Going beyond Wilber’s enclosure of the Integral Commons
5th June 2009Citation from Daniel Gustav Anderson:
By “after Wilber” I mean that the sun has set on Wilber’s project in a number of ways, at least as a practical and intellectual project. It may carry on as a religious institution, which is beyond my concern for it. The “Wyatt Earp” episode should have made this obvious to anyone concerned why this is so, if it wasn’t clear to them before this.
Michel Bauwens:
If you’d ask me to describe the ‘epistemological’ (i.e. form of knowledge) status of P2P Theory, then I would say it’s an applied theory designed to develop a coherent set of concepts which can explain the emergence of peer to peer dynamics and its expressions, with an underlying emancipatory intent. But the method that I use to arrive at conclusions is itself an application of integral theory.
I have explained my take on this in the following article: Beyond Perspectives, Reductionisms and Layers, which appeared in Integral Review, Issue 1, 2005 (June), pp. 14-15.
In short, it’s a method that allows you to intergrate the various aspects of reality, both objective (things), inter-objective (their relationships), subjective (intentional realities) and intersubjective (shared cultures and worldviews). My own method derives from Wilber, but is also radically different because Wilber oversteps boundaries and uses flawed interpretations to arrive at a synthetic interpretation of reality that aims to become dominant.
I had the occasion to critique Ken Wilber’s work in two short articles:
* The Cult of Ken Wilber, http://www.kheper.net/topics/Wilber/Cult_of_Ken_Wilber.html
* A critique of SD/Integral, http://www.kheper.net/topics/Wilber/SDi_critique.html
However, it is the deconstruction by Jeff Meyerhoff in Bald Ambition that has destroyed the edifice as a project with scientific claims.
In the theoretical article that I will be citing below, an episode is mentioned, “the Wyatt Earp episode“, Wilber unfortunately broke down as a coherent thinker and became the leader of a kind of intellectual cult, that is terminally closed to criticism. It signalled that the edifice was beyond repair.
At the time of my break with the mothership for the reasons explained in my short critical pieces above, I called to divest the integral movement from the particular Wilberian’s interpretation, and called for a emancipatory integral theory, that would replace the neoliberal and neocon alignment of the Wilberian’s. However, despite the launch of an originally promising Open Integral blog, this failed to materialize. (however, I consider my own P2P Theory to be a candidate for such efforts, though it’s focus is limited to the P2P field)
Recently however, I discovered the work of Daniel Gustav Anderson in Integral World, which carries a lengthy interview of him by Erik Scott Thornquist, and points to two major essays laying the foundation for a ‘critical integral theory’. I am therefore, understandably exited about the belated discovery of Daniel’s work.
Daniel’s interview shows that the critique is very congruent with mine, though much more detailed and updated, and of course, he has worked out a coherent alternative, something I choose to forego, instead focusing on the P2P Theory, but as a means to the same end.
His bio says that he “is presently a graduate student in Cultural Studies at George Mason University. His interests include critical theory, ecology, and European and South Asian traditions of dialectical thinking.”
His two main and recommended essays are:
* “Of Syntheses and Surprises: Toward a Critical Integral Theory”
* “Such a Body We Must Create: New Theses on Integral Micropolitics“,
Both of them have been published in Integral Review.
Sunday, June 07, 2009
Michel Bauwens - Going beyond Wilber’s enclosure of the Integral Commons
Modern Buddhism - On the Reincarnation of Tulkus
The story of Tenzin Osel Rinpoche, now known by his birth name of Osel Hita Torres, has been making the rounds in the news of late. Here is a brief recap from Time, which has also pocked up the story:Last month, however, the magazine Babylon confirmed that the shaggy-haired Hita had long-ago dropped out of his Tibetan University, and that he no longer even considers himself a Buddhist. He was quoted more pointedly in the newspaper El Mundo as saying, "I was taken away from my family and put in a medieval situation in which I suffered a lot. It was like living a lie."Toward the end of the article, they quote Robert Thurman on the issue, who makes a crucial point that seems to have been ignored in all the other coverage I have seen.Britain's Guardian then added the delicious factoid that at one point the only people Hita saw were Buddhist monks and Richard Gere. Last Monday, a statement attributed to Hita appeared on the FPMT website calling the press reports "sensationalized," and insisting "there is no separation between myself and FPMT." Still, his confirmation of his career change in the same posting in fact suggests a major rift.
Robert Thurman, a Buddhist scholar, former monk and friend of the Dalai Lama, recounts that when told years ago that Hita was to receive a traditional Buddhist education in India he expressed concern. Thurman's argument: "If he wanted Tibetan traditional [education] he could have reincarnated in a Tibetan family in exile." The result of the misplacement, he says, is that Hita "has broken away in a full-blown identity crisis." Thurman thinks that after some time in our "busy postmodern world," Hita may see the value of the Tibetan tradition, "which he will then be able to approach or not, of his own free choice." And, he adds, "More power to him!"I don't know that I buy into the whole reincarnation thing to begin with, but Thurman's point stands nonetheless as a cogent statement about the process - it neglects the cultural component of the chosen children.
As Tibetan Buddhism spreads and becomes less Tibetan and more modern, it will have to take into account that when Western children are chosen as tulkus there will have to be some accommodations made for their cultural identity. Even the Dalia Lama has joked that he will incarnate as a Western woman.
Thurman's concerns about the young Osel went unheeded and now the young man has left the tradition he was chosen to lead. What might have happened if he had been raised within a more Westernized Buddhism, a more modern version of the traditions?
As Buddhism adapts to becoming a more global religion, as it must, it will have to become more sensitive to the cultural identity of its adherents. As more and more of its leaders are reincarnated in the West, as is sure to happen, the traditional approach of raising the young tulkus in a very strict and isolated environment is going to have to become more tolerant of modern and postmodern culture.
APA - Neuroimaging: A Glimpse Into the Future of Psychiatry
Neuroimaging: A Glimpse Into the Future of Psychiatry
May 25, 2009
Medical Director, Division of Neuropsychiatry at Dent Neurologic Institute; Clinical Assistant Professor, State University of New York, Buffalo School of Medicine
First published in Psychiatry Weekly, Volume 4, Issue 12, on May 25, 2009
This interview was conducted on April 22, 2009 by Lonnie Stoltzfoos
Introduction
In psychiatry, where much of the diagnostic criteria for mental illness are based on phenomenological observation, Dr. Horacio Capote believes that neuroimaging can begin to foster a more objective understanding of the pathophysiology and treatment of many mental disorders.
As Dr. Capote explains, “these illnesses quite often do not bear any physical sequelae, so by delineating changes going on in the brain, it becomes easier to understand the effects these illnesses have on patients’ daily lives, and it becomes easier to explain a disorder to both patients, their families, and the healthcare industry.”
There is a chance that neuroimaging-derived data will shape the classification structure of the DSM-V, although neuroimaging has yielded significant breakthroughs in only several mental illnesses. Currently, our understanding of cognitive disorders and addictive disorders has benefited most from neuroimaging data.
