Posted: Oct 21, 2014 11:29 pm
Spearthrower wrote:I have very little to say on this topic as I consider it mostly mystical speculation worded as if it were fact, however this is now the 2nd time I've read you state this.
Well, I wouldn't necessarily say it's all speculation. I mentioned earlier that Dr. Rick Strassman felt the culprit behind these so-called 'mystical experiences' may be a natural induction of endogenous N,N-DMT. Dimethyltryptamine, as you may know, is naturally occurring neurotransmitter that also is one of the world's most powerful entheogens. There was a study done at the John Hopkins University involving clinical trials with psilocybin. Psilocybin is structurally related to N,N-DMT, and the research actually proved that a 'mystical experience' as described in ancient religion could, in fact, be induced by administering an effective dose to the volunteer.
Spearthrower wrote:Please be clear: not ALL physicists agree with the above - actually, only a very few are even interested in dealing with consciousness, and of those, only a minority would hold the position you ascribe to them. Perhaps you could specify which ones you are talking about.
At the very edge of science's explanatory power, you arrive at M-theory. This is basically science's best shot at describing the multiverse, and it involves including higher spatial dimensions into the equation. Some theoretical physicists feel that consciousness is no exception if we're going to describe how the mind truly works. David Bohm is considered to be one of the most significant theoretical physicists of the 20th century, and espoused such ideas as "quantum consciousness." I'm not trying to appeal to authority here, but I'd like to acknowledge the fact that neuroscience finds consciousness to be a very slippery topic. It's still somewhat of a mystery of how it truly functions. Even Wiki's page on consciousness makes the statement, "Nothing worth reading has been written about consciousness." So, I find it a very interesting topic, and I don't posit any of these concepts as true, and I'm also skeptical about a lot of these ideas. Materialism is sometimes thrown out there as though it's had the official stamp of neuroscience as the end-all, be-all explanation of consciousness. I don't think that's the case.