I got tipped off to a concise, clever, and thought-provoking video by Ken Wilber, a scholar of “spiritual phenomena” (which, as he points out, is a loaded term). In this eight-minute segment, he explores the question of whether scientific methodology can be applied to non-physical experiences.
Spirituality and the Three Strands of Deep Science
I think this should be required viewing for American students, if only for the grounding in basic epistemology that it provides.
3 Comments
The general scientific approach is one of the things I appreciate about the style of Ch’an Buddhism I’ve gotten involved in. There’s very much an attitude of “we’ve found that X therefore Y; try X and see what you get”.
At the same time, though, there’s a certain very valid point of view that science cannot be done without the ability to hold some things constant while varying others, and one of the assumptions is that the observer remains constant. But when you’re talking about mental states, that’s altering the very thing that’s supposed to be doing the observing. Given human predilections for self-deception and editing one’s own memory, I’d say that this is a healthy form of skepticsm in general, if somewhat limitingl
That’s certainly a good point - our ability to make objective observations of subjective phenomena is still very limited, and there may even be a theoretical limitation there.
However, some effects that are “within the mind” can also be observed scientifically - by a trained psychologist, for example, or by neuroimaging.
The assertion that “meditating for twenty minutes a day will bring you peace and make you happier” is relatively easy to verify; “meditating rigorously for five years will allow you to attain Buddha nature” would be difficult or impossible. In part because the personal investment to reproduce the described effect is prohibitively large - and so Wilber’s community of experts is miniscule.
Then again, the community of experts who are competent to understand many mathematical advances in this age is equally tiny.
Don’t go conflating math and science, now! Yes, there are only about a dozen people in the world who can understand the Proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem, but because they’ve all checked it and found it to be correct, we can be sure that Fermat’s Last Theorem is true. (I don’t like the way Wilber threw around the Pythagorean Theorem in his talk for that reason.)
This is a bit pedantic, since there are certainly scientific theories with very small communities of experts qualified to judge them. But not to the same degree as in mathematics, AFAIK. (Except in Physics, which has a lot of bullshit un-falsifiable stuff these days, like string theory.)
Matt