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It's my view that it's this psychological transformation that is the end goal of many spiritual traditions; Jung's "process of individuation," various notions o

by ryandv 3y ago

It's my view that it's this psychological transformation that is the end goal of many spiritual traditions; Jung's "process of individuation," various notions of "enlightenment," the alchemical "Great Work," the Greek notion of "anagoge," "union with the Higher Self/Genius/Logos," the Thelemic notion of "Knowledge & Conversation..." Unfortunately such flowery and offputtingly religious sounding language sounds quaint to our postmodern, secular ears. I think psychedelic, cogsci, and psychological research as explored in this paper offers fruitful avenues for recasting such religious or spiritual language in the vocabulary of science and empiricism.

nonrandomstring 3y ago
Dunno. As a scientist I say bring me flowery language and religiosity any day on this subject. Some things are improved by formalism, empiricism, and positivist reductionism. Some things are made worse by that kind of thinking. Science is not always a process of "removing confusion". A mature scientist who can question science itself stops seeing it as a hammer and everything else as a nail. Secular post-modernity is brilliant at giving us power plants, roads, and medicines. In other regards it's stunted our emotional and social development, bringing us to the brink of total war and social disintegration.
- p-e-w 3y ago
  > Some things are improved by formalism, empiricism, and positivist reductionism. Some things are made worse by that kind of thinking. But that doesn't mean anything is made better by mysticism and appealing to some vague idea of transcendence. If nothing formal can be said about a topic, then perhaps nothing at all can be said about that topic. Which is perfectly fine. It seems to me that so much of the available literature concerning such things is driven by the desperate insistence that it must be possible to investigate it, and if it cannot be done scientifically, there must be some other way. "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent." - Ludwig Wittgenstein
  - nonrandomstring 3y ago
    I'll respectfully disagree and explain why. > But that doesn't mean anything is made better by mysticism and appealing to some vague idea of transcendence. Actually it does. Let's talk about "better". Better for what, for who? Some of the most powerful forces for positive change are stories. Stories are made-up, vague, hand-waving. metaphorical and allegorical. They occupy a different, parallel communicative realm to science, maths and equations. But they are no less true, particularly with regard to their utility if you want to communicate important ideas to lots of people. Certainly, mysticism is not an analytical or investigative tool. But it is a powerful communicative, and - since you raise Wittgenstein - a powerful symbolic tool for word-concepts that "stand in for" formalisms. To be honest I think that the way the younger generations relate to smartphones, the Internet and AI is very much mysticism. The words have changed, but I don't see concepts like "The Cloud" having any more substance than "Ectoplasm" and "ethereal spirits". Again, that new generation mysticism isn't a bad thing, it's just a way of dealing with unfathomable complexity through stories that we can all share.
    - p-e-w 3y ago
      I think you're confusing mysticism with abstraction. The Cloud is an umbrella term for a collection of technologies and services, and for the way people interact with them. That interaction isn't "mystical", it simply happens through so many obscuring layers of abstraction that most people don't understand what is actually going on. But the cloud itself is very much a real thing, or, to be more precise, composed of many things that are very much real. By contrast, ectoplasm is a pseudo-scientfic term for something that has never been demonstrated to exist under controlled conditions, and has a long tradition of association with known charlatans. The two aren't comparable at all.
      - rolisz 3y ago
        Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Pile in enough abstractions and yeah, the cloud becomes magic. Are there many mystical experiences that if you peeled away enough layers you could have rational explanations? Probably. But we don't, and in the meantime the mystical explanations do give us a big picture approach.
- lll-o-lll 3y ago
  > Secular post-modernity is brilliant at giving us power plants, roads, and medicines. Postmodernism hasn’t been around long enough for any of that. Perhaps you meant “enlightenment”. It’s the “Age of Reason” that kicked society along this road. Post modernism has given us something else. A set of tools to deconstruct any human concept you can name, until it can be shown as meaningless. Which, I would posit, is the “end of enlightenment”.
  - kuchenbecker 3y ago
    Postmodernism posits that everything is bullshit when you look hard enough. Unfortunately the bullshit is useful when building things.
  - nonrandomstring 3y ago
    Indeed, I was copy-pasting the parent poster's words so as to faithfully respond. Enlightenment, Modernism and Post-modernism all being distinct things, no-one parodies their confusion better than Monty Python; What have the Romans ever done for us? Is Post-modernism the end of Enlightenment? Maybe yes, but not in a 'bad way', simply that post-modernism is the last stage of enlightenment, when a developmental stage has attained self-awareness and self-critical capabilities. First we had to become enlightened in order to see the limits of enlightenment.
  - lioeters 3y ago
    > Post modernism has given us .. a set of tools to deconstruct any human concept you can name, until it can be shown as meaningless. Which, I would posit, is the “end of enlightenment”. I enjoyed reading this pithy summary of post-modernism. As for the parent post: > it's stunted our emotional and social development, bringing us to the brink of total war and social disintegration. This was the doing of "modernism", the age of reason, the enlightenment, and the industrial age. Post-modernism is the questioning and subversion of that grand narrative of objectivity, rationality, science, social progress. From the wasteland of everything deconstructed as meaningless.. Hopefully something new can be born, maybe even a "spiritual language in the vocabulary of science and empiricism".

