Vogelfrei

My computer monitor is also quite able to manipulate my brain chemistry, which is clearly a greater accomplishment for it, since it's inanimate.

"I had the experience of God sitting down and chatting with me" is a psychological fact. "I had the experience of God sitting down and chatting with me, *and he really did*" is a metaphysical (+ psychological) fact. I'm just restating my previous explanation. Clear on it now?

You were right that I could ask the same question to people with various mental disorders, and probably get more answers, but my goal is to assess the incidence of this sort of thing in otherwise-normal people, not people with diagnosed mental disorders that would affect their response on this matter.

That's a straw man argument. I questioned whether you could either a) describe how neuroscience relates to metaphysics, or b) describe the nature of mystical experiences in a substantive, meaningful way via neuroscience. Instead, you decided to argue for the relatively trivial thesis that there is a relationship between neurochemistry and mind. Why you did that, I don't know, but the first guess I'd hazard is that b) is currently impossible.

I briefly described the reason that b) is currently impossible in the add-on post that I wrote previously. Let me review the facts, in a slightly-larger nutshell:

1) Current neuroscience is profoundly ignorant about how most aspects of mind are coded in the brain

This *should* be clear - if this stuff actually was known, human-level AI would be a hop, skip, and a jump away - but apparently it's not. Well: all the information we have about high-level functions of the brain is of the form "this structure does these general things, and is connected to these other structures". For instance, we know that schizophrenia is related to overactivity in mesolimbic dopamine tracts, and underactivity in dopamine tracts projecting to the cortex. We know that correcting these imbalances usually improves the mental status of patients. We conclude that the former systems are related somehow to hallucinations, delusions, etc., whereas the latter are related to attention and cognition. This is true enough. Other evidence corroborates this (e.g. amphetamine increases attention, drive, etc., but if you take too much, you end up with amphetamine psychosis). But *that's really all we know*. No one has a definite clue about how *any* of these important brain functions are coded for (if they did, they should probably be working on AI instead). It's been said, "if our brains were simple enough so that we could understand them, we'd be too simple to understand them" -- quite accurate (currently, anyway).

(some of the above was simplified, but not enough to matter much; the real state of knowledge about these things is not advanced far enough beyond this to make a difference for my point)

Now, from the other direction:

2) We don't know very much about the significance of the pharmacology of many psychoactive agents

First of all, it's worth noting that, compared to understanding the "wiring" of the brain, neuropharmacology is *incredibly* easy; you perform a bunch of assays to see which receptors a drug binds to, and then figure out what the receptors do and where they are; the big picture is much less important. Even so, no one can say anything meaningful about how a drug such as LSD (cause of numerous mystical experiences, I'm sure) works. As I remember the evolution of the theory, people first thought it was an agonist, and then an antagonist, and then a partial agonist at 5-HT2a, which was how it caused its characteristic psychoactive effects. Problem is, lisuride - another ergoline - has the same basic pharmacological profile as LSD (that is, activity at 5-HT1a and 2a and various dopamine receptors), without any hallucinogenic activity. There goes that explanation! I read some thought recently that hallucinogenic activity was related to 5-HT2c, but I honestly don't remember how lisuride (or other drugs) stack up there. And as I remember, fluoxetine was recently found to bind to 5-HT2c (don't remember what activity it had there) at reasonable concentrations, whereas other SSRI's don't, and fluoxetine has no observed effect on hallucinogen activity, either way, compared to other SSRIs. The best we can say is something akin to "well, LSD acts on the thalamus..."

Our knowledge about simpler drugs isn't very impressive either. Check out the current state of knowledge on how (serotonergic) antidepressants work; here's my unofficial list of some of the major findings:

-Desensitization of 5-HT1a (auto)receptors
-Downregulation of beta-adrenergic receptors in the locus coeruleus
-Upregulation of limbic D3 receptors
-Upregulation of BDNF in the hippocampus
-Increase in neurogenesis in dentus gyrate
-Modulation of GABA(A) receptors
-Other miscellaneous predicted receptor regulation

(these are just the neurochemical effects; I'm ignoring gross measures like EEG, etc.)

But how do antidepressants work? No one knows - that is to say, no one knows how the brain encodes mood, and that information is *required* if one wants to come up with an explanation of how the brain creates mystical experience.

Speaking of serotonin, last I checked, there were about 16 known receptor subtypes. No one has a clue what most of them do. Similarly, last I checked, it was only recently that it was determined whether whether all the sigma ligands people were finding were sigma agonists or antagonists (anyone know the year? I'm curious). And the function of the receptors is still basically up in the air. A neuroscience that can provide meaningful explanations about how the brain functions doesn't look *anything* like the disarrayed neuroscience we actually have. You can throw hypocretin and anandamide into the list of receptors that no one knows much about, too.

