Mind Shadows

I'm Away

2009-11-09T04:15:00.005-05:00

Off next week, which includes Veteran's Day. Click on the Random Read Generator for a chance post. Until I return, I'll leave you with this--

"If I hadn’t spent so much time studying Earthlings,” said the Tralfamadorian, “I wouldn’t have any idea what was meant by free will. I’ve visited thirty-one inhabited planets in the universe, and I have studied reports on one hundred more. Only on Earth is there any talk of free will.” (Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse–Five)

"There's a very large question here." (Winnie The Pooh)

Spending Five Months In Silence

2009-11-05T04:15:00.003-05:00

If you have ever tried gazing at a wall for hours a day, every day of the week, you can appreciate the account below. I have done it. I have attended Zen sesshins, sitting in lotus position, following my breath, noticing the occasional wayward thought or sensation as it skittered across a somewhere called the mind. Meditation, deep and prolonged, changes things. It alters how you look at the world and how you look within. Read on about meditating in Nepal.

"My childhood nickname was 'Chatterduck.' But last year, I decided to spend five months on silent meditation retreat, mostly in Nepal. What, my friends have asked (at least the ones who didn't think I'd lost my mind), is it like to spend five months without talking, writing, or even updating my facebook status? Short answer: not what you'd expect, but more powerful.

First of all, not talking is the easy part. You don't go crazy, and you don't forget how to speak."

". . . What's the point of noting all these mundane sensations, feelings, and thoughts? Well, enlightenment, of course, which comes as a result of seeing directly and in one's own experience that perceptions arise and pass of their own accord, that none of them ever really satisfies, and that there's no self or soul separate from the sensations, feelings, and thoughts themselves. Consciousness just happens, and the interiority of our experience is an illusion. There's no there, here. . . . There weren't many weird mystical fireworks that shot off during my months of silence -- just a lot of time to see the ordinary very, very clearly. This is true in everyday experience, too. It's not like most of us don't know what's good for us; we do. We're just too busy chasing the next pleasant experience to live up to our own ideals. Sure, what really matters is timeless and free -- but the timeless and free is also boring. So we get back on the hamster wheel and start spinning." More

Warren Buffet, Colanders, and Cookie Sheets

2009-11-04T04:15:00.013-05:00

For $34 billion Warren Buffett bought up Burlington Northern Santa Fe. The railroad is a major coal carrier and Buffett foresees an increased demand for that form of energy. Apparently, severely reduced carbon dioxide emissions are not in his crystal ball. In the short term he is probably a good soothsayer, but in the long term--by mid-century--drastically decreased water supplies due to global warming will have caused nations and their politicians to have acted because of overwhelming refugee masses and perhaps destabilized governments. They will find themselves in an emergency to severely reduce consumption of coal and other emitters. Many very respected experts say that by then the planet will have passed the point of no return. Buffet reminds me of one definition of a cynic: somebody who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.

For all that, he is an interesting character. He has a humble and plain-folks personality, although in him is a fierce competitiveness and desire to be top-dog. He is a man of contradictions.

Many tales have been told about the Wizard of Omaha, one of the world's richest people. One I like describes how he routinely took an elderly aunt, I think, to a hamburger joint for their regular meal together. He likes spaghetti, cheese hamburgers, and meat and potatoes, but has little use for exotic cuisine. Now, a biography is out, and it provides anecdotes as well as a psychological understanding of Buffet. Here is a review of the book, The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life By Alice Schroeder:

"Kind, but absent as a parent, Warren Buffet was used to the attention of his first wife as a 'sort of a single mother. . . . [and was] so undomesticated that once, when she was nauseous and asked him to bring her a basin, he came back with a colander. She pointed out that it had holes; he rattled around the kitchen and returned triumphantly bearing the colander on a cookie sheet. After that she knew he was hopeless. . . .

Here is one of the odd things about the man whom Schroeder describes: the plain facts of his young character assemble themselves into something like a portrait of a universal loser--and yet right from the start Buffett himself seems to have been able to believe that the universe was wrong and he was right. . . . In the most important social departments, he started out well behind his classmates and, as he puts it, 'I never caught up, basically.' He had terrible social anxieties and, right up until the time he married, at the age of twenty-one, a special lack of talent with girls. . . . As a man he would reserve his harshest criticism for those who lied or cheated or stole, but as a boy he shoplifted pathologically--not because he wanted a particular thing, but simply for the pleasure of stealing. . . . Buffett did well in only one class, typing. . . .

Kay Graham once asked him for a dime to make a phone call and Buffett, finding only a quarter in his pocket, went off to make change. " More

Steven Pinker on Consciousness and Pulling The Plug

2009-11-03T04:15:00.001-05:00

To dictate his memoir The Diving Bell and the Butterfly: A Memoir of Life in Death, Jean-Dominique Bauby used his eyelid to signal the words to his typist. That was all the communication he had available. In December of 1995, at 43, the editor in chief of France's Elle magazine suffered a stroke which severely damaged his brain stem. After several weeks in a coma, he woke to find that he was one of the rare victims of a condition called Locked-In Syndrome" or LIS, which had left his mind functioning but his body almost completely shut down. He was in a coma for weeks and then awakened to find that he understood others but could not communicate with them--almost. His mind functioned as usual but his body was completely paralyzed--except for one eyelid. The book was made into a profound and deeply engrossing movie. After finishing his book, Bauby died in 1997.

