comment by NomadSoul on 08 January 2009
Kahneman’s Nobel prize was in Economics, and the relevant research was on a descriptive model of decision making under known risks. That research has nothing to do with religion.
Don’t forget that my original reason (in this particular discussion) for bringing him up was to support my claim that truth is relative to your goals, but it does apply to religion as well.
His research wasn’t explicitly about religion, but it has important implications for religion. Kahneman showed that the context / framing of information significantly alters a person’s decision making abilities—such that when two logically identical problems are presented, a person’s performance in choosing the correct answer changes wildly, depending on the wording of the problem.
Consider the implications of that. When you’re faced with an ill-defined problem with lots of uncertainty—which is really many if not most major decisions in life—you’re going to want some sort of contextual information to frame the problem. Unlike Kahneman’s experiments, though, these are not problems that have been defined by someone and have known solutions—you simply have to make a decision. You may not even understand the consequences of that decision until much, much later—so you may not even have any feedback to guide your choice.
Without some sort of context, the uncertainty in making such a decision can be crippling—that’s why people often experience anxiety and despair when dealing with major decisions. This is especially true if the decision has a moral and/or emotional dimension to it. Morality deals with relations between people; and relationships often involve emotional components which can never be objectively known—again leading to great uncertainty.
A religious myth may not tell you exactly what to do, but it can at least provide the context that will help you figure out what is relevant to the problem, in such a way that will support the stability of the individual and/or the community. That doesn’t always mean it’s the right decision—but it’s often still better than nothing.
Now, I suppose there’s nothing in this that proves which religious mythology is the “right” one; but again, it’s not about that. It’s about what contextual information allows you to make a decision and move forward, while keeping yourself sane and your community intact.
Yes. The principles are the same — you have to accurately define what you’re talking about, develop tools for measuring it, construct a model and test it.
But you can’t easily do that when dealing with symbolic structure of myths and metaphors. You can collect a lot of anecdotal information, but you’re really dealing with something open-ended. A good example is Jungian dream analysis. Jungian psychiatry has catalogued a great number of archetypes and dream symbols—which are effectively the same symbolism you see in works of literature. But at no point can they tell you that symbol X means Y in any linear fashion. And yet, dreams and narratives do have significance.
You can’t tell me that when you read a great work of fiction that it doesn’t move you in some way—that you come away from it the same person as when you were before you read it. Stories and dreams give us a perspective we didn’t have before, but not a perspective that can be perfectly defined
Or, I’ll give you another example. Shortly after I started studying T’ai Chi, I had a dream where an evil version of myself—a doppelganger—grabbed me by the throat and tried to choke me. I woke up with a sore throat, and later went to the doctor. I had a throat infection. So several things were going on in this dream. The first one was the fact that my dream reality was connected to my physical health (though it’s hard to say which came first, the illness or the dream). You could argue that it was just coincidence that the doppelganger grabbed my throat, but that’s one hell of a coincidence, considering the timing of the dream and the illness. So mind and body are connected—despite the Cartesian dualism of mind and body a lot of skeptics tout.
The second thing is that this was obviously an encounter with the dark half of my psyche. I had just started a spiritual discipline, and this was the dream’s way of telling me that I was going to encounter all my bad and self-destructive habits—all those things that would prevent this discipline from being effective.
All of this is open ended, of course; it’s just my opinion—but the idea that the dream had no significance at all, given the timing, and the physical side effects, doesn’t seem reasonable.
The rest is pretty much just groundless opinion.
It is opinion, but it is not groundless.
I, personally, find it entirely irritating to hear literary types holding forth on what some author “really” meant, when the authors themselves never commented on it.
Well, if the literary type is presenting their opinion as if it’s the only reasonable one to hold, then I also find that irritating. But if they’re presenting an idea about what the author might have meant, then it can be enlightening.
There is no correct, certain answer when it comes to understanding mythical symbolism. The important thing is that people are thinking about the stories.
Religion fails when people don’t think about their stories… but when they do, it shines. So is the solution to the problems of religion to force people to abandon it entirely, or is it to get them thinking about their stories and how those stories are relevant to their individual lives?
