Yesterday I highlighted Sam Harris’s Q&A session with Reddit readers, and posed my own question to him, one prompted by his drawing a distinction between the low-level “spiritual” experience of, say, watching a sunset, and the more powerful transcendent experiences of religious people, those who meditate, and mystics. My question for Sam was this:
“So if we accept that people do have these seriously transcendent experiences, what follows from that—beyond our simple desire to study the neurobiology behind them?”
I’m chuffed that Sam has actually answered this question over on his site, in a new post called “What’s the point of transcendence?”
He has four answers, which I list below, but you’ll want to read his explanation in full, especially because he responds specifically to some of the comments that you readers made yesterday:
- It is possible to feel much better (in every sense of “better”) than one tends to feel.
- There is a connection between feeling transcendently good and being good.
- Certain patterns of thought and attention prevent us from accessing deeper (and wiser) states of well-being.
- Certain “spiritual” experiences can help us understand science.
I’ll be brief in response, taking up his points in order:
1. Sam notes that transcendent experiences confirm religious people in their faith, and block their transit to nonbelief. This is undoubtedly true for some people, but I do wonder how many of the religious really have felt “utterly at ease in the world—and such ease is synonymous with relaxing, or fully transcending, the apparent boundaries of the ‘self.’” Certainly many have, but I am curious how many religious people would tick a box on a survey saying that they’d had this experience.
Regardless, while I agree with Sam that “these states of mind act as a kind of filter: they get counted in support of ancient dogma by the faithful,” I strongly disagree with his claim that “their absence seems to give my fellow atheists yet another reason to reject religion.” We already have plenty of reasons to reject religion, foremost among them the lack of any evidence for religious claims. I doubt that there are any of us who question the “reality” of transcendent experiences among the faithful. Just watch any video of fundamentalist congregations weeping or speaking in tongues, or of Orthodox Jews davening in the synagogue. What we doubt is not the existence of these states, but the interpretation of what they mean. They are not evidence for the truth of religious claims. Period. How much, really, has atheism been held back by our denial of such spiritual states? Very little, I would think.
2. Sam argues that these transcendental experiences make one more ethical: “There are states of consciousness for which phrases like 1boundless love and compassion’ do not seem overblown.” I submit that here Sam may be projecting from his experiences with Buddhism, and that for other faiths the connection between transcendence and morality is tenuous. How can we test his claim? By showing that religious people—who, after all, are supposed to experience these mental states quite frequently—behave more morally than do atheists. I submit that there’s no evidence for that assertion, and, in my opinion, it’s probably wrong. Are atheists really below par in in the morality department? Look to many countries in Western Europe, where belief is low, for one answer.
3. Sam claims that transcendent states can give us insights not available under normal experience, and convey a greater sense of well-being. I agree with him on this. Having briefly engaged in meditation for a while (and abandoned it simply because I was too impatient to sit without thinking), I know that it reduces stress, makes one realize the pettiness of one’s problems, probably makes one healthier in body as well as mind (though I’m not aware of evidence bearing on this), and, perhaps by enabling reflection, helps one solve problems. Some of my drug experiences in college left me with a permanent and salubrious residue: most notably a sense of wonder about and appreciation of everyday things—things as simple as a rabbit or an ice cream cone. I’m sure this has helped me maintain the sense of wonder that is vital fuel for an evolutionary biologist.
But I’d also claim that if every religious person gave up their faith and simply meditated instead, the world would be a much nicer place. Validating the transcendent experiences of the faithful doesn’t move us towards this goal.
4. Sam argues that some scientific progress is facilitated by having transcendent experiences:
There are insights that one can have through meditation (that is, very close observation of first-person data) that line up rather well with what we know must be true at the level of the brain. I’ll mention just two, which I have written about before and will return to in subsequent posts: (1) the ego/self is a construct and a cognitive illusion; (2) there is no such thing as free will.
Again, is the support for this claim anything other than personal experience? I agree with both of Sam’s points, but was convinced of their veracity not through meditation, drugs, or religion, but simply through rational contemplation. And I believe that others who agree also do so largely from thinking about these issues.
Now it’s true that secular (and Buddhist) meditation may help one gain these insights (particularly the first), but I also submit that transcendent experiences of the religious sort prevent one from arriving at these conclusions. After all, religion—at least of the Abrahamic variety—tells us we have a soul, the antithesis of an illusory ego. And the idea that we really do have free will is behind most Christian doctrine on sin; for your fate absolutely depends on exercising that will (unless, of course, you’re a Calvinist). So while this may be an argument for meditation, it’s not an argument for transformative experiences of the religious kind.
In sum, I think Sam’s points constitute a compelling argument for secular, contemplative meditation, which might benefit many of us. Whether that activity produces “transcendent” experiences more powerful than those gained from, say, contemplating the immensity of the universe, or the amazing accomplishments of natural selection, is a point up for grabs. But I’m not convinced that grasping the reality of even genuinely deep transcendent experiences will make us more understanding and more powerful opponents of religion. We already have plenty of weapons in our arsenal against that form of delusion.
I’ve never seen an atheist reject religion because they didn’t apprehend that religious people often have powerful “spiritual” experiences. But I’ve seen plenty of us reject religion because we see these experiences as purely subjective, and not proof of any divine realities. In The End of Faith Sam argues that “moderate religions” are pernicious simply because they enable the more virulent forms. By somehow “validating” the transcendent spiritual experiences of religious people, we are in danger of doing the same thing for religion in general.
Much ado about something.
I agree with the both of you.
Sam has it nailed with his startlingly specific and concrete definition (by virtue of example and counter-example) of “well-being”, that is (in my opinion) quite impossible to contradict without seeming like a psychopath, or a cartoonish limp-wristed relativist post-modern buffoon.
sam harris is acting entirely in non-scientific manner when he insists on existence of some “special” experiences that are in any way different from any other experiences studied by neuroscience
sam harris is following the footsteps of “theists” when they declare existence of “special” non-material entity to which they promptly ascribe all sorts of properties inconsistent with science
it all starts from “specialness” that supposededly is “ignored” by scientists
See point 3 in Sam’s post:
There is no question that all of these mental states have neurophysiological correlates—but the neurophysiology often has subjective correlates. Understanding the first-person side of the equation is essential for understanding the phenomenon. Everything worth knowing about the human mind, good and bad, is taking place inside the brain. But that doesn’t mean that there is nothing to know about the qualitative character of these events. Yes, qualitative character can be misleading, and certain ways of talking about it can manufacture fresh misunderstandings about the mind. But this doesn’t mean that we can stop talking about the nature of conscious experience.
first person side is just that: first person side
the nature of conscious experience is simple:
the chemical and electrical activity of the brain as is determined by connectivity
but keep in mind that as we thin specific thoughts we _actively change_ connectivity in our brain
think about software that is running on hardware that simultenously changes the hardware that it runs
and the specific language we use and the frequency of it greatly affects the whole process
Elsburymk14’s comments get it right. I’ve had a very few truly amazing experiences of a transcendental, ecstatic nature that, were I not an intelligent, skeptical, educated person, could easily mislead one into thinking there’s something more out there than objective reality.
The particular experiences I’m thinking of are perhaps due to nothing more than overloading the brain with sensory stimuli, but that in no way diminishes their subjective nature. Nor, for that matter, their reproducibility. (No, don’t ask.)
The ancient Greeks addressed the problem of our brains misleading us about the nature of reality, so to recognize that intense subjective experiences have an objective cause doesn’t add anything new to human wisdom. But some phenomena are too complex to work out the details in a scientific manner, at least in any easy way, so we might as well sit back and enjoy the show.
Example (harmless example): think about the time you tried a new food and were, to use an old hippie phrase, blown away by the taste and aroma. Even exceptionally good ice cream could qualify. Sure, some neurophysiologist might be able to tease apart the details of the experience, but to what end? Or consider music that deeply moves one. Analyzing doesn’t the experience add anything to one’s appreciation of it. Don’t tell me that Mozart’s use of, say, a diminished seventh chord is the key to the deeply emotional nature of his best music.
Or even on a simpler level: we use our eyes to see, and have the impression that what we see is reality. In point of fact, there’s an exceedingly complex neurological system behind sight, yet our minds integrate the experience and mistake it for reality, not a reflection of reality.
The real question to be asked, for those of us with dirty minds, is: Are Sarah Palin and Michelle Bachmann mistaking orgasms for God speaking to them?
“Analyzing doesn’t the experience add anything to one’s appreciation of it.”
Richard Feynman disagrees with you. For the record, so do I. In any case this kind of support for appreciation without understanding can only enable mystical thinking.
Which is exactly how moderate religions enable extremism. The author Sam Harris has made this point quite clearly; so this Sam Harris guy you are talking about just needs to go read some Sam Harris to get set straight.
To what end? To the end of knowing specifically how to make ice cream or write music that induces these experiences. Analyzing a piece of music may not increase everybody’s enjoyment of it (although it increases mine), but you can’t seriously be claiming that we shouldn’t investigate why certain arrangements of pitches affect us in certain ways! Composers will need to know that kind of thing.
And what is evoking an emotional response in a listener if not the way the harmonies (i. e., a diminished 7th) and their constituent pitches are arranged? There is no magical, intangible (so to speak) component to music.
Frankly both the words “trancendent” and “spiritual” are ill-conceived.
To show this is quite simple: What test would we accept to correctly label an experience “trancendent” rather than “crazy”. Is a person with an identity disorder claiming to be Napoleon “transcending” their normal experience, or are they simply who they are with a certain neurological experience profile, that induces certain thought processes, beliefs and behaviors.
