Reenchantment of the World & The Romance of Transcendence: Archives of the Impossible II. Part Three.

The last day of the conference, which was Saturday the 13^th of May, was for me a half-day of rest. I missed the first sessions in the morning. I needed rest and recovery time. I’m sad, since the menu seemed tantalizing, with talks on more siddhis, Halperin’s intriguing “The Academy and the Impossible—A Tale of Two Bibles”, and the one I most wanted to hear, Gregory Mamedov’s “Dialectical Notes on the Human: Marxism as the Impossible, and the Impossible Through a Marxist Lens” (suitable dialectical inversions duly noted). The crown jewel of that first part would have to have been the plenary: Karin Meyers’ “Buddhism and the Impossible”. I was dismayed I missed these, but in any case that’s water under the proverbial bridge.

What I did do was have an impromptu pre-lunch (which spilled into lunch proper) chat with noted (but more skeptically-inclined) journalist of matters UAP Keith Kloor, whom I’ve had the opportunity to get to know pretty well (he’s interviewed me for a piece on academia and UAP he’s writing for The Chronicle of Higher Education, due out soon I’m told). I seem to get along rather well with Keith, even though I’m not as skeptical as he is (though, as readers know, I am skeptical—of much of the speculative efflorescence coming out of ufological quarters … it’s just that I’m also rather skeptical of the skeptics, adopting a stance I like to call, somewhat humorously, and complicatedly: transcendental skepticism). We talked about how I see the UAP issue intersecting with mainstream academia, and how there’s good cause for it to be woken up to the issue of how UAP ought to be studied, if it is to become something about which we can claim a measure of knowledge—rather than the academy acting in its traditional role as naysaying gatekeepers of accepted knowledge. After all, as we’ve said in this blog over and over (and as many others have pointed out), what needs to happen is that the embargo on serious study of anomalous phenomena needs to be broken, and the conspiracist haze that chokes off that serious treatment needs to be blown away by bringing to bear the meta-theoretical acumen of real (which means intrepidly rigorous) humanist academic scholarship, and disciplined empirical research on the subject of UAP—and not dodging the reality question in favor of convenient scholarly distanciation in which that reality is constantly bracketed in favor of safer ontologies of reduction or criticism. Not that some of this isn’t truly needed (as contrapuntal) as we pursue the “reality” question … the thing itself. Participatory and engaged dialogue is key here among these different standpoints: of the “being” v. the “meaning” v. critical interrogation and so on (thus have I founded The Society for UAP Studies to further this dialogical, which is also a deeply philosophical, end).

After the lunch—we had Greg Eghigian, Kevin Knuth, and others at one point in a crowd at the table with Keith … quite a pick-up event!—we gathered in the main auditorium for the final slate of “flash talks”, plenaries and panels. Another, but final  romp through Impossibilia for May 2023 at Archives II.

Of the flash talks, which I generally didn’t like because of the “flashiness” (I prefer depth, an hour or more of careful exposition, and the tedium of focused questions-and-answers), I really liked Sharon Hewitt Rawlette’s talk, entitled “The Impossible Efficacy of Intention? Psi as a Model for Value-Based Holistic Causation”. It was a beautiful example of what can happen when an analytically-trained philosopher turns their attention to something really interesting but outside of accepted tradition … the accepted range of phenomena of nature. Rawlette is a gifted thinker, and (it seems) a really gifted writer. From my notes, it seems I gathered a few precious gems of insight—those few I managed to scribble down, at least. Before we get to the final panel (one focused on the art of film and the impossible), and Jeff’s very existential closing remarks, let’s dwell for a moment in Rawlette’s conceptual landscape of thinking the impossible into a structured, coherent conceptual framework. It really helps organize our thinking about these phenomena of the seeming “impossible”, even if it just gives to us a sharper system by which to see where we need to gain more experience, where we might focus our empirical concerns…

