Re: psychoceramics: Re: stuff in #364

[William Tozier <tozier @ santafe.edu>]

I hope this is appropriate material for the mailing list. A good bit of
this is me explaining my own beliefs to Kip and some of the others who've
written, but it's also a bit of a clarification of my previous rant on Why
I Do Psychoceramics.

At 11:17 AM -0700 on 10/10/97, Kip Starrett wrote:

>but a blanket dismissal of religion
> and religious experience as kookiness by the hard-line devotee of the
> scientific method seems to me, just a tad stern...and maybe teetering
> dangerously close to a possible definition of kookiness itself. my question
> is this: could a strenuous unwillingness to accept the possibility of
> validity of some forms of religious experience (e.g., faith, religious
> conversion, grace, 'metanoia', etc.) be just a bit too defensive?

First, I am far from a hard-line devotee of the traditional scientific
method, though I see I didn't make this clear in my message. I try to be no
more enamored or disdainful of the practical or rational than I am of the
intuitive or numenous. Rather--since you bring up my personal attitudes--I
choose to believe *nothing*, at least in the sense that most people (R A
Wilson, for instance) would term intransigent belief. As often as I think
about it, I try to take a Fortean approach to life: observe what people say
has happened, collect and collate it, to try to see patterns.

My only defensiveness in my previous post, I hope, was practiced in defense
of others' beliefs -- frankly, that was the point of my climbing my soapbox
and trying to divert the You're-weird-&-stupid-messages-to-kooks idea.

But I realize that the justifications I invoked in my note could be
misinterpreted to read something like, "Let's study kooks in order to find
ways to cure people of foolish beliefs." I intended nothing of the sort.
I'd rather merely try to understand why, what, and how we believe in the
first place -- not out of any didactic intent, but rather to (in a perfect
world) do things like teach college more effectively, or maybe work out how
different belief systems come to clash with one another (and how this might
be defused), or even how beliefs evolve on various timescales. Just plain
practical insights like that.

So when I lump religion (which is ubiquitous) and crackpottery (which is
rather rarer) together, I was merely trying to make the point that belief
systems exist in some continuuum, that we all more or less carry them
around within us, and that drawing some artificial line between "proper"
and "improper" qualities of belief implies poor skills at self-examination.
But as I pointed out -- I'm not going for the Relativist approach that all
belief systems are equally valid. I'm saying something even more
wishy-washy ;-) : that social humanity seems to entail complex and diverse
systems of belief.

> some of my own experience remains undefinable, beyond logic, and
> mysterious--lying somewhere below articulation. through my own examination
> of this experience, i have come to the conclusion that the universe is
> bigger than our minds, God exists, and our lifes are indeed touched by him.
> and simply because an experience isnt replicable under scientific scrutiny,
> does not mean it isnt valid and believable. it may not be of value to the
> scientific community, but it is an inextricable and valued portion of my
> own ontology. so, while i share your appreciation of crackpot-ism, i
> disagree with your evaluation of religion. my appreciation of things
> psychoceramic is not in conflict with my religious experience.

I think you're taking the generally held (and potentially tricky) attitude
that crackpots and weirdos are intrinsically *wrong*, and projecting it
onto what I've written. I try not to hold such an attitude. By most
standards we use around here in the mailing list and in Ms. Kossy's book,
Leonardo and Einstein were bigtime kooks, though *correct* ones.
Extraordinarily eccentric, to say the least. I work with people like that,
too. So don't assume when I say that I'd like to understand kooks, I imply
some pathology is present, and that someday we'll live in a world where
these poor people can be cured.

Heaven forfend. ;-)

So when I laid out my thoughts on a continuum of belief from religion
through kookery, perhaps you thought I was casting aspersions on religious
belief. Not at all.

The religious experience and the social structures that accompany it are
everywhere, a fundamental component in almost all people and certainly all
peoples. It is in their nature that I cannot judge the validity of *any* of
these experiences, but I can certainly note that such a strong (though
vaguely-defined) mental component as "belief" is pretty damned important.
It should be studied. Lots of people have done so -- Eliade, Campbell, &c.
They looked at religion.

[And since you bring it up, this is why I think the folk who pontificate
and/or moan in _Skeptic_ and _Skeptical Inquirer_ are foolish in their
programs to "cure us" of incorrect belief. These attempts are oddly
reminiscent of earlier attempts to "cure" us of our sins.... (That was a
little joke). And as I think I pointed out in my previous note, there is a
pernicious dogmatism not only in Skeptics' attribution of right and wrong
thought, but also in their proposed solution of massive education in Right
Thought as a way to Stem the Tide of Ignorance and Foolhardiness. Nobody
ever showed me an educated feller that gave up his beliefs on the basis of
the incontrovertible facts. All I've ever seen is people controverting....]

Anways, on the study of belief: Studying belief as it exists in religion
has led to a good strong overview of the broad classes of stuff we think,
and maybe even to a slew of hypotheses concerning why we believe things;
then again, perhaps the forest is hard to see for the innumerable religious
trees.

Thus my observation that, in the biomedical sciences, we have learned how
normal things happen in our very complex and diverse healthy cells by
looking at some extreme and very specialized model systems. Just because of
the nature of biomedicine, many of these model systems are diseases and/or
bits of unusual sick people. Perhaps the analogy was a poor choice, since I
have no intent of attributing some sort of pathology-of-belief to
crackpots. Nor to religious people.

Instead I'm trying to argue that crackpots entertain some of the most
unusual beliefs we can find, and one of the points we've observed in them
is that they hold fast to these beliefs in the face of rather strong
counterevidence. We've already started to classify them. You can see motifs
among them, as well: the Einstein Was Wrong kooks, the Channelers of Exotic
Higher Beings, and so forth. And there are social systems present among
kooks -- particularly between net.kooks -- so we see these exotic ideas,
which stand out against the background noise of the Net, and can observe
how they spread, evolve, and so forth. Keely gets mentioned a lot.
Donnely's Atlantis. Theosophic jargon.

Finally, I'll point out that a lot of normal people -- who none of us would
usually call kooks even behind their backs -- maintain a few of these same
"weird" beliefs. The elderly father of a friend collared me at a dinner
party last summer and told me about his Goat Gland Rejuvenation, and then
when he found I was a scientist, told me about his (patented!) explanation
of how spiral galaxies form due to electromagnetic induction. A coworker
here (who is faculty at a large university) sees crosses and other
important symbols indicating that his theoretical work is Correct--in his
computer's screensaver. My father-in-law tried a raisins-soaked-in-gin cure
for his arthritis for several weeks.

And these folks aren't kooks. Really quite smart, actually. Thus the
continuum I've tried to evoke between traditional (read: "religious") and
exotic (read: "weird") beliefs perhaps should be joined by one that spans
normal behavior and psychoceramicism. I dunno. Any suggestions?

> thats all. oh, and SHOOT ME if i start posting stuff like THE ABOVE using
> too many CAPITAL LETTERS!!!!

Not at all. We'll merely record it for posterity ;-)

Regards,
Tozier

--------------                               ------------------------
William Tozier                               also: Santa Fe Institute
Biology Department                                 t--@s--.edu
University of Pennsylvania                 [Web Pages Being Serviced]

"Education makes a people easy to lead, but difficult to drive; easy to
govern but impossible to enslave."
  -- Lord Brougham