How does one distinguish faith from delusion?

I've suffered from delusions. Not in a 'religion is a delusion' sense of the word, but 'invisible agents are plotting my demise and watch my every move via reflective surfaces' kind of delusion. I had a pile of evidence based on personal experience, gut feelings and an inner voice that suggested that these agents were real. Mostly I thought they were malevolent but sometimes I thought there was a grand purpose behind their torments.How is a person to discriminate between their personal experiences et al leading to delusion or being true? I am convinced now that these experiences were a temporary (lasting about a year) bout of paranoid delusions. At the time, I felt quite the opposite.As an external observer how would you discriminate between my beliefs then and faith based belief in entities such as ghosts, angels, demons or gods? Before you ask: I visited these entities, and had a brief conversation with them. Sometimes they would give me sage wisdom for guidance in life, sometimes they would give me mental tasks such as cleaning out an (imaginary) room. I even saw with my own eyes (so I thought) the device they used to spy on me (it was a rectangle about the same dimensions as 'the obelisk' set into a cloudy floor which they stood around).I have a feeling that some people think that delusions are 'obviously delusional'. They aren't to the people who are deluded.Delusions protect themselves with rationalisations, halucinations, confirmation bias, filtering out contradictory information etc etc.Having had powerful delusions, and deep religious faith - I struggle to differentiate them in any way other than in social acceptability. Before my delusions, the role of the twelve demon/angel entities was played by God and Jesus who would offer advice, comfort, love, reassurance as well criticize shameful thoughts and deeds and be constantly watching me (though they didn't need reflective surfaces so it was kind of more oppressive).Study real delusions - not the two dimensional "I'm Napolean" Hollywood movie delusions, and those that suffer from them - maybe even take some powerful hallucinogens or other psychoactive drugs, read about the psychology studies surrounding such mental health problems. Whatever you do, become familiar with what a delusion is and then try and explain what makes it different from religious faith.The only thing I can think of is that religious faith is commonly less powerful than delusions. People can 'turn it down' or even 'off' a lot more readily than delusions can be.Maybe a delusions is an erroneous belief that you convinced yourself was true whereas faith is an erroneous belief that others believed in before you so you feel comfortable following suit so in a sense faith is a belief that the actions of other people as well as your own experiences has convinced you was true? Maybe this explains why religious faith tends to be a bit weaker - there isn't generally an underlying mental problem causing the issue - just a universal frailty of human psychology? Sorry Mike - there are lots of people who aren't really qualified to determine if you are deluded. The least qualified person is yourself. It is likely that you know someone with schizophrenia. When they are having an episode, ask them if they are delusional - what do you expect the answer would be?Edited by Modulous, : No reason given.

Many of the explanations you threw out there, were ones that at one time or another I geniunely believed to be true. Indeed - the experience led me to seek out methods of astral communication etc etc, in an attempt to 'thwart' the entities.Apart from all of that - the major issue is that it significantly impacted my life. I took actions that I would not have done otherwise. Some people are driven to murder or suicide by faith based beliefs, not just the more classic delusional beliefs such as paranoia.Of course, it could be that in my specific case I was geniunely gifted with communication from 'the other side' or 'a higher plane' or what have you. And yes, in another culture I may have been followed as a Boddhisatva, a Sannyasin or a shaman.However, it seems to me likely that not all such experiences are spiritual or what have you and that it might be an idea to develop a tactic for discrimination or dealing with this ambiguity.You seem to be arguing that we can't know with any reasonable confidence if someone is deluded or enlightened. Do you think that the man's wife really was a hat? It depends what you mean by 'sure'. I think that before accepting any proposition there should be some way of verifying it independent of the conception thereof, that it leads to conclusions about the way reality works that are reliable and so on. Otherwise, the proposition could simply be a random idea we pulled out of a hat. It seems daft to accept a random idea we pulled out of a hat simply on the basis that it could be true and that we can't definitively rule it out. If we used this methodology we would have major problems with resolving conflicting ideas (all currently unobserved entities are green (and revert to their 'correct' colour upon being looked at) versus all currently unobserved entities are black). Right - nor can we know if we are subject to Descartes' evil genius or any other similar concept. What we can do is try and understand the construct that we experience and develop methodologies to do so.Since we have experiential knowledge that people can be completely convinced of falsehoods (A large number of victims of miscarriages of justice were convicted on the grounds of an eye witness identification eg., Ronald Cotton^* as well as controlled scientific experiments showing the phenomenon is reliably repeatable), it seems a bit premature to believe that because someone adamantly believes something to be the case, without being able to show why it is the case beyond themselves, that we should think their experiences are gospel. If I understand you right, nobody can since it is impossible to determine what a delusion is versus a vision quest or other such spiritual event. And what if someone's experience falls outside of present cultures but would happily fit into a culture that has now passed - or a culture that has yet to be (what about a cultural pioneer, someone who may be the start of a new religious or cultural movement) - who would be on your delusion jury that would speak for them? The only way to represent all cultures, beliefs and experiecnes is to have every single human being that has ever, or will ever exist on the jury at the same time.In the meantime this delusional/enlightened person could be sexually abusing children under the belief that it is a rite of passage that is required to ensure their soul fixates to their body and is ritualistically protected against impurities.If we stipulate for the argument that they geniunely believe this to be the case - is it a delusion or a faith? What is the difference when it comes to dealing with it? I get the impression you don't think there is any difference.

