The God Helmet

[Cramulus]

I would hope it has the same effect as the Total Perspective Vortex

https://hitchhikers.fandom.com/wiki/Total_Perspective_Vortex

Showing each wearer the full infinite magnificence of creation and their own inconsequential role in it causing lovecraft level horror and existential crises

Fun fact:  If you give me three facts, I can extrapolate a complete description of the universe from those three facts.

It will be absolutely wrong, but this is the Trump era and I did it, so it's PERFECT.

No way. There's no way you can do that. It's impossible. Okay, here's three facts:

1. Visits to Pornhub totaled 33.5 billion over the course of 2018, an increase of 5 billion visits over 2017. That equates to a daily average of 92 million visitors.
2. The US county with the highest property tax is Westchester, New York.
3. You once got your tongue stuck in a printer.




extrapolate from THAT, you turd genie

[Doktor Howl]

I can do this too, but my version is just gross and awful and not even I like it.

Same.  But nobody said the future was gonna be pleasant.

[The Johnny]

I mean, you gotta define precisely what a "mystical experience" is?

Also, if you monkey enough with your brain, be it thru magnetic, chemical or outright surgery, I figure you could experience pretty much anything that imagination can conjure up.

[Doktor Howl]

I mean, you gotta define precisely what a "mystical experience" is?

Also, if you monkey enough with your brain, be it thru magnetic, chemical or outright surgery, I figure you could experience pretty much anything that imagination can conjure up.

I think in this specific instance, they mean you can feel God staring at you.

He does that.  Humans have traditionally not let it bother them.

[Doktor Howl]

I would hope it has the same effect as the Total Perspective Vortex

https://hitchhikers.fandom.com/wiki/Total_Perspective_Vortex

Showing each wearer the full infinite magnificence of creation and their own inconsequential role in it causing lovecraft level horror and existential crises

Fun fact:  If you give me three facts, I can extrapolate a complete description of the universe from those three facts.

It will be absolutely wrong, but this is the Trump era and I did it, so it's PERFECT.

No way. There's no way you can do that. It's impossible. Okay, here's three facts:

1. Visits to Pornhub totaled 33.5 billion over the course of 2018, an increase of 5 billion visits over 2017. That equates to a daily average of 92 million visitors.
2. The US county with the highest property tax is Westchester, New York.
3. You once got your tongue stuck in a printer.




extrapolate from THAT, you turd genie

Okay, I can deduce that humans are obsessed with the acts required to generate more humans (expected), that anything East of the Rocky Mountains is overpriced crap, and that Dr Howl is the butt of all of God's jokes.

Then there's a bunch of other crap and then gravity and some stuff about physics.

Then there's the fact that God hasn't been heard from in 2000 years because he knows Dr Howl is looking for him.

[altered]

I mean, you gotta define precisely what a "mystical experience" is?

Also, if you monkey enough with your brain, be it thru magnetic, chemical or outright surgery, I figure you could experience pretty much anything that imagination can conjure up.

As anyone with powerful dissociation can attest, you can do these things by just trying to, if you have the brain damage to really fuck with your own head.

For instance, I regularly step through portals into alternate realities. This is part metaphor for a huge change in mental state and part actual experience of walking, feeling /something change/, and suddenly you're tilted a bit off center from everyone else, and everything's a little different, a little deranged, and everyone is the same three recurring characters in blatant rubber masks, and you have a script you're supposed to read off if they interact with you, complete with stage directions.

There is some exaggeration to that last bit, but not as much as you might guess.

If you put your mind to it, you can think whatever you want.

[Cain]

Given how...intensely sexual a lot of religious experiences can be (look it up, I'm not bullshitting here), I hope the God Helmet comes with absorbant trousers and plastic-covered seating.

[altered]

I would hope it has the same effect as the Total Perspective Vortex

https://hitchhikers.fandom.com/wiki/Total_Perspective_Vortex

Showing each wearer the full infinite magnificence of creation and their own inconsequential role in it causing lovecraft level horror and existential crises

Fun fact:  If you give me three facts, I can extrapolate a complete description of the universe from those three facts.

It will be absolutely wrong, but this is the Trump era and I did it, so it's PERFECT.

No way. There's no way you can do that. It's impossible. Okay, here's three facts:

1. Visits to Pornhub totaled 33.5 billion over the course of 2018, an increase of 5 billion visits over 2017. That equates to a daily average of 92 million visitors.
2. The US county with the highest property tax is Westchester, New York.
3. You once got your tongue stuck in a printer.




extrapolate from THAT, you turd genie

Howl did his, now it's my turn.

Pornhub is a nexus of religious fervor and the pilgrimages are flooding it's gates to the point that some people must simply live outside of them. I imagine this has something to do with the Westchester royal family, whose relaxed view of trespassers on the lands surrounding Pornhub have increased the flow of pilgrims to the Holy Cumshot Compilation to unforeseen heights. The royal family must lease the most valuable, most Pornhub-adjacent lands to vassals. It probably looks like the Kowloon Walled City.

