Taffy Lewis

Hi mfaber,

You say:

Yes. Either people really do perceive God or they are delusional. These are our options.

Flynn says:

Have you read Newberg's book Why God Won't Go Away? He argues that certain types of religious experiences--specific kinds of unitive mystical experiences--are good evidence for a spiritual reality.

He says, "Gene and I further believe that we saw evidence of a neurological process that has evolved to allow us humans to transcend material existence and acknowledge and connect with a deeper, more spiritual part of ourselves perceived of as an absolute, universal reality that connects us to all that is.(p.9)"

Further, he says:

Another interesting point:

Lastly:

This last quote is relevant to some points I'd like to make.

You say:

First of all, simply because an experience can be artificially generated that does not mean identical experiences which aren't artificially generated are not genuine. It might be possible to manipulate your brain during surgery and cause you to have a vivid visual experience of a tree. That does not mean that your other visual experiences of trees are not genuine. The same applies to experiences of God.

Secondly, near death experiences occur under pathological conditions. So we have good reason not to trust them. The vast majority of experiences of God do not occur under such conditions.

Third, where else would experiences of God occur but in the brain? What should we find in the brain if experiences of God are genuine? A bright, golden light that cannot be measured? Or something more odd than this maybe?

It seems to me that we'd just find brain states. Just as we do for every other experience we have.

Also, you say:

I think this example has consequences which are opposite of what you intend. In the case of the drug, the addict desires something that is real. The object of their wants and needs are actual things that exist. So if God exists and is as great as theistic percipients claim then we would expect them to desire his presence or communion with him. So just as the desire for drugs has an object so does the desire for God's presence.

Further, I'd say that most theists who think they experience God aren't bothered by sceptics at all. In fact, I'd suggest they rarely think about them or if they do think about them then they usually feel sorry for them.

Lastly, feelings of superiority can also be intoxicating. It must be enormously comforting for some people to believe that they are too clever or intelligent to be conned by religious ideas. No doubt a person would feel good about themselves when they consider themselves to be far too well adjusted emotionally to fall prey to comforting ideas to which the vast majority of humans have succumbed.

mfaber

This is a classic theist false dilemma. People could simply be mistaken about their perception without being NECESSARILY being "delusional".


That is NOT what he said.... That is your wishful interpretation of what he said...WHAT HE actually said:

All he really said was that a higher reality was RATIONALLY POSSIBLE. How do you stretch the RATIONALLY POSSIBLE into PROOF? He, himself, even admits that he can't prove the actual existence of his "Absolute Unitary Being" Because he is a spiritual person (hasn't admitted, as far as I know that he believes in God, but admits to "spirituality"), he thinks there is "more to human existence that sheer material existence" (what is wrong with sheer material existence?), so to him his studies are evidence enough. You really are reaching and so is he.

Let's apply the principle of Occam's (Ockham's) Razor (the simplest explanation is probably the correct one) to the data..........

REVIEW OF THE DATA
1) Note that "God" was perceived AFTER electrical/magnetic stimulationof the brain.

2) One can also induce religious states (after the fact) with “entheogenic” drugs or substances which create a sense of spiritual or ecstatic experience; “they are drugs that essentially ‘create god.’ Examples would be certain hallucinogenic substances, amanita muscaria (sacred mushrooms) and other substances. NOTE: Similarly, there are “drugs which can take god away” -- anti-psychotic drugs, for instance, will often alleviate symptoms in certain patients who insist that they “hear god” or sense other supernatural beings.

3) Other way to induce "God perceptions" are by hypnosis.

4) Temporal lobe lesions can produce a form of epilespy, known to scientists for over a century, in which people suffer from extremely religious, often violent behavior. Tumors in this area also produce religious delusions that mimic paranoid schizophrenia. This is why people exhibiting delusional behavior, religious or otherwise, are CAT or MRI scanned for such lesionsbefore putting them on any kind of anti-psychotic drug (would not really treat the "cause" in the case of a brain lesion anyway).

The least elaborate explanation is that God is a creation of the human brain rather that the other way around. If you can explain religious experience purely as a brain phenomenon, you don't need the assumption of the existence of God AND that what has been uncovered are really our "spiritual antennas" for perceiving God and a "spiritual other-reality (not just elaborate, but assumes facts not in evidence, i.e. God, a spiritual reality apart from the one we inhabit).

Consider that theists claim that it is God who induces the religious experience. Look at it from the frame of reference, the inducer.... If it is really "God" that does the inducing, does that make the magnetic field "God"?, is the drug a "God", the hypnotist a "God", is the temporal lobe lesion a "God"? If this is really God's way of "communicating" (via the religious experience--->meditation, prayer, ritual, etc) then how can these trivial physical inducer produce an "experience" indistinguishable from the "real thing"? How can one now be sure that what one experiences in "chapel" so to speak is really "God"? It could simply be that we are mistaken in our interpretation of the experience and it there is really no God (spirit, fairy, whatever spiritual entity one assumes that one has communion with). Think about it.....

This is a classic example of the fallacy of equivocation (claiming that two things are the same when they really aren't). My seeing a living tree with my eyes is NOT the same thing as the stimulation of the MEMORY of having seen the tree. The stimulation of the stored memory creates a visual "hallucination" that there is a tree. Is there a tree in the operating room! NO!! The "tree' you see in the operating room is NOT real. The difference here is that there are REAL, PHYSICAL trees that generated the memory, no one doubts that there are trees of myriad varieties on the planet. Your analogy fails because where there is ample proof of trees outside of one's memory of them, there is absolutely NO such evidence for God. In other words, I am not reliant on a stored set of brain chemicals as 'proof" that trees exists, trees exist as independent, tangible entities OUTSIDE of my memory of them. Can you prove that God exists anywhere outside of your own thoughts and feelings, which, very conveniently, cannot be objectively observed for authentication.... NO!!! The God experience and the your "tree scenario" are not analogous in any shape, form, or fashion.

