Is God all in our heads--a product of brain chemistry?

[mia]

Or is the human brain like a radio that can tune into the divine?

...In the past few years, another new “science,” called “neurotheology,” has drawn some interest. Neurotheologists look at how religious experience plays out in the brain, and then changes the brain. Like most brain processes, meditation or contemplative prayer involves many areas of the brain, from the brain stem to the prefrontal cortex. But researchers like Andrew Newberg, the director of research at the Marcus Institute of Integrative Health at Thomas Jefferson University and Hospital in Pennsylvania, have noticed a peculiar response by the parietal lobe. After scanning the brains of Tibetan Buddhists as they meditated, he found that the parietal lobe, which orients your body in time and space, went quiet. But that “orientation” area, conscientious little beaver that it is, is still trying to do its job. “It’s still trying to create for you a sense of yourself and a spatial relation between you and the rest of the world. But it has been deprived of the information that normally has to do that, so you wind up with this sense of no self, no space, no time.” Newberg spotted the same physiological quirk when he imaged the brains of Franciscan nuns praying: They, too, said they felt timelessness and oneness with, in this case, God....

But does that mean transcendent experiences are only a physiological event? Or, is this how the brain is wired to connect with a dimension of reality that our physical senses cannot perceive — in other words, does the brain activity reflect an encounter with the divine?

I want to propose that how you come down on this issue depends on whether you think of the brain as a CD player or a radio. Most people who believe everything is explainable through material processes believe the brain is like a CD player. The content — the song, for example — is playing in a closed system. If you take a hammer to the machine, then the song won’t play. In other words, there is no song — or God — that exists outside the brain trying to communicate. All spiritual experience resides inside the brain, and when you alter the brain, God and spirituality disappear.

But suppose the brain is not a CD player. Suppose it’s a radio. In this analogy, the sender is separate from the receiver. The content of the transmission does not originate in the brain, any more than the hosts of “All Things Considered” are sitting inside of your radio. If you destroy the radio, you won’t hear the show, but the show is still being transmitted across the airwaves. If the brain is a receiver, then theoretically “God’s” communications never stop — even when the brain is altered, even when it stops functioning well, or at all. In this analogy, everyone possesses the neural equipment to receive the radio program in varying degrees. Some have the volume turned low. Perhaps Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris have hit the mute button. Other people hear their favorite programs every now and again, like those who have brief transcendent moments....

https://medium.com/s/reasonable-doubt/the-science-of-miracles-e7cc19f31c8d

[Snackshack]

1. CD Player.

[3Hotdogs]

2. Pink Floyd already explained it....

"The lunatic is in my head."

[Jim__]

3. All the Light We Cannot See.

The analogy with the radio made me recall this book, All the Light We Cannot See, by Anthony Doerr, written in 2014. It won the Pulitzer Prize. It's a book about World War II and a French girl, Marie-Laure, who goes blind when she is a young child, and an impoverished German boy, Werner Pfennig, who grows up in an orphanage. Werner finds an old broken radio and from it he learns all about radio technology. I'm not sure how this paragraph will read to people who haven't read the book, but this is from near the end, years after the war, Marie-Laure is walking with her grandson Michel:

People walk the paths of the gardens below, and the wind sings anthems in the hedges, and the big old cedars at the entrance to the maze creak. Marie-Laure imagines the electromagnetic waves traveling into and out of Michel's machine, bending around them, just as Etienne used to describe, except now a thousand times more crisscross the air than when he lived - maybe a million times more. Torrents of text conversations, tides of cell conversations, of television programs, of e-mail, vast networks of fibre and wire interlaced above and beneath the city, passing through buildings, arcing between transmitters in Metro tunnels, between antennas atop buildings, from lampposts with cellular transmitters in them, commercials for Carrefour and Evian, and prebaked toaster pastries flashing into space and back to earth again. I'm going to be late and Maybe we should get reservations? and Pick up avocados and What did he say and ten thousand I miss yous, fifty thousand I love yous, hate mail and appointment reminders and market updates, jewelry ads, coffee ads, furniture ads flying over the warrens of Paris, over the battlefields and tombs, over the Ardennes, over the Rhine, over Belgium and Denmark, over the scarred and ever-shifting landscapes we call nations. And is it so hard to believe that souls might also travel these paths? That her father and Etienne and Madame Manec and the German boy named Werner Pfennig might harry the sky in flocks, like egrets, like terns, like starlings? That great shuttles of souls might fly about, faded but audible if you listen closely enough? They flow above the chimneys, ride the sidewalks, slip through your jacket and shirt and breastbone and lungs, and pass out through the other side, the air a library and record of every life lived, every sentence spoken, every word transmitted still reverberating within it.