How is “spiritual” similarly different from an evokative experience for example.
If these categories are not easily separable perhaps they are just the same concept with different labels.
from
http://condition.org/forensic.htm
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
There is a bottom line to ‘the matter of forensic integrity’, and it is that if all the various principals of a discussion cannot wrap their hands entirely about ‘solely unambiguous material of discussion’ -even to the inclusion of statistical qualification if so necessary, it may be that there is absolutely no substance whatsoever in whatever conclusions they come to.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
I think Sam’s transcendence is just garbled nonsense I will stick with seeing the world as it is through full consciousness.
precisely like the theist’s garbled nonsense about relevance of something or someone that is “behind the scene and before everything else”
when one accepts that there is matter one automatically rejects ambiguous language of theism including such terms as “transcendance” and “spirituality”
How is experiencing states of mental happiness, which are above and beyond what we normally experience, the same as making unfounded, religious ‘behind the scenes’ claims about the world? Or am I misunderstanding you? What are you talking about?
state of “happiness” is fairly ordinary and can be easily achieved and indeed is achieved by half of the planet’s population either all the time as a mental habit or temporarily as the reaction to “fortune” or “misfortune”
i am talking about use of language of “transcedance” and “spirituality” to denote “specialness”
i am talking about “specialness” as the concept that is nt o conducive to science and as such to be not used by those who claim to _be_ scientist
“How is experiencing states of mental happiness, which are above and beyond what we normally experience…”
Why should we assume “states of mental happiness” are above and beyond anything? Why aren’t they simply another aspect of our normal lives? Your comment seems to already assume such a thing as transcendence.
i _stopped_ meditating when i understood that it is activity that only wastes one’s time
brain _cannot_ “rest” because the chemical and electrical activity stops only with death
this is why time spend “sitting” or “thinking about not-thinking” is entirely a waste of time – we can _use_ this time ACTING to actually IMPROVE our well being and well being of others through INCREASING knowledge
to _actively_ excercise mental discipline and develop patterns of thinking that is consistent with the science is much more conducive to mental health than “tuning out”
the amount of “noise” that is bombarding our brains is increasing with each one of us starting to share his thoughts and opinions with others
only thinking habits that “filter the inputs through the filter of science” will allow the generations of the future to deal with the challanges of ovcerpopulation and diasporating out of ignorance
meditating is a sure way to evolutionary dead-end
I better not catch you going to see any funny films at the movie theater. That wouldn’t be very scientific of you to just tune out like that! Just think! – If that’s all people did, we’d all go extinct!
you are playing the word game and just want to disagree for the sake of diagreeing instead of looking for _additional_ bit of knowledge as it relates to your understanding
ask explicit question and not just “hint” using metaphors
brain _cannot_ “rest” because the chemical and electrical activity stops only with death
This is like saying that muscle cannot rest, because it metabolizes all the time.
this is why time spend “sitting” or “thinking about not-thinking” is entirely a waste of time
According to your simplistic view of brain function, so is sleeping.
to _actively_ excercise mental discipline and develop patterns of thinking that is consistent with the science is much more conducive to mental health than “tuning out”
Any hard scientific data to support this claim or you’re just speculating?
your interpretation of my words by suggesting analogy with muscle and metabolism is misleading
we are talking about connection brain-mind
of course i do not have “studies” confirming my _opinion_
but my hypothesis will be tested over “deep time” as h sapiens lives through the “noise” of blogs, facebook, propaganda tv, etc.
One valuable thing I have learned from meditation is that it is possible to be conscious and sensually perceptive while activity in the language processing parts of the brain have been suppressed to the point that there is no verbal reaction to my perceptions—sensory experiences occur without labels or categorization. While this state precludes ordinary functioning, it graphically illustrates the degree to which verbalization of experience, while useful, is inadequate to describe the full nuance of sensory experience, in the same sense that a map is an inadequate description of actually being present in a location. It is nice to have the option of technicolor experience instead of black and white, to switch metaphors, and it puts our linguistic experience in a broader perspective: Language is utilitarian, and while it has its own aesthetic, it can curtail aesthetic experience in other domains. The menu is not the meal, the score is not the music, the DNA is not the peacock, etc., which is not to suggest that any of it is supernatural
I doubt if there are any atheists who haven’t had these types of experiences. Sam is making people uncomfortable with his bandying about of Buddhist slogans and then blaming atheists for his transcendental woes.
Here’s my slogan of the day: “Don’t blame it to us, explain it to us. Don’t be a complainer, be an explainer.?
I have a totally atheistic outlook and, therefore, have never had any religious transcendent experiences. However, every Sunday morning, instead of attending church like all “good” christian folk, I run through the Dandenong Ranges.
After about an hour or so, if it’s not transcendence I feel I don’t know what is, but I cannot imagine anythng better. Certainly the activity associated with it achieves much more than sitting around trying not to think.
Sorry mate, but that’s not spirituality. That’s pseudospirituality, the spiritual equivalent of intelligent design, dowsing, and conspiracy talk.
Why is wanting to have, or actually having, peaceful, blissful, or positive mental experiences analogous to pseudoscience? That question, to me at least, seems to be the underlying question about this whole topic.
If meditating produces these kinds of mental states, then why does nearly everyone on Jerry’s comment threads have such a problem with meditation?
If I’m in a bad mood right now and I tell myself to think of some funny jokes to get into a better mood, is that wrong or pseudoscientific or pseudospiritual? What if I meditate to produce the same results? What’s the difference? Obviously the type of stimuli or lack of stimuli to produce the wanted mental state would be the difference… but what’s the difference between the end goal of such a mental state when comparing meditating, running through the mountains, or watching some goofy youtube vids to get one’s mind into a more pleasant state? Why is this such a bad thing to so many atheists? Oppppsss! Did I just strawman everyone here. Zoomg!
Surely my dry humor came across?
LOL. Whoops! One never can tell in these discussions…
wanting to “tune out” is _natural_ and practiced by all as the “preventive maintenance” for the “information overload of the mind” but no “tuning out” is possible for the “brain”
to the extent that there is not possible to be aware of the “brain” but only of the second-order “entity” we call “mind” the whole debate is pointless and is a waste of time
science is manifestation of deliberative capability as purely physical property of homo sapiens and by extension is a property of matter
this is why watching our language to avoid ambiguity and misunderstanding is part of doing science
this is why such words as “transendance” and “spirituality” are not good choices when one talks about what belongs to the domain of science and what does not
AT,
The type of meditation that Sam is talking about may be a way for humans to get the brain into a certain type of state that we do not normally achieve in our everyday lives. A certain focusing on the mind on very limited stimuli or very specific thoughts while tuning out many other thoughts, may be an important brain state to achieve, and may help us focus on certain “objects”/ideas/phenomena.
I agree “transcendence” is a dangerous word to use, but the brain state that such meditation may lead to may be important. It also may just be like saying I am going to think really hard on “free will,” e.g., for the next hour.
look at the kind of words you are using
you say “maybe”
let’s focus what we can say without any doubt and let’s use language that both of us lable as “unambiguos”
i simply say that language constructions of a type “maybe there is something special because _i_ report is special” does not belong to the lexicon of the scientist
a mind that arises as manifestation of certain brain cannot distinguish whether any of its beliefs are scientific or not simply because _all_ of our own beliefs _appear_ to us as “ultimate truth”
only through discourse with other people we can learn which of our opinions are not scientific and only through someone pointing to us that we use the language that inconsistent with _science_
When “Sam” is in his deep-meditative brain state, there is a specific configuration to his brain- a configuration that will ultimately affect his behaavior. No, as for now, like most things involving consciousness and complex human behavior, science cannot measure it in any significant way, our theories are simply not there. There is a specific configuration to his brain that will make it hard for science to “know” it, – it does not mean it is “unkowable.”
Entering such meditative states changes the brain in certain ways, and, probably important ways, or just ways that brings “Sam” pleasure- which are ways that Harris thinks are important, and therefore engages in them and tells others to engage in them.
When talking about consciousness or complex behavior or social behaviors, it is impossible to speak of them in scientific ways, at the moment (despite many (not all) Evo. psych. claims). As for now, when talking about important behavior or brain states for human beings, such as the brain state of a 6th grader when he is learning math, is an entirely “unscientific” proposition at the time being. We “teach” the kid math in the way our society has learned to teach the kid math, even though we do not understand the biology or neuroscience behind it. In a similar way, the type of “transcendent” (the word needs to go) state arrived at by meditation, is (can be) an important brain state- even if it is only a way to “relax.”
The meditative states Harris talks about are real and affect behavior, in that way they are scientific. They are scientific, at this point in time, only in a limited, intersubjective way; that is, through expressing the feelings such states arouse and what we “learned” while in them, and comparing them with others.
I say “maybe” because I do not know if his specific states are very important to creating better lives or exploring deeper issues that one cannot get at by simply sitting at a computer and hashing out thoughts for an hour. But sitting in deep, contemplation of a subject or of phenomena is bound to create some insight (some change of the brain state in regards to that subject/object).
I don’t meditate, by the way, and any religious or dualistic-mind belief that people believe in because of meditation needs to be guarded against.
