Greetings from London

[malati]

Well, you have to give more details of the "findings".

Hare Krishna

[Ekantin]

See my last post? There were two links in there. Click them. Read them. All will be revealed.

Hare Krishna. ;D

[malati]

Ekantin, Your blog and the article you linked to are too technical. You don't want to be understood, do you?


It's not a forgone conclusion yet !


Three perspectives:

Francis Collins, medical doctor, geneticist and believer of God


Horgan: What do you think about the field of neurotheology, which attempts to identify the neural basis of religious experiences?

Collins: I think it's fascinating but not particularly surprising. We humans are flesh and blood. So it wouldn't trouble me—if I were to have some mystical experience myself—to discover that my temporal lobe was lit up. That doesn't mean that this doesn't have genuine spiritual significance. Those who come at this issue with the presumption that there is nothing outside the natural world will look at this data and say, "Ya see?" Whereas those who come with the presumption that we are spiritual creatures will go, "Cool! There is a natural correlate to this mystical experience! How about that!"


Collins interview, from National Geographic, link below.
ngm.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/0702/voices.html



Next one is from a nun, Pam Miller's blog:
www.godsdirectcontact.com/relatedtopics/meditationexperience.html

One neurotheological researcher, Andrew Newberg, in his book “Why God Won’t Go Away,” describes the effect as follows: If you block this region, as you do during the intense concentration of meditation, you prevent the brain from distinguishing between self and not-self.” This could lead, then, to the impression of being ONE with the universe.

Another theory holds that heightened electrical activity in the temporal lobes may induce mystical experience and produce visions. This view even suggests that the great spiritual inspiration reached by historical figures such as Joan of Arc, Dostoyevsky, Proust, Saint Paul and Saint Teresa of Avila simply may have been caused by “temporal lobe epilepsy,” which consists of abnormal surges of electrical activity in the brain’s temporal regions. As this is the area that governs language and association, the theory is that mini electrical storms can cause a heightened experience of visions and interpretative images, such as visions of God. The left lobe is supposed to govern the sense of self. If the right lobe is completely quieted, while the left lobe is stimulated, the brain interprets a limitless sense of self, or union with God. This is how the “voices” heard by Joan of Arc and the visions of Saint Paul can be explained.

While all of this may seem like reductionist science attempting to provide rational explanations for phenomena it does not understand, there is acknowledgement by some that neural activity alone is not proof of these experiences being “imagined” by the brain. Newberg admits that “there is no way to determine whether the neurological changes associated with spiritual experience mean that the brain is causing those experiences…or is instead perceiving a spiritual reality”. What these types of studies may do, however, is open science to a greater way of understanding the nature of human consciousness, one of the greatest mysteries of life. This bridging between the fields of science and religion may well lead to new breakthroughs in human understanding.



You are not your brain
Alva Noe, Atheist, American Philosopher

www.salon.com/env/atoms_eden/2009/03/25/alva_noe/index.html

Q: Maybe I'm naive but it seems kind of obvious that the brain is the mechanism that -- in the context of a person's life and environment -- gives rise to consciousness. That's not to say it is the same as consciousness, but that it is the mechanism from which consciousness emerges.

A: The brain is necessary for consciousness. Of course! Just as an engine is necessary in a car. But an engine doesn't "give rise" to driving; driving isn't something that happens inside the engine. The engine contributes to the car's ability to drive. Consciousness is more like driving than our philosophical tradition leads us to expect. To be conscious is to have a world. The fact is, you and I don't have what it takes to make a world on our own. We find the world, we don't make it in our brains.

The brain is essential for our lives, physiology, health and experience. But the idea that it is the whole story, or even the key to understanding the story, is not a scientific conclusion. It's a prejudice. Consciousness requires the joint operation of the brain, the body and the world.

In fact, neuroscience is probably not in the best position to answer questions of consciousness and mind and experience. When we look for who and what we are in the brain alone, we lose the phenomena that interest us most.

Imagine that we find the Holy Grail of neurobiology, the patterns of neural activation that correlate perfectly with different events in our mental lives. We would still never understand or make sense of why those correlations exist. There is no intrinsic relationship between the experience and the neural substrates of the experience. We always need to look at what factors bring the two together. The environment, other people, our needs and desires -- all these things exist outside the brain and have to be seen as essential parts of our selves and consciousness. So we aren't just our brains, we're not locked inside our craniums; we extend beyond our skulls, beyond our skin, into the world we occupy.

