Outlaw Comic: The Censoring of Bill Hicks [NSFW]

Bill Hicks is more infamous than famous - he is the comedian George Carlin was becoming when he died a few years back - angry, mean, and defiant. This is an excellent look at his life and career, narrated unobtrusively by Janeane Garofalo (who generally annoys the hell out of me).

It's too bad Hicks died so young - I suspect he was beginning to figure out his niche once he got off drugs and alcohol.

The embedded clip should have all seven parts - of not, just go back to the Documentary Heaven site linked to in the title below.

Outlaw Comic: The Censoring of Bill Hicks

February 21st, 2011

A biographical documentary on the late great comedian Bill Hicks and his career; in particular the censorship by Letterman that scarred it.

Hosted by Janeane Garofalo, this documentary tells the story of Bill’s transition from a non-drinking, non-smoking, straight laced funny man, to a hard drinking, hard smoking, drug taking angry ranter, to the happy and finally, peaceful and insightful man of much wisdom.

A rare insight into the battle against censorship that the great Bill Hicks waged against corporate America and it’s mainstream media for the better part of 15 years.

After 11 successful appearances on The Tonight Show with David Lettermen, the ‘powers that be’ axed Bill’s final performance from the show. 4 months later, Bill would tragically die from pancreatic cancer at the age of 32.

Tags: Outlaw Comic, The Censoring of Bill Hicks, Documentary Heaven, Janeane Garofalo, biographical, documentary, corporate America, mainstream media, Bill Hicks, comedy, biography, humor, censorship, The Tonight Show, David Lettermen, cancer

Pema Chodron: Smile at Fear - A Reservoir of Trust

A little Wednesday morning dharma . . . . Pema Chodron: Smile at Fear - A Reservoir of Trust - a talk based on Chogyam Trungpa's Smile at Fear: Awakening the True Heart of Bravery.

This is an excerpt from Pema Chodron's "Smile at Fear" from Richmond, CA, October 2010. Talk 2: The Path of Fearlessness. Ani Pema teaches from Chogyam Trungpa's book "Smile at Fear: Awakening the True Heart of Bravery." This clip is on the "reservoir of trust", a trust that the universe will never stop communicating with us. Pema Chodron's archivists, Great Path. www.pemachodrontapes.com. Item 152 available on DVD, audio CD and MP3.

Tags: Pema Chodron, Smile at Fear, A Reservoir of Trust, Chogyam Trungpa, The Path of Fearlessness, Buddhism, dharma, trust, books, Awakening the True Heart of Bravery

Marcelo Gleiser - Giving up the ghost: The search for a Grand Unified Theory

An armillary sphere - before telescopes these were used to determine celestial positions.

Interesting article from Cosmos - is the search for a unified theory of everything (the elusive Grand Unified Theory) little more than wishful thinking?

Giving up the ghost

Issue 35 of Cosmos, November 2010

by Marcelo Gleiser

Are physicists wasting their time hunting for a theory that unites the forces of nature? Marcelo Gleiser, once an enthusiast in the quest, wonders if it’s just wishful thinking.

IN THE 1990S, I was a physicist hunting for a theory that would unify two of the four forces – gravity and electromagnetism – as manifestations of a single force. There was good reason to hope, and the great and the good were committed.

More than 10 years on, are we any closer? Is the search fundamentally misguided? Could belief in a physical theory that unifies the secrets of the material world – a ‘hidden code’ in nature – be the scientific equivalent of the religious belief in oneness?

In Ancient Greece, Pythagoras and his followers believed nature was a mathematical puzzle, constructed through ratios and patterns that combine integers, and that geometry was the key to deciphering it.

The idea re-emerged in the late Renaissance, although Galileo Galilei, Johannes Kepler and Isaac Newton believed the mathematical description of nature could be found through the painstaking application of the scientific method, where hypotheses are tested by experiments and observations, and then accepted or rejected.

But that’s really only half the story. According to Newton, God was the supreme mathematician and the mathematical laws of nature were Creation’s blueprint.

And while the notion that God interfered with natural phenomena faded with the march of science, the idea that nature’s hidden code lay in wait to be discovered did not.

Modern incarnations of unified field theories come in two flavours. The more traditional version, the so-called Grand Unified Theory, seeks to describe electromagnetism and the weak and strong nuclear forces as a single force, and the first of these theories was proposed in 1974 by Howard Georgi and Sheldon Glashow.

The more ambitious version seeks to include gravity in the unification framework. Superstring theory tries to do this by abandoning the age-old paradigm that matter is made of small, indivisible blocks, substituting them with vibrating strings that live in higher-dimensional spaces.

Like all good theories in physics, grand unified theories make predictions. One is that the proton, the particle that inhabits all atomic nuclei, is unstable. But for decades, experiments of increasing sensitivity have looked for decaying protons and failed to find them.

As a consequence, the models have been tweaked so that protons decay so rarely as to be outside the current reach of detection. Another prediction fared no better: bundled-up interacting fields called magnetic monopoles have never been found.