Lyndon,
All you are saying can be summed up in much less words
You are saying that cogitation changes connectivity in the brain and as such needs to be studied
I have no problem with this
I have a problem with us assigning to one particular state of the mind (whatever it may be or whoever it may be reported by those who claim to have it) any kind of “specialness”
The electrical activity in the brain starts at starts as early as 20 weeks (http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/69905/title/Brain_cells_start_sending_signals_early) and ceases with death
All this time brain constantly registers stimuli and _relates_ them. We can say that deliberative capability operates on relationals. And this is it. All purely physical. The words and way of talking are learned and are high order relationals.
Nothing more. No “specialness” of any kind.
The perceived “specialness” of subjective “feelings” or “thoughts” has no basis in nature. It is our mental construct. It is the desire of illusory ego to feel “special”. The biological basis for this is simple genetic imperative that drive any lifeform to live as long as possible.
We always feel “special” in our own “mental eyes” because that is how helathy brain functions. But for science as accumulation of knowlege and progression towards less ambiguity this specialness is a big detriment. This specialness is behind people not looking to establish forensic integrity of discourse.
This “specialness” is behind people of one religion insisting that their particular kind of nonsense is “the only right thing”
This is why I say that if Sam is talking A by saying religion is a bunch of nonsense he should be consistent and say B with saying that _any_ kind of “specialness” is inconsistent with SCIENCE.
Instead Sam talks about “special experiences of meditation”
This is why I say that Sam is inconsistent and does not talk science when he says those things
When he does that he invents religion of his own
“Having briefly engaged in meditation for a while (and abandoned it simply because I was too impatient to sit without thinking)…”
This is so Woody Allen.
BTW, “Salubrious Residue” would be a great name for an album.
“Having briefly engaged in meditation for a while (and abandoned it simply because I was too impatient to sit without thinking)…”
That was my favorite partial sentence in the post! I so identify.
FWIW, I think BillyJoe’s description of zoning out while running is a good examply of just one of a group of non-meditative ways one can reach a similar state to that of meditation.
I object to the word transcendence. What is being transcended? Like supernatural, transcendental implies going beyond nature.
I tend to perceive transcendent, as transcending the everyday or status quo state that our mind is usually in. The term also seems to be related to a positive mental experience.
This state of mind is best described as contemplative rather than transcendental. We shut off our minds to some stimuli and open our minds and sharpen our senses to others, and/or reflect on information gathered in the past. Nothing mystical about it.
Why does the word ‘transcendent’ have to be fixed to mysticism?
It seems as if everyone is bent on preserving any word that could be used to describe supernatural/superstitious ideas for only uses having to do with super-naturalism just for the sake of it. Words like ‘transcendent’ which are polysemous do not have to be fixed in supernatural land!
Like the word ‘numinous’ for example… Do these words really have to stop us dead in our tracks?
it is not the words that stop us but the way we use them
language is a fluid constract – the meanings of words change all the time
this is why a certain way of using language is consistent with science and the other is not
check out the link on _substance_ and the words we use to denote it as part of the “system of human experience”
http://condition.org/organiz.htm
I agree with you, Neil. There are indeed unfortunate connotations to the word “transcendent.” We may be stuck with it, though…”contemplative,” to me, isn’t quite right, either.
Well, the English language is not overly rich in words describing states of mind. Once, while contemplating existence and the physical nature of reality, I experienced this overwhelming sense that the universe is unspeakably absurd, sort of like a Monty Python movie. Others have said they’ve experienced it too, although I do not know that there is an English word for it.
Sounds like you have a deeper understanding of reality than most of us. 😉
I agree. Transcendence is a useless word in this context. Leave it for “The George Washington Bridge transcends the Hudson river”
The idea of “transcendance” as meaning anything more than dyspepsia is silly. Let’s stick with brain states and observable behavior and phenomena, shall we?
Sam takes the same solipsistic stance that supports all magical beliefs: “Everyone else’s hyper-subjective moods of the moment don’t count but my transcend ordinary material existence!” Yeah sure.
The deeper question is “transcend” what.
Magical beliefs are deeply nihilistic, anti-human and anti-life since they demand an existence that must include fantasy beliefs and behaviors and attack the value and right to exist of any non-magical experience or entity.
Devotion to notions like the soul or a god is really radical denial and moral disgust with one’s self and of ordinary life and experience. For a believer in magical-religious-spiritual fantasies, normal people, things and experience are corrupt and immoral and so abuse, denial or even mass killing is the highest form of loyalty and proof of adherence to magical beliefs.
Magical beliefs ultimately worship death — because of a pathological inability to cope with death anxiety. It is no accident that mass murder, Apocalypse, is carried out in the name of a higher power thoughout history and will be in the future.
“The idea of “transcendence” as meaning anything more than dyspepsia is silly. Let’s stick with brain states and observable behavior and phenomena, shall we?”
Can you elaborate on that a bit? Can you please explain what you mean when you talk about ‘brain states’? Could you also give some examples of what brain states are or are not observable?
I was a Zen Buddhist (Soto) for 35 years, and even went so far as to take the precepts and get a “dharma name” and such.
One day, while pondering what has been learned about the brain and its processes, it occurred to me that the whole Buddhism/enlightenment/kensho thing is based on a brain seizure. I’d had ’em, and they were sublime, but nothing more than seizures really.
I’ve disposed of all my books and cushions and such, but am unable to pitch the statue I used on my altar for sentimental reasons. Anybody want some really good incense?
I think Sam has been transformed into a straw man. All Sam was trying to say — or at least this is what I took from him — is that we shouldn’t downplay people’s “transcendent” experiences as trivial or hallucinatory. Instead, we should appreciate the gravity of their experience while still being firm on the fact that they do not in any way provide evidence for the supernatural. We should also emphasize that these states can be achieved, and are better achieved, on secular terms. Ultimately, I think Sam thinks that a scientific understanding of these states, unburdened with supernatural assumptions, has the potential to improve the human condition and raise us to higher levels on the moral landscape. And I agree with him on this.
well said, dave. this was how i understood his comments.
“But I’m not convinced that grasping the reality of even genuinely deep transcendent experiences will make us more understanding and more powerful opponents of religion. We already have plenty of weapons in our arsenal against that form of delusion.”
jerry, you act as if he discounts those other “weapons”. i’d be more apt to say “tools”, but to each his own. if he wanted to discount those, he would have said so. too often dr. harris is attacked for what he didn’t say, rather than what he does say. i am often bewildered as to how anyone misinterprets him. i’m not saying i always agree with him on every point made, but it’s not as if he’s lacking in clarity when making his arguments.
On the contrary, Harris is quite equivocal and obscure for an atheist writer. He’ll use terms in unconventional ways without good reason. He’ll use analogies without explaining their validity. He’ll make incredible broad remarks as though their specific import were clear. “lacking in clarity”? Sounds about right.
totaly agree about lack of unambiguos definitions in sam harris
but i don’t blame him
all of us talk as if the other party “knows what we mean” and very few are prepared to ask and answer clarifying questions
sam harris is not special in this regard
he is just like all of us who are born into “goo of institutionalized ignorance” and who never mmasters the discipline necessary to be unambiguos
after all we all have “to make mooney” to survive and strive in ‘default human condition’
this is why ‘pure scientist’ is an ideal mental constract
in real life we have scientists who compromise science to one degree or another when the step out from their lab and into “the real world”
Harris is much less clear on certain matters than, oh, say, Coyne, for instance. Maddening when one considers how very clear he can be on most other pertinent subjects. I think it’s no accident the clarity disappears when he starts addressing these “transcendent” states.
Are you able to forward the best example of same, please?
Eschew trivializing cerebral flatulence.
– “The Wacky Way of Knowledge.”
Maybe I’m the odd duck out here but a transcendent experience through meditation led me beyond the edge of belief into steadfast atheism. And, like Sam hints, the experience itself was not only transformative in many very powerful and fundamental ways (and almost instantaneous… similar to ‘seeing’ a mathematical concept for the first time in all its beauty and simplicity) but akin to trying to explain the difference between, let’s say, affection (that most people can relate to and appreciate many of the good reasons why such affection may be held towards another) and suddenly arriving at state of passionate love (that may look a bit crazy to those trying to understand the differences in state using the same perfectly rational means).
Yes, the experience is at the level of the brain, and yes, it can (or will eventually be) understood in chemical and neurological terms. But for so many to discount or reduce the importance of the transformative experience itself (and methods how the conditions for having such an experience can be taught and practiced) because the words we use to describe it sound too oogity boogity to be of legitimate value in understanding what’s going on is similar to discounting how important and transformative loving another can be because its prosody lacks the definition of useful prose.
I understand Jerry’s criticism and appreciate Sam’s valiant attempt to better define what he’s talking about and why it’s important. It’s not oogity boogity nor supernatural; it’s as deeply human as falling in love and comes with a host of personal and social benefits, making its scientific study one would think important… yet currently under-served because of its association with woo. (Why let Deepak Chopra and others of his ilk control the topic?)
I give kudos and my support to Sam for trying to raise its stature as an area in need of much more study in the scientific community.
Nicely put! As Jerry says, “I think Sam’s points constitute a compelling argument for secular, contemplative meditation, which might benefit many of us.” And not just meditation, but any activity or practice that can engender peak experiences, http://www.naturalism.org/spiritua1.htm#Practice
I absolutely agree Tom.
Enabling to experience these peak moments is something I do regularly, usually once a day, at a time of my choosing. It prepares me to meet each day front-on, and I’m in control.
As an atheist’s atheist for many years, these experiences are all the more valuable because I am under no obligation to attribute them some mystical nonsense.
I’m with Tildeb. I actually lived as a monk within the framework of an Indian theistic community and it was precisely having these experiences that led me from belief to atheism.
