Protip: No, not everyone is spiritual

[sabotabby]

So Stephen Covey, author of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, died today. In a startling coincidence, this was the day everyone in my class had to do their presentations on various habits (they were actually pretty funny because my classmates are cool, but I think the book is bollocks).

One thing that struck me is how often that book, which is ostensibly about leadership and management, segues into religious claptrap. Same with most self-help books, even some of the better ones I've encountered. Of course, they don't call it "religious claptrap." They call it spirituality.*

Everyone, I am told, is spiritual.

No offense to people who are religious, but this one grates. Big time. Especially because "spirituality" outside of the context of New Age nonsense almost always means "Christianity, but we don't want to alienate Jews who might want to buy our book." In this case, there are direct references to "your church" and "reading scriptures," which is pretty specific to one religion that happens to be the dominant one in this part of the world. It's another way that non-Christians and non-theists are erased: "Oh, 'church' could mean 'synagogue' or 'mosque' too! Oh? You don't go to either of those? Well, walk through Nature-with-a-capital-N to renew your spirit. Everyone is spiritual."

Nope. I'm not. I'm completely grounded in the material world. I don't believe in a God, or gods, or fairies in the garden, and haven't since I was a wee child. That's cool if you do, but your assumption that my experience is just an exotic variation of your own is annoying as all fuck. I've never had any sort of religious experience, and it's pretty hard for me to comprehend how people can have religious experiences; I imagine the reverse is just as alien.

I've often been told–and it's generally meant as a compliment—"sabotabby isn't religious, but she's one of the most spiritual people I've ever met." Which, yes, is also pretty offensive, and untrue. It makes me think that people just think that I'm lying when I tell them about my beliefs. I think maybe they mean "ethical," maybe, but again, the conflation of ethics with belief in the supernatural is problematic. I do the stuff that I do because I believe that there's no afterlife, no judgment, no punishment, and no reward. Because the here and now is all that matters. To suggest that I'm an activist because subconsciously I'm doing what someone's God wants me to do is to negate my agency as a human being.

To be told that my spiritual wellbeing is an essential part of my fulfillment as a person is to tell me that I'll never be fulfilled as a human being. Fullstop. That's okay, I guess. I might be happier if I were religious, but then, I'd also be happier if I were a billionaire, but we live with our limitations. The problem is I don't think it's actually true. I suspect that religious people live with the same kind of gnawing doubts and empty spaces as atheists do, get just as terrified when their relatives die or when their bodies fail, are just as awful when they get into positions of power and responsibility, and so on. It would be like me suggesting that everyone should be politically involved; that if you're not out on the streets marching with signs, you're neglecting a vital part of your personhood. It's something that I'm into, a lot, but I don't think you're lying to yourself if you're not into it. You probably find it as boring as I find Nature-with-a-capital-N.

So that's my rant for the day. If you should happen to find the phrase, "everyone is spiritual in their own way" bubbling up in your head, clamp a lid on that baby and I'll be quiet about the opiate-of-the-masses thing.

* It's been awhile since my rant about how I respect religious fundamentalists more than cafeteria New Agers, but I'm sure I don't need to go into it again. Right?

Comments

[scruloose.livejournal.com]

Among people whose life experiences are similar enough that we agree on the existence of genuine love, sure, we say things like "it's clear she loves you very much" without much problem. I don't know about you, but I have also known people whose personal experiences with everything they were ever told was love were characterized by a pattern of people being nice, paying attention, claiming to love them, gaining their trust, and eventually it comes out that it was all because they wanted to get something out of the situation (sex, popularity, money, whatever). Based on the body of evidence that person has available to them, the rational conclusion that love is fake and if you believe somebody actually loves you then you're a sucker. This person is just as sure that I'm deluded to believe somebody genuinely loves me as you are that I'm deluded to believe there might be a spiritual reality. My conclusion that love can be real is based on my personal experience of every relationship I've ever had. Your own experience may have also led you to the conclusion that genuine love can exist, but you are working from your own, non-transobservable body of evidence. Nothing you can say will convey the knowledge of genuine love to that person, because according to the very real body of evidence offered by their own life experience, you're clearly deluded and any "real" loving relationship you hold up as an example simply hasn't yet reached the "it comes out that it was all because they wanted to get something out of the situation" phase.

