Gretchen Koch

I’m tripping over you, God

October 16, 2012 Gretchen No Comments

In a Newsweek article grandiosely (to put it lightly) entitled Proof of Heaven: A Doctor’s Experience With the Afterlife published yesterday, Dr. Eben Alexander recounts a story of what it was like to visit Heaven (apparently) and speak with God (apparently) which supposedly took place while he was in a coma due to bacterial meningitis.

Alexander’s sole basis for believing that this was an actual experience he had and not simply something his mind conjured up, like it might any dream (or drug trip), is the “fact” that it occurred during the coma, while his neocortex was shut down and conscious thought impossible.

What Alexander had was a mystical experience, no doubt. It fits William James’ still-very-useful criteria for such experiences:

1) Noetic quality — Alexander describes special knowledge as having been imparted to him, knowledge which he couldn’t have comprehended otherwise:

Each time I silently put one of these questions out, the answer came instantly in an explosion of light, color, love, and beauty that blew through me like a crashing wave. What was important about these blasts was that they didn’t simply silence my questions by overwhelming them. They answered them, but in a way that bypassed language. Thoughts entered me directly. But it wasn’t thought like we experience on earth. It wasn’t vague, immaterial, or abstract. These thoughts were solid and immediate—hotter than fire and wetter than water—and as I received them I was able to instantly and effortlessly understand concepts that would have taken me years to fully grasp in my earthly life. (Author’s note and spoiler: Alexander never says what these concepts were, or tries to explain them himself.)

2) Ineffability — Alexander does his best to describe the experience, but he can’t truly convey the majesty and meaning of it in words. Such a thing would be impossible. He wasn’t even able to comprehend himself for a very long time:

It took me months to come to terms with what happened to me. Not just the medical impossibility that I had been conscious during my coma, but—more importantly—the things that happened during that time.

3) Transience — Alexander doesn’t say how long the experience took. But it was definitely temporary. He’s not still floating around amongst the clouds and speaking to mysterious women in brightly-colored dresses:

“We will show you many things here,” the woman said, again, without actually using these words but by driving their conceptual essence directly into me. “But eventually, you will go back.”

4) Passivity — Alexander describes all of these things happening to him, without any real volition occuring on his part. Entities appearing to him. Things being shown to him. He describes the experience as a journey, but this journey is not a series of choices he makes– it’s a sensory experience, entirely about what he sees and hears.

So yes, mystical experience. Fine. Well and good. Those have happened throughout history, all over the world, in various forms. But Alexander is insistent that his mystical experience is real:

I’m not the first person to have discovered evidence that consciousness exists beyond the body. Brief, wonderful glimpses of this realm are as old as human history. But as far as I know, no one before me has ever traveled to this dimension (a) while their cortex was completely shut down, and (b) while their body was under minute medical observation, as mine was for the full seven days of my coma.

All the chief arguments against near-death experiences suggest that these experiences are the results of minimal, transient, or partial malfunctioning of the cortex. My near-death experience, however, took place not while my cortex was malfunctioning, but while it was simply off. This is clear from the severity and duration of my meningitis, and from the global cortical involvement documented by CT scans and neurological examinations. According to current medical understanding of the brain and mind, there is absolutely no way that I could have experienced even a dim and limited consciousness during my time in the coma, much less the hyper-vivid and completely coherent odyssey I underwent.

For all of the insistence that Alexander makes during his essay that he is a scientist, and his assurances that he approaches his understanding of the brain with skepticism and rigor, this is a bizarre thing to say. It overlooks several things that should be obvious to any person, let alone a neurosurgeon.

Namely:Alexander has no idea of the chronology of his experience. The only thing he knows is that it was over by the time he opened his eyes– and let’s note that his interpretation of his experience went on for months, while he was entirely conscious. He has absolutely no way of knowing whether his experience took place while his neocortex was “off.”

Our assessment of the duration of dreams during REM sleep is notoriously unreliable, but Alexander doesn’t even seem to consider the length of time that it might have taken for his brain to switch from “off” to “on,” and whether a malfunction just might have occurred during that time. That’s possible, but not likely I think. Alexander’s description of his experience is typical of mystical experiences, but not of near-death experiences (NDEs). Those are generally described as the experience of heading down a tunnel and/or “into the light” that you hear about. Alexander describes something more like a dream or a drug trip.

On the topic of dreams and drug trips– you don’t have to consume drugs to go on a drug trip. Chemical reactions can happen in your brain which cause you to experience fantastic visions for other reasons including severe fatigue and asphyxiation. Gee, can you imagine one of these being a factor in a person recovering from a coma? Mystics in many different religions induce religious visions by starving themselves, staying out in the hot sun, and/or keeping themselves awake for extended periods which might very well cause their brains to go into a state similar to Alexander’s when he was on his way back from coma-land.

So Alexander’s body was “under minute medical observation” for a week while he was comatose. How is this supposed to substantiate his belief that his NDE was authentic? Were the attending physicians supposed to have noticed a sudden change in his brain which indicated that his spirit had gone on temporary vacation? So far as I know there is no way to test for such a thing via fMRI, CT, PET, or EEG. Tests of these kinds have been performed on people supposedly having religious experiences at the time, and their results are very interesting.

But they’re not performed for a week, and they say nothing about whether the state of the person’s brain means that he has gone dimension-tripping while leaving his body behind, or whether he just thinks he has. Think about it– how easy would it be to catch someone at the precise time they’re having an out-of-body experience and get them into a scanner? Not very easy.

