Notes on Nagel, Religious Experience and Subjectivity

When one makes a decision based on moral values, or decides that his life goes better when he goes to church, there is no science which will verify for him that those are right decisions- for him.

After the fact, perhaps we could plug him into the "happy meter" - some scientific criteria for measuring some kind of happiness level based on defined brain states, say for example- and show that he is provably more happy as defined by the criteria.

But that doesn't help him decide.   And this also relates to the free will/determinism issue as well- no amount of scientific data about brain states will ever be able to take away the fact that I EXPERIENCE the quandary of making a choice in my life without the guidance of any possible scientific data, simply because choice is so complex and non-quantifiable, BESIDES the point that such matters are subjective to begin with and involve an entirely different point of view.

As far as subjectivity is concerned- but I think that you will find that any subjective statement, ie: any first person statement starting with the word "I" is not logically equivalent to any third person statement- a statement about other persons places or things. I take that as a fairly obvious fact, though I suppose I could be wrong.

For example the statement "I feel pain in my big toe" can be equivalent to "Bukowski says he feels pain in his big toe" but it cannot be made equivalent to the statement "The pain-o-meter shows pain impulses in Bukowski's big toe"

One is a statement about my feelings, the other is a statement about what the pain-o-meter shows.   They do not contain the same information.   They cannot be logically equivalent.

This I believe is essentially the point of Nagel's essay on "What it's like to be a Bat"

That is essentially why physicalism does not work- ie the belief that information about brain states is equivalent to subjective  information about feelings.

It just isn't!   The propositions are being made are not from the same point of view.   It is similar to making an observation from above a pyramid saying "Pyramids are square" and saying from a certain point viewing a pyramid from the side, "Pyramids are triangular".

Both are true and both are incompatible logically- because both are made from different points of view.

I make statements about my feelings from inside of me- about my subjective experience.  A scientist studying my subjective experience and brain states makes statements from outside of me by observing me.   A first person statement is not a third person statement and the information in each is not identical to each other.

For similar reasons, statements about spiritual experiences have nothing to do with statements about objectively verifiable (scientifically verifiable) experiences or states of affairs.   They are made from different points of view, similar to calling a pyramid a square from one point of view or a triangle from another.

A pyramid is both a square and a triangle at the same time- and a few other possible shapes- all depending on your point of view.

The Nature of Language

Every word we utter is a metaphor- words are not things, but they are symbols and signs we associate with things and situations and ideas.

On this view every idea - including those of science- are metaphors and linguistic structures.  If you want to use the word "myth" unfortunately it does have pejorative connotations that are especially offensive in a religious context and cause one to be misunderstood.

I think the idea of a "linguistic model" maybe communicates better and also can be seen to apply equally to science- as we know the paradigm shifts of science are shifts in linguistic models of how we see reality, and I think that terminology used also in religion is preferable.  It also illustrates I think the similarity between science and religion by calling them both "linguistic models" even though science indeed is an objectively verifiable linguistic model- meaning that we all can verify scientific models, whereas the model we use in religion is only "verifiable" by lending subjective meaning to a person's life.

Based on this view there is a very real sense in which religious experience- subjective as it is- is just as subjectively "real" to the individual experiencing it as science is to all of us.  One is subjectively real the other is objectively real.

Anyway, that's the way I "model" the difference, for what it's worth 

Living Subjectively in an Objective World

It's fascinating to me that some who believe that scientific truth is the only truth, deny that our perceptions of reality are ultimately subjective, and yet while doing so, pick which arguments to agree with, which ones to disagree with, not noticing that the very fact of disagreement proves that we live in our own little subjective worlds.

Why is education valued?  Because we see the value of each individual and their potential to contribute their subjective talents to the pooled talents of humanity.   We want each to be "productive citizens", who are independent and make their own choices.   We want them to "do something with their lives".

We all have our own subjective needs,  wants, preferences, talents and were all raised with different subjective experiences, differences in parenting, birth order, differing parental skills and conditions, different inbred talents, different ethnicities, economic conditions and cultures and other differences too numerous to even conceive.

What is important to us is different and not objectively definable, we just know what works for us when we see it or feel it.   Some shop at Walmart, others wouldn't think of it.   Some are vegans, others carnivores.  We are young, old, disabled, enabled, in great shape or sickly.  We are fat, thin, wear blue jeans or would not be caught in them.  We have messy houses or are neatniks.  We have different sexual preferences and are male or female.   We are liberal or conservative.

Yet with all these differences, there is something common to all of us.  We all live in an objective world which we share and which gives us choices.

The subjective self is what makes choices, defines our preferences, agrees and disagrees, decides to do it now or do it later, and what picks what is important to us, and decides if we will be scientists or artists, police officers or judges.  It decides whom to marry, where to go for a honeymoon, what church - or no church- is right for us.   It decides if we are atheists or believers, poets or policemen.

But you cannot say that that subjective self is a figment or our imagination.  That is truly "where" each of us lives and spends our lives.

Yet we all also have a world we all share.  We all need to pick up eggs milk and bread at the corner store, or go to the big box store a little farther away and hope to save some money. 

But absolutely without question it will be up to our subjective selves to decide if it is worth the drive.

Religion and Scientific Evidence

My comment on a religious message board in which most believed that there was no evidence for a global flood:

It bothers me that we use "evidence" to prove there was no global flood but yet "evidence" also points to no God.

