The Dark Surrealism of Erlend Mork

Found these images at Linkinn.com, very cool bit of surrealism. Reminds me a bit of the Brothers Quay films.

the dark surrealism of erlend mork

photoBlog

Tags: art, Photography, Linkinn, Erlend Mork, Brothers Quay

SciAm Mind Takes on PTSD Diagnosis

In a new article, Scientific American Mind presents a series of arguments against the PTSD diagnosis, particularly in veterans (this is being pushed by the Pentagon, which does not want to pay for the long-term treatment PTSD can sometimes require). Apparently, there are some prominent psychologists also arguing for the elimination (or, at the very least, a serious redefinition) of the PTSD diagnosis in the DSM-V.

Soldiers' Stress: What Doctors Get Wrong about PTSD

A growing number of experts insist that the concept of post-traumatic stress disorder is itself disordered and that soldiers are suffering as a result

By David Dobbs

DISTRESS CAN BE a normal response to pain and loss or a sign of a psychic wound that is failing to heal. Critics of PTSD diagnostic criteria, including many soldiers, feel that returning veterans’ natural process of adjustment is often mislabeled as a dysfunctional state.
TYLER HICKS New York Times

Key Concepts

• The syndrome of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is under fire because its defining criteria are too broad, leading to rampant overdiagnosis.
• The flawed PTSD concept may mistake soldiers' natural process of adjustment to civilian life for dysfunction.
• Misdiagnosed soldiers receive the wrong treatments and risk becoming mired in a Veterans Administration system that encourages chronic disability.

In 2006, soon after returning from military service in Ramadi, Iraq, during the bloodiest period of the war, Captain Matt Stevens of the Vermont National Guard began to have a problem with PTSD, or post-traumatic stress disorder. Stevens's problem was not that he had PTSD. It was that he began to have doubts about PTSD: the condition was real enough, but as a diagnosis he saw it being wildly, even dangerously, overextended.

Stevens led the medics tending an armored brigade of 800 soldiers, and his team patched together GIs and Iraqi citizens almost every day. He saw horrific things. Once home, he said he had his share of "nights where I'd wake up and it would be clear I wasn't going to sleep again."

He was not surprised: "I would expect people to have nightmares for a while when they came back." But as he kept track of his unit in the U.S., he saw troops greeted by both a larger culture and a medical culture especially in the Veterans Administration (VA) that seemed reflexively to view bad memories, nightmares and any other sign of distress as an indicator of PTSD.

"Clinicians aren't separating the few who really have PTSD from those who are experiencing things like depression or anxiety or social and reintegration problems or who are just taking some time getting over it," Stevens says. He worries that many of these men and women are being pulled into a treatment and disability regime that will mire them in a self-fulfilling vision of a brain rewired, a psyche permanently haunted.

Stevens, now a major and still on reserve duty while he works as a physician's assistant, is far from alone in worrying about the reach of PTSD. Over the past five years or so, a long-simmering academic debate over PTSD's conceptual basis and incidence has begun to boil over. It is now splitting the practice of trauma psychology and roiling military culture. Critiques originally raised by military historians and a few psychologists are now advanced by a broad array of experts indeed, giants of psychology, psychiatry and epidemiology. They include Columbia University's Robert L. Spitzer and Michael B. First, who oversaw the last two editions of the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the DSM-III and DSM-IV; Paul McHugh, former chair of Johns Hopkins University's psychiatry department; Michigan State University epidemiologist Naomi Breslau; and Harvard University psychologist Richard J. McNally, a leading authority in the dynamics of memory and trauma and perhaps the most forceful of the critics. The diagnostic criteria for PTSD, they assert, represent a faulty, outdated construct that has been badly overstretched so that it routinely mistakes depression, anxiety or even normal adjustment for a unique and especially stubborn ailment.

This quest to scale back the definition of PTSD and its application stands to affect the expenditure of billions of dollars, the diagnostic framework of psychiatry, the effectiveness of a huge treatment and disability infrastructure, and, most important, the mental health and future lives of hundreds of thousands of U.S. combat veterans and other PTSD patients. Standing in the way of reform is conventional wisdom, deep cultural resistance and foundational concepts of trauma psychology. Nevertheless, it is time, as Spitzer recently argued, to "save PTSD from itself."

