What do people mean when they say there's no evidence?

It's interesting that people on the web constantly say "there's no evidence for an afterlife", or "there's no evidence for psi". For this seems to be straightforwardly false. Take reincarnation. There's research into alleged past lives of young children that appears to show that they are getting accurate information about a person that had previously lived. Or take psi. Parapsychologists have provided plenty of evidence for it. 

Obviously, most of these people are presumably just repeating each other. But what justification could be given for the origin of this claim that there's no evidence for such things?

Consider the case where someone declares that we have evidence that beds are dangerous as people disproportionately die in them compared to elsewhere. Would this be evidence that beds are dangerous, even if only very weak evidence?

It depends on what people mean by "evidence". I would say yes, but I think most science educated people would say no. One reason why they would say no is because we already have a good explanation for why people die in beds -- namely because they go to bed when they are ill. But, another more compelling reason, is that it seems there's no conceivable mechanism whereby beds in and of themselves could somehow play a causal role in precipitating death.

Let's, for the sake of argument, accept for the moment these peoples' conception of "evidence" as requiring a possible mechanism.  Now, consider reincarnation. Even though young children appear to recollect previous lives, people assert there's no conceivable causal mechanism whereby consciousness can depart from a person who has died, to then appear in a fetus or new born baby. Hence, until someone proposes a possible mechanism, there can be no scientific evidence for reincarnation. Same applies more generally to an afterlife, or to psi.

There's a deep problem here though. There appears to be an implicit assumption that our everyday embodied consciousness being produced by brains is entirely unproblematic and hence that there will be a mechanism whereby this is achieved even though we have yet to discover it. Or, even if it's not entirely unproblematic, we can be confident that brains do somehow produce consciousness because of all the ways that brains affect our mind-states -- especially when we consider such debilitating conditions as dementia.

I would maintain, though, that the mind-brain correlations that supposedly prove that brains produce minds, appears to be no more persuasive than eyeglasses- acuity of vision correlations prove that eyeglasses produce vision. In the case of the eyeglasses, there clearly is no conceivable mechanism. And we know that vision already exists, it is merely changed by the eyeglasses. However, it seems to me, brains are in the same boat. There is nothing about the ultimate particles that brains are made of that could possibly produce our phenomenological experiences. So, similar to eyeglasses-vision, perhaps consciousness already exists with brains merely changing it.

But, regardless of whether I am right or wrong about the brain somehow producing consciousness, it seems to me we don’t have any conceivable mechanism for how the brain does this. Hence, if despite the correlations we have no evidence that beds precipitate death, then likewise, despite the mind-brain correlations, and since we lack a conceivable mechanism, we also have no evidence that brains produce consciousness. So even if – contrary to my position – the thesis that brains produce consciousness is at least conceivable (unlike eyeglasses producing vision), we have no evidence that brains actually do so (least of all do we have proof).

Indeed, we have a more plausible scenario; namely consciousness exists all along with brains merely changing it i.e. consciousness is fundamental. And if that should be the case, then consciousness can exist independently of brains just as vision exists independently of eyeglasses.  If this is so then the demand for a mechanism is misplaced.  Indeed, demanding a possible mechanism appears to presuppose that consciousness is material and hence is question-begging.

Now let’s consider psi. Even if the notion of the brain producing consciousness is unproblematic, the fact still remains we have no causal mechanism for how it is produced. But psi, if it exists, will be an ability or property of consciousness. If we lack a causal mechanism for the very existence of consciousness, how on earth can we expect anyone to produce a causal mechanism for psi? Further, if I am correct and consciousness is not produced by the brain, how can we a priori declare what properties consciousness must have?

When people say psi is impossible due to no possible causal mechanism, they have in mind that physics pretty much describes the entirety of reality and it doesn’t allow for psi. But physics leaves out consciousness in its description of reality; indeed it suggests consciousness shouldn’t exist. If it suggests this, it is scarcely likely to suggest a property of consciousness like psi should exist, or even free will or a causal role for consciousness.

DNA? Nurture? What makes us what we are?

Yesterday I read the following short article by Robert Plomin, an American psychologist and geneticist best known for his work in twin studies and behaviour genetics:

Parenting myths and the DNA revolution

I recommend people read this before proceeding further, it is only very short. (Update 11/8/22 I note that the whole article is no longer available!  Using wayback machine, try this).

My own position is that the notion that we are born blank slates and it is purely the environment that makes everything we are, is preposterous.  I briefly touch on this issue here.  I should stress, though, that our environment does, of course, shape and mould our behaviour.  This is often a persona that one learns to put on in order to be accepted by others.  But also, as we grow older, most of us (but not everyone) can acquire genuine empathy and compassion as a result of their interactions with others.  However, the notion that everything we are -- all our interests, our treatment of others and so on -- is wholly due to our environment, I find extraordinarily implausible.   


The article states that:

 "children growing up in the same family with the same parents are no more similar than if the children were raised in different families".

So, in other words, regardless of whether 2 children are brought up in the same family or whether each of them are brought up in different families, the author is claiming that this will not affect their personalities.  This is compatible with my own position since, though I think we can change by acquiring empathy and so on, this is not something that can easily be taught.  Moreover, this is largely only applicable once one reaches adulthood in any case.

The author states that his fifty years of research shows that:

inherited DNA differences account for about 50% of the differences between children for all psychological traits.  

So what about the other 50% if it is not due to the environment?  This is the interesting part.  The author says:

Following years of research trying to identify the environmental factors that make children in the same family different from one another, I conclude that they are mostly idiosyncratic, random factors over which parents have little control—in a word, chance. 

Of course, saying that the other 50% of all psychological traits is due to "idiosyncratic, random factors" is to say precisely nothing.  He is effectively saying, I have no idea what accounts for the other 50%, it beats me.  In other words he's floundering, flummoxed, unable to come up with any conceivable mechanism for the other 50%.

What seems to me to be happening here is that the author presupposes that we are purely material beings and hence it can only be the environment or our genetic makeup or some combination thereof, that can possibly explain the entirety of our psychological traits.  It seems that virtually the entire academic community are in this straitjacket, confining their thoughts to only those possibilities consonant with a naturalistic metaphysic. Virtually all of them believe that our nature is fixed by something external to the self -- whether it be the environment, genetics, or some combination of both. They are implicitly assuming that everything we are is simply a result of impersonal material processes.

This contradicts our commonsensical conception of the self that I have articulated in many of my blog entries, two very recent ones being here and here.  I regard it as a mistake to suppose that anything material -- whether genes or environment -- has to make us what we are. What we are, our essence, is just a fundamental fact not capable of further analysis. At best we might say we self-actualise our own essence. We make ourselves what we are. That is, we self-cause our own nature.

For me, the fact that his research has been unable to account for 50% of all psychological traits is entirely unsurprising, and indeed, to be expected.  It's like being surprised that people who have imbibed the same amount of alcohol don't all act the same.  Yes, they might all become more gregarious, more impulsive, and so on.  But that's just an influence on their distinct essences.  I suspect the genetic component of us plays a similar role. 

 

Is your "self" just an illusion?