For superstrings, the situation is even worse: in spite of its mathematical elegance, the theory is so detached from physical reality that it is difficult to determine what a measurable string effect might be.

I now think it is the very notion of a final theory that is faulty. Even if we succeed in unifying the known forces, our instruments have limits. Since knowledge of physical reality hangs on the measureable, we will never know all there is to know.

Who is to say there are only four fundamental forces? Science is full of surprises. Much better to accept our knowledge of physical reality is incomplete.

This way, science is understood as a human enterprise, and the idea of finding a theory of everything – what Stephen Hawking has called equivalent to “seeing the mind of God” – can be exorcised once and for all.

Particle physics experiments have shown us that our hopes for perfection are just that – hopes. Symmetries are violated left and right; in nature, unlike in John Keats’s famous poem, beauty isn’t always truth.

Perhaps fundamental asymmetries are necessary. The universe had to have very special properties to keep expanding for 13.7 billion years; and particles of matter had to dominate those of antimatter soon after the Big Bang, or the universe would consist mostly of radiation.

Life itself is a product of imperfections, from the spatial asymmetry of amino acids to mutations during reproduction.

Asymmetries forged the long, complex and erratic path from particles to atoms to cells, from simple prokaryotic cells to more sophisticated eukaryotic cells, and from unicellular to multicellular organisms.

The history of life is deeply enmeshed with the Earth’s environmental changes, from the increase of oxygen availability, to the advent of plate tectonics that help regulate carbon dioxide. Life – not to mention intelligence – is probably quite rare, a product of asymmetries, imperfections and accidents.

In the end, giving up on a final theory won’t make doing physics – or science – less exciting. Nature has plenty of mysteries to keep us busy for a very long time.

Tags: Marcelo Gleiser, Giving up the ghost, Grand Unified Theory, theory of everything, Cosmos, Science, physics, Philosophy, universe, unified field theories, electromagnetism, weak and strong nuclear forces, gravity, Superstring theory

Kalle Lasn - Paradigm Shift: The great machine of capitalism starts to heave

It seems our current economic approaches are collapsing under the weight of their own premises, a result of their failure to account for finite resources and the realization that "our human money economy is a subset of the Earth’s larger bioeconomy rather than the other way around." Interesting stuff - I wonder if anyone with the power to effect change is listening.

Via the always thought-provoking Adbusters.

Paradigm Shift

The great machine of capitalism starts to heave.

Kalle Lasn, 15 Feb 2011

Infographic from Whose Crisis, Whose Future? by Susan George

Audio version read by George Atherton – Right-click to download

There’s a tectonic mindshift going on in the science of economics right now, but you wouldn’t know it by tuning in to the likes of Martin Wolf, Paul Krugman, Andrew Sorkin, Lawrence Summers, Tim Geithner, Ben Bernanke, Dominique Strauss-Kahn or most of the professors teaching Economics 101 around the world. These old-school practitioners of neoclassicism are stuck in past, versed in only one language: the language of pure, unadulterated money.

As oil reserves dwindle and climate tipping points loom, they babble on endlessly about liquidity, stimulus, derivatives, bond markets, sovereign debt, AAA ratings and investment banker bonuses. They never say a word about melting glaciers, eroding coral reefs, rising sea levels, fizzing oceans or the methane that’s bubbling out of the arctic tundra. Like medieval theologians who argued endlessly about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, today’s economists argue incessantly about how economic growth can be sustained forever on a finite planet. Ten years from now, as the blowback from the externalities of their way of doing business repeatedly hammers us and global warming kicks in with a vengeance, we’ll look back in shock and awe – and wonder what it was about these logic freaks and their money narratives that so mesmerized us.

Five hundred years ago astronomers following Ptolemy’s geocentric model of the universe were tearing their hair out trying to make sense of all their calculations of the sun, moon and stars moving around above us in the night sky. It was only when Copernicus pointed out that we are not the center of the universe – the sun does not revolve around the Earth but rather the other way around – that all their convoluted calculations fell magically into place.

Today something eerily similar is happening in the science of economics: Economists and lay people alike are realizing that our human money economy is a subset of the Earth’s larger bioeconomy rather than the other way around. Over the next few years, as this monumental shift of perspective kicks in, all the economic, ecological and financial craziness of the industrial era will evaporate, and a new sustainable way of running our planetary household will fall magically into place.

Economics students, especially PhD students, in departments around the world have a crucial role to play in ushering in this new paradigm. Go to kickitover.org and join the movement.

—Kalle Lasn

Tags: Kalle Lasn, Paradigm Shift, The great machine of capitalism starts to heave, Adbusters, economics, society, Environment, culture, bioeconomy, capitalism, George Atherton

Sergey Badaev - Individual and Social in the Integral Theory of Ken Wilber

The interface and interconnection between the individual and the collective (cultural and social) is one of the weaker areas in Wilber's model, from my perspective. Many of the most prominent and important theorists in this realm have been ignored or excluded from Integral Psychology (2000) and Integral Spirituality (2007).