Casting a Wide Net
The overdiagnosis of PTSD, critics say, shows in the numbers, starting with the seminal study of PTSD prevalence, the 1990 National Vietnam Veterans Readjustment Survey (NVVRS). The NVVRS covered more than 1,000 male Vietnam vets in 1988 and reported that 15.4 percent of them had PTSD at the time and that 31 percent had suffered it at some point since the war. That 31 percent has been the standard estimate of PTSD incidence among veterans ever since.

In 2006, however, Columbia epidemiologist Bruce P. Dohrenwend, hoping to resolve nagging questions about the study, reworked the numbers. When he had culled the poorly documented diagnoses, he found that the 1988 rate was 9 percent and the lifetime rate 18 percent.

McNally shares the general admiration for Dohrenwend's careful work. Soon after it was published, however, McNally asserted that Dohrenwend's numbers were still too high because he counted as PTSD cases those veterans with only mild, subdiagnostic symptoms, people rated as "generally functioning pretty well." If you included only those suffering "clinically significant impairment" the level generally required for diagnosis and insurance compensation in most mental illness the rates fell yet further, to 5.4 percent at the time of the survey and 11 percent lifetime. It was not one in three veterans who eventually developed PTSD, but one in nine and only one in 18 had it at any given time. The NVVRS, in other words, appears to have overstated PTSD rates in Vietnam vets by almost 300 percent.

"PTSD is a real thing, without a doubt," McNally says. "But as a diagnosis, PTSD has become so flabby and overstretched, so much a part of the culture, that we are almost certainly mistaking other problems for PTSD and thus mistreating them."

The idea that PTSD is overdiagnosed seems to contradict reports of resistance in the military and the VA to recognizing PTSD denials of PTSD diagnoses and disability benefits, military clinicians discharging soldiers instead of treating them, and a disturbing increase in suicides among veterans of the Middle East wars. Yet the two trends are consistent. The VA's PTSD caseload has more than doubled since 2000, mostly because of newly diagnosed Vietnam veterans. The poor and erratic response to current soldiers and recent vets, with some being pulled quickly into PTSD treatments and others discouraged or denied, may be the panicked stumbling of an overloaded system.

Overhauling both the diagnosis and the VA's care system, critics say, will ensure better care for genuine PTSD patients as well as those being misdiagnosed. But the would-be reformers face fierce opposition. "This argument," McNally notes, "tends to really piss some people off." Veterans send him threatening e-mails. Colleagues accuse him of dishonoring veterans, dismissing suffering, discounting the costs of war. Dean G. Kilpatrick, a University of South Carolina traumatologist and former president of the Inter national Society for Traumatic Stress Studies (ISTSS), once essentially called McNally a liar.

A Problematic Diagnosis
The DSM-IV, the most recent edition (published in 1994), defines PTSD as the presence of three symptom clusters reexperiencing via nightmares or flashbacks; avoidance by numbing or withdrawal; and hyperarousal, evident in irritability, insomnia, aggression or poor concentration that arise in response to a life-threatening event [To see related sidebar please purchase the digital edition].

The construction of this definition is suspect. To start with, the link to a traumatic event, which makes PTSD almost unique among complex psychiatric diagnoses in being defined by an external cause, also makes it uniquely problematic, for the tie is really to the memory of an event. When PTSD was first added to the DSM-III in 1980, traumatic memories were considered reasonably faithful recordings of actual events. But as research since then has repeatedly shown, memory is spectacularly unreliable and malleable. We routinely add or subtract people, details, settings and actions to and from our memories. We conflate, invent and edit.

In one study by Washington University memory researcher Elizabeth F. Loftus, one out of four adults who were told they were lost in a shopping mall as children came to believe it. Some insisted the event happened even after the ruse was exposed. Subsequently, bounteous research has confirmed that such false memories are common [see "Creating False Memories," by Elizabeth F. Loftus; Scientific American, September 1997].

Read the rest of the article.

* Just to provide some balance, PTSD has a genetic link: here, here, and here. Based on this, trauma is necessary but not sufficient to create PTSD. The second study listed here also suggests that the number of incidents (# of combat experiences for veterans) increases the tendency to experience PTSD.

