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MBlume comments on The uniquely awful example of theism - Less Wrong
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In my (admittedly not immense) experience, intelligent theists who commit to rationality (and stay theists indefinitely) either engage in some heavy-duty partitioning of their beliefs - that is, they commit only partially to rationality, and consider part of their belief network exempt - or cover the gaps in their communicable rationality with incommunicable religious experience. In the first case, it's a clear case of not being wholly rational; if we can talk about those people as a convenient, accessible example of not-wholly-rational individuals with an obvious area of non-rationality, and happen not to severely offend anyone here, there seems no harm.
The latter case, however, makes me nervous, perhaps because I have a lot of Mormon friends and they seem to have a lot of incommunicable religious experiences as a group. From talking to my smart, generally rational Mormon friends - at least those of them who will let me interrogate them about this sort of thing - I find that they act and speak exactly like they're applying rational principles to experiences that they have had, which I just have not happened to have.
Since theists include both the partitioners and the experiencers (and probably some overlap and some categories I haven't thought of or met), perhaps we should stop talking about theists in general as our target group and start speaking of some narrower collection of people, if we want to stay with the example of religion for whatever reason. "Fundamentalists", perhaps - anyone who has met an intelligent, rational, non-partitioning fundamentalist will surprise me, but is of course welcome to shoot down this suggestion.
I'm in an ongoing conversation with a couple of LDS missionaries, and those incommunicable experiences seem to be their primary argument. They say they can't convince me Mormonism is true on their own, but if I read, and I pray, and I work, I'll just have that experience myself and I'll know it. And if I had more spare time, I would do all those things, primarily to give them Bayesian evidence that it's actually not true (I keep meaning to pick up my Book of Mormon, but, well, particle physics to read, LW posts to write, root documentation to go through, etc etc etc)
The primary argument that I have given back, though, is that religious experiences of this stripe simply aren't unique to Mormonism. Hindus, Muslims, Buddhists, Catholics, and ravers taking E have all had similar transcendent experiences. It is naive to take it as Bayesian evidence of mormonism.true.
I don't think Mormonism is true. I'm not even sure I should consider my friends' experiences evidence in favor of the proposition that Mormonism is true, especially given that I know other religions have similarly experience-laden representatives and "Alicorn's friends" isn't a group representative of the population as a whole. I do, however, suspect that they should consider it evidence - even strong evidence - to exactly that effect.
Why? Unless the experience displays obvious entanglement with external facts they couldn't have known at the time, "it's all in my head" is a perfectly good explanation.
Also, I agree that some experiences are incommunicable in practice, but it still seems that enough information is available that your friends should conclude (with a touch of Outside View reasoning) that other people who claim incommunicable evidence for their religions are probably experiencing about the same thing they are.
Unfortunately, there's a slippery slope from "it's all in your head" to "it doesn't matter"/"you're making it up". Look at the history of psychiatry and mental health for examples.
Not saying you're wrong, just that there may be layers of complicated cultural biases preventing people from accepting that answer.
A human mind is a physical object in the universe, mine as well as yours. An experience that you have should not produce a qualitatively different update in beliefs to an experience I report. In either case, the fact of the matter is, on such and such date and time, a human brain under such and such circumstances underwent such and such experiences.
To take it to an extreme case, no one has access to information which a scientist with a super-MRI machine observing the excitation of each individual neuron does not, in principle, have.
Yes, of course - but I don't have a super-MRI. I can't access the content of my friends' experiences; I can't take it into account the way I could entertain a communicable proposition, because they can't even describe their experiences. If someone tells me a piece of evidence that would be excellent evidence for proposition P, but they say it in Swahili, I have no such evidence for P.