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kithpendragon comments on Is Spirituality Irrational? - Less Wrong
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Yes, that is the whole point. The experience of God may be real even if God isn't.
Also, the reason I didn't choose sheet music as my analogy is that the information content of sheet music is different from the actual music. To get from sheet music to music you have to add information (in the information-theoretical sense) like the waveforms of the individual instruments. That is not the case with the grooves on a record. They contain all of the same information as the audio waveform, but simply rendered in space rather than in time.
The difference here is that there is something in the environment that causes the experience of color to appear consistently in many, many human minds. We can measure the waves that could enter the eye and trigger the "color" experience. The same cannot be said of God. "Spiritual" seems likely to be the best word to name the experience you have described. Religion need not be involved at any level. More simply, I'm sure these experiences exist. But there is good reason not to name the experience God. That word, and the set of words it often stands for, is far too laden with other meanings and contexts to be a helpful label in this context.
The information on sheet music is compressed, but an individual trained to read it can, with practice, decompress all of it into an experience of the composition. Ask any orchestra conductor of sufficient experience what that is like. Some conductors even prefer to experience the music that way; they find that the orchestra can get in the way of experiencing what the composer intended. That is, in fact, the job of a conductor. The phonograph record, on the other hand, is a representation of a single performance of a composition, interpreted by the conductor and the orchestra. And the point stands that a phonograph record cannot be read by (nearly all) humans. It is not analogous to the text of a book, it is analogous to the medium (tape, CD, MP3, &c.) on which the audiobook is recorded.
For that matter, the audiobook holds the same "additional information" as the recorded symphony: that added by the performer(s) translating the text/music into sound.
That's not necessarily true. It's possible that we could find the mechanism in the brain which is responsible for spiritual experiences. But that's kind of missing the point. Most human interactions don't drill down this deep. Even rational people have conversation that go, "Did you see that cool fnorble?" "Yeah, wasn't that awesome?" without citing the peer-reviewed academic literature that establishes the objective existence and material properties of fnorbles. Religious people do the same: they say, "Did you feel the presence of the holy spirit?" "Yeah, I did, wasn't that awesome?"
Sure, but such people are rare. You can probably also train yourself to have spiritual experiences.
Fine, how about this then: display the audio waveform on an oscilloscope. The point is that having music come into your years is a fundamentally different subjective experience than having it come in to your eyes even if the information content is the same in both cases.