“We are already able to differentiate between Alzheimer’s dementia and frontotemporal dementia with a high degree of accuracy—so much so that it is accepted by insurers and Medicare,” Dr. Capote explains. “Clinically, that’s very helpful to patients because it really does change the long-term management of the disorders; it gives us prospective expectations about the course of the different illnesses and how patients might respond to different medications.”
Dr. Capote notes that mood disorders comorbid with dementia can be ferreted out quite often by imaging results, adding that imaging is already very useful in his daily clinical practice with this particular group of patients.
A great deal of information is amassing on the pathophysiology of addictive disorders, particularly in regard to the question of whether a disorder is more addictive or obsessive compulsive in nature. “Compulsive shopping,” for example, although it is not an official category, appears to be more of an addictive disorder. Functional neuroimaging is showing increased activity in the nucleus accumbens in compulsive shoppers, which is more consistent with an addictive process. This would certainly make a difference in how you treat that patient.
Neuroimaging and Treatment
“Neuroimaging has opened up areas of treatment that, before, we would have only imagined,” says Dr. Capote. “In February 2009, the FDA approved DBS for treatment refractory OCD, which followed approval of rTMS as a second-line treatment for depression, in October 2008. This demonstrates the direct relationship between greater anatomical understanding and successive application of these other treatment modalities, which are opening up a new armamentarium for mental illness.”
Imaging has also contributed to new developments that can sometimes enable clinicians to identify who is most likely to respond to certain medications. For example, evidence from patients studied with functional neuroimaging in adulthood or adolescence could show who would be most likely to respond to SSRI treatment or to ECT.
“Ultimately,” says Dr. Capote, “I think imaging will help us parse out the genotypes and subtypes of patients that currently exist within one classification of the DSM-IV—the varieties of underlying, existing pathophysiology.”
Imaging in Practice
Daily access to imaging technology appears to be confined to a limited number of practices and clinics. With due consideration given to the enormous cost, size, and logistics involved with acquiring imaging equipment, Dr. Capote still hopes that more clinicians will begin to realize the benefits of integrating imaging in daily practice.
“We tell our patients that mental illnesses are brain disorders, so, especially for those with a first-time diagnosis, it would be important for us to see what’s happening in their brains,” he explains. “Even with normal MRI, it is not unusual to find that patients who have developmental disorders may have a lack of connection between hemispheres. I have had the experience of finding young people who have suffered silent strokes as a result of experimentation with different substances, suggesting some treatment resistance and perhaps requiring a special approach to treatment. Also, it’s not unusual to make a variety of surprising discoveries—such as a brain mass—in patients that end up being very useful in long-term management and short-term treatment decisions.”
Technology Advances
Regarding advances in the actual imaging technology, Dr. Capote notes that diffusion tensor imaging, which is of particular value in neurology, is developing nicely. More institutions are upgrading their MRI technology as well, moving to equipment featuring the more detailed 3T magnet, as opposed to the more prevalent 1.5T magnet. With the greater detail of the 3T magnet, Dr. Capote says it might be possible to spot a lesion 1–2 years earlier than with older technology, of course enabling a clinician to corner a diagnosis much sooner. Basic imaging aside, however, Dr. Capote also notes that functional modalities, such as white matter tracts, may be the wave of the future, because they provide a lot of information with comparative ease and less expense.
“To the extent that we embrace all these new modalities and apply them to our patients,” he says, “we will be all the better for it.”
Disclosure: Dr. Capote has served on the speaker’s bureau of Eli Lilly, Forest, GlaxoSmithKline, Novartis, Pfizer, and Wyeth; and has received research/grant funding from GlaxoSmithKline.
Damien Keown - Would You Help Your Parents End Their Lives?
My feeling was that it was the compassionate thing to do. She was going to die within weeks, and shortening that time to days (without pain) was by far the most human option.
So it's fair to say that I fully endorse a right-to-die for all people suffering from terminal illnesses.
Would You Help Your Parents End Their Lives?
By Damien Keown
In The Last Goodnights, John West, at the time a Seattle-based lawyer, recounts how he assisted the suicide of both his parents ten years ago. West’s father, Jolly, was a world-renowned psychiatrist at UCLA, and his mother, known affectionately as “K,” a respected clinical psychologist at the veterans’ hospital in West Los Angeles. Jolly was diagnosed with bone cancer at age seventy-four with a terminal prognosis of a few months, at a time when West’s mother, aged seventy-five, was suffering mid-stage Alzheimer’s, aggravated by emphysema and osteoporosis. They had been married more than fifty years, though not entirely happily.
Soon after the diagnosis, Jolly said he had no wish to linger on, possibly in pain, and asked his son whether he would assist his suicide when the time came. John West immediately agreed and began to make preparations during the frequent trips he made from Seattle to L.A. to be with his parents. After a fruitless attempt to seek help from the Hemlock Society, father and son decided to use an overdose of barbiturates issued on prescription for pain relief. Early in the new year, on his return home from a stay in hospital — and after moments of tragicomic drama in finding a pharmacy that had sufficient tablets in stock — Jolly ingested them with his son’s support. Jolly passed away in his sleep, and a death certificate was issued by the family doctor. No suspicions were raised and no inquiries were made by the authorities.
The remainder of the book, occupying by far the greater part, recounts the progressive decline of K and her own decision to end her life through assisted suicide, following the example of her husband. Assisted suicide was apparently becoming a family tradition, since Jolly himself had assisted the suicide of K’s mother, Harriet, some twenty-five years before. Once again, West agreed to help, and supported his mother through visits and phone calls during her remaining time before assisting her with a fatal overdose on the Fourth of July. As before, the manner of death raised no suspicions. K’s medical condition, personal and family interactions, and the minor details of daily life are recorded in the form of a diary.
In West’s view, the “right to die” is an unmitigated good that is self-evident and apparently needs no defense. As a progressive liberal, he assumes that the right to die is simply another personal freedom that will, inevitably, be won in the same way that reproductive and other rights were. For him, there is no contentious moral issue here, just the opposition of closed minds to the march of progress. In occasional asides, the familiar reasons in support of the right to die are mentioned-autonomy, mercy, and dignity. Approving mention is made of the Netherlands and Oregon, although his actions would have been illegal in both jurisdictions, both of which permit only doctors to assist suicides.
Yet, the ethical and public policy debate about whether to change the law and professional ethics to permit physician-assisted suicide raises many profound and complex questions, not least about the value of life, of autonomy and the protection of the vulnerable. Jolly had a terminal illness, whereas K did not. K was not dying; she was simply confused and depressed. One has to ask whether a patient in this state is capable of making an objective judgment about suicide. Even if we assume K was capable, many others are not.
Adding death as a “treatment option” would surely introduce an ambiguity into the practice of medicine. Most patients who do not want assisted suicide might no longer have the same confidence that their doctor’s only interest was in keeping them alive. This might undermine public confidence in the medical profession, particularly among more vulnerable members of society. West’s parents were educated people, affluent professionals who knew the medical system inside out. He was a lawyer. Not all families are as lucky, and not all sons are as devoted as West appears in this account.