* There is a definite "re-wiring" of the brain in those suffering from PTSD: here, here, and here. Basically, the amygdala grows and hypocampus shrinks, seemingly in response to prolonged exposure to cortisol (a stress hormone).

* The notion that PTSD is the only psychological diagnosis dependent on an exterior etiology (the experience of a traumatic event) is false. Addictions, cutting, depression, obsessive-complusive disorder, and DID all have environmental factors.

This is an interesting debate that should be more public. It's sadly discouraging that the folks working on the DSM-V have been sworn to secrecy and that there is no real consensus in the community about the addition or subtraction of diagnoses.

Tags: Psychology, trauma, war, therapy, brain, Post-traumatic stress disorder, PTSD, genetics, brain changes, cortisol, stress, Scientific American, Mind, military, David Dobbs, DSM-V, DSM-IV, Robert L. Spitzer, Michael B. First, Paul McHugh, Naomi Breslau, Richard J. McNally

Time - A Gay-Marriage Solution: End Marriage?

I've long argued for the abolition of marriage as a legal status, preferring civil unions with the state setting its own laws, provided they do not violate the 14th Amendment.

Then there is the real issue -- the government has no business regulating marriage, and marriage should have no standing under the law. Why? Marriage is a religious institution, not a legal institution. It's the separation clause this country was founded upon.

The government can and should regulate civil unions which, under the 14th Amendment, cannot be denied to any citizens - black, white, gay, or straight.

A couple of months ago, In These Times made essentially the same argument.

Today, Time Magazine posted an article making the same argument, though not from one of their staff writers, but rather following up on an article by two law professors from Pepperdine University, who issued a call to re-examine the role the government plays in marriage in a paper published March 2 in the San Francisco Chronicle.

A Gay-Marriage Solution: End Marriage?

By Michael A. Lindenberger Monday, Mar. 16, 2009

A gay couple is married at Arlington Street Church in Boston.

Rick Friedman / Corbis

When a Jewish boy turns 13, he heads to a temple for a deeply meaningful rite of passage, his bar mitzvah. When a Catholic girl reaches about the same age, she stands in front of the local bishop, who touches her forehead with holy oil as she is confirmed into a 2,000-year-old faith tradition. But missing altogether in each of those cases — and in countless others of equal religious importance — is any role at all for government. There is no baptism certificate issued by the local courthouse, and no federal tax benefits attached to the confessional booth, the into-the-water-and-out born-again ceremony or any of the other sacraments that believers hold sacred.

Only marriage gets that treatment, and it's a tradition that some legal scholars have been arguing should be abandoned. Two law professors from Pepperdine University issued a call to re-examine the role the government plays in marriage in a paper published March 2 in the San Francisco Chronicle. The authors — one of who voted for and one against Prop 8, which successfully ended gay marriage in California — say the best way out of the intractable legal wars over gay marriage is to take marriage out of the hands of the government altogether. (See pictures of the busiest wedding day in history.)

Instead, give gay and straight couples alike the same license — a certificate confirming them as a family, and call it a "civil union" — anything, really, other than "marriage." For those for whom the word marriage is important, the next stop after the courthouse could be the church, where they could bless their union with all the religious ceremony they could want. The Church itself would lose nothing of its role in sanctioning the kinds of unions that it finds in keeping with its tenets. And for non-believers or those for whom the word marriage is less important, the civil union license issued by the state would be all they needed to unlock the benefits reserved in most states, and in federal law, for "married" couples.

"While new terminology for all may at first seem awkward — mostly in greeting-card shops — [it] dovetails with the court's important responsibility to reaffirm the unfettered freedom of all faiths to extend the nomenclature of marriage as their traditions allow," wrote professors Douglas W. Kmiec and Shelley Ross Saxer. Kmiec voted for Prop 8 because of the teachings of his Catholic Church and his notion of religious liberty, but has since said he believes the Court should not allow one group of Californians to marry while denying the privilege to others.

Their idea got a big boost three days later, during the March 5 oral arguments before the California Supreme Court, which is expected to issue a ruling soon in the case brought by gay couples and others who argue the constitutional amendment passed by voters last fall is invalid. Justice Ming Chin asked attorneys for each side whether the idea would solve the legal issues connected to gay marriage — issues that at their core revolve around the question of whether some couples could marry but not others violates constitutional guarantees of equal protection under the law. (Check out a story about the state of marriage — and divorce — in America.)

