Interesting exploration into the mechanism behind experiences with the Divine. Where can I buy one of these? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y02UlkYjSi0 Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
Maybe it's just me. I couldn't get your link to work. I did, however, google 'god helmet' (two E's) and found this video, which I suppose must be what you were referring to. All right. Interesting. I gather you're kidding about wanting to buy one. I don't see why you would. Even the scientist who conducted the experiment said you could recreate the experience in any sort of church, synagogue, temple or mosque or alone in your room. I don't see how magnetically stimulating certain areas of the brain show that all religious experiences are false, if that's what they were trying to prove. Maybe they just found 'the spiritual door' that is there for the few rare times when 'the gods' want to contact us. Toward the end the scientist admits there are stimuli to religious experience we/they may not have even considered in the experiments, so whatever... I am not impressed and these experiments neither prove or disprove anything. The experiments also mention consolation of fear of death, which is always nice, but I know that my religious feelings rarely have anything to do with fear of death. They have more to do with the worries of life, or sometimes just pure joy basking in God's love. Thanks for raising the issue just the same.
I corrected my link but I think you saw the same video. I WOULD like to experience the God Helmet, especially since many such trials involve the sense of other presences. For all we know this sort of magnetic stimulation may not be inducing hallucinations so much as enhancing a latent capacity of the brain to perceive/experience a level of reality normally veiled from us. William Blake once observed: “If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro' narrow chinks of his cavern.” ― William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! “Each person is at each moment capable of remembering all that has ever happened to him and of perceiving everything that is happening everywhere in the universe. The function of the brain and nervous system is to protect us from being overwhelmed and confused by this mass of largely useless and irrelevant knowledge, by shutting out most of what we should otherwise perceive or remember at any moment, and leaving only that very small and special selection which is likely to be practically useful.” ― Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception
I don't need a God Helmet. Tinfoil works great for me. I think that I agree with Arne. (Oh jeez... hell just froze over!) Stimulating people's visual cortex can make them have the subjective experience of "seeing" spots of light. I don't think that most people would want to argue (Morpheous-style) that phenomenon constitutes persuasive evidence that the world that we typically see around us doesn't exist. It's probably more along the line of introducing false and spurious data on the vision channel. So if somebody wants to defend the evidenciary value of religious experience, they need only hypothesize that the God-helmet is just introducing false and spurious data into whatever religious experience channel they believe exists.
I would too. I'd go for it in an instant if I had the chance. That's an interesting thought. (I can always count on you for interesting thoughts. As for me, I'm not sure what I think of religious experiences. My attitude is basically skeptical I guess, but at the same time I'm not prepared to totally dismiss them either. Are religious experiences experiences of some objective reality that exists independently of the experiencer? It would be interesting indeed if users of the God Helmet all reported experiencing the presence of recognizably the same things, verifiable by others using the helmet. (That still wouldn't entirely rule out the possibility that the perceived similarities were really due to similarities in human brain physiology or something.) Perhaps proponents of religious experiences could argue for an analogy with instruments like microscopes and telescopes that enable people to perceive things that are invisible without the instrument. It might be hard to evaluate the plausibility of that idea though, without knowing far more than we presently know about what religious experiences are experiences of and about how the experiences are mediated. After all, if anyone has doubts about what telescopes and microscopes show us, optics provides convincing explanations of their mechanisms. Even if the God Helmet doesn't reveal any objective realities (and I'm doubtful that it will) subjective experiences shouldn't be sneered at. That might be the God Helmet's real value. What if we could tune the God Helmet to give subjects strong doses of feelings of universal good-will and benevolence? There might conceivably be all kinds of positive effects of using this thing.
Maybe we all get our own little God Helmet (or Reality Helmet) at birth--our culture laying down the semantic and logical foil runs in our brains over which the experiences of our lives will be routed and processed. Maybe Science itself is just a big consensual Reality Helmet or app we run in our own brains that preselects, amplifies, or filters out the scads of data flooding in thru our sensory channels. What would Reality be like without the processing of this brain program? An infinite interpenetrating field of pure iridescent energies and forces all happening in the present only. Most of us could never handle something like that. Perhaps only rare individuals like mystics and shamans learned how to integrate this quasi-dimensional continuum of scintillating pleromic novelty into their consciousness.
Well, Hell has thawed out again, my friend, because now that MR has explained himself better, I agree with him, and Huxley and Blake. However, why muck about with magnets and helmets? Why not just drop some acid?
