Maya And The God Part Of The Brain

In his article, A Ghost in the Machine, Ebon Muse discusses the superior parietal lobe. I’m not a neurobiologist and I don’t necessarily know anything about the brain, but Ebon Muse cites sources, and I have no reason to not believe what he says about what this part of the brain does.

Essentially, it’s the part of the brain that tells us where we are. It gives us a sense of location, which means it also gives us a sense of separateness, of being distinct from other things. When the superior parietal lobe’s functions are impaired or otherwise disabled, a person loses a sense of their own physical limits, i.e., where self ends and not-self begins. This can be accompanied by feelings of oneness with the universe or even religious and mystical experiences.

The more I think about this, the more it blows me away. Ebon Muse uses the function of the superior parietal lobe as evidence against mind-body dualism, but to me, this knowledge validates Maya.

Separateness is an illusion. In reality everything is the same as everything else- it’s all connected in one big system and the boundaries that we perceive are merely cognitive conveniences that enable us to simultaneously have consciousness and perform vital physical functions. The superior parietal lobe’s function is to produce a mental construct of physical (and mental/spiritual) distinctness. In other words, without the superior parietal lobe convincing us that we were separate individuals, we wouldn’t think we were. So the truth, before it’s chewed up by our brain and formed into a picture that we can comprehend, is that separateness is a myth. Everything is really the same.

Like I said, this is huge to me. I already believed in Maya, because it seemed like the most reasonable thing in the world when I read about it in books on Hinduism. I mean, we’re all made of the same basic atoms as everything else is, and the atoms that compose us don’t stay with us; they’ve not got our names written on them or anything. Our own bodies take in new matter and replace the old matter. If matter is really all just three different kinds of subatomic particles, how can I really say where “I” stop and “everything else” stops. Our mind tells us that we are finite and have borders, but our minds tell us lots of things that are not so.

Our very empirical experience of the world is not direct- it’s sensed indirectly by remote sensory organs, coded into nerve impulses which are sent to the brain, and then the brain sorts through it and composes a perceptive impression which it feeds to the consciousness. Along the way, mistakes get corrected, gaps get filled in, and all kinds of mental processes color and shade this sensory information. What I think I’m seeing is not necessarily the objects I think I’m seeing, or even the photons that bounce off them or the raw data that gets sent to the brain. It’s a processed mental construct. What we think we see is not necessarily what we see.

How is the sense of separateness different, particularly if it is only maintained by nervous activity in the superior parietal lobe? Without that, we would have no sense of independent existence, and to me that means that the sense of separateness is actually the artificial construct.

In other words, Maya is the product of our superior parietal lobe lying to the rest of the brain. It’s a functional, useful lie, to be sure, but it’s a lie. The real truth is that all is one, that everything is everything else, including you and me.

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Om

Om, the sacred syllable, the sound uttered by Brahman at the creation of the universe. Put another way, it’s the sound of the Big Bang, the eruption of everything we know into being. It gives me chills, just thinking about it. Om is the intersection of science and religion, of physics and metaphysics.

The silence before and after the syllable is as potent as the syllable itself. This is the kind of thing that is of eternal import. This is the kind of thing that I can believe.  The Bible’s simply got nothing on Om.

The rain is on the roof
Hurry high butterfly
As clouds roll past my head
I know why the skys all cry
OM, OM, Heaven, OM

The Earth turns slowly round
Far away the distant sound
Is with us everyday
Can you hear what it say
OM, OM, Heaven, OM

The rain is on the roof
Hurry high butterfly
As clouds roll past my head
I know why the skys all cry
OM, OM, Heaven, OM

-The Moody Blues

I like the Devanagari script best, but the Tibetan Aum is nice, too:

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Science And Metaphysics

Does science really leave room for metaphysics?  Or does metaphysics just serve as a gap-holder until we’ve discovered all the science?  I’m slowly settling on atheism, I think, but I’m not sure if there’s a rational place for metaphysics, or if it really is just so much more likely that materialism explains (or has the potential to explain) everything.