A chemically induced NDE is not a pathological state (ketamine carefully administered, does not put the patient at risk of his or her life). Multiple G-force causing a temporary reduction of blood to the brain is also NOT a "pathological" experience. Is the brain functioning normally? No! Yet both of these stimuli produce an experience indistinguishable from that experienced by someone at "death's door'. The simpliest explanation is that the person at death's door is experiencing the result of a malfunctioning brain and not "crossing-over" to a supernatural realm.

The problem here is that death is loaded with all kinds of 'supernatural" and "fear" baggage that the drug experience doesn't have. It is easy for a person to accept that what one experiences is the result of a drug-induced or physical;y-induced brain malfunction. Most people are taught to be terrified of death and cannot accept that it is final. The same brain malfuntion induced at death's door assumes a whole different connotation, i. e., hope that one has gotten a "glimpse" of another life and that death is not really final after all. Here, as in politics, "appearance" is everything!! (It 'appears' that we will really escape so we latch on to a faulty interpretation for comfort).

First, not all brain states are equivalent. Do remember the "tree scenario". There are real trees, they can be seen, touched, smelled, scientists can measure the oxygen they produce, in other words, there is ample evidence that they exists outside of your memory and last "sight" of one.

And yes, you do need some kind of verification, outside of your own perception, that you are interpreting your experience correctly. You say-so is not adequate as proof (however conforting and uplifting it is to you). For instance how do you know for a fact that:

• --You aren't in communion with an evil spirit who is lying to you (if your God can exists, how can you rule out the existence of other supernatural entities, whose benevolence may be questionable).
• --You aren't suffering paranoid schizophrenic delusions
• --You aren't suffering the effects of some brain injury
• --Someone didn't slip "essence of funny mushroom" in your morning cupper or sacramental wine
• --If you were ever a drug user, this experience is not the result of former or present drug use (the doctored morning cupper not withstanding)

The end result is that we have only your interpretation of a totally subjective experience that cannot be examined in any way that can autheticate your interpretation. Am I going to just take your word...no way!!! (PS. I am not casing an aspersions upon your honesty or integrity. I would hope that should our positions be reversed, you would be similiarly skeptical of my claim)

OK, yes drugs are real things that confer real effects...

I don't doubt that you do desire such communion, but in this case, unlike the case of the drugs, there is absolutely no evidence of His existence outside of your head. The commonality here is that the drugs just activate the same circuits as ritual, prayer, and meditation do. You just don't pop pills or shoot-up the way a drug user does, but because the drugs and ritual, prayer, mediation activate the same brain chemistry, you both have a similiar experience. Before you indulge in the adrenaline rush of indignation, please note that I have made no value judgement about yours or the drug users experience. I don't give a rats patootie one way or the other how other people get their jollies as long as they don't injure others during or "volunteer'' them for their favored "experience".

I'm so glad that we don't "bother"you!!!! Ha ha! Hee hee! Hoo! Ho!


What a classic case of projection! It was you in the above who said that if theists rarely thought about skeptics at all or if they did they (theists like yourself) usually "felt sorry for them". Only someone with a superiority complex would have the monumental gall to "fell sorry" for those who (gasp!) didn't agree with them.


Tsk! Tsk!
How disappointing that you should fall back on the standard theists retreat to the fallacy known as Appealing to the Gallery, or Appealing to the People. You commit this fallacy if you attempt to win acceptance of an assertion by appealing to a large group of people. This form of fallacy is often characterized by emotive language. For example:

"For thousands of years people have believed in Jesus and the Bible. This belief has had a great impact on their lives What more evidence do you need that Jesus was the Son of God? Are you trying to tell those people that they are all mistaken fools?" from: <a href="http://www.infidels.org/news/atheism/logic.html" target="_blank">http://www.infidels.org/news/atheism/logic.html</a>

Your version (in bold) is just another version of the same fallacy. A false idea on any scale is still false. Just because "the vast majority of humans have succumbed" to a false idea does not validate it. After all millions of people used to believe the world was flat. That didn't stop the world from being round.

BTW, I think that this particular false idea (religion) might very well result in the extinction of our species and quite possibly the planet as some God-deluded nut-case lights the blue touch paper of Armageddon, convinced that he and his (the Way, the Truth, and The Light Crowd™ ) are right and deserving to rule the world,as opposed to the rest of us "skeptics" (the children of the Heart of Ultimalte Darkness) who only rate death and destruction (Hey! Heap Big Sky Daddy says so..to them only, of course!). All one has to do is pick up any history book or newspaper and read the tales, written in blood, of the "Godly", who were and are so busy living for a hypothetical nether world, that they have forgotten (if they ever knew), how to live in this one.....

<img src="graemlins/boohoo.gif" border="0" alt="[Boo Hoo]" /> "Religion is a shell game, without the pea."---Typhon

[ August 13, 2002: Message edited by: mfaber ]</p>

Vorkosigan

Mods, can someone fix the URLs?

Taffy Lewis

mfaber,

I don't claim that his research is PROOF of a transcendent reality. I said that his research provides "good evidence for a spiritual reality." Newberg says:

I take "strong case" and "good evidence" to be equivalent.

You say:

Keep in mind that you referred to Newberg's research. You approvingly quoted Flynn who referred to Newberg as support for his position.

With regard to (1), you might note that people can have experiences of trees AFTER their brains are stimulated electrically. This fact doesn't cast doubt on experiences of trees which don't occur under such circumstances.

There are a few points relevant to (2). First of all, most people who have theistic perceptions do not have them under the influence of drugs. Secondly, people can have experiences of various physical objects while taking drugs. I had a friend in college who took LSD. He had experiences of various physical objects which simply were not present. This doesn't cast doubt on experiences of those physical objects under normal circumstances. Thirdly, "hearing God" is a case of faulty SENSORY EXPERIENCE. Hearing is a sensory modality. So if drug induced auditory experiences cast doubt on anything, they cast doubt on the reliability of sensory perception.

As to (4), it can be pointed out that hyponosis can cause false beliefs about physical objects. So what? This doesn't case doubt on sensory experience and thus it shouldn't cast doubt on theistic perception.

And lastly, (4) refers to people who are in a pathological condition. Once again, the vast majority of people who claim to experience God's presence and activity in their lives are not in any pathological condition. They live normal, productive lives. Also, persons with temporal lobe epilepsy have false sensory experiences. Apparent experiences of God are not the only types of false experiences they have.