In fact, when I started having them I was warned that they were dangerous: that they could delude me. I was told that they were real but that I was merging with the light that shone from the body of God, that I had to escew them to discover the personality of God.
The thing was though, the experience was much more sublime than any of the devotionals I was practicing. I would use the term transcendent because I transcend my sense of self as a separate individual, yet it is an experience that feels more fully conscious and cognitive. Afterwards I feel a greater sense of connection not just to the world but to all the people and all life. I’m more patient and empathetic; basically a more loving person.
It led to me leaving the community and reentering society with all its own difficulties and I actually took to developing my critical thinking and studying science. I hadn’t really understood evolution beforehand for one.
At the same time I can totally understand the wariness atheists feel about such language as it seems to be more the purview of the religionist and theist. However, I think I just learned to use my brain in a new and different way that is intrinsicly valuable because it gives a depth to my existence.
One day I’d hope that neurology will understand and make it easier to experience and explore without all the difficulty of learning to meditate.
I can imagine some kind of helmet that anyone could put on to stimulate and develop the ability. There is a sense I have that the difficult matter of the nature of consciousness itself will probably only gain real traction when it can be explored both objectively through neurology, and subjectively through the experience of the amazing depths consciousness can have.
At the same time I honestly feel that atheists and humanists are totally on the right track about their desire for how societies should be, which is totally secular, enshrining the rights of the individual and devoted to the pursuit of knowledge in all spheres. If anything these experience shine a light on the meanness and parochial nature of religion; it’s function as a means of control. How stultifying it is.
I have actually found Sam Harris’s openness to this aspect of life inspiring as he seems open to its possibilities.
@ Apashiol
I would use the term transcendent because I transcend my sense of self as a separate individual, yet it is an experience that feels more fully conscious and cognitive. Afterwards I feel a greater sense of connection not just to the world but to all the people and all life. I’m more patient and empathetic; basically a more loving person.
Very nicely expressed. For me there is a period of heightened attention (that lingers still) accompanied by what I will call an emotional sensitivity and empathy (and here I’m struggling to find the right words) to what is not me.
This shift in perspective is a remarkable experience in that it shows yourself to yourself to be fully immersed in and not separate from the natural world… just like everyone and everything else. It’s a tremendous ego adjustment to feel one miniscule part of an infinite whole rather than the centre around which the universe unfolds.
Just like falling in love changes how we view the world, the transcendent experience fundamentally changes how we think of our place in it.
“Falling in love” and “passionate love” do not usually stand the test of time.
Once you have fallen in love and known passionate love it does change your perspective on life, even if they don’t last. You can be dismissive of them because they don’t always last forever (ironically this is exactly the tack that was taken by Indian theism) but that doesn’t mean they don’t bring value to human life or transform you.
Also you might be in danger of pushing the analogy too far. These experiences are like but not identical with love.
I realise while reading many of these comments why I don’t tend to talk about these types of experience. It isn’t just an antipathy to anything that comes off as ‘preachy’ because of past experiences with religion. It is that I am very aware of there being a wall of communication that one hits, though it might be a lack of ability on my part.
The one way I have thought about this is how many things even within common experience are really non-communicable. We have labels for them but we actually rely on the fact of our shared human experience. I can’t describe the actual experience of emotions but have to describe a situation that might evoke an emotion and rely upon you having had similar experiences and being capable of empathy to get what I mean. Then we can label it as ‘fearful’, ‘happiness’, ‘delight’, ‘anguish’, and ever after these labels serve as shorthand for the experiences.
The example often used would be trying to explain the sensation of sweetness to someone who has never eaten sugar of honey. Yet if you give them some to taste then they ‘know’ what you mean viscerally.
I’d just like to head off any objection that I’m meaning to imply that anyone who hasn’t had these experiences is the lesser for them. That I’m passing judgement. I’m acutely aware that there are people who can do stuff that is totally beyond me. I’m constantly awed by the abilities other have when it comes to grasping maths or who see the logical flaws in arguments immediately.
It is like how I feel sometimes when I observe my ability to learn other languages as if someone else is doing it. As if simultaneously it’s me but not me.
Well said, I’d agree with pretty much everything; I even recognise the reluctance you mention as a familiar feeling. 😀
1. Jerry you claim, “What we doubt is not the existence of these states, but the interpretation of what they mean.” It seems apparent that a great many of the comments on your posts seem to doubt the religious interpretations of what transcendent experiences mean as well as the existence of such transcendent states. Why else would I have repeatedly read comments about how wackaloon and hogwash Sam’s comments on meditation are? (Comments and arguments of this flavor are not in short supply.) After all, Sam’s point here can be reduced to the following: meditation can make it “possible to feel much better than one tends to feel.” It is clear that there are many atheists here who disagree with this. If one disagrees with this, then what credence are we giving to the “reality” of transcendent experiences, if not for their ability to make us feel better?
Religion has pervaded and commandeered not only everyday English as part of its comprehensive colonization of human experience, but it has completely subsumed all these that homo sapiens experience so they cannot be spoken of or related to without religious interpretation and/or connotation. We cannot speak these words without the baggage of theism. This is a tragedy.
We need to re-appropriate these words, these experiences, and wrest them from the dead hand of theism so that they can once again can be rightly shared by all humans as they should be.
Some words though are so toxic as to never be able to be used again in a neutral fashion and these words need to be ditched; ‘transcendence’ may be one of those words, along with, soul, worship, sacred, holy, divine, pray etc etc.
excellent point
except that we should not make a big deal out of the fact that religion preceeded science
both religion and science are manifestation of purrely physical deliberative capability of h sapiens
religion was the early way of making sense of the world and should be viewed as pre-cursor of science
once humanity accumulated enough knowledge for scientific method to be born the new eraa has begun
the era when scince slowly takes over from religion as the shepherd of human condition
we are now in the period when science is only starting to supply a worldview to live by, the function usually performed by religion
the language, as you so very well pointed out, is the the realm were this transformation is taking place and being documented by re-appropriation of certain words from religion by science
some of the newer concepts don’t even have terms in the language and need to be invented
bear in mind that religion being a predecessor to science has much command of human condition than science
religion is part of “goo of institutionalized ignorance”
and this goo is constantly re-populated with the “fresh minds” of children who soak it in from default human condition that is almost entirely made up by “goo of institutionalized ignorance”
this is why people like us should be very vocal and disciplined about the kind of language we use in any and all of our conversations
we absolutely must to watch what we are saying to be consistent with science and minimize our use of ambiguos words whose substance cannot be defined
we should actively seek out other people who understand this, connect with them and become the thin layer of society that is beginning of proper institutionalization of science
this process is unstoppable because deliberative capability and science is machine-that-goes-by-itself
over “deep-time” science will become the _only_ shepherd of human condition
this is the direct consecuence of genetic imperative that drives all life forms to continue living or surviving
check out material at http://www.condition.org – you may find a lot of food for thought and the people to connect with
How is it so difficult to take Sam at face value here?
I take away the following: Conscience beings have experiences. Some experiences are enjoyable and some are bad. We want to increase the enjoyable experiences in the same way that we want to be healthy. All of this relates to our conscience experience of the world as manufactured or processed by the brain. People can have subjective transcendent feelings where they feel much better than they tend to feel. This, in principle, can be studied by understanding the physical processes of the brain. Some people look at such experiences in the brain, which can be described as, “feeling much better than we tend to feel,” as being supernatural. Because of the supernatural explanations, many rational people wrongly perform a wholesale rejection of such brain states and experiences. But, we should not discount the importance of such transcendent brain states, because they directly relate to our having enjoyable experiences of the world and can be studied and understood at the physical level of the brain. Some things, like meditation, can produce transcendent experiences, which are systematically hijacked by the religious and used to explain the mystical or supernatural. We should accept the simple fact that transcendent experiences happen and that they can be understood at the level of the brain. Such understandings may help us conscience creatures understand how to maximize our experience.
It’s unfortunate that so many disagreements with this will just be things like, “whoa?! Meditation is just wacko man! What an idiot!”
It is also funny that so many disagreements will be so polar: “Sam is just belaboring the obvious!” va “Sam is a wackaloon mediator!” Lol, that’s hilarious. I love that Sam can cause all of these rational readers and respondents to see his views as both obvious correct and obviously misguided.
Oh and sorry for using the word ‘transcendence’.
Could it be that people alternately claim that Sam belabors the obvious and claim that he vouches for woo-hoo because he goes back and forth between the two? In his first book, Harris lends credence to superstitious beliefs. In that book and later on, he has suggested, often in vague ways, that people who meditate are not just enjoying themselves; that in some sense they are really experiencing the most profound things that humans can experience. And at other times, Harris just acts like meditation is a good way to make life more enjoyable. Unless you think meditation literally has no purpose, Harris’ remarks on meditation almost serve as a Rorschach blot for whatever you happen to think about meditation.
“In his first book, Harris lends credence to superstitious beliefs.”
This is tiring and the accusation has been made ad nauseum, to no effect. Please point out what he says in his first book that lends credence to superstitious beliefs.
If I remember correctly, people had the same hangup with what we are talking about now as with what he said about meditation and transcendent experiences in his first book. I have yet to be shown any claims that he makes on insufficient evidence.
‘People have transcendent, peaceful, blissful, etc. experiences. People wrongly claim that these experiences have supernatural explanations. We should not apply supernatural explanations. Rather, we should try to understand these experiences at the level of the brain………..’
I cannot think of anything that lends less credence to superstitious beliefs!