Rawlette frames her analysis of the problem of “psi” phenomena as one requiring the abandonment of “smallism” when it comes to mind and cognition, in favor of an even more radical “holism” than is countenanced in current academic discourse concerned with mind and cognition (when it is considered at all). Smallism can be associated with another position on the scope of the causal or productive efficacy of mind and cognition, called “localism”. The former is a version of a position that is much more well known in (philosophical) discourse on mind and cognition: reductionism. A reductionist holds that the best way to understand some phenomena is to show how (and that) they can be reduced to some other class of phenomena which can be more readily explained, understood or otherwise analyzed. And so it is to the base of the reduction (the phenomena to which the target of explanation is reduced) that all the explanatory force is shifted. It is a very general strategy. For example, one might argue that in order to understand what tables, chairs, trees, or anything else is, one should simply reduce those phenomena to their parts, and then seek to understand how the parts are arranged, along with the forces that keep it all together (physical ‘forces’ being part of the reductionist base phenomena, which are primitives in the sense that, at least for the purposes of the explanation, aren’t themselves further reduced—a hint of a deeper issue with reductionism as an explanatory method adhered to strictly: can there be primitives in any reductionist explanation—so-called “unexplained explainers”? It’s a paradox of a more general conceptual standpoint: that of hierarchical verticality. Thus am I attracted to the radical immanence of someone like Spinoza: there can be only one “primitive” in any system, and it has to somehow be infinite in expression and implication, delimited and constrained only by the actuality of nature itself, which supplies content to the form). This reductionist analysis then yields a compositional analysis of the whole in terms of its parts. And voila, you now have understood the phenomena as nothing but their more basic constituents and how they are (structurally) arranged. That particular arrangement might be further analyzed in terms of a structure of natural principles or laws that ensure or establish the particular structural arrangements that these things manifest: the arrangements might be determined to be what they are as a matter of natural law. And those laws are just a matter of the way nature itself operates—something discovered only by way of an empirical investigation of nature herself. Things are what they are because of the way nature is, and our scientific/empirical laws or principles supply us with a knowledge of just that—how nature operates. Indeed, Rawlette here refers to “organizing principles”. “Smallism” is just a more restrictive version of reductionism, in that it insists that composite wholes be explained or determined by an analysis of their smallest parts.

Reductionism, and its more restrictive offspring smallism, are both compatible with “localism” which says that the activity and behavior of the whole is given only by an analysis of the local action of its parts. The blowing off of the cork on my champaign bottle is a function of the action of individual molecules of a gas released and expanding into the empty spaces of the bottle, which molecules in turn press up against the cork; and the cork—though held in place at the bottle’s opening by frictional forces between the molecules of the cork itself and those making up the bottle—is launched free by the force of the gas pressing up against the cork, which gas manages eventually to overcome the frictional forces that had kept the cork in place up until now. This whole picture, though, is framed by a very basic grasp of the Newtonian analysis of nature, which remains a very intuitive picture of how the world works (a picture, of course, we know to be false, though useful up to a point). In this picture, the forceful ejection of the cork is explained everywhere locally in a chain of forces going from the gas in the bottle, to the cork: from A to B to C.

Reductionism, smallism, and localism seemed to work well for the physical processes investigated by the sciences—until the introduction of the quantum theory, which seems to complicate if not entirely overturn this picture. Some degree of “holism” would seem to be demanded by the phenomena which the theory describes: for example, a so-called “entangled” quantum mechanical state is one that cannot be analyzed in terms of independently describable local states of the system. Indeed, an entangled quantum system—which we might represent as (A+B)—cannot be given in terms the independent states of the systems by the sum (A) + (B). An entangled state is not just the sum of the individual parts of the system—the act as a whole, no matter how far apart A is from B in space or time (indeed, until measurement, a quantum state seems to evolve without regard for the restrictions a spacetime description imposes). And that’s what makes quantum phenomena, and the resulting theory, so strange: if I am going about measuring the system (A+B), well, I have to choose whether I’m going to use the A or the B subsystem as the basis for making the measurement, but as soon as I make that choice, and perform the measurement on the system (A+B) using my chosen measurement basis, both A and B are immediately affected (well, “affected” … it’s not clear if a causal action has occurred; certainly a context of measurement has been concretely established, but is a change in context a “causal” action? I think you can argue, surely not.). For example, I can prepare two particles in an entangled state (A+B) and send them off to different parts of the universe. A goes one way, and B goes another (but even this description is somewhat wrong: I’ve “sent out” the whole system (A+B) which, before my interacting with it in order to measure its properties, is one whole “thing” … so I’m increasing the spatiotemporal range of the whole, which can be arbitrarily large without affecting anything about the entanglement itself … Schrödinger himself realized this as early as the 1930s, and in a somewhat obscure paper described it as “steering” the system). When I measure A, or B, it immediately affects (?) the other partner, no matter how far apart they are in space (or in time)! It’s as if the particles are acting “at a distance”. (And that was the worry, as Einstein was to put it: is this “spooky action-at-a-distance”?) Or perhaps this just shows that the particles’ connection is insensitive to spatiotemporal separation—but then what are space and time for the particles? Here’s where quantum phenomena heat up to become real philosophical-conceptual mysteries… (I should note briefly that one solution, at least conceptually, would be to eliminate a description in terms of the actions on or within fields (obviating the mathematics of continua), and opt instead for some direct, relational—and consequently finite—description in terms of the direct action between individual particles. The physicist Michael Ibison for example proposes to replace the calculus of fields with very large but finite sums over all actual particle interactions. But this is a side-note for the more technically-minded—not that I’ve done a very good job for those technicians.)

