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Aping morality

Aping morality published on No Comments on Aping morality

Whenever I’ve been involved in a discussion of the evolution of morality, the English language trips things up a bit. Due to the fact that “morality” could mean “being good” or “the capacity and tendency to distinguish right from wrong,” it’s always important to note which, specifically, you’re talking about. Generally speaking, it would seem that the latter entails the former– if you have an idea of what it means to be good, then you can probably be good. We all have our failings and occasionally fail to live up to our own standards of morality. But when asked what it means to be a good person, we usually give a description that most human beings could live up to, if they put their minds and consciences to it. By contrast, if a being doesn’t distinguish right from wrong, we generally don’t hold him or her responsible for doing things that would normally be considered wrong. I touched on this last week when talking about what agency means in terms of moral responsibility. An entity with a concept of right and wrong has the capacity to behave morally– this concept is sometimes called a moral sense. Having a moral sense is not the same as being moral, any more than having a car is the same as driving.

Are we good so far? Not moral, I mean, but clear? Okay.

Whether non-human animals can have a moral sense, and to what extent, is a very hot topic. It calls into question our own capacity to make these determinations, where that capacity comes from, and how we can recognize it. Maybe other animals have a moral sense, but it’s so different from ours that we wouldn’t know it if we saw it! Maybe other animals make judgments about all kinds of things that humans just don’t care about. Humans certainly don’t share all of our moral views about things– moral standards can vary significantly from culture to culture and from individual to individual– but most of us have both an extensive repertoire of ways to express moral approbation or disapprobation and an adeptness for registering when others approve or disapprove of something. We’re excellent communicators, both vocally and non-vocally. We’re actually so good at communicating that we sometimes betray feelings we’d rather not. I’m particularly bad at lying about or otherwise misrepresenting how I feel about something, which is why my career as a professional poker player ended before it began.

Our means of registering how other people feel without their telling us, or even in spite of their telling us something to the contrary, is called empathy. It’s what enables us to “read minds”– not via literal ESP, but by  interpreting patterns of behavior and comparing the situation others are in to our own past experiences, and extrapolating from that how they must feel, what they must be thinking. The simplest form of empathy is emotional contagion– imagine a nursery in which one baby starts crying, and the sound sets off others as well. This form of empathy is reflexive, which means there’s no point at which you actually think “This person must be feeling/thinking ______.” There’s a scene in the movie Clue where Mrs. White describes how her husband was murdered: “His head had been cut off, and so had his…you know.” Cut to three men listening while sitting on the couch, all simultaneously crossing their legs at the knee.

With reflexive empathy, you are effectively projecting yourself into another person’s body and situation and feeling what you imagine they feel, whether you want to or not. This is generally referred to as sympathy or a sympathetic reaction, and it’s very effective in terms of getting us to care about the welfare of others. It’s the reason that witnessing suffering bothers us, and it inspires us to help those who are suffering and be angry with those who cause it. If the person who is suffering is familiar to us or similar to us, our sympathetic reaction to their suffering is both more likely and stronger when it happens. If you want to prevent someone having a sympathetic reaction to another’s suffering, a good way to go about doing it– after attempting to disguise the fact that there’s someone suffering at all– would be to make the person suffering seem as unfamiliar and/or dissimilar as possible, so that it’s harder to relate to them.

Hume characterized empathy as the origin of morality. That is, he said, how we become moral– we are moved by the pain of others because we associate them with ourselves, and from this we extrapolate general dispositions about how others should be treated. We derive a moral sense.

So if other animals have empathy, does that mean they have a moral sense?

I think the answer from Frans deWaal is “yes” and “yes.” That is, yes he believes that some non-human apes have the capacity for empathy, and that this constitutes a capacity to form moral judgments. That’s what I expect him to argue in the new book he has coming out, The Bonobo and the Atheist.

A primatologist– and one you should read, if for some reason you haven’t already– deWaal has decades of experience observing the behavior of captive chimpanzees and bonobos, and has written copious books and articles on the topic, especially the ways in which that behavior is similar to our own. And then he began writing books and articles defending his emphasis on the ways in which their behavior resembles our own. The charge, as you might expect, was anthropocentrism– an insistence on incorrectly interpreting things (in this case, non-human primate behavior) in terms of human thoughts and behavior. To this, deWaal responded by accusing his accusers of “anthropodenial”– an insistence on refusing to interpret things in terms of human thoughts and behavior, even when it’s correct (accurate) to do so. You can see this exchange take place explicitly in Primates and Philosophers: How Morality Evolved, where deWaal argues basically that chimpanzees and bonobos have the ability to empathize and therefore at least a precursor to a moral sense, which can be recognized in their behavior by its similarity to human empathy– and there’s nothing hasty or unparsimonious (i.e., inaccurate) about  it.

That’s not what this post is about, though. Nor is it, really, about the general topic of morality in non-human primates or other non-human animals. It’s really about the fact that The Bonobo and the Atheist will be deWaal’s first book addressing religion specifically, and what I’m afraid he’ll say about it. See, his books to date have (largely) been about the possibility and extent of a moral capacity in the great apes, non-human primates, particularly chimpanzees and bonobos. Now my concern is that he’s going to use this body of data to argue that we– human beings– don’t need morality to come from God, because we’ve evolved it. That our closest living primate relatives are, in effect, secular humanists (or at least capable of being such), and therefore we humans might as well be, too.

