Scivillage.com Casual Discussion Science Forum

https://www.zmescience.com/science/news-...nderstand/

EXCERPTS: For centuries, experiences like these have inspired ghost stories, religious revelations, and tales of supernatural encounters. But psychologists have another name for the phenomenon: felt presence. And they’re beginning to understand why it happens in some people — and why it’s much more common than you might believe.

[...] These experiments suggest that at least some ghostly experiences can emerge from the brain’s own machinery for distinguishing self from other. But they don’t explain every instance of felt presence.

[...] Among people with higher psychosis-risk scores, those who also felt a strong connection to God, spirits, or a higher power described their encounters with invisible presences as more vivid and disturbing. Those who reported fewer spiritual experiences generally found these encounters less upsetting. Yet the most surprising finding concerned the pleasant experiences... (MORE - missing details)

Basic fallacy here---that artificially inducing a feeling state in people means that feeling state is itself artificial. Does the fact that Viagra induces erections mean all erections are therefore induced by the chemicals in Viagra?

Very telling:

Quote:Your brain constantly combines information from your muscles, skin, vision, and other senses to determine where your body is and what it is doing. Under ordinary circumstances, these signals work together seamlessly. There’s your body and there’s the outside world.

But when they become mismatched, the brain may interpret information originating from your own body as belonging to somebody else.

Like dissociation. Nothing "artificial" about human vagaries of perception, especially when exacerbated by mental illness.

Quote:But when they become mismatched, the brain may interpret information originating from your own body as belonging to somebody else.

Much as it does everyday with the sensations of colors, touch, sound, flavors, and odors, the very structure of being-in-the-world at all based on the unconscious projection of inner phenomenal qualities upon outer objects and events. Thus we can understand the experience of the uncanny and the numinous, so central to both religious and anomalous experience, as simply how consciousness of the Real works. A skill largely antithetical to the obsessive hyperobjectification and "thingification" of everything thru physicalist reductionism.

Cope.