By Peter Foges

Dr. Jeremy George, senior consultant in the Department of Thoracic Medicine at London University’s Middlesex Hospital, was on duty one fine May afternoon in 1988. It was a day like any other. At around 3 p.m., an elderly patient was admitted with pneumonia.

When the young doctor saw this “crumpled heap in a corner of the private wing,” as he later put it, he instantly recognized “it” as Professor Sir Alfred Jules Ayer, also known as A.J. Ayer (or “Freddie” to his friends), the former Wykeham Professor of Logic at Oxford, and Britain’s most eminent philosopher.

“He was very pleased that somebody knew who he was,“ said Dr. George, who spoke about the event for first time more than a decade later to the English playwright William Cash. “He looked very blue. His oxygen level was virtually incompatible with life.”

Dr. George gave Ayer emergency oxygen and admitted him immediately to the intensive care unit, where his condition improved. “He would not have survived the day.”

Ayer was my wife’s stepfather and brought her up. As his virtual; son-in-law I knew him well and was extraordinarily fond of him. Naturally, therefore, I paid him a visit. What, I asked, could I get him to relieve the tedium? A book was what he wanted—one to stretch his astonishing stainless steel brain. He asked me to buy Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time, rather surprisingly riding high on the best-seller lists in Britain that spring. Within the hour I had placed it beside his bed as he slept, and tiptoed away. My visit was but one of many. Another of his legion of friends brought him a supply of smoked salmon—which his kind nurses pretended not to see.

In the early evening of June 6, as Ayer later wrote, he “carelessly tossed” a slice of this salmon into his mouth. It went down the wrong way and he choked. Before the biomedical machinery in the ICU, flashing red, had managed to summon the emergency staff to his side at a run to revive him, Freddie had actually been clinically dead for four minutes. The hospital notes simply stated: “cardiac arrest with bradycardia, and asystole.”

To give context to this mini medical drama it’s important to bear in mind that A.J. Ayer was an atheist. Not just any old atheist—the atheist as far as millions of Britons were concerned. In addition to establishing his reputation as one of the great analytic and rationalist philosophers of the century with such works as Language, Truth and Logic and the later Foundations of Empirical Knowledge, Ayer had spent most of his adult life putting the case very publicly on radio and television, as well as in print, for the “non-existence” of God—indeed arguing that the very idea of “God” was devoid of meaning, a position known in theology as igtheism. He had gone twelve rounds with the best and the brightest of the bishops and theologians in the land—and in the public mind he was thought, in the main, to have triumphed.

According to his own account written for the London Daily Telegraph three months later, “the earliest remarks of which I have any cognizance…were made several hours after I returned to life…addressed to a French woman in French…Did you know that I was dead? The first time that I tried to cross the river I was frustrated—but my second attempt succeeded. It was most extraordinary. My thoughts became persons.”

He went on to describe what he so vividly recalled “on the other side.”

“I was confronted by a red light…Aware that this light was responsible for the government of the universe. Among its ministers were two creatures who had been put in charge of space…”

Somehow Ayer was aware, however, “that space, like a badly fitted jigsaw puzzle, was slightly out of joint…with the consequence that the laws of nature had ceased to function as they should.”

(One can surmise that one influence on Ayer in this “undiscovered country”—somewhere in the borderlands between life and death—were the ruminations and calculations of the great Cambridge cosmologist Stephen Hawking. Reading Hawking in hospital just before he choked had clearly set in motion a set of questions in Ayer’s mind about black holes and the mysterious continua of space-time. He confessed to me months later, however, that he’d found A Brief History of Time, which I had so lovingly given him, almost impossible to understand.)

“I thought,” he went on, “that I could cure space by operating upon time…The ministers who had been given charge of time were in my neighborhood and I proceeded to hail them…” They however seemed quite uninterested in the philosopher’s offer, despite his twirling his grandfather’s fob watch (which he always carried) around furiously to attract their attention. Ayer’s “experience” came to end, as he reported, with him in “despair.”

(It must be said—as Ayer realized—that this imagery, embellished in this case by Hawking and Ayer’s thorough grounding in the classics, are a commonplace today, a byproduct of high-tech medicine’s power to resurrect the “dead.”)

He ended the article by asserting that “my recent experiences have slightly weakened my conviction that my genuine death, which is due fairly soon, will be the end of me, though I continue to hope that it will be. They have not weakened my conviction that there is no God.”

Three months later, alarmed by the world-wide publicity his piece engendered (“Afterlife Shocker” ran the lead headline on the front page of the National Enquirer), Ayer retreated yet further, publishing a short addendum in The Spectator. “What I should have written at the end (instead of the words ‘slightly weakened’),” he wrote, “was that my experiences have weakened, not my belief that there is no life after death, but my inflexible attitude towards that belief.”