"In any event like this, a case for mass hallucination (which occur) would still be better than the case for miracles (which presumably do not)." Okay. Good to know that reference point. And from the outside, I most definitely agree. A couple of dozen people reporting such a thing... easily dismissed. If I were one of the people in that room, I'm not sure which would yield first, "I know what I experienced and it was verified by dozens of other people" or "I know Jesus doesn't turn up in a Greyhound station and show off a few miracles." I think that for myself, my willingness to question the veracity of my senses and my willingness to question the things I know to be impossible might be pretty close to equal, lacking some external factor to point to hallucination.

[mendaciloquent.livejournal.com]

Among people whose life experiences are similar enough that we agree on the existence of genuine love, sure, we say things like "it's clear she loves you very much" without much problem. I don't know about you, but I have also known people whose personal experiences with everything they were ever told was love were characterized by a pattern of people being nice, paying attention, claiming to love them, gaining their trust, and eventually it comes out that it was all because they wanted to get something out of the situation (sex, popularity, money, whatever)... Nothing you can say will convey the knowledge of genuine love to that person, because according to the very real body of evidence offered by their own life experience, you're clearly deluded and any "real" loving relationship you hold up as an example simply hasn't yet reached the "it comes out that it was all because they wanted to get something out of the situation" phase.

If you'll pardon the foray into something less exiting as true love and betrayal, let us say that we have two scientists who are studying the digestibility of lactose in rats. One group of rats, under the care of one scientist, can digest lactose. The other group, under the second scientist, can not. As it turns out, these rats are genetically different; one has a gene for producing the enzymes for breaking down lactose, the other does not. Were these scientists to have their rats switched without their knowledge, and subsequently asked, “Can your rats digest lactose?”, they would both produce an incorrect answer. Different rats, different evidence, different answers.

Even in this example, there is information which is not conveyable. The two scientists might be totally different in terms of personality. One might be emotionally attached to his rats where the other isn’t. One might love their job, the other might hate theirs. Neither of them, even with the mind of a Proust or a Shakespeare, can fully conjure in words the particularity of watching rat urine spin in a centrifuge -- the whir of the motor, the shimmer of Pyrex, etc, in all its fullness. The experimental results are themselves just the tip of a giant and non-conveyable phenomenological iceberg. And yet the experiment, for most observers, would be no less valid for this; the essential information is still communicated, skeletal though it may be in the dry language of science.

Obviously the lack of emotional involvement in my example makes it a little hard to relate to, but you get the idea. If you have two groups of people experiencing love -- one with reciprocating, well-adjusted people (for lack of a better term) -- and the other with abusive, manipulative people -- then yes, those people are going to give you different answers about what the experience of love is like. But that we would get different answers does not suggest that there is anything ineffable about human experience where conveying information is concerned, only that our mileage may vary when working with different data sets.

[scruloose.livejournal.com]

Okay, I'm game for a foray into the romantic and alluring world of the digestibility of lactose in rats!

The key point that I take from your example is that both scientists have rationally and correctly evaluated the evidence available to them and arrived at the most rational answer, which turns out to be wrong due to factors they had no way of knowing. Heck, even without the switcharoo at the end: if we take your two scientists with the two groups of rats and we take as a given that neither of the scientists has any way to know that the rats are genetically different and each one assumes that the rats she's working with are representative of rat-kind in general, then at the end you ask the question "can rats digest lactose?" Each one will give you a different answer. The key thing here is that neither of them is hallucinating or believes what they believe because of some social or psychological need. Each of them has rigorously and rationally evaluated the evidence available to her and arrived at the most reasonable answer.

As for the simmer of Pyrex in the centrifuge, while admittedly poetic, I have to regard that as a red herring. The point on which your example fails as a parallel to the "does genuine love exist" example is not on a lack of emotional involvement, but the fact that the non-conveyable sensory fullness of the experience of watching rat urine spin in a centrifuge is utterly irrelevant to the experiment and its outcome.

