From: Samantha Atkins (samantha@objectent.com)
Date: Sat Apr 05 2003 - 23:59:32 MST
Anders Sandberg wrote:
> On Thu, Apr 03, 2003 at 08:53:14PM -0900, John Grigg wrote:
>
>>As I somehow imagine it, I would know an angel or God simply by the
>>sheer physical majesty (intense glow, levitating, telepathy,
>>overwhelming presence) and overall supernatural "vibe." You would not
>>need any tests done, you would instantly know.
>
>
> People undergoing mystical experiences nearly always have this kind of
> noesis experience of really knowing How Things Are. The drama may or may
> not be there and there might be a personal God or just Reality present,
> but the sense of Truth is very common.
>
Yes, but of course the $10 billion question is what Reality
actually is. From within such states it feels as if one's eyes
are open and one truly sees for the first time. For me it is
like opening my eyes from within everything there is across all
space-time plus the most profound joy and peace - literally
beyond imagining. In my misspent near-hippie youth I reached
part of such a state with LSD but that was more mechanical
feeling and not as unitive or blissful. Then it felt more like
walking beneath the "skin of reality" if you will, being at the
level from which all being springs. These things are
notoriously difficult to describe of course. It is part of the
symptoms that ones conceptual facilities or at least the
verbalization parts shutdown or are bypassed.
> This is actually what bothers me as a materialistic neuroscientist. We
> have brain systems that tell us about the salience, familiarity and
> likely the perceived truth of things. If these were simply made fully
> active we would experience whatever we see or think as totally true and
> beyond doubt (even the dualist explanation that truth is experienced
> directly by the soul doesn't work, since the same argument could go for
> the corresponding truth-detection system within the soul).
You are on to something here I believe. There has been research
into what goes on in the brain when very advanced meditators go
into samadhi/satori/divine union. Unfortunately I gave my best
book on this away so I can't do much justice to the details.
(An interesting online work is at
http://www.noetic.org/ions/medbiblio/ch2_1.htm). But it was
found that certain brain centers, especially vocalization and
sense of spatial orientation, become relatively starved of
energy (oxygen?) and other sections become very super-energized.
The result is that cosmic oceaning feeling and very high
degrees of bliss and many parts of the brain firing much more
than normal. And this is in non-epileptics. I have my
suspicions, although the books did not go that far, that some of
the yogic, meditation, diet, even celibacy practices make these
states much more reachable and indeed may fire them off. I am
not very advanced at all in meditation by some of the forms I
have learned do produce a "spiritualization" effect where
everything looks different and I notice my interest, attention,
feeling of energy flow within myself changes. Some of the
changes are quite positive and I am much more peaceful and
filled with love. But the downside is that I notice that my
thinking/interests/speed of uptake of new information, churning
of existing knowledge into new combinations all seems to be a
bit muted. If I go into this spiritual practice, many things I
am normally quite interested in seem much less important than
going deeper into the spiritual space. It is quite seductive to
those who get into it a ways.
> So if someone makes me experience this sense of total Truth, how am I to
> know it is real truth or just my hippocampus getting all excited? Even
> worse, while I can make this argument right now sitting in my office
> with no divinities around, if one would appear it seems likely that at
> least while that experience lasted I would be fully convinced regardless
> of my current doubts.
>
Yes. The mind also goes on overdrive weaving together a
super-coherent mega-Rationalization that is extremely overpowering.
> This makes me suspect that I would not (later on) find any divinity
> appearing in full majesty very convincing. To really be a convincing
> divinity it would have to convince me without any neurological dramas.
>
"Just the facts, Lord" :-) None of this hyper-bliss fire and
smoke stuff.
> Just asking "please grant me a bit of limited omniscience so that I can
> think up a good question and understand the answer" (which I consider to
> be a very neat idea; a bit like the encounter with the eponymous entity
> in Hamilton's _The Naked God_) wouldn't work, since I could always be
> given an experience of having had indescribable experiences (now nearly
> faded) and a very convincing but deep answer I almost but not quite
> could remember.
>
I have had some experiences where I carried just enough
skepticism in to attempt to organize and bring out some of the
things I was sure I knew and knew completely within the
experience. I once had it all laid out in order only to watch
in horror as one piece of this fabulous knowledge after another
disappeared until what remained was just another stutter
description of the ineffable.
> Maybe we are going about all this from the wrong direction, trying to
> get a superbeing to demonstrate that it is the supreme super being. It
> is far easier for it to demonstrate that it is merely a super being in
> some practical sense (lift mountains, turn the sea to blood, solve
> diophantine equations instantly). It is probably because we all here
> seem to hail from the monotheistic cultural sphere. What questions would
> you ask Pallas Athene or Thoth if they appeared to you?
>
They are much less interesting. Mere advanced transhumans with
access to good nanotech could probably do or convince us they
did, most of those things. So what?
- samantha
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