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What Ecstasy Does To Octopuses (theatlantic.com)
Gul Dolen, a neuroscientist at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine who studies how the cells and chemicals in animal brains influence animals' social lives, gave ecstasy to octopuses and recorded her observations. The study, published in the journal Current Biology, suggests that the psychoactive drug that can make people feel extra loving toward others also has the same effect on octopuses. An anonymous reader shares the report from The Atlantic: [Dolen] and her colleague Eric Edsinger put five Californian two-spot octopuses individually into the middle of three connected chambers and gave them free rein to explore. One of the adjacent chambers housed a second octopus, confined inside an overturned plastic basket. The other contained an unfamiliar object, such as a plastic flower or a Chewbacca figurine. Dolen and Edsinger measured how long the main animal spent in the company of its peer, and how long with the random toy. The free-moving individuals thoroughly explored the chambers, and from their movements, Dolen realized that individuals of any sex gravitate toward females, but avoid males. Next, she dosed the animals with ecstasy. Again, there's no precedent for this, but researchers often anesthetize octopuses by dunking them in ethanol -- a humane procedure with no lasting side effects. So Dolen and Edsinger submerged their octopuses in an MDMA solution, allowing them to absorb the drug through their gills. At first they used too high a dose, and the animals "freaked out and did all these color changes," Dolen says. But once the team found a more suitable dose, the animals behaved more calmly -- and more sociably. "With ecstasy in their system, the five octopuses spent far more time in the company of the same trapped male they once shunned," the report continues. "Even without a stopwatch, the change was obvious. Before the drug, they explored the chamber with the other octopus very tentatively."
"They mashed themselves against one wall, very slowly extended one arm, touched the [other animal], and went back to the other side," Dolen says. "But when they had MDMA, they had this very relaxed posture. They floated around, they wrapped their arms around the chamber, and they interacted with the other octopus in a much more fluid and generous way. They even exposed their [underside], where their mouth is, which is not something octopuses usually do."
"They mashed themselves against one wall, very slowly extended one arm, touched the [other animal], and went back to the other side," Dolen says. "But when they had MDMA, they had this very relaxed posture. They floated around, they wrapped their arms around the chamber, and they interacted with the other octopus in a much more fluid and generous way. They even exposed their [underside], where their mouth is, which is not something octopuses usually do."
Nobody denies that brain chemistry exists. So it's not "a notch" for anyone. Drugs can make you feel different ways - yeah we've all known that for at least 7,000 years.
Well, I take that back - sometimes when someone is seriously under the influence of heavy drugs, they might think they are having a spiritual experience rather than a chemical experience. But they also think that they could walk through a wall if they really, really wanted to, think they ARE walking when they are actually sitting still, and think that Bernie Sanders makes sense. So we can disregard what they think when they're really, really high.
The question isn't whether or not brain chemistry exists and can affect our emotions. The question are:
Are our emotions linked to something eternal, or are they purely random happenstance?
Is their a *reason* we have brains and emotions, a purpose, or is it again totally random and devoid of any meaning or purpose?
When you use the words "religion" and "God", those words have thousand different meanings; everyone has different ideas about what this "God" thing is. What all the major world religions agree on, a common denominator, is that Exodus and Moses are Canon (plus and Exodus account also appears in Egyptian records). So the generally agreed part of what "God" is would include God's answer to Moses when he asked in Exodus who Had is. The Greek is really hard to translate accurately to English because English uses the word "is" for several different meanings, but a reasonable translation would be "I am the eternal", or "I (permanently) am", or "I am what is everlasting".
Given God's own answer as to who / what God is, in the book most agreed on, that's why I say the question is whether our spirits, our deepest emotional selves, are connected to something eternal. Because "the eternal" is the one definition of "God" that most agree on.