Just read this: Is Your 'Self' Just an Illusion?   I reject this idea that the self is an illusion.  I believe we are the very same selves throughout our lives, and perhaps before and after our lives too.  This can be accommodated if we regard ourselves as mental substances (read this recent blog post by me).

However, according to the article and contrary to my position, both John Searle, a philosopher of mind at the University of California, Berkeley, and Colin McGinn, a British philosopher of mind, although apparently sympathetic to the feeling we are persisting selves, both have difficulty in imagining how we could be.

Quoting from the article, John Searle said:

The problem with personal identity is, we feel there is a fact that 'I'm me'. But that's hard to pin down philosophically, because all of my experiences change, all of the parts of my body change, all of the molecules in my body change.

He further stated:

You have to postulate a self to make sense of rational behavior. We want to find a 'soul' that is at the bottom of all this … but, of course, there isn't any. 

Colin McGinn said:

The self is something real, but the self has got to be grounded in the brain — the self's unity over time must be a function of what's in the brain. We don't know how that works, but it must be so.

He also adds:

 All we've got is the idea that you, at a later time, are causally connected to you at an earlier time. That isn't the same thing as you persisting through time.

So they have a great deal of difficulty reconciling this idea that we are persisting selves with the idea that the brain produces consciousness.  I sympathise with this.  Our brains are in a constant state of change.  Thus, how could they produce an unchanging self?

Psychologist and skeptic Susan Blackmore outrightly rejects this concept of persisting selves.  She says:

This so-called 'me' is really just another reconstruction. There was an earlier one 30 minutes ago, and there will be others in the future. But they're really not the same person

She further goes on to say "so there's no self to die", because there is no self prior to death and "there's certainly no self to continue after death".

And she also said:

Death has no sting, because there never was a 'you' to die. Every moment is just a new story.

We regard death as the end of us and something to be feared.  But this presupposes we exist before death -- that we are conscious entities that persist from second to second, day to day, even from one year to the next. But, if there's no persisting self, then all this is an illusion.  We effectively are constantly dying every second, only to spring into being anew the next second.  But the new "you" that springs into being each and every second are always replicas (this can best be understood by a teleportation thought experiment.  See a relevant blog essay by me).    I agree with Blackmore that it's kind of liberating to feel that way.  However, that does nothing to make it true.

Finally, we have the famous Daniel Dennett, a philosopher, who, like Blackmore, outrightly rejects the concept of persisting selves.  He says:

The notion that the only thing that could persist is a little, special, unchangeable pearl of self-stuff seems like a fairly lame solution to the problem.

I agree with all four of the quoted philosophers/psychologist that it is extremely difficult to reconcile a persisting self with the notion that the brain produces such a self; indeed perhaps impossible.  But what if the brain doesn't produce consciousness?  In which case the commonsensical self -- what we might label an immaterial self or mental substance -- no longer encounters any such intractable difficulty.   It's of no avail simply stating it's a fairly lame solution.  I think this is simply a reflection of Dennett's view that science explains reality in its totality (i.e modern materialism) leaving no room for that which cannot be measured, a view which I emphatically reject.    

It seems that if we subscribe to materialism, or indeed any position that has the brain producing consciousness, we ought not just to reject an afterlife, but also the notion that we are selves that persist from one second to the next.  Very few people appear to understand how radical this brain produces consciousness thesis actually is. 

Is the fear of death rational?

I'm not as afraid of dying as I used to be. It's probably the realisation I have perhaps 30 years left and I've come to terms with that fact, or at least I have to a degree. If one thinks a lot of one's impending death, then I think maybe death loses its sting a bit.

(As an aside, I was vastly more afraid of dying in my 20's. Having said that, I had flu when I was about 18. I was bedbound and at one point thought I might possibly die. I felt so ill that my fear of death, to a large extent, dissipated, and I remember thinking it wouldn't be so bad if I died. Yeah, this was flu, or so the doctor said who came to visit me. Up until then I thought flu was like a bad cold!)

So, why are we afraid of dying? Many people think such fear is irrational and like to quote Epicurus who is alleged to have said:

Death does not concern us, because as long as we exist, death is not here. And when it does come, we no longer exist.

Of course he's assuming that death is the end of our existence. Let's go with that. Does that make one's fear of death irrational as Epicurus maintains? I don't think so. Contra Epicurus, I would dispute that it is death per se that we fear. Imagine that we could die for an hour, then come back to life again (similar happens under general anaesthesia). There would be no sense of nothingness, rather we would appear to awaken with no sense of time having passed whatsoever. It would be like teleportation, except through time rather than space. If there's little to no fear dying for an hour, then the same surely applies if we were dead for a day, a year, or arguably even a 1000 years.

No, it seems to me that the fear is of eternal nothingness. It's the idea that it is the end of all things. All our wants, desires, loves, fears, hopes, plans, are suddenly all to no avail. Whatever we have achieved (or whether we have achieved nothing), whoever we have loved or hated, all our hopes, yearnings, fears -- all collapse into complete irrelevance. We are all equal at the end. Because nothing will ever happen to us again. Our lives, our existence, all ultimately meant nothing in the grand scheme of things. In a sense, when we die, the Universe might as well cease to be.

Let me hasten to add that this doesn't mean we can't obtain many satisfactions in life (see this blog post by me). But, at some point, it will all be over. And whatever experiences we've lived through, we're now all in the same boat facing eternal oblivion.

All this is antipathetic and repugnant to the yearning soul. We fear from the bottom of our souls this abyss of nothingness. It appears to rob life of all meaning. Very deep inside us we feel, perhaps know, that this cannot be so.

The Checker-Shadow "illusion" Part 2.

Around 15-20 years ago I had this sudden insight, a sudden understanding. It was pertaining to so-called perceptual illusions.  I suddenly realised that many so-called perceptual illusions are not in fact illusions at all. Close to ten years ago I wrote a blog post regarding the checker-shadow illusion where I explained that, in my opinion, properly speaking, this is not in fact an illusion at all. Before reading further I recommend that people read that blog post. I would also recommend that people read another blog post by me on perceptual illusions here.   And, although not necessary to read, this blog post too might be of interest.  

On searching on the net I've only ever been able to find one person who holds the same opinion as I do that this shadow-checker "illusion" is not in fact an illusion at all.  And that was merely on a discussion forum.  Indeed, I have been vehemently attacked on this issue by many people (although it is clear to me they simply completely fail to understand my argument). Anyway, just a couple of days ago, I discovered a very interesting review of a book regarding colours and which talks about the checker-shadow illusion.  It says:

“Illusion” implies that our system is fooled, but as far as useful information goes, the checkerboard interpretation is probably better. Try as they might, mathematicians can’t make the computers see the checkerboard. Rather than a demonstration of how easily fooled we are, optical illusions like this one are examples of the brain’s mysterious and irreplicable abilities. It interprets its environment with a sophistication that exceeds our ability to measure and reconstruct physical phenomena. The usual framing has it wrong: Despite A and B having the same SSR, humans are still able to see the checkerboard.

First of all, it's gratifying to at last find someone else that agrees with me.  Two other people actually, both the author of the book and the reviewer.

