Susan Blackmore, and the Corroded Human Mind

I sometimes come across a snippet about, or even by, Dr. Susan Blackmore. She seems easily discounted in the overall scheme of the pursuit of rational thought. So I haven't, until now, tried to find out anything about her. But over at Richard Dawkins' blog I came across a particularly aggressive attack by her that caused me to wonder just who she is. So I googled her.

Blackmore has a website that is revealing. Aside from her overt attempt to appear bizarre with hair of miscellaneous crayon colors and random lengths, her statements against irrationality (in her view) are put to rout by the irrationality of her approach to rationality: to wit, drugs; illegal drugs of all types, taken to make her more "rational". She explains the payoff of using drugs to produce science:

"For both individuals and society, all drugs present a dilemma: are they worth the risks to health, wealth and sanity? For me, the pay-off is the scientific inspiration, the wealth of new ideas and the spur to inner exploration. But if I end up a mental and physical wreck, I hereby give you my permission to gloat and say: 'I told you so'."

Blackmore's list of "inspirational drugs" is all inclusive, from smoking dope which she admits she needs, to LSD, psilocybin, DMT or mescaline, and magic mushrooms she grew herself, to the hard stuff such as cocaine, and miscellaneous hits such as nitrous oxide, MDMA ("ecstasy") and ketamine ("Special K"). Science is just a mental enhancement, and so are drugs.

Blackmore apparently believes that because the hallucinations that she induced with the drugs turned out not to be real, that Materialism is proven. In her view, an out of body experience that doesn't produce a factual account of where her children really were during her hallucination - despite the impression that she had visited them while her drugged mind seemed to float off looking for them - proves that OBE's do not exist, categorically. So really, according to Blackmore, the mind is inseparable from the brain, and she proved it.

The reason I looked up Blackmore in the first place was due to a singular statement she made that was quoted on Dawkins' site:

"Faith is corrosive to the human mind. If someone genuinely believes that it is right to believe things without reason or evidence then they are open to every kind of dogma, whim, coercion, or dangerous infectious idea that's around.

Blackmore brags about turning students from their "faith" while dissembling about a students right to believe (something? anything?).

For Blackmore it appears that not only is evidence necessary for non-corrosive thought, it is also possible for evidence to include warped-mind-nuggets, induced in states of non-reality, with rationality held in chemical suspension. It is hard not to wonder if Blackmore's brain has not precipitated into a state of mental sludge, similar to the product of the chemistry set I had as a child which produced such a meaningless mass of (probably toxic) inertness when all the chemicals were mixed into a test tube at the same time?

But Blackmore's mental state is not questioned by the Atheist mass at Dawkins' site, probably because she is firmly "one of them", saying all the things that Atheists say, using words like "evidence" with no appearance of understanding the nuances which make up evidence. Blackmore could be a poster child for the prevention of illegal drugs, and also for the prevention of the pretense of rationality. It is difficult to respect religions and faith, she says, because of the lack of evidence. Presumably she means such addled schools of thought that include logic, mathematics, theoretical physics, and of course philosophical Naturalism / Materialism and their faithful adherents who believe without tangible proof. But who really knows what she means, or what stuff she was on when she wrote that stuff. And does it really matter? I think not. At least to a non-addled pursuit of rationality.