Francis Crick did us a major service by taking seriously and publicizing the problem of consciousness. But in the journal Nature he wrote, "Scientists need no longer stand by listening to the tedious arguments of philosophers perpetually disagreeing with each other. The problem of consciousness is now a scientific problem."

I say, "Bravo!" Consciousness is a scientific problem! But Crick framed the problem in terms of an unquestioned set of philosophical dogmas; namely that the key to consciousness will be found in the brain, that that's literally where experience and thought take place. My book is not anti-science; it's a challenge to science to get serious. It's deluded to think we're free of philosophy.

Q: Is your battle a turf war between philosophy and neuroscience?

A: Not at all. I think these are scientific questions. I want to help science take them over. But I think science is in philosophically troubled waters here and it's just not ready yet to go it alone.
You're arguing that all we'll learn about by studying the brain is the brain.

Q: We'll never learn from the brain what love is? Or what religion is? Or consciousness?

A: Right. And that the radically reductionist view is not only unfounded, but it's also ugly. And dangerous.

Q: Dangerous, how?

A: There are practical dangers, like raising expectations too high for specific scientific programs. The motivation for proceeding along some line, or justification for funding it, may be based on the assumption that it will find the place where consciousness is happening.

Second, the question of consciousness is a problem for all of us -- not just for science. We all want to know how to understand humans and think about ourselves. And claiming that neuroscience is going to explain us to ourselves is false advertising. It's important that we not believe it.

But the view that the self and consciousness can be explained in terms of the brain, that the real us is found inside our skulls, isn't just misleading and wrong, it's ugly. In that view, each of us is trapped in the caverns of his own skull and the world is just a sort of shared figment. Everything is made interior, private, rational and computational. That may not pose a practical danger, but it presents a kind of spiritual danger.

In that view, each of us is an island of intellect, alone. When you think of us as just interior neurological mechanisms, you see us as alienated from the world around us. The world shows up for us as bits of information that we decipher, like linguistic relics of an ancient culture that we have to interpret. Like when Mr. Spock says, "What is this strange kissing custom?" The danger is alienation, plain and simple. We're strangers in a strange land.
I find this a very sad and ugly picture of our circumstance. Now contrast that view with a sense of ourselves as engaged in the flow, responsive to the things going on around us, part of the world. It's a very different picture.

Q: The late David Brower, conservationist and founder of Friends of the Earth, said that a California condor is only 5 percent feathers and blood and 95 percent its environment.

A: Exactly.

Q: There's a kind of temporal lobe epilepsy that causes people to experience deeply religious feelings. Couldn't the relevance of that association tell us something about, say, the roots or essence of religious experience?

I'm pessimistic. A lot is context; things always happen in a setting. Imagine how you feel after a run. Out of breath, rapid heartbeat, sweaty? Now imagine you just woke up feeling like that. It would be terrifying. But after a run it makes sense and it feels good. Meaning is not intrinsic, it's relational. It's only in context that an intense feeling means one thing or the other.

Again, we need to look outside neuroscience to understand what that significance is.

If someone had a seizure that caused a sensation like they imagine they might have if they were meeting God, that would be very confusing. But it would be a mistake to conclude from that that religious experience is only a brain state.

I'm not a religious person. And putting aside the fact I don't believe in God, I don't think the impulse of religion can be thought of as a kind of biological feature of us, or that there's something about our brains that makes us apt for that. I think of religions as communal and as literary traditions, both things existing outside the brain. I don't think of religious belief as something we can understand individualistically. When someone says they believe in God, you've got to understand the practices, customs, backgrounds and social realities that are part of that. None of it is going to reduce to anything individual inside of that person's brain.

People like Sam Harris, who worry about the irrationality of religious customs and practices, are right to be concerned. I agree that religion can be dangerous. But I don't think neuroscience is the way to understand it at all.


Q: Why are so many smart people these days looking at the brain as the key to understanding consciousness? Is it just irrational exuberance about the new imaging techniques and other technological advances that give us peeks inside the functioning brain?

A: Yes, but there's something else, too. For a long time now, going back at least to Descartes and Galileo, we've liked to be told that things are not what they seem. When we go to a magic show, there's a feeling of delicious pleasure when the wool has been pulled over our eyes. Similarly, to be told that the love you feel is actually just a chemical reaction, or that your depression is just a malfunctioning of your brain, is surprising and in some paradoxical way satisfying. There's a modern pleasure in the unmasking of our everyday experience. We feel like we're seeing behind the curtain, seeing how the trick is done.

Q: It validates our suspicion that the world is different than it looks?

