Comatose but Conscious

Anyone who has had a family member in a coma from a brain injury has probably wondered whether their loved one could hear them and wondered what it must be like for someone to be conscious but completely unable to express themselves. We've discussed this on VP on several occasions in the past but whenever I come across an article on the topic, I feel like I should mention it again.

In a partial transcript of a podcast interview with neuroscientist Michael Egnor, Egnor elaborates on the work of Adrian Owen who discovered about fifteen years ago that many comatose patients were capable of thinking and could hear what was being said to them.

Subsequent research has determined that in a significant number of cases, as high as 40%, comatose patients are indeed able to hear what is being said to them and, with modern MRI techniques, even able to respond.

Here's part of Egnor's discussion of Owen's work:

Owen took a woman who was in a persistent vegetative state—she’d been in a car accident and had severe brain damage, and she’d been in this state for several years—and he put her in an MRI machine and did what’s called a functional MRI test. A functional MRI test looks at changes in blood flow in the brain that we believe correspond to activation of parts of the brain. So you can kind of tell what’s going on inside the brain during the time they’re in the machine.

So he put her in the machine and he put headphones on her and he asked her to think about things. Now remember, she’s a woman who, supposedly, is in the deepest level of coma, just a hair above brain dead. And he said, “Imagine you’re walking across the room.” “Imagine you’re playing tennis.” “Think of things.” And he found activation in her brain.

So he then took fifteen normal volunteers, put them in the machine, and asked them the same questions. And her patterns of activation were identical to theirs. So he said, well, to a first approximation, it looks like she can think just like they can think.

But, he said, you know, maybe the activation that we are seeing in the brain isn’t because she understands. Maybe it’s just the brain’s reaction to sound. Maybe it doesn’t necessarily mean that you understand, maybe just the noise from the headphones is causing this activation. So he scrambled the words. Instead of saying, “Imagine walking across a room” he would say “across walking imagine room your”.

So it made no sense. And the activation went away in her brain and in the volunteers’.

So he showed that the only time she had activation in her brain was when what was asked of her made sense. And her activation was completely indistinguishable from the activation of completely conscious people. So he concluded that she was able to understand and think about things that he was asking her to understand and think about, even though she was in the deepest level of coma.

This alone is astonishing, but there's more:

His research has been repeated by a number of other laboratories on many, many patients with persistent vegetative state. And about forty percent of people in persistent vegetative state show high levels of intellectual functioning even in deep coma.

There are ways of conversing with people in deep coma where you can, for example, look at the activation state representing "Yes" and the activation state representing "No" and you can ask them questions. You know, “Are you lonely?” “Do you wish your mother were here?” “Would you like something to eat?”, stuff like that, and they can answer you, with these brain states.

In addition, some people can do mathematics in a coma. You can ask them “Is the square root of 25, 6?” and they do a "No." And “Is it 5?” and they do a "Yes." So there can be very high levels—not in all patients that we have found—but in many patients, forty percent, at least—of mental function in profoundly damaged brains. To the point where the medical profession has actually added a category to this list of ways you can be in a coma, and this is called minimally conscious state.

So patients who have evidence of intellectual functioning in deep coma are called “minimally conscious,” although, frankly, they’re not really minimally conscious, they’re quite conscious.

I've always wondered whether the comatose patient was in pain but unable to communicate their suffering to anyone. If so, it would be hellish. These sorts of developments give hope that medical professionals will be better able to care for and comfort those who appear to be unconscious but aren't.

Getting at the Truth

A friend recently emailed me with a concern about the difficulty of judging the reliability of various news sources that report on casualties and possible war crimes being committed in the war between the Israelis and the Palestinian Arabs in Gaza. Maybe you'll find what I wrote back to him to be helpful as you try yourself to decide what to believe:

I agree that it's sometimes difficult to know who or what to trust, but there are a couple questions that I think are helpful when I read anything that makes Israel look villainous. The first is the lawyer's question, cui bono? For example, when it's reported that Israel has bombed a hospital or fired on ambulances I have to ask why would they do something like that intentionally?

In war, accidents happen. Sometimes there's bad intelligence. But how does it help Israel to deliberately or indiscriminately attack civilians? How does it benefit them to have the world despise them even more than it already does? The Israelis aren't cold-blooded killers like the Russians in Ukraine, nor are they stupid.

They have nothing to gain from purposely killing civilians so I'm very skeptical of any reports that suggest that they did.

The second question I ask is what's the track record of the source? For instance, a news organization that rushed to report that Israel had bombed the Al Shifa hospital when in fact all the evidence eventually showed that it was an errant Islamist rocket that hit the hospital parking lot has eroded their credibility.

Or consider a newspaper like the New York Times or the Washington Post that buried on page 20 the news that several hundred thousand people turned out in D.C. on Tuesday to rally in support of Israel appears to be playing favorites and has thus diminished their reliability with me.

I'm also skeptical of almost any news report having to do with casualties. The latest report is that there are 11,000 fatalities among Palestinians, mostly women and children, but this doesn't really tell us much. How many of those 11,000 are Hamas fighters? How many of the "children" are between 12 and 18 and fighting on behalf of Hamas? How many of those who are truly innocent were killed by Hamas either deliberately or accidentally or indirectly because Hamas used them as human shields?

I don't know the answer to any of those questions but in lieu of those answers no one can draw any firm conclusions from the casualty figures.

War With Iran Is Inevitable

News reports tell us that President Biden has just unfrozen another $10 billion dollars for the Iranians. This is an unfathomable move given that Iran will almost certainly use the money to further their nuclear weapons development program and to build up organizations like Hezbollah and Hamas, that is if Hamas survives their war with Israel.

Meanwhile, Tom Holsinger, writing at Strategy Page, declares that war with Iran is inevitable. Here's an excerpt:

The major effect of Hamas’ attack on Israel is that it makes an Israeli pre-emptive nuclear attack on Iran inevitable, at least against Iran’s nuclear weapons program and probably also its oil export facilities. This will happen when Iran gets close to developing nuclear weapons carried by ballistic missiles.

Given that Gaza’s Iranian proxy nutball Hamas regime just made a suicidal attack on Israel with Iran’s help, Israel simply cannot chance Iran’s equally nutball mullah regime making its own suicidal nuclear attack on Israel as soon as it has the means to do so. A single nuclear airburst over an Israel city could kill several hundred thousand Israelis.

Even if Israel doesn’t pre-emptively nuke Iran, Israel certainly will if Iran nukes Israel first. It’s really a question of who nukes who first. Israel lacks the non-nuclear means to prevent Iran from developing such weapons. Iran’s nuclear program is now too widespread and dug in.

