RE: What philosophical evidence is there against believing in non-physical entities?
August 31, 2016 at 11:59 pm
(This post was last modified: September 1, 2016 at 12:11 am by Panatheist.)
(August 31, 2016 at 11:03 pm)Rhythm Wrote:(August 31, 2016 at 10:34 pm)Panatheist Wrote: I referenced the inability to prove my own past subjective experiences to anyone - because there is not. And I am not saying that - you - personally have not experienced dissosociation or some other phenomena involving unusual visual and audial perception.This is, I think, the third time you've mentioned it, but again..no ones asked you to prove your subjective experiences. You presented conclusions -about them- that you cannot support. This is what people are dismissing, when they dismiss them.
Quote:Now, various definitions are given for altered states. I have mentioned unusual perceptual phenomena such as seeming to appear on an island as an example. Now I highly doubt this is a day dream because it occurred in a busy work environment and caused disruption until I was able to perceive my surroundings again. That would likely be classified as a hallucination by therapists which is included in some definitions of altered states. In some definitions of altered states are included dreams and day dreams and states induced after meditating, drinking an alcoholic beverage, or taking drugs. What exactly is your definition of an altered state?You highly doubt it was a daydream because it busy work environment? That's the prime location for daydreaming...where most people -do- the majority of their daydreaming. It;s pretty much a cultural meme to daydream at work, at this point. This is a very common experience, that you doubt.
Quote:I agree that you have a point about false or inaccurate memories. Perhaps I am simply not remembering this accurately -- doubtful given my history I think and some level of verification I have been able to obtain from others that I behaved in some cases as though I was totally unaware of my environment, unless all of that is a case of inaccurate memory as well or a mistaken observation. It is possible my dreams never had the content I think I recall -- they are all false memories.Again, you find yourself doubting something so common and everyday as to be called ubiquitous. Daydreamers are also "totally unaware of their environment"...that's why we call them daydreamers.
Quote:Even equipment cannot prove anyone is experiencing certain subjective sensations. At most we get a report of them.Irrelevant with regards to your conclusions regarding your proposed experience, but obviously used to buttress your inability to flesh them out. Again, this is the sort of thing that gets dismissed.
Quote:It is just as much of a problem if you base a natural belief that you actually experienced a particular vivid day dream on the fact that you think you remember it.So, as fallible as memory can be....and as explicable as your experience may be by other means, and regardless of the fact that you had no equipment to record any altered state......that's what you go with? Again, not doubting that you had an experience or that you have a memory of an experience.....I'm just showing you why those propositions you've built -atop- that experience are dismissed...which you interpret as people dismissing your experience. If you can keep all of that in mind...you -might- find that it doesn't bother you at all when people do it. They're justified in doing so.
To take an even more startling viewpoint it is possible that my whole life up to this point is simply a dream and that I will wake up soon.
There is an element of belief in what we think we remember and even in what we hold as most certain. There is no problem there at all as long as we acknowledge that.
You specifically mentioned that there is a way to prove altered states after I mentioned that I cannot prove my own. I am not sure why you keep saying no one asked me to prove them. I did not say you asked me that. I am simply making a statement that I cannot personally prove that. In fact there is no way to prove that anyone is experiencing altered states or any subjective states. At most we can get a correlation between certain physical brain states and reported subjective states.
I have said it is - slightly - annoying to have personal experiences dismissed. I have gone on to say that it is not actually a huge problem if mine are dismissed personally but that such phenomena are useful to consider in general when research into them gives us good evidence for non-supernatural reasons for their existence.
And no, I do not believe I was day dreaming when I was extremely busy working at the time in the fast food industry. I believe it was altered perceptual and audial phenomena combined with a loss of awareness of any sensations in my immediate environment. That is an example of what I mean by an altered state. A day dream would qualify, too, so it's sort of pointless to debate.
I was looking for some better articles, but these two provide some definition with examples of an altered state of consciousness:
http://study.com/academy/lesson/altered-...-quiz.html
http://www.veryshortintroductions.com/vi...-chapter-7
I am not sure how profitable it is to debate this issue if I don't know what you mean by altered state of consciousness. You seem to be excluding a day dream as an altered state for example, but I have seen that mentioned as an example of an altered state many times in articles and literature on psychology.
As for what conclusions I have come to that are dismissed besides thinking it was an altered states, do you mention that some of them were healing? I am not going to go into huge detail, but some of them directly involved addressing certain emotions and integrating new perspectives on them. I'm not sure what to say other than that some were very cathartic and resolved some emotional issues for me, so I said it was healing. That is how I remember experiencing it. It could simply be a correlation and not causal, although that is not how I think of it when I process emotions in a more mundane way. I could say writing a journal entry was cathartic and healing. But perhaps that was correlative as well. I am not saying I have absolute certainty.
I mention the fallibility of our memory and of our certainty in general because it was a good point you made, but it doesn't just apply to experiences that seem unusual. It applies to mundane events and to more common altered states as well, the content of your day dreams included. You cannot know you accurately remember the content of that state any more than I accurately recall the state I described.
I am really curious what you define an altered state as.
Note: the above statement I made about altered visual and audial perception could apply to a day dream, although I usually think of day dreams as occurring while I am still and gazing out of a window. In this experience I seemed to be transported to the island and then back to my immediate environment several times abruptly again and again over about a half hour's duration and there were other attendant experiences. This is more in line with what I think of as a disruptive hallucination, not a day dream.