I’m not a scientist, I’m a law student.  So with a lot of this stuff, when it gets past my level of personal knowledge, I’m left believing what other people tell me.  I’ve been reading Ebon Musings, which makes a pretty convincing argument for purely materialist atheism as the most, if not only, reasonable possibility.  But I’m just taking his word for it.

It seems to me like there is something to the universe that goes beyond the purely physical.  I don’t know what it is, and I realize fully that any hypothesis on my part would be purely speculative.  However, I know it seems to most people like there is or should be a God, and it turns out I think they’re wrong about that.  Am I really any different if I claim that there’s some mysterious Æther! or mind-body-soul tri-ism, when there seems to be nothing scientific at all that would indicate that such an extranatural reality exists, and when science seems to be able to explain most things without needing anything non-material?

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Cosmology, Science, and God

On some Christian Blog or website, I don’t remember which one it was, I read some thoughts written by some Christian writer, I think it was Ray Comfort, and he said that believing in God was simply more reasonable than atheism.  As evidence, he said (and I paraphrase) “when I look at a newborn child, I don’t see evolution, I see the work of a loving creator.”

I’ve been thinking about this, and wondering.  In ancient times, the divine supernatural was used to explain things that people didn’t have a good explanation for, like lightning, rain, and the turn of the seasons.  Over time, humans have discovered evaporation, condensation, static electricity, and the revolution of the earth- perfectly natural, scientific explanations to phenomena that were once explicable only by attribution to the hand of God (or gods, or whatever).

Science has displaced the supernatural, as we progressively come to understand the “behind the scenes” workings of the world we live in.  A person could still claim that Thor or Perun or Zeus or YHWH makes lightning, but they’re being willfully ignorant: there’s an explanation for it and human scientists understand it inside and out.

As I think about this, I feel like there are two pertinent questions.  First, what do we need God for?  Second, will humans ever abandon God?

We no longer need God to explain most of the universe that we encounter in our daily lives.  we may not all know the science down to the atomic level, but we know a surprising amount, and we generally trust the scientists who know a lot more than we do.  This is fine, because scientists aren’t keeping this knowledge hidden.  It’s written down in textbooks and journals, and the information is theoretically accessible to anyone.  Everyone might not understand it, but at least in the country I live in there are no great barriers to significant scientific education. If I doubted a scientist’s explanation of, say, photosynthesis, there’s nothing really that can stop me from learning enough to understand what the scientist is talking about, and if I was really still skeptical, I could duplicate whatever experiments it would take to prove it.

Of course, humans haven’t fully discovered the workings of the entire universe, and there is so muchmore out there to be discovered- the depths of space, the human brain, subatomic particles.  However, we’re constantly making progress, and so far there have been no major roadblocks saying “Warning: God’s Territory” marking the boundary of a large body of inexplicably unknowable science.  Whatever we don’t know, we have every reason to assume that we will know someday.  That being said, why do we need God?

I’m oversimplifying, of course.  Religion has many functions, and only one of them is to provide a model cosmology.  But we’re rapidly apporaching the point, if we’re not already there, where religion is completely unnecessary/superfluous/redundant in helping us to actually describe the universe.  We really don’t need a God to fill up the spots that science has left vacant.  So for at least that one function, religion is no longer particularly useful.

On the other hand, have we reached or are we reaching a point of critical mass in science?  What I mean is, the frontiers of scientific knowledge get further and further away from what the layperson can empirically perceive or understand without substantial scientific training and education.  There are gaps left, but as science fills them in, it gets harder to explain the science to laypeople, and thus more and more the scientist has to be trusted.  People are superstitious, and when choosing between trusting God and trusting scientists about arcane knowledge that they don’t understand, they’ll trust the simpler explanation of “God did it.”

Will humanity forever be separated into scientists, people who trust scientists, and people who do not?  If scientists do discover, say, exactly how consciousness works in a material sense, will it be so complex that laypeople simply decide that it sounds like a lot of nonsense?

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