But, anyway, this underscores the fact that in certain respects computers, at least if merely using visual information, cannot see as well as we do.  The fact that computers cannot see the checkerboard implies that they cannot see their environment very well at all.  This is why autonomous cars can't just rely on cameras but require other sensing methods such as LIDAR.  It also partially explains why fully autonomous cars might still be decades away.  Back in 2014 I predicted 2060, which at that time was vastly later than all the predictions of the various pundits.  Almost to the man they thought that fully autonomous cars would be widespread within 5-20 years.

So, despite using highly sophisticated algorithms, computers still cannot see as well as we do.  An interesting question is why can't they?  Why can't they see the checkerboard?  If it is merely the brain that enables us to see, then whatever physical processes are involved, they surely should be able to be matched by suitably sophisticated algorithms.  To me their failure in this regard suggests that something else is required, that consciousness in and of itself  is playing a pivotal role that is enabling us to see proficiently.

Comments on a guest essay about Materialism and Idealism

I've just read this guest essay by a certain Stephen Davies on Bernardo Kastrup's blog. I'm not particularly keen on his strategy of comparing the hard problem of consciousness with Zeno's paradoxes, but I'd like to comment and expand on some of his more direct points and arguments.

He says: 

[W]e need to briefly explore what the hard problem of consciousness is, and to do that we need to look at the metaphysical philosophy of materialism. Simply stated, this asserts that everything is made of matter, of physical stuff. You may wonder why such a seemingly obvious and self-explanatory statement requires the title of a metaphysical philosophy. The reason is that materialism isn’t just saying that there are physical things, it is saying everything is physical. Materialism is saying that the thoughts you are having now are physical; it is saying that the curious and unique mix of emotions you are subjectively experiencing at this very moment are purely and solely physical material things. And it is saying that the awareness that witnesses all these subjective feelings is physical. This no longer seems so obvious, does it?

I'm in agreement with all of this. They are saying the material stuff out there -- trees, rocks, stars etc -- is the same type of stuff as toothache, feeling angry, or indeed the experience of seeing said trees, rocks and stars. And the experiencer or self who undergoes all these experiences is also material! But what is the cash value of this, what does it actually mean? My experiences, emotions, thoughts etc don't have any attributes we conceive the material world as having -- so no shape, no size, no mass, no electric charge etc. Moreover, our consciousness appears to be invisible. I cannot see your consciousness, you cannot see mine. It can only be inferred from our behaviour, not directly detected.

Not only does it perhaps seem a little strange to assume that all our mental, emotional and spiritual experiences, and the subjective experiencer, are actually objective, external and physical, materialists have absolutely no idea, even in principle, how matter could possibly create our rich inner life of conscious awareness and experience. This is what is referred to as the hard problem of consciousness.

Their solution is often to identify consciousness with neural processes or, alternatively, what such processes do NB it is not being said here that neural processes cause or elicit conscious experiences, but rather our conscious experiences are nothing but such neural processes. If you think this is utterly nonsensical, then you get it, it is. A bit like saying ice cream is literally one and the same thing as sand, or identifying any 2 completely different objects as being one and the very same object.

So, even though it might be true that conscious experiences are inevitably correlated with neural processes, this doesn't justify materialism. At the very most, this might lead us to say the neural processes cause or elicit [non-material] conscious experiences. But then we get the problem that the author of this essay states; namely "how matter could possibly create our rich inner life of conscious awareness and experience". I myself try to explain this problem in my Brains affecting Minds do not rule out an Afterlife and I also explain there that even if there were no such problem, this still fails to show that such correlations compel the conclusion that the brain creates consciousness.

But what of science? Isn’t the indisputable and phenomenal success of science and technology proof that materialism is an extremely successful theory? No. Science is agnostic on metaphysical philosophy. The scientific method and all the advances and technological breakthroughs that follow, work perfectly well regardless of your philosophical beliefs. That is, in fact, its strength: it relies on empirical data, not belief.

Yes, material reality exhibits patterns, science describes such patterns using mathematics. How could that possibly connote that consciousness is material? It seems to me to be similar to someone exclaiming that given how successful metal detectors are at finding metal objects, anything that is not registered by the detector, such as plastic objects, must be really metal in disguise or else illusory. It's that silly.

The metaphysical theory that everything is matter is a philosophy, not a scientific fact. But we can go further and say that even the assumption that there is any matter at all, is equally a theory and a philosophical assumption, not a scientific fact. The idea that there is physical matter outside of our conscious experience is just that, an idea. We only know for sure that we have subjective experience; we cannot know for sure what constitutes that experience. The only thing we know for sure is our immediate experience of being subjectively aware. Everything we can ever possibly know can only be known by us within and via the medium of our subjective experience.

Yes, we cannot know that a material reality exists at all if what we mean by a material reality is material stuff having a full-blooded existence entirely independently of consciousness. One alternative is Berkeley's Idealism otherwise known as subjective idealism. I talk about Berkeley's subjective idealism here (this isn't quite the same as Kastrup's idealism).

In contrast to this idealist view of the world, a materialist philosophy posits an external and objective physical world that is not directly knowable. Our only experience of such a world, if it exists at all, is through our subjective experiences. The idea that there is such an objective external physical world is an abstraction thought up by consciousness. And it is an abstract theory that is becoming less and less supported by the results of our best scientific experiments in quantum mechanics.

Yes, for example, is this material external world coloured? Are there sounds and smells out there? In other words, is this material reality similar to our perceptions of it? Not according to the standard scientific story. To be honest, I do not think you have to be an idealist to emphatically reject this scientific story. I regard it as preposterous this notion that objects are not really coloured but are a creation of the mind.

The self or soul as a mental substance

Mental Substance

What is a mental substance? I think it can best be understood by contrasting mental substances with material substances. Think of material objects. They have properties such as their weight, whether they are dented, their colour and so on. These properties cannot exist by themselves, they are not freestanding, they belong to a material substance. Material substances, on the other hand, exist in and of themselves and are the bearer of such properties. Crucially, the properties can change but without changing the identity of the object or substance. So, for example, a table might acquire certain types of scratches, its colour might fade and so on as it grows older, but, despite these changes, it is still the very same table or the very same substance as it ages.

The concept of a substance and its properties also apply to the realm of the mental. There are experiences, for example, the experience of pain. But one can argue a pain doesn't exist all by itself, there has to be a self that undergoes the pain. Experiences, in other words, are seemingly always had by an experiencer, or self.

This self is called the mental substance. This self remains the same identical self throughout our lives. It is the I. It is that which makes me feel I am the very same person from one hour to the next, one day to the next, and one year to the next. My moods might change from one hour to the next, my interests and even intelligence might change from one year to the next, nevertheless, it is still me that undergoes all these changes. The I or me is the mental substance; contrariwise the moods, cognitive abilities, memories, interests and so on are the properties of the self/mental substance. These properties can change without me ceasing to exist and turning into another person. 

To try and illustrate my meaning here imagine someone throughout their lives wearing a pair of spectacles.  The lenses will age, acquire scratches and so on.  In addition, the lenses might be changed periodically.  As a result, even if that person's unaided vision remains the same, their bespectacled vision will change throughout their life.  And such changes need not be confined to the acuity of their vision.  They could have lenses that cast everything in a shade of colour or distort their vision in a particular manner.  They could even have lenses that render them unable to see at all.

