Freud's 'Oceanic Feeling'

[YesNo]

As far as Barrett's evidence, what is it? I admit I haven't found the book yet, but you haven't offered any evidence, yesno, you merely say Barrett does.

I won't be home until after January 9th. I'll see if I can summarize the evidence after that date.

When I first read the book, I thought what Barrett was trying to show was obvious. Children have monsters in the closet and imaginary friends. What I wonder now is whether childhood is a human experience that can be studied to shed light on things like the oceanic feeling. I wonder if studying childhood experiences is more like studying near and shared death experiences, mystical experiences, psi experiences and the like.

Here's my experience (and also a reaction to the anti-Christmas thread in "general discussions", in which yesno is a participant): rituals like Christmas create an almost supernatural thrill in young children. I'm not religious, but I still thrill to the notion that God gave his only begotten Son to save us from our sins, and my spiritual thrill may be related to the excitement I felt at Christmas as a very young children.

The idea of God suffering through his Son for us is very moving. That "moving" part may be what the oceanic feeling is about. I think we all feel this to some extent. We aren't machines. There is something it is like to be us and that includes being moved.

Christians do focus on the sacrifice of Jesus, but there is also too much concern for creationism, telling gay people not to have sex, claiming their way is the only way, blaming Jews rather than Romans for the crucifixion, and making up stories about weapons of mass destruction in order to invade other countries.

However, if Christians (or some other group of theists) were perfect we would be compelled by their example to join them and that would diminish diversity and the need to forgive and be forgiven.

Atheism has problems also not least of which is that I don't think there is any science to support it anymore especially after quantum physics had to give up determinism. Also given near and shared death experiences, there is more evidence for the Christian view of the resurrection of Jesus than there is for an atheistic perspective on death.

Now this excitement is partly spiritual (even for young kids) and partly based on family fun and greed. The thrill of receiving hidden gifts as a child suggests the thrill of receiving the gift of Jesus' birth. Here are two of my favorite Christmas literary treasures:

http://www.journeywithjesus.net/Poem...hristmas.shtml

http://shortstories.co.in/the-heavenly-christmas-tree/

In spite of my annoyance for some Christmas music, I do like this song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4cP2...yBf6vg&index=6

It gives me an oceanic feeling almost every time.

[YesNo]

Nonetheless, there are a wide variety of Gods in the history of the world, and a wide variety of atheistic religions (like Buddhism)...

I don't classify Buddhism as a form of atheism although western Buddhists may actually view it is a such. Regardless, it clouds the issue since it appears to be an example of an atheistic spirituality. I think that is a contradiction in terms.

Some people say they are not Christian or not Muslim or not Buddhist. That's fine. I'm not any of those things either, not that there is anything wrong with being Christian or Muslim or Buddhist. What atheists say is that they are not conscious, or, in other words, that their consciousness can be reduced to unconsciousness. That is the only form of atheism I am opposed to.

[Ecurb]

If you insist on defining words idiosyncratically, yesno, you will continue to be misunderstood.

"Supernatural" and "metaphysical" are almost identical words. (Super = meta; natural = physical.) So if we say that anyone who uses metaphysics to influence his beliefs is religious, and anyone who opposes all metaphysics is an "atheist", then your point is reasonable. However, most people would not say that atheists must eschew metaphysics.

[YesNo]

I think part of the problem is to understand what we mean by the words we use so I offer definitions.

Supernatural assumes there is a natural that the supernatural goes beyond. So the important word to clarify is what do we mean today, in our culture, by the word "natural"?

In our current culture, the natural state is believed to be materialistic and even fundamentally unconscious. It is a belief that what is real (natural) is deterministic or caused by chance if one can't get determinism to work. Consciousness in this natural view is insignificant if it can't be wished away completely.

However, if the natural state does not include consciousness, then one can expect to find all sorts of "supernatural" phenomena such as our own consciousness, psi phenomena, near and shared death experiences, or the oceanic feeling being reported because consciousness is real whether atheists like it or not. These supernatural phenomena become evidence that there is something wrong with our idea of the natural. What we believe to be natural does not include everything that is real. However, granting consciousness its proper place can quickly point to ghosts, angels, demons, deities and the "god within".

If one allows the natural state to include consciousness, then there is no need for a supernatural.

Perhaps you don't like my definition of atheism as the view that we are not conscious or that consciousness is an epiphenomenon of what atheists believe to be unconscious and materialistic? I imagine that atheists like to think they are righteously opposed to the nonsense of Zeus, Jesus, Buddha or Allah. What they are really opposed to is their own consciousness.

