Between Science and Spirituality

The Chronicle of Higher Education ^ | Nov. 29, 2002 | John Horgan

[beckett]

Between Science and Spirituality

By JOHN HORGAN

Can mystical spirituality be reconciled with science and, more broadly, with reason? To paraphrase the mystical philosopher Ken Wilber, is the East's version of enlightenment compatible with that of the West? If so, what sort of truth would a rational mysticism give us? What sort of consolation?

There are many claimed convergences between science and mysticism. Cognitive psychology supposedly corroborates the Buddhist doctrine that the self is an illusion. Quantum mechanics, which implies that the outcomes of certain microevents depend on how we measure them, is said to confirm the mystical intuition that consciousness is an intrinsic part of reality. Similarly, quantum nonlocality, which Einstein disparaged as "spooky action at a distance," clinches mystics' perception of the interrelatedness, or unity, of all things. I see a different point of convergence between science and mysticism: Each in its own way reveals the miraculousness of our existence.

The more science learns about the origin and history of the cosmos and of life on earth and of Homo sapiens, the more it reveals how staggeringly improbable we are. First there is the fact of existence itself. The big-bang theory represents a profound insight into the history and structure of the cosmos, but it cannot tell us why creation occurred in the first place. Particle physics suggests that empty space is seething with virtual particles, which spring into existence for an instant before vanishing. In the same way, some physicists speculate, the entire universe might have begun as a kind of virtual particle. Honest physicists will admit that they have no idea why there is something rather than nothing. After all, what produced the quantum forces that supposedly made creation possible? "No one is certain what happened before the Big Bang, or even if the question has any meaning," Steven Weinberg, the physicist and Nobel laureate, wrote recently.

Next questions: Why does the universe look this way rather than some other way? Why does it adhere to these laws of nature rather than to some other laws? Altering any of the universe's fundamental parameters would have radically altered reality. For example, if the cosmos had been slightly more dense at its inception, it would have quickly collapsed into a black hole.

A smidgen less dense, and it would have flown apart so fast that there would have been no chance for stars, galaxies, and planets to form. Cosmologists sometimes call this the fine-tuning problem, or, more colorfully, the Goldilocks dilemma: How did the density of the universe turn out not too high, not too low, but just right?

The odds that matter would have precisely its observed density, the physicist Lawrence Krauss has calculated, are as great as the odds of guessing precisely how many atoms there are in the sun. Some physicists are so troubled by the arbitrariness of the cosmos that they espouse a quasi-theological concept known as the anthropic principle. According to this notion, the universe must have the structure we observe, because otherwise we wouldn't be here to observe it. The anthropic principle is cosmology's version of creationism.

The next improbability is life. The evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins once declared that life "is a mystery no longer," because Darwin solved it with his theory of evolution by natural selection. Yet life is as mysterious as ever, in spite of all the insights provided by evolutionary theory and more-recent biological paradigms, such as genetics and molecular biology. Neither Darwinism nor any other scientific theory tells us why life appeared on earth in the first place, or whether it was probable or a once-in-eternity fluke.

Many scientists have argued that life must be a ubiquitous phenomenon that pervades the universe, but they can offer precious little empirical evidence to support that assertion. After decades of searching, astronomers have found no signs of life elsewhere in the cosmos; a 1996 report of fossilized microbes in a meteorite from Mars turned out to be erroneous. Researchers still cannot make matter animate in the laboratory, even with all the tools of biotechnology. In fact, the more scientists ponder life's origin, the harder it is to imagine how it occurred. Francis Crick once stated that "the origin of life appears to be almost a miracle, so many are the conditions which would have to be satisfied to get it going." In his book Life Itself, Crick offered the speculation that the seeds of life might have been planted on earth by an alien civilization.

Once life on earth started evolving, many scientists have contended, it was only a matter of time before natural selection produced a species as intelligent as Homo sapiens. But for more than 80 percent of life's 3.5-billion-year history, the earth's biota consisted entirely of single-celled organisms, like bacteria and algae. So not even the simplest multicellular organisms were inevitable. The evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould has estimated that if the great experiment of life were rerun a million times over, chances are that it would never again give rise to mammals, let alone mammals intelligent enough to invent negative theology and television. Similar reasoning led the eminent evolutionary theorist Ernst Mayr to conclude that the SETI program -- the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, which scans the heavens for radio signals from other civilizations -- is futile.