And even if/when you can do it, the information you gather is neutral regarding whether they actually spoke with God or whatever it is they claim to have experienced. Even if it turned out they have a brain tumor, hey– the brain tumor could’ve been put there by God as a means of communicating with them! A very morbid, tragic way of communicating, but still. “God made your brain that way/do that thing so that he could talk to you” is an untestable but still possible explanation.

That doesn’t mean that I have to accept his interpretation of it as happening anywhere outside of his own head, or signifying the truth of anything he claims to have gleaned from it. And what’s more, having had time to think about this in the four years since he came out of this coma, I’d think the neurosurgeon himself would have some doubts as well. But no, he doesn’t. Because he does not think of it like a scientist. He thinks of it like a die-hard believer who thinks he found confirmation:

I know full well how extraordinary, how frankly unbelievable, all this sounds. Had someone—even a doctor—told me a story like this in the old days, I would have been quite certain that they were under the spell of some delusion. But what happened to me was, far from being delusional, as real or more real than any event in my life. That includes my wedding day and the birth of my two sons.
What happened to me demands explanation.

Modern physics tells us that the universe is a unity—that it is undivided. Though we seem to live in a world of separation and difference, physics tells us that beneath the surface, every object and event in the universe is completely woven up with every other object and event. There is no true separation.

Before my experience these ideas were abstractions. Today they are realities. Not only is the universe defined by unity, it is also—I now know—defined by love. The universe as I experienced it in my coma is—I have come to see with both shock and joy—the same one that both Einstein and Jesus were speaking of in their (very) different ways.

I’ve spent decades as a neurosurgeon at some of the most prestigious medical institutions in our country. I know that many of my peers hold—as I myself did—to the theory that the brain, and in particular the cortex, generates consciousness and that we live in a universe devoid of any kind of emotion, much less the unconditional love that I now know God and the universe have toward us. But that belief, that theory, now lies broken at our feet. What happened to me destroyed it, and I intend to spend the rest of my life investigating the true nature of consciousness and making the fact that we are more, much more, than our physical brains as clear as I can, both to my fellow scientists and to people at large.

One would hope that a neurosurgeon would have spent a good chunk of his life “investigating the true nature of consciousness” before being interrupted by a mystical experience, but perhaps not. If Dr. Alexander is really interested in this topic I can certainly recommend Daniel Dennett’s Consciousness Explained or Susan Blackmore’s Consciousness: An Introduction— heck, I’d recommend those to anybody– but he won’t find confirmation of his unconfirmable convictions in either of those. Quite to the contrary, he will find evidence that the brain really does generate consciousness.

In order to find someone who is willing to claim otherwise, you have to drop the pretense of talking about science. You have to drop the aspiration of convincing your fellow scientists, that is if you intend to convince them as a scientistrather than as a true believer. And Alexander is not even willing to speak as a non-Christian or at least Christianity-neutral, even though according to his own account there is nothing Christian-specific about what he experienced.

PZ Myers describes the story in a post called Newsweek panders to the deluded again, which isn’t an inaccurate label (it is indeed a delusion to say that the experience of one questionably conscious neurosurgeon “proves” anything, much less the existence of an afterlife) but I think he misconstrues the experience a bit:

But here’s the real killer for me. People who go through these fantasies often tell of awe-inspiring insights that they receive and are quick to tell us how brilliant they were in Heaven. Alexander is no exception.

That would be the “noetic” part of mysticism, and if we could manage to induce Myers to have a mystical experience whether by drug trip, brain damage, or ESB (as Julia Sweeney put it, “People who wore this helmet experienced a sense of transcendent understanding, an overwhelming peace and connectedness, and sometimes the presence of God. Or, of aliens”), he’d probably experience the same thing. He just hopefully wouldn’t go on to present that knowledge as real evidence of anything, as Alexander has.

If a person comes out of a mystical experience with, say, knowledge of how to build a perpetual motion machine, thenthere might be something to what they claim to have experienced. It wouldn’t prove the rest of their story, but it would at least be interesting! But what generally happens is that the person feels strongly as though he or she has been confronted with the greatest underlying truths of the universe, and yet…couldn’t tell you what they are. Or else gives you some rather banal messages like the ones Alexander mentioned:

“You are loved and cherished, dearly, forever.”

“You have nothing to fear.”

“There is nothing you can do wrong.”

I recall in one of Dan Savage’s books– Skipping Towards Gomorrah— he described how a friend of his kept a wicker basket of New Agey phrases printed on laminated slips of paper by the front door for visitors. These were intended to be self-esteem enhancers, pulled randomly from the basket whenever needed in order to create a feeling of empowerment

When my friend saw me picking through her little wicker basket of affirmations, she folded her arms across her chest, cocked her hip, and said “Go ahead, Dan, make fun of me.” She was asking for it. So I pulled out an affirmation, said “I’m Adolf Hitler,” and then I read Hitler’s affirmation. “I’m a good person, and I want good things.”

“That’s awful!” my friend said.

“I’m Pol Pot: ‘I strive to spread love and understanding.’”

“I’m Richard Speck: ‘I am respected and admired, and people want to be near me.’”

“I’m Trent Lott: ‘My inner beauty is like a bright light.’”