So, if Israel is going to preempt an Iranian nuclear attack against Israel they have to use nuclear weapons themselves since their conventional arsenal is inadequate to the task. The U.S. could destroy Iran's nuclear weapons facilities with conventional weapons, but Holsinger doubts that we'd ever do it, at least not as long as there's a Democratic administration in the White House.

But an Israeli nuclear attack would spark world-wide nuclear proliferation, which is close to a worst-case scenario for America’s own security.

But, Holsinger writes, a nuclear-armed Iran would cause the same rampant nuclear proliferation even apart from attacking Israel. He's very pessimistic about the future and the wisdom of pouring billions of dollars into Iran:

The open favoritism and funding of Iran by the Obama and Biden administrations, particularly including the latter’s recent easing of oil sanctions on Iran, has created an impending disaster for America’s national security.

The Biden administration exacerbates this by calling on Israel for a cease-fire in Gaza. Nothing could more convince Israel that it must rely only on its own strength concerning the existential threat posed by a nuclear Iran.

How would Iran react to an attack against it by Israel? Iran’s reaction to any major military action against it will be to launch thousands of guided missiles at the oil infrastructure of every other country in the Persian Gulf, excepting possibly Qatar, mining the Persian Gulf, and attacking shipping there. This threat has definitely deterred attacks on Iran so far, but now Israel’s survival depends on nuking Iran before Iran has the capability of nuking Israel.

So, if there is a real good chance that Iran will attempt to stop everyone else’s exports from the Persian Gulf anyway, the downside from anyone else attacking Iran first is diminished.

He thinks the only way to avoid this calamity is for the U.S. to act first:

The United States could avert an Israeli pre-emptive nuclear attack on Iran, and thereby also the ensuing rampant nuclear proliferation, by itself pre-emptively attacking Iran using only conventional weapons.

No Democratic administration would do this because, for them, Iran’s nutball mullah regime are “misunderstood friends” who provide lucrative income opportunities. But a Republican administration might.

What would an American attack look like? It'd almost certainly involve destroying the Karg Island oil depot:

98% of Iran’s oil exports flow through the one port of Karg Island. Iran’s other oil ports lack even 10% of Karg Island’s capacity. Two American cruise missile submarines, carrying 154 non-nuclear Tomahawk cruise missiles each, could completely knock out Karg Island for months, and its production could not be significantly restored in a year.

Iran’s oil income would pretty much cease for long enough that its mullah regime would be overthrown by their own people. And their nuclear weapons program would cease for lack of funding.

Karg Island is the strategic center of gravity in any conflict with Iran. Israel would certainly nuke it in the process of destroying Iran’s nuclear weapons program.

Iran would then take down as much of the entire Persian Gulf’s oil production as possible but, if the US launches a preemptive attack, a significant portion of that damage could be reduced by other non-nuclear attacks on Iranian naval forces and missile bases.

And Iran will try this if significantly attacked by anyone, which is pretty much guaranteed given that Israel is as determined to preempt Iran’s nuclear capability as it is to exterminate Hamas in Gaza.

In the not-too-distant future Iran will almost certainly attack or be attacked. If Israel attacks Iran they'll use nuclear weapons and break the tacit global prohibition of the use of these weapons. The Russians will probably then use them against Ukraine, the Chinese will use them against Taiwan, North Korea will use them against Seoul, and Pakistan and India will use them against each other.

It'd be better if the U.S. did the dirty work employing non-nuclear weapons, but it's doubtful that there's a will in Washington for such decisive action.

Refuting the Fine-Tuning Argument

Over the years I've put up numerous posts on what's called cosmic fine-tuning, i.e. the idea that the forces, parameters and constants that make up the fabric of our universe must be exquisitely fine-tuned to unimaginable precision in order for the universe to be life-permitting.

The fact of fine-tuning is such strong support for the belief that the universe is the product of an intelligent designer that those who wish to evade that conclusion have been forced to come up with some pretty desperate counter hypotheses to rebut it.

One of these is the multiverse hypothesis, the idea that there are an infinity of other universes, all different from each other. Given the assumption then a universe like ours, no matter how improbable, must exist. See here and here)

Another response to the fine-tuning phenomenon is what's called the Weak Anthropic Principle (WAP).

WAP proponents argue that the fine-tuning of the cosmos isn't anything to marvel at since if the cosmos wasn't fine-tuned no life would exist and we wouldn't be here to observe it. This argument sounds very peculiar, but it may be difficult to see exactly what's wrong with it. In fact, a number of very bright people have embraced it, but its popularity began to wane once philosophers began to give it some thought.

This eight minute video by Inspiring Philosophy explains why the WAP is more like a scientific card trick than a plausible scientific theory:

It does seem fair to say the WAP has faded in popularity over the past decade and other objections to the cosmic fine-tuning argument haven't fared much better. After watching the video you can see why.

Could the Universe Have Come from Nothing?

It turns out that the answer to the question posed above is no and yes.

This 12 minute video from Inspiring Philosophy addresses two questions about the origin of the universe. The first is whether the universe could've arisen out of nothing naturalistically, that is without any input from anything non-spatial and immaterial. The second is whether there's a reality more fundamental than the space-time cosmos we find ourselves in.

Most philosophers find the first claim as proposed by physicist Lawrence Krauss to be incoherent since Krauss' "nothing" is not really nothing.

The second question is leading a lot of philosophers and scientists to the same conclusion that George Berkeley arrived at, namely, ontological idealism. These thinkers believe that the fundamental reality is not matter but information, but if that's so, then that would presuppose a pre-existent mind.

Watch the video and see what you think:

The Singularity and Model Collapse

Casey Luskin has an interesting piece on artificial intelligence at Evolution News.

Ray Kurzweil is a computer scientist, futurist, top Google engineer, and arguably the greatest prophet of AI to ever span the mainstream academic and tech worlds.

At a recent conference Kurzweil predicted that by 2029 AI will pass the Turing test, and by 2045 it will reach a “singularity.” If you’re not familiar with AI, both concepts probably require a little explaining.

The Turing Test is a test developed by Alan Turing that would show whether an artificial intelligence had reached human levels of intelligence.

The "singularity" is the point at which AI becomes so powerful that it acquires superhuman intelligence, and is capable of growing and expanding on its own. This is “runaway” AI where we lose control and AI begins to train itself and act as a truly sentient, independent entity.

This sounds frightening but Luskin says that Kurzweil isn’t worried:

In Kurzweil’s future, “as medicine continues to merge with AI, it will progress exponentially” and potentially help us solve “every possible human disease.” If Kurzweil is right, by 2029 AI will give humanity the gift of “longevity escape velocity,” where AI-based medicine adds months to our lives faster than time is going by.

