Weekly Picks – April 7, 2024

Credits (clockwise from bottom left): Gaia Moments/ Alamy; Patrick Meinhardt for The Intercept; Paul Sahre; Gary Hershorn/ Getty; The Canadian Press/ Jeff McIntosh; Marc Dozier/ The Image Bank via Getty Images

This week’s collection:

The first article also reminded me of a debate on NDEs that took place a decade ago. I fall firmly into the “there is no life after death” camp. Our brain’s complex mechanisms are capable of creating plenty of intricate and maddening illusions, some of which we depend on to cohesively structure a picture of reality around us, while plenty can lead us astray. In case the debate is of interest:

And finally, a note to all that you can watch the upcoming solar eclipse from anywhere in the world, in case you are not within the path of totality.

Introductory excerpts quoted below. For full text (and context) or video, please view the original piece.

1. The new science of death: ‘There’s something happening in the brain that makes no sense’

“For several years, Jimo Borjigin, a professor of neurology at the University of Michigan, had been troubled by the question of what happens to us when we die. She had read about the near-death experiences of certain cardiac-arrest survivors who had undergone extraordinary psychic journeys before being resuscitated. Sometimes, these people reported travelling outside of their bodies towards overwhelming sources of light where they were greeted by dead relatives. Others spoke of coming to a new understanding of their lives, or encountering beings of profound goodness. Borjigin didn’t believe the content of those stories was true – she didn’t think the souls of dying people actually travelled to an afterworld – but she suspected something very real was happening in those patients’ brains. In her own laboratory, she had discovered that rats undergo a dramatic storm of many neurotransmitters, including serotonin and dopamine, after their hearts stop and their brains lose oxygen. She wondered if humans’ near-death experiences might spring from a similar phenomenon, and if it was occurring even in people who couldn’t be revived.

Dying seemed like such an important area of research – we all do it, after all – that Borjigin assumed other scientists had already developed a thorough understanding of what happens to the brain in the process of death. But when she looked at the scientific literature, she found little enlightenment. “To die is such an essential part of life,” she told me recently. “But we knew almost nothing about the dying brain.” So she decided to go back and figure out what had happened inside the brains of people who died at the University of Michigan neurointensive care unit.

. . .

Since the 1960s, advances in resuscitation had helped to revive thousands of people who might otherwise have died. About 10% or 20% of those people brought with them stories of near-death experiences in which they felt their souls or selves departing from their bodies. A handful of those patients even claimed to witness, from above, doctors’ attempts to resuscitate them. According to several international surveys and studies, one in 10 people claims to have had a near-death experience involving cardiac arrest, or a similar experience in circumstances where they may have come close to death. That’s roughly 800 million souls worldwide who may have dipped a toe in the afterlife.

. . .

For all that science has learned about the workings of life, death remains among the most intractable of mysteries. “At times I have been tempted to believe that the creator has eternally intended this department of nature to remain baffling, to prompt our curiosities and hopes and suspicions all in equal measure,” the philosopher William James wrote in 1909.”

2. Ufologists, Unite!

“The premise that UFO mania resembles a religious movement is nearly as old as the phrase “flying saucer,” which was coined by giddy headline writers to describe the nine shiny circular objects that Kenneth A. Arnold, an amateur pilot, observed flying at outrageous velocities, in echelon formation, above Mount Rainier on the afternoon of June 24, 1947. Hundreds of sightings followed within the year, including one over Roswell, New Mexico, that three decades later, after the original Air Force investigator claimed a cover-up, received enough belated attention to dwarf them all. The mushrooming cultural influence of the great UFO awakening led Carl Jung to argue, in Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies (1959), that UFO mania was displacing traditional belief systems. It fulfilled a primitive human need that organized religion had increasingly left unmet. The UFO was, in Jung’s phrase, a “technological angel,” and green men zapping vaporizers were better suited to modern sensibilities than angels brandishing golden spears. When God exited, aliens beamed in.

. . .

When the Catholic Church considers a candidate for sainthood, it assigns a postulator, a supervisory official licensed by the Vatican, to scrutinize each alleged miracle. The miracle validation process can take years, even decades, due to the extraordinary rigor of the operation. Witnesses are interviewed, medical reports are scrutinized, and independent experts are hired to arbitrate; postulators have rejected purported miracles on the basis of DNA tests. The skepticism is understandable: the Church can’t risk embarrassment.