God's existence is not an assumption. And the existence of God is not put forward in order to explain theistic perception. It is very important that one realize that there is a distinction between appealing to God's existence to explain something and appealing to the content of experience.

In his Perceiving God, William Alston says:

If anything, you are beginning with your nonbelief in God and are attempting to explain away theistic perception. But in order to avoid begging the question, we cannot start with either belief in God or its negation. We should begin with the content of experience as we do with sensory experience of the physical world.

Again, I don't take this to be a serious objection because the same thing can be said about sensory experience.

First of all, just as we can artificially bring about experiences of God we can artificially bring about experiences of trees. The genuine experiences and the delusory experiences can have the same content yet we know in the delusory case that we have brought about the experience artificially. In the case of trees, you rightly point out that we have independent reason to believe in the existence of trees. Yet, in order to justify belief in other trees, you must appeal to further sensory experiences of trees; specifically sensory experiences of trees that are not artificially generated.

But experiences of God are in exactly the same situation. There are experiences of God brought about artificially and there are experiences of God not brought about artificially. If you can appeal to experiences which are not brought about artificially to give independent support for your belief in trees then why can't the theist appeal to experiences of God which are not brought about artificially to give independent support to his belief in God? You seem to be applying a double standard.

And you cannot prove the existence of trees without some appeal to sensory experiences of trees.

NDEs can be judged nonveridical because they occur under pathological conditions. The vast majority of experiences of God do not occur under such conditions.

Let's try this with experiences of trees. "And yes, you do need some kind of verification, outside of your own perception of trees, that you are interpreting your experience of trees correctly." What is your verification for the existence of trees which is "OUTSIDE" sensory experiences of trees? This is another double standard.

I'm sure you find it "comforting and uplifting" to believe that you don't need the crutch of religion. Most likely you feel superior to people who do need, what is in your eyes, a crutch such as religion. As I've already pointed out, this sort of psychological analysis can occur from both sides. None of it has any force.

You say:

Maybe I am. It could also be the case that I am a brain-in-a-vat or I am in The Matrix. That's possible. Would you have me doubt my trust in sensory experience because of this? I doubt it. Neither should it cause doubt with regard to theistic perception.

As to the other items in your bullet list, I will merely point out that one does not need to have a brain examination in order to trust ones sensory experience so one shouldn't need an examination in order to trust ones religious experience. Until it can be shown that a person is in some sort of pathological state then that person shouldn't believe they are in such a state.

There are some statements by Newberg which are relevant here:

He also says:

Lastly, he says:

Next, you say:

People who experience God don't feel sorry for nonbelievers because they disagree with them. They feel sorry for them because they aren't aware of, what is to them, something of tremendous value. It's similar to an American who feels sorry for someone who lives in a third world country. It seems to be a natural response. It would be odd if they were indifferent.

You misunderstand me. I am not appealing to these people to support belief in a god. I pointed out that to you millions of people have succumbed to a false worldview simply because it makes them feel good. I am saying that it might make you feel good to believe that you aren't capable of being duped by something which has managed to dupe so many people. Or that you simply have not been fooled by something which has conned so many people.

Science has given us the ability to destroy the world. Does this say anything negative about science? Obviously not.

Further, Stalin and Pol Pot were atheists and they were responsible for the deaths of millions. This doesn't cast doubt on atheism.

Simply because theism has its share of nuts that doesn't cast doubt on theistic belief.

[ August 13, 2002: Message edited by: Taffy Lewis ]</p>

RogerLeeCooke

What is quite clear from the research is that religious experiences are indistinguishable as phenomena from certain drug experiences, and that they are correlated in a way as yet imperfectly understood with brain chemistry. I find Hume vindicated once again (partly) in his simple observation that the human personality is an effect of the brain (or body, as Hume said) and dies when the body dies. Given that, the question of gods hiding out there somewhere and not wanting to be found, becomes irrelevant to me. I've got enough to do understanding what I can see, hear, and reason about.

Kantian

Will somebody explain to me just exactly what is Taffy Lewis claiming here? Is he or she saying that "theistic perception" cannot be compared to sensory perception, and then he or she goes on to do just that?

Furthermore, isn't it true that the elements of sensory perception that justifies belief in an external reality (sensory data, detail, uniformity of nature, communal agreement) utterly lacking in theistic perception?

How is it possible a contingent proposition, that of a perception, ever justify a necessary conclusion?

Is there a logically possible, well specified set of perceptions that could "falsify" the hypothesis of theistic perception? I strongly do not believe there is any possible set of perceptions that can falsify the notion of God.

bd-from-kg

Taffy Lewis:

Yes, but all of your analogies were to belief in specific physical objects. Actually this is unavoidable, as we shall soon see.

This doesn’t really make sense. My belief in even one physical object is based on a multitude of sensory experiences which display consistent correlations across different senses and across time. Indeed, the reason for hypothesizing specific objects is precisely to account for this consistency. Of course, this is part of a vast, interlocking series of hypotheses (what I call my ontology) by means of which I account for all, or nearly all, of our sensory perceptions; these include various regularities, such as the things called “physical laws”. Strictly speaking, it is through this entire conceptual scheme, not discrete bits of it, that I account for specific experiences. Every feature of my ontology is there to account for at least some perception, or some aspect of my perceptions, and the ontology as a whole is the simplest, most elegant one that I can think of that does so. This is what every rational person does.

To say that I believe in an external world is simply to say that my ontology includes elements that are not part of my mind, but exist independently of it. There is no reasonable sense in which I can be said to “perceive” the physical world as such. The most that can be said is that I have certain mental experiences which appear to be sensory inputs, which I interpret as being caused by specific physical objects, or in some cases (such as rainbows and mirages) by aspects of the physical world that do not correspond to anything that I would call an “object”.