While Kurzweil promised that AI will effectively cure aging, he cautioned that doesn’t mean we’ll live forever because you could still die in a freak accident.

But even here AI might come to our rescue, with AI guiding autonomous vehicles that will reduce crash fatalities by 99 percent. AI will further yield breakthroughs in manufacturing, energy, farming, and education that could help us end poverty.

In the coming decades, he predicts that everyone will live in what we currently consider “luxury.”

We’ll also be living in the luxury of our minds. In the coming decades, he expects our brains will “merge with the technology” so we can “master all skills that every human being has created.”

For those hesitant to plug technology into your skull, Kurzweil claims AI to enhance our brains will be no different, ethically speaking, from using a smartphone. At this point, Kurzweil proclaimed AI will be “evolving from within us, not separate from us.”

In other words, under Kurzweil’s transhumanist vision of the future, AI promises us superhuman capabilities complete with heaven on earth and eternal life — what science historian Michael Keas has termed the “AI enlightenment myth.” While Kurzweil framed everything in terms of scientific advancement, it’s easy to envision how this could inspire new religions.

There are skeptics. The power AI would give to whomever could seize it would be enormous and human nature being what it is the people most likely to saeize it are precisely the people we wouldn't want to have it.

Moreover, some experts predict what they call "model collapse."

In short, AI works because humans are real creative beings, and AIs are built using gigantic amounts of diverse and creative datasets made by humans on which they can train and start to think and reason like a human. Until now, this has been possible because human beings have created almost everything we see on the Internet.

As AIs scour the entire Internet, they can trust that virtually everything they find was originally made by intelligent and creative beings (i.e., humans). Train AI on that stuff, and it begins to appear intelligent and creative (even if it really isn’t).

But what will happen as humans become more reliant on AI, and more and more of the Internet becomes populated with AI-generated material? If AI continues to train on whatever it finds on the Internet, but the web is increasingly an AI-generated landscape, then AI will end up training on itself.

We know what happens when AIs train on themselves rather than the products of real intelligent humans — and it isn’t pretty. This is model collapse.

Some experts in AI have warned that we’re at the edge of available training data for AI — essentially we’re hitting the limits of what we can feed AI to make it smart. Once AI runs out of training data, what will it do? Will it implode?

As one put it, "After we’ve scraped the web of all human training data” then “it starts to scrape AI-generated data” because “that’s all you have.” That’s when you get model collapse, and we might be getting close to it.

2029 is only a few years off so we should soon know whether Kurzweil or the skeptics are correct. Meanwhile, there's a lot more on this at the links given above. Checkj them out if you're interested in your technological future.

Israel's Tunnel Strategy

Israel is facing a daunting challenge in defeating and eliminating Hamas in Gaza. In addition to the terrorists' use of hospitals and schools as cover for their operations they have over the years constructed hundreds of underground tunnels with the financial support that Western nations have sent to be used for humanitarian relief of the Gazan people.

A piece at Strategy Page discusses the difficulty the tunnels pose and the strategy the Israelis will probably employ to neutralize them:

Urban fighting is bad enough, especially in Gaza with scores of thousands of booby traps in buildings and tunnels, but the tunnels particularly will make it far worse than any urban combat in history.

Israel casualties could easily exceed the 11,000 of the Yom Kippur War but for one particular innovation – the “sponge bomb”, a variety of rapidly expanding foam plastic that hardens to concrete consistency, and is delivered by anything from a man-portable grenade or an engineering-type large foam sprayer.

The grenade-type device would create a temporary tunnel barrier a meter thick while the engineering devices could form 5-10 meters thick semi-permanent barriers.

These almost instantly effective sprayable tunnel barriers, if they work, will be crucial because they allow the Israelis to use standard urban combat tactics of slow, methodical advances to isolate small chunks of areas, clear those, and do this repeatedly.

Gaza’s network of tunnels (people can probably move underground from any 3+ story Gaza building to any other 3+ story building) would allow Hamas to constantly infiltrate more fighters behind the Israelis. Sprayable tunnel barriers will prevent that. Israel can take small bites above and below ground simultaneously.

While Hamas does have engineers who can clear such barriers, they simply don’t have anywhere near enough, while the required explosives would be so noisy that the Israelis would know when and where the clearing was being done, and kill the Hamas engineers.

With that in mind, and the fact that Israel has obviously prepared years for such an offensive, the conquest of northern Gaza, including its tunnels, might take 9 Israeli infantry brigades, with lots of engineers, as little as 10-14 days @ 300 casualties a day. Assuming 1500 infantry in the rifle companies of each brigade totaling 13,500, that would be 3000-4200 casualties or about 22-31% of the force involved. That’s enough to put them out of action for months.

Nine more, fresh infantry brigades would be required to conquer Gaza’s second half, so Israel is looking at 6-8 thousand casualties total.

When Israel is ready to conquer Gaza’s southern half, they will order civilians there to move to tent cities in adjacent areas of southern Israel. An Israeli general announced this several weeks ago.

Hamas is unlikely to allow this, which will be tough for the civilians but some will probably survive and be cared for by Israeli medics and civil affairs personnel. The US did the same concerning stay-behind German civilians in the 1945 Battle of Aachen, and stay-behind Sunni Arab civilians in the 2004 second battle of Fallujah.

All of the bloodshed and destruction that is, and will be, taking place in Gaza has been brought on the Palestinian Arabs by Hamas whose sole reason for being is to kill Israelis. They're a death cult and their own deaths are condign punishment for their murderous savagery over the last fifteen years.

No one except American leftists will miss them.

Eternal Life, After a Fashion

David Goldman, writing at PJ Media, makes an interesting point. Some of the same secular folk who scoff at the Judeo-Christian concept of a God-granted immortality of the soul nevertheless believe that such immortality is possible through technology, and they're excited by the prospect.

He introduces his thoughts by referencing the belief of ancient elites, particularly in Egypt, that they'd live forever:

What was the upshot of Egyptian idolatry? The ruling elite wanted to live forever, and enslaved my ancestors to build grand tombs in which their mummified bodies would migrate to another life, surrounded by their wealth and some conveniently dead servants. A remarkably large part of Egypt’s economic output fed the fantasies of the pharaohs, at which we laugh today.

The desire for eternal life is not new, and hardly unique to Jews or Christians. Neanderthals buried their dead with grave gifts. Gilgamesh, the Babylonian hero, set out to find eternal life. The pharaohs built pyramids with [Jewish] sweat and blood.

