Mind Shadows

Hero is Okay but Wimp is Better: Future Prediction and The Illusion of Courage

2012-01-24T04:15:00.018-05:00

Throwing yourself on a grenade to shield your buddies. Slugging an assailant with a purse to protect your child. Wing-walking atop a biplane at 10,000 feet. Jumping a motorcycle over three parked cars. Some people would say they could do one or all of these actions.

All of that is rather extreme. Most of us say we would not do it. On the other hand, many people predict they would engage in actions relatively mild compared to extreme behavior. These are situations like investing in an agressive stock, or giving a speech in front of two hundred people, or standing up to an intimidating boss. Would you do it?

For people who say yes, recent research indicates that many are wrong.
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Alzheimer's Is Not Inevitable for the Aging Brain

2012-01-17T04:15:00.065-05:00

"A 115-year-old woman who remained mentally alert throughout her life had an essentially normal brain, with little or no evidence of Alzheimer's disease, according to a study in the August issue of Neurobiology of Aging. The findings question the assumption that Alzheimer's disease or other forms of dementia will inevitably develop, if people live long enough.
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Amazingly TIny Brain But A Normal Life

2012-01-10T04:15:00.011-05:00

"A French civil servant has been found to have a huge cavity filled with fluid in his head -- yet lives a completely normal life.

The commonly spouted wisdom that people only use 10 percent of their brain power may have been dismissed as a myth, but one Frenchman seems to be managing fine with just a small fraction of his actual brain.

In fact the man, who works as a civil servant in southern France, has succeeded in living an entirely normal life despite a huge fluid-filled cavity taking up most of the space where his brain should be.
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The High Priests of Physics and The Occult Language of Mathematics

2012-01-03T04:15:00.040-05:00

There is nothing in the laws of the cosmos that says physicists are supposed to be happy. Steven Weinberg said something like that, voicing an opinion similar to Feynman's, who in effect said of quantum mechanics that you may not like it but that's the way it is.

A group of thinkers refuse to accept it as the way it is. Concerned for their reputation, they do not like "sloppy thinkers who might well be called 'cranks,' who if given wide publicity would harm" their cause.

I will leave you to form your own opinions.

They are "devoted mainly to broad-ranging, fully open-minded criticism, at the most fundamental levels , of the often irrational and unrealistic doctrines of modern physics and cosmology; and to the ultimate replacement of these doctrines by much sounder ideas developed with full respect for evidence, logic, and objectivity. Such reforms have long been urgently needed; and yet there is no area of scholarship more stubbornly censorial, and more reluctant to reform itself."
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Stephen Hawking: Philosophy Is A Waste of Time

2011-12-13T04:15:00.005-05:00

I will be away until January
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Stephen Hawking believes philosophy as practised nowadays is a waste of time and philosophers a waste of space. "More precisely, he wrote that philosophy is ‘dead’ since it hasn’t kept up with the latest developments in science, especially theoretical physics.
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The Puzzle of Face Space: Your Eyes May See When Your Brain Does Not

2011-12-06T04:15:00.007-05:00

In Oliver Sacks' classic The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat the title is comic and almost absurd but his book provides fascinating explanation of a neurological condition in which a man does mistake his wife for a hat without realizing it. Sacks introduces the lay reader to another phenomenon--how a stroke leaves a person unable to see things on one side of the visual field and how the stroke victim also has no inkling that anything is wrong or missing with his perception. In fact, in both cases, nothing is wrong with the eyes, only with the way the brain processes visual information.

There is a name for this condition, prosopagnosia, and it describes a small fraction of people who cannot recognize faces--even the faces of loved ones The condition puzzles researchers but they are beginning to understand how facial recognition works, which may help those with prosopagnosia. With her colleagues, Marlene Behrmann at Carnegie Mellon University has gathered some pieces of the puzzle by comparing the brains of individuals who are face-blind to those who are face-sighted. Their results hint at how we recognize faces not in a flash of insight, not as a kind of photographic image, but by building up recognition on a neurological assembly line. Recognition is encoded in the brain as face space.
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Consciousness and the Soul Solved

2011-11-29T04:15:00.000-05:00

Even atheists have souls, Nicholas Humphrey might jest in a book both difficult and fluidly written. In Soul Dust: The Magic of Consciousness he believes the soul can be explained along with the hard problem of consciousness.
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A Little-Known Story: Maria Leontievna Bochkareva, Who Met President Wilson

2011-11-22T04:15:00.003-05:00

Of peasant stock, beaten by her alcoholic father, working since age eight, she married at fifteen and left her husband when he began beating her and swore to kill her. She married again, followed her husband to exile in Siberia but left him when he tried to hang her. In 1914 she fought for the Czar as the only woman in the 25th Tomsk Reserve Battalion, where fellow soldiers taught her to read and write. She was wounded twice, decorated three times for bravery, fought with frost-bitten feet, bayoneted German soldiers, and pulled fallen comrades to safety.
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Who's In Charge?: Did Your Neurons Really Make You Do It?

