Temporal lobe epilepsy & religious experience.

[The Grand Nudger]

I don't think you know what that word means. Both experiences would be authentic, merely arrived at by disparate means of inducement. A researcher in one hand, a god in another, and an epilepsy in yet another.

Your objection, accurately phrased, isn't that the existence of counterfiet money isn't proof that real money doesn't exist - but that states induced by researchers or damage isn't proof that those states can't also be induced by gods.

[Angrboda]

I think you misunderstand the objection.  If one replaces real causes with an epiphenomenal god, then all one is doing is engaging in pointless metaphysics.  Yes this fit of epilepsy could be caused by god, and gravity could be the effect of an omnipotent machine projecting force throughout the universe, but why would you?  If you replace one cause with God then you can replace them all.  The principle of insufficient reason will cut down all such moves.   If you can replace them all, then "God" just becomes a new name for nature, and your attempt to explain the original phenomenon turns out to be nothing more than bullshit semantics.  It's the same problem with Berkeley's argument for God; all you're doing is insisting on calling nature God for Reasons[TM].

No. I was not suggesting that epilesy was a means by which any god communes. I am saying that one experience can be authentic and another inauthentic depending on the chain of events that brought* it into being. By way of analogy, the perfect forgery of a Vermeer painting can never be an authentic Vermeer.

*Interesting how it seems so intuitive to use teleological language!

Fair enough. I presumed you were responding to Nudger and my talk of an extraneous god. I don't know how your response relates and it seems unrelated. You haven't dealt with the objection in play.

(And feel free to provide argument or evidence for authentic communing with a god.)

[Jehanne]

No. I was not suggesting that epilesy was a means by which any god communes. I am saying that one experience can be authentic and another inauthentic depending on the chain of events that brought* it into being. By way of analogy, the perfect forgery of a Vermeer painting can never be an authentic Vermeer.

*Interesting how it seems so intuitive to use teleological language!

Authentic Vermeer paintings exist, though, because Vermeer, a human being who existed, was also a painter.

[The Grand Nudger]

A god that communicates by causing epilepsies. Fucks sake, just learn english?

I think the reason people find this so instructive is not just that there are three possible causes for such experiences in question, two being observed and one being alleged - but that the contents of the alleged set are, themselves, a pretty common argument for the existence of the grand nudger himself.

Yes, yes, researchers and epilepsies can do this, but so can god, and I know there's a god, because it can do this - it's done it to me! No one could possibly misattribute these very authentic experiences to a god that wasn't there......

[Angrboda]

So for example there is Nun Anne and Matrix Jane. Nun Anne has lived a life of Catholic devotion. Anne has a prayerful brain-state prior to brain-state V (for visionary). Matrix Jane is connected an electro-helmet. Jane has any random brain-state prior to the induction of brain-state V. I contend that the experience of Nun Anne can be deemed likely authentic and the experience of Matrix Jane as clearly inauthentic based on observable characteristics of both Anne and Jane.

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.

[vulcanlogician]

William James discusses this sort of thing at length in Varieties.

James has an interesting reply to the question of mystical experiences being caused by epilepsy or abnormal brain activity. His answer is, "so what?" He urges us to judge the content of the experience rather than the cause. If you have a high fever and see a bunch of pink elephants dance around on your wall paper, the content of the experience is bankrupt of meaning. Go ahead and ignore it.

However, if the same fever causes some cosmic vision that has meaning to you, why not take that experience seriously? Especially if it empowers you in some way. James is a pragmatist, so that sort of thing is his main focus. "How useful is such an experience to one who has it?"

Plenty of objections to this approach, of course, but I am fascinated by James's take on things.

[Neo-Scholastic]

So for example there is Nun Anne and Matrix Jane. Nun Anne has lived a life of Catholic devotion. Anne has a prayerful brain-state prior to brain-state V (for visionary). Matrix Jane is connected an electro-helmet. Jane has any random brain-state prior to the induction of brain-state V. I contend that the experience of Nun Anne can be deemed likely authentic and the experience of Matrix Jane as clearly inauthentic based on observable characteristics of both Anne and Jane.

