category: TST (Thinking Stops There), the sociology of false beliefs
are thoughts ideas, or are thoughts mere symbols of ideas?
Our emotions in their essential forms are all naturally selected to promote our survival and reproduction -- fight or flight, hunger and taste, love and lust. Once you've unsurvived, what's the point of those emotions?
I'm intrigued by reports of paranormal psychic reports. Having lived over seventy years, I sense that my mind registers information well beyond what I'm fully aware of. Riding my bike I often feel that an auto is about to appear within my sightline in an intersection, even though I haven't heard or seen the auto hidden by the tall buildings of the Manhattan streetscape. Could it be that I've been Pavlovianly trained by experience to respond to the clues visible on the street that react to an auto moving on the street, clues that the people on the street themselves aren't aware of but yet nudge their behaviors?
Another example you might have experienced: if someone walking behind me begins to talk to a companion on the street, I hear it as their conversation, but if someone walking behind me alone begins to talk on the phone, I intuitively hear it as addressed to me. Do I have some sense that the person behind me is alone? Have the sound of steps been registered below the level of my consciousness?
It's not supernatural, it's just responses below the radar of awareness. What else am I missing in my awareness? How do those unconscious senses influence me? These paranormal abilities intrigue me.
On the other hand, supernatural notions of the afterlife seem completely unthinking. In an age informed by Darwin, instructing us that all our emotions are naturally selected for survival, reproduction and species/DNA support, why imagine an afterlife with emotions, an afterlife that requires neither survival, reproduction or species support. I'm making some assumptions here -- maybe it's one great orgy, gratuitous yet nonetheless fun. Is it eternal feelings of love and care with no object to love or care about? Or is the afterlife a floating cloud of non-emotions? A zen-like state of emptiness? Adoring and loving the deity's great and perfect and beautiful plan "red in tooth and claw", needless war, the good punished and the wicked rewarded. Why even bother to imagine such a fantasy?
Or is it a place where you reunite with your family including your siblings ripped apart by bombs of war or burnt to a crisp by genocidal hate? What exactly is being imagined here and why? And why don't the fantasts think about these consequences of their own fantasies?
I find false beliefs almost always pedestrian and unimaginative because they are self-serving, especially compared to the unlimited imagination of science which has no audience to appeal to -- the facts and conjectures lead wherever they go, regardless of how crazy and far from serving any self. But the fact that we believe such lame and often contradictory ideas -- that's a fascinating puzzle. How can we believe an obvious falsehood or an incoherent one? Of course we know that we believe whatever we want to believe, but how does a species that relies on cognition and prediction survive holding thoughts the only merit of which are their wishfulness?
A friend -- actually a bunch of friends -- ask me what I think about the afterlife and the cases of people who came back from death, you know, people who were dead and were resuscitated and report having met dead family members and such. The obvious response is that as you fade off into death, like fading into sleep, you hallucinate or dream or just get thoughts and memories confused. And what might you hallucinate or dream about? Familiar ideas and people, of course. There's nothing surprising in this. It's exactly what you'd expect from fading out of awareness towards death.
What's surprising is that anyone would take these reports as evidence of the experience of death. Like, why believe such a wishful-thinking but wild and weird fantasy when the obvious explanation is in plain sight? "As I drifted off, I dreamt about the people I hoped to see in death."
Now, you object that the wild fantasy is also not surprising, since it's so dearly wished. I beg to differ. Hamlet -- remember him? -- also differed. The afterlife scared him, for good reason; Epicurus' life-ends-with-death comforted him. Me too. Why not everyone else?
So what's this great interest in resuscitation stories? Why are they taken seriously? Why are they lumped with the paranormal, investigating which seems useful and informative, while speculations about the afterlife seem just unthinking and useless? What, even, does it mean to come back from the dead?
In an upcoming post, I set out a few principles that are often lost in wishful ideas including myside or confirmation bias. Among them: attending to the normal which we often take for granted -- the oblivious obvious; seeking the negative or disconfirmatory side of a question, for example asking not the benefits of free speech, all of which have downsides, but asking what happens when there's no freedom of speech, whether enforced from the top (government censorship) or from one's peers (cancel culture); attending to the entailments or implications; attending to the origin and purpose of an idea rather than just the content -- when you ask where the "chem trails" conspiracy theory must have come from, given that it doesn't identify the chemicals or how they act or what has actually happened as a result of them, you recognize whoever came up with this idea had no knowledge at all but a lot of distrust -- "I don't know what that thing there is, but because I don't know what it is, it must be dangerous and put there by Them."