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^*The victim was raped, and studied the face of her rapist deliberately so she could track him down. Ronald Cotton was arrested and she identified him as the attacker, by the time the trial began she was convinced it was him. Ronald Cotton later met a man in prison who looked more like the photo-fit than he did who was in prison for a very similar crime. At appeal, the victim had the opportunity to see Ronald Cotton and the other man and she still identified Ronald Cotton as the rapist. DNA evidence later confirmed that the second man, Bobby Poole was the rapist all along, and this was corroborated by the fact that he was heard bragging of committing the crime to other inmates. I believe it was on US TV recently. A friend of mine has been a victim of a similar miscarriage of justice (a single witness identified him from an incident 12 years ago, no corroborating evidence, still convicted).

For context I should probably add that I was entering into puberty and the situation lasted about a year maybe two with no recurrence (that I have noticed ). My edit was to add in the last paragraph to mike, you might have conflated my message with my reply to its reply where I said "Some people are driven to murder or suicide by faith based beliefs, not just the more classic delusional beliefs such as paranoia." For some people, faith is built upon a single experience. And a single experience is not really classifiable as a delusion, its either reflective of reality or a hallucination, mistake or false memory or the ilk. But some people believe themselves to be in continual communication with a specific entity that guides them or instructs them. Sometimes this is nearly harmless and they get on with their lives more or less normally - some might say even more happily than most others.
But others find their lives more significantly impacted.
The question is - is it possible to differentiate between someone who is suffering delusions and someone who has deep faith and has recurring experiences affirming this position? This definition is all well and good - but why? It seems you are deliberately discounting the possibility of communal delusions but I think we should seriously consider such a possibility when we examine a group like Heaven's Gate.And what if a delusion could exist, could be come communal and does not commonly drive its victims to suicide or murder but drives them instead to simply spread the delusion? I agree it is akin to meme theory, but would we not expect if such a monster exists, for it to show certain properties such as exploiting cognitive weaknesses common to many if not all humans?I'm not making a concrete claim here - just pointing out that your definition might result in overlooking something. I agree. Most people I meet who say they have faith are in this category - but not all. When some encounter a collision between their 'worldview' and conclusions derived from science they become resistant to the contradictory position - sometimes angrily and in a manner that would seem disproportionate. Is accusing friends or family of lying and being part of a conspiracy (unwittingly or otherwise), and ranting about some great scientific hoax just because someone mentioned that birds evolved from dinosaurs, really not something we might consider the act of someone suffering under a delusion?

