• A bright is a person who has a naturalistic worldview
• A bright’s worldview is free of supernatural and mystical elements
• The ethics and actions of a bright are based on a naturalistic worldview

That’s from the website’s home page. Naturalism is “the doctrine that the world can be understood in scientific terms without recourse to spiritual or supernatural explanations” (@WordNetWeb).

One of the Enthusiastic Brights listed on the site is Daniel Dennett, but the organisers are not, unfortunately, philosophers. I contacted them to complain that they misuse the word “mystical”. They were good enough to ask me to explain what it means to me, and here’s my reply:

In your previous message you said “Being a Buddhist presents no problem to the Brights.” Presumably that’s because you understand that such an identification does not necessarily carry any implication regarding belief in “the supernatural”. You also mentioned other religious affiliations, so presumably we can broaden out the point to say that “religious” does not imply “non-naturalistic”. I would say that exactly the same consideration applies to “mystical”, and in support, here’s a quote from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:

In the wide sense, mystical experiences occur within the religious traditions of at least Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Indian religions, Buddhism, and primal religions. In some of these traditions, the experiences are allegedly of a supersensory reality, such as God or Brahman (or, in a few Buddhist traditions, Nirvana, as a reality (See Takeuchi, 1983, pp. 8-9). [Missing parenthesis closure, presumably after "Nirvana", in the original.] Many Buddhist traditions, however, make no claim for an experience of a supersensory reality. Some cultivate instead an experience of “unconstructed awareness,” involving an awareness of the world on an absolutely or relatively non-conceptual level (see Griffiths, 1993). The unconstructed experience is thought to grant insight, such as into the impermanent nature of all things. Buddhists refer to an experience of tathata or the “thisness” of reality, accessible only by the absence of ordinary sense-perceptual cognition. These Buddhist experiences are sub sense-perceptual, and mystical, since thisness is claimed to be inaccessible to ordinary sense perception and the awareness of it to provide knowledge about the true nature of reality. (@Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Section 1.1 on that page. My emphasis.)

I hope you agree that there is nothing to contradict naturalism in “an awareness of the world on an absolutely or relatively non-conceptual level”. Even where deities are mentioned, such statements can be interpreted in a naturalistic fashion, such as Spinoza’s concept of God as reality-as-a-whole. That’s my own preference, not that I often think of it in these terms, and I certainly don’t worship it, but I do, as a practising Buddhist, seek to identify with it, and that, for me, is mysticism. Mystification is something else altogether, and I won’t bother to say anything about it, because I’m sure we see it the same way.

The brights net person replied saying that they were using “mystical” in the ordinary sense, not the philosophical one. Now, I’m not sure that there is an ordinary sense of “mystical”, besides the common but mistaken assumption that it must mean something like “mystificatory”, but this is not really about semantic squabbles.

Another, much shorter definition of “mysticism” that I ran across a while back but didn’t note the source for, is “the elevation of experience over the intellect”, and that works for me. This is, arguably, the main aim of meditation. Some people think it’s about stopping thinking, and that’s true as regards the result, but how the result is obtained is extremely important: ideally, at least, that state is reached effortlessly. But this is not about meditation technique either.

So what is it about? Well, at one level, it’s the usual, my main obsession (yes, I have a few) for some time now: is academic philosophy really what I want to be doing at this stage in my life? But people on the Buddhist/mystical/meditation path are supposed to become less selfish, and if there’s one thing that most or all of my on-line writings show, it’s my self-obsession (of which the one about studying is a sort-of sub-obsession).

This morning the sky here was a clear, light blue, and the sun was shining brightly on the snow all around. I took my camera, went out, and had a ball. I rediscovered the thing I used to like most about photography when I was deeply into it many years ago: the focusing. Of course, my current camera has autofocus, and that’s not what I’m talking about. I find the concentration required to get the best possible shot from a given situation takes me to another level, mentally. After I got back to the house and uploaded the pics to the computer, I discovered most were horribly over-exposed (I’d taken bad advice about compensating for the snow). But it didn’t matter very much: it was the activity of taking the pictures that mattered, not the results. I’d rediscovered photography—I even discovered things about the camera I never knew before, though I’ve owned it for a couple of years. And, for the first time in several years, I was sufficiently active in really cold weather to get really warm. (I used to do a lot of hill walking, until knee trouble got in the way.) I enjoyed it all immensely. And although some thinking was involved, I enjoyed it most when thinking least. Because that’s when I was most aware of the sun, the snow and the scenery. It was truly beautiful.

