The problem with taking personal experiences at face value (soul, hell, Mormons)
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One of the most important life lessons I learned from discovering the truth about Mormonism and from studying psychology and philosophy is to not take one's personal experiences at face value. Mormons say that once you experience the Spirit testify to you that something is true, it is pretty hard to convince yourself that you did not feel the Spirit. I felt what I used to call the Spirit many times, I now feel forced by the evidence to have to think differently about those powerful experiences. I now believe that those experiences are produced entirely by the biological brain.
When I was nine, I had an experience that I interpreted as being visited by an angel. I no longer interpret it that way. When I was 14 years old, my mother passed away. On the day of my marriage in the temple, I believed I felt her presence there. I now believe that that experience was entirely produced by my brain. Experiences are always vulnerable to reinterpretation when we adopt a new perspective. So, the argument that "if you had only experienced what I have experienced, then you'd believe" does not have any validity for me.
Experiences are several steps removed from reality. Think about an optical illusion or a magical trick. First the rods and cones in our eyes are activated by photons that passed through my retina. The first level of processing takes place in the retina, in which light from neighboring cones that are sensitive to photons of different wavelengths combine. What we perceive as color doesn't really exist in the natural world. What does exist is light of different wavelengths, our photoreceptors and brains create mental colors by which to communicate to us the different wavelengths of light in the environment.
Different neurons are activated if there are horizontal lines in the visual field, etc. Then according to "rules written in the software" of the brain, such as retinal disparity, convergence, proximity, etc, the brain merges those horizontal and vertical lines into objects. Our brain then checks its "database" of prototypes to see if it can make sense of the object it created from the lines and colors in the visual field. Let's say due to the shape of the object and its similarity to the prototype of playing card, your brain identifies the mental image it has created as a playing card.
Now, your brain has developed something called object permanence - it believes that objects remain what they are and don't just change into something else. But, the where the playing card was, your brain no longer sees it and instead identifies a bird in its place. Your brain doesn't like that because it violates object permanence. But, a child would swear that they saw the card turn into a bird. They experienced it and now believe that magicians can literally change a card into a bird. You try to tell them that that can't happen - cards can't turn into birds. But, they insist that you would believe that cards can turn into birds if you had experienced it like they did. Well, as adults, we know that it was simply a misperception on the part of the child. They did have an experience, but they are misinterpreting it. They did not really see a card change into a bird. They saw a card and then they saw a bird in the location the card was in a split second before. We have a natural, physical explanation for it so we don't resort to just believing what we see. Despite what we saw, we know that there is another explanation.
Similarly, a person may say they saw a ghost or whatever. They did not actually "see" a ghost. (To be technical, everything that we think we see is actually just a mental representation created in our brains, just like colors. We don't really see a table in front of us. Photons hit our rods and cones in a pattern and then our brain takes the electrical signals and creates a mental model. There are plenty of opportunities to misconstrue what is really going on in our environment). Anyway, a person did not really see a ghost, their brains created the mental representation of a ghost based on the electrical activity of some neurons which may or may not be responding to real photons bouncing off of something in the environment.
So, in a nutshell, we may say that we heard our dead mother's voice, but in reality all we can honestly say is that our brains perceived hearing something which it then interpreted as the voice of our mother.
The bottom line is one can belief what one wants, but merely having an experience does not prove that your interpretation of that experience is the correct one. And there are always alternative interpretations for every experience. One does not have to accept an experience at face value. It may really look like a playing card turned into a bird, but that doesn't mean that that is what actually happened.
My position is that having an experience that (fill in the blank) you left your body and floated around the room, is not proof that you actually can or did leave you body and float around the room. Your brain caused you to interpret sensations you were having as floating around the room, even though it did not happen. Although it may be real that you really did have an experience, it may not be real that what you think happened during your experience actually happened. More atheists need to understand that so that they won't so easily jump to conclusions about the nature of reality when they have what-people-usually-term "spiritual" experiences. I think I have an advantage in that I had spiritual experiences first before I became an atheist. I have already "experienced God" and was convinced for a while that I had a very close, personal relationship with what I now believe was nothing more than an imaginary friend.