Consider, then, this situation as described by Steven Pinker. It is not LIS, but a condition called Persistent Vegetative State. Here is a woman whose brain was more profoundly injured than Bauby's, yet it reflected consciousness of events going on around her. Was there an "I" in her mind, aware of all that was going on but unable to communicate?:

"The young women had survived the car crash, after a fashion. In the five months since parts of her brain had been crushed, she could open her eyes but didn't respond to sights, sounds or jabs. In the jargon of neurology, she was judged to be in a persistent vegetative state. In crueler everyday language, she was a vegetable.

So picture the astonishment of British and Belgian scientists as they scanned her brain using a kind of MRI that detects blood flow to active parts of the brain. When they recited sentences, the parts involved in language lit up. When they asked her to imagine visiting the rooms of her house, the parts involved in navigating space and recognizing places ramped up. And when they asked her to imagine playing tennis, the regions that trigger motion joined in. Indeed, her scans were barely different from those of healthy volunteers. The woman, it appears, had glimmerings of consciousness."

Pinker says this about her condition: "Try to comprehend what it is like to be that woman. Do you appreciate the words and caresses of your distraught family while racked with frustration at your inability to reassure them that they are getting through? Or do you drift in a haze, springing to life with a concrete thought when a voice prods you, only to slip back into blankness? If we could experience this existence, would we prefer it to death? And if these questions have answers, would they change our policies toward unresponsive patients--making the Terri Schiavo case look like child's play?" More

Is Mormonism Christian?

2009-10-29T04:15:00.007-04:00

I regard the question as academic and not worthy of serious consideration. I think this way because after Jesus' death the Jesus teachings took many forms, and many interpretations until becoming codified into the orthodoxy it is today. Centuries after Jesus' death, Constantine's Council of Nicaea, after days of wrangling and debate, decided what would be accepted as official Church doctrine, and what would not be. In the 19th Century, Joseph Smith's ideas came far too late to be accepted or rejected as orthodoxy by Council members--that's all. In short, the matter of orthodoxy was decided by men, some wise, some foolish. Barring his polygamy and other possible heresies, they might have accepted some of Joseph Smith's claims had he and his ideas been of the times and assimilated by the culture. Still, I offer the writer's comments below as they are interesting.

" . . . there has been more smoke than light, particularly about the fundamental question of what Mormons actually believe. Journalists, never particularly interested in doctrinal matters, tend to focus on the contemporary influence of the church or on intriguing chapters from its past history—most prominently the practice of polygamy, which officially was ended in 1890. Scholarly studies do little better, in part because they tend to focus on the history of the church, particularly its formative era from 1820 to 1890, or on its contemporary sociology and culture.

All this has led to considerable misunderstanding about what Latter-day Saints believe about the central subject of Christian religion: Jesus Christ and his atonement for sin. One can find innumerable assertions that Mormons do not believe Jesus was the messiah, that they do not believe he atoned for the sins of the fallen human race, and that they believe salvation comes by works.

All of these statements are false, and they reflect incomprehension of Mormon beliefs and doctrine." More

Penn and Teller On The 7 Basics of Magic

2009-10-28T04:15:00.002-04:00

Holding a cigarette, Teller wants his tricks to expose how we construct reality. Every day of our lives we perpetuate fraud on ourselves, unaware of our self-deception. T.S. Eliot said mankind cannot bear too much reality and he apparently was right.

Our brains were adapted for evolution. A rock could be a bear, a stick a snake, and too much stimuli could overload the brain. Instead it pictures "reality" for us. It is wired to reveal to us how things are supposed to look.

Although not psychologists, magicians have an intuitive grasp of our ability to deceive ourselves. "Every time you perform a magic trick, you're engaging in experimental psychology," Teller says. "If the audience asks, 'How the hell did he do that?' then the experiment was successful. I've exploited the efficiencies of your mind."

We can gaze open-mouthed as the lady emerges unscathed after seemingly being sawed in half. We know it was a trick. We knew we would be deceived, but we cannot see how it was possible. We trust our vision, our hearing, our common sense, which deceive us each time a magician steps on stage.

Watch the video below to understand the basic rules of deception in magic.

Psychopaths I Have Known

2009-10-27T04:15:00.008-04:00

I can count psychopaths among my acquaintances. They committed no crimes and had never been in prison, but psychopaths they were. One acquaintance was the most notable. He rose to become head of a large organization and those who worked for him suffered greatly from his callous disregard for common decency. Numerous formal complaints were lodged against him, but somehow he manipulated the perceptions of those who received the complaints so that either (1) his bosses were afraid of him or (2) they truly believed his employees simply had grudges against him.

Herman Goering, Hitler's Luftwaffe Marshal, was a psychopath. Like so many of his kind, he was likable in superficial meetings, but was vain, indifferent to others' feelings, and the super hero of his own story--so much so that he thought everybody else must admire him as much as he admired himself. Under-appreciated at the Nuremberg War Crimes Trial, he was shocked to discover the judges considered him a criminal. He hanged himself.

Estimates vary for male psychopaths in the population, from one out of ten to one out of a hundred to four out of a hundred . An estimate for women is one out of three hundred. The essential point is this. They are more common than people think. Your next door neighbor may be one. The statistics would include some readers of this blog.

