Early/late Steiner

[Rodriel Gabrez]

I wonder whether the whole problem of verification is, in a sense, orthogonal to the purpose of Steiner's spiritual-scientific output. It may arise because we are interpreting the contents of spiritual science primarily as facts and thereby importing the epistemological requirements appropriate to one mode of cognition into another.

"Fact" may simply be the linguistic cloak that modern consciousness is compelled to use in order to communicate what is actually closer to an enzyme. Steiner has to say things in forms like "X happened," "Y existed," or "Z is the activity of such-and-such a Being," because our language is overwhelmingly adapted to representing objects, events, and causal relations. But it does not follow that the primary purpose of these statements is to populate an otherwise familiar world-picture with additional, supersensible objects and events.

I like to view the "facts" of spiritual science as icons of activity. They are conceptual-imaginative precipitations of impulses and streams which cannot appear within ordinary intellectual consciousness in their native form. Their primary value therefore lies not in our possessing the correct representation, but in what happens when the representation is actively taken up into thinking. In that sense they are, again, more like enzymes than pieces of information: they are meant to catalyze an activity.

If so, asking how such a content can be "verified" may sometimes involve an analogous category error to what we find in the "hard problem of consciousness." The problem is generated in part by the conceptual architecture we bring to it. We first imagine spiritual cognition as perception of a hidden world of quasi-objects, analogous to sensory objects, and then naturally ask why independently trained clairvoyants cannot inspect those objects and converge upon the same descriptions. But perhaps this already spatializes and objectifies precisely what spiritual cognition is attempting to approach differently.

This does not, however, mean that anything Steiner says can be protected from criticism by declaring it "spiritual" whenever difficulties arise. We have to distinguish epistemic registers, although even these registers cannot simply be treated as timelessly self-identical.

To whatever extent a spiritual-scientific statement enters the sensory-empirical register, it becomes accountable to what can actually be encountered there. If a treatment is claimed to produce a measurable physiological effect under present conditions, then present empirical methods are entirely appropriate for investigating that effect. Logical claims remain logically accountable, and claims concerning presently observable phenomena cannot be insulated from observation by appealing to their esoteric origin.

As has been pointed out here, the situation becomes considerably more complicated, however, when present empirical methods are used not merely to investigate present phenomena but to reconstruct remote phases of terrestrial or cosmic evolution. Here measurement and extrapolation have to be distinguished. A method may establish a relation with extraordinary reliability under presently given lawful conditions while its projection into another cosmic epoch presupposes that the relevant lawful conditions themselves have remained sufficiently invariant.

But, as has also been mentioned, this invariance is precisely one of the things spiritual science may call into question. If cosmic evolution includes transformations not merely of the contents appearing within nature but of the lawful conditions under which nature manifests at all, then present measurements cannot simply be projected backward indefinitely without remainder. The resulting reconstruction is not "mere observation"; it includes assumptions about the continuity of the very framework within which observation presently becomes intelligible.

This cannot become an escape hatch whereby every conflict with empirical evidence is explained away by saying that "the laws were different then." That would simply make spiritual science immune to correction. Rather, it means that the conflict itself has to be located carefully. We should ask whether an empirical finding directly contradicts something spiritual science claims should be observable under the same conditions, or whether the contradiction appears only after the empirical finding has been embedded within a reconstruction that presupposes continuity of conditions across qualitatively different epochs.

In the first case, spiritual science should simply bear the contradiction. In the second, however, the disagreement may concern something deeper than competing factual claims: it may concern whether the lawful structure disclosed by present cognition can legitimately be treated as the invariant measure of every phase of cosmic unfolding.

This is especially important because the epistemic registers themselves may be products of the differentiation being described. It's likely a mistake to imagine a timeless box called "empirical reality," another called "spiritual reality," another called "logic," and then simply sort Steiner's statements among them. The empirical register is real and binding within the conditions under which it operates. What is questionable is its elevation into an invariant ontological grammar for reality as such.

