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I'd believe that I could fly if I suddenly found myself flying, and I'd be right to do so. That fact does not in any way challenge or discredit my current belief that I can't fly.

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There's a line in "A Beautiful Mind" where he states about his hallucinations .."They're not aging". If a person is in a full-blown hallucinating experience, it can strike them in two ways 1) the experience is totally real but they 'know' it's an hallucination . 2) the experience is totally real and 'at the time' they can't do anything but believe it's actually happening.

Hallucinating flying may fall in either of those, the test is whether one believes it next week or reason returns and a version of "they're not aging" decides the issue. I'm always amazed with how much we're aware about the ease of hallucination, false memory and other tricks our mind has in it's bag, that people put such credence is "well, it happened to me."

Sometimes it's even in other ! peoples experiences.. "My wife had this amazing experince so now I believe xyz.." Yet, experiences occur inside the mind, not outside. Even discounting false memory ( which is very common), the best we can say about an experience is that we experienced it.

Whether it 'happened' is a matter to be resolved as best we can - outside of the direct experience.

luckyme

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Yes, all fair comment, I wouldn't argue against any of that - scratch 'suddenly' and make it 'repeatedly, over time' if it's preferable. All that I was getting at, RE the original Pope question:

You can take any belief we have, nevermind flight - take gravity, time, anything. And you can concoct some scenario which, if it happened, would refute those beliefs. All that possibility establishes is that we're not idiots. We can and should change our beliefs based on new evidence.

But throwing a hypothetical into the mix in this example is useless. It's like saying 'what if the Pope was caught visiting a brothel'. The hypothetical already refers to a guy that doesn't exist, he's a different guy by virtue of that action and what it says about his personality, so we can't pull any conclusions from that scenario about our current guy.