Well, the responses I got to my previous post, "Objective reality is validated by the reality-based community," were underwhelming.
Not really surprising, since I said:
The question I'd pose to those who hold a mystical, religious, or intuitive view of reality is this: what alternative to Rauch's approach below do you suggest for determining the nature of objective reality?
Meaning, it is easy to criticize reason, rationality, facts, science, open discussion, criticism of propositions about reality, and such. But it is difficult, if not impossible, to come up with a better approach than the Constitution of Knowledge.
Read what follows.
Then, if you disagree with some of what Rausch says below, leave a comment on this post describing the nature of your disagreement. Others can then submit their own ideas. This is how knowledge is gained: by a reality-based community willing to engage in the social pursuit of truth.
No one could suggest a better approach for gaining knowledge than a reality-based community willing to engage in the social pursuit of truth.
So in this post I'm going to take a different approach, with the goal of convincing those who hold a mystical, religious, or intuitive perspective that there isn't any other valid means of gaining knowledge of objective reality.
Note that I said "objective reality." Obviously we all gain knowledge of subjective reality just by being ourselves. Every experience each of us has is subjective, since it isn't evident to other people.
There's no way anyone can put a thought, emotion, perception, or any other content of consciousness on a table and say, See, this is my experience.
Thus a basic assumption here is that there are almost eight billion subjective human realities, one for each person on Earth. Yet there is only one objective shared reality. Rausch writes:
The main idea of the Constitution of Knowledge, as we have seen, is that reality is what we know, not what you or I know. No purely personal belief can be knowledge, no matter how much merit you or I might think it possesses.
...A corollary is that members of the reality-based community accept that, despite their diversity, they are all exploring aspects of one reality. The Constitution of Knowledge does not require them to see the world the same way or to agree on facts.
In fact, it only works where people see the world differently and disagree on facts, so that they can test their ideas and surmount their biases.
Its unique capacity, however, is to force individual differences toward social convergence. It does so by requiring persuasion, which in turn requires that we try to account for our differences by comparing them.
Science has made astounding progress in the past several hundred years by doing just that. By and large, scientists the world over agree on the knowledge gained from the scientific aspect of the reality-based community.
By contrast, religious believers and mystics have made essentially zero progress in arriving at a common spiritual knowledge. The same questions are being debated today as were being debated hundreds or thousands of years ago.
Why? One obvious reason is that there's no persuasive evidence that a supernatural realm exists. Thus there's no way to test propositions about what that realm consists of, since almost certainly it exists only in the subjective minds of individuals.
Consider the religious belief system that I used to accept, that of Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), a form of Sant Mat, an India-based religiosity that claims Perfect Living Masters can guide their disciples back to God by connecting them to the shabd, or Sound Current, the power that activates the cosmos.
That'd be amazing if it was true. But how would it be possible to determine the truth of RSSB or Sant Mat?
It can't be by accepting someone's claim that they're experienced divine light and sound. Hallucinations of that sort are commonplace. Psychedelic drugs can produce those phenomena. People can be mistaken. People can lie. People can fool themselves.
No matter how strongly someone believes in a religious, mystical, or supernatural tenet -- whether this belief is held by a small number or billions -- the question remains, Why should anyone else believe what you believe?
Christians believe Jesus is the Son of God. Muslims believe there is no God but God and Muhammed is His prophet. Hindus, Jews, Sikhs, plus adherents of thousands of other religions all have their own unique beliefs.
Atheists and agnostics are skeptical about all of those beliefs. For good reason, because there is no reality-based community in the realm of the supernatural. Again, almost certainly this is because that reality doesn't exist.
Yet suppose you're someone who has had such a profound experience of a supernatural reality that you feel the need to speak your truth to others? (A number of those someone's leave comments on this blog.)
Again, why should I or anyone else believe you?
It can't be because you've done the experiment of meditation, or whatever you want to call it, and the rest of us haven't. I haven't done any quantum mechanics experiments nor genetics experiments, but I accept the scientific knowledge in these areas.