In these two pieces—the second in particular—Ayer was clearly at pains to preserve his reputation, of which he was almost childishly proud. In the public imagination he was the champion slayer of theological nonsense, the pioneer of logical positivism, and the winner—in his own eyes at any rate—of his famous 1949 BBC radio debate about the existence or otherwise of god with Father Frederick Copleston, Britain’s most formidable modern Catholic philosopher. (Ludwig Wittgenstein, listening in distant Dublin, took a typically waspish view, complaining to a friend that Copleston had contributed “nothing,” and Ayer had been “shallow.”) Was Ayer now to be remembered as having buckled—as Voltaire had—on the threshold of St. Peter’s pearly gate? No. Despite the river, the light and the rude, dismissive, Masters of the Universe, the experience had turned him into “a born-again atheist,” he maintained, reaffirming his conviction that God was a barbarous relic, the afterlife a fairy tale.

That was in public. Privately, and secretly, the story is more intriguing. On the day of that first “death” (the second and final one occurred eleven months later), Dr. George returned to Ayer’s bedside. “I came back to talk to him later that evening,” he told Cash. “Very discreetly, I asked him, as a philosopher, what was it like to have had a near-death experience? He suddenly looked rather sheepish. Then he said, ‘I saw a Divine Being. I’m afraid I’m going to have to revise all my various books and opinions.’

“He clearly said ‘Divine Being,’” said Dr. George. “He was confiding in me, and I think he was slightly embarrassed because it was unsettling for him as an atheist. He spoke in a very confidential manner. I think he felt he had come face to face with God, or his maker, or what one might say was God.

“Later, when I read his article, I was surprised to see he had left out all mention of it. I was simply amused. I wasn’t very familiar with his philosophy at the time of the incident, so the significance wasn’t immediately obvious.”

(Ayer never wrote or spoke of this conversation with the doctor who saved his life—not to his wife, nor to Nicholas his adult son. It may be that he had no recollection of it. When it came to light as result of Dr. George’s contacting William Cash, both my mother-in-law and Nicholas were skeptical. Why, though, would one doubt the word of an upstanding and seemingly discreet senior consultant physician? I have no reason to disbelieve him.)

When Ayer was released by his doctors a month later, friends and family did notice that he’d changed.

“He became so much nicer after he died,” was the mordant way my mother-in-law, Dee Wells, put it to Cash. “He was not nearly so boastful. He took an interest in other people.”

What she also noticed is that as his life ebbed away, Ayer began spending a great deal of time with Father Frederick Copleston, his former opponent in the BBC debate. Until then they’d never been particularly close, though Ayer had grudging respect for Copleston’s muscular mind. (The erudite Jesuit had taken on Bertrand Russell on the BBC a year before arguing with Ayer, to defend St. Thomas Aquinas’ five metaphysical proofs of god’s existence, not a position guaranteed to endear him to many modern rationalists). Nevertheless, in the last year of his life, Ayer spent many hours in Copleston’s company, talking and arguing about who knows what. The must have made an odd couple seated together in the darkest recesses of London’s Garrick Club. The Catholic divine even graced Ayer’s scrupulously secular cremation.

“In the end, he was Freddie’s closest friend,” said Dee. “It was quite extraordinary.”

http://www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/roundtable/an-atheist-meets-the-masters-of-the-universe.php

“… everything just disappeared. All the pain was gone, the fear was gone. And I was like being in a big void, and this voice was in me. It was a voice like your grandfather’s or father’s or favourite uncle’s — somebody who cared for you very much. It was a male voice. The voice said: “You don’t die, Glenn.” I remember saying I don’t understand. And the voice said: “You don’t die, you continue.” And I said I still don’t understand.

I was conscious of being in a big void, floating. I wasn’t conscious of being in a body or anything. And far off in a distance was a very pinpoint of bright light, and it was like I was flying towards it through space. And it got rapidly larger, and as I got closer to it, it became a huge burst of light. It was brilliant, just brilliant – blue, white, sparkling. And it filled up my entire vision… it was almost like I was going into it.

Just was it filled my vision and I was very close to it, I stopped and it opened up. It’s at this point that it becomes very hard to try to tell what happened. It’s like seeing a video movie where you see ten thousand images in a spilt second. I was shown reason why I didn’t have to fear dying and I understood why you do not die.”

Brymer is convinced he had encountered God and was deeply moved. From then on, he felt a powerful love for all around him – from people to trees.