Indeed, some of Steiner's strangest cosmological pictures may have precisely the function of preventing this unconscious backward projection. A condition such as Old Saturn, for example, becomes almost nonsensical if imagined merely as a fantastically ancient physical environment governed by the categories through which present natural science organizes matter, force, organism, consciousness, space, and time. But perhaps the point of the picture is precisely to make thinking capable of approaching conditions in which these categories have not yet differentiated in their present form. Spiritual-scientific cosmology would then concern, among other things, the genesis of the very categories through which we presently construct an empirical account of cosmic history.

The spiritual content is therefore not necessarily exhausted by whatever proposition precipitates into one of our present epistemic registers. The same statement may carry an empirical implication while simultaneously functioning as an imaginative expression of an activity that cannot be reduced to that implication. A failure in one register genuinely matters within that register, but it does not automatically settle the nature or value of the originating spiritual content.

The spiritual-scientific content as spiritual-scientific content would consequently require another kind of evaluation. Not simply, "Does this sentence correspond to a hidden object in the way that an empirical proposition corresponds to a sensory state of affairs?" but something more like: What does this content do to cognition when it is actually metabolized? Does it disclose relationships that were previously unavailable? Does it make thinking increasingly capable of following processes rather than merely arranging representations? Does it illuminate otherwise disconnected phenomena without proliferating ad hoc explanations? Most importantly, does it eventually liberate the student from dependence upon the representation itself by awakening the activity of which the representation was only a carrier?

This is where morality and the person-as-instrument intersects the epistemological domain. The two, as Steiner often reminds us, are inseparable. I'd hesitate, though, to make moral purification itself a criterion of verification. Different spiritual traditions can cultivate profound moral development while articulating apparently incompatible accounts of reality. Moral development may be epistemologically indispensable insofar as the cognitive instrument is the person himself—it may reduce the distortions introduced by desire, vanity, fear, antipathy, attachment, etc.—but it cannot by itself establish the truth of a particular spiritual-scientific proposition.

Nor, from this perspective, do the differing spiritual traditions necessarily need to be conceived simply as competing inventories of claims about the same static supersensible geography. Their apparently incompatible pictures may themselves function within different streams, historical conditions, and transformations of consciousness. That possibility does not magically reconcile their contradictions, but it changes the nature of what would have to be compared. One would need to understand not merely what each picture says, but what cognitive activity it embodies, what it makes possible, and what relation that activity bears to the development of consciousness.

So perhaps the underlying misstep is to assume that spiritual science must eventually supply the modern soul (Consciousness Soul) with a new collection of sufficiently well-verified facts. It may instead be trying to transform the activity of knowing out of which our very notion of a fact arises, while leaving factual cognition completely legitimate within its proper conditions.

On this reading, the point is not ultimately to believe Steiner's pictures. Indeed, their successful use might involve their eventually becoming dispensable (a point I made a while ago, from another angle, in the Tomberg thread). There's something paradoxical about treating the contents of spiritual science as doctrines to be preserved intact in memory and defended propositionally if their intended function is to catalyze the development of a cognition capable of no longer needing them in that form. The picture has done its work when the activity it was carrying has become one's own.

This is why I'm not sure the verification problem, as presently formulated, ever quite reaches the heart of the matter. It asks whether the pictures Steiner gives us constitute reliable representations of supersensible reality. But I'd say the more fundamental question is whether they can cease being merely representations at all—whether, when properly worked with, they can become channels through which the activity they iconically express begins to participate in the inflowing and informing of our own thinking.

If that is the case, then the ultimate criterion appropriate to spiritual science would not simply be whether one has accumulated a set of correct propositions about an invisible world, but whether the supposedly spiritual "facts" have actually become active within cognition—whether the enzyme has catalyzed anything. And at that point the question is no longer simply what one knows about spiritual reality, but what one's knowing has become capable of doing.

This post seems like it might lead in fruitful directions.

You've proposed that we judge spiritual-scientific content by what it does to cognition when metabolized — whether it discloses, illuminates, follows process, and eventually becomes one's own. My difficulty is that every one of those marks is satisfied by a systematically compelling falsehood as fully as by a genuine disclosure. So the question is: can you name a single mark that a truth-catalyzing enzyme has and a falsehood-catalyzing enzyme lacks - one that is available from inside the metabolizing, without an external check? If the true enzyme and the beautifully false one both feel like illumination then we still have a problem.