Starting with the last. Where does this notion of afterlife comes from. It's not a recent one. All those cases of people who were revived from death knew about heaven before they died. It's a cultural staple, just looking at ancient texts. When I studied Attic Greek we read Lucian's Dialogues of the Dead in which the hero travels through the underworld. So I can attest that this afterworld idea is old. If your mind is still working after being around your fellow idiots for years of sharing inane ideas, you've got to wonder where the ancients got the idea about the afterlife. And you know it's not from medical resuscitations, unless you think that the ancients practiced resuscitations or maybe there were aliens resuscitating Greeks. There are no texts I know of -- and I think we'd know about it -- mentioning aliens resuscitating Greeks. All we get are some fictional stories based on myths, not case histories.
In other words, this notion of the afterlife is a piece of religious mythology most likely generated to soothe or warn. That's a reasonable explanation, especially since there are cultures that don't tell us about afterlife. South Asians have reincarnation, not afterlife, as I understand it. Lutherans believe death is a long sleep. The Chinese die only to haunt their children.
To put it simply, why should anyone credit any of the stories or experiences or memories of their gradual loss of consciousness towards death? There's no reason besides wishful thinking of the most unthinking kind. Do you really want to meet in the afterlife (one friend says one of these resuscitated from the dead says they saw their family in their brief stint in the afterlife) your senile family members or the aforementioned dismembered and burnt and crispy...you get the picture. It's not pretty. And what about all the toxic people that you worked so hard to cut out of your life. Eternity with them! Yes, that's just what you wanted. Or is that hell? You deserve that? That's wishful thinking?
The afterlife might be wonderful, but the probability is that it's awful, at least as awful as the living world which has little justice and plenty of toxicity. The wishful "thinking" over the afterlife is at least as lame as wishful thinking over a supernatural deity. Why would anyone imagine that a deity who created animals of prey who tear apart their prey alive would be merciful to you? The very idea of God is a terrifying one. The idea that anyone is listening to my thoughts is the ultimate nightmare and everyone knows it judging by how upset everyone was over Snowdon's data dump of government surveillance. What's going on with people -- an all powerful deity surveiling you is okay with you and even a blessing, but a government that obviously doesn't care about you as long as you shop, troubles you? I give credit to the Jews: the Old Testament deity is f***ing scary. I am so glad He's dead so I can go eat lobster without guilt.
Is it wishful (non) thinking? Is it a rebellion against the "you must believe science" -- the resistance against the chains of the must-believe-this (Gilovich)? Is it just the intuition that since others say they believe it, it must be true, since if they didn't have special access to the truth, no one would come up with such a belief? Notice that the last one is the reason most people believe the earth is round -- not because they understand the science behind, which they know nothing of, but because they intuit that such an absurd belief -- that the earth is spinning?!? and is round!?! -- would never have caught on with everyone across the globe unless it were true. But the belief in the afterlife, unlike flat earthism, is not only absurd, it's undesirable. It's a lot like sci-fi spaceships. They were imagined in order to produce dramas. They're not a representation of the future. The afterlife is no representation of the future either. If it were, it'd have burned and dismembered bodies etc. It's been imagined for some drama or story, a feel-good story. The Nietzschean story: it's a comfort for an oppressed people who had to admit that the Romans were too big for them to resist. The oppressed win in the next life.
Lumping the afterfile in with the paranormal tells us that those who are drawn to them as a class are unthinkers. I don't mean that they are incapable of thinking. Flat earthers are not only incisive and clever in their arguments but well-informed too. They recognize that if the earth is flat the sun must be close not far and that gravity can't be Newtonian on their view. They know more about flat Earth theory and its justifications than the average round-earth believer, who merely trusts that their grade school teachers wouldn't have told them such a counterintuitive theory if it weren't true.
The afterlife believers' motivations don't seem to distinguish between the unknown and the absurd. It's believing what you want, and thinking stops there.
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