I agree that we are using 'to know' slightly differently. But I disagree that you can misrepresent me as using 'to know' as a form of faith. Bit of naughty sleight of hand by you there, Waspy.
I am using 'to know' as deriving from experience, without stipulating that that experience needs to be able to be translated into useful/accurate communications to other minds.
It's not sleight of hand. That is what "faith" means -- belief that is held strongly based on some experience. Some people use it to mean belief in the absence of evidence, but that is wrong. There is always some evidence on which any belief is based, if only a feeling that some experience is correct.
If the experience cannot be examined, then it cannot be call "knowledge" properly speaking. You can use the colloquial form of "know", as in "I know that God exists because I felt His presence", but that is faith, not knowledge. If we cannot agree on word definitions, then we cannot discuss matters since equivocation is a ready danger. The same thing happened with Malerin when he insisted that my use of the word evidence somehow meant that I believed that the evidence was necessarily correct (proof). That sort of equivocation only leads to misunderstanding.
By using the word "faith" I am not calling it something bad, regardless of the way many of the people here treat that word. It is simply a reference to a type of belief (knowledge is belief as well, but with justification) that is held strongly because of a feeling.
There is legitimate comparison between experience of fundamentality and experience of non-fundamentality. Those who seriously claim to have experienced fundamentality typically compare it to (as less real than) non-fundamentality (the phenomenal world). After their experience they forevermore treat the phenomenal world as less real than the world they experienced as fundamental.
I know people do this. That should be a red flag telling you either that they did not experience fundamental reality or that their attempt to describe it is fundamentally wrong, if for no other reason than that the experience is of something that they feel is not describable by language. I think it is a reflection of humans being human. Whatever the experience actually *is*, we all feel the need to explain and communicate.
What do you make of the experiences of mystics throughout recorded human history?
I think they are experiences. They may be accurate reflections of ultimate reality. They may be experiences based on a common neurological pathway. I don't see a clear way of deciding between the two based on the experiences themselves. Interpretation of what those experiences represent depends on a surrounding framework.
Whatever the answer is, we do have ways of thinking about this issue that do not need to involve reference to basic neurology. We would need to look at two things -- human psychology and the actual accounts.
If the accounts all consist of -- "it was incredible, there is no way to express it in words" -- and nothing else, then they would pass the first test. We would simply have to categorize those experiences as potentially reflecting ultimate reality or potentially reflecting something else, like a common human experience based in our psychology, whatever the ontology. If the accounts have culturally important differences, as with many NDE claims and claims of reincarnation, then the answer could very likely come from basic human psychology (again, whatever the ontology).
If we can recreate the same sort of experience through some "physical" means, that should also give us pause that there is a physical explanation for the experience.
Regardless, it isn't as though there is only one potential explanation. You may lean more one way than the other -- experience of fundamental existent rather than experience arising in human psychology -- but that is not knowledge.
