What do you consider spiritual?

[windwalker099]

You'll have to explain this a little more. I'm not sure what you mean. .

The meaning shown
what cannot be explained

Practices can be viewed through results
a result not the point of the practice.

 

[JowGaWolf]

The meaning shown
what cannot be explained

Practices can be viewed through results
a result not the point of the practice.

So what do you think about the practice after getting the unexpected result?

 

[Gyakuto]

It seems like hallucinations, which also presents itself in artificial neural networks. It is sometimes associated to "overfitting" insignificant details. The hallucinations are "extrapolations" that disconnects to reality (so a failure from the predictive perspective), while at the same time beeing perfectly consistent with the neural net predictions.

I didn’t know that!

I suspect the magnetic coils in that experiment might have been replaced by allowing participants in the same dark room, to sit on a popsicle. There is a good chance that many would have strange hallucinations?

Persinger is able to induce specific experiences, predictably which suggests this is not simply the effect of sensory deprivation.

One could ask; during what conditions are a neural net more like to start hallucinate?

I think that’s what governed the placement of the magnetic could; over the temporal lobe.

A wild guess might that that when put into an "odd situation", where there is little confidence in the predictions, maybe strange things are more likely to envisioned. Someone the whole sitaution, or beeing asked to relax, sit in a dark, room, attached to weird gadgets, likel puts your brain into unusual states, where it as "little training"...

Have you ever tried sitting in a floatation tank? I haven’t, but I really want to having heard of others weird, neurally generated hallucinations!

I am not sure I would choose speak about spirituality in any of these cases. But fooling a predictive system, or getting it to derail is certainly interesting!! Both from perspectives of AI modelling and from psychiatry I guess.

I think the point being made is that these artificially produced ‘spiritual experiences’ are what people are experiencing in the big wide world. Some have suggested that local geomagnetic concentrations in rocks, caves etc and the like can trigger these neural spiritual circuits, some desperate religious people say those circuits were placed in the brain by Thor/Wotan/Zeus/Yahweh so they could easily communicate with humans. A simple voice coming out of a physical person would be slightly less ambiguous.