Multiply all of these improbabilities and they spike to infinity. As the psychologist Susan Blackmore has pointed out, we are bad at judging probabilities, hence prone to make too much of chance events; that is why we believe in ESP, clairvoyance, telekinesis, and other miracles. I do not believe in miracles, at least not defined in the conventional religious manner as divine disruptions of the natural order. But if a miracle is defined as an infinitely improbable phenomenon, then our existence is a miracle, which no theory natural or supernatural will ever explain.

Scientists may go much further in plumbing nature's secrets. They may decipher the neural code, the secret language of the brain. They may arrive at a plausible explanation of how life emerged on earth, and they may discover life elsewhere in the cosmos. They may find and verify a unified theory of physics, which will provide a more precise picture of the origin and history of the universe. Although there are good reasons for doubting the likelihood of such scientific advances, they cannot be ruled out. What can be ruled out is that science will answer the ultimate question: How did something come from nothing? Neither superstring theory nor any other of science's so-called theories of everything can resolve that mystery, any more than our supernatural theologies can.

Although we can never solve the riddle of existence, we can never stop trying. We must keep reimagining our relationship to the infinite. Skepticism alone --- and the cold, hard facts of science --- cannot serve as the basis for spirituality. Blackmore, a practicing Zen Buddhist, helped me reach that conclusion. She described Zen as a kind of rubbish-removal system that cleanses the mind of extraneous beliefs and emotions so that we can see reality as it truly is.

I found Blackmore's garbage metaphor appealing at first, because it provided a handy criterion for judging theories and theologies. The worst ones, I decided, distract us from the reality right in front of us by postulating parallel dimensions and universes, heavens and hells, gods and ghosts and demiurges and extraterrestrials. Too much garbage! Viewed this way, skepticism appears to be the ideal spiritual perspective. Skepticism clears away cumbersome beliefs on an intellectual level, just as meditation (ideally) clears away beliefs, emotions, and thoughts on a more experiential level. Skepticism can help us achieve mystical deautomatization, or so I wanted to believe.

My handling of real rather than metaphorical garbage gradually gave me a more complicated view of the matter. In my kitchen, we put garbage in bags that come in boxes of 20. After I yank the last bag from a box, the box itself becomes trash, which I put into the bag. Sometime after I interviewed Blackmore, every time I pulled the last bag from the box and stuffed the box in the bag, I intuited a paradox lurking within this ritual.

I went through more garbage bags than I care to mention before I solved the riddle: Every garbage-removal system generates garbage. Zen apparently works as an efficient garbage-removal system for Susan Blackmore. But as minimalistic as it is, Zen clutters more than it clarifies my mind. Once I started down this line of thinking, it was hard to stop. I began looking askance at skepticism, too. Maybe skepticism, instead of cleansing our vision, just substitutes one type of trash for another. Instead of belief in reincarnation, angels, ESP, extraterrestrials, parallel universes, and the Oedipus complex, the skeptic crams his mind with disbelief in reincarnation, angels, and so on.

The problem is that any truth or antitruth, no matter how initially revelatory and awe-inspiring, sooner or later turns into garbage that occludes our vision of the living world. Ludwig Wittgenstein had this problem in mind when he described his philosophy as a ladder that we should "throw away" after we have climbed it. At its best, art -- by which I mean poetry, literature, music, movies, painting, sculpture -- works in this manner. Art, the lie that tells the truth, is intrinsically ironic. Like Wittgenstein's ladder, it helps us get to another level and then falls away. What better way to approach the mystical, the truth that cannot be told?

