Alex's question at the end of the interview:
What do you make of the slow-drip attacks on near death experience science? Is it just free-thinking academics speaking their mind, or is there some larger agenda behind it?
To paraphrase it with number agreement:
What do you make of the slow-drip attacks on the science of near death experience? Do they merely represent the arguments of free-thinking academics, or is there a larger agenda behind them?
I wondered what "slow-drip" meant. One gets the sense of incessant and erosive, and perhaps niggling. In any event, I haven't personally read the book, but listening to the podcast, it seems that Mitchell-Yellin wants it both ways: on the one hand, he wants to cast doubt on non-physicalist interpretations of the data, and on the other, he wants to grant that NDEs are valuable and transformative.
Thing is, if NDEs have a purely physicalist interpretation, then any value they might have as true transformative experiences is challenged. I don't see how you can say that NDEs can be profitably interpreted as the result of purely physico-chemical processes and at the same time grant them any unusual degree of true transformative power. They'd have no more such power than any other experience.
It seems an incoherent position to me: the guy wants to grant the value of psychological experience even though in the end all psychological experience boils down to the blind interaction of particles of matter. This is where people like him and Sam Harris drive me crackers. They think that morality is valuable even though it seemingly comes from nowhere and can't be explained in terms of the properties of particles. If I were really to believe that, I'd be saying to myself that morality is pointless: I might as well be amoral and do whatever I like.
It seems far more coherent to grant the existence of morality in some non-physical sense, and if you do that, then you can either be dualist or idealist, but not in any event a physical monist. It's almost as if Mitchell-Yellin feels constrained by political correctness: he can't bring himself to denigrate NDEs as what he presumably thinks they are: events with purely physical explanation. If he doesn't think that, then why has he bothered to co-write this tome? Is he merely defending the physicalist position as an academic exercise, all the while sitting on the metaphysical fence?
Alex asks if there's more to it than that; if there's a larger agenda behind the book. As I've often said, I don't go with conspiracy theories as often as I do with the capacity for the human mind to maintain conflicting stances. Frankly, I wonder if Mitchell-Yellin himself understands his own position, which if I were to paraphrase it might go like this:
There's no need to invoke the "supernatural" to explain the subjective experiences of NDEs. All of the data, even that from experiments specifically designed to eliminate the possibility of physical causes, can be interpreted in a physicalist way.
Well, of course, anything and everything
can be interpreted in a physicalist way, but the question is, at some point, does a physicalist interpretation become so strained, bizarre even, that it becomes downright perverse? And if it does, why can't its proponents let go of it? Why do they keep on gnawing at it like a dog a bone (or, indeed, like the slow drip of water a stone)? My tentative answer is that they must have a strong metaphysical belief in physicalism; a belief that they feel they
must hang on to lest their world view collapse.
For whatever reason, they find the possibility of the transcendent extremely disturbing. Yet for all that, not a few of them still want to hang on to ideas of morality; don't want to accept the possibility that there's no point in being good or bad, or that anything whatsoever matters.
They might, for instance, construct evolutionary stories about how morality confers survival advantages and hence is naturally selected for. But what has survival got to do with anything? The universe presumably wouldn't give a toss whether or not particular aggregations of molecules on some totally insignificant planet managed to survive and propagate: it'd be all the same to it if they didn't.
In a way, the physicalist-cum-moralist is averring the existence of the transcendent, but merely as an illusion we can't escape on account of our constitution: put another way,
consciousness is an illusion. We can't help, given our constitution, experiencing emotions, colours, various sensations: qualia in general, but beyond that, they have no significance.
What about logical thought then? Is that in the same stable as qualia? Would it be possible for us to think purely logically, regardless of experiences, pleasant or otherwise? It's an interesting question. Ask a mathematician whether or not he experiences an intense sense of pleasure in proving a theorem. Ask him if he would ever bother trying to solve it in the first place if he didn't eagerly anticipate that pleasure.
There can likewise be intense pleasure in many scientific pursuits, which comes purely from the satisfaction of coming to understand something a little better, and if that pleasure weren't a fact, how much incentive would there be to become a scientist? Come to think, we all experience intense pleasure in coming to understand something a little better, even an infant who discovers it can, with a little effort, move from A to B by crawling in order to get something it wants.
In other words, the motivation for logical thinking could be an axiomatic and ineffable desire for truth, and the reward be implicit in the discovering of it. Moreover, out of logical thought, we are often able to improve our environment in some way, and so experience some quale of pleasure or other in that way.
Materialists often tend to think in terms of logical thought somehow standing outside experience; of its being able to be used independently of experience, but one wonders to what extent that can be true. Might it not be truer to say that logical thought
arises out of experience, and that language is a way of helping memorialise experience for future reference and application?
Again, why do we enjoy teaching someone else? Why do most of us get pleasure from being sincerely able to impart facts or skills (regardless of whether or not those are wholly accurate or effective)? Why do some of us cynically manipulate others through imparting facts or skills we know to be wrong? Why do some of us obfuscate (maybe not intentionally), even with ourselves? What's in it for us? Maybe obfuscation enables us to maintain a pleasurable or rewarding idea (such as physicalism) at the expense of repressing or ignoring something we'd rather not entertain.
The picture I'm painting is of qualia -- which inevitably accompany experience -- taking the lead in shaping who we are; of their being indispensable in developing so-called "higher" mental faculties such as logical thinking. We can't explain how qualia arise under a physicalist interpretation, and so what we proponents do is accept that qualia, as aspects of consciousness, are in some sense axiomatic and primitive or primal. I personally believe (as an idealist) that insofar as they give us physical sensations, those are the way our undeniably real interactions with other dissociated consciousnesses and with cosmic consciousness (MAL) itself are represented to us. We can't help but experience them that way, and, indeed, there is some utility in doing so.
Physicalists don't accept that. To them, our physical sensations represent something that lies outside consciousness, something that is real and existent in its own right as exactly what we perceive. But then, they can't explain qualia and throw them in the box labelled
to be understood at some future time when we've refined our understanding of physicalism. Or, maybe, hubristically, claim we already know enough under physicalism to explain them.
I suppose to some extent the former position is to be preferred to the latter, but Mitchell-Yellin wants it all ways; wants to privilege physicalism and at the same time honour the worth of pyschological phenomena like NDEs, which to my mind are mutual incompatibilities.