Note: This is the sixth part (more or less) of a nine-part essay that I am posting over the course of "a week or so," which in my dialect means at least a month. The first part may be found here.
V and a half. A Clarification
When I told a friend in London that some readers had accused me of highjacking a powerful scientific theory in order to prove my religious beliefs -- in effect, of putting a gun to Darwin's head and making him to fly me to heaven -- he said, "Maybe you should have called it a thought experiment."
It was a joke, of course: I had already attached that subtitle to the first two installments of the series. But as some readers seem to have missed all the cautionary road signs I've planted so far, I will add a few more.
This is not a theory I am trying to prove. I am not trying to prove anything -- least of all my "religious beliefs," which are, in any conventional sense, negligible. If you put a gun to my head and asked me if I believed in an afterlife, I would say no. Or, more likely, I would equivocate (which I am quite capable of doing even at gunpoint) and say that I put the odds at about one in three. (By "afterlife" I mean survival of the individual mind, not some sort of mystical union with the universe, which I find actuarially more challenging.)
If you then asked me to give the odds that there is an afterlife and it has a Darwinian explanation, I would shrug (very carefully) and say, "Maybe one in 15."
Why, then, do I pursue this thought experiment, given that it matches neither my temperament (squeamish) nor my experience (subnormal in matters paranormal), and that I give it only a small chance of corresponding to reality?
I pursue it because it is, as Oppenheimer said of the Manhattan Project, "technically sweet." Following Darwinian logic, we end up in some unexpected places. Of course, to get there we must accept, heuristically, the premise that the human mind might be capable of existing independently of the neuronal activity on which it usually depends. While that is not a proposition I would bet on, neither is it one I would reject out of hand. Apart from the hearsay evidence of folklore, religion and esoteric practice, there is the vast literature of "near-death" and "out-of-body" experiences, including some cases that some credentialed scientists consider to have some objective corroboration. Finally, there are the first-hand stories I've heard from a few trusted friends.
Not much to go on, true. But given how little we know about consciousness, it's enough to let me suspend my own materialist bias and accept, for the length of this thought experiment, the premise on which it rests. Those for whom such a suspension is impossible need not be detained by this essay. Those for whom it is possible will, I think, find these speculations only a few degrees more speculative and untestable than numerous others, often by reputable scientists, on the origins, nature and destiny of art, music, language, love, conscience, consciousness, life, matter, energy, the cosmos and other things that may have slipped my mind. Granted, most of those speculations have the advantage of trying to explain things that are known to exist, rather than things that are merely believed by some people to exist. But I don't mind working under a slight handicap.
VI. Reverend Ancestors
According to Stanley Cavell, watching a movie is like being dead: you are hidden in darkness, effectively bodiless, watching life unreel but unable to intervene.
According to the late essayist Jerry Stern, being a parent is like watching a movie: you want to shout, "No! Don't do it!" -- but even if you do, it will have no effect.
Rub the two similes together and sparks fly, as from fur in the dark.
Maybe Cavell is wrong and being dead is more like watching a play from the wings: though mostly unseen, you can coach or heckle, make mischief or smooth frayed nerves.
Maybe Stern is right and some living parents feel deader than dead, in the sense of being dead wood: utterly ineffectual. And maybe some dead parents feel as if they're still alive and can't help helping, meddling, kibbitzing.
Would kibbitzing be the limit of their powers, or could the dead be helpful in a more concrete way? Could they intervene directly in the physical world?
In folkore and the annals of psychic research, they routinely do. Tapping, rattling, lifting, shaking, even the materialization of foreign objects ("apports") are, for what it's worth, standard features of the séance. Tales of helpful meddling by spirits -- such stuff as nudging a skier away from a precipice, hiding a passport so that a fatal flight will be missed or apporting a parking space at 7:45 p.m. a block away from a Broadway theater -- are legion. They are, to be sure, even harder to swallow than reports of mere communication. (How, one wonders, do ghosts have it both ways, drifting through some solid objects while finding firm purchase on others?) My point, however, is not that spirits exist and do these things, only that many people who think spirits exist think they do these things.
They have been thinking it for a very long time.
Ancestor worship (or, if you prefer, veneration) is found in cultures spanning a vast stretch of time and space: from Egypt to Rome, from China to India, from the Philippines to Celtic and Teutonic Europe. Significantly, it is nearly universal among indigenous peoples in the hothouse of human evolution, Africa.