Personal experiences (aka anecdotal evidence) are great for generating hypotheses but are never sufficient as reliable proof of anything. They are too faulty, prone to misperception and misinterpretation, subject to bias and prejudiced by one's beliefs, jumps to unwarranted conclusions like the child who assumes magicians can really turn cards into birds, subject to delusions and hallucinations, are at best a mental model of what happens in the world around them. It is well documented that our memories for personal experiences are crap. Loftus showed through scientific research that witnesses are horrible at describing what happened during a motor vehicle accident they were shown - their accounts contradicted each other and the tape. Memories can be manipulated and planted without a person's awareness.
I have seen too many psychological experiments that illustrate and exploit our brain's weaknesses to accurately understand what is going on and remember it correctly to ever trust accounts of personal experiences, even my own.
Most of this post is from the wiki post on anecdotal evidence :
"Anecdotal evidence is an informal account of evidence in the form of an anecdote or hearsay. The term is often used in contrast to scientific evidence, which are types of formal accounts. Anecdotal evidence is often unscientific because it cannot be investigated using the scientific method. Misuse of anecdotal evidence is a logical fallacy and is sometimes informally referred to as the "person who" fallacy ("I know a person who..."; "I know of a case where..." etc. Compare with hasty generalization). Anecdotal evidence is not necessarily typical; statistical evidence can more accurately determine how typical something is. Psychologists have found that people are more likely to remember notable examples than typical examples.
In all forms of anecdotal evidence, testing its reliability by objective independent assessment may be in doubt. This is a consequence of the informal way the information is gathered, documented, presented, or any combination of the three. The term is often used to describe evidence for which there is an absence of documentation. This leaves verification dependent on the credibility of the party presenting the evidence.
In science, anecdotal evidence has been defined as:
* "information that is not based on facts or careful study"
* "non-scientific observations or studies, which do not provide proof but may assist research efforts"
* "reports or observations of usually unscientific observers"
* "casual observations or indications rather than rigorous or scientific analysis"
* "information passed along by word-of-mouth but not documented scientifically"
Researchers may use anecdotal evidence for suggesting new hypotheses, but never as supporting evidence.
Anecdotal evidence is often unscientific or pseudoscientific because various forms of cognitive bias may affect the collection or presentation of evidence. For instance, someone who claims to have had an encounter with a supernatural being or alien may present a very vivid story, but this is not falsifiable. This phenomenon can also happen to large groups of people through subjective validation.
Anecdotal evidence is also frequently misinterpreted via the availability heuristic, which leads to an overestimation of prevalence. Where a cause can be easily linked to an effect, people overestimate the likelihood of the cause having that effect (availability). In particular, vivid, emotionally-charged anecdotes seem more plausible, and are given greater weight. A related issue is that it is usually impossible to assess for every piece of anecdotal evidence, the rate of people not reporting that anecdotal evidence in the population.
A common way anecdotal evidence becomes unscientific is through fallacious reasoning such as the post hocfallacy, the human tendency to assume that if one event happens after another, then the first must be the cause of the second. Another fallacy involves inductive reasoning. For instance, if an anecdote illustrates a desired conclusion rather than a logical conclusion, it is considered a faulty or hasty generalization. For example, here is anecdotal evidence presented as proof of a desired conclusion:
"There's abundant proof that God exists and is still performing miracles today. Just last week I read about a girl who was dying of cancer. Her whole family went to church and prayed for her, and she was cured."
Anecdotes like this are very powerful persuaders, but they don't prove anything in a scientific or logical sense. The child may have become better anyway and this could be an example also of the regressive fallacy. Anecdotal evidence cannot be distinguished from placebo effects. Only double-blind randomized placebo-controlled clinical trials can confirm a hypothesis.
Sites devoted to rhetoric often give explanations along these lines:
Anecdotal evidence, for example, is by definition less statistically reliable than other sorts of evidence, and explanations do not carry the weight of authority. But both anecdotal evidence and explanations may affect our understanding of a premise, and therefore influence our judgment. The relative strength of an explanation or an anecdote is usually a function of its clarity and applicability to the premise it is supporting.
By contrast, in science and logic, the "relative strength of an explanation" is based upon its ability to be tested, proven to be due to the stated cause, and verified under neutral conditions in a manner that other researchers will agree has been performed competently, and can check for themselves."
There are so many problems with anecdotal evidence for the existence of god. It is easiest to show those problems with specific examples. So, provide some if you have them.