In this article from Integral World, Sergey Badaev analyzes a single chapter (chapter 7) in Wilber's Integral Spirituality - it's an interesting article, although I'd like to see it expanded and more detailed in its analysis. I think Badaev has valid observations, but the arguments need to be more nuanced in their unpacking, which requires a longer article than most people will read online.

Individual and Social in the Integral Theory of Ken Wilber

Analysis of the 7th chapter of his book 'Integral Spirituality'

Sergey Badaev

Wilber starts 7th chapter of his book Integral Spirituality with a claim that for lots of people it is difficult to understand relationship between an individual and a group and it is a problem which a lot of thinkers have been grappling with for millennia. Then Wilber gives a few versions of this problem:

1. If the individual is an organism, is society an organism also?
2. Is society made of individual organisms in the same way individual organisms are made of cells and molecules?
3. Is Gaia a single giant organism, made of all living beings?

First of all, let us analyse the very problem or question under consideration. The first version suggests that the question should be a matter of terminology. The answer would depend on how we define "organism" and what essential features we include in the definition. If a society has these features we call it an "organism", if not, we do not.

The second version is formulated in a rather strange way. It seems that any sensible person would agree that individuals are components of society and from this point of view it would not be wrong to say that society consists of individual organisms. But does society consist of organisms exactly the same way as organisms consist of cells and molecules? This formulation seems to be quite vague without clarification of what 'the same way' means here.

In the third version Gaia is mentioned which is usually considered as a planetary system of Earth. The term 'Gaia' in this context comes from so called 'Gaia hypothesis' by James Lovelock which he introduced at the end of 1960s. The idea was to view our planet as a living self-organising system, that is a sort of a super organism.

Wilber's formulation is not quite correct because according to Lovelock's definition of the term Gaia includes not only living things but all non-living components as well. In spite of this Wilber defines Gaia as a network of procaryotic cells and insists that it was an original definition by Lovelock.

After all, Wilber gives another version of the question which can be presented as follows.

4. What exactly is that relationship between an organism and society?

Quite probably, what Wilber means here is the question of what the features and qualities are that make an individual and society similar from systemic point of view and what makes them different.

Let us follow Wilber's thoughts and see what he suggests as an answer to this question.

He starts with drawing our attention to the fact that according to the widely accepted idea, the world is organised hierarchically and that there is "a sequence of nested spheres of relational being, with each higher sphere enveloping the lower, until you have the entire universe". Although Wilber calls this idea one of the most popular responses to the question, hierachical structure per se does not give any clear answer to the relationship of an individual and society.

To illustrate the hierarchical structure of the world Wilber gives two schemes. One is taken from a popular book on eco-holism (unfortunately, Wilber gives no reference).

(Scheme 1)

• Sub-quantum vacuum
• Quantum events
• Atoms
• Molecules
• Cells
• Organisms
• Families
• Communities
• Nations
• Species
• Ecosystems
• Biosphere
• Universe

The second is taken from Alwyn Scott's Stairway to the Mind.

(Scheme 2)

• Quantum events
• Atoms
• Molecules
• Biochemical structures
• Nerve impulses
• Neurons
• Assemblies of neurons
• Brain
• Consciousness
• Culture

With regards to these schemes Wilber comes to a conclusion that they are flawed with the same basic confusion. In order to demonstrate this he mentions a principle of such hierarchical sequences. According to this principle every upper level of this sequence should include the lower one as its component. Wilber draws our attention that in the first scheme ecosystems go after nations and that means ecosystems cannot appear in evolution before nations appear. That is obviously wrong.

In the second scheme consciousness and culture appear after brain as if they were material structures of a higher level than the brain. That is not correct as well. Putting aside a question how typical and widely circulated those schemes are, let us have a look at what Wikipedia suggests. You can find there a similar sequence of levels which is called 'the levels of biological organisation' (Wikipedia )

(Scheme 3)

• Atom
• Molecule
• Organelle
• Cell
• Tissue
• Organ
• Organ system
• Organism
• Population
• Biocoenosis
• Ecosystem
• Biosphere

I hate to think that Wilber uses a straw man argument but the third scheme does not have those flaws that Wilber criticises in the first and the second schemes.

Anyway, what does Wilber suggest as an alternative?

Read the whole article.

Tags: Integral World, Integral Spirituality, Ken Wilber, Sergey Badaev, Individual and Social in the Integral Theory of Ken Wilber, organism, society, Gaia, social holons, holarchy, hierarchical structure, AQAL, Integral, biology, ecosystems, Philosophy, evolution, Integral Theory

Stuart Henderson Describes 'Videodrome' as the "First Transnational-Media-as-Enemy Film"

I am a huge fan of David Cronenberg's films - and one of his early films that I have seen probably ten times (at least) is Videodrome. He is probably better known for The Fly, Dead Ringers, Naked Lunch, A History of Violence, and Eastern Promises. He has only began to achieve recognition in the film industry in the last five years or so, yet some of his earlier films are profoundly disturbing and philosophically complex, all the while working in the horror genre in a way few others have done.