The Last Goodnights gives the impression that assisted suicide is purely a private matter, a personal choice, and nobody else’s business. However, dying raises complex psychological and spiritual issues, and is not perhaps as easy to micro-manage as some people assume. Contending that it is a private matter ignores the fact that individuals live in society, not in a vacuum. The legal, medical, and social ramifications of permitting assisted suicide affect everyone, not just the tiny minority of patients who want it. Significantly, expert committees that have considered the arguments for changing the law have, overwhelmingly, recommended that assisting suicide should remain an offence, not least in order to protect the vulnerable.
Caring for elderly relatives can be burdensome, both emotionally and financially, and death can offer a seductive way out. The economic attractions of assisted suicide would not be lost on healthcare funders or financially pressed relatives. This does not necessarily mean that patients would be killed against their wishes, but it could mean that the system had less incentive to spend resources on keeping them alive.
There are also concerns about a “slippery slope” leading from assisted suicide to voluntary euthanasia, and from voluntary euthanasia to nonvoluntary euthanasia. After all, if death is a benefit, why should it be withheld from those who cannot request it? Despite reassurances by right-to-die campaigners about legislative safeguards against such “creep,” the evidence from the Netherlands suggests that once the genie is out of the bottle it’s very difficult to control. The Dutch started by permitting only voluntary euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide, but Dutch law now allows euthanasia for some patients who cannot request it.
Although there is no mention of Buddhism in this book, and neither of West’s parents was religious, we may nevertheless take it as a point of departure for a discussion of Buddhist perspectives. The three values that West identifies as supporting the case for assisted suicide (autonomy, mercy, and dignity) have already been mentioned, and autonomy is the one most often cited. Autonomy is a concept derived from political theory, where it justifies the right of a state to enact its own laws free of outside interference. In an ethical context, it gains support from Western philosophical views about the importance of the individual and comes to stand for the right to self-determination and free choice. It is reinforced by post-Enlightenment notions about personal rights, and in modern times has been elevated by liberal theorists to the status of a quasi-supreme moral principle.
One wonders, however, how well this quintessentially Western liberal notion fits with traditional Buddhist teachings. These do not lay such stress on individuals and their rights, and the doctrine of “no-self” may be thought to undermine the concept of individuality entirely. The discourse of rights is absent from Buddhist literature, and what one finds instead is talk of duties and obligations to the community. Buddhism emphasizes not so much that we have the right to choose, but that we are responsible for what we choose. Again, the law that is to be respected is not one enacted through personal choice, but the eternal law of dharma.
Indeed, far from stressing autonomy as a key value, Buddhism seems to tell us that we are not autonomous. A key Buddhist philosophical teaching is often said to be “dependent origination.” In terms of most popular interpretations of this doctrine, things are seen as interconnected, rather than autonomous, independent and self-determining. A Buddhist case for assisted suicide based mainly on autonomy, therefore, would seem to be on shaky ground.
Does what West calls “mercy,” or what Buddhists call “compassion,” provide a more secure basis? To accompany others in their suffering would seem to be a primary moral duty for all who follow the path of the bodhisattva. Suicide, however, can represent a flight from suffering rather than an acceptance of it. Perhaps the more compassionate response to suffering is to provide medical care, comfort and support, as opposed to terminating the life of the sufferer. We know at least, that this is what monastic law says, and the case histories recorded in the vinaya, or monastic rules, reveal that monks who assisted the suicide of patients, even with the most compassionate of motives, were expelled from the order. Yet, there are also reports in the Pali canon of monks who took their own lives, and some were even said to have attained arhatship.
The interpretation of these cases is complex, but what I think we see in the Buddha’s reaction to them is compassion for those who cannot endure suffering and are driven to desperate measures. This is not to say, however, that such actions were approved or condoned. Buddhist teachings on ahimsa, or nonharming, strongly oppose the taking of any life, including one’s own, and regardless of the compassionate motivation to end suffering, the first precept, not to kill, weighs heavily in the scales when any life-threatening action is contemplated.
The final value mentioned by West is dignity, for which there is no obvious Buddhist equivalent. However, Buddhism certainly recognizes and respects human dignity. We see this in the belief that humans have a special capacity to attain enlightenment, and in the notion that a “precious human rebirth” is a great blessing. Some schools locate this dignity in the possession of buddhanature, the inherent capacity for buddhahood in all living beings. If this is what dignity means for Buddhists, then it is objective and an attribute that can never be lost. It is constant in sickness and in health, in youth and old age, and from one life to the next. Subjectively, we may feel that it fluctuates as independence is lost and our physical and mental faculties deteriorate. But why should dependence on others imply a loss of dignity if, in reality, we are all inescapably interdependent? Perhaps what is at issue here is not so much dignity, but vanity. We do not like to think of ourselves as vulnerable, or as a burden on others, but these concerns may have more to do with self-image and pride than a loss of innate dignity. Perhaps such concerns are best dealt with by identifying less with the egocentric concerns of an illusory self and more with the inalienable dignity of one’s buddhanature.
There may be a lesson here we can learn from the life of the Buddha. In the last months of his life, the Buddha suffered from a painful terminal illness. He knew the end was near, but fought the illness and carried on as long as he could. If ever there was a case for cutting life short, surely this was it: he could have avoided any further pain and entered nirvana immediately with no ill consequences of any kind. So why didn’t he? We can never know for sure, but perhaps it has something to do with his own basic teachings. In the four noble truths, death is identified as the problem, rather than the solution. Death (often symbolized by Mara) is mentioned in the first noble truth, suffering, while the cessation of suffering, nirvana, is the third. To see death as a solution to suffering, as in the case of assisted suicide, gets things back to front, because choosing death only gets you deeper into the problem. For the Buddha to have chosen death would have been an existential choice that undermined his life’s work. It would have meant embracing Mara, as opposed to vanquishing him.
For those without religious beliefs, for whom death means annihilation (such as West’s parents), suicide may seem a rational choice. For Buddhists, however, death would not appear to be the recommended solution.
Damien Keown is professor of Buddhist Ethics at Goldsmiths College, University of London. He is the author and editor of several books, including Buddhism and Bioethics, and is co-founder of The Journal of Buddhist Ethics. His current research interests include the role of religion in peace and conflict.
Saturday, June 06, 2009
Review - B. Alan Wallace: Mind in the Balance
When Columbia University offered me a review copy of B. Alan Wallace's newest book, Mind in the Balance: Meditation in Science, Buddhism, and Christianity, I was thrilled. I have been a fan of Wallace's more academic works for quite some time.In the past couple of years I have read Genuine Happiness: Meditation as the Path to Fulfillment (2005), Contemplative Science: Where Buddhism and Neuroscience Converge (2007), and Embracing Mind: The Common Ground of Science and Spirituality (2008). These are very good books, but this new one feels to me more general in its appeal than earlier books. It would be nice to see his work reach a non-Buddhist audience, but judging by the lack of promotion on the part of the press, I don't see that happening. In my opinion, it's a missed opportunity on their part - and a loss to the culture at large.
