Justifying Hallucinations as "Reality"

[mfbukowski]

7 hours ago, Meadowchik said:

(I did not ask you to avoid the issue.  I said you avoided what I actually said in my post and I said you undercut my point by suggesting I was not expressing my own views.)

Especially in Mormon thought, this is a foundational issue, that of processing someone else's personal religious and spiritual experiences and deciding how to apply them to ourselves.

My friend saw Christ in his reality. Many people in Joseph's time and entourage were extremely spiritualistic, "seeing with spiritual eyes." Not everyone is or was constituted or structured that way. "Constituted" was a term that I deliberately used to accommodate a number of perspectives, like

1) a person being spiritually prepared by circumstances, worthiness, and divine blessing

Or

2) a person being socially and psychologically primed and conditioned for specific religious hallucinations 

So I suggested that perhaps the poster (Ahab, if I recall correctly) would expect that we respond to a spiritual experience  of another as if it is their own reality and not necessarily ours, that we only accept it as our own if we can replicate the experience for ourselves.

Furthermore, perhaps if we cannot replicate it, this means we are not constituted for it. The Church might suggest that we'd need to repent or prepare more if we cannot replicate some version of such an experience.  Yet I add another possibility: if we cannot replicate that spiritual experience, perhaps we don't need it. At the very least one might say we are not structured to process that experience as if it were our own because we did not have it (or replicate it.)

Sorry, we are not communicating.

I have not accepted Mormonism because I learned it from someone else- I found here what I already believed and it added to what I already knew to be true.  I had a major spiritual experience confirming Mormonism a day after I discovered it- it was not conditioned nor did I know what to expect.

And yes, that word "true" is used contextually in a Mormon language game as in "I know the church is true".   I have no problem with that since truth is undefinable but we know what it means.  I know what it means here.

On the other hand I do not understand what you are talking about.

I see no evidence that people are "structured" to obey one thing or another.

Edited April 9, 2017 by mfbukowski

[pogi]

3 hours ago, Meadowchik said:

Anyways, I agree that such a thing is polarizing. It has a way of emotionally isolating LDS from their non-LDS brothers and sisters on this planet.

Are you not arguing that your version of reality is better than mine?  Does that not make your truth claims just as polarizing? Are you not here trying to "convert" others to your world view?  We are really not much different.

To accuse Mormons of being less capable of emotional connection with people of other beliefs is ignorant.

 

 

 

[mfbukowski]

5 hours ago, Meadowchik said:

Yet 2 and 2 is 4 in conventional math, the world is not flat and the planet revolves around the sun. 

Yet Joseph Conrad uses the light and absence of light frequently in The Heart of Darkness to convey deeper meanings.

Yet the British aristocracy frequently used servants. Feudal systems was a form of government. Antarctica is relatively cold.

You speaking words already implies at the very least a threshold of shared reality inherent in language and specifically the English language. 

So in all fairness, when someone says "in reality," they may very well be referring to something as objective and verifiable as words, or mathematical rules in a given system, or well-defined notions.

It is therefore useful to distinguish between the following:

-Common, well-established rules and systems

-Expressed opinions

-Verifiable and unverifiable facts

-Testable and untestable theories

-Repeatable and unrepeatable phenomena

There is a hierarchy of realities, so to speak, if we compare the transmitability and observability of ideas. Some things transmit much more readily from one person to another.

In other words, the subjective nature of experience does not make all ideas equally subjective. Some are much more objective than others.

On what do you base this?

What is your evidence for any of it?

[mfbukowski]

4 hours ago, pogi said:

1) We don't claim to have all the truth.

2) Competing truth claims should be expected. The idiocy comes in assuming that contradicting and conflicting claims are equally valid in God's eye.  There is no us versus them in Mormonism.  That is too black and white.  We recognize the good in other religions and recognize that there are many paths to one baptism.  Other religions may be stepping stones to greater enlightenment and we are not against them.

Nailed it as usual

[mfbukowski]

2 hours ago, Meadowchik said:

Just feeling the goodness of people is one of life's sweetest joys. How sad if that is overwhelmed by guilt and pressure that we need to convert them?

