Chuck Collins - The Case for Taxing the Wealthy

Yes! Magazine posted this TED Talk by Chuck Collins - he argues that the rich did not get to be rich all on their own, so they owe it to the society to pay a little more taxes than the not wealthy. Works for me.

The Case for Taxing the Wealthy

 
The 1% didn’t get there by themselves. Chuck Collins offers a TED Talk on why the wealthy should pay it forward.

posted Nov 28, 2011

Chuck Collins is a senior scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) and author of several books including Economic Apartheid in America: A Primer on Economic Inequality and Insecurity as well as Wealth and Our Commonwealth: Why America Should Tax Accumulated Fortunes, which he co-wrote with Bill Gates Sr.

In October 2011 he participated in a TEDx event at Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts, where he spoke about the importance of taxing the wealthy.

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Interested?

• YES! Magazine's ongoing coverage of the Occupy Wall Street movement.

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UCTV - Uniquely-Human Features of the Brain: Plasticity Social Nature Unified Mind

Who says school is boring? This lecture comes form UCTV, from the UC San Diego Center for Academic Research and Training in Anthropogeny (CARTA).

Uniquely-Human Features of the Brain: Plasticity Social Nature Unified Mind

Leading brain researchers Todd Preuss, MIke Gazzaniga and Katerina Semendeferi explore unique specialization in the human brain that may be keys to the brain's plasticity, our social nature, and the coordination of the functions in both sides of our brains.

Google TechTalks - Our Place in the Cosmos

Interesting talk by Raja GuhaThakurta, an astrophysicist, on the origins of of all life from the "cosmic web."

Google Tech Talk: Our Place in the Cosmos

December 1, 2011

Presented by Raja (Puragra) GuhaThakurta.

ABSTRACT

The lecture "Our Place in the Cosmos" explains how we (and, for that matter, all complex life forms) are connected to the Universe around us. This connection relies on the fact that our Milky Way and other galaxies like it play host to cosmic recycling processes that involve the formation of stars and their planetary systems inside nebulae (dense gas/dust clouds), nuclear fusion reactions that occur within stars, and the death of massive stars in explosions known as supernovae. As a result of these processes the Earth contains elements like carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen, all of which are essential ingredients of protein molecules that are basic building blocks of life on Earth. To understand our origin we must therefore understand how galaxies form as part of the so-called cosmic web and evolve via galaxy cannibalism: merging and destruction of small satellite galaxies whereby their stars are incorporated into larger galaxies. This portion of the story will take us back to the earliest imaginable times in the history of the Universe. The talk will be illustrated with the latest astronomical images obtained using space-/ground-based telescopes and state-of-the-art computer simulations.

Speaker Info:

Raja (Puragra) GuhaThakurta received a bachelor's degree in Physics at Saint Xavier's College in Kolkata, India and a Ph.D. in Astrophysical Sciences at Princeton University in 1989. He was a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, NJ and at Princeton University. He worked briefly at NASA's Space Telescope Science Institute in Balitmore, MD (operational headquarters of the Hubble Space Telescope), before joining the faculty of the University of California Santa Cruz in 1994 where he is currently a professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics. The primary focus of GuhaThakurta's research is the formation and evolution of galaxies, including the Andromeda galaxy. He has authored/coauthored ~350 journal articles and meeting abstracts, and has given dozens of lectures, both non-technical and technical. He received an Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship in 1997 and the Herzberg Memorial Prize and Fellowship in 2001.

This talk was hosted by Jeff Dean and Boris Debic.

Authors@Google: Penn Jillette

Penn Jillette visited Google's Santa Monica office on August 19, 2011 to discuss his book God No! Signs You Already May Be an Atheist and Other Magical Tales. This talk took place as part of the Authors@Google series. Warning: This talk contains adult language.

Understanding the Concept of Time in Maharaj & Heidegger

Here is yet another segment from the Science and Nonduality Conference - Mila Makal speaks about the Concept of time in Maharaj and Heidegger.



Understanding the Concept of Time in Maharaj & Heidegger from Science and Nonduality on FORA.tv

ONE WHO IS AFRAID OF TIME BECOMES A PREY OF TIME: Radicalization of understanding of the concept of time in Nisargadatta Maharaj and Martin Heidegger
by Mila Makal

If for us humans, life is a disease with a very poor prognosis, for philosophers the certainty of death opens up possibilities and thus time. Only for mortals does time pass. For God, years neither go nor come – they are, according to Saint Augustine, “completely present all at once.” “Time is the child of a barren woman,” states Nisargadatta Maharaj. “One who is afraid of time becomes a prey of time. But time itself becomes a prey of that one who is not afraid of it.” To fear time is like fearing an unborn child. For Martin Heidegger, being is time. Time is only because we are mortal. Our being finds its meaning in death. Authentic existence is the courage ‘for anxiety in the face of death’. Time itself is the presence in the unity of presence and absence. What defines our very existence, indeed, what gives the sum of Descartes’ ‘cogito sum’ meaning is that it is ‘sum moribundus’. We humans are destined for death and Heidegger believes that this ultimate limit or end makes all possibilities eo ipso time intelligible. Plato argued that the task of philosophy is to charm away the fear of death. Maharaj insists that if you meet a lion, “You threaten the lion since either way it is going to kill you. So why die like a coward out of fear? Attack it bravely and knock out some of its teeth. If you are certain of your death, why suffer a lowly death? Die nobly and honorably.” The philosopher and the sage triumph over death, they do not run away from it, but look it straight in the face.

