Dr. John Irving Bentley's inexplicable death: A light-blue smoke of unusual odor or somewhat sweet

Dr. John Irving Bentley's inexplicable death: A light-blue smoke of unusual odor or somewhat sweet (Art From www.tate.org.uk

In the small town of Coudersport, Pennsylvania, Don E. Gosnell, a meter reader for the North Penn Gas Company, set out on his accustomed rounds on the morning of December 5, 1966. His first call was on Dr. John Irving Bentley, a 92-year-old retired physician, who was a semi-invalid but still able to get around his house with the aid of a walker. Gosnell opened the doctor's front door, yelled, but received no answer. He proceeded downstairs to the basement to read the meter. There he became aware of a “light-blue smoke of unusual odor ... like that of starting up a new central heating system ... somewhat sweet.”

In the corner of the dirt-floored basement was a pile of fine ash about 14 inches in diameter and about 5 inches high, perhaps enough to fill a bucket. Idly, he kicked and scattered the stuff. He did not notice the hole in the ceiling—an irregular area about 2 1/2 feet wide and 4 feet long, charred around the edges—burned clear through the floorboards above. He read the meter and then went upstairs to look in on the doctor. There the smoke was denser, but Dr. Bentley was nowhere in sight. Don Gosnell stuck his head into the bathroom. He was appalled at the sight that greeted him. The doctor's walker was tilted over the burned hole in the floor, and alongside it was all that remained of Dr. Bentley—his right leg from the knee down, browned but not charred. The shoe was still intact. Gosnell ran out of the house, white as a sheet, yelling at the top of his lungs: “Doctor Bentley burnt up!”

The coroner, John Dec, had too many unanswered questions to determine how the accident could have happened. One theory was that the doctor had set his robe on fire in the living room while striking a match to light his pipe, then used his walker to get to the bathroom for water to put out the flames. (His robe was found in the bathtub next to the drain, singed but not badly burned.) But even if the robe had burst into flames, how could it have generated enough heat to set a body on fire? If the fire had started in the living room, why was there no trace of it? And how was it possible for a body to be consumed so completely with so little else being affected?

The coroner's certificate finally gave “asphyxiation and 90 percent burning” as the cause of Dr. Bentley's basically inexplicable death.

Sources:

I - Francis Hitching, The Mysterious World: An Atlas of the Unexplained, pp. 20 - 21

II - Pursuit, 9: 75 - 79, Fall 1976

#inexplicabledeath #inexplicablecrime #drJohnIrvingBentley #doctorJohnIrvingBentleysinexplicabledeath

A striking coincidence is much like a small drama: The Causal Figment

A striking coincidence is much like a small drama: the participants arrive exactly on cue, wear the right makeup, know their lines, and produce results that are significant or trivial, amusing or, sometimes, awe-inspiring. The problem is that no scriptwriter, no director, no stage manager, and no collusion on the part of the actors are involved in the performance; it unfolds, without reason but with perfect order, as though by magic.

Coincidences are baffling because they seem to represent order arising by chance: they resemble the results of an orderly causal process, but they do not have a causal connection that fits our experience. For example, the beetle that flies into the psychiatrist's consulting room just as a patient is recounting a dream in which such an insect enters her room has no discernible connection with the patient. It could not have known how to enter the room on cue. Furthermore, the patient who dreams of this liberating encounter has no way of knowing that it will occur or any means of ensuring that her response will be the one predicted by the dream.

The problem with coincidences is that they violate our notions of cause and effect. But supposing our notions of causality are wrong?

In 1739 the Scottish philosopher David Hume published A Treatise of Human Nature, an analytical rejection of the commonly established ideas of causation. In philosophical terms, his arguments have never been fully rebutted; in scientific terms, much of what he maintained has been justified.

