h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I clicked here "to be the first person to discuss this Guide Entry" though I know I'm not -- I found the article through a parallel conversation, F57153?thread="smiley - rainbow" title="rainbow" class="smiley" src="http://www.h2g2.com/h2g2/skins/Alabaster/images/Smilies/f_rainbow.gif"/>

Thanks for your comments! I've just updated it slightly, as you were posting this!

Links for some of the famous epileptics. Good idea, I'll get googling, and thanks for the link.

Agreed. It should say 'brain'. Thanks.



Ste

excellent peice - very interesting.

One point though
Temporal lobe epilepsy suffers such as Joan of Arc, Muhammad, Moses, and Saint Paul : what evidence is there to support this ?. Possibly worth a footnote to support the point.

Lost Rhino

'excellent peice - very interesting.'
Thanks.

You have a point Mr Rhino

Though an h2g2 entry doesn't require references, perhaps I should back this up some more. There were three articles I read that each mentioned some, but not all of those historical figures. I just took them and lumped them together. I'll scour my research and get websearching to try and find some supporting documents. Though I can't promise anything . I suspect the diagnosis of TLE was from historical documents, describing their behaviour, but I'll see.

Thanks for reading and for commenting

Ste

Life can throw such horrible things at humans that the delusional is a necessary part of survival and so the brain has evolved a 'virtual reality' centre all of its own.
Like other areas of the body this can, in some people, be over and under active.
If for instance faced with absolute horrors in reality, with no apparent survival outcome, this area of the brain can switch on and give us a quote like "all shall be well". We can back this up with the idea that we are being 'looked after' by a supreme being.
In some circumstances this may initiate a 'will' to survive against all the odds and click us into an activity which removes us from the danger.
Therefore it is not a 'weakness' to believe in God or a supreme being in these circumstances, but a strength.
It would appear to only become problematic when the 'supreme being' is credited with the humanistic characteristics of wanting some kind of pay back. Ie. worship, in some hideous forms .The other downside to the ability to beneficially self delude, is that other , more controlling humans can take advantage of it.

What an intriguing topic. Having just lost nearly half-an-hour's worth of writing on it,(while checking out Moth's home page) the second attempt will be, perhaps, briefer.

A couple of point's regarding Ste's excellent description of the basic neurotheological position. Question: Paragraph 3: "Can all of this really be explained and witnessed using a glorified X-ray machine which tracks blood around your head? Strangely, yes." Witnessed, definitely yes. Explained? I wonder.

Moth seems to agree, if I understand her aright, with the idea that belief in a divine being, or God, is a survival mechanism. This would certainly accord with the evolutionist understanding of neurotheology, as propounded by Prof. Richard Dawkins on the BBC documentary, "God on the Brain," which was shown a few nights ago. But is that all there is to it?

Let me put my cards on the table, in a brief biog: I have been the subject of scientific laboratory investigation into the physiological effects of meditation (T.M.) 35 years meditating, preceded by recreational and other psychogenic drug use, on an overlay of a childhood of fairly relaxed Protestantism, in the Irish context of staunchly Catholic nannies etc. So God was a big, all-seeing daddy threat. A brief flirtation with Tibetan Buddhism in the early 70's was followed by a continuing immersion in what could best be described as non-specifically-religious meditation ( advaita vedanta, in origin.) As an experienced psychonaut, I can attest to the very different subjective flavours of a variety of so-called "religious/spiritual" experiences. It is far too simplistic to say merely that they can all be explained by X,Y,or Z brain activities.( And only psylocibin ever produced visions of "gods".)

Interestingly, my childhood memories included considerable curiosity as to why my consciousness/awareness was limited to my body ( Hi, Berkeley ). But aged 21, before any psychotropic drugs had entered my system ( I was quite a late starter ) an experience of awesome, all-encompassing universality/unity arose during a concert. Hypnotic music? Perhaps, but absolutely not of a type usually classified as "drum-and-dance" trance inducing.

