No, the hardware/software analogy does not imply or endorse or even so much as hint at mind-body dualism. But never mind.
Not to be obtuse or anything, but in what sense do individuals “perceive” religious experiences in your understanding? Am I misreading or are you expressing the notion that religious experiences occur outside the realm of “normal” sensory perception?
No, that analogy does not. Mind-body dualism presupposes that the two are entirely seperate - independent, affecting each other but not requirant of the other to exist. That there could be such a thing as a mind, or that which produces a mind, without a body, and likewise that there is such a thing as a body without a mind. The hardware/software duality, however, requires hardware for there to be software - requires a system in order to run on, or physical matter in which to reside. Likewise, if we analogise to the brain, then we’d say that the mind requires the brain in order to work, and that if you had no brains, then you’d have no minds.
The points you raise also aren’t a “distraction”; you raised these issues in the first place as, I read into your OP, you believed them to be good examples of and reasons for why you were correct on this point. It is hardly a “distraction” for people to discuss the very same examples and reasons you yourself have given to support an idea in a thread designed to debate that idea - in fact, it’s the very point. I’d be interested to know how it is you’d like people to debate without referring to the points you raise, and discussing them.
The first point you made was that Dawkins in particular claimed that all religious experiences involve those things, which was incorrect.
As to your new point, of that definition being inaccurate as refers to religious experiences, I agree with you, for many examples. However, I would say that simply because religious experiences do not fall into the category of hallucinations to assume they therefore fall into the category of utter truth would be quite a stretch. They aren’t the only two categories to pick from, after all, and I suspect my own personal categorisation would likely fall somewhere other than the two.
Actually, you cite a book of Maslow’s, not a piece of research, though certainly his book may be the result of it. However, it’s a problematic issue; how do we know whether Maslow’s words are the result of opinion, or of research, either his or someone else’s? I suppose the easiest way would be to find that research, which would certainly be interesting just in general. If this is a book you own, i’d suspect that the words you’ve cited are sourced in some way; does it point us to a particular piece or pieces of research we can try and look up?
Too, the more recent research you cite would be interesting to see also.
Well, you’ve yet to manage to prove them as facts, so that seems a wee bit presumptuous. And i’m afraid you’ve once again misread Dawkins, again in impressive fashion since you’ve managed to bring up at least one of alternative points already, only to apparently dismiss them now that they no longer serve your argument. Dawkins also bring up the matter of optical illusions, of mistakes of perception (which he, himself, admits to having), of the brain taking some information and constructing of it a model that may not be fully supported by that information, of delusion, or deception, and of physical affectances.
Now, unless you are claiming that there is *no single occurence *of a claimed religious experience that can be explained by “hallucinations and insanity”, then i’m afraid you’re going to have to drop this particular point. Dawkins doesn’t claim it to exclusion; do you, the other way?
To add to what Half Man Half Wit said: TheJournal of Scientific Exploration has a dubious reputation and appears to not be indexed by major databases such as Pub Med.
“…due to its scope of examining anomalies, fringe science, protoscience, and other controversial topics, the editors of the JSE acknowledge that the periodical “publishes claimed observations and proffered explanations that will seem more speculative or less plausible than in some mainstream disciplinary journals. Nevertheless, those observations and explanations must conform to rigorous standards of observational techniques and logical argument.”… the JSE was initially established to provide a forum for three main fields that had largely been neglected by mainstream science: ufology, cryptozoology, and parapsychology…”
Their definition of “peer-reviewed” also sounds, shall we say, fluid.
"Bernard Haisch and Martha Sims, respectively past editor in chief and past executive director, describe the Journal of Scientific Exploration “as peer-reviewed Journal following the customs and standards of academic journals but designed specifically for the scholarly study of anomalies”. If an article or essay paper is accepted "but there remain points of disagreement between authors and referee(s), the reviewer(s) may be given the option of having their opinion(s) published “subject to the Editor-in-Chief’s judgment as to length, wording, and the like”.
Sounds like articles can be published despite objections of reviewers, if the Editor-in-Chief likes you.
The link to ITR’s article reveals such a toxic level of psychobabble that I’m afraid I lost faith in the authors’ objectivity just a couple of paragraphs into the article. Maybe an EEG would reveal the reason why.
Apart from what I think would be your extreme difficulty in finding any statement ever made on this board that “peer-reviewed science is always right”, I think you share a basic misunderstanding among purveyors of woo. I see this quite often in Internet discussions. Someone will argue a dubious proposition and when challenged on it will present a research article that typically involves some combination of 1) a very small study population, 2) a poorly-designed/controlled experiment, 3) research originating from a country or in a publication with a poor reputation for generating meaningful, reproducible results, and 4) making conclusions not justified by the findings in the study.
When you point these things out, the person making the argument often becomes querulous and accusatory - after all, they presented Science, and by criticizing it you must be an arbitrary Meanie.
