Astro-liberalism and mysticality

[ClaytonB]

Indeed what do you consider to be a “mystical stance”?

I’m using this by analogy to Dennett’s “intentional stance” - the tendency of animals (including human beings) to interpret phenomena as the result of the action of a purposive agent. This is an evolutionary response; it’s safest to presume that the snapped twig in the forest was broken by someone rather than something; if it turns out it was a thing, there is no loss except a little sweat but if it turns out that your paranoia/superstition was justified, you may end up saving your life. Assuming that there is an acting, purposive being with wants lurking behind any phenomena is a safe strategy because it might turn out to be the case and you might be the thing that it wants. This is the intensional stance.

I’m using the term “mystical stance” to refer to one’s orientation to the ineradicable component of human ignorance. When I say “ineradicable” I do not merely mean that part which might be the result of economic limitations or ignorance that results from its lack of utility. This ignorance can be eradicated at least in principle even if it will never be practical to do so.

However, because human beings do not have omniscience and do not possess and exhaustive knowledge of all knowable truths, our knowledge is necessarily contingent and less than certain. Hence, it is always possible that - no matter how advanced our knowledge of mathematics, physics or even human physiology - our systematized knowledge can harbor undetected errors or even contradictions.

This fact is, I believe, something that most people intuitively grasp even while most scientists and philosophers train themselves to ignore it or pretend it is not true. The mystical stance is a response to this fact that is related with the intentional stance in that superstition is the safest response to phenomena that is not understood. Religious superstition concerning gods and demons is an intensional stance regarding ineradicable ignorance; it is a mystical stance.

Religious superstitions do no solely concern gods and demons. In the case of Buddhism it concerns no gods, though there are multiple conscious lifetimes. In certain occult traditions, it concerns demons but not gods or - in the case of Scientology and perhaps others - extraterrestrial beings (mystical beings with physical bodies and who act exclusively by means of physical causality). In Deism and atheistic Unitarianism, it concerns no conscious being at all, a kind of disembodied mysticism towards Nature itself.

Why is it that society or individuals need a “mystical stance” or any sort of religion?

For individuals, we have it because of ineradicable ignorance. This ineradicable ignorance is not just the “corner cases” like ironing out the last details of the Higgs boson. In fact, the corner cases of science arise primarily from the increasing economic hurdles and decreasing utility of answering a certain line of scientific inquiry. These questions are all answerable in principle, anyway.

But the questions we’d most like to answer - does my theory of the world contain hidden contradictions? what will happen in the future? how did the Universe begin or has it a necessary existence? how does conscious experience arise and why does it feel like something to be aware? and so on - are the very questions which reside in the “ineradicable ignorance” category. We simply cannot know the answers to these questions.

How you feel about these questions matters and affects the way you think about everything else. We recognize this in the case of geocentrism versus heliocentrism. In the geocentric Universe, man is naturally the center of everything - he’s the crowning achievement of God’s creative act. But in the heliocentric Universe, man is not the center of anything. He’s on a random planet orbiting a random star in a random arm of a random galaxy. He is small and insignificant. I’ve written about this at length here.

To see this in action, let’s look at what happened to the geocentrism and anthropocentrism of the ancients. In its stead, we have the so-called Copernican Principle. The idea is that man is “just a speck of dust” somewhere out on a random planet orbiting a random star in a random arm of a random galaxy. This is all supposed to be very humbling. We are tiny little cogs in an incomprehensibly large - and essentially random - clockwork. This is supposedly a much more “serious” and dispassionate way of looking at ourselves.

But there is a striking similarity between the Copernican cog-in-the-machine and the slave. Neither really acts. Neither is really aware of anything. Awareness - if it exists at all - is just an illusion or magic trick. The new cosmology isn’t science. It, too, is a myth or narrative whose purpose is to teach us our place in the order of things, just like the astrological myths and narratives of the ancients. The difference is that the ancient myths and narratives were illuminating. They taught man about his innate nature and purpose and made him aware of the cosmic importance of his consciousness.

The old justification for slavery was the aggrandization of the mystical, that is, the claim of Divine Right to rule. The King rules his subjects just like God rules all of humanity and the King is appointed by God for this purpose. With the breakdown of the lies on which the Establishment’s religions are built, they had to shift to a new justification for ruling people. The new justification is the exact opposite of the old justification. You are not a spiritual being at all, you are a machine. You are a tiny cog in a random universe. You cannot hope to make sense of the machine in which you are embedded… a machine which was not created for you or your happiness. So, there’s no point trying to understand it and there’s no point trying to be happy. There’s no point acting purposefully because you have no purpose. Do not try to listen to your consciousness because you do not even have a consciousness… you are just so many whirling gears and levers.

At all times, in all we do, we are always human. Science is not the work of a bunch of emotionless robots like Data from Star Trek. This matters because the character of the lessons that precipitate from scientific knowledge into the wider culture very much depend on the character of that knowledge itself. But the character of scientific knowledge can as easily be hostile to the human condition as it can be conducive to it. Hence, we require a “mystical stance” or pre-rational context in which to situation the facts of science.

You might say “ah, that’s metaphysics” but it’s not. Metaphysics is still limited to the rational. It does not encompass the whole being. For that, you require an all-encompassing structure of living, acting, thinking, emoting. We might as well call such a thing “religion” irrespective of whether it involves deities and superstitions or not.

Clayton -