DiscussMormonism.com

I'm responding to his blog entry here:

http://mormondiscussions.com/discuss/we ... .php?e=788

For your vision thing, salt, or the """spirit""", it's interesting that you ask what kind of information the experiences carry. The move to make salt indescribable is similar to the move to make belief in God epistemically basic. Since things that are basic can't be broken down further, alone they carry virtually no information. It would be a minimal element that together with other basic elements produce information that's useful. As soon as you say, "I saw green and red together" then the hallucination is breaking down into simpler parts. Remember, Packer argued that you can't break down the taste of salt further. It's suppose to be rock bottom. And rock bottom alone by definition sort of, doesn't carry a lot of information.

But Mormonism shifts gears and argues the """spirit""" from a completely different angle when not under the threat of the bluff being called. It wants to have it both ways so that the spirit is both "basic" and as well conveys vast amounts of information. Now, there's a subtle semi-intelligent yet wrong way to do this and a complete dumb, moronic first-discussion way to do this. The subtle way is to to go the qualia route and say that the what-it's-like experience of the spirit can span more than just basic perceptions, that the sum total of ones experience has a what-it's-like feel to it. Two points:

1) If qualia is irreducible (if physicalism is false) then the taste of salt, the spirit, and your vision thing can't carry any information that can be described as factual! None at all! And that's trivially true since if there were a fact of the matter to it than physicalism would be true. Now there might be a way to salvage this by arguing a connection between information and qualia (Chalmers) but that still leaves testimony facts out of the running, such as, the Book of Mormon being true history.

2) If qualia is reducable, then we can say it carries information. Now does that contradict what I said above about "basics" being rock bottom? Not really. Because epistemic basics, human knowledge, isn't necessarily physical basics. Now an interesting point here, see Paul Churchland, is that the physical basics would matter, a testimony in the form of qualia, could carry facts about the real world, but, folk pyschology is eliminated. So the ultimate truth a testimony conveys isn't the kind that would work for the realm of psychological knowledge since that's all an illusion.

Now the dumb way is the spirit as a "testifier" of truth which doesn't look for any kind of deep meaning, but rather uses the spirit for its coincidental properties. In this interpretation, there is no actual connection between the spirit, or qualia and the real world. But rather, "If you read this passage, and then see a red X, then that means it's true". There is no necessary connection between the "X" and the passage, but we'd take it on possible authority that if some kind of super intelligent force can send us signs then we should take that intelligent's explanations of the signs as true. There is no connection between feeling good inside and the fact that Nephi made a bow. But a higher authority can tell us in advance that we'll have these strange qualia's in the case we do Y, and the meaning of this is Z. So at a certain point, if something odd persists in what seems like a statistically meaningful way, we start seeing credibility to the one who fortold it. If the church taught I'd see a gigantic spider everytime I saw the word Nephi, and I did, then...you start taking it seriously.

Gadianton wrote:Now an interesting point here, see Paul Churchland, is that the physical basics would matter, a testimony in the form of qualia, could carry facts about the real world, but, folk pyschology is eliminated

I'm having a particularly hard time parsing this sentence. What sort of facts about the real world are could here be carried by qualia? Only physical basics which is something quite different from the truth of say the Book of Mormon because that would be physically complex.

(You have this way of talking over my head and keeping me humble).

asbestosman wrote:

Gadianton wrote:Now an interesting point here, see Paul Churchland, is that the physical basics would matter, a testimony in the form of qualia, could carry facts about the real world, but, folk pyschology is eliminated

I'm having a particularly hard time parsing this sentence. What sort of facts about the real world are could here be carried by qualia? Only physical basics which is something quite different from the truth of say the Book of Mormon because that would be physically complex.

(You have this way of talking over my head and keeping me humble).

c'mon asb, i know i'm not, if it seems that way, then it means i've made mistakes.

Well, that was my point. however you look at it, qualia, "the taste of salt" or the mysterious aspect of testimony that finds an analogy in salt, couldn't actually encapsulate any kind of information that establishes truths about the world. But this is what BKP is claiming. That all his Mormon experiences and so on, the establishment of the Book of Mormon, and Smith, and all the rest, is something he knows phenomenally, like the taste of salt. But the feelings of the spirit, and feelings in general when one regards them in context of qualia, can't possibly do that kind of work. And BKP's use is different than the spirit as a testifier. God might have programmed physical reality as such that as true propositions of physical complexity are input, then "good feelings" result. but the good feelings themselves don't carry any information.

Gadianton wrote:God might have programmed physical reality as such that as true propositions of physical complexity are input, then "good feelings" result. but the good feelings themselves don't carry any information.

Agreed. But in theory, this one might draw reasonable conclusions about the correlation of the good feelings and truth or physical reality if one performs some kind of double-blind experiment. This is how we can learn, for example, that there is a correlation between rain and barrometric pressure or between electrically stimulating the brain and what it invokes in a patient.