Horgan is an interesting guy. And he sounds like a truly nice guy. I read his column regularly.
This is one I really wish there was a full transcript for so I could pull quotes to defend the rest of what I say here.
He is not a dogmatic materialist until.. in the end he clearly is. He is open minded to a point and then he retreats back to a bunch of standard cop-out postions that Alex normally would be all over.
The "Im not an expert but.." position. Translation: havent done the research that would force him to take a starting position that might conflict with materialism.
"I haven’t seen enough to convince me that ESP is real, and in part because of encountering Susan Blackmore and interviewing her. But, I don’t know. This is a crazy world we live in and I’m sorry I have to fall back to the position that I know you’re tired of hearing — more research needs to be done, and more thinking needs to be done about these things."
What?!!! Id like to see anybody else get away with that statement on the show! : ) The times Alex did press him a little, he pulled the classic cognitive dissonance maneuver of redirecting the conversation.
His response mostly struck me as the kind of false open mindedness (which I bet he is unaware of) that as the evidence gets better, will find some way to shunt it aside or rationalize that it doesn't meet the burden of proof for overturning materialism, a philosophy currently masquerading as an objective description of default reality. The Wiseman defence.
The part that really killed me was how once again we have somebody casually ignoring the elephant in the room issue of: What could possibly be a more important than evidence for Survival. At some point towards the end he says something like how he covered some of these issues in his book xyz and but now was interested other topics. The "I've moved on." defense. Of course War is a hugely important topic but in the context of Survival there is a bit of irony here.
You don't need to be a Believer, to see that if there is a growing body of good evidence and research that people survive death in some fashion that
this is the most overwhelmingly important topic that Science should work on, hell,
could ever work on. What could possibly have a greater impact on Humanity or have greater effect on what it means to be human individually or as societies going forward? This is so painfully obvious yet so cavalierly unacknowledged and passed over; completely due to ideological filtering. The magnitude of its importance resulting in the magnitude of its shunning. In an often strange and perplexing world the utter unreasonableness of this situation is the strangest thing of all.
This quote from a good blog post on NDEs says it well:
My own interest is in what one can reasonably believe. And having argued in detail that one can more than reasonably believe that consciousness is not reducible in principle to physical mechanism (but is, instead, a “bedrock” phenomena in the world all in its own right), my conclusion extends to entail that one can reasonably believe that the near death experience could very well be just what it appears to be: an experience of the separation of consciousness from the body and brain. To the extent that there is simply no compelling justification (beyond prejudice) for confidence in the philosophical idea that qualitative, subjective experience is wholly and completely reducible to physical mechanism in the first place, there is no compelling justification (beyond prejudice) for confidence that any particular reductionist explanation of the near death experience is especially likely to be true. Any insistence otherwise plainly rests not on the independent plausibility of these reductionist explanations, but instead in the a priori conviction borne solely from philosophical prejudice that some reductionist explanation must be true—with this a priori conviction in place, the fact that it is conceivable that the patient near death has some residual brain activity we can’t currently measure, or that it can’t be definitively refuted that some complex combination of factors, none of which independently come anywhere near explaining the whole experience, and each of which seem entirely lacking in at least some large number of cases, could combine in any number of ways (and no matter how combined still produce the archetypical NDE) is—for the skeptic—enough. But for those of us who reject the claim that there is sufficient justification for such confidence in this a priori conviction in the first place, it isn’t. - Aedon Cassiel
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http://zombiemeditations.com/2015/05/23/epistemology-of-death/