"When my son was four or five years old, he asked one of those interminable questions that children ask: 'Why does the sky get dark at night?'
"Eager to increase his understanding, I put a lamp in the middle of the floor to act as the sun, got down the world globe, and used a tennis ball for the moon. Then I walked around the "sun", carrying the globe and turning it, explaining how we are suspended in space, constantly moving. It was the universe in a nutshell - sun, earth, moon, stars, seasons.
"My son watched the production with silent, squint-eyed attention. When I finished, he said to me, 'You don't expect me to believe that, do you?'"
For a lot of people, the supernatural explanation is the simpler explanation. The so-called "scientific" (or more properly Scientistic[1] or maybe Naturalistic[2]) world view rests on explanation after explanation that takes years and years of education to even understand, much less accept.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientism
[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naturalism_%28philosophy%29
I'm a physics teacher, and most teenagers don't have a clue about this at all. They think astronauts float around in space because there's no gravity there. If there's no gravity, then how does the earth stay in orbit around the sun? That shows they really don't understand it at all. It's difficult and you have to actually think hard over a long time to make all the pieces fit together.
the level of precision and rigor, backed by advanced instruments and mathematics, needed to disprove the Geocentric Model is really quite high. you have taken your own education for granted.
So it seems that people in this thread are taking the position that depression is a calling from a higher being. Not just metaphorically, but some version of actually true.
Have you spent some time with depressed people, or been depressed? This posited higher being is pretty weird.
I am constantly suprised by my fellows.
Consider a religious zealot who denies evolution on the basis of a literal interpretation of a Creator. Pretty ridiculous right?
The opposite end of the spectrum is an empiricist who only cares to discuss or consider that which can be posited and falsified by scientific experiment. If something can not be observed and measured then it is "supernatural" and therefore nonsense that doesn't merit consideration.
I am of the opinion that the empiricist is just as much of a bull-headed fundamentalist. Of course the empiricist is more rational on the surface, but as you peel the layers of logic away, eventually you realize that there is always faith in something in the end. Maybe you believe that objective knowledge can give us meaning, maybe you believe science can explain all phenomena, maybe you believe there is nothing real which can't be somehow perceived.
Well I am an agnostic. To me, the application of Occam's Razor is that my consciousness if evidence of some meaning. The idea that the configuration of my atoms gives rise to my consciousness is possible but does not seem particularly likely, yet many so-called rationalists somehow assume this is the case out of fear of a "supernatural" explanation. Setting up an image of God as a bearded man in the clouds is just a strawman to discredit what is actually a very reasonable idea: there is some purpose to the universe which is probably beyond our understanding and which will never be revealed by science.
Talk of a higher being necessarily implies not understanding. Being able to sit comfortably with not knowing is a valuable trait. Putting a framework like a "higher being" around difficult psychological conditions is one way to grapple with uncertainty and perhaps find a solution. Getting caught up in whether or not that is a metaphor is to really miss the point.
Very good point. Most people in the west assume that religious texts are written to be understood literally and not metaphorically.
This might be due to zealotry witnessed in some major religions.
You've invoked consciousness, purpose and meaning as if they were important. All of which are like the higher being - they aren't real outside psychology. They are compact labels we made up to try to capture some aspects of our psychology. They help us predict each other's behaviour and communicate effectively.
There's no hard problem of consciousness, no problem of meaning or purpose, no need to ground anything in faith, no solutions exist, because all these things are psychological concepts that have no meaning at all outside the psychological context. They aren't nonsense - they are important to us as people - but that doesn't make them real in any fundamental way. They are contingent on the details of our brains. Its very important to realize that we don't need cosmology to be compatible with these things.
Consider how difficult it is to even define any of these terms in satisfying way. They are all metaphorical, like the higher being.
This means that:
> what is actually a very reasonable idea: there is some purpose to the universe which is probably beyond our understanding and which will never be revealed by science.
is incoherent. 'Purpose' is a property that is convenient to ascribe to brains. There is absolutely no justification to apply it to anything else. And if you look even a little closely, you can't even find it in brains.
Are you able to explain what an electron is, or what gravity is or how light propagates without resorting to metaphor and hard-to-define terms?
I used to be a pretty hardcore rational materialist until I accepted that it doesn't fit very well with my own experiences.
> You've invoked consciousness, purpose and meaning as if they were important.
They are and you know it.
My point is that you don't need to ground your cosmology on them.
No one can say there is no absolute because that statement itself is asserted as absolute.
is your mind real? is mine?
I doubt anyone believes that. How could that ever be so?
"To me, the application of Occam's Razor is that my consciousness is evidence of some meaning"
This really makes no sense, it's the same anthropocentric fallacy that led people to believe for centuries that the Earth must be the centre of the universe.
It's back-to-front... the need to seek 'meaning' for life is more likely a result of the narrative tendency in human consciousness. And in recognising this we can turn away from the idea that there must be some kind of 'higher' externally-provided big-m 'Meaning' - an idea which must lead to either hopelessness and futility, or self-delusion.
Instead, small-m 'meaning' in your life becomes something you can give to yourself, you can choose what gives meaning to your life, you can change your mind.
Being able to sit comfortably without Meaning is a valuable trait.
Note that I don't need for there to be Meaning, I just happen to believe there is because it makes sense to me. It's not particularly anthropocentric because I'm not claiming that it has anything more to do with humans than with space dust. Again this is not about knowledge but about faith. We all have faith in something, but some people have trouble accepting that and instead justify their belief systems by pointing to facts. The problem is we don't live in a mathematical world where the axioms are defined by us, our logic has to ultimately be based on something. I agree with you it's a beautiful thing that we get to choose what that is.
The problem with this conversation is that the idea you unpack from the phrase "higher being" isn't really like the idea they compiled to that phrase. There's a fundamental translation problem in that things which are simple structures in one framework are hard or impossible to express in the other.
You have to understand what the reverse image of that phrase is in their model, not what the reverse image is in your model (ie, the idea they were trying to convey, not what you would have been trying to convey using those words). This is obviously extremely hard, as we only have access to our own model, not theirs.
For places where the models are similar, this is less of an issue, because the two reverse images are then similar. However, when the models substantially diverge, it leads to one of the most common breakdowns in communication we see (and we see it a lot, across topics).
I mean, modern mathematics happened because people had different internal models for what "function" meant, but you seem to think a concept like "higher power" is easy to translate.
For what it's worth, I don't think the two ideas are incompatible -- could you elaborate on why you do?
I have no idea why you think I have any position on the ease or otherwise of 'translating' this term. I've made no claim about that. I read the article in good faith. 'Higher being' is the term they chose. I assume it's the best term available to the author. I'm not arguing about it. I'm just not persuaded that depression is a call from a higher being, as far as I understand what they are getting at.
If you don't actually understand what they're getting at, you being pretty sure the views are incompatible results from misevaluating how well you understand what they're saying -- hence the discussion of why that communication is hard.
Which is why I asked you to elaborate on why you think the views are incompatible. Which you declined to do.
So I'm not really sure what else to say if you don't want to get in to specifics of how you interpreted the concept and why you think the two models are incompatible.
I said they weren't equivalent, and earlier I asked which explanation is more likely.
What's the more likely explanation:
(1) various different conditions including depression and psychosis are calls from a higher being, not thus far sensible to science; or
(2) the brain, a vastly complex organ with significant structure and dynamics, grown out of meat from a tiny unique egg and trained over decades of unique experience, works a bit differently to the norm in some people, in ways that can be distressing.
Occam's Razor is tingling.