What good are subjective sweet joys if there is no evidence for them being real?  How can we know they are true?

[Calm]

"You speaking words already implies at the very least a threshold of shared reality inherent in language and specifically the English language."

On words:

"Speech, originally, was the device whereby Man learned, imperfectly, to transmit the thoughts and emotions of his mind. By setting up arbitrary sounds and combinations of sounds to represent certain mental nuances, he developed a method of communication - but one which in its clumsiness and thick-thumbed inadequacy degenerated all the delicacy of the mind into gross and guttural signaling.

Down- down- the results can be followed; and all the suffering that humanity ever knew can be traced to the one fact that no man in the history of the Galaxy, until Hari Seldon, and very few men thereafter, could really understand one another. Every human being lived behind an impenetrable wall of choking mist within which no other but he existed. Occasionally there were the dim signals from deep within the cavern in which another man was located-so that each might grope toward the other. Yet because they did not know one another, and could not understand one another, and dared not trust one another, and felt from infancy the terrors and insecurity of that ultimate isolation - there was the hunted fear of man for man, the savage rapacity of man toward man.

Feet, for tens of thousands of years, had clogged and shuffled in the mud - and held down the minds which, for an equal time, had been fit for the companionship of the stars.

Grimly, Man had instinctively sought to circumvent the prison bars of ordinary speech. Semantics, symbolic logic, psychoanalysis - they had all been devices whereby speech could either be refined or by-passed."

http://interconnected.org/home/more/2012/03/seldonsplan.html

[Robert F. Smith]

20 hours ago, Tacenda said:

The problem here is that we have two or more churches on the earth that think they have all the truth, it's an us vs. them syndrome that doesn't play well with individuals that are living with that idiocy. 

While it is true that there are only several churches, synagogues, and mosques which lay claim to true authority, there is a lot of mutual respect among some of them.  Rory is a fine example of a Roman Catholic who fully understands the competing claims, but doesn't get upset about it.  In fact, he is quite sympathetic with the issue of authentic authority, and realizes that it is a key issue.  I think that he is disappointed in Mormons who don't get that, and who are ready to give away the store.

No one has all truth, and no human is capable of having it.  Some (like the Jews, the Roman Catholics, and the Mormons) claim to have a preponderance of truth.  They can claim to represent God, and to be his chosen people, but none can claim that "all is well in Zion," nor that they are immaculate.  That is nonsense, and none of them claim it.  All are fallible, and they know it.  The only "idiocy" is in not knowing that fact.

[Robert F. Smith]

19 hours ago, Bernard Gui said:

Then you might enjoy this article from the Temple Institute....

Quote

Nowhere is the power and beauty of brotherhood more pronounced throughout the year than during the time of the Korban Pesach, the Passover offering. All of Israel is commanded to form temporary fellowships whose members will share in the bringing of and eating of the Passover offering. These fellowships are inclusive of all Israel in its entirety. Not a soul is left out. And, of course, the Passover offering cannot be brought without the assistance of our brothers, the kohanim. The Passover offering is the embodiment of everything that makes Israel a nation: Fraternity and equality before G-d, which leads, in turn, to true liberation. The power of brotherly love - the apple of G-d's eye!

 

Today was the anniversary of Jesus' Triumphal Entry into Jerusalem on a donkey, with his many followers waving palm fronds of glory at him.  Next Friday is the anniversary of his Crucifixion, in which his Father offers him as the sacrificial Lamb of God, and next Sunday commemorates his Resurrection from the Tomb -- in which Jesus is both the unblemished lamb killed as the supreme Passover Offering whose blood saves us all from death, but Jesus is also the High Priest who offers himself.  As the late Jewish scholar Jacob Milgrom commented about the Jewish High Priest "it seems strange that the high priest is both expiator and the expiated, that he officiates for his own sin.”[1]  Of course, in Jesus' case, the offering is sinless and so provides an infinite Atonement.