[Ecurb]

Not all atheists are strict materialists. I agree with you that there are flaws in strictly materialistic determinism. I remember C.S. Lewis argued that materialists have no grounds for saying some beliefs are "truer" than others -- all beliefs are simply the results of neurons firing in our brains. In addition, Goedel's Proof suggests that materialism cannot be both consistent and complete. WE need to make metaphysical (supermaterialist) judgments ABOUT materialism in order for it to have philosophical merit.

We cannot assume based on this that God (or Gods) exist.

[YesNo]

I agree with you that some people who call themselves atheists aren't materialists. For example, I suspect Thomas Nagel would call himself an atheist but he tries to account for consciousness by introducing panpsychism. In this way he salvages a bottom-up reductionism which does not require conscious deities and avoids a top-down explanation of consciousness which would need those deities (or demons). If one looks at the indeterminism of a quantum particle as the particle making a choice that is where I could see his panpsychism getting a scientific justification.

I am trying to push atheism in general into a corner by claiming that it effectively says we are "not conscious". There are ways one might try to avoid that corner. Nagel's panpsychism would be one way.

I think the reality of our consciousness forms a base on which we can assert the reality of other consciousnesses perhaps those containing our own. For example, is our species as a whole conscious? I see consciousness characterized objectively as an ability to make a choice no matter how constrained. If we can observe something make a choice then I would consider it conscious. Was our species the result of another species making an evolutionary choice to split off our species? I think it was and that is how I view Eldredge's punctuated equilibria theory of Darwinian evolution. But are choices possible in an atheistic conception of reality? Or is it all explained by determinism or chance?

One piece of evidence for a God-like consciousness is that our universe is finite and it had a beginning. Was there a choice involved in its start? If so, that would imply a God-like consciousness. That is still far from a loving God or a God that sustains the universe. It could be a demon, but it would still be conscious. It could also be loving.

Based on current science I can see at least three places where choices are made and consciousness implied: (1) the indeterminism of quantum reality could be a choice providing a foundation for atheistic panpsychism, (2) punctuated equilibria involves a choice at the species level to split off other species, and (3) the big bang implies a choice made to start the universe.

[YesNo]

Here is the Wikipedia article on the "Oceanic Feeling": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oceanic_feeling

On the one hand we have Romain Rolland describe a specific experience as the foundation for religiosity. Freud doesn't recognize that experience as something he felt and explained it away as a remnant of infantile consciousness.

What I get from this is Freud would probably not have as much trouble with Barrett as some atheists do today. I think he was right about Rolland's view. This specialized experience can't be the "source of all religious energy". However, it might be a source of some religious creativity for those who have had the experience.

What I suspect is the source of religious energy is more general like having subjectivity itself whatever the content of that subjectivity may be. This means one does not have to be enlightened with a special experience to motivate religious interest. One just has to be conscious. Perhaps one way to have an oceanic experience is to not take one's consciousness for granted, but rather to pay attention to it.

[mortalterror]

In regards to the OP, I read that book in college about fifteen years ago. Unfortunately for Freud, most of his theories have been discredited in the century since he wrote them. Freud happens to be one of the founders of psychology, which pretty much makes him required reading even today, which has the dolorous habit of perpetuating some of his nineteenth century biases. He was a pretty staunch atheist and so his theories sometimes reflect those beliefs more than they do good science or careful observation. For instance, his major colleagues at the turn of the century Carl Jung and William James had a great deal more respect for religion and religious experiences. One must wonder, would the current state of psychiatry be quite as materialistic/atheistic today if one of them were considered the core of the curriculum.

Currently, I think that Freud's Oceanic Feeling would contrast well with Abraham Maslow's Peak Experiences, everyday moments of euphoria and sublime ecstasy which most people experience from time to time. "One could say that the nineteenth-century atheist had burnt down the house instead of remodeling it. He had thrown out the religious questions with the religious answers, because he had to reject the religious answers. That is, he turned his back on the whole religious enterprise because organized religion presented him with a set of answers which he could not intellectually accept--which rested on no evidence which a self-respecting scientist could swallow. But what the more sophisticated scientist is now in the process of learning is that though he must disagree with most of the answers to the religious questions which have been given by organized religion, it is increasingly clear that the religious questions themselves--and religious quests, the religious yearnings, the religious needs themselves--are perfectly respectable scientifically, that they are rooted deep in human nature, that they can be studied, described, examined in a scientific way, and that the churches were trying to answer perfectly sound human questions." - A.H. Maslow 'Religions, Values, and Peak-Experiences' p.18.

Freud tries to explain away all religion as motivated by a fear of death, and failing that he throws in his 'Oceanic feeling' to explain religious feelings of joy which are not accounted for by fear. William James' answer to him in Varieties of Religious Experience was thus "Scientific theories are organically conditioned just as much as religious emotions are; and if we only knew the facts intimately enough, we should doubtless see 'the liver' determining the dicta of the sturdy atheist as decisively as it does that of the Methodist under conviction anxious about his soul. When it alters in one way the blood that percolates it, we get the methodist, when in another way, we get the atheist form of mind. So of all our raptures and our drynesses, our longings and pantings, our questions and beliefs. They are equally organically founded, be they of religious or of non-religious content.