So as if this isn’t bad enough for our attempts at reductionism, smallism, or localism, now let’s add mind and cognition to the mix. Reductionism et al. is meant to show that mind and cognition (and human consciousness more generally) are just part of the physical world, and can be reduced (somehow) to effects of purely physical, and local, processes—presumably in the material brain. But this presupposes that mind and human cognition are already tightly confined to just the matter of the brain. What if their scope is wider than that? Indeed, what is the extent of cognition, or of consciousness more generally? Here’s where the conceptual dangers begin, for does reductionism act first as an a priori demand—an imposition and requirement from nature—before one takes account of the full extent of the phenomena of “mind”? Or, rather, does reductionism act as a somewhat useful (because simplifying) methodological procedure for trying to come up local, and “smallist” explanations of the phenomena of nature—which might turn out to be false, or at least incomplete (i.e., inadequate to the phenomena of “mind”)? Rawlette, of course, proposes to take the impossible direction and relax if not entirely surpass “smallism” and all its manifestations in favor of a radical holism sufficiently rich to encompass more than just the default conventional assumption that the phenomena of “mind” are tightly confined to one’s physical brain.

What, she asks, are the mind-based “organizing principles” of nature? It’s a brilliantly flipped and impolite question which challenges the “mater”-oriented “organizing principles” put forward by a science of nature that had excluded the operations of mind from the beginning (going all the way back to the then-somewhat-sensible distinction between “primary” and “secondary qualities” … but that’s another story). What is fascinating about Rawlette’s approach is that she argues that the unduly constrained matter-based organizing principles in fact yield certain imprecisions or inaccuracies which make room for a structure of mind-based organizing principles. Given these imprecisions in the observed predictions from the matter-based principles, a number of future states, she argues, are consistent with the past, and it is this alternative range of possibilities (I suppose) that makes room for the (nonlocal) operation of mind. Or at least this seems to by an hypothesis which, given a suitably arranged experiment, ought to be susceptible to some empirical study.

The trick is that Rawlette wants to focus on intentionality: the endogenous (as it were) orientation of thought on some aspect of the external world to which it is directed. Ever since the phenomenologists of the 19^th century began to study the structure of our subjectivity, it was noted that thought is directed—it has some orientation which is efficacious: I see my cup of delicious cappuccino right before me, and I direct myself towards it first (seemingly) in thought then in the world outside of that thought. But this might not be the right example, because it is already steeped in a world of local causation, and it would appear to get caught in the Cartesian trap: is my thought (mind) “causing” my body (matter) to do something? What is going on, exactly, at the moment of initiation, as we pass from intention to physically efficacious action on the material of the world? What is the place of mind (and its intentions) in a material world? This leads us to the problem of mind and consciousness itself—and on towards what David Chalmers decades ago dubbed “the hard problem” of consciousness.

