Disembodied trippers - nature of consciousness

[kalki]

Jan 27, 2012 16:29:50 GMT -6 malati said:

A computer scientist blogger unpacks a recent scientific study negating the long-held views of atheists and materialists that consciousness is generated by the brain.

B. Kastrup comments: To me, what is of significance in this work is not the psychedelic connection, but the idea that extremely intense subjective experiences can occur without accompanying brain activations; a kind of disembodied experience, if you will, which seems to contradict the currently-accepted notion that the brain generates consciousness.

[/i][/quote]

This blog is way heavy! A lot of research. I just kinda skimmed it to look for the parts about how mushrooms work on the brain. In my own conclusion, I guess psychedelics kinda make an effect on our mental consciousness and sort of bypasses the brain. But our brain still computes information and causes us to see things that the consciousness is seeing.

At least that seems to be what is happening when I trip.

[Nitaidas]

Feb 25, 2012 3:01:56 GMT -6 malati said:

Jan 29, 2012 15:44:28 GMT -6 kalki said:

This blog is way heavy! A lot of research. I just kinda skimmed it to look for the parts about how mushrooms work on the brain. In my own conclusion, I guess psychedelics kinda make an effect on our mental consciousness and sort of bypasses the brain. But our brain still computes information and causes us to see things that the consciousness is seeing.

At least that seems to be what is happening when I trip.

I dont know if you miss the importance of the study. The current (materialistic)scientific paradigm is that all mental activities have correlates in the brain. Or any mental activities would show brain activations. That the brain is the source of all experiences.

But in this study the strong experiences of those subjects who took psylocibin did not show any activations on those areas of brain expected to show such. Why?

That study was most likely a fluke. Perhaps the machines didn't work properly. Even the authors of the study doubted their own results (as you would know if you read the study). There must be thousands of studies involving scanning the brains of people on one psychodelic drug or another and only in this was there no activity registered in the brain. It is surely a flawed study like that one in which neutrinos were thought to be moving faster than the speed of light. That, too, turned out to be a mistake.