This position– if indeed that’s what deWaal argues, and I don’t know if it will be– doesn’t bother me because it’s false. It bothers me because it’s beside the point.

Let me back up.

If Great Apes-Who-Are-Not-Humans (that would include chimpanzees and bonobos, but also gorillas and orangutans) do indeed have the capacity for empathy, then I would say that “precursor to morality” is a fair description for it. It would seem, on the face of it, that if nonhuman primates  have the capacity for empathy, then it is indeed evolved. I expect deWaal to argue this– he has before. (However, this isn’t necessarily the case. It could be, for example, that the great apes have evolved to have the kind of brains which make it possible for us have an empathetic response, but not be “wired” for empathy per se. To continue the clumsy analogy I began with, this would be like saying that just because you have a car, doesn’t mean you have a drive-to-the-store device. You have a device which you can drive to places, including the store if you so desire. This distinction goes to the heart of the “general learning device” vs. “kludge” discussion of how our brains have evolved, which I do not have any desire to get further into here.)

But even if other Great Apes have the capacity for empathy and hence morality, that is not a good point of evidence with which to oppose a theological insistence that morality must come from belief in God. That’s why I think, if this is the arrow deWaal will be firing, it will miss the target. Because we don’t need to have evolved morality (that is, to have inherited a moral sense) in order to have it– both the capacity to be moral, and the tendency to exercise it. Clearly, however we came by these things, we have them. And they are universal, and they do not require belief in a deity.

Now you may ask, why does this matter? Shouldn’t demonstrating that we have evolved a moral sense answer that question just as well, if not better? I say no, for a few reasons. First, because a lot of the people who believe that if your morality doesn’t come from God you don’t have morality at all, don’t believe in evolution. They very likely don’t have a good grip on what evolution is. And plenty of people– theist and atheist alike– who do know what evolution is, and are fully onboard with it, nevertheless have a distaste for evolutionary psychology or anything that smacks of it. And even those who don’t have such a distaste at all but have a dedication to scientific rigor (which all of us should, presumably) will need to be convinced. And I’m saying this convincing is important– very much so– but also beside the point.

You don’t need to demonstrate that morality is evolved in order to show that it doesn’t need to come from God, or at least a belief in God. The reality of nonbelievers being moral now, and the immoral behavior of not only believers but by believers in the name of the deity who is supposedly the origin of morality (not just the capacity to be good, but Good itself), accomplishes that.

I think of this every time I see, for example, someone claiming that those who oppose him or her politically are opposing morality itself. As if there’s a monopoly on morality: it only comes in one brand, and anyone who doesn’t have that brand doesn’t have morality at all. No knock-offs, even. Fellow nonbelievers– you’re not the only ones who, it’s being maintained, are not just insufficiently moral but incapable of acknowledging morality itself because your concept of it is somewhat different from that of the person making the accusation. Often that person will pretend that members of the morally bereft group he/she is describing are nonbelievers, because no “true” believer would support the right to an abortion/separation of church and state/feminism/sex before marriage/ending school-sanctioned prayer/supporting the teaching of evolution/ending the War on Drugs/ending war, period etc. But realistically speaking, there are nowhere near enough nonbelievers to accomplish any of these goals. And yet there is ample support for them. Hmmm.

So…yeah. Perhaps I’m flailing at windmills, and in fact deWaal’s book will not go anywhere near making the we-evolved-morality-therefore-we-don’t-need-God argument. But since this argument exists, and is actually relatively common to see whenever a believer challenges a nonbeliever regarding where he/she finds his/her foundation of morality on the basis that if God does not exist we should all be out murdering, raping, stealing, etc., I think it’s worth discussing why this approach is not actually the best one.

The best one is far simpler: There are loads– loads– of moral standards which are not based on divine mandate. Many of them were endorsed by Greek philosophers before Jesus ever set foot in Bethlehem. It’s not possible to show that morality didn’t come from God, because God’s existence itself is non-falsifiable. Fine. But it’s easy to evaluate whether the morality that is claimed to come from God, is in fact, moral or not. This will very likely get a person accused of “judging God” (and who has a right to do that?), but since the person making these proclamations is invariably not God, but a man…well. It carries just as much weight as anything else said by man.

I’m really looking forward to deWaal’s book, despite my misgivings stated here– and hey, for all I know, they might be totally off-base. I hope so. And if you aren’t familiar with his books, go get Chimpanzee Politics when you can. Everybody should read that one, and will likely enjoy it.

————————————-

Prior relevant writing: Is Darwin Responsible for the Chimp Attack?

I am not a cockroach– what materialism is, and isn’t

I am not a cockroach– what materialism is, and isn’t published on 2 Comments on I am not a cockroach– what materialism is, and isn’t

Several years ago, I bounded out of a faculty building on a university campus and, in a thoughtful and optimistic mood, joined a couple of lecturers in the pub across the street. After we’d settled on benches in the garden out back, I mentioned that in the course of my studies, I seemed to be becoming a materialist. The reaction was immediate and memorable: “A Marxist, you mean?”

