ayl%hutds.hut.fi@FINGATE.BITNET (Antti Ylikoski) (09/06/88)
Date: Sat, 3 Sep 88 19:32 EDT From: Antti Ylikoski <ayl%hutds.hut.fi%FINGATE.BITNET@MITVMA.MIT.EDU> To: AIList@AI.AI.MIT.EDU Subject: religious experience and cognitive science cc: ayl@hutds.hut.fi It seems that one of the main arguments against "religious knowledge" is the subjectivity of religious experience. But when a scientist carries out an experiment then he gets out of it subjective experiences such as the act of perceiving the position of a pointer on the scale of a milliamperemeter. Knowledge which has been derived from experience is usually considered reliable if: a) the experience has taken place under circumstances which are known, are described by the experimenter, and are known to produce reliable results b) the experience is repeatable; it is described by the experimenter and can be carried out by others, and when they do this they get the same results. Religious experience is repeatable, I would claim. I have read descriptions written by evangelist Christians involving their experiences, and they are very similar. Whether religious experiences can be considered to take place "under circumstances which produce reliable results" is less evident. I have played with the idea that one could collect a large number of people representing various religions and study them and their religious behaviour and experiences with the methods of experimental psychology, trying to exclude the possibilities of hallucination, bad mental health, cheating and so forth. This would produce scientific data either confirming or not confirming the "reality" of religious experience. I would guess that the experiment proposed above would indicate that religious experience is real. More than a decade ago, I read a book on popularized science and found the statement that the electroenchephalograms of people that have regularly practiced Zen meditation for a long time are different from those of ordinary people; they have more theta waves. Thus, Zen experience is scientifically observable even at the neurological level. (It is not certain whether I can find the reference any more.) I'm dreaming of the day when Cognitive Science can say facts about religious experience with the same level of detail and reliability as cognitive scientists nowadays know the human vision. --- andy