#2, as worded, assumes God exists, and so is begging the question. Obviously, if God exists, then it trivially follows that “there is a God”. It can’t be our Statement B if it is just an obfuscated Statement A. That’s no progress.
Just complaining about a fallacy seems uncharitable, so I’m trying to build a steelman out of this, but it’s not working. If we remove “God” and replace it with “Higher Power”, then it’s no better than #1 as a crux. We still don’t know it’s your God we’re talking to. If we remove “God” altogether, then we’re talking about humans having psychic powers, which doesn’t seem to help. Maybe you can word it better than I can.
The human mind is made of parts that can disagree or get out of sync. Auditory hallucinations are known to science, but telepathic communication is not. So on priors, I would first assume a hallucination. How can we distinguish these cases? At a minimum, I think the voice in your head would need to reveal things that it could not know simply from being inside your head. But even given that, if we’re already assuming extrasensory perception for the telepathy, how do we know you’re not hallucinating and clairvoyant as opposed to telepathic and in contact with an alien? Maybe it would help if said alien had multiple contacts, as this would seem to reduce the chance that they’re all hallucinations, but only if the contacts independently agree about what the alien is saying. But if we’re already assuming telepathy, how do we know the contacts aren’t colluding telepathically behind your back? Maybe we would still need some outside confirmation the alien exists. Can we prove that people are telepathic but not clairvoyant? Can we prove that people are only telepathic with aliens but not each other?
You are saying that you can totally communicate with a non-existent god so that point is only a single sided crux at the moment.
I don’t really understand the difference between clairvoyant and telepathic. Either the contact mechanism is know or unknown. If it is known we can argue what kind of entities can be in that kind of contact. If it is not known there is no point in differentiating between different types as the details could be anything.
While both telepathy and clairvoyance involve a mind gaining knowledge through means other than the known sense input modes*, telepathy refers to communication between two or more minds, whereas clairvoyance usually involves only one mind.
One example of telepathy in pop culture is the Vulcan Mind Meld, where a Vulcan can achieve various levels of mind-to-mind communication through (apparently) touch alone.
One example of clairvoyance in pop culture is Farsight, a Star Wars universe Force Power that allows the user to look at things that are not in their usual visual range.
In this context, I believe gilch is suggesting that it would be difficult to discern between a telepath communicating with a remote (unseen) being and a clairvoyant whose mode of knowing is to hallucinate a conversation, but where no other being is present.
*Known sensory modalities for living things on earth include but are not limited to vision, hearing, taste, smell, touch, balance, proprioception, time perception and magnetoreception.
if the clairvoyant knows any thing ie their experience correlates to anything then the other being is present. But I guess it would be hopeless to establish how reliable the information channel is using that information channel only.
If you have an other being involved in any way the power isn’t clairvoyance, it’s telepathy. The problem is how to distinguish the telepath from the clairvoyant who interprets their unusual senses by hallucinating non-existent “voices” or some such.
#2, as worded, assumes God exists, and so is begging the question. Obviously, if God exists, then it trivially follows that “there is a God”. It can’t be our Statement B if it is just an obfuscated Statement A. That’s no progress.
Just complaining about a fallacy seems uncharitable, so I’m trying to build a steelman out of this, but it’s not working. If we remove “God” and replace it with “Higher Power”, then it’s no better than #1 as a crux. We still don’t know it’s your God we’re talking to. If we remove “God” altogether, then we’re talking about humans having psychic powers, which doesn’t seem to help. Maybe you can word it better than I can.
If you would have telepathic contact with a foreign intelligence would that make you think that other communication party exists?
What would convince you that another person beside yourself was having communication contact with non-human intelligences?
Do you lack the communcation potential to non-human intelligences? If yes that would be material disagreement whether every person can.
The human mind is made of parts that can disagree or get out of sync. Auditory hallucinations are known to science, but telepathic communication is not. So on priors, I would first assume a hallucination. How can we distinguish these cases? At a minimum, I think the voice in your head would need to reveal things that it could not know simply from being inside your head. But even given that, if we’re already assuming extrasensory perception for the telepathy, how do we know you’re not hallucinating and clairvoyant as opposed to telepathic and in contact with an alien? Maybe it would help if said alien had multiple contacts, as this would seem to reduce the chance that they’re all hallucinations, but only if the contacts independently agree about what the alien is saying. But if we’re already assuming telepathy, how do we know the contacts aren’t colluding telepathically behind your back? Maybe we would still need some outside confirmation the alien exists. Can we prove that people are telepathic but not clairvoyant? Can we prove that people are only telepathic with aliens but not each other?
You are saying that you can totally communicate with a non-existent god so that point is only a single sided crux at the moment.
I don’t really understand the difference between clairvoyant and telepathic. Either the contact mechanism is know or unknown. If it is known we can argue what kind of entities can be in that kind of contact. If it is not known there is no point in differentiating between different types as the details could be anything.
While both telepathy and clairvoyance involve a mind gaining knowledge through means other than the known sense input modes*, telepathy refers to communication between two or more minds, whereas clairvoyance usually involves only one mind.
One example of telepathy in pop culture is the Vulcan Mind Meld, where a Vulcan can achieve various levels of mind-to-mind communication through (apparently) touch alone.
One example of clairvoyance in pop culture is Farsight, a Star Wars universe Force Power that allows the user to look at things that are not in their usual visual range.
In this context, I believe gilch is suggesting that it would be difficult to discern between a telepath communicating with a remote (unseen) being and a clairvoyant whose mode of knowing is to hallucinate a conversation, but where no other being is present.
*Known sensory modalities for living things on earth include but are not limited to vision, hearing, taste, smell, touch, balance, proprioception, time perception and magnetoreception.
if the clairvoyant knows any thing ie their experience correlates to anything then the other being is present. But I guess it would be hopeless to establish how reliable the information channel is using that information channel only.
If you have an other being involved in any way the power isn’t clairvoyance, it’s telepathy. The problem is how to distinguish the telepath from the clairvoyant who interprets their unusual senses by hallucinating non-existent “voices” or some such.