In the case of what you call “theistic perception” you are claiming that you have direct access to the actual nature of what is causing the perception. If so, this experience is nothing like sensory perception, and any analogies to it are completely invalid. In the case of sensory perception we never have direct access to, or knowledge of, what is causing it. We form hypotheses about what is causing it. These hypotheses are “good” or “valid” just to the extent that they allow us to predict or anticipate later experiences. There is simply no way ever to know whether our ontology “corresponds to” some external reality; all we can ever know is that it has yielded correct predictions, and therefore will presumably continue to do so.

Thus you are completely wrong when you say:

This statement represents a total misconception of the nature of sensory perception. It simply does not give us “access,” primary or otherwise, to its “objects”.

That’s true. The “physical world” hypothesis is simply part of (what seems to most of us, at least) the ontology that provides the simplest, most straightforward way to organize and conceptualize our sensory experiences. It is not clear, to put it mildly, that this is true of the God hypothesis. At any rate it is certainly not the simplest, most straightforward way to incorporate “mystical experiences” into an ontology that already includes the physical world, since such experiences can easily be accommodated within this framework.

Of course. As far as I’m concerned, these are just two different ways of talking about how we interact with “reality”. I tend to use the representationalist terminology because it is closer to the way I think about such things, but I will be happy to adopt “direct realist” terminology if you prefer.

Ah. That depends on which terminology you adopt. For example, say that you “see” a flower. According to the representationalist account what you are “directly perceiving” is something in your mind, which is often referred to as “sense data” (even if it turns out not to be coming from one of your “senses”). In this account you can be pretty much sure of what it is that you are “directly aware” of because it is something that exists in your own mind. What you can’t be sure of is what these “sense data” represent, or whether they represent anything at all. (You might be dreaming or hallucinating.) According to the direct realist account what you are “directly perceiving” is something like photons impinging on your retinas. In this account, however, you can’t be sure of what it is that you’re perceiving, or even that you’re really perceiving anything at all. (There may not be any photons; you may be dreaming or hallucinating.) Thus, in the representationalist account, if you think you’re seeing a flower, you really are perceiving something (namely “sense data”) even if you’re hallucinating, whereas in the “direct realist” account you are not perceiving anything if you’re hallucinating. What you’re “directly aware” of in this case is some neuronal activity in your brain, which you are incorrectly interpreting as photons. (One reason I don’t like the “direct realist” account is that it seems to force one to say weird things such as that you may be mistaking neurons for photons even though you may know nothing of either neurons or photons. It seems more natural to say that you are mistakenly interpreting sense data as representing a flower when in fact they don’t represent anything.)

In either account we are “directly aware” of the “objects” of our perception. In the representationalist account we are even directly aware (in a sense) of the nature of these objects. (That is, we recognize them as “sense data”.) What we are not directly aware of is what these objects represent, or indeed whether they represent anything. According to the “direct perception” account we are directly aware of the things (such as photons) that are the proximate “objects” of the perception, but we are not directly aware of their nature. (They may not be photons after all.) And of course, even if the things we are directly perceiving really are photons, we are certainly not “directly aware” of whatever the photons were emitted or reflected from.

OK, but there must be some criteria for distinguishing between “mystical experiences” that are entirely subjective and ones that involve perception of some “objectively existing” entity. In the case of sensory perception the criteria include whether difference senses produce related sensory inputs, and most importantly, whether other people who are “nearby” in a spatiotemporal sense have related experiences which can be given a unified (simple, elegant) explanation by assuming the existence of an “objectively existing” entity (e.g., a physical object or objects) with definable properties, together with definable causal relations, which taken together can account for all of these experiences. These criteria provide numerous “cross-checks” that can be applied to test the hypothesis of an objective, external cause. Without such cross-checks there is no way to distinguish experiences with objective causes from purely subjective ones, and there would be no rational reason to believe in an external world at all. So far you have rejected all of the criteria used in the case of sensory perceptions to distinguish objective experiences from subjective ones, and have proposed no new ones to replace them. Thus, so far as I can see, you have no way to distinguish between “mystical experiences” which are purely subjective from ones caused by an external, objectively existing entity – much less between ones caused by God and ones with some other objective, external cause.

Yes, I trust my memory to be generally reliable, and there doesn’t seem to be any noncircular way to justify this. More generally, I trust my cognitive faculties as a whole to be generally reliable, and there certainly is no noncircular way to justify this.

I discussed this at some length on the <a href="http://iidb.org/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic&f=21&t=000384" target="_blank">Nature of Metaphysical Axioms</a> thread a while back. The basic idea is that certain things must be taken by any rational being as fundamental premises. I discuss how to recognize these and distinguish between them and other “presuppositions” that cannot be justified in this way.

There is no such thing as logical intuition. To understand a basic logical truth is simply to understand the meaning of the words involved. The meaning of words such as “and,” “or,” and “implies,” for example, is defined by the corresponding logical axioms. “Understanding” more complicated logical truths is simply a matter of applying the definitions correctly.

No one can seriously argue that a being with the properties that God is postulated to have could be anything but infinitely complex, and Swinburne does not attempt to do so. what he says is that the hypothesis that God exists is a fairly simple hypothesis. And this might be so, depending on what you mean by “simple”. But it’s not an appropriate hypothesis to invoke to explain any physical phenomenon. There are several reasons for this.

First, it has no explanatory value. Since God can do anything, the hypothesis cannot be falsified. It is consistent with any observation or state of affairs whatsoever. Thus, if you say, “observation X is explained by God” you have said nothing meaningful, because any alternative could be “explained” in exactly the same way.

Of course, you could make the hypothesis more specific by postulating that God’s nature is such that He would predictably do this, but not that. To the extent that you do this, it is possible to make some predictions based on this hypothesis. But if you want to be able to make any nontrivial predictions you’re going to have to postulate some reasonably interesting, nontrivial characteristics. And in that case you no longer have a simple hypothesis.

What’s more, to the extent that God is constrained to act in predictable ways (and thus becomes a useful hypothesis) to just that extent He becomes a natural object rather than a supernatural one. Thus to postulate any such properties is to deny God’s transcendent nature.

Second, God is unimaginably different from the sorts of things that are postulated by a standard naturalistic ontology. Thus accepting the hypothesis that God exists involves a radical modification to a conceptual scheme that can explain almost all observations or perceptions, in order to explain a few very simple ones. This is a gross violation of Occam’s Razor unless there is no alternative – that is, unless there is no less radical modification that can do the job. And of course there are very simple modifications that can be made to a standard naturalistic ontology that can do the job perfectly well.

