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gjm comments on Is Spirituality Irrational? - Less Wrong
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I think we may be referring to different analogies. There are two going on, and lisper is making a third analogy between them.
The first pair, lisper intends to be importantly non-analogous, on the grounds that the difference in immediacy and intensity and so forth is so much greater for the records than the books. The second pair, he intends to be importantly analogous, the idea being that the difference between having spiritual experiences and merely hearing about them is as profound as that between hearing music and looking at the groove on a vinyl record.
But a problem (at least as it seemed to both kithpendragon and me) is that the disanalogy between records and books isn't just a matter of greater immediacy and vividity; it's that most of us are literally unable to interpret the groove on a vinyl record even theoretically, and this is an important part of what's going on in the comparison between records and books. And this (so I think and I guess kithpendragon does too) is not the case for spiritual experiences; even people who have nothing resembling the experiences some profoundly religious people have can get a reasonable understanding of what sort of thing they're experiencing, even if it's a dry and theoretical understanding. Which, to my mind, means that the analogy between analogies doesn't work the way lisper intended it to.
A correct analogy between records and books would be the phonograph and the text of the book written in ASCII hexadecimal. Both are designed to be interpreted by a machine for presentation to humans.
Not a bad analogy, but for me at least interpreting hexadecimal ASCII is much, much easier than interpreting images of vinyl records.
[EDITED to add:] More explicitly, I can do the former, though it would be boring and greatly reduce my enjoyment of reading, but I'm not at all sure that I can do the latter at all without electronic assistance.
I would also have an easier time with ASCII, but that's because I (and presumably you also) have been trained in how to produce instructions for machines. This is a negligible chunk of humanity, so I thought it was equally discountable.
I suppose the spiritual analogy would be an ordained priest praying on behalf of another person!
I reckon I could teach anyone of average or better intelligence to read books in hexadecimal ASCII codes in a day.
I suspect a substantial majority of highly intelligent and musically inclined people could not learn to "read" pictures of vinyl records in a day, no matter how well taught.