I don't talk about it a lot - I still worry that it'll come back though it was more than half a lifetime ago. Yes - it was terrifying. So when Abraham was about to kill his son he was deluded, for example?What about when Jesus for all intents and purposes killed himself?I know what you are saying about religions et al. However, you seem to be saying that if your experience has all the qualities of a delusion, but falls within cultural norms then it is faith.I would argue that this is simply avoiding the issue, no? If you go back through my posts long enough, you will see me discussing my own pantheism. If I had been a member long enough you would have seen me discussing things through an Eastern thought lens. I even ended up following Osho for a while. I think that modern psychology has now surpassed the (admittedly noble) beginnings that eastern philosophy began. Empiricism has a lot to say about morality. See Descriptive ethics.Of course, empiricism does not engage in normative ethics, which is what you referred to. This is not 'interesting' I feel, but obvious.However, empiricism can engage - in part - with normative ethics via descriptive ethics. First though, we need to define what goals we have in mind when we are trying to establish an ethical system. Then we can look around and see which of the various ethical systems in use gets closest to the goals we want, and then perhaps experiment with minor changes to try and get closer.This is pretty much standard in the 'liberal west', now. So much so we barely notice we're doing it. But we do it so rapidly, that that the norms of the previous generation look almost completely barbaric (did some western nations really used to arrest gays for having sex just a few decades ago? We're seriously discussing allowing gays to marry today!)We frequently use evidence of how certain ethical ideas can help build a society to be stronger (either by increasing happiness, cooperation, decreasing suffering etc etc), or use data to discover which ideas are destructive or cause stagnation etc.Our experiences, as well as improved methods for gathering and analysing such data, has been vital to shaping our present morality. Don't write off the usefulness of empiricism in morality. If you think that declaring somebody to be suffering significantly mentally ill is something done lightly?How can you say that empiricism has little to say about determining the mental health of somebody?First of all, you need to establish what their symptoms are. You need to establish whether the person can function in society without intervention, whether therapy alone will be of use - or if therapy plus drugs is going to be better. You need to weigh the risks of what you propose to the patient versus the risks of not doing what you propose. As good an understanding as possible of the brain, how it functions and what is occuring in the patient's brain and it how it might differ from the norms is useful. All of this requires data obtained through decades of study, to make as good a conclusion as possible.Obviously, if they were doing this to Jesus and it turns out that Jesus really was an amazing spiritual being and not a delusional apocalyptic madman - then I'd hope that being an amazing spiritual being has the benefits of being able to get your message across to the right people before accepting the modern day cross of mental health care...or something. Exactly. And we can devise completely independent tests to try and verify our conclusions. If you know of another epistemological methodology that can be employed by blind independent investigators to verify your results (especially if that method is able to calculate the expected error margins and confidence levels etc), then I'd like to hear it. Any evidence which cannot be experienced is already invisible (and unhearable, unsmellable, untasteable and well...presumably entirely undetectable). So since we cannot detect it, we cannot know that it even exists. Yes we can. We define what a god is, what the consequences of such an entity existing are, and then we devise a test to see if those consequences have borne out. For example, if we define a god as being an entity that answers the prayers of others, we do a 'prayer experiment' if the results show that those that pray get positive results above and beyond chance we have ourselves some evidence in favour of this go.The more defined the god, the more evidence we collect the more confidence we have in its existence.abe: Of course, if you carefully define god so as to be unempirically demonstrable, then your point is trivial. The point I'm making is that god is empirically demonstrable or not depending on how one chooses to define said god. The idea isn't just mocking - there is a serious point behind it. It is a challenge to rigorously define your epistemology such that it includes the ability to know that a god exists or Ultimate Truth, or ghosts or whatever while also excludes any number of other beings we can dream up. If it can't - the epistemology has been show to be absurd: Reductio ad absurdum.The shocking thing is that people who champion this alternative epistemology spend more time getting defensive about how offensive or 'mocking' this argument is than they do actually rigorously defining their alternative epistemological method. I entirely agree. I particularly enjoyed "Socrates'" arguments for the immortality of the soul - even if I still believe it contains some significant flaws. Philosophy is a rigorous pursuit of logic and argument in search of eking out truths about the world - woolly statements about vague possibilities aren't philosophy, though many people mistake it as such. Correct. It is empirical evidence. And physicalists suggest that this interconnectedness is because the mind is what the brain does - the brain being part of the body.It seems better than something akin to the pineal gland idea of Descartes, no? I just think we should take into consideration that a witnesses memory should be considered a very delicate crime scene with great care taken to avoid contaminating it. I would be very tempted to eliminate the use witnesses in criminal trials, but not entirely - it is a topic in its own right.Edited by Modulous, : No reason given.