Contemporary secular elites are too sophisticated for such superstitious nonsense. Their belief in eternal life relies on advances in technology, but it turns out to be at least as "faith-based" as some traditional views:

Today our progressive opinion-makers ridicule the concept of an eternal God and a world to come, but they believe that we soon will upload our minds to the Internet where our consciousness will continue intact.

We laugh at the idea that the blessed would spend eternity strumming harps while seated on clouds, but enlightened opinion now believes that we shall maintain our conscious minds in Google’s cloud. Add to this a robotic body, and supposedly we can live forever. A lot of Silicon Valley billionaires take this seriously, apparently.

According to Wikipedia, mind uploading may potentially be accomplished by either of two methods: Copy-and-transfer or gradual replacement of neurons. In the case of the former method, mind uploading would be achieved by scanning and mapping the salient features of a biological brain, and then by copying, transferring, and storing that information state into a computer system or another computational device.

The biological brain may not survive the copying process. The simulated mind could be within a virtual reality or simulated world, supported by an anatomic 3D body simulation model. Alternatively the simulated mind could reside in a computer that is inside (or connected to) a (not necessarily humanoid) robot or a biological body.

That is not science, but science fiction. The urge to escape death, though, remains as powerful today as it was when Moses confronted Ramses.

A tech startup now offers a method to preserve the chemical arrangement of your brain until such time as it can be uploaded, with the minor side-effect that you will have to die in the process.

It's not uncommon to hear materialists declare that they're satisfied with the one life they have and have no desire to live on forever. What they apparently mean is that they have no desire to live forever if that means that they must come to terms with God. If eternal life can be accomplished otherwise, then they're all in.

If they're promised that they can bypass God and find eternal life through technological advances they'll grab hold of that shred of possibility like a drowning man grasping at a piece of flotsam.

There's more in Goldman's article, but this, I think, is noteworthy. Comparing our modern elites to the ancient pharaohs who expended huge quantities of both money and human life to achieve immortality for themselves he writes:

Our new pharaohs believe in methods to achieve immortality as silly as the old ones. And they entertain such fantasies for the same reason: They want to make themselves into immortal gods who have no more constraint on the satisfaction of their appetites than the rapacious, concupiscent and murderous gods of ancient paganism.

Yes, as long as none of it involves the God of Judeo-Christian belief.

How Does a Brain Understand?

One major controversy in the philosophy of mind is driven by the claim that computers can think, or will soon be able to. If that claim is true then it makes it a lot easier to assume that the brain is a kind of computer and that what we call mind is simply a word we use to describe the way the brain functions.

Or put another way, mind is to brain what computer software is to the computer's hardware. This view is called "functionalism."

In 1980 philosopher John Searle published an argument that sought to show that functionalism is wrong and that there's more to our cognitive experience than simple computation. His argument came to be known as the Chinese Room argument and neuroscientist Michael Egnor has a helpful discussion of it at Evolution News. Egnor describes the argument as follows:

Imagine that you are an English speaker and you do not speak Chinese. You've moved to China and you get a job working in a booth in a public square. The purpose of the booth is to provide answers to questions that Chinese-speaking people write on small pieces of paper and pass into the booth through a slot. The answer is written on a small piece of paper and passed back to the Chinese person through a separate slot.

Inside the booth with you is a very large book. The book contains every question that can be asked and the corresponding answer -- all written only in Chinese. You understand no Chinese. You understand nothing written in the book. When the question is passed through the slot you match the Chinese characters in the question to the identical question in the book and you write the Chinese symbols corresponding to the answer and pass the answer back through the answer slot.

The Chinese person asking the question gets an answer that he understands in Chinese. You understand neither the question nor the answer because you do not understand Chinese.

Searle argues that you are carrying out a computation. The booth is analogous to a computer, you are analogous to a CPU, and the information written in Chinese is analogous to the algorithm. The question and the answer written on the paper are the input and the output to and from the computer.

In other words, the computer, like the person in the booth, has no understanding of what it's doing. As Egnor says: "Thought is about understanding the process, not merely about mechanically carrying out the matching of an input to an output according to an algorithm."

Searle's argument denies that computers "think." They simply follow an algorithm. Since humans do think, however, and do understand, either our brains are not computers or functionalism is not true.

Searle points out that the computation performed by the booth and its occupant does not involve any understanding of the questions and answers provided. His point is that computation is an algorithmic process that does not entail or require understanding, but since we do understand when we perform a computation, human cognition is something qualitatively different from mere computation.

This leads to the question of how a material chunk of meat, the brain, can generate something as mysterious as understanding. If all the material that makes up a brain were placed in a laboratory flask would the flask understand? Would it be conscious?

If you could peer into someone's brain while they were thinking would you see "understanding" somewhere in the brain or would you see only electrochemical reactions occurring along neurons? And if the latter is what you would observe how do these reactions produce an understanding? What exactly is understanding anyway?

That human beings are capable of such marvels as conscious understanding is evidence that there's more to our cognitive abilities than just our material brain. Perhaps that something more is an immaterial mind or soul that's cognitively integrated with the material brain and which the brain cannot function without.

Journey Inside the Cell

A three and a half minute video titled Journey Inside the Cell, narrated by philosopher of science Stephen Meyer, the author of Signature in the Cell, Darwin's Doubt, and Return of the God Hypothesis, gives us a glimpse of a very small part of the amazingly complicated process by which proteins are produced in the cell.

As Meyer's Signature in the Cell makes clear the process is much more complex than what the video shows, but even so, the video does a nice job of illustrating why so many people today have trouble believing the materialist dogma that the astonishing complexity of the cell is solely a product of blind chance and natural selection.

If you don't know the biology the video illustrates, don't worry. Just get a sense of how complex the process is and bear in mind that, if naturalism is true, it's a process that must have emerged almost instantaneously early on in the history of life. It can't be the product of gradual evolution since until this process or one like it was in place evolution couldn't even get underway.

The kind of information required to operate a structure like the cell is only known to be produced by intelligent minds. To think that such information could come about by sheer accident would be risible were it not for the fact that some bright people are convinced that that's what happened.

Nevertheless, the acumen of these thinkers notwithstanding, none of them has ever been able to explain how it could have happened. Their reasoning goes something like this:

• Only material, physical processes can be considered in science.
• Enormously complex structures like cells exist.
• Therefore these complex structures must have been produced solely by material, physical processes.

The error here, of course, is in the first premise. It imposes an arbitrary limitation on scientific explanation that potentially rules out explanations for biological complexity which might be true. Just because some people think that scientific explanations should be restricted to physical causes it certainly doesn't follow that only physical causes operate in the world.