"It is well observed that psychopaths (a.k.a. sociopaths) are found both in prison and in managerial positions. In The Sociopath Next Door, Martha Stout analyzed many individuals with psychopathy and most of them were not part of the offender population. I think that leadership researchers have somehow overlooked these types of "leaders" or organizational psychopaths who have inflicted pain to many but succeeded in maintaining their positions (even been promoted). More

I found a checklist by Robert Hare for psychopathy. He lists the following traits:

(1) interpersonal or affective defects (e.g., glibness or superficial charm, grandiose feelings of self-worth, conning or manipulative behavior, lack of remorse or guilt, shallow affects, callousness or lack of empathy)
(2) social deviance and antisocial (irresponsibility, parasitic lifestyle, impulsivity, and unstable relationships, criminal versatility).
(3) other attributes.

Number 3 leaves the door open and such characteristics as irresponsibility describe criminals rather than those who have careers. Quoting the checklist, the writer, Key Sun, says he has "encountered about three or four psychopaths in organizational settings in the past. I observed they were frequently abusive, disregarding the feelings and rights of others; they caused disasters to everything they put their hands on. However, they appeared to never be found responsible for the harms they did. I always wonder how those who are neither emotionally nor socially intelligent (namely, they lack the basic leadership qualifications suggested by some researchers) operate so well, whereas nice people in the same settings are frequently reprimanded or punished."

Note "they appeared to never be found responsible for the harms they did." That was precisely my experience in observing my former acquaintance.

The writer has "tentative explanations:
1. Psychopaths know how to ingratiate themselves with people of higher status.
2. They prey on nice victims who they know are unlikely to jeopardize their positions.
3. They know how to take others' achievements as their own credits, and blame their mistakes on others.
4. They are good at using both fear and tear to menace and confuse others.

Here are excerpts I found while surfing for information on psychopaths:

Only 20-25% of those in prison are psychopaths.

When asked a question such as “What does remorse feel like?” for instance, the typical psychopath will become irritated, deflect the question, or attempt to change the subject.

Psychopaths “know the words but not the music.” Those that turn to crime are generally considered “unsuccessful psychopaths” due to their failure to blend into society. Those who do succeed can do so spectacularly.

While it may sound like a cynical joke, it’s a fact that psychopaths have a clear advantage in fields such as law, business, and politics. They have higher IQs on average than the general population. They take risks and aren’t fazed by failures. They know how to charm and manipulate. They’re ruthless.

It could even be argued that the criteria used by corporations to find effective managers actually select specifically for psychopathic traits: characteristics such as charisma, self-centeredness, confidence, and dominance are highly correlated with the psychopathic personality, yet also highly sought after in potential leaders. More.

And More. In the interest of brevity, I did not want to include this, but it eloquently captures the problem of psychopathy, so here it is:

"The high incidence of sociopathy in human society has a profound effect on the rest of us who must live on this planet, too, even those of us who have not been clinically traumatized. The individuals who constitute this 4 percent drain our relationships, our bank accounts, our accomplishments, our self-esteem, our very peace on earth.

Yet surprisingly, many people know nothing about this disorder, or if they do, they think only in terms of violent psychopathy - murderers, serial killers, mass murderers - people who have conspicuously broken the law many times over, and who, if caught, will be imprisoned, maybe even put to death by our legal system.

We are not commonly aware of, nor do we usually identify, the larger number of nonviolent sociopaths among us, people who often are not blatant lawbreakers, and against whom our formal legal system provides little defense." More

Does Spontaneity Promote Happiness?

2009-10-22T04:15:00.008-04:00

"Despite considerable research on the topic, I've discovered very little explicitly relating spontaneity to happiness. Admittedly, it's doubtful that any straightforward, one-to-one correspondence actually exists. Still, what various theorists have said about this ideal state of consciousness suggests that, however indirectly, spontaneity does play a crucial role in its achievement. For whether these writers talk about the importance of living in the moment (or 'mindfulness'), liberating oneself from self-consciousness, or even 'being in the zone,' the underlying notion of living more spontaneously to foster a greater state of well-being is generally not far below the surface."

Spontaneity. Hmmm. Long ago when I took French, I read a novel by Andre Gide, Lafcadio's Adventures (in French Les Caves du Vatican, or The Vatican Cellars), in which the protagonist tried to do a completely gratuitous act--something undetermined by him. Without premeditation, so he thinks, without a plan, he murders a man, by shoving him off a train. But the act was not gratuitous, for at the last minute Lafcadio Wluki had intent. He could not escape the cause and effect which informs our lives. For Gide, this was a philosophical novel on what the novelist regarded as the conflict between human freedom and determinism. So much for literature vis-à-vis neuroscience, which cannot find a ghost in the machine.

Which raises the question, Is anything ever spontaneous? Yes, says Robert Burton (On Being Certain: Believing You Are Right Even When You're Not). Yes, by implication in the sense that we think we know something because a conscious thought (our belief) arose as a sensation produced by the unconscious mind. The conscious thought that we are right is produced by an unconscious association and is therefore spontaneous. Burton has an interesting argument and from a neurological perspective he is dead on about many things, but it is too long for my purpose here. Read the book if you want to understand more.

Burton, though, was a neurologist, now retired to write novels, and his book is not about happiness. For a psychologist's perspective on happiness and spontaneity, read on. More

Anterograde Amnesia

2009-10-21T04:15:00.005-04:00

What would it be like to be Rip Van Winkle every thirty seconds? That is, to remember at most in thirty second segments, and to forget everything beyond that time span? According to the video below, it is like continually waking up. It is like a repeated surprise. Oh, so this is new! Oh, so that is new! Soon, the continual newness gets old.

The movie Memento puts a Hollywood spin on the condition. The lead character suffers from anterograde amnesia and searches for the man he believes raped and killed his wife during a burglary. His brain incurred severe trauma during the attack on his wife and he cannot store new memories. To compensate, he takes copious notes and photographs, as well as tatoos, to keep information about himself, others, and his wife's killer.