Steiner's racial anthropology was fertile, integrative, category-illuminating, and internalizable - it did everything your criterion asks of genuine spiritual content - and it was false, and we know it was false only because at one edge it made a claim that could be checked, and the check failed.

I think this is a very good objection, and it makes me realize that I'm using words like “metabolize” (and perhaps even, generally, more ordinary words like “disclose,” and “illuminate”) too loosely. If by these I mean that a content becomes internally coherent, fruitful, transformative, or even experientially luminous, then I agree with you: none of that distinguishes truth from a sufficiently powerful falsehood. False systems can be extraordinarily fertile.

I'm pointing actually to something stronger, and it probably requires bringing the higher faculties themselves explicitly into the discussion.

Imagination, Inspiration, and Intuition shouldn't be understood simply as faculties which supply additional contents to consciousness. They progressively alter the relation between cognition and what is cognized. In particular, Inspiration and Intuition concern participation in the moral activity from which a content arises, rather than simply reception of a more vivid or unusual representation of that activity.

So the “mark from inside the metabolizing” that you are asking for would not be another phenomenal property of the content—something like unusual coherence, luminosity, meaningfulness, certainty, etc. It would be the degree to which the content is perceived as participating in the living activity that the faculty itself is entering.

An analogy that comes to mind is music. Imagine a burst of static occurring in the middle of a piece of otherwise conventionally harmonic music. The static is not unperceived. It may even alter one's experience of everything that follows. But it is perceived differently from a musical event because one hears the latter from within an intelligible temporal activity. Or, to use another image, a boulder placed in a brook may radically alter the movement of the water and generate all sorts of complex patterns downstream, but the boulder does not itself flow.

That's closer to what we could characterize as a “false enzyme.” It can be cognitively consequential, or even fertile in a certain limited sense, without participating in the activity it purports to express.

Of course, this immediately invites the further objection: couldn't something false simply feel as though it participates in living thinking? Couldn't one mistake the static for music?

Yes—if “living thinking” means a subjective feeling of vitality accompanying one's thoughts. But that's not what it is. The claim made by spiritual science is, again, much stronger (and consequently places a much greater burden upon it): that the formative relations themselves can progressively become perceptible. Imagination gives form (in images); Inspiration penetrates toward the activity expressing itself through form; Intuition, in Steiner's technical sense, involves participation in the being/activity itself. The higher faculties are therefore not simply sources of increasingly impressive spiritual information. They are also progressively deeper means of discriminating what is occurring within cognition.

Another analogy—perhaps a trite one, but illustrative nonetheless—could be hearing pitch. If you ask me for the “internal mark” distinguishing C from C#, I can't give you some further phenomenal criterion that hearing then checks. Hearing is the faculty within which the distinction becomes perceptible. A frequency meter can provide an external correlate, and that may be extremely useful, but it cannot substitute for the perceptual act itself.

This is why I'm not sure there can be the sort of single additional “mark” you're asking for. That formulation still seems to imagine truth as a content to which cognition applies some further criterion. What I take Steiner to be pointing toward is instead an increasing identity—or perhaps better, participation—between the activity of knowing and the activity known. The “mark” is not stamped upon the representation. It consists in the changing relation of cognition to the activity from which the representation arises.

That certainly does not make spiritual cognition infallible. Quite the opposite: one important source of error may occur precisely in the precipitation of genuine spiritual activity into conceptual representation (think of Blavatsky, for example). Someone might perceive something real and nevertheless clothe it in concepts supplied by his historical situation, personality, education, expectations, etc. This is one reason I think the distinction between epistemic registers matters so much. A spiritual perception and the empirical, historical, or conceptual proposition into which it precipitates need not possess identical epistemic status.

Where a claim genuinely enters an empirical register under conditions available to empirical investigation, I don't think spiritual provenance exempts it from empirical accountability. But neither do I think empirical falsification of some conceptual precipitation necessarily tells us, without further work, exactly what occurred at the level of the originating spiritual perception. We have to discriminate the levels rather than either immunizing the spiritual claim from criticism or assuming that the intellectual formulation exhausts the spiritual content.