But not all “scientific research” is created equal.
The paper you cite on “the visions at Medjugorje” is not convincing to those who do not already have a predisposition to believe in religious miracles. It reminds me of the sort of weird stuff churned out by Lionel Milgrom (who also publishes in Scientific Journals) to elucidate the mechanism of homeopathy (despite the stunning lack of evidence that homeopathy does work, Milgrom is convinced that it does, therefore, there must be a mechanism to explain it, which he provides in blitheringly dense and obtuse detail, using (God help us) quantum field theory). :eek:
What occurs during red circle seeing and green square seeing does not correspond. Green square seeing is clearly a hallucination; it fits every conceivable definition of the word to a T. Red circle seeing, then, is no hallucination. Does that now in any way imply that red circles are any more real than green squares?
Besides, your original point was not merely that religious experiences were not hallucinations, but the following:
(bolding mine)
It is well known that the brain is capable of creating mental phenomena different from hallucinations that nevertheless could be classified as what I have somewhat vaguely previously called false experiences; dreams, for one, or optical illusions, even memory distortions (if you, for instance, remember something that never actually happened that way). So, that religious experiences differ in some way from a dictionary definition of hallucination doesn’t imply that they don’t originate in the brain. To show this, you would have to show that there is an objective quality to such experiences, which you have yet to do in any convincing way. (Of course, even the establishment of an objective background for religious experiences only shows that there is some external thing causing them; to then link them to whatever flavour of god one happens to like best requires some additional work, and if you fail on that account, it could still just be electromagnetic fields generated by tectonic stress or something like that. As an example, consider Haidinger’s brush: some people, under the right lighting conditions, perceive a “diffuse elongated yellowish pattern, pinched at the center”, which is crossed at an angle of 90° by “bluish leaves, generally shorter”. Two or more people who are able to perceive this pattern will generally report identical orientation, without any opportunity to match their stories, despite there being no obvious physical cause for their perceptions. One possibility, of course, is that they are in telepathic contact, or that they’re having some unusual divine vision (people certainly have seen stranger and more abstract things than that). However, in reality, things are more mundane than that – they’re simply perceiving the polarization of the ambient light, which goes to show that even such objective elements to what could then be dubbed ‘minority perceptions’ – i.e. things only a small subset of the population perceives – are not sufficient to establish a supernatural connection.)
So, whether or not anybody questions that “not all religious experiences involve a vision or a locution (or a sense touch, sight, movement, etc…)” is of no significance whatsoever; me, I’m perfectly prepared to take your word for it. However, this does not constitute a tacit approval of your claim that religious experiences do not originate in the brain.
Well, dreams occur in the most mentally healthy people; they are still examples of the brain making shit up. Besides, what is and what isn’t mentally healthy is largely a definitional matter (much like what is and what isn’t a hallucination): it’s perfectly well imaginable for a society to declare the feeling of being in the presence of some supernatural being (or whatever else you would want to constitute religious experience) to be a symptom of mental illness, in which case those having them would be thought of as people with mental health problems. The same thing has already happened with what used to be regarded as demonic possession – in earlier times, you could well say that a person was perfectly healthy except for that demon that occasionally took control of them and made them collapse into convulsions. Today, one would simply call that person ill. Then, you could have truthfully claimed that there is no positive correlation between demonic possession and (mental) illness; today, that simply doesn’t have any meaning any more.
So, again, there lies the reason nobody has bothered much with Maslow – because the question whether or not those having religious experiences are in good mental health is wholly irrelevant to the claim that these experiences do not originate within the brain. And again, by that token, not disputing Maslow’s findings does not indicate agreement with your thesis.
The salient point in this thread is whether or not religious experiences originate within the brain, and the only way to settle this question in favour of an external origin is to establish an objective element to these experiences, at least so far I can see. The only thing you have offered in this regard are the visionaries of Medjugorje; this, in contrast to the irrelevant points, has been disputed.
Indeed, and since the OP thinks atheists are just citing tabloids, I will have inform him that even the Catholic church continues to dismiss what took place in Medjugorje.
http://www.catholicherald.co.uk/articles/a0000299.shtml
And the commissions came mostly to their conclusions because of the lack of credibility of the seers.
http://www.catholicapologetics.info/catholicteaching/privaterevelation/medja.htm
I mean; if the church, that accepts even iffy apparitions (IMO) like Lourdes is rejecting Medjugorje, I would listen to them as they would indeed had more to gain IMO if they had decided to accept the apparitions as real, unfortunately the seers continue to disobey and embarrass themselves and the church.
The brain makes up nothing thought happens in the consciousness which is not produced by the brain.
That might have been a valid stance in the 17th century when people still thought that neural signalling worked via bell-pulls, but thankfully, scientific understanding has advanced a little since then, and now we can directly observe thought processes happening in the brain via fMRI.
