Money for old rope
Ah, the Templeton prize. What a treat.
A Canadian philosopher who believes that spirituality is an essential part of the study of philosophy and the social sciences has won the $1.5 million Templeton Prize for advancement and research of spiritual matters.
Okay; first pressing question; what does that mean? What is spirituality? Depending on how it’s defined, either, of course it’s an essential part of the study of philosophy and the social sciences, or what on earth does he mean it’s an essential part of the study of philosophy and the social sciences?
Professor Taylor has written extensively on the sense of self and how it is defined by morals and what one considers good. People operate in the register of spiritual issues, he said, and to separate those from the humanities and social sciences leads to flawed conclusions. “The deafness of many philosophers, social scientists and historians to the spiritual dimension can be remarkable,” Professor Taylor said.
Same thing. Wot’s he mean? Just stuff that’s not rocks and boards and dirt? Then of course people ‘operate in the register of spiritual issues’ (I suppose he means think about and care about, but ‘operate in the register of’ sounds more – Templetonian). Or supernatural? Then some operate in that register (or think they do, or want to, or hope to) and some don’t.
Whatever. Professor Taylor can have his prize, I don’t mind, but I wish people would say what they mean when they talk about spirituality.
Bullshit Baffles Brains!
Nothing new here, then ….
As has been said elswhere (PZM) what is going to happen to all this when the neurophysiologists really get some results on the “mind” – as they are already close to doing?
The whole thing will fall down, very noisily, and quite a few peole will get hurt.
The slippery insinuation that morality is at its core a “spiritual matter” is especially whiffy of b.s. If he’s using “spiritual” as a code for “religious” – which almost everyone does, all the damned time – then this is just another version of that repellent (and demonstrably very, very false) morality=religion trope.
Bah humbug!
When is someone going to start handing out million dollar prizes for actual CLEAR thinking instead of woolly-headed nonsense gussied up in academic-ese.
grumble grumble… starving grad student …grumble mutter grumble
Hm… spirituality seems to have lots of non-religious advocates. It seems to me a way of enjoying religious emotions, without the obligation to believe in any particular thing.
Mind you I worked with a counsellor who had people addressing ‘feelings’ and ‘entities’ as if capable of undertanding speech. This was his idea he said was from Liebniz that we are surrounded by some kind of spiritual soup, with entities like atoms all around us. No religion there, move along.
I say “spiritual” when I mean “non-physical”. I assume science might be right that all of the mind reflects physical processes in the brain, so even abstract thought is something physical. Is there something more than this? I don’t know, but I’d like to be able to talk about such possibilities, which is what I would call spirituality.
I would think there is great variation in what people mean by “spirituality” and “God”. I’ve given my definition of the first one. For the second one my favorite definition is that God is the one who answers when I pray, “God help me!” Many people prefer a different definition. It’s a pity. I like functional definitions, but I accept that not everyone does.
So my vote is that both those words should be defined early in any piece that uses them. I’ll do that if others will.
OK.
“Spirituality” = “An echoing void in which people choose to hear the sounds of the fairy-tales their culture tells them.”
How’s that?
I’d just like to come at this from the other end. I see no shortage of philosophers, scientists and nearly everybody else dealing with “spiritual” matters, some of them linked from this very site, so I can’t see why he deserves the prize particularly. Unless it is connected with the throwaway note at the end that he is a Roman Catholic…
“It seems to me a way of enjoying religious emotions, without the obligation to believe in any particular thing.”
I find that very interesting. It seems to imply (correct me if I’m wrong) that there’s something slightly evasive or lazy or otherwise wrong about the failure or refusal to believe in any particular thing – which links up with or simply is the idea that ‘faith’ is a virtue and lack of faith is a vice and something to be apologized for. I always do find that (often buried, or implicit, not fully aware) idea very interesting, as well as quite harmful. I think just the opposite: that faith is a bad thing, and the avoidance of faith is a good thing. I mean faith in general rather than religion in particular here: I mean the habit of embracing uncritical belief and commitment and loyalty, and refusing to question them.
> “I wish people would say what they mean when they talk about spirituality”. OB,
Teilhard’s Catholicism stood in the way of Teilhard’s spirituality.
Perhaps, as well, the Templeton Prize stands in the way of Professor Taylor’s spirituality.
