We all dream. Some dreams are more vivid then others and some are indistinguishable from reality. When i have a vivid dream, it is only upon awakening that i realize that it was just a dream. Now imagine that upon awakening i would claim "the ultimate nature of reality is that which i saw in my dream." And for the sakes of the argument let us say that what i dreamed was a huge creature made up of people from which i inferred that all people are actually one entity. You would not take me seriously now would you?
Or say that instead of a dream i took a hallucinogenic drug such as LSD. And during the trip i saw exactly what i claimed to see in a dream earlier and made the same inference. You would probably call a psychiatrist.
The point is - i made an inference from a subjective experience that i had during an altered state of consciousness. In these cases you must agree that no claim about the objective world can be made from these experiences. It seems rather obvious doesn't it.
Then can someone explain to me why the same exact situations in the context of religion is taken very seriously? Why do Buddhist "gurus" meditating(i.e, altering their state of mind) for years and then claiming enlightenment and a discovery that the nature of reality is empty, are taken seriously?
Why do Christian or any other theist priests praying(i.e, altering their state of mind) daily for years and then sensing cosmic love or the presence of God to be taken seriously?
The difference is nonexistent. What does make it seem more credible is simply the amount of people that allow for this type of justification. Might i remind you that at one point people believed the earth to be flat.
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"We all dream. Some dreams are more vivid then others and some are indistinguishable from reality. When i have a vivid dream, it is only upon awakening that i realize that it was just a dream. Now imagine that upon awakening i would claim "the ultimate nature of reality is that which i saw in my dream." And for the sakes of the argument let us say that what i dreamed was a huge creature made up of people from which i inferred that all people are actually one entity. You would not take me seriously now would you?"
Actually, depending on how you presented what you experienced in your dream, that all people are effectively a non-discrete phenomenon, I might indeed take you seriously. There are non--excludable philosophical frameworks in which this makes sense. Take, for example, the fact that you speak and think in English/Russian. All the words you use to think logically, and all the concepts you manipulate with your thoughts, each and every one of them is either something someone told you, something you observed, or something you "created" via a straightforward transformational process in your brain. Thus humanity could be thought of as a non-discrete highly parallelised processor of "objective" reality. The "could" there is important. We don't have to think about it that way, but there is nothing obvious that prevents this from being a valid point of view.
"Or say that instead of a dream i took a hallucinogenic drug such as LSD. And during the trip i saw exactly what i claimed to see in a dream earlier and made the same inference. You would probably call a psychiatrist."
Hehe, well, since I seem to remember it was a psychiatrist that first noticed the effect of LSD, I might just want to call one so's I could get some too, and at least write some decent poetry... :)
"The point is - i made an inference from a subjective experience that i had during an altered state of consciousness. In these cases you must agree that no claim about the objective world can be made from these experiences. It seems rather obvious doesn't it."
I think a brain is a beautifully evolved mechanism for mixing up information into new and interesting and potentially useful combinations. We can think of this as an incredibly complex processor applying an unbelievably intricate function to a stupendously immense data set. I think that dreaming, meditating, pharmaceutically supplementing, or just plain thinking hard are all equivalent to slightly modifying that processor or that function, or a little of both. For instance, mathematicians apply various Fourier transforms to the same data set, looking for one that makes the most sense of the data. Just because for a particular data set the transform that generates the most useful results isn't the "standard" transform, but an obscure, more chaotic variant does not invalidate what we learn about the data set from the resultant simplification.
Or, to put it in more concrete terms, for years scientists were trying to figure out the structure of DNA. The structure looks obvious from our point of view, knowing how it works and why, but back then it was a complete and utter mystery. Until one night, a particular biochemist had a dream. That dream amounted to "DNA is actually a coiled helix". You seem to assert that we shouldn't have taken him seriously, but I'm glad that he and his lab partner did, cause the completely new and objectively unsupported experimental direction his dream suggested turned out to be bang on, humanity reaped the benefits of a better understanding of the "objective" universe, and a Nobel prize was his ultimate reward.
"Then can someone explain to me why the same exact situations in the context of religion is taken very seriously? Why do Buddhist "gurus" meditating(i.e, altering their state of mind) for years and then claiming enlightenment and a discovery that the nature of reality is empty, are taken seriously?"
