Out of the Darkness

Define higher consciousness, prove humans can experience it, and that it can be achieved through sex.
What does higher consciousness look like through FMRI?
What do you mean by energy inside are bodies?
The transcendent experiences some people attain from sex is nothing but smoke and mirrors, It’s the conscious interpretation of the complex flood of neurotransmitters that are produced before during and after sex.

“‘It was more like we were just steeped in Divinity, and it was all One. And the feeling of love was just tremendous...just being imbued with something Other, something Divine.'” Sounds more like oxytocin mixed with a delusional mind.

Anyone can reach a higher state of consciousness through the use of MDMA crack sometimes even from a good joint, but is that REALLY higher consciousness?

A little mean-spirited in your response there! The whole discipline of transpersonal psychology is based on the study of states of consciousness like these - states in which our normal awareness becomes more expansive and more acute. You can't simply reduce experiences to neurotransmitters and other chemicals - it's perverse reductionism. Even the most materialistic scientists would be reluctant to do that. A lot of research has found that higher states of consciousness correlate with certain changes in brain functioning but that doesn't prove that the experiences are produced by changes in brain chemistry - you could just as well say that the experiences themselves produce changes in brain chemistry.

Scientifically, all conscious experience emerges through the interactions of neurotransmitters over time, and electrical pulses (or "action potentials") that transmit across networks of hundreds of billions of microscopic nerve fibers. Describing this as a fact does not do anything to delegitimize the sacred experience of love for children, or real terror, or the rush of true understanding and connectivity with something— whether it be math, the creation of music, or having really intimate sex. The encoding of real conscious experience in patterns of electrical energy and molecular configurations in fact makes it more exciting and interesting— that means there is a connection between the objective absolute (physics, math, and chemistry) and experiential subjectivity (the experience of life). They are somehow, the same.

The idea of having "energy inside your body" is a reference to something that is empirically experienced, but not by everybody. The energy is not necessarily an objectively existent "supernatural energy," like Chi, or life force— all that people mean when they talk about sexual energy or tantric energy is the fact that the energy can be felt, that it can be felt in terms of quantity, quality, and its motion throughout the body, and that it is always there but is only first noticed when they go into a significantly altered state of arousal. If you were to ask them to "prove it," you would make a fool of yourself. The standard of proof for if pain exists is whether or not the psyche experiences it. It's the same with sexual arousal, and "energy."

If 2 out of 100 people say they definitely feel something supernaturally strange when they get aroused, this is cause for interest rather than skepticism and a feeling of satisfaction when you can successfully feel like you proved the person wrong. Strange new phenomena are what the adventure of learning is about. And just because the people who normally tap into these weird phenomena are normally unfamiliar with science, it doesn't mean their experiences are not legitimate.

This person in the article saw reality fundamentally differently because she had sex. Now tell me if that's not cause for interest!

Hardcore science types typically say: where's the hard data? Where are the instruments we can use? There are two errors they commonly make:
- If the measuring instrument does not catch it, it de facto does not exist
- They want to use an instrument that is outside of the relevant scale of what they are measuring

First— if you are a scientist on the ocean and have a net that only catches medium-sized fish, are you going to declare there are no living things less than three inches long in the ocean?

Second— if we want to take data on human experiences, we are going to have to be conscious of what scale we are measuring that experience at. We can measure things physically, chemically, biologically, neurologically, or psychologically. The measuring instrument of psychological phenomena is the psyche, period. There is nothing else that compares. fMRIs and EEGs do give us data— but data that, today, tells us literally nothing about what a human's experience is like.

example: You can give as much LSD to a rat and watch the effect on socialization, fear response, and intelligence in maze solving, but comparatively it will tell you --ABSOLUTELY NOTHING-- as compared to if you were to take LSD. The relevant measurement device for psychologies is, big surprise— consciousness.

