Agnostic mysticism

[Terrapin Station]

How do you experience the world, then?

So, to start, the bulk of my perceptual experience is not tied up with concepts and/or language.

To explain something by what it is not signifies either there is no such thing or it is so esoterical that you simply have no words to describe it. Maybe you can sketch it

So, as I just said above, "For the majority of my perceptual experience my mind is 'blank' aside from perceptual data as such. "

[AmericanKestrel]

How do you experience the world, then?

So, to start, the bulk of my perceptual experience is not tied up with concepts and/or language.

To explain something by what it is not signifies either there is no such thing or it is so esoterical that you simply have no words to describe it. Maybe you can sketch it

So, as I just said above, "For the majority of my perceptual experience my mind is 'blank' aside from perceptual data as such. "

So your mind is not blank, it has “perceptual data.” You see a tree, your mind forms the image of a tree, and thus you “know” you are looking at a tree, because you know what a tree is.
Your mind is never blank. It can be, but it takes great effort to make it go blank. Only at death, there is no mind.

[Terrapin Station]

So, to start, the bulk of my perceptual experience is not tied up with concepts and/or language.

To explain something by what it is not signifies either there is no such thing or it is so esoterical that you simply have no words to describe it. Maybe you can sketch it

So, as I just said above, "For the majority of my perceptual experience my mind is 'blank' aside from perceptual data as such. "

So your mind is not blank, it has “perceptual data.” You see a tree, your mind forms the image of a tree, and thus you “know” you are looking at a tree, because you know what a tree is.
Your mind is never blank. It can be, but it takes great effort to make it go blank. Only at death, there is no mind.

Hence why I wrote "aside from." The whole point is that language, concepts, etc. are not involved.

I don't buy representationalism by the way. I'm a direct realist.

[Nick_A]

Nice post ChewyBrian

But, it goes further than language. Even if I try to have a direct experience, I can't help but frame it through concepts already in my head. I see a bird and already think 'bird' and add all sorts of prior knowledge to my experience of seeing the bird. I can't see it in the way a child might experience a bird when seeing one for the first time, without the prejudice of the world of concepts framing the experience. Unlike the child, we frame new experiences in the lens of past experience. But, while seeing the world as the past and the future, we can't help but miss important aspects of the present. The child or the mystic does not think of the world in terms of time and space as we do.

The concepts and the language are both a blessing and a curse, Huxley says. They help us to stay alive and deal with a world that is all too complex without them. He says our brain is effectively a filter, allowing us only that sliver of experience that is relevant to surviving and accomplishing goals we have set. A part of us is still able to experience the world in the way of the child, seeing everything all at once, but accessing this aspect of ourselves is not easy. This is why he was using LSD and mescaline. The drugs partly wiped out the filtering of the brain and allowed him to see the world in a different, perhaps more real way. Meditation is another method to get at this different understanding of the world, and I imagine there are other ways.

Can we have a direct experience through the senses (dianoia) or does it require remembrance (noesis) of what has been forgotten?

http://www.john-uebersax.com/plato/plato1.htm#interp

While dianoia thinking certainly has benefits, we have a distinct tendency to over-rely on it and to forget its limitations. The weakness of dianoia is that it must begin by taking as true unproven assumptions. We are, in effect, presupposing a model of reality before we begin our deliberations. But any model, be it logical, geometrical, or moral, is only imperfect. Its conclusions may be, and frequently are, wrong. Our selection of assumptions, moreover, is bound to be influenced by our passions and prejudices. Our dianoia thinking tends to reflect the values and prejudices of whatever subpersonality is currently activated. We then see reality partly — through a glass darkly. Moreover, the principle of cognitive dissonance may cause us to ignore, distort, or rationalize away any data which do not fit our preconceived model.

In contrast, noesis presupposes a soul that has turned away from specific selfish concerns to seek the Good itself. With this change in mental orientation — this Pauline metanoia or Plotinian epistrophe — we may then begin to see things more truly, and in their proper relation to one another. We may better think, judge — and therefore act — according to natural law and right reason. We will consequently be more harmonized with the external world as well as within ourselves.

Noesis (Peters, 1967, 121ff.) is the mental power or faculty associated with an immediate apprehension of first principles (Forms) of mathematics, logic, morals, religion, and perhaps other things. So understood, noesis, when concerned with moral Forms, is very close to, if not the same thing as what is traditionally called Conscience. By Conscience we mean not a Freudian super-ego formed by the internalization of arbitrary social conventions, but an innate sense, something divine, and something perhaps closely associated with consciousness itself (let us not forget that in some languages, such as French, the same word denotes both consciousness and Conscience.) We need not commit ourselves to a particular religious creed to say that this moral noetic sense is a phenomenological reality — a clarifying, integrating, joyful, loving faculty of human consciousness.