A: Yes. Galileo said that the apple in your hand is colorless, odorless and flavorless. That color and so on are effects that the apple has on you, comparable to the sensation of the prick of a pin. The flavor of the apple, he said, is no more in the apple than the prickliness is in the pin. The taste and the prickliness are in you. Galileo thought we were radically deceived by the world around us. The contemporary neuroscientists simply extend this even further -- this idea that the world is a kind of grand illusion that the brain creates.

Sure, it's an important fact that the perception of colors depends on the physics of light and the nature of the nervous system. If our physiology were different, our ability to detect colors would be different. But none of that speaks to the unreality of color, any more than saying that I can't see anything in my room if I turn the lights off speaks to the unreality of my desk. We've almost made a fetish of this desire to be told that things are not what they seem. We get a thrill from the paradox.

[Ekantin]

Malati, please don't try to teach me about religion and/or the problem of consciousness. I have been privately studying the relation of consciousness to religion for around the last five years. Please also don't try to quote "big names" like Andrew Newberg at me. I know full well who Newberg is. You don't. I have written about Newberg at my blog too. He is a fraud. There are plenty of other frauds like him out there.

It is an open fact that scientists don't understand the problem of consciousness yet. But this wasn't the subject we were discussing. We were discussing that religious thinking is the same as social/human thinking. Why have you suddenly switched to blurting entire blockquotes about consciousness at me? Clearly you don't understand what you are reading at all. If you did, you would have known how horrifically redundant all of those opinions are. You think I was being technical? The first link was to a proper scientific paper published by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), and the second was to my outline and commentary on that paper, where I took pains to outline the details of the paper for everyone (the public) to read and understand. Too technical? Too bad. I deal in real science; details like fMRI analyses, blood counts, analyses of variances, multiple analyses, linear regressions, and much more. Hard details. You clearly prefer getting your information from blogs, columns and magazines over real science. That is your right, but as it is, you now consider the opinion of a philosopher or a nun is as important as or greater than that of a neuroscientist.

You know what? Talking to you has been tedious. You haven't understood anything I've been trying to say to you, yet somehow you think you know it all. I'm not wasting any more of my time on you. Life's too short. See you around.

[malati]

Sept 29, 2009 16:48:33 GMT -6 Ekantin said:

Malati, please don't try to teach me about religion and/or the problem of consciousness. I have been privately studying the relation of consciousness to religion for around the last five years. Please also don't try to quote "big names" like Andrew Newberg at me. I know full well who Newberg is. You don't. I have written about Newberg at my blog too. He is a fraud. There are plenty of other frauds like him out there.

It is an open fact that scientists don't understand the problem of consciousness yet. But this wasn't the subject we were discussing. We were discussing that religious thinking is the same as social/human thinking. Why have you suddenly switched to blurting entire blockquotes about consciousness at me? Clearly you don't understand what you are reading at all. If you did, you would have known how horrifically redundant all of those opinions are. You think I was being technical? The first link was to a proper scientific paper published by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), and the second was to my outline and commentary on that paper, where I took pains to outline the details of the paper for everyone (the public) to read and understand. Too technical? Too bad. I deal in real science; details like fMRI analyses, blood counts, analyses of variances, multiple analyses, linear regressions, and much more. Hard details. You clearly prefer getting your information from blogs, columns and magazines over real science. That is your right, but as it is, you now consider the opinion of a philosopher or a nun is as important as or greater than that of a neuroscientist.

You know what? Talking to you has been tedious. You haven't understood anything I've been trying to say to you, yet somehow you think you know it all. I'm not wasting any more of my time on you. Life's too short. See you around.

I appreciate your arrogance you know.

Who do you think among readers here can understand a technical paper like that.

I really am worried about you. Who cares if you know or not know Newberg or if a nun, a geneticist or a philosopher made their comments about the subject. What I'm after is an intelligent analysis of the significance of the result.

No one is questioning the method presented in the study. Afterall as far as I know no one is an expert in that field among the members here.

You have to refute what they said to make a case that the firing of a particular area in the brain is a definitive explanation why people feel a sense of transcendence and longings for something higher beyond themselves.

Because the truth is: the study is just a correlation to an event happening in a person's state.

How do you differentiate tears of joy and tears of sadness, if you are looking at the brain?

This type of study you pointed out in fact is not definitive.

In fact the result of one "God spot" scientific study in Persinger Laboratory in Canada failed to prove it, when a journalist was bombarded with electromagnetic waves in the area of the brain where they think causes the feeling of transcendence and thought about God, the journalist instead of thinking about God, thought about his childhood girlfriend and sex.