To plead the organic causation of a religious state of mind, then, in refutation of its claim to possess superior spiritual value, is quite illogical and arbitrary, unless one have already worked out in advance some psycho-physical theory connecting spiritual values in general with determinate sorts of physiological change. Otherwise none of our thoughts and feelings, not even our scientific doctrines, not even our dis-beliefs, could retain any value as revelations of the truth, for every one of them without exception flows from the state of their possessor's body at the time.

It is needless to say that medical materialism draws in point of fact no such sweeping skeptical conclusion. It is sure, just as every simple man is sure, that some states of mind are inwardly superior to others, and reveal to us more truth, and in this it simply makes use of an ordinary spiritual judgment. It has no physiological theory of the production of these its favorite states, by which it may accredit them; and its attempt to discredit the states which it dislikes, by vaguely associating them with nerves and liver, and connecting them with names connoting bodily affliction, is altogether illogical and inconsistent."

If a belief in the supernatural can be the function of a malfunctioning brain, then so can atheistic disbelief. Indeed, in Faith of the Fatherless professor Paul C. Vitz even posits the assumption that atheists are frequently born out of unhappy relationships with father figures. If I understand the theory, then atheists are projecting their antagonistic relationship with their fathers onto the ultimate father figure of God and trying to symbolically castrate him by rejecting his existence and power over them. If St. Paul was an epileptic, and George Fox a psychotic, then we might just as easily explain away Freud's theories as the ravings of a coke fiend, or Frederick Nietzsche's philosophy as the fevered dreams of a syphilitic brain.

Returning to Freud's 'Oceanic Feeling' as William James points out in section 2 of Varieties of Religious Experience, there is no single emotion or personality type associated with religiosity. There are as many religious states as there are religions and they run the gamut from sobriety to euphoria. Trying to pigeon hole religion into just an 'oceanic feeling' is to oversimplify things.

[YesNo]

If a belief in the supernatural can be the function of a malfunctioning brain, then so can atheistic disbelief. Indeed, in Faith of the Fatherless professor Paul C. Vitz even posits the assumption that atheists are frequently born out of unhappy relationships with father figures. If I understand the theory, then atheists are projecting their antagonistic relationship with their fathers onto the ultimate father figure of God and trying to symbolically castrate him by rejecting his existence and power over them. If St. Paul was an epileptic, and George Fox a psychotic, then we might just as easily explain away Freud's theories as the ravings of a coke fiend, or Frederick Nietzsche's philosophy as the fevered dreams of a syphilitic brain.

Yes. If religious belief can be reduced to a malfunctioning brain, so can an atheistic (dis)belief. If one form of belief can be reduced to unconscious processes so can the other.

Is there any real conscious experience? Or is it all an illusion of something unconscious? And how can that unconscious substance have illusions?

Which makes me wonder, Is the following a correct statement? If atheism is true, then we are not conscious.

[mortalterror]

As far as Barrett's evidence, what is it? I admit I haven't found the book yet, but you haven't offered any evidence, yesno, you merely say Barrett does.

I haven't read Barrett's book either but he is not alone in his findings. Paul Bloom, Yale professor of psychology, author of Descartes Babies writes in his essay Religion is Natural (a series of quotes follow) -

But in the last few years, there has been an emerging body of research exploring children's grasp of certain universal religious ideas. Some recent findings suggest that two foundational aspects of religious belief - belief in divine agents and belief in mind-body dualism - come naturally to young children.

The most dramatic demonstration of childhood dualism concerns the development of afterlife beliefs. Bering and Bjorklund (2004) told children of different ages stories about a mouse that died, and asked about the persistence of certain properties. When asked about biological properties of the mouse, the children appreciated the effects of death, including that the brain no longer worked. But when asked about the psychological properties, most of the children said that these would continue - the dead mouse can have feelings of hunger, think thoughts, and hold desires. The body was gone, but the soul survives. And children believe this more than adults do, suggesting that while we have to learn the specific sort of afterlife that people in our culture believe in (heaven, reincarnation, spirit world, and so on), the notion that consciousness is separable from the body is not learned at all; it comes for free.

Stewart Guthrie (1993)... presents anecdotes and experiments showing that people attribute human characteristics to a striking range of real-world entities;... This capacity to attribute agency based on minimal cues is not a late-emerging developing accomplishment. One can get the same sorts of intentional attributions even in babies (e.g. Csibra, Biro, Koos & Gerge;u. 2003; Scholl & Tremoulet, 2000).

