[betty boop]

p.s.: Turning your question around in my mind, I realized that there is a kind of qualitative difference between a hallucination, hearing voices, etc., and what I have been speaking of. It is precisely that the people I've observed doing what your friend's son was observed to be doing were perfectly incapable of "objectifying" their experience sufficiently to communicate something of its nature to another person. In subsequent moments of clarity, they could say nothing about the experience. Whatever it was for them, it left them literally "speechless."

In short, it does not appear clear to me that such people had a strong enough self concept to understand their experience as something that could be understood. It was something that just "happened."

Do you think this makes any difference?

[balrog666]

Do you think this makes any difference?

Frankly, no.

I also tend to agree with js1138 (although I readily admit that have not followed every nuance of that discussion) that these personal "experiences" are well within the generative capability of our material brains and indeed may be be self directed to a significant degree. And while that may not make them any less real to the person involved, it limits any real discussion of them to vague analogy and meaningless philosophical noise.

Don't take my comments to be insulting or derisive; it's just that I see no basis for meaningful discussion.