Both sets of lawyers agreed that the idea would resolve the equal protection issue. Take the state out of the marriage business, and then both kinds of couples — straight and gay — would be treated the same. Even Ken Starr, the Pepperdine law dean and former Whitewater independent counsel who argued in favor of Prop 8, agreed that the idea would solve the legal issues, though he said it was a solution that lies outside the legal authority of the court. An attorney for the other side, Michael Maroko, didn't expressly endorse the idea, but he told Chin, "If you're in the marriage business, do it equally. And if you're not going to do it equally, get out of the business."

The two Pepperdine professors are arguing that the Court use that line of thinking in crafting its decision in the case before it, short-circuiting the need for a new referendum. Their proposal is aimed at helping speed a resolution on the issue in other states — where gay marriage is heating up in Iowa, Connecticut, Vermont and elsewhere — and on the federal level. All sides on the debate expect the issues bubbling up out of the state courts and legislatures to eventually gain traction in federal courts, too, ultimately leading to a case before the Supreme Court or efforts to amend the U.S. Constitution, or both.

But as Solomonic as the compromise seems, giving up the word "marriage" may be impossible. For many couples who have already joined in matrimony, the idea of the state no longer calling them "married" may seem as if something important has been taken away — even if it's hard to define just what it is that's been lost. And for many others — the folks who feel most strongly about marriage, and who most passionately supported the expensive campaign to defeat gay marriage — the issue of nomenclature is only the beginning. They aren't just against gay marriage, they are against gay couples — and especially against government sanctioning those relationships, no matter what they are called.

And as Justice Chin considers whether he can craft a compromise with his fellow justices that would both uphold Prop 8 — and therefore the right of the people to amend the state constitution — and assert the right of gay people to be treated equally, he may find that the folks who cling hardest to the word "marriage" are the gay couples themselves. After all, what was the most sweeping part of the May 2008 decision Ming and his colleagues issued granting gays the right to marry? It was the idea that the word "marriage" itself is so strong that denying it to gay couples violates the most sacred rights enshrined in the state constitution, the right for all people to be treated with dignity and fairness. Just 10 months later, gay couples — whether they are among the 18,000 who married in the state before Prop 8 stopped the ceremonies or not — are loath to lose a word for which so many fought so hard and so long to have apply to themselves.

But the Pepperdine idea does put into a play a new way of thinking — and whether it's part of the court's decision in the Prop 8 case, or whether it makes it way into a new referendum, the idea of getting governments out of the marriage business offers a creative way to thinking about a problem that is otherwise likely to be around for a long, long time.

This is the ONLY solution. It's that simple.

Tags: gay rights, marriage, culture, society, Time, A Gay-Marriage Solution, End Marriage, civil unions, religion, government

Paraplegic Man Suffers Spider Bite, Walks Again

Very weird, but very cool. If true, is this something that could be used intentionally and that might work for others?

However, at least one site is calling bullshit on this story - see below.

Paraplegic Man Suffers Spider Bite, Walks Again

He has been confined to a wheelchair for 20 years. Now a paraplegic man is walking again, and his doctors call it a miracle. CBS13 went to Manteca to find out how a spider bite helped get him back on his feet.

"I closed my eyes and then I was spinning like a flying saucer," explains David Blancarte.

A motorcycle accident almost killed David 21 years ago. At the time he might have wished he was dead.

"I asked my doctor, 'Sir what happened? I can't feel my legs'," said David.

Ever since, David's been relying on his wheelchair to get around. Then the spider bite. A Brown Recluse sent him to the hospital, then to rehab for eight months.

"I'm here for a spider bite. I didn't know I would end up walking," says David.

A nurse noticed David's leg spasm and ran a test on him.

"When they zapped my legs, I felt the current, I was like 'whoa' and I yelled," he says.

He felt the current and the rush of a renewed sense of hope.

"She says,'your nerves are alive. They're just asleep'," explained David.

Five days later David was walking.

"I was walking on the bar back and forth," he said.

Now David is out of the hospital and on his feet and walking.