"In most cases of anterograde amnesia, patients lose declarative memory, or the recollection of facts, but they retain non-declarative memory, often called procedural memory. For instance, they are able to remember and in some cases learn how to do things such as talking on the phone or riding a bicycle, but they may not remember what they had eaten earlier that day for lunch. In addition, patients have a diminished ability to remember the temporal context in which objects were presented." More

In brief, anterograde amnesia applies to those who can't remember after the event that caused the memory loss. Retrograde amnesia applies to people who can't remember what happened before the event. Some people suffer both kinds.

The man in the video below cannot remember beyond fifty or sixty seconds. He tells the woman that each time he feels like he has just awakened. He feels continual amazement. He cannot remember dreams, or what he did five minutes ago. He knows he is aging and by listening to him you understand he feels that without memory he is losing his life. As soon as he wakes up he makes a diary entry to the effect that he has just awakened. Then he wakes up again and crosses out the previous entry because he believes he has just awakened this time instead .

Myths of What Makes Us Happy

2009-10-20T04:15:00.003-04:00

We think we know what will make us happy, but do we? Extensive research on happiness reveals a rather surprising conclusion. Few people know what will make them happy. Most people think they know, but really don't. This failure to understand themselves leads them into lives with unfulfilling careers and relationships.

One explanation for the failure to understand can be found in the natural tendency to cognitive bias. Cognitive bias sneaks up on us, even though we know it exists. We try to be objective in our decision making, but often don't have a clue as to how we are prejudiced in our reasoning criteria. Our brains are hard wired for cognitive biases and we often cannot see through that fact. This had an evolutionary advantage. If it moved and was as big as a boulder, it probably might eat us. Our ancestors ran. They didn't have to think about it. People tend to believe a certain way because others do. This, too, had an advantage, for those who didn't fit in were cast out into the wilderness. Then there is confirmation bias, the tendency to look for explanations that fit our preconceptions. This may have facilitated decision making when life was simple, nasty, brutish, and short, and decisions had to be made quickly.

Interestingly, many people think fame would make them happy. This is a relatively new phenomenon, one rare in communitarian societies, as well as in America and Europe as recently as the nineteenth century. I regard it as due to alienation in modern society. People want recognition that closer social connections once offered. As an example, self-esteem once came from love, concern, and warm relationships with others in close-knit communities.

The video below discusses the myths about happiness and points out what has been found to make people happy. A very brief commercial precedes it.

Living With Epilepsy

2009-10-15T04:15:00.001-04:00

In High school, walking between classes, I saw a group of kids standing around something. When I got to the crowd, I saw a boy on the lawn, his legs and arms jerking spasmodically. He was wholly unconscious. Fourteen years old, I didn't know what to do. I had never seen anybody behave like that and had no idea how to help him.

Suddenly, two teachers and the school nurse pushed through the crowd. We went on to our next classes. They took care of the boy. That afternoon, I learned that he had an epileptic fit. I didn't know the boy but I felt sorry for him. As a teenager, he had been publicly seen in a very un-cool situation. I didn't understand that was the least of his worries, although I am sure he felt stigmatized. Much later, I learned the terminology. The boy had what was then called a grand mal seizure. That was a big-time problem.

Seizures are strange things. "Depending on the part of the brain affected, seizures can produce hallucinations, anxiety, feelings of religious ecstasy or bizarre psychological tics such as 'hyperfamiliarity,' a delusional sense that you're already acquainted with everyone you meet."

I wonder if the boy is still alive, or how long he lived. "There is some debate about the long-term risk from repeated seizures." Some scientists believe seizures can cause brain damage. Most certainly uncontrolled seizures can lead to "lasting memory problems, cognitive deficits, personality changes—and death."

Curiously, specific recurrent events can cause seizures. Oliver Sacks described a woman who went into a seizure whenever she heard Neapolitan music.

Nowadays some epilepsy can be controlled by electronic devices such as the vagal nerve stimulator. It sends an electric signal to the brain through the vagus nerve in the neck. More

Were The Essenes Authors of The Dead Sea Scrolls?

2009-10-14T04:15:00.001-04:00

Discovered between 1947 and 1956, the Dead Sea scrolls altered the historical view of Biblical times and were of great importance in our understanding of Christ and antiquity. Found in eleven caves at Wadi Qumran on a shore of the Dead Sea, the roughly 900 documents include copies of Biblical documents. Written on parchment or papyrus and in Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek, the manuscripts range in date from 150 years before Christ to 70 years after his birth. The scrolls are most commonly identified with the ancient Jewish sect called the Essenes.

Scholars have put forth many well-reasoned doubts as to whether the Essenes existed, or were invented by Greek and Laton historians. Rachel Elior is one of them. More

Caloric Restriction & Long Life

2009-10-13T04:15:00.001-04:00

It happened long ago, and yet popular culture lacks knowledge of ground-breaking experiments on how to live longer. The year was 1934. The scientists were Clive McCay and Mary Crowell of Cornell University. The experiment was simple. McCay and Crowell fed laboratory rats a diet with severely reduced calories while insuring nutrition remained adequate. This diet resulted in life spans twice as long as otherwise expected. In humans, a calorie-restricted diet could lead to life spans of 115 to 120 years, the maximum that longevity evidence indicates. That increase in years would be attended by relatively good health until death.

