But can it philosophize? (Rhetorical question)

"A student shares his iPad screen with OpenAI's new AI model GPT-4o, and the AI speaks and helps the student learn in real-time.

The world just changed forever. Every student will now have his own personalized tutor."

[ 🎥: @openai ]

https://www.threads.net/@evolving.ai/post/C666S8sIYCw/?xmt=AQGzBf4B58Hj1X6DZw8sqUQ3tlMkhr-5x2eoWvCMkBZ4Ag

Possibilism & hope

"…I share the view that a Trump election would pose immense damage to American political and legal systems. But in the scientific world we would continue to move forward with new vaccines for breast cancer, new drugs to combat obesity and new CRISPR gene-editing techniques to treat sickle cell and other diseases.

How can we weigh democratic decline against lives saved through medical progress? Of course we can't. As my intellectual hero, Isaiah Berlin, might say, they are incommensurate yardsticks — but that does not mean that they are irrelevant to our well-being.

And no one can accuse me of ignoring the problems that beset us at home and abroad, for they have been my career. They've left me a bit too scarred to be a classic optimist. Hans Rosling, a Swedish development expert, used to say that he wasn't an optimist but a possibilist. In other words, he saw better outcomes as possible if we worked to achieve them. That makes sense to me, and it means replacing despair with guarded hope.

This isn't hope as a naïve faith that things will somehow end up OK. No, it is a somewhat battered hope that improvements are possible if we push hard enough.

In 2004 I introduced Times readers to the story of an illiterate woman named Mukhtar Mai, whom I met in the remote village of Meerwala in Pakistan. She had been gang-raped on order of a village council, as punishment for a supposed offense by her brother, and she was then expected to disappear in shame or kill herself. Instead, she prosecuted her attackers, sent them to prison and then used her compensation money to start a school in her village.

Instead of giving in to despair, Mukhtar nursed a hope that education would chip away at the misogyny and abuse of women that had victimized her and so many others. Then she enrolled the children of her rapists in her school.

Mukhtar taught me that we humans are endowed with strength — and hope — that, if we recognize it and flex it, can achieve the impossible."

Nicholas Kristof 

Chasing Hope

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/09/opinion/journalism-reporting-progress.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

Reasons to Have Hope

"More than three-quarters of Americans saythe United States is headed in the wrong direction. This year, for the first time, America dropped out of the top 20 happiest countries in the World Happiness Report. Some couples are choosing not to have children because of climate threats. And this despair permeates not just the United States, but much of the world.

This moment is particularly dispiriting because of the toxic mood. Debates about the horrifying toll of the war in Gaza have made the atmosphere even more poisonous, as the turmoil on college campuses underscores. We are a bitterly divided nation, quick to point fingers and denounce one another, and the recriminations feed the gloom. Instead of a City on a Hill, we feel like a nation in despair — maybe even a planet in despair.

Yet that's not how I feel at all.

What I've learned from four decades of covering misery is hope — both the reasons for hope and the need for hope. I emerge from years on the front lines awed by material and moral progress, for we have the good fortune to be part of what is probably the greatest improvement in life expectancy, nutrition and health that has ever unfolded in one lifetime..."

Nick Kristof

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/09/opinion/journalism-reporting-progress.html

HDT (and WJ & Frank Bascombe) on words

But he'd still agree: Life and reality cannot and must not be reduced to "talk, talk, talk! ...words, words, words…"

"A written word is the choicest of relics. It is something at once more intimate with us and more universal than any other work of art. It is the work of art nearest to life itself."
Henry David Thoreau, who died on this day in 1862

 

It’s gonna take way more than a day

"Saturday, May 4, is the National Day of Reason!

With Christian nationalist influence in Congress, and with the threat to our judiciary looming large, it has never been so important to affirm our commitment to the constitutional wall of separation between religion and government, and to celebrate reason as the guiding principle of our secular democracy. Learn more"

https://www.nationaldayofreason.org/about

The Holdovers

 We saw this last night. Good message for all teachers, especially those on the edge of burnout. Young people really are our future. We need to prepare them for it. And trust them.

Hoping for a sea-change

My mostly-retired philosopher pals, having (like my semi-retired minister pal) too much time on their hands, started another too-early-in-the-day text thread.

The discussion of academic presidents who are also humanities scholars led one of us to say "there won't be many Shakespeare scholars in [U.S.] presidential suites in the future..."