Somewhere else, given the flow of the rich, powerful and presumably educated to Westchester where they can see titties all day long, the education standards have fallen to an all time low and the untrained maintenance interns have begun licking printers while they're printing.

This is because of their heathen allegiance to Doktor Howl, who has fought back against the Anal Crusades for years now, and who tells his followers that if they lick the toner right off a printer drum, they will never die.

One time, a demonstration went wrong. Those who couldn't remember they should have forgotten about it were killed.

From this we can deduce that...
1: the most powerful religion in the world is Pornhub, the land surrounding which is owned by the royal family of Westchester, NY. They are benevolent rulers, and they have built a temple-city to porn.
2: their greatest foe is Maintenance, a pagan upstart religion in the West, who performs arcane rituals with computing equipment to gain magical powers. The religion revolves around cult leader, deity, and Very Bad Man Dok Howl, who is a brutal and no-nonsense sort of fellow.
3: their wars have turned the Midwest into a wasteland, probably full of unexploded bombs.
4: the fact that a bunch of uneducated yokels from the West Coast have successfully fended off the porn-fueled military attacks from the Pornhubbers implies their magic ACTUALLY WORKS.
5: their magic comes from violating computing equipment, so the likely source of magic in our universe is electricity. Alternatively, disgust.
6: I prefer this timeline to our own.

[Cramulus]

aLTERED, come BACK, we need you on THIS side of the portal   

[Doktor Howl]

aLTERED, come BACK, we need you on THIS side of the portal   

No, we need to be on THAT fucking side of the portal.  This side is full of cock & repost.

[chaotic neutral observer]

Fun fact:  If you give me three facts, I can extrapolate a complete description of the universe from those three facts.

It will be absolutely wrong, but this is the Trump era and I did it, so it's PERFECT.

Some people can read War and Peace and come away thinking it's a simple adventure story. Others can read the ingredients on a chewing gum wrapper and unlock the secrets of the universe.

[minuspace]

I did some googling on Michael Persinger, the originator of this God Helmet thingy.  Here are a couple choice quotations:

The space-time characteristics of the axonal action potential are remarkably similar to the scaled equivalents of lightning. The energy and current densities from these transients within their respective volumes or cross-sectional areas are the same order of magnitude. Length–velocity ratios and temporal durations are nearly identical. There are similar chemical consequences such as the production of nitric oxide. Careful, quantitative examination of the characteristics of lightning may reveal analogous features of the action potential that could lead to a more accurate understanding of these powerful correlates of neurocognitive processes.

Our primary assumption is that consciousness and its variants of mystical states can be expressed as quantum phenomena, as predicted by Niehls Bohr and others. If consciousness and thought are coupled to electron movements, then a macroscopic manifestation should be congruent with the magnetic field strengths associated with neurocognitive activities. Access to the information within the movements of an electron, its fundamental charge, and the photon emissions associated with changes in electron movements, would allow mystical states and the information with which they are associated to have alternative interpretations that recruit the fundamental properties of space-time and matter.

...it's just so...beautiful.

Yup, that part, the one about action potentials. Leaving the lightning bit aside, I wonder what the effect of an electromagnetic field would be on the polarity those potentials. Could an induced experience of God also compel me to act accordingly? God... Hell... met...

[tyrannosaurus vex]

Oh yeah, if it's repeatable, then the way to monetize the "empirically verifiable religious experience" is like a new frontier of commerce. It will also allow all sorts of zany new religions to pop up - "the church of people who climbed a mountain and then jacked off while wearing the god helmet".

Monetizing the mystical experience is nothing new, but this would have the benefit of actually delivering something on at least a relatively reliable basis. And that can't be anything but a net positive, given that all the other forms of mystical experience are unpredictable at best. Economic theory says the worst that could happen is it drives all the competitors out of business, and fewer Hare Krishnas dawdling outside the airport terminal is fine by me.

My first reaction to reading this was a sort of disappointment that this lends itself to a highly reductive explanation of religious experience.

I used to worry about reductionism, but even materialism is spooky and mystical when you look at it from certain angles. And this is just another way to fuck up the way your neurons interact with each other so if LSD and psilocybin can get away with it, there's no reason this would be any different.

but as an aside, I want to see two people wearing god helmets fight each other in a steel cage.

Anyone who doesn't want to see that needs more time in the God Helmet.
...

All in all, I'm in favor of devices that induce mystical experiences. Consciousness is weird, and doing weird things with it is at the center of the human condition. If this is/was a real invention, it should be celebrated, and maybe even mandatory for high school graduation.

[Doktor Howl]

Anyone who doesn't want to see that needs more time in the God Helmet.
...

This is my new battle-cry.

[Cramulus]