Normal services…

Two brief points:

There won’t be much new coming up here until I have recovered from an inconvenient bout of Swine Flu.

But, as I continue to Twitter feverishly, it is good timing that the News Felch aggregation of my daily Twitter output has been restored. See link on sidebar for this.

Catch you on the flipside.

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Mind, senses, science and the spiritual

“Saying there’s no soul because the brain has consciousness structures is like saying there’s no light because a lightbulb has filaments.”

John Shirley

“Saying there’s no soul because the brain has consciousness structures is like saying there’s no light because a lightbulb has filaments.” – John Shirley

A thought which needs further development…

It’s a common statement by modern scientists – especially the strain of no-ghost-in-the-machine rationalism espoused by the likes of Pinker and Blackmore – that there’s a part of the brain which acts as though it has some contact with a higher consciousness or God. Of course in their minds this part is either some kind of bizarre evolutionary holdover like the appendix or else just a glitch in the way we think. It can’t be actually be sensing anything, because what it reports doesn’t fit their model of the universe.

It occurs to me that the same thread of scientific enquiry has found many interesting flaws and glitches in our senses – in fact many optical, sonic and other sensory illusions are often offered as a kind of explanation for why people see or report non-ordinary phenomena. Yet, knowing this, those scientists do not automatically dismiss all sensory data.

Why is it so hard to consider the possibility that the ‘god-sensing’ part of our minds is at least as valid a sense organ as the others?

Prone to confusion and mistake, sure. Full of holes and possible to trick, certainly. But since that’s exactly what all our other senses are like, why dismiss it completely?