How is that different? I can’t reject a bad idea without being called closed-minded? Sorry – I don’t buy it.
Scott, it’s not that you reject it—it’s that you expect everybody else to reject it, too; ignoring the fact that they have their own experience, their own evidence to consider one way or the other. Just because they can’t always articulate that evidence doesn’t mean they should dismiss it—it means they should think more about it.
I respond to publicly posted opinions, and offer my own in response. So, where’s the issue? I’m doing exactly what you’re saying I should.
Maybe it’s the way you do it. I just don’t think it’s effective to try and strip people of their beliefs simply because you don’t agree with them. If you’re trying to play doctor, and cure people of their bad beliefs, then your bedside manner leaves a lot to be desired.
Let’s see… DBT seems to be in relatively wide use — I’ll admit that. MBCT and MBSR seem to fall pretty solidly into “alternative” medicine. They’re little more than research programs — their creators are convinced, but the community at large seems rather more skeptical and want more evidence.
Experimental medicine vs. Alternative medicine is a significant distinction. The point is, the people who are doing this are qualified scientists doing research at accredited academic institutions. They’re not new-agers out to spread mumbo jumbo or make a fast buck.
Really, my point in bringing these therapies up was to demonstrate that science is currently doing the research on meditation; and that it’s promising. I’m fairly certain that science will eventually prove that meditation does work when it’s used correctly, and can be more effective than established techniques like Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, talk therapy, or even drug therapy alone.
But from what I can tell, it’s all supportive of exactly the parts of meditation I’ve already said were interesting, and have little, if any, support for the “woo” parts I reject. So how is any of this relevant to what we’re discussing?
Maybe it would help to define exactly what the woo parts you reject are. I’ve been arguing against the rejection of mythology, because I think that mythology is useful.
But at no time have I tried to assert that there was anything particularly
supernatural about meditation. It’s mainly just a tool for clearing your head, and to avoid distracting thoughts.
I guess it can seem mystical, because getting beyond distracting thoughts means encountering the raw symbolic and sensory data that underlies thought—and those parts of experience largely defy categorization. It’s not because they’re especially magical, it’s just because they are more fundamental. Consciousness is an emergent phenomenon. Meditation gets you in touch with the substrate that it emerges from.
And wouldn’t it be nice if that were actually the typical attitude towards these things? If people who read the bible would think, “hm — this has given me an interesting idea”. Again, I’ve already agreed with that — my problem is that it’s an isolated position, one almost nobody appears to actually hold.
On the contrary—there are quite a lot of people who hold that position, or one sufficiently similar to it. Their religion may be strongly held, but there are lots of open-minded, thinking, religious people who go a lot deeper into the meaning of their stories than to simply accept them as infallible and superficially true. The shallow, non-thinking types may have great numbers and may get all the media attention, but there are lots of people out there who are intelligently religious.
The point that I really wish to emphasize is that you can encourage people to be intelligent about their religion without forcing them to abandon it entirely or to deny their own experience. This seems like a much simpler and more elegant solution to the problem of religious fundamentalism than more conflict prone approaches.
But I doubt more than about 15% of Christians consider it anything other than something divine — probably far fewer. So the sentence is relevant.
I disagree, but in the absence of solid data, we really have no basis for argument on this point. Are we entering the realm of groundless opinion?
I would only add to this that considering something divine doesn’t always equate to considering it infallible—or even if it does—a thinking person knows that his or her interpretation is fallible, even if scripture is not, so it still leaves room for critical thinking.
Huh? The bible was written specifically for the purpose of literary study as mythology? Hardly.
No no—the bible—or large sections of it—were written for the purpose of understanding humanity’s existential situation. The book of Genesis is all about man’s transition from egoless being to a self-conscious being. That’s pretty relevant in all times and places. There is an interesting discussion of it by Jordan Peterson here .
Then you can’t know anything about it, either. I just don’t see that as having any meaningful epistemological status. And I know you don’t agree.
That’s true. We just disagree on that. I don’t really know if we can really talk about this further without agreeing on basic points like that. I don’t feel sufficiently qualified to clearly articulate why we can still learn useful things from fiction. I just know it to be true, because I have learned useful things from it.
Recent Comments