As a circumstantial condemnation, the fact that most people buy into the "chemicals cause feelings" explanation shows that there hasn't been any significant amount of real information trickling down from the scientists - because, as I said, the scientists don't have anything really meaningful to share. Chemicals don't cause anything besides signal transduction inside cells, eventually leading to some kind of output. Claiming that it's the chemicals that are primarily reponsible is ludicrous. Consider the metaphor: there is a black box, with a button; if you press the button and toast pops out from the top via some unknown internal mechanism. If a person claims that pressing the button makes the toast pop out, it's true, but only trivially; the actual reason has something to do with the contents of the box. Of course, if no one knows what's in the box, they'll surely draw attention to the regularity of the response caused by pushing the button, and hope no one realizes how much they don't know. Similarly, if one switches one black box for another with different internal structures, the button isn't going to work the same way. On the other hand, if one changes the color of the button, it should make no difference to the function of the box.

As for a)...well, I'd still like to here what you think about the relationship, or lack thereof. The philosophy forum is probably a more appropriate place, though.

Offhand, do they use it in America? I though that was a British thing (much like the way the British use pharmaceutical heroin for the same purpose).

Reading properly requires both direct awareness of what's written, and contextual understanding of said information. You've got lots of the former, but you missed the latter (the "psychological" vs. "metaphysical" distinction I drew).

BTW, don't take this post the wrong way; sometimes my writing falsely makes me appear as if I have a bad attitude.

[ July 23, 2002: Message edited by: Vogelfrei ]</p>

Buffman

Vogelfrei

Thank you for the elaborate post. It did help to clear up some of the questions that arose after your first three posts.

I think you should understand that you are far from the first person to enter these forums seeking answers to the kind of questions that you have asked. Unfortunately, far too many of your predessors were seeking to freely obtain personal experiences in order to use them to promote their own religious beliefs rather than to simply gather objective (hopefully) data.

When you dashed off this response: "Drug-induced experiences surely can count as mystical, but I didn't ask about them because most people (?) well-aware that they exist; on the other hand, whether these experiences occur spontaneously is information that I'm not well-acquainted with.", I will admit that I did not view you as someone on a scholarly quest.

I hope that helps to explain my rather flip original remarks. I had read nothing to explain why you sought this personal information or what you planned on doing with it beyond asserting that you planned to compare it with theist responses. Thus, my post was a feeble attempt to alert other folks, who may not have been around quite as long as I have, to be careful with the information they might be willing to share with you.

... sometimes my writing falsely makes me appear as if I have a bad attitude.

Unfortunately, your initial response to me did nothing to lessen the accuracy of your self-analysis. I hope that we can both move beyond that at this point. (Unless someone has a loaded, and cocked, gun stuck in my mouth, electronicly generated words aren't going to cause me any concern beyond their level of accuracy.)

Though I am in full agreement with your statement about our lack of in-depth knowledge concerning the Brain-Mind interface, I will not as readily concede to your "personal" conclusions concerning the lack of significance of the pharmacology.

Perhaps I am simply too suspicious of folks who make definitive statements before they have established any manner of credibility to make them. Just look at this next one and try to see how it would strike you were it coming from me.

As a circumstantial condemnation, the fact that most people buy into the "chemicals cause feelings" explanation shows that there hasn't been any significant amount of real information trickling down from the scientists - because, as I said, the scientists don't have anything really meaningful to share. Chemicals don't cause anything besides signal transduction inside cells, eventually leading to some kind of output. Claiming that it's the chemicals that are primarily reponsible is ludicrous.

(As I recall, I used to talk much like that when I was a sophomore in a college...well north of your current residence. I was filled with an inflated ego because I was working with DNA and RNA in my biology major and genetics specialty...genetic coding/manipulation done with chemicals.) Since you have previously admitted that you have little practical experience with drug users, but that most people are well aware that drugs produce some very strange mental effects, it would seem to me that you are omitting a very critical element in your research. "Are drug induced mystical experiences similar to non-drug generated experiences? If they are similar, might that not be a very significant piece of information for your study? However, based on your statement above, you appear to have closed your mind to the possible tie-in between chemicals and mystical experiences. Perhaps you have too cavalierly cast off that "some kind of output." (Don't forget, genes are merely long strands of various chemicals; but they can work some mighty powerful "magik.")

Reading properly requires both direct awareness of what's written, and contextual understanding of said information. You've got lots of the former, but you missed the latter (the "psychological" vs. "metaphysical" distinction I drew).

Thank you for the free analysis. I'll work harder on my contextual understandings if you will work a little harder on not conveying a false attitude. Deal?

never been there

For those who prefer an electromagnetic explanation to UFOs and gods, check out:

<a href="http://www.laurentian.ca/neurosci/persinger.html" target="_blank">Michael Persinger home</a>

His own postings are fairly conservative, but a bit of searching on the web should turn up some articles where he discusses more openly where he thinks this is all heading.