That should be enough to show that thoughts do originate in the brain for any sensible person; however, I’m sure you’re going to reply with the same old hand-waving about how the brain is some kind of an ‘antenna’ of the supernatural or immaterial, anyway. If that’s the case, you might as well save us both some time and not bother, for, to me, this explanation suffers from the fatal flaw of not being able to give an account of how the immaterial is supposed to interact with the material; how something non-physical is supposed to have physical effects (as our thoughts undoubtedly do). Consider a very simplified universe made up of billard balls and the space between them: their interactions are described by simple mechanics, they collide and change their trajectories according to the laws of conservation of energy and momentum. Now, some supernatural demon wishes to produce an effect on those billiard balls – change the course of one of them, for instance. On the face of it, this might seem simple enough: it exerts its will, and, through magic, the ball changes its course; and in a similar way, our supernatural consciousness could easily affect our physical bodies in such a way as to take some form of action.
However, we should take a closer look at the point of contact, at the interface between the natural and the supernatural, when the demon willed the ball to alter its course. How did the information to change its trajectory reach the ball? How could it know the will of the demon? Well, that’s magic for you, the demon just zapped it with a supernatural bolt of lightning which… then did exactly what? Did it hit the ball, transferring energy and momentum? If that’s the case, then it must be a physical object, since the ability to interact in some way is all that’s required for something to be physical – because, if it interacts, it can be detected, it can be tested, it effects changes in the physical world that can be measured. It may still be something strange, but it is definitely physical.
Well, alright, so the magical lightning bolt is physical after all, but still, it comes from our supernatural demon, so it’s still a method for the supernatural to affect the natural. Except – now that we’ve established the naturalness of the lightning bolt, it faces the same problem the ball did before: how is it influenced by something supernatural? Again, the only conclusion is that if the demon is able to influence physical reality, that means it must itself interact with physical reality in a measurable, quantifiable and describable way, and thus, be a part of physical reality itself!
What you want, is both a movement without cause – for if the ball were to move without anything exerting a physical influence on it, that is exactly what happens – and yet for something to cause the ball to move. This is a contradiction, and remains one when broadened to the more complicated world we inhabit.
Everything that interacts with the physical world is itself physical, for that very interaction opens it up to measurement (think about magnetic fields: you can’t see them, smell them, hear them, but with a hand full of iron filings they’re easily detected; you enhance your natural abilities of detection and thus realize in the magnetic field a physical thing. If instead of iron filings you had something the supernatural interacted with, you would similarly enhance your perception, and the supernatural would progress from the realm of the mysterious into the realm of the ordinary). One might say that it’s only the part that interacts that then must be physical, but remember that the parts making up any given thing must interact with each other, too; else, it would not be one single thing. So, if something has a part that is physical, it is totally physical.
This might seem as a bit of a hijack, and I’ve certainly written more than I originally intended to, but, if god wants to induce a [del]hallucination[/del] religious experience in somebody, he is met with the same difficulties as the hypothetical demon trying to cheat at billards, so I’d say this is not totally beside the point.
I don’t have Maslow’s book, but the same point has been verified by other researchers many times. For example, in McNamara’s Where God and Science Meet:
Lots more studies here if you’d like to read them.
Well, I’ve never claimed that there is no single such occurrence. What Dawkins does is have a section in which he claims to have addressed “The Argument from Personal ‘Experience’”, and in that section he only actually mentions people who see visions or hear voices. He gives no indication that he acknowledges the existence of other forms of religious experience.
How are you defining “religious experience?”
No matter HOW you define it, you can’t show any evidence that any of it is not self-generated. You certainly aren’t trying to assert that the Virgin Mary really exists and appears to people, are you?
The Catholic Church does no such thing. The current position of the Catholic Church is neither approval and condemnation, but more of a provisional acceptance that may be changed at a later date. The Vatican has disallowed official pilgrimages to Medjugorje funded by the Church itself, but has not in any way disallowed or discouraged Catholics from making pilgrimages, carrying out devotions, or otherwise treating the events as genuine. Within the Catholic Church, the debate centers much more around doctrinal correctness than scientific evidence. Some ultra-conservative factions dislike what the visionaries are saying, and hence they want the Vatican to declare the visions invalid, but the the Vatican has not done so.
Bishop Zlavo’s position is well known, but it’s not the last word on the issue from the Catholic Church. If you read Sullivan’s book, you’ll see that the Bishops’ position were related to political problems. In 1981 all of Yugoslavia was still under communist rule and the authorities were very hostile to Christianity. Although churches were allowed to practice, large gatherings were forbidden and many clergy were arrested. Not surprisingly, the government in Belgrade was unhappy when tens of thousands of people started visiting Medjugorje, and they more or less ordered the Bishop to declare it a fake and break up the gatherings.