I do so because there is a reality-based community -- researchers, journals, conferences, peer review, universities, government agencies, science writers, etc. -- that's skilled at assessing the validity of scientific propositions.
If a single scientist claims this or that is true, no one should believe them. Yet if their claim survives careful scrutiny by the reality-based community, there's good reason to believe them. At least until the claim is debunked.
With religious and mystical claims about the supernatural, so far none have become validated knowledge.
Not miracles. Not ESP. Not life after death. Not astral projection. After thousands of years of attempts by humans to find proof of the supernatural, there's so little to show for this search, we might as well round it off to zero.
The reason is that what Rausch says in his book is correct.
By extension, the empirical rule also dictates what does not account as checking: claims to authority by dint of a personally or tribally privileged perspective. In principle, persons and groups are interchangeable.
If I claim access to divine revelation, or if I claim the support of miracles which only believers can witness, or if I claim that my class or race or historically dominant status or historically oppressed status allows me to know and say things which others cannot, then I am breaking the empirical rule by exempting my views from contestability by others
...You have to check your own claims and subject them to contestation from others; you have to tolerate the competing claims of others; you have to accept that your own certainty counts for nothing; you have to forswear claiming that your god, your experience, your intuition, or your group is epistemically privileged; you have to defend the exclusive legitimacy of liberal science even (in fact, especially) when you think it is wrong or unfair.
If we are going to use science as the basis for a common understanding of reality, it can only be on the basis of things science can test. And that is only a limited portion of reality.
"The existing scientific concepts cover always only a very limited part of reality, and the other part that has not yet been understood is infinite. Whenever we proceed from the known into the unknown we may hope to understand, but we may have to learn at the same time a new meaning of the word ‘understanding’."
Werner Heisenburg
The effort to claim those experiences that defy scientific verification don't exist, aren't real, or are false is itself a false argument.
No comment can be made on scientific grounds for those things that have yet to be tested. They aren't false. They are not non - existent. They are unknown, from the perspective of science.
The effort to invalidate the experience of others rather than to acknowldge the unknown, and proceed to investigate it, is in fact to deny the very business of science.
It's lazy thinking by folks who don't like the messy and humbling unknown and don't want to do any real science themselves.
Posted by: Spence Tepper | July 05, 2021 at 10:48 PM
Let me raise this point again.
To argue in 1800 that there is zero evidence for the entire of history of humankind for a "particle" of light and therefore the notion that light has particles, is a false argument.
To argue, in that same year, that in all the millennia of human kind no such thing as an organic cell, bacteria or virus has ever been seen in any scientific record ever and therefore doesn't exist is false.
We can say today it is false.
But a good scientist back then would say so also. Because the argument that lack of evidence is proof of anything is not scientific.
Science proves stuff exists, proves hidden things are real all the time.
That's the business of science.
Therefore to claim the absence of data, around events that can't be measured yet, is some sort of proof that something doesn't exist is false.
Equally false if the argument that only what science has proven in the past exists can be considered party of reality is false. Reality consists of the known and the unknown.
What the history of science proves is that the unknown is real. Science is proving that every day, every minute of every day.
Posted by: Spence Tepper | July 05, 2021 at 10:59 PM
Anti-theists want to prove God and the Soul don't exist.
They falsely twist scientific data from experiments testing other things as fake evidence to support their claims about God and Soul.
Religious zealots want to prove God and the Soul exist.
They falsely twist scientific data testing other things as fake evidence to support their claims.
True Scientists, whether they are people of faith or atheists, state that reality includes both the known and the great unknown and that such concepts as God and Soul are not testable by science today. Therefore no proofs, for or against God or Soul can be made on scientific grounds.
As for someone's vision, when Einstein had a vision of riding on a beam of light when he was a teenager, that informed his thinking about light. He claimed in later years it was very helpful. He saw something that didn't match with current physics about light. But it turned out to be true.
How could his imagination have offered up a journey into a new reality within that science has since proven is in fact real?
His vision wasn't proof. But it was a real window into a deeper reality. Science has verified that.