That led me to point out that POTUS likes to quote Seamus Heaney:

History says, don't hope
On this side of the grave.

But then, once in a lifetime
The longed-for tidal wave

Of justice can rise up,
And hope and history rhyme.

So hope for a great sea-change…

Another of us said that's pretty highbrow.

And someone said something about Ted Lasso.

So I said Heaney's not so highbrow (Joe's definitely not), his poem can be rephrased in Ted Talk:

"So I've been hearing this phrase y'all got over here that I ain't too crazy about. 'It's the hope that kills you.' Y'all know that? I disagree, you know? I think it's the lack of hope that comes and gets you. See, I believe in hope. I believe in belief."

Ted's pretty wise:

"What I can tell you is that with the exception of the wit and wisdom of Calvin and Hobbes, not much lasts forever."

But he's a highly improbable sort of coach, apart from being hired to lead a professional English football club when his only experience is High School (American) football:

"For me, success is not about the wins and losses. It's about helping these young fellas be the best versions of themselves on and off the field."

Nick Saban said that too, said my pal the 'bama fan. But of course his alums had a different notion. 

The Battle for Attention

The pre-eminent philosopher/psychologist of flights and perchings would be fascinated by the "Birds" who make a deliberate effort to guide and manage their thoughts and "reveries"…

"…In many people's view, it is William James, Henry's brother, who supplied the first comprehensive American model of attention. In a chapter devoted to the subject in his "Principles of Psychology" (1890), James portrayed attention as a restless thing. When we think we're holding it, our mind is winging out on errands and returning; sustained attention is, in effect, a stream of attentional moments. Thus, despite the complexity and multiplicity of the world, "there is before the mind at no time a plurality of ideas." (This insight went on to frame James's philosophical work.) When we look at a statue, the stone doesn't change, but the art work we see does, because we are continually noticing different things. James's model pushes against the idea that attention is something you pay out, free of wandering thoughts and individual reverie..." Nathan Heller

“Rain”

The Beatles tribute show Saturday night at Belmont's Fisher Center was great fun. Beautiful performance space, great acoustics, colorful costumes, dazzling multimedia, timeless music accurately replicated. They showed us, as the song says, "everything is the same"… well, not really. But still  a fabulous trip to yesterday and motivation to read Sir Paul's Life...

Sunday inspiration

Steve Gleason’s good life

What's the last great book you read?

"When I was diagnosed [with ALS], one of the first questions I asked in a journal entry was, "Can I discover peace of mind, even if this disease destroys my body?" That inquiry has been a guiding light for me the past 13 years. "The Good Life: Lessons From the World's Longest Scientific Study of Happiness," by Robert Waldinger and Marc Schulz, has real-life stories I could relate to, providing insights which have helped illuminate the path for me to live longer, and be grateful and content..." nyt

==

Also...

An indulgent thought at semester's end

But it's also the thought we began with, and will begin with again next semester.

Socrates said it first, long before the Devi'ls Dictionary said it this way, when he heard what the oracle had said about him:

"Education: That which discloses to the wise and disguises from the foolish their lack of understanding." — Ambrose Bierce

Yes, Homer. But...

There is also a time to be wordlessly wakeful and aware.

"There is a time for many words, and there is also a time for sleep." Odyssey, XI, l. 379

Less talk, more attention. Then, words. Only then.

Meliorism: unfamiliar formulation

"Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen."*

No. Things worked for are the substance of hope. Faith is the willingness to work, in the spirit of hope, to create evidence in support of the vision of things not seen.

*Bartlett's Familiar Quotations: https://a.co/1gz0zsY

The Fate of Earth Day

...liberals have come to take as a core creed the urgent need to reckon with global warming, and limit carbon emissions. To turn concern into action requires politics. The science of carbon emissions is there. The politics is not. On its anniversary, Earth Day is worth not just celebrating but also studying—as a story with political lessons. ♦

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/04/15/when-the-earth-moved?_gl=1*eh8bq7*_up*MQ..&gclid=05dc19316ca81fce994f7f12f1af4029&gclsrc=3p.ds

Peter Attia’s Quest to Live Long and Prosper

Attia's point ("How to Die in Good Health") isn't longevity per se, I think, it's to feel good today and plan to feel good again tomorrow. And to know you'll be ready, whenever the time comes, to rejoin Russell's great sea of "universal life" (which really you're already doing, if you're doing it right). The point is to "live long and prosper" right now. Like Annie Savoy said, "I mean William Blake!