Alva Noë - Do Plants Have Minds?

Here is a follow-up to Alva Noë's recent article comparing Watson, the IBM super computer, to plants. Some people seemed to think he underestimated the plants.

Do Plants Have Minds?

December 2, 2011
by Alva Noë

Plants do seem to have a sense of where they want to go.

In my last contribution to 13.7, I suggested that Watson has the mind of a plant; he just sits there, plugged in, responding to what he is fed. Watson sees nothing, seeks, hides, wants and fears nothing. He has nothing to think about. Watson, like a plant, I suggested, is without understanding or interest.

On reflection — and as readers and colleagues were quick to point out to me — I may have been unfair to plants. There is, in fact, a substantial and developed scientific literature — one I was by-and-large unfamiliar with, but which I have now dipped into — on plant behavior and intelligence, a literature that sometimes goes under the heading "plant neurobiology!"

For excellent surveys, see here and here.

The guiding idea of this literature seems to be, first, that plants do in fact act, and they act in ways which, when animals act that way, we are disposed to think of as signs of intelligence. Some examples: plants orient and react appropriately not only in response to light, but also wind, water, predators, quality of soil and the volume of available soil, among many other factors.

Plants reshape themselves — extending, growing, opening, closing, altering leaf size, etc — in direct response to what they need, what they have good reason to shun and to a broad range of local conditions. In developing underground networks of roots, they show sensitivity to obstacles in the ground, and there is evidence that they differentiate their response to the roots of other plants from their response to their own roots.

Granted, by human and animal measures, plants are very slow. But surely it is prejudice to think that only movements and responsiveness that occurs on time scales that seem natural to us count as legitimately expressive of intelligence and mind.

Wittgenstein once remarked that it is only of what looks and acts like a human being that we say that it thinks, it sees, it wants. Wittgenstein was not advocating chauvinism; he was calling attention to the ways in which our conception of intelligence — of mind — is bound up with ways of acting, coping and responding. Indeed, we see this idea at work in discussions of plant intelligence. Scientists are assembling cases that bring out clearly the ways in which plants do look and act like human beings. You just need to look carefully.

Is it correct to say that plants forage for light, or that they actively avoid shade? Should we say that plants decide where to send out their roots, that they know that they should send roots down into the ground and stems up toward the sky? Is the plasticity and growth of plants to be compared with the free movement and action of animals? These are interesting and important questions that deserve our attention. I won't comment on them any further here other than to notice that if plants have minds, then perhaps they show that you don't need a brain to have a mind, and that's a strange and exciting possibility.

I mentioned there was a second guiding idea of the plant intelligence literature. This is the idea that plants can be viewed as complex information processing systems in the way that computers are; plants, the thinking goes, build models of themselves and their environment and compute courses of actions and possible outcomes. The study of plant minds, like the study of human and animal minds, is shaped and guided by the computer model of the mind, the idea that to have a mind is, in effect, to be a computational system that takes data received by receptors, builds representations of the environment and on this basis computes what to do.

And so we confront a lovely irony. Plants are intelligent, it is claimed, because they are, in effect, robots! I began by criticizing claims that Watson is intelligent by comparing Watson to a mere plant. But defenders of plant intelligence argue that plants are intelligent, that they have minds because they are, really, computational systems; they are, in effect, like Watson!

But this seems misguided. No robot exhibits anything like the sorts of behavioral complexity that we see in plants. That is, no robot or computer — not even Watson — exhibits anything like the behavior that seems to warrant, in the case of plants, thinking they might have minds after all.

We need to look elsewhere. At the end of my post last week, I made a suggestion in this direction. Plants are living beings, I wrote, and:

" ... living beings, even the simplest ones, even the cell, are already engaged in an autonomous struggle to maintain themselves and survive. Living beings, even the simplest ones, already have something like rudimentary minds — motivated sensitivities and useful interests — and so they are way beyond Watson."

This idea that mind and life go together is the central theme of Evan Thompson's important work Mind in Life, and it is also defended in my own Out of Our Heads.

If we want to understand plants, and their minds, we need to start not with computation, but with the fact that they are alive.

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You can keep up with more of what Alva Noë is thinking on Facebook, Twitter and over at The Atlantic.

Daniel Leonard Everett - Language: The Cultural Tool

From FORA.tv. Daniel Everett is author of the entertaining and intriguing Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes: Life and Language in the Amazonian Jungle. I enjoyed that account of his experiences and discoveries made while living with the Pirahã, a small tribe of Amazonian Indians in central Brazil. The video lecture is cool, too.

Language: The Cultural Tool



 Language: The Cultural Tool from Grand River Forum on FORA.tv

Grand River Forum University Lecture. Daniel L. Everett, Dean of Arts and Sciences at Bentley University, is a U.S. author and academic best known for his study of the Amazon Basin's Pirahã people and their language.