At a scholarly meeting on mysticism I attended in Chicago, one speaker warned that if we can't talk about mysticism, we can't whistle about it, either. In other words, all our modes of expression, including art, fall short of mystical truth. But unlike more-literal modes of expression, art comes closer to uttering the unutterable by acknowledging its own insufficiency. It gives us not answers but questions. That does not mean mystical insights cannot be expressed within other modes of knowledge, like science, philosophy, theology -- and, of course, journalism. But we should view even the most fact-laden mystical texts ironically when they turn to ultimate questions. Some mystical writers, notably the psychedelic raconteur Terence McKenna, supply their own irony, but we readers can supply it even if the author intended none. We can read the Upanishads, Genesis, Dionysius the Areopagite, and the neurotheological suppositions of Andrew Newberg just as we read Blake or Borges or Emily Dickinson.

Viewed ironically, even the most fantastical ghost stories, including the old stories of religion, can serve a purpose. Whether they postulate superintelligent clouds of gas, insectoid aliens in hyperspace, a demiurge with multiple-personality disorder, or a loving God who for inscrutable reasons makes us suffer, well-told ghost stories can remind us of the unfathomable mystery at the heart of things. Our creation myths and eschatologies, our imaginings of ultimate beginnings and ends, can also help us discover our deepest fears and desires. But even the most sophisticated theologies and theories should never be mistaken for ultimate truth. What Voltaire said centuries ago still holds, and will always hold: "It is truly extravagant to define God, angels, and minds, and to know precisely why God defined the world, when we do not know why we move our arms at will. Doubt is not a very agreeable state, but certainty is a ridiculous one."

ther than art, is there any method particularly suited to evoking mystical awe without the side effects that so often attend it? In Psychedelic Drugs Reconsidered, first published in 1979, Lester Grinspoon and James Bakalar suggested that the chief benefit of psychedelics is "enriching the wonder of normality" -- that is, enhancing our appreciation of ordinary consciousness and ordinary life. That is the spiritual value cited most often by advocates of psychedelics. But those compounds can have the opposite effect. This world may seem drab in comparison to the bizarre virtual realms into which LSD or DMT propel us. Instead of opening our eyes to the miraculousness of everyday reality and consciousness, psychedelics can blind us.

All mystical technologies that induce powerful altered states pose this risk. One mystical expert who has reached this conclusion is Jean Houston. A pioneer of the human-potential movement, she works as a kind of spiritual psychotherapist, usually for large groups rather than individuals. She seeks to rejuvenate her clients' psyches through dance, song, chanting, guided imagery, and role-playing, often with a mythological dimension. She and her husband, the anthropologist Robert Masters, proclaimed in 1966 that investigations of LSD and similar drugs could help human consciousness expand "beyond its present limitations and on towards capacities not yet realized and perhaps undreamed of."

Houston subsequently became quite critical of the via psychedelica. "l am by nature not pro-drug," she told me. Timothy Leary was one of the most charming people she had ever met -- and one of the most irresponsible. Too many people lured onto the psychedelic path by this Pied Piper suffered breakdowns and ended up in mental hospitals, Houston said. "If I were to take the American pragmatic tradition and say, 'By their fruits ye shall know them,' then I'd have to say I haven't seen too much evidence" that psychedelics promote a healthy spirituality. "Some might say it is a shortcut to reality. But the fact is, it doesn't seem to sustain that reality."

Houston's disillusionment with psychedelics led her to seek safer means of self-transcendence. In the early 1970s, she and Masters devised what they called the altered states of consciousness induction device, or ASCID. It consisted of a suspension harness in which blindfolded subjects could spin around in three dimensions. The contraption worked so well that Houston and Masters discontinued its use. "People would get addicted to it and even refuse to explore their inner states without first taking a ride," Houston recalled. The experience reinforced her suspicion that any spiritual practice or path -- particularly those emphasizing altered states -- can become an end in itself, which leads us away from reality rather than toward it.

Anything that helps you see --- really see --- the wondrousness of the world serves a mystical purpose. According to Zen legend, when a visitor asked the 15th-century master Ikkyu to write down a maxim of "the highest wisdom," Ikkyu wrote one word: "Attention." Irritated, the visitor asked, "Is that all?" This time, Ikkyu wrote two words: "Attention. Attention." Fortunately, life itself is so wildly weird and improbable that sooner or later it is bound to get our attention. And if life doesn't grab our attention, death will. Whenever death intrudes upon our lives, we feel the chill of the deep space in which we are suspended.