There is one solution, perhaps crude, to which, it would seem, Rawlette is able to move. If we eliminate reductionism (and the physicalism or materialism to which it is dogmatically aligned), we are left with a structure of empirical correlations, given to us through our experience of the world. We therefore can conceive of the relationship between “mind” and “matter” as one of correlation: my intentions are correlated with the goings-on of the “physical” world outside of them. Sometimes my intentions are tightly correlated with those goings-on: usually, I managed to get the cup of cappuccino ordered (in very bad Italian, French or slightly better German), and to my mouth for drinking. But sometimes I don’t—something else intervenes and breaks that correlation. If I then want to present some scientific image of this situation (i.e., according to some set of “organizing principles”) then, beginning from a rather neutral standpoint that preferences neither “mind” nor “matter” (and hence which eschews reductionism, etc.), but which starts from a characteristic set of psycho-physical correlations given to us experientially, then we might say that we have two representation spaces from which we may draw the correlations. We have the representation of a structure of purely “physical” phenomena (call it system “A”), and we have one corresponding to those purely “psychical” phenomena (call it system “B”). A and B are correlated. But the predictions of the future states of A by means of a purely physical set of “organizing principles” is only approximate, and there will (perhaps always) be imprecisions; the real and its (theoretical) image (our representations) do not exactly coincide. Likewise for B. But we don’t—yet—have organizing principles which characterize B very precisely: they would be purely psychical principles that yield a kind of “law of motion” for the evolution of the states of B (i.e., those confined to “mind” in exact parallel with those confined to “matter” for A).

And that’s what Rawlette is looking for; with this, we might then characterize the correlations between A and B. Immediately, however, we can see that in this more metaphysically neutral space of conceptualization, we can begin to introduce the more impossible—“paranormal”—aspects of mind-matter relations into the picture. They could be characterized in terms of a coincidence or correspondence between the states of evolution of a physical system (A) and those of a psychical system (B). If we then relax the meta-theoretical requirement that all substantial correlations be resolvable by some reductionist model, i.e., by some structure of local/causal processes, then we must “explain” the presence of these psycho-physical correlations by invoking some non-causal—perhaps purely a-causal structural—principle (or principles) which can be abstracted from these empirically-given correlations. After all, reductionism is built on a kind of historical process of abstraction from an arguably a priori constrained experiential base—the Newtonian point of view. This, I think, is a more honest portrayal of the search for organizing principles: allowing experience to guide; freedom from dogmatic assumptions; description (of empirically given correlations); abstraction and generalization; positing (of laws or “organizing principles”), and a-causal or “structural” explanation: x explains y because x is an empirically-discovered constraint (regularity or “law”?) on the activity of y.

There is a lot of “noise” in the A and B systems, so finding the correlations, if and when they exist, is nontrivial. But if there is to be an “impossible” science of some kind (to which perhaps Rawlette is gesturing), then perhaps this is the right direction. (My attempt at a description of it is poor, I admit; rest assured that there are far more knowledgeable scholars capable of providing a much clearer account of what I’m trying to get at—Rawlette herself of course being one of them.)

The next speaker (Joel Gruber) was a kind of “now for something completely different” moment: a strangely dogmatic ex-academic, fired from his post—as he not-so-subtly informed the audience—because of his passion for trying to screw with the students’ presumably conventional attachments and psychodynamics. He really wanted them to have a “nondual experience”. I suppose it was a kind of flipped classroom, with a twist: a mysticism lab. Here was an evangelist of the impossible: Joel Gruber preaching the gospel of “Manufacturing the Impossible: A Practice-Based Approach to Instigating the Mystical Experience (Without Psychedelics)”. Indeed, perhaps we ought to place the emphasis on manufacturing. It’s the kind of thing I myself felt passionate about once-upon-a-time: o woe as me, the conventional world, and their suffering minions of workaday insensitivity—if only they be woken up by the power of the mystical! Perhaps I operated with these illusions as I myself taught the great range of non-Western philosophical-religious (or more properly “soteriological”) traditions. They are such a breath of fresh air, given their intrinsic orientation towards some kind of practice (though not without the foibles of experiential detachment—the phenomenon of the “schools”. There’s plenty of scholasticism in the Asian traditions!).

Rather than stay with the academic grind, Gruber founds his own nonprofit (as ex-academic evangelists are wont to do): “New Gods: A Mind-Expanding Community Integration of Heart, Spirit, Plant (!) and Mind”—quite the combo (perhaps it has a better ring in Sanskrit?). He aims, it would seem, to make the mystical personal, to “normalize” the paranormal. Convention be damned. I suppose there’s always the wounded healer thing in every crowd—or in this case, a wounded shaman of the nondual sort. For someone so very radically and rabidly anti-ego, like someone who takes pride in their humility, something rang false about the whole thing (except perhaps their passionate conviction: there was no disputing that one).

