Maverick Philosopher

Mary Neal’s Out-of-Body Experiences

The personable Dr. Neal recounts her experiences during this 13 and a half minute video clip. The following from an interview with her:

The easy explanations—dreams or hallucinations—I could discount quickly, because my experience—and the experience described by anyone who's had a near death experience or other experiences that involve God directly—is different in quality and memory from a dream or hallucination. It's just entirely different. The memory is as precise and accurate now, years later, as it is when it's happening.

So then I thought it must be due to chemical changes or chemical releases in a dying brain. I did a lot of reading about that. If my experience had lasted five, six, seven minutes, maybe even eight minutes, I am sure that no matter how real it seemed to me, I would have said that's a reasonable explanation. But the people who resuscitated me would say that I was without oxygen for up to thirty minutes.

It took them ten or fifteen minutes to figure out, first, that I and my boat were both missing. Then once they identified where they thought I was, they started their watch. They're used to doing this—you have to know the timing so you can recognize whether you're trying to rescue someone or you're trying to go for body recovery. So on the watch it was fifteen minutes, but about thirty minutes in all. I tend to stick with the fifteen minutes, because that's an absolute timing. But even at fifteen minutes, that is way longer than can be explained by a dying brain. The human brain can hang on to oxygen for maybe five or six minutes, and so even if you give it another four minutes to go through its dying process, that still doesn't add up to fifteen minutes. And so after I looked at all that, my conclusion was that my experience was real and absolute.

To paraphrase Pascal, there is light enough for those who want to see and darkness enough for those who don't. Atheists and mortalists will of course not be convinced by Neal's report. Consider her first paragraph. She underscores the unique phenomenological quality of OBEs. Granting that they are phenomenologically different from dreams and ordinary memories, there is nonetheless a logical gap between the undeniable reality of the experiencing and the reality of its intentional object. Into that gap the skeptic will insert his wedge, and with justification. No experience, no matter how intense or unusual or protracted, conclusively proves the veridicality of its intentional object. Phenomenology alone won't get you to metaphysics. Everything I am perceiving right now, computer, cup, cat, the Superstition ridgeline and the clouds floating above it (logically) might have a merely intentional existence. How do I know I am not brain in a vat? If I cannot prove that I am not a brain in a vat, how can I know (in that tough sense in which knowledge entails objective certainty) that cat, cup, etc. are extramentally real? The skeptic can always go hyperbolic on you. How are you going to stop him?

The other consideration Dr. Neal adduces will also leave the skeptic cold. Her point is that her brain had to have been 'off-line' given the amount of time that elapsed, and that therefore her experiences could not be the product of a (mal)functioning brain. We saw in an earlier post that Dr. Eben Alexander employed similar reasoning. The skeptic will undoubtedly now give a little a speech about how much more there is yet to know about the brain and that Neal is in no position confidently to assert what she asserts, etc.

The mortalist starts and ends with an assumption that he cannot give up while remaining a mortalist, namely, that there just cannot be mental functioning without underlying brain activity, and that therefore no OBEs can be credited. In the grip of that materialist framework assumption, he will do anything to discount the veridicality of OBEs. Push him to the wall and he will question the moral integrity of the reporters. "They are just out to exploit human credulousness to turn a buck." Or they will question the veridicality of the memories of the OBEs. The human mind can be extremely inventive in cooking up justifications for what it wants to believe. That is as true of mortalists as it is of anyone. To paraphrase Pascal again, there is enough darkness and murk in these precincts to allow these skeptical maneuvers.

Our life here below is a chiaroscuro.

There is no proof of the afterlife. But there is evidence. Is the evidence sufficient? Suppose we agree that evidence for p is sufficient just in case it makes it more likely than not that p. Well, I don't know if paranormal and mystical experience is sufficient because I don't know how to evaluate likelihood in cases like these.

So let's assume that the evidence is not sufficient. Would I be flouting any epistemic duties were I to believe on insufficient evidence? But surely most of what we believe we believe on insufficient evidence. See Belief and Reason categories for more on this.)

Those who believe that it is wrong, always and everywhere, to believe anything on insufficent evidence believe that very proposition on insufficient evidence, indeed on no evidence at all.

