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.  

Stephanie Miller Does The Best Trump Impersonation - Better Than Colbert's

 

 

She's the exact opposite of Ben Meiselas reading Trump tweets,  I can't stand listening to him read things.  Stephanie does it as well as anyone could.

I don't think we can base such a morally consequential question on the musings of materialist particle physicists.

MY ALCOHOLIC RELATIVE  I wrote about a week ago is at the end and, as I said, I'm one of the ones taking care of him.   I'm hoping to write more soon.  In the mean time, here's the estimable but not unlimited Sabine Hossenfelder again attempting to debunk free will, the sum total of her argument hinges on her ideological choice of materialism and materialist reductionism.   Despite all of the rather clever though not especially deep reference to "emergence" - I will say she does a better job than most English language and French materialists I've encountered - and other assorted materialist framings, her choice doesn't answer any of the questions I've asked on the topic which deal with accounting for our experience of consciousness, which encompasses our earliest conscious, pre-language moments to the most rigorous and comprehensive proofs of mathematics and, on a lower level of human structured thinking, physics and chemistry.   I'd be tempted to throw in that I'm a lot more impressed with the rigor of some theological writers.   They don't deal with with radically limited topics that physicists and chemists deal with but, then, physics and chemistry are entirely incompetent to deal with those aspects of human experience that theology takes as its subject matter.  I think that's one of the reasons that when I listen to the Evangelical apologist William Lane Craig, when he is refuting the claims of the likes of Sean Carroll and other militant atheists, he's impressive though I often disagree with him on topics proper to theology and Scripture study.  

Notice that her too pat dismissal of the idea that the mind is not material and so could not be limited to the web of material causality that her subject matter has as its only proper area of competence, physical objects and energy as those can be discerned from their (perhaps partial) presence in humanly perceived or reasoned networks of causation.   It's not surprising that someone so invested in physics would insist that the entirety of reality is governed by the rules People have discovered (or perhaps invented) to explain those to themselves is the sum total of reality.   To a carpenter everything looks like a nail, is the cliche.   

I'd like to see her explain why anyone should have any more confidence in the non-apparent ideas of elite physicists, chemists, theoretical biologists, etc.  have any more connection to reality than the freedom of choice that materialist atheists with a devotion to scientists are so ready to reject because it can't be made into an aspect of their framing of reality.   Every idea of mathematics or physics or any science is as fraught with the question of choosing to believe everything from our earliest notion of numbers or logical thought right up to the latest seemingly confirmed products of a particle accelerator or from an orbiting telescope.    We mere human beings can never, ever remove ourselves and our minds from the products of those minds, that's as true of even observable physics as it is from religious Scripture.

As a political blogger my concern about materialism is the fact that whenever People and other living beings are seen as material objects having no transcendent characteristics that make them more than objects, the consequences are a moral catastrophe.   The failure of academic intellectualism - apart from some of post-WWII theology and other areas of non-reductionist thinking - has failed to address the fact that whenever that view of human beings are mere objects, in part or in total, the dominant view of those with power, lots of people suffer the most terrible oppression, use, destruction and murder.  That is the consequence, whether under Marxism or Nazism, whether under European fascism or its American traditional form in white supremacy, etc. whenever People, in part or in total, are seen as objects, no more than that and that, as Nietzsche understood to be the consequence of scientific materialism, if you could get away with using, exploiting or killing one of millions of People, then there was no reason not to do it if you liked doing it.   That is a real-life proven consequence of the demotion of human beings into objects, whether it is Native Americans, Black People, Jews, LGBTQ+ or Women,  I don't think we can afford to allow someone to not address those consequences of their ideological assertions under the guise that when People invented science they decided to exempt it from questions of moral consequences.   I don't think we can base such a morally consequential question on the musings of materialist particle physicists. 

I know that the companies that put out cheap vodka in handles and "bum wine" know they are marketing to alcoholics.  In short, they see the alcoholics they market to as objects for profit even as it's obvious that they have abandoned their ability to choose to save themselves to a molecule.   They know they're making money off of killing People.    Just as I know the member of my family dying of COPD was marketed to by the tobacco industry and Hollywood when she was a teenager.   Surrendering your ability to choose to molecules seems to me to be that hazardous to your health.   It's as hazardous to believe someone who has spent so much of their life seeing molecules, atoms and subatomic particles as the ultimate reality can really account for our experience of our lives.   Much as I like Ms. Hossenfelder when she's talking about her topic of competence, she's pretty useless when she insists that's all there is to reality.