Spiritual seekers have employed mementos mori, like a human skull, to keep themselves mindful of death. An extreme version of this technique, used in certain Buddhist sects, involves sitting next to or on top of a rotting corpse. It seems that this practice may merely desensitize you to death rather than sensitize you to life. Moreover, dwelling on death, the abyss, nothingness, may convince you that it is the only abiding reality, and that all finite, time-bound phenomena, including our mortal selves, are ephemeral and hence, in some sense, unreal. To be enlightened, Ken Wilber once wrote, is "to snap out of the movie of life." This is perhaps the greatest danger posed by mysticism -- that you will be left with a permanent case of derealization and depersonalization.

If you are lucky, your glimpse of the abyss will make this life seem more real, not less. You will feel what Albert Hofmann -- the chemist who, in 1943, discovered the psychotropic properties of LSD -- felt after emerging from the psilocybin trip in which he had found himself all alone in a ghost town inside the earth. When he returned from this hellish solitude, back to the world and his dear friends, he felt "reborn," and he was overcome with gratitude and joy at the "wonderful life we have here."

This is by far the greatest gift that mystical experiences can bestow on us: to see -- really see -- all that is right with the world. Just as believers in a beneficent deity should be haunted by the problem of natural evil, so gnostics, atheists, pessimists, and nihilists should be haunted by the problem of friendship, love, beauty, truth, humor, compassion, fun. Never forget the problem of fun.

John Horgan writes about science. This article is adapted from his book Rational Mysticism: Dispatches From the Border Between Science and Spirituality, to be published in January by Houghton Mifflin. Copyright © 2003 by John Horgan.

[Alamo-Girl]

Thank you for your posts!

I have no intention of arguing this is with you. You are the expert in what is or is not metaphysics.

When I made my statement I visualized a bunch of scientists trying to get their arms around a theory and being unable to do so, handing it off to the philosophers. Obviously, somebody had to propose the theory in the first place, but it seemed to me proposing a theory does not necessarily mean it can be explored empirically, but that metaphysics has no such limitation.

But that's a layperson's view and you are the expert.

[Alamo-Girl]

Thanks for the referral!

[cornelis]

I have no intention of arguing this with you

Ahh! :- <

Objectivism Revisited: Ortega on Philosophy and Science

[Alamo-Girl]

Thank you so much for the link!

It's not that I don't have opinions, but semantics is everything in communications - and I don't know your language (LOL!)

[beavus]

I have yet to observe behavior suggesting consciousness separate from a functioning brain.

Also, I think you've been reading too much pop quantum mechanics. It is all much more mundane than you seem to think.

[edsheppa]

Animals automatically seek and eat what is appropriate to them.

Dude, you've obviously never owned a dog.

[MHGinTN]

Quantum mechanical calculations are statistical probabilities. How mundane is that?... The 'averages' mete the force? Why is the universe as a whole accelerating in its dissipation of masses and spacetime in which those masses exist, yet locally it doesn't appear to be happening. Even einstein placed a 'lambda' in his relativity calculations. How mundane is that?

[betty boop]

What is 'spirit?' Can we define this term? Before we can talk about 'spirituality' don't we have to define 'spirit?' This is a major issue that cannot be lightly brushed aside. What does this term mean? What is the concept denoted??

Don't mean to pry you away from this marvelous post of beckett's; but I pinged you to a discussion ("On Debate and Existence") that attempts to answer your inquiries here.

If you have the time and interest, please go take a look?

[beavus]

How mundane is that?

Are there degrees of mundane? I don't know. They are all mundane. Interesting, but mundane. It is quite a stretch to go from experimental results in quantum physics to concluding the existence of an incorporeal consciousness.

[beavus]

How mundane is that?

mun·dane ( m¾n-d³n“, m ¾n“d³n”) adj. 1. Of, relating to, or typical of this world; secular. 2. Relating to, characteristic of, or concerned with commonplaces; ordinary. [Middle English mondeine from Old French mondain from Latin mund³nus from mundus world] mun·dane “ly adv. mun·dane “ness n.

--American Heritage Electronic Dictionary 4.0

I meant "mundane" as in the first sense. I don't think there is anything ordinary or commonplace about quantum physics.