With hallucinogens one's grip on reality and perception of things cycles quite rapidly. These aren't really delusions - they are hallucinations. The visual hallucinations (the land moving like the sea or faces appearing in reflections of light from puddles in mud etc) are easily understood to be hallucinations. Then again, you can become completely convinced that your thoughts control reality and that everything that is happening is because you thought about it happening seconds previously. Perhaps you are convinced you are an intrepid explorer, defining reality by discovering its boundaries. Or other strange affects, those kind of hallucinations can be convincing for hours at a time. There may be niggling questions or doubts, but they can remain very much in the background.Many faith-based believers report similar experiences, of 'questioning their faith' and 'having doubts' but winning through their spiritual war and having a stronger faith because of it.The advantage someone has who has taken a drug, is that they preserve the memory of having taken a psychoactive drug - and when they access that memory it can remind them of the nature of their unusual experiences...but it is difficult if not impossible to keep it in mind for long periods of time (just as it is sometimes difficult to remind yourself that you have had a lot to drink and that maybe calling your ex- is actually bad idea right now).

Great so the transcendent is loving - but what about other entities? Human entities calling themselves YHWH who are skilled illusionists who might have convinced Abraham they were a god and duped him into almost killing his son. Or what about a demonic or otherwise malevolent spirits called YHWH? How are you ruling them out?Of course, it might not have happened at all - but it is an example that is basically familiar to us all. Actually, because they are cultural norms - our society almost universally does not dismiss them as delusions. They call them beliefs, faiths, religions. As long as those beliefs don't challenge our social conventions we tolerate them. When they do - we are more likely to call them delusions (as you did with Abraham).And yes - we can learn from them. We can learn a great deal about what it is to be human by studying what humans believe, by studying the way the brain works - what shortcuts it makes and how they can be exploited intentionally or in a passive sense such as cultural reinforcement. All statements about the health (mental or physical) of a person have a subjective element...there are criteria in place. If you think your criteria is better - then you need to make your case, provide evidence, and maybe it will be employed. Right now, the evidence and the argument is largely in favour of what is in place now (though as always, the mental health professionals are crying out for more resources so they can actually enact their 'ideal world' solution). Maybe, or maybe not. Maybe spiritual experiences are delusions, albeit mostly benign and often euphoric rather than malevolent and fearful. Maybe we just call 'positive feeling delusions' spiritual experiences and 'negative feeling delusions' delusions. I'm not stopping them. If they want to garner my opinion, they can have it. Empiricism can explain normative ethics rather well - they are behavioural traits of certain animals (not just humans), that govern social interaction. It is not however, a method can be used exclusively to derive normative ethics. "Most of us", isn't to whom I was referring. I was referring to psychologists. And the experiencer's view is important - taking into account that they may be mentally ill. If a person wants to keep their voices and says 'I deserve it' that is a mental illness, and if possible that person should be helped.Oliver Sacks tells a story of an elderly woman who had contracted Syphilis, which left her feeling friskier and livelier. She opted out of being treated despite having a 'mental illness'.Anyway - as the writer of the article notes, not all voice hearing episodes are the result of mental illness. They are, by definition, auditory hallucinations, but they don't always merit treatment. You could have an underlying condition though, and it might be a good idea to seek the advice of a medical professional. This is probably unwise. But it's your life. I'd rather make sure I wasn't having simple partial seizures or a brain tumour or something else since approximately 10%¹ of people who start displaying psychiatric problems and seek help for them find that there is an underlying medical condition behind them. Of course it can. One uses empiricism to determine that they said they believed they talked to Jesus. You use empiricism and rationalism to determine that they likely did have a conversation. You use empiricism to determine if there is any mental illness or medical condition that might have caused an hallucination. You use empiricism to determine, given the evidence above, and the reports of the patient and their stated desires what the best course of action is: treatment or not. If there is no mental illness, or medical condition as you stipulated - then no treatment is required as long as the patient is not distressed by the experience. Those aren't epistemologies, they are mostly fields of study - many of which are empirical in nature (it could be argued that they all are, but let's not go there for now!). Experiential and anecdotal are both empirical avenues of knowledge. Instinctive is an interesting one - but what do you do if someone's instincts are running counter to yours. It maybe that they have a different experiential background. How do you determine whose instinct leads to truth? How can you tell that instincts are the path to truth in one instance, but empiricism is better in another?What you need to do, is to explain the criteria of truth of some other epistemology and then explain how these criteria can be employed to reliably do better to determine if someone is delusional or experiencing temporary hallucinations or actually having a geniune spiritual experience.What do you suggest? Intuition? But whose intuition if there are conflicting intuitions? Majority opinion? Where whatever most people think, is the truth. If most people think Jesus had a religious experience then he did? Tradition - if it has become traditional it has stood the 'test of time' and is therefore true, or contains a truth or something?What are you actually proposing? That is the topic at heart, after all. Not to worry, he pulled it off last time very successfully. I guess you don't have a better methodology to present. Ah - so you are defining god so as to not include "the collective consciousness of the praying people". Well one possibility is to have some people pray for bad things to happen...if something bad doesn't happen we might conclude that there is some mechanism that makes good things happen and filters out bad thoughts. That mechanism could be named 'god'. Of course, if you define a god as being a person of some kind then you haven't proven that yet. Do you have a non empirical methodology that you can describe that can make you more sure? I know - but it is amusing that you chose an example that we agree on. Is this confirmation that you use Tradition as a criterion of truth? Maybe not - but if you believed you could see chakras and you had the power of healing then you are certainly getting closer to delusion. Did I ever tell you that shortly after my 'episode' I became convinced I could see auras and chakras and that I had been given the gift of healing from my spirit guide (who was called Danielle (God is my judge, a subconscious connection maybe?)) who also granted me the gift of dispersing clouds with my mind. I am frankly unsure how to categorize that part of my life, was I actually delusional or had I just bought massively into a pseudo-eastern new age bullcrap? To be honest I don't know, and there is no longer any reliable evidence. Empiricism can't help here but to assign probabilities. That is really frustrating when that happens