As of July 1, 2010 he serves as Dean of Arts and Sciences at Bentley University in Waltham, Massachusetts. Prior to Bentley University, Everett was Chair of the Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures at Illinois State University in Normal, Illinois. He has taught at the University of Manchester and is former Chair of the Linguistics Department of the University of Pittsburgh. He is married to Linda Ann Everett. He has three children from his first marriage of 35 years to Keren Graham: Dr. Caleb Everett (Assistant Professor of Anthropology, University of Miami); Dr. Kristene Diggins (DrNP in Charlotte, North Carolina); and Ms. Shannon Russell (missionary with SIL International in Porto Velho, Brazil). 

All in the Mind - Mind the gap! The seduction of the synapse

In this episode of All in the Mind, Natasha Mitchell speaks with several neuroscientists about synapses, the tiny gaps between brain neurons.

Mind the gap! The seduction of the synapse

• Listen now
• Download audio
• show transcript

Saturday 3 December 2011 

 

Photo: Mapping the Connection Matrix of the Human Brain  

[2007 Public Library of Science (open access)]

Bah! All that talk about brain cells and grey matter!  Let’s focus on where the real interesting action is inside your head: the connections between your brain cells—synapses. From the ancient past to the frenzied future—it's all about making connections.

Transcript

Guests

Seth Grant

Professor of Molecular Neuroscience Director, Genes to Cognition Program (G2C) Edinburgh University Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, Cambridge University

Geoffrey Goodhill

Professor, Computational Neuroscience Queensland Brain Institute and School of Mathematical and Physical Sciences University of Queensland.

Huda Akil

Co-director and Research Professor Professor of Neurosciences Distinguished University Professor and Quarton The Molecular and Behavioural Neuroscience Institute Department of Psychiatry University of Michigan USA

Further Information

All in the Mind blog with Natasha Mitchell

Look out for occasional extra audio and program information on the All in the Mind blog

All in the Mind Facebook page

The Melbourne Brain Symposium, 2010

Molecules to Mind: Challenges for the 21st Century

Session at the AAAS Conference 2011, Washington DC

Genes to Cognition Program, Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute and partners.

The Blue Brain Project

The Blue Brain Project is "reconstructing the brain piece by piece and building a virtual brain in a supercomputer".

The Human Connectome Project

From the connectome to the synaptome: an epic love story

Javier DeFelipe, Science Nov 26, 2010;330(6008):1198-201.

The early history of the synapse: from Plato to Sherrington

Max Bennett; Brain Research Bulletin, 1999 Sep 15;50(2):95-118.

The origin and evolution of synapses

Tomas J. Ryan and Seth G.N Grant. Nat Rev Neurosci. 2009 Oct;10(10):701-12.

A general basis for cognition in the evolution of synapse signalling complexes

Seth Grant, Cold Spring Harb Symp Quant Biol. 2009;74:249-57.

Computing behaviour in complex synapses

Seth Grant, The Biochemist, Volume 32 No 2 April 2010

Neurotransmitters Drive Combinatorial Multistate Postsynaptic Density Networks

Marcelo P. Coba, Andrew J. Pocklington, Mark O. Collins, Maksym V. Kopanitsa, Rachel T. Uren, Sajani Swamy, Mike D. R. Croning, Jyoti S. Choudhary, and Seth G. N. Grant, Sci. Signal., 28 April 2009 Vol. 2, Issue 68, p. ra19

Challenges and Opportunities in Mining Neuroscience Data

Huda Akil, Maryann E. Martone, David C. Van Essen; Science 331, 708 (2011)l. (PDF file).

Theoretical Models of Neural Development

Hugh D. Simpson, Duncan Mortimer, and Geoffrey J. Goodhill, Current Topics in Development Biology, 87, 1-51, 2009.

A simple model can unify a broad range of phenomena in retinotectal map development

Simpson, H.D. & Goodhill, G.J. (2011). Biological Cybernetics, 104, 9-29 (PDF file).

Credits

Producer

Natasha Mitchell / Maria Tickle

Presenter

Natasha Mitchell

Elisha Goldstein, Ph.D. - From Trauma to Transformation: An Interview with Jack Kornfield

Elisha Goldstein, Ph.D., who writes for Psych Central at the Mindfulness and Psychotherapy blog, interviewed Jack Kornfield on trauma, transformation through mindfulness practice, and his collaboration with Dr. Dan Siegel. This seems to be from a while back (Siegel's Mindsight is mentioned as forthcoming), but it is an interesting (though too brief) interview.

From Trauma to Transformation: An Interview with Jack Kornfield

By Elisha Goldstein, Ph.D.

 

Jack Kornfield stands alongside an esteemed group of elders such as Thich Nhat Hanh, Sharon Salzberg, Pema Chodron, and Joseph Goldstein in bringing mindfulness to the west. Not only that, he also holds his PhD in clinical Psycholog,y which makes him so relevant to the connection between mindfulness and psychotherapy.

He co-founded Insight Meditation Society in Barre, Massachusetts and is a founding teacher of the well known retreat center Spirit Rock, in Woodacre, Ca. He has taught in Centers and University settings worldwide with teachers such as Thich Nhat Hanh and the Dalai Lama. He is also author of many widely popular books translated in over 20 languages, his most recent are Bringing Home the Dharma and A Lamp in the Darkness. Others include, A Path with Heart, The Art of Forgiveness, Lovingkindness, and Peace, After the Ecstasy, the Laundry and his newest book The Wise Heart: A Guide to the Universal Teachings of Buddhist Psychology.

Today he talks with us about the connection between East and West psychology, his work with Dr. Dan Siegel, and how his own trauma in life has influenced his work with himself and others.