You don't know much about how science works. And I worry about your credentials.

Philosophy and science work hand in hand. And that has been the case since the enlightenment. If you read the biography of greats in the past you will know that scientists are philosophers too. After all if we are looking at the same world then we should be looking at the same thing albeit from different angles.

One psychologist researcher from MIT said that sometimes philosophers are more tough in analyzing scientific data .

I heard in an interview with your atheist heroe Daniel Dennett that science begins after philosophy has asked the questions. And that was referred to by Alva Noe in his interview above when he mentioned Crick.

Your vigorous posting in this forum shows the depth or lack of depth of your knowledge about science.


Kartik starts Oct 04. Jai Sri Damodar

[madanmohandas]

Since, according to the Bhagavat, the jiva is endowed with sense faculties that can be utilised for various purposes, it would hardly be surprising that the same faculties used fo contemplating the narratives of Hari Lila should be used for getting into Star Trek or whatever.

[Nitaidas]

Hi All,

Well, it looks like there have been some interesting postings while I was busy entertaining guests. Now I have a break of about a month before the next one shows up. I will try to get caught up here and see what has been going on.

It looks like our intrepid administrator Harisarana has vanished into thin air. He contributed a lot of good things last year, but has not been seen much lately. I hope he is well and doing sadhana. Anyway, I was wondering if anyone would like to take over for him as an administrator of this site. The only rule is that no one should be censored or made to look any more foolish than they are able to manage for themselves. My involvement here seems to be too sporadic for the present. I plan to spend as much time at the British Library as I can. It is a treasure-trove of Vaisnava texts.

Here is what I have been up to. I have been examining the works of a very active Vaisnava scholar at around the turn of the 20th century. This scholar's name is Syamalala Goswami and he seems to have published a vast amount in the years between 1890 and around 1910. Quite by accident I noticed a book on my shelf at home that I collected at some point during one of my trips to Kolkata. It is an edition with translation of the five short works of Visvanatha Cakravartin. I never looked at it closely before, but this time I noticed that it was by a Goswami named Syamalala and that the Bengali translation of the Sanskrit was more like a translation/commentary. The date of publication is 1906. So it is 103 years old. So I decided to take it with me to London and work on it in my spare time. Lo and behold guess whose books I find in the BL. Syamalal Goswami's! Surprisingly, the BL does not seem to have the book I have, though. Yesterday, I examined a huge edition of the Vedanta-sutras with the commentary of Baladeva and subcommentary of Baladeva and Syamalal Goswami's translation and essay on the text at the back. It must have been over a thousand pages long and from what I gather from the introduction this text (the commentaries of Baladeva) were all but lost until this edition was brought out. It was because of the presence of this edition that the translation of the text by Basu was possible. Later, many others copied this text and brought out their own editions (like the one done by the GM). But this was the ground breaking work.

The editor says that he had only three mss to work from, none being found in any of the other libraries around India. He complains that he knows for sure that certain parties had mss, but refused to lend them to him to use for this edition. He also thanks Kedaranath Datta Bhaktivinoda for lending him a hand copied version of part of a manuscript he had found in South India. One noble Goswami of the editor's acquaintance did lend him a complete copy of the text and that formed the basis of his editions, aided by the readings of Bhaktivinoda's copy and another partial ms he gained from yet another old Goswami family. At any rate, it was ground-breakign work and Syamalal Goswami, whose title was Siddhanta-vacaspati, was one of those who achieved it. It would be great to get a complete copy of it, but the BL charges too much for that. I may just go with my little laptop and type some in tomorrow. The first four sutras with commentaries are often the must important and set the tone for the rest of the text.

I will write about Goswamiji's two volume work entitled Sri Krsnalila on my next visit. It is pretty amazing. He also has a large work on Sri Gauranga which I will look at tomorrow.

[Ldd]

I know Ekantin tried his best ..... but I have to declare Malati the winner
Ekantin sounded like a gramaphone record of somebody else, while Malati sounds like a person with real inner revelations (thats what i considered when i gave her the prize.)
Jai vaishnava devi!

[Ekantin]

Sept 30, 2009 0:50:51 GMT -6 malati said:

Who do you think among readers here can understand a technical paper like that. I really am worried about you. Who cares if you know or not know Newberg or if a nun, a geneticist or a philosopher made their comments about the subject. What I'm after is an intelligent analysis of the significance of the result. No one is questioning the method presented in the study.