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¹Physical Illness Presenting as Psychiatric DiseaseA study of 658 consecutive psychiatric outpatients receiving careful medical and biochemical evaluation, defined an incidence of medical disorders productive of psychiatric symptoms in 9.1% of cases.Edited by Modulous, : copy paste went mad

How do you know they are a deluded person acting on their delusions and not a faithful person acting on their faith? That's the point I was making.So how do we discriminate between someone who has faith, and someone who is having faith coloured delusions? Exactly. Is it? I don't see your point. I'm not arguing that all delusions include religious themes. Maybe it does, if we assume ahead of time that faith is an entirely separate phenomena from delusion. I don't think that "By assuming them to be different" is a very satisfying answer to "How does one distinguish faith from delusion?" You might be right - I'm not saying you aren't. I'm just asking how you can tell if someone who has faith isn't delusional? If I see Jesus and he tells me to love my neighbour and that he'll be watching to make sure I do - is that a delusion? What if Jesus implores me to check my gas hobs ten times before I leave the house? Or if he tells me to microwave my baby child to purify it?I appreciate I'm using examples which include 'hallucinations' - but I figure they should be the more interesting and easy examples. We can worry about people that have faith but have not had a religious experience or have had a 'emotional or difficult to describe sensational' experience later - if space permits.Or are all those examples of faith without delusion? Is seeing an apparition only a delusion when1) The apparition is not a commonly accepted religious entity
2) The apparition tells you to do something commonly regarded as socially negative.And is it faith only when the opposite applies? Or would you say that somebody talking with Jesus who tells them to give to charity is +faith +delusion ? (Sounds eerily Orwellian, I think I'll stick with someone who has faith and is deluded!)

