Last night my wife and I engaged in our annual ritual of watching every bit of the Oscars show where Academy Awards are presented to film winners in 43 categories, if I recall that number correctly.
We like movies. So we like the Oscars.
This year, per usual, the show ran long, so I spent 3 1/2 hours of my remaining life span in front of our TV. Given that expenditure of vital energy, I'm going to do my best to conjure a Church of the Churchless blog post out of the more philosophical/political aspects of the Oscars.
A primary interest of mine was hoping that Everything Everywhere All at Once didn't win Best Picture, because I disliked that film.
As I said in that above-linked blog post, the multiverse theme in the film left me feeling confused and uninterested. Of course, there's no evidence that the multiverse exists. But the movie's fantasy multiverse was much less appealing than real life.
The way a multiverse was presented in Everything Everywhere All at Once reminded me of reincarnation beliefs.
Meaning, there's forces outside normal human understanding that control what is happening in this life.
It takes some special powers to learn what those forces are. Because anything can happen in the multiverse, hurting other people or even killing them is no big deal, since they will remain uninjured or alive in another corner of the multiverse. (Akin to reincarnation, obviously.)
For me, this took away the most interesting aspect of a movie for me: the struggle of characters to deal with problems in their lives. When a movie like Everything Everywhere All at Once resorts to science fiction mumbo-jumbo, the humanity of the characters becomes subservient to fantasy.
In my January blog post about the movie, I quoted from a review in The Guardian.
Everything Everywhere All at Once has been critically swooned over in the US and pretty much everywhere else, so it’s disconcerting to find it frantically hyperactive and self-admiring and yet strangely laborious, dull and overdetermined, never letting up for a single second to let us care about, or indeed believe in, any of its characters.
There are some nice gags and sprightly Kubrickian touches, and one genuinely shocking scene when Evelyn fat-shames her daughter – an authentically upsetting moment of family dysfunction that seems to come from another film, one in a parallel universe.
But this mad succession of consequence-free events, trains of activity which get cancelled by a switch to another parallel world, means that nothing is actually at stake, and the film becomes a formless splurge of Nothing Nowhere Over a Long Period of Time. Again, this film is much admired and arrives adorned with saucer-eyed critical notices … I wish I liked it more.
"Means that nothing is actually at stake." So true. This movie isn't really religious, but its multiverse theme gives it a supernatural vibe.
Just as a religion will say that human life is just a brief way station on the way to eternal life in heaven, so Everything Everywhere All at Once presents a view where nothing really matters in the lives of the characters, since whatever is happening is just one of many happenings to them in other corners of the multiverse.
By contrast, I liked All Quiet on the Western Front, a German movie, much more. The horrors of trench warfare in the first World War came through loud and clear. I could identify with the soldiers who had to obey stupid orders of their generals.
Scenes from All Quiet on the Western Front are still vivid in my memory because I could identify with the humanity of the German soldiers in the film. I can't recall any scenes in Everything Everywhere All at Once that came close to that vividness, since the characters in that movie were caricatures lacking human depth.
What else comes to mind about the Oscars? Well, here's an excerpt from the blog post about the Oscars I wrote last night.
A few years from now, I suspect Everything Everywhere All at Once will be viewed as a production that doesn't age well.
On the plus side, I was thrilled when Navalny got Best Documentary. The acceptance speech for Navalny was the only time Putin's horrendous invasion of Ukraine and his authoritarian rule of Russia was mentioned at the Oscars.
And having watched and hugely enjoyed RRR, an Indian film, I was rooting for it to win Best Original Song, which it did for the catchy “Naatu Naatu.” The dancing that accompanied the song was as infectious as it was in RRR itself.
Jimmy Kimmel had some good jokes. Naturally I can't remember most of them. One that sticks in my mind came near the end of the show when he observed that whoever edited the voluminous footage of the January 6 insurrection at the nation's capitol into a "film" that made the riot look like a tourist visit deserved an Oscar.
(It was Tucker Carlson of Fox News who fashioned that lie, of course.)
Here's the "Naatu Naatu" dance.
Mystical experiences need testing if they become a worldview
As I've noted before, and surely will do so again, one of the pleasures I get from this blog is reading intelligent comment conversations on posts that I've written. Or in this case, on an Open Thread where the comments are the substance of the post.
Below is a comment that Appreciative Reader left on an Open Thread in response to a comment by manjit. If you want to read manjit's comment, click on that link and scroll up to the preceding comment.
Appreciative Reader has a knack for saying things in a way that I've never come across before. I'm not saying that his ideas are totally unique, just that how he expresses those ideas often is wonderfully clear and creative.
He's correct in noting that every personal experience is subjective, so not rational, logical, or scientific. The world's greatest physicist, along with everybody else, is engaged in a totally ineffable experience when eating a strawberry.
So mystical experiences are simply a subset of all experiences.
They can't be put into words, or pictures, or numbers, or anything else, just as any other experience can't. I make this point frequently on this blog: nobody can question someone else's personal experience, because they aren't the person having the subjective experience.
However, once someone claims that their mystical experience has a meaning beyond the personal, that's when I tend to agree with Appreciative Reader that reason, logic, and science come into play. He just has a fresh way of saying this, as you can read below.
That said, I'm not totally convinced that his thesis is correct about a worldview needing confirmation by reason, rationality, logic, or science. I put raspberries on my cereal every morning. The taste of those berries is "mystical," in the sense that no one but me knows how they taste to me.