David basks in his glory and gives a ray of hope to other hoping to walk again. The 48-year-old former boxer and dancer is taking it in stride, knowing his best days are still ahead.

David's dream is to see his 14-year-old twin daughters grow up and get married so he can walk them down the aisle and have that first dance.

Miraculous if true, but Rod Brouhard is not convinced. In fact, he is calling bullshit on the spider part of the story. Not sure if he is right, but interesting.

Spider Bite Cures Paralysis -- Not!

Friday March 13, 2009

A man from Manteca, California claims a spider bite was responsible for curing his paraplegia.

He'd been paralyzed since crashing his motorcycle in 1988. He claims a brown recluse spider bite put him in the hospital and then in rehab, where nurses discovered he had feeling in his legs. After months of physical therapy, he's walking again.

It's an amazing story, but I'm a little skeptical about one part: I doubt there was a spider.

Brown recluse spiders don't live in northern California, especially not in the cities. The only recluse spiders we have are desert recluses found in southern Cal scrublands and the high desert.

We do have MRSA, however. I'm more inclined to think he had some sort of staph infection rather than a spider bite. They can look the same. Indeed, unless you have the offending spider in hand it's probably better than 50/50 odds that your "spider bite" is really a skin infection.

As far as the spider curing his paralysis, well, I hope he's not really claiming that. I hope his point is that without the spider bite -- or infection, whatever -- that he wouldn't have been back at the hospital or in rehab. If that's his story, I'll agree.

Tags: Nature, medicine, Health, Paraplegic Man, Spider Bite, Walks Again, Brown Recluse Spider, MRSA, paralysis, David Blancarte

Shambhala Sun - Polly Young-Eisendrath on Mindfulness, Love and Relationship

Very cool - big fan of Polly Young-Eisendrath, so this was great to listen to. This is also some very practical information for people in relationship who want to be healthier in how they relate to their partner.

Shambhala Sun Audio: Polly Young-Eisendrath on Mindfulness, Love and Relationship

In these two new Shambhala Sun Audio clips from last year’s Mindfulness, Love and Relationship program in New York City, Jungian psychologist and Buddhist practitioner Polly Young-Eisendrath explains why Buddhism’s three “facets of existence” can lead us to have healthier relationships with others, and how couples can break destructive cycles of behavior by taking a good look at the contents of their minds.

Just click the players, below, to listen.

To attend this year’s Mindfulness, Love, and Relationship weekend in New York City from April 3rd to April 5th, visit the Omega Institute, here.

For more from our esteemed panel of teachers, all of whom will be at this year’s program, just follow these links:

Shambhala Sun Audio: Sylvia Boorstein on Mindfulness, Love and Relationship

Shambhala Sun Audio: John Tarrant on Mindfulness, Love and Relationship

Polly Young-Eisendrath on “The Training of Love”

Shambhala Sun Audio: Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche on Mindfulness, Love and Relationship

Sylvia Boorstein: “We Are All Wayfarers”

Thanks, as always, for listening to Shambhala Sun Audio. And hey, why not leave a comment about your thoughts on these two clips?

Tags: Shambhala Sun, Audio, Polly Young-Eisendrath, Mindfulness, Love, Relationship, Buddhism, meditation, three facets of existence, psychology

Blogging Heads - Carl Zimmer and Paul Ehrlich on Cultural Evolution

Interesting discussion, featuring science writer Carl Zimmer and Stanford biology professor Paul Ehrlich. Ehrlich is best known as for his book, The Population Bomb.

Tags: Carl Zimmer, Paul Ehrlich, Cultural Evolution, Blogging Heads, The Population Bomb, Science, Environment, Politics, society, evolution, culture

Kirsten Cronlund - Mindfulness: The Best Bang for Your Buck, Part I

A good, though basic, look at the benefits of mindfulness meditation, which is all the rage of late. This article appears at the very good Positive Psychology News Daily.

Mindfulness: The Best Bang for Your Buck, Part I

By Kirsten Cronlund

Positive Psychology News Daily, NY (Kirsten Cronlund) - March 15, 2009, 10:00 am

Kirsten Cronlund, MAPP 2008, is founder of Lemonade From Lemons: Divorce Coaching, Workshops, and Seminars (www.lemonadedivorcecoach.com). She is committed to helping others navigate the rough waters of divorce with resiliency, drawing upon personal experience and the science of positive psychology. Full bio.