Our unaided vision can analogically be compared to the mental substance/self. The bespectacled vision can analogically be compared to one's particular mental state at any time, or our minds.   Just as changes in the lenses influence our bespectacled vision but not our unaided vision, so too might changes in the brain influence our mental states (the properties of the self) but not our essence (the mental substance).

Notwithstanding the fact that throughout our lives our moods, cognitive abilities and so on continually change, we all still feel that we are nevertheless the very same self throughout our lives.  This is so even for those who reject an afterlife.  So the mental substance/self that I have described seems to align up to most peoples intuitions as to what they truly are.

Note that this self I have outlined is not the same as the sense of self just as a sense of a tree is not the same as the tree itself. Few of us would deny that we have at least a sense of self.  But most professional philosophers reject this notion of an actual self, they believe it is an illusion.

Should there be an afterlife it is my view that it is this self or mental substance that will survive.  In which case the self or mental substance can be referred to as one's soul.

Alleged problems with such a mental substance or soul

In The Soul Fallacy, the author Julien Musolino refers to the analogy of a radio. He says that this involves:

the idea that the brain does not cause the mind, but that it merely serves as a gateway for it, just like a radio set functions as a receiver and decoder of electromagnetic waves.

He goes on to say:

A radio set (or a TV, if you prefer) and the signal it receives are separate things, and so they can exist independently of each other ...  Destroy the receptor, and you still have the signal. Obliterate the brain and you still have the soul.

This then seems to be essentially the same type of analogy as my own analogy of spectacles.  So just as destroying a radio will have no effect on the signal, so too destroying one's spectacles clearly will have no effect on our unaided vision.

However, Julien Musolino is not impressed with such analogies.  He goes on to say:

a few moment's reflection reveal so many dead-ends, contradictions, and nonsensical implications that it will make your head spin.

For starters, the receptor view of the brain doesn't even begin to respond to the challenge posed for dualism by what we called the fragility of the mind. If damaging only parts of the brain can annihilate just about every aspect of our mind, then by what miracle would the complete destruction of our brain following death leave us with all our mental faculties intact so that we can recognize Uncle Fred in heaven? If the soul needs a functioning brain to be able to think, see, and feel, then how could it perform these functions without a brain at all?

But, of course, the whole purpose of the analogy is to convey the idea that the soul doesn't need a functioning brain to think, see, and feel.  If the lenses in my spectacles get dirtier and dirtier as time goes by, this can have no implications for my unaided vision when I take my spectacles off.   He needs to argue that this analogy is false or inappropriate.  Instead, he seems to have completely missed its point.

He also says:

Does the all-or-nothing radio-brain view entail that the soul signal gives rise to my entire mental life? Are the languages I speak, the memories I have, the skills I possess all the product of something beamed into my brain from above? My suspicion is that the reason I speak French and English is because I grew up in France and then moved to the United States. I am also convinced that my memories have to do with the people I've met and the places I've visited in this world. If certain aspects of my mind are the obvious consequence of my dealings with the denizens of the physical world, then what exactly is the soul signal supposed to do? Does it just make me conscious?

One's memories and acquired skills are clearly not part of the mental substance, they are, rather, acquired properties.  Also, it should be noted that the self or soul doesn't make one conscious any more than a table makes its colour or shape etc.  That is to say, a substance doesn't make its properties, a substance is the prerequisite requirement for the very existence of any properties. 

It seems to me that Julien Musolino doesn't appear to have any understanding of what he's attacking.  And he essentially says nothing else regarding the analogy.  So much for the aforementioned "dead-ends, contradictions, and nonsensical implications that it will make your head spin".

Two other people I've read that attack this analogy, but equally and independently misunderstand it, and in precisely the same manner, are Keith Augustine and Steven Novella. Keith Augustine is one of the editors and is by far the most prolific contributor to The Myth of an Afterlife (I wrote a ~13,000 word assessment of the arguments contained in that volume here).  In that book Keith Augustine says:

It doesn’t take much reflection to see that a television receiver is a terrible analogy for making sense of known mind-brain correlations. For the analogues would have to be:

Broadcast station → Electromagnetic signal → TV receiver → TV program images 

External soul ↔ Interactive forces ↔ Brain ↔ Behavior

On this analogy, mental activity itself occurs in the external soul, just as the images of a television program originate from the broadcast station. But no damage to the local circuitry of your TV set can have any effect on the television program recording playing at the remote broadcast station, or on the signal that the station puts out.

Steven Novella  raises the same objection, except he invokes the plot of TV programmes rather than the TV signal.  He says:

A more accurate analogy would be this – can you alter the wiring of a TV in order to change the plot of a TV program? Can you change a sitcom into a drama? Can you change the dialogue of the characters? Can you stimulate one of the wires in the TV in order to make one of the on-screen characters twitch?

Well, that is what would be necessary in order for the analogy to hold.

But the fact that the TV set can have no effect on the TV signal/plot of a programme is the very point. Or, to use the simpler analogy, the fact that the eyeglasses have no effect on our unaided vision is the very point.  For it is the TV signal/unaided vision that represents the mental substance/self.  They are conflating the mind, which is what results when the self operates through the brain, with the mental substance/self/soul.  In my many communications with Keith Augustine (e.g. in the comments under my amazon review of his book and elsewhere.  Update 11/2/22 Amazon have, without warning, deleted all comments under customer reviews!). I have pointed out his misunderstanding on this issue, but in his responses he has always ignored this particular point.  I'm also pretty sure I've pointed out this misunderstanding to Steven Novella too.

What would destroy the analogy and the whole concept of mental substance would be if damage to the brain could alter the actual mental substance rather than merely affecting its properties.  However, this is a difficult task since there is not much we can say about this substance apart from it being responsible for the feeling that we are the very same self throughout the duration of our lives and serving as the bearer of properties. Moreover, that feeling need not be constantly present.

 

Conclusion

So long as we feel we are the same self as time passes the default assumption should surely be that this is correct unless compelling reasons are advanced to doubt this.  And they would need to be compelling indeed since I'm sure the vast majority of us are convinced of our persisting nature, at least from our births until our deaths.  

Finally, is such an enduring self/mental substance consistent with the notion that the brain somehow produces this self? Consider that my brain changes all the time. Could a constantly changing brain produce a self that is unchanging?  Arguably this is problematic.  Hence this notion that we are mental substances implies both an afterlife and indeed "beforelife". And this is before we consider any evidence for an afterlife.

No, I don't Hate Science

Apples fall. That is to say, if we hold an apple, then release it, then it will fall to the ground.

Why does it? Why not just stay there in the air, or move upwards, or whatever?

Throughout history, human beings have dreamt up explanations for why apples and any other unsupported object fall. Aristotle gave a teleological account; namely that objects have a goal-directed behaviour to move downwards to the ground. Isaac Newton dispensed with goal-directed behaviour and said that objects fall due to this thing called gravitational force, a thing only known via its effects. Albert Einstein then came along and said objects fall due to the warping of space-time, this warping again only known via its effects.