You really are rising from one level of thickness to higher ones. They do say it is better to be thought a fool than to open one's mouth and prove it beyond doubt, but I'm afraid in your case you lost your credibility a long time ago. And I'll tell you why, it is because every time you open your mouth you reveal yourself to be even more ignorant than before. You just asked me who among here can understand a technical science paper. You have claimed several times to be well-read in science, having read more about it than other people here etc., but you don't seem to know that the 'juice' of science, the results and stuff that actually make progress, lies in these "technical" papers published in proper science journals. Clearly you've never read a single such paper in your entire life. And that's OK, because I don't expect you or anyone else to regularly read them, but you actually seem to think that what is written in newspaper columns, blogs and magazines somehow trump actual and real evidence.

If you had read my post carefully (which you continually refuse to do with all my posts) you'll have seen that I wrote a review of that paper on my blog. Here it is, again. There is a large community of science bloggers out there who do this in their spare time. Did you hear what I just said? I said that there are actual scientists in large numbers who blog, they find interesting papers and "translate" them for public reading. You can find lots of them collected at ScienceBlog.com or ScienceBlogs.Com. I've done similar with this paper, I've described the methodology of this particular experiment and outlined the paper's results and conclusions. If you think you find it too hard, well, to me that says more about you. People like you don't want to put any effort into learning anything. You want everything handed to you on a plate. It makes me wonder how you survive reading all you do about physics when that is a seriously hard subject. But no, we have since discovered that you get all of your information from vox-pop magazines and nun blogs where opinions are counted higher than evidence. You might want to consider sticking to those, because you are clearly incapable on discussing a subject on the basis of evidence. Like scientists do.

Of course you aren't questioning the methodology of the experiment. How could you do such a thing when you don't know a single thing about the subject? But here is yet another revelation why I know you aren't as intelligent or well-read as you try to project. The reason is because everyone knows that scientists disagree on some subjects. Why do they disagree? Because of the methodology, they disagree with each other basically saying that the other did the experiment "wrong". And if it is wrong, then they'll do better next time. Or they'll do the experiment again, 'properly', and see what results turn out. This can take place because the methodology of experiments is questioned. Constructive criticism is a good thing. So it is in the interests of science to criticise a paper. If you read other articles on my blog, you'll see that I do the same thing. Now you're saying you're not questioning the methodology of this paper, and that's a fine thing. But I'll reserve my right to think that you're not criticising it because you can't (i.e. you don't know enough about the subject). This is why you erroneously thought that the subject of the experiment was about the nature of consciousness, and your reasoned response was to throw entire blockquotes at me from people who know as much about the subject as you do. Just once again, the subject of the paper was about how "religious" thinking doesn't differ from "normal" thinking in any way, they use the same neural processes. It had nothing to do with consciousness. It looks like Madanmohanji has already figured it out with his excellent post, why haven't you figured it out yet?

Now your next point was: "Who cares if you know or not know Newberg or if a nun, a geneticist or a philosopher made their comments about the subject." Well, bully for you! You clearly cared enough to quote the opinion of irrelevant people in this discussion, and now you wonder why I'm supposed to care? How is that a sensible proposition? But I'll tell you why this point of yours reaches new levels of stupidity, because in quoting their opinions you clearly thought that they had something valuable to say. Now would you mind telling me how the opinion of a geneticist or a nun has any bearing on neuroscience? Don't even bother answering this rhetorical question, their opinion is clearly irrelevant in comparison. You cannot compare subjective speculations ad wishy-washy theories with hard facts. However you did do something marginally clever in quoting Andrew Newberg who, much as I hate to admit it, has a fair background in neuroscientific experiments even though he isn't a qualified neuroscientist (he's a radiologist). Did you read the review at my blog? Well, I actually wrote some more about that experiment here: Further Thoughts on 'No More God Spot?', where I have also written about Andrew Newberg. Here is what I said there:

I still don't think much of the criticism referring to the drawback of testing only 'thinking' participants, those who agreed or disagreed with the statements being read out to them, instead of analysing a 'visionary' brain. How exactly would that work? Who made such a criticism like this? Do they even know what fMRI scans involve and how difficult or expensive they are to do? Ask Andrew Newberg (MD), the guy who apparently thinks it's sooo easy to scan a brain in the middle of a religious experience that he hasn't tried to do it himself. Or has he? Looking over his website and the research papers he's come out with, I notice that most of them were written for Zygon. If you've been following my blog for a while, you'll know exactly what I think of Zygon. Now I don't want to seem like I'm unnecessarily attacking some poor guy without provocation, but it comes to something when a titan like PZ Myers doesn't think much of him either. It is incidences like this that make it so hard for genuine science to reach the public and educate their little cotton socks, because Templeton yes-men like Newberg tend to pop up when you're least expecting them and feed something silly into the public imagination which, when investigated, turns out to be an overblown exaggeration.

