Experience as site of contested meaning and value: The attributional dog and its special tail

Taves, Ann

doi:10.1016/j.religion.2010.09.012

Cited by 15 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 26 publications

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“…To that end, we also prefer the second-order framing of an encounter deemed spiritual or religious. We find the differentiation between encounter and experience important because we are not looking to extreme examples of sensory overload or mystic revelation, but instead, those events and experiences that are relatively normative in a religious context but considered "special" as religion (Taves 2010). 3 We are interested in why encounters with machine agents such as a robotic Buddhist priest or a "spiritual chatbot" actually feel like a typical religious encounter with human agents.…”

Section: The Problem: How Should We Understand Encounters Deemed "Spi...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Fabulation, Machine Agents, and Spiritually Authorizing Encounters

Loewen-Colón

Mosurinjohn

2022

Religions

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This paper uses a Tavesian model of religious experience to make a modest theorization about the role of “fabulation”, an embodied and affective process, to understand how some contemporary AI and robotics designers and users consider encounters with these technologies to be spiritually “authorizing”. By “fabulation”, we mean the Bergsonian concept of an evolved capacity that allows humans to see the potentialities of complex action within another object—in other words, an interior agential image, or “soul”; and by “authorizing”, we mean “deemed as having some claim to arbitration, persuasion, and legitimacy” such that the user might make choices that affect their life or others in accordance with the AI or might have their spiritual needs met. We considered two case studies where this agency took on a spiritual or religious valence when contextualized as such for the user: a robotic Buddhist priest known as Mindar, and a chatbot called The Spirituality Chatbot. We show how understanding perceptions of AI or robots as being spiritual or religious in a way that authorizes behavioral changes requires understanding tendencies of the human body more so than it does any metaphysical nature of the technology itself.

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Section: The Problem: How Should We Understand Encounters Deemed "Spi...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Fabulation, Machine Agents, and Spiritually Authorizing Encounters

Loewen-Colón

Mosurinjohn

2022

Religions

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“…• Sind die Patient/-innen körperlich in der Lage, die entsprechenden Bewegungen selber zu vollziehen, so führen die Heileurythmist/-innen die Bewegungen begleitet von Handlungsanweisungen zu den einzelnen Buchstaben, ihren Bewegungen, Bedeutungen und farblichen Assoziationen zunächst vor, bevor das Halleluja gemeinsam aktiv eurythmitisiert wird. Dehnt man den verwendeten Begriff des Heiligen mit Ann Taves (2009Taves ( , 2010 auf den Begriff des Besonderen (special) aus, so lassen sich damit »Dinge, Überzeugungen und Praktiken« fassen, die im Feld entweder explizit als religiös benannt werden oder aber denen eine besondere Rolle zugeschrieben wird, indem sie im Sinne Durkheims von herkömmlichen Dingen abgesondert werden oder verboten sind. Taves zufolge hängt die Besonderheit (specialness) dieser Dinge gerade davon ab, wie und zu welchem Grad sie abgesondert oder verboten sind: vom gewöhnlich Besonderen, zum singulären Besonderen, zum wirklich Besonderen.…”

Section: Konkrete Vollzugswirklichkeitunclassified

Praxistheorien und Religionswissenschaft

2021

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“…My goal, as I reiterated in subsequent publications (Taves 2010a(Taves , 2010b, was to cast a wide net that would capture the range of things that people consider non-ordinary in order to focus on (a) how and why people perceive some experiences as non-ordinary, and (b) how and why they understand and respond to such experiences (Taves 2013a(Taves , 2013b. In doing so, I was continuing my efforts to position the study of experience within an interdisciplinary space and, at the same time, elaborate and extend the 'building-block approach' I advocated in Religious Experience Reconsidered.…”

Section: Experiencementioning

confidence: 99%

Perceiving the Problem of Disenchantment

Taves

2015

J Religion Eur

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In light of the framing of Asprem’s book in terms of Problemgeschichte, we can ask what is meant by a “problem.” Problems, as he uses it, are grounded in human experience, which means that for problems to be problems people have to perceive them as such. The problem of disenchantment thus entails both (1) the perception of the problem and (2) various responses to the problem. Asprem focuses primarily on the way people responded to the problem. But we can also ask how, when, and why people perceived the problem in the first place. If recognizing a problem can be construed in terms of “event perception” then we can view Problemgeschichte as involving the perception of problems at a whole range of levels from our perception of the historical past, our personal past, and what just happened, thus allowing for a fuller integration between sociology and psychology.

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Experience as site of contested meaning and value: The attributional dog and its special tail

Cited by 15 publications

References 26 publications

Fabulation, Machine Agents, and Spiritually Authorizing Encounters

Fabulation, Machine Agents, and Spiritually Authorizing Encounters

Praxistheorien und Religionswissenschaft

Perceiving the Problem of Disenchantment

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