That “tiring” accusation was made because it was correct. I don’t own a copy of The End of Faith, though I read it through and through (footnotes included), but I recall in the first chapter him stating something about how “the world may be far stranger than we suppose” and saying, in a footnote, that there “may” even be solid evidence for reincarnation and xenoglossy. In any case, I’m not noticing a page cite for the quote you just made yourself…
I was trying to paraphrase…sorry if it was misleading.
I had a feeling you were paraphrasing, and paraphrasing only what you take to be Harris’s consistently reasonable stance on meditation and superstitious ideas.
Now, I grant that he has gotten much less woo-woo over time. But unless my memory is unbelievably bad , Harris does indeed make some suspicious remarks on these matters in his first book. He has been retreating since then. Retreating from stupid ideas is fine so long as you admit that you were wrong before, but Harris doesn’t acknowledge that he once lent credence to notions like reincarnation.
+ 1
+2
And xenoglossy.
And I just read a little farther up the thread. The redundancy award for redundancy goes to me.
elsburymk14,
I agree wholeheartedly with all your comments in this thread, but I think that the insistence on using the term “transcendence” is a poor choice on Harris’ behalf. This word has strong metaphysical and supernatural connotations, which is not what he wants to project.
I agree with you. But it is such a convenient term! 🙂 It is much easier to say than, “feeling better than we normally tend to feel.”
Nonetheless, you are probably right, but I do think it’s important to note the current time period and state of understanding of the brain and conscience mind. Sam can’t even make the simple point, to rationalists, that such mental states exist and that we should understand them in a scientific way by understanding the brain, without being completely (purposely?) misunderstood. Without even being able to get the concept across, developing a new vocabulary that tracks our increasing understanding of the brain and our conscience experiences will be slow going.
why even bother to talk about things that _inherently_ ambiguos and controversial?
why simply leave out the whole subject?
did it ever occur to you that some questions make no sense whatsoever?
the fact that we can make up a question doe not mean we need to try answer it
there are many questions that simply irrelevant to science because the words used to construct those questions cannot be defined as to poin to unambiguos _substance_
Brygida Berse
Yes. I make mention of how religion has commandeered English, at Comment 15 above.
‘Transcendence’ is a poor choice of word with far too many barnacles attached to its hull.
I think what Sam is demonstrating is that religious people SHOULD not be attributing their transcendent moments to a deity, but to natural processes. I don’t see that happening.
For now, yes, it will give believers something to brag about; the same way that they thank their god for answered prayers, all the while people elsewhere are thanking a different god for their own answered prayers.
Perhaps when/if religion is obsolete, this will be helpful, interesting, etc. to research. I’m open to it, mainly because I’m pretty confident we’re not going to find any supernatural explanations. Instead, we’ll only find more natural ones, which hopefully will make people who attribute these feelings to gods look more foolish.
Jerry says, “I think Sam’s points constitute a compelling argument for secular, contemplative meditation, which might benefit many of us.” And not just meditation, but any activity or practice that can engender peak experiences, http://www.naturalism.org/spiritua1.htm#Practice (with the usual caveat that such practices not have untoward harmful consequences).
Btw, I had such an experience watching the movie The Tree of Life. Not everyone will of course, and some folks don’t even want them damned transcendent states – e.g., having the sense of a separate self vanish temporarily. That’s fine, people vary.
Such a simple statement, so easily forgotten in practice!
I’m sorry my last comment saying this thing was kooky didn’t make it. I’m sorry but all this stuff makes me think of “ooOOooOOOooo” *spirit fingers*
I think a better, more on-point refutation of Sam’s No. 1 would be: Says who?!
As someone pointed out yesterday (David B, I think), some people don’t respond well to meditation. Take as an analoft certain medication. Cephalexin helps many people feel “better.” But not my wife. She’s allergic to cephalosporin. It makes her feel much worse.
Goddamn autocorrect. “Analoft” is now in my phone’s list of words I may have intended. Jesuschrist!
Hey, “analoft” could be our substitute for “transcendent experiences!”
Sam Harris
<blockquoteBut there are people who appear to have experienced none of them—and many of these people are atheists.
Really? I’m getting the sense that Sam doesn’t think very much of other atheists, that they are, as a whole, experientially deficient, a character flaw. That’s fine. But it’s incendiary as one person’s opinion.
Harris 1:
Since Sam offered no evidence in support of this, I have a different interpretation which makes more sense. A transcendent state of mind (“body-dissolving bliss”) had in a religious context puts personal experience at greater value and would actually devalue ancient dogma handed down from a hierarchical and authoritarian system. These people move away from organized religion as they don’t trust it and come to rely on a more personal spirituality. And it’s likely the Abrahamic god of their upbringing shifts to “God is love” because it better maps to the feelings their experiencing.
Harris 2:
Feelings and sensations are not reliable and are not the best option for a well-informed decision. Something so easily manipulated should not be relied upon to inform one’s ethics.
Harris 2:
But I’ve experienced fleeting moments of boundless love, too! Sam must think transcendental bliss is so unique to him and fellow practitioners of Buddhism that he knows, down to a group, who hasn’t accessed these states of mind. Too often we assume our internal states of mind, and the resultant feelings, are unique to us (and maybe those who think like us) when in fact we’re experiencing nothing that isn’t commonplace across all feeling humans. Surely this is also the result of the “ego as cognitive illusion” Sam discusses in his response.
Harris 3:
This is intriguing. However, I think there is an assumption that investigating subjective mind-states will not just increase our understanding of how the brain works (obviously) but will lead to a special wisdom or way of knowing. If Sam hasn’t claimed this then I misunderstood him.
Harris 4:
Well okay. Altered states, perhaps at the extreme of human experience, could lead to unique insights into the brain. There are a lot of things we could be doing to our brains that would yield interesting results. Why the focus on mediation and not pyschoactive drugs? It sounds easier and is just as available to atheists as anyone else. Or maybe a combination of both. Though having read Rational Mysticism, it becomes clear that the pharmacological approach can take us much further than simple Oms.
I’m sure most parents feel boundless love for their children.As a mother there are times that I look into my child’s big brown eyes and I feel such “boundless love” that I have to catch my breath.I swear there is absolutely nothing… nothing more beautiful,more profound, more meaningful than those eyes. Then,I get over myself and tell his little butt to go clean his room.
“A transcendent state of mind (“body-dissolving bliss”) had in a religious context puts personal experience at greater value and would actually devalue ancient dogma handed down from a hierarchical and authoritarian system. These people move away from organized religion as they don’t trust it and come to rely on a more personal spirituality. And it’s likely the Abrahamic god of their upbringing shifts to “God is love” because it better maps to the feelings their experiencing.”
THIS! Sam implies that not many people who had such experiences ever go on to leave religion, but I am one of those who did. As a Christian, I spoke in ‘tongues’ was ‘slain in the Spirit’, had visions, the full works. It was this that led me to a more personal spirituality and then to question the experiences themselves, which finally led to atheism. I think you’re really onto something here!
I don’t understand how science has shown that “the ego/self is a construct and a cognitive illusion”. How is it an illusion? I remember a radio interview with Harris from years ago where we was talking about this and he said, in effect, ‘the brain can cease to represent itself’, referring to these experiences in which one loses one’s sense of self.
It seems to me that he has it backwards. It is consciousness not localized to an animal that is an illusion. How is what he describes different from a feeling that one is floating when one is not? Surely the brain would be ceasing, for the time, to represent the actual relationship between the physical surroundings and the body that you are. Would laying in your bed be a mere construct and cognitive illusion?
“Laying in your bed” is always mediated through the phenomenal data that is bombarding the self through the senses. The self constructs and organizes the sensual data in a “coherent” way, specifically, in a way that helps that self interact with it (via evolutionary genetic importances and the importance of your historical environment, such as empirically having discovered and remembered that that shiny thing is a door knob and if I turn it I can leave my room and get some food)
That “self” furthermore is a construction of a long history of such phenomenal intake. It has centralized its desires and goals, very much with cues from evolutionary forces and social forces. All of the desires and goals and beliefs that one is consciously aware of (and many that we unconsciously react to) have been organized and focused on to create a more “stable” and “healthy”/useful being. In this process it overemphasizes and misrepresents essenciality, stability, and conscious goals and conscious choice (see the Libet experiment).
Anyways, hopefully that is a start (if coherent), there is much more . . .
I would recommend someone’s book like Thomas Metzinger’s the Ego Tunnel, or Chris Frith’s Making Up the Mind. Certainly others as well, Damasio, Owen Flanagan, e.g.
It is also not that the “sense data” that your self is organizing does not exist. It of course exists and it is being “produced” by the objects outside of the self (usually). There is just an endless possibility of categorizing, forming “models” of it, and then responding to it.
How and why your self responds in the way it does is because of the genes and environment that have determind your brain/self/body to be the way it is at that time. The “self” model, the central self, that you are consciously aware of, is a construction that distorts the taken-for-granted quality of the objects. You do not think about the fact that your sensory input of the alarm clock is your brain’s representation of that alarm clock, you simply think of that object-in-itself. Not that you think this, “you” just respond to it, ignoring all the complex and distorted and unorganized sensual input that is actually bombarding your ears and eyes. Learning to unify these sensual inputs into specific objects, and signifying (naming) these objects, and expecting behavior of other people and objects and ones “self,” helps create a constructed but unified subject/self.
I don’t see how anything you have said addresses my concern. I do not see in what sense “the self” is an illusion. Do you maintain that it is? As I am thinking of “self”, nothing you have said so far is inconsistent with it.