Pasulka assumes a similar posture. She is not interested in studying the YouTuber who claims to have footage of a UFO from the Galactic Federation of Alpha Centauri; instead she interviews the man who runs the Facebook group debunking UFO hoaxes. She meets hundreds of professional scientists who not only believe in UFOs but actively investigate them: terminally credentialed university professors, biotech CEOs, a former NASA astronaut, and a Silicon Valley venture capitalist with a high-level security clearance. Although their experiences and theories vary, they tend to agree about one fundamental fact: the US government is in possession of alien spaceships and alien corpses.

Very few of them will admit this on the record, however. What emerges from Pasulka’s research is a portrait of a modern-day religious society that, until recently, has been largely concealed from public view: devout believers who, despite the strength of their conviction, refuse to discuss their beliefs openly out of fear of social or professional embarrassment. They are smart enough to know how ridiculous they sound.

. . .

In ufology the appeal to credibility tends to take refuge in scientific metaphor and technological jargon: the more abstract the concept, the less explanation needed…Even pseudoscience is more persuasive than angels.”

3. Our tools shape our selves

“It has become almost impossible to separate the effects of digital technologies from our everyday experiences. Reality is parsed through glowing screens, unending data feeds, biometric feedback loops, digital protheses and expanding networks that link our virtual selves to satellite arrays in geostationary orbit. Wristwatches interpret our physical condition by counting steps and heartbeats. Phones track how we spend our time online, map the geographic location of the places we visit and record our histories in digital archives. Social media platforms forge alliances and create new political possibilities. And vast wireless networks – connecting satellites, drones and ‘smart’ weapons – determine how the wars of our era are being waged. Our experiences of the world are soaked with digital technologies.

But for the French philosopher Bernard Stiegler, one of the earliest and foremost theorists of our digital age, understanding the world requires us to move beyond the standard view of technology. Stiegler believed that technology is not just about the effects of digital tools and the ways that they impact our lives. It is not just about how devices are created and wielded by powerful organisations, nation-states or individuals. Our relationship with technology is about something deeper and more fundamental. It is about technics.

According to Stiegler, technics – the making and use of technology, in the broadest sense – is what makes us human. Our unique way of existing in the world, as distinct from other species, is defined by the experiences and knowledge our tools make possible, whether that is a state-of-the-art brain-computer interface such as Neuralink, or a prehistoric flint axe used to clear a forest. But don’t be mistaken: ‘technics’ is not simply another word for ‘technology’. As Martin Heidegger wrote in his essay ‘The Question Concerning Technology’ (1954), which used the German term Technik instead of Technologie in the original title: the ‘essence of technology is by no means anything technological.’ This aligns with the history of the word: the etymology of ‘technics’ leads us back to something like the ancient Greek term for art – technē. The essence of technology, then, is not found in a device, such as the one you are using to read this essay. It is an open-ended creative process, a relationship with our tools and the world.”

4. “It’s Dirty Water”: Rio Tinto’s Madagascar Mine Promised Prosperity. It Tainted a Community.

“Bloated and distorted carcasses shimmered on the surface of Lake Ambavarano in southeastern Madagascar. Forty-year-old fisherman Olivier Randimbisoa lost count as they floated by.

“I know what it’s like to see a dead fish that’s been speared,” he said. “I’d never seen anything like this.”

A series of cyclones and storms had battered the region in early 2022, and in the days afterward, the air was still and calm. As Randimbisoa paddled around in his dugout canoe, he recognized the different species and called them by their local names: fiambazaha, saroa, vily, and malemiloha. Overnight, the fish he made his living from, the fish his wife and children ate, the fish that supported the entire lakeside community, were nearly gone.

“It was scary, because we have been eating fish from this lake for so long. We have fed our families, and now it’s polluted,” said Randimbisoa. “We have told our families not to go to the lake.”

Randimbisoa has a theory about what killed the fish. “It’s dirty water from the factory of QMM,” he said.

Lake Ambavarano, where Randimbisoa works, is connected to two other lakes — Besaroy and Lanirano — through a series of narrow waterways. The lakes are adjacent to QIT Madagascar Minerals, or QMM: a mine in Madagascar that’s 80 percent owned by the Anglo-Australian mining and metals behemoth Rio Tinto, and 20 percent by the government of Madagascar. The mine extracts ilmenite, a major source of titanium dioxide, which is mainly used as a white pigment in products like paints, plastics, and paper. QMM also produces monazite, a mineral that contains highly sought-after rare-earth elements used to produce the magnets in electric vehicles and wind turbines.

. . .