One thing that all of his films have in common, whether they are horror, psychological dramas, or studies of human nature is that they all have a philosophy - they all revolve around a moral question in one way or another. I think it is this factor that has led me to see nearly every film he has made (that I have access to by video or now on DVD or Blu Ray).

For example, Dead Ringers (starring Jeremy Irons as brilliant identical twins, both of whom are gynecologists) tells the story of brothers who share women (and the women generally do not know). One brother is confident and smooth with women, but the other is more insecure. Elliot is the dominant twin, and he seduces women and then hands them off Beverly - until one of them falls in love, and this is where everything goes wrong. Roger Ebert gives a fair review, generally positive:

The technical perfection of the film is not matched by its emotional content. The story could have used more of the Bujold character, who is sophisticated and worldly enough to understand the twins, but who is dropped when they begin to retreat into their private disintegration. "Dead Ringers" is a stylistic tour de force, but it's cold and creepy and centered on bleak despair. It's the kind of movie where you ask people how they liked it, and they say, "Well, it was well made," and then they wince.

That creepy despair is the point of the film - it's cold and distant, just like the characters at the center of the film, who discuss female anatomy as they are talking about engine parts. Cronenberg generally shapes the feel of the film to match the content - that what makes his films feel different than so many other directors.

With that background on a single movie, and assuming many people have by now seen A History of Violence, a brilliant film, and/or Eastern Promises, also an excellent film, this review of Videodrome at PopMatters (occasioned by the release of the Blu Ray version) may make a little more sense.

In a strange way, the film predicts the rise of monologue as discourse, a la Glenn Beck or Rush Limbaugh. Another point of interest, there is a line, "reality is less than television," that feels, in the context of the film, like an amplification of Marshall McLuhan's "the media is the message."

As a side note - it's unfortunate to hear that the film is being remade (I'm not sure by who), but the time at which it was made the first time around made it a very prescient film.

'Videodrome': The First 'Transnational Media as Enemy' Film

By Stuart Henderson 14 February 2011

PopMatters Features Editor

Videodrome
Director: David Cronenberg

Cast: James Woods, Deborah Harry, Sonja Smits, Peter Dvorsky

(US DVD: 7 Dec 2010)

David Cronenberg’s classic bit of uncategorizable prescience stands up amazingly well today, almost 30 years later. A grotesque, bloody, but always cerebral fantasy about the curious ways media are affecting our experience of reality, Videodrome hit the film community like a cannon shot back in 1983. Following a series of increasingly assured (but always singular and “difficult”) films, this Canadian wunderkind had finally scored a full spectrum triumph. As clever as it was entertaining, as sexy as it was revolting, and at all times unrelentingly imaginative, Videodrome set the standard for what has developed into a bit of a subgenre: the “transnational media as enemy” film.

What would happen if the mind, the body, the human, became a kind of cog in a media-driven system in which monologue overwhelmed connected interaction? What if this has already happened, and media (whether unwittingly or not) merely serve to reinforce our enslavement to some systemic infection of the mind? What if those screens we are all staring into every day were to become the dissemination point for a global plague, a mass hypnosis, or, you know, FOX news? Videodrome suggests these, among many other, unsettling questions as it leads us down the rabbit hole.

Max Renn (a rarely-better James Woods) runs a TV channel devoted to edgy entertainment: soft-core porn, violence, objectionable material in general. He has recognized the hole in the market, and has filled it up with his brand of titillation. However, he is always redefining the limits of what his channel deems fit for broadcast. “I’m looking for something that’ll break through,” is how he puts it to one of his suppliers.

Read the whole review - it seems Stuart Henderson is an even bigger than am I.

Tags: Videodrome, The First 'Transnational Media as Enemy' Film, Stuart Henderson, PopMatters, David Cronenberg, James Woods, Deborah Harry, Sonja Smits, Peter Dvorsky, film, media, culture, society, corporations, Philosophy, Max Renn, television, video, mind control, anti-media, revolutionaries, violence, video-induced hallucinations, Dr. O’Blivion, monologue, discourse

Being Ordinary - Enlightening the Shadow

Nice.

21. Enlightening the Shadow

Podcast: Download (Duration: 40:59 — 37.5MB)

This month Mike speaks to Scott Kiloby, author of Love’s Quiet Revolution: The End of the Spiritual Search, about the joy of Awakening and the importance of exploring and understanding the Shadow afterwards.

Click here for Scott’s website.

Thanks to sigur ros for use of their beautiful song, ‘gong’. We welcome all comments and questions below.

Tags: Enlightening the Shadow, Being Ordinary, Mike, Scott Kiloby, Love’s Quiet Revolution, Buddhism, books, awakening, shadow work

Peter Lawler - The Moral Foundations of Personal Evolution

From the Big Think blog: Peter Lawler is a postmodern conservative, by his own definition. Here's more from Wikipedia:

Lawler writes broadly from within a Catholic intellectual tradition that emphasizes the importance of limits on unfettered personal autonomy in shaping well-lived lives, as well as the centrality of the love of truth in making sense of the human experience. By no means dogmatic in matters of religion, Lawler does argue that our human moral anthropology suggests the possibility of God's existence and love. His influences include both Catholics (Augustine, Thomas, Pascal, Tocqueville, Flannery O'Connor, and Walker Percy) as well as non-Catholic thinkers (especially Leo Strauss).

