religion and the brain
the neurophilosopher posts Andrew Newberg on religion and the brain (video) via Bicyclefish
the most interesting part of the video was the point that if we have only the subjective reports saying the mystical experiences felt more real than everyday reality (and the neuroscience only shows that dreams, everyday reality, and the mystical experience all have similar effects in the brain), then the possibility opens up that the mystical experience is the most real, and everyday reality is perhaps derived from that, and if so, all the subjective/objective “science” doesn’t really prove that the everyday reality is “real”, since it is based in that same everyday reality.
…
upon reflection, that leads into a bit of a catch-22, since the subjective reports of the mystical experience exist in the everyday reality to begin with.
this makes me think of that movie with the terrible title of “what the bleep do we know…”, which from what i understand of pop quantum physics (extremely little), the observer kind of constructs reality by observing it?!?
please feel free to clarify if possible
the idea in that film was based around
heisenberg’s Uncertainty principlethe observer effect, in which the act of observing changes the thing being observed. in quantum physics, particles can exist in a state of superposition, meaning that until they are observed, they are in all possible states at once.this is a little easier to understand if you think about the weird behaviors of particles, ie, that some pop into and out of existence extremely fast (possibly b/c they’re traversing universes/dimensions all the time), or that some apparently travel backwards in time, and have a twin that moves forward in time. they’re kind of like a fuzzy blob of possibilities.. in spacetime. Observing something apparently narrows the possibilities down, although the observer effect still applies.
So, the film proposes, your brain constructs reality by observing it, and therefore you should be able to influence how that’s constructed.
It’s a bit of a jump from the science to the film’s idea, but it gets a bit more interesting when you consider many ancient traditions contained very similar ideas. I believe Fritjof Capra wrote about these similarities in The Tao of Physics.