Depends
In other words there’s a difference between being convinced by something, so convinced that you are literally unable not to believe it, and being rationally convinced by it. Which is, indeed, interesting. It seems like a real problem, in a way – at least potentially. But maybe it is only potentially, not actually? If so, that too would be interesting. In other words – if there are few or no cases of (say) committedly rational people, with strong habits of questioning evidence, second-guessing their own inferences, and the like, who have (say) an unexpected religious experience – an experience like the experience Russell Stannard has when praying – and find themselves unable not to believe that the experience is veridical – then it seems fair to say that Russell Stannard’s experience doesn’t show much.
In other words it depends where you start from. If for example you start from a habit of believing god exists, or from a desire to believe that god exists, and have internal experience that seems to confirm that god exists, that’s different from starting from a habit of not believing god exists and no desire to believe that god exists. If the only (or perhaps the vast majority of) people who have such experiences and find them compelling and convincing, are in the first category – then I don’t think their experience tells us that it’s rational to take the experience at face value. Understandable, yes; reasonable, maybe; rational, no.
I think the phenomenon of hypnogogic and hypnopompic hallucinations are especially fascinating on this front – because I’ve had at least one very strong and convincing experience of this sort.
I woke up from an afternoon nap – and I was fully conscious, with no doubt in the moment and no lingering doubt after (different from that dream experience of waking up, which one can later look back on and know as a dream). I was fully awake, but almost completely paralyzed – I could not take a deep breath, I could not speak or move, but I did manage to open my eyes. I felt an enormously strong and phenomenologically convincing sense of presence – I simply knew that some malign personality was nearby and coming nearer. Then I heard footsteps on the stairs, out of my line of sight.
Just about the time that the footsteps had audibly reached the top of my creaky stairs and the maker of the footsteps would have been entering my (paralyzed but eyes open and movable) field of view – I suddenly was able to move again, and the sense of presence and sounds of footsteps disappeared.
This experience was some 17 years ago and I still remember it quite vividly. But even at the time, despite the absolutely veridical (what a silly word!) character of the experience, I did not take it as an experience of something that objectively happened in the world. It was an experience, that is all. It didn’t lead me to wonder about ghosts or whatever, not because of anything internal to the experience that was less than convincing, but rather because I’m a critical thinker who is broadly familiar with the limitations of human sense perceptions.
But I also did not dismiss it as just a particularly vivid dream, because the character of the experience was entirely different from dreams. I knew it was some other sort of experience – I just didn’t know what sort. It was only years later that I read an article about hypnogogic and hypnopompic hallucinations, wherein the parts of the brain that constitute conscious thought revive from sleep before the parts of the brain governing motor control – and also before the parts of the brain that generate dream images and sensations have ceased their sleepy-time business. It is quite literally a form of waking dream.
This wasn’t a religious experience per se, but it’s exactly the sort of experience that seems at the heart of many people’s beliefs about encounters with spirits – and, in the more modern mythos, alien abductions.
This is one of those things where the specter (pun intended) of rational consistency arises. One part of Hume’s argument against miracles, roughly summarized, is that we pay too high an epistemic price by accepting that the regularities in the operations of the world we observe every day in every way can be and were suddenly suspended on the occasion of a given miracle. Indeed the epistemic price is so high, Hume argues, that it is impossible to gather evidence of sufficient strength and quality to outweigh and overthrow the overwhelming mass of evidence accumulated every other moment of every other day of our collective human experiences of the world working in an orderly fashion.
I think roughly the same reasoning makes it impossible for me to have rationally accepted this anomalous experience as being an experience of something happening in the world, outside of my mind, no matter how phenomenologically convincing. To accept that a body with mass enough to cause my stairs to creak disappeared in an instant with no further noise or sign of existence is to believe something inconsistent with every other experience of massive objects/persons I have ever had in my entire life, before and since. That tiny aspect of the experience alone is sufficient to make it irrational for me to have believed that I experienced an external event rather than an internal one. Adding the accumulated absurdities and conflicts with other experiences of a particular theory about it – a ghost, for example – would only make the irrationality greater.
To accept such experiences at face value is to keep the dirty bathwater (isolated anomalies of experience) and throw out the baby (all of our other experiences combined into a coherent world view).
And Russell Stannard is a physicist. He’s not just some random credulous daydreamer. So he ought to be able to realize that the inside of his head is just the inside of his head. That ‘ought’ is why I don’t think his taking the experience at face value is rational.
G, this post just shows that your mind is so closed! Why can’t you accept that some things exist that don’t fit your paradigm? Why do you have to be so ‘rational’? Science doesn’t have all the answers you know! Some things, you just have to know with your soul, not your brain!
“G”‘s description is a classic case of sleep paralysis.
Now a fairly well-understood phenomenon.
Ocuring just at dropping off to sleep, or waking, where the brain (or part of it) has woken up, but the motor-control muscles can’t or won’t wake up.
This is the phenomenon behind incubi, succubi, a lot of “demonic visitations” and angelic ones, for that matter …
Ther is quite a lot of literature on the subject.
It can be terrifying.
It happened to me once, many years ago, when I was about 13, and is VERY disorienting, let me tell you.
But, if it ever happens again, well, it’s just sleep paralysis …..
See also:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep_paralysis
http://www.stanford.edu/~dement/paralysis.html
http://watarts.uwaterloo.ca/~acheyne/S_P.html
It is also sometimes called “Lucid Dreaming”
Yes GT, we know. And G says so in his comment. Why repeat it?
Is it crass of me to observe that the main part of our enjoyment of a magic trick is that we know that the experience we ostensibly take at face value has a deeper explanation ? We don’t have the tools to explain it right now, and we happilly suspend disbelief for a while, and enjoy the perfomance. Conjecture on what really happened behind the event then forms perhaps the part greater, second part of the entertainment…
It is not rational to say, “No he really sawed her in half… I SAW it”… is it ?
Oops, missed that, in skimming over the piece …
Sorry!
But, I still suggest looking at the links I gave might be informative.