Since Greek philosophers first turned their attention to causality in the fifth-century b.c., it had been almost universally accepted that everything that has a beginning must be caused by something else. Hume rejected this. On the contrary, he maintained, it is not certain that every object which begins to exist must owe its existence to a cause. To believe, said Hume, that every being must be preceded by a cause is no more valid than believing that because every husband must have a wife, every man must therefore be married.

Hume aimed to show that the traditional starting point for theories of causation is incapable of proof; he was not, of course, trying to prove its reverse or any other position. All we can justly say of causality is that what we take to be a cause always precedes what we take to be its effect, and that there is always continuity between the two. Beyond this, he said, nothing could be claimed, and the view that a necessary connection exists between a cause and its effect is nothing more than a habit of mind.

The Scottish philosopher David Hume

The Scottish philosopher David Hume held that the idea of a causal relationship between two events occurring in sequence is nothing more than a habit of mind.

For example, while watching a game of billiards, we confidently expect that when one ball strikes another, the ball that has been struck will move, and we, therefore, persuade ourselves that there is a connection between the motion of the first ball and the motion of the second—between cause and effect. Such an idea, however, is not based on logic or observation, Hume said. All we observe is that contact—contiguity— occurs; the rest is an assumption. Our expectation that a stationary ball will move in a predictable way when struck by another ball may well be correct in most cases, but this is not a certainty. The momentum and inertia of the two balls must be considered—too little momentum or too much inertia, and the effect will not be what we expect. The materials from which the balls are made must also be taken into account, and so must their soundness—is one of the balls apt to shatter rather than move? We must also consider the shape of the balls, the nature of the surface on which they lie, and the stability of the situation in which the event takes place. Among all these variables and many more, we look in vain for an identifiable principle connecting cause and effect; and since we look in vain for it, we are under no compulsion to assert its existence or to accede to such assertions.

Although Hume's arguments may appear to fly in the face of common sense, they have to some extent been vindicated by 20th-century physics. At the subatomic level, ideas of predictability (which should pertain, at least theoretically, if causal connections could be found or even theoretically established) have been replaced by those of statistical probability.

Established ideas of causality have also come under fire at a macroscopic level, particularly among evolutionary biologists. For example, how can we describe the evolution of the reptilian egg in terms of cause and effect? Evolutionary theory holds that changes in organisms occur as the result of random genetic mutations; if one of these changes confers an advantage that allows the organism to produce more offspring, the change is likely to be inherited by the offspring and may eventually become normal for the species. But when we look at the reptilian egg (or the mammalian eye or any number of other features and organs), we see that numerous events must have occurred simultaneously for the development to succeed. The shell, for instance, had to be impermeable and strong enough to protect the embryo. But unless the embryo had at the same time developed some means of liberating itself from the shell, this durable egg would have become a tomb. In addition, the embryo had to develop a means of absorbing nutrition while in the egg. But unless it had also developed some means of storing its own waste products safely, it would soon have created a poisonous environment.

Each of these developments—the durable shell, egg tooth, and so on—had to arise, according to evolutionary theory, as the result of random mutations. But between the mutations that produced the shell and those that produced the egg tooth there could have been no connection (they arose at random), nor between those concerning nutrition and waste disposal. And if there were no such connections, how was the whole process orchestrated? From this point of view, the reptilian egg must be seen as appearing without causal benefit and as representing the culmination of a series of wildly improbable coincidences.

David Hume was well aware that his view of causality would be hard for people to accept when he ascribed the difficulty to the force of mental habits that condition our outlook. If he was right—if we expect causal connections—we have only ourselves to blame (or congratulate) when we find coincidences a tantalizing and titillating affront to the commonsense view we hold of the world.

#coincidences #davidhume #TheScottishphilosopherDavidHume #philosopherDavidHume

Attempts to explain prophecy: Cognition of the Future

Attempts to explain prophecy: Cognition of the Future (Art from pinterest)

Attempts to explain prophecy must make suppositions about the future. The most fundamental supposition is that events in the future do not yet exist and cannot, therefore, produce effects in the present. The path of explanation that stems from this view leads, of necessity, to various ideas of the future as a potential that somehow exists in the present.