 Elisha: You are a well known as a leader in the continuing dialogue of Eastern and Western psychology and are very skillful in how you marry the two. With all of the suffering that many of our readers experience, how do you see each supporting the other and where do you see this dialogue heading in our culture?

Jack: The suffering that is experienced by people is described in the Buddhist tradition as the first noble truth of the Buddha. The Buddha says that life entails a certain measure of suffering and no one is exempt from that. There is pleasure and pain, gain and loss, praise and blame, fame and disrepute. Human happiness and mental well-being doesn’t come from avoiding these changing circumstances, they happen to all of us. True happiness comes from the openness of heart, compassion, resiliency and mindfulness, the wisdom that we bring to it, that gives perspective and meaning. In eastern and Buddhist psychology there are many kinds of trainings in compassion, in mindfulness and a balanced perspective that make it possible to hold our suffering in a wise way. We can also learn how to release suffering from the body and emotions and transform its energy.

In Western psychotherapy, much of the same is true. The biggest complementary difference between east and west is that most of western psychotherapy is done together with another person. At best we can call it a kind of paired attention or paired mindfulness in which another person is helping to direct your attention and encourage your capacities to be with your experience with greater wisdom, greater balance, greater understanding, and greater compassion.

With Eastern practice you can have the same paired experience working with a teacher to a certain extent, but then much more emphasis is put on continued trainings and practices that you do regularly and frequently on your own. These capacities develop strongly through practice over and over again. East and West complement one another in this way.

Elisha: Speaking of marrying East and West, can you tell us a bit about your work with Psychiatrist Dr. Daniel Siegel, author of The Mindful Brain and upcoming book Mindsight: The New Science of Personal Transformation. I heard you were running a new online 6-week online course on Mindfulness and the Brain through Sounds True.

Jack: The beautiful work that I’m able to share with Dan Siegel describes this same wedding of East and West and particularly of modern neuroscience and the neurological basis for the capacity for resilience, authentic presence, and for interpersonal attunement,demonstrated in a lot of the neuroscience research. The capacities for wisdom and compassion that I teach about can also be understood from Interpersonal Neurobiology how all this happens and how it fits both in eastern and western perspective. Dan too teaches how it can be developed and learned, changing us and changing our lives.

Read the whole interview.

Related Posts

• Mindfulness and Psychotherapy: An Interview with Jack Kornfield
• The Nature of Fear and What You Can Do About It: An Interview with Jack Kornfield
• Reconnect to Your Life Today! An Interview with Jack Kornfield

Upaya Dharma Podcasts - Enkyo O'Hara: Occupy the Heart

From the Upaya Zen Center, Enkyo O'Hara muses on the occupy movement from a Buddhist perspective, but she makes it much more personal.

Enkyo O'Hara: 11-30-2011: Occupy the Heart

Speaker: Enkyo O'Hara

Recorded: Wednesday Nov 30, 2011

Enkyo Roshi has come to see the term “occupy” as being present, as bearing witness to what is happening. She cites the classic zen koan response: “Moment to moment, non-stop flow.” Enkyo concludes with a Rohatsu-inspired gatha.

Enkyo Roshi’s focus is on true self-expression, peacemaking, and HIV/AIDS activism. She holds a Ph.D. in Media Ecology and taught Multi-media at New York University for over 20 years.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Adyashanti: The Inner Revolution of Spiritual Awakening

Another nice talk from the Science and Nonduality Conference hosted by FORA.tv, except that this is a flashback to the 2010 keynote by Adyashanti.



Adyashanti: The Inner Revolution of Spiritual Awakening from Science and Nonduality on FORA.tv

Adyashanti: The Inner Revolution of Spiritual Awakening

Adyashanti dares all seekers of peace and freedom to take the possibility of liberation in this life seriously. He began teaching in 1996, at the request of his Zen teacher with whom he had been studying for 14 years. Since then many spiritual seekers have awakened to their true nature while spending time with Adyashanti.

The author of The End of Your World, Emptiness Dancing, and True Meditation, Adyashanti offers spontaneous and direct nondual teachings that have been compared to those of the early Zen masters and Advaita Vedanta sages. However, Adya says, "If you filter my words through any tradition or-ism, you will miss altogether what I am saying. The liberating truth is not static; it is alive. It cannot be put into concepts and be understood by the mind. The truth lies beyond all forms of conceptual fundamentalism. What you are is the beyond -- awake and present, here and now already. I am simply helping you to realize that."

Alva Noë - IBM's Watson Bested by a Plant

This is a cool and interesting article from Alva Noë at NPR's 13.7 Cosmos and Culture blog - after reading this, vegetarianism may seem no better than meat eating.

Fertilizing The Mind

November 19, 2011

by Alva Noë

Watson doesn't realize it, but this tree can be said to have more of a mind that "he" does.

Watson, IBM's powerful new supercomputer, won at Jeopardy again recently, this time beating teams of students from Harvard and MIT. You've got to wonder — I'm returning to this topic for the second time — what Watson's ascendence tells us about ourselves, and what makes us the kinds of being we are.

Which puts me in mind of the question, what is the difference between plants and animals? You don't have to look far for an answer. Plants are, well, planted. They stay put, rooted to the earth. They don't do anything. Or rather, they do a lot, but they do it the way power stations — power plants — do things. They make good use of what's at hand. You might think that plants can't see because they don't have eyes and nervous systems. But it gets closer to the truth to remember that plants don't have eyes and nervous systems because they don't need to see.

