It's a bit more subtle than that, Adder, though it would seem that I'll have to repeat myself a third time for the sheer amount of misdirection that resulted in this impression...
It is of very limited concern to me if people believe they perceived something, or what value they derive from what ever practice or belief. If I'm feeling overly pedantic I might object to the "real to me" manner of speech at times employed in such confessions, but at the end of the day I won't interrupt anyone's meditation and demand to see evidence that they were projecting into a spirit world until my rude intrusion.
That being said, I have no such reservations when it comes to people claiming to be witness to mystical forces above and beyond the strictly personal and subjective. In their
post #354475
Fyxe explicitly and in no uncertain terms stated that in his belief the Force is
not confined to the minds of her subjects, but is real in some further sense of the word. He went on to make further claims about it in his
post #354520
, where they said that it is a "power of experience to
mentally control the environment (emphasis added)", and implied that it was comparable in some way to physical forces.
These are not "real to me" claims, these are claims about what would be real to all, and what would at least in its effects count as simple enough to be controlled, repeated, and measured. I ignored so far Fyxe's claims about being a Reiki master - in part because I figured that if this meant anything they would have learned that Reiki is spelt with an 'i' at the end, rather than an 'e' well enough to not make that mistake several times over - but that's a claim of a power to provide medical aid by magical means. That, too, is not a mere "real to me" claim. It can in fact be quite a dangerous one and I feel no obligation to treat it tenderly. People pay money for such "services", even forego real medical treatment believing to be better off with the sorcerers, despite the mounting masses of readily available evidence to the contrary.
To a fair extent I appreciate what you are saying, Adder, that there is a meaningful distinction between the limits of experience and the limits of knowledge, but the debate that sprung up here is not due to my misapplication of one in a realm reigned by the other. Fyxe is trying to have it both ways, to make bold claims in the knowledge-domain (for lack of a more swift yet accurate way to refer to that modality), yet because they are lacking all of the evidence to back it up in that domain they try also to only have to defend it in the experience-domain. So Fyxe pushes both the concrete claims of real-world-impacting magical powers, but upon the first challenge pretends like all they were proposing are vague claims of subjective perception and personal meaning, knowing that these I have no means of chipping at. I shall leave it to the judgement of our readers to decide if or who of us is conducting the discussion in good faith, but I shall as well insist that I make no category error in addressing claims about an intersubjective, possibly external world with the same approach as we would use any other day to address any other claim about that same intersubjective, possibly external world.
