RE: Are all forms of religious faith indicative of insanity? (My counter example.)
May 9, 2015 at 12:20 pm
(This post was last modified: May 9, 2015 at 1:59 pm by Thumpalumpacus.)
(May 9, 2015 at 12:03 pm)whateverist Wrote: I'm not sure I quite follow. Can you say more about what you mean in the part I bolded?
Well, I can't remember, but I think it was Nicholas Humphries who posited that consciousness is an artifact of differing parts of the brain observing other parts of the brain at work in a series of recursive loops that are pretty tangled up. As a theory of mind, it makes sense to me, though I know little about the topic other than what I've read in a couple of books. Anyway, I tend to use that as a model for consciousness. And I suspect that subconcious activity in the brain arises when a part of the brain is quietly at work with no other part of the brain overseeing or observing it.
So it seems to me that if the parietal lobe is at work with some serotonin coming through it, and is not being monitored by (say) the cerebral cortex, then the religious experience would feel organic and natural, and very difficult to understand outside of the framework one has be programmed with as a child.
Again, I'm not very well-educated on this subject, so take this with a salt-shaker or two.