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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.""
First post.
The effect described sounds like the euphoric feeling you sometimes get while on acid. Minus the hallucinations.
Sensing something that is not there.... surely that classifes as hallucination
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Bugs Bunny: [singing] Oh, mighty warrior of great fighting stock! Might I inquire to ask-Eh, [eats a carrot] what's up, Doc?
Elmer Fudd: [singing] I am going to kill the Wabbit!
Bugs Bunny: [singing] Oh, mighty hunter, twil be quite a task. How will you do it? Might I inquire to ask?
Elmer Fudd: [singing] I will do it with my spear and magic helmet!
Bugs Bunny: [singing] Your spear and magic helmet?
Elmer Fudd: [singing] Spear and magic helmet!
Bugs Bunny: [singing] Magic helmet?
Elmer Fudd: [singing] Magic helmet!
Bugs Bunny: Magic helmet.
...after seeing the volunteer scream "Oh, GOD! Oh, GOD!" while being stimulated.
I think they discovered a G-something, but not exactly God.
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?
but perhaps, and I am just saying perhaps, this is a communication region in the brain, and stimulating it analogous to stimulating the nerve of the ear, or stimulating the region of the brain interpreting signals from the eye. It would seem if you wanted a religious explanation, this could be the "communication center" for an other state of being than the one we're currently in. Like I said, this will be an unpopular opinion.
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.
Science and religion are orthogonal to each other. The set of axioms that runs:
wouldn't last five minutes in Introduction to Logic 101.
The only rational thing to say is that science does not allow us to make statements about the existence of 'God', which should hardly be a surprise to anyone.
Science deals largely with the study of symmetries.. things that allow us to ignore some kind of change. The laws of projectile motion remain the same (are symmetric) regardless of whether you're facing north or south; whether you're standing in Boston or Beijing.
One thing that's extremely easy to ignore is 'agency'. You can write a doctoral thesis on the kinetics and aerodynamics of a curveball, but you can't use any of it to 'prove' or 'disprove' the existence of Nolan Ryan. Science only allows us to talk about how the ball behaves subsequent to a given set of initial conditions. It doesn't allow us to extrapolate that behavior back to the agent which imposed those original conditions.
At the end of the day, there are only two possible end-states for science: Either we'll be able to reduce the creation of our universe to a set of repeatable phenomena that could be reproduced by an intentional agent with sufficient resources, or we'll find that we can't reduce the creation of our universe to a set of repeatable phenomena. In other words, we'll either prove that 'God' could exist, or we'll prove that 'God' must exist.
Besides, science doesn't have all that much going for it in the Universal Truths department. It has a tendency to paper over difficult fundamental questions by slapping a name on what happens, and sweeping the rest of the mess under the rug of combinatorial complexity.
When Newton published his theory of gravity, it was denounced as mysticism by his peers. They considered the idea of 'action at a distance' tantamount to saying, "God did it." General relativity papered over the problem by calling it 'curved space/time'. We still don't really have any solid answers on what 'space' or 'time' are, and the mechanism of 'gravity' is still an open question, but GR has great predictive power, and tons of experimental validation.
In 1909, Rutherford discovered 'the hand of God' when he proved that electrons don't fall to the lowest possible energy state as predicted by the most basic laws of electrodynamics. Quantum theory papered over that problem by calling it 'uncertainty'. The fact that we can't explain 'uncertainty' in any terms other than 'it just happens' is something we can ignore. QT also has great predictive power and tons of experimental validation.
The small fact that GR and QT are mathematically incompatible -- meaning they can't both describe the same universe -- is something we don't talk about when the children are in the room.
Ffor all the intricate math, and all the really cool things we've done by reducing physics to engineering, we're still dealing with the simplest cases of the simplest pieces we can find. Inverse-square law? We're so excited about being able to call it a Universal Truth that we'll ignore the fact that the N-body problem is provably unsolvable in the general case. Protein folding? Meh.. let's harness a few teraflops of distributed processing power and brute-force our way through the umpty-zillion possibilities. Consciousness? It is to laugh. 'God'? Not even on the map.
A large part of what makes science and math such great tools is that they tell us their own limits. We know for a fact that mathematics as we practice it today cannot derive all possible truths from a finite set of axioms. We know that science doesn't give us the tools to discuss matters of agency or initial-first-causes.
Watching people ignore those limits and use 'science' to 'disprove God' offends me as a mathematician.
"But I don't hear answers from any other quarter."
You must be living in a special world, never heard of various other relogions offering similar ancient stories which to me are not distinguishable (since i shed of my childhood Christian indoctrination) ?
"you don't think your existance is a good reason to at least contemplate it?"
Um, I've looked at myself, contemplated the existence of the Hebrew God, and read a bit here and there about the background of biblical stories. When I add all up my conclusion for now is that there is abundant evidence that the bible is a collection of subjective and heavily edited material. Resulting in a strange mix of violence and orders to kill quite a few people I rather not kill, such as name-calling children, teenagers in puberty, and people spreading other beliefs.
Looking at it from a philosophical pov i think the alternatives given by modern biology are a lot more coherent. This magnetic machine does not disprove God, something which is impossible by definition, but it is another indication that there is a God-shaped hole in the brain waiting to be filled with whatever religion available.