Roy Walford and Richard Weindruch conducted similar experiments on mice. In 1986, Weindruch reported that restricting the calorie intake of laboratory mice proportionally increased their life span compared to a group of mice with a normal diet. The calorie-restricted mice also maintained youthful appearances and activity levels longer and showed delays in age-related diseases. Walford and Weindruch summarized their findings in a book, The Retardation of Aging and Disease by Dietary Restriction (1988).

The findings apply to more than rats and mice. Many people have taken up the practice of caloric restriction (CR) and there are web sites dedicated to it. Because life is short, they have chosen not to wait for research on the possibility of parallel physiological links in humans.

The findings have been significant. In 2002 at Washington University, 30 participants were engaged in trials on longevity and caloric restriction. Dr. Luigi Fontana found that the practitioners appear to age more slowly than the general population. In the caloric restriction group,with a mean age of 55, systolic blood pressure had a mean of 110, about that of a 20-year-old. More here and here.

Cloning Neanderthals: Within Our Reach

2009-10-08T04:15:00.001-04:00

Let's say that our cousins the Neanderthals can be cloned and brought back to life. Although our ancestors wiped them out, rendered them extinct, we modern humans allegedly have found a way to bring them back. That is, "a team of researchers led by geneticist Svante Pääbo at the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig, Germany" have. They have "completed a draft sequence of the genome of Neanderthal humans."

Mind you, they won't be brought back because of compassion for having rendered them extinct. Rather, "evolutionary biologists believe that comparing the Neanderthal genome with our own will throw considerable light on the genetic changes that gave us our big brains, language, and the ability to create culture."

How much will it cost? Some say about $30 million, peanuts with the right grants and sponsors.

There is an ethical problem in all of this. "Neanderthals are human beings, too. The ancestral lineage that led to both Neanderthals and modern humans diverged from the chimpanzee line nearly 6 million years ago.Archaeological evidence also indicates that Neanderthals behaved in ways similar to modern humans. They controlled fire, wore clothing, made and used tools, and buried their dead."

The same laws that protect us, must protect them. They would not be chimpanzees in a laboratory. More.

Military Dogs Returning to Multiple War Tours Suffer Stress, Nightmares

2009-10-07T04:15:00.001-04:00

In WWI they called it shell shock. In WWII it was combat fatigue. Today, soldiers experience Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Dogs also go to war.

Timi, a 5 year-old German shepherd, is an Iraq war veteran, and "according to his medical file, he has nightmares 'characterized by violent kicking.' His veterinarian says he has had 'readjustment issues' since coming home--although not severe enough to prevent him from returning to the field. Timi started thrashing about in his sleep. . . . . 'He was kicking the . . . kennel down. . . . When I got him out of it, he'd have that bewildered look, and it would take him a minute to know where he was. Then he'd fall back asleep, and it would happen again and again.' For two years, Walter Burghardt, chief of behavioral medicine at the Department of Defense Military Working Dog Veterinary Service, has been studying the effects of combat on dogs. More

Consciousness (Not) Explained

2009-10-06T04:15:00.002-04:00

For most of us, our emotions are stirred, powerful feelings arise, and that is what we are likely to remember.

"Bill Noonan hasn't suffered any obvious physical damage to his brain. Yet for more than two decades after his return from Vietnam, he has re-experienced the most terrifying event of his life several times a week as a waking dream. 'It was a night ambush,' he remembers. 'The first seven guys to my right were machine-gunned down. My gas mask was shot right off my hip. That was my first fire fight.' Bill knew his flashbacks weren't real-but they seemed so real that it made no difference. 'I didn't know what was happening,' he says. 'The biggest fear I had was that I was crazy. ' "

Not so, all of us. Far from traumatic experiences, Marcel Proust sought a kind of metaphysics in memory. He found his most meaningful events in the taste of a cookie, or the angle of his feet while he gazed at a building. "The past," he wrote, "still lives in us . . . has made us what we are and is remaking us every moment!" He says, "it is a vase filled with perfumes, sounds, places and climates! . . . So we hold within us a treasure of impressions . . . that become certain moments of our past." (Formerly Remembrance of Things Past, now In Search of Lost Time.)

In either case, Proust's or Noonan's, the mind is the mystery. It is the source of our sense of self, our sense of being in the world, our sense of choice. Some say it is merely a function of consciousness, which in turn arises from the brain, an emergent phenomenon, physical at its root. Others argue that to insist on only the physicality is to deny a spiritual aspect to our lives.

Long before Descartes came up with his "I think, therefore I am," Buddha had said, in effect, "I am, therefore I think." Consciousness itself remains a mystery, arising as Eastern sages say, out of the great I AM.

In the West, science hopes to explain much of it. Nonetheless, as they study it, they understand that the victims of mental disease or brain damage provide "stark demonstrations of how fragile reality can be. Most people agree, within limits, on the objective character of the world around them. Yet while the victims of mental disorders are certainly conscious and aware, their worlds are profoundly different from those of most of us." More

I'm Away

2009-09-17T04:15:00.002-04:00

Click on the Random Read Generator for a chance post until I get back. I hope to resume posting on Tuesday October 6th.

Survival of The Kindest

2009-09-16T04:15:00.003-04:00

In Good Natured (1996) Frans de Waal provides an account of an old male bonobo leading a blind female around by the hand, and another of an ape who helped an injured bird by climbing a tree, spreading the bird's wings, and sending it off into the air. The primate somehow knew the kind of help the bird needed. Throughout the world of primates, observers have noted how apes reveal a capacity to assist others insightfully.

