- Now, I think it's fair to say
that supernatural agents have been part
of the human experience for at least 30,000 years.
Across all ecologies, all cultures,
all living conditions, all epochs,
one of the few constants of the human experience
is the invocation and the postulation
of supernatural agents.
So why, why is that the case?
One possibility is that supernatural agents are real.
Maybe they're real.
Another possibility is that they're not real,
but they perform some vital function
for human groups and human individuals,
or they help us with healing, and with anxiety levels.
But what we're seeing all around us now
in the current modernized societies,
you know, people losing traditional religious orientations
left and right, I mean, it's ubiquitous.
So if that evidence is correct,
that they perform these vital functions for human groups
and human individuals, then a natural question arises:
What happens when you stop believing in,
you know, supernatural agents?
What do you do then?
So it's important to define
what we mean by "supernatural agents,"
since it plays such a central role
in religious consciousness, at least traditionally.
So a supernatural agent, in general,
is an agent with special, superhuman powers.
They typically are disembodied, but not always.
And the crucial thing
is that they know what we're thinking and desiring.
They have powers to heal, and powers to curse.
They tend to set up standards
that human beings are expected to strive towards,
and they tend to put human beings
in a servile, petitionary stance.
So we approach them with reverence, awe, fear-
and all kinds of ceremonial rituals.
We're always saying, "Please give us blessings and help,
and then we'll sacrifice to you, we'll worship you,
we'll organize our lives around you."
What you find when you start to study the attributes
and powers of supernatural agents,
in particular, in relation to individuals,
is that the agentic sense of self,
the executive self, gets diminished.
So a natural question arises:
Why?
Why do the supernatural agents want that?
And why would we go along with it?
What benefit, if any, do we derive from that process?
When we relate to a supernatural agent,
there's a lot more at stake
than when we relate to an ordinary agent.
You know, our entire lives are in the hands
of our loved ones, in a sense, it's true.
But when we relate to a supernatural agent,
when we really believe that they're real
and that they can confer blessings or curses on us,
then we gotta approach them
with due safety procedures in place
because we give them such power over us.
We need these guardrails to relate to supernatural agents.
So a big question that comes up
when you're studying supernatural agents is:
'Is a set of brain activity patterns any different
when we're relating to a supernatural agent
versus some control agent,
like a particularly significant loved one
or a prominent, powerful individual?'
And the answer is 'yes.'
We have noticed very different brain activity patterns
when people are cognizing, remembering, or imagining,
or praying to supernatural agents
versus interacting with ordinary control agents.
The default mode network is more intensely activated,
particularly the the set of structures
that we see during REM sleep.
Those include things like the hippocampus and the amygdala,
the default mode network and the salience network.
Whereas, the dorsilateral prefrontal, and the parietal
executive function networks are downregulated.
So the downregulation,
those networks facilitate that petitionary stance,
and the upregulation of all those social brain areas,
and REM sleep areas
tend to activate the experiential aspects
in the postulating of a superhuman mind
that can read our minds.
Now a question comes up about
when people who consider themselves non-religious
or in non-religious context
encounter what we would normally call a supernatural agent-
and that's happening quite a bit these days
in psychedelic experiences.
The question of whether or not
the same brain activity patterns
associated with supernatural agents
that occur during psychedelic experiences,
versus those that occur during REM sleep
or during religious experiences is a crucial question
that we don't know the answers to yet.
But initial indications are very similar,
brain activity patterns are occurring in all cases.
There's a lot of sensory associations going on
during these encounters with the supernatural agents.
After studying these supernatural agents,
both in psychedelic contexts
and in standard, experimental neuroscience protocols,
question comes up about their ontological status-
'cause people who experienced them,
even people who claim they were atheists, they're saying,
"I experienced them as absolutely real entities.
They don't follow my desires, or my will, or my agency,
and they have independent effects, and I believe they exist
whether or not I'm interacting with them."
So very healthy people
experience supernatural agents all the time-
they believe they're real.
In experimental neuroscience protocols,
nothing about what we've learned so far
about brain activities in relation to supernatural agents
suggest that they're mere hallucinations.
What to think of them ontologically is an open question.