Can racism be understood as a historically evolving system of domination, and do near-death experiences and the prospect of immortality really support the big metaphysical conclusions people often draw from them?
My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy.
1. Guest
Benjamin Mitchell-Yellin is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Sam Houston State University and his work focuses on ethics, action, racism, as well as death and dying.
2. Interview Summary
Benjamin Mitchell-Yellin begins by laying out a “genealogical” account of racism: to understand what racism is (and how it works), you need an essentially historical lens rather than a timeless list of necessary and sufficient conditions. On his view, racism is pluralistic in its basic structure: psychological elements (attitudes, dispositions, patterns of perception) and social-structural elements (institutions, norms, policies) are co-fundamental and develop together over time. A central through-line is domination—both a “drive to dominate” at the individual level and a broader “dominion of the dominant,” where those with power shape institutions and public narratives in ways that reinforce hierarchy. He connects this to contemporary politics—e.g., how leadership and public rhetoric can normalize racial antipathy and help explain downstream social effects.
The conversation then shifts to near-death experiences (NDEs) and the attempt to use them as evidence against physicalism. Mitchell-Yellin (drawing on work with John Martin Fischer) argues that prominent “NDEs refute physicalism” arguments are typically much weaker than advertised: the inference from “people report vivid experiences” to “mind is non-physical” makes big, contestable leaps, and appeals to simplicity often backfire because “soul” hypotheses introduce a lot of new explanatory burdens (especially about mind–body interaction). He also emphasizes the interdisciplinary point: physicians and researchers can contribute crucial data, but philosophers are doing something different—evaluating whether the metaphysical conclusions actually follow. And when it comes to controlled tests aimed at verifying “out-of-body” perception (hidden targets near ceilings, etc.), he notes that results have not produced the sort of clear “hits” we’d expect if literal disembodied observation were common.
Finally, they discuss immortality—especially whether it would be necessarily boring, and whether it would be desirable even if boredom isn’t guaranteed. He engages Bernard Williams’s famous Makropulos-style argument, stressing that the relevant “boredom” is a deep, existential disengagement (not mere restlessness), and he suggests there are plausible routes by which interests could remain resilient (old projects becoming newly meaningful, new cultural products continuing to appear, etc.). But he also develops a further worry about meaning: if what you value depends on ongoing engagement with valuable objects (people, projects, environments), then very long lives risk outlasting—or watching the degradation of—the very things that make life worth continuing. He highlights climate change as an under-discussed example of how the long-run disappearance of valued activities and conditions could threaten the desirability of immortality, even for someone who initially wants it.
3. Interview Chapters
00:00 - Introduction
00:40 - Genealogical view of racism
05:06 - Cause of racism vs. racism itself
11:04 - Importance of history
14:31 - Weakness of theory?
19:20 - Potential counterexample
21:28 - Inferring racism in new cases
26:01 - Drive to dominate
27:44 - Racism and Trump
31:57 - Revealing racism
35:23 - Benefit of historical view
36:18 - Near-death experiences and physicalism
41:03 - Dependence on prior views
45:45 - Philosophical input
51:32 - NDE data limited
57:21 - NDE’s are real
1:00:05 - Experience vs. interpretation of experience
1:01:41 - Fake reports
1:05:02 - Immortality and boredom
1:12:41 - Memory
1:14:06 - Other problems with immortality?
1:19:03 - Extending life
1:25:05 - Value of philosophy
1:29:41 - Conclusion