Harris seems to mean by ‘the self/ego’, the feeling of ‘I’. The feeling that there is a ‘me’. That my experience and consciousness is localized to what I and other people call by my name.
I mean, if our minds are our brains and brains are organs produced by evolution and the activities of the brain are fully caused and if the brain ‘constructs’ representations of reality (e.g. that I am sitting in front of a computer) from environmental information obtained through our sense organs I do not see how any of that makes ‘the sense of self’ an illusion.
Remember, Harris said that in his meditative experiences he has been able to get out of the illusion that is the sense of self. So not feeling like an “I” is closer to reality than feeling like one? How? Sam Harris is an “I”. If Sam Harris while meditating feels like his consciousness might not depend on his brain, I would say that that is an illusion that he has coaxed himself into.
Our minds are our brains, but our mind feels the way it does(our consciousness) because of its inaccessibility to the brain. The “self” is our conscious narrative of the “I.” In forming that narrative about our bodies, about our characteristics, about our behaviors, about our “choosing,” about the objects around us, the experiencer naturally represents itself in a way that glosses over what most of the brain is doing. The “taken-for-grantedness” of the objects we interact with are products of the brain that are presented to our conscious self in a unified way- which actually is not the way that it is first presented to the brain. To begin to unwind some of that unity, is what Sam Harris is talking about. To begin to “see” what the brain is experiencing would be a terrifying experience, an experience that would probably completely shatter the sense of “I” at that moment.
Think of the William James claim (or the Helen Keller experience) that the world is a “blurring whirl” to a newborn infant (this is probably a bad account but let us go with it). There is no sense of self, only endless sensual experiences. The self that eventually gets created is one that picks and chooses what is most useful. Including what is the most useful representation of the “self.” But, the actual experiences and history of the brain is endless, and is capable of arranging our conscious experience in a greatly different way. The “sense of self” is ignorant of all sorts of factors that are closely linked to it, that are determing its action, that are encouraging it to choose in the manner that it does.
For instance, manipulation experiments where someone has been “unconsciously” motivated to do an action. Such an individual that is at least unconsciously aware of why their brain/body committed an action- the hypnotist told them to- will consciously (the self) claim that some entirely disparate reason was the cause of the action (there are other similar experiments without hypnosis). The conscious self does not actually “know” why their brain chose the action, but must create some story as a unifying experience, which is far better than saying “I do not have the faintest clue why I did that” when we consciously are owning the action.
If in meditation we could enter, for a few seconds, back into that “blurring” world of experience it would be such a strange condition that that memory would be indescribable. And, also, something that would give “us” insight into what it is our brain is doing, what it is bracketing out and unifying in order to tell a useful narrative of the world and of the experiencer’s body and brain activity (that is a narrative of that self).
So, I am not saying that is a perfect acoount of our experience but in general that would be the idea.
Thanks for trying to explain. I think Harris has really failed to explain what he means by “the ego/the self”. He pretty much acts as though it is self-evident. But if what he means is close to what you are pointing at then I don’t think it is. So “the self” may be an illusion but I can’t see that right now because I don’t what “the self” is.
Lyndon,
I can clearly see you are interested in the matters of cognition and cogitation
And I am very happy to learn that someone of your abilities to manipulate language is so concerned about these matter.
I like how you trying to put your meaning into Sam Harris’s words.
But don’t you see how difficult it is?
Don’t you see that many of the words you use only raise more ambiguity?
Don’t you see how some of the words point to the _substance_ that cannot be defined in scientific terms
We can talk about wheter supernatural deity exists or not ad infinitum but we will never be able to agree on the _substance_ of that entity because the whole body of science suggests that the task is impossible to achieve.
This only one example how some words do not lend themselves to scientific definitions
That is scientists wuill never be able to pin those down and this is why proper scientists will avoid discussing those words and what they mean by them.
they know that it is the waste of their “science time” to do so
I strongly recommend you to go over the material at http://www.condition.org/organiz.htm
The fact that we can combine certain words into a question does not mean that asking that question makes sense.
Spending time trying to answer those question is waste of time.
Insted we should focus on questions that have direct impact on h sapiens and on our evolution as evolution of deliberative capability.
I’m not sure that many religious people actually do have these kind of mental experiences. In the catholic tradition it was only mystics such as John of the Cross or Theresa of Avila who had these – the catholic term used is an “ecstasy” – and they were considered highly suspect by the Church authorities for centuries.
Although all my family (except me) are catholics, the only catholic I ever heard of who had such an experience was my mother once in later life when she was spending much effort on her religious life including much contemplation and reading of (guess who) John of the Cross and Theresa of Avila……..The subject came up at her funeral and from the comments made by many attendees her experience was considered unusual in the extreme..
As described to me I’d say the experience was that of a major satori as described by zen patriarchs and others. Note that when buddha was asked about this experience by one of his followers he is said to have remarked “these experiences are not the reason we meditate”. I guess the old fellow knew something!
Maybe it’s all down to major endorphin overload…….anyway that’s my hypothesis
Yes, torture your brain with boredom for long enough and it will produce a massive endorphin rush to quell the pain.
I have a guaranteed way to give a transcendent experience to anyone. Starve yourself for a full five days. Then have your favorite food prepared for you, and eat it slowly.
You mean, fasting.
Religion already beat you to that punch. And, yes, it affects behavior and can help you have a “transcendent” experience, such as being grateful for our ease of life, which we tend to forget on a daily basis.
Not exactly. I believe that insofar as fasting is practiced by religious people as a means to spiritual experience it is going hungry that produces the desired experience, not the breaking of the fast.
Both in my experience. Fasting can create feelings of energy and vitality which are very pleasant and then what food you do eat has a vastly more wonderful taste. I am fasting at the moment but I just ate a chocolate biscuit, (okay I’m weak, my son offered it me, should I throw his kindness in his face? ;-)), it was the best chocolate biscuit I’ve eaten in years.
And considering the physical state of most of us we’d probably get more benefit from fasting than meditation, though nothing’s stopping you from doing both.
I think the idea of “transcendental” experience simply makes no sense. Transcendent of what? Nor, I suggest, does it make any clear sense to say that we can have insights through meditation that — this is unclear: “close observation of first-person data” doesn’t seem to make a lot of sense here — but what does “insights … that line up rather well with what we know must be true at the level of the brain” mean? So far as I can tell this is just words, and the fact that Sam is tied up in words here suggests to me that he is trespassing into theology — which is exactly what I think he is doing. Not only does he give comfort to believers. He himself (almost) becomes one. This is fairly straightforward woo.
Excellent comment! One cannot say it better!
“Transcendent of what?”
Of, for instance, the standard experience of being a separate self facing the world. This would be to have the direct, non-cognitive experience of the fact of your complete connection to nature, if you want that sort of experience, and you may not.
“‘close observation of first-person data’ doesn’t seem to make a lot of sense here — but what does ‘insights … that line up rather well with what we know must be true at the level of the brain’ mean?”
It could mean that in looking at the brain, we don’t find a self, just a set of processes (see Thomas Metzinger’s book The Ego Tunnel, reviewed at http://www.naturalism.org/metzinger.htm ) So in observing our experience carefully in meditation, we might notice that there’s no substantial self having experience, only experience arising on its own, including the experience of a self having it, an experience which can on occasion disappear. So our meditative experience might sometimes reflect – non-cognitively, non-discursively – what’s true at the level of the brain. Not that there’s anything wrong with the experience of being a self – very useful feeling most of the time, but refreshing to dispense with occasionally.
It seems to me that the fact that so many here are trying to explain what Harris meant is indicative of at least some want of clarity.
Is this kind of “unitive” experience transcendent? I don’t think that’s what’s usually meant by transcendence. There is a kind of unitive mysticism in which the person experiences a kind of oneness with nature, say, in a Wordsworthian sense. But this was not transcendence, although Wordsworth thought that it may have proceeded from the transcendent. But the unitive experience of “something far more deeply interfused” was much more a sense of unity of self with other, of the “round ocean and the living air, and the blue sky and in the heart of man.”
As for the self, of course we don’t find a self in the brain, nor do we find it, as Hume said, when we look inside ourselves. But the psychological state that Harris is talking about is not something that is plausibly reflected in the state of the brain, at least there is not the slightest reason to suppose that the absence of a self in the brain corresponds to an absence of an introspective self.
I still think he’s talking woo.
+ 2
Much as I’ve loved the majority Harris’s writings, have even distributed copies of “Letter to a Christian Nation” to friends, I’ve always felt that this “spiritual” part of his oeuvre was worrisome.
In my mind, of all the atheist spokespeople today, he’d be my candidate for “most likely to pull a fast one and convert to the other side” some day. (Note that even a “most likely,” in this company, is still what I regard to be a pretty low probability.)
I wonder if it’s any accident that he’s the youngest of the crew? As JAC in his original post, and several people in the comments have noted, these are the sorts of experiences one seems most likely to experience or seek out around college/grad school age or within maybe a decade after. One only has to recall the avidity for LSD before it was illegal (and after, of course); a young Sagan among others was interested in pursuing the insights offered by psychedelics. The references above likening transcendence to falling in love also might reflect a certain stage of life…
I don’t often disagree with you, Eric, but on this matter I think you are assuming a conclusion separate from the premises Sam is using.
The transcendence is in all likelihood similar in effect to a stroke victim whose brain ceases to recognize physical boundaries of the body. But unlike a stroking brain, the sense of self is neutralized while higher cognitive function maintained.