Nor does any scientist who insists on dealing exclusively with physical causes - and not all scientists think this is wise - have any business ruling out intelligent causes.

The most a materialist scientist can say is that he chooses not to theorize about causes that can't be observed or measured. He cannot say that such causes don't exist or haven't operated in the world or can't be inferred from what we are able to observe and measure.

Yet many scientists do say this, but when they do they're not speaking as scientists, they're speaking as philosophers making metaphysical pronouncements that go well beyond what a materialist scientist can affirm.

Boycott Jews?

There's a piece making the rounds on the internet which highlights the problematic nature of BDS campaigns and recent calls for Muslims in Philadelphia to boycott anything Jewish.

In response, Meyer M. Treinkman, a pharmacist, out of the kindness of his heart, offered to assist them in their boycott as follows:

Any Muslim who has syphilis must not be cured by Salvarsan discovered by a Jew, Dr. Ehrlich. He should not even try to find out whether he has syphilis, because the Wasserman Test is the discovery of a Jew. If a Muslim suspects that he has gonorrhea, he must not seek diagnosis, because he will be using the method of a Jew named Neissner.

A Muslim who has heart disease must not use Digitalis, a discovery by a Jew, Ludwig Traube. Should he suffer with a toothache, he must not use Novocaine, a discovery of the Jews, Widal and Weil.

If a Muslim has diabetes, he must not use Insulin, the result of research by Minkowsky, a Jew. If one has a headache, he must shun pyramidon and antypyrin, due to the Jews, Spiro and Ellege.

Muslims with convulsions must put up with them because it was a Jew, Oscar Leibreich, who proposed the use of chloral hydrate.

Arabs must do likewise with their psychic ailments because Freud, father of psychoanalysis, was a Jew.

Should a Muslim child get diphtheria, he must refrain from the “Schick" reaction which was invented by the Jew, Bella Schick.

Muslims should be ready to die in great numbers and must not permit treatment of ear and brain damage, work of Jewish Nobel Prize winner, Robert Baram.

They should continue to die or remain crippled by infantile paralysis because the discoverer of the anti-polio vaccine is a Jew, Jonas Salk.

Muslims must refuse to use Streptomycin and continue to die of tuberculosis because a Jew, Zalman Waxman, invented the wonder drug against this killing disease.

Muslim doctors must discard all discoveries and improvements by dermatologist Judas Sehn Benedict, or the lung specialist, Frawnkel, and of many other world-renowned Jewish scientists and medical experts.

In short, good and loyal Muslims properly and fittingly should remain afflicted with syphilis, gonorrhea, heart disease, headaches, typhus, diabetes, mental disorders, polio convulsions and tuberculosis and be proud to obey the Islamic boycott.

And don't call for a doctor on your cell phone because the cell phone was invented in Israel by a Jewish engineer.

I can't vouch for the accuracy of these claims but readers are welcome to check them out and email me. I'll be happy to post any corrections.

Proving Chesterton Right

Mind Matters has an interesting piece that addresses an article at Scientific American written by Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb. Loeb states that all the theories which seek to explain the origin of our universe without positing an intelligence are inadequate.

In his Sci Am article Loeb writes:

Now there are a variety of conjectures in the scientific literature for our cosmic origins, including the ideas that our universe emerged from a vacuum fluctuation, or that it is cyclic with repeated periods of contraction and expansion, or that it was selected by the anthropic principle out of the string theory landscape of the multiverse—where, as the MIT cosmologist Alan Guth says “everything that can happen will happen … an infinite number of times,” or that it emerged out of the collapse of matter in the interior of a black hole.

Loeb's objection to each of these explanations is that they simply push the problem back a step or two or are otherwise unsatisfactory. He argues that the best explanation is that our universe resulted from the intentional efforts of an intelligent agent or agents:

A less explored possibility is that our universe was created in the laboratory of an advanced technological civilization. Since our universe has a flat geometry with a zero net energy, an advanced civilization could have developed a technology that created a baby universe out of nothing through quantum tunneling.

There's more to Loeb's hypothesis at the link, but it's worth dwelling for a moment on what he's proposing in what's been quoted above. He's arguing that intelligent beings of some sort created the universe out of nothing, ex nihilo, and designed it to produce civilizations driven by Darwinian natural selection:

If so, our universe was not selected for us to exist in it—as suggested by conventional anthropic reasoning—but rather, it was selected such that it would give rise to civilizations which are much more advanced than we are. Those “smarter kids on our cosmic block”— which are capable of developing the technology needed to produce baby universes—are the drivers of the cosmic Darwinian selection process, whereas we cannot enable, as of yet, the rebirth of the cosmic conditions that led to our existence.

One way to put it is that our civilization is still cosmologically sterile since we cannot reproduce the world that made us.

This hypothesis is remarkably similar to the Judeo-Christian creation story except that Loeb substitutes some sort of hypothetical superintelligent, superpowerful extra-cosmic aliens for a creator God, but these aliens seem for all practical purposes to be ontologically almost indistinguishable from the God they replace.

Why this puzzling aversion to identifying the designer as God? What is it about the concept of God that repels our naturalist friends like Dracula from a crucifix? One gets the feeling that were it to be somehow discovered that there really was a heaven and a hell awaiting the departed that our contemporary secularists would insist that these had in fact been established by aliens and that there's no reason to suppose that a God had anything at all to do with it.

G.K. Chesterton famously wrote that when men no longer believe in God they don’t believe in nothing, they believe in anything. Loeb’s suggestion is a confirming instance of Chesterton’s claim. Unwilling to attribute the universe to God, he posits creatures whose existence not only lacks any unwelcome religious implications and overtones, but also lacks any supporting evidence.

The universe, Loeb acknowledges, is the product of intelligent design, but the designer need not be anything so rebarbative as the God of traditional theism. Yet the unobservable aliens hypothesis is not in any way testable or scientific, so what advantage does one gain by positing such beings?

What's the practical difference, after all, between a transcendent superpowerful, superintelligent alien who brings about the creation of the cosmos out of nothing and a God who does the same?

It seems like a scientist can offer any explanation for the universe, no matter how outré, no matter how unscientific, as long as it's not a theistic explanation. We might well ask why that is.

Israel Must Be Allowed to Win

Writing in the Washington Free Beacon Matthew Continetti lays out the case for ignoring, and denouncing, the many calls for "pause" and "cease-fire" coming from the left and letting Israel win their war with Hamas. He argues that calls for a ceasefire reward barbarism, and he's right.

