Science and Natural Philosophy

When push comes to shove, I define myself as a “hard,” top-down spiritualist. By that I mean that reality comes from a single conscious agency. From this vantage reality appears to me as hierarchically arranged. If that word jars, I suggest a glance at this recent post. This viewpoint clashes with materialism but is yet entirely compatible with a scientific approach to reality. Science can and should be viewed as a discipline, one of the disciplines of thought. Its focus is the observation and explanation of observable reality based on the rules of reason. The western world has excelled in this discipline and has vastly enlarged our understanding of organic and inorganic nature. This is a marvel and a triumph—and all of humanity has benefited. The determination of how things work and how they are arranged is subject to objective determination and, in very large regions of reality, even to experimental verification. In this sense I’m also a “hard” scientist.

Science is said to have emerged from “natural philosophy”—and said to have displaced the latter. I rather think that speculative or contemplative thought about Nature remains alive and well to this day; science hasn’t displaced it at all. The more disciplined approach to observation, augmented by experimental and statistical methods of verification has, instead, greatly empowered philosophical thought about the observable and measurable world. The task of natural philosophy, indeed of all philosophy, is to work with why rather than with how or what questions. And those questions remain perennially new. They remain—and shall remain—open. We may gain much better and firmer answers to those questions—but not in our current state of existence.

Materialism, in effect, is one school of natural philosophy. It interprets and makes assertions about the meaning of scientific discoveries. Its conclusions, much like those of any philosophy, natural or metaphysical, must be assessed comprehensively in view of our total understanding of all facts and values available to us. And no philosophy produces a “final solution” to the questions that we pose. All of them have a tentative character. They’re all approximations.

I emphasize this distinction because there is a distinction. The very definition of science suggests that, with appropriate study, qualifications, effort, and (often) sufficient funds, anybody should be able to replicate the findings of science to his or her own satisfaction. Problems arise at the edges of genuine science—where science gradually slips away into the speculative mode. Examples of such regions are those where “hard” data are impossible to obtain. Not that these regions are off limits to investigation (the very deep past, the very tiny, the very large, the origin of life); but in these areas a certain kind of humility is necessary—not least the open admission that the investigator, if he or she offers conclusions that cannot be replicated by experiment, may be practicing natural philosophy rather than science. But, as I say, conclusions of that philosophy may also be examined. It’s simply that the rules to be applied to that kind of result are not scientific but—philosophical.

Myth: You Can’t Communicate Mystical Experiences

I read words like “ineffable” and “incommunicable” used to characterize mystical experiences. Are those words accurate? Should they be used? If mystical experience cannot be put into conceptual language, no other experiences can be communicated either. Really. That’s an obvious fact. Let’s try to unpack this conundrum.

I think that we describe “inexplicable” experiences all the time. If they are inexplicable, then those who hear the description just haven’t had the experience. For the right people, the mystical is just as accessible as is, say, the experience of tennis. Let me give a conceptual description of a tennis maneuver.

Let’s take serving the ball in a tennis match. We begin by assuming a nicely balanced position but inclining forward slightly, our body oriented toward the target across the net, one foot forward, the foot opposed to the hand that holds the racket. The ball is in our other hand. We toss it high from a position about a foot ahead of our face—and toss it somewhat higher than the point we’re able to reach with our racket arm and the racket, both at maximum extension. Even as we make and complete the toss, we reach back with our racket arm and, in one smooth motion execute the following movements: we cock the arm, we stretch our bodies to our maximum height, we bring the racket forward again as we raise it to maximum height and, on its forward sweep, we cause it to impact the ball, which is now falling downward, so that the racket hits the ball with the center of its netted surface. We use the greatest possible force consistent with accuracy to deliver this blow. The ball will then surge forward but on a slight downward vector, travelling in a pleasing ark so that it barely crosses over the net and descends to the targeted area below. As the racket hits the ball, we register a pleasing tactile feedback even as our eyes follow the ball’s trajectory. At our own choice—some pro players excel at this—we can also make a loud exhaling grunt to tell the audience just how hard we tried.

Now the truth of the matter is that this maneuver, as experienced, feels much more mysterious. Someone raised in some inaccessible, hidden mountain valley in Tibet who’s never seen tennis played, has never seen a racket, has no idea of the ball’s size or the court’s layout, unaware of the game’s rules, unfamiliar with words like vector, feedback, and trajectory, will have difficulty understanding what is being said.

Experience itself is necessary to understand its description. Those born blind cannot appreciate the colors of a fresco, those born deaf cannot appreciate the sound of a symphony. We can try to communicate such things by analogy—to something they have experienced—using a richly patterned textile surface for the blind, a video of moving, mixing colors for the deaf.

Mystical experiences can be communicated—and in perfectly ordinary conceptual language—but only those who’ve had them will genuinely understand what’s being described. Those who have higher perception are rare. Those among them skilled at conceptualization even rarer. The great majority of us have these experiences in such muted form, we stand there with mouth open and listen to the babble certain in our mind that those people are just nuts.