Did you understand all that? If you follow all of the links and all, you'll get it. Andrew Newberg is a creationist. All or most of his papers are to do with religious subjects and most of which are published in a junk journal like Zygon, and he is a stooge of the Templeton Foundation who are notorious for funding projects that aim to find "positive links" between religion and science. That's why I care who Andrew Newberg is, Malati, because whatever this guy comes out with is slanted and biased, he has an investment in religion and not in the interests of science. I consider him a fraud.

But don't worry, you're no better. You are in great company with men like Newberg because you are a fraud too. Neither of you have any understanding of the subject what to speak of being impartial and unbiased, because you are already predisposed to the notion of God and will accept any evidence, no matter how silly it is, as long as it seems to prop up your ideas. And when there is evidence to the contrary, you will ignore it. And above all you will never, never, admit that you're wrong. I told you this in a previous post when I showed your statistics as junk and said you suffered from confirmation bias. Have you looked up that term yet, and seen how it applies to you? So you can go ahead and quote people like Newberg all you want, just be prepared for a lot of people rolling their collective eyes and ignoring you. That is why I don't take you at all seriously when you say you're after an "intelligent analysis of the significance of the result." Sadly, the things you've come out with so far shows me that you wouldn't know an intelligent analysis if it smacked you in the face.

[Ekantin]

Afterall as far as I know no one is an expert in that field among the members here.

You're probably right about that. I don't know each and every member here, but I'd venture to guess there aren't many neuroscientists here. Just wait a second, a short time ago you were accusing me of showing my "piece of paper" (when I wasn't), weren't you? What exactly do you think I'm qualified in, if I work in neurosciences research?

But it isn't about credentials, Malati. Any idiot can work hard and get credentials at university, which is why idiots like Newberg and many more like him are qualified in their field as well. It is understanding that matters, which you obviously lack. If you understood what we're talking about here, or were up-to-date with current research, you would never have said any of the things you've said so far. So worrying about people's credentials is really the least of your problems, Malati.

You have to refute what they said to make a case that the firing of a particular area in the brain is a definitive explanation why people feel a sense of transcendence and longings for something higher beyond themselves.

Why would I need to refute something like that? It is exactly what I've been saying all along, silly! And this is even more proof that (a) you don't know anything about the subject, and (b) whatever any idiot has said something that sounds nice to you, you follow it like an unthinking sheep. You don't even know what needs to be refuted and what doesn't, and here you presume to tell me what I should refute!

Now let me explain it to you. I have no idea if you'll understand this as you've utterly failed to understand everything else I've said so far, but let me throw it out there anyway, maybe someone else apart from you will benefit: the idea that the brain and mind are two separate entities is known philosophically as dualism. This is a chief foundation of many religious/spiritual beliefs. It is the reason why you think you are not the body but the soul, for instance, and that you will live on after death of the body. This is dualism, that the mind is a spiritual-type entity that may reside in, but is ultimately apart from, the brain. Neuroscientific research has shown that this is in fact not true, and follows monism, that the mind and the brain are one entity. This has been borne out ever since case of Phineas Gage. With a monistic understanding, it is understandable how a "sense of transcendence" and longing for higher things are the results of neural firings within the brain. That is what the subject of the Kapogiannis paper was all about, and that is the understanding that is revealed over and over and over again with every experiment that is carried out. So why on earth would I seek to refute this? There are plenty of idiots out there, like Newberg for instance, who refuse to accept this and even try to deny it, preferring instead to find 'scientific' evidence for their fallacious dualistic leanings. But in asking me to refute this, you once again ask me to do something as ridiculous as your stupid demand for scientists to produce 'physical' evidence of memes. You don't even realise what you say half the time, but you expect me to fulfil your desires.

Because the truth is: the study is just a correlation to an event happening in a person's state.

How do you differentiate tears of joy and tears of sadness, if you are looking at the brain?

Gee, and you even made this text bold, because you really thought you had something intelligent thing to say! Where do I even begin? First, why have you now jumped to a question of happy and sad emotions? We were first discussing the 'sameness' of religious and normal thinking when you leapt into a discussion about consciousness, now you've just done the same thing again with happy and sad emotions. You just can't stick to the subject, can you? Why do you always go off-topic?