Oh, please. We are acquainted with no[ beings, personal or otherwise, that can create things ex nihilo, which are self-existent (whatever that means), that exist outside the physical world, that are omniscient or omnipotent, which know the future, etc., etc. God is so far outside our experience as to be utterly incomprehensible to humans. More on this later.

As I pointed out above, the kind of “explanation” you’re talking about here is utterly devoid of any actual content.

Pointless word games. If you prefer, cognitive processing is occurring your brain such that, if it were slowed down enough, you would perceive it as a long, involved series of inferences.

Anyway, the real question is no whether your belief that you are perceiving a computer is in fact the product of a series of rational inferences, but whether it can be justified or warranted by such a chain. As Evan Fales puts it in the article you reference later:

That seems pretty accurate to me. If someone asks me why I think that I’m seeing a computer, I can explain (at least in outline form) the series of inferences that justify this conclusion, and this corresponds reasonably well to the actual process that my brain went through when it was processing the relevant sensory inputs and producing the output “that’s a computer”. What difference does it make whether I was actually conscious of this process while it was taking place?

Gee, thanks.

Oh, please. Anyone whose conception of God even remotely resembles the sort of thing called “God” in modern western cultures cannot be under the impression that he is, or was, having any kind of sensory perception of Him – that he is “seeing” or “hearing” God, for example. God is simply not the sort of being that one can conceivably have a sensory experience of.

Not so. Those who claim to have had a “mystical experience” of something or other have radically different impressions of the nature of this “something”. A Buddhist who has such an experience is absolutely not under the impression that he has had an experience of God, or of any kind of “personal presence”. And Buddhist monks certainly do not report having “visions” of God or any other supernatural being. In fact, it’s quite clear that they are having the very same kind of experience that you call “theistic perception”. Except that, oddly enough, they do not interpret it as theistic perception.

But I didn’t just state it. I pointed out that the criterion that ultimately defines whether an apparent perception is subjective or objective is whether other people perceive the same thing. This is actually a complicated issue, since different people rarely have the very same perceptual experience. But if one person is under the impression that he is perceiving something “real” (i.e., something that “objectively exists” independently of his perception of it) and no one else perceives anything that can be plausibly attributed to the same “objectively existing” thing, the fundamental criterion for something being “objective” demands that his claim be rejected, and that his experience must be classified as subjective.

The fact that different people at different places and times have the same kind of experience when they are subjected to the same conditions is not good enough to qualify the experiences as perceptions of an objectively existing thing. For example, if Smith, Jones, and Edwards are hit over the head in a certain way at different places and times, all of them may “see stars”, but we do not conclude from this that the stars objectively exist. What we conclude is that it is objectively true that many humans have characteristics that cause them to have this apparent perceptual experience under certain reproducible conditions.

What you’re really asking is that we make a special exemption to the usual rules for distinguishing between objective and subjective experiences in the case of so-called “theistic perception”. But you have not offered any remotely adequate justification for doing so. And if we do, how shall we then distinguish between subjective and objective experiences? What new criterion do you propose to replace the one that you propose to discard?

This is exactly backwards. One of the reasons that I reject the God hypothesis is that it seems obvious to me that there are good naturalistic explanations for the kinds of experiences that you call “theistic perception”.

But even if had no idea how such experiences could be explained naturalistically, I would certainly not explain them by adopting the “God hypothesis” for reasons that I’ve already explained and others that I will soon explain.

Not so. If someone who is not familiar with mirages sees what he takes to be a large lake in the distance in the middle of a desert (and I know that there is no such lake) I don’t consider him delusional. His cognitive faculties are probably working just fine. He’s just misinterpreting what he’s seeing.

So you’re saying that the reason God is part of the theist’s worldview in the first place (i.e., prior to any “theistic perception” experience) is that they have perceived Him in some other way? If so, you have abandoned your original argument. If not, what’s your point? My question was, what rational reason would there be for God to be part of one’s ontology (i.e., to believe in God) if, as you stipulated in the OP, "belief in God is not based on any kind of inference from other things of which we are aware", and one has not had a “theistic perception” experience?

Now as to Alston’s first condition for having a “theistic perception,” you say:

OK, but by “concern” you mean that they think about things more than people, or that they tend not to take the interests of other people into account in deciding what to do. You cannot mean that they are not concerned to notice whether another person is around, or that they often fail to perceive the presence of other people. So what could this have to do, logically, with their ability to perceive God? And is there any actual evidence that such people have a harder time having a “mystical experience” than others if they choose to? Or is it merely that they generally don’t choose to? If the latter, the condition is meaningless. I don’t often perceive roller coasters since I rarely go to amusement parks. But that’s not at all the same thing as saying that I might have trouble seeing a roller coaster if I followed someone’s directions (“Go to such-and-such a place and look to the north”).

The only conceivable reason why being “preoccupied with impersonal objects” might interfere with “theistic perception” (on the assumption that this kind of experience is really a “direct perception of God”) is that God doesn’t want such people to perceive Him. And so far you have offered no rationale whatsoever for why this might be so.

As to my second point, that the requirement that someone be a “moral person” in order to be able to perceive God would seem (according to most theists) to be pretty much impossible for a rational atheist to satisfy, you say merely:

OK. Let’s see how this works. What do you mean by being a “moral person”. Specifically, how does one determine whether an action is “moral” or not? What is the criterion that distinguishes a “moral” action” from one that is not “moral”? What distinguishes a “moral” person from one who is not “moral”? If you can answer these questions in a noncircular way without reference to God, I’ll concede the point.

Finally regarding my point that the requirement that one must be “open to the possibility that God exists” also requires a nontheist to be irrational in order to be able to “perceive God”, you replied:

So far as I know, such claims are based on the belief that the concept of God is logically incoherent. This is not an unreasonable position. But those who hold it are not properly regarded as atheists. They do not hold that the proposition expressed by the statement “God exists” is false; they hold that the statement “God exists” does not express a proposition. It does seem at first sight that it would impossible even for God to persuade such people that He exists. But that’s not correct. God would first have to enlighten them as to where they went wrong in concluding that the concept of God is logically incoherent; and that the statement “God exist” does indeed express a proposition. Then He could show them that this proposition is true by revealing His existence to them using the same means that He would use for anyone else.