What about the thrill of the Dow suddenly surging to 15,000 in a day or the disaster of the S&P 500 plunging 900 points—for a backward Chinese rice farmer? Let's picture him as ignornant of what we call a portfolio and who spent this splendid or disastrous day knee-deep in water wearing a circular but pointed straw hat. For this ordinary and competent farmer, these words might describe the mystical babblings of a western nut. The words don't signal anything.

What is true is that those who have mystical experience do have trouble, at least early on, in formulating their experiences in language. But some can and do do so. And there are those among them who, even having found fitting descriptions, will keep these to themselves—knowing full well that those who haven’t shared the experience will be unable to understand the language no matter how eloquent. The Buddha here comes to mind. The poets are the best at this sort of thing. They are gifted both in tennis and in talk.

Souls Sort Themselves

There are three forms of culture: worldly culture, the mere acquisition of information; religious culture, following rules; elite culture, self-development. [Hujwiri, Revelation of the Veiled]

Suppose that we are guided by our own intuition. That this is so follows as the consequence of two facts. One is that the physical world is harsh. If we violate its rules we will be punished. In that dimension guidance is simply feedback. The second fact, as I’ve endeavored to show in the last post, is that intellectual arguments concerning higher matters, the metaphysical, are never compelling in and of themselves because they can’t be proved—as physical facts can be. But to orient ourselves, we must rely on something. That something concerning matters that can’t be proved (and are not harshly enforced by nature), is our own judgment. And our judgment is guided by a feeling from within: this sounds true; or, this sounds phony.

Let me be precise. Intuition, as the word itself implies (“tuition,” “tutoring” from “within”) is not something we do. It is something we experience. After an intuition is received, something else must follow. It is our agreement or disagreement. In other words, we can act contrary to our intuitions too. When the matter is in the area of knowledge, we can deny the knowledge or act contrary to it. When the intuition is the judgment of an action, thus in the moral sphere, we can override it. Hence “conscience,” in the sense that Catholicism uses that word, is intuition in one of its modes. The presumption here is, one, that we are guided; and, two, that this guidance isn’t our own or, if it is, it emanates from a higher aspect of ourselves.

This suggests that if we correctly understood and invariably followed our intuitions, the world would be paradise. What makes life “interesting”—in the sense of the Chinese curse, “May you live in interesting times!”—is that our condition, the Church Militant of which are now members, is developmental in character. We’re moving up a spiral or, refusing to do so, sliding into an abyss. The downward movement is not interesting but must be acknowledged to exist. We live side by side with others. Most are moving up, some are willfully sliding down. The intuitive “hearing” of individuals varies; some are more and some less sensitive to this inflow; sensitivities, furthermore, can be enhanced by effort or dulled by ignoring the guidance. Intuition is not only accepted or ignored; its strength and effect are also influenced by innate intellectual and physical characteristics which appear to be randomly distributed. The intuition is there, but it may be more dimly or powerfully felt; it may be understood swiftly by some, slowly by others. Whatever the innate disposition, the will still plays a crucial role. The super-bright, for instance, may understand the intuition immediately, but if they don’t want to follow it, they will be very clever in rationalizing it away. Therefore the strength of the intuition is not as important as the direction the person has chosen to follow. It’s a free universe. The soul is sovereign however it may be enabled or delimited by the characteristics of its vehicle.

This then sets the stage for the suggestion that souls sort themselves out by using intuition and will. It is this sorting which produces the three cultural forms that Hujwiri uses to show the hierarchical arrangement of humanity in this realm. The foundational level is physical—where straightforward understanding of the ordinary world suffices; the religious sphere is on a higher level, but behavior is guided by semi-mechanical arrangements, rules. Here a higher dimension is already intuited, but conformity to it is expressed in the language of law, motivated in terms of reward and punishment, and expressed in ritual forms. The highest level is also the most free. Here the intuition is very strong and willingly followed. People at various levels of development find comfort in the culture that feels best. Not surprisingly, those on the lower levels cannot understand and therefore disparage the practices at the levels above. The highest level, however, is marked by understanding of the lower. It’s a good self-test to examine one’s own views, say, of religion, science, or mysticism. You’re certainly not a member of the spiritual elite if you bad-mouth legitimate science or ridicule the true believers.

The sorting process no doubt continues after death. And concepts like hell, purgatory, and heaven are mere labels, very roughly hewn, of other clustering of souls on the other side of the border zone. The sorting over there follows the inclinations of the soul. A way to illustrate that is to say that those who, in this realm, are seeking the depths will feel much more comfortable in hell than anywhere else…

* * *

Ali Hujwiri (990-1077) was a Persian Sufi, teacher, and writer. He was born in what is today Afghanistan. He wrote Revelation of the Veiled, also rendered as Unveiling the Veiled, in Persian. The quotation cited, which I took from Idries Shah’s The Sufis, should be rightly understood. Hujwiri, like all Sufis, believed that the highly developed individual will not only understand but also practice the wisdom available at all three levels of culture.