Not memorable, mind you, because unusual or unexpected. I had, after all, been studying political philosophy that semester, and this was the United Kingdom– and my interlocutors were British and Austrian, respectively. What else could I possibly mean? After all, Marx was a continuation of a long line of becoming more and more about…well, the material. German philosophy in the 19th and 20th centuries has in large part been about coming down from the ideological rafters and starting to deal with mundane, real, ordinary life. Realism in reaction to idealism. Imagine that scene from Mary Poppins in which they visited a friend of hers stuck on the ceiling because he laughed so much, and eventually everyone started laughing along and floated up there with him, while Mary stood on the floor beneath them impatiently waiting for them to come down. Those people floating around, drinking tea? Hegelians. Mary Poppins on the floor (at least, at that specific moment)? Young Hegelians, which sounds like progeny but is actually more reactionary. Estranged progeny. Marx was one of them. He was impatient with philosophers pretending that philosophy could be about things that don’t really matter– or to be more charitable, things that don’t really matter in daily, practical existence, such as making a living and feeding yourself and your kids. While Hegel waxed on about the für sich (for itself) and the an sich (for us), Marx took from that a lesson to figure out what it means to exist for yourself as opposed to for someone else, and translated it into a matter of property, and who is control of property. That’s Marxist materialism.

That was not really what I meant. But it’s connected.

What I meant was that, in the course of studying religion and culture, I for some reason got it into my head that I ought to learn more about the mind and how it produces…well, anything, including culture, to begin with. And with that thought, in rapid succession I read a long list of books which included the following:

  • Consilience, by E.O. Wilson
  • Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, by Daniel Dennett
  • The Blank Slate, by Steven Pinker
  • How the Mind Works, by Steven Pinker
  • Consciousness: An Introduction, by Susan Blackmore (if you have not read this, and are interested in the science and philosophy of consciousness and the theories of principle thinkers on such…do)
  • The Meme Machine, by Susan Blackmore
  • Consciousness Explained, by Daniel Dennett
  • Freedom Evolves, by Daniel Dennett
(This was pre-Breaking the Spell. This was pre-, for that matter, a lot of the popular literature on the cognitive science of religion, which became a thing in 1993 but didn’t really catch fire until about ten years later)

When you think about that, it’s really no wonder my MA thesis was a mess. It was a struggle between social constructivism– “continental philosophy”– as I was being taught, and a much more…well, naturey approach which I’d undergone basically on my own. Now, I hasten to pull up a bit here and note that the constructivist perspectives I was hearing about in the classroom (“post modernist” would be the indelicate term) were not useless. Far from it. I learned how important perspective is– that it must always be taken into account, and that manifold factors shape one’s perspective without any requirement of awareness or acknowledgement on the part of the speaker. I learned what it means to have privilege, and to lack it, and that claims of objectivity must never be taken for granted. That differences are as important as generalities. That it’s important, critical, to understand where people with other views are coming from– but that you don’t “win” against them by knowing it; you can’t psychoanalyze someone into submission. Anthropology, sociology, psychology…studies of human thought and behavior can’t begin and end with what people say about their own motivations for doing things. You need a heterophenomenological approach, which acknowledges that experience but doesn’t take it as authoritative. And knowing someone’s motivation may not confirm or refute what he or she is saying, but it can tell you a hell of a lot about why they’re saying it.

Knowing all of this augmented, rather than detracted from, my understanding that we are simply organisms making our way in the world, in our environment (both natural and social). I started to see culture as more of an extended phenotype than an independent causal force. My thesis was, in retrospect, a rather weak project and a terribly ambitious one at the same time– I was trying to sell cognitive science to scholars of religion. Make what seemed obvious to me– that you need to understand the brain in order to understand belief and behavior, including religious belief and behavior– seem even palatable, much less relevant.

Admittedly, I didn’t do the best job. At least, it didn’t appear to be very convincing. When it became clear that my PhD was going to be more along those lines, a meeting was held and it was determined that I’d need to go elsewhere. Why not to Denmark, where this university is starting a brand new program for the cognitive science of religion?

Yes. 

Anyway, getting back to materialism. I’m writing this in the first place in reaction to an “open letter to atheists”  posted on Answers in Genesis, which repeats every last misconception and outright falsehood about what it’s like to be an atheist– and therefore a materialist (which doesn’t actually follow, but oh well)– there is. To wit:

Do you feel conflicted about the fact that atheism has no basis in morality (i.e., no absolute right and wrong; no good, no bad?) If someone stabs you in the back, treats you like nothing, steals from you, or lies to you, it doesn’t ultimately matter in an atheistic worldview where everything and everyone are just chemical reactions doing what chemicals do. And further, knowing that you are essentially no different from a cockroach in an atheistic worldview (since people are just animals) must be disheartening. Are you tired of the fact that atheism (which is based in materialism, a popular worldview today) has no basis for logic and reasoning? Is it tough trying to get up every day thinking that truth, which is immaterial, really doesn’t exist?

Okay, yes, there is a version of materialism which entails that nothing but physical objects exist. That’s why I now prefer not to call myself a materialist– or a material girl, for that matter (diamonds have never been my best friend, or even a close acquaintance, really). I much prefer the term naturalist (which should not be confused with naturist. No nudism in this instance). It means, basically, that the natural world is what we have. That science has it right, and we should consider things to be real only if they have an objectively demonstrable existence. Which means, yes, that supernatural factors should not be taken into account. Metaphysical naturalism pairs well with secular humanism, the ethical philosophy that as humans we have to rely on our own resources and abilities to make existence better. To flourish, to reach our full potential, to do what my former adviser called “becoming divine.” But by that, she did not mean we should literally become gods ourselves. She was talking about enabling fulfillment, becoming the best, most satisfying version of yourself. We might have disagreed on several things, including terminology such as this, but not on the concept itself. To hear the author of this “letter to atheists,” you’d think such a pursuit would be worthless without a belief in God.