The Four Gs

Conservative: God, guns, gold, grub

Libertarian: guns, gold, grub, grass

Liberal: government, government, government, government.

Extremism in Defense of Liberty?

William Voegli, in this longish piece, was visited by some writerly muse when he penned:

Engaging in politics with liberals, it appears, closely resembles conducting arms control talks with the Soviet Union. In both cases one confronts adversaries who insist that what’s theirs is theirs and what’s yours is negotiable.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: The Sitar in Popular Music

The sound of the sitar played a prominent role in the soundtrack of the '60s. To George Harrison, student of Ravi Shankar, goes the credit of having introduced it to Western popular music. Light a stick of sandalwood incense and enjoy these great Beatle songs that feature its use:

Norwegian Wood

Love You To

Tomorrow Never Knows. "Turn your off your mind, relax, and float downstream. It is not dying, it is not dying. Lay down all thoughts, surrender to the Void. It is shining, it is shining. That you may see the meaning of within. It is Be-ing, it is Be-ing . . . ." The depth and creativity of a song like this surpasses anything in popular music since.

Within You, Without You

Across the Universe

Following the Beatles, everybody and the brother of his monkey's uncle got into the sitar act. The Rolling Stones for example. No, I'm not going to link to "Paint it Black." I'll link to something obscure: Richie Havens, Something Else Again.

By 1970 or so, the sitar's popularity in Western popular music had subsided. Its resonance belongs to those far-off and fabulous days of the '60s.

Worldly Success

Seek only as much worldly success as is necessary for the pursuit of unworldly ends. What the deeper natures want, this world cannot provide. It cannot offer ultimate satisfaction or true happiness.

You say there is no ultimate satisfaction or true happiness? My point stands nonetheless. This world cannot supply them. To think otherwise is delusional.

Speech and Guns

It is time to trot out my old gun posts to counteract the tsunami of leftist Unsinn washing over us because of the recent massacres in Oregon and Connecticut. Here is one from December of 2010, slightly revised.

…………….

How should we deal with offensive speech? As a first resort, with more speech, better, truer, more responsible speech. Censorship cannot be ruled out, but it must be a last resort. We should respond similarly to the misuse of firearms. Banning firearms is no solution since (i) bans have no effect on criminals who, in virtue of being criminals, have no respect for law, and (ii) bans violate the liberty of the law-abiding. To punish the law-abiding while failing vigorously to pursue scofflaws is the way of the contemporary liberal. The problem is not guns, but guns in criminal hands. Ted Kennedy's car killed more people than my gun. The solution, or part of it, is guns in law-abiding hands.

Would an armed citizen in the vicinity of the Virginia Polytechnic shooter have been able to reduce his carnage? It is likely. Don't ask me how likely. Of course, there is the chance that an armed citizen in the confusion of the moment would have made things worse. Who knows?

But if you value liberty then you will be willing to take the risk. As I understand it, the Commonwealth of Virginia already has a concealed carry law. Now if you trust a citizen to carry a concelaed weapon off campus, why not trust him to carry it on campus? After all, on campus there is far less likelihood of a situation arising where the weapon would be needed. Conservatives place a high value on self-reliance, individual liberty, and individual responsibility. Valuing self-reliance and liberty, a conservative will oppose any attempt to limit his self-reliance by infringing his right to defend himself, a right from which one may infer the right to own a handgun. (As I argue elsewhere; see the category Alcohol,Tobacco and Firearms.) And appreciating as he does the reality and importance of individual responsibility, he will oppose liberal efforts to blame guns for the crimes committed by people using guns.

Nothing I have written will convince a committed liberal. As I have argued elsewhere, Left-Right differences are rooted in value-differences that cannot be rationally adjudicated. But my intention is not to try to enlighten the terminally benighted; my intention is to clarify the issue.

Persuasion and agreement are well-nigh impossible to attain; clarification, however, is a goal well within reach. We must be clear about what we believe and why we believe it and how it differs from the beliefs of the benighted. And in the light of that clarity we must carry the fight to our enemies.

My Jeep Guru

My Jeep from the Arizona Trail:

Dalrymple on Inhumanity

Here. Excerpt:

Nevertheless, no one could read this book [Golden Harvest: Events at the Periphery of the Holocaust by Jan Tomasz Gross] without being, yet again, horrified by man’s inhumanity to man. Indeed, the term inhumanity seems almost an odd one in the circumstances, assuming as it does that Man’s default setting is to decency and kindness, whereas the evidence presented in this book is that, once legal and social restraints are removed, Man becomes an utter savage.