The Primacy of Intuition

One reason for the high profile of science in our culture—apart from supposedly fathering our technology—is that, ultimately, no metaphysical assertions are capable of demonstration. Our wealth, thanks to fossil fuels, has temporarily eased our sufferings. Hence our intuitive faculties have been distracted. The small change that science offers, and in the grand scheme of things that’s all it is, suffices for our ordinary lives.

An example of a metaphysical assertion may be drawn from the first line of Genesis: “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.” This assertion contains several others within it. One is that God exists. Others are that matter did not always exist, that it came into being at a certain point in time (“in the beginning”), and that an agency produced it out of nothing. Contrary claims—e.g. that the universe has always existed, that were is no God, that all that is is matter, or that the universe is God, etc.—are also metaphysical assertions and hence impossible of demonstration.

What serves as an alternative to proof is reasoning, but if we look at the products of reason, we find them to be empty. They rest on abstract ideas. These, carefully defined, are linked to one another and examined for logical coherence. All we get is formulae of which the terms are suspended in the air. We can understand the ideas—toss them back and forth in play—but we cannot demonstrate that they correspond to anything real. An example? Let’s take Aristotle’s definition of substance. Substance is a duality of matter and form. But this idea requires proof of unformed matter, what Aristotle called prime matter, and of disembodied form. We cannot find such things anywhere. The unbeliever cannot be forced to admit that substance, as here defined, exists by simply being shown prime matter and forms awaiting to be actualized.

Similar problems also plague our most cherished conception, namely that everything has a cause. The problem here is that causes cannot be tidily disentangled from the flux of reality. If we don’t separate them out, however, everything that happens is caused by—well, by everything that happens. The damage to the lamp post down the street was caused by the truck that hit it. Really? What about the driver’s drunkenness? And why did the driver drink? What caused a tavern to be opened so close to the driver’s last stop? Was it the incompetence of the restaurateur who occupied that space last? Why was he incompetent? What caused the current owner to post a sign saying, “Drinks at 1/2 price 5 to 7”? We could go on and on, of course. Modern scientific thought has drifted from the old-fashioned cause and has substituted for it concepts of probability. All change is thus due to random motion; but what we call “cause” is just a way of saying that certain outcomes are much more probable than others. Cause, once the property of agencies, has now become a servant in the house of Chance.

This sort of thing has radiations. Thus the various proofs for the existence of God were built on the older conceptions of cause and motion. Taking the last first, the proof from motion relies on the a priori assertion that nothing moves unless moved by another; a first and unmoved mover is thus necessary because an infinite regress is intolerable. But an infinite regress is only intolerable if we grant the first premise (“nothing moves unless…”). If that is true, yes. Motion then has no beginning, and the presumption is that it had to have had one. Indeed, the very definition of motion has, hiding within it, the denial of infinite regress. But that’s not immediately obvious. The problem is that we cannot demonstrate the first premise. What we observe is motion in everything, down to the hydrogen atom, and below. This motion—thus the motion or energy of hydrogen’s sole electron—seems to require no “fuel” or “push” at all. Nor does it gradually dissipate. Let’s turn to causes. If causes are impossible to package or quantize or separate out from the flux, the argument for an uncaused cause, God, also falls apart. Here, too, the argument depends on the notion that discreet, serial events are accurate definitions of reality. The contrary assertion is that everything has always moved and, indeed, motion is an aspect of reality; this motion clusters in various ways and has always done so, producing what we naively call “causes.”

Notice here how abstract concepts drive the metaphysical project. In one case we have an abstract definition of motion as the temporary property of things; hence they need to acquire motion from something else. This leads to the unmoved mover and the uncaused cause. In the other case, motion is ascribed to reality from the git go, as it were. Other arguments for God’s existence rely on concepts of order, teleology, law, or self-existence versus caused-existence. In none of these cases can we discover tangible proofs for the abstractions. All we find are hints.

This then leads to my premise today: Higher knowledge requires a faculty that transcends reasoning. Reason cannot give us answers to why questions. To the extent that it does, it relies upon the quiet collusion of our intuitive faculty. We have to grant standing or status to certain abstractions—such as they cannot obtain from demonstration or from logical reasoning. We do so, when we do, because we find the abstractions “intuitively true.” This in turn means that higher truth cannot be imposed; logical demonstration can never force us—as physical demonstration can. More importantly, the knowledge obtained will depend on the development of the intuitive power within us. It cannot be acquired by the usual brute means of hard work, memorization, and exercise—as reasoning can be.

For these reasons debate on religious or spiritual subjects has no merit whatsoever. The higher life is a realm of freedom. The compulsions present there must always come from within.