When the hypothesis being tested is "genuine selfless love can be found among human beings", on the other hand, the body of evidence at your disposal critically includes your lifetime of experiences with how people who have claimed to love you (and acted as though they loved you) ended up either sticking with you through thick and thin or betraying their ulterior motives and taking advantage of you. If one person's experience is consistently characterized by people lying, maintaining the facade (perhaps for years), and ultimately it comes out that it was for their own advantage, and another person's experience includes one or more examples of somebody demonstrating loyalty when they have nothing to gain and everything to lose... well, these two people can rationally examine the evidence at their disposal and arrive at two very different conclusions. Further, each of these people can reasonably and rationally conclude, based on the body of evidence at their disposal, that the other person is deluded/deceived and anything they have to say on the subject is highly suspect. The real and relevant body of evidence that rationally dictates the acceptance or rejection of the hypothesis in this case is non-transobservable. They can't trade rats and re-run the experiment. The shimmer of Pyrex in the centrifuge is as irrelevant as the sensory fullness of the smell of a particular lover's skin.

[scruloose.livejournal.com]

If you have two groups of people experiencing love -- one with reciprocating, well-adjusted people (for lack of a better term) -- and the other with abusive, manipulative people -- then yes, those people are going to give you different answers about what the experience of love is like.

...our mileage may vary when working with different data sets.

I think that brings me quite neatly back to my initial point. Some data-sets, such as chronic pain, romantic attraction, and one's experience of love, are... let's say highly resistant to being conveyed to another person. Especially in cases where you're trying to convey the information to someone who is working from a data-set that contradicts yours to such a strong degree that the most rational conclusion they can reach is that you are deluded and your information is suspect. We have a very real, everyday example of exactly such a conflict in the two groups of people experiencing love, referenced in the quote above. Given the non-conveyability and non-transobservability (at least in practice, in the real, present world) of this key data, I don't see any way to escape the conclusion that different people are working from different evidence as they construct and revise their understanding of how the universe works.

I think that the charitable assumption is that at least some religious/spiritual people may have been exposed to a different set of evidence than you have and that, even if not ultimately correct, the hypothesis "yes, there is a supernatural realm that interacts somehow with the material world" may actually be be most rational explanation for the evidence they have available from their lives, their experience of the world.

I don't see anything in the discussion so far that effectively challenges this central point. And as long as that point stands, any starting assumption that discounts this possibility cannot reasonably be defended as "charitable".

[mendaciloquent.livejournal.com]

Ah, but here you're sidestepping the everyday examples that you yourself brought up and reframing the conversation in the rationalism and empirical materialism of experimental science. I maintain that the answers to everyday questions that are fundamental to how we navigate the world, such as "how is my health" and "is this or that romantic partner right for me" can hinge crucially on evidence that is neither transobservable nor reproducible, and yet both real and vitally relevant. Chronic pain exists regardless of "conveying justifiable belief". The pain is, in and of itself, a determining factor in answering the question "how is my health?" and is neither transobservable nor reproducible. Whether my doctor (or any arbitrary skeptic) is satisfied as to the existence of my pain through observation of its indirect effects or not, (and often the answer is "not", especially for patients who endure pain stoically) my health still suffers from the the simple fact that I hurt. (Disclaimer: I, myself, thankfully do not suffer from chronic pain. I am using it as an example only.)

But within my examples, I don’t see any cases where non-transobservable states, objects, etc., have “vitally relevant” importance in how we make decisions and answer questions. If you would like to point some out, feel free. Let’s take pain. One could arguably say that if you experience a mysterious pain, yet (a.) have no sign of mental illness, (b.) no nerve activation for the pain, and (c.) nothing else wrong with you, one could in a somewhat trivial but not irrelevant sense truthfully answer that you are in good health. Behaviorally speaking, we couldn’t even say that you were registering stress, depression, or any other psychological effects of your chronic pain -- because these would be observable and would corroborate at least a part of the claim.

Like the loved-person who is loved-by-someone-who-does-not-in-any-way-act-like-they-love-them, let’s consider what we’re really talking about after stripping away everything that could be observed by someone else: someone who claims to be in constant pain, but shows no sign of pain, no sign of discomfort, fatigue, depression, or anything else -- in other words, they are physically and psychologically identical to someone who is not in pain -- except that they utter the statement, “I’m in constant pain.” Would we really believe that person? We would expect to see some sign of pain, even if we couldn’t find any nerve stimulation, wouldn’t we? Some sign of discomfort? Frustration/fatigue? Depression? Distraction? If literally nothing about their behavior or physiology matched up with their statement, would we believe them?

