I’m going to go against the grain here and say that I support (at least in principle, not with $ yet, except for my Times subscription) a paywall for a single-source, well-researched story.
I don’t know whether this is such an article, but if a magazine agrees to let a journalist or three work for a week or more researching and writing a good story, why shouldn’t we support it? We know perfectly well that the little ads on the side (that most of us block) aren’t going to pay for that.
The problem is not having a trivial way to make micropayments. It should be as easy or easier than buying an app for your phone. I should just be able to click on a little link that pops up my Google Wallet or whatever and lets me click “accept.”
With such a trivial payment system, they could make the price half as much and many more people would pay 49¢ or 99¢ for a good article.
I understand, Maggie… I was actually replying to binary girl’s comment. I would actually love to be able to read the article, but not for $1.99… maybe I’ll go see if my Doctor’s waiting room has the magazine.
Firefox + NoScript + AdBlock = no paywall seen at all
I really appreciate your link as it answered some questions about brain science that I had.
Alexander’s experience reminded me of something else I read recently which describes PTSD for ICU patients who experienced hallucinations and delirium: Nightmares After the I.C.U. - The New York Times What would he say to someone who experienced a similar situation medically but described going to hell and back?
Isn’t it standard dogma among the religious right to believe that most people are going to hell and only a few are truly saved? Wouldn’t they take such hellish hallucinations as equally supportive of their supernatural world view?
I bypassed the paywall by loopbacking the paywall hostsite in my /etc/hosts file, viz:
127.0.0.1 buy.tinypass.com
127.0.0.1 tinypass.com
Then reloading the page. This trick work on all OSes. (I can’t remember where Windows keeps its ‘hosts’ file, but it does have one, & it works the same as other OSes.)
In a way. Any kind of Woo has some positive psychological effects. Otherwise it wouldn’t appeal to people and become so popular. It gives people hope, usually by reinforcing their belief system or invoking some magical entities, forces or realms that rejects the depressing notions such as “death is the end of an organism”, “the universe is harsh and uncaring”, “Humans, like all other life forms, are insignificant in the grand scheme of things”.
However, all that good hope comes with a lot of emotional baggage that has, in turn, social effects: Should you pay for the services of Homeopathy, and when you’re emotionally convinced it’s working, push for government support that uses tax-payers’ money? Should you stand by as your relatives, after gaining a little bit of hope by going to psychics (e.g. Sylvia Browne) that continue to prey on their weakness and increase their dependence by inviting them to more and more costly sessions, and do nothing like suggesting they seek “real” professional help?
As you said, this book helps. Perhaps there are other books (and people) that can help, and be less damaging to the individuals, and to society.
The Sam Harris piece is excellent, and makes an important point that doesn’t appear to be in the Esquire piece, namely that there is no requirement that Dr. Alexander’s memories of his cognitive state (however achieved) correspond to his actual cognitive state. Memory is a tricky business, and one’s self-assessment of the passage of time can just be wrong.
So, a possible scenario is, he has his bacterial meningitis, he’s in a coma at the hospital, and his brain actually is quiescent for hours (although, as Harris points out, there’s no instrumentation on even this basic part of his claim), and then as he comes out, he has a brief but powerful psychologically transformative experience, which occurs over a few minutes, but feels like it must have taken hours. Projecting backwards, and accepting his subjective time-line as accurate, he then incorrectly concludes that it was his quiescent brain that was having the transformative experience, and from that, moves on to his core claim, which is that his consciousness must have transcended his material brain in order for this to be true.
But if either his brain was actually not quiescent, or if there is a mismatch between the experiential and physical time-lines, then his experience could still have been entirely material.