Meditation – like prayer – is known to alter blood flow to certain areas of the brain. This ability to somehow shift blood flow is remarkable in and of itself in that it is a byproduct of methods to help facilitate not thinking. What is the mechanism by which this is done? For any neuroscientist, this has got to be interesting and worth further investigation, whereas a very typical response from too many otherwise articulate, intelligent, and scientifically minded people is that it’s “fairly straightforward woo” when the evidence clearly indicates it’s no such thing.
That, unfortunately, is not what Harris is (or seems to be) talking about. He’s talking about insights. I’m quite prepared to accept that different cognitive experiences are reflected in different states of the brain. This is, as they say, a no-brainer. But I am not prepared to accept the claim that certain particular insights are reflected in states of the brain, or that such an identification can be made. That’s where I have problems, not with the relationship between conscious experience and brain states.
One of the funny things is that neuroscientists do fMRI scans of nuns who claim to be having religious experiences. Of course, nuns would, wouldn’t they? But we’re still dealing with quite subjective experiences, to which others have no access. Are they experiences, or are they merely thinking about experiences, or perhaps thinking about having a particular type of experience? And how would you tell the difference? But, certainly, to claim some kind of correspondence between insights and states of the brain seems to me to be far-fetched, though, of course, I can be convinced otherwise.
Yes, this is my problem with his claims as well. Harris keeps trying to prop up transcendence as deserving special respect, as if it offers a valid “way of knowing”–but provides no evidence that transcendence does any such thing. Just as we hold that religious claims deserve no special treatment, neither do claims of transcendence. Transcendence is no more valid a way of knowing than its relative “revelation.”
People who experience transcendence and/or revelation come to wildly divergent conclusions about what is true rather than convergent views. Since those divergent conclusions are often, if not mostly, mutually exclusive that suggests rather strongly that transcendence is not a way of knowing but a way of **feeling** like you know, that you have unique factual knowledge, much as alcohol or THC can make you feel clever and insightful when, in fact, you don’t and are just having your subjective judgment impaired…
Perhaps a different way to think about it would be that we have an inbuilt filter that is tagging things as useful and worthy of attention and useless and not worth bothering with. It is likely made up in part by many of the cognitive biases we have.
If we didn’t have the filter we would quickly overload but the downside is we might be dismissing stuff that is pertinent or valuable. Our attention is limited and often squandered.
Our minds can be like a needle in a groove, constantly following well worn pathways.
So meditation can get you out of the way of your own mind. It isn’t a substitute for proper investigation and reliable knowledge and the quality of the insights you get will always be dependant on the quality of the information you are immersing yourself in and processing.
My own experience is more a case of constantly taking in ideas and discoveries and struggling to understand and incorporate often counter-intuitive propositions. I might not be seeing anything of significance.
Unconsciously though I am working through all this stuff without any awareness it’s going on, and it’s not that during meditation I am thinking about it, but rather that I go outside and beyond all that usual mentation, figuratively speaking, which experientially is a dissolution of the self, or the construction and narration of self, and just being, the mind temporarily ceases to do what is always doing. None of the internal chatter, none of the ideation.
It is when the ‘I’ returns that the insights can happen. As if I have popped the needle out of the groove and reset things. Then suddenly I can get that ‘aha’ feeling. My mind is on a fresh and different track and the connections I make are new and can lead me out of mental cul-de-sacs.
Once I struggled with Sanskrit and ideas that were quite alien and when I came out the other side of meditation I would have suddenly integrated and understood that stuff.
Now that I am concerning myself with the discoveries of science the insights I get are based on science. I am being informed in a totally different manner.
The meditative state itself is contentless.
Well, the fourth point he makes is about insight when he writes , here are two facts which science gives us good reason to believe, and which I believe we can know through introspection, but which seem quite paradoxical and troubling to most people.
In this sense, Eric, he is saying that meditation furthers our introspection. Although I know it sounds weird, a common state of meditation is this shift in perspective beyond/separate/outside of our usual point of perspective – our steady-state self – to immediately see (in the mathematical understanding sense of the word ‘see’) what may be paradoxical and troubling to those without such first-hand experiences, such as why our sense of self is clearly a temporary construct and not a trait.
For those who have experienced moving outside of this usual perception of seeing the world from our central self outwards, it becomes quite evident and even obvious that who I am is who I make myself to be, so to speak, sifting and sorting through identity debris collecting and assembling those bits I prefer over those bits I don’t and pretending that this is identity is really the way I am, the way I come. One understands the falsity of this belief about identity quickly and easily with the experience of moving outside of this self-centered perspective of what Sam calls ‘ego’. My own experience mirrors Sam’s assertion that the idea of a temporarily constructed self identity seems to cause a great many people difficulty grasping through reasoning alone, and we hear this intransigence all the time with those who favour ‘I am who I am’, and ‘You have to take me as I come’ and other typical assertions of identity presented as if were a trait rather than the construct it is.
The understanding of self identity as a construct rather than a trait has, as I’m sure you can appreciate from your role as counselor, huge ramifications in a host of issues involving psychological health and welfare. What one believes about the permanence of self identity can significantly impact the efficacy of treatment, to name but one example of insight derived from introspection through meditation. But note that meditation is not required for successful introspection, but it allows for an immediate understanding rather than what for some requires a post doctoral inquiry to reach the same understanding.
“But note that meditation is not required for successful introspection, but it allows for an immediate understanding rather than what for some requires a post doctoral inquiry to reach the same understanding.”
^^^^^THIS.
the lot of the comments here are nauseatingly misguided.
Meditation is a method of starving the brain of stimulation, The low tech equivalent of sensory deprivation tanks. The same things can be experienced by use of drugs, Ecstasy making one love everything and everybody or LSD scrambling the senses and expanding the view of the universe. Just because this deprivation makes the brain experience unusual things I don’t think we should read too much into it either in a religious or secular manner.
I’m just up set that Sam claims that there are higher states of consciousness that us atheists aren’t willing to accept when he can’t even explain what those higher states are.
I used to meditate for 2 years and I didn’t get anything out of it but relaxation. There is no special zone a person experiences through meditation.
Yes, Sam it is difficult to focus on your breath alone. But so what.
My verdict: Sam is definitely trying to justify his meditation practice. Which is fine. But don’t degrade your own people without bringing the cold hard facts. It seems to me all the special experiences Sam is talking about we all experience anyway.
There are different states of awareness we can achieve that I think Sam is arguing these subjective experiential reports can be useful and revealing in the scientific sense and this seems to cause many no end of difficulty to appreciate. It has nothing to do with woo, although it is perfectly understandable that – having no other scientific frame of reference for what they have experienced – many who have such experiences attribute their cause to some unseen outside agency. This is unnecessary but inevitable when so many in science seem eager to dismiss the experiences as imagined and of no real practical value. I think Sam’s point is that telling someone who has had such an experience that it was all an imagined/hallucinated/mis-attributed brain fart is not good science.
Neurologist Jill Bolte Taylor’s book My Stroke of Insight describes this radical change in perspective in a similar way, but we make a mistake thinking that useful and insightful experiences from, say, stroke victims automatically means that the person who pays attention to the reports is therefore a supporter of stroking. Those who pay attention to the experiences reported by meditation practitioners doesn’t mean that the practice itself automatically induces keen insights into consciousness. But it is what these experiences reveal that can be very useful in a scientific sense as an indicator for further study rather giving in to the urge to dismiss these transformative (what many call transcendent) subjective experiences themselves as falling into the rabbit hole from a malfunctioning brain.
After writing my previous comments I actually realised that because I restricted myself to particular experiences that seemed germane I ended up omitting saying that there are a whole range of possible experiences, not just the tranquil loss-of-self or self-transcendent one (there’s that word again).
One personal ‘insight’ I had is of the fundamentally labile nature of consciousness.
Included is an awareness that, so to speak, our consciousnesses are shaped and trained by the exigencies of survival and the cultures we are born into. While we come to think of the boundary of our selves ending at our skins there can be times when one is aware of how we are selves-within-culture. That has an impact on ideas of free will. The illusion of free will originating from within the self is not so captivating when you glimpse how responsive we are to changes in our environment, when the ego’s job seems less to will and more to confabulate.
What I hadn’t heard of before reading this thread was the phenomenon of transcendent experiences leading one away from supernaturalism to naturalism, see comments by tildeb, Apashiol and Papalinton above in 14. Quite the revelation, thanks!
“…a transcendent experience through meditation led me beyond the edge of belief into steadfast atheism.”
“…the experience was much more sublime than any of the devotionals I was practicing….It led to me leaving the community and reentering society with all its own difficulties and I actually took to developing my critical thinking and studying science.”
“As an atheist’s atheist for many years, these experiences are all the more valuable because I am under no obligation to attribute them some mystical nonsense.”
“This shift in perspective is a remarkable experience in that it shows yourself to yourself to be fully immersed in and not separate from the natural world… just like everyone and everything else.”
Good post, Jerry.
FYI… A couple of years, in preparation for being interviewed by an “evolutionary spirituality” leader from the Eastern tradition, I wrote a blog post that began this way…
“The present moment is highly overrated. From an evolutionary perspective, the past and the future are where it’s at. Any aardvark, antelope, cat, or cockroach can effortlessly reside in the present moment. Only human beings can engage deeply with the past and consciously co-create the future. By doing so, by looking outward with aims of bettering our world, big or small, we also walk a path that leads to inner fulfillment.”
