kfpswf t1_j37oo6g wrote on January 6, 2023 at 4:44 PM

Reply to comment by AmirHosseinHmd in The Persistent Problem of Consciousness: an astronaut's epiphany by simsquatched

>Why is that so-called "epiphany" presumed to be the canonical, authoritative experience, somehow informative of some deep truth as opposed to merely a momentary illusion?

These experiences can literally change your entire persona and course of life. And you think they don't deserve some form of respect?...

>Why is it assumed to be any more "valid" than the ordinary kind of conscious experience?

This epiphany you are talking about are called direct experiences in spirituality. That means, you are observing something without the added distortions of the mind. For example, a picture of a mixed race couple can invoke different reactions based on who you show the picture to. So what do you think is the difference between a racist bigot who froths at his mouth in anger looking at the picture, and let's say someone who merely wishes the couple well in life?... The difference is that the mind of the bigot is conditioned to react with hatred and bile. This added judgement by the mind is not what you would call a direct experience.

Although the example of bigotry is an extreme one, this is the reality of all our ordinary experiences. They are colored by our learned judgements, misconceptions, and identity. This is exactly what the astronaut lost in that moment. A complete dissolution of his judgements and identities. In that moment he saw how all our differences are made up, how our existence is interconnected, and how we are all children of Earth. You'll shed tears if you ever end up having such an experience. Perhaps you should then ask yourself this very question you pose in this thread.

>Sure, the former is rarer, and it's often accompanied by a sense of awe and profundity, but none of that gives any credence to it, really.

None of your experiences are real, but whatever changes they bring about in you are very much real. You can either learn to appreciate such experiences as being glimpses of unfiltered truth, or continue to wonder why such experiences are spoken with reverence.

AmirHosseinHmd t1_j3al4lz wrote on January 7, 2023 at 4:18 AM

>That means, you are observing something without the added distortions of the mind.

That is an unfounded assumption. There's no reason to suppose that. Why couldn't such an "observation" be the result of yet another distortion that actually evokes the feeling that there are no distortions?

Sounds like a more plausible hypothesis to me, given the profound susceptibility of the human mind to error at every level of cognition.

>You can either learn to appreciate such experiences as being glimpses of unfiltered truth

Once again, you've failed to substantiate why such experiences are "glimpses of unfiltered truth", and that thus remains a mere claim and nothing more.

>You'll shed tears if you ever end up having such an experience.

Sure, I might very well end up having a similar experience at some point, one that I would describe as life-changing, and might ultimately be compelled to conclude that they are in fact informative of some deeper reality, but that won't mean anything either, I'm just another person, with the same mental and intellectual deficits that plague everyone else.

There are people, on this planet, right at this moment, who are having what they would describe as profound spiritual experiences which are actually suggestive of mutually-exclusive worldviews.

Someone right now is likely talking to Jesus (or so they imagine), or Muhammad, or Mahdi if they happen to be a Shia Muslim say. I've actually met some of these people firsthand and they are 100% convinced of what they saw, and what they think what they saw meant, yet as a matter of pure logic, at least some of these people have to be experiencing some form of delusion, they can't all be right.

Therefore, you can't look at this phenomenon (of spiritual experience) that manifests itself in radically different ways, and lazily conclude that whatever an individual instance seems to suggest on the surface must be true because it simply felt profound, or that you ended up crying because of how intense it was.