by Nevermark | 2026-01-23 21:29:46+00:00
I think it pays off to treat unexplained widely perceived mystical things as real phenomena, I.e. genuine experiences, and go from there scientifically.

The conflict between subjective and objective phenomena is alleviated simply by recognizing subjective experience as objective phenomena. Not as necessarily accurate interpretations of reality, but also as not devoid of an objective connection to reality.

History is full of psychological effects thought to be purely subjective for which we now have an objective understanding much more interesting than “those experiences are just made up”.

The brain processes information along many pathways and in complex ways. This creates all kinds of interesting effects of perception, many not experienced by everyone.

A really good example is people who “see vibrations and colorful auras”. We now know there is a large class of effects given the umbrella name of “synesthesia”. In these cases, pre-awareness or sub-awareness information is combined in the brain, in a way not common to most people, and encoded into a directly perceived form.

For the person with one of these effects, the perception is very real.

But the effect is often more interesting than a different sensory/conscious encoding of reality.

For instance, many people, due to early childhood trauma or divergent development, innately process social information very early in their perception pathways. They pick up on micro-gestures, perceived intentions, hints of people’s characters in a pre-conscious way that they experience as direct perception.

Often this came about due to basic psychological function being tuned for an uncommon level of social negotiation demands and social threat preparedness, from birth.

I am very close with a “highly sensitive person” (psychological technical term) who also has color-social synesthesia.

She absolutely “sees” auras and vibrations around people and has since her earliest memory. This is as real to her as the emotional responses most of us have mixed into our perceptions of music.

She can’t unsee these effects any more than most people could go-music-affect blind at will. But she spent her childhood being bullied for her “strange”, “weird”, “stupid”, processing and reactions, to a level and form of information people around her couldn’t see.

But her differences are not just a curiosity, they are very adaptive for her. She sees a visual representation of information generated by her hyper alert pre-conscious social mind directly. Essentially she has an unusually effective social co-processor/pre-processor most of us do not have.

I have been simply amazed on too many occasions to count, at how quickly she picks up on people’s intentions, character traits, or current situational psychology. Such as stress about something unrelated to the moment, and any behavior I could see.

She is not always right in interpretation. And the fact that to her, she perceives many of these subtleties encoded as something clearly seen can make it hard for her to accept a different interpretation without some good alternate evidence.

But generally speaking she is a wonder at low latency high bandwidth personal interpretation.

I feel absolutely blind compared to her, even in situations where I am paying close attention to behavior and cues.

Since I respected her experiences from the time we first met (even though I initially assumed there was a lot of “pure” subjectivity and wishful thinking going on), and brought up the scientific view of understanding phenomena as complementary to perception, not anti-mystical, we got along well. We routinely talk about many things back and forth in mystical vs. scientific forms, with the assumption there is only temporary, never inherent, inherent conflict.

Which is really fun. Her mystical mind and her perception of the world is beautiful and functional in ways I would never have imagined without our rapport.

I think scientists make a big mistake when they approach mystical views from a science competitive stance. Especially perceptions that are common to many. There is likely it or only a scientific explanation, for those subjective perceptions, but interesting benefits associated with the value that people with these perceptions place on them.

Recognizing when there is value makes a dual but consistent mystical/scientific view more accurate and more palatable to people who otherwise have seen science practiced as a selective reality ideology.

The internal mind, relative to our physical processing machinery, is a first class world, for exploration, discovery, and surprising explanations. That it can operate by very different rules from non-psychological artifacts just makes it more important to take seriously as a first class realm.