I know an atheist who gets these. She used to think it was future superintelligences talking to her, but eventually she asked herself some very hard questions and managed to realize it was just a brain storm. It’s one of the most heroic acts of rationality I’ve ever seen anyone perform.
What was the deciding factor?
(I can only imagine this playing out as a comparison of not-particularly-well-founded prior probabilities for “gods are communicating with me” versus “mundane brain malfunction”, which I think of as in practice being a matter of Copycatesque instrumentalish rationality (“what interpretation scheme would help me integrate these experiences such that they bear pragmatic fruit?”) rather than epistemic rationality as such. ’Cuz basically you have no other choice than to pull inductive biases out of your local subculture; it’s simply too difficult to reliably engage in successful hermeneutics on your own.)
If another data point helps: when I experienced a version of this after some traumatic brain injury, I basically asked myself “What’s more likely? That what I’m experiencing actually corresponds in some relevantly isomorphic way to a distal stimulus that existed prior to my injury, but which I didn’t previously notice for some as-yet-unknown reason? Or that what I’m experiencing doesn’t correspond to any relevantly isomorphic event, and I’m experiencing it primarily as a consequence of my brain injury?” (I wasn’t anywhere near that precise in my formulation of the question at the time, of course.)
One major deciding factor for me was that I was at the same time experiencing other novel perceptions, none of which seemed to have much to do with one another if I interpreted each of them as evidence of actual events I was accurately perceiving, but which allowed for a common explanation if I interpreted them as evidence that I was hallucinating. And, of course, another major deciding factor was believing that brains had a lot to do with constructing perceived experience, and were capable of doing so in the absence of isomorphic distal stimuli.
I mean, it was certainly possible that all of my perceptions were accurate and I really was being Called to Prophecy by Beings from Beyond the Veil of Unknowing, and also that my arm was no longer physically attached to my shoulder despite remaining under my control, and also that etc. etc. etc. But it seemed more likely that these apparently unrelated perceptions that began after my brain injury were connected to that injury in non-trivial ways.
But of course you’re right that culturally primed priors play a huge role as well. If I’d remained strongly embedded in the Orthodox Jewish community I was raised in, for example, I might have found it equally plausible that all of those experiences were being sent to me by YHVH, or that the most mysterious-seeming of them (the Call to Prophecy) had a different explanation than the others.
And, of course, that whole line of reasoning would have been completely unavailable had I not been aware of the brain injury in the first place, and/or had the only novel perception been the Call to Prophecy.
That was really interesting, thanks. I’ve read that God usually calls to prophecy those who are least likely to interpret the call for what it is because they are meek and self-doubting. Did this factor into your considerations? Also, paranoid schizophrenic that I am, I would have toyed with the hypothesis that God chose to talk to me when my brain was damaged because the brain damage and its non-spiritual effects act as a form of plausible deniability (because it seems that the gods, if they exist, are obviously trying to be somewhat coy about it). Did this factor into your considerations? (It seems like it may have at some point because of your sentence “or that the most mysterious-seeming of them (the Call to Prophecy) had a different explanation than the others”.)
The idea that there was a genuine external communicator (whether Divine or otherwise) that was deliberately seeking out brain-damaged or otherwise unreliable recipients didn’t occur to me. Thinking about it now, my reaction is mostly to tell those hypothetical communicators to go fuck themselves.
The meek and self-doubting thing didn’t occur to me, either.
In general, the alternatives to “I’m hallucinating” I considered were all variations on “I am now able to perceive things I wasn’t previously able to perceive” rather than “something that previously was able to communicate with me but chose not to is now choosing to communicate with me”.
For example, I did toy with the idea that the trauma had fortuitously opened up some psychospiritual channel, perhaps by shutting off some part of my brain that ordinarily either blocked my ability to receive such signals or caused me to forget them or whatever… that’s a pretty common trope in fantasy fiction as well. I also toyed with the idea that having my ordinary perceptions screwed with made me more receptive to noticing novel isomorphic-to-reality patterns as well as the novel non-itr patterns I was demonstrably noticing… like the way taking acid might make me less succeptible to certain optical illusions or cognitive biases.