Can a person become conscious without the experience of objective conscience? What objectively good are objective facts without objective values or how they relate to the ONE? This raises the question of how people can value suffering:

Within his book Brave New World, Aldous Huxley paints a futuristic dystopian world in which people are controlled by drugs and conditioning. Throughout the novel, Huxley attempts to convey messages related to morality, free will and the nature of happiness. These messages are often satirical in nature such as Huxley’s fictional drug “Soma”, a drug that induces ‘happiness’ within its users, this being a clear reference to Prozac, a drug prescribed to relieve depression. In addition to being satirical, Huxley also tries to be prophetic with his world of mechanically produced humans controlled by drugs and the consumption of goods.

What is happiness according to Huxley and how does it relate to suffering?

“But I don’t want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

“Man, the bravest of animals, and the one most accustomed to suffering, does not repudiate suffering as such; he desires it, he even seeks it out, provided he is shown a meaning for it, a purpose of suffering. The meaninglessness of suffering, not suffering itself, was the curse that lay over mankind so far.” (On the Genealogy of Morals, Friedrich Nietzsche)

A drug called ‘soma’, an opiate with no withdrawal symptoms, is widespread and used to numb emotions and feelings. It is necessary to maintain social order; the people cannot imagine a life without it for it carries “all the advantages of Christianity and alcohol; none of their defects.”

“In Brave New World the soma habit was not a private vice; it was a political institution…” writes Huxley. “The daily Soma ration was an insurance against personal maladjustment, social unrest and the spread of subversive ideas. Religion, Karl Marx declared, is the opium of the people. In the Brave New World this situation was reversed. Opium, or rather Soma, was the people’s religion.”(Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Revisited)

All of those beautiful human emotions — pain, sorrow, trust, delight — are never experienced and people are instead reduced to a nothingness existence.

The great problem is suffering without meaning, without value, without conscience. Since humanity as a whole denies opening their being to conscience, perhaps soma or drugs are a better alternative? Could this be true? Huxley amongst others reminds us of a meaningless existence. How can we have the direct experience of objective meaning?

[chewybrian]

The whole point is that language, concepts, etc. are not involved.

I concede that concepts, and especially language, may not be at the front of your mind as you experience the world. But, they no doubt influence your experience whether or not you are aware of it, even if you are wired a bit differently than most. Maybe a couple 'thought experiments' will show the point.

1--Bart, Lisa and Maggie ride a roller coaster. Bart has been on this coaster and many others. Lisa has never ridden a coaster, but has an excellent understanding of physics. Maggie is too young to have the idea of roller coaster in her mind, and she has never seen one. They are genetically the same in the way they are wired to have experiences, yet their past experiences are different. Don't they necessarily have very different experiences of the ride? What accounts for this difference if you concede it is there?

2--You buy a new convertible, and for the first drive, you take your dog to the dog park. Years later, you take your dog to the dog park in the same car for the 500th time. How is your experience different between ride 1 and ride 500? Is the dog's 500th experience materially different from his first, or is the difference between his two experiences as great as the difference between yours? What accounts for this widening gap in the nature of the experience between you and the dog, if you concede it is there?

[Terrapin Station]

1--Bart, Lisa and Maggie ride a roller coaster. Bart has been on this coaster and many others. Lisa has never ridden a coaster, but has an excellent understanding of physics. Maggie is too young to have the idea of roller coaster in her mind, and she has never seen one. They are genetically the same in the way they are wired to have experiences, yet their past experiences are different. Don't they necessarily have very different experiences of the ride? What accounts for this difference if you concede it is there?

Aside from differences in the way they might think, they have different experiences because they're different people, and their brains (and the rest of their bodies) aren't identical. Every experience for everyone is really unique, and our brains (and the rest of our bodies) are constantly changing. Our bodies actually change a lot more, much more easily and quickly, than most people realize. A saying in bodybuilding to help remind us of this is "Think of it as shaping sand, not chiseling concrete." On our relatively macro levels of experience, our bodies are much more like sand than concrete. (Part of the point of that in bodybuilding is to remind us that we need to regularly work out particular body parts, or they'll start to lose their form/definition. You can't figure that you'll get it chiseled and then it will stay that way for a long time while you neglect it.)

2--You buy a new convertible, and for the first drive, you take your dog to the dog park. Years later, you take your dog to the dog park in the same car for the 500th time. How is your experience different between ride 1 and ride 500? Is the dog's 500th experience materially different from his first, or is the difference between his two experiences as great as the difference between yours? What accounts for this widening gap in the nature of the experience between you and the dog, if you concede it is there?

