The Need to Evolve

[Belacqua]

What objective evidence can we have that the people in the trial actually feel happier?

None, it's a subjective feeling, though it is of course a trivial claim, but the best we can have is objective markers, just as with pain, that's why A & R (that's ER department to those in the US) carefully check for signs of addiction before whipping out the prescription pad. 

Yes, I think we agree on that. Some very important things (e.g. happiness and other moods) exist but cannot be confirmed through objective evidence. 

Imagine you were the CEO of GlaxoSmithKline, and your chemists came up with a new chemical. And they tested it on 10000 severely depressed patients, and 9999 of these reported a significant improvement in their mood. Related objective indicators would be partial confirmation, but these are knock-on effects, and not the subjective experiences themselves. If you were CEO, I doubt you would reject this evidence and decline to produce the medicine due to a lack of objective evidence. The subjective evidence here would be sufficient. And if you did refuse your shareholders would fire you right away. 

No doubt you can see further implications here. 

So for example after Isaac Newton changed the metaphysics of the way we think about color, people understood that the experience of color is subjective. It is in the mind of the individual. However, because human beings mostly have the same faculties, it is reasonable to assume that although our experience of color is subjective, almost everyone's is the same. That's what I meant by "intersubjective." 

So there are subjective experiences, for which we don't have objective evidence, which nonetheless we consider to be common and real. 

Now, back to the earlier discussion. As I recall, you were asking for a definition of the word "spiritual." The Cambridge Dictionary gives this:

relating to deep feelings and beliefs, especially religious beliefs: "Traditional ways of life fulfilled both economic and spiritual needs."

The issue I'm working on here is whether the lack of objective evidence for spiritual experiences is a good reason for us to conclude that such experiences are unreal. Over time a huge number of people have self-reported such experiences. For example, W.H. Auden reported a spiritual experience that seems to have been very similar to the spiritual experiences of Plotinus. Since we agree, I think, that subjective experience (e.g. happiness or color) is not to be dismissed simply because it is subjective, then I don't think we have established sufficient reasons to claim that they are false or illusional. 

We can guess that all the people making the reports are mistaken in some way, but without begging the question is there reason to conclude this? 

Earlier on someone mentioned Karma Yoga, and I think you connected this with Hinduism. Probably people mostly think of Hinduism as polytheism with lots of gods running around like superheroes. No doubt we've all seen lots of illustrations to the Ramayana with cute monsters, etc. But if you go back to the intellectual sources of the traditions that later became known as Hinduism you'll find that their epistemology and ontology are very subtle and not at all easy to dismiss. There are sentences from the early Sanskrit writings that could just as easily have come from Wittgenstein or Heidegger. These were not dummies. And the spiritual paths of the different types of yoga (the serious original types, not just stretching exercises) have yielded a long tradition of spiritual experiences. The practices have benefits that pay off, according to serious practitioners. 

I am unwilling to dismiss these many well-established traditions simply because we cannot measure the results with some sort of quantifying machine. As you acknowledge, subjective truths may be partly confirmed through objective indicators, but we would need to be very serious about what these indicators are before we dismiss the existence of the subjective experiences.