The world imposes a double standard on Israel. Israel is expected to act with "restraint", but no such expectation attaches to the Arab Muslims. Here's Continetti:

The usual double standard is hard at work: Hamas terrorists spent years planning the murder of more than 1,400 Jews on October 7, and Hamas terrorists continue to hold hundreds of captives, including Americans, while shelling Israel with indiscriminate rocket fire. Yet it is somehow Israel's responsibility to exercise self-restraint.

This interpretation of the situation is entirely backward. Hamas could end all this tomorrow if it released the hostages, put down its arms, and surrendered. Hamas, not Israel, is the aggressor. Hamas, not Israel, is the "occupier" of the Gaza Strip. Hamas, not Israel, rejects international law. Hamas, not Israel, steals food, fuel, and water from civilians. And the fact that these words need to be written at all is evidence that the culture-producing institutions of the West—the media, the universities, cultural and political celebrities—are irreparably broken.

A ceasefire would be worse than useless. If Israel were to end combat operations now, with Hamas in control of the Gaza Strip and captives hidden in the maze of tunnels known as the Gaza Metro, then the terrorists will score a remarkable victory. Harassment and attacks on Jews worldwide will surge.

The West has flooded Gaza with millions of dollars in aid but Hamas steals it from the Palestinian people for whom it's intended and uses it to build hundreds of miles of underground tunnels in which to launch their terror attacks against Israel.

Continetti points out that if Israel halts its campaign to destroy these tunnels and Hamas' organization with them then the terrorists will just reorganize and rebuild:

Hamas will regroup. Its strategy of using civilians as pawns in a chess match for global opinion will have proven effective once again. Its ranks will swell. It will plot its next move.

"The Al-Aqsa Deluge"—Hamas's name for its October 7 crime against humanity—"is just the first time," Ghazi Hamad, a Hamas factotum, said on Lebanese television the other day. "And there will be a second, a third, a fourth [until Israel is annihilated]."

Hamad's words reinforce the lesson of October 7: You cannot maintain a ceasefire against homicidal maniacs with genocidal intent. Since 2007, Israel believed that Hamas could be bought off, that the price of détente was rocket fire and intermittent conflict to "mow the lawn" of terrorists.

Détente was an illusion. Hamas used the pause between wars to plan the worst terrorist attack in Israel's history. Hamas will do so again if given the chance.

Someone once noted the truth that if the Arabs would lay down their arms there'd be no more violence in the Middle East. If the Israelis were to lay down their arms they'd cease to exist.

The pressure on Israel to abandon its war of survival is global and intense and the pressure on President Biden to force Israel into a cease-fire is causing him to waver:

The cretins at the United Nations want a ceasefire. So-called peace activists have similar demands. American campuses are rife with pro-Hamas and anti-Semitic voices. The socialist "Squad" of Democratic lawmakers in the U.S. House of Representatives defame AIPAC and the pro-Israel community while regurgitating Hamas propaganda.

Bureaucrats in the State Department and the White House are livid at President Biden for supporting a democratic nation's right to self-defense. Democratic strategists worry that Biden's commitment to Israel might cost him votes in Michigan, throwing the election to Donald Trump.

And Biden is starting to crack.

At an event in Minnesota on Wednesday, a deranged heckler screamed at Biden to impose a ceasefire. Biden could have stayed silent. He could have told off the heckler by detailing Hamas's evil—yes, evil—acts and by saying America will stand with Israel in this existential struggle. Instead he told the crowd that "I think we need a pause. A pause means give time to get the prisoners out."

Continetti points out what should be obvious to anyone who has observed the Israeli/Palestinian conflict over the past fifty years - a pause simply won't work.

There have been pauses in the fighting to allow humanitarian aid into Gaza. Hamas steals the aid and uses it for its war machine. There have been pauses to let civilians in Gaza evacuate to the southern part of the Strip or, in select cases, transit the Rafah crossing into Egypt. Hamas won't let people leave. Since October 7, Hamas has released five hostages. Hundreds are still in captivity—including 32 children. The youngest is nine months old. Nine months.

Hamas doesn't need a pause to "get the prisoners out." It needs a conscience. And it needs to pay.

Read the rest of his column at the link. He closes with this:

Why not try a different strategy? Why not say that Israel has every right to protect itself, that Hamas is responsible for every life lost, and that America will stand with Israel until the job is done? No more equivocation. No more dithering. No more obedience to the politically correct. Let Israel win.

If Naturalism Is True We Have No Reason to Trust Our Reason

In past VP posts (see here for example) I've written that the metaphysical doctrine of Naturalism and the biological doctrine of Evolution cannot both be true. It may be that one or the other is true, but they can't both be true.

If matter, energy, and physical forces like gravity are all there is then everything is ultimately reducible to material, non-rational particles. If so, our beliefs are just brain states that can be completely explained in terms of non-rational chemical reactions, but any belief that is fully explicable in terms of non-rational causes cannot itself be rational.

Therefore, if materialism is true, none of our beliefs are rational, reason itself is a non-rational illusion, and both truth and the reliability of scientific investigation are chimerical. Thus the atheistic materialist has no rational basis for believing that materialism, or anything else, is true.

As Stephen Pinker of MIT has said, "Our brains were shaped [by evolution] for fitness, not for truth." Only if our reason is an endowment from an omniscient, good Creator do we have actual warrant for placing confidence in it. We may, if we don't believe that there is a Creator, decide to trust reason simply as an act of faith, but it's very difficult to justify the decision to do so since any justification must itself rely upon rational argument. And, of course, employing reason to argue on behalf of its own trustworthiness begs the question.

Philosopher Alvin Plantinga, in his book Where the Conflict really Lies, presents a defeater for the belief that both naturalism and evolution (N&E) are true.

Philosopher William Lane Craig summarizes Plantinga's argument as follows:

1. The probability that our cognitive faculties are reliable, given naturalism and evolution, is low.

2. If someone believes in naturalism and evolution and sees that, therefore, the probability of his cognitive faculties’ being reliable is low, then he has a defeater for the belief that his cognitive faculties are reliable.

3. If someone has a defeater for the belief that his cognitive faculties are reliable, then he has a defeater for any belief produced by his cognitive faculties (including his belief in naturalism and evolution).

4. Therefore, if someone believes in naturalism and evolution and sees that, therefore, the probability of his cognitive faculties’ being reliable is low, then he has a defeater for his belief in naturalism and evolution.

Conclusion: Naturalism and evolution cannot both be rationally accepted. If one is true the other must be false.