2011-11-15T04:15:00.009-05:00

Free will or no free will? Benjamin Libet, John Dylan Haaynes, and so many others have weighed in on the issue. Now we have a new point of view based on new evidence. "Many neuroscientists have maintained a long-standing opinion that what we experience as free will is no more than mechanistic patterns of neurons firing in the brain. Although we feel like free agents contemplating and choosing, they would argue that these sensations are merely an emotional remnant that brain activity leaves in its wake. If these neuroscientists are right, then free will isn’t worth much discussion.

Michael S. Gazzaniga, professor and director of the SAGE Center for the Study of the Mind at the University of California at Santa Barbara, seriously disagrees.

Neuroscience provides more and more evidence for a mechanistic view of the human mind. A lot of people find that bleak and they don’t like it.Once you learn how the machine works, does that mean that you’re not responsible for your actions because your behavior may be determined? No, I don’t think it means that at all, says Gazzaniga.More Subscribe in a reader

How Will Brain Science Change The Legal System?

2011-11-08T04:15:00.011-05:00

If you were to lose the tip of your little finger in an accident, you’d be saddened, but your conscious experience would be no different. By contrast, if you were to damage an equivalently sized piece of brain tissue, this can change your capacity to understand music, name animals, see colors, judge risk, make decisions, send signals to your muscles, use verbs or perform any of the other hidden, daily feats that we pull off seemingly without effort.

Thousands of natural experiments with brain tumors, degenerative disorders, genetic mutations, drug addictions and traumatic brain injury have taught a simple lesson: our hopes, ideas, desires and behaviors depend directly on the state of the enigmatic lump of thinking stuff.
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Thomas Metzinger: What Is Behind Our Talk About The Self

2011-11-01T04:15:00.019-04:00

Here is an excerpt of an interview between Ginger Campbell, MD, and Thomas Metzinger, PhD, author of The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self

Dr. Campbell: I guess I was really wanting to start with the working definition that you gave in your book. Why in the book did you pick the phrase “consciousness is the appearance of a world” as your working definition? I’m going to assume it’s a working definition, since that’s the way you defined it in the book.

Dr. Metzinger: For a popular accessible book I needed a simple working definition—and “the appearance of a world” is just that. It happens when you wake up in the morning: a world appears to you.
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Can the Brain Explain Your Mind? On V.S. Ramachandran

2011-10-25T04:15:00.014-04:00

"Is studying the brain a good way to understand the mind? Does psychology stand to brain anatomy as physiology stands to body anatomy? In the case of the body, physiological functions—walking, breathing, digesting, reproducing, and so on—are closely mapped onto discrete bodily organs, and it would be misguided to study such functions independently of the bodily anatomy that implements them. If you want to understand what walking is, you should take a look at the legs, since walking is what legs do. Is it likewise true that if you want to understand thinking you should look at the parts of the brain responsible for thinking?
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Of The 1%, By The 1%, For The 1%

2011-10-18T04:15:00.016-04:00

Subscribe in a reader What started as a movement called Occupy Wall Street has spread to London, Paris, Berlin, and other cities. Critics say that both the American and global demonstrations are too diffuse and too decentralized to achieve change.
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The Martian Inside Your Head

2011-10-11T04:15:00.026-04:00

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Years ago Reader's Digest published a series of hugely successful articles by J.D. Ratcliff, all beginning with "I am Joe's ____." Fill in the blank: heart, brain, pancreas, etc. The articles explained complicated body organs in simple terms for lay readers. The one on the heart began, "I’m certainly no beauty. I weigh 12 ounces, am red-brown in color, and have an unimpressive shape. I am the dedicated slave of —well, let’s call him Joe. Joe is 45, ruggedly good-looking, has a pretty wife, three children and an excellent job. Joe has made it."

Some time ago, for Journal of Consciousness Studies, Andy Clark--currently professor of Philosophy and Chair in Logic and Metaphysics at the University of Edinburgh--wrote an article using J.D. Ratcliff's style and format. It was titled "I Am John's Brain."