On to the post - this is an interesting argument coming from a Catholic.

The Moral Foundations of Personal Evolution

Peter Lawler on February 21, 2011

So I've said before evolution is getting more personal. I'm now going to say a few things about the personal point of view of our time. I'm just trying to lay out the facts as I see them among sophisticated Americans. Like about most social trends, the reasonable conclusion might be that things are getting better and worse.

We now seem to know of no higher standard than securing the being of the persons alive right now. We’re now clear that we have no right to say more in public than all persons have human dignity and human rights, and the point of life is to sustain them in their personal identities as long as possible. That means, of course, that they have the duty to what they can to sustain themselves, to protect themselves as well of possible from all the “risk factors” that surround them. In that sense, we’re more pro-life than ever.

The most obvious positive effect of technological progress--combined with personal freedom--is the extension of the average life to near 80. There has always been occasional exceptions among members of our species to the natural rule of reproduce (spread one's genes), raise one’s children, and soon thereafter die.

What’s new is the average person now has a new birth of freedom, a generation or really more when his or her kids are grown and he or she is finally on his own. This fact seems to confound the evolutionary theorists. This long period of postmenopausal flourishing among our females, for example, simply does not exist among the other mammals.

What we have here, in truth, is a real technological victory over nature. It’s a very limited victory--so far the oldest of the old are no older than they were in the past and hardly anyone reaches three digits in age--but real nonetheless. And we have the new biotechnological hope that some combination of genetic manipulation, regenerative medicine (which promises to either to fix up or generate replacements for our key bodily organs) and perhaps nanotechnology will finally start to move persons in the direction of indefinite longevity.

We have the hope, in other words, that we can really change our natures in ways that keep us from being so defined by time and death. There are some who say that the first person to live to be a thousand or even much longer is alive today. (It’s as certain as certain can be that it’s not me.) I don't buy the extreme claims of the "singularity" guys, but I can't say for sure that indefinite longevity won't eventually become a possibility for us.

There’s actually, of course, two new facts that make the population of the most technologically advanced countries older than ever. Not only are people living longer, they're having fewer children. And it’s pretty much the case that the countries that have most longevity have the least fertility.

Persons, we might say, are tending to do what they can to choose not to be replaced. They’re often failing to do their duties to the species or for that matter to their country (the birth dearth is arguably a growing national security problem in some European countries and maybe Japan). Persons are having more and more trouble thinking of themselves as parts of anything greater or larger than themselves.

The average American is getting older too, although we stand out in still doing our duty in generating sufficient personal replacements.. But if you take out first-generation immigrants and observant religious believers, our birth rate is the same of the France that may be gradually fading away.

So one result of our diminishing personal concern about extending one's own personal being toward others through love or beyond one's own biological demise is an emphatically moral--or very judgmental--focus on personal health and safety. Unprecedented personal longevity and personal security depend upon ME taking maximum personal responsibility for keeping myself around.

The emerging medical and other technical means for achieving those goals are worthless unless I really use them. I have to be determined to apply them in my own case. It’s irresponsible for not to act on what I can know when it comes to diet, exercise, supplements, drugs, safe sex, and so forth.

More than ever, we blame people who die young for their irresponsibility. We’re much less accepting of the thought than death is the intention of nature or God’s will or just bad luck. We're getting past the romantic thought that only the good die young. We now think we can see that it’s the case more often than not that it’s the stupid and self-indulgent who die young.

We can even appreciate that our separation of sex from reproduction--which, we can imagine, will eventually become perfect through biotechnological progress--is much more pro-life than it first seems. It’s first of all about keeping me alive, but its general intention is to keep everyone around at any particular time alive as long as possible.

Now it’s still true that we still use abortion for eugenics. We’re getting almost perfect in inducing moms to choose against defective models--such as babies with Down syndrome. And we still let women choose abortion when their personal virtue or contraception fails them. But anyone with eyes to see can be pretty optimistic that the era of abortion, at least or especially eugenic abortion, is coming to an end.

One of our real goals, after all, is to make sex perfectly safe. Another is to fix the defective fetuses in the womb or, even better, to be very careful about only implanting embryos that have been certified defect-free. The perceived need for abortion, it seems, is destined to wither away.

It goes without saying that any presentation of a "moral foundation" is bound to be somewhat exaggerated. All good exaggerations are meant to highlight the truth.

Tags: Peter Lawler, Moral Foundations, Personal Evolution, Big Think, Catholic, postmodern conservative, sociology, evolution, culture, Philosophy, technology, trends, progress, values, ethics

The Cultural Self - Different Cultures, Different Selves

I've been making this point on and off now for a couple of years - and have long felt that there is no "me" without a "you" (or as Buber put it, no "I" without a 'Thou").

