The Science of Consciousness and Mystical Experience: An Argument for Radical Empiricism

Recent findings in neuroscience, psychology, and evolutionary biology challenge the dominant neo-Kantian theory of consciousness, which holds that concepts and language are necessary foundations for consciousness. Evidence indicates emotion is more fundamental to consciousness than previously thought, and language plays a less foundational role. These developments support radical empiricism, which acknowledges nonlinguistic experience and treats emotional and qualitative aspects of experience as irreducible to discursive foundations. Radical empiricism thus offers a more accurate understanding of human consciousness and a better explanation for mystical experience, with implications for cross-cultural similarities and the veridicality of such experiences.

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Abstract

Recent evidence in neuroscience and psychology militates against the dominant theory of consciousness that has typically been used in explaining mystical experience—a neo-Kantian model that emphasizes concepts and language as the necessary foundations of consciousness. Findings in neuroanatomy, psychology, and evolutionary biology indi-cate that emotion is more fundamental to consciousness than previously suspected, and that language does not play as foundational a role in human consciousness as has been widely believed. These developments suggest that radical empiricism—in acknowledging the possibility of nonlinguistic experience and in construing emotional/qualitative aspects of experience as nonreducible to discursive foundations—represents a more accurate understanding of the nature of human consciousness, and therefore offers a better explanation for the character of mystical experience. This perspective also has implications for the possibility of cross-cultural similarities in mystical experience and the question of the veridicality of mystical experience. SINCE THE LATE 1970S, the majority of scholars studying mystical experience have adopted a neo-Kantian epistemology which assumes that consciousness is fundamentally linguistic and conceptual in nature, and