Posted: Oct 16, 2014 9:45 pm
Stein wrote:What really matters is what professional rigorous scientific analysts can extract from placing this recurring trans-cultural phenomenon under properly rigorous scrutiny. If religions and the notion of some deity had never been mooted by humans, what is the first thing a sensible neuroscientist would do in analyzing this constantly recurring brain hiccup? What is really going on in these hiccups, and why do they recur across millennia?
The reason why similar things happen to different people is that brains are similar, and when they function abnormally they tend to do so in common ways.
People often have similar experiences to each other when feverish, or when they take a particular psychoactive substance, or get sleep-deprived, or suffer from particular mental illnesses, or...
How does someone 'rigorously scrutinise' someone else's feeling of 'oneness with the universe'?
Such feelings seem likely to be vague by definition and difficult to verbally describe.
It's possible to stick someone in a scanner and see what brain regions are active, but that doesn't say much about what the experience is actually like or what it feels like it's about.