If the United States, itself awash with weapons, wishes to benefit from Israel’s experience, it must make sure it learns the right lessons. The first and most universal one is that ever more stringent gun control is bad policy: As is the case with drugs, as was the case with liquor during Prohibition, the strict banning of anything does little but push the market underground into the hands of criminals and thugs. Rather than spend fortunes and ruin lives in a futile attempt to eradicate every last trigger in America, we would do well to follow Israel’s example and educate gun owners about their rights and responsibilities, so as to foster a culture of sensible and mindful gun ownership.
Eben Alexander: “We Are Conscious in Spite of Our Brains”
I am at the moment listening to Dennis Prager interview Dr. Eben Alexander. Prager asked him whether he now maintains, after his paranormal experiences, that consciousness is independent of the brain. Alexander made a striking reply: "We are conscious in spite of our brains." And then he made some remarks to the effect that the brain is a "reducing filter" or something like that.
That is to say much more than that consciousness can exist independently of the brain. For the latter would be true if consciousness existed in an attenuated form after the dissolution of the body and brain. Alexander is saying that embodiment severely limits our awareness.
Well, why couldn't that be true? Why is it less plausible than a form of materialism that views consciousness as somehow dependent on brain functioning and impossible without it?
Let us assume you are not a dogmatist: you don't uncritically adhere to the unprovable materialist framework assumption according to which consciousness just has to be brain-based. And let us assume that you don't have a quasi-religious faith that future science has wonderful revelations in store that will vindicate materialism/physicalism once and for all. By the way, I have always found it passing strange that people would "pin their hopes on future science." You mean to tell me that you hope you can be shown to be nothing more than a complex physical system slated for utter extinction!? That's what you hope for? It may in the end be true, but I for one cannot relate to the mentality of someone who would hope for such a thing. "I hope I am just a bag of chemicals to be punctured in a few years. Wouldn't it be awful if I had an higher destiny and that life actually had a meaning?"
But I digress. Let's assume you are not a dogmatist and not a quasi-religious believer in future science. Let's assume you are an open-minded inquirer like me. You are skeptical in the best sense: inquisitive but critical. Then I put the question to you: Can you show that the Alexander claim is less plausible that the materialist one?
I don't believe that there can be talk of proof either way, assuming you use 'proof' strictly. You have to decide what you will believe and how you will live. In the shadowlands of this life there is light enough and darkness enough to lend support to either answer, that of the mortalist and that of his opposite number.
So I advance to the consideration that for me clinches the matter. Bring the theoretical question back down to your Existenz. How will you live, starting right now and for the rest of your days? Will you live as if you will be utterly extinguished in a few years or will you live as if what you do and leave undone right now matters, really matters? Will you live as if life is serious, or will you live as if it is some sort of cosmic joke? Will you live as if something is at stake in this life, however dimly descried, or will you live as if nothing is ultimately at stake? It is your life. You decide.
Now suppose that when Drs. Mary Neal and Eben Alexander die the body's death, they become nothing. Suppose that their phenomenologically vivid paranormal experiences were revelatory of nothing real, that their experiences were just the imaginings of malfunctioning brains at the outer limits of biological life. What will they have lost by believing as they did?
Nothing! Nothing at all. You could of course say that they were wrong and were living in illusion. But no one will ever know one way or the other. And if the body's death is the last word then nothing ultimately matters, and so it can't matter that they were wrong if turns out that they were.
If they were right, however, then the moral transformation that their taking seriously of their experiences has wrought in them can be expected to redound to their benefit when they pass from this sphere.
On Calls for a ‘Conversation’ About Guns
Liberals often call for 'a conversation' or a 'dialogue' about this or that. Didn't Eric Holder a while back call for a 'conversation' on race? What have we been talking about for 150 years? Same with guns. Our liberal pals must know that the gun debate has been raging for decades. So what does a liberal mean when he calls for a 'conversation' about guns?
He means: You conservatives and libertarians shut up and acquiesce in our position. Kurt Schlichter gets it right:
. . . we’re not supposed to have what people might commonly describe as a “conversation” at all. We’re supposed to shut-up and listen as liberals, barely masking their unseemly delight at the opportunity, try to pin the murder rampage of one degenerate creep on millions of law-abiding Americans who did nothing wrong. The conversation is then supposed to end with us waiving our fundamental right to self-defense.
Because that is what the goal is – a total ban on the private ownership of firearms. There’s always another “common sense” gun law which fails because it is targeted at law-abiding citizens and not criminals, thereby inviting another round of onerous new restrictions until finally no citizen is keeping or bearing anything more than a dull butter knife.
Well, almost no citizens. “Gun control” means all guns under the control of the government and available only to it and, of course, to politically connected cronies. Gun-grabbing poser Michael Bloomberg is going to be surrounded by enough fire power to remake the movie Heat. He’s always going to be protected. The purpose of gun control is to ensure that we aren’t.