But it seems a stretch to say that the fact that I buy raspberries whenever I do our weekly grocery shopping makes raspberries part of my worldview, and so requires confirmation by reason, rationality, logic, or science.
Anyway, Appreciative Reader and manjit have made me ponder things that I usually take for granted. So their comment conversation has benefitted me in that regard. I guess I tend to see a dividing line between symbolic and non-symbolic sorts of experiences, which is a bit different from how Appreciative Reader sees things.
Yet maybe we're seeing similarly. So long as I simply enjoy the taste of raspberries in a subjective, non-symbolic fashion, I'm in the realm of unquestionable personal experience. However, as soon as I try to describe their taste in some way, now I'm in the realm of questionable interpersonal experience.
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Dear manjit,
As ever, pleasure to read your thought-provoking comment.
You think Brian’s approach pseudo-scientific. I’m afraid I don’t agree, at all. I’m kind of curious why you think *that*, but I’ll let it pass, because there’s way more meat in your comment, that I’d like to address, and that I’ll be glad if you’re able to answer, whenever you are able. (I’ll bookmark this thread, so that I don’t miss it, should you end up responding after awhile.)
I’ll resist the temptation of addressing much of your comment, in the interests of (relative!) brevity, and instead focus on just two things, on which your thoughts will be of great interest to me.
The first, and most important, of where we disagree is where you say this: “I think one of your incorrect understandings of mysticism is that there is anything rational, logical or scientific about it.” I’m very interested in how you can possibly have arrived at that conclusion, especially in context of how I see this, which is as follows:
I agree, the mystical experience itself is not rational or logical, in and of itself. Nothing subjective ever is. If we’re content to experience whatever mystical experience we have, and simply stop at that, then, agreed, there’s no reason for reason, rationality, logic, or science to intrude in there. But the moment we incorporate that experience into our worldview, immediately it is subject to all of these things.
And nor is this peculiar to mystical experience, I’d say this applies to any and every subjective experience. You see the sun rise in the morning. Or, say, you feel that kind-of-painful-yet-pleasant pump in your bicep after working out.
Both of those mundane, non-mystical experiences, if you’re content to register them, and simply let them be, then that’s the end of it; and there’s no call to bring in logic, reason, rationality, or science into it. However, the moment you incorporate these experiences into your worldview, even in the slightest bit, then your surest way to arriving at a worldview, a model, that comports best with reality, is by following logic, and reason, and science.
Likewise with mystical experiences, surely? If you’re content to simply have those experiences, and then leave them be, well then, sure, that’s the end to it.
But if you go worldviewing your way with those experiences, no matter how much or how little, no matter how concretely or how vaguely --- even if only negatively, in questioning the veracity or the completeness of what we know about the world --- well then, right then, right there, is when it becomes subject to rationality and to science.
(To be clear, I’m not saying mystical experiences might not occasion reason to question, maybe even revise, our worldview. They well may. My point is, the moment you do even that much, the moment you do anything other than simply register that experience, completely passively and completely without any thoughts about it at all; the moment you incorporate that experience into your worldview [no matter how much or how little, no matter how concretely or how vaguely], right then, right there, is where science becomes the surest way of ensuring that that worldview, that model, those thoughts, comport best with the actual reality.)
Which is why I cannot see how you can possibly state, as you did, that there’s nothing rational, logical or scientific about mysticism.
My other point of disagreement is where you say this (and I’ll quote that paragraph of yours in full here):
“One man's "loose-jawed goggle-eyed imbecelic dogma" is another's belief that the universe was created ex-nihilo, like a rabbit out of a hat, or that life & consciousness are the product of the random, purposeless, accidental bumping together of inert matter, as if putting some oil and pigment in a bag, giving it a good shake for 10 seconds, then throwing it at a canvas could create a perfect replica of the Mona Lisa, and assorted other credulous and magical beliefs. Humanity has a long history of conflating the cultural status quo with reality itself, and implying anyone who challenges it is a "loose-jawed goggle-eyed imbecelic" dogmatist. Very often they're more right than wrong. However, very often they're more wrong than right.”
Well said, that. I agree with much of what you’ve said there. But the essence of it, the actual point of it, that is what I disagree with completely; and, again, wonder whether you might not end up changing your mind about this on thinking a bit more about it.
Haha, agreed, things popping into existence out of nowhere does sound crazy. That goes for lots of things, and indeed most things QM [quantum mechanics], agreed, absolutely. But why do we imagine that reality must necessarily comport with our native intuition about what makes sense?
After all, our intuition itself is shaped by our evolution, and is no more than what we needed to deal to best survive while running around naked in the wilds of Africa. Whether something *sounds* reasonable to our intuition, can hardly be the touchstone for evaluating whether something is *real*.
So then, if not intuition, then how *do* we make sense of the world around us, and within us? By following the evidence. By using reason and logic. In short, science. Even if that, for the present, leads us to such apparently goggle-eyed and imbecilic --- read “counter-intutive” --- explanations, as well as non-explanations, like things popping in out of nowhere, and quantum superposition, and the rest of it.
That is, there is a huge huge huge difference between the “goggle-eyed imbecilities” that science reveals to us, and the other extravagant explanations we think up about the world by means other than scientific. And what's more, basis what I’ve said just now, perhaps you’ll agree that if there’s apparently a double standard at play here, then it’s entirely warranted, in fact it is the only thing that *is* warranted, in this context.
-- Appreciative Reader
Posted at 09:46 PM in Comments, Mystics | Permalink | Comments (6)