De Waal studied the field work of researchers, and the "veneer theory" of people such as Jane Goodall, who held that apes and humans share an innate tendency toward agression and violence. In human society this tendency is veiled by the veneer of civilization. Instead, he finds, and argues for, a wide range of ape behavior, from agression to tenderness and explores what this might mean in human society.

"When a bird flew into the glass enclosure of a bonobo named Kuni, de Waal recounts, she picked it up and tried to help it fly away again. Rather than comforting the starling like a fellow ape, Kuni carried it to the top of a tree, carefully spread its wings, and launched it gently into the air, showing that she recognized its needs as distinct from her own--a remarkable act of empathy. Humans show the same inclination when they help strangers without regard to their own reward, such as stopping to assist accident victims or giving away money to people they have never met."

“I think our motivations often transcend the reason why a behavior evolved,” de Waal says. “Acts of helping may have originally evolved in context for their survival value, but are now applied to situations outside that.”

Notice the words "transcend" and "evolved" above. He refers to transcending evolution. Here, de Waal implies a position against the reductionist explanations of evolutionary psychology, which see behavior as a means to perpetuate individual genes. A catch-phrase of reductionism can be found in Richard Dawkins' concept of "the selfish gene."

In Our Inner Ape, de Waal has a section, “Girl Power,” in which he "describes how females run the show in bonobo communities, controlling the food supply and wielding considerable authority over relationships and mating. Even the male bonobo hierarchy, de Waal says, is actually determined by the influence of the mothers." More

Carlos Castaneda & Tin Cups

2009-09-15T04:15:00.001-04:00

Carlos Castaneda reached world fame with 12 books that have sold more than 8 million copies in 17 languages. As in the 1960s and 1970s, today he is read for his descriptions of another way of seeing the world through heightened awareness. He rarely spoke in public about his work, but since his death in 1998 he remains widely read, with followers around the globe. To this day controversy surrounds his accounts of his experiences.

Bruce Wagner was not convinced of the author's accounts of don Juan Matus, the Yaqui nagual, or sorcerer. Castaneda's tales of shape-shifting crows and coyotes in the Sonoran desert seemed far-fetched. Wagner was fortunate enough to get an interview with the reclusive author, an interview which reveals Castaneda in a different light.

In 1960 Castaneda was a graduate student in anthropology at University of California Los Angeles. He said that on a field trip in Arizona researching the medicinal properties of plants, he met don Juan, an old Yaqui Indian shod in huaraches, who offered to help. Don Juan also happened to be a sorcerer.

Narrating the story of the old peasant, Castaneda wrote his first book, The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge, now a classic, and a runaway best seller when first published. Written in California during the days of LSD and peyote, Castaneda learns how to fly, talk to a bilingual Coyote, and behold wondrous columns of singing light. This and other books made Castenada famous.

Like authors J.D. Salinger, and Thomas Pynchon, his celebrity drove Castaneda into life incognito. Reporters clamored for interviews but he was nowhere to be found. He slipped out back doors as they came in the front, you might say. Photographs of him are publicly unavailable. On a 1973 cover of Time magazine, only eyes are visible against the the dark outline of a head, but then Time discovered that the person wasn't Castaneda. Other magazines have tried to reconstruct his face based on the memories of old colleagues and erstwhile acquaintances. When Wagner asked how he should describe Castaneda, Carlos replied, "You may say I resemble Lee Marvin." (A macho Hollywood star now dead.) In fact he was a short, pudgy Peruvian. His ex-wife, Margaret Runyon, said he looked like a Cuban bellhop.

When they met at a cafe of a hotel in Beverly Hills, Wagner shook the hand of a man who "smiled broadly" and then sat down. All seemed well, and Wagner began to frame his first question when Castaneda's forehead wrinkled, his body convulsed, and his lower lip twitched. " 'Please!,' he declared, a shaky truce with facial muscles just enough to spit out the words, He bore down on [Wagner] in needy supplication. 'Please love me!' "

"We are apes with tin cups," Castaneda said after his sobbing stopped. "We're too busy holding onto mommy's hand," he explained, adding that "the scenarios of our lives have already been written by others." Contrary to this, he also said, "We are sublime--but the insane ape lacks the energy to see--so the brain of the beast prevails. We cannot grab our window of opportunity."

Wagner asked him "But if we have a choice, why do we stay in the gutter?"

"It's too warm. We don't want to leave."

Castaneda later said, "We must see ourselves as beings who are going to die. Once you accept that, worlds open up for you. But to embrace this definition you must have balls of steel." He went on. "What's real?," he asked. "This hard, shitty, meaningless, daily world? Are despair and senility what's real?" Castaneda claimed his system of opening worlds derived from twenty seven generations of sorcerers, bequeathed him by don Juan.

In Castaneda's books, don Juan helped him to perceive energy directly, teaching that we are magical beings who mistake ourselves for egos rather than spirits

Castaneda had encountered people like Bruce Wagner, skeptics of his accounts. Castaneda recalled a party where he met a scientist who read the first book but said he wanted proof, not anecdotes. Castaneda replied that to understand the book, the scientist would have to take Sorcery 101.

Somewhere in his article, Wagner asks himself, "What if it turns out Castaneda is inventing nothing? If that's true, you are in a very bad spot."