By now, my sensitive friend was, yes, crying. I know, I know, I’m a terrible person. Which is precisely my point. The problem with setting out a basket of affirmations is that you’re assuming each and every person who comes into your home or spa is a good person who wants good things. With all the respect due a basket of laminated affirmations, I beg to differ.

It sure sounds to me like Dr. Alexander encountered that wicker basket in “Heaven.” Hmm…does everybody who goes on a similar trip? Is there nobody who catches a glimpse of the afterlife and is told “You’ve been a very bad person and have plenty to fear; step it up!” Ebenezer Scrooge-style? Yes, there are such cases. But I’m pretty sure they are vastly outweighed by the other variety.

The only time it’s possible to not be able to do anything wrong is when nothing you do matters, which is when you’re experiencing something that’s not real. In the real world, there is plenty to fear. There are all kinds of things you can do wrong. And…there’s no guarantee that you will be loved, much less forever.

So I can see why a person would cling to such an experience, much like a security blanket. I can’t see why someone would wave that blanket around claiming that others must cling to it as well, much less why a magazine would declare that they should. Alexander, and Newsweek, should know better than that.

$75k happy

October 14, 2012 Gretchen No Comments

This is a bit old, but I just came across it– an article in Time reports on a study which says that money can buy you happiness, but it reaches diminishing returns past $75,000 or so. That is, people whose yearly salary is around $75,000 seem to have reached the point at which money can make them maximally happy.

I’d be happy for $75,000. Just for the record, if anyone’s wondering? I would.

As you would expect, there are caveats to that. The happiness affected by having that amount of money was not your general day-to-day cheer, but your sense of fulfillment and well-being in life:

Before employers rush to hold — or raise — everyone’s salary to $75,000, the study points out that there are actually two types of happiness. There’s your changeable, day-to-day mood: whether you’re stressed or blue or feeling emotionally sound. Then there’s the deeper satisfaction you feel about the way your life is going — the kind of thing Tony Robbins tries to teach you. While having an income above the magic $75,000 cutoff doesn’t seem to have an impact on the former (emotional well-being), it definitely improves people’s Robbins-like life satisfaction. In other words, the more people make above $75,000, the more they feel their life is working out on the whole. But it doesn’t make them any more jovial in the mornings. . .Researchers found that lower income did not cause sadness itself but made people feel more ground down by the problems they already had. The study found, for example, that among divorced people, about 51% who made less than $1,000 a month reported feeling sad or stressed the previous day, while only 24% of those earning more than $3,000 a month reported similar feelings. Among people with asthma, 41% of low earners reported feeling unhappy, compared with about 22% of the wealthier group. Having money clearly takes the sting out of adversities.
At $75,000, that effect disappears. For people who earn that much or more, individual temperament and life circumstances have much more sway over their lightness of heart than money. The study doesn’t say why $75,000 is the benchmark, but “it does seem to me a plausible number at which people would think money is not an issue,” says Deaton.

And the article mentions what would seem like the biggest point of contention to me, which is that people often care more about their standing relative to others than they do about their sum worth. A person who is financially very comfortable but lives and works around people who make significantly more than he or she does may actually be less happy than someone who makes substantially less but is more on par with his or her friends and colleagues. This tells me that should I ever win the lottery, I should not move into a wealthy neighborhood and hang out with movie stars. Which I wouldn’t want to do anyway.

It also seems, however, that regional differences would matter hugely in this consideration, something the article– and the study it reports on– don’t appear to consider. $75,000 is not stinking rich, but it’s a good bit of money to make in many parts of the U.S. But I sure wouldn’t try to move to New York City or San Francisco on that salary. You’d think the happiness threshold of people who live in such places would be quite a bit higher than for the rest of us, but perhaps that was averaged out. This web site is useful for calculating cost of living for a different city relative to where you are now. It says, for example, that a person who makes $75,000 a year living in Dallas should make $170,571 in San Francisco. Housing is the biggest factor in that difference, being 715% more expensive! Wow.

What this study really says to me is that there is an identifiable point at which people become what you’d call “comfortable,” and this matters in terms of their overall satisfaction in life. Their worries cease impinging on their pursuit of happiness, because poor health and inability to pay your bills are a huge source of worry. The spookiest thing about Mitt Romney is the fact that he not only doesn’t have these worries, but he doesn’t even know what it’s like to have these worries. He can’t properly empathize with Americans on…well, most things in life because he is completely unequipped to process the feeling of not being sure if you need to sell your car in order to hang onto your apartment and keep the lights on, let alone not being sure if you can afford to buy your sixth house (and put a car elevator in its garage). I’m talking about a form of privilege here– inability to empathize because of never having been exposed to the same fear, concern, or worry as those who are suffering it– but it’s so far beyond that, that it hardly seems like the right word. Hyper-privilege, perhaps. Most if not all American presidents have been privileged, but Mitt Romney is hyper-privileged. And that’s why the usual attempts by presidential candidates to appeal to the common American are extra laughable coming from him.

Should someone so far beyond the standard of living which makes the average American happy be in charge of our collective pursuit of happiness? I’m thinking “No.” Perhaps this would be a difficult question if the person under consideration had made some kind of effort to demonstrate an ability to empathize with those who are in a situation he has never and will never have to endure, but Romney has done precisely the opposite– he has sneered at and written off such people. Rather hilariously (and frighteningly) he has lumped people who are comfortable into that group and written them off as well. Like my parents, for example. How does anybody support someone who has said “Screw you” to half the country in that way, even if they aren’t in that half?