I should add that I don't entirely accept your racial-anthropology example as stated. I don't regard “Steiner's racial anthropology was false” as a sufficiently discriminating characterization of the problem, and I suspect unpacking that would take us into a large and mostly separate discussion about exactly which claims are being made, at which epistemic register, and what specifically is supposed to have falsified them. I would rather not take us too far down that road.

There is, however, another reason I find the example relevant, although in almost the opposite direction. (And some here might object to my position on this, as it ultimately has to do with what one understands the mission of Anthroposophy to be and what that looks like after Steiner.) Even true spiritual content is not thereby appropriate for unrestricted public communication. If spiritual ideas really are active agents rather than inert information, then “Is it true?” cannot be the only question governing their disclosure. One must also ask what the content will do when introduced into a particular cultural-historical organism.

This introduces a moral dimension that comes after, rather than substitutes for, the epistemological one. Something may be genuinely cognized and yet be destructive when communicated to people or into circumstances incapable of receiving it appropriately. Historical conditions can also change the effects of an utterance so radically that what could once be responsibly discussed may later require a very different mode of treatment. The initiate's problem is therefore not only distinguishing truth from falsehood, but distinguishing what may be said, when, how, and to whom. Again, I know this can seem contrary to the spirit of SS as put forward by Steiner, but I think there are deep and important reasons why much of what can be disclosed should be held back according to circumstance.

I suppose this is partly why I've used the enzyme metaphor. An enzyme is not “good” simply because it is active or even because it performs its proper activity in abstraction. Its effect depends upon the organism, its location, timing, concentration, and relation to other processes. Likewise, spiritual content cannot finally be separated from the conditions of its reception.

None of this, however, gives someone who has not developed the relevant faculties an external procedure by which he can certify another person's spiritual cognition. I think the spiritual scientist simply has to concede that. If these are genuinely unfolding organs of cognition, their intrinsic discriminations cannot be completely reproduced from outside them, any more than the qualitative character of hearing can be reproduced by displaying the output of a frequency meter. Note this is part of why Goethe had such difficulty in getting his ideas to land during his time.

But that concession does not entail “therefore trust the clairvoyant.” In fact, I think it entails almost the opposite. It means I should be extremely careful to distinguish what I know through my own cognition from what I entertain because someone whose cognition I take seriously has reported it.

There are things in Steiner that I can enter into sufficiently livingly that they have ceased, for me, to function primarily as Steinerian propositions. There are others that make extraordinary sense within the organism of spiritual science but which I cannot honestly say I know in the same way. In those cases, I think the appropriate posture is neither credulous assent nor premature rejection, but suspension at the level actually warranted by one's own cognition.

So I think your objection succeeds against my earlier formulation if “metabolization” means fruitfulness, coherence, illumination, or internalization. Those are insufficient.

What I mean by metabolism in the stronger sense is the progressive passage from representation of an activity toward participation in that activity, accompanied by an increasing capacity to distinguish the living activity from the representational, personal, and historically conditioned material through which it becomes expressed.

Whether spiritual science actually succeeds in doing this is, of course, another question. But I think that is at least the claim that has to be evaluated. Otherwise we keep treating Steiner's higher faculties as though they were unusual telescopes supplying unverifiable observations of hidden objects, when their more radical claim is to transform the structure of knowing itself.

[Anthony66]

So we have a candidate for the altimeter - conscience. This seems reasonable - it has the ability to read against the local felt-gradient. The felt-sense says "up" (this pleasure makes sense); conscience says "down" (this is a local hill with a drop behind it). Unlike resonance, which could only ever confirm - conscience can read "down".

The question becomes what does conscience read? Conscience does reliably contradict the local hedonic gradient. But look at what it's tracking when it does. When conscience says "that pleasure leads to a chasm," it is tracking consequences - to yourself, to others, to your integrity and relationships and future. It is a faculty exquisitely tuned to the human and moral consequences of action, and it is answerable to things that can push back like ruined relationships and corrosion of self. Conscience makes claims that reality checks, which is exactly why it's a genuine altimeter.