Mind in the Balance was written for his daughter, who has been a Christian for most of her life. She wanted her father to write a book that could help her improve the quality of her inner life and mind, a book that would be useful to everyone interested in a better quality of life, whether they are Christian, Buddhist, or something in-between.
The book begins with four good chapters, though brief considering he has written whole books on the topic, on the science of meditation, it's origins, and it benefits. He cites many of the most recent and promising articles on the benefits and uses of meditation in medicine and psychology. For the general reader, this is great introduction that may lead some into his more academic books on the subject, including the two mentioned above.
The remainder of the book is devoted to twin chapters on meditation techniques and the philosophical/psychological theory behind the practices, bridging a variety of religions, not just Buddhism and Christianity. There are ten of these practice/theory pairs, ranging from simple mindfulness of breath to contemplation on the emptiness of matter and finishing with a chapter on being mindful in our daily lives - the idea of "meditation in action."
I'm sure that Buddhists from different schools might quibble over some of the subjective states Wallace associates with various techniques, but that is a matter for experts. The lay reader should simply keep in mind that Wallace writes from a Tibetan Buddhist tradition, which is only one of several variations on the teachings of the Buddha.
Likewise, I'm sure that some Christians (and those other faiths) may not recognize their own religion in some of these practices, which is sad. So much of Christianity (especially Protestant, but also Catholic) has been divorced from the contemplative practices of the monks and nuns who spent lifetimes cultivating a direct relationship with their conception of the divine. This book offers a way back to those traditions in a non-denominational practice - and it may contribute to a post-modern Christianity (as advocated by the Trappist monk Father Thomas Keating in the form of Centering Prayer).
Overall, this is a highly recommended book for meditation novices and experts alike. The ten practices and theories presented, along with the scientific research on meditation, form a compelling arguments for living a life informed by meditation. And as a side note, I suspect that this book can contribute to a better understanding of how Buddhism and Christianity will co-mingle in the West in the coming decades.
John Perry - Thinking and Talking About the Self
John Perry investigates two quite different ways of thinking of ourselves; one, that we express with the first person, that is a special way of considering ourselves; the other, for which we use our name, that allows us to think of ourselves more or less as others do. He explores these two different ways of thinking, and talking, about ourselves, and draws some conclusions about the structure of thought and language. Series: UC Berkeley Graduate Council Lectures [6/2009]
P2P Wiki - Importance of neotraditional approaches in the reconstructive transmodern era
Importance of neotraditional approaches in the reconstructive transmodern era
From P2P Foundation
Article: The importance of neotraditional approaches in the reconstructive transmodern era. Michel Bauwens.
Written for a delayed Buddhist Economics conference planned at Ubon Rajathanee University, Warin Chamrab, Ubon Rathchathani, Thailand, for December 5-7, 2008 and rescheduled for April 9-11, 2009.
Text
I see the emergence of Buddhist Economics as part of a broader canvass of initiatives, thought streams and social practices, that could be broadly termed ‘neotraditional’. My aim in this essay is to offer a hypothesis of why their emergence is important, and what role they could play in movements aimed at reforming and transforming the current political economy.
The Main Argument: the common immateriality of traditional and post-industrial eras
It is not difficult to argue that modern industrial societies are dominated by a materialist paradigm. What exists for modern consciousness is material physical reality, what matters in the economy is the production of material products, and the pursuit of happiness is in very strong ways related to the accumulation of goods for consumption. For the elite, its powers derive essentially from the accumulation of capital assets, whether these are industrial or financial. Infinite material growth is really the core mantra of capitalism, even if it happens through the medium of money.
But this was not the case in traditional, agriculture-based societies. In such societies, people of course do have to eat and to produce, and the possession of land and military force is crucial to obtain tribute from the agricultural workers, but it cannot be said that the aim is accumulation of assets. Feudal-type societies are based on personal relations consisting of mutual obligations. These are of course very unequal in character, but are nevertheless very removed from the impersonal and obligation-less property forms that came with capitalism, where there is little impediment for goods and capital to move freely to whomever it is sold to.
In the more traditional societies that we have in mind, both the elite and the mass body of producers are united by a common immaterial quest for salvation, and it is the institution that is in charge of organizing that quest, like the Church in the western Middle Ages or the Sangha in South-East Asia, that is the determining organization for the social reproduction of the system. Tribute flows up from the farming population to the owning class, but the owning class is engaged in a two-fold pursuit: showing its status through festivities, where parts of the surplus is burned up; and gifting to the religious institutions. It is only this way that salvation/enlightenment, i.e. spiritual value or merit in all its forms, can be obtained. The more you give, the higher your spiritual status. Social status without spiritual status is frowned upon by those type of societies. This is why the religious institutions like the Church of the Sangha end up so much land and property themselves, as the gifting competition is relentless. At the same time, these institutions serve as the welfare and social security mechanisms of their day, by ensuring that a part of that flow goes back to the poor and can be used in times of social emergencies.
It is still a little bit harder to argue in Asian than in the West, but the current era, despite the rapid industrialization and ‘materialisation’ of East Asia, is undergoing a fundamental shift to immateriality.
Material goods still need to be made, and Asia is furiously industrializing, but nevertheless, for the world system, important shifts have already happened, which are most readily visible in the West.
Here are just a few of the facts and arguments to illustrate my point for a shift towards once again a immaterial focus in our societies.
The cosmopolitan elite of capital has already transformed itself for a long time towards financial capital. In this form of activity, financial assets are moved constantly where returns are the highest, and this makes industrial activity a secondary activity. If we then look at the financial value of corporations, only a fraction of it is determined by the material assets of such corporation. The rest of the value, usually called good will, is in fact determined by the various immaterial assets of such corporation, it’s expertise and collective intelligence, it’s brand capital, the trust in the present and the future that it can generate.
The most prized material goods, such as say Nike shoes, show a similar quality, only 5% of its sales value is said to be determined by physical production costs, all the rest is the value imparted to it by the brand (both the cost to create it, and the surplus value created by the consumers themselves).
The shift towards a immaterial focus can also be shown sociologically, for example through the work of Paul Ray on cultural creatives, and of Ronald Inglehart on the profound shift to postmaterial values and aspirations.
For populations who have lived for more than one generation in broad material security, the value system shifts again to the pursuit of knowledge, cultural, intellectual and spiritual experience. Not all of them, not all the time, but more and more, and especially so for the cultural elite of ‘cultural creatives’ or what Richard Florida has called the Creative Class, which is also responsible for key value creation in cognitive capitalism.
One more economic argument could be mentioned in the context of cognitive capitalism. In this model of our economy, the current dominant model as far as value creation is concerned, the key surplus value is realized through the protection of intellectual properties. While Asia is still (mostly) engaged in producing cheap industrial goods (though it is changing fast), the dominant Western companies can sell goods at over 100 to 1,000 times their production value, through state and WTO enforced intellectual rents. It is clearly the immaterial value of such assets that generate the economic streams, even though it requires creating fictitious scarcities through the legal apparatus.