We're having a philosophical debate. You would fail any philosophy course if your essay was essentially two thousand words of 'philosophy is opinion, and it cannot be demonstrated that one is closer to the truth than others'. You suggest there are other criteria for truth, and that's fine. You vaguely wave your hand in the near direction of a couple of them - but you fail to argue why they should be taken seriously. Why we should include them in our methods for establishing truth.Philosophy has advanced a lot over the course of centuries, you'll find that the epistemological arguments are almost entirely surrounding the mix of rationalism and empiricism (or constructivism in some cases) that is best, as well as ideas surrounding the problem of inductive logic etc. So philosopher's have concluded that we can't 100% know certain things (principle of fallibilism etc), but the arguments have certainly advanced over the centuries.I don't think repeating "I have a different philosophical starting point" over and over is debating in good faith unless you tell us exactly what that starting point is.So make your case, this is a debate after all. Give us a method for discriminating between faith and delusion that is not some form of rational empiricism or logical positivism or what have you, and explain why it is more reliable or otherwise superior. We might not agree - but we might actually understand your position.abe: If you are a solipsist then in your philosophy, you are arguing with (potential) figments of your imagination (or the constructs of someone else's, or similar) - by any reasonable definition of deluded you are very likely delusional - even if you think that your delusions serve some greater purpose.Edited by Modulous, : No reason given.Edited by Modulous, : No reason given.

I agree with the sentiment, that just because you can seperate them it doesn't mean they are the same. However it still remains that one property of two things being the same is that you can't seperate them.And there are practical implication to consider: if they are to all appearances the same - should we treat people in the same way (minor delusions can be ignored, but as they start to encroach on a person's life and behavour we might want to consider intervening with psychological help? Or if they commit a crime as a result of their faith, should they be tried as insane --even if they are adamant they are not? (For example the Neumann case that recently concluded and other occasions where someone has prayed rather than sought medical help).

It has been noted by many parties that this is actually quite difficult, which is something philosophers of psychiatry have also noted^{1, 2}. Is a delusion not a delusion if it is religious or non-disturbing etc?I'm going to go with the following argument why faith is different from delusion.Underlying conditionA delusion generally has some medical or psychological underpinning. Temporary psychosis, epilepsy, schizophrenia and so on.It is feasible that someone who does not have a medically recognized condition (mental or physical) is also suffering a delusion - but this is a great starting criteria when examining whether there is a delusion going on.Since mental illnesses are defined basically as abnormal and generally negative conditions that affect someone - it can be said that something that is typical mental behaviour of a human is not a mental illness. Thus - most faith is not a mental illness (though I would still argue that it is symptomatic of cogntitive 'holes' common to humans brains that we all fall victim to.)BizarreSpeaking to god or his agents is quite a common experience, although it is a bit odd - it is generally quite normal. So even auditory hallucinations of this nature don't constitute as delusions.However, if the entity being spoken with is a twisted version of a common entity or entirely novel - or normal but in a strange context or it instructs someone to where pink shoes on tuesdays or kill their baby...then this is bizarre enough to count.Significant distressA lot of the time, communicating with God is comforting or leads to happy/warm/loved feelings. Even if this communication is coupled with hallucinations - if they are comforting then they generally wouldn't be classified as delusions. Such communication could evolve into something disturbing, frightening or otherwise threatening. Then it certainly fulfills this criterion of delusion.Excessive preoccupationFaith does often fulfill this criterion. But not always.Resistant to counter argument or evidenceFaith fulfills this one completely.