 

---

[1] Milgrom, Leviticus 1-16 (Anchor Bible), 232 (re Leviticus 4:5).

 

[Ahab]

19 hours ago, mfbukowski said:

I know with absolute certainty you are not a hallucination

I would never dream you up on my own.

Not even remotely close to an answer to the question I asked.

Did you think I had asked you about me?

Hello! This is Ahab speaking to you now, and Ahab would like an answer to the question he asked rather than a comment that had no bearing on that question.

[Ahab]

3 hours ago, mfbukowski said:

Huh?  Are you reading the thread at all?  Like that is the topic of the thread?

Yes. I know it is. Your answer, please.

[mfbukowski]

45 minutes ago, Ahab said:

Yes. I know it is. Your answer, please.

Oh gosh.  Read the thread- the entire thread is my answer to that.  I won't respond further to you asking the same question again and again when I answer it with every post.  Your credibility is vanishing- I cannot follow your thought processes at all.

Edited April 10, 2017 by mfbukowski

[mfbukowski]

I came across this quote by Wittgenstein in the book quoted below

Quote

Christianity is not a doctrine, not, I mean, a theory about what has happened and will happen to the human soul, but a description of something that actually takes place in human life. For 'consciousness of sin' is a real event and so are despair and salvation through faith. Those who speak of such things (Bunyan for instance) are simply describing what has happened to them, whatever gloss anyone may want to put on it.

Ludwig Wittgenstein Culture and Value, p 28e Translated by Peter Winch Chicago, University of Chircago Press, 1980

[Meadowchik]

9 hours ago, Bernard Gui said:

I've never felt that guilt or pressure. Even as a missionary, I recognized that I was not the one doing the converting. My responsibility was simply to provide the opportunity.  Sharing the gospel with someone else does not obligate me to pray their prayers for them or to answer their prayers myself. The former they must do for themselves, and the latter is the provence of the Holy Spirit. I have never believed that if someone was not interested then he could not be a good person.

That's good and is how I felt, too, as a believing Mormon. But I recognise now that that was an adaptation I made to make Mormonism work for me, and that a paradigm of active missionary work being required, and thus the accompanying guilt for inadequacy, is closer to orthodox Mormonism. 

Edited April 10, 2017 by Meadowchik

[Meadowchik]

8 hours ago, mfbukowski said:

Sorry, we are not communicating.

I have not accepted Mormonism because I learned it from someone else- I found here what I already believed and it added to what I already knew to be true.  I had a major spiritual experience confirming Mormonism a day after I discovered it- it was not conditioned nor did I know what to expect.

And yes, that word "true" is used contextually in a Mormon language game as in "I know the church is true".   I have no problem with that since truth is undefinable but we know what it means.  I know what it means here.

On the other hand I do not understand what you are talking about.

I see no evidence that people are "structured" to obey one thing or another.

You say you were not structured for any such experience but then you also describe how you already believed it before knowing it.  So you were structured, in a way, to accept it.  When I said constituted or structured, I did not mean an exclusively external influence, I simply mean the structure/constitution of who one has become, regardless of means, which might make them more disposed for certain religious and spiritual experiences. You are free to own it, in other words!

[Meadowchik]

8 hours ago, pogi said:

Are you not arguing that your version of reality is better than mine?  Does that not make your truth claims just as polarizing? Are you not here trying to "convert" others to your world view?  We are really not much different.

To accuse Mormons of being less capable of emotional connection with people of other beliefs is ignorant.

 

 

 

Well, as Bernard Gui pointed out, he did not respond to such a paradigm in that way.  So, one could say that there are many Mormons who adapt within the Mormon paradigm and resist such polarizing notions.  Yet then there are others who seem to work from the premise that all non-members are generally not just in the world but of the world and will not be as happy as they can be in their path until they convert, be it in this life or the next.  I could argue that this is similar to a characteristic of any group or tribe behavior, yet even given that, one could say that that aspect of the Mormon paradigm can work to enhance the polarity.