[mia]

5. A beautiful passage.

I haven't read the book, but would like to after reading this. Thank you.

[Cartoonist]

9. Anthems in the hedges

I'm not panning the book based on one paragraph, but writing like that makes me gag.

[NeoGreen]

4. Basically, 'Yes', nothing but a mere human construct...

...and a pretty poor one at that.

Logically inconsistent.

[trotsky]

6. The only real evidence we have points it being a mental construct.

For all the "you can't prove god doesn't exist!!!" types, that is quite true. Define your god, and only then can we test for it. They never want to take you up on that first part, though. I think that's all the evidence one needs to determine the likeliness of gods existing.

[MineralMan]

7. Fantasy Pretending to be Science

Please note that "science" is in quotation marks in the article. The word "perhaps" also appears in the article. "Perhaps" that's because this is all speculation and imagination.

[edhopper]

8. this is

But does that mean transcendent experiences are only a physiological event? Or, is this how the brain is wired to connect with a dimension of reality that our physical senses cannot perceive — in other words, does the brain activity reflect an encounter with the divine?

completely unfounded speculation, based on nothing but the author's fantasies.

The phrases like "dimension of reality" and "encounter with the divine" are as vague and ambiguous as "the Creator"

[Bretton Garcia]

10. So monks don't know where they are for awhile?

That's just disorientation. Or being out of it. Or forgetful. Absent minded.

Granted, forgetting, shutting out your envirinment, can help focus on your thoughts.

But monks even screw that up too.

"Contemplative prayer" is usually closer to useful thought, thinking, than "meditation" of nothingness, or nowhere.

[trotsky]

11. You know, the more I read this the more insulting it gets.

In this analogy, everyone possesses the neural equipment to receive the radio program in varying degrees. Some have the volume turned low. Perhaps Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris have hit the mute button.

If this were the case, why isn't every human being given the same antenna? What sense does it make to give some people defective equipment that can't hear the divine? And why should others be given ones that pick up the broadcast but get it so, so wrong and decide that god is telling them to oppress or kill others?

And what's with assigning atheists this deliberate intent to "hit the mute button"? That's essentially saying atheists really DO hear the same thing, but we (out of a desire to be evil, perhaps? I mean, that's been the typical refrain of theists over the centuries, so they can spread hatred and distrust of atheists) disregard it intentionally. What the actual fuck?

Someone in this group insists that we should build bridges, not walls. I bet he'll love this article, though.

[marylandblue]

12. I have defective eyes that can't see without glasses

Perhaps you have a defective antenna but a better something else. I have received prophetic messages from God, or perhaps my subconscious. I believe that this sense of the divine that some of us feel is not FROM God, it IS God. It's what people are actually referring to that can be measured as activity in the brain. It often feels like it is coming from outside ourselves. It probably isn't. But if it is, there is no way to measure it.

[trotsky]

13. Then it would appear that whatever entity is responsible for the defective antennas in some of us...

INTENDED for them to work differently, and thus directly cause confusion, disagreement, and chaos.

If that's the god you believe in - essentially Loki - then I cannot dispute the evidence. Your god is an asshole.

[Pandoris]

14. Loki isn't all bad.

He is Tyr's less enlightened alter ego. Plus, he was lovely as a mare.

Loki is the hand, like Thing from the Addams Family.

[Act_of_Reparation]

15. "Lovely as a mare"

Svaðilfari certainly thought so.

[Pandoris]

16. Funny :)

The mythological association with horses refers in this case as well as for centaurs, to a god's ability to travel long distances (in time) and even carry men.

[marylandblue]

18. Sure, it's an asshole sometimes, it's a Zoroastrian conceit that it's perfect

Maybe Zoroaster thought if it were perfect, people could become perfect. But it never worked out that way. Then the idea got into Judaism, then Christianity. And it still never worked out. They just pretend that it could.

[Voltaire2]

22. If it is originating from outside your brain

and getting into your brain, then it is at some point a physical process and can be measured.

[marylandblue]

30. Yes, when it gets into your brain.

[Bretton Garcia]

17. Why is experiencing being nowhere, the ultimate experience!

[marylandblue]

19. Because it feels great, you escape your little body

with it's aches and pains and chitter chatter brain. You still feel all that stuff, but no longer identify with it, as if that's all you are. It's like getting a furlough from jail.

[Bretton Garcia]

20. You escape your life

But in exchange, you are in the middle of an empty nothing. No place.

