...I don't know the answers to your questions about what they are made of. ... given the religious context, it's largely unimportant with regard to interacting with them.
As to how they communicate, in the normal way. You perceive them with your senses.
If you can perceive them with your senses (see hear, touch, etc), that would suggest that they're material entities that are physically effectual, made of matter (protons, neutrons, & electrons) like the rest of us, otherwise there would be an interaction problem.
Alternatively, if they were manifested entirely in the mind, their communication would not be normal unless you consider communication with entities in your head that no-one else can see or hear normal.
Again, I'm guessing, based on fragmentary and ambiguous information...
In those prior experiences I've been told I must have had hallucinations, etc. In your case, the word schizophrenia popped out. It may have been a simple misunderstanding of what I was saying with no negative intent, but the result is the result nonetheless. I've no interest in answering you further on that point.
OK. I mentioned schizophrenia because one of its many symptoms is hearing voices with distinct personalities; many healthy people hear voices too (it's surprisingly common), and I was hoping to prompt you to be more specific. If a particular encounter with such an entity is perceptible only to you, that might fit the definition of a hallucination ("
a perception in the absence of external stimulus that has qualities of real perception; vivid, substantial, and perceived to be located in external objective space"), but it's rare for them to be multisensory. Hallucinations are also surprisingly common.
My lack of interest is twofold. First, I consider it laughable silliness the number of times people with no professional training as a counselor hand out diagnoses after one post in an Internet forum - and I don't just mean the ones directed at me. It happens all the time to all kinds of people.
I'm not interested in making a diagnosis of anything, I want to know what your experience of this phenomenon is like - what do they look like? what do they say? do they answer questions? etc.
Second, there is a fascinating TED talk by a journalist who interviewed a man who had been in a psychiatric hospital for decades after being found not guilty of a crime for reasons of insanity. The man admitted he had faked his symptoms to avoid jail, but now couldn't get out of the hospital. The doctors, despite being aware of his admission, continued to maintain he actually did have a mental illness. Due to the amount of time the inmate had spent trying to get out, he had become an amateur expert of sorts in psychiatry. He handed the journalist a thick book listing mental illnesses. He explained why he couldn't get out. In his opinion, every person on the planet could be diagnosed with at least one of the illnesses in that book. So, technically, the doctors were right. According to the book he was mentally ill. But so was everyone else, including the doctors who were diagnosing him. Once you are labeled as mentally ill, the patient explained, you never, ever lose that label because the doctor can always find a reason to label you mentally ill. The point was that psychiatry has reached a place where there is no such thing as "normal" or "healthy". Rather, it's only a matter of whether your illness has been stamped with an official seal. If that's truly the case, it's ridiculous.
There's some truth in that. I've heard of two experiments where volunteers faked symptoms to gain admission to psychiatric hospitals, and after a set period they stopped faking and tried to gain release. In the first experiment, their efforts were taken to be further evidence of their 'illness', and experimenters had to intervene to ensure their release.
In the second experiment, the institution was informed in advance and agreed to the trial, confident they'd spot the fakers; but the same thing happened - the fakers had to be rescued. It's a telling example of the power of expectation (confirmation) bias even in supposed experts, and the difficulties of psychiatric assessment.
OK. I'm not sure I actually understand what you're saying. Your description seems just as vague and lacking in context as the others you mention, but … OK. You seem to think you're saying something.
It's a commonly accepted description in the philosophy of consciousness of what the core concept of consciousness entails, i.e. subjective, phenomenal experience; that there is 'something it is like' to be that thing. If something is not conscious, it has no subjective phenomenal experience; for example, there is not something it is like to be a rock or a cheese sandwich, but
there is something it is like to be a bat.
You don't think the description is beyond us and you think science will get there one day. OK. Whether science will get there seems like faith rather than something grounded in any real demonstration of science to approach the issue of consciousness, but … OK.
I'm extrapolating from the considerable progress made to date investigating various aspects of consciousness such as sense of self, location, orientation, physical extent & bounds, ownership, agency, memory, recall, and so-on. We've discovered a lot about how these aspects interact and how they can be modified and distorted to produce unusual states of consciousness.
And your statement seems contradictory to me. You're saying science will never address the subjective aspects of consciousness, but it will eventually address the objective. Umm. But if the definition of consciousness is given in terms of the subjective, and science won't address that, what exactly is science going to discover about consciousness?
It's just the way things are. Science is a means of acquiring objective descriptions and explanations of the world. Conscious experience is subjective, individual, solitary, and inaccessible to others. It is only communicable via metaphor and simile, an appeal to shared objective events in the hope that another's subjective experience of those events is similar; i.e. via translation to an objective description then via another individual's unique interpretation of how they would experience that objective description.
We also know that different people's subjective experiences of events are not necessarily similar, e.g. colour-blindness. It's not even clear that the concept of comparing subjective experience is meaningful, i.e. what does it mean to say my
subjective experience of red is the same as, or similar to, yours, beyond that we both have the same
objective responses to the same
objective encounters with red?
Consequently, science can only deal with the objective aspects of consciousness - the physical correlates of consciousness and the reported (objective) descriptions of someone's subjective experience. So it seems to me that we could, potentially, reach the point of having a detailed functional description of all the observable and reportable correlates of consciousness, to the extent that we could predict the reported experience of a subject of any particular activity in their brain, and explain why that activity produced that reported experience and not a different one, yet we would still not know, and could not know in principle, what it was like for that subject to have those experiences.