I usually try to avoid such ambiguous words. Sorry.

[Sabertooth]

This is a mistake introduced to philosophy by René Descartes. One must already have knowledge to understand what doubt is. His is a wonderful example of the logical fallacy identified by Ayn Rand called the "stolen concept."

This is a red herring.

The understanding of doubt is not at issue in the acquisition of First Knowledge, nor have I brought it up.

One does not have to understand the process of reason before one begins to use it. The process of reason itself must be used to gain that understanding. Doubt cannot possibly be the beginning of reason.

Nor was that my claim.

My claim was that reason proceeds from "not knowing," or agnosis, to knowing, or gnosis.

Your first sentence actually beats around this very bush, as you are taken by reason to understanding, from what clearly would be a lack of understanding… to gnosis from agnosis.

Before one knows, one doesn't know. You can disagree in only two possible ways: either you didn't exist before you knew anything (in which case, what others perceived to be you was an illusion, apparently), or you were born with innate knowledge (a nice trick, but such knowledge would be self-evident).

But you don't make claims of self-evident knowledge, right?

All reasoning must begin with those simplest concept one forms at the beginning of conceptualization, that is, the identification of the first percepts we have.

No. What comes before first conceptualization is no conceptualization. Before any gnosis there is agnosis. Before one there is zero, in any cumulative chronology (unless the one is eternal or the zero is extrapolated to mean nothingness).

However, it is no postulate, but undeniably true, that what you cannot perceive in any way whatsovever, or know in any way whatsoever, cannot possibly ever matter.

You follow up your claim that you haven't made a postulation with a rephrased postulate.
Adding more internal contradictions is not especially compelling.

A tautology is a tautology because what it expresses is true.

I guess you might as well rewrite this book too.

"Joe is smart because he eats macaroni, and he eats macaroni because he is smart."

This is undeniably a tautology. It is also undeniable that you have no way of knowing, without other information, whether it is true or not. By itself, it informs you not a whit.

It was not an "empty tautology," but an expression of a truth that otherwise could not have been grasped.

In other words…

"My tautology is not empty because it is true, but the only evidence for its truthfulness is my tautology."

Pretty nifty, using one tautology to support another. Not only that, to argue that there is no way to know that a tautology is true, except for the tautology itself, is clearly a claim of self-evident knowledge.

Hey, I thought you said you didn't do that.

My statement was not an arguement. Everyone knows this. It is true by definition.

It's just getting funny now.

Your statement:
Just for the record, nothing is self-evident, if by self-evident one means knowledge of any kind. A perception is not knowledge."

Seeting aside the appeal to belief fallacy ("Everyone knows this."), "It is true by definition" is yet another claim of self-evident knowledge… that there is no self-evident knowledge.

Cool.

Since only percepts are self-evident (you are aware of them without thinking), and percepts are not knowledge, and, since knowledge consists of concepts, which require reason (thinking) to form, no knowledge is self-evident.

"Except mine, when I'm pretending otherwise."

This is an amazing statement.

Not really, nor do you follow up with anything other than red herrings. Look:

Have you decided that the only way one can know or believe in God is to be irrational. Do you automatically discount all those who believe God can be known rationally and without superstition. Well, I guess God made a big mistake when He said, "Come now, and let us reason together...." (Isaiah 1:18).

The question is not about how I think God can be known, it's about your claims regarding the possible existence or relevance of things beyond our perception.

Let's look again at my statement in response to yours:

Your #73: What one gets without reason, that is, using anything but the raional faculty, is the irrational, or superstition. Superstion is not knowledge.

Your #4:
"All that matters is what you can see and what you can know. There is nothing else. It is exactly that, nothing, and to the extent one wastes their minds on what is not, they waste their lives."

This statement, and the atheism it requires, were arrived at without reason.
By your definition, they are superstition.

You've let this stand without rebuttal. If you have a germane response, you may want to post it.

By the way, have you noticed that throughout all of your comments that you have used reason to refute or question my views. If there is something better than reason for reaching the truth, why didn't you use that?

You're using a straw man to shift the burden of proof. I never said that there was anything better than reason for attaining truth or knowledge, nor did I say that there wasn't.