by ryandv 3y ago

nonrandomstring 3y ago

Dunno. As a scientist I say bring me flowery language and religiosity any day on this subject. Some things are improved by formalism, empiricism, and positivist reductionism. Some things are made worse by that kind of thinking. Science is not always a process of "removing confusion". A mature scientist who can question science itself stops seeing it as a hammer and everything else as a nail. Secular post-modernity is brilliant at giving us power plants, roads, and medicines. In other regards it's stunted our emotional and social development, bringing us to the brink of total war and social disintegration.

p-e-w 3y ago
> Some things are improved by formalism, empiricism, and positivist reductionism. Some things are made worse by that kind of thinking. But that doesn't mean anything is made better by mysticism and appealing to some vague idea of transcendence. If nothing formal can be said about a topic, then perhaps nothing at all can be said about that topic. Which is perfectly fine. It seems to me that so much of the available literature concerning such things is driven by the desperate insistence that it must be possible to investigate it, and if it cannot be done scientifically, there must be some other way. "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent." - Ludwig Wittgenstein
- nonrandomstring 3y ago
  I'll respectfully disagree and explain why. > But that doesn't mean anything is made better by mysticism and appealing to some vague idea of transcendence. Actually it does. Let's talk about "better". Better for what, for who? Some of the most powerful forces for positive change are stories. Stories are made-up, vague, hand-waving. metaphorical and allegorical. They occupy a different, parallel communicative realm to science, maths and equations. But they are no less true, particularly with regard to their utility if you want to communicate important ideas to lots of people. Certainly, mysticism is not an analytical or investigative tool. But it is a powerful communicative, and - since you raise Wittgenstein - a powerful symbolic tool for word-concepts that "stand in for" formalisms. To be honest I think that the way the younger generations relate to smartphones, the Internet and AI is very much mysticism. The words have changed, but I don't see concepts like "The Cloud" having any more substance than "Ectoplasm" and "ethereal spirits". Again, that new generation mysticism isn't a bad thing, it's just a way of dealing with unfathomable complexity through stories that we can all share.
  - p-e-w 3y ago
    I think you're confusing mysticism with abstraction. The Cloud is an umbrella term for a collection of technologies and services, and for the way people interact with them. That interaction isn't "mystical", it simply happens through so many obscuring layers of abstraction that most people don't understand what is actually going on. But the cloud itself is very much a real thing, or, to be more precise, composed of many things that are very much real. By contrast, ectoplasm is a pseudo-scientfic term for something that has never been demonstrated to exist under controlled conditions, and has a long tradition of association with known charlatans. The two aren't comparable at all.
    - rolisz 3y ago
      Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Pile in enough abstractions and yeah, the cloud becomes magic. Are there many mystical experiences that if you peeled away enough layers you could have rational explanations? Probably. But we don't, and in the meantime the mystical explanations do give us a big picture approach.
lll-o-lll 3y ago
> Secular post-modernity is brilliant at giving us power plants, roads, and medicines. Postmodernism hasn’t been around long enough for any of that. Perhaps you meant “enlightenment”. It’s the “Age of Reason” that kicked society along this road. Post modernism has given us something else. A set of tools to deconstruct any human concept you can name, until it can be shown as meaningless. Which, I would posit, is the “end of enlightenment”.
- kuchenbecker 3y ago
  Postmodernism posits that everything is bullshit when you look hard enough. Unfortunately the bullshit is useful when building things.
- nonrandomstring 3y ago
  Indeed, I was copy-pasting the parent poster's words so as to faithfully respond. Enlightenment, Modernism and Post-modernism all being distinct things, no-one parodies their confusion better than Monty Python; What have the Romans ever done for us? Is Post-modernism the end of Enlightenment? Maybe yes, but not in a 'bad way', simply that post-modernism is the last stage of enlightenment, when a developmental stage has attained self-awareness and self-critical capabilities. First we had to become enlightened in order to see the limits of enlightenment.
- lioeters 3y ago
  > Post modernism has given us .. a set of tools to deconstruct any human concept you can name, until it can be shown as meaningless. Which, I would posit, is the “end of enlightenment”. I enjoyed reading this pithy summary of post-modernism. As for the parent post: > it's stunted our emotional and social development, bringing us to the brink of total war and social disintegration. This was the doing of "modernism", the age of reason, the enlightenment, and the industrial age. Post-modernism is the questioning and subversion of that grand narrative of objectivity, rationality, science, social progress. From the wasteland of everything deconstructed as meaningless.. Hopefully something new can be born, maybe even a "spiritual language in the vocabulary of science and empiricism".