Let’s look at fibromyalgia, which you brought up earlier. As you yourself pointed out, this is a problem which is becoming more and more accepted as a real medical condition. Why? Because people inexplicably find first-person reports more credible today than they did 30 years ago? Or is it because -- motivated, no doubt, by persistent first-person reports -- physicians have been looking for and finding diagnosable (which is to say, transobservable) features, however reluctantly, of a disease that is poorly understood and legitimately difficult to diagnose?

According to the venerable Wikipedia, the symptoms of fibromyalgia include: “[C]hronic widespread pain, fatigue, and heightened pain in response to tactile pressure (allodynia). Other symptoms may include tingling of the skin, prolonged muscle spasms, weakness in the limbs, nerve pain, muscle twitching, palpitations, functional bowel disturbances, and chronic sleep disturbances.”

I will note that of the 11 symptoms described here, not a single one is unobservable. Take allodynia, for example; even if the cause of abnormal tactile sensitivity might be unknown, the fact that a person is having a pain response to stimulation when they “shouldn’t” be would be something that is, in principle, observable; one has nerves, those nerves fire, one feels pain. That doctors are reluctant to deal with something they can’t easily test for in the office does not mean that pain is not transobservable (in, say, the same sense that gravity is).

[mendaciloquent.livejournal.com]

The fact remains that the reason why you're assuming all accounts of angels, the hand of God, talking coyotes and so on are hallucinations is not because all unconfirmed eyewitness accounts of transient phenomena are assumed to be hallucinatory. If that were the case, then every account of a fog bank that burned off in the morning sun or a passing butterfly would similarly be dismissed as hallucination. No, these particular accounts are assumed to be hallucinatory because you have a prior belief that the things described are impossible or implausible--a belief which is, to the best of your understanding, supported by stronger evidence than that provided by eyewitness testimony to the contrary.

Well, we seem to have reached an impasse on this point. I’ve tried to explain the epistemic difference between transobservability and mass hallucination, but I either haven’t done so convincingly or clearly enough. Morning fog, butterflies, and even hippogriffs (were one to exist) would in principle be transobervable, regardless of our prior conceptions of what does or does not exist. If there is a report of a hippogriff on the street, and I or anyone else can stand in line to see it, photograph it, analyze it, etc., then it is transobservable -- again, regardless of whether or not I believe in hippogriffs prior to studying one. A mass hallucination, by definition, is transient and closed. You’re either hallucinating or you’re not. The hallucinatory quality is not conferred by prejudice, but entirely by access.

I suppose there could be “open hallucinations”. Let’s say that you have a mushroom which produces the hallucination of a flying pig, and only a hallucination of a flying pig. Furthermore, these hallucinations are somehow coordinated; if 50 people take the mushroom, then 50 people see the flying pig in the same location, same trajectory, and so-on. Presumably, one can go on and off the drug as often as one likes, and determine pretty quickly that it’s the mushroom that’s creating the appearance of a flying pig, however convincing it might be.

And then I suppose there be closed but “universal” hallucinations (like in the Matrix, but without Laurence Fishburne’s clique). Everyone happens to be wrong about what they’re experiencing, but for the most part, there’s no way of retreating to a non-hallucinogenic state. This type is moot; if in principle you can’t discover that you’re hallucinating, you will assume that what you and everyone else is experiencing is reality. You have no way knowing if you're wrong, and even if you were, it wouldn’t matter.

As a counter-example, I’ll note that these principles even hold true for types of things that we assume do exist. If you tell me that you have a golden coin in your pocket, but you refuse to show it to me or to anyone else, I reserve the right not to believe in your coin, and not because I simply assume that gold coins do not exist. My skepticism would be based entirely on there being “closed” access to the evidence -- that is to say, having no evidence and no expectation of evidence for it -- even if I assume such a thing very well could exist.