And when I was thinking, it wasn’t about myself. Because that’s one of the main things behind the academic activity: I want recognition for my ideas, and for my ability to come up with them. It’s all ego. That’s not to say I don’t find the ideas intrinsically fascinating, because I really do. But to do a proper academic job, you not only have to cultivate your own beautiful ideas, and show how good they are, you also have to shovel the shit of competing ideas, to show how bad they are, and that can be so tedious! (That’s a caricature, of course.) But it’s worth it, in some cases. If I was much younger, and looking for a career, the situation would be very different. To have an academic career, and all that goes with it, including being able to work on your own ideas, is a highly worthwhile aspiration. But that’s not me, I’m just too old now. And that’s not all: I want to spread my thinking as widely as I can, incorporating consciousness, information and mysticism, and I know how to do it, the outline is really quite clear. It involves Dennett plus empathy, simulation and imitation, memes as information, Blackmore, the self as memeplex and meditation to dissolve it. But I’d never get to work on more than one tiny corner of that at a time in academia.

Maybe, just maybe, the main issue here, though, is that the academic work involves too much thinking for me now. Yes, working on my own ideas involves thinking too, but not nearly as much as does the work of shovelling those of other people. So, instead of a PhD, and maybe also instead of completing the MSc, I want to write a non-scholarly, popular (I hope) book on my ideas. Yes, it’s still largely ego-motivated, and I might well drop the book as well after a while, but meanwhile, I think, it’s much closer to what I really want to do. And this post is ridiculously long, and I need to get some other things done today, so that’s where I’ll leave it for now.

References

• Griffiths, Paul J., 1993, “Pure Consciousness and Indian Buddhism,” in The Problem of Pure Consciousness, Mysticism and Philosophy, Robert Forman (ed.), New York and London: Oxford University Press, 121–159.
• Takeuchi, Yoshinori, 1983, The Heart of Buddhism, James W. Heisig (trans.), New York: Crossroad.

So what it comes to is: do I want to do a PhD for its own sake, regardless of what I might or might not do with it? An important consideration is that my philosophical interests tend to be in the big picture, the broad sweep, and philosophers these days seem to be like scientists, focusing on smaller and smaller issues. I want to develop a sort of philosophical (as opposed to scientific) theory of everything: matter, meaning and mind from the bottom up. What are my chances of getting to do a PhD on that? Not good, I’d guess—but that’s all it is, a guess, I really don’t know.

So leaving aside the question of what I’d do it on, for now, ask this: would I be likely to enjoy the process of doing it, the life, as it were? Umm, don’t know that either, so how could I find out? If only I could do the next best thing, the nearest to a PhD that’s currently open to me, an MSc by research, and see what that’s like. Wait a minute, that’s what I’m already doing! Except, as long as I’m thinking about my future in philosophy, or studying other things like information (or blogging), I’m not. I suppose I better get on with it then…

[In a "senior moment", I forgot I supposedly committed myself to completing the MSc and going on to do (or try to) a PhD on information last week. That's fairly typical these days. Would having a memory like that compromise my ability to do a PhD? Let's see what effect it has on an MSc...]

The last I heard about this, admittedly several years ago, was from a media studies academic, who insisted that no such link had ever been shown. However, Hurley cites many studies, including meta-studies (reviews of multiple studies), and the overall effect is very convincing. This bit particularly impressed me:

What is the magnitude of the effects of media violence? The effect sizes shown in the 1994 meta-analysis are larger than the effects of calcium intake on bone mass, lead exposure on IQ in children, or asbestos exposure to cancer… (p303)

So why isn’t this widely known? IMHO, the main reason is that there are connections between news and entertainment media businesses, and it’s not in their interests to publicise it. After all, what’s more important, to reduce the level of violence in society, or to maintain the profitability of big business? What do you think they think?

The main development yesterday was my realisation of the link between the MSc dissertation and what is now my main aim for a PhD project. So here’s my favourite expression of what I very much hope to do a PhD on:

It is tempting to suppose that some concept of information could serve eventually to unify mind, matter, and meaning in a single theory. Daniel Dennett and John Haugeland.