There are a bunch of curve-balls in this short little paragraph... First off, I think I've demonstrated that the usefulness of a mental concept isn't tainted by the mental state in which that concept arose. So let's set that aside and look at the real issue: the usefulness of any particular mental concept is determined by how well the concept relates to "objective" reality, and much of the appropriateness of that concept depends on how the concept is put to use. I don't know what definition of "religion" you use, but I think "a philosophical system containing dogmatic elements" is pretty standard. Obviously, any concepts clearly deriving from dogma are unlikely to fit objective reality well. Notwithstanding, some of them occasionally turn out to be useful. "Don't kill people" can be hard to argue from a purely "objective" standpoint, such as evolution.
Further, calling Buddhist practice at the level necessary to produce what some refer to as "enlightenment" a religion is definitely controversial. Buddhist religion, and various flavours of Buddhist dogma definitely exist, but I don't think what is usually referred to as Buddhist practice is either a religion or dogmatic. A dogma consists of a set of concepts that cannot be experienced and must be unreservedly taken on faith. The Scientific Method is the opposite: nothing is believed that cannot be experienced and subsequently described in such a manner that it can be experienced again by anyone possessing a given level of observational capacity and the ability to understand the description. The description part is crucial to Science. Science will not contemplate what cannot be described. This, I think, ultimately limits Science. From a scientific point of view, we feel confident that most human languages are turing-complete with respect to the universe we observe. But from a philosophical point of view we have no assurance that we have the ability to observe all of the "universe." Thus we can't, philosophically, make any assertions as to the turing-completeness of our languages with respect to the actual universe. Thus, philosophically, we can't necessarily exclude the possibility of individuals having experiences they can't describe.
So dogma and Science are not the only two options, they are two ends of a spectrum. Someday someone might come up to us and say: "dude, I've had this experience. I can't describe it very well, but this is how I approached the experience. If you make a similar approach, you might have a similar experience." Sound familiar? Now, I'm not interested in Buddhism as a dogma, or a religion, and I'm not at all certain Buddhist practice is what's best for me, but I have explored Buddhist psychology and philosophy to considerable depth. And stripped of the trappings of dogma and many, many layers of metaphor, what is left seems to be very much such a statement: "We made this kind of approach, and all seem to have had experiences that we can only vaguely and nebulously describe, but that we all seem to feel were useful. We encourage you to make a similar approach." If we accept the Scientific Method as dogma, that is, if we belong to the religion of Science, we reject such a statement because it is inconsistent with a dogma that requires description. Interestingly, other dogmas are not so antithetical to Buddhist practice. Many Christians, Muslims, and others undertake Buddhist practice and claim to reap benefits from doing so without sacrificing their own dogmas.
This brings us to the last curve, and the one that gives me most pause. Many who have undertaken advanced Buddhist practice do say things like "ultimate reality is emptiness," and often don't seem to be doing as much as some less meditative people do to make the world a "better" place. I suppose that if we accept the possibility that advanced Buddhist practitioners are having experiences that are difficult to describe we shouldn't be surprised at statements about "emptiness." Especially since what ultimate reality could conceivably be empty of is describable stuff. And there is also the argument that minds good at the meditation apparently required for advanced Buddhist practice are not necessarily also good at real-world problem solving. Still, it is at this level of how the concepts resulting from Buddhist practice are put to use that most of my current thinking in this area is applied. It's not clear to me that the result is useful, at least in terms of my current goals and values.
"Why do Christian or any other theist priests praying(i.e, altering their state of mind) daily for years and then sensing cosmic love or the presence of God to be taken seriously?
The difference is nonexistent. What does make it seem more credible is simply the amount of people that allow for this type of justification. Might i remind you that at one point people believed the earth to be flat."
Hehe, yes, we did once believe that the world was flat. Consider that fact a significant and dire warning. What do we currently believe to be "obvious" that is not? How many more perceptual bubbles remain to be burst? Question everything. Question the ultimate validity of the Scientific Method. Question the philosophical foundations of our societies. Question the very nature of reality, for one thing is sure: the surprises aren't over yet.
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