Actually, the author is mistaken about a lot of things, and it makes my head spin to try and articulate exactly how many. Perhaps most ironically, the fact that not only is atheism not based in materialism (since not being convinced of something doesn’t need to be “based” in any particular philosophy) but there are plenty of non-materialist atheists out there. Believers in the supernatural are certainly the stars of the mind/body dualism debate, but they certainly aren’t the only players. The most obvious part of this portrayal of  “atheists are materialists, which is a crap philosophy” is the inability to imagine that there can be any meaning in life without a belief in God, which I don’t think most atheists acknowledge the strength of. That is some powerful conviction, even with the similarly powerful fear of eternal hellfire which frequently accompanies it. What the author of the above letter, Bodie Hodge, is doing is conflating naturalism– the belief that objective reality is all we have– with the naturalistic fallacy, which says that the way things are is the way things should be. This is a common mistake, perhaps the most common mistake made regarding any view of life which appears too reductionistic for the person critiquing it: You think this is all there is. That must mean that’s all you want it to be. Well, of course not, replies the naturalist. If I point out that we’ve got a newly built house and several cans of paint, that doesn’t mean I’m opposed to having a painted house. I’m simply refusing to believe that the house will be or has already been painted by magical elves. If we want that house to be painted, we’d better get out the brushes and roll up our shirt sleeves.

Similarly, the criticism that “everything and everyone are just chemicals doing what chemicals do” is only really a criticism if you fail to recognize that what chemicals do is freaking amazing. Complaining that what we do and are is chemicals is like complaining that the Sistine Chapel is made of bricks, only worse because a chemical is far more versatile than a brick (and bricks are pretty darn versatile). “Greedy reductionism” is Daniel Dennett’s term for when you explain how something works by describing the interactions of its components (reductionism), but in the process of doing so, you leave some things out. You fail to take into account the true complexity of what you’re explaining, and end up doing the equivalent of describing how to bake a cake without mentioning that it requires some heat, a move which is legitimately invalid. Anti-reductionism, by contrast, is a refusal to see something in terms of its components in the first place. Opponents of evolutionary theory, and of what I’m going to stick with calling naturalism, often seem to have a hard time with the concept of emergent properties. Or at least, the concept of us being emergent properties. It’s okay for a lot of cars to equal traffic, but not for the activity of a load of chemicals to equal consciousness. Dennett was famously quoted as saying that we have a soul, but it’s made of lots of tiny robots. Religious anti-reductionists don’t like the robots. They don’t like the idea of unthinking things combining to form a thinking thing, at least not without the outside help– the outside design– of some grander, elevated thinking thing who had this all planned out from the beginning. Whenever that was.

“Knowing that you are essentially no different from a cockroach in an atheistic worldview…” Religious anti-reductionists have a problem with essentialism, too. And by that I mean, they seem to be addicted to it. They are too fond of it. Things have properties, and those properties are immutable, and there’s no room for one thing to turn into another thing– the very notion is ridiculous. Gender essentialism is the belief that men have to be one thing and women another, and never the twain shall meet– except to have sex and make babies, of course. That’s common enough in religion, but the “atheists are just the same as cockroaches according to atheists” thing is saying that unless we consider humanity to be separate from the rest of existence as distinguished by our relationship with God (aka possession of a soul), then we might as well be cockroaches. Hodge assumes the conclusion of atheists by his own standards– we reject what he thinks distinguishes us from vermin, therefore we must perceive ourselves as vermin. And wow, that must suck for us, huh? That must be why when you enter a room and turn on the lights, all of the atheists scatter for the dark space under the stove or the fridge.

But strangely…no, we’re not. We’re living our lives as human beings, thinking thoughts, doing work, relating to others, practicing empathy and creating works of art and caring for family and occasionally taking a road trip or seeing Avatar in 3D or making a podcast about video games. No demonstrable diminished joie de vivre; no elevated angst; no visible heightened incidences of people being told to get off of lawns or general curmudgeonliness (well, I can’t exactly speak to that– I’ve been a curmudgeon since age 20 or so). Hodge is simply mistaken about the consequences of non-belief, apparently because he cannot comprehend what it’s like not to believe. It’s like the god-of-the-gaps wrapped up in an argument from incredulity– “I can’t fathom what it’s like to not have, much less not need, this thing I find so important. So I can’t help but conclude that people who lack it are missing something important, and must suffer from the lacking.”