So let’s have that conversation, and let’s lay the cards on the table. Modern firearms (which really aren’t that modern) are highly effective weapons in the hands of an evil little freak who gets off shooting children. They are also highly effective weapons in my hands when defending my children from evil little freaks.
Liberals ask why I need these weapons. The answer is simple. I’m going to be as well-armed or better armed than the threat. Period.
See also: The U.S. Has Already Had a Conversation About Guns — and the Pro Side Won.
Nasty Gun Grabbers
There are some really nasty folk among liberals. Read these librul letters to John Lott.
UPDATE 12/19: Lott has apparently deleted the post in question. Probably just as well given how vile the hate mail he receives.
Topical Insanity: Guns
Another old post that makes points that need regular repeating. Enjoy!
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There is temporary insanity as when a middle-aged man buys a Harley on which to ride though his midlife crisis, wisely selling the bike after the crisis subsides. But my theme is topical insanity, that species of temporary insanity that can occur when certain topics are brought to one’s attention. Someone so afflicted loses the ability to think clearly about the topic in question for the period of time that the topic is before his mind.
Try this. The next time you are at a liberal gathering, a faculty party, say, calmly state that you agree
with the National Rifle Association’s position on gun control. Now observe the idiocies to flow freely from liberal mouths. Enjoy as they splutter and fulminate unto apoplexy.
Some will say that the NRA is opposed to gun control. False, everyone is for gun control, i.e., gun control
legislation; the only question being its nature and scope. Nobody worth mentioning wants no laws relating to the acquisition and use of firearms. Everyone worth mentioning wants reasonable laws that are enforceable and enforced.
Others will say that guns have only one purpose, to kill people. A liberal favorite, but spectacularly false for all that, and quickly counterexampled: (i) Guns can be used to save lives both by police and by ordinary citizens; (ii) Guns can be used to hunt and defend against nonhuman critters; (iii) Guns can be used for sporting purposes to shoot at nonsentient targets; (iv) Guns can be collected without ever being
fired; (v) Guns can be used to deter crime without being fired; merely ‘showing steel’ is a marvellous deterrent. Indeed, display of a weapon is not even necessary: a miscreant who merely suspects that his target is armed, or that others in the vicinity are, may be deterred. Despite liberal mythology, criminals are not for the most part irrational and their crimes are not for the most part senseless. In terms of short-term means-ends rationality, it is quite reasonable and sensible to rob places where money is to be found — Willy Sutton recommends banks — and kill witnesses to the crime.
Still others will maintain that gun ownership has no effect on crime rates. False, see the work of
John Lott.
Here then we have an example of topical insanity, an example of a topic that completely unhinges otherwise sane people. There are plenty of other examples. Capital punishment is one, religion is another. A. C. "Gasbag" Grayling, for example, sometimes comes across as extremely intelligent and judicious. But when it comes to religion he degenerates into the worst form of barroom bullshitter. See my earlier post.
If All Knowledge Comes from Experience, is All Knowledge Subjective?
This is the kind of e-mail I like, brief and pointed:
Recently I've encountered an argument that runs like this:
1. All knowledge comes from experience
2. All experiences are subjective
3. Ergo, all knowledge is subjective.I think I can argue somewhat against this argument, but I need a nice snappy response to it.
The snappiest response to this invalid argument is that it falls victim to a fallacy of equivocation: 'experience' is being used in two different senses. Hence the syllogism lacks a middle term and commits the four-term fallacy (quaternio terminorum).
To experience is to experience something. So we need to distinguish between the act of experiencing and the object experienced. The act is subjective: it is a mental occurrence. The object is typically not subjective. For example, how do I know that there is a cat on my lap now? I experience the cat via my outer senses: I see the cat, feel its weight, hear it purr. The experiencing is subjective; the cat is not. I have objective knowledge of the existence and properties of the cat despite the fact that my experiencing is a subjective process.
Now I don't grant that all knowledge comes from experience; I grant only that all knowledge arises on the occasion of experience. But suppose I grant premise (1) arguendo. What (1) says is that all knowledge is knowledge of the objects of the senses. (There is no a priori knowledge.) So we can rewrite the argument as follows:
1*. All knowledge is knowledge of sensory objects (either directly or via instruments such as microsopes).
2*. All acts of experiencing are subjective
Ergo
3*. All knowledge is subjective.
This syllogism is clearly a non sequitur since there is no middle term.
The subjectivity of experiencing is logically consistent with the objectivity of knowledge via the senses. There is no knowledge apart from minds. And yet minds have the power of transcending their internal states and grasping what is real and true independently of minds. How this is possible is a further question, and perhaps the central question of epistemology.
One way to embarrass an empiricist is to ask him how he knows propostions like (1*). Does he know it by experience? No. Then, by his own principles, he doesn't know it. Why then does he think it is true?
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:
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.
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.
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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.