Temporal lobe epilepsy & religious experience.

[Angrboda]

If I'm understanding Neo's position correctly, if they weren't having the experience while in a 'prayerful state', it's not authentic.

Being a prayerful state was just my example for demonstrating that continuity of the experiences' history is a factor outside the experience itself that needs to be considered. An uninduced visionary experience has a history of prior brain-states and behaviors that are relevant to our understanding of the phenomena. For example, lets' say you are reading a book and as you are doing so you find yourself inside a completely different story. After the initial confusion had passed you would soon realize that the publisher had somehow accidently bound in the middle a chapter from a different story. You know this because there was a sudden break in meaning.  So while two experiences may be first-person identical in the immediate present, those experiences have different contexts and history, and as such, the significance of the two experience is different.

My point hinges on the idea that at least some brain-states have semiotic content.

How things can having meaning (semiotic content) seems to be a central bugbear.