Premise #1 is based on the fact that if our cognitive faculties have evolved then they have evolved for survival, not for discerning truth. This is not a fringe idea. It's admitted on all sides by atheists and theists alike. The quote from Steven Pinker above is an example and here are a few more among the many that could be cited:

Evolution selects for survival and “Truth, whatever that is, definitely takes the hindmost.” - Atheist philosopher Patricia Churchland.

Modern [naturalism] is the faith that through science humankind can know the truth and so be free. But if Darwin's theory of natural selection is true this is impossible. The human mind serves evolutionary success, not truth. - Atheist philosopher John Gray

Our highly developed brains, after all, were not evolved under the pressure of discovering scientific truths but only to enable us to be clever enough to survive.- Atheist biologist Francis Crick

Oddly none of these thinkers carried their idea to its logical conclusion, but the theist C.S. Lewis does it for them in his book On Miracles where he writes:

Supposing there was no intelligence behind the universe, no Creative Mind. In that case, nobody designed my brain for the purpose of thinking. It is merely that when atoms inside my skull happen, for physical or chemical reasons, to arrange themselves in a certain way, this gives me, as a by-product, the sensation I call thought.

But, if so, how can I trust my own thinking to be true?.... Unless I believe in God, I cannot believe in thought: so I can never use thought to disbelieve in God.

If theism is true then, of course, the evolution of our cognitive faculties could be goal-directed by God toward discovering truth, but that possibility isn't open to the naturalist since she doesn't believe theism is true.

Thus, the argument outlined above leads to the conclusion that it can't be rational to believe in both N&E. This is bad enough for the naturalist, but it gets worse, as Craig points out.

The naturalist is faced with a defeater for any belief that he holds since none of his beliefs are reliable. He can't believe that N&E are both true, nor can he believe that either one or both are false. On naturalism no belief, especially no metaphysical belief, is rational since our cognitive faculties are not reliably geared toward truth. If they happen to hit upon truth it's just a serendipitous outcome, and we can't even be rationally assured that we've hit upon the truth.

To loosely cite Craig again:

The naturalist is caught in a logical quagmire from which there is no escape by rational thought. He cannot even rationally conclude that he cannot rationally accept both naturalism and evolution and that he therefore ought to abandon naturalism. He can’t rationally conclude anything. He's caught in a circle from which there is no means of rational escape.

And yet, despite all this, the naturalist accuses the theist of being irrational for believing in God. It'd be funny were it not so sad.

Two State Solution?

President Biden recently declared that once Israel has completed its war against Hamas there must be a "Two State Solution" to the situation in the region.

Perhaps the President, as well as many of the Pro-Palestinian antisemites protesting in our streets against the "Occupiers" and "Colonizers," i.e. the Israelis, aren't aware that throughout the last seventy years or so, Israel has tried five times to give the Palestinian Arabs their own state and each time the Arabs refused.

The Arabs don't want a Two State Solution. They've not hidden the fact that they don't just yearn for their own state, they're obsessed with getting Israel out of the Middle East altogether. In other words, the Arabs and their allies among Western university professors and students demand that Israel commit national suicide.

The attacks against Israel will continue until either Israelis judst leave or they're all slaughtered, as this Hamas spokesman makes crystal clear. This short Prager U. clip reviews the attempts that Israel has made to help the Palestinians achieve their own state and the Arab responses to each attempt. It's quite informative:

The Koch/Chalmers Wager

Back in 1998, neuroscientist Christof Koch had wagered philosopher of mind David Chalmers a case of fine wine that within the next twenty-five years a specific “signature of consciousness” would be found in the brain. Koch is a materialist and believes that whatever consciousness is, it's a product of the physical brain.

Chalmers, the author of the so-called "Hard Problem of Consciousness" bet that no such connection to the brain would be found. Chalmers won.

Chalmers is a dualist although he doesn't believe that the mind or soul is immortal as most dualists do. He does, however, believe that mind is a fundamentally different substance than matter and that it exists independently of matter.

You can read the details of the wager and see an interview with Chalmers at Mind Matters.

Denyse O'Leary who has written a lot on the debate between dualism and materialism in the philosophy of mind, discusses the wager between Koch and Chalmers and some related matters in a piece at Evolution News.

Here's an excerpt:

Materialists who insist that science will somehow “crack” the problem of consciousness often sound as though they are missing the point. The most recent attempt, the wager between Christof Koch and David Chalmers, ended not only with the materialist losing the wager but with broad recriminations within the discipline. It’s sensitive [within that discipline] because never far below the surface is the thought that all theories of consciousness are pseudoscientific.

As a result, the proponents of various theories are not always held to a rigid ideological standard.

Philosopher of mind David Chalmers, who coined the term “Hard Problem of Consciousness,” also spoke to Kuhn at Closer to Truth. He told him that he accepts dualism, the idea that the mind or soul has a real existence, but he does not believe in the immortality of the soul — though he would like to.

Presumably, he believes that the soul, though real, dies with the body.

He said something else too, that dualism did not come easily to him: “Every week I had a different physical theory of consciousness. None of them worked and eventually I came to see this is for systematic reasons.

"There are reasons why no purely physical theory will ever give you consciousness. It’ll always be an objective theory of objective functions. None of that ever gives you subjective experience.”

In other words, sensations, beliefs, desires, intentions and acts of will are all subjective and defy material explanation. Yet explanation in terms of the material brain is the only option open to the materialist.

The Middle East's Perpetual War

Given the current state of things in Israel and Gaza I thought it appropriate to rerun this post from 5/30/2019:

Ever since its founding in 1948 the Israelis have been fighting a defensive war against their neighbors, particularly the Palestinians. Their neighbors attack and Israel responds until the attack is repulsed and their enemies are too weakened to continue.

Then the world prevails upon Israel to relent, to show restraint, and retreat from the field which, of course, allows their enemy to recover, regroup, resupply, and at some future date restart the whole cycle all over again.

It seems like an exercise in endless futility, but this is the status quo in the Middle East, and it will continue until Israel's foes, who have sworn its destruction, ultimately wear it down and destroy it. It often seems that this would not bother the West overmuch, which perversely views the stronger more civilized side in a dispute to be ipso facto the evil aggressor and oppressor.

Nevertheless, the prospect of their ultimate destruction should at least bother Israel, one would think, unless, like the rest of the West, they've succumbed to the notion, promoted by the left for the last eighty years or so, that the civilized nations of the world just don't deserve to survive.

Roger Simon at PJ Media once made a shocking suggestion as to how perpetual war in the Middle East might be ended. He opined that perhaps it's time for Israel to create a new status quo. Perhaps it's time to eliminate Hamas in Gaza:

A permanent truce, i.e., genuine peace, does not seem part of the vocabulary of jihadists whose sworn goal is to make the world Islamic, sooner or later, like it or not. They just take a time out when it looks as if they could be in trouble, like a hockey player with a twisted ankle.

