[Buddha-l] the advent of the meditation machine?

[curt]

Richard Hayes wrote:
> On Thursday 11 October 2007 07:14, curt wrote:
>
>   
>> Reductionism is not something that I invented for the purpose of this
>> argument.
>>     
>
> No one suggested that you had invented reductionism. But you did not answer my 
> question, which was an invitation to you to specify just which reductionists 
> you are targeting. Surely reductionism is at the heart of most Buddhist 
> philosophy. The "non-self" dogma is one of the biggest reductionist gambits 
> in the history of human thought. So is it reductionism per se that you are 
> targeting, or are there some reductionists of you you approve and others whom 
> you contemn? If the latter, why do you applaud some and disdain others?
>
>   

The "meditation machine" article wears its reductionism on its sleeve. 
But it seemed to me that you tried to imply that I was imagining (or 
possibly "projecting") a reductionism onto that article that was not there.

Here is the specific statement (of yours) that I was responding to:

> RH: Surely everyone would agree with you that if someone were to state 
> boldly that the firing of neurons is "all there is" to religious (or 
> any other kind of) experience, that person would be stating an 
> untestable hypothesis. But who has ever made such a claim?

The "meditation machine" article was, in fact, titled "Searching for God 
in the Brain" - and the subtitle is "Researchers are unearthing the 
roots of religious feeling in the neural commotion that accompanies the 
spiritual epiphanies of nuns, Buddhists and other people of faith".

To be fair, the article does provide itself with a fig-leaf in the form 
of the disclaimer in the closing paragraph. But this would be like 
writing an article with a headline "Saddam's links to Al Qaida and 9/11" 
and the subtitle "Unearthing the insidious connections between Iraq's 
dictator and America's deadliest enemies" - and then 20 or so paragraphs 
later stating blandly "Of course some people still believe that there is 
no actual evidence of any links between Saddam and Al Qaida or 9/11".

Curt Steinmetz