That– assuming someone’s conclusion through the lens of your own philosophy– is part of prejudice, or more basically it’s a form of ignorance which gives birth to prejudice. It seems to be most easily overcome by not just actually getting to know members of the group you’re prejudiced against and seeing that they have no existential gaps in their lives which need to be filled, but also by coming to realize that the choice you made (more or less voluntarily, depending), was in fact a choice. There were/are others, equally legitimate. Comparative religion courses are valuable in part because they encourage this realization– they nudge a student to take note of the fact that if he or she had been born somewhere else, his/her beliefs about the order and creator of the universe might well be radically different. It’s fine to stop there– this is the foundation of inter-faith exchange, after all– but some of us go on to conclude that if all faith-based perspectives are equally valid, then they are all equally invalid, and that maybe it would be better to go about life on the assumption that they are. This is a conclusion I reached in my junior year of college as a religious studies major, as part of a program at Texas Christian University which I recall the local Campus Crusade for Christ called an “atheist training camp.” Not hardly– it simply wasn’t/isn’t a seminary.

Is it tough trying to get up every day thinking that truth, which is immaterial, really doesn’t exist?

No, because I have no trouble distinguishing between the legitimacy of beliefs and the reality of physical objects. I’m perfectly aware that the fact that modus ponens can’t be found anywhere in the universe using a GPS or any other tracking device makes it no less real. You will not catch me stepping out of an airplane at 10,000 feet without a parachute on the conviction that truth is relative, and therefore doesn’t matter. But you also won’t catch me declaring that gravity (which is not material, but is physical) or modus ponens (which is neither) created the universe, and therefore should be worshiped. One thing a naturalistic worldview does cut down on is relentlessly anthropomorphizing things.

I’d like a glue gun, some acrylic paint, and some birth control

I’d like a glue gun, some acrylic paint, and some birth control published on 2 Comments on I’d like a glue gun, some acrylic paint, and some birth control

A federal judge denied Hobby Lobby’s request for exemption from the federal requirement to provide health care coverage which covers contraception, especially (at least, this is what owner David Green claimed to be his basis for objection) the morning-after pill.

In a 28-page ruling, U.S. District Judge Joe Heaton denied a request by Hobby Lobby to prevent the government from enforcing portions of the health care law mandating insurance coverage for contraceptives the company’s Christian owners consider objectionable. The Oklahoma City-based company and a sister company, Mardel Inc., sued the government in September, claiming the mandate violates the owners’ religious beliefs. The owners contend the morning-after and week-after birth control pills are tantamount to abortion because they can prevent a fertilized egg from implanting in a woman’s womb. They also object to providing coverage for certain kinds of intrauterine devices. At a hearing earlier this month, a government lawyer said the drugs do not cause abortions and that the U.S. has a compelling interest in mandating insurance coverage for them. In his ruling denying Hobby Lobby’s request for an injunction, Heaton said that while churches and other religious organizations have been granted constitutional protection from the birth-control provisions, “Hobby Lobby and Mardel are not religious organizations.”

Well, they might be– they sound pretty darn religious to me. But I’m very glad they don’t get to impose that religion on their female employees by denying them health coverage.

Now to decide whether to end my personal boycott of Hobby Lobby…shopping for all of my craftsy stuff at Michael’s really bites.

How Skepticon is and isn’t like going to church

How Skepticon is and isn’t like going to church published on 2 Comments on How Skepticon is and isn’t like going to church

Is: Skepticon is a gathering of like-minded people on specific dates.
Isn’t: The particular dates don’t matter, except that that also mostly encompass a weekend, but purely for reasons of travel and availability. There is no such thing as a skeptical Sabbath.

Is: Skepticon involves speakers getting up before an audience and issuing proclamations.
Isn’t: Those proclamations are not from an agreed-upon text. There is no official doctrine or dogma.

Hemant Mehta compares the drawings by an eight year old
in Sunday school of a good Christian boy (well-groomed,
carrying a cross) and an atheist boy (tattooed, drinking)

Is: Speakers talk about what’s important to them, and to members of the audience.
Isn’t: What’s important is not furthering belief in supernatural entities.

Is: There is a sacrament.
Isn’t: It’s beer.

Is: There is a lot of talk about religion.
Isn’t: Not generally in a favorable light.

Is: You get to hear “God” a lot.
Isn’t: It’s likely to be followed immediately by “damn.”

Is: It’s free.
Isn’t: Nobody passes a basket. At least, not literally.

Is: There are protesters.

Text: “The Scientific Reliability of The Bible
Psalm 119:138
If the Bible is not true then nothing really
matters. If the Bible is true then nothing else
really matters. SouthCreekChruch.com [sic]
BornofHim.org”

Wait, wait, wait….that’s an “is”? Yes. Where (and when) I went to church, there were protesters.
Isn’t: Somewhat different kind of protesters. But not terribly different.

Sign: “If You Died Today, Where
Would You Go?”

Is: It happens on a regular basis.
Isn’t: Skepticon happens once year. People travel hundreds of miles to reach it, because there isn’t anything equivalent happening closer to them.

Is: It’s very segregated. You could make pretty accurate arrangements to meet up with someone by saying “I’ll see you by the black dude at 4:00.”
Isn’t: There was somebody making an issue of this. Unfortunately, a lot of people (including myself…I had to get on the road) weren’t around to hear it.