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So while some faith is delusional - it isn't often delusional in the 'abnormal mental life' kind of way. And it should be noted that what can be delusional about things that also happen to be true, even though normally delusions are defined as being 'false beliefs'.So really, all this talk of ascertaining truth isn't strictly speaking necessary to determining if there is some kind of delusion in play. Obviously all the criterion have some subjective position (what is bizarre enough? how much distress and to whom? How much preoccupation is too much?) but this subjectivity is at least somewhat tempered by empirical study into delusions.I am willing to believe that the question can be answered empirically, but it would be difficult - and some people will remain forever unsatisfied with the results. But as we study brains and how delusions form neurologically we can start to pull apart the differences between strong beliefs which have no empirical support to them (beliefs based on non empirical epistemologies, or simply non standard (either poor or inspired, usually the former )reasoning processes), and delusion - more commonly a pathological condition.It may well turn out that as far as behavioural impacts there is little difference, but handling them will probably require different strategies.I appreciate that some might read this and say "But that was what I was trying to tell you!!". I was reading your words, I assure you. However, much of the discussion centred on establishing the truth behind the beliefs and whether that can be done as a method for seperating delusion from faith.I thought I'd try and at least put forward some of the commonly accepted criteria (which I broadly accept), for determining if someone is delusional as opposed to other form of belief.Ultimately, the layman's understanding of delusion as a 'fixed false belief resistant to change' is useful for layman's conversations but when you start to look at things closer - a number of thorny issues must be dealt with.However, vague handwaving about possible other ways to determine if a belief is 'true' don't cut the mustard. I've managed to more or less defend that there is some difference between delusion and faith, as well as providing some guidance on how to tell the difference where a difference exists using only good old empiricism. I found it easy (if a little time consuming).If anyone has criteria they think is better which is non-empirical, I'm still interested in seeing it.

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¹On the Impossibility of Defining Delusions: David, Anthony S²Beliefs about delusions Bell et al.

Hi Straggler,
It doesn't seem (to the likes of us) like anyone could seriously propose a method of establishing truths about the world in this fashion, but Consensus gentium is essentially a potential criterion of truth.This is one of the non scientific ways you've been asking for for establishing if a belief is delusional or not. Of course, you can argue several points:1) It is empirical (knowing what other people think requires gathering data about other people's thoughts)2) It is unreliable - sometimes it makes sense to assume that if everybody is running south it might be a good idea to do likewise even if you don't know what is north.However It can be trivially shown to be problematic in the exact areas we are discussing. First of all despite the claims that there are commonalities between religions - commonalities are the exception rather than the rule and a good deal of the commonalities that exist now are partially the result of merging cultures thanks to our 'smaller world'. Some other commonalities have been explained by neuroscience, and others can be explained through history (common roots). Most unrelated (or at least very distantly related) religions are significantly different from each other in fundamental ways, even today. The only real commonality is 'there is something going on beyond our normal ken', which is actually true - one such thing is called nonvisible electro-magnetic radiation.However, even easier to demonstrate is with optical illusions. For example, no matter how much I empirically confirm that these two tables share the exact same dimensions as each other - every ounce of my subjective experience says they are different. My subjective impression is very convincingly telling me that there is motion in the picture above. And not only that - but those illusions and others like them 'fool' almost all humans that have ever encountered them. According to this kind of subjective experience + commonality of experience with other people method of ascertaining truth fails here. It is rare that anybody is prepared to argue that the tables are definitely different dimensions and the measurements are just an opinion of choice based on different epistemological starting points.True - technically most people actually 'know' that optical illusions aren't real so it might be counter argued that consensus wins here too - but that is only because optical illusions can be empirically shown to be illusions. Purely cognitive illusions are much more difficult to tackle (not necessarily impossible but we lack enough understanding of the brain to currently do it convincingly enough for most people's taste, I think). What is sufficient is that if we remove the ability to empirically confirm one way or another something like the tables above...there would be a lot (probably nearly all) of people who'd stake their life that the two tables have different dimensions.A lot can be said in favour of a kind of consensus gentium + own experiences method of truth finding, in all honesty. And if we stop and think we can probably think of times we all do it. However, a clear case can be made about its inappropriateness in this kind of situation.Arguments aside - I think you have your answer Straggler, at least from one person - and I think this is what others are trying to argue too. "Clearly IPU is not real - nobody believes it is true - it's ridiculous", is probably something you've read the like of a few times in the past few months. I think that kind of sentence makes sense in light of this epistemological method of subjective experience + how other people interpret this experience.Edited by Modulous, : I was about to lose what I had written so had to post a partial post early.