[Buddha-l] Re: Inducing Out-of-Body Experience

[Vera, Pedro L.]

>The circular logic involved here is so blatant that I wonder why it
>needs to be pointed out. The assumption is that OBE's are the result of
>a "mistake" that the brain makes - then researchers try to reproduce
>this "mistake". The underlying assumption is never examined. Does anyone
>doubt that the senses and the brain can be "fooled"? That is the only
>thing that this study "proves".

>There is absolutely no reason to assume that the experience being
>induced in the experimental subjects has any relationship to the
>phenomenon that the study claims to be investigating.

I have not read the full article, however, I do not see such blatant circularity in the thinking. They have managed to create these experiences using a particular methodology. The inferential leap, as you point out in your second paragraph, is that this way of creating such an experience has some relationship to other ways of creating such experiences. 
 
One way of interpreting their results is that they have managed to produce, through entirely reproducible (presumably), controllable, and explainable methods, the experiences some people relate. Therefore, one possibility is that asynchrony between the senses may explain such experiences. Whether all such experiences can be explained the same way, as you suggest, is open to further investigation. However, their explanation seems reasonable, until another one comes along. While, of course, as you say " there is absolutely no reason to assume that the experience being
induced in the experimental subjects has any relationship to the phenomenon that the study claims to be investigating", there is equally absolutely no reason to suppose the other experiences (whichever one people consider "real") are different from the ones generated by the experiment. The burden of proof then falls on those claiming that there is a difference in these experiences.
 
Best regards,
 
Pedro