[FRIAM] A longer response to Dave's question

[Eric Charles]

If we are willing to go back and forth a bit between being philosophers and
psychologists for a moment, there are far more interesting things to talk
about regarding "altered states".... here are the some of the issues:


   1. When someone claims to be responding to something, we should believe
   they are responding to *something*.
   2. People generally suck at stating what they are responding to, even in
   highly mundane situations.
   3. It is worth studying any types of experiences that lead fairly
   reliably to other certain future experiences, because in such situations
   one has a chance discover what it is people are *actually *responding
   to.
   4. As we are complex dynamic systems, human development is affected by
   all sorts of things in non-obvious ways.
   5. There is no *a priori *reason to discount the insights one
   experiences under "altered states of consciousness", but also no *a
   priori* reason to give them special credence.
   6. The degree to which a someone has a sense of certainty about
   something is not generally a reliable measure of how likely that thing is
   to hold up in the long run, unless many, many, many other assumptions are
   met.
   7. There is likely good reason to think that altered states of
   consciousness are less reliable in general than "regular" states.
   8. There are many examples that suggest certain
   insights-that-turn-out-to-hold-up-pretty-well, which were first experienced
   when under an altered state, were unlikely to have been experienced without
   that altered state.

Is that the type of stuff we were are poking at?


-----------
Eric P. Charles, Ph.D.
Department of Justice - Personnel Psychologist
American University - Adjunct Instructor
<echarles at american.edu>


On Sat, Feb 22, 2020 at 2:30 PM Frank Wimberly <wimberly3 at gmail.com> wrote:

> Agreed
>
> ---
> Frank C. Wimberly, PhD
> 505 670-9918
> Santa Fe, NM
>
> On Sat, Feb 22, 2020, 12:25 PM Marcus Daniels <marcus at snoutfarm.com>
> wrote:
>
>> Frank writes:
>>
>>
>>
>> <It would constitute proof that Marcus exists if he were to admit that I
>> was correct in our years-ago argument when I said that gender defines an
>> equivalence relation on the set of people.>
>>
>> Definitions.  Notation.  Argh, who cares.  Where’s that neuralyzer, let
>> me get rid of them.
>>
>> (That should at least be evidence of continuity!)
>>
>>
>>
>> Marcus
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