As an aside, I note that Clark observes that our ability at language distorts our understanding of how the brain works. That is, we interpret its workings in terms of concepts we use in our lives. That same ability at symbolic representation insists on intellect as the only means of understanding the world. We interpret the workings of the world in terms of concepts we use everyday. Just as, in Clark's essay, "John" gets caught up in his symbols for his brain, so do we in our symbols for the world.

John misuses words to explain his mind, thereby misunderstanding it. People use words as a prism for the world, and fail by arriving at conventional realities, however convenient. Still, the issue of misunderstanding also arises with those who espouse an unconventional, nondualist, perspective. Sadly, many writings on nonduality assume certain "metaphysical" words are the only and right words just because language can find no better ones.

Indeed, John's brain explains why people don't "get" nonduality. The left hemisphere, the seat of linguistic ability and intellect as well as the sense of the do-er, is relied upon in our modern lives more than the left hemisphere, comprised of emotion and intuition. In an experiment, when a split-brain patient's right brain is shown a command like WALK, he begins to walk to the door. When asked why he is leaving, his left brain interpreter has an answer for the researcher: To get a drink of water. (See my review of Michael Gazzaniga's The Mind's Past.) The right brain had no explanation for what it saw, while the left side provided it, however erroneously. Words don't always provide proper answers, which is why nonduality can be "gotten" independent of a linguistic interpreter. (Intellectuals take note.)

Here are parts of Clark's interesting and original essay:

"I am John's brain. In the flesh, I am just a rather undistinguished looking grey/white mass of cells. My surface is heavily convoluted and I am possessed of a fairly differentiated internal structure. John and I are on rather close and intimate terms; indeed, sometimes it is hard to tell us apart. But at times, John takes this intimacy a little too far. When that happens, he gets very confused about my role and functioning.
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Daniel Dennett, Breaking The Spell. You Think Belief In God Is Irrational? So Is Belief In Atheism

2011-10-04T04:15:00.016-04:00

In Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon, Daniel Dennett hopes to break the spell--not of religious belief, but of the conviction that it is not a fit subject for scientific inquiry. Never the twain shall meet--this is a bad idea according to Dennett. Stephen Jay Gould wrote of "non-overlapping magisteria," of both science and religion as worthy of respect in their own rights, but unbridgeable, the one to the other.

Dennett takes exception to this, maintaining that religion is a fit subject for scientific scrutiny, and in doing so he draws upon evolutionary, anthropological and psychological research on the origin and spread of religion. He speculates as to how a primitive belief in ghosts later became a belief in wind spirits, rain gods, wood nymphs, and leprechauns. According to Dennett, as hunter-gatherers became farmers, as they aggregated into prehistoric villages, a need to protect one's own arose--property, spouse, children, crops, livestock. Richard Dawkins' selfish gene no longer served the common weal. That is, genetic kinship among tribe members was not enough in itself to insure Darwinian cooperation. Shared beliefs rather than DNA enforced proper behavior. People became commanded by an authoritarian but vengeful god to do their duty to others not genetic kin.

This is a tidy explanation, tying all up in a neat bundle, but there are the Neanderthals who were not fit inside. At digs of Neanderthal burial sites, something extraordinary was found, something which provides evidence of Neanderthal practices long before ours became the dominantly successful species. Around the burial site and bones of a beloved individual flowers and trinkets were carefully placed. They are extinct now, the Neanderthals, but could this mean that even they had a sense of the spiritual, a regard for an after life? I can see no other way to understand the findings. So much for Dennett's religion as emergent from the need for duty in communities. Something there is that cannot be packaged as well as he would have it. As Yeats put it, "An aging man is but a paltry thing, a tattered coat upon a stick unless soul clap hands, sing, and louder sing for every tatter in his mortal dress." Religion was informed by spiritual as well as moral needs.

Dennett draws upon the concept of memes--scientifically unverifiable and another Dawkins concept--to explain how primitive beliefs evolved into modern religions. "Every minister in every faith is like a jazz musician keeping traditions alive by playing the beloved standards . . . but mixing familiarity and novelty in just the right proportions to grab the minds and hearts of their hosts." Hosts here is meant to mean the same as an unsuspecting, sometimes insentient host for a virus, a parasite. According to Dennett, people are dumb, unwitting hosts for memes, in this case religious beliefs. I will add, they are also hosts for the vaunted faith in the scientific model as the only true way of understanding the universe.

Sorry, Daniel, but I cannot get there from here. Nor can you. Dennett is playing in a mind-field, one that eventually will explain nothing and sets off duds.

