Pass me the salt and Packer, please.

[_sock puppet]

I sat on a plane next to a professed atheist who pressed his disbelief in God so urgently that I bore my testimony to him. “You are wrong,” I said, “there is a God. I know He lives!”

He protested, “You don’t know. Nobody knows that! You can’t know it!” When I would not yield, the atheist, who was an attorney, asked perhaps the ultimate question on the subject of testimony. “All right,” he said in a sneering, condescending way, “you say you know. Tell me how you know.”

When I attempted to answer, even though I held advanced academic degrees, I was helpless to communicate…When I used the words Spirit and witness, the atheist responded, “I don’t know what you are talking about.” The words prayer, discernment, and faith, were equally meaningless to him. “You see,” he said, “you don’t really know. If you did, you would be able to tell me how you know.”

I felt, perhaps, that I had borne my testimony to him unwisely and was at a loss as to what to do. Then… an idea came into my mind and I said to the atheist, “Let me ask if you know what salt tastes like.”

“Of course I do,” was his reply.

“When did you taste salt last?”

“I just had dinner on the plane.”

“You just think you know what salt tastes like,” I said.

He insisted, “I know what salt tastes like as well as I know anything.”

“If I gave you a cup of salt and a cup of sugar and let you taste them both, could you tell the salt from the sugar?”

“Now you are getting juvenile,” was his reply. “Of course I could tell the difference. I know what salt tastes like. It is an everyday experience—I know it as well as I know anything.”

“Then,” I said, “assuming that I have never tasted salt, explain to me just what it tastes like.”

After some thought, he ventured, “Well-I-uh, it is not sweet and it is not sour.”

“You’ve told me what it isn’t, not what it is.”

After several attempts, of course, he could not do it. He could not convey, in words alone, so ordinary an experience as tasting salt. I bore testimony to him once again and said, “I know there is a God. You ridiculed that testimony and said that if I did know, I would be able to tell you exactly how I know. My friend, spiritually speaking, I have tasted salt. I am no more able to convey to you in words how this knowledge has come than you are to tell me what salt tastes like. But I say to you again, there is a God! He does live! And just because you don’t know, don’t try to tell me that I don’t know, for I do!”

So, what do you think? If we cannot convey by language what salt tastes like, then we should not expect believers to be able to convey how they know that something is the case on the basis of spiritual experience. Right?

That approach might overwhelm mentally those that do not use critical thinking. I am suspicious that an attorney would 'buy' it, as opposed to wanting to tune out the old coot sitting next to him on the plane and not talk to him anymore.

[_DrW]

This has evolved into a very interesting thread in terms of the variations in color perception and naming among cultures.

An analogous effect of brain training that fascinates me is the ability of very young children to learn to distinguish among certain sounds in speech from other languages that simply cannot be distinguished by adults who do not speak those languages.

One example relates to the Arabic language "K" sounds (such as indicated by the Arabic letters QAF, KAF and KEHEH), transliterated variously as K, Kh, Q, or Qu in the English alphabet.

My approximately 2 year old granddaughter took part in university studies wherein it was shown that she could be trained to distinguish among these Arabic "K" sounds over a period of a few 20 minute trial sessions.

However, as an English language only speaker, by the time she was 4 years old, she could no longer be readily trained to distinguish among the various Arabic "K" sounds.

The explanation provided by the university researcher who was conducting this work was that this fairly common outcome was due to loss of brain plasticity. As the number of neuronal connections associated with acquisition of the English language increases, the ability to be quickly trained to reliably distinguish among similar and unfamiliar sounds from other languages is lost.

As an adult, I lived in Arab speaking countries for several years and was never able to reliably distinguish among the "K" sounds. When I tried to mimic the different "K" sounds in response to prompts by a native Arabic speaker, the normal response was a polite smile.

[_Nightlion]

But Brother Packer, not only can I share with you the taste of salt so that you can know for certain, I can also show the salt. Look, here it is.
*passes salt condiment*
People have a consistent view of what salt tastes like because it is the same for everyone. All you can really do is tell me what you think God tastes like and your view is not consistent across the world because belief in God is not consistent across the world. But I believe in fairness.
I have physically shown you salt, so now it's your turn to physically show me God....