I wonder does he – in his spare time – hang out at Lexicon Ave? I believe,
“spirituality” is the name of main dish served up at its O.D. cafeteria – especially that of a pre Vatican II concoction which is very much savoured by its fervent secret devotees. If that is the case one would hardly expect such a high profile figure to give away the ingredients of “his spirituality”, – would one?
Don’t you think that there might be a genetic substrate, with variation within the human population, to the desire for/need for/attachment to supernatural explanations? and that “spirituality” might be a good name for one end of the distribution? Hence the fact that people at the other end (B+W readers, including me) find “spirituality” an almost meaningless concept, since it is effectively an emotion that we don’t feel?
Furthermore, don’t you think that a significant attachment to scientific method might also be an emotion with a genetic substrate, given the problem of induction?
DavidD:
“I assume science might be right that all of the mind reflects physical processes in the brain, so even abstract thought is something physical. Is there something more than this? I don’t know, but I’d like to be able to talk about such possibilities, which is what I would call spirituality.”
Hmmmm, I’d say that “abstract thought is something physical” is a category mistake, regardless of one’s theory of mind. It may be based in some manner on physical processes, it may be thought to be reducible to it by some – but it is non-physical, by definition.
I’m in agreement with the thrust of your comment, though. The problem with “spirituality” is that it’s a bit of a buzzword – i.e. both used for religious feelings without much commitment or depth in society at large, and some quite awful woo-woo at the fuzzier edges of humanities disciplines. If spirituality has to do with the need to deal with human beings, human actions and desires in philosophy in a non-reductionist manner, I’m all for it.
OB: Lack of faith (as you define it) is surely a virtue, but I think there is something at times very superficial and lazy about non-committal spirituality as compared to mainstream Christianity. I’m talking about the well-educated, broad-minded type here who will allow that there is “something” out there, and who will scoff at those who believe in the resurrection of Jesus while firmly believing individual destiny can be read from a horoscope at the same time. They exist. Believing in something at least partially defined (it can never be wholly so) at least potentially allows oneself to relate critically, in some manner, to one’s own beliefs. I think there is very little critical thought in the smorgasbord of super-individualistic self-help New Age beliefs.
Merlijn, yeah, agreed – I know what ChrisPer means, really; there’s something annoying about the vague gestural piety that takes all the fun and none of the askesis (so to speak).
Wikipedia gives us the very useful term ‘glittering generality’ – I found that in the comments on PZ’s post that GT mentioned. Thpirituality is a glittering generality or I’m a Dutchman. Oh wait…
I think it’s fair to say that abstract thought, if it is ever successfully defined, will turn out to be some kind of electrical activity. Unless you believe in a ghost in the machine. I think you could fairly say that the products of abstract thought, qua concepts, were non-physical, but the process itself is entirely physical — or else it’s supernatural.
And I haven’t got a headache yet today, so please try not to give me one… That’s what too much abstract thought does to my physical processes… ;-)
Agree with you on the smorgasbord though. Rather have someone try to defend the 39 Articles than see them reconcile belief in Native American Dreamcatchers, Yoga and I Ching…
Not to mention listen to them recount their experience of visiting The Goddess via inward journey, or Sylvia Browne on what heaven is like.
I can’t think of any definitions of “abstract thought” and “physical” that would make “abstract” thought non-physical by definition. Unless you want to go along with Descartes. But there’s no particular reason to go there.
“Thought is physical” a contradiction like “Squares are three-sided”?
Incidentally, talking of Mind and World, there’s this:
http://www.theamericanscholar.org/sp07/newtheory-lanza.html
Reading through it as a layperson, it smacks of woo-woo with a bit of Bishop Berkeley on the side, but am I being uncharitable?
Dave:
I don’t know. There’s some echos of process philosophy in it here and there also, which I would be sympathetic towards, but… It all seems to build a lot on a specific interpretation of quantum mechanics (consciousness causes collapse) which is not universally accepted to say the least. And I think there’s a host of problems with the way it’s presented here. I.e. the logic seems to lead straight to panpsychism/panexperientialism, which is fair enough – but that would vitiate the centrality of biological life in Lanza’s theory and the importance of cosmic fine-tuning, etc. I’m also a bit peeved at the author’s attitude towards physics (modern physics does tell us something interesting about the universe. Not the whole story, OK, but quite a big part of it).