Throughout these differing explanations, apples still fall. The rate at which they fall i.e the acceleration, can be quantified. We can note that they fall at the same acceleration irrespective of their weight.

More generally the material world exhibits regularities and we can describe these regularities using mathematical equations. No matter what our explanations for these regularities, no matter how regularly such explanations might change, reality still exhibits the same patterns.

Don't imagine I pooh-pooh such scientific explanations though. They can be very useful! Look at the GIF below:



How do we explain the movement of the black dots? We can hypothesis the existence of invisible triangles! Clearly, the apexes of these invisible triangles somehow give rise to the black dots. Such an explanation is useful, it allows us to confidently mathematically describe the path of the black dots. We have given a scientific explanation! All done and dusted. And anyone who denies the existence of these triangles is being unscientific and must hate science (I have often been accused of being anti-science and even hating science).

But hold on just a sec. We could equally hypothesize invisible squares too. Or invisible stars! Which is the real underlying explanation, the real mechanism? Perhaps, to be very radical, none of them are?

We don't know why reality behaves as it does. Yes, reality exhibits regular patterns that can be mathematically described. But we don't know why it exhibits those particular patterns, or why reality exhibits any patterns at all. Nor indeed do we know why the world/universe exists at all.

Science doesn't explain, it doesn't tell us why reality is as it is. It merely describes. Bear that in mind when someone next tells you that some phenomenon couldn't possibly be for real. They are assuming that our scientific explanations amount to more than mere descriptions. That their explanations depict how reality really is. That the triangles, or perhaps the squares, or perhaps the stars, have a literal existence.

God of the Gaps

Julien Musolino in the soul fallacy says:

Thanks to Fox News celebrity Bill O’Reilly, the logic of god-of-the-gaps argument has become viral. During an interview with David Silverman, president of the American Atheists, O’Reilly challenged his baffled guest to explain how the tides so predictably and regularly go about their business. “You can't explain that!” O’Reilly told Silverman. But if you assume that God exists, as O’Reilly says he does, then everything makes perfect sense and you can understand how the tides work.

Some people (known as “pinheads” in the anchor's colorful jargon) informed O’Reilly that we do know how the tides work, and that we have known for more than three hundred years. Undaunted, O’Reilly posted a clip on YouTube in which he pushed the argument one step further. Fine, he concedes, the gravitational pull of the moon explains the tides. But where did the moon come from? (For an amusing parody demonstrating the existence of mail fairies using O’Reilly logic, YouTube is also an excellent resource—because you can't explain the superb regularity with which the mail gets delivered, and if you can, you sure can't explain where the mailman came from.)

The mail analogy is a very poor one - or at least it is if one is attempting to mock the notion that any type of "God" or metamind could be responsible for the predictability of tides. The "superb regularity with which the mail gets delivered" is, after all, due to conscious agents with an end in mind. So, if anything, the analogy suggests the regularity of the tides is also due to some conscious agency with an end in mind.

People might object that in the case of the tides that we know this is due to the existence of gravitational force. However, this buys into a certain conception of physical reality that it is constrained to behave as it does due to innate physical causes such as gravitational force. But this goes beyond what we can legitimately infer. Physical reality exhibits patterns, those patterns can be captured via mathematical equations. And, ultimately, that's all that physics deals with. I go into detail about this here. Indeed, physics has absolutely nothing to say about such a suitable conception of "God". I try and illustrate this here.

Granted this conception of God is not a God of the gaps one. But did Bill O’Reilly actually state that he was defending such a conception of "God"? I would imagine not. The God of the gaps is a silly one as I address here.

The Tabletop Illusion

I'm currently reading the soul fallacy by Julien Musolino. In it he tries to stress that we are constantly being fooled by our subjective first person perspective and in our judgements. That we need the objective third person perspective as provided by science to tell us how reality really is.

He tries to illustrate his point by the following perceptual illusion of two tables (the Roger Shepard tabletop illusion).

I think we would all agree that the two tables are different shapes. But, when we rotate the left table 90 degrees clockwise and move it over the other table, we find they are both exactly the same shape! Moreover, even when we are made aware of this fact we cannot help but see that the tables are very different shapes. Julien Musolino finds this very significant. In the the soul fallacy he says:

[This illusion] pits our first-person perspective—what our senses subjectively reveal to us—against the third-person perspective—what the result of objective measurement demonstrates. The story of the demise of the soul, to a large extent, reflects the triumph of the third-person perspective over its subjective, first-person counterpart. But there is more to Shepard's illusion than meets the eye. The analogy contains two additional virtues. After this brief demonstration, I do not know anyone who would continue to insist that one tabletop really is longer than the other because of the way they look ... The analogy's second virtue is that it reveals to us how stubborn first-person impressions can be in the face of objective evidence.

I think this is flawed reasoning. Indeed, it seems to me to be inappropriate to call this an illusion at all.

First of all, we need to draw a distinction between the image of the tables, and the actual tables themselves that they represent. The above picture is an image of two tables.

Having put that aside, let's suppose there are two tables in front of us that are in our visual field. When looking at the tables, let's also suppose that the image of the tables on our retinas closely approximates to the image of the tables we see above on our computer screens. Just as the shapes of the images of the two tables is the same on our computer screens above, so too will the shapes of the two images of the tables on our retinas be the same.

Are we fooled in the latter case? I would say not since if we approached the two tables, look at them from different angles, run our fingers over them and so on, we would definitively establish the two tables are of differing shapes. Likewise, if we are to take the drawing of the two tables above as actually depicting tables rather than arbitrary lines representing nothing, it is not fair to say we are being fooled here either. In other words, there is no illusion, as such.


We need to understand how are senses work. We don't simply passively perceive what's out there. The data we receive through our senses is hopelessly inadequate for us to see the world as it truly is in and of itself. The actual ability to see is supplied by our implicit expectations gained from our previous acquaintance with the world. That is to say, what we actually see is shaped and moulded by all of our previous visual experiences. In effect, we have an implicit unconscious theory about how the world is and this is instrumental in shaping what we actually perceive.

Without such an implicit theory, we wouldn't be able to perceive at all, at least not a 3D world of objects at various distances. We'd just see a splodge of colours in a 2-dimensional plane. In other words, we'd see the world as a computer or robot would; namely as depicted from a third person perspective shorn of any "illusions" that any minds can add.

In short, this "illusion" is not an example of us being fooled. If we didn't experience such "illusions", then we wouldn't be able to see at all! This is why autonomous cars -- which do not have the benefit of illusions to apprehend the environment correctly -- shouldn't rely upon cameras alone. They need other instruments to effectively detect the environment, such as LIDAR. Even then, they are not as proficient as human drivers in urban environments. My personal expectations are that fully (level 5) autonomous vehicles will not be widespread for a few decades yet (back in 2014 the date I gave was 2060).


So, is the subjective first person perspective inferior to the objective third person perspective as Julien Musolino claims? Certainly not when it comes to visually apprehending the environment. So much for, as he puts it, "the triumph of the third-person perspective over its subjective, first-person counterpart". This is not to deny that we are often fooled and that the third person perspective, as provided by science, is the more accurate. But I don't think this has any relevance for deciding whether, on the one hand, our essence is a soul or, on the other hand, a sophisticated biological machine. But I'll address that issue when I come to reviewing his book.

