I think you aren’t taking the cell phone world metaphor seriously enough. Moving down meta levels in this way will not help me explain anything to Alex about what looking up from his phone is like, except insofar as it involves doing “whispering into ear”-type stuff, which we’ve discussed elsewhere.
This seems like an odd reply. Suppose Alex were to ask what good comes of being able to do this “look up” thing, and you said “I can’t explain to you what looking up is”. Alex would see that as a non sequitur.
Similarly, suppose you launched into an explanation of your baking technique, and I asked you for a slice of cake. Does “serving you a slice of cake won’t help me explain the baking technique” make sense as a reply? It does not.
Where is the cake? Damn the explanations, man; show me the cake!
Making a photo of a cake and sending it to Alex doesn’t help him to learn about the cake that he would see if he would look up.
Alex might come up with a lot of arguments why he has much more beautiful pictures on his smart phone that look much tasty but that will be besides the point because cakes are for eating and not for looking at pictures of them.
Looking up from your phone provides experimentally verifiable “superpowers”—you can, for example, communicate with other Lookers Up via invisible gestures without texting them. Telepathy!
Maybe that’s a flaw in the analogy. But Valentine does claim real-world benefits, such as superhuman insight into psychology (as do other people who describe themselves as enlightened.) Maybe those aren’t “the point”, but demonstrating them convincingly would go a long way towards convincing the rest of us that there is a point and we just can’t see it.
The Buddha himself didn’t just say “trust me guys”, he supposedly did a bunch of miracles using his enlightenment-granted powers.
I think you aren’t taking the cell phone world metaphor seriously enough. Moving down meta levels in this way will not help me explain anything to Alex about what looking up from his phone is like, except insofar as it involves doing “whispering into ear”-type stuff, which we’ve discussed elsewhere.
This seems like an odd reply. Suppose Alex were to ask what good comes of being able to do this “look up” thing, and you said “I can’t explain to you what looking up is”. Alex would see that as a non sequitur.
Similarly, suppose you launched into an explanation of your baking technique, and I asked you for a slice of cake. Does “serving you a slice of cake won’t help me explain the baking technique” make sense as a reply? It does not.
Where is the cake? Damn the explanations, man; show me the cake!
Making a photo of a cake and sending it to Alex doesn’t help him to learn about the cake that he would see if he would look up.
Alex might come up with a lot of arguments why he has much more beautiful pictures on his smart phone that look much tasty but that will be besides the point because cakes are for eating and not for looking at pictures of them.
Looking up from your phone provides experimentally verifiable “superpowers”—you can, for example, communicate with other Lookers Up via invisible gestures without texting them. Telepathy!
Maybe that’s a flaw in the analogy. But Valentine does claim real-world benefits, such as superhuman insight into psychology (as do other people who describe themselves as enlightened.) Maybe those aren’t “the point”, but demonstrating them convincingly would go a long way towards convincing the rest of us that there is a point and we just can’t see it.
The Buddha himself didn’t just say “trust me guys”, he supposedly did a bunch of miracles using his enlightenment-granted powers.