In their simplest form these ideas follow the analogy of the seed and flower. A gardener can examine a seed and predict what flower it will produce.

Some premonitions may indeed stem from clues scarcely noticed in a conscious way. An unfamiliar noise in a car, for example, may give rise to an accurate premonition of danger. The weakness of the theory, in this form, is that it requires of the precognizer an uncanny ability to analyze signs and indications that are not only imperceptible to the ordinary eye but impossible to deduce theoretically. What clues in a dreamer's environment could prompt an accurate precognition of a disaster six months and 3,000 miles away? Some extraordinary suggestions have been made to explain how the future may be unrealized but cognizable in the present.

One such suggestion, by Gerhard Dietrich Wasserman, a mathematical physicist at the University of Durham in England, is that all events exist as timeless mental patterns, with which every living and nonliving particle in the universe is associated.

This idea owes something to the ancient belief that the universe—the macrocosm—contains innumerable microcosms, each recapitulating the features and order of the large whole. Thus, man was seen as a microcosm of the earth, his veins and arteries corresponding to streams and rivers, and so on.

By the end of the 17th century the idea had undergone many transformations but was still potent. The great philosopher and mathematician Baron Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz, for example, wrote:

All the different classes of beings which taken together make up the universe are, in the ideas of God who knows distinctly their essential gradations, only so many ordinates of a single curve so closely united that it would be impossible to place others between any two of them, since that would imply disorder and imperfection.

Accordingly, the various orders of beings, animate and inanimate, so gradually approximate each other in their attributes and properties that they form a single chain, “so closely linked one to another that it is impossible ... to determine precisely the point at which one ends and the next begins.”

In this concept of a “chain of being,” then, the animate, and therefore the spiritual or psychic, are connected with the inanimate by a gradation of shared attributes. For Leibniz the implication was that someone with enough insight “would see the future in the present as in a mirror.

Another version of the idea that the future lies hidden in the present was advanced by Adrian Dobbs, a mathematician and physicist at the University of Cambridge, in 1965. As events unfold, he proposed, they actualize a relatively small number of the possibilities for change that exist at a subatomic level. In the process disturbances are caused that create, in another dimension of time, what Dobbs calls a psitronic wavefront. This wavefront can be registered by the brain's neurons, at least in certain especially sensitive people, and interpreted. A metaphor may help to clarify the process:

Imagine a pond, at one side of which a toy ship is launched. At the other side of the pond is a very small person. He is unable to see the ship, but as the ship travels forward, the waves it makes reach the shore on which he stands. As they travel across the pond, these waves pass around certain objects—weeds, leaves, a log—that are fixed or slowly drifting on its surface. The objects thus create disturbances in the wavefront, which the small person, who has a lifetime’s experience in these things, is able to note in fine detail. From what he learns of the wave fronts he not only obtains an image of the objects that produced them but calculates how long it will be before they drift to the shore.

In this metaphor the toy ship represents an event unfolding in time. Its course across the pond represents one of many paths it might have taken and the dimension of time it occurs in. The pond itself represents another dimension of time in which other factors are having an influence. The ship's bow wave represents Dobbs's“ psitronic wavefront,” and the small person is, of course, the neuronal apparatus that receives the wavefront and converts it to a prediction.

Granting that Dobbs’s theory is purely hypothetical and that no psitronic wave has been discovered, the difficulty is in suggesting a neuronal mechanism by which the observer distinguishes the wavefront of a particular event from the presumable maelstrom of wavefront produced by simultaneously unfolding events. Again, the farther away the event is in the future, the more numerous the wave fronts and the more complex the problem.

Such, in general, are some of the theories that regard the future as being, in some way, a potential implicitly accessible in the present, and such are the difficulties and limitations attending them.

#prophecy #prophecies