However, it must be said, and we will develop that issue later, that this model is undermined through the emergence of distributed infrastructures for the production, distribution and consumption of immaterial and cultural goods, which makes such fictitious scarcity untenable in the long run. The immaterial value creation is indeed already leaking out of the market system.
Read the whole article.
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Discover - The Biocentric Universe Theory: Life Creates Time, Space, and the Cosmos Itself
The Biocentric Universe Theory: Life Creates Time, Space, and the Cosmos Itself
Stem-cell guru Robert Lanza presents a radical new view of the universe and everything in it.
From the May 2009 issue, published online May 1, 2009
NASA/ESA/A. Schaller (for STScI)Adapted from Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness Are the Keys to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe, by Robert Lanza with Bob Berman, published by BenBella Books in May 2009.
The farther we peer into space, the more we realize that the nature of the universe cannot be understood fully by inspecting spiral galaxies or watching distant supernovas. It lies deeper. It involves our very selves.
This insight snapped into focus one day while one of us (Lanza) was walking through the woods. Looking up, he saw a huge golden orb web spider tethered to the overhead boughs. There the creature sat on a single thread, reaching out across its web to detect the vibrations of a trapped insect struggling to escape. The spider surveyed its universe, but everything beyond that gossamer pinwheel was incomprehensible. The human observer seemed as far-off to the spider as telescopic objects seem to us. Yet there was something kindred: We humans, too, lie at the heart of a great web of space and time whose threads are connected according to laws that dwell in our minds.
Is the web possible without the spider? Are space and time physical objects that would continue to exist even if living creatures were removed from the scene?
Figuring out the nature of the real world has obsessed scientists and philosophers for millennia. Three hundred years ago, the Irish empiricist George Berkeley contributed a particularly prescient observation: The only thing we can perceive are our perceptions. In other words, consciousness is the matrix upon which the cosmos is apprehended. Color, sound, temperature, and the like exist only as perceptions in our head, not as absolute essences. In the broadest sense, we cannot be sure of an outside universe at all.
For centuries, scientists regarded Berkeley’s argument as a philosophical sideshow and continued to build physical models based on the assumption of a separate universe “out there” into which we have each individually arrived. These models presume the existence of one essential reality that prevails with us or without us. Yet since the 1920s, quantum physics experiments have routinely shown the opposite: Results do depend on whether anyone is observing. This is perhaps most vividly illustrated by the famous two-slit experiment. When someone watches a subatomic particle or a bit of light pass through the slits, the particle behaves like a bullet, passing through one hole or the other. But if no one observes the particle, it exhibits the behavior of a wave that can inhabit all possibilities—including somehow passing through both holes at the same time.
Some of the greatest physicists have described these results as so confounding they are impossible to comprehend fully, beyond the reach of metaphor, visualization, and language itself. But there is another interpretation that makes them sensible. Instead of assuming a reality that predates life and even creates it, we propose a biocentric picture of reality. From this point of view, life—particularly consciousness—creates the universe, and the universe could not exist without us.
MESSING WITH THE LIGHT
Quantum mechanics is the physicist’s most accurate model for describing the world of the atom. But it also makes some of the most persuasive arguments that conscious perception is integral to the workings of the universe. Quantum theory tells us that an unobserved small object (for instance, an electron or a photon—a particle of light) exists only in a blurry, unpredictable state, with no well-defined location or motion until the moment it is observed. This is Werner Heisenberg’s famous uncertainty principle. Physicists describe the phantom, not-yet-manifest condition as a wave function, a mathematical expression used to find the probability that a particle will appear in any given place. When a property of an electron suddenly switches from possibility to reality, some physicists say its wave function has collapsed.What accomplishes this collapse? Messing with it. Hitting it with a bit of light in order to take its picture. Just looking at it does the job. Experiments suggest that mere knowledge in the experimenter’s mind is sufficient to collapse a wave function and convert possibility to reality. When particles are created as a pair—for instance, two electrons in a single atom that move or spin together—physicists call them entangled. Due to their intimate connection, entangled particles share a wave function. When we measure one particle and thus collapse its wave function, the other particle’s wave function instantaneously collapses too. If one photon is observed to have a vertical polarization (its waves all moving in one plane), the act of observation causes the other to instantly go from being an indefinite probability wave to an actual photon with the opposite, horizontal polarity—even if the two photons have since moved far from each other.
In 1997 University of Geneva physicist Nicolas Gisin sent two entangled photons zooming along optical fibers until they were seven miles apart. One photon then hit a two-way mirror where it had a choice: either bounce off or go through. Detectors recorded what it randomly did. But whatever action it took, its entangled twin always performed the complementary action. The communication between the two happened at least 10,000 times faster than the speed of light. It seems that quantum news travels instantaneously, limited by no external constraints—not even the speed of light. Since then, other researchers have duplicated and refined Gisin’s work. Today no one questions the immediate nature of this connectedness between bits of light or matter, or even entire clusters of atoms.
Before these experiments most physicists believed in an objective, independent universe. They still clung to the assumption that physical states exist in some absolute sense before they are measured.
All of this is now gone for keeps.
WRESTLING WITH GOLDILOCKS
The strangeness of quantum reality is far from the only argument against the old model of reality. There is also the matter of the fine-tuning of the cosmos. Many fundamental traits, forces, and physical constants—like the charge of the electron or the strength of gravity—make it appear as if everything about the physical state of the universe were tailor-made for life. Some researchers call this revelation the Goldilocks principle, because the cosmos is not “too this” or “too that” but rather “just right” for life.At the moment there are only four explanations for this mystery. The first two give us little to work with from a scientific perspective. One is simply to argue for incredible coincidence. Another is to say, “God did it,” which explains nothing even if it is true.
The third explanation invokes a concept called the anthropic principle,? first articulated by Cambridge astrophysicist Brandon Carter in 1973. This principle holds that we must find the right conditions for life in our universe, because if such life did not exist, we would not be here to find those conditions. Some cosmologists have tried to wed the anthropic principle with the recent theories that suggest our universe is just one of a vast multitude of universes, each with its own physical laws. Through sheer numbers, then, it would not be surprising that one of these universes would have the right qualities for life. But so far there is no direct evidence whatsoever for other universes.
The final option is biocentrism, which holds that the universe is created by life and not the other way around. This is an explanation for and extension of the participatory anthropic principle described by the physicist John Wheeler, a disciple of Einstein’s who coined the terms wormhole and black hole.
SEEKING SPACE AND TIME
Even the most fundamental elements of physical reality, space and time, strongly support a biocentric basis for the cosmos.According to biocentrism, time does not exist independently of the life that notices it. The reality of time has long been questioned by an odd alliance of philosophers and physicists. The former argue that the past exists only as ideas in the mind, which themselves are neuroelectrical events occurring strictly in the present moment. Physicists, for their part, note that all of their working models, from Isaac Newton’s laws through quantum mechanics, do not actually describe the nature of time. The real point is that no actual entity of time is needed, nor does it play a role in any of their equations. When they speak of time, they inevitably describe it in terms of change. But change is not the same thing as time.
