Crazy to audibly hear god?

[eight bits]

Again, that may be ethical and all, ...

It's a skill, Hans. I have represented to you that I do something similar to it almost every day, on cue, and have done it almost every day for years. You can call me a liar, as you have on another occasion, and that's your prerogative, but if our conversation begins at all, then it begins with Luhrmann having observed in the field, and then studed in the lab, an actual phenomenon.

Just as the ability to read can be and sometimes has been faked, I have no doubt that somebody has faked this skill as well. On the other hand, being a reader myself, I not only know that there is such a skill as reading, but I am also persuaded that if I can do it, almost whenever I want to do it, then it's probably not terribly demanding to do. You do have to exert yourself to learn it in the first place, and practice to get good at it. Not everyone bothers to do all of that.

Also, admittedly, I can't read if the light isn't right or I don't have a gizmo called "reading glasses," and not just any old glasses, but my very own personalized pair. There are perfectly fine texts that I can't read, for example, those in Turkish. I can see, then, that a non-reading skeptic might wonder about this skill. Excuses, excuses, no?

Nevertheless, if somebody tells me, "I have read the word of God," then it is not the reading part which I sorely doubt, but rather the actual authorship of what they have read. As it happens, I have read much of the same writing. I have come to a different opinion about its source, but I am fully persuaded that it can be read.

Even so, in a current thread, I express doubt whether a particular apologist has read the New Testament. He gets the plot points wrong, over and over again. So, I really do understand that Bible reading can be faked, and even will be to create an aura of religious authority, but apart from acknowledging the possibility, it isn't an interesting aspect of the problem, in my opinion. I can test for this "Bible reading" skill. Conversely, for most people who aspire to be Bible readers, actually doing it is easy and cheap compared with the effort required to fake it.

However, if reading were less common, then some people might earnestly question the reading part, too. An anthropologist-psychologist might study this "Bible reading" activity in the lab. Part of her experimental investigation might be to see if other "texts" might also be read, and read by people with no special interest in the particular text that the "Bible reader" claims to experience.

Those would, in my opinion, be good questions. Our anthropologist, or her critics, might fantasize about taking some of those non-Bible people and somehow trick them into learning to read a text which the experimenter deliberately misattributes to God, to see whether any of the subjects get "carried away" by the novelty of reading and acquiesce in this misattribution.

Well, it's an alternative universe. I don't know how World War II came out there, but in this universe, we don't do "experiments" like that so much anymore.

In any case, there's no "debate" here. You and I lack sufficient agreement about the ground facts. Our posts are addressed to one another formally, but ... They are, however, "open letters," and so we can hope that somebody else gets something out of reading them.

 

[HansMustermann]

Err, no. I'm not calling you a liar at all. On the contrary, I'm convinced that it's possible to make yourself hallucinate, especially auditory hallucinations. As I was saying, even enough caffeine makes people susceptible to that, so technically someone wouldn't even need more skill than downing several espresso cups to start hearing things. Plus, as I was saying, I go into REM before actually falling asleep myself, and I can somewhat control that. Well, mostly. I have no doubt that other people can do better.

That some people can hallucinate on demand, was never my question. I don't doubt THAT. Just like I don't doubt that some people can cough on demand, limp on demand, or produce a bunch of other stuff on demand that's normally symptoms of something else.

In fact, you might notice that my discussion of why it's an undistributed middle explicitly allows that at step 1. Though technically it can also be a vacuous truth (think, "all fridge gnomes in my fridge are alcoholics"), I never implied in any form that it is that.

What I AM disputing is that you can do that undistributed middle fallacy, and pretend that you know it explains the cases where people (A) without any such training, and (B) genuinely thinking they heard God.

You didn't show that, and the good professor didn't show that. In fact, as I was saying, nobody even showed any overlap between the two, much less equivalence.

And not only the evidence is missing for that, but there is good, solid evidence against it being the case that every hallucinating person just taught themselves a skill. The evidence is that we have more than enough cases of people just hearing voices, without having gone through such training or knowing they do it on demand, respond to anti-psychotic medication.

In fact, as I was saying, the fact that they respond to anti-psychotic medication is at the root of a known problem: it makes a lot of those folks stop taking their medication, because it makes the voices that made them special go away. It's a serious problem that makes people end up drooling in a corner eventually, because untreated schizophrenia just gets worse over time.

I see no reasonable mechanism for why or how it would respond to anti-psychotics, if it were just a trained skill for everyone. Do you? You don't forget other skills like driving a car or adding up a supermarket bill when you take neuroleptics, you know? Or yes, since you use reading as an example, you don't forget how to read when you're on anti-psychotics.

You have to explain that before you can just take hallucinations as the same as exercising your skill. And you also have to explain why in a bunch of people it comes together with various delusions, and disordered thought patterns. Does teaching that skill also eventually produce the other schizophrenia symptoms, or what? (And wouldn't it be unethical then to teach a skills that causes actual brain damage?)

So yes, you've taught it to yourself as a skill. Other people didn't.

 

[jj]

Ok, I'm going to say this again: PUTS ON EXPERT PEDANT HAT:

The human auditory system is wired to detect speech and speech-like sounds, and also to decode sounds into speech-like things.

Thinking you heard a voice in pink noise, for instance, is nothing more than your attentional focus coupling with nonstationarity of the noise (which is required when filtered through a set of filters like cochlear filters).

Now, having it speak to you and give directions, that's another thing, but hearing a word, or speech, or a whisper, well, that's how your hardware works.

 

[eight bits]

Hans

and pretend that you know it explains the cases where people (A) without any such training, and (B) genuinely thinking they heard God.

First, I don't pretend things. Second, which cases do you think this thread is about?

Luhrmann is studying, and I am commenting on, a subset of of people who to all appearances B) genuinely think they hear a believable character speaking with them, in which A) the people involved do have a history of receiving training, whether or not it was called "training."

It's a big subset, and people can be recruited into it ad libidum. Luhrmann began her recent studies by identifying a large, growing, well-financed network of churches that offer such training (labeled as devotional activity) to the general public. There are probably others, but she investigated the so-called "Vineyard" movement. The training exercises are also objectively indistinguishable from some things that religious people report themselves doing on their own, easily (and sincerely) labeled as popular forms of prayer, contemplation or meditation.

The pool of potential participants in this approach to vivid religious (or other imagined interactive) experience is huge and growing, but of course there are other ways to do similar things, or have them happen to someone. I have acknowledged throughout our discussion that there are other ways, and also that fakery is possible. I have not "pretended" to know anything about them, except that your diagnosis of epileptic, schizophrenic or drug-abusing left much to be desired.

However, the topic of this thread is what Professor Luhrmann comes to tell us, and she specifies which cases she's talking about. So, those are the cases I talk the most about here, too.


jj

Now, having it speak to you and give directions, that's another thing, ...

Correct, and it is a variety of other thing that is the subject of Professor Luhrmann's research.