Temporal lobe epilepsy & religious experience.

[Mister Agenda]

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?

I don't rule it out, if it comes up I note it's wildly improbable and that suffices. I have no need to claim certainty on the matter, but that's a personal preference on my part, I don't object to someone else rounding 0.a trillion zeroes then 1 down to zero as long as I grok that's what they're doing.

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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.

I don't think I quite follow, how does Saul's revelation on the Road to Damascus fit in? What was the semiotic content that makes you think his revelation authentic (assuming you believe it was authentic given your reasoning thus far)?