Animals, in contrast, are movers and shakers. They aren't just mobile plants; animals seek, hunt, avoid, fight and hide, and to do this they need to be very alert to the environment around them, to their situation, and also to their own needs. Because animals not only see their delicious prey, but also, at the same time, are attracted to the tempting mate even as they also notice the threatening predator, and because animals get it, because they understand, they are forced to make choices and to reason effectively about where they are.

Being able to see, like being able to think, are distinctive features of a distinctively animal mind. They have no place in the mind of a plant, if you'll allow that it makes sense to speak of plant minds at all.

Which brings us back to Watson. He has the mind of a plant. He's rooted beside his outlet. He sees nothing, seeks, hides, wants and fears nothing, and so he has nothing to think about. He processes information not the way an animal does — animals gather information, they grab on to it and pick it up — but the way a plant turns electromagnetic radiation into energy. Passively, and without understanding or interest. Watson doesn't really answer questions. He never questions anything! He can't even understand the questions. He simply reacts to text inputs.

Actually, it's stretching things to credit Watson even with the mind of a plant. For Watson isn't alive, and the plant's mind — its sensitivity and responsiveness — really only shows itself in the dynamics of the plant's active life. Watson has more in common with a thermostat than a plant.

Engineers make artifacts and the question engineers face is something like: How can you build a machine with a plant, or even an animal, mind? This isn't a question Mother Nature ever had to face. For plant and animal minds are not evolved from artifacts, but from living beings. And living beings, even the simplest ones, even the cell, are already engaged in an autonomous struggle to maintain themselves and survive. Living beings, even the simplest ones, already have something like rudimentary minds — motivated sensitivities and useful interests — and so they are way beyond Watson.

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You can keep up with more of what Alva Noë is thinking on Facebook, Twitter and over at The Atlantic.

Documentary - The Marketing of Madness: The Truth About Psychotropic Drugs

Cool documentary on the pathologizing of being human by the mental health and pharmaceutical industries. I think this film goes a little too far in some ways, but the overall message is valid.

The Marketing of Madness is the definitive documentary on the psychiatric drugging industry. Here is the real story of the high income partnership between psychiatry and drug companies that has created an $80 billion psychotropic drug profit center.

But appearances are deceiving. How valid are psychiatrists’ diagnoses-and how safe are their drugs? Digging deep beneath the corporate veneer, this documentary exposes the truth behind the slick marketing schemes and scientific deceit that conceal dangerous and often deadly sales campaigns.

In this film you’ll discover that… Many of the drugs side effects may actually make your ‘mental illness’ worse. Psychiatric drugs can induce aggression or depression. Some psychotropic drugs prescribed to children are more addictive than cocaine. Psychiatric diagnoses appears to be based on dubious science. Of the 297 mental disorders contained with the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, none can be objectively measured by pathological tests.

Mental illness symptoms within this manual are arbitrarily assigned by a subjective voting system in a psychiatric panel. It is estimated that 100 million people globally use psychotropic drugs.

The Marketing of Madness exposes the real insanity in our psychiatric ‘health care’ system: profit-driven drug marketing at the expense of human rights.

This film plunges into an industry corrupted by corporate greed and delivers a shocking warning from courageous experts who value public health over dollar.

Lucid Dreaming, Consciousness and Quantum Theory

Another lecture from the Science and Nonduality Conference hosted by FORA.tv - this is actually more of a discussion among the three participants, which includes Stephen LaBerge, the first person to look at lucid dreaming through the eye of empiricism.

At the bottom I have included a video of LaBerge from the 2010 Science and Nonduality Conference.




Lucid Dreaming, Consciousness and Quantum Theory from Science and Nonduality on FORA.tv

Speakers:

Zoran Josipovic Ph.D.

Zoran Josipovic, Ph.D. is a research scientist and an adjunct professor at and Psychology Dept. and Center for Neural Science, New York University. His main interests are the nature of consciousness and its relation to the brain, global versus local theories of consciousness, and the functioning of anti-correlated neural networks. Zoran is a long-term practitioner of meditation in the nondual traditions of Dzogchen, Mahamudra and Advaita Vedanta. He has also worked as a psychotherapist and a bodyworker and has taught meditation at Esalen Institute for many years.

Menas Kafatos Ph.D.

Physicist, Founding Dean, Schmid College of Science, Vice Chancellor for Special Projects Dr. Menas Kafatos is Vice Chancellor for Special Projects and also Dean of the Schmid College of Science, Director of the Center for Excellence in Applied, Computational, and Fundamental Science, and The Fletcher Jones Endowed Professor of Computational Physics at Chapman University. He received his B.A. in Physics from Cornell University in 1967 and his Ph.D. in Physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1972. After postdoctoral work at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, he joined George Mason University and was University Professor of Interdisciplinary Sciences there from 1984-2008. He also served as Dean of the School of Computational Sciences and was Director of the Center for Earth Observing and Space Research. He has 34 years experience in undergraduate and graduate Earth systems science, natural hazards and climate change, remote sensing and data information systems, physics, computational and theoretical astrophysics, astronomy, and foundations in quantum theory. He has published numerous books including The Conscious Universe, the Non-local Universe (with Robert Nadeau, Springer-Verlag), Principles of Integrative Science (with Mihai Draganescu, Romanian Academy of Sciences Press), and more than 250 articles on computational science, astrophysics, Earth systems science, hazards and global change, general relativity, cosmology, foundations of quantum theory, and consciousness. http://chapman.edu/CS/pcse/faculty/kafatos.asp

Stephen LaBerge Ph.D.