JonJ: That’s exactly what I’m saying. Sure, it may be that thought arises from the electrical activity of the brain, etc. – but that does not make thought qua thought physical. The very idea of an abstract object is non-physical. There’s no physical analogue of a perfect circle – which is precisely why it is an abstract object. Even if we had the knowledge to correlate a certain neuronal state and a certain pattern of electrical activity with a subject thinking of an perfect circle – that does not mean the neuronal state and the pattern of electric activity are an abstract thought. They’re what they are: neuronal states, electric activity, and an abstract thought it still precisely what it is.
a] Cheers; I assume panpsychism is what I’d call woo-woo; and
b] But doesn’t that make ‘abstract thought’ an emergent property of a physical process? Or one could be even more provocative, and say that the concept of abstraction is in a sense chimerical, since absent a ghost in the machine, it is indubitably a product of physical brain processes, and it might be said to be the limitations on our understanding of those processes which compel us to assume that it is ‘abstract’… We have conjured up the idea of ‘abstract thought’ because we don’t understand how the brain works… And maybe, indeed, part of ‘consciousness’ is being fooled by own own limitations into believing that we’re thinking, whereas if we knew better we’d know it was all just crackling neurons … ;-)
Well, granted the possibility that abstract thought is emergent upon physical processes (I’m not too sure about it – but it is one of the most widely held positions on the matter-mind issue if I’m not mistaken), that does not make abstraction chimerical. We pretty much need abstract thought and abstract concepts to have thought at all – to connect concrete entities and items with abstract properties, patterns, structures, etc. This cannot be replaced as such by neurology (which needless to say is itself dependent upon abstract thought). There’s a risk of a reductionist mind-matter position becoming self-refuting in that manner.
As for panpsychism, I find the position interesting if it is somewhat well-defined what the physical and mental aspects of substance, event or whatever is taken as basic are. I.e. something like Galen Strawson’s recent proposal (physical properties as relational, dispositional; mental as intrinsic, “thing in itself” – which I think itself is based on Russell). But I’m leery of connecting panpsychism to some kind of observer-central theory of quantum mechanics. Note that Lanza does (apparently) not quite do that, but I think he would need to make sense of his idea of observer-created reality.
Hmm, I suppose one does have a problem if one tries to explain away thought. If it is an illusion, or an artefact of an underlying process, then the end result is not much different [coming at it from a different side] to the ‘am I really just a brain in a jar’ puzzle. If there is no real ‘I’ to do the thinking, then there is no grounds to be thinking about anything. Non sum, ergo, errr…
I still think consciousness is just an accident of evolution, mind. But that may be just because, in my twisted way, I find it an emotionally satisfying story – and as we know, everybody is programmed to like a good story…
Not that it was germane to the original points made in the N & C, but all the same, I’m curious about why Taylor was selected for this prize. I know almost nothing about him except that he authored the book Sources of the Self among others, and that at least some philosophers think he’s a big deal.
Can anyone who has read Taylor explain why his work advances the Templeton goal of a creating dialogue between science and religion, and tell us if he has always been so accoodating to spirituality (however defined)?
Phil
spiritual = crap that doesn’t exist
A Canadian philosopher who believes that crap that doesn’t exist is an essential part of the study of philosophy and the social sciences has won the $1.5 million Templeton Prize for advancement and research of spiritual matters….
Professor Taylor has written extensively on the sense of self and how it is defined by morals and what one considers good. People operate in the register of issues related to crap that doesn’t exist, he said, and to separate those from the humanities and social sciences leads to flawed conclusions. “The deafness of many philosophers, social scientists and historians to the dimension of crap that doesn’t exist can be remarkable,” Professor Taylor said in remarks prepared for delivery at the announcement of the prize at the Church Center for the United Nations in New York this morning. This is damaging because it “affects the culture of the media and educated public opinion in general.”
Professor Taylor, a Roman Catholic who said in an interview he was heavily influenced by pre-Vatican II documents he read while an adolescent in Quebec, is currently studying how crap that doesn’t exist influences those who commit random violence and whether traditionally spiritual motivations such as a sense of purpose could be a factor….
The prize was established in 1973 by the investor and philanthropist Sir John Templeton and exceeds the monetary value of the Nobel Prize because of Sir Templeton’s belief that advances in the realm of crap that doesn’t exist can reap greater benefits than those in the secular.
snicker