Noa Latham works primarily in the fields of metaphysics and the philosophy of mind and has written on laws of nature, causation, the mind-body problem, consciousness, free will, and meditation. His current research on mystical experiences focuses on the concept of a mystical experience and its operationalisation in questionnaires, their epistemic import, and their psychological and ethical value. He received his Ph.D in philosophy at U.C. Berkeley supervised by Donald Davidson and is currently Associate Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the University of Calgary.
Colloquium Presentation: 16 June 2023 – 2.30-4pm (WS 105)
The Value of Mystical Experience
In this talk I take a critical look at some retrospective and prospective studies of the value of mystical experiences. A question arises as to whether the lasting benefits found in many of these studies all stem from a comforting delusion due to the experience involving a probably false nonphysicalistic metaphysical belief. I suggest how empirical data can be used to discover ways mystical experiences could have benefits when they don’t involve nonphysicalistic beliefs. I argue that fine-grained information about the mystical experience, including what metaphysical belief if any it embodied, and about specific beneficial features could establish correlations and assist with explanations of these benefits. Existing studies do not pursue such potential correlations, though I argue that in some cases it would have been possible to do so from their raw data, and that this would be an interesting goal for future studies.