Of course, Wagner's suspicions might have been groundless and Castaneda was no fraud. Then again, he could have found support in Amy Wallace. In her memoirs, The Sorcerer's Apprentice: My Life with Carlos Castaneda, she recalls the May-December affair she had with Castaneda--she young, he aging. She met him at one of his workshops where he lectured on body movements, including sexual, as taught by his twenty seven generations of sorcerers. At a seedy Los Angeles motel they got into bed. "Carlos was so nervous that he insisted we leave our clothes on. He seemed anxious to complete the act quickly and was strangely businesslike, evidently struck with performance anxiety," Wallace writes. "As he fumbled with buttons, I stopped him and whispered, 'Let's relax for a while--Carlos, let's kiss for a while'. "

At a lecture by Castaneda in San Francisco, and attended by Wagner, a young man asked Castaneda how people could achieve all his experiences if they could not have access to a sorcerer such as don Juan. Castaneda replied that the fellow didn't need don Juan. Instead, he needed a lot of energy, "and for that you have to work your balls off."

Castaneda ended his lecture by saying that "don Juan used to say, 'One of us is an asshole. And it isn't me.' That's what I came to tell you today."

Although Wagner didn't, the audience roared with laughter and Castaneda disappeared through the back door. While the audience laughed, Wagner responded differently to Castaneda's remark. He made up his mind about Castaneda, and one imagines him thinking of P.T. Barnum's phrase, "There's a sucker born every minute."

After deciding on his opinion of Castaneda, he says of Carlos running into the alley, "I wanted to chase him down, calling 'Please love me!' " Wagner says "that would have been a good laugh, anyway. But I forgot my tin cup."

At his Los Angeles home, Castaneda died in 1998 of liver cancer. He was 72. His death went almost unnoticed by the press.
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This article derives from various sources, including Details magazine, March 1994, "You Only Live Twice," by Bruce Wagner.

Karen Armstrong, Religions, and The Golden Rule

2009-09-10T04:15:00.001-04:00

"As she accepts her 2008 TED Prize, author and scholar Karen Armstrong talks about how the Abrahamic religions -- Islam, Judaism, Christianity -- have been diverted from the moral purpose they share to foster compassion. But Armstrong has seen a yearning to change this fact. People want to be religious, she says; we should act to help make religion a force for harmony. She asks the TED community to help her build a Charter for Compassion -- to help restore the Golden Rule as the central global religious doctrine."

The Duel Over von Trautmansdorf's Moustache

2009-09-09T04:15:00.004-04:00

“In Hamburg in 1834, a handsome young army officer named Baron von Trautmansdorf challenged a fellow officer, Baron von Ropp, to a duel. The precipitating offense was a poem that von Ropp had written and circulated among his friends about von Trautmansdorf's moustache, stating that it was thin and floppy and hinting that it might no be the only part of his physique to which those adjectives could be applied. The feud between the barons had originated in their shared passion for the same woman, Countess Lodoiska, the grey-green-eyed widow of a Polish general. Unable to resolve their differences amicably, the two men met in a field in a Hamburg suburb early on a March morning. Both were carrying swords; both were still short of their thirtieth birthdays; both would die in the ensuing fight.

In this last aspect, the event was no exception. From its beginnings in Renaissance Italy until its end in the First World War, the practice of duelling claimed the lives of hundreds of thousands of Europeans. In the seventeenth century, duels were responsible for some five thousand deaths in Spain alone. Visitors to that country were advised to take extra care when addressing locals, lest they accidentally offend their honour and end up in the grave. “Duels happen every day in Spain,” declares a character in a play by Calderon. In France, meanwhile, Lord Herbert of Cherbury reported in 1608 that there was “scarce any man thought worth the looking on, that had not killed some other in a duel,” and in England, it was widely held that no man could be termed a gentleman unless and until he had “taken up his sword.”

Although occasional duels were sparked by matters of objective importance, the majority had their origin in small, even petty, questions of honour. In Paris in 1678, for example, one man killed another who said that his apartment was tasteless. In Florence in 1702, a literary man took the life of a cousin who had accused him of not understanding Dante. And in France under the regency of Phillipe d'Orleans, two officers of the guard fought on the Quai des Tuileries over the ownership of an Angora cat.

For as long as it lasted, duelling symbolised a radical incapacity to believe that one's status might be one's own business, a value one decided on and did not revise to accord with the shifting judgments of others. In the dueller's psyche, other people's opinions were the only factor in forming a sense of self. The dueller could not remain acceptable in his own eyes if those around him judged him to be evil or dishonourable, a coward or a failure, foolish or effeminate. So dependent was his self-image on the views of others that he would sooner die of a bullet or stab wound than allow unfavourable assessments of him to go unanswered.” In Alain de Botton, Status Anxiety

George Koval

2009-09-08T04:15:00.004-04:00

Nobody knew it, at least almost nobody, but a man born and bred in Sioux City, Iowa, did great damage to the United States as a spy for the Soviet Union. "Atomic spies are old stuff. But historians say Dr. Koval, who died in his 90s last year in Moscow and whose name is just coming to light publicly, was probably one of the most important spies of the 20th century." George Koval grew up in a small town, made many friends, played baseball and football, ate hot dogs, served in the United States Army in World War II, worked on the Manhattan Project, and eventually defected to the Russians after they thought his cover was blown. Worst, he provided them with key information on how to make an atomic bomb. He was recently honored by Vladimir Putin with the Russian Federation's highest medal. Hero for them, traitor for the United States.