Exactly right. One of the most pernicious illusions of the Left is that human beings are basically good and decent, and that society has corrupted them.

According to Gross, people of all social strata in Poland gladly, even joyfully, plundered their Jewish neighbours; if so, they were not unique in having done so, for it happened across Europe during Nazi occupation, while in Rwanda, in 1994, ordinary Hutus happily and without conscience appropriated the property of their erstwhile but now massacred Tutsi neighbours.

On Being 26 Rather Than 62

W. K. writes,

You recently mentioned your being very happy, given what's wrong with the world, to be 62 rather than 26; I am 26. Although, sadly, I think liberalism will run until it destroys itself as a parasite that destroys its host, this metaphysical fact of evil's being self-destructive is reason enough for hope. People have always sensed that the world is falling apart, because in a sense it always has been, but even greater than the mystery of evil is the mystery of goodness. Rather than regretting my being 26 rather than 62, I remember, in my Mavphil-inspired gratitude exercises, that the cruelest regime in the history of mankind fell during my lifetime.

I have always believed that Good and Evil are not opposites on a par, but that somehow Good is more fundamental and that Evil is somehow derivative or interstitial or parasitic or privative. The Thomist doctrine of evil as privatio boni is one way of explaining this relation, though that doctrine is open to objections.

So I agree with my correspondent that, in the end, Good triumphs. Unfortunately, it is a long way to the end, a long march along a via dolorosa with many stations of suffering. I don't relish making that journey. Hence my satisfaction at the thought that my life is, most likely, three-quarters over. As I said in that post-election post,

One can hope to be dead before it all comes apart. Fortunately or unfortunately, I am in the habit of taking care of myself and could be facing another 25 years entangled in the mortal coil. When barbarism descends this will be no country for old men.

I too am grateful that the Evil Empire fell during my lifetime. But now we have an incompetent jackass in the White House, a hard-core leftist, who was given four more years by a foolish electorate for whom panem et circenses are the supreme desiderata. Innocent of the ways of world, trapped in leftist fantasy land, he is the polar opposite of Ronald Reagan. We are in deep trouble.

But I do not counsel despair. We live by hope, within this life and beyond it. We shall hope on and fight on.

History Lesson

Victor Davis Hanson answers three questions:

1. Why did the Japanese so foolishly attack Pearl Harbor?

2. Why did the Germans attack the Soviet Union so recklessly at a time when they had all but won the war?

3. Why did the United States stop after spring 1951 at the 38th Parallel, thereby ensuring a subsequent sixty-year Cold War and resulting in chronic worries about a North Korea armed with nuclear weapons and poised to invade its neighbor to the south?

What Exactly is an Ontological Constituent?

I asked commenter John whether he thought that temporal parts — assuming that there are temporal parts — would count as ontological constituents of an ordinary particular such as an avocado. Here is what he said:

. . . I believe that I would say that the temporal parts of an avocado are ontological constituents of it. A thing's temporal parts are much more like a thing's material parts than any other putative constituent of that object, so I would say that if a thing's material parts are ontological constituents of it, then so too are a thing's temporal parts.

But I don't think I would say that this commits perdurantists to constituent ontology in any interesting sense. I have always understood the contrast between constituent and relational ontologies to be primarily a matter of how a thing relates to its properties: does a thing have properties by standing in some external relation to those properties, or instead by having those properties somehow 'immanent' in it? Perhaps this is wrong. But if it's right, then I would say that perdurantists believe that the temporal parts of a thing are among its ontological constituents, but that this does not commit them to any interesting version of constituent ontology.

John's response is a reasonable one, but it does highlight some of the difficulties in clarifying the difference between constituent ontology (C-ontology) and relational ontology (R-ontology).