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.

[Jehanne]

William James discusses this sort of thing at length in Varieties.

James has an interesting reply to the question of mystical experiences being caused by epilepsy or abnormal brain activity. His answer is, "so what?" He urges us to judge the content of the experience rather than the cause. If you have a high fever and see a bunch of pink elephants dance around on your wall paper, the content of the experience is bankrupt of meaning. Go ahead and ignore it.

However, if the same fever causes some cosmic vision that has meaning to you, why not take that experience seriously? Especially if it empowers you in some way. James is a pragmatist, so that sort of thing is his main focus. "How useful is such an experience to one who has it?"

Plenty of objections to this approach, of course, but I am fascinated by James's take on things.

The Tailban would approve. Problem is, of course, different experiences from different individuals contradict one another. Perhaps God is speaking with a forked tongue?

[vulcanlogician]

William James discusses this sort of thing at length in Varieties.

James has an interesting reply to the question of mystical experiences being caused by epilepsy or abnormal brain activity. His answer is, "so what?" He urges us to judge the content of the experience rather than the cause. If you have a high fever and see a bunch of pink elephants dance around on your wall paper, the content of the experience is bankrupt of meaning. Go ahead and ignore it.

However, if the same fever causes some cosmic vision that has meaning to you, why not take that experience seriously? Especially if it empowers you in some way. James is a pragmatist, so that sort of thing is his main focus. "How useful is such an experience to one who has it?"

Plenty of objections to this approach, of course, but I am fascinated by James's take on things.

The Tailban would approve.  Problem is, of course, different experiences from different individuals contradict one another.  Perhaps God is speaking with a forked tongue?

Well, the Taliban wouldn't approve of James. Because James explicitly states that one ought not try to impose one's own visions on other people.

Plus, not really familiar with the religiosity of the Taliban... but they strike me as fundamentalists rather than mystics. But, like I said... not familiar enough with the topic to say.

[The Grand Nudger]

William James discusses this sort of thing at length in Varieties.

James has an interesting reply to the question of mystical experiences being caused by epilepsy or abnormal brain activity. His answer is, "so what?" He urges us to judge the content of the experience rather than the cause. If you have a high fever and see a bunch of pink elephants dance around on your wall paper, the content of the experience is bankrupt of meaning. Go ahead and ignore it.

However, if the same fever causes some cosmic vision that has meaning to you, why not take that experience seriously? Especially if it empowers you in some way. James is a pragmatist, so that sort of thing is his main focus. "How useful is such an experience to one who has it?"

Plenty of objections to this approach, of course, but I am fascinated by James's take on things.

 Neopaganism is all in on this approach, and shamanism may be it's oldest advocate.  It's the value of the religious ideation that explains a persons conformative behaviors, not the truth of the contents as described.  I think that's perfectly workable when it comes to how a person looks at or approaches life in general - but at some point, the contents of the vision hit the brick wall of reality - as no one is drum circling dinner onto their plates, or drawing down the goddess to hold up a wobbly table - but we do organize our families and our communities in a collective normative effort to that effect.

You're giving short shrift to seeing pink elephants dancing on wallpaper, btw, man. Hallucinogenic rituals are ubiquitous to human culture. We knew about drugs and fevers and exhaustion before we knew about wheels. As for inducement, a nun in lifelong prayer and a shaman in a lodge and a ghost spirit-fingering our brain and a researcher with drugs or a cattle prod are all equivalently engaged. It would only be those states that occurred without such active administration by an intentional agent that could qualify as natural, as opposed to artificial. We're basically swirling the drain of how people (or gods) have figured out ways to take advantage of abnormal brain states generally caused by damage or malfunction, in nature.