Anyway, this wasn’t intended to be a political commentary. If you’re interested in the psychology of happiness generally, I would highly recommend Jonathan Haidt’s book The Happiness Hypothesis and Daniel Gilbert’s Stumbling on Happiness. If you were unaware that there is a psychology of happiness– guess what? There is. And no, it hasn’t succeeded in making everyone happy yet, as I’m sure you are aware. But it’s useful, because it helps us understand why we’re not happy and why it’s very often not our fault. That’s an important counter to so-called power of positive thinking theories which claim that we can just decide to be happy. We can’t. We can decide to do things which will contribute to our happiness, and they may succeed and they may not, but there is no Happiness Switch, and nothing which can flip it. Not even a bucketload of money, though that money can sure help in terms of erasing the worries that are caused by lack of money. So as with all aphorisms, there’s a lot more to “Money can’t buy happiness” than is expressed in the statement itself. It can. It can buy you the happiness of being able to pursue happiness unfettered. Or at least, less fettered than you were before.

Sam Harris on a NDE as drug trip

October 13, 2012 Gretchen No Comments

I wrote this week about Eben Alexander’s account of his must-be-true experience with the afterlife, which made the cover story in Newsweek. Now I see Sam Harris has weighed in on the topic, and he definitely has opinions. First, he incredulously asks how a neurosurgeon could deliver such an account:

Everything—absolutely everything—in Alexander’s account rests on repeated assertions that his visions of heaven occurred while his cerebral cortex was “shut down,” “inactivated,” “completely shut down,” “totally offline,” and “stunned to complete inactivity.” The evidence he provides for this claim is not only inadequate—it suggests that he doesn’t know anything about the relevant brain science. Perhaps he has saved a more persuasive account for his book—though now that I’ve listened to an hour-long interview with him online, I very much doubt it. In his Newsweek article, Alexander asserts that the cessation of cortical activity was “clear from the severity and duration of my meningitis, and from the global cortical involvement documented by CT scans and neurological examinations.” To his editors, this presumably sounded like neuroscience. The problem, however, is that “CT scans and neurological examinations” can’t determine neuronal inactivity—in the cortex or anywhere else. And Alexander makes no reference to functional data that might have been acquired by fMRI, PET, or EEG—nor does he seem to realize that only this sort of evidence could support his case. Obviously, the man’s cortex is functioning now—he has, after all, written a book—so whatever structural damage appeared on CT could not have been “global.” (Otherwise, he would be claiming that his entire cortex was destroyed and then grew back.) Coma is not associated with the complete cessation of cortical activity, in any case. And to my knowledge, almost no one thinks that consciousness is purely a matter of cortical activity. Alexander’s unwarranted assumptions are proliferating rather quickly. Why doesn’t he know these things? He is, after all, a neurosurgeon who survived a coma and now claims to be upending the scientific worldview on the basis of the fact that his cortex was totally quiescent at the precise moment he was enjoying the best day of his life in the company of angels. Even if his entire cortex had truly shut down (again, an incredible claim), how can he know that his visions didn’t occur in the minutes and hours during which its functions returned?

Then he wonders, as I wondered, how Alexander didn’t even consider the possibility that he was just experiencing a really intense high:

Alexander believes that his E. coli-addled brain could not have produced his visions because they were too “intense,” too “hyper-real,” too “beautiful,” too “interactive,” and too drenched in significance for even a healthy brain to conjure. He also appears to think that despite their timeless quality, his visions could not have arisen in the minutes or hours during which his cortex (which surely never went off) switched back on. He clearly knows nothing about what people with working brains experience under the influence of psychedelics. Nor does he know that visions of the sort that McKenna describes, although they may seem to last for ages, require only a brief span of biological time. Unlike LSD and other long-acting psychedelics, DMT alters consciousness for merely a few minutes. Alexander would have had more than enough time to experience a visionary ecstasy as he was coming out of his coma (whether his cortex was rebooting or not). Does Alexander know that DMT already exists in the brain as a neurotransmitter? Did his brain experience a surge of DMT release during his coma? This is pure speculation, of course, but it is a far more credible hypothesis than that his cortex “shut down,” freeing his soul to travel to another dimension. As one of his correspondents has already informed him, similar experiences can be had with ketamine, which is a surgical anesthetic that is occasionally used to protect a traumatized brain. Did Alexander by any chance receive ketamine while in the hospital? Would he even think it relevant if he had? His assertion that psychedelics like DMT and ketamine “do not explain the kind of clarity, the rich interactivity, the layer upon layer of understanding” he experienced is perhaps the most amazing thing he has said since he returned from heaven. Such compounds are universally understood to do the job. And most scientists believe that the reliable effects of psychedelics indicate that the brain is at the very least involved in the production of visionary states of the sort Alexander is talking about.

I hadn’t realized that Alexander was writing, or has already written, a book on this experience. I imagine that books describing the author’s trip to the celestial afterlife do much better than books describing the author’s really amazing drug trip, but that’s just a hunch.

Political dietary supplement

October 13, 2012 Gretchen 2 Comments

Joe Biden seen here impersonating the debate’s audience.