Founder of The Lucidity Institute Stephen LaBerge is the first scientist to empirically prove the existence of the phenomena of lucid dreaming. His work has developed this technique into a powerful tool for studying mind-body relationships in the dream state and he has demonstrated the considerable potential for lucid dreaming in the fields of psychotherapy and psychosomatic medicine. His book on the subject, Lucid Dreaming, Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming and his more academic Conscious Mind, Sleeping Brain have received enormous popular interest. He is the founder of The Lucidity Institute, an organization that promotes research into lucid dreaming, as well as running courses for the general public on how to achieve a lucid dream.

IN DREAMS AWAKE: An Overview of Lucid Dreaming, West and East a presentation by Stephen LaBerge, Ph.D. (Founder of The Lucidity Institute) at the Science and Nondaulity Conference in 2010.

Philosophy Bites - Jonathan Glover on Systems of Belief

Interesting segment from the Philosophy Bites podcast. Below is an article from his website on a related topic.

Jonathan Glover on Systems of Belief

Sun, 9 October 2011

Beliefs are important. Wars are fought over conflicting belief systems. Philosophers ask 'What is it reasonable to believe?' Can philosophers, then, give us any insights into what is going on when belief systems clash? Jonathan Glover discusses this issue with Nigel Warburton in this episode of the Philosophy Bites podcast.

Philosophy Bites is made in association with the Institute of Philosophy.

Direct download: Jonathan_Glover_on_Systems_of_Belief.mp3

This is from his website - one of many articles at the link, so scroll down for this one.

PHILOSOPHY AND CONFLICTS BETWEEN RIVAL POLITICAL OR RELIGIOUS WORLDVIEWS.

Probably most people who spend a lot of time thinking about philosophy do so because of the deep interest of the questions and the intellectual challenge their difficulty poses. But the conventional wisdom that these questions have little practical relevance is mistaken. In recent times, philosophical argument has been applied to many ethical issues: to questions about human rights and the just society, to medical ethics, to the ethics of war, to the genetic choices now becoming possible, to our treatment of animals and to environmental issues.

But there is also a case for the practical relevance of parts of philosophy other than ethics. The world is full of rival systems of political or religious belief, and these ideological conflicts sometimes lead to war or other violence.

Philosophers, at least since Socrates, have debated the relative merits of different reasons for believing something true. Yet, so far, philosophers have contributed little to the dialogue between rival believers that is surely the preferred alternative to violence. It would be a sad comment on the long history since Socrates if philosophy had nothing to contribute to the alleviation of ideological conflicts.

One merit (among obvious others) of a society where where rival beliefs are argued with rather than persecuted is that it creates the possibility of rational discussion making this kind of contribution.

THOMAS JEFFERSON: THE VIRGINIA STATUTE, ON A WALL BY A CAR PARK IN RICHMOND.

The Royal Irish Academy generously invited me to choose the topic for a one-day conference and to give the opening lecture. This gave me an opportunity to develop some thoughts on how it might be possible for philosophical discussion of the contrasts between well-founded and poorly-founded beliefs to help to reduce ideological conflict.

Irish Academy Lecture: Ideological Conflict, Belief and Philosophy

The Politics and Psychology of a New World Order

Bedlam: The History of Bethlem Hospital

Cool and interesting - and sad - piece of history. This is an episode from the History Channel, posted for us by Top Documentary Films.

Bedlam: The History of Bethlem Hospital (2010)

The Bethlem Royal Hospital in London became infamous in the 1600′s in regards to the inhumane and cruel treatment of its patients as revealed by psychiatric historians.

Bedlam: The History of Bethlem Hospital reveals why Bedlam came to stand for the very idea of madness itself.

It was satirized for centuries as both a human zoo and a university of madness and for 100 years was one of London’s leading tourist attractions, as Madame Tussauds is today.

Britain’s leading psychiatric historians discuss Bedlam and its inhabitants as we reveal the incredible history of one of U.K’s most notorious institutions.

Watch the full documentary now

The Dalai Lama - Setting an Intention

DALAI LAMA HEART OF WISDOM
CALENDAR 2012
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Dalai Lama Quote of the Week

"When serving society or others in general, it is very important to set a proper motivation at the start of each day. When we wake up each morning, we reflect, 'Today I am not going to come under the power of either attachment or hostility. Today I am going to be of benefit and help to others.' Thus we consciously set the tone for the entire day so that we go through it within the context of a pure, altruistic motivation and attitude."

--H.H. the Dalai Lama, excerpted from The Gelug/Kagyu Tradition of Mahamudra, published by Snow Lion Publications

--from Dalai Lama Heart of Wisdom Calendar 2012 (June)

RSA - Creating Healthy Cities

From The RSA.

