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Scientists Deliver 'God' Via A Helmet
prostoalex writes "Scientific American is reporting on scientific work done to map the euphoric religious feelings within the brain. As a result, it's now quite possible to experience 'proximity to God' via a special helmet: 'In a series of studies conducted over the past several decades, Persinger and his team have trained their device on the temporal lobes of hundreds of people. In doing so, the researchers induced in most of them the experience of a sensed presence — a feeling that someone (or a spirit) is in the room when no one, in fact, is — or of a profound state of cosmic bliss that reveals a universal truth. During the three-minute bursts of stimulation, the affected subjects translated this perception of the divine into their own cultural and religious language — terming it God, Buddha, a benevolent presence or the wonder of the universe.""
Sensing something that is not there.... surely that classifes as hallucination
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Coming soon to a government near you. Big Brother loves you.
After a few millenia, the term "new" hardly applies.
funny, i dont feel the need to talk about my non-belief until someone tries to 'educate' me on their belief system. its not exactly a catch-22 when large, well-funded groups have dedicated their resources in an attempt to un-secularize my country.
turn up the jukebox and tell me a lie
It sounds as though you're more afraid of this work than its authors are 'afraid of [religion]'. Slashdot has been known for biased summaries in the past, but this one is [miraculously!] almost straight synopsis, as is the article. Neither makes any moral or philosophical assertations. [In fact, the article asserts that the technology could be used to make non-theists happier!]
:Cheers.:
How is this not news that matters? Isn't this a little more important than articles about the latest nuance in the Linux Task Scheduler? Might it not help us understand that whole religion bit that's been, you know, an integral part of the human experience for all of observable history?
Perhaps a little introspection as to what about this article so upsets you would yield some overall personal benefit.
Perhaps life really is full of possibilities.
Just because you can replicate the sensory experience of something by "poking" at the brain doesn't mean that a real outside stimulus is false. For instance, I think you could probably make the brain experience the sensory perception of color by "poking" at the visual cortex. That doesn't change the fact that there are real world stimuli that evoke this experience as well. In short, showing that the brain is capable of experiencing something because of a different, artificial stimulus does not predict or rule out the primary "natural" source of that experience. Although it does present an interesting question for evolutionary theory - why does this perception ability exist?
First of all, this is an old experiment, I remember reading about it a long time ago. But while it's interesting from a neuroscience point of view to discover the location of these experiences within the brain, it doesn't give us any philosophical insight into the existence or non-existence of God. On the one hand, it could be that the religious experiences that people have had throughout history were caused by random events stimulating this bit of the brain. But from the theistic perspective, it seems obvious that if God exists He would build the brain with some capacity to detect His presence under certain circumstances -- just as we can't say that the fact the experience of seeing colour is caused by certain brain regions being stimulated means that colour doesn't exist except in our heads, we can't say that this experiment proves that God is just in our heads either. So: philosophically uninteresting.
Except of course for the tiny contribution that is of all of human technology and knowledge that scientists have contributed. A small matter I know, but I felt the need to add it.
Control is an illusion, order our comforting lie. From chaos, through chaos, into chaos we fly
This seems like more proof of what I personally believe, that there is nothing mysterious or supernatural in our universe. Everything in human history about religion and spirituality is just our minds and imaginations running around playing tricks. Religion is a Ouija board; and we're all moving our own hands and pretending there's something great and magical out there that's doing it. Our minds are so primitive and easily tricked that we can even induce this feeling artificially. People have been doing it for a long time, long before this device. LSD users report the same kind of experiences as well as hallucinations. I'm not trying to say that having these experiences is a bad thing, but take it for what it's worth. It's an interesting or novel change in your perception, but it's transient, and only "real" insofar that it really happened to you, outside of your own mind everything is chugging along normally and the world is no different, no more mysterious or wondrous than it was before.
There's plenty of wonder in the world to be experienced without using a Ouija board.
If you build it, nerds will come. Soylentnews.org
The results of the experiments are consistent with the mind-numbingly banality of the reports of God, Satan, Heaven, Hell and astral travelling trips.
There's a good reason people can spend an hour describing what they did on a day out at the beach, whereas people who claim to have experienced Heaven can't bear to describe it for more than a few minutes. Heaven's all 'wonderful,' you see, but nothing in the recount of Heaven is anything to write home about. Quite a lot of recounts of Heaven are pretty tasteless, rather Hellish, even.
In contrast, one who is recalling a day out at the beach will have no trouble identifying what it was about the experience that made them happy.
