"… The study of mystical experience is a respectable enterprise. William James took it seriously, as did later philosophers and psychologists, including W. T Stace, the teacher of John Rawls, who taught Tom Nagel. (Apparently, mysticism skips a generation.) Studies of LSD and psilocybin sometimes use the Mystical Experience Questionnaire, inspired by Stace. A strong predictor of long-term benefits from psychedelic use, statisticians have found, is whether one has something like an experience of God—though it remains unclear whether this is correlation or causation. Perhaps both peak-experience and long-term mood improvement are effects of a common cause: the neural plasticity psychedelic drugs inspire.
Even if they are psychologically real, and psychologically beneficial, though, peak-experiences may not be veridical. My pale approximation wasn't: it represented a force pulling me into space, my legs dangling in the void—but gravity was not, in fact, reversed.
What about the more abstract content of full-fledged peak-experience: reality as an integrated whole, independent of us, and perfectly good? That this experience is, in Maslow's words, "self-validating," that it feels as true as the perception of one's hand in front of one's face, proves nothing. Still, there's reason to be empiricist: to take experience at face value, in the absence of grounds for doubt. This is the attitude James, and perhaps Maslow, brings to peak-experience. Maybe we should think of reality as an integrated whole, independent of us—unless there's reason to think otherwise.
The problem is with the ethical content of peak-experience: the sense that nothing truly bad can happen, that the problem of suffering and injustice has, somehow, been solved. It's not that one could not experience this—perhaps one can—but that the experience has no more weight than my experience of gravity reversed. Which is to say: whatever weight it has is outweighed by evidence to the contrary. Life is hard.
Though perhaps I'm being unfair. After all, I've confessed that I have no first-hand knowledge of peak-experience: I don't really know what it's like. If I did, I might be able see directly how it answers the problem of evil—even if the answer cannot be expressed in words…"
—Kieran Setiya
https://open.substack.com/pub/ksetiya/p/shall-all-manner-of-thing-be-well?r=35ogp&utm_medium=ios&utm_campaign=post
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