First a little background:

Albina Ruiz started worrying about health and environmental problems caused by garbage in Peru when she was an industrial engineer student. Twenty years ago, she came up with an idea for local enterprises to collect and process garbage: charging affordable fees, reducing waste volume in municipal landfills and generating more income by separating recyclables, spinning off additional microenterprises to produce compost and other marketable by-products. After 15 years of promoting her concept while working as a consultant to cities, industrial firms and various international development projects, she founded Ciudad Saludable in 2001.

KEY ACCOMPLISHMENTS AS OF 2010

• Establishing waste management systems that are more dependable and less expensive than those provided by municipal governments, Ciudad Saludable has organized over 1,500 waste collectors, creating employment and improving health and living conditions for over 6 million people living in rural and poor urban regions in Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, Peru, Venezuela and India.
• Ciudad Saludable was instrumental in the creation of the first law in Peru (as well as Latin America) to regulate the activities of waste recyclers.
• Ciudad Saludable has also established two other organizations: Peru Waste Innovation, a consulting firm specializing in solid waste management; and Healthy Cities International (New York), which is in charge of replicating Ciudad Saludable’s model around the world.

Here is the post from RSA.

Creating Healthy Cities

22nd Nov 2011

Listen to the audio (full recording including audience Q&A)

Please right-click link and choose "Save Link As..." to download audio file onto your computer.

RSA Albert Medal Event

Albina Ruiz, founder of Ciudad Saludable (The Healthy City Project) is awarded the 2011 RSA Albert Medal for for outstanding contribution to environmental management and micro enterprise.

Albina Ruiz is founder and chief architect of a system of self-reliant, community-run micro businesses that are dedicated to processing urban waste and promoting cleaner and healthier cities across the globe.

Albina will give a lecture highlighting the innovative work of her organization Ciudad Saludable, describing how it grew from its small Peruvian origins into a global non-profit movement. Ciudad Saludable has its own postgraduate university programme and a dedicated foundation geared towards replicating their successful model in other cities worldwide.

Recounting her own experiences of setting up and driving forward this global social enterprise, Albina’s story will strike a chord with many of the RSA’s Fellows who are working in the same field, and will provide inspiration for the RSA’s nascent Enterprise programme.

Chaired by Julian Thompson, director of enterprise, RSA.

RSA Albert Medal

First awarded in 1864, the Albert medal was created as a memorial to Prince Albert, who had been President of the Society for 18 years. It was originally given 'for distinguished merit in promoting Arts, Manufactures and Commerce'. Today, it acknowledges those at the forefront of driving social innovation in action.

Authors@Google: Jeffrey Sachs, "The Price of Civilization"

Interesting talk from Jeffrey Sachs, Director of The Earth Institute at Columbia University. He is author of The Price of Civilization: Reawakening American Virtue and Prosperity.

"The Price of Civilization"

As he has done in dozens of countries around the world in the midst of economic crises, Sachs turns his unique diagnostic skills to what ails the American economy. He finds that both political parties—and many leading economists—have missed the big picture, offering shortsighted solutions such as stimulus spending or tax cuts to address complex economic problems that require deeper solutions. Sachs argues that we have profoundly underestimated globalization's long-term effects on our country, which create deep and largely unmet challenges with regard to jobs, incomes, poverty, and the environment. America's single biggest economic failure, Sachs argues, is its inability to come to grips with the new global economic realities.

Yet Sachs goes deeper than an economic diagnosis. By taking a broad, holistic approach—looking at domestic politics, geopolitics, social psychology, and the natural environment as well—Sachs reveals the larger fissures underlying our country's current crisis. He shows how Washington has consistently failed to address America's economic needs. He describes a political system that has lost its ethical moorings, in which ever-rising campaign contributions and lobbying outlays overpower the voice of the citizenry. He also looks at the crisis in our culture, in which an overstimulated and consumption-driven populace in a ferocious quest for wealth now suffers shortfalls of social trust, honesty, and compassion.

Finally, Sachs offers a plan to turn the crisis around. He argues persuasively that the problem is not America's abiding values, which remain generous and pragmatic, but the ease with which political spin and consumerism run circles around those values. He bids the reader to reclaim the virtues of good citizenship and mindfulness toward the economy and one another. Most important, he bids each of us to accept the price of civilization, so that together we can restore America to its great promise.

Dharma Quote of the Week: Bruce Norman on Meditating with an Attitude

A BEGINNER'S GUIDE TO TIBETAN BUDDHISM

by Bruce Newman

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Dharma Quote of the Week

We all have a certain style for doing things--how we drive, how we cook, how we dress. Some of us are shy or cautious, others assertive or flamboyant. We've refined that style over the years based on how successful it is, but it's not usually something of which we're completely aware. As long as it gets the job done, as long as we get the appropriate feedback from others, our style goes unnoticed, and when questioned we'll say, "That's just the way I am."

When we begin meditation, it is inevitable that we will meditate with the same style with which we do everything else, because it's who we think we are. Furthermore, this style has proven to be reasonably successful in our other activities. However, in this case, it is not at all appropriate. If there is any style, there is a hidden agenda and an implicit judgment of the various phenomena of meditation. There is not the true detachment or choiceless awareness of real meditation. Our style contains our unacknowledged attitudes toward meditation.