So, first I don't think there's any reasonable way to quantify "differences of experience" like that, especially not between two different people or creatures. As I mentioned above, every experience is unique. One way that your body changes though is that your brain changes--that is, the actual structure of your brain--as you experience things (and gain how-to knowledge and so on), and your brain will change more when you first learn to do something than it will change as you subsequently do it. (And this fact, by the way, is what enables many tasks to essentially become autonomic functions--it's why practicing certain things is necessary, like musical instruments. You need to get your body to a point where you can do the basic functions of that thing automatically, without having to consciously think about every move you're making.)

This isn't to say that I disagree that concepts and the like can influence perceptions, by the way. But I certainly don't think that they necessarily do, and I don't actually buy that there's a good reason to believe that there are unconscious or subconscious mental phenomena per se.

[Gee]

Hence why I wrote "aside from." The whole point is that language, concepts, etc. are not involved.

I don't buy representationalism by the way. I'm a direct realist.

Terrapin;

I don't think this is about representationalism, it is just about simple recognition. If you hear a sound you have never heard before, would you recognize what made the sound? Or if you smelled something or saw something that you never experienced before, would you know what it was? No.

In order to recognize anything, we need experiences, concepts, words, or something to tell us what we are experiencing now. These concepts, words, experiences, etc., are our individual Rosetta Stones that allow us to recognize, decipher, and know our world. Does it really matter if we call it the brain, or the unconscious, or even our personal Rosetta Stone? It is necessary for recognition.

What Huxley seems to be concerned with is when our concepts, words, experiences, etc., start to guide and influence our experiences. Let us say that you are a young boy from an affluent white neighborhood and are walking down the street when you hear gun shots and all hell breaks loose. You see police ahead of you and run to them because you recognize that they keep you safe. Same scenario, except that you are a young black boy, who lives in an inner city, so when you see the police, you hide because you recognize that they are dangerous.

Gee

[Terrapin Station]

I don't think this is about representationalism, it is just about simple recognition. If you hear a sound you have never heard before, would you recognize what made the sound? Or if you smelled something or saw something that you never experienced before, would you know what it was? No.

Yeah, I might not know what made the sound, etc., but that's beyond perception. Perception is simply hearing the sound/smelling whatever, etc.

In order to recognize anything, we need experiences, concepts, words, or something to tell us what we are experiencing now.

Again, this is beyond perception, though. You don't have to recognize something in order to perceive it. If that were the case you could never perceive anything for the first time, before you were familiar with it.

. . . our individual Rosetta Stones that allow us to recognize, decipher, and know our world.

Perception is different than knowledge, and it doesn't require knowledge.

[chewybrian]

I don't actually buy that there's a good reason to believe that there are unconscious or subconscious mental phenomena per se.

I cannot doubt that there are subconscious ("existing in the mind but not immediately available to consciousness") activities in the mind. When you can't recall the name of a song or something, and you put it out of your mind, only to have the problem and the solution surface involuntarily minutes or hours later, who or what is working on the answer for you in the intervening time if not your subconscious? You actually laid out hedonic adaptation and heuristics pretty well. I say these processes are nothing but your mind trying to clear space in active consciousness to leave room for thoughts related to staying alive, or for ideas that relate to important goals you have set. Language and concepts are just an extension of these processes which you already acknowledged and explained. Huxley is only trying to show us the double-edged nature of these processes.

[Terrapin Station]

I don't actually buy that there's a good reason to believe that there are unconscious or subconscious mental phenomena per se.

I cannot doubt that there are subconscious ("existing in the mind but not immediately available to consciousness") activities in the mind. When you can't recall the name of a song or something, and you put it out of your mind, only to have the problem and the solution surface involuntarily minutes or hours later, who or what is working on the answer for you in the intervening time if not your subconscious?

So the reasoning error here is thinking that phenomena are not factors of specific, dynamic relations of matter, and rather thinking that any given phenomenon must exist wholesale all the time, where it must just be "hidden" when it's not apparent.

So, for example, under this reasoning error we might think that rain always exists in a given location, it's just that usually it's "hidden." And then when questioned about this we'd say, "Otherwise where does it come from?"

Or we might think that a radio always has music present, it's just that we can "hide" the music so that it's not apparent. ("Otherwise where does the music come from?")

Instead, what's really the case with things like rain and radios producing music is that those phenomena only obtain when the dynamic relations of materials in question are in very specific states. They can be in those states because of the sort of matter, structures/relations and processes in question. The matter, structure/relations and processes that comprise a radio have the potential to produce music under the right conditions/when it's in the right state for producing music. But it's not the case that the music is always there, it's just hidden sometimes.