To measure anything’s position precisely, at any given instant, is to lock in on one static frame of its motion, as in the frame of a film. Conversely, as soon as you observe a movement, you cannot isolate a frame, because motion is the summation of many frames. Sharpness in one parameter induces blurriness in the other. Imagine that you are watching a film of an archery tournament. An archer shoots and the arrow flies. The camera follows the arrow’s trajectory from the archer’s bow toward the target. Suddenly the projector stops on a single frame of a stilled arrow. You stare at the image of an arrow in midflight. The pause in the film enables you to know the position of the arrow with great accuracy, but you have lost all information about its momentum. In that frame it is going nowhere; its path and velocity are no longer known. Such fuzziness brings us back to Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, which describes how measuring the location of a subatomic particle inherently blurs its momentum and vice versa.
All of this makes perfect sense from a biocentric perspective. Everything we perceive is actively and repeatedly being reconstructed inside our heads in an organized whirl of information. Time in this sense can be defined as the summation of spatial states occurring inside the mind. So what is real? If the next mental image is different from the last, then it is different, period. We can award that change with the word time, but that does not mean there is an actual invisible matrix in which changes occur. That is just our own way of making sense of things. We watch our loved ones age and die and assume that an external entity called time is responsible for the crime.
There is a peculiar intangibility to space, as well. We cannot pick it up and bring it to the laboratory. Like time, space is neither physical nor fundamentally real in our view. Rather, it is a mode of interpretation and understanding. It is part of an animal’s mental software that molds sensations into multidimensional objects.
Most of us still think like Newton, regarding space as sort of a vast container that has no walls. But our notion of space is false. Shall we count the ways? 1. Distances between objects mutate depending on conditions like gravity and velocity, as described by Einstein’s relativity, so that there is no absolute distance between anything and anything else. 2. Empty space, as described by quantum mechanics, is in fact not empty but full of potential particles and fields. 3. Quantum theory even casts doubt on the notion that distant objects are truly separated, since entangled particles can act in unison even if separated by the width of a galaxy.
UNLOCKING THE CAGE
In daily life, space and time are harmless illusions. A problem arises only because, by treating these as fundamental and independent things, science picks a completely wrong starting point for investigations into the nature of reality. Most researchers still believe they can build from one side of nature, the physical, without the other side, the living. By inclination and training these scientists are obsessed with mathematical descriptions of the world. If only, after leaving work, they would look out with equal seriousness over a pond and watch the schools of minnows rise to the surface. The fish, the ducks, and the cormorants, paddling out beyond the pads and the cattails, are all part of the greater answer.Recent quantum studies help illustrate what a new biocentric science would look like. Just months? ago, Nicolas Gisin announced a new twist on his entanglement experiment; in this case, he thinks the results could be visible to the naked eye. At the University of Vienna, Anton Zeilinger’s work with huge molecules called buckyballs pushes quantum reality closer to the macroscopic world. In an exciting extension of this work—proposed by Roger Penrose, the renowned Oxford physicist—not just light but a small mirror that reflects it becomes part of an entangled quantum system, one that is billions of times larger than a buckyball. If the proposed experiment ends up confirming Penrose’s idea, it would also confirm that quantum effects apply to human-scale objects.
Biocentrism should unlock the cages in which Western science has unwittingly confined itself. Allowing the observer into the equation should open new approaches to understanding cognition, from unraveling the nature of consciousness to developing thinking machines that experience the world the same way we do. Biocentrism should also provide stronger bases for solving problems associated with quantum physics and the Big Bang. Accepting space and time as forms of animal sense perception (that is, as biological), rather than as external physical objects, offers a new way of understanding everything from the microworld (for instance, the reason for strange results in the two-slit experiment) to the forces, constants, and laws that shape the universe. At a minimum, it should help halt such dead-end efforts as string theory.
Above all, biocentrism offers a more promising way to bring together all of physics, as scientists have been trying to do since Einstein’s unsuccessful unified field theories of eight decades ago. Until we recognize the essential role of biology, our attempts to truly unify the universe will remain a train to nowhere.
~ Adapted from Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness Are the Keys to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe, by Robert Lanza with Bob Berman, published by BenBella Books in May 2009.
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Brain Science Podcast #58: Interview with author Alva Noë
Brain Science Podcast #58: Interview with author Alva Noë
Posted on June 5th, 2009 by Ginger Campbell, MDEpisode 58 of the Brain Science Podcast is an interview with philosopher Alva Noë, whose book Out of Our Heads: Why You Are Not Your Brain, and Other Lessons from the Biology of Consciousness argues persuasively that our Minds are MORE than just our brains. He says that “the brain is necessary but not sufficient” to create the mind. Listen to Episode 58 [Play]
Show Notes and Links:
- Alva Noe (University of California, Berkeley)
- Out of Our Heads: Why You Are Not Your Brain, and Other Lessons from the Biology of Consciousness by Alva Noé
Important scientists mentioned in the interview:
- Paul Bach-y-Rita: pioneering studies in sensory substitution using tactile stimuli to substitute for vision
- Held and Hein: experiments with cats showing that development of normal vision requires motor-sensory feedback
References:
- Brain Mechanisms in Sensory Substitution by Paul Bach-y-Rita, 1972.
- Bach-y-Rita, P “Tactile-Vision Substitution: past and future”, International Journal of Neuroscience 19, nos. 1-4, 29-36, 1983.
- Held, R and Hein, “Movement-produced stimulation in the development of visually guided behavior.” Journal of Comparative and Physiological Psychology. 56(5), 872-876, 1963.
- Held, R. “Plasticity in sensory-motor systems.” Scientific American. 213(5) 84-91, 1965.
Episode Transcript (Download PDF)
Listen to Episode 58Friday, June 05, 2009
Seed - The New Interface of Governance
If we can just tweak the way we make choices, we can make smarter ones. A look at Obama’s plans to put the science of human nature to work.The New Interface of Governance
Frontier / by / June 2, 2009
Illustration: Mike Pick, adapted from photograph by Sir Mervs
For those of us familiar with the strange land that is Washington, DC, it’s tempting to snicker a bit at the sudden star turn of the field of behavioral economics in our nation’s capital. Books like Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler’s Nudge, Dan Ariely’s Predictably Irrational, and George Akerlof and Robert Shiller’s Animal Spirits are being passed around like samizdat. Human beings, the thinking goes, bear little more than a passing resemblance to the “economic man” of classic econ textbooks. We’re messy creatures, not altogether skilled at maximizing value, or efficiency, or all those other things our self-interest is supposed to drive us to attain.
“People make bad choices,” says Swarthmore psychologist Barry Schwartz, author of The Paradox of Choice. “Or they make no choices at all unless you hold a gun to their heads.” Look no further than the mortgage mess. For all the malevolence on the part of mortgage lenders, many of us simply took on loans we couldn’t possibly carry long term. Moreover, we regularly do things like leave money on the table, letting our confusion over retirement plans scare us away from employers matching funds. The dream of Nudge-ers, as the shorthand goes, is that if the Obama Administration can just tweak the way that we make choices, even just slightly, we might make smarter ones.