It was Ravi Shankar playing a long sitar solo ( no hypnotic tabla rhythms..) What was interesting was that the experience/epiphany lasted for a considerable length of time, as these things go, with the emotional aftermath lasting several weeks. The upshot was absolutely not a conversion to religious belief ( which compulsory church attendance and endless choir practice at boarding school had effectively expunged ) but to an unshakeable intuition of the universality of consciousness ( hello again, Berkeley) as One, as a unity, that the mind is not individual, but that individual minds arise as waves within the ocean of universality through the awareness of individuals. Buddhism seemed to come closest to describing my experience of "truth." And this took place at a time of zero stress, zero threat, no drugs ( not even alcohol!), nothing other than serenely beautiful music. And only that concert.

This unity perception is the position of advaita ( non-dual ) vedanta, the oldest of the Indian philosophical systems, which interpenetrated Buddhist thought, and even intermingled with some of the Greek philosophers also.

The materialists will say, so what, it's still just brain-cells doing their thing. And I agree to the extent that every state of consciousness has an equivalent level of physiological activity. So why did exposing the brain, specifically the temporal lobes, of Prof. Richard Dawkins to the magnetic field stimulation helmet produce no results?

Is my ongoing intuition of non-self/unity perception merely parietal lobe suppression? And if so, why did this intuition of unity only return to my awareness in the last year, 35 years after that initial epiphany at the Ravi Shankar concert? And why do I not believe in either a personal god, or a personal self/soul?

I should add that I have never heard "voices-of-god/s" speaking to me.
I have been near death three times, once in sickness, twice in near-fatal car crashes, but never had a near-death/out-of-body experience! Indeed, for your amusement, the time I did have "down-the-tunnel/into-the-light/out-of-the-body" experiences was while making love in the days before drugs screwed up my synapses!

And that is a point I want to underline, that three years of psychoactive drug-taking completely blotted out all trace of the earlier states of heightened awareness. And it took years of meditation before that intuitional aspect of mind started to return.

So, in my experience, it is altogether too facile to equate all so-called "spiritual" experience, drug-induced, trance-induced, helmet-induced, or whatever. And we haven't even got into the interesting stuff.

But that's more than enough for now.

Chaiwallah

I don't mean to negate the god experience with my thoughts on temporal lobe/parietal lobes supression by electro magnetic fields.
My thoughts on the godthing are the same as yours in terms of believing that what we call God is the complete consciousness which is what the Universe, and contents, is 'made' of .
Rather that this opens a 'door' in the parietal lobes
The one thing I have learnt is that whilst in the physical body we are 'alone' - we are separated.
Supression of the parietal lobes reduces this feeling.
We can decide for ourselves whether this is delusion or a very real connection to consciousness of the 'not alone'
which is the delusion? Separation or Oneness.
Is it the function of the parietal lobes to produce the feeling of separation and yet when it is 'switched' off we get a truer picture of our condition or vice versa?

That indeed, is the question, revered Moth. At the risk of annoying any "hard" scientists reading this thread, the "interesting stuff" with regard to consciousness/unity etc., emerges from areas that do not seem to be very amenable to "scientific method" investigation. This is a huge topic.

For instance, to start by considering the "truth" of hard science is to uncover a real can of worms, esp., regarding the weirdness of,say, quantum physics. But to stay closer to this thread for the moment, UK's Channel 4 TV recently aired a documentary called "Do You Believe In Magic?" showing how the current popularity of all sorts of "spiritual" alternatives were reactions against "hard" science, particularly in view of the established church's failure to provide meaning in the wake of WWI, ( not to mention WWII and the Jewish holocaust.)

We saw Prof. Richard Dawkins bemoaning the fact that popular astrology was so much duller than the real magic of astronomy ( amen to that ) but what we did not see, and this is significant, was any treatment of what we might call the ritual-magic aspect of supposedly "hard" science.