When I discovered Jerome Bruner, Kenneth Gergen, Rom Harre, and Lev Vygotsky (among many others), it all finally came together as cultural psychology. It seems more and more people are beginning to understand that the "self" is not simply pre-programmed to emerge in a series of innate structures. There are definitely some elements of this - you are not likely to find a three-year-old exhibiting post-formal cognition.

On the other hand, we're not likely to see too many people reaching post-formal cognition and ego development unless we do something to make this possible - higher development requires appropriate life conditions, i.e., culture.

I found this old episode of Philosophy Talk at Church of the Churchless - it's a great discussion featuring Hazel Markus: Different Cultures, Different Selves. Unfortunately, we have to buy the episode (on sale right now for $1.29). We can get new episodes for free each week as downloads.

Different Cultures, Different Selves

Audio: Get new Philosophy Talk episodes for free!
Subscribe to our weekly download service.


Download



Guest: Hazel Markus; Professor of Psychology; Director of the Research Institute of Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity; and Director

Why do we do what we do? To please others? To live up to what culture expects? Or for our own reasons as "autonomous agents"? Americans tend to admire (at least in theory) the autonomous individual, the person who knows what he wants, and sets out to get it, no matter what the world might think. Is this true of all cultures? John and Ken are joined by Stanford Psychologist Hazel Markus to explore differences in motivation and action across cultures.

Original Airdate 02/22/2009

This is from Dr. Markus' web page - in presenting a culture-based version of psyche, she approaches an integral model - or at least provides a piece sort of missing from Wilber's model.

Mutual Constitution of Culture and Psyche
Related Publications

Hazel works in the area of cultural psychology, which explores the interdependence between psychological structures and processes and sociocultural environments. Hazel and her colleagues investigate how people are shaped by culture as they engage with its patterns of meaning and practices; how people require and are shaped by engagement with the culture-specific meanings, practices, artifacts, and institutions of particular contexts; and how psychological tendencies serve to perpetuate these particular cultural contexts. This dynamic relationship between culture and the psyche or self is called the framework of mutual constitution.

Hazel and her colleagues have conducted extensive research comparing the psychological processes of Westerners and East Asians, demonstrating that European American models of independence and East Asian models of interdependence emphasize very different conceptions of the self and social relations. Hazel evaluates strategies for understanding the links between culture and psyche, and how the human brain has evolved to use cultural models that enable people to coordinate and cooperate in diverse culture-specific adaptations. She has studied cultural models of self, competence, motivation, conflict, and well-being as significant features of cultural contexts that fashion individual experience. As a cultural psychologist, Hazel asks questions such as: What is a person? What is the source of individual variation in behavior? And what meaning is attached to this variation in behavior? Depending on the cultural context (e.g., national origin, ethnic background, or social class) these questions are answered differently for different people.

Tags: The Cultural Self, Different Cultures, Different Selves, Hazel Markus, Stanford, Mutual Constitution of Culture and Psyche, Philosophy Talk, Church of the Churchless, Psychology, culture, identity, Self, individualism, collectivism, cultural psychology, Jerome Bruner, Kenneth Gergen, Rom Harre, Lev Vygotsky

Tech Nation - Alone Together (MIT Professor, Sherry Turkle)

Good discussion of a new book by MIT Professor, Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less From Each Other.

Sherry Turkle: Alone Together

Turkle is an MIT Professor & Author
Tech Nation

24 minutes, 11mb, recorded 2011-02-08

• Play
• Download

Dr. Moira Gunn talks with author and MIT Professor, Sherry Turkle, about her new book, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less From Each Other. In it, she talks about how peoples relationships with their devices is effective their human relationships. One reviewer wrote "a sobering and paradoxical portrait of human disconnectedness in the face of expanding virtual connections in cell-phone, intelligent machine, and Internet usage."

---

Our publication of this program was made possible by the support of the following:

This free podcast is from our Tech Nation series.

Tags: Digital Identity, Internet, World Wide Web, Mobile, Wireless, Science, Technology, Dr. Moira Gunn, Tech Nation, MIT, Professor, Sherry Turkle, Alone Together, Why We Expect More from Technology and Less From Each Other, Psychology, books, technology, relationships

Antonia Macaro and Julian Baggini - Should we listen to our inner critic?

Antonia Macaro and Julian Baggini posted this interesting article in the Financial Times a week or two ago. Long-time readers of this blog know that I am a fan of the "parts work" approach to shadow work, so it's cool to this in a mainstream publication - even though it isn't really about how to work with this part as much as it is a critic-activating assertion of what a healthy critic should be.

In my head, I'm hearing, "Why can't I have a healthy critic? Damn, I suck." Oh, the challenges of an over-active critic.

Should we listen to our inner critic?