Remarkably, through many centuries, thousands have reported strikingly similar experiences. Key commonalities include having

“a sense of being outside one’s physical body, sometimes perceiving it from an outside position; a sense of movement through darkness or a tunnel; intense emotions;  heightened perceptions; experiencing a great light or darkness; perceiving a spiritual realm, which may include vividly memorable landscapes; encounters with deceased loved ones, spiritual beings and/or religious figures; knowledge of the nature of the universe; a life review; a sense of oneness and interconnectedness; a border of no return; a sense of having knowledge of the future; messages regarding life’s purpose.” (from: International Association for Near-Death Studies)

Have these people glimpsed a profound reality that most are blind to?

While many who testify appear sincere and credible, might it be that they were merely caught in an illusion generated by their brains? Some scientists think so – they believe such experiences are hallucinations caused by severe stresses to the brain. Indeed, there might always be at least a lingering suspicion that we don’t know the brain well enough to conclude otherwise.

But couldn’t we draw a parallel with another collection of experiences? Consider how many of us make strikingly similar reports about what we have come to term ‘the physical universe’. We all claim to see a sky, other people, buildings and the like. But might all these be mere hallucinations caused by our brains? After all, our suspicions aren’t eliminated by there being a common core to a vast range of experiences.

A seminar is effective to the extent that it tells me what I don’t know but should know, yet would find it hard to know, in a manner that makes me want to know. Alas, many seminars make very little positive difference and really ought not be permitted to exist (assuming others think similarly of it). To be clear, my complaint is not:

(A) That they are too theoretical. Theories account for phenomena and unless the trainer explains the wrong theories, they help us understand why things are the way they are. I suspect most who lodge this popular complain don’t get what a theory is. The clearest indicator is when they mutter: “Theory is not truth; we all know that.”

(B) That there are too few examples. Examples are typically thrown in to bring the abstract to life. In my experience, trainers usually provide examples with almost religious fervour.

My lament is that trainers don’t appear worried enough that they can be easily out of jobs if people are prepared to be less efficient in learning. Most of what a trainer teaches can be learnt by reading a good book, or through experience. But an effective trainer speeds up the learning significantly in at least 3 ways:

(1) They provide you all the relevant empirical information which you seek, and even those you do not seek but should. (As for the non-empirical, a good trainer can reveal insights which might otherwise entirely elude you.) Typically, their research involves collecting such data, or being aware of it. It is usually very labourious for non-specialists to find these things out and they aren’t obvious enough to be grasped without rigourous study.  It is not quite necessary to invest time to hear someone tell you that students’ attention increase when the classes are interactive, that 21st century folks need to be creative and that adults are most interested in learning subjects that have immediate relevance to their job or personal life. You can’t get paid to say these things, professor.

(2) They provide expert feedback. For instance, a trainer can coach you in acquiring a skill though immediate feedback specific to your wondrous performance. Basically tell you stuff which a book can’t and your friend can but shouldn’t (when not qualified).

(3) Infect you with passion. Of course passion can be generated in other ways, but someone with the related skills, experience and disposition is in a great position to light one’s fire.

If you’re planning to attend a seminar, I strongly suggest having a backup plan to spend your time gainfully should the seminar be poor and you can’t simply leave. A small stock of intellectual puzzles should always be kept in one’s mind for occasions like these.

“to know whether things really are as they seem to be, we must have a procedure for distinguishing appearances that are true from appearances that are false.  But to know whether our procedure is a good procedure, we have to know whether it really succeeds in distinguishing appearances that are true from appearances that are false.  And we cannot know whether it does really succeed unless we already know which appearances are true and which ones are false.  And so we are caught in a circle.” How do we escape the circle?

From The Problem of Criterion, by Roderick Chisholm.

By the way, Chisholm is not that terrible creature – he merely tells of that riddle. Here is a picture of Chisholm describing the horrific creature to a mortified student.

Put another way, the quest to understand knowledge goes through 2 questions:

(1) What do we know?

(2) What is the criterion for determining when we know something?

It seems we cannot answer (1) unless we first have the answer to (2). After all, how can you tell if you truly know something without first having the proper criterion to determine that? Yet it seems (2) cannot be answered without (1). How should we know if the criterion is the right one unless we can show that it truly separates what we know and what we don’t? But that requires us to know what we know.

– Max Scheler

IN THIS age of a new Opec – the Organisation of Politically Engaged Celebrities – George Clooney hires satellites to monitor Sudanese troop movements during a referendum on partition; Daniel Craig, Kate Winslet and Paul McCartney lead successful campaigns to remove foie gras from high-end department stores; Angelina Jolie is a United Nations goodwill ambassador.