Two other relevant similar blog posts by me are:

Are Perceptual illusions always necessarily illusions?  (essentially the same argument I make in this blog post, but I wrote it over 9 years ago).

Perceptual illusions show our minds construct reality

Is there a better alternative to capitalism?

People often say that socialism or communism don't work, that Russia and China have shown this to be true. Contrariwise, that modern democratic capitalism does work. But is it true that capitalism works?

It depends on what people mean by saying it works. Clearly, the way we live now is unsustainable. The world's escalating population, climate change, insects disappearing, rain-forests getting smaller, and a whole host of other issues regarding the degradation of the environment, are very worrying indeed. Of course, one might argue that it is modern industrial society rather than capitalism per se that is the main culprit here, but they are deeply intertwined.

Let's just consider a few other detractions of modern capitalism.

Capitalism creates gross inequalities. Indeed, in the USA, apparently the bottom 80% of people have a mere 11% of all wealth!  I find myself unable to adequately convey how utterly shocking this is. 80% (4/5ths) of people in the USA only have 1/9th of the total wealth? So just 20% (1/5th) of them have the other 89% (8/9ths) of the wealth? This is a complete disgrace beyond words. 

Capitalism has killed many millions of people, even if only indirectly. Consider the Native Americans and Africans captured to become slaves. Consider those who died as a result of poor health care, poor housing, overworking in unsafe environments. Consider those who have died from pollution caused by corporate greed and from drugs over-sold to consumers. Consider the members of the armed forces of capitalist nations that have been used as canon-fodder in wars to protect and enhance corporate interests.

The rise of modern capitalism and the introduction of the division of labour to maximise profits has resulted in many people living their lives as wage slaves, obliged to do work that is dull and repetitious. Repetitious work for five days a week taking up most of the day is surely deeply unsatisfactory and unfulfilling.  Indeed, a good proportion of the population seem to effectively clock-watch, hoping that 5 pm and the weekend quickly roll by so they can let their hair down. Thus they are effectively wishing their lives away. All this is somewhat ameliorated by the camaraderie of the workplace. But, considering they live such brief lives, is it a satisfactory state of affairs to engage in unfulfilling work wishing their time spent doing it quickly passes by?

Democracy too is deeply flawed. In order to win and keep power leaders are incentivised to pander to the electorate and avoid, as much as possible, unpopular policies. They slip and slither and slide around every issue to make sure the voters keep on voting them back into office. This often results in very bad decisions that are highly detrimental to society as a whole.

So, my conclusion is that modern democratic capitalism does not work, or at least only works extremely poorly. It is a poor show indeed if it is quite impossible to improve upon this dire state of affairs.

So, will any other system lead to even worse outcomes? One thing is for sure. Any alternative system can't just be cobbled together without a huge amount of forethought and planning that will be necessary to deal with all the immense complexities and problems engendered by millions of people interacting with each other. The most noteworthy problem is the tragedy of the commons.

In my opinion, so long as people are estranged from each other, so long as each person is an island who only cares about his or her own self-interests and of their close family, so long as prestige and adulation are measured and evoked by a person's wealth and fame, then any type of "socialism" or "communism" will be impossible. The tragedy of the commons will ensure that.

It is therefore absolutely essential that we have a feeling of connectedness, empathy, and affiliation towards others, or at least for those in our immediate community. We require, in other words, closely-knit communities that encourage co-operative and caring behaviour, that encourage empathy and a feeling of responsibility towards others. That is, we require social harmony. But it seems to me that our modern world could scarcely be more antithetical towards this ideal. For it fosters an attitude where our prestige and worthiness is measured by our wealth. Unfortunately, it seems to me that multiculturism is also antithetical to this ideal since a closely-knit community cannot be achieved when the newcomers do not integrate and assimilate.

I see the modern world, global capitalism, as being deeply antithetical to our deepest needs and what makes us happy. This constant striving for economic growth doesn't appear to be making us any happier and is destroying the planet to boot. We seriously need to find a better way to live.

Admins and a flawed argument against an afterlife

I attempted to submit a post (scroll down to under dashed line) to a private Facebook Group called Science, Philosophy, and Psychology Discussion that currently has a staggering 65,508 members. It was rejected.

I sent the following (in blue) to the moderating thread in that group:

I submitted a post concerning a flawed argument by a certain Matthew Alpe against an afterlife. My post has not been permitted. The following "reason" was given:

to see the blog post one must be a member. this is not going to fly. the mature (sic) of the post is already problematic as it assumes a god and a heaven and is trying to be persuasive that this is true. this is akin to preaching.

My post has absolutely nothing to do with any "God", it is pertaining to an argument by a certain Matthew Alper against the afterlife. His argument is an attempt at a reductio ad absurdum -- namely by assuming the existence of an afterlife, this leads to an intractable problem about what it is that actually survives. My argument in turn essentially is that he is question-begging. I don't want to reiterate the arguments here though. The point being is that to claim I'm assuming either a God or an afterlife displays a complete lack of understanding of my post.

Nor of course do counter-arguments constitute "preaching". Of course, the admins may not agree with my argument. But not allowing an argument to be seen by labeling it as "preaching" is truly deplorable. Is this a group for those who subscribe to the modern western metaphysic and will allow no dissent? It seems so to me. Which contradicts what it says in the description of the group where it states "[t]he entire range of science and philosophy are open to analysis and discussion" and "[t]he administrators of this group pride themselves on free speech and will never censor posts or comments on the grounds of disagreement". To put it mildly, this appears to be contrary to the reality.

If one is an admin and their responsibility is to judge the suitability of posts, they really need to establish what the post is actually about. This involves reading and attempting to understand the content. Being an admin should also involve the capacity to understand arguments. The admins should especially have the capacity to distinguish between demonstrating an argument is flawed, and preaching.

Anyway, here is the post full of preaching about God and Heaven!

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An interview with Matthew Alper author of The "God" Part of the Brain: A Scientific Interpretation of Human Spirituality and God.  In the interview he says:

So I have people say, “When I die I’m going to be in heaven with my family.” So I’ll say like, “Okay, you’ll be in heaven. Let’s even assume that’s true. You’re going to go to heaven. Who you are is going to live forever. You, Joe, is going to be around for eternity.” But then I say, “But let me ask, what if Joe gets dementia, Alzheimer’s tomorrow, and then you die a year into it, where your last self didn’t know whether to go to the bathroom or eat an apple, you didn’t know the difference between the two. You didn’t remember the names of your own children, your wife, let alone your own self. So is Joe the demented going to be floating around in this eternal headspace for eternity, or do you have this idealized version that it’s you, Joe, now as you’re talking to me? ”

Dementia is due to an impaired brain. Now, if there is an afterlife, the self/soul would have to be an entirely distinct entity from the brain. Hence, the impaired brain would be an irrelevance to our cognitive abilities. Consider if one has on a pair of eyeglasses. The lenses might be cracked, hence affecting one's vision. But that has no implications for one's vision when we take the eyeglasses off.