Is: People feel a surge of enthusiasm and joy from the knowledge that they are amongst others who sympathize on something very important to them. As one was quoted, “Hanging out with people who agree with me recharges and revitalizes me.”
Isn’t: Well…

This quote was mentioned by James Croft on Sunday morning (fittingly) during his talk on skeptical and atheist communities. In light of the fact that “non-religious” is the fastest-growing “religious” faction in America, with 1/3 of people under age 30 fitting that description, Croft was encouraging attendees of Skepticon to join and/or start local organizations for the non-religious in order to have that revitalizing and recharging sense of community more often, and to engage in the kind of proactive ethical pursuits that churches often do (collecting food, toys, etc. for the poor) as secular communities, all over the country, when conventions like Skepticon aren’t taking place. Croft was encouraging everyone to become more active, to translate that feeling of inward belonging into outward action, which– if we’re to be fair– is like pulling teeth to get church members to do. People who live fewer than two miles from their place of worship, from the supposed locus of attention of the ever-loving deity who created the universe. I guess they figure he’ll take care of it for them. Skeptics don’t have that to fall back on.

I think impatience in this case is easy, actually– particularly if you’re the sort of person who has no problem finding people who are very accepting of skepticism and secularism as an important or even necessary element of their day-to-day life, which is also your day-to-day life. It can be easy to discount the comfort that can be found in people who think similarly if you are not one of those (like a secularist in the midwest) who spends every waking moment around people who largely don’t.  

I know, I know, it’s a messy issue. Routinely, the community of skeptics/atheists/secularists runs up against such concerns, and runs up against them hard. Croft bent over backwards in his talk to make the idea of gathering together seem as palatable to secularists– who, incidentally, had already made quite a significant show of being willing to gather together at least once a year, for a couple of days, for the sake of common interest and the comfort that comes from that, and for some socialization. Like cons are known to be– gatherings of enthusiasts.

For me, it was an opportunity to socialize in particular with a friend I’ve known for a good fifteen years (thank you, internet!), but had never met in person.

Gretchen and Ed Brayton

Damn sure it’s not going to be another fifteen years.

Proximate pratfall

Proximate pratfall published on 1 Comment on Proximate pratfall

Regarding Richard Mourdock’s “rape babies are a gift from God” comment…

It’s fun to see people all over the internet making fun of Mourdock saying that a pregnancy which results from rape should be considered a gift from God, because that life is something God intended to happen. They can see the obvious dishonesty of it, and are going to town drawing the logical conclusions of such a statement. Those logical conclusions are how we can know it was dishonest– if it wasn’t, then the most charitable thing that can be said is that Mourdock didn’t exactly think it through.

You see, the position that God intended for a pregnancy to have resulted from a rape can be interpreted in one of two ways:

1. Ultimate: Of course God intended for it to happen, because God intends everything! God is the author of the universe, the primary force behind everything and everything. He is the ground of being, or at least the first cause who set everything in motion. Therefore if something happens, it is by his intention.

Why Mourdock’s statement is ridiculous, if that’s what he meant: Rape pregnancies, then, are intended by God in the same sense as cancer, earthquakes, and car accidents. The implication of Mourdock’s statement is of course that a pregnancy resulting from rape is intended by God, therefore the woman should not have an abortion. But our response to disease, natural disasters, and human-caused mishaps is not to proceed about our day as if nothing happened, whether we regard those things as ultimately intended by God or not. When those things happen, we attempt to fix them– to put things right. Oftentimes, to a woman whose pregnancy resulted from rape, getting an abortion is putting things right (well, as much as she can). God intending the pregnancy is not an argument against her doing so any more than it is an argument against chemotherapy for cancer patients.

2. Proximate: A rape victim’s pregnancy is a result of special intervention on God’s part. For reasons known only to God– and apparently to Mourdock– God looked down on that woman who had recently experienced the suffering of sexual violation and said “Hey, that raped lady needs a baby.” And presto! He put one inside her.

Why Mourdock’s statement is ridiculous, if that’s what he meant: Because it makes God– and Mourdock– a sadist. Unfortunately Mourdock’s use of the word “gift” makes it much more likely that this is the sense in which his statement was made, and that’s why people are reacting so badly to it even though he still appears to have no clue of the enormity of what he said. That’s what is making people mentally dry heave.

And by the way, you can give a gift back. It might be rude, but you can do it. Just saying.

This lead me, though, to think of an earlier rumination I had about conservatives conflating God’s behavior in the proximate vs. ultimate sense, so I’m re-posting that here:

1. “Everything is caused by a higher power. I call that higher power God.”

2. “Natural disasters are acts of God– they are part of the structure of the world and we just have to deal with them as they come.”

3. “Now that (insert natural disaster) has happened, are the people of (insert region of the world) going to wake up and see that God has a message for them?  Are they going to see that God is not happy, and change their ways?”

Three very different statements. The third person is claiming that a natural disaster is a specific act of God, performed in reaction to the behavior of people in the area affected by it. This person is either too uneducated to know the reality of why natural disasters happen in certain times and in certain places, or does not mind appearing to be. To put it less delicately, if you claim that natural disasters are actually divine punishment you are not only stunningly lacking in empathy but can also safely be thought less than bright. I don’t expect people to stop doing that any time soon, but our collective willingness to call their statements ridiculous has increased.  Previously there would have been no need for Michele Bachmann’s PR person to declare that she was simply joking [when she said that Hurricane Irene was God “getting Washington’s attention”].

We still don’t– or at least, shouldn’t– want people who are willing to make statements like that running the country. We shouldn’t want governors who think that you solve problems like property rights violations and drought by appealing to God to solve them. We shouldn’t want a president who decided to run in the first place because he/she thinks God told him/her to run, or that God will tell him/her things like whether to go to war or not while in office.