Although I do not have interest or belief in the dogma or doctrine of any religion, I do see all religions as serving a deep, human need. (I think Dennett would agree with me on this while he holds that humankind would be better off without the need.) The need is not served by a flawed scientific paradigm in which the objects of scientific investigation somehow are supposed to provide meaning. (Else, why are they pursued?) I am reminded of Nobel Prize winning physicist Steven Weinberg, who famously remarked, “the more we find out about the universe, the more meaningless it all seems.” Meaningless, because science ignores the other magisterium, which at its core--though not always in tenets--points to what we all are, and teaches that fulfillment-meaning cannot be found in the objects of scientific research. John Gray continues for me.
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William James Sidis, The Smartest Person Ever?

2011-09-29T04:15:00.005-04:00

The following essay is about William James Sidis, whom Robert Persig (Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance) discusses in his novel, Lila. Sidis's one great passion in life was collecting street car transfers.

The account comes from a web page I saved to my hard drive. Before uploading it, I checked it and found it dead, but still want to give credit, so here is the obsolete URL--http://members.aol.com/popvoid/TOC.html. Jim Morton, the essayist, uses Peridromophilia as a term for Sidis's love of street car transfers.

Peridromophilia Unbound:William James Sidis
By Jim Morton

The great geniuses of mankind are often said to be "born ahead of their time." William James Sidis, on the other hand, seems to have been born out of his time completely; on the wrong world, in the wrong dimension. Perhaps someday the world will understand "Willie" Sidis's strange genius, but that day is far off indeed.

Sidis was born in 1898. His father, Boris Sidis, taught psychology at Harvard and was considered one of the foremost psychologists of his day. The boy was named after William James, a leading psychologist and brother to author Henry James. Boris argued that traditional approaches to child-rearing obstructed the learning process. The elder Sidis was determined not to make the same mistake with his son.

He started by stringing words together with alphabet blocks above the child's crib. He eschewed the usual "googley-goo" baby-talk that adults lapse into around infants, speaking instead to the child in the same way he would speak to an adult. If the boy showed any interest in a subject, Boris encouraged his curiosity and study.

The effect of all this on the boy Sidis was astounding. By the time he was two, Willie was reading literature meant for adults; by age four he was typing letters in French and English; at age five he wrote a treatise on anatomy and dazzled everyone with a mathematical expertise few adults could match.
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Loren Eiseley & Milan Kundera : Consciousness & Mystery

2011-09-27T04:15:00.032-04:00

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Benjamin Franklin Professor of Anthropology and History of Science at the University of Pennsylvania, Loren Eiseley (1907–1977) was a prairie child growing up in Lincoln, Nebraska, son of a hardware-salesman father and a deaf mother, his parents living together but estranged. Something in their relationship made a tortured poet out of Eisely, for in his books there is a quest, a haunted imagination of eternity and the infinite, all of it filtered through the long shadow of geological epochs and black outer space. After years, I can pick up The Immense Journey, Darwin's Century, The Night Country, and other books to find myself enrapt by captivating prose evoking the long shadows of an evolving Earth and its tiny, whirling track among galaxies.

In The Immense Journey, he recalls a moth under an opera tent, a seemingly insignificant subject, but in his prose he provides a metaphor that reaches above the tent into the night sky, up toward the stars. Here it is.

While I was sitting one night with a poet friend watching a great opera performed in a tent under arc lights, the poet took my arm and pointed silently. Far up, blundering out of the night, a huge Cecropia moth swept past from light to light over the posturings of the actors. “He doesn’t know,” my friend whispered excitedly. “He’s passing through an alien universe brightly lit but invisible to him. He’s in another play; he doesn’t see us. He doesn’t know. Maybe it’s happening right now to us.”

Zerah Colburn, Eighth Wonder of The World

2011-09-13T04:15:00.025-04:00

I won't be posting for a while. In the meantime, click on the red dice at right for a chance read.

So many fascinating lives are lost to popular history, such as the life below. They came, walked their minutes on the stage, and then were gone.

For many, Zerah Colburn (1804-1839) was regarded as an eighth wonder of the world. In 1810, his father, Abia Colburn, heard his 5 year old son reciting multiplication tables while playing among the wood chips in the workshop. Zerah had been at school for about six weeks.
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The Machine In The Ghost

2011-09-09T21:51:00.001-04:00

Descartes said "I think, therefore I exist."

You don't need the "I think" part. That part is an object used to prove a subject, I exist. No object is permanent, certainly not your thoughts, and it proves nothing.

