From: Anders Sandberg (asa@nada.kth.se)
Date: Fri Apr 04 2003 - 01:46:46 MST
On Thu, Apr 03, 2003 at 08:53:14PM -0900, John Grigg wrote:
>
> As I somehow imagine it, I would know an angel or God simply by the
> sheer physical majesty (intense glow, levitating, telepathy,
> overwhelming presence) and overall supernatural "vibe." You would not
> need any tests done, you would instantly know.
People undergoing mystical experiences nearly always have this kind of
noesis experience of really knowing How Things Are. The drama may or may
not be there and there might be a personal God or just Reality present,
but the sense of Truth is very common.
This is actually what bothers me as a materialistic neuroscientist. We
have brain systems that tell us about the salience, familiarity and
likely the perceived truth of things. If these were simply made fully
active we would experience whatever we see or think as totally true and
beyond doubt (even the dualist explanation that truth is experienced
directly by the soul doesn't work, since the same argument could go for
the corresponding truth-detection system within the soul). People with
temporal lobe epilepsy sometimes get these sensations. As Dostoevsky
described it in _The Idiot_:
He was thinking, incidentally, that there was a moment or two in
his epileptic condition almost before the fit itself (if it
occurred in waking hours) when suddenly amid the sadness,
spiritual darkness and depression, his brain seemed to catch
fire at brief moments....His sensation of being alive and his
awareness increased tenfold at those moments which flashed by
like lightning. His mind and heart were flooded by a dazzling
light. All his agitation, doubts and worries, seemed composed
in a twinkling, culminating in a great calm, full of
understanding...but these moments, these glimmerings were still
but a premonition of that final second (never more than a
second) with which the seizure itself began. That second was,
of course, unbearable.'
So if someone makes me experience this sense of total Truth, how am I to
know it is real truth or just my hippocampus getting all excited? Even
worse, while I can make this argument right now sitting in my office
with no divinities around, if one would appear it seems likely that at
least while that experience lasted I would be fully convinced regardless
of my current doubts.
This makes me suspect that I would not (later on) find any divinity
appearing in full majesty very convincing. To really be a convincing
divinity it would have to convince me without any neurological dramas.
Just asking "please grant me a bit of limited omniscience so that I can
think up a good question and understand the answer" (which I consider to
be a very neat idea; a bit like the encounter with the eponymous entity
in Hamilton's _The Naked God_) wouldn't work, since I could always be
given an experience of having had indescribable experiences (now nearly
faded) and a very convincing but deep answer I almost but not quite
could remember.
Maybe we are going about all this from the wrong direction, trying to
get a superbeing to demonstrate that it is the supreme super being. It
is far easier for it to demonstrate that it is merely a super being in
some practical sense (lift mountains, turn the sea to blood, solve
diophantine equations instantly). It is probably because we all here
seem to hail from the monotheistic cultural sphere. What questions would
you ask Pallas Athene or Thoth if they appeared to you?
-- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Anders Sandberg Towards Ascension! asa@nada.kth.se http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/ GCS/M/S/O d++ -p+ c++++ !l u+ e++ m++ s+/+ n--- h+/* f+ g+ w++ t+ r+ !y
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