Besides which, it is simply wrong to suggest that the Church overall has some sort of bias towards declaring that visions are authentic. Anyone who follows this issue at depth knows that the Catholic Church always leans heavily against authenticity when a claim is reported, as your own link says. When a would-be seer or miracle-worker shows up, the institutional church is almost always hostile to them and urges them strongly to abandon their claim.
You did not check the other cites.
Investigations by the church dismissed the seers. Politics had little to do with it.
And to me it would be odd to call this neither approval or condemnation:
What did someone said about a house divided? Good thing that I’m a lapsed Catholic.
I am trying very hard to understand the process, maybe you could help. The subject looks at the word neuron then a software program scans the brain activity and does exactly what? Then another program does something while the subject looks at “fresh” what?
I would like very much to understand this, when I was young 50 years ago I read an article in a psychiatry journal that said people in the near future would learn math by taking an injection. Never happened of course. I think this is just another wishful thought.
The first step is one of calibration – the proband looks at a certain number of (random) 10x10 pixel images, while a fMRI device records the patterns of activation in the brain; the idea is to get a mapping of such images to patterns of neural activity. Then, a (or a number of) novel 10x10 pixel image is presented to the proband, and a computer linked to the fMRI device attempts to reconstruct the picture seen. It’s important to note that using this method, you can reliably identify pictures that have never before been seen by the test person, like the letter ‘n’ in the word ‘neuron’, so it’s not just a case of the computer ‘looking up’ previously recorded activity patterns and matching them to pictures using its database; no, the brain does something to the data it receives from the eyes in an algorithmically predictable way – it thinks. Even if you want to claim that what is being observed is just the brain ‘sending’ the data to the supernatural consciousness, this remains true: it has gathered the data and acted on it, produced an output from an input in a consistent and repeatable fashion; and ultimately, that’s all that thinking is.
Why a wishful thought? It’s already reality! (However, I do admit that there have been times when I could have used a math injection or ten…)
Say what??
I know kung-fu!
OK I do understand it better, but will reserve judgement until it gets better if ever. Meanwhile the research on near death experiences clearly shows a separation of brain and consciousness. Something I have experienced.
No-you had a bad dream.
Your quote kind of fails in that it’s already seperated out two types of religious person - a particular definition of what interior and exterior mean in this context would be helpful (especially if it’s something that could be applied equally to nonreligiosity), but note that it doesn’t seem to compare exterior religious folk - nor are “interior” or “exterior” qualified in terms of hallucinations, or, indeed, any kind of religious experience.
They are indeed pretty interesting, but I can’t see any that manage to back up your main claim (or indeed the site itself’s main claim). The studies cited in it variously claim that religiousness and psychopathy aren’t particularly linked (which isn’t Dawkins’, or those considering religious experiences hallucinations, claim), ones which are at odds with each other as to whether religiousness is a bulwark against varying types of mental affliction or not, one claiming that apparently not being spiritual is itself a sign of mental illness (which, amusingly enough, would make you as its supporter pretty much the opposite side of what you consider Dawkins to believe; i’m not spiritual myself, so I hope you won’t hold my inevtiable sickness against me), one that says (in what surely is a never-before-thought idea in psychology) that apparently Freud might be wrong on some things, one saying that there should be more strict, scientific theoretical approaches to religious and psychology (pretty much in keeping with what a lot of people are adovocating, at least in part, in this thread), and, finally, something i’d be willing to cautiously accept; that religiousness can in general have a physical health benefit, at least with American Christians. But that hasn’t been your (or Dawkins’) claims either.
Out of interest, if you don’t have Maslow’s book. where did you get the original quote from?
Well, i’ve never claimed that you claimed that, to continue that. 
Hence me asking the question as to whether you did, and all. Unfortunetly, you’re entirely incorrect, as I believe i’ve already pointed out (though, helpfully for your argument, you seem to have moved the goalposts from “he claims these are the only types” to “he only happens to mention these types”, while seemingly avoiding mentioning the backpeddle). He also mentions “visitations” (and considering “visions” is a seperate category in that sentence, it is clear he is not just using a different word to mean the same thing), unconscious imaginings, and manifestations. When talking about people in asylums (to whom he does appear to consider analogous, for at least some people who have had religious experiences) he mentions convicted belief arising from within. So no, Dawkins has not done that, and he gives several indications otherwise.
Seriously, read the thing. Like i’ve said, I agree with your overall point, but your arguments in service of it are terrible.
I LOVE bad dreams! Yeah, I love them less if my internal censor gives one a temporary pass, but I’m pretty damned sure that what he rejects is rejectable, no matter how fun it was at the time. Examples include my kids doing their chores and Marie Osmond moving in with us. As the former seems impossible, not even I took enough drugs in the 70s to mentally make the latter happen.