A window Einstein used over and over again throughout his life, and which he encouraged his students to develop. The inner vision into reality.
Posted by: Spence Tepper | July 05, 2021 at 11:35 PM
@ BrianJi : "Yet suppose you're someone who has had such a profound experience of a supernatural reality that you feel the need to speak your truth to others? (A number of those someone's leave comments on this blog.) ... Again, why should I or anyone else believe you"
You shouldn't believe those crackpots either. The true mystics, on the other
hand, share only what they've experienced and pointedly disdain credulous
belief. They suggest mindfulness and a devotional practice to confirm what
they allege to be true. That's the only conditional hurdle. You must experience
that truth within yourself.
Should the mystic remain silent about what he has experienced? Wait for the
"reality-based" community to sanction a mystic search? To set parameters
for the experiment? Obviously, not. After all, the mystic, unlike faith-based
religious figures, doesn't seek converts or endorse an external "standards"
committee to canonize a body of mystic scripture.
Perhaps even the mention of a claim of transcendent reality is anathema
to the "churchless" faithful. Then there should be clear demarcation
between mystic and ordinary religious claimants. The former insists on
validation within consciousness itself at every step. The latter doesn't.
Surely, the devoutly scientific on CofC would give a grudging nod to the
methods of the former too.
Posted by: Dungeness | July 06, 2021 at 01:36 AM
"If a single scientist claims this or that is true, no one should believe them. Yet if their claim survives careful scrutiny by the reality-based community, there's good reason to believe them. At least until the claim is debunked."
..........Bingo! That goes to the heart of the matter, and I guess answers my question about "secondary rationality".
What some individual scientist says is of no consequence, no matter how hallowed that scientist's name. What matters is what science as a whole says, that is, what the scientific community as a whole agrees on.
That process is susceptible to errors, sure, especially given systemic flaws in the de facto practice of science. But eventually the whole apparatus does get over temporary glitches, and moves on to the right answer.
(And yes, this also points out the fallacy inherent in what apologists of theism do all the time, which is to cherry-pick something some particular scientist said at some time that, taken in isolation, happens to support their irrational ideas.)
----------
"Why should anyone else believe what you believe?"
..........I continue to find this emphasis on others' belief somewhat off. This continued insistence on differentiating between one's own private beliefs and what one seeks to have others believe.
It isn't somehow okay for someone to privately believe in all kinds of fantastic ideas, in so far as one aims at rationality. It isn't as if this principle suddenly comes into play only when one is seeking to have others buy into one's beliefs.
The fact is that what is insupportable, from a rational POV, to have others believe, is insupportable for oneself to believe, as well.
(Except in one particular scenario, which I feel constrained to mention here so as to close the loop fully, as it were, but which I'm not going to expound on unless subsequent discussion actually veers towards that aspect, because that would amount to a tiny sliver of the whole mass of actual beliefs going around.)
.
While I'm cent per cent behind what is being said and discussed in this book and in these series of reviews of that book, but I don't see the need to base that principle on a spurious (and in any case entirely unnecessarily) distinction between what one believes oneself, and what one would have others believe.
It is a matter simply of being rational, or not, regardless of whether one keeps one's beliefs to oneself, or seeks to have others believe them as well.
Posted by: Appreciative Reader | July 06, 2021 at 07:28 AM
"Should the mystic remain silent about what he has experienced? Wait for the
"reality-based" community to sanction a mystic search? "
..........Dungeness, if I may cut in with what appears to me to be the the solution to what you're asking of Brian, as it follows from what I've just said, in the comment immediately preceding, about not setting up a spurious (and unnecessary) distinction between one's private beliefs and what one seeks to have others believe:
Let the mystic himself join the "reality-based" community!
That he's into mysticism does not in any way disqualify him from joining in. In fact, he'd be best served in his own quest if he were to do that.
Let him not, himself, buy into fantastic worldviews arising out of his mysticism, that he cannot rationally justify to himself.
If he were to scrupulously follow that rule, then the one to benefit the most in terms of not being led astray into false narratives would be the mystic himself. And if he bases what he thinks and what he says on rationality, then, no matter the nature of his mysticism, anything he has to say will be a very valuable addition to the sum total of knowledge.