*sigh* Anyway, how do I differentiate tears of joy and sadness if I'm looking at the brain? Very simple. Emotions have different neural signatures. Happy emotions tend to activate the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC), cingulate gyrus, inferior temporal gyrus, and cerebellum structures. Sad emotions tend to activate the ventrolateral prefrontal cortex, anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), transverse temporal gyrus, and superior temporal gyrus. That's how you can tell the difference between emotions when looking at the brain. Other emotions will have corresponding neural signatures, of course. Anger tends to activate the dorsal ACC. Mine must be working overtime because of you. ;D

This type of study you pointed out in fact is not definitive.

Here you go again, making careless statements without a moment's thought to explain what you mean. This study was not definitive in terms of what? And, I beg to ask, how would you know if it wasn't definitive anyway, when you don't know anything about the subject? Every study analyses something different, something very particular. This (Kapogiannis) study attempted to analyse the apparent difference between religious thinking and 'normal' thinking. It found that the two types of thinking use exactly the same neural circuits, so thinking about religious and spiritual things is nothing special from 'ordinary' thinking. Why do you keep making me repeat the same thing over and over again? This study was pretty definitive in making this particular point. In fact this was the last line of the paper: "Regardless of whether God exists or not, religious beliefs do exist and can be experimentally studied, as shown in this study." The only way it can be refuted is if someone points out a flaw in the methodology and carries out a better-designed experiment that overturns these results. You don't need to worry about that, however. If or when it's done, I'll inform you.

In fact the result of one "God spot" scientific study in Persinger Laboratory in Canada failed to prove it, when a journalist was bombarded with electromagnetic waves in the area of the brain where they think causes the feeling of transcendence and thought about God, the journalist instead of thinking about God, thought about his childhood girlfriend and sex.
You don't know much about how science works. And I worry about your credentials.

You just haven't bothered to read my blog at all, have you? Why did you just speak about the "God Spot"? If you had bothered to read the first couple of paragraphs at least, you'd have seen that, in these times, there is no "God Spot". You should have picked up the clue in the title of my post: "No More God Spot?" But in fairness, as recently as 2004 some scientists did think that there was a certain area of the brain (informally nicknamed 'God Spot') that dealt with religious experiences. This theory has been overturned now because, as I keep repeating over and over and over again , the purpose of this Kapogiannis paper was to show that there isn't a single 'God Spot', but that religious thinking uses the same neural circuits as normal thinking. It isn't the first paper to say that of course, it is one of many new findings that serve to establish the point. You seem to be too unbelievably thick to grasp this point, and you still keep on quoting old and outdated research at me. And you presume to worry about my credentials and scientific knowledge? Trust me, spend more time worrying about yourself. I told you before and I'm telling you again, you are an illiterate when it comes to these topics.

Philosophy and science work hand in hand. And that has been the case since the enlightenment. If you read the biography of greats in the past you will know that scientists are philosophers too. After all if we are looking at the same world then we should be looking at the same thing albeit from different angles.

Hmmm. Somewhere in all of your humungous bullshit, Malati, you managed a worthy object buried somewhere in that steaming pile. But on closer inspection, all that glitters is not gold. You're half-right about philosophy and science working hand in hand, the only question is Which Philosophy? Certainly not your religious philosophy, as the advancement of science seems to be destroying your propositions all over the place, or at least forcing you to rethink them. We're talking about naturalistic philosophy here. This means we're talking about a philosophy that finds itself informed by science, not as a guide for it. You are evidently the kind of person who thinks science should be forced to conform to what you think is the truth, but you will soon find that it works the other way around, that the 'truths' preciously held for centuries need to change when new evidence is found.

This idea is probably too radical for you. However, Nitai knows all about it and I think he is trying to do the same thing with Caitanya Vaisnavism; throw away all the dogmatic junk and establish CV on a rational basis. But the question you need to ask yourself is this: Why should philosophy be connected with science anyway? Science, after all, is a system of evidence and facts, so who cares about airy-fairy waffle like philosophy? The answer is this: Science is objective, but humans are subjective. All the hard data science offers us is ultimately rendered meaningless if we cannot find a way to make it meaningful to us and incorporate useful scientific findings into our lives that make it relevant for us. Philosophers (like Daniel Dennett) sometimes serve a useful function by thinking about the things science has to say, and wondering how relevant it is to functional experience. Dennett in particular is someone who has managed that rare position of being able to guide some aspects of scientific research, because he happens to be exceptionally clever. But the general point is that one needs to be wary of incorporating philsophy into science and vice versa. Personally speaking, I'm not keen on it at all, but that's my feeling.