[Pandoris]

24. That is the nature of thoughts.

Not necessarily an empty "place." It can be filled with any number of exquisitely useful constructs.

[marylandblue]

26. It's not what you think. Don't knock it until you try it.

[Voltaire2]

21. Ok but that is not some mystery broadcast

from a divine entity, it is an internal brain state.

[Bretton Garcia]

23. Might not even be divine

Giving up your whole life to be no place, nobody, might be a devilish bargain. And a kind of premature death, or brain sleep or brain death

[marylandblue]

27. You are not giving anything up, you are simply having an experience.

[Bretton Garcia]

32. It often becomes partly permanent

I think everyone does meditation to a degree. The everyday version is shutting out distractions, and concentrating on your work. Or thoughts. Or nothingness.

But I'd suggest this can become exaggerated and semipermanent. When you talk to nerds, and very spiritual persons, you sometimes sense they are not quite there, here and now. Most of their lives. They can't really see the here and now. Or they seem lost in fantasies, phantasms, abstractions, surreal dreams. More or less permanently, or longterm.

[marylandblue]

35. I suspect a lot of those people were already not quite there

I am not sure what being a nerd has to do with this. A lot of people who are not spiritual are also not quite there.

[marylandblue]

25. You are probably right, but that is not how it feels.

[Voltaire2]

28. If that was intended to be funny it was lol.

[marylandblue]

29. It was not intended to be funny.

Last edited Fri Feb 8, 2019, 08:26 PM - Edit history (1)

Does the color red exist? Physically, it is just a wavelength of light, but knowing this does not change the perception or any emotion it may evoke. It doesn't change the fact that redness appears to be a property of an object, even though it is really a property of your eye and brain.

Likewise, spiritual feelings have certain qualities to them. It's essentially irrelevant where the come from. Many people call these feelings "God." Sometimes it feels like the feelings come from outside oneself. Sometimes they don't. Cultures build elaborate narratives around these feelings. That's the religion you are always criticizing.

But these criticisms do not penetrate because it doesn't change the feeling. You might as well point out all of my wife's flaws and explain how love is really just chemicals in the brain. Your criticisms of my wife may be 100% correct. It still changes nothing.

[Voltaire2]

31. Sure. The qualia of experience is unique

for each of us. But the op wants to extrapolate from specific types of experience to some babble of extra dimensional divine forces. It’s just bullshit.

If the claim was just “it feels like the divine”, it would be unobjectionable.

[Bretton Garcia]

33. Some TM or Transcendental Meditation teachers

.. came to say later on, that TM was not even religious. Just a relaxing state of mind.

Just say "it feels divine"; leave out like "the" divine?

[Voltaire2]

34. sure one can also substitute "transcendent" or "sublime"

the point is that it is an internal experience.

[marylandblue]

36. He didn't mention anything about extra dimensional divine forces.

He just said that people have these experiences, quoted some doctors who have different opinions about and said that he personally did not know the answer.

The experiences are hard to explain to anyone who hasn't had one. Even if you've had one, it's also can be hard to talk about with someone who has a different interpretation.

Even harder is that our society is so rationalistic, we don't have a very good language for it, and tend to dismiss anyone who talks about it as "irrational" or "crazy" whether they claim it's natural or supernatural.

[Voltaire2]

37. Um yes the article did.

“But does that mean transcendent experiences are only a physiological event? Or, is this how the brain is wired to connect with a dimension of reality that our physical senses cannot perceive — in other words, does the brain activity reflect an encounter with the divine?”

[marylandblue]

38. Ok, missed that sentence, but he still says "I don't know"

in answer to that question.

[Bretton Garcia]

39. But we're allowed a secular reading.

Heidegger may have agreed that Nothingness was important, in that it is the complementary opposite of Being. (See Sartre Being and Nothingness).

So a secular philosophical reading seems indicated.

Personally I see this nowhereness 1) as a state of mind, 2) and pretty secular. And 3) continuous with what anyone experiences, when they "shut out the world," ignore distractions. In order to free their mind for work or fantasies, or simple relief from clutter.

[marylandblue]

42. Yes, of course you can read it like that.

But how many people read Heidegger? Religious writers make a point of being accessible to a wide audience. It would be nice if philosophers did that.

[Voltaire2]

40. Sure, and doing so elevated utter nonsense

based on nothing with neuroscience.

It is standard woo-purveyors ploy.

[Bretton Garcia]

41. Founding our lives on Nothing ...

.. could indeed be a problem.

[marylandblue]

43. I think that's best foundation, because it gives you total freedom.