In this sentence you seem to be saying that things exist solely in well-insulated subjective and objective categories. If that is what you are saying, then that seems to be an overstatement ...
Okay now we're talking. Great post. In it, here's where the branch I'm on fits into the picture
“According to California State University, deductive inference conclusions are certain provided the premises are true. It's possible to come to a logical conclusion even if the generalization is not true. If the generalization is wrong, the conclusion may be logical, but it may also be untrue.” (emphasis added).
When I employ critical thinking, one of the first tasks is to establish a premise, which is why I asked Jerry if he could clarify his position. If you listen to the show this all begins around 39:20 when Jerry mentions the late 1890s airship sightings in the USA and makes the claim that they happened on the "experience level", the rationale being that if they happened on what he called on the "event level", it would turn into a conspiracy theory with so many complications that it would "overload all common sense", especially because there were no dirigibles in the USA in the late 1890s.
He goes on to say that there were sightings in the USA that seemed to him to be "true to people's experience", but not happening on what he calls an "event level reality". To clarify that, I said "let's unpack that a little", and asked if what he was talking about was a hallucination. To which he replied "No." So I asked him to explain what he meant by that exactly.
He went on to say that, '... when we talk about high strangeness experiences, they don't have to occur in some kind of binary system with reality on one hand and imagination on the other. They're occurring apparently in some sort of liminal state in which those boundaries are erased. And that it's like they're imaginary, but not
only imaginary. It's kind of imagination plus. And so they occur in liminal or threshold space, that they have the appearance of consensus reality but not the substance of consensus experience. And this is where all weird encounters occur. They don't seem to be happening on the event level. even though people who experience them don't have a mental framework. They're like all of us, they're in binary thinking. It's A or it's B. "
So I said, "Well there's no evidence that there's something in between, that's why. I mean we either have something that's material or something that is conceptual ..."
That's where Jerry interrupts and asks what I mean by evidence. I start by explaining that:
"We have material evidence of material things because we have the
materials. So if we see something like a craft that is material, we can go up to it and we can identify the materials it's made out of."
Jerry interrupts again and says, "That's what binary thinking tells us. It's physical or it's not. What if it's neither?"
So I asked him again: "What evidence is there that it's neither? There's no evidence for that?"
You can follow it from there. But the point is that the premise Jerry is making is that something can exist withing the realm of experience of the witness but be neither physical nor mental at the same time
Obviously there are some immediate problems with that statement. For example how can the witness have a mental experience of the event if it's not at least in part a mental event? They are in every essence one in the same. Personal experiences are all mental events. If no mental event were to take place with respect to the observation of an airship, no airship would be observed. He continues to add and subtract various other ideas in an effort to make some sense of the theory, but never does make a coherent case.
So returning to your point (
The Premise ) is: Something can exist between the objective ( a.k.a. the material ) and the subjective ( a.k.a. the mental ).
This premise is logically inconsistent with respect to the airship sightings because ( Reason One ).
A - The human experience ( consciousness ) is a mental phenomenon.
B - Therefore the experience of sighting an airship must be at least in part a mental phenomenon.
C - Therefore the experience cannot simultaneously
not be a mental phenomena.
Specifically, if there are no mental phenomena associated with an airship or UFO experience, there can be no memory, imagery, feelings, or any other experiential clues or mental activity to alert the alleged "witness" that any airship or UFO sighting is taking place. The sighting itself, would not ( and
could not ) happen, at least not as described.
We can go on to apply the same logic to the objective side of the equation:
If the airship is objectively real but never mentally experienced by a witness, it exists objectively but the "witness" would have no awareness of it and therefore there would be no sighting report of it. So there is no way for there to be a sighting of something that doesn't exist as at least a mental ( subjective ) phenomena.
Returning to the beginning, the philosophical problems with the idea Jerry proposed "overloads common sense" far more than the idea that some people built an airship in North America around the same time they were being made in Europe. Either that or the stories are a fabrication. Or lastly, they were neither airships nor fabrications, but perhaps only
looked like airships and were in fact something
else. And to me that's where the conversation gets
interesting.