...What's the problem in meditating with an attitude? First, a large amount of energy goes into maintaining the attitude. To make this clearer, if we are trying to be aware of our breathing, 100 percent of our attention should be on our breathing. If we're thinking, "I'm a shy person and I'm a little afraid of what's going on here," even if we're not consciously aware of that thought, it will be taking our energy away from the breathing and keeping it tied up in the world of ego. Consequently, this energy is not available for our practice. And your evaluation of your practice and progress will be based on your agenda rather than on the Buddha's teaching.

Of course, no one is a perfect meditator. It's not like we have to wait until we have a perfect attitude before we begin. If that were the case, we would never start..With time, the purity of your attitude will grow...refining one's approach is a lifetime's work and is at the same time the practice itself.(p.72)

--from A Beginner's Guide to Tibetan Buddhism by Bruce Newman, published by Snow Lion Publications

A Beginner's Guide • Now at 5O% off!

(Good until December 9th).

Road Map to Resilience: Ways to Bolster Resilience and Well-being

In this Webinar, Dr. Donald Meichenbaum and Dr. Lisa Firestone examine six realms within which we can increase resilience (Physical, Interpersonal, Emotional, Thinking, Behavioral, and Spiritual domains). If he had included environment, too, it would approach an integral model. My own model does include both environmental and organizational aspects to increasing resilience.

Posted on YouTube by PsychAlive.

Road Map to Resilience: Ways to Bolster Resilience and Well-being

NPR - 'Dangerous Method': Shocking Therapy For A Hysteric

I am so looking forward to seeing this film - Cronenberg is one of my favorite directors, and I have actually read the Collected Works of Carl G Jung, so you could say I am a fan of his theories.

The New York Times gave this film a MUCH better recommendation (a Critics' Pick) and a glowing review.

Watch Clips

• 'I Think Of You As Galileo

• 'A 13 Hour Conversation'

• 'Never Repress Anything'

Here is an interview with Cronenberg about this film:

'Dangerous Method': Shocking Therapy For A Hysteric

by Mark Jenkins

'Dangerous' minds? Psychoanalyst Carl Jung (Michael Fassbender) applies the talking cure to Sabina (Keira Knightley) a young woman diagnosed with what was then called hysteria.

A Dangerous Method

• Director: David Cronenberg
• Genre: Drama
• Running Time: 99 minutes

Rated R; for sexual content and brief language
With: Michael Fassbender, Keira Knightley and Viggo Mortensen

November 22, 2011

 

In a clash of dueling methodologies, A Dangerous Method depicts the struggle between the coolly intellectual and the messily instinctual. There's also some stuff in there about Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung.

Based on the correspondence of the two psychoanalytic pioneers, the movie began as a book, then became a play by Christopher Hampton, who's best known for writing another perilous work, Dangerous Liaisons. (That script was also based on letters, but fictional ones.) On the other side of the argument is director David Cronenberg, the horror-flick veteran whose most lurid movies could hardly be further removed from Hampton's tidily literary manner.

The two men's styles sync better than might be expected in this smart if somewhat timid drama; Hampton's approach mostly dominates, his tasteful style reinforced by the upscale historical setting and Howard Shore's conventional score. Yet there are flashes of Cronenbergian anarchy that prevent the movie from settling too comfortably into the period upholstery.

The story turns on Sabina Spielrein, a Russian Jewish teenager who arrives at a Swiss asylum in 1904 with a serious case of what was then termed hysteria. As overplayed by Keira Knightley, she's a whirlwind of tics, grimaces, outbursts and contortions. Her problems might seem physical, but Jung (Michael Fassbender) decides to apply the "talking cure" developed by Freud (Viggo Mortensen).

Not so long before, Freud had shocked the world — or at least educated Europe — by suggesting that many psychological issues were fundamentally sexual. That insight is a key that quickly unlocks Spielrein's psyche; she's a masochist whose erotic proclivities were shaped by the beatings her father began administering when she was 4.

Jung doesn't simply diagnose Spielrein. He enters into her obsession, whipping her before they have sex — an approach that defies the teachings of Freud, who insists that doctors keep a distance from their patients. It also violates Jung's wedding vows to the oft-pregnant Emma (Sarah Gadon), whose inherited wealth funds the family's lavish standard of living.

Later, Jung and Freud actually meet, and the two go on a speaking tour of North America — an oddly truncated episode that seems to have been included in the movie for the sake of a single shipboard conversation. Jung also briefly treats one of Freud's wayward proteges, Otto Gross (Vincent Cassel), who has decided to "never repress anything." Jung disapproves, although his relationship with Spielrein is closer to Gross' lifestyle than to Freud's.

Jung and Freud begin to pull apart, which A Dangerous Method treats partially as a symptom of the gap between Jews and Protestants at the time. Jung's growing interest in the sort of mystical stuff now called "New Age" is mentioned but not really explored. A note at the film's end explains what happened to the principal characters. Spielrein, who became a psychiatrist, might have lived a "normal" life, if not for the Nazis.

Fassbender and Mortensen play their roles coolly and simply, which further emphasizes Knightley's antics. As if the actress weren't conspicuous enough, she uses a Streep-like Russian accent while her colleagues employ the usual Masterpiece Theater diction. The contrast is distracting, though not fatal.

This movie isn't simply work-for-hire for Cronenberg; it treats issues that have long been prominent in his films. Still, the clinical style doesn't play to the director's strengths. A Dangerous Method didn't have to be another Naked Lunch, but Freud plus Jung plus Cronenburg should have equaled something a little more dissonant and troubling.