Cognitive Operators and Belief

July 24th, 2006 Fred McVittie

D’Aquili and Laughlin (1979), give a cognitive explanation for the universality of myths, rituals, and ‘religious’ practices, citing three processes which the mind engages in, and which have identifiable cortical correlates. These innate and non-conscious forms of thinking, conceptualisation, abstraction, and binary thinking, are used by all humans to make sense of the world, to ‘organise unexplained external stimuli into some coherent cognitive matrix’ (1979: p.161). This idea is developed further in Newberg and D’Aquili (2002), which names eight of these ‘cognitive operators’ underpinning the organisation of psychological experience. This work further proposes a mechanism for how the functioning of these cognitive operators leads to mystical and religious belief.

This research suggests that all humans are universally determined to find explanations and produce ‘theories’ about the structure and operation of the world in which they are lodged and to invest these theories with belief. There is no evidence, however, of a cognitive operator, or any other cortical or cognitive structure, which corresponds to the protocols of rational sceptical science. This is presumably for good adaptive reasons: humans would be likely to evolve mental processes which organise experience in a way which optimises survival of the body, but the parsimoniousness required by evolution would not allow the kind of objective rigour that scientific process demands. Embodied cognition will tend to produce heuristics rather than laws.

Posted in Belief, Cognitive Operators, D'Aquili, Eugene, Newberg, Andrew, Religion, Science | No Comments »

The Extended Space of the Illuminated Mind

September 7th, 2006 Fred McVittie

One of the most common experiences of the mind is that it is an object, like other objects in the real world, located in space, and existing at, or centred on a particular point. We routinely intuit our consciousness and cognition to be located in this single place, exactly here, precisely now. This point is also usually felt to be located at the centre of lived experience; we are the centre of our little worlds. However, there is another conceptual understanding of the mind which uses a very different spatial metaphor, this understanding relating to a correspondingly different form of consciousness to that of the little world and the central point. This formulation does not imagine the mind located within space, or even as somehow expanding, contracting, or moving through space, but rather that space and mind are, in some way, co-terminous. Space, in this model, is not an inert, unstructured void in which the mind occupies a distinct bounded region, but space is mind. Most commonly found in developed metaphysical systems, this metaphor reverses the Kantian proposition that space is a function of mind. The notion of an identification of mind with space as opposed to mind existing at a singular point in space correlates with states of consciousness often referred to as ‘enlightenment’ (which is itself a metaphor for the existence of a brightly lit space in which knowledge is visible). This enlightened space/mind features in a range of metaphysical practices and religious traditions including ‘divine union’, ‘advaita’, and which Newberg (1999) generalised as a sense of ‘Absolute Unitary Being’ (AUB). It may be said to be part of the perennial philosophy indicated by Huxley and others. Neurological evidence for this relationship between space, mind, and a sense of AUB comes from the work carried out by Michael Persinger who used ‘Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation’ (TCS) to affect part of the brain which contribute to our sense of physical location in space. When subjects were affected in this way their subjective experience was of feeling a sense of unity with the world.

Posted in Enlightenment, Huxley, Aldous, Kant, Immanuel, Light, Newberg, Andrew, Persinger, Michael, Space, Unity | No Comments »

Induced Spirituality

June 1st, 2007 Fred McVittie

Work carried out by Michael Persinger at Laurentia University (reviewed at http://home.comcast.net/~neardeath/religion/001_pages/04.html) suggests that some of the feelings associated with spirituality: union with a greater power, the presence of a divine being etc, can be induced by the application of Trans-cranial Magnetic Signals (TMS). This work is complemented by that of Andrew Newberg who, working with Buddhist monks and nuns, discovered that the meditative practices they engaged in, and which induced feelings of divine union, seemed to produce particular patterns of activation in the brain similar to those produced by TMS. Whilst this work does not dismiss or disprove the concept of the divine, or erase God from the equation (completely), it does clearly indicate that some of the experiences and feelings which we associate with ’spiritual practice’ are not evidence of the validity of whatever beliefs we may hold, but are part of our cognitive operation.

Posted in Buddhism, Neuroscience, Newberg, Andrew, Persinger, Michael, Spirituality | No Comments »