What I've said is that your claims that there are no other means but reason for attaining truth or knowledge are unsupported by observation or evidence. It's irrelevant to this that I focused on reason in my other comments.

Shiftng the burden is actually crucial to your overall position. You want to wave off questions about the relevance or existence of anything beyond our perceptions by declaring that if we don't perceive them, they don't exist and they don't matter anyway. Not only do you not offer any concrete evidence, you can't possibly offer it because we are dealing with questions beyond our perceptions. You can't know the answers to these questions one way or the other.

Reason would compel you then, to agnosis. But for whatever cause, that doesn't satisfy you.

You claim that nothing exists beyond our perceptions and that anything beyond our perceptions is irrelevant. You also state, at #65:

I am only defending the view here that the ability to reason (rationality) is the only faculty man has for discovering and understanding the truth. If we have any knowledge, it is only throught the faculty of reason that we have acquired it.

Those who do not agree with this view, it seems to me, are obliged to tell use what other faculty man has for aquiring knowledge, and how it works.

You are not simply attempting to defend a view, you're trying to shft the burden of proof from the outset in order to have your position installed as the default view of reality.

When you make a claim, the burden is on you to support it. The evidence you've presented not only fails to support your claim; it contradicts your claim. In and of itself, that doesn't disprove your claim. That was done elsewhere, at #98.

Rather than simply concede that you don't know about things beyond your perceptions and acknowledge agnosis in the matter, you've insisted on an overreach that is strikingly hubrisian.

And the farther you reach, the more elusive your quarry becomes.

[MHGinTN]

No apology necessary to me, I'm the 'stumble stooge of missinspoke'. Can't type well, either.

[Hank Kerchief]

My claim was that reason proceeds from "not knowing," or agnosis, to knowing, or gnosis.

Your first sentence actually beats around this very bush, as you are taken by reason to understanding, from what clearly would be a lack of understanding...

I'm sorry I misunderstood you, if this is the case. This is exactly correct. We reason from ignorance to knowledge. So long as you do not take the position that reason begins with nothing.

I said: All reasoning must begin with those simplest concept one forms at the beginning of conceptualization, that is, the identification of the first percepts we have.

You said: No. What comes before first conceptualization is no conceptualization. Before any gnosis there is agnosis. Before one there is zero, in any cumulative chronology (unless the one is eternal or the zero is extrapolated to mean nothingness).

Sorry, I do not see what you disagree with here. First there are no concepts, then the first concepts are formed as simple identifications of percepts. What's the problem?

I said: However, it is no postulate, but undeniably true, that what you cannot perceive in any way whatsovever, or know in any way whatsoever, cannot possibly ever matter.

You said: You follow up your claim that you haven't made a postulation with a rephrased postulate. Adding more internal contradictions is not especially compelling.

Suppose there is something that you will never know in any way whatsoever, directly or indirectly. It never has any affect on any aspect of your life or concsoiusness (if it did, you would at least have indirect knowledge of it). What I mean by the word "matter," is that a thing must have some kind of effect on one's life. There is nothing to figure out here: what you cannot know you cannot know because it has no effect on you life in any way. Only that which has some effect is some way on your life matters. Therefore: what you cannot know cannot matter, by definition.

I said: A tautology is a tautology because what it expresses is true.

You said: I guess you might as well rewrite this book too.

"Joe is smart because he eats macaroni, and he eats macaroni because he is smart."

This is undeniably a tautology. It is also undeniable that you have no way of knowing, without other information, whether it is true or not. By itself, it informs you not a whit.

You are mistaken here.

tautology -- Logical truth. A statement which is necessarily true because, by virtue of its logical form, it cannot be used to make a false assertion.

From The Philosophical Dictionary or any other philosophy resource you might like to consult.

Your example, by the way is not a tautology.

I said: It was not an "empty tautology," but an expression of a truth that otherwise could not have been grasped.

In other words…

"My tautology is not empty because it is true, but the only evidence for its truthfulness is my tautology."

Pretty nifty, using one tautology to support another. Not only that, to argue that there is no way to know that a tautology is true, except for the tautology itself, is clearly a claim of self-evident knowledge.

