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That is worse. Not better. People have visions - hallucinations - dreams - and more all the time. You just decided what it meant up front - explaining it with a baseless premise - then spent decades verifying it to yourself. Again: Confirmation bias much?
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Originally Posted by sanspeur
Meditation and/or sensory deprivation. When the brain lacks external stimulation to form perceptions, it may form hallucinatory perceptions....Hallucinations are false or distorted sensory experiences that seem real and may be seen, heard, felt, and even smelled or tasted, yet are generated only by the mind....
Please elucidate those things that are NOT generated only by the mind . . . and how YOU know that.
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Originally Posted by AREQUIPA
No, he just hasn't allowed himself to be fooled twice.
Correct. The meditation came first, the baseless premise came afterwards.
Mystic, give it up - we have had you sussed for the last couple of years. You can't bamboozle us.
You know I have no desire to bamboozle or convince anyone, Arequipa . . . just explain and defend my views and why I hold them.
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Originally Posted by Hueffenhardt
One can actually pinpoint what the baseless premise was with Mystic. He cites three criteria for determining whether a meditative experience is an experience of something real or imaginative: 1) immutability, meaning he can't willfully change the experience (like one can sometimes with dreams), 2) consistency, and I cannot remember the third one right now. But, his baseless premise is that if these characteristics are present in a meditative experience, then the experience is of something genuine and real.
As I have explained many times before, Hueff . . . I have satisfied myself many times through personal application and replication of the scientific method within the confines of my own mind (as much as that is possible). I understand that your metaphysical solipsism will not allow you to credit it . . . but it is not intended to do so for you or anyone else. But it is sufficient FOR ME.
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It is baseless because the premise has never been established or tested. One would first have to independently know that an experience was of something real before one could test whether those criteria reliably identify real ones from imaginary ones. And one would have to run multiple trials of this. But, the problem is there is no way to independently (meaning without using those criteria) know that a meditative experience is of something real. And without that one can never test whether those criteria are accurately identify experiences of something real versus experiences of something imaginary.
This would require you attain the same abilities in deep meditation and then perform the tests for yourself. There is no other way. Such things are NOT amenable to secondary verification.
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One can use meditative experiences as inspiration for making hypotheses about how things work, but logically, they could never be sufficient to allow one to declare they know something about the nature of reality.
These are two different issues. I can personally know . . . but for everyone else it must remain a hypothesis to be tested by each individual separately.
You just quoted me, then said nothing to me. Then quoted another user and replied to something they said. Did you forget something?
In the reply to him however you appear to be shifting the onus of proof - an old theist tactic. You had an experience - many people have. If you want to explain that experience then the onus is on you to provide the evidence for your explanation. The onus is not on us to disprove something you just made up. You have simply had an experience - made up an explanation for it from nowhere - then in your own words spend years confirming that explantion to yourself. For the third time: Confirmation bias much?
You just quoted me, then said nothing to me. Then quoted another user and replied to something they said. Did you forget something?
No . . . you are both proceeding from the same false premise that there is anything BUT what our minds generate as evidence about reality. I am focused on the personal verification process within our minds for those things generated by it . . . because EVERYTHING we experience is generated by our mind (the old "mind in a vat" problem).
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In the reply to him however you appear to be shifting the onus of proof - an old theist tactic. You had an experience - many people have. If you want to explain that experience then the onus is on you to provide the evidence for your explanation. The onus is not on us to disprove something you just made up. You have simply had an experience - made up an explanation for it from nowhere - then in your own words spend years confirming that explantion to yourself. For the third time: Confirmation bias much?
I have done so many time and Hueff has made reference to those attempts to explain. He does not credit them as a metaphysical solipsist. You might not either as a methodological naturalist. C'est la vie.
Again people have experiences all the time. It is you postulating a totally absurd explanation for yours. If you have evidence to back up the explanation then stick it up here. However you appear to have just admitted to assuming it first and verifying it later. A perfect example of confirmation bias.
You had an experience you can not explain to yourself. So you just pull out the god of the gaps - and its job done. You then engage in decades of confirming it to yourself. Confirmation bias much?
Be honest, those of you that do have "issues" with Christians, is part of the problem their absolute certainty that God does exist? Or is really more your feeling that Christians try to force their beliefs on you? Or is it something else entirely?
We all know that you cannot prove a negative, so there's no way you can say with 100% certainty that God does not exist. And I know an atheist will say the same thing about proving God does exist, that it's impossible.
But as a Christian, I can say with all honesty that I am 100% certain that God does exist. The reasons why I (and other Christians) believe this have been discussed ad nauseum on this board so I won't rehash any of those now. I can also say with complete certainty that I will go to heaven when I die and that I will be reunited with my loved ones (those that were saved) who have gone on before me. I'm also sure that every other Christian on here would agree with me about their certainty that God exists.
It's my belief that this is one of the problems atheists have with Christians, this confidence we have in our belief in God. Maybe you interpret is as Christians having a chip on our shoulder or thinking that we are better than you. In all honesty, for me anyway, this is absolutely not true. I'm just a sinner saved by grace and do not see myself as being any better or worse than the next gal.
