I am responding to some common objections regarding why one should not consider spiritual/mystical to be knowledge producing.
1)
Mystical experience are private and hence are not verifiable
Response: All experiences are private. I have not seen any public experience. My experience of a tree is as private as your experience of the tree.
2)
There is no entity out there to which such experience refers to. Hence they are not about anything
Response: This does not mean that the experience is not pointing to a truth. Mathematical relations can be cognized without it being out there. Thus we can have veridical experiences that are not directly tied to things out there in the world.
3)Mystical experiences cannot be checked or verified for being true or false
For an established tradition of mysticism there are strict regulations and rules determining what does or does not constitute a genuine mystical experience. There are hundreds of texts on this. What has not happened is the universalization of standards across traditions that is accepted by all. However it is to be noted that sustained interactions between Hindus, Buddhists, Taoists, Sufis, Sikhs did mean that despite differences, much similarities can be found in the processes that lead towards spiritual experiences and the ways of determining if these experiences are real or not. Further, just like any advanced discipline, it is only practitioners of the path who form the peer group who have the expertise to decide whether an experience based claim is veridical or not.
4)
Not everyone can experience it. So it cannot be reliable.
Not everyone can gather, analyze, understand or use the data that scientists or medical practitioners or experts use in their professional lives. However it can be learned, just like any specialized discipline. Not everyone can learn as well or do as good as some or reach the highest level. This too is common in all disciplines of human activity. It does not make sense to claim General Relativity is false as I cannot grasp it. Why would it make any more sense here?
5)
The experiences cannot be expressed and are vague and unfalsifiable
There are literally thousands of years of detailed debate and interrogation literature on the nature of these experiences, apparent contradictions between the various experiences and what they truly tell about the nature of reality in Indian history. That is probably true in other traditions as well. Entire systems of logic, grammar, mathematics and epistemology has been developed out of such debates. These are not the marks of vague or unfalsifiable vacuous statements that are alleged for spiritual experiences.
6)
They have no utility that you can check now
Studies have already shown that being part of a participating faith community is highly beneficial to physical and mental health. The benefits of yoga, various types of meditation on mental health, dealing with pain etc. are also established. Further, it is up to the practitioner to decide whether what he/she is getting is worth the effort.
7)
The claimed knowledge is disconnected with scientific reality
This is not true for all systems. But many systems need to modernize and update what it is saying to be more consonant with what science says. In many traditions what can actually be known from spiritual insights have been mixed up with older beliefs about the world that were generally believed in the time when such traditions arose. Careful re-examination needed to distinguish between actual insights and legacy beliefs from an older time. I believe that if this is done, there is nothing really incompatible between the truths of spiritual insights and scientific knowledge of the world.
8)
What about all the extra-ordinary claims (like you can live a 1000 years, fly etc.)?
Do not believe extra-ordinary claims unless you get extra-ordinary evidence. Fishing IS a legitimate activity even if half the claims of what fishermen say they had caught in the good old days need to be treated with a dose of skepticism.
What do you think?
I'll take a shot. I will say that I don't agree with how you've phrased some of these objections, since a lot of them unnecessarily create burdens of proof or don't characterize what I think the actual objections are, but I'll try and explain why.
1) I would rephrase this as "Mystical experiences are subjective and hence are not objectively verifiable." Your tree example therefore fails, because we can objectively verify that trees exist. If you then want to attribute mystical properties to that tree that we cannot objectively verify,
then I will not particularly believe you, because there is no demonstration tethering that claim to demonstrable reality.
2) Again, it's better to say, "There is no objective, empirical, or demonstrable evidence that any entity is causing these subjective experiences." You go on to say that "this does not mean that the experience is not pointing to a truth." Well, that's nice, but we can't disprove a negative. We're looking for
evidence that the experience
is pointing to a truth, because otherwise there is no reason to believe you. Math is a conceptual language. I can make up math just like I can make up a story about Klingons, and until there is evidence demonstrated in objective reality to confirm the things I've made up, we should assume they are merely imaginary and not real. The fact that I can't disprove them adds nothing to the discussion or to their credibility.