[mendaciloquent.livejournal.com]

When the hypothesis being tested is "genuine selfless love can be found among human beings", on the other hand, the body of evidence at your disposal critically includes your lifetime of experiences with how people who have claimed to love you (and acted as though they loved you) ended up either sticking with you through thick and thin or betraying their ulterior motives and taking advantage of you. If one person's experience is consistently characterized by people lying, maintaining the facade (perhaps for years), and ultimately it comes out that it was for their own advantage, and another person's experience includes one or more examples of somebody demonstrating loyalty when they have nothing to gain and everything to lose... well, these two people can rationally examine the evidence at their disposal and arrive at two very different conclusions. Further, each of these people can reasonably and rationally conclude, based on the body of evidence at their disposal, that the other person is deluded/deceived and anything they have to say on the subject is highly suspect. The real and relevant body of evidence that rationally dictates the acceptance or rejection of the hypothesis in this case is non-transobservable. They can't trade rats and re-run the experiment. The shimmer of Pyrex in the centrifuge is as irrelevant as the sensory fullness of the smell of a particular lover's skin.

But let’s look at the list of phenomena you bring up here as being relevant: (1) people claiming to love you, (2) people acting like they love you who (2a) abandoned you, or (2b) remained loyal through difficult circumstances, (3) people lying, (4) manipulating you, (5) demonstrations of selfless loyalty, etc. Literally nothing in the list of “relevant experiences” is unobservable. All of them deal with real events between real people and behaviors that in principle could be observed by someone else. So I ask: what unobservable experience produces a crucial piece of information that an outside observer could not be aware of? What prevents an outside observer from looking at a list of negative life-experiences, without ever feeling them themselves, and saying with good reason, “I bet you this person would have a very pessimistic view of ‘true love’”? What is an example of a non-observable phenomena which is relevant here? I will note that even at this moment, you and I are discussing, in a fairly reasonable way, the experiences and beliefs of hypothetical people -- simply by making inferences based on how we think people would react to a set of objective events. If the purely objective sense of these experiences weren't enough to convey intelligible information about belief and mental state, how is it that we seem to be doing exactly that?

[scruloose.livejournal.com]

So I ask: what unobservable experience produces a crucial piece of information that an outside observer could not be aware of?

The "list of negative life experiences" itself--the gestalt, if you like--is non-transobservable (note that I do not say "unobservable", that would be substituting a different and more restrictive term in as if it were equivalent to the one we've been using thus far). While you may very well have had some, possibly many, similar experiences in which somebody claims to love you and you later discover an underlying motive of selfishness, the actual observed dataset as a whole that this person is working from (a life-long, unbroken string of people faking love) is not available to you. They can recount the list to you, but then you are faced with the choice between taking their word that the list accurately reflects reality and assuming that they are deluded, much like in the chronic pain example. The conveyability of knowledge is widely variable and grossly incomplete: "our mileage may vary when working with different data sets" as you have said, and I have provided as-yet unrefuted examples in which that mileage is so low as to be below the threshold of usefulness. And as illustrated with the black cat vs the hippogriff, you will tend to accept uncorroborated personal accounts of things that fit in to your prior understanding of how the universe works, and question those that contradict it. Sure, there's lots of overlap, and in those areas where our prior experiences and the conclusions we've drawn from them are similar enough that we share a frame of reference, we can jointly extrapolate the experiences and beliefs of hypothetical people. Further, the conclusion of our "true love vs everybody's faking for their own gain" example is not merely "I bet you this person would have a very pessimistic view of ‘true love", but rather that the pessimistic view at which they have arrived (including their skepticism regarding any counter-example they are presented with) is the most rational conclusion they can reach from the information available to them--even though we may know with great confidence from the evidence available to us that it's mistaken.

Keep in mind that I'm not talking about "in principle". I'm talking about you, personally, in the real, present world. Absent a sudden manifestation of telepathy, the discovery of complete memory-transfer technology, or some similar "magic wand", you yourself, right now, are living in a world populated by people who are working from datasets that differ substantially from yours and to which you do not and cannot have anything close to complete access.

[mendaciloquent.livejournal.com]

The "list of negative life experiences" itself--the gestalt, if you like--is non-transobservable (note that I do not say "unobservable", that would be substituting a different and more restrictive term in as if it were equivalent to the one we've been using thus far). While you may very well have had some, possibly many, similar experiences in which somebody claims to love you and you later discover an underlying motive of selfishness, the actual observed dataset as a whole that this person is working from (a life-long, unbroken string of people faking love) is not available to you.

