Sam Harris' mystical rationalisations

I've read a couple of interesting books recently. One is an Apocalyptic Christian story about the end of the world that I got handed by a street preacher (I have a bad habit of picking up this kind of research material). The other is Sam Harris' The End of Faith. I want to comment on both of them, but I'll start with the latter.

Sam Harris' book is largely about the kind of preposterous ideas that religion peddles, a scathing attack on the idea that these fairytales deserve any sort of special status. It's brilliantly articulated with examples that make it so clear that religion is complete hogwash that I'm envious. It's exactly the sort of book I always wanted to write. Plus, it reintroduced me to the word 'preposterous', which I am now using liberally to describe religious ideas!

However, Harris' last two chapters trouble me. He makes an attempt to show how naturalism can replace the areas to which religion claims to have unique access. I'm in favour of the attempt, I'm just not sure I agree with his analysis. His ideas are ethical realism, and empirical mysticism.

Ethical Realism
Harris says that ethics need not be the closed purvue of esoteric philosophical musings, or religious absolutism. He says that if we get together and agree what we are trying to achieve, eg. maximum happiness for the most people, long-term survival of the species, etc, even getting right down into the nitty-gritty of what precise measurements we are using, then we can study the behaviour that best meets those goals scientifically. No need to invoke a mystical 'force for good' that we have to tap into, we can actually study what is good and bad, and get better at being good.

Fine. I agree completely. But surely the big problem is not deciding what is moral once we've established our goals, but establishing those goals and measurements in the first place. And, from religion's point of view, establishing whether or not there is a moral code 'out there' somewhere that we can find and follow, ie. absolutism.

I think that when we instigate Harris' moral science we're going to come to a lot of conclusions that clash so profoundly with our natural instincts, which are inherently selfish and short-sighted, that we'll find it hard to call them 'moral' at all. It could easily conclude that all disabled or genetically unfit embryos and babies should be terminated for the long-long-long-term good of the species. It would likely conclude that war is justified, that the right to vote should be restricted, and so on. In order to make it satisfactorily 'moral', we'd have to change the goals to be more short-term, selfish, and small-group oriented. In the end, it wouldn't be much more than a study of human social instincts, ie. what do we instinctively feel is good and bad, and that wouldn't produce a consistent message (because it already doesn't).

Even if we accepted the conclusions, whatever they were, having agreed on the premises, how could we come to agreement on the measurements in the first place? And even if we could both agree and follow the conclusions, I still don't see how any system could successfully answer questions like "is cannibalism immoral?". Ultimately there would be a great deal of issues that such a science would have no stance on.

I'm being a little unfair, because I agree that such a science is useful and necessary. But I don't really think it will satisfy the religiots. They don't want utilitarian, Kantian answers to ethical questions, they want the universe to be specifically constructed to divide the good and the ungood. I think such an argument is best kept in philosophical and theological circles attacking the claim that an imposed code can ever be truly moral, or the coherence of a universe that somehow 'encodes' good and evil. Harris' fundamental premise, that there is no moral code except that which we decide for ourselves, is correct, but to people who are unsatisfied with that, one can only say "get used to it, that's the way it is".

Empirical Mysticism
Harris points out that certain forms of mental training and drugs can alter the way we experience our consciousness. He then makes a number of claims: This change of perspective can be empirically studied; it tells us something fundamental and profound that is worthy of investigation; and the erosion of the sense of a strong subject/object divide (the sense of identity and being separate from other things) can lead to an improved respect for others. I don't think Harris argues well for any of them.

For a start, how do you measure a subjective experience? I'm not going to go into it here, it may be possible, but it does seem to beset by the very definition of 'subjective'. Secondly, what precisely does society gain from this profound introspection? And lastly, what evidence is there that these 'mystical' experiences lead to an improved morality? I don't see any perfect societies anywhere near the sorts of places where this kind of mental practice is common.

Ultimately, the sorts of things that Harris is talking about can be duplicated through certain drugs. But to achieve the same state of introspection without drugs takes a certain kind of mental training. This training may indeed be beneficial for an individual, leading to an ability to control thoughts, urges and instincts. But it is the training that does this, not the experiences themselves, neither can we easily claim that society as a whole benefits from individual enlightenment. And the experiences are just trips, they don't tell us anything particularly useful about the way the world is.

The collapse of the subject/object barrier during a meditational enlightenment doesn't actually mean that there is no subject and object! Your thoughts are located in one place, attached to sensory and motor neurons that can sense and act in a particular location. Harris makes out that our sense of identity is a kind of nurtured bias impressed on us from youth. I don't agree; I think it's a valid representation of the self. Yes, we are located in a particular place and have control over these senses and limbs, not other ones. Yes, the 3-space point of convergence of our most acute senses, hearing and vision, is somewhere behind the eyes. The fact that our cognitive functions also take place in the head is indeed irrelevant - they could be going on in another room for all we cared - but I see no reason to believe that if they were in the next room, our sense of self wouldn't be located behind the eyes just the same.

Here's a test - think of the last film you went to that really absorbed you. When you think of the film, do you think of yourself sitting in the cinema watching a screen? Or do you think of yourself as a kind of impassive observer, located wherever the camera is in each shot?

I believe Harris' publishers made a big mistake letting these ideas go out with the political and religious polemic. They need a lot more work, and they detract from the excellent and important principal message.