Scientifically, all conscious experience emerges through the interactions of neurotransmitters over time, and electrical pulses (or "action potentials") that transmit across networks of hundreds of billions of microscopic nerve fibers. Describing this as a fact does not do anything to delegitimize the sacred experience of love for children, or real terror, or the rush of true understanding and connectivity with something— whether it be math, the creation of music, or having really intimate sex. The encoding of real conscious experience in patterns of electrical energy and molecular configurations in fact makes it more exciting and interesting— that means there is a connection between the objective absolute (physics, math, and chemistry) and experiential subjectivity (the experience of life). They are somehow, the same.

The idea of having "energy inside your body" is a reference to something that is empirically experienced, but not by everybody. The energy is not necessarily an objectively existent "supernatural energy," like Chi, or life force— all that people mean when they talk about sexual energy or tantric energy is the fact that the energy can be felt, that it can be felt in terms of quantity, quality, and its motion throughout the body, and that it is always there but is only first noticed when they go into a significantly altered state of arousal. If you were to ask them to "prove it," you would make a fool of yourself. The standard of proof for if pain exists is whether or not the psyche experiences it. It's the same with sexual arousal, and "energy."

If 2 out of 100 people say they definitely feel something very intense and strange when they get aroused, this is cause for interest rather than skepticism and a feeling of satisfaction when you can successfully feel like you proved the person wrong. Strange new phenomena are what the adventure of learning is about. And just because the people who normally tap into these weird phenomena are normally unfamiliar with science, it doesn't mean their experiences are not legitimate.

This person in the article saw reality fundamentally differently because she had sex. Now tell me if that's not cause for interest!

Hardcore science types typically say: where's the hard data? Where are the instruments we can use? There are two errors they commonly make:
- If the measuring instrument does not catch it, it de facto does not exist
- They want to use an instrument that is outside of the relevant scale of what they are measuring

First— if you are a scientist on the ocean and have a net that only catches medium-sized fish, are you going to declare there are no living things less than three inches long in the ocean?

Second— if we want to take data on human experiences, we are going to have to be conscious of what scale we are measuring that experience at. We can measure things physically, chemically, biologically, neurologically, or psychologically. The measuring instrument of psychological phenomena is the psyche, period. There is nothing else that compares. fMRIs and EEGs do give us data— but data that, today, tells us literally nothing about what a human's experience is like.

example: You can give as much LSD to a rat and watch the effect on socialization, fear response, and intelligence in maze solving, but comparatively it will tell you --ABSOLUTELY NOTHING-- about the effects of LSD as compared to if you were to take it. The relevant measurement device for psychologies is, big surprise— consciousness.

Dear MacDavis

I agree with everything you say - apart from your first statement that conscious experience is produced by the interaction of neurotransmitters over time and electrical pulses across nerve fibers. You state this as if it's an established truth, but this is far from the case. No one has yet come close to demonstrating how brain activity produces consciousness. The idea that electrical impulses or neurotransmitter could somehow have an 'interior' - and generate subjective experience is quite bizarre, if you really think about it. (This is what philosophers call the 'hard problem' but I think it's even harder than they believe.) As one philosopher said, it's tantamount to a miracle, like turning water into wine. (This is not to mention the 'binding problem' of how the brain integrates different aspects of phenomena into one whole).

Another point is that we are always conscious of something - consciousness isn't just of the brain, it's of the whole world, it reaches out into the phenomenal world. And it is always intentional. I can decide what I want to be conscious of. Experience may be there but I am not conscious of it if I don't attend to it. (This is the concept behind mindfulness meditation.) Also, consciousness exists even when there is no qualia to be conscious of - e.g. in states of deep meditation when there is no experience entering the field of attention, but there is still an awareness.

So I think the assumption that the brain produces consciousness is just that - an assumption based on materialistic principles, which has no evidence. It's clear that the brain is involved in consciousness, and that damage to the brain impairs it, but that doesn't mean that the brain produces it.