But you then takes conscience - a consequence-tracking, outcome-answerable moral faculty - and identify it with the activity of other beings (who shape the greater curvature) and with Christ. The latter is again an uncheckable identification (conscience is the voice of Cosmic beings / the Christ-stream). The first is true and is an altimeter. The second not something conscience's reliability establishes. Conscience can warn you off a local hill shows it tracks real moral topology; it does not show the topology is authored by beings.

And the conscience altimeter convicts Steiner on his racial anthropology. This may have made sense within Steiner's SS framework; it was coherent, integrative, felt like disclosure. But conscience - the actual, consequence-tracking, morally-answerable faculty tells us that felt coherence of a racial hierarchy is a local hill with catastrophe behind it.

Let’s first expand the metaphor a little.



Instead of a binary mode where we have the myopic tracking of the moment-to-moment curvature of the World flow and then another, more encompassing tracking (conscience), it would make more sense to think of a contextual gradient. Each sphere is like a specific attention span. Each greater sphere is able to grasp longer-horizon curvature. When these attention-span spheres are eccentric, our experience of becoming is locked into the lowest common denominator, so to speak. We experience the flux of phenomena from moment to moment, loosely trying to instill some tactical and strategic trajectory in the longer term.

Here we immediately meet the first obstacle to our default local realism. Drawn like that, it seems that we propose something like the block universe view, where spacetime already exists ‘out there’, and consciousness can expand to grasp more of it. There’s no need to imagine that, however. We can stay anchored in the here and now and consider the expanded attention span to be also in the here and now, except that it intuits more persisting tendencies of the World flow (initially, we can intuit such tendencies only regarding our own temporally extended intents).

When the spheres of attention span become more concentric (as in meditative concentration), it can be said that the shorter spacetime intervals feel musically and meaningfully embedded in the greater intervals. Such is also the case about conscience. A short-term spacetime interval may make local sense, yet it may fight a higher-order tendency. In that case, the attention-span spheres are eccentric; we either feel the clash of tendencies very dimly or not at all. Conversely, when the spheres are concentric, then even our moment-to-moment frames of existence feel musically embedded in a longer-term unfoldment that makes greater sense. The benefit of this contextual (instead of binary) view is that, effectively, we are always seeking the direction that makes sense (resonance), yet this direction is grasped in direct proportion to the concentricity of the attention span spheres. In this way, we do not need to see the local resonance tracking and conscience tracking as categorically distinct features.

Now what is the origin of this deeper conscience? The safest thing to say (from within our present secular stance) would be that this intuition is somehow the essence of consciously or unconsciously accumulated experience (wisdom). It’s like the present World state has accreted ‘tree rings’ of past experience, which may not be readily graspable at our moment-to-moment intellectual ticking, but nevertheless provide some background context (just like painful experiences in our childhood may feel today like reluctance to engage in a certain activity even though we may not be aware why).

All of this is fully compatible with materialism, except that we take a more inner stance, where we feel willfully pushing toward the next World state. It’s like we’re on a democratic trip and each human perspective exercises its ‘vote’; it contributes a push of the World state toward the next, and thus we collectively steer the body of humanity through various regions of World state-space that we call ‘the unfoldment of history’ (remember that even by thinking we push toward a World state that we yearn to manifest).

To better understand this process, we should be clearly aware that the greater attention-span spheres are not simply greater geometric volume of physical objects and more clock ticks. Every greater sphere grasps the existential flow at a certain level of integration, so to speak. For example, one such attention span can become known to human beings in the event of a near-death experience. Then, by being temporarily freed from the suction and distraction of bodily and sensory ticking rate, one may become concentric with an attention span that grasps our life journey more holistically. Now everything is seen on a more existential level. We realize how we may have been slumbering most of our life, living reactively to momentary sensations, chasing them and experiencing corresponding elastic bouncebacks, without much awareness of whether our life’s story is integrating into a more meaningful plot, let alone with the knowledge that we may have a proactive attitude toward this destiny.

Seen in this way, we can understand the historical process only when we seek these inner concentric or eccentric contextualities within which human destinies unfold. Of course, the reductionist mind of today will claim that even these contextualities are only intellectual levels of abstraction. In reality, there’s only flat energy flux ruled by the principle of least action. I think we have shown more than once that such beliefs remain abstract conjectures that cannot be lived by realistically, and in fact lead to a pathological psychological state where we effortfully try to prove our point, but when we are asked about it, we lift our hands and say, “I’m not doing anything! This is merely what the mechanical energy flux feels like!”

