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Jayson_Virissimo comments on Undiscriminating Skepticism - Less Wrong
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Brilliant!
Did you ever figure out what it was (not that one has to)?
Reminds me very much of Trisha's experience in HHGTTG.
The only other thing I ever heard about it was on a local news channel. It didn't really help one way or the other because they said it was military flares, but they claimed they were shot off after I saw the lights and the video they showed of the flares didn't resemble what I saw (they were much too small and moved too fast). I honestly wish I never saw the damn thing.
This sounds like you're a bit too scared that it has an "unnatural" explanation. If it did happen, there's a normal explanation for it. Curious, yes, scared, no.
This is exactly why I wish it didn't happen. I can't think of anything else I would tell someone about that would cause them to say "if it did happen...". Either I could provide enough evidence for my claim or my reputation as a truth-teller would be sufficient. Not so, in this case.
I think you're misreading a logical statement as a statement of uncertainty.
I see your point. After rereading it, I see that I didn't really have any reason for interpreting it as being particularly uncertain, as opposed to a conditional statement. Perhaps it would be less ambiguous if it was spoken instead of written.
I totally empathize with the psychology, but there's no good reason to regret seeing it. You saw something you didn't understand. You still don't understand it. Such things will happen. I think it's admirable that you hope for a rational explanation even when one isn't forthcoming - moreover, in the teeth of our human need for some explanation, even if it's a bad one.
To extend on Eliezer's point here, it's trivially easy to be a skeptic when the believer's epistemic position is foreign to you. Much harder when you're the experiencer-of-experiences, and the object of scrutiny.
We're nearly all of us materialists here; how many of us would still be if we had a powerful religious experience? And yet we (rightly) reject the truth claims of people who have had such experiences.
There was a time that I prayed intensely and experienced the presence of God on a nearly daily basis. Reading identical reports from people of other religions and learning about the many frailties of the brain helped me greatly to discount these experiences.
I hope I don't sound too effusive if I say that's borderline heroic.
But yeah, I suppose if you read "The Varieties of Religious Experience" or some other such book, you realize pretty fast that an experience like that is not really evidence.
I'm nonetheless surprised at your ability to do that calculus, as opposed to just closing the book. It impresses me almost as much as, say, the family of a murder victim speaking up in the defendant's cause. You were surely working through the Venus-of-Willendorf of all biases (I would imagine).
I'm not worried about sounding effusive and I'll omit the "borderline" part.
Thank you. Another factor that helped me was that I was encouraged to read the Bible. I actually did read all of it and was disturbed by some of the things I found. Something that particularly sticks out in my mind is the story of Jephthah from Judges chapter 11. Here God basically demands that a man sacrifice his young daughter (i.e. stab her to death and burn her body) as repayment for answering a prayer. God also claims responsibility for creating evil somewhere in the book of Isaiah, though the exact reference escapes me. It took me several years after these initial disturbances to ultimately own up to my mistake, but I gradually realized that the truths I were protecting were structurally quite different from the truths that were protecting themselves.
My experience was similar. If you (are similar to me and) want to lose the Christian faith - go to church and read the Bible. Two recipes for apostasy.
For another similar account see Julia Sweeney's Letting Go of God-- she was contently Catholic, went to Bible classes, and gradually became an atheist.
That calculus isn't as uncommon as you'd imagine; most people who take a religion very seriously end up having experiences they identify as "the presence of God", and anyone who leaves a religion they'd taken seriously must confront that bit of evidence. I'm another such case, although I have to cede the most impressive of these stories to the acquaintance of Eliezer (sorry, can't find the link to this anecdote) who had frequent, detailed, coherent visions and eventually decided that the most likely explanation was hallucination rather than contact with a deity or superintelligence.
It's here (starting at "I know a transhumanist who has strong religious visions").
I once experienced "Hag syndrome", I must have been around eleven. I woke up during the night, unable to move and convinced I had a witch sitting on me.
The next day when I could think about it in bright daylight I thought it was kinda cool that my brain could make me believe something so clearly supernatural, but it seemed just as obvious it had only been the same kind of thing as a nightmare, only more powerful. I didn't mention it to my parents or anything, just filed it as "one of those things". (It was downright scary at the time though; I don't recommend the experience, which as you can see still, um, haunts me.)
I had very strong religious experiences in my past, and became an atheist/materialist later, if that counts. So I'm guessing a later one could be similarly worked around.
Thanks for coming forward. May I press you for details? What was it like? What were the circumstances? Do you think it showed you anything psychologically, if not factually, worthwhile? What is your general take on the thing now?
I've also had sleep paralysis (multiple times). No hallucinations, though. I just couldn't move.
I've had about one episode of sleep paralysis per year starting around the same age. I haven't had any visual hallucinations, though there have been occasions where I've heard ambient sounds that very likely weren't real. It was terrifying the first time I experienced it, but they no loger bother me at all.