The premise of ancestor worship is that the dead can be helpful in direct, practical ways: that they can bring game, or rain, or a copious harvest. In Sulawesi, Indonesia, that belief is embodied in yard-high wooden effigies called tau-tau that are fashioned when family members die and are set on ledges outside the vaults, carved in limestone cliffs, in which they are buried. The attitude of the tau-tau is one of watchful care: the right palm facing sideways to receive blessings from heaven, the left upward to transmit those blessings to the living.
Or consider this prayer traditionally recited by a merchant clan of Huizhou, China, at the spring festival of Qing Ming, or Tomb Sweeping Day (from Nancy Zeng Berliner, Yin Yu Tang, p. 19):
"Being prostrate [in front of the tombs of the ancestors, I am] aware that it is from the souls [of our ancestors] that our good fortune has come, and it is they who make the offspring more and more prosperous with the passage of time. ... Being prostrate [in front of the tombs of the ancesstors, I] wish your frozen souls will stay clear and your jadelike spirits will be as active as when you were alive, so that you will benefit your sons and prosper your grandsons and so that they may inherit the good fortunes you had before. Every one of your offspring will be noble and famous, and they will have gold and jade piled up. ... The fame that the family holds will spread as melons' vines do, and the fortunes we enjoy will develop as crickets reproduce. Whenever [the people of this family] try to obtain something, [they] shall achieve it. When [they] engage in farming, the sunshine and rain will alternate in a perfect way. When [they] devote themselves to learning, [they] will be successful in examinations and receive high official posts thereby."
The ancestors' love is not unconditional. Ancestor worship is just that: forebears must be buttered up with liturgy, sacrifice and behavior they approve of, lest they become peevish, withhold their boons, even punish their errant offspring.
This, however, is no obstacle to our project. The dead are people, too. Like the living, they have complex feelings and are not pure Darwinian agents. Dead parents, like living ones, can lose patience with wayward children. And by keeping the family on the straight and narrow, they may even improve its long-term success.
Next: Saints Preserve Us
Laura Berman Fortgang: Dreams Are Never Foolish
Laura Berman Fortgang: Your Inner GPS
Marlowe Brown: Films for Your Soul: Mothering, the Most Sacred Art (WATCH)
Russell Bishop: Soul-Talk: Let Go of Toxicity and Restore Balance to Your Life
Maybe Cavell is wrong, and there's no one to do any watching from the wings.
Although you seem to be saying that you have no interest in proving anything, you've certainly come a long way down this rabbit-hole, and so it seems to me that you are arguing a few primary points:
- That NDE's and OBE's should not be dismissed out of hand.
It's o.k. they are dismissed because of no evidence, and they can be explained sufficiently without invoking a mind separate from brain. (The principle of parsimony-- excellent in for analyzing any thought experiment worth it's salt)
- The idea that something that has developed naturally via evolution(consciousness), say by some gene, can then exist after the processes that gave rise to consciousness, and that that idea is a result of "Darwinian logic".
This is certainly highjacking the name of Darwin and slapping it on something that has nothing to do with evolution.
- There's a probability of the afterlife.
"one in three", though shouldn't thought experiments estimate actual probabilities instead of arbitrarily defined ones?
I just don't get what this is for. Maybe to spare confusing people, you could have simply excluded the word "experiment" from the subtitle.
This is ridiculous. Anyone is capable of analyzing the logic in this "thought experiment". It is just what you say it is, a "thought experiment". It is most certainly not a thought experiment in "Darwinian logic". That's probably the reason you've been criticized; I don't know how you've missed that. I mean it sounds like you didn't miss that call-out, but you've proceeded as though "Darwinian logic" is an accurate definition of this whole reasoning.
He was far wiser, and humbler, than those who now claim to be his defenders.
Arguing with dogmatists -- whether religious or materialist -- is tedious, so from now on I think I'll respond to comments only when someone has something new and interesting to say.
Firstly, it presupposes a gene which continues to be effective after the gene itself is dead. A sort of quantum gene? Schrodinger's gene?
Second, I can't see anything that would select for such a gene, as it would not have any positive outcome on reproduction (excepting the virgin birth, perhaps, and that didn't work out so well). So presumably it would simply have to arise randomly and then propagate without selection - which is of course possible.
Finally, on post-menopause survival, there is a third explanation, that longevity is selected for in males, because increased length of life can be positively selected for in men. Female post-menopausal longevity could simply be a corollary of male longevity.
As for the second, my argument is precisely that the gene or genes in question would have a positive effect on reproductive success. I won't rehash the argument here, as I think I've made it as clearly as I can in the first installment.
Your third point is a good one. I'm still inclined to think that longevity in both males in females is selected for, at least in part, by extended parental (and grandparental) investment.