Mechanical Enlightenment
August 30, 2006
Pureland 1996, Mariko Mori
The search for enlightenment has traditionally been an arduous path, involving all sorts of discipline: years of prayer, meditation and mantras, solitary mountaintops, fasting, perhaps the odd bit of flagellation, doing good deeds, undergoing purification and spending lifetimes on the karmic wheel.
But now perhaps enlightenment is just a short, sharp shock to the temporal lobe away. The inimitable neurophilosopher describes recent findings in neurotheology
the cognitive neuroscience of religious experience and spirituality. I have a few questions about these findings though: would such stimulation provide self-declared atheists with a spiritual experience? Would these experiences be completely different for different people, or would certain commonalities occur? How would one’s cultural background shape one’s experience? And lastly, what would the enlightenment machine look like?
For an possible iteration, see Mariko Mori’s Wave UFO installation that she did for the 2005 Venice Biennale. Although the artist was using EEG monitoring, she wasn’t actually administering shocks to the viewers …
August 30, 2006 at 11:45 am
Your questions are very pertinent and are yet to be explored.
I’m inclined to think that the evoked sensory experiences of declared athiests would not be too different from those of theists. What would be different, however, is the interpretation of those experiences, which, like you say, would be based on faith (or lack of it), cultural conditioning and the expectations of the individual.
I am a declared athiest and would be interested to see what kind of experiences would be evoked in me by temporal lobe stimulation.
As for the ‘enlightenment machine,’ it might look something like this
August 30, 2006 at 12:01 pm
I love the link, thank you! it would be very interesting to try it out and see what happens. Do you think that it could be potentially dangerous at all?
August 30, 2006 at 12:42 pm
I don’t know a great deal about this, but I’d imagine that the strength of the magnetic field generated by Persinger’s device is probably far weaker than that produced by magnetic resonance (MRI) scanners.
There is no doubt that radiation has an effect on the brain. I’m sure you’re aware of the debate about whether or not the microwave radiation produced by mobile phones is damaging to the human brain.
However, research into the effects of various kinds of radiation is inconclusive.
August 30, 2006 at 1:05 pm
Thanks, I have heard about the mobile phone radiation controversy, and the more general fears about effects of EMFs on health, but as you say the actual findings seem quite inconclusive. Perhaps as more time passes we’ll understand this better?
August 30, 2006 at 9:12 pm
i thought the most interesting part of that 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 mysical 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 mysical experience exist in the everyday reality.
August 30, 2006 at 9:39 pm
Brain Cramp! This reminds me of arguments in the feminist linguistics of Cixous et al that speak of the impossiblity of getting far enough outside of language to be able to critique certain gender constructs embedded in and articulated by language – in other words how do we get far enough outside of ‘everyday reality’ in order to determine the ‘more-real-than-real’, or even the ‘less-real-than-real’