Well, it does seem to me that personal impressions of one’s personal prior mental states are in a bit of a special category. This is information not accessible, at least with our current understanding of brains, by anyone else, and whatever is not known about it by the individual involved is not known by anyone else, either. I don’t think it falls neatly into categories about our knowledge about facts relating to the world outside of our heads, and it’s really that sort of thing that I’m trying to address: if the claim was only that “revelations” are very real to the person experiencing them, in the same sense that dreams are real, then this might be comparable. But the claim is that “revelations” are a useful way to obtain knowledge about external facts rather than about the details of one’s internal experience.
On that, though, a tale. I remember the day the Challenger blew up. I was at the US Courthouse in Philadelphia, taking depositions in a case where the plaintiff was so weird and menacing that the judge gave us a conference room to do the depositions in (normally these would be done in our offices) so that he’d have to go through the metal detectors to get there. I’d taken a break and gone downstairs, and on my way back up to the deposition someone in the elevator told the others in the elevator that the space shuttle had blown up. I returned to the room where the depositions were being taken, and told the others. This really seared its way into my memory; I remember it. I feel that I know it; this is exactly how it happened.
So it was a bit unsettling to me when one day, years later, I looked up the date of the disaster. Between the date of the disaster and various known dates in the litigation, I am now able to tell you with great certainty that this simply didn’t happen. We weren’t taking those depositions at that time. I have no idea whether some part or other of the tale is true – did I learn of the disaster on an elevator? In the US Courthouse elevator? Was I there for that case, but not for depositions? Or was I not there at all and have garbled this memory with something else entirely? Obviously the answers to these questions aren’t very important, but the fact that I can’t answer any of them is vexing. It wouldn’t be vexing if I had simply FORGOTTEN the event. The problem is that my memory of this event is clear and vivid and yet is plainly, demonstrably wrong. Even now that doesn’t change the fact that I do remember it, in exactly this way.
I can falsify my memory of the event by reference to known external evidence. But internal mental states, though made very much of the same stuff, are not subject to later disconfirmation. The Challenger disaster, together with such things as the work of Elizabeth Loftus, taught me that I can’t trust my own mind to have recorded events correctly.
And here is where good mental habits come into it, I think. My intellect cannot convince my emotions to stop feeling bad about something which I feel bad about. My historical scrutiny of the Challenger episode cannot convince my memory to stop remembering things that didn’t happen. But these different aspects of consciousness each have their own fields of competency. To allow one’s emotions to override one’s intellect in a matter of the heart is perhaps a way to, say, forgiving some offense, and it gives expression to the (I hope!) competence of emotion over intellect in such matters. To allow one’s emotions to override one’s intellect when sitting on a jury (“well, SOMEONE killed that kid, and someone’s got to pay!”), however, would be to allow the incompetent to override the competent. Likewise, I should think, privileging subjective feelings and experiences of a cognitively-questionable nature over the sober weighing of actual evidence, in questions such as whether Baal exists, is also privileging mental processes that are incompetent for the particular job in questions over processes that are competent for that job. Let the emotions rule themselves. Let feeling have its full expression, subject to civilized limits. Let the memory, right or wrong though it may be, construct one’s internal self-history. But when the task is one for the intellect to do, with its particular skills in evaluating questions in the light of evidence and reason, these others have much less, if indeed anything, to contribute.
Indeed not. I recall, back in my teenaged years when I was regularly targeted by pedophiles, preachers and preacher/pedophiles, that I was sitting in the Greyhound bus terminal in Seattle reading the bit from The Brothers Karamazov about the “Grand Inquisitor.” Unfortunately, one of these pedophile/preacher combos sidled up to me, saw what I was reading, and latched on to the religious nature of it. This led to my receiving a very long presentation about all of the statements in the Bible which science had proven to be true in ways which no writer of the time could have foreseen, ergo, proof that the scripture was the product of the hand of Baal (or Slartibartfast? I can’t recall) himself.
Of course, everything this creepy codger told me turned out, when I looked into it, to be a combination of outright lies and exaggerations. On balance, I preferrred being solicited by the straight-up pedophiles; their motives were generally less exploitative and were more honestly expressed, to boot. And, unlike the preachers, they never forced the issue.
I’ve spent a good many hours in the years since then ping-ponging between faithful people who insist that the majesty of Whatzisface The Ineffable is manifest in all things, accessible to all honest inquirers-after-evidence, and could only be denied by the willfully blind, and other faithful people who insist that it is right next-door to blasphemy (667; The Neighbor of The Beast) to suppose that Whatzisface The Ineffable can be experienced other than by faith itself. Whenever I encounter one of either type, I think of that wonderful commercial where the woman at the hotel bar receives a meant-to-be-alluring smile and a room key from one smarmy dude, and then later is confronted by another smarmy dude – to whom she smiles alluringly and hands that room key. I’d love to get these two types, each sliding about in the froth of their own terrible arguments, to argue with one another and leave me the hell out of it; but I suspect that if I did, the pretense would fall away and they’d have no disagreement with each other at all except upon the subject of how to make a sale.
) have had a divine revelation I am not best placed to explore that question.