Well, this would be very significant if we needed the experential content of someone’s life in order to believe things about them. But we don’t. This standard of corroboration, or confidence-building, is unrealistically high. In fact it’s off the chart. Our entire concept of truth and belief is based on understanding and evaluating the truthfulness of statements -- and that process of evaluation never involves directly accessing the experiences of others.

Imagine if a detective investigating a crime were to say, “Well, I either have to believe every word the suspect says, or I have to assume everything he says is a lie, because I can’t access the entirety of his experience.” It doesn’t work that way. He doesn’t need to access the suspect’s experience at all, in fact, in order to build or destroy confidence in the statement. He simply has to cross-reference it with other pieces of information he can experience for himself, or that others have experienced as his proxy (and thereby producing further questions of confidence and reliability). Does the suspect’s alibi match verifiable physical or electronic evidence -- a credit-card transaction, a security camera’s footage? This builds confidence in the story. Does the suspect’s alibi match the statements of disinterested witnesses? Yes? That builds another layer of confidence. What about the internal consistency of the alibi -- the chronology, locations, distances involved? All good? Another layer. Note that none of this has to do with (a) either simply believing someone at their word or (b) having direct access to their experience.

[mendaciloquent.livejournal.com]

I have provided as-yet unrefuted examples in which that mileage is so low as to be below the threshold of usefulness

Such as? What unrefuted example? Please provide a link or a quote.

And as illustrated with the black cat vs the hippogriff, you will tend to accept uncorroborated personal accounts of things that fit in to your prior understanding of how the universe works, and question those that contradict it.

Actually, in the hippogriff example, I gave an account here of why prior understanding is irrelevant, and how the relevant category is rather one of epistemological access. I have yet to see a rebuttal of that point.

They can recount the list to you, but then you are faced with the choice between taking their word that the list accurately reflects reality and assuming that they are deluded, much like in the chronic pain example.

The “all or nothing” approach you propose here strikes me as a highly implausible account of how human beings actually communicate information and form beliefs. The reason the chronic pain example fails is because, in fact, we would find it pretty unbelievable if someone complained of chronic pain, but showed literally no other symptoms, medical, psychological, or behavioral, to corroborate the self-report. Similarly, someone claiming to be deeply in love with someone else, yet who has literally no interaction with the object of their affection, and who did not even “act” in love themselves, would strike us as very strange. We simply don’t go around forming beliefs by making uninformed all-or-nothing bets on atomized, contextless self-reports. We naturally cross-reference and corroborate; we build giant mosaics of “the real” out of interrelated overlapping truths. And when we doubt, we verify. If we can't, we disbelieve. Anything that is opaque to that basic and mostly unconscious mode of evaluation is going to stand out as being conspicuous.

Further, the conclusion of our "true love vs everybody's faking for their own gain" example is not merely "I bet you this person would have a very pessimistic view of ‘true love", but rather that the pessimistic view at which they have arrived (including their skepticism regarding any counter-example they are presented with) is the most rational conclusion they can reach from the information available to them--even though we may know with great confidence from the evidence available to us that it's mistaken.

We must be talking about very different things here. You’ve just admitted that we “know with great confidence” that the belief of the subject is mistaken. I couldn’t have made a stronger claim myself. And we are talking about justifiable belief, right? At least I thought we were. If we are in fact talking about people’s emotional idiosyncrasies, regardless of evidence or justification, then this is a different animal -- and one that makes no claim to rational justification.

[mendaciloquent.livejournal.com]

Keep in mind that I'm not talking about "in principle". I'm talking about you, personally, in the real, present world. Absent a sudden manifestation of telepathy, the discovery of complete memory-transfer technology, or some similar "magic wand", you yourself, right now, are living in a world populated by people who are working from datasets that differ substantially from yours and to which you do not and cannot have anything close to complete access.

But nothing even vaguely resembling complete access is needed to evaluate the truthfulness of other people’s statements. And you are talking “in principle”; whether you intended to or had wanted to is another matter. We both have been the entire time. We’ve said nothing about actual cases in my life or yours, have we? We haven’t mentioned specific people or specific events even once, have we? We’ve been talking about hypothetical experiences by hypothetical people this entire time, haven’t we? So we are talking about the truth of the matter in principle.