The question now is whether this human agency is at the border of agentic and non-agentic aspects of the World flow. Yes, certain aspects of the World flow that we are forced to track are steered by human intents according to their concentric or eccentric contextuality. To some extent, we can follow that even into the animal kingdom, but when we reach into the plant and especially the mineral kingdom, we are tempted to imagine that we are tracking a dark energetic landscape impinging on our sensory screen. Why is this tempting? Because it is convenient. We don’t need to get up from our intellectual armchair. We assume that the first-person frames of human experience constitute the complete palette that our knowing capacity needs to arrange in various storyboards and believe in the most plausible one. It feels immediately disturbing if it is suggested that we are yet to discover even more encompassing attention-span spheres with their corresponding causal roles (remember that attention tracking doesn’t need to be purely passive tracking of external phenomena, as it is clear when tracking the sounds of our inner voice).

It’s not even so much a question whether there are other agencies at these levels, but rather we can investigate for ourselves what existence at such an attention span could be like. If we awaken at such a level, then the answer about agencies will come by itself. In a similar way, if an animal could reason, it would never solve the question of whether there are such things as human agencies. It may track how houses appear, roads are built, books are written, and so on, but the question will remain open whether there are some meaningful perspectives behind these phenomenal ripples. Conversely, when the animal reaches its own egohood, the reality of other egos comes automatically. In the same way, we can only find a truly satisfying answer about the existence of an angelic perspective when we ourselves orchestrate and make concentric the attention-span sphere gradient up to that level. Then we begin to comprehend how, for example, human destinies only make fuller sense when we see that certain softening and guidance of the life-trajectories is contributed by such perspectives. Of course, we can keep pushing back. The animal reaching egohood can say, “But what if I’m the first ego in existence and I’m only projecting my egohood in the void?” Well, if we approach this from a purely logical perspective, we can ask, “Is it more plausible that all these phenomenal ripples (buildings, books, etc.) that would make perfect sense if seen as proceeding from the life of an ego, are actually only mechanical processes that just appear in this way?” It can only be said that such a question is practically impossible to ask in the higher spheres. While in the bodily sphere we can still hide behind the wall of sensory phenomena and fantasize whatever we like (including solipsism, Turing tests, etc.), in Imaginative cognition, the life of other perspectives intermingles with ours, so the only way to deny it is to zoom back inside the sensory sphere and build intellectual storyboards about what may lie on the opaque side.

So, unsurprisingly, I cannot give an answer that proves such spheres of attention are possible. I can only speak of how they make the picture fuller and can lead humanity in directions that make even greater sense – in ways that no sequence of purely bodily frames of existence can. In your case, I believe, it is important to realize what you are fighting with. The seeking of a purely mental and sensory-empirical justification of these questions is not at the core, just like Rodriel gave the example about the hard problem – “The problem is generated in part by the conceptual architecture we bring to it”. So things must be traced back to the origin. And this origin is a soul question. The embodied soul is torn between the tempting vista of a mechanical/energetic world-feel and one which is woven of meaningful intents through and through. Why is the first tempting? Because it alleviates us of responsibility. All our moral ideas and virtues, are only consensual protocols between agents that have risen from the dark abyss, in order to make their strange existence more bearable and predictable. On the other hand, if we are embedded in a Cosmos woven of intents traceable to coherent perspectives, then anywhere we ‘set our foot’, we ‘step on the head of a being’. This feels like an overwhelming responsibility at first. Yet, if we explore the contextual concentricity, we’ll also find that there’s a natural way to navigate such a World state-space. One which doesn’t consist of memorizing countless ethical rules, but of musical attention-span gradients that ‘make sense’. In fact, the core of this concentricity can be pointed at in a few words: “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind… and thy neighbour as thyself.”

I think your contextual-gradient reframe is an improvement over the binary. Replacing "myopic tracking vs. conscience" with a continuum of attention-span spheres, and making resonance proportional to concentricity is phenomenologically cleaner and dissolves an artificial dichotomy. I could target the extrapolation of attention-spans into world's unknown but I'll leave that for now.

