[extropy-chat] John Wright Finds God

[Samantha Atkins]

For the same reason that many of our subjective experiences can't be
verified, yet.   See, wasn't that really easy?

As a matter of fact some research is being done and has been done as
we get better tech for mapping what is going on in the brain.  One
study wired up monks, Tibetan Buddhists iirc,  and monitored what
changed when they went into reportedly higher levels of consciousness.
  I don't have the reference handy but it said some interesting things
about what the attendant physical changes, causative or not, are for
some states of consciousness.   Using such things it would not be too
difficult to actually show that a person had acheived a particular
state.  That is it would not be if either you had them wired up at the
time or reported long term changes were present in their brains.

Also, particularly in Eastern religions, there is a rather developed
body of knowledge on states of consciousness and distinquishing such
states by non-physical examination of experential evidence.

- samantha



On Wed, 15 Dec 2004 13:54:12 -0500, John K Clark <jonkc at att.net> wrote:
> <john-c-wright at sff.net> Wrote:
> 
> >My question to my respected fellow atheists (if I may so call you, for I
> >have only departed your company recently) is this: what does an honest
> > and rational man do when he has a supernatural experience?
> 
> I have never had a supernatural experience but if I ever have that
> misfortune I intend to keep it to myself because yammering about it to
> others is pointless. It is one thing to have a mystical experience, it is
> quite another to listen so somebody else talk about theirs. Perhaps you
> really did discover an unexplored world and a new path for knowledge, or
> perhaps you are just the victim of a bad bit of beef and bad digestion, I
> have absolutely no way of knowing. Even you can't be certain if you had a
> real experience or a neurological accident, but at least you can make an
> educated guess, I can't even do that.
> 
> I do have one question for you, people have been claiming supernatural
> experiences for thousands of years but not one has ever been verified; If
> it's
> real why do you suppose this is the one area of knowledge that is not
> amenable to the scientific method?
> 
> John K Clark     jonkc at att.net
> 
> 
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