I wonder, what opinion do you hold of Julian Jaynes' _The Origin of
Consciousness In the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind_? It's a dusty text by
now, but interesting in its own right.
Toward the accumulation of useful information,
Noctem
P.S.: A solipsist could make a decent case that religious experiences
aren't the only thing that we hallucinate.... :b
"Hallucination" in fact, seems to be used frequently as a
definition/vaccime, especially when the word "consensual" is prefixed to it
-- it invalidates the ramifications of _any_ type of perception by defining
the perceptive mechanism as (temporarily?) flawed. It also seems to be a
vaccime -- no insult intended -- that you seem to make extensive use of. Do
you think that it is always a beneficial meme to hold? Doesn't it just
again unearth the dead-horse question of "What is health?" and in the
process lend itself to intellectual purging of ideas that are arbitrarily
defined as "diseased" or "defective" -- whether or not this is verified by
objective test?