When Proof Is Not Enough: Proof of Heaven and the Problem of Objectivity in Science
Source: realitysandwich.com
The story is one you’ve heard before: a man slips into a coma and nearly dies. While his body fails, he somehow experiences lights, colors, and landscapes, all while disconnected from his body. Messages are imparted, deep feelings are felt, and then the man is sucked back into the material world. His whole perspective has changed, and he’s ready to talk about it.
The difference this time, in Proof of Heaven, is that the author and experiencer, Eben Alexander, is a neurosurgeon. Alexander’s near-death experience (NDE) was triggered by a rare form of E. Coli infection/meningitis -- but the real weight of the book rests on his education and experiences as a doctor, which are meant to give him a more informed perspective on the whole ordeal, which featured women floating on butterfly wings, clouds, psychic intervention, and more. His credentials are meant to serve as a bridge between these fantastic features and their facticity. After all, Alexander and his supporters ask, who could be better qualified to talk about an NDE than a practicing neurosurgeon? To this end, Alexander counters many of the standard arguments against the reality of NDE content, using his understanding of the brain to skewer them one by one.
Neither his credentials nor his account prove Heaven, however. Instead, the book and its subsequent critical fall-out point to deep cultural concerns, less about Heaven and more about proof.
A cursory look at online and print reviews of the book reveal what you might expect: depending on whether you’re a skeptic or a believer, Alexander’s credentials mean that he does know better than most about brain states and can trust his experiences, or that he should know better and distrust them.
I share some of his critics’ concerns, if not their vitriolic and dismissive feelings. Aside from examining them in the narrative, Alexander includes an appendix in the book which addresses common scientific questions when it comes to NDEs. But many other questions remain. Unanswered questions for me, which I have not yet seen raised by others, include ones about possible psychotropic substances in the E. Coli bacteria themselves, as well as the possible involvement of Acetylcholinesterase, an enzyme whose activity is studied in schizophrenic patients, and whose function is amplified by other types of meningitis. Another question -- and it’s a big one -- comes from more than one of Alexander’s critics (though most vocally from famed atheist Sam Harris), who wonder if Alexander’s cerebral cortex was actually shut down. Alexander asserts again and again that it was; his critics say it wasn’t.
If it was shut down, then Alexander believes he has the right to claim the D of NDE, because according to mainstream medical models, human beings must have brain function to live. This won’t ever work for skeptics, because they’ve created an unwinnable and nearly tautological argument that goes like this: a shut-down cerebral cortex equals death. How do we know Alexander’s cerebral cortex wasn’t shut down? Because he didn’t die. Finality serves as the marker of death for many skeptics, so there was no "after" in Alexander’s afterlife: he merely entered into a weird sort of hypnogagia.
Such questions of science and definition, however tedious answering them may seem, are demanded by Alexander’s title, which claims "proof." His entire account of his NDE is aimed at communicating to others that the afterlife is real, that it is composed of beings who love and care about us. It’s a vividly written account to match the lucidity of Alexander’s NDE state, and through it, he reasons that since when he nearly died he saw a beautiful woman on a floating butterfly wing who said he could do no wrong in life, that everyone will encounter a similar experience when they die. In other words, he tries to create a general scientific principle out of his observation.
We’re bound to bang our heads against the wall if we follow the path that Alexander or his critics have laid out for us. The lines are drawn and no one is going to switch sides, not only because Alexander hasn’t proved anything, but because the whole enterprise of foregrounding "proof" is misguided. Not only when exploring NDEs, but also in use of homeopathic remedies and other deeply individualized medicines, parapsychological phenomenon, and more. When it comes to non-materialistic phenomena, seeking proof above all else blinds us to the extraordinary and profound nature of subjectivity.
There may be overlapping (though not universal) themes -- in NDEs, for example, "walk toward the light" and "everything is love" -- in all non-materialistic phenomena, but they always intersect with and are informed by the unique matrix of the individual’s personality and social circumstances. One person may see a ghost, whereas another person in the same room may see nothing. Acupuncture may heal one person’s back pain and leave another’s unhealed. For the latter example, skeptics might be happy to cart out placebo, but they don’t have any real understanding of how placebo works, and it, too, affects different individuals differently.
Not only are the experiences individualized, but many of them exist within mind states (i.e., the content and contours of our thinking and feeling world, as opposed to physical brain states). Alexander can tell us all about the clouds and colors of the afterlife, but he can’t make us see them, because they intersected with his mind alone.
In other words, for certain experiences, reproducibility (and by extension, falsifiability), a bedrock of materialistic science, seems to go out the window.
The subjective, the individual, the irreproducible, are anathema to the skeptic (though not all scientists’) version of science. Subjectivity and anecdotes generally cloud our judgement of the truth, skeptics say. In his rebuke of the book, Amitai Shenhav advocates the values of distance and objectivity. We must, he explains, remove ourselves from our experiences to really understand them, which would be impossible for Alexander, who experienced an intense euphoria during his NDE. Setting aside the good feelings that researchers like Shenhav feel when they believe they’ve sufficiently distanced themselves from feeling, there’s another weird paradox here.
In the materialistic demand to somehow untangle ourselves from the world completely in order to understand it, we’re asked to borrow a popular theological narrative. First, researchers are meant to believe there’s a way to create an experiment and not intervene or interact with it, and that they’re meant to do everything they can to preserve this principle. Then, they should believe that thoughts, feelings, and impressions have nothing to do with the reality they’ve set up inside the experiment and that there are laws (controls, etc.) that they’ve also created that actually prohibit them from interfering with whatever takes place inside the experiment world. This is remarkably similar to the deist or TV-addicted version of God -- an old man on a distant cloud with a billion billion TVs. He set the show in motion so he could watch, pretending things happen independent of him.
For those who demand total objectivity, proof is Heaven, or God. It’s a distant principle which should be always appealed to, never questioned, and of which nothing is greater.
Of course, it’s impossible to be objective. First, there’s a long and rich history of the very concept of objectivity and its evolution. This is constantly ignored by skeptics like Harris in favor of pretending objectivity has a fixed definition without history or context. Second, in the course of its conceptual development, we were warned against the dangers of our current form of objectivity (one that was supposed to be divorced from experience).
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