By Antonia Macaro and Julian Baggini

Published: February 11 2011

The Shrink

If you were to pay attention to every available self-help book and therapy workshop, you would be justified in concluding that we are experiencing a plague of self-criticism. Here are just some of the titles I’ve recently come across: Embracing your Inner Critic, Master your Inner Critic, Self-therapy for your Inner Critic, Beyond the Inner Critic, Coping with Your Inner Critic, Disarming your Inner Critic.

Macaro is the shrink. While she finds this huge assortment of books on how to deal with the inner critic, she also suggests that many of us could use whole lot more self-criticism (not me, and people like me, who have been enslaved by the critic at various points in our lives - see the sidebar for details).

She notes that we tend to take all the credit for our successes and blame others for our failures - neither of which is accurate. Likewise, most people think they are above average in some way, which is statistically impossible.

There's more to her argument, including some distinctions in the type of self-criticism we employ, but she ends with this distinction from psychologist Paul Gilbert:

[C]ompassionate self-correction is a desire to improve, while shame-based self-attacking is a desire to punish. We should listen to our inner critic only if we have nurtured a kindly and rational inner voice.

Julian Baggini is the sage.

The Sage

Philosophy is often accused of being excessively rational, dismissing emotion as irrelevant at best and a harmful distraction at worst. Such charges usually put me on the defensive, but when it comes to self-criticism, philosophy’s alleged vice turns out to be its greatest virtue.

Most of us want to believe what is true rather than what is false. We want to have an accurate picture of the world, not one distorted by wishful thinking, ignorance or prejudice. Yet, if we are honest, most of our beliefs are based on scanty information, hearsay or received opinion. Of course they are: life is literally too short to examine rigorously the bases of all our beliefs.

Baggini argues that we must have an astute inner critic who can examine our beliefs and discard the ones that do match the evidence. I like this kind of self-reflective inner critic - too bad so few people have reached a stage of ego development where that is possible.

His version of the critic is emotion-free and hyper objective - impersonal. If we can adopt this form of the critic (and I am not sure how possible this is), we can avoid shaming attacks on ourselves and simply look at the facts.

If the critic makes things personal (whether we are a good or bad person), then it activates our defense mechanisms (often avoidance, repression, or paralysis of various types) and may end up needing to be right to be good. Baggini concludes:

That’s why the best philosophical inner critic is neither nice nor nasty, neither gentle nor harsh. In fact, it’s a critic that has nothing to do with you as a person at all. It’s all about the beliefs.

This is a brief but useful article, so go read the whole thing. Now we just need some guidance on how to develop the healthy version of the critic.

Oh yeah, according to FT, The Shrink & The Sage live together in south-west England.

Tags: Psychology, inner voice, critic, Philosophy, Antonia Macaro, Julian Baggini, Should we listen to our inner critic?, Financial Times, Shrink, Sage, objectivity, self compassion, self-reflection, Paul Gilbert, rational therapy, philosophical psychotherapy, shadow work, parts work, subpersonalities

Amphetamine Use Increases Parkinson's Disease Risk 60% - Impact on ADHD Treatment Not Mentioned

This is a disturbing finding - those who used the drugs were 60 percent more likely to develop Parkinson's than those who didn't take the drugs. They looked at people who took amphetamines (benzedrine and dexedrine) by prescription back in the 1960s-1970s, when it they were commonly prescribed for weight loss.

But what does this say for the millions of American kids (and adults) taking amphetamines now for ADHD? Are they all screwed? Most people on these drugs, which are variations of amphetamine salts (adderall, ritalin), are taking between 10-30 mg a day, or sometimes twice a day. Are we going to end up with an epidemic of Parkinson's Disease when all of these people hit late adulthood?

Using Amphetamines May Increase Risk of Parkinson's Disease, Study Suggests

ScienceDaily (Feb. 20, 2011) — New research shows people who have used amphetamines such as benzedrine and dexedrine appear to be at an increased risk of developing Parkinson's disease, according to a study released February 22 that will be presented at the American Academy of Neurology's 63rd Annual Meeting in Honolulu April 9 to April 16, 2011.

Benzedrine and Dexedrine are amphetamines often prescribed to increase wakefulness and focus for people with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and narcolepsy, a disorder that can cause excessive daytime sleepiness and sudden attacks of sleep. They are also used to treat traumatic brain injuries.

The study involved 66,348 people in northern California who had participated in the Multiphasic Health Checkup Cohort Exam between 1964 and 1973 and were evaluated again in 1995. The average age of the participants at the start of the study was 36 years old. Of the participants, 1,154 people had been diagnosed with Parkinson's disease by the end of the study.

Exposure to amphetamines was determined by two questions: one on the use of drugs for weight loss and a second question on whether people often used Benzedrine or Dexedrine. Amphetamines were among the drugs commonly used for weight loss when this information was collected.

According to the study, those people who reported using Benzedrine or Dexedrine were nearly 60 percent more likely to develop Parkinson's than those people who didn't take the drugs. There was no increased risk found for those people who used drugs for weight loss.