Immediately after the above Matthew goes on to say:

Or maybe is it going to be Joe 10 years ago, or Joe when you were five? We’re all chameleons. We’re a thousand different people in our lifetimes based on our periods of life.

We might have a 1000 different pairs of eyeglasses we could wear, all affecting our vision in differing characteristic ways. But our unaided vision is unaffected and perhaps our vision is different from the vision from all of the eyeglasses.

The real self is that which makes one the same self from childhood to adulthood, the same self regardless of whether one is drunk or sober etc. Go into all this in more detail in a blog post.

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I often seem to have problems with moderators both with facebook groups and various discussion boards as I also discuss here.

A Purposeless Existence?

At the following link in the comments underneath a lady called violagirl says:

After my husband died of a 13 year illness I spent a lot of time reading, meditating, doing yoga, hiking, etc and here's what I learned; life is purposeless and meaningless. When we die it is over unless there was something huge we did. My husband was a brilliant NASA engineer, but his work is not "his", it belongs to NASA. We live then we die and it does not matter one little bit what we do in that time. It would be nice to think we would at least aspire to be moral and ethical, but greed and stuff are what is lauded and that is another reason humans and their lives do not matter.

I feel for her and I understand why she and so many others feel this way. Her sentiment is due to the underlying message that our culture is giving us -- namely that we are biological machines with no set purpose apart from living this one life. The Universe just is, there's no meaning behind it, there's no reason for it. We live our very brief lives, and that's it.

But I think she is very wrong. I feel that our lives and the Universe are ultimately mysterious, and we are all on this adventure. That perhaps part of the mystery will be revealed when we die. I feel that life is exciting and even though it may appear to be dreary and monotonous, that this is illusory. We get a brief glimpse of how things truly are during moments like mystical experiences.

Peoples indifference to the coronavirus

It almost feels like I'm in a dream and that I'll wake up at some point then tell everyone on Facebook that I had this bizarre dream -- a worldwide pandemic, people confined to their homes, empty streets, supermarket shelves empty. Then my next-door neighbour starts to cough (which he has) . . the dreaded cough, signalling he's one of the infected... But then I wake up! Or, perhaps I'll wake up after completing this blog post...

It's extraordinary that we've found ourselves in such a mess. This needn't have happened.  Back on the 24th January on Facebook, I said:

"if it's possible that millions might die, it is surely sensible to completely terminate all international flying".

Unfortunately, the vast majority of other people simply didn't share my assessment of the danger.  For example, here's a screenshot of another Facebook post regarding the virus one week later on the 31st of January.

I've rubbed out the names and photographs of the 3 comments made by 3 different people, but they are all good Facebook friends of mine who usually tend to be levelheaded and whose opinions I value. Just in case the comments can't be read, they are as follows:

Person 1:

Whatever happened to "Keep calm and carry on?"

Person 2

This virus is no worse then the flu. It’s much ado about nothing.

Person 3

Incredible amount of sensationalism. The question I'm asking is who benefits from all the hoo-ha? You might want to read this Ian.

My Response:

I make no claims about how much this virus will spread and how many will die. I have absolutely no idea. The one worrying thing is the claim that people can pass it on when displaying no symptoms themselves.

Following from my comment back then, we now know that many people who get the virus -- perhaps as many as 50% -- do not have any symptoms, yet they can still pass the virus on! This is the key to the spread of this virus. What is also extremely important is that each infected person infects on average 2.5 others. Contrast this with seasonal flu where each person infects on average only 1.3 others. Hence, the claim that many people make -- at least until very recently -- that this virus is no more worrying than seasonal flu, is simply preposterous. I elaborate on why it's preposterous here.

All this information was known back in January.  So why on earth was allowing people to gallivant around the planet more important than taking the appropriate measures back then to snuff out any possible danger?  Of course, we didn't know it would end as bad as this, but it was always on the cards.

Even now people are being highly irresponsible.  Last weekend, when it was sunny, many people were visiting seaside resorts.  Many young people justify such behaviour by saying that they'll be unlikely to die.  This misses the point.  Even if they suffer no symptoms whatsoever, they will infect others.  These people will be indirectly responsible for killing many others. They need to dwell on this, they need to grok this.

Yes, it's difficult not socially interacting, especially when we might have to forfeit this pleasure for possibly many months.  I suffer from social anxiety and will not be as anywhere near as bothered by it as others, but even I miss the occasional visit to the pub etc.  But, unless we try to limit our interactions, then the number of infected will continue on its exponential growth rate and the NHS and other countries' health services will be overwhelmed.  If this happens millions could die.  We need to do the right thing and to isolate.

Who's to say what's extraordinary?

Somebody who had spent her whole life in a tropical climate with no contact with the rest of the world would regard the notion that water could turn solid as being contrary to everything she had ever discovered about water. Water simply doesn't, and couldn't, do that sort of thing.

Our science is only applicable to a given domain. With the very fast, or the very small, different laws are required. And I suggest our contemporary physics only applies to non-conscious reality. We need new laws to understand consciousness and how it relates to (fits in with) the rest of reality. Once we have those new laws, once we know how consciousness fits in with the rest of physical reality, then we can say whether psi is to be expected, or a "life after death" etc. But, until that moment, we're simply not in a position to declare psi or an afterlife are extraordinary claims.

When Religion Makes Grief More Difficult

I've just read the following article:

When Religion Makes Grief More Difficult.

It says:

Most Americans grew up with a Sunday school image of God as a protector/punisher, and go through their lives without ever questioning that image. For some, a profound loss or trauma can inspire deeper exploration, but for those don’t – or won’t — question their faith, trying to make that image fit with actual human experience is like trying to put a square peg into a round hole.The square peg is a belief in divine reward and punishment. The round hole is the way life actually works. By the time most of us are young adults we have observed that the good are not necessarily rewarded and the bad are not necessarily punished. Real human experience proves that it just doesn’t work that way.

People have a propensity to subscribe to extreme positions.  Further, others tend to assume if you disagree with their position then you must subscribe to the precise opposite e.g. you disapprove that the bottom 80% of people in the USA only have 11% of all wealth?  Then you must be a communist who is in favour that everyone has precisely the same wealth!  And of course the same applies to concepts of God and an afterlife.  You don't subscribe to the notion that the Universe and our lives are pure happenstance, that we are merely sophisticated biological robots with no free will whose lives have no ultimate purpose?  Then you must believe in a personal God as a protector and punisher; that if you are good you will go to Heaven, if you are bad you will go to Hell.

Personally my beliefs are more along the lines that reality as a whole is somehow infused with awareness, and indeed a manifestation of awareness. And all things, all events, everything that has been, everything that will be, is infused with ultimate meaning. A meaning that eludes us in our daily day to day existence, but whose existence might be very briefly glimpsed with peak experiences and mystical experiences.  But this awareness underlying reality, or all pervading spiritual presence, is not some personal being that watches over us and requires us to worship it.

I don't want to argue about the issue of an appropriate "God" though.  The point I'm making is that people should think more about what they believe, and avoid believing something simply because most others in your camp believe it.  We need to adopt more nuanced positions. 