One of the difficulties is to specify what exactly is meant by 'ontological constituent.' John takes the material parts of a thing to be ontological constituents of it. I don't. Material parts are ordinary mereological parts. For me, ontological constituents are quasi-mereological metaphysical parts to be contrasted with physical (material) parts. Ontological parts are those parts that contribute to an entity's ontological structure. R-ontologists deny that ordinary concrete particulars have any ontological structure. This is not to deny that they have mereological structure. So R-ontologists have no use for ontological parts (constituents). But they have plenty of use for material parts as we all do. 'Ontological' and 'metaphysical' are interchangeable adjectives in this context.

An avocado is an improper physical part of itself. Among its proper physical parts are the skin, the meat, and the pit. Of course, each of these has proper physical parts, and the parts have parts. All of these parts are parts in the strict mereological sense of 'part.' Now consider the dark green (or greenness) of the skin. It is not a physical or material or spatial part of the skin. I can't peel it off the skin or cut it up or eat it. If it is a part at all, it is a metaphysical part of the skin. And the same goes for every other property of the skin: if is is a part at all, it is a metaphysical part. These metaphysical property-parts together perhaps with some other metaphysical parts (bare or thin particulars, various sorts of nexus, Castanedan ontological operators. . .) make up what we can call the ontological structure of an ordinary particular. This quasi-mereological ontological structure is distinct from the strictly mereological structure of the object in question.

Everyone agrees that things like avocados and aardvarks and asteroids have physical parts. But not all agree that they have in addition metaphysical parts. As I see it, the issue that divides C-ontologists from R-ontologists is the question whether concrete particulars have metaphysical parts in addition to their physical parts where the thing's properties are among its metaphysical parts. C-ontologists say yes; R-ontologists, no.

This is a broader understanding of the difference between C- and R-ontology than John's above. For John the difference is between how concrete particulars have properties. For a C-ontologist, a thing has a property by having it as an ontological constituent. For an R-ontologist, a thing has a property, not by having it as a constituent, but by standing in an external relation to it. That is not wrong, but I think it is too narrow.

John seems to be suggesting that the only ontological constituents there are are properties, and that the only items that have such constituents are ordinary concrete particulars. My understanding is broader. I maintain that among ontological constituents there are or could be other items such as bare or thin particulars, various type of nexus, ontological operators, and perhaps others, in addition to properties (whether taken to be universals or taken to be tropes). I am also open to the possibility that entities other than ordinary concrete particulars could have ontological constituents.

Take God. God is presumably a concrete particular, concrete because causally active, particular because not universal; but surely God is not an ordinary concrete particular, especially if 'ordinary' implies being material. Arguably, God is not related to his attributes; if he were his aseity would be compromised. So I say he has his attributes as constituents. If he is identical to them, as on the doctrine of divine simplicity, then a fortiori he has them as constitutuents, improper constituents.

Return to the humble avocado. Our avocado is green, ripe, soft, etc. So it has properties. This simple observation gives rise to three philosophical questions:

Q1. What are properties?

Q2. What is the item that has the properties?

Q3. What is property-possession? (What is it for an item to have properties?)

I will now contrast one R-ontological answer with one C-ontological answer. What follows are very rough sketches.

One R-ontological answer is this. Properties are abstract objects in a realm apart. They are causally inert, atemporal, nonspatial, not sense-perceivable. Not only do properties not enter into causal relations, they do not induce causal powers in the things that have them. They are what is expressed by such open sentences as '____ is green' analogously as propositions are expressed by such closed sentences as 'Ava is green.' If, per impossibile, God were to annihilate all of these abstract objects, nothing would change in our humble avocado. I say per impossibile because the abstract objects in question are necessary beings. My point is that they do no work here below. They are as irrelevant to what is really going on in the avocado as the predicates 'ripe' and 'green' are.

The item that has properties is just the ordinary concrete thing, the avocado in our example, not a propertyless substratum or any other exotic item. The having is a relation or nonrelational tie that connects the concrete thing to the abstract property.

Now for a C-ontological answer. Properties are universals. Whether or not they can exist unexemplified, when they are exemplified, they enter into the ontological structure of ordinary particulars as metaphysical parts thereof. Thus the greenness of the avocado is 'in' it as a metaphysical part. Same holds for the ripeness, the softness, etc. These universals are empirically detectable and induce causal powers. The thing that has these universals is the avocado viewed as a complex, indeed, as a concrete fact. What makes it particular is a further constituent, the thin particular, which is nonrelationally tied to the universals and unifies them into one thick particular.