This is also not an unreasonable position, but I don’t have the time or inclination to explain why on this thread. Here we are discussing only whether what you call a “theistic perception” of God is significant evidence for His existence. Whether anything else could be significant evidence for it is a subject for another day.

This misses the point entirely. Your contention, as I understand it, is analogous to saying that the baseball will not allow me to perceive it unless I believe that there is something more than a remote probability that it exists beforehand. My question was: what possible reason I would have for believing that there was anything but a very remote possibility that the baseball existed before perceiving it? In other words, this is a completely unreasonable prior condition to impose on being able to perceive something – unless, of course, the “something” does not want to be perceived by anyone who is at all rational.

Perhaps this is true if you’re a newborn baby. But anyone else is not a tabula rosa. We already have a very extensive set of experiences and have developed a very complex conceptual scheme by means of which we understand and remember them. Hypotheses to explain new experiences are going to be evaluated according to how well they harmonize with this existing conceptual scheme. Far from being irrational, this is at the heart of rationality. We are not free, as rational creatures, to simply add new hypotheses willy-nilly without regard to whether they are consistent with hypotheses we have already accepted, and it is totally impractical to “reinvent the world” every time we have a new experience.

First of, I didn’t say that the concept of god is foreign to all ordinary experience, but that God Himself is. Unless you really are delusional, this must be obvious. It is a commonplace, even among theists, that for some mysterious reason God chooses to remain “hidden”. He does not display Himself publicly. But not only do we not have any experience (at least of the ordinary kind – i.e., aside from “theistic perception”) of God Himself, but we have no experience at all of anything remotely like God. (See below.) This is the real point of saying that He is foreighn to human experience. If you claim that you’ve discovered a new species that resembles an elephant, but is bigger than an elephant and is striped, I may be skeptical but I would not demand extraordinarily strong evidence because, although this species is “utterly foreign to human experience” in the sense that no one has seen it before, it resembles things that humans have seen enough that its existence is plausible. To put it more generally, believing that it exists does not require a massive, radical modification of my ontology.

More accurately, we hypothesize that there are other minds, etc. It’s a useful hypothesis; it has a lot of explanatory and predictive power. When we predict what other “human bodies” will do on the basis of this hypothesis, we’re right far more often than if we consider them to be “black boxes” with no motives, purposes, likes or dislikes, beliefs, etc.

No, it isn’t. God is completely different from every “personal being” of the kind that we “know” of through sensory perception. The fact that He is not accessible to sensory perception would seem to be a significant difference in itself, but that’s just for starters. What other personal being acts, wills, etc., but is outside time? Can we even form any real conception of what this means? What other personal being is omniscient? Think about what this means. He must have access to an infinite database of knowledge, and for any purpose that He might have He can instantly determine exactly which items of this database are relevant and access all of them immediately. He can process this infinite amount of information instantly without any kind of central processor. Does this sound remotely like any other personal being that you’ve ever heard of? What other personal being is omnipotent? Think about what this means. He can create things ex nihilo even though He has no apparent means of doing so (or of doing anything else, for that matter). He could overpower any conceivable other being effortlessly, even if that other being was also infinitely powerful. That means that his power must in some sense exceed any cardinal number, which is to say that it is literally beyond conceiving. What other personal being can define right and wrong? This is not only unheard of, it is inconceivable and incomprehensible.

And yet, unlike every other hypothesized personal being, the God hypothesis has no explanatory or predictive power. Assuming that God exists does not allow us to predict anything that we couldn’t predict otherwise, nor does it improve the accuracy of any predictions in the slightest. The world operates in all respects (with the possible exception of “theistic perception”) just as though God does not exist.

In short, the existence of God is a stunningly radical hypothesis invoked (on your showing) for the sole purpose of explaining a rather trivial phenomenon which can easily be explained in other, naturalistic ways.

Next we come to your responses to my comments about McKim’s conditions.

Regarding my Cameron Diaz example, you say:

No, I’m pointing out that there is no apparent reason why a mocking attitude would interfere with our ability to perceive God. There is absolutely nothing in the nature of “theistic perception” itself that would lead us to predict that such an attitude would preclude my being able to experience it if it is really a perception of God. God could make me perceive Him if He wanted to, and it isn’t at all clear why my disbelief in Him would make Him not want to. On the other hand, if the experience is not really a perception of God, I can think of all kinds of reasons why various aspects of my mental state might preclude my being able to have it.

Hmm. I take it that the problem is that God is afraid that He won’t be able to convince me that He really exists even if He tries really hard?

In fact, it seems impossible to imagine any plausible reason why God would not want to reveal Himself to someone, especially to someone who goes to the trouble of fulfilling all of the conditions for having a “theistic perception” other than believing that there is more than a remote chance that God exists. In fact, the conditions listed are such that, as a practical matter, they can only be fulfilled by someone who is already very close (at the least) to believing in God.

Finally, you say:

Once again you seem to have completely missed the point, which can be found in the summary:

Look at this from the perspective of Bayes’ theorem. If a “theistic perception” experience were really a perception of God, there would be absolutely no a priori reason to expect that the kinds of conditions listed by Alston and McKim would have to be fulfilled before one would be able to experience it. On the other hand, if it is not really a perception of God, it is absolutely to be expected that these kinds of conditions would have to be fulfilled. The conditions are precisely those designed to produce the requisite frame of mind (or filter out those who are not in the right kind of state of mind) to be maximally receptive to the suggestion that can “perceiving God” if they go through the appropriate ritual, and thus to be likely to convince themselves that they did “perceive God” if they succeed in experiencing the mental state in question.

Thus the fact (if true) that these conditions must be fulfilled in order to have a "theistic perception" experience is strong evidence that such an experience is not a "direct perception" of God.