As an example, Hamas is known for its hudnas, cooling down (or pretending to) and then heating up again as soon as possible to do what the beginning of its charter always promised it would do — destroy Israel.

For years the bien pensant of the West (Europe, the U.S.) have urged, actually put strong pressure on, Israel to play the hudna game with Hamas, Fatah, Islamic Jihad and the rest of the sociopathic Islamofascist crew. The Israelis, from a humanistic tradition and anxious to be thought well of, have acquiesced, even when they have the extreme whip hand.

The results have been as one would predict: another war, another hudna and on and on. This has been going on since the founding of the state of Israel in 1948 - even before that really. In other words, for a long while.

Maybe it’s time for a different approach. How about just...winning?

Whether one agrees with Simon or not it's true enough that what many Israelis realize but many other Westerners seemingly don't is that radical Islam is in a state of permanent war with the world. It's a war that's been raging since the 7th century and will continue until Islam is the only religion in the world (actually it will continue beyond that as Muslims will be killing each other to decide which sect of Islam will be the only sect in the world).

We will never be safe from this threat. To think that it's at an end, or that we have somehow made peace with the Islamists, is to confuse their temporary tactic of hudna with a genuine desire for peace.

The world shouts "peace, peace" but there is no peace. The Islamists don't want peace, they want total victory. That's why it often seems that there's no peaceful or lasting solution to the conflict in the Middle East and no realistic prospect of compromise.

Tragically, any clear-eyed American foreign policy must take that as its starting point. To do otherwise is to substitute wishful thinking and self-delusion for objective reality.

Human Language, Animal Communication

An interesting short article by Michael Egnor at Mind Matters explores the difference between human language and the vocalizations of other animals. Despite having much of the hearing and vocal apparatus necessary for speech, animals are not capable of language.

He begins by quoting science writer Tom Seigfried who states that: It’s true that humans, and humans alone, evolved the complex set of voice, hearing and brain-processing skills enabling full-scale sophisticated vocal communication. Yet animals can make complicated sounds; parrots can mimic human speech and cats can clearly convey that it’s time for a treat.

Many animals possess an acute sense of hearing and are able to distinguish random noises from intentional communication.

Much of the physiological apparatus for hearing and speaking is found in all land-dwelling vertebrates — the tetrapods — including mammals, birds, amphibians and reptiles. “Humans share a significant proportion of our basic machinery of hearing and vocal production with other tetrapods,” Fitch writes in the Annual Review of Linguistics. Even so, only humans have language, Egnor argues. Here's part of his reasoning:

[Animals] can make and respond to signs—gestures, grunts and the like. A dog, for example, can respond appropriately to simple words directed at him (“Sit!” “Fetch!”). But all animal communication is symbols, that is, signals that point directly to an object. In this case, the object is a simple expected action the animal is to perform immediately.

What animals cannot do is communicate using abstractions. They cannot use designators, — words employed abstractly as language. For example, a dog can be trained, by reward and punishment, to stay when told, “Stay!”

He associates the sound “s-t-a-y” with a behavior and performs the behavior. But he doesn’t know what you mean when you say “Let’s stay a bit longer on the beach,” “He extended his stay in Peru,” or “The judge issued a stay of the eviction order.”

Animals can only think concretely. Their thought is of particulars—the particular bowl of food, thrown stick, or warm bed. They don’t contemplate nutrition, exercise, or rest. Humans can think abstractly, without any particular physical object in mind. For example, a vet might tell her client during an office visit, “Tuffy here needs to lose about 1.5 kg. I suggest a lower calorie kibble and more exercise—if possible, before bedtime.”

She can explain it to her client but not to the dog because it’s all abstractions about times, places, things, and concepts. Of course, he might recognize his name, “Tuffy,” and raise his ears slightly to see if he is being told to do something concrete.

Concrete thought needs no language because the concrete thinker focuses on a perceived object. Tuffy thinks of his bowl of food. If he were to think of nutrition, an abstract concept, he would need abstract designators as objects, not only to express his thought but even to think it.

In short, animals don’t have language because they don’t have abstract thought and thus have neither the capacity nor the need for abstract designators—words as language.

Language is a tool for abstract thinking and only human beings can think abstractly. Despite what some Darwinians aver, the gap between animals and humans is not just a narrow evolutionary jump. It's a chasm, a chasm the bridging of which has eluded evolutionary explanation for 160 years.

Mind-Boggling Numbers

Here's a brief video from Lad Allen that presents some amazing facts about the number of stars in our universe, the number of grains of sand in the world and the number of molecules of water in a single drop.

Whether you're inclined to agree with the conclusion of the video or not, the physical facts it presents are not in dispute, and they are mind-boggling.

The video is only five and a half minutes long, but it will surely fill you with a sense of wonder at the size of the universe, both astronomically and microscopically.

Enjoy:

After Death

I've written about NDEs (Near Death Experiences) before and have said that I used to be skeptical about them (although a character in my 2015 novel Bridging the Abyss has one), but the scientific and philosophical literature has become so large regarding these phenomena and the experiences people report have been documented by so many medical professionals, that I've come to believe that these reports, or at least some of them, are very likely to be veridical.

I'm still a bit leery of reports that the individual experienced heaven or hell. Those reports are, by their nature, not confirmable, since, with a couple of notable exceptions, the person who makes them can provide no details that can lead to a verification of the truth of what they recount.

So I'm generally withholding final judgment on those, but reports that contain details that the person could not have known apart from having an Out of the Body Experience (OBE) and which can actually be confirmed are another matter.

If those reports are indeed true they must count as very powerful evidence against philosophical materialism, a view which says that our conscious experience is the product solely of our physical brain. After all, if individuals who show no brain activity are having conscious experience then there's something else involved in producing that experience besides the material brain.

I recently came across a podcast that features an interview with a cardiac physician named Dr. Jeffrey Long who has investigated thousands of these reports and who is featured in the forthcoming documentary titled After Death (see the trailer below). The information discussed in the podcast is fascinating, and I commend it to anyone who's interested in NDEs.

I did have a couple of questions, though, about the podcast. For example, according to the trailer, 23% of those who report an experience of either heaven or hell describe something that sounds hellish, but Dr. Long says several times that the experience is wonderful for everyone who has had it. I'm not sure how to reconcile those two claims.

At any rate, here's the podcast:

Here's the trailer for After Death which is being released to theaters tonight (Oct. 27th):