Therefore it's far more plausible that in a Heaven NDE, the 'Wonderful' button was being directly stimulated so that nothing in the experience need be interesting at all.
It's a wirehead thing.
Blancmange
Hehe, I get the feeling that everyone else who is posting comments like yours is just playing the devil's advocate but you really believe what you just wrote don't you?
The *point* of the demonstration is to show that there is an area of the brain that is trivial to stimulate and which causes "connection to the sacred". What it shows is that religious experience is hardwired into us. It is not learned and it is not a mystical thing. It is a physical part of the brain.
How we know is more important than what we know.
You're confusing the mechanism of perception with the existence of a source.
Brain surgeons have long known that stimulation of the temporal lobe can make people hear voices. That doesn't count as proof that 'voices' don't really exist, though.. unless you're writing the Cliff's Notes summary of The Matrix.
One could just as well ask why such a center exists in the brain if nothing exists to stimulate it.
If for example I had a "taste box" that made everything taste like chocolate...it doesn't prove that nothing exists that tastes of chocolate.
And for all the theists I know, only a small fraction would tell people they are going to burn in hell or go around forcing people (forcing what exactly?). The overwhelming majority don't do that and either silently disagree (by respecting your beliefs) or state their beliefs in a civil, non confrontational way. On what you say about a double standard I think you're reading different semantics to what they mean. You can respect (accept someone has a POV in a civil manor), but disagree with them.
Religion causes psychological dependence, which is harder to break.
Correct. There is *nothing* that can prove nor disprove the existance of God...including the "good book". I can not show you something that will undeniably prove it to you. The "good book" does indeed state the existance of God but it talks about it through faith, not proof.
But you're missing the point. The only thing believers have had to hold up as evidence of the existence of God are these experiences.
Now these experiences can not only be explained, but duplicated in a laboratory.
If that's all there is to back up belief, it doesn't prove that something doesn't exist, but on the other hand there isn't anything left that can't be rationally explained and duplicated to believe there is one.
This is the most ridiculous argument anyone has ever made. In no other area of human "thinking" (I'll use the term loosely here) would anyone seriously claim that something exists when there is no reason to even suspect that it might.
Believing in "god" makes less sense than believing that there is a 747 jumbo jet at the center of the Sun. At least in the case of the 747 those actually do exist.
The Farewell Tour II
1. Evolution. Animals that can think eat the ones that can't.
2. Evolution. Populations of moral animals survive better than populations of immoral ones.
3. You can't model the Big Bang with Newton's Third Law, so don't try. And since "time" and "cause and effect" are aspects of this universe, it doesn't make sense to ask what happened "before" the Universe or what "caused" it.
4. Hopefully, the fact that you love your family manifests itself in observable facts about the real world, something that religious statements usually lack.
You're welcome.
Win dain a lotica, en vai tu ri silota
There is no trace of evidence that chocolate actually exists, but many people talk incessantly about the wonderful substance of chocolate, and how they can often taste it, which is proof to them of chocolates existence.
The chocolate helmet shows that there are perfectly scientific explanations to the taste of chocolate that need not involve invisible Magical Hershey Bars or the great Girardelli factory in the sky.
Give me liberty or give me kill -s 9
Our ability to think and reason, and our sense of right and wrong, can be adequately explained by evolutionary psychology.
Science can't explain how or why the initial conditions of the universe came about. But religion can't either. All it does is replace those unknowns with totally unsubstantiated story, and in doing so creates even more unknowns. For example, religion can't explain how or why an omniscient personal God came about.
I presume there's evidence that you love your three daughters, so you can "prove" it to me. Otherwise, no, I wouldn't believe it. If I claim the plate of spaghetti I am about to eat loves you, but I can't prove it, should you believe it? I certainly hope not, because there's no evidence that my spaghetti even exists, let alone that it has exhibited love for your daughters.
Yet again, we have more evidence that the brain can be affected by EM.
If you are a government and you want to make sure everybody is dulled down, what better way than to flood society with technologies masked as ubiquitous, ever-so-useful tools which people voluntarily hold up to their heads several times a day, every day of the year?
Cell phones don't cause cancer. Well, they do, but that's not the primary intention. The primary intention is to make you dumb and susceptible to further programming and easy management.
-FL
It emerged and was stimulated by social interaction and solving tasks presented to me in school. Some people say it is result of evplution, because it gives an competitive edge. On a side note your question is biased, as it presumes we are on some sort of "stage" where objects "come" and "go" from and to some other, hidden space. You LIKE secrets and that is a preference.