Note: I have some comments about your later posts, and about the whole concept of being able to “directly perceive” God in the sense you seem to mean. but this will have to wait. This post is already too long, and way overdue.

[ August 14, 2002: Message edited by: bd-from-kg ]</p>

bd-from-kg

Taffy Lewis:

In this post I want to discuss your quite amazing reaction to the recent research into the neurological mechanisms underlying “mystical experiences”.

mfaber quotes Tom Flynn as follows:

The Newsweek article that he cites goes into further detail, making it clear that the “mystical experience” effect does not come from any special part of the brain designed to produce it, but is simply the result of unusual inputs (or lack thereof) to parts of the brain that are adapted for straightforward practical purposes.

Now as you note, Newberg seems unfazed by all of this. He sees in it “evidence of a neurological process that has evolved to allow us humans to transcend material existence ...” But this is reading far more into the data than is there. The data shows evidence of a neurological process that has evolved, all right, but there is zero evidence that it evolved “to allow us humans to transcend material existence”. All of the available evidence indicates that these process evolved to help us determine our position and orientation in space and similar mundane tasks which just happen to be essential to survival.

You can quote Newberg all you like, but the more you quote him the clearer it is that he’s not thinking clearly. For example:

In other words, the fact that a phenomenon has a simple, straightforward naturalistic explanation is strong evidence that there is something beyond nature! This is madness. If the existence of a naturalistic explanation for “mystical experiences” is evidence of something beyond nature, what would the discovery that there is no naturalistic explanation for such experiences show?

At this point we have two possible explanations for such experiences:

(1) The human brain is structured in such a way that, by manipulating the inputs of certain areas of it in certain ways, one can produce an experience of oceanic oneness with the universe, the presence of a mysterious Other, etc. The structures in question can easily be accounted for by the processes of random mutation and natural selection.

(2) The human brain is structured in such a way that, by manipulating the inputs of certain areas of it in certain ways, one can produce an experience of oceanic oneness with the universe, the presence of a mysterious Other, etc. The structures in question can easily be accounted for by the processes of random mutation and natural selection. But actually God guided the evolutionary process for the specific purpose of bringing about this result.

It doesn’t take a genius to recognize that Occam’s Razor demands that the first hypothesis be preferred to the second. The additional hypothesis in (2) that God somehow caused these specific survival-enhancing aspects of the brain’s structure to develop is completely superfluous; it adds nothing to the explanatory and predictive power of (1). This is why Christian philosopher Nancey Murphy (as quoted by Tom Flynn) says that such results “reinforce atheistic assumptions and make religion appear useless. If you can explain religious experience purely as a brain phenomenon, you don’t need the assumption of the existence of God.” Or at any rate you don’t need the God hypothesis to explain mystical experiences.

This is exactly analogous to many other developments over the centuries that eliminated the need for the “God hypothesis” to explain many things. For example, it was once widely believed that when people died from typhoid it was because God was punishing them. Now we understand that people get typhoid by drinking infected water. But following your reasoning, we could say that the existence of a natural cause shows that God’s judgement is at work. Isn’t it obvious that this is one of God’s methods of punishing people? And why would you have expected a natural event such as death from typhoid to have anything but a natural cause? The naturalistic explanation is right as far as it goes, but it overlooks the “cause behind the cause”.

Fortunately most people have a firmer hold on reality than this, or we would still be in the Dark Ages. Instead of treating schizophrenics and epileptics, we would lock them in the attic. Instead of trying to predict hurricanes and warn people that they were coming, we would just let events play out so as not to interfere with Divine Providence.

No, I’m afraid that once a straightforward naturalistic explanation for a phenomenon is found, it is madness to continue to regard it as evidence of God or of Divine intervention. It’s possible, of course, that God does play some role in it, but there is no rational reason to believe that it does in the absence of some evidence other than the existence of the phenomenon itself.

bd-from-kg

Taffy Lewis, Vorkosigan, et al:

Here are a few comments on the exchange between Taffy Lewis and Vorkosigan.

1. Vorkosigan points out:

This is the understatement of the year. The idea that personal beings are part of “objective reality” is actually a very radical hypothesis. The reasons that it may not seem so are that (1) We all adopted at it at such an early age that we can’t remember the process leading to it; and (2) Our minds appear to be structured in such a way as to create a predisposition to adopt this hypothesis. However, when we attempt to produce a rational reconstruction of the reasoning involved to show that this hypothesis has a rational warrant, we see that it is a powerful unifying idea, allowing us to understand and explain a massive amount of experience, and to make accurate predictions, in a way that, complicated as it is, is far simpler than any alternative.

But at the same time we have all, personally and collectively, learned the pitfalls of interpreting experiences in terms of personal beings. Very young children tend to regard almost anything that moves, and many things that don’t (such as dolls) as personal beings. And it is apparently human nature to attribute the seasons and the alternation of day and night, eclipses and earthquakes, epilepsy and madness, diseases and accidents - in short, virtually every feature of “objective reality” – to the actions of a personal being. The history of the progress of science and enlightenment has been a history of discarding such explanations as superfluous.

Thus, while the “personal being” hypothesis is very powerful and useful when it is applied appropriately, we must be very careful to avoid applying it inappropriately, especially given that human beings seem to have a strong inherent disposition to do just that. Explaining a phenomenon that we can’t understand immediately by invoking a hypothetical “personal being” is exactly what humans have practically always done, and they have practically always been wrong.

2. Vorkosigan’s point that what we become aware of (in the case of sight, hearing, etc.) is not the actual sensory inputs but the output of extensive cognitive processing is a very good one. I would add that this processing is itself strongly influenced by one’s previous experiences. Thus it is simply not possible to consciously interpret the original sensory inputs. A good example of this is speech. For example, I might “perceive” Tom saying “There’s supposed to be a thunderstorm this afternoon”. But the original sensory inputs were simply a series of vibrations in the air. What’s more, we almost always fail to pick up all of the vibrations needed to reconstruct each syllable separately, What actually happens is that our very sophisticated unconscious processing is able to reconstruct the sentence from what was heard clearly, plus what wasn’t heard so clearly, but clearly enough to rule out certain interpolations, plus our extensive knowledge of English vocabulary and grammar, the things people are most likely to say, the likely patterns of pitch and volume for various possible reconstructions, etc. Usually all this happens so fast that we aren’t aware of it at all. But sometimes there is a noticeable delay during which we are in doubt about all of what was said. Then suddenly we “perceive” the entire sentence as a whole. This illustrates as clearly as anything the true nature of “perceiving” something.

