Thoughts On This Side Of The Undiscovered Country From Whose Bourne Perhaps Some Report On

CARING FOR SOMEONE who is dying can make you face more directly your own fears of death.  That's what is shadowing my life right now, at my age it might for however long I've got to go, myself, reaching a certain age is like a warning that the end is coming closer.

My first try at writing this led me to go all over the place, mostly about stuff I go over regularly here, atheist to "white evangelicals" and trad-catho-fascists, eternal damnationists as opposed to universalists, etc.

I rather stupidly tried to divert myself by listening to a number of lectures by the archeologists and others who have been digging up and studying the Homo naledi remains and artifacts.  That was a big mistake, not because of the remains or artifacts but the descriptions of the deep, narrow, distant caves in which the remains and artifacts are found.  I have a terrible phobia about confined spaces and being trapped. It wasn't  a good idea to have to deal with that with what I'm dealing with.  

And I was surprised to find that I am no where near as diverted about those interesting but long dead cousins of ours as I used to be about our mutual cousins previously "discovered."  I would love to find out that there is evidence of interbreeding with the modern humans that were around when they were.  I love the idea that we're all mutts.  Pure breeding is a myth of putrid snobbery that apparently saturates such near or para-science.  Most interesting to me is the controversy that the discovery that those "small brained" cousins regularly seem to have buried their dead and did cave art with those who have a professional or ideological stake in denying the possibility that such "small brained" distant relatives of ours could have done that.  

What I find most interesting in that is how confident these men of science can be in their speculations about the lives of creatures they never saw in life but, nevertheless, have fixed opinions about.  Even before the physical evidence of them is in. Even.

I will say that considering the amount of highly detailed evidence available about this branch of the family due to what is being interpreted - on what looks like good evidence to me - that they buried those remains quite intentionally, it makes you doubt what they will claim about species known only by the most fragmentary possible information.  Some such species are known by a single bone or tooth.  The scientific denial of evidence is something that does interest me quite a bit as does the ideological insistence of what can and cannot be among those who, presumably, would chafe at being called ideologues who depend on speculation based authority and orthodoxy instead of evidence.  That orthodoxy and authority are almost entirely based on modern conjecture and narrative, often based on the scantest of actual evidence.  In this controversy and earlier ones about whether or not our nearest known relations, the so called neanderthals buried their dead, cared for them, created art, such conjecture and narrative, especially when embedded into professional self-interest, can swamp even conclusive evidence.

Related to that the only possible information we have about what may await us after death is in things like reports of near death experience, reports of what happens at death scenes, the sometimes seemingly uncanny accuracy of information given by mediums under controlled conditions and various apparitions of those who are dead the living report they see.  The deep emotional rejection of all of that whether by those who have a deep emotional investment in the denial of an afterlife or those who have a religious taboo against them are, I think, related to the invested ideological anthropologists, archeologists, etc. who insist that the recent discoveries of naledi remains cannot be interpreted to mean what they would seem to mean.  

I read Raymond Moody's famous book about near death experiences, Life After Life, a few years after it was published and I thought it was striking but at the time I was more interested in politics and life in the here and now.*  But in reading those who repeatedly tried to debunk the reported experience of those who experienced what they did, why the debunkers thought they had any standing to deny those people the interpretation of their own experiences seemed to be the most important points in their  dispute.  People are the only possible source for reports of their own experiences, especially experiences with no external aspects which are observable by others.  How anyone could think they know about that better than the People who had the near death experiences or related ones should be the first question anyone asks about such attempted debunkery.  That was something that, as I looked more skeptically at the "skeptics" and more critically at the critics, seemed to be relevant to all of that stuff.  Now I think that while there are such reports of experiences I find less and others more believable, I wouldn't automatically deny anyone who seems to be rational on what they have experienced in such things.  I certainly wouldn't figure any explanation I might grasp onto to deny they experienced what they did was any kind of evidence.  

There, I think I actually feel better having written this out and worked on it.  Something that no stupid AI bot could do.  I think People who don't write about their worst fears and obsessions to try to deal with them are missing out on something that the geeks who come up with such alleged intelligence seem not to be able to imagine.  This week I listened to an interesting podcast by Marc Vernon on that topic.  I think his point that people who work in AI spend so much of their life in that that they lose track of reality has a lot to recommend it.  I think Alan Turing's life might have been thwarted and shortened by that very phenomenon.  

*  I recently had occasion to watch The Return of the Secaucus 7 again and found that though I thought it was really good at the time it was made, I couldn't much stand the characters in the movie, now.  I was never that impressed with people my own age, even then.  Though I kept thinking at times what a good writer John Sayles was.