Why? Because these put God in front of natural and human causes for things. They make him a proximate cause, rather than the ultimate one. God might indeed favor Herman Cain for president, but the rest of us should be primarily concerned with whether he’s what the country needs, and whether he’ll do a good job. God might be concerned about property rights, but since it’s the job of politicians to make things right in that regard, they should be doing it. God might have an opinion about whether the country should go to war, but hopefully it’s based on the same things a president should be concerned about– whether the war is just, how much suffering it will cause, and so on. God might have very firm opinions about how Obama’s handling the deficit, but if you consider Irene to be a sign of that you’re a cretin and shouldn’t be in an elected position of power.

Demonology

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Art by Sandro Castelli

It’s getting close to Halloween, so let’s talk about demons.

I’m going to define a demon as a non-human agent who works in the world– the existence we inhabit– to create evil. Now, yes, I’ve said that I don’t believe in evil, that evil is a problematic concept. I don’t, and it is. But I don’t believe in demons either. This definition is a description of what demons are to people who do believe in them, and people who believe in demons typically believe in evil.

There are all kinds of demons. There are other kinds of “real” demons in folklore across the world, and other kinds of intentionally fictional demons depicted all over movies, literature, gaming, and so on. The Dungeons and Dragons Monster Manual for example has a whole slew of them, each with their own characteristics, rank, and abilities. Demons as mythological characters are really fun, because they can look like virtually anything although they typically have horns and a tail at least, sometimes hooves. A tiefling is a humanoid with demonic ancestry, and they’re not even necessarily evil.

But the kind some Christians believe in? They’re evil. Their reason for existing is, in fact, evil. They exist to prevent humans from flourishing and achieving spiritual salvation. That is, demons serve Satan and work to prevent the souls of humans from being saved so that those humans will go to a heavenly afterlife. In the Bible, demons usually take the form of “unclean spirits” who possess people and can only be removed via exorcism. Jesus was, among many other things, an exorcist. Catholic clergy have performed exorcisms for centuries and do to this day, while specifying that the allegedly demon-possessed person must be examined by a doctor to ensure that it is not actually a case of mental illness. After all,

“Not everyone who thinks they need an exorcism actually does need one,” said Bishop Thomas J. Paprocki of Springfield, Ill., who organized the conference. “It’s only used in those cases where the Devil is involved in an extraordinary sort of way in terms of actually being in possession of the person. “But it’s rare, it’s extraordinary, so the use of exorcism is also rare and extraordinary,” he said. “But we have to be prepared.”

Indeed. A 2008 Pew Forum Landscape Survey found that 68% of Americans “believe that angels and demons are active in the world.” According to a 2009 Barna Group study, in America,

A majority of Christians believe that a person can be under the influence of spiritual forces, such as demons or evil spirits. Two out of three Christians agreed that such influence is real (39% agreed strongly, 25% agreed somewhat), while just three out of ten rejected the influence of supernatural forces (18% disagreed strongly, 10% disagreed somewhat). The remaining 8% were undecided on this matter.

So these people believe that there are other agents in our world– non-human but human-like agents– which have an effect on the world for good or for evil. I’m focusing on evil for now, because I think it’s more interesting in terms of moral responsibility. Namely, how demons function to add, take away, or otherwise mess with it. See, the notion of a non-human agent which can possess people and make them do evil works excellently for two purposes: 1) asserting that someone else is doing something wrong when you can’t come up with any real evidence of the wrongness of the act, and 2) exculpating oneself of actual or at least allegedly actual harmful acts by taking the blame. You’ve heard someone speak of his or her demons? Some people actually mean that literally.

Whether they appear in someone’s explanation for the reason for whatever they consider evil happening in the world, or in a movie designed to scare the hell out of us, there’s one feature of demons that is particularly salient to me: they don’t work voluntarily. And by that I don’t mean demons are slaves. I mean that they can take control of things without any consent on the part of the person or people for whom they are ruining existence. Frequently when a demon shows up in a movie, it’s because somebody summoned it by accident by performing some ritual (Ritual: A sequence of actions which produces a supernatural result as an emergent property, in addition to the expected physical consequence of those actions. Dunking someone in water gets them wet. Baptizing someone confirms them as a child of God.) which brings them into the world, completely involuntarily on behalf of the summoner. And when a demon is summoned on purpose, it’s generally without the summoner having a complete understanding of what he/she is doing, which tends to turn out very badly indeed for him/her. Demons: not big fans of consent.

I watched Hellraiser recently for the Film Sack podcast. I’d never seen it before. I wasn’t big on horror movies at all growing up because they’d seep into my dreams whether I recognized them as fake and ridiculous or not, so I just avoided them altogether. But over the past few years I’ve started watching both and old and new ones, good and bad, from The Omen to Poultrygeist, and the thing that sticks out to me the most is how they screw with moral responsibility. Sure, anybody who has so much as seen a horror movie or watched Scream knows this. But there’s a lesson about morality that horror movies can tell you. I’m not saying it’s a good or correct lesson, but it’s a pretty darn consistent lesson:

Horrible things will happen, perhaps to you. They will be worse if you’re a bad person. Whether it’s “cheated on your significant other” bad or “serial killer” bad (or just “had sex” bad, if you’re female) doesn’t matter. Being a good person will not save you. You do have to be a good person to survive, but you also have to have access to and seize upon an opportunity presented for no real reason and based entirely on luck. If you do that, you might survive.