To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour...

Attia "compares healthy aging to investing in retirement: contribute what you can, whether it’s a daily walk or an extra half hour of sleep, and the benefits may compound over time."

As we grasp that our days are limited, we seem to abdicate our need for control; we may try to close the gap between what we want and what we have. Healthy aging seems to require a shift in mind-set as much as a shift in muscle mass...
while I’m here, I want to know that I gave it my all,” he went on. “We have this one shot. Wouldn’t it be a shame if we didn’t make the most of it?”

If "the average American celebrates just one healthy birthday after the age of sixty-five," well, I'm already doing twice as well.

Humility

We live in such angry times in part because we live in such unhumble ones, as I note in this excerpt, published in The New York Times today, from my new book, "The Age of Grievance." -Frank Bruni

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/20/opinion/students-humility-american-politics.html

Daniel Dennett (1942-2024)

Remembering speaking with Dennet in Chicago at the APA February 2020, Told him I appreciated his email correspondence back in the 90s (and then later when I asked if he could arrange a meeting with Dawkins). Helped him figure out how to use the APA app, and sat across the aisle from him listening to Philip Kitcher and Martha Nussbaum at that meeting. 

"...I saw with greater clarity than ever before in my life that when I say "Thank goodness!" this is not merely a euphemism for "Thank God!" (We atheists don't believe that there is any God to thank.) I really do mean thank goodness! There is a lot of goodness in this world, and more goodness every day, and this fantastic human-made fabric of excellence is genuinely responsible for the fact that I am alive today. It is a worthy recipient of the gratitude I feel today, and I want to celebrate that fact here and now…" Thank Goodness! 

==

After decades of enthusiastically following AI’s development, Dennett published a brief, unequivocal essay in The Atlantic earlier this year, “The Problem With Counterfeit People,” arguing that “creating counterfeit digital people” — known as deepfakes — could “destroy our civilization. . . . By allowing the most economically and politically powerful people, corporations, and governments to control our attention, these systems will control us.” Humanity’s future, he believes, depends on strict regulation: he wants every AI-generated thing to have some kind of watermark, so we can tell the difference between fake and real. Meanwhile, he’s taken to warning about the gaps in our understanding of the algorithms that drive machine learning. “Don’t worry about whether it is conscious or not, don’t worry about whether it’s alive or not,” he told me. “Worry about the fact that it can replicate and hence evolve independently of us. That’s what’s scary, because you can’t predict the mutations.”

…

“I think that my career has been all about opening philosophers’ minds to the facts they need to know if they are going to avoid the great foible of philosophy, which is mistaking failures of imagination for insights into necessity.”

He paused again, then said he particularly liked the last part of that sentence. “Your imagination is not gonna get any better if you don’t get out there and learn stuff,” he said. Then he repeated one of his more famous lines: “What you can imagine depends on what you know.”

“So maybe,” I asked, “you occasionally need to replace the footing on the barn?”

“Yeah,” he said…

https://downeast.com/arts-leisure/philosopher-daniel-dennett-on-the-illusion-of-consciousness/


Daniel Dennett’s Science of the Soulhttps://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/03/27/daniel-dennetts-science-of-the-soul

Dennett versus Searle https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1995/12/21/the-mystery-of-consciousness-an-exchange/

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/19/books/daniel-dennett-dead.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare


…If we can’t say exactly how we think, then how well do we know ourselves? In an essay titled “The Self as a Center of Narrative Gravity,” the philosopher Daniel Dennett argued that a layer of fiction is woven into what it is to be human. In a sense, fiction is flawed: it’s not true. But, when we open a novel, we don’t hurl it to the ground in disgust, declaring that it’s all made-up nonsense; we understand that being made up is actually the point. Fiction, Dennett writes, has a deliberately “indeterminate” status: it’s true, but only on its own terms. The same goes for our minds. We have all sorts of inner experiences, and we live through and describe them in different ways—telling one another about our dreams, recalling our thoughts, and so on. Are our descriptions and experiences true or fictionalized? Does it matter? It’s all part of the story.