One of the biggest problems is non-falsifiability. In other words, God is covered no matter what the outcome is. If one asks god for something, and you get it, he gets the credit. If you don't get it, either it was not god's will or god does not respond to our requests like a circus act or we were unworthy, etc. If we don't ask for anything, and we get something good, well, god sometimes blesses us even when we don't believe in him or it was going to happen anyway. If we don't ask and we don't get it, well, that is just what happens or god is punishing you. There is no control condition. There is no condition in which if such and such outcome happens, we have shown the premise of god's existence is false. This makes a true experiment impossible, and without that you only have correlational data, and correlations cannot prove causation, for there are many factors that can explain correlations.
Furthermore, the supposed correlations may be only perceived correlations and not true correlations due to selective memory, confirmation bias, and the availability heuristic. We fall victim to these effects without even knowing it and even when we are trying very hard not to. Sincerity does not mean accurate reporting.
Conditions of the experiment must be written down before the experiment is run and one must be specific about what constitutes failure or success. An independent party needs to write down the outcome. Skeptics need to review the evidence to see if the outcome actually satisfies the conditions set out in the beginning. A close call counts as a miss.
You see people often say that they watch a video and it was just like the vision they had earlier that week. Was the vision written down before the video was watched? If not, how do we know that your mind is not merging your memories or giving you a false de javu? We don't. You are sure it is not, but that doesn't count for squat. If I had you here with me I could implant false memories very easily. Our minds are not tape recorders. Each time we retrieve a memory different pieces of it are reassembled anew. It is very easy to be certain and wrong at the same time.
And we tend to remember our hits and forget our misses. We forget about all the premonitions we have that never came true.
We also forget how we subconsciously pick up on certain clues and warnings from our environment.
For every miracle, there are many possible explanations. We will never know what the true explanation of a past event was, but we can design experiments that replicate the situation and rule out many of the possible explanations. So, since we can never know the true explanation for past events, we can never be justified in being certain that god is the explanation.
We sometimes marvel at the odds that somethings could happen without god's intervention. What we forget is that we may not have to explain as much as it first appears. The event may not have happened quite as the person is telling you. The probability of what really happened may not be that rare. And we mustn't forget the law of very large numbers, in that even very improbable events will happen if given enough trials. And we need to remember that we have a tendency to way underestimate the likelihood of some events occurring. And our inability to imagine alternative explanations says more about our ignorance than the true possibilities.
All of that just to say you don't believe in personal experiences by others, well, maybe you're not supposed to, after all it is a personal experience and meant for the individual that was experiencing it. I've always been told that a revelation is one on one and everything else afterwards is hearsay.
All of that just to say you don't believe in personal experiences by others, well, maybe you're not supposed to, after all it is a personal experience and meant for the individual that was experiencing it. I've always been told that a revelation is one on one and everything else afterwards is hearsay.
No. All that to say, that a person should not trust his own interpretations of his own personal experiences.
No. All that to say, that a person should not trust his own interpretations of his own personal experiences.
When you have those experiences, which I've had, you have to wonder...did I just imagine that or project that much like a dream?
However...I had an experience where something like this happened to me not only in broad daylight but I had another person as a physical witness.
The summer after H.S. I got a job in the mall working at a jewelery store. It was a kiosk so I was in the middle of the mall. I was doing a lot of soul searching at the time and had spent a majority of the night praying and pondering life...asking for a witness of what I believed...asking if I was worthy in God's eyes.
I went to work that morning deeply wrapped up in my thoughts. I opened the store. It was during the day and kind of slow, I was alone. As I was standing there I felt this presence walk past before I saw him...I looked up- and noticed his strange dress...he was very tall, looked Indian, and was dressed in what I would describe Middle Eastern/Jewish. He had a loose long shirt with a sash around it and flowing pants.
In the meantime an old employee came up to the counter and was talking with me. Then I felt that presence again...I turned around and the man was just standing there at the counter. I asked if him if I could help him and he said, "no." So I turned back around and started talking again. A few minutes passed and this man walked around the counter, standing right next to the girl I was speaking with, and said to me..."I have a message from God." As he began to speak I felt my heart and soul warm..., he then said...I'm here to tell you that God loves you...he finds you worthy. And that in your life something bad may happen- and then he rephrased and said, not bad... but it's because God loves you. He then sat there looking at me and then said...do not fear you will not see me again." He left.
I looked at the girl standing across from me...her face was flushed and a look of astonishment was on her face. I know she felt the same way I did.