I can’t seem to recall anything useful from the final flash talk of the event—Scarlett L. Heinbuch’s “A Lifetime Between Worlds: Love is Key”—and perhaps it was because after the anti-ego egoism of the converted, I had to get up, take refuge in the toilette, and find some coffee, Danish and fresh air. Or something to feed my starving ego. I just can’t recall. But I certainly made my way back to my seat for the last panel of the event on “The Impossible and Film”. This is the one I was waiting that afternoon to see (after of course being wonderfully surprised by the philosopher in the room, whose thinking we covered, perhaps with undue obscurity, supra). On the panel were filmmakers and producers whom I really didn’t know (but that’s not saying very much, as I’m pretty ignorant of these things): Brad Abrahams, Josh Boone, Stuart Davis and Kevin Lincoln (the latter of whom was co-executive producer for the recent Showtime UAP docuseries). I really seemed to click with Kevin in particular. For the most part, the panelists recounted their various experiences involved in the artistic side of the UAP/UFO experience, attempting to document or dramatize what is essentially an impossible encounter—at least one so fleeting, yet so often very disturbing, as to be impossible yet again: to actually meaningfully document. One of the panelists has been involved in a multi-year project attempting to document a kind of multiple abduction case, which, if I can recall correctly now, began as an “ordinary” UAP sighting (a nocturnal light, or something of the kind). This case wasn’t just the usual one, marked as they tend to be, by either seriousness or trauma or both (though there was that, too). Rather, what the filmmaker managed to capture was the humor the abductee managed to find in it all: now an elderly gentleman, the abductee claims that the encounter with the UAP being (a pilot it seemed) led eventually to his first sexual experience. He lost his virginity, he tells us, laughingly, to an extraterrestrial! (Of course, not all that uncommon in the abduction lit, to be sure.)

I mean, this just raises the more general question of the whole conference, doesn’t it? Or was it the problem of the whole event? Experience, and experiencers. Lots of extraordinary, paranormal, uncanny, absurd, or impossible events, occurrences, sightings, encounters, feats, … phenomena were claimed, asserted, stated, spoken about, referenced, and finally theorized. What the Asian traditions have a leg up on I think (if only by virtue of the sheer amount of time spend on the problem) is the formalization of the process of accessing or producing these alleged realities: they frequently will provide a kind of spiritual recipe for the reconstitution, recovery or creation of the key phenomena—often acknowledged to be rare, or special, or unique or otherwise nonordinary but real all the same. Many of these traditions acknowledge that in order for the phenomena to be accepted, one must worry not only about the sources of knowledge about and for them, but also the conditions for their ontological and epistemic possibility: none of the more extraordinary phenomena are given for free, as it were. But to be sure, in the Asian (especially south Asian) traditions, there isn’t the same problematic dichotomy of mind and matter—indeed, in Buddhist scholastic discourse it’s taken for granted that the mind is a kind of organ which “senses” material of its own (of a very “subtle” sort). Thought (ideas) is (are) “sensed” by mind (“manas”); both are democratically laid upon the same ontological plane, as it were (from Spinoza’s point of view, this is what Descartes was up to, we might note in passing). So, what in the Western tradition is ghettoized as “paranormal” is already in principle a possibility given the absence of an a priori mind/matter split: mind acts on matter, as much as matter affects mind (thought, emotion, etc.). Mind never got banished from nature as an active force or power (to slip into somewhat archaic terms). There are just special conditions of possibility for the occurrence of these non-ordinary mind-matter/matter-mind conjunctions (what we have previously called, following a recent tradition in Western philosophy, psychophysical correlations), often involving (at least on the mind side of the equation) some inward practice (which is practice in what we might call the recovery, instigation or stabilization of nonordinary—expansive—states of experience, or awareness). I mean, that’s what I think is up.