But this does not really matter. In both principle and reality, people verify what they doubt by seeking out points in an account of someone's experience that can be confirmed independently elsewhere. And where confirmation is wanting, doubt will justifiably persist.

However, when you take the step from evaluating the credibility of the beliefs to concluding--in the face of unrefuted examples to the contrary--

Name one? I mean, I’m seeing a lot of material -- e.g., my entire response to the chronic pain example -- go completely ignored here. I've checked LJ side, in the event I've missed an email, and have found nothing. From where I’m standing, it almost looks as if you’ve missed an entire reply. What “unrefuted examples” do you keep talking about here? I would like to respond to them if I haven’t.

-- that you, personally, in the real, present world, have sufficient access to the dataset on which another person is basing their conclusions to know with certainty that there's no way they can have rationally arrived at a wrong conclusion based on having properly interpreted a misleading dataset (like the scientists whose rats have been secretly switched), that's not skepticism. That's arrogance and prejudice.

What is “arrogant” about singling out anomalous, unverifiable first-person experiences as being especially untrustworthy as sources of evidence? What specifically is arrogated in this? We are social creatures and knowledge is a social beast; indeed the very concept of justification implies an interlocutor. One might more easily say, if we are committed to talking about “arrogance”, that the charge lies with the solipsist who, in spite the great fallibility of human perception and memory, nevertheless would sooner believe the world is upside-down than doubt the significance of their own epiphanies, ecstatic states, and so-on. And yet plenty of rational people seem perfectly able to enjoy and find meaning in “peak” experiences, altered states of consciousness, and so on, without once believing that the entire universe hinges on them.

[mendaciloquent.livejournal.com]

We have a very real, everyday example of exactly such a conflict in the two groups of people experiencing love, referenced in the quote above. Given the non-conveyability and non-transobservability (at least in practice, in the real, present world) of this key data, I don't see any way to escape the conclusion that different people are working from different evidence as they construct and revise their understanding of how the universe works.

But this just leads us full-circle. The problem here is that the “evidence” in the example of love does not derive merely from experience but from events that are knowable and are in principle able to be corroborated. The difference between being loved by a person and being loved by God is that we can, at the very least, verify that people exist. Was Person B abused? Betrayed? Manipulated? Lied to? We know what these events are; we know they can happen; furthermore and most importantly, we can in principle observe them. Even if we’re cut off from the subjective experience of their consequences, we can at least confirm the objective elements of the story. Person A has in principle the ability to examine those events, verify them, and conclude that Person B’s beliefs, while different, are nevertheless based on evidence that can be corroborated.

In the example of feeling the love of God, etc., we have no such corroboration. We’re given a belief claim which is very conspicuously backed up by experiences which can not be co-observed in any way and stand out as being wholly unlike anything else we encounter in the real world. This strikes me as fundamentally problematic. The way we evaluate the credibility of these beliefs is qualitatively different from how we evaluate the credibility of someone who doesn’t believe in “true love”, and again, it has nothing to do with our assumptions from the outset; rather, it has to do with our ability to evaluate, even in the most rudimentary way, the evidence which justifies the belief. In cases where no justificatory evidence is accessible, I maintain that a rational person is entirely justified in maintaining an open and unapologetic skepticism.

[scruloose.livejournal.com]

The way we evaluate the credibility of these beliefs...

In cases where no justificatory evidence is accessible, I maintain that a rational person is entirely justified in maintaining an open and unapologetic skepticism.

Absolutely. I have not, at any point, questioned your justification in maintaining that the beliefs are not credible. I am entirely willing to accept that you have, based on proper interpretation of the fullness of the evidence available to you, concluded that any belief in in a religious or spiritual reality is a mistaken belief. I fully support this open and unapologetic skepticism.

However, when you take the step from evaluating the credibility of the beliefs to concluding--in the face of unrefuted examples to the contrary--that you, personally, in the real, present world, have sufficient access to the dataset on which another person is basing their conclusions to know with certainty that there's no way they can have rationally arrived at a wrong conclusion based on having properly interpreted a misleading dataset (like the scientists whose rats have been secretly switched), that's not skepticism. That's arrogance and prejudice.