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Jiro comments on Psychic Powers - Less Wrong
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You're not classifying it as a spiritual experience, but you're classifying it in the same category as a spiritual experience. You're saying that both of them are "empiric". You imply that since taking vitamin D3 at different times of day iis empiric, and nobody could object to that, and spiritual experiences are empiric too, nobody should object to them either.
But your category "empiric" is so broad that it includes things that aren't really very similar.
No. There isn't something inherently empiric of taking vitamin D3 at a specific time of the day. There's something empiric about the way that advice get's generated as opposed to theory driven drug development that only tests drug candidates where it has a biochemical target.
Objecting to spiritual experience is an interesting choice of words.
Do you mean that if people meditate in a spiritually framed setting, do you think they won't have experiences? Do you mean you object in the sense that you think those are bad experiences and the people shouldn't have those experience? The way people object to LSD and ban it, because it leads to objectionable experiences?
"Object" here means "object to the use of, as a way of determining things about reality".
I don't really care if you like triggering brain malfunctions, but don't expect me to believe you when you tell me the hallucinations are of real things. And that's equally true whether you triggered the brain malfunction through a drug or a "spiritual experience". Billions of people believe that when Mohammed starved himself and went into the desert, the angel Gabriel that he saw really was there. I do not.
The question of whether the object of a hallucination is "real" is a question about having a theory about the world. I advocate against focusing on that question. I advocate to focus on whether you can make reliable predictions.
Yes, that's not an easy concept to understand if you are bound up with thinking the important and meaningful question is whether or not the angel Gabriel was really there. It typical for the new atheist crowd to focus on those questions and because you are emotionally invested into that question you pattern-match myself into a category that's not the position I advocate.
Whether the angel Gabriel was really there is inherently the most important and meaningful question because how people act based on that can leave me dead. Whether something leaves me dead is pretty important. You can't just say it isn't important and make it become unimportant.
Very few people act on whether or not the angel Gabriel was really there or not. A lot of people act on whether or not they think the angel Gabriel was really there. If James thinks that Gabriel was there, then James will act as if Gabriel had been there; if John think Gabriel wasn't there, then John will act as if Gabriel hadn't been there.
You are replying as though "X is an important question" means "the truth value of X has important effects", but in this context it really means "knowing the truth value of X has important effects". The fact that people will act based on what they think the answer is, rather than the actual answer, is irrelevant to the latter parsing.
Yes, you care about the question and it's very meaningful to you.
At the same time is valuable to understand that there are other people who don't care about the question and care about different things and that you won't understand them if you project your own values about which questions are meaningful on them.
That's a fully general argument--you could say it about the importance of anything.
It has nothing to do specifically with hallucinations.
If you just mean that it's unimportant whether something is a hallucination because everything is unimportant to someone, then I can't disagree. But you don't seem to have meant that.
I haven't used the word hallucinations or intentended to refer to that concept before you did. I also haven't said atheists but new atheists, which is a term that refers to a subgroup of atheists.
If someone goes offtopic and you tell them that they are offtopic it's indeed a quite general argument. That doesn't make it wrong.
You don't need to use a concept in order for what you say to have implications concerning that concept.
That's not a standard term, so with no way to distinguish them, anything you say about it just ends up being a statement about atheists.
It is a standard term, the fact that you don't know it doesn't mean that it doesn't have a regular usage. It's standard in the way that it has a Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Atheism
If you can't follow me when I talk about concepts that are easily understandable and well documented on Wikipedia, there no hope that you get a glimpse when I talk about things in this discussion that are not easy to understand. No hope for medium level concepts like the nature of modern drug development and the QS. No at all for hard concepts like living knowledge, body knowledge, beginners mind, support points, effects of ideology and phenomenological investigation.