The same thing is true of brains. The matter, structures/relations and processes that comprise brains are of the sort that under the right conditions can amount to a memory of a song, say. But that doesn't mean that the memory is always there, it's just hidden. And this is the case for mental content in general. Mental content obtains when the right conditions are met. There's no reason to believe it's there all the time, only it's hidden some of the time.

[Sy Borg]

chewybrian

Late to the party but I'd like to refer back to the OP, where you quoted Huxley:

Most people, most of the time, know only what comes through the reducing valve and is consecrated as genuinely real by the local language. Certain persons, however, seem to be born with a kind of by-pass that circumvents the reducing valve. In others temporary bypasses may be acquired either spontaneously, or as the result of deliberate "spiritual exercises," or through hypnosis, or by means of drugs. Through these permanent or temporary by-passes there flows, not indeed the perception "of everything that is happening everywhere in the universe" (for the by-pass does not abolish the reducing valve, which still excludes the total content of Mind at Large), but something more than, and above all something different from, the carefully selected utilitarian material which our narrowed, individual minds regard as a complete, or at least sufficient, picture of reality.

I agree with Huxley. Two peak experiences made clear to me that our usual consciousness filters out most of the reality around us. Peak experiences may be instructive and challenging, but they are not practical. We are each wonders of nature, and we are surrounded by wonders at every moment. But we cannot live our lives in a mystical state of mind. Like racehorses, we need blinders to stay on track, so to speak.

It doesn't matter that peak experiences are just dopamine or oxytocin etc. Everything is just atoms, energy, fields, and the like. That atoms and somesuch are involved in these dynamics is not the issue. It's the content that comes from those atoms, energies and fields.

To survive and thrive, we each must filter out most of reality and amplify the minutiae of human interactions. Senses filter out most of reality and brains amplify content that is deemed useful. However, our actual reality is truly mind-boggling and awe-inspiring in every detail, and we are but brief (and extraordinary) outputs of a remarkable planet whose future is both unknown and, possibly, incomprehensible to us.

It's easy to ignore or forget the wonders of life - that each of us, even the &^%$#%s, are wondrous beings ourselves. We can become so embroiled in professional and social concerns (which are amplified by the brain) that we fail to notice. Many have deathbed regrets because they started appreciating "the little things" too late.

[Sculptor1]

SO why is this thread employing the term "Agnostic mysticism"?

Was this a phrase used by Huxley? If so where and why?

[Tegularius]

Huxley was no doubt brilliant, but who's to say that the paranormal experiences he describes are not simply mind distortions accompanied by oceanic feelings of emotion conveying a sense of deep immanence within an illusive hyper-reality. It may be nothing more than a dream state of acute awareness compared to the normal dream state encountered in the early morning hours. There is no insight to be gathered in such seemingness only the experience of it just as there is no afterlife as often contained in an NDE when it manifests itself most intensely based on how the brain itself was programmed consciously, sub-consciously and unconsciously throughout life. The unconscious part can truly deliver very strange and alien visions as also confirmed in dreams.

In effect, there is no "reducing valve" only the heightened transformation of contents already existing including much of what is not realized consciously. To think that drugs or spiritual exercises have the power to unconstipate the senses into some higher reality belongs to the realm of the ignorant and the stupid. The best way to think of it, imo, are as sense metaphors of one's personal psychic contents. If there were a true opening to such a reality it would have to be nearly the same for everyone which obviously it is not.

[Sy Borg]

Not sure that anyone who does not understand Mary's Room is in a position to call others stupid and ignorant.

[Tegularius]

Not sure that anyone who does not understand Mary's Room is in a position to call others stupid and ignorant.

I was responding to the quote by Huxley, not to any arguments against physicalism as in Mary's Room or What Is It Like to Be a Bat but to the fact that our senses can't wander into some other region they are not designed to perceive. The only thing that can happen is its transformation which usually means the distortion of an experience into something which is no-longer real by changing the chemistry of the brain through drugs. Why in reverse do schizophrenics require medication to force the retreat of delusions they are normally subject to?

You, like so many, like to attack an argument by separating it from its context, hardly making an effort to understand it. It is, I repeat, stupid and senseless to think that an extended reality is on the horizon by altering the normal chemical actions or reactions of the brain, and I'm certain I made that clear. Mary's Room has little or nothing to do with it, but it does render the fact that it's mostly the subjective experience of qualia which is referred to in this trite little allegory. If this is incorrect, then may someone correct me!