I say just forget about "evidence" for religious truths and take them for what they are- true stories that bring us closer to our Maker

It cannot ever be proven that there was or was not a global flood any more than you can prove the existence of God so alleged evidence either way becomes irrelevant.

To me, it is just a confusing position to take citing evidence in one direction and not the other.

Perspectives

Imagine looking at a square table and drawing it.  Your final result will depend on your point of view.  The image of the table will not be "square" unless you are seeing it from directly above, but from that perspective it might actually be hard to recognize it as a "table" at all, because perhaps a photograph of a room from the ceiling will just show a green square and from that perspective it might not be identifiable.

If you are standing at some distance from the table, it will appear as perhaps a parallelogram and at first glance you might not know that it is "square".

Directly from the side, all you will see is the legs and the side, and and again perhaps you might not see it as a table, but you will certainly not know it is "square".  In fact, from the side, if the legs are longer than the top nothing about the image you see will be square at all.

The best way to "know" the most about the table is to see it from all angles and perspectives- to see how the legs are attached, if there is a label on the bottom, casters on the legs etc.

But if you have never seen a card table with a green felt top, you might not know the function of the table even after you have examined it carefully from an "objective" perspective.

Further, suppose this is the very table at which Wild Bill Hickok was shot. (I don't even know if he was shot like that- it is just an example)

It might be worth a million dollars as an historical artifact.

So there are entire cultural dimensions to this simple table that have no bearing on what you first see.  You don't see its function, you don't see its history, you don't see its significance to a collector who will pay what seems like a ridiculous sum to you, just to own this object you at first saw as a "green square" in a shot from the ceiling.

But was it wrong to see it as a "green square"?  No, indeed it is all of these things from each perspective.  None of them was wrong- all were right from their point of view.

"But it has to be one or the other, it can't be BOTH" someone might say.  "One HAS to be True!"

But to say that seeing it from one point of view is THE "correct" one, absolutely, is just short sighted.  It's not necessarily "wrong", it just doesn't capture the full reality.  That is where dogmatism enters the view, be it in either science OR religion.

Science and Religion in a Nutshell

This is the simplest explanation of my view I can come up with:

All linguistic discourse is metaphor and symbols.  We open up our mouths and make sounds or make squiggles on paper or pixels on a screen.

Squiggles and noises and pixels are not chairs tables planets or anything "real" - they are squiggles and noises which are symbols and signs.

They are metaphors.

Scientific squiggles and noises tell us about metaphors which humanity has seen useful for manipulating the world around us.

Religious squiggles and noises tell us about metaphors  which humanity has seen useful for explaining what is important to us, what we should do, what to value, and what our place is in the world in which we all interact.

We each pick which sets of squiggles and metaphors from each category help us best to put together a world view which helps us make sense of all this world we each experience.

The idea that truth is a property of sentences and sentences are just ultimately interpretations of experience really strikes people the wrong way but I think the position is unassailable.

The only way of even discussing the problem is in language, which is subject to interpretation.  There is nothing you can say to argue that in the final analysis we are not ultimately talking about words and each others interpretation of them, because the only way to make the argument is by expressing your interpretation of words.  It is inescapable.  The scientist ends up talking about and interpreting words and so does the theologian

Once you see human experience as one whole with no way to communicate it but language, then the objective and subjective become two sides of the same coin and inseparable, and just as valuable in their respective spheres.  We cannot survive without both of them.

We all live in the subjective every minute of our lives, but if we do not acknowledge the limits of the objective we cannot survive.

Galileo's Subjective Experience

I am fascinated by how subjective first person experience becomes objective science, and thinking about some of the main discoveries of science perhaps make it easier to bring this question into perspective.

For example, consider those incredibly exciting moments when Galileo first pointed his new telescope at Saturn and saw a blurry lump of light consisting of what he first thought were three spheres, and which subsequent observation, and better focus finally resolved into a single sphere with reflective rings to the sides.

For a few days or weeks, that was a subjective experience totally belonging to Galileo alone.   No one else had ever looked into a telescope at Saturn and his experience had not yet been replicated.  It was his own private experience communicated (let us suppose) to no one.

Much of science even now starts as a subjective experience of some scientist in some lab somewhere, who sees an anomaly in the data, a blip on a screen when there is not supposed to be a blip, or some outlier which his brain registers as "abnormal", which might lead to a "hunch" that if he slightly tweaked the experiment, suddenly that blip or that outlier might suddenly turn into something significant.

At that moment, he is experiencing something subjective no one else has experienced, and his idea- his "hunch"- is part of bringing order to "matter unorganized".

This is what humans do- we order our worlds around us through our perceptions, some of which we share with others, and other experiences remain subjective, intimate, and private.

Of course when he published the data in whatever form, all of that changed from a subjective experience to an objective one that anyone can verify, and that act of publication makes it part of the totality of what humanity knows, and in a sense creates that reality for others.  Indeed this is what science is- a collection of observations and experiences once private, now made publicly accessible, or what can be called "objective evidence" because we all can replicate it for ourselves.

This is the insight I wish all could see, that this is the kernel of what humans do, and which is part of our little ventures into embryonic godhood and how our activy parallel the activity of God Himself, and how what he does symbolizes what we do, and what we do symbolizes what he does, in the ongoing dance of creation.

We are created in His image, as theomorphic humans, and in turn he reveals himself to us as our Father, the anthropomorphic God.


He is the Word, the God who is man, and the Man who is God.