"On November 2, 2007, some of Russia’s most senior military and intelligence officials gathered at the Kremlin to honor a Soviet spy whose name was until then completely absent from the annals of espionage history. . . .Russian president Vladimir Putin [paid] tribute to George Koval. Koval was an American citizen born in Iowa to immigrant parents from Belarus. In 1932, Koval, his parents and two brothers, all of whom were US citizens, moved back to the then rapidly developing Soviet Union to escape the effects of the Great Depression. . . . He received Soviet citizenship and returned to the US through San Francisco in October 1940. By that time, Koval was an accredited agent of the GRU, what intelligence professionals usually refer to as a sleeper agent. In 1943, Koval joined the Manhattan Project –the allied effort to develop the world’s first operational atomic bomb. More. Also read this.

Mark Rothko & Trophy Paintings: Or What Is It Really Worth?

2009-09-03T04:15:00.002-04:00

It's both a cliché and a truism that "starving" artists depend on discovery by critics and endorsement by rich patrons in order to spread their reputation for genius. It's another cliché and truism that many die undiscovered. In other words, the intrinsic value of a painting depends on the painter's reputation. Investment bankers don't worry about being discovered and they don't worry about where their next meal comes from. The intrinsic value of money may be arbitrary, but a million dollars are still a million dollars. They can buy lots of stuff. *(For my purposes here, read intrinsic as a consensual value which in turn dictates price.)

We are in a recession and in a bear market, and stock prices have plummeted. Toxic assets and banks involve a question of mark-to-market, which is another way of asking whether they have intrinsic value, or whether they simply should cost what the market will pay.

In current economic conditions, how do art prices find their level? How do prices form at all in the art market? Why $73 million for a Mark Rothko and not $7.3 million? So here is one consideration of the question:

"If you want to own things, art is a pretty good bet. Buy art, build a museum, put your name on it, let people in for free. That's as close as you can get to immortality . . . I love art. It is uplifting. If the choice is between buying another building or a Pollock, I'd go for the Pollock every time."

"When a living artist knows his works can sell for tens of millions of dollars--which is the case with Jasper Johns, say, if not quite yet with Damien Hirst--how does he respond to that opportunity? And how does a buyer feel about remunerating a living artist so hugely and directly? To buy a work of art is one thing; to make another man rich is somewhat different. It demystifies the process, at least. More

Alan Weisman: The World Without Us

2009-09-02T04:15:00.005-04:00

In that classic movie, On The Beach, the submarine crew finally discover the source of the erratic Morse code they had heard in Australia. Arriving off the coast of California, they take a launch to a deserted industrial site. Prowling its grounds, they discover a window draw string that the breeze has wrapped around the lever of a telegraph key. When the wind blows, the key taps out its "code." In San Francisco, they had looked through a telescope at a deserted city. It was all gone. The United States was gone. The world was gone. Fallen to nuclear holocaust.

Picture a world from which we are all suddenly vanished. Tomorrow. For a few days, there would be silence as grass grows in neighborhoods, street lights burn at intersections, and static hisses on radios and televisions. In a few months, weeds take over. In a few years, wild animals prowl the neighborhoods. Colonies of cockroaches make homes in kitchen cupboards and scamper across floors.

"How would the rest of nature respond if it were suddenly relieved of the pressures we heap on it and our fellow organisms? How soon would, or could, the climate return to where it was before we fired up all our engines?"

And again. "After we're gone, nature's revenge for our smug, mechanized superiority arrives waterborne. It starts with wood-frame construction, the most widely used residential building technique in the developed world. It begins on the roof, probably asphalt of slate shingle, warranted to last two or three decades--but that warranty doesn't count around the chimney, where the first leak occurs. As the the flashing separates under rain's relentless insistence, water sneaks beneath the shingles. It flows across four-by-eight-foot sheets of sheathing made either of plywood or, if newer, of wood-chip board composed of three- to four-ince flakes bonded together by resin."

From The World Without Us by Alan Weisman. It can be found here and here

Buddhism, Animals, and The Desire To Live

2009-09-01T04:15:00.007-04:00

Is there a philosophical link between Buddhist thought and the nature of animals? In his book The Ethics of Killing, Jeff McMahan claims that your interest in continuing your life depends on your understanding of the continuity between "you" and later "you's". Animals, he says, are not as connected to their later selves.

As a reviewer of the book puts it, "The interest in going on living that you have at a particular point in your life (your “time relative interest” in going on living) depends—says McMahan—on the “prudential unity relations” between you at that time of your life and you or you at later times."

McMahan says that animals have a tenuous connection to this continuity. The reviewer of his book has questions about McMahan's thesis. The implication is that animals have "a weaker stake in going on living." The problem, as the reviewer sees it, is that "it implies that certain kinds of people have a weaker interest in going on living than the rest of us."

This sounds reminiscent of Buddhist teachings on putting out the fire of desire and living in the now. Or, people who no longer believe in their religion. Or, those who lose themselves in intense activity--Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi's concept of flow. (He has a book titled Flow.) In all these three cases there is less continuity between your present and future self. Does this mean you and animals have a weaker desire to go on living?

The reviewer has this to say about Buddhists: "You’ve taken heed of Buddhist wisdom that desire is the root of all suffering, so you 'live in the present' and limit your desires about the future as much as possible."

As for me, I think McMahan is way off base. Apropos of not very much at all, I once heard a story about a captain, a first mate, an ordinary seaman, and a pig. Floating at sea in a life boat after their ship sank, they discussed how to stay alive with only a cask of water and a pig. They would have to ration the water, but how could they ration the pig? If they killed it, it would rot under the hot sun and they would starve. The captain and first mate thought it best to cut off a little chunk of the pig at a time, first a little here, then a little there. The ordinary seaman then pointed out one small matter. They were in a very small boat and the pig would violently resist any attempt to diminish it.

If you want to read the review of his book, here it is. More