Sharon Hewitt Rawlette

Robert Nozick’s experience machine thought experiment is often considered a decisive refutation of hedonism. I argue that the conclusions we draw from Nozick’s thought experiment ought to be informed by considerations concerning the operation of our intuitions about value. First, I argue that, in order to show that practical hedonistic reasons are not causing our negative reaction to the experience machine, we must not merely stipulate their irrelevance (since our intuitions are not always responsive to stipulation) but fill in the concrete details that would make them irrelevant. If we do this, we may see our feelings about the experience machine become less negative. Second, I argue that, even if our feelings about the experience machine do not perfectly track hedonistic reasons, there are various reasons to doubt the reliability of our anti-hedonistic intuitions. And finally, I argue that, since in the actual world seeing certain things besides pleasure as ends in themselves may best serve hedonistic ends, hedonism may justify our taking these other things to be intrinsically valuable, thus again making the existence of our seemingly anti-hedonistic intuitions far from straightforward evidence for the falsity of hedonism.

In the last 150 years, a number of scientists, medical doctors, and other highly qualified investigators have diligently collected a wide variety of data pointing to the continuing existence of some portion of human consciousness after death of the body. This essay lays out the most pertinent elements of that accumulated data and argues that they strongly support the hypothesis of survival of human consciousness after permanent bodily death. Part I lays out the third-person evidence for survival, from phenomena such as apparitions of the dead, dreams, mediumship, and poltergeists. Part II looks at first-person evidence, not only from people who have had near-death experiences but also from those who remember living previous lives in other bodies and/or being conscious in a disembodied state between lives. The essay argues that the extensive cross-validation between the third-person and first-person evidence cripples the strongest skeptical arguments that have been brought against each category considered alone and makes the hypothesis of survival of permanent bodily death the best explanation for the evidence considered as a whole.

Many people are persuaded of the existence of psychic phenomena by their own spontaneous experiences of apparent psi. However, without some measure of how often psi-suggestive experiences can be expected to occur purely by chance, it is difficult to determine the epistemic import of these cases. While methods have been developed to find statistical baselines for some spontaneous cases—specifically, ones in which cases of interest can be identified before any verification of their supposedly psychic content has been obtained—many spontaneous cases of purported psi are not identified as such until after some degree of spontaneous verification occurs: for instance, when a person notices a striking correspondence between their mental state and another event to which that state appears to have no physical causal connection. This paper develops a method applicable to these cases—the time-slice method for calculating baseline correspondence potential—and thus enables individuals to determine the epistemic import of their own spontaneous psi experiences.

Winner of New York University's Dean's Outstanding Dissertation Award

This revolutionary treatise starts from one fundamental premise: that our phenomenal consciousness includes direct experience of value. For too long, ethical theorists have looked for value in external states of affairs or reduced value to a projection of the mind onto these same external states of affairs. The result, unsurprisingly, is widespread antirealism about ethics.

In this book, Sharon Hewitt Rawlette turns our metaethical gaze inward and dares us to consider that value, rather than being something “out there,” is a quality woven into the very fabric of our conscious experience, in a highly objective way. On this view, our experiences of pleasure and pain, joy and sorrow, ecstasy and despair are not signs of value or disvalue. They are instantiations of value and disvalue. When we feel pleasure, we are feeling intrinsic goodness itself. And it is from such feelings, argues Rawlette, that we derive the basic content of our normative concepts—that we understand what it means for something to be intrinsically good or bad.

Rawlette thus defends a version of analytic descriptivism. And argues that this view, unlike previous theories of moral realism, has the resources to explain where our concept of intrinsic value comes from and how we know when it objectively applies, as well as why we sometimes make mistakes in applying it. She defends this view against G. E. Moore’s Open Question Argument as well as shows how these basic facts about intrinsic value can ground facts about instrumental value and value “all things considered.” Ultimately, her view offers us the possibility of a robust metaphysical and epistemological justification for many of our strongest moral convictions.

Every now and then, we all have experiences that seem too meaningful to be chance but that we can't explain in any normal way. Now, philosopher Sharon Hewitt Rawlette tackles some of the hardest questions surrounding such "coincidences." For instance,

--How can we tell whether a coincidence is too improbable to be just chance?
--Is there any hard evidence that coincidences convey genuine messages from God or our deceased loved ones?
--Do ordinary people have the psychic ability to create coincidences, for themselves or others?
--Why do coincidences sometimes harm or deceive?

Rawlette brings together an immense body of research and personal experience that clearly points to a meaningful reality beyond the bounds of current science and at the same time demonstrates both the promise and peril of interpreting coincidences as signs from above. Rigorously paradigm-shattering, this volume will leave skeptics and believers alike ruminating for years to come.

While Sky Nelson-Isaacs is not the first physicist to be interested in the phenomenon of synchronicity-others who come to mind are Wolfgang Pauli, F. David Peat, and Walter von Lucadou-Nelson-Isaacs' new book Living in Flow is notable for its engaging and highly readable presentation of his particular theory about the relationship between quantum physics and synchronicity. Like the great idealist philosophers before him, Nelson-Isaacs takes mind to be the primary reality, and his theory explains how the contents of our minds-in particular the qualities of the experiences we anticipate having-shape the evolution of the physical world through the process of "meaningful history selection." Nelson-Isaacs also links his theory to psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's concept of flow, positing that we are best able to shape the evolution of the world in accordance with our desires when we are in the state of flow. Nelson-Isaacs begins his book with the psychological component of his theory and works up to the quantum physics near the end, but I'm going to take the opposite approach here. Those who have some familiarity with the basic ideas of quantum theory will be aware that the mathematics of quantum mechanics provides us with information about a physical system in the form of a collection of superposed states and their associated probability amplitudes. However, it has long been a matter of debate what causes one of these superposed states to become the state we ultimately observe. Many theories have been proposed, but none has been universally agreed upon. Nelson-Isaacs takes the position that it is the act of observation by a mind that causes a physical system to assume a determinate state (at least with regard to that observer). Furthermore, he hypothesizes that the qualitative experience anticipated by the observing mind influences which state becomes actual, with states more conducive to the anticipated qualitative experience being more likely to occur.