And that's the point.  Does it enhance the human tendancy to polarize?  I think that on one hand, all the love and charitable feelings that Mormonism can inspire toward our fellow human beings, causing us to turn to them and see them as just as real as we are ourselves would subvert that claim.  There can be examples, however, of immaturity where prospective converts are objectified and treated like "golden converts" who add to numbers.  And when that baptism is rejected, there may be this tendency, both individual and institutional to draw members away from people who are not interested in being LDS.  The Mormon religion is very intensive, it asks for absolutely everything of its people, and can have the effect of actual organic relationships beings left at the side in favor of church duties and activities.

Rather than using the polarising attributes of Mormonism as a gotchya moment, I'd prefer to use it as a way to understand how we develop inside and outside of Mormonism, how it all works systemically, regardless of intent, so that when we see undesriable outcomes we can try to mitigate them.

[Meadowchik]

8 hours ago, mfbukowski said:

On what do you base this?

What is your evidence for any of it?

This is a sincere question, not intended as snark or sarcasm: why do you bother using words to communicate?  Where is your baseline for expressing, and attempting to assure a communication is received with minimal degree of accuracy?

[Meadowchik]

8 hours ago, mfbukowski said:

Nailed it as usual

That's not the doctrine.  In LDS doctrine, an LDS baptism is required to achieve ultimate enlightenment, to live in God's presence. And that's just the first of many steps to live there.

[Meadowchik]

8 hours ago, Calm said:

"You speaking words already implies at the very least a threshold of shared reality inherent in language and specifically the English language."

On words:

"Speech, originally, was the device whereby Man learned, imperfectly, to transmit the thoughts and emotions of his mind. By setting up arbitrary sounds and combinations of sounds to represent certain mental nuances, he developed a method of communication - but one which in its clumsiness and thick-thumbed inadequacy degenerated all the delicacy of the mind into gross and guttural signaling.

Down- down- the results can be followed; and all the suffering that humanity ever knew can be traced to the one fact that no man in the history of the Galaxy, until Hari Seldon, and very few men thereafter, could really understand one another. Every human being lived behind an impenetrable wall of choking mist within which no other but he existed. Occasionally there were the dim signals from deep within the cavern in which another man was located-so that each might grope toward the other. Yet because they did not know one another, and could not understand one another, and dared not trust one another, and felt from infancy the terrors and insecurity of that ultimate isolation - there was the hunted fear of man for man, the savage rapacity of man toward man.

Feet, for tens of thousands of years, had clogged and shuffled in the mud - and held down the minds which, for an equal time, had been fit for the companionship of the stars.

Grimly, Man had instinctively sought to circumvent the prison bars of ordinary speech. Semantics, symbolic logic, psychoanalysis - they had all been devices whereby speech could either be refined or by-passed."

http://interconnected.org/home/more/2012/03/seldonsplan.html

Calm, are you saying that language acts as an overall barrier, a net hindrance to human connection?

Either way, my point was that language itself is an attempt to find common ground, to use agreed-upon signals and combine them in ways that convey what we want to convey. The choice to use words is already an exercise in objectivity.

[Meadowchik]

8 hours ago, mfbukowski said:

What good are subjective sweet joys if there is no evidence for them being real?  How can we know they are true?

Well, for starters, they simply are. What they mean and how far their implications extend outside of that one moment, outside ourselves, and to the edges of the universe, that is another question.

Have you seen the movie Mindwalk?  It might be applicable in your explorations.

It addresses the ways of thinking of the past and how they must change so that humanity can continue to progress.

What is the significance of the internal logic of a system, in your opinion?

[Calm]

1 hour ago, Meadowchik said:

That's not the doctrine.  In LDS doctrine, an LDS baptism is required to achieve ultimate enlightenment, to live in God's presence. And that's just the first of many steps to live there.

There are plenty of other steps not unique to the LDS faith that are as required.  And LDS baptism (or rather the baptism currently authorized to be performed by the LDS faith) is available to all before it's time to make that choice for ultimate enlightenment.

I see no reason not to believe there may currently be something only available through another system of belief that we all must experience before the ultimate choice that will also be universally made available somehow.