Stories aren’t real, and yet they’re meaningful; we tell different stories about our minds, as we should, because our minds are different. The story I tell myself about my own thinking is useful to me. It helps me think, by giving me a handle on my mind when thinking gets slippery. The other day, I got stuck on a problem that troubled me. So I went for a swim, hoping to think it through. I wore a wetsuit against the cold water, and at first focussed only on the sensation of cold, and on steadying my breathing. But eventually I warmed up and relaxed. I treaded water a little way out from shore, buoyed by the waves, and prepared to think about my problem; I turned my mind toward it while I watched a seabird float nearby. Nothing happened for a while. I watched the bird, the clouds, the silver water. Then I sensed a thought in need of expression, as I’d known I would. I cleared my throat while the bird flew away. ♦︎

How Should We Think About Our Different Styles of Thinking?https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/01/16/how-should-we-think-about-our-different-styles-of-thinking

The Internet’s New Favorite Philosopher

A "philosopher of the moment"… 

"He is not on social platforms; he told El País in a rare interview that he writes three sentences a day and spends most of his time caring for his plants and playing Bach and Schumann on the piano…"

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/infinite-scroll/the-internets-new-favorite-philosopher?utm_source=threads&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=tny&utm_social-type=owned

Life = momentum

"Energy and matter didn’t dissipate after the Big Bang, didn’t flatten out like a puddle into homogenous atomic soup, but clumped and hiccupped into structure. Stars formed, and planets, and surfaces, and seas. That disequilibrium eventually led to us as well.

From this vantage, the question of whether we’re alone could almost become moot. We’re not alone because we’re not separate from the swirl of a galaxy’s arms or the way wind catches dust in a gyre. We’re no more an anomaly than an atom is. How could we ever consider ourselves alone?

But at the same time, life is also something apart from the rest. A protein is more than an atom, a cell is more than a protein—some thresholds are clearly being crossed. Even if the lines are arbitrary, the differences are not.

When we pursue knowledge about the origin of life, we’re thinking about what life is. Is life self-replicating information? Is life a new way for the universe to organize energy? Is it, as Carl Sagan and others have put it, a way for the universe to experience—and hope to understand—itself?

It’s all of those, of course. Life is information and energy and awareness. It’s a squirreling away of entropy, so that one bit of ordered matter can look at another and try to know it. It’s momentum rolling, for a moment, uphill."

--"The Possibility of Life: Science, Imagination, and Our Quest for Kinship in the Cosmos" by Jaime Green: https://a.co/239Dkpi

Coming summer '24

  

MALA 6050 Americana: Streams of Experience in American Culture B term (7/1-8/9) web assisted (Tuesdays 6-9:10pm in JUB 202) w/Phil Oliver

Cosmic philosophy

Sagan: the stars are in us, we are star-stuff contemplating the stars, a way for the universe to know itself.

 

Tyson: The cosmic perspective not only embraces our genetic kinship with all life on Earth but also values our chemical kinship with any yet-to-be discovered life in the universe, as well as our atomic kinship with the universe itself.

 

Aurelius: Watch the stars, and see yourself running with them.

Blowing smoke

For just over a week, Mount Etna, one of Europe's most active volcanoes, has been spewing circular, mostly white smoke rings into the skies over Sicily… https://nyti.ms/3Je4FKO

Eclipse or lecture

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Phil Oliver (@osopher)

https://youtu.be/tfnav2afQnI

Healthy Minds, Flourishing Lives

 

 

POSTSCRIPT. It was pleasing to receive a group email from Dr. Evins of the Honors College, at semester's end, thanking all the faculty participants for their contributions to the Mental Health semester series. These remarks in particular gratified: 

"...It was a really really really good series, thanks to all the wonderful presenters. Truly excellent... Phil touched on so much. He brought the classics and the wisdom of the ages directly to the students in one meta Philosophy lecture. It was powerful. The students will have much to say about the many points he touched on in his lecture. And also about going outside to walk the dog :) ...Also, Tom stood up for cat culture as personal therapy, balancing out Phil very nicely. (My husband is an Epictetus guy. I myself brought Epictetus home from both Phil and Tom.)"

Cat culture? Well, whatever works. 