The classic examples of this are the recent studies which showed that various "hard" surgical procedures may merely have a placebo effect, including coronary bypass and arthroscopy!

WHAT? I hear you cry. An extraordinary recent study showed that arthroscopy patients who had merely been anaesthetised and subjected to small incisions in the skin of their knees recovered as well as those who had had actual arthroscopy with the full deal of scraping off the damaged cartilege etc. Same thing a while ago with a study on coronary bypass patients.Those who were only anaesthetised and incised had the same recovery rate as those who had their coronary arteries re-plumbed.

And this is absolutely central to this discussion, because it demonstrates that ritual, no matter how seemingly dotty from a "hard" scientific point-of-view, may enable us to effect changes in consciousness which defy the apparent rules of science.

So, now, if you're ready, here's a bit of the really weird stuff. A relatively well-documented occurence amongst Tibetan buddhist lamas, particularly of the two older sects ( Nyingma and Kargyupa ), is called "jalu" or "rainbow body." This occurs in the days immediately following death ( and can therefore have absolutely no genetic survival/evolutionary value ) in which the body of the dead lama gradually diminishes in size, and finally, after no more than seven days, completely dematerialises, leaving only the non-living tissue of hair and nails. During the seven days, there are usually reports of "rainbow" light emanating from the area around the body.

One of the most famous cases was a stone-carver, Sonam Namgyal, not even a monk, but a "secret yogi," who died in 1952 in Eastern Tibet.( cf. 'The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying", by Sogyal Rimpoche, pps 167-169.) But the story is reported in other sources as well, and I know a Tibetan who lived in the area and told me about the case independently. Another well-respected Tibetan lama recently told me of two more instances that occured in the last couple of years in occupied Eastern Tibet ( despite China's negative impact on the religious structures of Tibet.)

The point being the nature of the relationship between consciousness and the physical structure. Which actually depends on which?

Enough for now, but there's lots more where that came from.

PS ( my last entry seems to have been a bit of a conversation stopper!) Anyone interested can see HH the Dalai Lama's contribution to this debate in the New York Times, op-ed, 26th April. It seems both Dr. Davidson of the Univ. of Wisconsin, and Dr. Ekman of the Univ of California at San Francisco have both been working on parietal lobe functioning.

If the parietal lobe has evolved as a mechanism to define our "selfness" in relation to a threatening "other" environment, then maybe its de-activation through meditative techniques allow a different "reality" to be perceived.

Certainly, the upshot of long-term meditation is probably not in the best interests of "selfish" gene propagation. If the individual sense of "self" becomes less important, then the struggle to survive as an "individual" gene-carrier is also less of a priority.

Is this a subtle part of Richard Dawkins' "Conspiracy of Doves?" Or why does our genetic mechanism allow for the arising of the "Unity" experience, which tells us that all beings are an inseparable, equally valuable part of a seamlessly unified wholeness?

Recumbentman may be able to enlighten me?

I can try.

Just as each stage of evolution unwittingly creates a niche for the next -- herbivores become food for carnivores like lions and tigers for instance -- big human brains provide a home for consciousness.

The agenda of consciousness is not the same as the agenda of genes, and, as we see, they are in constant conflict.

Hence all the human problems.

I may be being singularly obtuse, but are you not, Recumbentman, begging the question when you say that big human brains provide a home for consciousness, as though consciousness were a higher order of material creature on the evolutionary scale?

Genes are material measurable, albeit microscopic entities, whereas consciousness is an intangible abstract quality, measurable only in its apparent effects. As some scientist said somewhere in something I read sometime ago, "There is no way of predicting consciousness from the biochemistry."

Or have I missed Dawkins' point? And your point?

Does that have to be an either/or question?



Aha, the old mind/body problem, eh?
The physical structure can usefully be regarded as a set of relationships between its parts.
The mental structure can usefully be regarded as a set of relationships between its parts.