3) I think the objection stands. I don't see how your rebuttal challenged the point. Yes, there are long traditions of people believing things that are apparently only imaginary, and passing those ideas down to other people who also believe these imaginary things, and categorizing the types of things they imagine. I don't see any justification that their ideas correspond to reality, nor do I see any justification for thinking any of them have "expertise" to tell other people what they can or can't imagine.
4) I don't think this is a valid objection. There are people who can taste flavors that others can't due to their genetics. Likewise, some ethnic groups can see farther into the UV or infrared light spectrum than most other humans. In these cases, we can design experiments that objectively test and demonstrate these facts. There have been no objective tests or demonstrations showing that mystical experiences correspond to anything in reality besides the propensity for human emotions, imagination, and group hysteria, or drug-induced chemical changes to our brains that changes our mental state temporarily. These are all related to conceptualizations in our brain, aka imagination.
5) Again, not really a well-structured objection. If something is vague and unfalsifiable, it doesn't mean it's false. It just means it's not verifiable and therefore doesn't warrant belief. Your following explanation makes a genetic fallacy, namely that if an initial idea leads to the consideration and development of other true ideas, then the first idea must be true. This does not logically follow.
6) I agree with your objection to this argument. However, the evidence merely shows that there are benefits to belonging to a social in-group where people support each other throughout their lives, and benefits to exercise and personal introspection. These benefits accrue no matter the underlying belief involved, whether it is mystical, naturalistic, or entirely mundane like a social group of sports fans. The benefits therefore do not support the particular beliefs, except insofar as the beliefs psychologically motivate the behavior. Again, nothing here supports any supernatural, mystical, or theistic claims.
7) Science makes no absolute claims about reality, nor does it prove things. Currently, there is no scientific evidence that specifically supports mystical, supernatural, or theistic claims. You point out that many such claims are not incompatible with science, and this presents a good opportunity to educate you about the scientific method and what makes good epistemology. Due to the
problem of underdetermination, an infinite number of different explanations can sufficiently explain any current or past data; any can be
compatible with all observations and data. I could say a devious alien is tricking everyone who claims to have mystical experiences, by sometimes teleporting an undetectable object into their brain to trick them into thinking they're connecting with some presence or substance outside of their mind, but it's just a chemical manipulation caused by the alien object. This explanation is not inconsistent with the entire history of mysticism. And yet do we have any reason to believe it? No. I could imagine an infinite number of similar explanations that would be consistent with everything we see in past and present reality, but that consistency gives zero evidence they are in fact real. In the same way, there isn't any reason to believe ancient claims about superstition, imaginary attributions of emotional experiences, etc, until it is verified by science. And based on induction and all the observable patterns of human progress in knowledge, the older a "legacy belief" is, the more likely it is to be wrong.
The scientific method introduces
novel, future-testable predictions. Instead of post hoc rationalization to come up with a self-consistent explanation of past or present data, it forces us to test our conceptual models of reality against new predictions that have never been tested before. If such tests then produce the new evidence your model predicted, then this is very good evidence that your explanatory model is the real one, as opposed to the infinite other explanations we can merely imagine. So far, no such testable predictions have been confirmed for any supernatural models. Mysticism is an untested hypothesis at best, and very possibly incompatible with science if no such test can even be proposed.
8) I think what you're trying to say here is, "What about the apparent tendency for humans to make up stories, exaggerate the details over time, and then subsequently believe these exaggerations in later generations when the original true details have been lost?" I think this is a good argument against mystical experiences being more than subjective feelings in our brains. If you lower your evidentiary standard enough to belief mystical claims, then in order to be intellectually consistent you would then need to accept most other supernatural claims, many of which are contradictory. This would be incoherent and irrational.