Thinking about it now, my reaction is mostly to tell those hypothetical communicators to go fuck themselves.
Ha, that’s my first reaction too, but “He trolls us because He loves us.” I think He’s sort of a bastard but I can’t help but smile at His jokes despite that; He’s a lot like reality in that way. (One of my friend’s interpretation of the story of Job is roughly ‘reality is allowed to fuck with you, but you must still love reality, you’re never justified in turning your back on reality, and if you stay faithful to reality then you’ll likely be rewarded but being rewarded isn’t the point’. In the same vein, “I don’t like YHWH, but that’s not the point: I love Him and I fear Him.”)
Sure, I’m acquainted with the argument. Personally, I’ve never found it compelling. Even if I assume that there was a deliberate communicator, be it YHWH or Gharlane of Eddore or whatever, I’m content to let it go about its business without my love.
As for fear, well, it doesn’t really take much to inspire me to fear. I’m a relatively frail life form.
It’s similar to staying faithful to someone you love, e.g. a wife or a good king. Caring about the way the world really is even if the world is really painful. Not flinching away from reality because it tells you something you don’t want to hear, not rebuking reality because it dares to disagree with you, not resenting reality because it seems unjust. Not replacing reality with a fantasy because you’re bored or because you want to escape. Not gerrymandering the definition of what counts as staying faithful to reality. Like Eliezer’s “something to protect”. It’s something that binds you to reality and keeps you from going out and identifying with a lot of stupid hypotheses and having sex with tons of chicks and getting STDs or delusions or whatever. (Note that going on dates with a lot of ideas is great, but you shouldn’t have sex with every idea you come across.)
I really like this framework. In particular, the interpretation of Job that goes with it. I may want to use them as part of this year’s Less Wrong Solstice gathering, if that’s okay with you.
What was the deciding factor?
(I can only imagine this playing out as a comparison of not-particularly-well-founded prior probabilities for “gods are communicating with me” versus “mundane brain malfunction”, which I think of as in practice being a matter of Copycatesque instrumentalish rationality (“what interpretation scheme would help me integrate these experiences such that they bear pragmatic fruit?”) rather than epistemic rationality as such. ’Cuz basically you have no other choice than to pull inductive biases out of your local subculture; it’s simply too difficult to reliably engage in successful hermeneutics on your own.)
If another data point helps: when I experienced a version of this after some traumatic brain injury, I basically asked myself “What’s more likely? That what I’m experiencing actually corresponds in some relevantly isomorphic way to a distal stimulus that existed prior to my injury, but which I didn’t previously notice for some as-yet-unknown reason? Or that what I’m experiencing doesn’t correspond to any relevantly isomorphic event, and I’m experiencing it primarily as a consequence of my brain injury?” (I wasn’t anywhere near that precise in my formulation of the question at the time, of course.)
One major deciding factor for me was that I was at the same time experiencing other novel perceptions, none of which seemed to have much to do with one another if I interpreted each of them as evidence of actual events I was accurately perceiving, but which allowed for a common explanation if I interpreted them as evidence that I was hallucinating. And, of course, another major deciding factor was believing that brains had a lot to do with constructing perceived experience, and were capable of doing so in the absence of isomorphic distal stimuli.
I mean, it was certainly possible that all of my perceptions were accurate and I really was being Called to Prophecy by Beings from Beyond the Veil of Unknowing, and also that my arm was no longer physically attached to my shoulder despite remaining under my control, and also that etc. etc. etc. But it seemed more likely that these apparently unrelated perceptions that began after my brain injury were connected to that injury in non-trivial ways.