The point of LDS doctrine is everyone ever born everywhere takes the same steps eventually.  Mormons are not a privileged class.

Edited April 10, 2017 by Calm

[Meadowchik]

1 hour ago, Calm said:

There are plenty of other steps not unique to the LDS faith that are as required.  And LDS baptism (or rather the baptism currently authorized to be performed by the LDS faith) is available to all before it's time to make that choice for ultimate enlightenment.

I see no reason not to believe there may currently be something only available through another system of belief that we all must experience before the ultimate choice that will also be universally made available somehow.

The point of LDS doctrine is everyone ever born everywhere takes the same steps eventually.  Mormons are not a privileged class.

So you are saying that there may be elements exclusive to a non-LDS system which are necessary for ultimate enlightenment? Are you saying that this has been taught by those who are in authority to proclaim LDS doctrine and that such has been canonized by the church?

The point that the gospel will be made available to every soul who has come or will come to earth has always resonated with me.  Yet, again, this still makes the church ordinances, be they received in this life or beyond the veil, an absolutely necessary step for all who would move forward to ultimate enlightenment, abiding in the presence of God.

The church teaches and claims to be the one true church. I have always appreciated the way temple work had made total inclusion eventually possible.  But let's call a spade a spade, the church still claims to be the gatekeeper of ultimate enlightenment for all humanity: A person either passes though the saving ordinances in this life or must accept them in the next, post-mortem ordinances being performed in their behalf by proxy in the temple by those who are in authority who hold special keys as passed from the Twelve and/or the President of the Church.

[Atheist Mormon]

14 hours ago, mfbukowski said:

But colors and sounds are not created by your brain depending on how it is stimulated at the moment? 

What's the difference?

Big deal. Your brain processes whatever it sees for the split second, there's no design behind it. I can tell you this; anyone can stimulate the Brain activity, I've done it decades ago. When it is the influence of those stimulants the brain takes an amazing journey (very short though), hard to describe.

[Gray]

14 hours ago, mfbukowski said:

I know you are joking but no, it is not true because it is question begging

AJ Ayer was one of the originators of positivism and even he saw it was dead

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logical_positivism

I am so confident of my views because the stuff I am presenting is pretty much the only game in town to answer these questions- that is why my devil gif doesn't stand a chance.

Good thing the local atheists do not know that. Ignorance is bliss.   I have a cheat sheet and that is virtually all philosophy since WWII   I am of a firm belief that contemporary philosophy and postmodernism provides a great groundwork for Mormonism and for the life of me I do not understand why it seems no one sees that.

 

I'm actually not joking - well, I'm teasing a little but I'm also prodding your argument. Although I'm not a logical positivist, you're trying to use logic to say that logical positivism can't be true. But under the rules of your philosophy as I understand it, there is no correspondence whatsoever between ideas and an external reality. So whatever you believe that is of value to you is "true" and "real", making logical positivism true and real to whoever finds value in it. Isn't that so? 

 

[Tacenda]

4 hours ago, Calm said:

There are plenty of other steps not unique to the LDS faith that are as required.  And LDS baptism (or rather the baptism currently authorized to be performed by the LDS faith) is available to all before it's time to make that choice for ultimate enlightenment.

I see no reason not to believe there may currently be something only available through another system of belief that we all must experience before the ultimate choice that will also be universally made available somehow.

The point of LDS doctrine is everyone ever born everywhere takes the same steps eventually.  Mormons are not a privileged class.

IMO Calm, you contradicted yourself in the bold. Mormons must feel they are a priviliged class, when they think their way is the only way to ultimate enlightment and they are fortunate to be a Mormon. I know you didn't mean the last sentence how I took it and I may have twisted it, but when you think about it, aren't Mormons a priviliged class when putting it in that context.

[USU78]

Objects and other phenomena are as we perceive them. 

Spiritual and other inner life experiences are as we perceive them.

Objects and phenomena are useful.

Spiritual and other inner life experiences are useful.

Wait a minute. What was the question again?