Okay, let me try being intellectual then. Ahem, let's say I take you into the ocean so you can taste salt. You would soon realize that the entire ocean must be salty. If I helped you to know God you would soon realize God is in all things and that you were not capable of sensing it. But God is not carnal nor sensual. So you need to rise up above your carnal and sensual to get the sense of knowing God. We are talking about God and not just another mineral.

For you to insist a demonstration of God where you are is like asking to sense the ocean from where it is not. God must plant within you awareness of himself. Like you are on Mars or Venus, and so the ocean of God awareness must be brought to you.

Have I been intellectually honest? hmm?

[_Samantabhadra]

The whole idea for separating propositional knowledge from experience as knowledge is that there's a real rift here, and as propositional knowledge about the world might know nothing about experiencing color, the color experience itself does not give us propositional knowledge about the world. Apologists who go the "personal experience" route misunderstand this rift as one directional. They believe they've shielded their testimony from science, but leave ways for their testimony to stake out claims in propositional territory.

Even if I were to grant BKP making a proposition of the kind: "I know what it's like to be a bat," which I would personally not grant, any victory trades on semantic ambiguities. When thoroughly defining the terms involved in a way to keep the terms restricted to the qualia itself, there would be no crossover, no having the cake and eating it to tell an atheist that there is a God in a way that any atheist would give a rat's ass about.

Bingo.

As a side note, my very first time taking LSD I became mildly synaesthetic; I could "feel" sights and sounds. It wasn't merely a drug-induced illusion, when a phone rang it really felt like physical vibrations against my body (in all fairness I suppose "sound" is the mental representation of a compression wave and thus has a physical analogue in a way that e.g. the black-and-white numbers in your example above do not... although I could also "feel" the elements of my visual field, so...). Anyway this was a huge moment for me in terms of understanding that sense-data are not the same things as qualia, far less the same things as what those data represent in(/to) consciousness.

[_Tarski]

In short, there is a huge and obvious gap between knowing (as in being justified believing) and thinking that one knows.

This is only true IF "knowledge" means something like <["believing prosition P is true"] while [proposition P is "in fact" true]>. Assuming that epistemological paradigm means that you have already taken for granted what it is that you set out to prove ("knowledge" concerns "propositions" about "facts"), so you are begging the question.

Of course, but I claim there is no coherent paradigm that doesn't leave us in the same position. Do you have an alternative paradigm? (or is it an ineffable paradigm?-LOL)

I claim that any idea of knowledge that includes a notion of direct epistemic access which somehow bypasses both communicable rational argument, publically available evidence or notions of gaining a demonstrable ability of some sort is a nonstarter and maybe even incoherent.

What does ineffable direct private knowledge (of an intrinsic property) even mean? In particular, how are we to unpack the meaning of "direct". The "direct" is direct between what and what? Is knowledge possible without information entering a brain? How is that direct?

[_Samantabhadra]

I claim that any idea of knowledge that includes a notion of direct epistemic access which somehow bypasses both communicable rational argument, publically available evidence or notions of gaining a demonstrable ability of some sort is a nonstarter and maybe even incoherent.

I think the notion of "direct epistemic access" to real external objects is incoherent, so it seems we are in agreement here.

In particular, how are we to unpack the meaning of "direct". The "direct" is direct between what and what?

In my epistemological paradigm, only the first, subliminal, pre-conceptual or non-processed moment of a perception can be counted as "direct." This is something like "raw sense-data" that are ordinarily inaccessible to consciousness. At time 1 there is this nonconceptual "direct" perception.

At time 2 the contents of this perception have been cognitively processed and rendered by consciousness into an intelligible form (generally speaking, as a dualistic "image" that includes a "subjective aspect" of the perceiver and an "objective aspect" of the perceived). But this "image" at time 2 is not "direct", it is a conceptual "inference" made on the basis of the nonconceptual perception from time 1.

In this paradigm, propositional knowledge is then a further step removed, at time 3, when the contents of a sense-perception (that have only been accessible to our consciousness as ordinarily constituted since time 2) are further processed and conceptualized in terms of various characteristics: their being red, or square, or salty, and so on.

Is knowledge possible without information entering a brain?