Been watching the presidential and vice-presidential debates? Yes? What’s wrong with you? Just kidding, so have I. And there may be many things wrong with me, but I don’t think being curious to see how the people aspiring to rule the country handle themselves when faced with direct and challenging questions is one of them. Unfortunately however, the answer for the most part has been “not well.” I’m one of those people who think Biden absolutely trounced Paul Ryan the other night, but I still didn’t appreciate what an ass he was being while doing it. And I’m kind of sorry that while discussing domestic issues the topic of the drug war didn’t come up, because Biden has a lot to answer for there— it’s just that it’s just another topic on which Ryan would contently hold the same position as the incumbents. Generally speaking, the topic of civil liberties has gotten almost no discussion at all, and it’s hard to shake the impression that this is because the candidates on both sides are not big fans.

Which is why I won’t be voting D or R in November. I’ll be voting L again most likely, and am looking forward to seeing the debate for the other presidential candidates; the ones you haven’t seen shouting at each other– yet. The Free and Equal Elections Foundation is hosting a debate for third party candidates coming up:

Free and Equal Elections Foundation announced today that four candidates have confirmed their participation in the 2012 Presidential Debate at the University Club of Chicago on October 23: Libertarian Party candidate Gary Johnson, Green Party candidate Jill Stein, Constitution Party candidate Virgil Goode, and Justice Party candidate Rocky Anderson.
This debate is the only 2012 Presidential Debate featuring four candidates. The top six candidates were invited to participate. Democratic Party candidate and incumbent Barack Obama and Republican Party candidate Mitt Romney are welcome to participate in this historic debate. The moderator will be announced shortly. “The four candidates participating represent a nice balance of right and left leaning candidates,” stated Christina Tobin, chair of Free and Equal. “This debate will cover the real issues facing our country such as foreign policy, the economy, and civil rights, rather than topics that further divide us.” Free and Equal’s 2012 Presidential Debate sponsors span the political spectrum of grassroots organizations and media who are uniting to solve our nation’s problems. Current sponsors include The Josh Tolley Show, Ballot Access News, Muslims for Liberty, National Constitution Party, The Justice Party, Blue Republicans, Restore the Republic, Re-Tea Party, Free the Vote NC, We the People, Grassroots for Liberty, and New Progressive Alliance. The debate will be broadcast online at www.freeandequal.org. Several additional live feeds will be announced shortly as Free & Equal finalizes its media sponsors.

I will always maintain that even people who fully support the Democratic or Republican candidate for president should want third party candidates to be included in the debates as well, because chances are there is something you think that your candidate just isn’t good enough on, and one or more of the third party candidates are better. That or those candidates are in a position to challenge your man or woman to step up to the plate and do more– make better promises, articulate better plans, do something to justify your continuing to support them rather than defecting to a candidate who better serves your interests. They’re not going to get that kind of pressure from the single guy on the other side of the stage, because Mitt Romney sure as hell isn’t going to compete with Obama on who can legalize marijuana (for example) faster.

Ideological competition: it does a country good. It makes us healthier to have options. If we can be bothered to pay attention, they’re there.

I would recommend….

October 11, 2012 Gretchen No Comments

…buying stand-up comedian Tig Notaro’s set off fellow comedian Louis CK’s web site.

But before you listen to it, I would really recommend listening to listening to the Professor Blastoff podcast. In general, but especially since episode 63. Here’s the iTunes link.

Hat tip to Kara, who pointed me in the right direction after I discovered Notaro in this.

Tripping a little more

October 10, 2012 Gretchen No Comments

A few more thoughts on Eben Alexander’s near-death experience:

But here’s the real killer for me. People who go through these fantasies often tell of awe-inspiring insights that they receive and are quick to tell us how brilliant they were in Heaven. Alexander is no exception.

That would be the “noetic” part of mysticism, and if we could manage to induce Myers to have a mystical experience whether by drug trip, brain damage, or ESB (as Julia Sweeney put it “People who wore this helmet experienced a sense of transcendent understanding, an overwhelming peace and connectedness, and sometimes the presence of God. Or, of aliens”), he’d probably experience the same thing. He just hopefully wouldn’t go on to present that knowledge as real evidence of anything, as Alexander has. If a person comes out of a mystical experience with, say, knowledge of how to build a perpetual motion machine, then there might be something to what they claim to have experienced. It wouldn’t prove the rest of their story, but it would at least be interesting! But what generally happens is that the person feels strongly as though he or she has been confronted with the greatest underlying truths of the universe, and yet…couldn’t tell you what they are. Or else gives you some rather banal messages like the ones Alexander mentioned:

“You are loved and cherished, dearly, forever.”“You have nothing to fear.””There is nothing you can do wrong.”

When my friend saw me picking through her little wicker basket of affirmations, she folded her arms across her chest, cocked her hip, and said “Go ahead, Dan, make fun of me.” She was asking for it. So I pulled out an affirmation, said “I’m Adolf Hitler,” and then I read Hitler’s affirmation. “I’m a good person, and I want good things.” “That’s awful!” my friend said. “I’m Pol Pot: ‘I strive to spread love and understanding.'” “I’m Richard Speck: ‘I am respected and admired, and people want to be near me.'” “I’m Trent Lott: ‘My inner beauty is like a bright light.'” By now, my sensitive friend was, yes, crying. I know, I know, I’m a terrible person. Which is precisely my point. The problem with setting out a basket of affirmations is that you’re assuming each and every person who comes into your home or spa is a good person who wants good things. With all the respect due a basket of laminated affirmations, I beg to differ.