 

MTSU Honors Lecture Series Spring 2024, here are the links to videos from each lecture; some videos are better than others depending on who was there to be the videographer!, but much was, happily, captured:

1/22 M. Evins, Honors Intro

1/29 Michelle Stevens, MTSU Center for Fairness, Justice, and Equity

2/5 Mary Kaye Anderson, MTSU Counseling Services

2/12 Rudy Dunlap, MTSU Health and Human Performance

2/26 Seth Marshall, MTSU Psychology

3/4 Spring Break – No Classes

3/11 Sarah Harris, MTSU Nutrition and Food Science

3/18 Kent Syler, MTSU Political Science

3/25 Rev. Susan Pendleton Jones, Belmont University

4/1 Bill Dobbins, NAMI-TN

4/8 Phil Oliver, MTSU Philosophy

4/15 Honors Student Presentations: Emilie Conners, Eli Ward, Madalyn Dye

4/22 Tom Brinthaupt, MTSU Psychology

Nearly eclipsed

 It will almost eclipse my Honors Lecture...

Across North America on Monday, the moon will materialize and eat into the yellow orb of the sun, casting a shadow over a swath of Earth below, causing a total solar eclipse and reminding all in its path of our planet’s place in the cosmos.

Where the weather cooperates, millions of people will behold the disorienting, disquieting wonder of darkness in daytime. They will experience it on the beaches of Mexico and the plains of Texas; throughout the Midwest, New York State and New England; and across pockets of eastern Canada, from the steeples and spires of Montreal to the rugged coastline of Newfoundland... (continues)

Behind eclipse glasses or other safe means of viewing the phenomenon, they will watch the moon’s shadow grow until the light is extinguished.

In some places, it will be dim for as long as four and a half minutes, and in those moments eclipse viewers may gasp. They may shout. They may clap. They may even cry.

At this moment, it is dark in the South Pacific Ocean, where the eclipsed sun will first rise. As you prepare for this event to glide into your area, here’s what to know:

• The partial eclipse will first make landfall in North America near Mazatlán, Mexico, around 12:51 p.m. Eastern. It will reach the edge of Texas, near Eagle Pass, around 1:10 p.m. Canada will catch its first glimpse at 3:12 p.m. The Canadian province of Newfoundland will be the last major piece of land to see the total eclipse, which will conclude there around 3:45 p.m.

• The eclipse will carve a southwest-to-northeast path, sweeping through San Antonio at 2:33 p.m., Dallas at 2:40 p.m., Little Rock, Ark., at 2:51 p.m., Indianapolis at 3:05 p.m., Cleveland at 3:13 p.m. and Buffalo at 3:18 p.m.

• While the eclipse is most impressive when viewed at totality, hundreds of millions of people may experience a partial eclipse. In Chicago, the sun will be about 94 percent obscured. In Boston, 93 percent. In New York (around 3:25 p.m. Eastern time) and Philadelphia, there will be a 90 percent eclipse.

• Even the most devoted eclipse chasers know that they are at the mercy of the clouds. The New York Times’s weather data team has been tracking the forecast, which showed that nearly everyone along the path in the United States will have at least some chance of clouds obscuring their view. Danger of severe storms also compounded that concern in many parts of Texas. But there were some bright spots on the eclipse path, including Maine and other parts of New England, and optimism expressed for parts of Arkansas through Cleveland.

• In the United States, about 32 million people live along the eclipse’s path, and countless more will be driving toward it (and, eventually, away from it), creating gridlock. Allow extra time, and lots of it.

• It is never safe to look at the sun without protective eyewear. Throughout the partial stage of the eclipse, use eclipse glasses or try to construct a pinhole viewer to observe the shadow over the sun indirectly. It is safe to look at the fully eclipsed sun only for the duration of totality.

• The next opportunity to see a total solar eclipse in the 48 contiguous U.S. states and Canada isn’t until 2044. To see a total eclipse before then, you’ll need to travel.

• 
  

The Sun, the Shadow, and the Unselved Self: Helen Macdonald on Eclipses as an Antidote to Ideologies of Otherness and a Portal to Human Connection – The Marginalian

"…And then something else happens, a thing that still makes my heart rise in my chest and eyes blur, even in recollection. For it turns out there's something even more affecting than watching the sun disappear into a hole. Watching the sun climb out of it…"

https://www.themarginalian.org/2020/09/15/helen-macdonald-vesper-flights-eclipse/

Why I Love Baseball

My conference presentation today in Ottawa. I'll be lucky, as usual, to get through a fraction of the slides. But that's okay, I enjoyed making them.