So again, in all honesty, does it just irritate the heck out of you that Christians are so sure of their belief in God?
As immature as I find this post I too am guilty of being so ignorant when it comes the theists. The area I'm most ignorant in is your conceit. I find it an oxymoron between the story of Jesus and how well you think of yourselves separately from that message, the actions you take in government.
The problem IMO with your confidence is it leads our country into situations based on that confident conceited Christianity I'd prefer not to enter.
"For those who see American civilization as superior, there is "quite often more readiness to exert ourselves in the world," said William R. Hutchison, a professor of the history of religion in America at Harvard University."
"American exceptionalism", I don't dig on it actually, we ignore our own problems huffing around all pumped up. Religion a Strong Current in U.S. Wars - Los Angeles Times
I was just talking about this in my thread on being afraid to be atheist.
As I have explained many times before, Hueff . . . I have satisfied myself many times through personal application and replication of the scientific method within the confines of my own mind (as much as that is possible). I understand that your metaphysical solipsism will not allow you to credit it . . . but it is not intended to do so for you or anyone else. But it is sufficient FOR ME.
This would require you attain the same abilities in deep meditation and then perform the tests for yourself. There is no other way. Such things are NOT amenable to secondary verification.
These are two different issues. I can personally know . . . but for everyone else it must remain a hypothesis to be tested by each individual separately.
For the moment, I haven't even been talking about verifying it for the world or for a community of scientists and skeptics, I am saying your criteria logically cannot verify (i.e., is incapable of verifying) that your meditative experience was an experience of something real even for yourself. Yet, you persuade yourself into thinking you have verified it sufficiently for yourself. Therein lies your problem. You have abandoned logical analysis of your own experience.
This doesn't even have to do with my position as a methodological solipsist. If you would look at this rationally, you'd see that you can't use those three criteria to verify whether a meditative experience is of something real when the criteria themselves haven't been shown to have the ability to discern between the meditative experience of real things versus imaginative things. Heck, it is still just a hypothesis that one can ever experience real things during a meditative experience.
I am not even sure that those three criteria work to identify what is real in normal life, but they definitely haven't been established to be able to tell what is real in the very different situation of realm of meditation. (Remind me of what that third criteria was, by the way).
There is no point for me to go through the trouble of trying to reach deeper levels of meditation so that I can have the experience you had, if the logic doesn't hold up. I have full confidence that I could experience things similar to what you have experienced, but what would it prove, even just to myself (I am not talking about a community of skeptics)? Nothing. Why? Because your logic doesn't hold up. Even if I had the experience, I could not know whether it was of something real or imaginative because there are no tools (logical or otherwise) that could establish whether it was real or imaginary. Those three criteria don't cut it. They haven't been established to be able to reliably tell the difference, and they can't ever become established instruments, because we have to have some independent way to know that when they indicate something is real, it actually is real; and when they indicate something is imaginative, it really is imaginative; and that they don't indicate something is real when it's not, or that something is imaginary and its actually real. We can't test it that way, because we have no way of knowing if something experienced during meditation is of something that is actually real.
It is a contradiction in terms and ideas, to call anything a revelation that comes to us at second-hand, either verbally or in writing. Revelation is necessarily limited to the first communication — after this, it is only an account of something which that person says was a revelation made to him; and though he may find himself obliged to believe it, it cannot be incumbent on me to believe it in the same manner; for it was not a revelation made to me, and I have only his word for it that it was made to him.
No . . . you are both proceeding from the same false premise that there is anything BUT what our minds generate as evidence about reality. I am focused on the personal verification process within our minds for those things generated by it . . . because EVERYTHING we experience is generated by our mind (the old "mind in a vat" problem).
I have done so many time and Hueff has made reference to those attempts to explain. He does not credit them as a metaphysical solipsist. You might not either as a methodological naturalist. C'est la vie.
No you are wrong, as an example I smelled my dinner cooking last night. The odor was generated by the roast cooking in the oven...The odor traveled to my nose and caused a message to be sent to my brain, which was the LAST to receive the message.
Mystic, I wonder if this article would mean anything to you...
I enjoy his writing style. He reiterates a lot of what I spent my career dealing with in research efforts to get anything useful out of human responses. Turns out the actual reasons for human behavior are less important than the believed reasons. The lag time for what we consider our conscious awareness is the result of the quantum time it takes for our actual consciousness to form and react. We are virtually always in a time-delayed broadcast mode with respect to our actual consciousness . . . not our instantaneous awareness that we use to think, measure and experience reality. This is why McFadden's CEMI Field accompanying the motor responses is so exciting. It is testable and it validates the field theory of our conscious awareness . . . which by association tends to legitimize Libet's and E. Roy John's non-EM resonant neural field as the probable basis for our actual consciousness . . . the one that precedes our so-called instantaneous awareness.
Thanks again . . . I enjoyed the article. It explains your skepticism perfectly and would have raised doubts but for my extensive efforts to validate my meditative experiences over decades. Consistency of results is a strong validation of reality, IMO. I will not press you to accept my views, however. There is more than sufficient reason for you and the others to be skeptical.
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Thanks . . . I enjoyed it.