Now, into this ‘celebocracy’ steps British uber chef Gordon Ramsay campaigning to save the world’s shark population from ending up as soup. His recent TV special ‘Shark Bait’ investigated finning, the method used to source the key ingredient for the dish. During finning, a shark’s fins are removed after it is caught but often while the fish is still alive. The carcass, which is worth a fraction of the value of the fins, is then discarded at sea.

In his infamous foul-mouthed style but acting as a moral caped crusader, Ramsay and his film crew barge unannounced into shops in London’s Chinatown trying to find the perfectly legal fins as though on the trail of contraband.

He quizzes Costa Rican dock workers unloading fish, demanding to know the location of the source of harvested fins. He interrogates restaurant diners as to their ethics over eating such ‘beautiful creatures’. One wonders how long a journalist would last in one of Ramsay’s restaurants if they asked his customers to justify what they had on their plates.

Ramsay also visits Imperial, a high-end restaurant in Taiwan, tasting shark’s fin soup for the first time. Clearly believing that his Western pallet is the universal arbiter of good taste, he declares: ‘It’s really bizarre…it actually tastes of nothing.’

Food is a matter of personal taste, and Ramsay can have his opinion. I tasted shark’s fin soup once, and that will be the only time. However, members of this new Opec use their status to do more than opine. They reduce complex issues to black and white morality tales and demand immediate action to support their causes.

Shark’s fin soup is supposedly a delicacy that was traditionally reserved for the wealthy on special occasions and it has been part of Chinese culture for centuries. For years, only rich Chinese – mostly in Hong Kong, Taiwan and Singapore – consumed it. However, China has seen a dramatic rises in standards of living in recent decades, especially among the middle classes. This has put shark’s fin soup within touch of many more people. To satisfy this demand, fishermen traverse the oceans in search of sharks.

Space is limited on fishing vessels. Fins can sell for US$700 (S$890) per kg, 70 times the value of a kilo of tuna. The bodies of sharks are bulky and worth almost nothing as there is little or no demand for the meat. Finning is also carried out when sharks are caught as ‘by catch’ when fishing for tuna and swordfish.

Conservationists believe finning is exacerbating a crisis in the global shark populations. Ramsay claims ‘sharks will be extinct by the end of the century’.

There are over 400 species of shark. To claim they are on the verge of extinction is headline grabbing, but an inaccurate generalisation, equivalent to claiming that all fish are endangered. As with the treatment of geese in the production of foie gras, exaggeration is common place for those who cannot tolerate the cultural habits of others.

The UN Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wildlife Fauna and Flora (Cites) lists only three shark species whose consumption is subject to regulation – the great white, basking and whale shark. Dr Giam Choo Hoo, the longest-serving member of Cites, has said: ‘The perception that it is common practice to kill sharks for only their fins – and to cut them off whilst the sharks are still alive – is wrong… The vast majority of fins in the market are taken from sharks after their death.’

Predictably, Ramsay’s show led to an explosion of chatter on the Internet. Culinary culture warriors condemned Chinese food traditions and bemoaned the rapid economic growth that means more members of the middle class can afford this luxury dish. Online petitions against finning have been launched. There are plans to organise protests in London’s Chinatown during Chinese New Year.

Ramsay has drawn vehement criticism from animal rights activists for hypocrisy: ‘persuading’ restaurants not to sell shark’s fin soup, while his restaurants continue to serve an endangered eel and foie gras – whose production requires geese to be force-fed to enlarge their livers. A case of the pot calling the kettle black?

Finning may be uncomfortable to watch, but is the production of foie gras any different? Even if one doesn’t like the taste or idea of shark’s fin soup, what’s at stake is the individual’s right to choose what to eat within the confines of the law, regardless of what some celebrities may believe or espouse.

The writer is a former senior project manager at Understanding Animal Research, a London-based non-profit organisation.

Comment:

re: “what’s at stake is the individual’s right to choose what to eat within the confines of the law, regardless of what some celebrities may believe or espouse.”

>>> This conclusion leaves me uncomfortable. In this context, do we indeed have a such a right? We may ignore the part about celebrities. But the moral acceptability of eating sharks’ fin is not fundamentally about the confines of legal rules: we do not acquire a moral right to do some thing just because that thing is legal.

For instance, if I’m living in South Africa in the 1970s during its apartheid era, and someone argues it is wrong for me to sell Zulus as slaves, it wouldn’t be a good reply to say “what’s at stake is the individual’s right to choose what to sell within the confines of the law”. It may be true that the South African law permits the sale of Zulus as slaves, but the dispute would be about the moral acceptability of that very law.