Inspite of this interesting point, Malati, once again talking to you has been a tedious and mind-numbing waste of time on the whole. I said I wouldn't waste any more time on you, but you succeeded in coming out with such a load of bullshit that I just had to respond. I take refuge behind a favourite saying of Kahlil Gibran's: "You will not understand half of what I say, but I say it so that the other half may reach you." And if it doesn't, well, maybe someone else will find something useful in it. In any case, I think a more productive use of your time would be spent in trying to educate yourself in all these topics instead of pretending that you know something about it, when it is blatantly obvious that you don't. Also, there's no need to worry about me as I have absolutely nothing I need to prove to you, so thanks for your concern but I'm fine where I am, working in the neurosciences.

[complexity]

You and I must be reading different things square, I'm getting more out of ekantin's postings than from malati's.

[Ldd]

i come now and then to drop my score, but don't depend on me to be sucked into a mess.. victory to the lady, again!

[Ekantin]

Oct 2, 2009 11:00:21 GMT -6 complexity said:

You and I must be reading different things square, I'm getting more out of ekantin's postings than from malati's.

Thanks very much, but after reading my last two posts I realise that I was exceptionally harsh on Malati. Normally I am not so, but I tend to get annoyed at know-nothings stubbornly portraying themselves as know-it-alls, even going as far as to question people's credentials, knowledge, and even intelligence, just because the other person disagrees with them. Anyway, this subject was important because I think they will eventually form rational bases for the type of CV that Nitai has in mind. I still think ZVS asked an excellent question, one that continues to motivate me. So hopefully soon I will come up with some important issues for discussion that will have implications for a rationality-based CV, as soon as I finish a couple of important books. Like you, I don't think much of square's observations either. There's me taking time out of a busy schedule to knock some sense in a skull, and that's gramaphone [sic]. Yet Malati regurgitates whatever she has read and posts entire blockquotes, and those are "real revelations". Right. Birds of a feather certainly do flock together.

Anyway, in case anyone was interested in more brain discussion, I spotted this free download at the Society for Neuroscience's website here. One can download individual chapters or even the whole book in pdf format.

[Nitaidas]

Went to the BL again yesterday and spent the afternoon keying in a text, Syamla Goswami's edition of Baladeva's comm. I want to capture the first four sutras along with Baladeva's comm and sub comm. That will be for volume three of the my vedanta series, Fundamentals of Vedanta. It will be paired with the first four sutras with the comm of Sankara. Volume two will the classic Vedanta training text, the Vedanta-paribhasa (for the Advaita position) and Baladeva's Siddhanta-ratna (for the CV tradition). This latter text is another that Shyamlal Goswami published way back then. I have not had a look at it yet. The good Goswami has also done an edition of the Sat-sandarbha of Sri Jiva, also something that I have not looked at yet.

I did examine his book called Sri Krsna-lila. It is pretty amazing. It was published in 1904 and has an interesting introduction in Bengali. I may just translate that introduction. He says some things I have never heard before. Anyway, the whole first volume is composed of what he refers to as the Vrndavana lila of Sri Krsna. It is basically the first 40 chapters of the 10th Skandha of the Bhagavata. Each version is given with an anvaya version and each word is paraphased in Sanskrit. Then each version has a Bengali translation. The second volume starts with Yadunath's Bengali verse translation of the Govinda-lilamrta. It is called the Nitya-lila. And that is followed by a collection of Bengali songs from various poets on the Naimitta-lila which deals with the various periodic lilas that occur throughout the year. Then comes Mathura lila which is the next 10 chapters (41-51) of the 10th Skandha of the Bhagavata which are given the same treatment as the first forty. Finally, comes Dvaraka lila which is entirely in Bengali and this time prose Bengali, not collections of songs. This must be the Goswami's own presentation of the Dvaraka lila. The second volume concludes with a Bengali translation of the Bhagavad-gita. The Sanskrit is not included in this. All together the two volumes add up to about 1300 pages. One of the interesting features of this presentation is that Goswamiji occasionally presents variations in the lila found in other texts like the Harivama or Visnu Purana.

On Monday, I will look at his book on Sri Gauranga. According to the catalog it is around 600 pages.

Cheers!

[Sakhicharan Das]

Jai Nitai!

This is all very interesting Nitai Ji. Thanks for keeping us informed. I am looking forward to hearing about Shyamlal Goswami's Sri Gouranga book. I am glad you are having such a good time in the BL.