From my upbringing, my parents taught me, my peers reacted differently to my actions until I learned that there are things that will keep everybody happy, while there are other things that will cause me loneliness.
I don't know, I'd like to know, you seem to think you know, but I am sure neither one of us really knows. There are several possibilities, some of them may be quite astonishing. However, imagine you where right and there was God behind it? Now that would be very awkward because you would have to explain God, how he became to be, where he was before he came into existence
Based on comparison with many millions of parents, there is pretty large probability that you do, so why should I doubt? However that is unfortunate choice for this argument, because I think your God is your inside feeling, just like your love is. I wonder why you pull it out and drag it around, pushing it onto others? Do you wish to get emotionally hurt? There are many studies of emotions and love and "gene selfishness" that dissect parental love but I don't feel like protesting them on the grounds of "I don't like it", just like I don't feel like giving up my love because "it is fabricated plot by ruthless organic compounds that turn us into biological robots". When your reason and your feelings are at odds it is a sign you are not managing one or both of them very well. There is subjective truth and there is objective truth, they don't necessarily match.
For example a friend, now and then, casts spells (mainly healing), has killed a person and maimed another with vodoo dolls and sometimes sees angels and spirits.
Now, adopting a skeptic perspective, I could ask myself why does she thinks she cast spells and kills/maims people with vodoo. Because she got the right feedback while doing so. She did things and they worked. She's seen her mom doing the same things, and they worked. Being a logic lassie (I know she suffers from a bad case of cognitive dissonance, but just let go on with the example), she's seen a cause-effect relationship in her mystical actions, so she believes that piercing your vodoo doll with needles in your chest will kill you: after all she's done it before, and it worked. She did the same with a guy's doll crotch and he got kidney stones...
I apply the same logic: when I see ghosts, it's usually my low blood pressure doing things with my retina; when a 50+ years old always angry bloke dies of heart attack it's quite normal. When I say i don't believe in god, magic, supertition, etc, it's like saying that I don't believe there are blue monkeys under my bed during the night. Quite simply, I don't know if god is out there, but I'm pretty much certain he's not there. I can't really attribute any effect to it. So I don't believe he exists.
But maybe he's just hangin out with the blue monkeys under my bed. But till I see him, he doesn't have a place in my vision of the world, I don't use 'god' as a label for things I don't uderstand. But if one day I'll find a god, well, I'll publish a peer reviewed paper about it.
So, where is my religious lunacy? Am I a lunatic because I don't believe in things I can't find any fundament for? Shouldn't it be the opposite?
I don't think the church can be called "new".
Deleted
God is the ultimate Anonymous Coward -- he has infinite ability, but uses it to hide from our scientific tests with mathematical certitude.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
These types of self-pitying posts always show up in any discussion mentioning Christianity, and they're bullshit.
Obviously from the eyes of any atheist, Islam is just as wrong as Christianity is, but since most Slashdot posted are Westerners, obviously any discussion about religion is going to turn to the most popular religion in the West, which is still Christianity, simply because it has a much, much greater impact on our daily lives than Islam does, fear-mongering about Islamism aside.
There's no need to tag posts about Islam with "flyingspaghettimonster", since the absurdities of Islam are readily apparent to most people in the West already. The very same absurdities in Christianity are overlooked by most Westerners, simply because they're Christian themselves, so yes, tagging stories about Christianity with it is still necessary.
Also, has it ever occured to you that maybe you perceive any discussion about Christianity as an attack simply because it strikes closer to home?
Get over your persecution complex already.
An equally valid observation, then, is that Dr. Sagan may be implying that the soccer mom's UFO abductee cousin is psychotic because there are difficult truths he doesn't (or doesn't WANT to) understand
Er, no. The notion that untold hundreds of thousands of people used to be routinely visited in the night by sex-crazed demons, and then right about the time 1950's sci-fi/horror movies jumped on the flying saucer meme and used cheap costumes to portray bubble-headed aliens - surprise! - those people shifted over to "I routinely get levitated out of my bed, through the wall, to a giant space ship that hovers over my house, where I'm proctologically examined..." - gee, shocking. Especially given the complete and utter absence of any evidence that anything like that ever happens to anyone, ever..
So, what's more likely? Some not uncommon wiring/chemistry problems that cause people to experience some semi-waking paranoia and delusions which they articulate in terms of popular mythology... or, a planet infested by high tech alien proctologists that don't actually leave any evidence of all of the horrible things they do? That's not, I'm afraid, "equally valid."
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.