Just ask yourself, How do I know I exist?

All you can finally conclude is, I don't know how. I just know it. That is all of which I can truly be certain.

No object can be found in the I am. There is just knowing it. Pure subjectivity.

Once that is understood, REALLY understood, the search has ended.

I am. One without a second. Just this. Forever this.

The ghost is not in the machine. The "machine" is in the "ghost". Forever unidentifiable but unmistakably present.

Paul Lafargue: The Right To Be Lazy

2011-09-06T04:15:00.030-04:00

Written in Saint Pélagie Prison, 1883.

"A strange delusion possesses the working classes of the nations where capitalist civilization holds its sway. This delusion drags in its train the individual and social woes which for two centuries have tortured sad humanity. This delusion is the love of work, the furious passion for work, pushed even to the exhaustion of the vital force of the individual and his progeny.
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The DNA Evidence for Nonduality

2011-08-30T04:15:00.086-04:00

Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play,
All the conventions conspire
To make this fort assume
The furniture of home;
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.
(September 1, 1939, by W.H. Auden)

And the world continues on its mad way, while occasionally a few begin to question their quiet desperation and ask, What else? There is nothing else. It's all right here. You are what you are looking for, as St. Francis said. Or, what you are looking for is not behind you, as Jean Klein quipped. When this is realized, when only that day dawns to which we are awake, as Thoreau put it, life changes for the better.

That is not so much mystical mumbo-jumbo. The understanding is available as you go about the bustle of your daily life.

A scientific slant on what I mean can be found in the material below. But I provide this because it is not just about DNA; it is about you. DNA is an object, something observed as a word in print or thought, or under a fluorescence microscope. You are not an object.

Richard Dawkins, apostle of materialism and atheism, argues that DNA uses organisms to perpetuate itself and that we exist to serve it. That is, he means we are objects, you and I, and he is big-hearted enough to include himself among us. Although his The Selfish Gene is a brilliantly clever book, it manipulates evidence, as Mary Midgley has noted. Here is a counterpoint to his view. The author I quote, John Stevenson*, speaks outside the centuries-entrenched scientific paradigm, and with regard to DNA and deathless one-life he has this to say:

~Tradition is very strong in human thinking. A lifetime of learning that life consists of being born, having offspring and then dying produces a mind set. Relationships within families such as sister, mother, father, etc. are fundamental in our thinking. A human, we believe, is an individual, another human is a separate life. Conclusion 5 presents an entirely different story. It says that all life in all living things is the same life. This violates all previous teachings about life.
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A Stillness Arose As Artillery Shells Exploded

2011-08-23T04:15:00.012-04:00

This is the true story of William Samuel, a Captain of Infantry, who in the midst of hellish, fierce, and bloody combat, found spiritual peace, an "immeasurable calm" and understanding of "the deathlessness of Life." A new life, his, was born from the carnage.
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I'm Away

2011-08-09T04:15:00.085-04:00

Click on the random read generator (the red dice) for a chance read until my return. I'll be back soon. In the meantime, here are a few quotations from Mark Twain:

~[Man] is the only animal that has the True Religion--several of them. ("The Lowest Animal")

~What God lacks is convictions--stability of character. He ought to be a Presbyterian or a Catholic or something--not try to be everything. (Notebook, 1898)

~Satan hasn't a single salaried helper; the Opposition employ a million. (Notebook # 42.June 1897—March 1900)
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A Christian Experience of Nonduality

2011-08-02T04:15:00.019-04:00

Years ago I read The Path To No-Self, and The Experience of No-Self, both by Bernadette Roberts, a former nun who later raised four children. Although she left the cloister after ten years, the cloister never left her, as evinced by her books. Through a "circuitous" route, she came to realization also offered by a more "direct" route--Buddhism, advaita--but she did it within Christianity, and this was perhaps a great consolation to her.

Our modern world needs something, and consolation is a good word to help describe what is missing, although Roberts is on to something far more profound than that. Some people, though, go the opposite direction.
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Mary Toft, the Rabbit Woman of Godalming

2011-07-19T04:15:00.006-04:00

"In 1726, a rumor spread through England about a peasant woman from the outskirts of Guildford, who was giving birth to rabbits. . . . The rumor soon made its way to the Prince of Wales, who, fascinated, promptly dispatched the court anatomist, Nathaniel St. Andre, to investigate. St. Andre, an ambitious self-promoter with no real medical training, arrived to find Mary in labor, about to give birth to her fifteenth rabbit.
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