There’s another important thing about the specific messages Eben (no, I’m not going to make a joke about that) Alexander says he received– they are themselves passive. They are the kind of messages it would be appropriate to give a person who is seeing a movie, especially a scary movie, for the first time ever. Don’t worry. There’s nothing to be afraid of. You can’t do anything wrong here. You can’t do anything wrong because you can’t do anything— the story is going to play out as it does regardless. The only time it’s possible to not be able to do anything wrong is when nothing you do matters, which is when you’re experiencing something that’s not real. In the real world, there is plenty to fear. There are all kinds of things you can do wrong. And…there’s no guarantee that you will be loved, much less forever.

So I can see why a person would cling to such an experience, much like a security blanket. I can’t see why someone would wave that blanket around claiming that others must cling to it as well, especially why a supposed news magazine would declare that they should. Alexander, and Newsweek, should know better than that.

I’m tripping over you, God

October 10, 2012 Gretchen 1 Comment

In a Newsweek article grandiosely (to put it lightly) titled Proof of Heaven: A Doctor’s Experience With the Afterlife published yesterday, Dr. Eben Alexander recounts a story of what it was like to visit Heaven (apparently) and speak with God (apparently) which supposedly took place while he was in a coma due to bacterial meningitis. His sole basis for believing that this was an actual experience he had and not simply something his mind conjured up, like it might any dream (or drug trip), is the “fact” that it occurred during the coma, while his neocortex was shut down and conscious thought impossible.

What Alexander had was a mystical experience, no doubt. It fits William James’ still-very-useful criteria for such experiences:

1) Noetic quality — Alexander describes special knowledge as having been imparted to him, knowledge which he couldn’t have comprehended otherwise:

Each time I silently put one of these questions out, the answer came instantly in an explosion of light, color, love, and beauty that blew through me like a crashing wave. What was important about these blasts was that they didn’t simply silence my questions by overwhelming them. They answered them, but in a way that bypassed language. Thoughts entered me directly. But it wasn’t thought like we experience on earth. It wasn’t vague, immaterial, or abstract. These thoughts were solid and immediate—hotter than fire and wetter than water—and as I received them I was able to instantly and effortlessly understand concepts that would have taken me years to fully grasp in my earthly life. (Spoiler: Alexander never says what these concepts were, or tries to explain them himself)

It took me months to come to terms with what happened to me. Not just the medical impossibility that I had been conscious during my coma, but—more importantly—the things that happened during that time.

“We will show you many things here,” the woman said, again, without actually using these words but by driving their conceptual essence directly into me. “But eventually, you will go back.”

4) Passivity — Alexender describes all of these things happening to him, without any real volition occuring on his part. Entities appearing to him. Things being shown to him. He describes the experience as a journey, but this journey is not a series of choices he makes– it’s a sensory experience, entirely about what he sees and hears.

So yes, mystical experience. Fine. Well and good. Those have happened throughout history, all over the world, in various forms. But Alexander is insistent that his mystical experience is real:

I’m not the first person to have discovered evidence that consciousness exists beyond the body. Brief, wonderful glimpses of this realm are as old as human history. But as far as I know, no one before me has ever traveled to this dimension (a) while their cortex was completely shut down, and (b) while their body was under minute medical observation, as mine was for the full seven days of my coma.All the chief arguments against near-death experiences suggest that these experiences are the results of minimal, transient, or partial malfunctioning of the cortex. My near-death experience, however, took place not while my cortex was malfunctioning, but while it was simply off. This is clear from the severity and duration of my meningitis, and from the global cortical involvement documented by CT scans and neurological examinations. According to current medical understanding of the brain and mind, there is absolutely no way that I could have experienced even a dim and limited consciousness during my time in the coma, much less the hyper-vivid and completely coherent odyssey I underwent.

Alexander has no idea of the chronology of his experience. The only thing he knows is that it was over by the time he opened his eyes– and let’s note that his interpretation of his experience went on for months, while he was entirely conscious. He has absolutely no way of knowing whether his experience took place while his neocortex was “off.” Our assessment of the duration of dreams during REM sleep is notoriously unreliable, but Alexander doesn’t even seem to consider the length of time that it might have taken for his brain to switch from “off” to “on,” and whether a malfunction just might have occurred during that time. That’s possible, but not likely I think. Alexander’s description of his experience is typical of mysterical experiences, but not of near-death experiences (NDEs). Those are generally described as the experience of heading down a tunnel and/or “into the light” that you hear about. Alexender describes something more like a dream or a drug trip.
On the topic of dreams and drug trips– you don’t have to consume drugs to go on a drug trip. Chemical reactions can happen in your brain which cause you to experience fantastic visions for other reasons including severe fatigue and asphyxiation. Gee, can you imagine one of these being a factor in a person recovering from a coma? Mystics in many different religions induce religious visions by starving themselves, staying out in the hot sun, and/or keeping themselves awake for extended periods which might very well cause their brains to go into a state similar to Alexander’s when he was on his way back from coma-land.
So Alexander’s body was “under minute medical observation” for a week while he was comatose. How is this supposed to substantiate his belief that his NDE was authentic? Were the attending physicians supposed to have noticed a sudden change in his brain which indicated that his spirit had gone on temporary vacation? So far as I know there is no way to test for such a thing via fMRI, CT, PET, or EEG. Tests of these kinds have been performed on people supposedly having religious experiences at the time, and their results are very interesting. But they’re not performed for a week, and they say nothing about whether the state of the person’s brain means that he has gone dimension-tripping while leaving his body behind, or whether he just thinks he has. Think about it– how easy would it be to catch someone at the precise time they’re having an out-of-body experience and get them into a scanner? Not very easy. And even if/when you can do it, the information you gather is neutral regarding whether they actually spoke with God or whatever it is they claim to have experienced. Even if it turned out they have a brain tumor, hey– the brain tumor could’ve been put there by God as a means of communicating with them! A very morbid, tragic way of communicating, but still. “God made your brain that way/do that thing so that he could talk to you” is an untestable but still possible explanation.