Sure, we scoff. That stuff might win you Nobel Prizes (Note Princeton’s Daniel Kahneman, 2002). But, we think, Washington and the convoluted political process therein is where grand intellectual visions go to die.
There’s a chance, though, that the web-savvy Obama Administration might have an opening through which to put its behaviorist vision into practice. Behavioral economists use the term “choice architecture” to frame how decision makers can gently scoot people towards better choices. Internet experts talk about “information architecture” or “interaction design.” But they share much in common—particularly, the understanding that today’s information-rich world is confusing, and that attention dedicated to crafting the environment in which people make choices gives us, as Schwartz puts it, “a fighting chance of knowing what we’re doing.”
“When you’re doing interaction design,” explains Christian Crumlish, curator of Yahoo’s Pattern Design Library, “you often start by studying people’s behavior in the wild, because you want to map and facilitate what they already do.” Take Amazon.com’s “Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought…” feature. Search for Herbert Marcuse and Amazon suggests that perhaps you might also be interested in something by Hannah Arendt. The site’s architecture is mimicking the experience you might get by walking through your neighborhood bookshop’s philosophy aisle.
Though other times, says Crumlish, the intent behind interaction design is to guide new behaviors. If you’re launching a new social network, for example, your goal is to shape an environment that encourages users to share as much as possible. “There are,” says Crumlish, “all sorts of tricks to do that.”
Facebook, for example, sets defaults that encourage their users to reveal as much as possible about their lives—details that other humans find irresistible. (Some moves, like Facebook’s News Feed, at first violated users sense of privacy. But tellingly, it was users’ comfort level that adjusted, not company policy.) What’s striking is how well those web design tricks find their match in behavioral economics’ literature. Sunstein and Thaler, for instance, prescribe defaults to solve the problem of uneconomic humans who simply fail to pick a 401(k) plan: make enrollment in a plan the default option. Most people will stick with the status quo. Others will work up enough energy to change it. All will be better off than if they were enrolled in no plan at all.
If you’re US Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, and you really want Americans to renegotiate the terms of their mortgage—a major feature of the Obama Administration’s plan to ease pain for homeowners—the web can be an ally. The Treasury Department boiled the complex economic plan down into the bare bones site MakingHomeAffordable.gov. The interface is built like a cattle chute, shunting mortgage holders into the program most appropriate for them. It’s perhaps not the most nuanced of tools, but it’s better than letting Americans flounder under stifling mortgages. There’s a corollary from Obama himself: As a candidate, Obama distributed a drop-dead simple web widget that calculated an individual’s tax burdens under his economic plan. “Too crude!” his critics cried. The campaign said nothing, while millions of Americans got the idea that—contrary to what McCain kept arguing—what they owed the IRS might just be a little lighter under President Obama.
Stanford’s Persuasive Technology Lab makes academic study of these computer tricks and of the technological engineering that shape human behaviors. One example they cite is the popular sale site, Woot.com. Every day a new item is featured on the homepage, like a digital watch that sets itself according to atomic time at a price of $19.99—good for one day only. Mere mortals are powerless to resist the call of a limited-time deal. Studies show, writes Sunstein and Thaler, “losing something makes you twice as miserable as gaining the same thing makes you happy.” And so, we buy. Of course, bricks-and-mortar retail stores take advantage of the one-day sale, but the web is different. Running to Best Buy for the latest deal raises questions in our minds like, “What if the parking lot is so crowded that I can’t get a space?” With Woot.com, it’s one or two-click satisfaction. Even more powerful, though, is the web’s built-in transparency. Commenters on that Global Atomic Watch one-day sale, for example, helpfully point out that the cheapest online price for this timepiece is $39.95. Sold.
The transparent nature of the digital world has potentially powerful public policy implications. Obama, for example, is pushing in Congress for greater credit card transparency, and Sunstein and Thaler see a day when our own personal MasterCard and Visa records get uploaded to a site that spits out a determination of whether our APRs, payment terms, and frequent-flier miles are a good match for our individual economic needs. The hope is that that direct, individualized feedback can prompt people to use their resources more wisely; that’s also the thinking behind Google’s PowerMeter project, which aims to display your home energy usage rate right on your Google home page. Another example: The state of California runs an online greenhouse gas registry that makes public just how much CO2 local businesses emit. The Environmental Protection Agency is planning on launching a nationwide version of the program. The agency’s proposal, while still in its rough-draft stages, doesn’t yet spell out the registry’s online component.
To understand how the online component of the EPA’s greenhouse gas registry will evolve, it’s necessary to take a brief tour through the Federal regulatory process and just how President Obama plans to overhaul it. Already in this young administration, using the web to add a dose of “public” to public policy has become standard operating procedure. Witness Recovery.gov, HealthReform.gov, FinancialStablity.gov, to name just a few of the executive branch sites that have blossomed in Obama’s Washington. There are signs that the White House is planning to take this approach further, imprinting the way it does business on the rest of the sprawling executive branch.
There exists in the Federal Government a little-known office called the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. OIRA’s job is to make sure that as Federal agencies regulate their actions carry, as Congress has phrased it, “The President’s voice.” In a barely-noticed directive issued just after taking office, President Obama called for a rethinking of OIRA and the regulatory process to in part, “Clarify the role of behavioral science in formulating regulatory policies.” For the position of OIRA’s director, the president appointed Nudge’s Cass Sunstein himself—a strong sign that the Obama White House is eager to examine how “choice architecture” and gentle nudging could help Federal agencies and departments tackle their regulatory challenges. When the EPA’s greenhouse gas registry eventually rolls out, there’s a good chance that it will go beyond a simple website to be a carefully-crafted framework to use what we know about human nature to rein in greenhouse gases.
There’s no doubt a tendency to recoil a bit at the idea of the Federal Government shaping behavior through a pre-checked checkbox and a tempting user interface. It’s not pure paranoia. Says Yahoo’s Crumlish, “People coming to use an interface have an interest, but the ‘house’ has an interest as well.” Is the fact that “house” also happens to be the executive branch of the US Federal Government enough to provoke fears of Big Brother, and thus resistance to whatever the White House’s latest web project might be?
Not necessarily. “Get over the idea that you’re not pushing people one way or another,” Schwartz says he regularly tells decision makers.If the general public understood that choice shaping is ubiquitous, Schwartz believes, they might get over their initial wariness at being nudged. Behaviorists like to use the example of the school cafeteria. Nudge-ers might recommend that fruit choices be placed before cookies and cakes on the dessert table. It’s not, they argue, like there’s a pre-ordained natural order according to which food choices should be placed before children. Throwing all the food up in the air to see where it lands isn’t a very sensible approach, so decisions have to be made. If everyone who designs anything—whether it’s a lunchroom or a new government home page—is architecting choice, the argument goes, that power might as well be used to advance rational, efficient, economic public policy.