Hey, I thought you said you didn't do that.

Now that you understand what a tautology is, and not what you supposed it was, you understand that my argument was correct and that there is no claim for self evidence, only the evidence of logical deduction.

I said: My statement was not an arguement. Everyone knows this. It is true by definition.

You said: It's just getting funny now.

Your statement:

Just for the record, nothing is self-evident, if by self-evident one means knowledge of any kind. A perception is not knowledge."

Seeting aside the appeal to belief fallacy ("Everyone knows this."), "It is true by definition" is yet another claim of self-evident knowledge… that there is no self-evident knowledge.

Cool.

I was mistaken in assuming you understood the definition of the most basic words describing consciousnees in philophy. Percepts are elements of direct consciousness, all conscious creatures have them. They are non-cognative (not knowledge). "Concepts" is the term for those conscious elements knowledge is comprised of. A concept is also called an idea.

I was simply referring to these definitions which are commonly known to those with a minimum exposure to philosophical terms.

...............

I'm sorry that I am not convinced the rest of what you wrote is sincere. That is only my impression. I will only comment on this:

You quoted me: Those who do not agree with this view, it seems to me, are obliged to tell use what other faculty man has for aquiring knowledge, and how it works.

Then you said: You are not simply attempting to defend a view, you're trying to shft the burden of proof from the outset in order to have your position installed as the default view of reality.

This is what I mean about not being entirely sincere. You did not quote all I said. The very next paragraph said:

I do not tell anyone they cannot have knowledge without reason, only that I have discovered no other way to it. I, and all other merely rational men, only have our rational minds for acquiring knowledge. Those of couse who have some other kind of knowledge are irrational, that is, have beliefs and convictions not based on reason. The other name for beliefs without a rational basis is superstition.

I have nothing to prove. I'm not trying to prove others do not have some other way to the truth than reason. I only stated that I do not know and cannot imagine what it is. If anyone wants to convince me they can know something without reason, I believe I have a responsibility to ask, how?

If you want to believe things on any other basis than reason, that is your perogative. I'm not trying to dissuade you. Until someone wishes to provide an answer to the question of how one acquires knowledge without reason, I will continue to call all claims to knowledge derived in any way other than by using the reational faculty (reason), irrational.

Hank

[Hank Kerchief]

Dude, you've obviously never owned a dog.

Yes I have. Dogs are not animals. Dogs are not people. Even dogs don't know what they are.

Hank

[LogicWings]

Could it be, could it be, I'm not the only one who thinks logic is valid?

Put down your magnifying glass and step away from the mirror, Narcissus.

Narcissus saw no one but himself. Since others are the focal point of my question, not myself, your statement is faulty.

[LogicWings]

Incorporeal consciousness.

During recent research I have come to realize how damaged I have been by Logical Positivism, but be that as it may, this definition is self contradictory and has no meaning.

[Sabertooth]

Narcissus saw no one but himself. Since others are the focal point of my question, not myself, your statement is faulty.

Your comment, though glib, was self-absorbed. The others were incidental.

[LogicWings]

My spirit is who I am. It exists apart from, but is associated with, my body. It is not bound by the laws of physics, e.g. it exists outside of space and time. In between the two is my soul, which is my ego, my mind, sense of humor, etc.

How do you know it exists apart from your body? Is this any different than your mind? How do you know it is separate from your mind? How do you know there is anything not bound by the laws of physics, outside time and space, unless you can perceive outside time and space? How do you know your soul is between the two? How do you know what it is you are experiencing? Maybe it is all of one piece.

[LogicWings]

Your comment, though glib, was self-absorbed. The others were incidental.

This is your opinion. It is not fact. If I were so self absorbed I wouldn't bother to answer you, I'd be too lost in myself to bother.

[Sabertooth]

This is your opinion. It is not fact. If I were so self absorbed I wouldn't bother to answer you, I'd be too lost in myself to bother.

Your comment struck me as self-absorbed, so I cracked wise. I don't know one way or the other about you as an individual.

FWIW, it doesn't necessarily follow that some hypothetical self-absorbed person wouldn't respond to someone who'd pricked his vanity.