Do I think that Alexander had a near-death experience? Sure, possibly. If the details of his explanation of the bacterial disease he contracted are correct– and there’s no reason to doubt that part– are true, then I see no reason not to believe that he had a profoundly beautiful experience that might or might not have resulted from him actually becoming literally brain dead, temporarily. That doesn’t mean that I have to accept his interpretation of it as happening anywhere outside of his own head, or signifying the truth of anything he claims to have gleaned from it. And what’s more, having had time to think about this in the four years since he came out of this coma, I’d think the neurosurgeon himself would have some doubts as well. But no, he doesn’t. Because he does not think of it like a scientist. He thinks of it like a die-hard believer who thinks he found confirmation:

I know full well how extraordinary, how frankly unbelievable, all this sounds. Had someone—even a doctor—told me a story like this in the old days, I would have been quite certain that they were under the spell of some delusion. But what happened to me was, far from being delusional, as real or more real than any event in my life. That includes my wedding day and the birth of my two sons.What happened to me demands explanation.Modern physics tells us that the universe is a unity—that it is undivided. Though we seem to live in a world of separation and difference, physics tells us that beneath the surface, every object and event in the universe is completely woven up with every other object and event. There is no true separation.Before my experience these ideas were abstractions. Today they are realities. Not only is the universe defined by unity, it is also—I now know—defined by love. The universe as I experienced it in my coma is—I have come to see with both shock and joy—the same one that both Einstein and Jesus were speaking of in their (very) different ways.I’ve spent decades as a neurosurgeon at some of the most prestigious medical institutions in our country. I know that many of my peers hold—as I myself did—to the theory that the brain, and in particular the cortex, generates consciousness and that we live in a universe devoid of any kind of emotion, much less the unconditional love that I now know God and the universe have toward us. But that belief, that theory, now lies broken at our feet. What happened to me destroyed it, and I intend to spend the rest of my life investigating the true nature of consciousness and making the fact that we are more, much more, than our physical brains as clear as I can, both to my fellow scientists and to people at large.

No scientist holds that the universe is devoid of any kind of emotion. No good scientist, anyway– humans are part of the universe, and we’re pretty darn emotional. And no good scientist starts with a firm belief derived from something out of his own head and then assumes that it can be proven empirically, and sets about to find evidence which will confirm this to his peers. One would hope that a neurosurgeon would have spent a good chunk of his life “investigating the true nature of consciousness” before being interrupted by a mystical experience, but perhaps not. If Dr. Alexander is really interested in this topic I can certainly recommend Daniel Dennett’s Consciousness Explained or Susan Blackmore’s Consciousness: An Introduction— heck, I’d recommend those to anybody– but he won’t find confirmation of his unconfirmable convictions in either of those. Quite to the contrary, he will find evidence that the brain really does generate consciousness. In order to find someone who is willing to claim otherwise, you have to drop the pretense of talking about science. You have to drop the aspiration of convincing your fellow scientists, that is if you intend to convince them as a scientist rather than as a true believer. And Alexander is not even willing to speak as a non-Christian or at least Christianity-neutral, even though according to his own account there is nothing Christian-specific about what he experienced. The fact that the only recognizable being he conversed with was a woman speaks against that, all by itself.

You want to know which part makes me saddest, though? Here’s what makes me saddest:

Without using any words, she spoke to me. The message went through me like a wind, and I instantly understood that it was true. I knew so in the same way that I knew that the world around us was real—was not some fantasy, passing and insubstantial. The message had three parts, and if I had to translate them into earthly language, I’d say they ran something like this: “You are loved and cherished, dearly, forever.” “You have nothing to fear.” “There is nothing you can do wrong.”

Three platitudinous cookie fortunes are the only “truths” he derived from this experience.

These are the sum of the precious inviolate knowledge he received, the extent of the gnosis passed on unto him, the sole actual revelation in the entire bad science fiction/fantasy tale. Really, if there’s one statement that, more than anything, sums up the ability to appreciate the grandeur, mystery, and ineffable beauty of a mystical experience, it’s “You had to be there.” And, by the way? A college student who has been on an acid trip could tell you that.

Hat tip to Pharyngula for mentioning the story, albeit with a rather different interpretation.

Internet antipathy

October 7, 2012 Gretchen No Comments

So much of what happens on the internet is petty squabbles between strangers. Arguments which flare up and then fade away, which will have no effects outside of making some people temporarily inflamed/enthused/bewildered. But if you dismissed every internet disagreement on that basis, you’d be highly naive. Reputations are built and ruined on the internet. Connections are made and broken, careers begun and ended, romances kindled and snuffed out. And oftentimes, it’s hard to recognize when one of these things is taking place because all you, the subjective observer, can see…is people talking.