Reasons not to scoff at ghosts, visions and near-death experiences

The following article is not my own. The author is Andreas Sommer who is a German-born historian of science and magic who runs the Forbidden Histories website. The original article can be found here.

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‘If the fruits for life of the state of conversion are good, we ought to idealise and venerate it, even though it be a piece of natural psychology; if not, we ought to make short work with it, no matter what supernatural being may have infused it.’

From The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902) by William James

There is a long tradition of scientists and other intellectuals in the West being casually dismissive of people’s spiritual experiences. In 1766, the German philosopher Immanuel Kant declared that people who claim to see spirits, such as his contemporary, the Swedish scientist Emanuel Swedenborg, are mad. Kant, a believer in the immortality of the soul, did not draw on empirical or medical knowledge to make his case, and was not beyond employing a fart joke to get his derision across: ‘If a hypochondriac wind romps in the intestines it depends on the direction it takes; if it descends it becomes a f–––, if it ascends it becomes an apparition or sacred inspiration.’ Another ‘enlightened’ enemy of other-worldly visions was the chemist and devout Christian, Joseph Priestley. His own critique of spirit seership in 1791 did not advance scientific arguments either, but presented biblical ‘proof’ that the only legitimate afterlife was the bodily resurrection of the dead on Judgment Day.

However, there is good cause to question the overzealous pathologisation of spiritual sightings and ghostly visions. About a century after Kant and Priestley scoffed at such experiences, William James, the ‘father’ of American scientific psychology, participated in research on the first international census of hallucinations in ‘healthy’ people. The census was carried out in 1889-97 on behalf of the International Congress of Experimental Psychology, and drew on a sample of 17,000 men and women. This survey showed that hallucinations – including ghostly visions – were remarkably widespread, thus severely undermining contemporary medical views of their inherent pathology. But the project was unorthodox in yet another respect because it scrutinised claims of ‘veridical’ impressions – that is, cases where people reported seeing an apparition of a loved one suffering an accident or other crisis, which they had in fact undergone, but which the hallucinator couldn’t have known about through ‘normal’ means. The vicinity of such positive findings with ‘ghost stories’ was reason enough for most intellectuals not to touch the census report with a bargepole, and the pathological interpretation of hallucinations and visions continued to prevail until the late-20th century.

Things slowly began to change in about 1971, when the British Medical Journal published a study on ‘the hallucinations of widowhood’ by the Welsh physician W Dewi Rees. Of the 293 bereaved women and men in Rees’s sample, 46.7 per cent reported encounters with their deceased spouses. Most important, 69 per cent perceived these encounters as helpful, whereas only 6 per cent found them unsettling. Many of these experiences, which ranged from a sense of presence, to tactile, auditory and visual impressions indistinguishable from interactions with living persons, continued over years. Rees’s paper inspired a trickle of fresh studies that confirmed his initial findings – these ‘hallucinations’ don’t seem inherently pathological nor therapeutically undesirable. On the contrary, whatever their ultimate causes, they often appear to provide the bereaved with much-needed strength to carry on.

Rees’s study coincided with writings by a pioneer of the modern hospice movement, the Swiss-American psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, in which she emphasised the prevalence of comforting other-worldly visions reported by dying patients – an observation supported by later researchers. Indeed, a 2010 study in the Archives of Gerontology and Geriatrics addressed the need for special training for medical personnel regarding these experiences, and in recent years the academic literature on end-of-life care has recurrently examined the constructive functions of death-bed visions in helping the dying come to terms with impending death.

Kübler-Ross was also among the first psychiatrists to write about ‘near-death experiences’ (NDEs) reported by survivors of cardiac arrests and other close brushes with death. Certain elements have pervaded popular culture – impressions of leaving one’s body, passing through a tunnel or barrier, encounters with deceased loved ones, a light representing unconditional acceptance, insights of the interconnectedness of all living beings, and so on. Once you ignore the latest clickbait claiming that scientists studying NDEs have either ‘proven’ life after death or debunked the afterlife by reducing them to brain chemistry, you start to realise that there’s a considerable amount of rigorous research published in mainstream medical journals, whose consensus is in line with neither of these popular polarisations, but which shows the psychological import of the experiences.

For instance, although no two NDEs are identical, they usually have in common that they cause lasting and often dramatic personality changes. Regardless of the survivors’ pre-existing spiritual inclinations, they usually form the conviction that death is not the end. Understandably, this finding alone makes a lot of people rather nervous, as one might fear threats to the secular character of science, or even an abuse of NDE research in the service of fire-and-brimstone evangelism. But the specialist literature provides little justification for such worries. Other attested after-effects of NDEs include dramatic increases in empathy, altruism and environmental responsibility, as well as strongly reduced competitiveness and consumerism.

Virtually all elements of NDEs can also occur in psychedelic ‘mystical’ experiences induced by substances such as psilocybin and DMT. Trials at institutions such as Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and Imperial College London have revealed that these experiences can occasion similar personality changes as NDEs, most notably a loss of fear of death and a newfound purpose in life. Psychedelic therapies are now becoming a serious contender in the treatment of severe conditions including addictions, post-traumatic stress disorder and treatment-resistant depressions.

This brings us back to James, whose arguments in The Varieties of Religious Experience for the pragmatic clinical and social value of such transformative episodes have been mostly ignored by the scientific and medical mainstream. If there really are concrete benefits of personality changes following ‘mystical’ experiences, this might justify a question that’s not usually raised: could it be harmful to follow blindly the standard narrative of Western modernity, according to which ‘materialism’ is not only the default metaphysics of science, but an obligatory philosophy of life demanded by centuries of supposedly linear progress based on allegedly impartial research?

Sure, the dangers of gullibility are evident enough in the tragedies caused by religious fanatics, medical quacks and ruthless politicians. And, granted, spiritual worldviews are not good for everybody. Faith in the ultimate benevolence of the cosmos will strike many as hopelessly irrational. Yet, a century on from James’s pragmatic philosophy and psychology of transformative experiences, it might be time to restore a balanced perspective, to acknowledge the damage that has been caused by stigma, misdiagnoses and mis- or overmedication of individuals reporting ‘weird’ experiences. One can be personally skeptical of the ultimate validity of mystical beliefs and leave properly theological questions strictly aside, yet still investigate the salutary and prophylactic potential of these phenomena.

By making this quasi-clinical proposal, I’m aware that I could be overstepping my boundaries as a historian of Western science studying the means by which transcendental positions have been rendered inherently ‘unscientific’ over time. However, questions of belief versus evidence are not the exclusive domain of scientific and historical research. In fact, orthodoxy is often crystallised collective bias starting on a subjective level, which, as James himself urged, is ‘a weakness of our nature from which we must free ourselves, if we can’. No matter if we are committed to scientific orthodoxy or to an open-minded perspective on ghostly visions and other unusual subjective experiences, both will require cultivating a relentless scrutiny of the concrete sources that nourish our most fundamental convictions – including the religious and scientific authorities on which they rest perhaps a little too willingly.

Andreas Sommer

This article was originally published at Aeon and has been republished under Creative Commons.