I will never forget that. Now...we can discount that by saying it was coincidence. However...I cannot deny the timing and feeling I felt at that moment.
When you have those experiences, which I've had, you have to wonder...did I just imagine that or project that much like a dream?
However...I had an experience where something like this happened to me not only in broad daylight but I had another person as a physical witness.
The summer after H.S. I got a job in the mall working at a jewelery store. It was a kiosk so I was in the middle of the mall. I was doing a lot of soul searching at the time and had spent a majority of the night praying and pondering life...asking for a witness of what I believed...asking if I was worthy in God's eyes.
I went to work that morning deeply wrapped up in my thoughts. I opened the store. It was during the day and kind of slow, I was alone. As I was standing there I felt this presence walk past before I saw him...I looked up- and noticed his strange dress...he was very tall, looked Indian, and was dressed in what I would describe Middle Eastern/Jewish. He had a loose long shirt with a sash around it and flowing pants.
In the meantime an old employee came up to the counter and was talking with me. Then I felt that presence again...I turned around and the man was just standing there at the counter. I asked if him if I could help him and he said, "no." So I turned back around and started talking again. A few minutes passed and this man walked around the counter, standing right next to the girl I was speaking with, and said to me..."I have a message from God." As he began to speak I felt my heart and soul warm..., he then said...I'm here to tell you that God loves you...he finds you worthy. And that in your life something bad may happen- and then he rephrased and said, not bad... but it's because God loves you. He then sat there looking at me and then said...do not fear you will not see me again." He left.
I looked at the girl standing across from me...her face was flushed and a look of astonishment was on her face. I know she felt the same way I did.
I will never forget that. Now...we can discount that by saying it was coincidence. However...I cannot deny the timing and feeling I felt at that moment.
Have you ever consider that he might just have been some silly old fart dressed in a loose long shirt with a sash around it and flowing pants....who imagined that he was special enough for 'God' to give him messages for other people and you just happened to be in the same place as him that day??
Why on earth would an omnipotent deity have the need to pass a message to you via a lunatic...why wouldn't he just tell you himself in some way that was undeniable? I mean, this 'messenger from God' couldn't even get the message right...he had to rephrase what he initially said!!!
There's nothing wrong with taking personal experience at face value so long as it's not the only thing you take into consideration. E.g. both symptoms and tests lead to a diagnosis, but the symptoms (personal experience) are still part of getting to the correct diagnosis.
No. All that to say, that a person should not trust his own interpretations of his own personal experiences.
You have just invalidated your own conclusions based on the distrust of your own personal experiences. Those personal experiences lead to a conclusion of Aetheism being correct but applying such logic negates your conclusions.
To give another power over interpreting your experiences is to negate meaning only You have the right to give and deny. I would never give another that kind of power over Myself, or My own conclusions. God or denial of God has nothing to do with it.
Now...we can discount that by saying it was coincidence. However...I cannot deny the timing and feeling I felt at that moment.
No one is asking you to deny the timing or the feeling you had (at least I am not). The interpretation that you gave to the experience is what one should not be certain of. Inferring broad statements about the nature of reality (such as God exists) from anecdotal evidence (such as the experience you had) is the problem. There are many alternative explanations for your experience, the timing, and the feeling you felt. That means it is pretty flimsy evidence to establish the extraordinary claim that god exists.
By the way, it has been a hobby of mine to study the scientific explanations for the feeling you had as well as many other "spiritual" feelings. Here is just one of my threads about a few of them (contained in the first 3 or 4 posts): //www.city-data.com/forum/athei...aturalism.html
You have just invalidated your own conclusions based on the distrust of your own personal experiences. Those personal experiences lead to a conclusion of Aetheism being correct but applying such logic negates your conclusions.
Wow, you are not following this at all. My belief that there probably isn't a god is not based on taking my personal experiences at face value. So, a swing and a miss on your part.
Quote:
Originally Posted by KnightShadow
To give another power over interpreting your experiences is to negate meaning only You have the right to give and deny. I would never give another that kind of power over Myself, or My own conclusions. God or denial of God has nothing to do with it.
I am certainly not suggesting anyone give power to another to interpret their experience. So, you are way off base there, too.
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Those personal experiences lead to a conclusion of Aetheism being correct but applying such logic negates your conclusions. 