But of course you’re right that culturally primed priors play a huge role as well. If I’d remained strongly embedded in the Orthodox Jewish community I was raised in, for example, I might have found it equally plausible that all of those experiences were being sent to me by YHVH, or that the most mysterious-seeming of them (the Call to Prophecy) had a different explanation than the others.
And, of course, that whole line of reasoning would have been completely unavailable had I not been aware of the brain injury in the first place, and/or had the only novel perception been the Call to Prophecy.
That was really interesting, thanks. I’ve read that God usually calls to prophecy those who are least likely to interpret the call for what it is because they are meek and self-doubting. Did this factor into your considerations? Also, paranoid schizophrenic that I am, I would have toyed with the hypothesis that God chose to talk to me when my brain was damaged because the brain damage and its non-spiritual effects act as a form of plausible deniability (because it seems that the gods, if they exist, are obviously trying to be somewhat coy about it). Did this factor into your considerations? (It seems like it may have at some point because of your sentence “or that the most mysterious-seeming of them (the Call to Prophecy) had a different explanation than the others”.)
The idea that there was a genuine external communicator (whether Divine or otherwise) that was deliberately seeking out brain-damaged or otherwise unreliable recipients didn’t occur to me. Thinking about it now, my reaction is mostly to tell those hypothetical communicators to go fuck themselves.
The meek and self-doubting thing didn’t occur to me, either.
In general, the alternatives to “I’m hallucinating” I considered were all variations on “I am now able to perceive things I wasn’t previously able to perceive” rather than “something that previously was able to communicate with me but chose not to is now choosing to communicate with me”.
For example, I did toy with the idea that the trauma had fortuitously opened up some psychospiritual channel, perhaps by shutting off some part of my brain that ordinarily either blocked my ability to receive such signals or caused me to forget them or whatever… that’s a pretty common trope in fantasy fiction as well. I also toyed with the idea that having my ordinary perceptions screwed with made me more receptive to noticing novel isomorphic-to-reality patterns as well as the novel non-itr patterns I was demonstrably noticing… like the way taking acid might make me less succeptible to certain optical illusions or cognitive biases.
Ha, that’s my first reaction too, but “He trolls us because He loves us.” I think He’s sort of a bastard but I can’t help but smile at His jokes despite that; He’s a lot like reality in that way. (One of my friend’s interpretation of the story of Job is roughly ‘reality is allowed to fuck with you, but you must still love reality, you’re never justified in turning your back on reality, and if you stay faithful to reality then you’ll likely be rewarded but being rewarded isn’t the point’. In the same vein, “I don’t like YHWH, but that’s not the point: I love Him and I fear Him.”)
Sure, I’m acquainted with the argument. Personally, I’ve never found it compelling. Even if I assume that there was a deliberate communicator, be it YHWH or Gharlane of Eddore or whatever, I’m content to let it go about its business without my love.
As for fear, well, it doesn’t really take much to inspire me to fear. I’m a relatively frail life form.
What does “stay[ing] faithful to reality” mean?
It’s similar to staying faithful to someone you love, e.g. a wife or a good king. Caring about the way the world really is even if the world is really painful. Not flinching away from reality because it tells you something you don’t want to hear, not rebuking reality because it dares to disagree with you, not resenting reality because it seems unjust. Not replacing reality with a fantasy because you’re bored or because you want to escape. Not gerrymandering the definition of what counts as staying faithful to reality. Like Eliezer’s “something to protect”. It’s something that binds you to reality and keeps you from going out and identifying with a lot of stupid hypotheses and having sex with tons of chicks and getting STDs or delusions or whatever. (Note that going on dates with a lot of ideas is great, but you shouldn’t have sex with every idea you come across.)
I really like this framework. In particular, the interpretation of Job that goes with it. I may want to use them as part of this year’s Less Wrong Solstice gathering, if that’s okay with you.
How did it go? It seems like it would create some unsettling ambiguity in the “happy” ending.
I did not end up using it, although I periodically stumble upon this again and still think it’s a neat way of thinking