One of the most interesting discoveries in the developmental psychology of religion is that this bias toward creationism appears to be cognitively natural. Four-year-olds insist that everything has a purpose, including things like lions ('to go in the zoo') and clouds ('for raining'). When asked to explain why a bunch of rocks are pointy, adults prefer a physical explanation, while children choose functional answers, such as 'so that animals could scratch on them when they get itchy'. Based on such findings, Kelemen has proposed that children are prone to 'promiscuous teleology' - they tend, more so than adults, to see the world in terms of design and purpose (see Kelemen, 2004, for review). Other research finds that when children are directly asked about the origin of animals and people, they tend to prefer explanations that involve an intentional creator, even if the adults who raised them do not (Evans, 2000, 2001).

The proposal here is that there are certain early-emerging cognitive biases that give rise to religious belief. These include body-soul dualism and a hyper-sensitivity to signs of agency and design. These biases make it natural to believe in Gods and spirits, in an afterlife, and in the divine creation of the universe. These are the seeds from which religion grows.

[Ecurb]

The idea that consciousness is "metaphysical" (i.e. "supernatural") is clearly natural and reasonable for both children and adults. The notion of "agency" is also common among humans. E.E. Evans Pritchard, in his classic ethnography, reported that the Azande claimed that all bad things that happened to people were the result of witchcraft. If a house collapsed and killed its inhabitants, the Azande were not so naive as to deny that rotten timbers in the frame were involved, but nonetheless ascribed the fact that the falling house killed some people to witches.

Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny was a standard anthropological metaphor in Evans-Pritchard's England, from biology -- the fact that human fetuses resemble first one-celled creatures, then amphibians, then lower mammals, etc. was extended to "explain" human culture by early anthropologists. "Primitive" cultures (like the Azande) were "infantile" in (as one example) their notions about agency. Modern anthropologists eschew the metaphor, perhaps because it is politically incorrect, or perhaps because it fails to explain the wide variety of beliefs in "primitive" cultures.

IN any event, interesting posts, MT.

[YesNo]

I doubt that "metaphysics" and "supernatural" are interchangeable. As I see it, metaphysics is a rational consideration of being while the supernatural is whatever a particular culture does not consider natural regardless of any rational explanation. I suspect the Azande would have a smaller set of supernatural phenomena than we would have although from our perspective they might be characterized as believing in the supernatural. Did the Azande consider witchcraft to be a natural part of their world?

I think you have the idea of agency correct. I am going to try to get Barrett's book from the library tomorrow. The involvement of witches is one problem that needs to be addressed if one takes consciousness more seriously. If we acknowledge that people can harm others in ways we may not currently accept, how do we protect against that while maintaining civil liberties?

[YesNo]

Justin Barrett's "Born Believers" is divided into two parts. The first part considers the evidence and the second the implications.

The question is how naturally are children able to identify "agents"? Agents are anything that can intend to do something. Non-agents just sit there and wait for an agent to act on them. These agents can be human, animal or non-material like an imaginary friend. The first evidence is to establish how easy a child can distinguish between an agent and a non-agent.

One of the methods to get information is through "preferential looking" originated by Robert Franz about 50 years ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preferential_looking This evidence measures how long a child pays attention to a set of stimuli.

One of the problems for this research is that it is not clear what is being studied. Do we have innate nature? Can everything be reduced to the environment? Does reduction make sense at all? Elizabeth S. Spelke and Katherine D. Kinzler describe what is being studied as a "core knowledge" which doesn't fit into the previous categories: http://www.psy.cmu.edu/~siegler/710-Spelke2007.pdf It is probably good that one gets past old metaphors. Barrett wants to leave the physical "hardwiring" to the electricians. Also a reductionism to what a culture tells children to believe is questioned because children don't believe everything they are told.

I am currently looking at the concept of imaginary friends and Bradley Wigger is one of the researchers mentioned. That is where I have stopped.

When I read scientific surveys I try to identify whether the author has a bias. Barrett seems to have a theistic bias. So his evidence has to get past this bias. Spelke seems to have a feminist bias. There is nothing wrong with these biases. They motivate research, but one needs to make sure the evidence justifies the bias and not the other way around. Although Barrett is aware that he is writing a popular presentation his audience is mainly professionals. He wants to motivate the way they see their research so further questions can be asked that help answer questions Barrett is interested in. In a footnote to his introduction Barrett writes (p260):

I am the first to concede that alternative glosses of the data to date may be reasonable and new data may change the state of the art as presented here. Nevertheless, for clarity and to put in sharp relief where the critical issues for future scientific research lie, I present a strong version of the thesis that children are naturally born believers.

My view is that all science surveys are literature so I have no problem with that.