My thing always used to be consciousness, but having a much clearer view of the state of the art since starting the MSc course, I don’t believe there’s very much left to do there. Information is something else, and I have some very definite ideas, which remain intact even after studying Dretske and others last semester, and spending much of this week looking at philosophy of info on the web.

The link between the MSc dissertation (see the proposal) and the proposed PhD project is memes, as items of information. I’m now thinking that it might be possible to explain the difference between Blackmore’s and Dennett’s concepts of consciousness largely in memetic terms. That’s basically because Blackmore, unlike Dennett, provides a convincing account of how memes get going in the first place (though she didn’t make the link between that story and consciousness). That unfortunately reduces the emphasis on meditation (probably, I think), but you can’t study everything!

If that works out as I hope and expect it will, it’ll make a great jumping off point for the PhD project. The timing isn’t so great, though, because as yet I’ve no idea who might be willing and able to supervise it, so I’ll probably have to take a year out, and start the PhD in September 2011, which seems a long, long way away! But of course I don’t have to wait until then to get working on it…

[Later: I should maybe make it clear that my commitment to this plan isn't absolute, but any alternative would have to be very good to compete. Short of sheer fantasy, I can hardly think of anything better!]

Exposure to robots in the movies and television could affect our ability to empathise with synthetic beings, suggests a study of the brain regions thought to be responsible for our ability to relate to each other.

The team found that the MNS [mirror neuron system] was activated when the robot performed actions – but only when the actions were robotic, not when the robot’s motion was smooth and human-like.

When they watched the virtual human, exactly the opposite was true – the MNS was activated when the movements were human-like, but not when they were robotic – and the contrast was even greater between these two scenarios.

What, exactly, is this “machine”? A few minutes spent studying the politics of the group who took the coveted Christmas Number One slot in the UK Singles Chart in 2009 (see Rage Against the Machine on Wikipedia) makes it clear that what they’re against is the political-military-industrial power structure, or what’s sometimes called “the system”. And let me say here quite clearly that, in terms of general political orientation, I’m entirely with them, as is anyone who instinctively sides with the underdog and finds him or herself alienated from much of modern culture, in my opinion. But they go too far—not in their analysis, because analysis should be pursued as far as it will go, and if that takes you far beyond the current consensus, so be it—but in their reaction to it. Rage, or anger, is a destructive emotion.

It’s also entirely inappropriate when what you’re dealing with is machinery. I share Philip K Dick’s view (though it took me many, many years to come around to it). In Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (filmed as Blade Runner), the only way to tell the most sophisticated humanoid robots from humans—short of opening them up—is to test their ability to empathise, because the robots lack that, though they can fake it to some degree. This aspect of his philosophy seems to have been quite consistent. In 1976, commenting on a story written in 1953, he wrote “It’s not what you look like, or what planet you were born on. It’s how kind you are. The quality of kindness, to me, distinguishes us from rocks and sticks and metal, and will forever, whatever shape we take, wherever we go, whatever we become.” To lack empathy is to be inhuman. And that’s true of all of us: whenever we speak or act without empathy, we are behaving mechanically, regardless of how humane we might be at other times. And for me, as for Dick, that’s not just a metaphor, but the literal truth (see the post No wonder people don’t like Dennett on this).

But what about “the system”? Well, it is a machine, and the people who work within it are just its components, machine parts, as long as they do so, no matter how kind they are to their children when they get home. When I started writing this I intended, after a little web research, to explain organisations and institutions as memetic machines, but my googling has brought up nothing relevant so far, and I have several other things that I should be getting on with (like the good little component that I am).

I’ll say just a little about “destructive emotions” before closing for now. That is the title of a book by Daniel Goleman, author of Emotional Intelligence. The subtitle of the emotions book is “A Scientific Dialogue with the Dalai Lama”, and Goleman’s thinking is very Buddhist-oriented as well as being quite thoroughly science-based. Anger is not one of Buddhism’s traditional “mind poisons”, but Goleman rates it as one of “the big three toxic emotions: anger, anxiety and depression” (see Daniel Goleman on emotions and your health). I must admit I’ve yet to read the book, but I’m fairly familiar with the Buddhist take on this sort of thing, and it looks like he’s promoting his concept of the “toxic emotions” as a modern and more scientific version of the “mind poisons”.

I’m going to have to return to this another time, but I’ll publish anyway, and see if there’s any response.

(Later: if not anger, what’s to motivate us to do the right thing? Compassion: see the next post.)