"If further studies confirm these findings, the potential risk of developing Parkinson's disease from these types of amphetamines would need to be considered by doctors before prescribing these drugs as well as be incorporated into amphetamine abuse programs, including illicit use," said study author Stephen K. Van Den Eeden, PhD, with the Division of Research at Kaiser Permanente Northern California in Oakland, Calif.

Van Den Eeden explained that amphetamines affect the release and uptake of dopamine, the key neurotransmitter involved in Parkinson's disease. He explained that more research needs to be completed to confirm the association and learn more about possible mechanisms.

The study was supported by Kaiser Permanente Northern California.

Citation:

American Academy of Neurology (2011, February 20). Using amphetamines may increase risk of Parkinson's disease, study suggests. ScienceDaily. Retrieved February 20, 2011, from http://www.sciencedaily.com­ /releases/2011/02/110220193013.htm

Tags: Amphetamines, Increased risk, Parkinson's Disease, 60%, ADHD, Treatment, benzedrine, dexedrine, adderall, ritalin, mental health, brain, drugs, medicine, American Academy of Neurology, Stephen K. Van Den Eeden, dopamine, neurotransmitter

Embodied language comprehension requires an enactivist paradigm of cognition

Interesting (and geeky) article from Frontiers in Cognition - an open access publication.

Embodied language comprehension requires an enactivist paradigm of cognition

Michiel van Elk^1,2*, Marc Slors³ and Harold Bekkering¹

• ¹ Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour, Radboud University Nijmegen, Nijmegen, Netherlands
• ² Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience, Brain Mind Institute, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Lausanne, Switzerland
• ³ Department of Philosophy, Radboud University Nijmegen, Nijmegen, Netherlands

Two recurrent concerns in discussions on an embodied view of cognition are the “necessity question” (i.e., is activation in modality-specific brain areas necessary for language comprehension?) and the “simulation constraint” (i.e., how do we understand language for which we lack the relevant experiences?). In the present paper we argue that the criticisms encountered by the embodied approach hinge on a cognitivist interpretation of embodiment. We argue that the data relating sensorimotor activation to language comprehension can best be interpreted as supporting a non-representationalist, enactivist model of language comprehension, according to which language comprehension can be described as procedural knowledge – knowledge how, not knowledge that – that enables us to interact with others in a shared physical world. The enactivist view implies that the activation of modality-specific brain areas during language processing reflects the employment of sensorimotor skills and that language comprehension is a context-bound phenomenon. Importantly, an enactivist view provides an embodied approach of language, while avoiding the problems encountered by a cognitivist interpretation of embodiment.

From the introduction - here is a brief explanation of how they define the terms of the discussion - the cognitive approach vs. the enactivist approach:

We state that these problems for an embodied approach to language comprehension hinge on a cognitivist, representationalist understanding of embodied cognition. Tackling them requires switching to an enactivist paradigm of cognition. Cognitivism is here defined as the theoretical approach that attempts to explain cognition in terms of the manipulation of discrete internal representations. Although on this account cognition may be used for the purpose of guiding actions, the cognitive process as such is thought of in terms that do not essentially involve the actions that it may help to guide. Cognition understood as the manipulation of internal representations is supposed to mediate between perception and action. But although it is enabled by perception and used for action, neither perception, nor action is constitutive of it. By contrast, enactivism can be defined as the view that cognition emerges in the interaction between an organism and the environment, such that perception and action are co-constitutive of it. Cognition is manifested in the kind of appropriate, dynamic perception–action coupling that allows us to cope effectively with our physical and social environment. On the enactivist view it is misleading to think of such coupling as requiring discrete representations of one’s environment: effectively dealing with one’s environment does not presuppose awareness of features of one’s environment, rather it reflects such awareness. Enactivism implies that cognition is essentially tied to action and that cognition is always context-bound.

In the present paper, drawing a parallel with the recent enactivist criticism of the simulation interpretation of the mirror neuron system, we argue that the data relating sensorimotor activation to language comprehension can best be interpreted as supporting a non-representationalist, enactivist model of language comprehension. We will start by outlining evidence from cognitive neuroscience in favor of an embodied approach to language comprehension and by elaborating on the problems such an approach faces. We will then briefly turn to a parallel with the debate on the function of the mirror neuron system and highlight the recent enactivist move made in that debate. After having contrasted the enactivist cognition paradigm with the current cognitivist paradigm in cognitive neuroscience, we will introduce a similar move in the present context and discuss how an enactivist approach to embodied language comprehension can deal with the objections to an embodied approach to language comprehension. We will conclude with a discussion on the perspectives and limitations of the enactive approach to language and discuss the prospective for future research on language and embodiment.

Full Citation:

van Elk M, Slors M and Bekkering H (2010) Embodied language comprehension requires an enactivist paradigm of cognition. Front. Psychology 1:234. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2010.00234

Tags: embodied cognition, enactivism, simulation, language comprehension, Embodied language comprehension, enactivist paradigm, cognition, Michiel van Elk, Marc Slors, Harold Bekkering, Frontiers in Cognition, necessity question, simulation constraint, sensorimotor activation, non-representationalist, enactivist, model of language comprehension