Temporal lobe epilepsy & religious experience.

[Angrboda]

Except that Occam's razor rules out superfluous causes.  If God isn't needed in non-religious epileptic fits, he isn't needed in religious ones.

There's a difference between not needed and ruled out. I'm fully familiar with Occam's Razor and made no claims subject to that guideline.

Yes and no. In reality you can't rule out Russell's teapot, but for similar practical reasons we do. How is this any different than the explosion of possible things that we can't rule out but actually do rule out in practice? What is the epistemic rule for such possibilities?

---

Authenticity has nothing to do with it.  Either they are induced or they are not.  I think you're using authenticity as a substitute for unobservables despite the claim of observables.

Exactly, either they are induced or they are not. It sets up a simple heuristic:

Induced experiences are clearly inauthentic because they do not follow from prior brain-states.
Experiences that follow from prior brain-states may be authentic (We still don't know. Prior relation [psychosemantically?] is a necessary condition but not sufficient.)

And, yes, authenticity has everything to do with it. Lots of things are like that. In pool, who hits the ball into a pocket is observable fact and affects the significance the sinking a ball into a pocket has. My belief that Nun Anne's experience would be authentic would be based on the observable character of her life. Lots of the historic saints, mystics, and heretic visionaries have, experiences that IMO deserve to be reckoned with on their own terms and not casually dismissed just because one's metaphysics doesn't have a place for them. Those of Thomas Aquinas, Terresa of Avila and Swedenborg come to mind as curious. And I am not opposed to giving spiritual significance to uncanny events of a more mundane sort such as bizarre coincidences and fortuitous outcomes...you just have to be cautious and not take things too seriously.

So in the absence of a deafeter, I have no reason, given my own predisposition to believe such things, to suppose that Nun Anne's visionary experience was not what she claimed it was. In the case of Matrix Jane, there is an observable defeater, i.e. the head-set induction.

All roads lead to the environment. The ultimate source of any brain state lies outside ourselves. Being charitable, you seem to be saying that an experience is authentic if the cause is a proximal state of the brain. I'm not sure where that leads, but it leads to a sliding scale rather than a binary property. I'm reminded of Dennett's example of missing a putt in golf and thinking that you "could have made the putt." The question becomes which counterfactuals are sufficiently close to the actual putt to count as real possibilities. With brain states, the question is which aspects of a causal chain leading to a brain state count as authentically prior. Imagine two scenarios. The morning Anne has her vision, her husband shook her awake to feed her breakfast. That shaking awake primed certain neurons which lead to her vision. Without that, she wouldn't have had her vision. Was her vision induced? The second scenario, in the dimness of early morning, Anne hears a sound which given her background knowledge of belief in the supernatural leads her to thinking about ghosts, thus priming the neurons. Is that induced? What if Anne for whatever reason just dismisses the noise and so doesn't prime her neurons and has no vision. Is that induced? Taking antidepressants, eating an apple, stubbing one's toe, getting cold or warm -- what environmental factors are separate from this hypothetical brain state(s)?