From: Charles Hixson (charleshixsn@earthlink.net)
Date: Wed Apr 02 2003 - 16:04:06 MST
Eliezer S. Yudkowsky wrote:
> ...
> Given the previous statistical correlation of such subjective
> experiences to their corresponding realities, interpreting an apparent
> miracle as a hallucination makes sense, unless God provides a
> consilient explanation instead of just random miracles. Obviously
> since I *don't* expect to hallucinate, ordinarily, ...
But perhaps you should expect just that. Much appearant sensory
evidence is actually internally generated fill. The classic
demonstration is the psychology class where a man is stabbed by someone
who rushes in, stabs the person, they collapse, and then he rushes out.
Few people notice that what he was stabbed with was a banana. They
disagree on the details of the knife, but that's what they saw.
Given that experiment, it seems likely to me that much of our "reality"
is interpolation, but that we can't easily tell the difference.
That said, I don't consider a hallucination supplied by a "God" to be
any proof. I've encountered a few, and decided that they were
projections from activated archetypes (I was going through a heavily
Jungian period). Again, these are difficult to notice as what they
are. A starlet isn't called a "love goddess" by mistake. When people
see her, they are projecting an emotional hallucination from the
internal "love goddess" onto the image that they see. There are other
gods, and they act the same way. I don't believe in the messages that
they provide... their hit rate seems pretty low. But they exist. I
suspect that in the environment for which we evolved they were much more
accurate. Think of them as one of the necessary preconditions for
language coming into existence. But when you encounter them, you can't
be rational (except partially). Rational judgements need to be
postponed to appreciate the numinosity of the event. THEN you can
rationally analyze it. But be cautious, for some of the emotional
arguments can be quite convincing.
-- -- Charles Hixson Gnu software that is free, The best is yet to be.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Wed Apr 02 2003 - 16:11:04 MST