Rio Tinto, which has over 52,000 employees and saw net earnings of $12.4 billion in 2022, has a troubled track record in Madagascar. Local residents, civil society groups, and media outlets have accused the company of damaging the endangered forest, threatening rare endemic species, forcing villagers off their land without proper compensation, destroying fishers’ livelihoods, and failing to honor its promises to employ local people. Communities have been protesting the mine almost since its inception.

. . .

QMM started exploring for heavy mineral sands around Anôsy, Madagascar, along the southeastern coast in 1986. The region is home to about 800,000 people, with more than 90 percent of rural residents living on less than $1.90 per day.

The area where the minerals were discovered is a unique ecosystem, a littoral forest occurring in the sandy substrates close to the Indian Ocean. Madagascar once had a continuous 1,600-kilometer band of littoral forest along its eastern coastline. Today, it’s estimated that only a fraction of that forest remains intact, like patches of hair on a thinning beard. New species are being discovered there all the time, but many of them are already endangered due to habitat destruction. Yet the region, with its famous lemurs and a concentrated diversity of plant species, remains one of the most important and fragile ecosystems in the world.

It is also one of the most beautiful places in the world. Towering, forested mountains cast shadows on sparkling freshwater lakes that flow through tranquil sandy beaches into the abundant waters of the Indian Ocean. Tiny dugout canoes manned by the region’s fishers dot the waterways. Women wearing mud masks to protect their skin from the sun bake fresh bread that rivals the baguettes in Parisian boulangeries. On clear evenings, the sunsets splash a palette of warm colors into the sky.”

5. The Contested World of Classifying Life on Earth

“For centuries, taxonomists have cataloged every living thing they could find. Expeditions have traveled the globe, searching for unknown species; museums and universities maintain entire departments devoted to classifying specimens.

But there exists no single, unified list of all the species on Earth.

The lack of consistency in taxonomy has always bothered Stephen Garnett. Every 10 years, the conservation biologist has assessed the extinction risk of Australian birds. But he repeatedly ran into inconsistencies between lists: A single species might have multiple scientific names, or, conversely, a single name could refer to different organisms. The problem, he found, extended far beyond birds. Taxonomists in different fields didn’t define species the same way, and classification systems were largely inefficient and poorly governed.

Eventually, Garnett spoke with an ornithologist friend, Les Christidis, who shared his concerns. “And then we wrote this thing in Nature that got people stirred up,” recalled Garnett.

Their 2017 commentary in the prestigious science journal was inflammatory from the opening salvo: “For a discipline aiming to impose order on the natural world, taxonomy (the classification of complex organisms) is remarkably anarchic.”

Garnett and Christidis proposed tidying things by creating a universal set of rules for classifying all life on Earth and assigning governance to a single organization: the International Union of Biological Sciences, a nonprofit comprising international science associations.

The notion of imposed authority enraged taxonomists, a fastidious bunch who even Garnett concedes are the opposite of anarchists. In the most prominent rebuttal, 184 people from the global taxonomy community warned in the journal PLOS Biology that the proposed bureaucracy was not only unnecessary and counterproductive, but also a threat to scientific freedom. Such governance would result in “science losing its soul,” wrote a smaller group of Brazilian and French scientists in another journal, raising the specter of Joseph Stalin and his political rejection of established science in the early 20th century.”

6. Fossil fuel subsidies cost Canadians a lot more money than the carbon tax

“The federal carbon tax increase is now in effect, and will raise gas prices by three cents per litre in most Canadian provinces.

The hike prompted complaints from seven premiers and a recent parliamentary showdown, culminating in a failed vote of non-confidence in the Liberal government.

Yet this ongoing debate overlooks a far costlier carbon tax: fossil fuel subsidies.

Every year, federal and provincial governments use taxpayer dollars to provide financial supports or tax breaks to fossil fuel companies.

These subsidies cost Canadian taxpayers at least $6.03 billion, or roughly $214 per taxpayer every year. And unlike the federal carbon tax, Canadians don’t get a rebate on this tax.

. . .

A billion here, a few billion there — all these subsidies add up to a big cost to Canadian taxpayers. While oil and gas companies boast about record profits, Canadian taxpayers are footing the bill.

These explicit fossil fuel subsidies are only the tip of a growing iceberg.

They don’t include the health-care costs of air pollution, which is responsible for five million deaths worldwide every year. They also don’t include the future costs of cleaning abandoned oil wells, unpaid municipal property taxes and other costs abandoned by fossil fuel companies.”