Well, perhaps I’ve distorted the actual situation. Maybe what’s being said is that the existence or not of these impossibilia is more a matter of perspective, some shift which reconfigures what is already there in a new, more expansively revealing way. It’s not that the impossible has to be created by instituting the requisite conditions of possibility—as if we can conjure the siddhi out of the matter of the conventional sciences. On this view, the impossible is obscured by a framework. Change the framework and voila! I don’t know. If something like that is being said, it’s just not very convincing. Frameworks are surely important—but are they that ontologically important? Maybe. Then again, there is a sizeable literature allegedly documenting the impossibilia. Hence, Archives of the Impossible…

I did manage to ask a question to the final panel of filmmakers and producers, and it touches on the issues I was just raising. At least with UAP (and I guess also with the whole range of alleged impossibilia under discussion during these two and a half days), nature is trying to teach us something which we don’t already know. Yet, we come armed with expectations, ideas, needs, desires, frameworks. A passion for seeing, capturing, collecting, studying—all the armature of the sciences, of scholarship. Yet what was the deeper lesson of a film like Nope—or even 2001: A Space Odyssey? The uncanny strikes at the core of our conceptual and linguistic failings, hitting us exactly in our blind spot. Where the eye joins nerve, and nerve brain, in this in-between space is where the uncanny resides. It exists outside our systems of enchantment—that is, our ways of appropriating nature, naming it, and reducing it to the field of the human (a move of desperation of which we’ve lost sight of the origins). So finally it’s not about enchanting or disenchanting nature; it’s just about finding the silence to listen to her. Our systems of appropriation of the events of nature are approximately good; but between the approximation and the thing(s) approximated, there’s lots of room—Rawlette’s “imprecisions”. There is where the new science resides, in the company of the uncanny, a host of experiences perhaps waiting for engagement. So it may be about “perspective” and the ontological implications (not only epistemological or conceptual) of the shift from one framework to another (silencing or diverting from one system of appropriation to one more adequate to what is lost in the noise of the imprecisions of existing systems).

I have to bring these reflections to a somewhat abrupt close, as always, lest they meander further into the realm of the absurd (reproducing the uncanniness with my prose, and distracting from the main event). There were not a few talks I’d missed, or overlooked or just plain slept through (not in the audience of course—I do take pride in my non-sleepy attentiveness).

If the reader will allow me, I will append a coda to this nomadic review, penned as I awaited my flight to Frankfurt, Germany, where I continued my adventuring through the realms of ufology, UAP studies and all things UAP…

Sitting at the large observing windows of the Condor terminal, awaiting the boarding and final departure of my plane (it ended up three hours late—ain’t I due compensation per EU laws?), I took up the reading of a short text by one of those intellectuals whose work really transformed my whole outlook on academia, and the world from which it sometimes escapes. Morris Berman begins his Eminent Post-Victorians with a quote from the great sociologist C. Wright Mills:

In our time, what is at issue is the very nature of man, the image we have of his limits and possibilities as man. History is not yet done with its exploration of the limits and meanings of ‘human nature’.

—it really comes down to this, doesn’t it? “The Archives of the Impossible” presents at each instance an image of what is beyond accepted conceptual or experiential boundaries; but it was the human that was the conduit, bounded by “the possible” (frequently determined out of practical or material desperation), but yet who is thrown into a condition of freedom, a void where the human is suspended before the uncanny, which acts as a sign, indicating a way through … or beyond. That seemed to be the general sentiment. Kripal frames it as super-human(ities) … and yet when we stand at those limits, we really first grasp what? What we have learned, through hard work engaging with Nature beyond ourselves, has shown us what is possible. But then we turn this into a limit: this here is possible, but no more. This is where our knowledge becomes dogmatic, illegitimately generalizing into a beyond which has not yet been grasped. What more is possible? The “impossible” is empty, or tentative, momentary, uncertain. The possible is certain, determinate; the impossible uncertain and indeterminate. So, what really I worry about is not so much that the impossible becomes a kind of empty signifier; but that there is a dogmatism of the possible in play which says that: no, here is what is truly possible and that is beyond what you think is possible, from you peculiar zone of understanding (the sciences, etc.). But what determined this new possible as possible—beyond a report, a claim, a sighting? That only gives us reason to explore, not to become convinced of a new possible. Each possibility gives conditions under which the possible may (or does) come into being. What are those precise conditions? This is where the cult of the possible, adjoined to its negation: the cult of the impossible—goes astray. For, not having a grasp on the determinate empirical conditions of possibility (or not even supplying a new way of thinking those conditions), what is left is but the convenience of idealism: a retreat to the infinite malleability of ideas, of “mind”. What gives resistance is what is non ideational. The uncanny starts there.

In a very beautiful, and appropriate, close to the whole event, Jeff simply ended with, well, I don’t have anything to end this conference with, except thanks, and good night. Or something to that (existential) effect.

Indeed, good night. Or good morning. (And thanks for reading.)