Here’s the whole post…
EVOLUTIONARY SPIRITUALITY: COMING HOME TO REALITY: http://thankgodforevolution.com/node/1976
Michael,
You are trying to combine essences that cannot be combined
Thee water and oil can be put together in a bottle and shaken to look like thewy have become one
But as soon as you put the bottle at rest the oil and water separate
Your efforts to combine “evolutionary” and “spirituality” are the efforts of mixing the bottle
You are wasting your time
Deeds speak louder than words
By attempting to juxtapose “evolutionary” and “spirituality” you tell me that you do not understand “evolution” and “spirituality” in scientific terms
This is why although I may applaud your efforts to do “good” I am compelled to ask you to stopp it because you are doing more of “bad” than “good” by wasting your own time and the time of others because you distract them by adding “noise” and multiplying “the goo of institutionalized ignorance”
I am happy you feel you discoverd the “ultimate truth” but the way you use words indicate to me that you are “delusional”
Try to go back to basics
Start with the matter
And go step by step to discover that science over deep (evolutionary)time be the _only_ shepherd of human condition
“spirituality” is redundant and should not be brough into the picture – Occum’s razor
A brief note since, bummer, Harris’ site seems down. (And I’ll no doubt have to come back to this, if indeed he defined “well-being” robustly.)
“and wiser) states of well-being.”
Here again there is a lack of robust definition, what is a “wiser” state?
Coyne seems to take it as suggesting that reflection helps prioritize among problems (“realize the pettiness”) and helps solve them, and that different perspective (“wonder”, “appreciation”) is more informative (wiser?).
But none of those are unique to meditation, and the last is arguable. This may or may not help depending on context. IIRC the “different perspective” creating practice of brain storming is now under critique because it doesn’t seem to be useful in practice but quite possibly lowering problem solving efficiency of organizations.
“Here again there is a lack of robust definition, what is a “wiser” state?”
Sounds like alt med guru Andrew Weil’s idea of “stoned thinking.” Both Harris and Weil want to attribute special and reliable powers of insight to altered states of consciousness, but neither have sound **evidence** of any such thing. It is really disappointing to see Harris align some of his thinking with the woo crowd.
The rather embarrassing elephant in the room just got bigger. I’m getting embarrassed by all the atheists who are defending Harris here.
Harris frankly needs to stop with his nonsense, because this is damaging the aims and goals of the atheist movement, which is based on reason and not revelation.
yes especially givewn high visibility of Harris and his regular appearances in public
But can we really be sure that Harris is absolutely in control of his ability to engage in “woo” or not?
He himself argued that there is no free will and this is his argument in action – he just does what he was “programmed” to do by all of his prior life.
Harris is the relection of the current level of institutionalization of science.
It is up to all of us collectively to engage in the discourse in such a way that someone with “adequate worldview” (Harris minus “specialness”) is brought into “public eye”
It is demand and supply – we need to change deman and it is the ultimate task of discipline and proper reasoning for all of us
Thanks for your comments – I do like you pointing the fact that Harris sabotages his own crusade against religion by actively engaging in “religious woo talk”
I think those who are accusing Sam of woo woo are being unreasonable. It’s simply not consistent with his comments and his most recent endeavors.
It seems to me arrogant and close-minded to believe that the last discovery of man capable of transcendent experience was the invention of Music. Just imagine a world where only a small island of people have ever heard or played music and claimed that it was a transcendent experience that could make us feel better, be better and even improve our understanding of the world.
That said, i do have some disagreement with Sam. He seems to suggest that atheists may be less open to these experiences. Maybe so, but that hasn’t been my experience.
As for Sam’s careless comment:
“their absence seems to give my fellow atheists yet another reason to reject religion.”
I agree with Dr. Coyne:
“We already have plenty of reasons to reject religion, foremost among them the lack of any evidence for religious claims.”
But i disagree with Dr. Coyne when he says:
“By somehow “validating” the transcendent spiritual experiences of religious people, we are in danger of doing the same thing for religion in general.”
No politics necessary; the religious do not have a monopoly on transcendent experiences, and of course no amount of validation for those experiences could validate religion in general. Unless transcendent experiences can change history and the laws of physics.
check out the thread for argument that transcedant experience is at best a mis-nomer and at worst an oxymoron
i do not think sam harris can control whether he engages in woo woo or not – he is what he is and always will be 🙂
he will, of course, disagree with all of the comments here by simply saying “but you do not get my point accross”
notice that this is exactly what we hear from the other side in atheist vs theist debate and each side considers itself to be “right”
it is not possible “to persuade” anyone of anything
only when brain/mind spends effort on acquiring knowledge the knowledge may become the basis of scientific worldview
but it is very hard to do so because we are surrounded by “goo of institutionalized ignorance” that at some point in the past constituted knowledge
this is the reason why even such highly intelligent people like Sam Harris and you and me will occasionally fall baclk on our wicked ways and produce a statement that stinks of woo-woo
It is the duty of the people around Sam, you and me to point out to us that we are talking nonsense and this is precisely whhat is happening here
Jesus y’all, he’s talking about brain states! Not the occult! I think a few people on here could really benefit from reading some Ramachandran, Sacks etc. I think part of the problem here could be that some atheists have little knowledge of neuroscience and are ignorant of the remarkable abilities of the human brain. Sam should really address this more and not assume his fellow non-believers to have this knowledge.
He is talking about some brain states to be “more special” than the other.
And this _is_ occult 🙂
If it smells like occult, if it tastes like occult, if it looks like occult it is probably occult
I like Jerry’s use of “rational contemplation”, as I have often linked the “transcendent” feelings I get when rationally contemplating about what we have learned about nature and our place in it to the same “transcendent” feelings that the faithful have when they think about God’s purpose for them and their reward in heaven. It’s the same thing. It’s the same kind of experience. The difference is your knowledge. One’s knowledge tells them that they were created by God, and the others knowledge tells them they were created by the amazing process of natural selection. It’s the same experience you get when a certain song moves you, remembering the past, falling in love, etc. I have never denied the existence of such experiences, I only question the claim of their origin. If one claims that this kind of experience is supernatural, or spiritual, then I would need evidence for this supernatural or spiritual realm or dimension from which these experiences tap and interact with the physical parts of our brain (the neurons, chemicals and electrical signals).
The evidence supports the claim that these experiences are a product of the neurons, chemicals and electrical signals and their interactions. Our previous experiences (likes and dislikes) and knowledge guide what think about. The faithful won’t be thinking about evolution and the big bang and get the same powerful transcendent experiences that atheists would get, and vice versa. Country music lovers aren’t going to get the same transcendent experience when listening to ambient techno music as a ambient-techno music lover would. Because each of us has a unique layout of neurons and a unique combination of chemicals and electrical signals, which hold unique experiences from a unique point of view in reality, we are going to have subjective transcendent experiences. Because we are of the same species and our neural pathways are similar, yet unique, some of us may like the same songs, or agree on certain points of view. It is these same similarities and uniqueness of our structure and the processes that occur within it that give rise to the similarities and uniqueness of these experiences.
I commented at some length in the former thread.
I have had my transcendental experiences on drugs and meditation – in that order – and the meditation ones seemed more benign.
At the time.
Now – I see the seemingly benign effects of meditation as equivalent to the seemingly benign effect of many people reporting feeling better as a result of ‘treatment’ by homeopathy, Reiki et al, and feeling better as a result of auditing.
The papers produced on beneficial effects of meditation tend to come from those sympathetic to it, and those which address the problems of dissociation resulting from it tend to get ignored, but they are there in the literature, and in my own experiences and observations.
Once again I commend http://www.suggestibility.org/
and suggest that what the author says have wider applications to fringe medicine, scientology, many forms of meditation and other religious experiences.
The ‘benefits’ of meditation should, IMV, be given no more easy a ride from sceptics than the idea that Jesus was a man with nothing supernatural about him, but was a great moral teacher.
In fact, looked at closely and as a whole, the moral teachings of Jesus – if he in fact was a historical person – are shite.
David B
Now I had time, and Harris site is up: no, no valid definition of well-being here:
It is fuzzy and non-testable.
Further, it is meaningless:
From one side it leaves open for anything from sickness over drugs to actual healthy behavior as “well-being”. So it doesn’t map onto any particular subset of feelings.
From the other side not everything can be sensible feeling or thought. If noise overwhelms the signal-to-noise ratio, you don’t get any meaningful behavior. You get confusion.
(1) the ego/self is a construct and a cognitive illusion; (2) there is no such thing as free will.
these are two heresies!!!! Try to ask to people who fall in coma state if self is an illusion…!!!!! And harris sell himself like a “neuroscientist”… but what kind of neurosceintist doesn’t know that right frontal lobe is the point of cerebral cortex correlated with the sense of self?? a material part in wich we can find our sense of self!!! .. he’s crazy… I really don’t have words. WE aren’t trees!!! we need self to live… Harris dosen’t say thAt buddhism is a way to get out from reality!! please read buddha’s canon-pali. No more happiness, but escape. DAMASIO AND DENNET ARE MORE SCIENTIFIC AND MORE LOGIC… HARRIS IS MAD!!!! How we can use a doctrine of escape in a secular way?? simply.. we can’t.
and.. sorry… I’ve to add one thing..
Please, please help me to understand why harris which critics religions tell us other forms of commandments like he did in his ultimate book “LYING”. He talks against lies…ahahahahahahhahahah
christians practicings talk against lies since two thousand years!!!! He’s much more than simply “confused”… he’s a cheater.
DENNETT says us why religions can be mantained in a atheist way of thinkig. here’s