Noggin

Us normals cannot conceive of there being a consciousness devoid of a physical supporting structure. But there is a tradition of "enlightened" beings who insist that there can be consciousness devoid of a physical support mechanism, indeed, that consciousness has no causative relationship with the physical. But I don't see how one can discuss that, except as heasay.

The physical IS a set of causative relations. If consciousness is consciousness of these causal relationships it must be causally related to them. Otherwise it would just be a solipsistic illusion.

Noggin

Oh my poor scrambled brains. Retires to check exact meaning of solipsism ( well, the Eng.Lang.Lit.degree was a long time ago, and I no longer share a workshop with the learned Recumbentman to keep my philosophical repertoire up-to-scratch.)

noggin
I'm actually thinking of this as a mind/conscious problem not body/mind.
I stopped posting here because I realised that I was talking about same stuff on other channel!!! God myth or fact thing and in danger of repetition.

I've been battering on for ages about the whole of the universe being 'made' of the same 'stuff' (note the intellectual and reasoned use of the word 'stuff ) this is because I do not want to humanise it or matterfy it !!!
This makes sense, everything is made of atoms and yet there are sub atomic particles so everything is made of subatomic particles.
some of which are still being discovered.
I've tempted to call these particles what is being identified as dark energy or that science will discover that at the foundation of the atom is the dark atom.
but these atoms will behave like consciousness more than matter.
I'd also go as far as to predict that discovering these particles (rather than the effect of these particles) will be difficult. BECAUSE they will react with the consciousness of the investigator to become whatever he wills them to be.

Solipsism is sometimes expressed as the view that 'I am the only mind which exists', or 'My mental states are the only mental states'. However, the sole survivor of a nuclear holocaust might truly come to believe in either of these propositions without thereby being a solipsist. Solipsism is therefore more properly regarded as the doctrine that, in principle, 'existence' means for me my existence and that of my mental states. In other words, everything which I experience - physical objects, other people, events and processes, in short, anything which would commonly be regarded as a constituent of the spatio-temporal matrix in which I coexist with others - is necessarily construed by me as part of the content of my consciousness. For the solipsist, it is not merely the case that he believes that his thoughts, experiences, and emotions are, as a matter of contingent fact, the only thoughts, experiences, and emotions. Rather, the solipsist can attach no meaning to the supposition that there could be thoughts, experiences, and emotions other than his own. In short, the true solipsist understands the word 'pain', for example, to mean 'my pain' - he cannot accordingly conceive how this word is to be applied in any sense other than this exclusively egocentric one."

Minds are physical and as such many billions of them exist.
however if solipsism referred to consciousness it would be correct only the word 'mine' would be a product of self instead of mine in terms of the whole of consciousness or the what 'enlightened' people call ONE.
so billions of minds but only one consciousness. - the whole, the everything.
to tap into it brings us the phenomena of ; telepathy, precognition, ancestral memory, previous lives, astral travel. deju vue. spiritulism.
Because we are all ONE and it is this larger 'mind' that is singular .
Love is a state of quantum entanglement of the larger mind .

and another thought for the future
Once we discover 'how this all works' then time travel and teleportation may be a real option.
BUT instead of teleporting the whole body, the mind can use the consciousness to travel where and wherever it wants to go.

Derar Moth,

Thank you for all of that. Yes, these threads seem to be converging. And I now remember the derivation of solipsism being "solo ipse." The difference between the ego-centric solipsist and the unity-conscious visionary being precisely as you expressed it. I have tried to express my vision of that unity over on the other thread, so I won't repeat it here.

The "faith" of the "nothing-but" materialist view of evolution rarely takes time to deal with the paradoxical weirdness of the quantum world. Dark atoms, dark consciousness??? The mystery of the relationship between consciousness and "matter" at the deepest levels of sub-atomic activity is the most exciting area of science. Have you read John Gribbin on Schrodinger's Cat, Kittens et al?