contrary to evidence or for which I have compelling (at least to me) naturalistic hypotheses; and I only discuss these in what I think are appropriate venues.
PR
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-- “We would think and live better and be closer to our purpose as humans if we moved continuously on foot across the surface of the earth” Bruce Chatwin
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