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one thing that frustrates me: people sometimes have weird brain experiences and then become convinced of crazy metaphysical beliefs. like you have some strange spiritual experience and become convinced god exists.
human brains are really fucking weird and complicated! it’s true that the default hypothesis of conscious experience (the idea that unless you’ve gone completely crazy, you basically just perceive reality as it is, and act on it as a rationalish agent) is not exactly true. the correct update is that while most of the time this is accurate, there is a lot of weird shit that goes on inside your brain, and your perception is the result of a whole lot of computation over the streams of raw data, and there are all sorts of weird modes you can push your brain into that feel really fucking weird from the inside, especially through drugs/meditation/etc, but even sometimes without. it’s actually completely possible to just hallucinate very complicated things, or suddenly feel some emotion very strongly for no obvious reason, or your brain can even mess with your memories too.
my diagnosis is that a lot of people have a belief that perceiving weird bullshit is not compatible with the standard rational view of the world (“science can’t explain why i heard the voice of god booming from the sky”), the one that says ghosts don’t exist and whatever, so if you perceive weird bullshit the standard rational view must be wrong and therefore we must consider ghosts and spirits and god and such to be in the space of hypotheses again. this is understandable but totally wrong. if anything, experiencing weird brain shit should make you more cautious about epistemology.
then again, although i’ve run into lots of weird quirks of my brain that violate the basic rational model, i’ve never had any kind of strange spiritual experience. maybe i’d change my mind if i have such an experience, though hopefully not. i’d like to think if i heard the voice of god booming down from the sky i would be like “aha yes my brain is fucking with me”.
That doesn't make sense to me, either emotionally or logically (it seems like there are lots of reasons that could have happened that would be totally consistent with God being real and people sometimes being able to really feel the presence of God?)
7J Bostock
His logic was something like:
* I strongly believe in the Christian God because of the feeling of the Holy Spirit that I get in church (and not much else, the world looks pretty secular)
* This feeling is similar to, but weaker than, the feeling of taking LSD
* If God is real, then He probably would not create a random mushroom derivative chemical which provides a stronger connection to him than an actual church does
* Therefore this feeling is probably not the Christian God connecting to me
* Therefore I have no evidence for God
* Therefore God likely does not exist