Thus we do not, and cannot, simply “see or hear what’s there”. By the time we are conscious of a “perception,” the automatic, preconscious processing that our brains perform without our bidding has already, in effect, interpreted the original sensory input extensively. There is a strong tendency for what we “perceive” to be consistent with the conceptual framework implicit in this “pre-processing” – a conceptual framework, that, oddly enough, closely resembles the conceptual framework that we are conscious of – what I call one’s ontology. This is why there is a strong tendency to perceive what we expect to perceive.

[Note: On the other hand, I don’t really understand what Vorkosigan means when he says:

One guess is that he is referring only to the kind of “inference” involved in processing sensory inputs to produce “perceptions”. If so, I basically agree. But it sure does seem as though there is such a thing as consciously inferring a conclusion from explicitly stated premises. For example, when I read the classic proof that there are infinitely many primes, I could have sworn that I was engaged in a conscious reasoning process. And I can’t imagine what kind of evidence there might be, even in principle, to show that I wasn’t. If I’m wrong, I sure wasted a lot of time taking all those classes in logic.]

3. Taffy says: “Beliefs based upon experience have a prima facie rationality.” Actually this is true just to the extent that the experience is a relatively familiar, commonplace one. If I have a perception that a car went through the intersection in front of me, there really is no rational reason to doubt that I perceived the event pretty much as it occurred. But if I have a perception that an accident involving three cars occurred in the intersection, there are very strong reasons to doubt that I perceived the event as it really occurred. It’s very likely that there really was an accident, but I will probably be wrong about a great number of the details – even things like who was going in what direction, or who hit whom. (This has been borne out by innumerable experiments and observations.) Our cognitive processing is adapted to handle familiar types of experiences very well, but it is extremely unreliable when it has to deal with unfamiliar ones.

Now the whole point about “theistic perception” experiences is that they supposedly give us important new information about the nature of things precisely because they are radically unlike all other experiences. But this very fact justifies extreme skepticism as to whether what is perceived has any relationship to “objective reality”. There is no reason to suppose that our cognitive faculties interpret such experiences correctly.

Also, “prima facie rationality” is just that – prima facie. There are many, many cases where what we perceive is flat-out wrong. Beliefs that are prima facie rational are only actually rational if there are no defeaters. As Vorkosigan pointed out, in this case there are a number of defeaters. In fact, “theistic perception” is almost unique in that it seems as though every theoretically possible type of defeater actually exists. The experiences in question are personal, not shared - the defining feature of a subjective experience; different people who have such experiences report “perceiving” entirely different things; there are simple alternative explanations that are far more compatible with everything else we know about the nature of “objective reality”; there are powerful reasons to doubt that the brain’s cognitive faculties are in good working order during such experiences; the “God hypothesis” has been advanced to explain innumerable other experiences and rejected in every case, etc., etc. If you reject every conceivable type of defeater as irrelevant or inapplicable, you have simply created an unfalsifiable – which is to say, meaningless - hypothesis.

Vorkosigan

One guess is that he is referring only to the kind of “inference” involved in processing sensory inputs to produce “perceptions”. If so, I basically agree. But it sure does seem as though there is such a thing as consciously inferring a conclusion from explicitly stated premises. For example, when I read the classic proof that there are infinitely many primes, I could have sworn that I was engaged in a conscious reasoning process. And I can’t imagine what kind of evidence there might be, even in principle, to show that I wasn’t. If I’m wrong, I sure wasted a lot of time taking all those classes in logic


No, I meant what you doubt.....

BD, I would most respectfully argue that you did not consciously infer anything. If you were looking at philosophical language, inferences couched in the jargon of p and ~p, then your brain had to carry out many operations, sorting through the various things "p" could symbolize, and then offering you the correct set of results. You might be able to talk yourself through the process step-by-step, you might have the kind of mind that perceives the whole thing while it narrates to itself what it is doing, but you're still only getting the outputs of the inference process taking place elsewhere. The irony of consciousness is that it can't think, it can only experience thoughts taking place elsewhere.

Those classes were worth every penny. Just think of all the training your brain has had.

Think about chess or bridge. Lots of logical processing, but none of it conscious. Your brain only gives you a few choices of the hundreds possible. The same with your proof of primes. Your brain never gave you "prime beef" or "prime of his life" or "alpha prime" or any other meaning of the word; it chunked those away and you never saw them. The rules you used to solve the problem you had internalized through all those expensive philosophy classes.

Imagine yourself doing a simple math problem like:

14789
+ 334

You can narrate the thinking process to yourself upon request to the rest of your brain: "9 + 4 equals 13, carry the 10...." but notice that you go a lot slower than you would if you kept your mouth shut. Similarly, when you solved proof for primes, you may have internally talked yourself through it step by step, but the actual processing went on elsewhere.

Another way to think about it is to use the arguments from evolutionary psychology. There is no such thing as a multi-purpose device in the body. Evolution rarely produces organs that perform two or more divergent functions. The intestines only digest, they do not make white blood cells or process nerve impulses. The heart pumps blood, but doesn't breathe. The lungs breathe but they don't trigger the immune system. And so on. Likewise, consciousness can't think. That's not its job. Its job is to provide an "I" for the organism that enhances its ability to compete in a society of highly complex and competitive primates. The illusion that one is "thinking" consciously might be useful as a way of justifying one's conclusions to oneself, but the mundanities of thinking would only get in the way. I mean, would you really like to consciously sort through the more than 200 meanings of the word "run" each time you saw it?

That's why Taffy is so far off. Not only are his ideas about brain processing deeply flawed, but his underlying assumption about the role of consciousness as a sort of central computer or policymaking place is wrong.

OK, that's enough for you to chew on (blast to pieces). Or, at least that's the way I see it. Be merciful in your response.

Vorkosigan