So it’s hard to know sometimes which disagreements to pay attention to, what it means to be “internet famous” and whether anyone should actually want that any more than they’d want to be regular-famous, and how people can become so passionate about things you wouldn’t imagine anyone would care about for more than five seconds. On the internet, attention is a free market. People will care about what they care about, and frequently that will be things like voting for Taylor Swift to give a free concert at a school for the deaf. Because on the internet, people think some really stupid things are just hilarious.

I blogged a few months ago on the topic of how empathy works in that atmosphere, and how charity can arise from anarchy when enough people are paying attention. Unfortunately, so can wrath, jealousy, and casual sadism. People can find both reasons and opportunities to be incredibly altruistic, but also to punish perceived wrongdoers exponentially more than the wrong that was done, and to generally be enormous douches when the mood strikes or they just get bored enough.

I don’t, for example, know why you’d create necklaces similar to that of a person whose internet presence is shaped around the jewelry she makes which espouse a particular ideology, which mock both her and the ideology, and then wear them to a conference she’s attending for the specific purpose of provoking her. I just don’t. But I do know where the idea came up.

The only football player I care about

October 6, 2012 Gretchen No Comments

He’s also nearly the only football player I could name, but only nearly. Minnesota Vikings punter Chris Kluwe writes again in response to another banal, thoughtless anti-gay marriage diatribe, and his essay is just superb. The diatribe in this case was written by his former team member Ravens center Matt Birk, who trots out the traditional but mysterious (because never fully elaborated or explained) argument that gay marriage is bad for children. Kluwe responded with a very thorough refutation which, as is so often the case with refutations, required considerably more time and thought than the original piece to which it responded. One can spew a load of nonsense in an incredibly brief time, but it takes a great deal more work to unpack why it’s nonsense. And Kluwe did so. My favorite part:

The only impact same-sex marriage will have on your children is if one of them turns out to be gay and cannot get married. What will you do (and I ask this honestly) if one or more of your kids ends up being gay? Will you love them any less? What will your actions speak to them, 15 years from now, when they ask you why they can’t enjoy the same relationship that you and your wife have now? And if your response is “We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it”, well, for a lot of people that bridge is here right now. They’re trying to cross it, but the way is barred, and I will do my best to tear those barricades down any way I can because I believe that we are infringing on the free will of other human beings by denying them their basic right to live free of oppression. I love my daughters for their minds and their personalities, not for who they love as adults. That’s none of my damn business, and I will support them in life no matter who they want to marry.

Now you may ask, why exactly are we leaving the discussion of gay rights up to pro football players who write passionate editorials? And I will say, honestly– I have no idea. It seems to be mainly celebrity worship, and they probably differ very little from the general populace in terms of opinions on gay marriage and degree of actual knowledge about gay marriage. But Kluwe, who is exceptional in more ways than his eloquence and intelligence (he’s also a self-confessed nerd, and his twitter handle is Chriswarcraft), is certainly the one we should want to listen to first. Use that bully pulpit for all you’ve got!

A simple ethics of expectations

October 3, 2012 Gretchen No Comments

On the news this morning I listened to a report about a new virus discovered in Saudi Arabia. But after talking about how scary and disturbing that is, it was mentioned that it has infected a total of two people and is believed to be only transmissable from non-human animals to humans, so it probably won’t be any significant threat to the tens of thousands of people expected to flood into the country for the Hajj, the pilgrimmage to Mecca.

And I thought…..man, I’m glad I don’t believe in a god who wants me to do things.

Not just things like go on a pilgrimmage to a country where I might get infected with a virus, but anything. Because those things might be against my own interests, and because they’re expectations of a god, they’re not expectations I could advisably ignore.

Now, morality requires you to act against your own interests sometimes– only psychopaths go around using other people with absolutely no regard for those peoples’ welfare. But with morality, you’re refraining from harming people for the sake of those people. With the expectations of a god, you’re refraining from doing things because of the demands of a being that you don’t even know exists. And whom you can’t harm.

Frequently, and happily, the expectations of the gods people believe in just happen to be things they would do anyway, because they’re also moral (e.g. giving to the poor). Infrequently, the expectations of the gods people believe in are very immoral indeed (e.g. punishing non-believers). And frequently those expectations are morally neutral or close to it (e.g. making a pilgrimmage). But even a morally neutral expectation can be an unnecessary pain in the ass at best for the believer because it still requires him or her to at least exert some energy, time, and/or money on something he/she wouldn’t otherwise do. And in this case, could actually prove very harmful to him or her.

Good things are worth doing because they’re good.

Good things may be good because of God, or they may not. But regardless, you don’t need to believe in God to know what Good is, and to do good things.

If God is good, then God should only expect us to do good things. Not bad things, and not neutral things. Not because neutral is bad, but because it’s subjective– once you demand that someone do a neutral thing rather than them doing it for their own pleasure, you’re imposing on them. And that’s bad.

Conclusions:

Therefore, it would be reasonable for a believer in God to do only those things which God expects that are recognizable as good by the believer him/herself. Which would mean that “God says so” is never sufficient reason to consider something good.

Therefore, a believer who is moral should behave identically* to a non-believer who is moral.

Therefore, you can tell if the god someone believes in is good by whether that person’s behavior reflects an expectation of doing only Good things, not bad things or neutral things.

Therefore, believing in God, if God is good, is a morally neutral thing to do. As is not believing in God. If God is bad or neutral, then believing in God is an imprudent (bad for you) or bad (immoral) thing to do.

*Edit: This is a problematic term. I don’t mean “exactly the same as” but “indistinguishably from.”

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