It's all in your head

I heard a fascinating article on NPR yesterday suggesting that mystical experiences may have a neurobiological basis, leading neuroscientist Michael Persinger to exult

that God and all spiritual experience are a product of your brain.

"What is the last illusion that we must overcome as a species?" he asks theatrically. "That illusion is that God is an absolute that exists independent of the human brain — that somehow we are in his or her care."

The article is part of a longer series on the Science of Spirituality which you can peruse here. I haven't heard the entire series, and perhaps I should withhold comment until I do, but the earlier quote seems problematic for a couple of reasons:

One, most religious believers don't have mystical experiences, but they believe anyway. In fact, there's been spirited (pardon the pun) debate in Christian and other religious circles about how much credence one should give to dreams, visions, ecstatic states and whatnot.

Secondly, and this gets to the follow-up quote in the article, if my mystical experience of God is just a seizure, and therefore God does not exist as an objective reality, then does that mean that dark forests, which the reporter saw when she donned the "God helmet," also don't exist as an objective reality? One might counter, The difference between God and dark forests is that the latter are empirically verifiable. Ah, but only with your brain, the same brain that can apparently be manipulated by chemical imbalances or magnetic waves to yield a false positive for God. How do you know your brain's not being manipulated when you see a dark forest, or a computer screen, or anything else? How do you know you aren't hallucinating right now? Why didn't Agent Smith get to Barbara Bradley Hagerty before she blew the cover on everything?

Scientists really ought to read a little more philosophy. I doubt that the question of the mind's relationship to reality can be settled merely by dissecting the brain.

Comments

[Philippe]

"Scientists really ought to read a little more philosophy. I doubt that the question of the mind's relationship to reality can be settled merely by dissecting the brain."

It is worth noting that these Persinger-types are taking notes from philosophers, at least the popular and highly quotable philosophers, like Friedrich Nietzsche.

In the end, though, I agree with your sentiments. It simply doesn't suit a "scientist" to talk about overcoming illusions. Even the phrase he used, "spiritual experience," calls into suspicion his own experiential approach to dispelling this "illusion." I suppose the difficulty is defining what is meant by "spiritual experience," and then describing how any experience can be anything but spiritual, and then arguing that the anything-but-spiritual experience supersedes the other. Etc. Blah, blah.

This all just makes me think about Lewis's Abolition of Man, which I think is a very interesting answer to Bacon and Nietzsche, and all these modern neurophysiologists who buy into that scheme of things. What's next for this species if we get rid of the God-illusion, and all the morality and æsthetics and religion and mythos? Will we advance to the newest stage of humanity? Or will we just cease to be recognizably human, an emasculated and sterilized race of chemists?

[John]

Please check out this reference on brains, "spiritual" experiences (and experience altogether) plus Real God

http://www.adidam.org/teaching/aletheon/truth-science.aspx

Plus

http://www.aboutadidam.org/lesser_alternatives/scientific_materialism/reductionism.html

Elsewhere the author points out that everything you experience is a fabrication of, and thus a projection of your brain and nervous system complex.

Meaning of course that none of us ever Reality as it IS.