Theistic Inclinations

[Angrboda]

External experiences are useful for verifying external phenomenon.  Internal experiences are useful for verifying internal phenomenon.  You're using internal experience for verifying external phenomenon.  That simply doesn't work.  All you can learn from internal experiences is your common psychology.  Anything else is wildly prone to error and misattribution.

It looks like you responded quickly and perhaps oversimplified you point(s) in favor of expediency. Also, I do not understand what qualifies as either an “external experience” or an “internal” phenomenon; since those are unusual pairings. So pardon me if I misinterpret what you are trying to say.

You seem to be suggesting that knowledge of allthird-person phenomena is necessarily more reliable than all first-person conscious experience and also that these are parallel and distinct. Personally, I find both stances representative of a prior commitment to a picture of reality (physicalism?) that is not immediately obvious.

No, I'm saying that each has their own domain and that the domain of internal experiences is the world of our shared psychology.

What is obvious is that conscious experience is existentially primary and all knowledge of the phenomenal world is mediated by conscious experience.  As such, knowledge gained by reasoning from first principles is of the highest order (examples: mathematics and deductive reasoning) and that application of those principles to external phenomena produces second order knowledge (examples: inductive reasoning and the natural sciences). So going back to your critique, I agree that I am indeed using internal experience to verify external phenomena. It not only works; it is the only way it can work. The physical world and all its processes are ultimately inferred from conscious experience. Unlike our perceptions of physical objects, mathematical objects are immune to misattribution. Unlike natural laws, the laws of thought are self-evident and indispensable.

Math and logic do not verify the external world. You've created a straw man.

The internal world of math and logic is mapped to the external world. That's taking a piece of math or logic and using it to model the external world. That is using math and logic as descriptors. You won't find math or logic themselves in the external world.

People who say that math and logic are merely descriptions seem to have reversed that order. Someone can do math without physics but no one can do physics without math. I would not call first-principles, like the principle of non-contradiction or deductions like the Pythagorean theorem “wildly prone to error.” None of this first-order knowledge would fall under the category of “common psychology”.

By common psychology I am simply emphasizing that which we have in common. How do you know that math and logic aren't a part of our common psychology?

Having said all that, my earlier comments concerned the empirical value of meditation and contemplative prayer. These practices are nothing short of a technology of consciousness refined by trial and error over centuries to separate individual “ego” psychology from direct apprehension of essential being, in which first-person and third-person collapse into one reality. To my mind, this rings true since human reason so readily corresponds with a rationally ordered phenomenal world.

And I feel that you're applying insight from one domain into a domain it has a track record of error within. It may "ring true" to you, but the multiplicity of incompatible first person insights into the divine suggest that it is highly unreliable, as well as our knowledge of how error prone the mind is on its own.