"Information" is not exclusively material, even if (for the purposes of this discussion) it requires a material component. For example, a collection of ones and zeroes is not by itself "information," nor is a photon-pattern by itself "information"; but when the ones and zeroes are re-constituted as a digital photograph on a computer screen, and the light waves from that screen contact the visual faculty of a conscious human observer, that human observer has access to "information" about the subject of the photograph. The point is, brains are strictly material, so "information" cannot "enter" brains. Brains are obviously a sine qua non for any human being to be able to process information, but a brain by itself is no more able to process information than a stone or a lump of wood. So, given that "information" can never "enter" a brain just like that, if there is such a thing as knowledge, it must be gained some other way than simply being funneled into a brain.

[_Nightlion]

God is as much the guy next door as the guy next door. He is not ineffable. Neither is he relative to our perception of him, if that is what qualia is all about. He is of infinite power of which you experience at the point of contact when he is working his new creation upon you. The residual resonates forever in the field in which God continues to abide. You are hooked up.

Knowing God is not a ball dropped in a pin machine through random gates to mean something different each time. We approach him through a straight gate and it will be the exact and precise same event for everyone whom he receives. No more and no less as that would come of evil. Yeah, that is what Jesus said to the Nephites.

Don't mind me. Mystify to your hearts content so that you are really only speaking of your own mystification and not really about God at all. Whom you do not know at all.

[_MrStakhanovite]

So, what do you think?

Bad and unrealistic anecdotes are no substitute for genuine thought.

[_Darth J]

Packer's own statement shows that he is relying on the fallacy of equivocation.

Then… an idea came into my mind and I said to the atheist, “Let me ask if you know what salt tastes like.”

“Of course I do,” was his reply.

“When did you taste salt last?”

“I just had dinner on the plane.”

“You just think you know what salt tastes like,” I said.

So the atheist doesn't "know" what salt taste like. He only knows what it is like to have an experience, and infers from that experience that "this is the taste of salt." But, like Gadianton has noticed, Packer wants his reasoning to be unidirectional.

He could not convey, in words alone, so ordinary an experience as tasting salt. I bore testimony to him once again and said, “I know there is a God. You ridiculed that testimony and said that if I did know, I would be able to tell you exactly how I know. My friend, spiritually speaking, I have tasted salt....."

By his own logic Packer doesn't "know" what it is like to "taste salt" vis-a-vis God. Packer just thinks he knows what it is like to experience God. You don't even have to deny Packer having a subjective "tasting salt" experience to see his metaphysical Three-Card Monte. Let's grant for argument's sake that he did spiritually "taste salt." That doesn't mean that he is right about what it means. All Packer can do, per his "you just think you know what salt taste like" dictum, is say that he had a subjective experience, and then explain or not explain why he interprets that experience the way he does. But instead, Packer equivocates. We are meant to be so impressed by this apostle's inspired logic game that we overlook the special pleading: Packer compares his spiritual experience to tasting salt, but in his case he "really knows" what "salt tastes like."

The entire metaphor is loaded, anyway, because Latter-day Saints don't simply proclaim that God exists. The faith-promoting narrative of the LDS Church rests on numerous propositions of objective fact, but we're supposed to "taste salt" to determine the veracity of those objective facts. Unfortunately for the metaphor, I can objectively determine whether what I perceived to be salt was in fact salt, and I can also objectively determine whether what I perceived to be "tasting" the veracity of various faith-promoting claims of fact is accurate.

And this also misses the theological big picture: if God has a plan for me, and my eternal destiny depends on how well I follow and understand it, then God can come explain it to me himself. Don't send middlemen to tell me fallacious parables and threaten me with damnation if I don't give them 10% of my money (or that my family's salvation depends on me becoming one of your spokesman's wives, if I am a teenage girl living in the 1830's). If God uses a third party who relies on paternalistic claims of authority to explain life, the universe, and everything to me, then that must mean I can have a third party go to church for me.

[_zeezrom]

Now I know where many MAD folks get their choice of words from.

Packer!

He protested, “You don’t know. Nobody knows that! You can’t know it!” When I would not yield, the atheist, who was an attorney, asked perhaps the ultimate question on the subject of testimony. “All right,” he said in a sneering, condescending way, “you say you know. Tell me how you know.”