Back to Leech’s point, I would have the right to eat sharks’ fin only if that is morally acceptable. That’s where the important issue lies – and we cannot presume we’ve such a right.

– CS Lewis, Studies in Words

We could obtain a map of the universe and show we are not equidistant from all sides. That wouldn’t be terribly compelling though: when we speak of ourselves not being the center of the universe, we do not mean we lack the honour of being the geographical center. Instead, we’re admitting we aren’t the sole reason for which the universe exists. In even plainer (though perhaps less precise) terms, we aren’t the most important feature of the universe.

If so, then our geographical location does not matter in itself. The most important person in the room need not be the one in the middle. Unless we have prior reason to expect her to be there, why think she would be? Hold all else constant and consider if a person becomes more important just by being placed in the center. Back to the universe: why think the geographical center is where the most important resides? I don’t see any physical or philosophical reason.

The same seems true of size. All else being equal, the biggest entity in the room need not be the most important. Similarly, the most important entity in the room does not shed any importance just because we expand the room by a million times. As before, we need some prior reason to think size matters.

Thus, though the speaker rightly observes we are but a tiny part of the universe, she needs to say more how being tiny translates to being not the most important. In so addressing the students, the speaker very likely has something in mind to fill that gap. Unknown to some students, she has set them homework in the first minutes of the school year.

All said, we do know very well the world doesn’t revolve around us!

“There are different food traditions within Japan and around the world. It is important to respect and understand regional food cultures, which are based on traditions with long histories.”

The mayor could give the West a taste of their own medicine by filming and screening fox hunts and bull-fights. But nothing would be as effective as making a show of factory farming. (Oh, actually that’s already been done: Earthlings.) That would certainly hammer in whatever need there is to respect and understand longstanding food cultures.

But all these would merely demonstrate the prevalence of food cultures built upon immense and needless animal suffering.

In his essay “Hypocrisy on the High Seas”, Peter Singer considers the ‘don’t impose your culture on mine’ response to the ethical case against Japan’s whaling:

Japan says that it wants the discussion of whaling to be carried out calmly, on the basis of scientific evidence, without “emotion.” The Japanese think that humpback whale numbers have increased sufficiently for the killing of 50 to pose no danger to the species. On this narrow point, they might be right. But no amount of science can tell us whether or not to kill whales.

Indeed, Japan’s desire to continue to kill whales is no less motivated by “emotion” than environmentalists’ opposition to it. Eating whales is not necessary for the health or better nutrition of the Japanese. It is a tradition that they wish to continue, presumably because some Japanese are emotionally attached to it.

The Japanese do have one argument that is not so easily dismissed. They claim that Western countries object to whaling because, for them, whales are a special kind of animal, as cows are for Hindus. Western nations, the Japanese say, should not try to impose their cultural beliefs on them.

An interesting response and insightful essay.

[Pic credit: Koji Sasahara/AP]

“The next Monday, when the fathers were back at work, we kids were playing in a field. One kid said to me, ‘See that bird? What kind of bird is that?’ I said, ‘I haven’t the slightest idea what kind of bird it is.’ He says, ‘It’s a brown-throated thrush. Your father does not teach you anything!’

But it was the opposite. He had already taught me: ‘See that bird? It’s a Spencer’s Warbler.’ (I knew he didn’t know the real name.) ‘Well, in Italian it’s Chutto Lapittida. In Portugese, it is Bom da Peida. In Chinese, it’s Chung-long-tah, and in Japanese it is Katano Tekeda. You can know the name of that bird in all the languages of the world, but when you are finished, you’ll know absolutely nothing whatsoever about the world. You’ll know about the humans in different places, and what they call the bird. So let’s look at the bird and see what it’s doing – that’s what counts.’ I learned very early on from my father the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something.”

Feynman explained: “My father understood that knowledge was different from the names of things. The names of things are only a convention that human beings use to discuss things, and of course that is important. But when he would tell me about looking at birds, it was not just to look at them but to see what they were doing. As an example, he said, ‘Look, see the birds walking around there. They seem to be packing their feathers all the time. Why do you think they do that?” And I said, ‘Well, I don’t know.’ I was a kid of ten or eleven.

I said, ‘Maybe their feathers get ruffled when they are flying.’ I made an attempt at an explanation. He then said, “If that were the case, they would peck more when they just landed after they flew. And after they got straightened out, walking around, they wouldn’t peck so much. So let’s see, watch those that land and then see how long they go on pecking and whether or not they peck in their feathers at the same rate.’ After a while we discovered that indeed they did. So it was not due to a need to straighten out their feathers just after flying. You see, he had made a little experiment, learning how to observe and discuss”

– The Beat of a Different Drum: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman, p. 4.