In the case of Hellraiser there is plenty of Hell and demons, and fortuitous opportunity is a small wooden box. A box which apparently (the movie is not very clear) provides both the opportunity to inadvertently turn your soul over to the complete control of demons, or, under the right circumstances, to banish those demons. I won’t spoil the movie for you, but I bet you can guess which sort of people get controlled and which get the banishing power. The important thing is how unintentional it was in all cases. In both movies and popular conceptions of demons, the matter of whether you end up being controlled by them or whether you are in a position of chase them away has very little to do with what you actually will to happen. In popular conception, here are some ways you can worship and/or summon demons completely inadvertently:

This last was the focus of a recent radio show rant by Linda Harvey of Mission: America, who said:

The core of Halloween is glittering artificiality, you can pretend to be someone you aren’t’ for a night, you can flirt with danger, you can divine a different destiny, but it is all void of the presence of or will of God. It’s a seduction that says, ‘don’t be afraid, do whatever you want, there’s nothing to fear,’ it’s one of Satan’s oldest tricks. Costume parties are fun but these costumes may even disguise our very souls. Most Christians with a sincere faith acknowledge that there is a demonic realm and that Satan and his minions are at work in the world to deceive humans, so why wouldn’t Halloween provide an extremely useful tool? Mixed in with the fun and games are frightening and disturbing experiences that may leave some children with nightmares. Then there is the flirtation with occult practices that are forbidden in Deuteronomy 18:10-12 and elsewhere, Christians aren’t supposed to be consulting fortune tellers, Ouija boards or palm readers about our future but all are frequently a part of Halloween festivities. ‘But it’s just for fun,’ parents will say, ‘God understands my children are not serious.’ Really? Do your kids know how risky these practices are and that real contact with real demons is quite possible. Satan doesn’t care about our intentions; he will take any willing participant.

Putting aside the fact that that “There’s nothing to fear” was one of the profound messages of divine insight delivered in neurosurgeon Eben Alexander’s trip to paradise, the most important thing here is that the only intentions which matter are those of Satan and his minions. Not even God’s omniscient understanding of the content of the minds and hearts of men is apparently good enough to rescue what would otherwise be completely morally neutral acts of fun from actually being rituals to deliver souls into demonic control and presumably a very warm afterlife. Believing in Satan and demons means that there are evil agents in the world actively trying to pull your soul away from God’s embrace, and they can do by means which coincidentally look just like the ways to have the most fun.

The arguments that practicing yoga is demonic center around the notion that you’re actually practicing the rituals of another religion, and if you’re doing that (knowingly or unknowingly) then you’re obviously not conforming properly to your own religion. And since there are no other gods but God, you can’t actually be worshipping the gods of other religions by mistake. What you are doing, then, is demonic. Since it is not God-focused, it must be Satan-focused, since Satan wants you to turn your attention from God. As if there isn’t enough pain and suffering going on in the world occurring naturally, accidentally, and deliberately by the acts of the malicious, we have to worry about accidentally serving Satan by being influenced by demons to commit ungodly acts which don’t appear ungodly because they harm nobody and actually seem fun, helpful, and/or educational.

The lesson of demon-believing Christianity seems uncannily like the lesson of horror movies, doesn’t it? Evil is actively working in the world to cause you to suffer and die. You will likely suffer more if you’re even slightly bad, but being good– according to rather questionable rules we’ve made– is not enough to save you. You must also be lucky enough to be given an unlikely and seemingly arbitrary opportunity, and you must seize on that opportunity in order to have any hope of surviving. If you ignore these rules and this opportunity in favor of enjoying yourself and doing what you think is right, you will unwittingly serve the interests of the evil agents and ultimately become theirs.

I submit that this portrayal of moral responsibility is absolutely incompatible with free will, which shouldn’t be shocking at all (it may shock you that I believe in free will, but that’s another commentary altogether. Sufficed to say I’m persuaded by Daniel Dennett’s portrayal). I think that demon-belief is completely fatuous, which should also be unsurprisingly. But I also want to say that I consider it an immoral belief, because of this effect of completely distorting moral responsibility to make evil out of acts which are not just benign, but intended as benign and actually morally neutral or perhaps even positive. Demon belief is a cheap cop-out in terms of morality in a way that angel belief is not, which is why I didn’t feel compelled to address angels here at all. I don’t believe in angels, but consider the belief  mostly benign except when people credit angels for things like successful surgery rather than, you know, their surgeons.

I can’t get people to stop believing in demons. But I think I have offered a sound argument for not taking people seriously when they attempt to invoke demons as moral justification for….well, anything. Linda Harvey’s full rant included the suggestion that demons are responsibility for homosexuality and what she calls “gender confusion.” We should not listen to people like Linda Harvey. They are literally making up supernatural support for their morality, and in the worst, most damaging possible way.

Sam Harris on a NDE as drug trip

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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.

Tripping a little more

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

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, 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.”

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.

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

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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)

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 — 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.

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 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.

A simple ethics of expectations

A simple ethics of expectations published on No Comments on A simple ethics of expectations

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.”