Natural poetry

How to Breathe With the Trees

"… Writing a poem might seem like the least practical way imaginable to address melting glaciers, bleaching coral, drought, pollution and the like, never mind the overarching catastrophes of climate change and mass extinction. What can language do to save us now? What can something so small as a poem possibly do to save us now?

The answer lies in poetry's great intimacy, its invitation to breathe together. We read a poem, and we take a breath each time the poet takes a breath. We read a nature poem, and we take a breath with the trees. When the trees — and the birds and the clouds and the ants and even the bats and the rat snakes — become a part of us, too, maybe that's when we will finally begin to care enough to save them."

Margaret Renkl
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/01/opinion/ada-limon-poet-nature.html?unlocked_article_code=1.hU0.lOZT.XzlSs8kIsJDE&smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare&ugrp=m

Breaking out

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Phil Oliver (@osopher)

INVITED SOCIETY: WILLIAM JAMES SOCIETY CHAIR: Phil Oliver, Middle Tennessee State University PRESENTERS: Phil Oliver, Middle Tennessee State University *"In Memoriam: the Legacy of John Lachs (1934-2023)" Randall Albright, Oklahoma State University [?] "Founding the William James Society" Justin Ivory, University of Minnesota [prizewinning essay] "Towards a Jamesian Constructivism" Sami Pihlström, University of Helsinki [presidential address] "Philosophical Temperaments, Freedom, and Responsibility"

“We get to die-that makes us the lucky ones”

"The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia."

Richard Dawkins, who turns 83 today, on the luckiness of death – superb, life-affirming read for anyone willing to stretch their mind beyond our intuitive human perspectives.

https://www.themarginalian.org/2021/07/25/richard-dawkins-death/

https://www.threads.net/@mariapopova/post/C4_cHhxPmR9/?xmt=AQGzsRHZwdWqHIIWkH56G4O4i4RyKWgrijfsm3N_eBMtEQ

The Anxious Generation

The book is out today.

"…childhood underwent a "great rewiring" in the blink of an eye, between 2010 and 2015. The result was a new "phone-based childhood," which altered the developmental pathways of children and adolescents, bringing them minimal benefits while reducing the time spent on beneficial real-world activities such as sleeping, playing with friends, talking with adults, reading books, focusing on one task at a time, or even just daydreaming...

https://open.substack.com/pub/jonathanhaidt/p/its-time-to-free-the-anxious-generation?r=35ogp&utm_medium=ios

“Glorious glimpses”

A marvelous tribute from John’s old(est?) student, shared yesterday by the Boston conference organizers. 

Herman Saatkamp obit quotes JL’s ILWL: “The best thing to do with old age is to accept it and to enjoy the glorious glimpses of life it presents. Up to a point at least, the mind rises to the mountains as the body goes down.” And he closes with “Mastery in life is to remember death and yet live joyously.”

Spirituality from a humanist perspective

Spent a delightful afternoon yesterday at Hattie B's and Bobby's Dairy Dip with Younger Daughter. Might even call it spiritual.

The question of humanist spirituality came up. To me, it means being gratefully aware that I'm alive,  breathing, thinking, enjoying, loving… as Marc reminds us to remind ourselves every morning.

And it means what Andrew Copson said:

A vast literature both popular and academic has investigated and promoted the concept of a materialist and non-theistic spirituality. Five aspects emerge from those various works that also accord with what I personally would describe as a spiritual experience. So, for this humanist at least, spiritual experiences, in no particular order:

1. are positive experiences – and at the more powerful end of experiences in general, causing a surge of feeling; 
2. are fleeting – and we become conscious of them only when they are underway or are over; 
3. are personal and individual experiences – they're subjectively experienced even when they're shared;
4. are not not intellectual or rational experiences – although they occur within ourselves and minds, they're not experiences to which you can ascribe any meaningful analysis (neither are they irrational experiences!). 
5. take you (metaphorically or imaginatively) outside of yourself – you feel as if you are connected to something bigger or more than yourself in some way.

All of that applies, accompanied by deep gratitude for the joy of an ongoing relationship with someone I've known, admired, and loved her whole life. As WJ said, this beloved incarnation too was among "matter's possibilities." It "lends itself to all life's purposes" and delights.  Pragmatism III

And don't underestimate the spirit of ice cream following hot chicken on a perfect spring afternoon.