Abstract
The idea of disembodied communication has received widespread discussion in the context of the various kinds of online interaction. Electronic mail is probably the purest form of text-based communication where interlocutors are present in mind rather than body. I argue that this online model provides a way of understanding and defending the possibility of a certain kind of public religious experience, contra the many critics of the very coherence of genuine religious experience. I introduce the concept of ‘telic possibility’, a specific kind of modality, applying it to e-mail. I argue that we can reasonably move from the telic possibility of disembodied communication in mundane e-mail exchanges to the epistemic possibility of communication from a divine being in cases where the content of the messages is sufficiently extraordinary.
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Notes
As in the e-mail signature: ‘This message uses 100% recycled electrons’.
Indeed, as Dylan Wittkower pointed out to me, some kinds of electronic exchange are implicitly intended positively to rule out at least certain types of bodily information. If a simple question about going to a meeting, say, received the response, ‘Yes, I’m going; and by the way, what are you wearing today?’, the recipient would likely find this rather creepy.
Note that I am not using ‘metaphysically possible/impossible’ in a technical sense that might allow, say, for the spontaneous, even miraculous, reassembly of the encyclopaedia after it had been destroyed. So I am taking it to be metaphysically impossible that a destroyed encyclopaedia could be a source of information for anyone who has no memory of its contents, no other extrasensory access, where there is no miracle involved, etc. The same goes for the possibility of the general’s being resurrected from the dead, issuing orders from the grave, coming back as a ghost, and so on.
Again, I am keeping it simple. Some might hold it to be metaphysically possible for the ordinary e-mail traffic between humans to come occasionally from a ghost, an angel, or a divine being. All I am contending here, for simplicity’s sake, is that the embodied creatures responsible for this ordinary traffic could not (metaphysically) have been disembodied and that if we hold fixed the whole causal history of the traffic apart from who sent it, then it is plausibly metaphysically impossible for it to have originated with a disembodied being.
Of course, there is room for discussion here. There are many public anomalous events (such as reports by independent witnesses of unidentified flying objects) which convey no explicit religious content. There are many reported private communications that are said by their subjects to convey religious content. What might be thought exceedingly rare, at least in our own days, are events that are both public and convey unambiguous religious content. (The ‘miracle of the dancing sun’ at Fatima in 1917 was reported by thousands of people, but only occurred within a religious context rather than itself conveying religious content. Needless to say, sceptics have always alleged that the event had a perfectly natural explanation. On the other hand, the ‘miracle of the moving crucifix’ in a small church in Limpias, Spain, in 1919, was reported by many independent witnesses who went there to see the body of Christ on the cross move like a real person in agony, and could be said to have conveyed religious content explicitly, though maybe not a message as such.)
I am grateful to Luciano Floridi for inviting me to speak at the AHRC-funded workshop on personal identity in the information age held at the University of Hertfordshire, to the participants for all their helpful comments, and to two anonymous referees for a number of suggestions that have improved the earlier version of this paper.
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Oderberg, D.S. Disembodied Communication and Religious Experience: The Online Model. Philos. Technol. 25, 381–397 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13347-011-0051-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13347-011-0051-6