Still, the behaviorists in President Obama’s inner circle likely anticipate a good amount of skepticism from the public. One recently launched executive branch project might be read as an attempt to allay some of those fears. Data.gov exposes some of the dry details of Federal Government operations and the information it regularly collects. By making it easier for the public to find, download, and make use of government data sets, Data.gov aims to “make government more transparent,” and create “an unprecedented level of openness.”
Of course, it’s a fair question whether one-click access to US Geological Survey spreadsheets showing the “locations and characteristics of world copper smelters” really amounts to pulling back the curtain on Big Brother. There’s a risk of going down a rabbit hole, trying to make sense of whether government transparency is a counterbalance to being nudged—or if it is itself “choice architecture.” In the end, whether the new politics of choice succeeds in bettering our lives may depend on letting go of the idea that we always have to be fully in-control of our choices. Perhaps the coming age of smarter, more efficient public policy has to start with personal admissions that as flesh-and-blood human beings, we’re not always smart, and we’re very often inefficient.
We live in a world awash with knowledge. “The challenge we have now is to shape how we navigate that information in meaningful ways,” says Swarthmore’s Schwartz. “The people who truly figure that out,” he predicts,” are going to be the ones to run the world.” Perhaps they already are.
Discover - Susskind Lectures on General Relativity
Susskind Lectures on General Relativity
Via Dmitry Podolsky, a series of YouTube videos from Stanford encompassing an entire course by Lenny Susskind on general relativity. I didn’t look closely enough to figure out exactly what level the lectures are pitched at, but it looks like a fairly standard advanced-undergrad or beginning-grad introduction to the subject. (For which I could recommend an excellent textbook, if you’re interested.) This is the first lecture; there are more.
It’s fantastic that Stanford is giving this away. I don’t worry that it will replace the conventional university. The right distinction is not “people who would physically go to the lectures” vs. “people who will just watch the videos”; it’s between “people who can watch the videos” and “people who have no access to lectures like this.” And Susskind is a great lecturer.
Mel Schwartz - Coming into Balance
Read the rest of the article to see what Schwartz is really talking about here.Coming into Balance
Coming into balance
I recently broke my foot, a fracture that occurred as I missed a step on my front porch. The break occurred on the outside part of my foot- the fifth metatarsal. My doctor provided some good news in that I wouldn’t need a cast and I proceeded to adjust to my broken foot. Or so I thought. In deference to the pain on the outer perimeter of my foot I shifted my weight toward my other side, compensating for the damage.
By the following week later I had developed a new and more painful problem. I stressed the unbroken part of my foot by placing an inordinate amount of pressure on it. I actually experienced more acute pain in that area than in the break itself. A month later the broken bone had essentially healed--but the damage I caused to the inner part of my foot still lingers. This is an issue of compensation. And nowhere does this tendency provoke more havoc than in our emotional and psychological states.
At different times in life—and most particularly in childhood—we develop coping mechanisms to adjust to the challenges and travails that we encounter. Coping mechanisms are the adjustments that we make to our personalities, typically in our childhood. We’re not usually aware that we’re developing them as they assimilate into our being in very subtle ways. We craft them so that we might deal with the challenges, wounds, rejections or other stressors that life brings us. Coping mechanisms are our way of defending against challenges. Ordinarily, these alterations to our natural state of being are adaptations to the assaults to our emotional and psychological being.
An abusive or unloving parent may cause us to become indifferent to the hurt so that we can survive the pain. So we fashion a personality to protect us from being vulnerable. And in so doing we preclude having more open and intimate relationships. A chaotic or turbulent home environment may induce us to fashion the mask of being a people pleaser, as we try to placate everyone so that peace may reign. We might also seek the security of predictability to compensate for the uncertainty of childhood. Over time, becoming rooted to the need for that predictability, we dull the growth and creativity that only comes from embracing uncertainty.
We might be simply compensating for not feeling good enough, popular enough or loved enough. In most cases the temporary defensive formation can be a helpful mechanism. It assists us in getting through a difficult transition. Over time, however, the coping mechanism becomes a fixed and habitual feature of our persona, which limits our growth.
These adaptive techniques are reasonably purposeful when we first adorn them. The problem is that most of us struggle to shed these previously adaptive parts of our personality and over time they become hardened. In other words, they burden us and they block our greater emergence. What was once a coping mechanism becomes a suit of armor—and we clank through life wearing it.
Elisha Goldstein - Can Mindful Eating Change Your Life?
Sour, sweet, bitter, pungent-all must be tasted.
Chinese proverbWhether you are a food lover or someone who wishes they could just take a food pill and get on with their day, food is an inevitable part of our lives and we can learn to relate to it in a way that supports our mental and physical health. More and more people are beginning to learn of a new way to relate to food whether they love food or not. Surprise, surprise, I’m talking about Mindful Eating. Here’s how to engage in it. While there is a lot of fervor over the benefits of mindful eating, my biggest suggestion is always to trust your own experience.
Here’s how to do it (This is an excerpt from the upcoming Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction Workbook, New Harbinger Publications, February 2010 by Bob Stahl, Ph.D. & Elisha Goldstein, Ph.D.):
When practicing mindful eating you can choose to intentionally be aware of the food you are eating during any meal or snack. Begin each meal by carefully noticing your food choices before you eat them. Notice the colors of the food, the shapes, and the fragrance.
You can also reflect for a moment on the number of people who may have been involved in bringing the food to your table; the farmers, truckers, grocery workers, and others who’ve made it possible. In this way, you deepen your appreciation for the interconnectedness we all truly share. Below are five mindful reflections inspired by Thich Nhat Hanh that I’ve found to be meaningful and supportive when sitting down to eat.
- May we receive this food as a gift from the earth, the sky and all the living beings and all their hard work that made it possible for me to nourish this body and mind.
- May we eat with mindfulness and gratitude so as to be worthy to receive it.
- May we recognize and transform our unskillful ways, especially our greed, and learn to eat with moderation.
- May we keep our compassion alive by eating in such a way that we reduce the suffering of living beings, preserve our planet and reverse the process of global warming.
- May we accept this food so that we may nurture our strength to be of service to others.
In practicing mindful eating, we’re taking the first bite to our lips, opening them, and taking the food into your mouth. Pay careful attention to what happens next. How does it feel in your mouth? Notice whether there are thoughts, judgments, or stories arising. Try to keep the focus on the direct sensation unfolding as you begin to chew. Notice the taste. Is it sweet, sour, earthy, bitter, or something else? Is the texture smooth, grainy, chewy? Does the taste change as you continue chewing? Notice how the mouthful disappears, how swallowing happens. Just acknowledge this as it occurs and let it be.
The Center for Mindful Eating also is doing a lot of professional work to help people change their relationship to food. Which food is often integrated into issues such as stress, anxiety, depression, and addiction.
Try this practice with your next snack or meal. Share with us below what you noticed or what thoughts came up. Your interaction below provides a living wisdom for us all to benefit from.