The animal-egohood analogy is a good argument for why the personhood question can't be settled from outside. I've been grappling with this over the last couple of days.

Initial thoughts
I like thinking in Bayesian terms.
Let H = "Cosmic/higher perspectives exist" (the antecedent in question).
Let E = "on attaining the commensurate attention-span sphere, one has the experience of directly recognizing such a perspective."

Now whatever prior credence you give to the existence of higher perspectives, the evidential update depends entirely on the likelihood ratio:
P(E | H) / P(E | ¬H)
how much more probable the recognition-experience is if higher perspectives are real than if they aren't. The experience is strong evidence for H only if it's much more likely to occur when H is true than when H is false.

Much reasoning goes wrong in neglecting the denominator - in our matter here, how likely is the felt experience of recognizing a higher perspective, given that no such perspective exists? And the problem we have is that P(E | ¬H) high. A practice that trains you on a rich framework of higher agencies, cultivated over years, reliably produces the experience of recognizing them whether or not they're there. Projection, apophenia, psychosis, divergence across traditions shows this.

So if P(E | H) ≈ 1 and P(E | ¬H) ≈ 1, the likelihood ratio ≈ 1, and we have no evidential base for higher perspectives. The recognition-experience fails to raise P(H) because it's roughly as expected under ¬H as under H.

Of course we could rescue things via a high prior P(H), but this gets us into highly contentious waters. I fear there may have been some confusion in the animal-egohood analogy where the prior P(human ego exists)=1 is known from outside the analogy, unlike in the target case.

Subsequent thoughts
Is P(E | ¬H) ≈ 1? The structure of subject recognition really is different from the structure of perception. When I perceive an object, my experience presents a content (a colored shape) and I then infer or posit an external cause; the gap between seeming and being is wide open, which is why perception is so counterfeitable (dream, hallucination, illusion all deliver the content with no object). But recognizing a subject is not like that. To recognize something as a subject is to apprehend it as another center of apprehension - a perspective for which things are the case, an inside. The content of the recognition is that there is a point of view other than mine. You can't have that content be entirely a projection of my point of view, because the very thing recognized is its not being mine - its being another origin of intending. A recognized subject, if it's genuinely recognized as subject, carries within its content the mark of otherness - of a perspective I am meeting, not generating. So recognition seems to have a kind of built-in resistance to the projection reading that bare perception lacks: the counterfeit would have to counterfeit otherness itself, which is closer to self-contradiction than ordinary illusion is.

So where genuine recognition-of-otherness occurs, the inference to a real other perspective is strong.

But all that still has a significant issue. You can't establish, for a given episode, that it is genuine recognition rather than projection wearing otherness's form. The dream is the proof: it's the mind manufacturing, nightly, exactly the "origin-not-mine" content the strong inference claimed self-generation couldn't author.

Concluding thoughts
Genuine recognition and projected-otherness may be indistinguishable in the moment, from the momentary phenomenology alone - but they are not indistinguishable tout court, because they come apart under probing over time: the real other resists in stable, cross-checkable, informative ways; the projected other drifts, dissolves, or only ever returns what the recognizer could have supplied. The real other surprises me with a consistency that persists across contexts I didn't script, they inform me of things I couldn't have supplied. Further, other recognizers converge on the same subject, and the perspective maintains its integrity precisely where my projections would drift. Dream-others dissolve under scrutiny; real others sharpen under it.

So I think I've landed in cautiously hold that SS practice can rightly infer Cosmic/higher perspectives.

==

You finished by relocating one's demand for verification/falsification to be a soul question. One doubts because they are fleeing responsibility.

If the intent-woven Cosmos is real, then yes, resistance to it might be a flight from responsibility. But if the intent-woven Cosmos is a compelling construction, then "you only doubt because you're fleeing responsibility" is exactly what that construction would say to explain why honest, careful people don't accept it.

Notice it also runs the other way. The agentic picture is tempting because it relieves a different burden - the vertigo of a meaningless cosmos, the grief of no cosmic witness, the fear that no one is minding the story.

Motivated reasoning is available on both sides.