-------
In short, the obvious answer to that, as it appears to me, is for the mystic to not stand apart from the reality-based community.
He has no reason at all to do that, and every reason not to, as far as both his own private personal quest for meaning, as well as his interactions with the wider world.
Posted by: Appreciative Reader | July 06, 2021 at 07:42 AM
Hi AR
Who says all mystics make extraordinary claims? They aren't extraordinairy among the community of practitioners. And many of those are trained scientists.
The danger is pretending to know, and to label oneself, with such a lofty term as reality-based community.
Anyone who tests reality and bases their perception and belief upon that can claim the same. Of course, better, more scientific testing leads to more accurate results.
But folks using their membership to make negative claims of others they deem inferior, when these self - appointed reality policemen and reality policewoman aren't actually conducting their own investigations into reality, I think disqualifies the integrity of their claimed membership.
Because much of reality is unknown.
Claiming therefore to have superior knowledge isn't a legitimate claim simply because someone read a book. Or many books.
It requires confirming for oneself also.
To the extent that the mystic requires this second step, they are superior to the ones claiming to be reality-based on hearsay of the work of real scientists, and who do not conduct their own personal verification.
As for fantastic claims, the mystics provide the method for anyone to confirm this for themselves. They have done their part.
Reality is actually quite a bit of what we don't know. We should be careful claiming to know reality. Maybe reality is actually fantastic.
Rather we should be humbled by our own limitations to see, to learn what we can from those who think differently than we do.
If you love science, you will love the practice of inner exploration.
If you have no interest in explorartion within why comment upon it?
And if you are conducting your own explorations, then please share your method and results. That's a requirement of membership in the reality club, isn't it?
The reality-based community is the community in the process of investigation, and verification, I humbly suggest.
Posted by: Spence Tepper | July 06, 2021 at 12:38 PM
The only way to move beyond beliefs is to look at the facts, and question beliefs and the motives and background of the person who is forcing beliefs on you. GSD of RSSB is nothing but a hypocrite, and a BILLIONAIRE baba from a sales man. He is so called god on a stage, and a tyrant, power hungry, fake and a womenizer behind it. Step out the box, and keep questioning these so called FRAUDULENT gurus put you in while your so called perfect master gets away with everything.
Posted by: Uchit | July 06, 2021 at 03:41 PM
I suggest reading Dr. Stephen Meyer's new book, Restoring the God Hypothesis. I've noted that all the books you review are ones that back up your own personal opinions. Try reading Meyer's book, it may open your mind to new possibilities.
To counter your conclusion, there is zero objective or theoretical evidence for the existence of this universe without a designer, and for life itself without a designer. The secular science argument comes down to "these things just happened," or that an alien intelligence got the ball rolling (an answer that just begs the questions of where that alien intelligence came from). Meyer's book looks at all this and more.
Posted by: Tendzin | July 06, 2021 at 05:00 PM
Here is something interesting
https://youtu.be/KPD1oIKnnjs
It’s about out health, not some abstract God in the sky sitting on judgement 24/7 with nothing better to do.
We tend to believe bodies such as the American Diabetes Association
American heart Association
Etc
Yet here is this documentary he shows they are giving out Mis-information because they are sponsored by the very bodies who supply the food causing illness.
He shows that humans have known for a long time how to live healthy, without diabetes, heart issues, arthritis, cancer etc. Yet we all happily go on killing our own bodies.
He shows that being a vegan, those illnesses just disappear.
They added a few drops of blood from a vegan to cancer cells, and it killed the cancer.
Yet most of us don’t know any of this.
Diseases that can be easily avoided
Posted by: Osho Robbins | July 07, 2021 at 12:14 PM
Those who understand this can do anything / Dr Bruce Lipton ... (3:52)
95% of our time we're literally running on autopilot. We have all been programmed and in order to change we need to understand this...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iun45sa6Hn4
Posted by: Jen | July 25, 2021 at 06:55 PM