(June 19, 2023 at 1:59 pm)The Grand Nudger Wrote: It is interesting to wonder whether a vision quest can succeed by those criteria you offered - of novelty and externality. I don't think it's clear that it would. If a vision quest is to be anything different from normal empirical observation - it seems like we'd be discussing some sort of inward-searching. Whether we can acquire something we don't already possess by looking inward is an open question. OTOH, I'm sure we can come up with novel arrangements of items already possessed.
A hard requirement for externality probably does endanger most of what we refer to as a vision quest to being unsuccessful.
If you talk to a true savant, many of them sometimes speak (If they can Speak) of an experience where they are like a passenger in a car going for a ride, or a movie theater goer where their primary conscious is set aside and this secondary 'consciousness' completely independent of their waking mind takes over and allows them to paint photo realistic scenes with no formal training, or perform write music on a Mozart level. Not saying this is how vision quests work. I'm just demonstrating a plausible avenue that is in fact a well known and scientifically documented avenue which similar phenoma occur (where information outside of a person's scope age or ability is imparted to them on a scale that could not normally originate from the individual.)