Kirsten writes on the 16th of each month, and her past articles are here.

The benefits of mindfulness and meditation are becoming widely recognized and receiving significant press attention. As a coach, one of my favorite applications of positive psychology research is working with clients to explore mindfulness. Keeping with this month’s PPND theme, I am excited to explore the theory and application of mindfulness with PPND readers, in a two-part series.

Meditation practice may still be viewed by some as a relic of 1960’s counter-culture or a sequestered religious practice to attain “enlightenment.” But scientists now seriously study mindfulness practices, and report a wide range of interesting findings.

How does meditation work, and how best can coaches bring this research to our clients? I will present two intriguing studies here, and hope to stimulate a fruitful discussion that generates ideas for application here on PPND.

Mindfulness Creates Positive Reappraisal

Psychologists Eric Garland, Susan Gaylord, and Jongbae Park (2009) from the University of North Carolina define mindfulness as “present-centered attention to raw experience liberated from cognitive abstractions and preoccupations.” They propose that mindfulness practice works by decentering, or shifting cognitive assessment of a stressful situation, to allow for reappraisal of the original stressor.

What this means, in plain speak, is that mindfulness practice helps people develop more flexible thinking. For instance, when adversity hits, many of us respond as though we are on autopilot. We interpret stressful events as uncontrollable and threatening. Mindfulness meditation training, however, allows us to take a step back and see the situation from a kind of bird’s-eye view. The practitioner learns to observe not just the original stressor, but also the observation process itself.

Garland and colleagues suggest this process develops cognitive flexibility and the capacity to reframe events and interpretations, which fosters meaning-making. With these skills, it’s possible to return to the original stressor and think of it differently – perhaps as an opportunity to exercise skills in a new way. This process seems particularly relevant to developing resilience, which has been shown to support success in every area of life. (See enlarged Figure 1)

To support their theory, Garland and colleagues present research showing that:

• there is a relationship between the ability to shift cognitive sets (the view we take of any given situation) and to positively reappraise (which is to take a more positive view of the situation);
• people who practice mindfulness meditation more easily adopt an optimistic attitude towards stressful events because of their heightened ability to decenter; and
• the practice of mindfulness meditation increased participants’ ability to shift visual focus from one object to another.

In a pilot study, Garland and colleagues taught mindfulness meditation to people with stress-related illness. After eight weeks, results showed that “persons with higher self-reported mindfulness also reported higher levels of positive reappraisal.” That is, the more mindful the participants felt, the more easily they were able to reframe negative events in a positive light.

These findings help to explain the mounting evidence for the effectiveness of engaging in mindfulness before introducing cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) techniques.

Loving Kindness Meditation is Not Just Feel-Good

Primate Hug

Barbara Fredrickson’s broaden and build theory of positive emotions (1998) was groundbreaking in positive psychology. She asserts that positive emotions broaden our attention and thinking, allowing us to then “draw on higher-level connections and a wider-than-usual range of percepts or ideas.” From this open stance we can build consequential personal resources which serve us long after the fleeting emotion has passed. Several studies have shown that positive emotions do measurably broaden human resources and capacities. Fredrickson recently launched a study which empirically supported the build aspect of her theory by examining the impact of loving kindness meditation (LKM) on employees of a software and IT services company in Detroit.

She specifically chose LKM as an intervention that could predictably heighten positive emotions. Her study compared an intervention group of 102 LKM participants to100 people in a wait-list control group. The 9-week program required that participants meditate for at least 5 days a week and to attend one 60-min session per week with an LKM instructor (average number of minutes spent in independent meditation was 80/week). Fredrickson’s results indicate that LKM effectively elevates positive emotions and leads to positive differences in people’s lives. Specifically, the practice promotes a loving attitude towards oneself and others, and strengthens feelings of competence.

Importantly, Fredrickson’s study indicated a strong dose-response to the intervention of LKM. By the end of the 9-week intervention, the positive impact of a meditation session was three times as strong as a session in the beginning. That is no small fact for practitioners eager to find interventions that do not lose impact over time.

Questions to Ponder

Given the two studies highlighted here, I leave you with two questions to consider:

1. While Fredrickson has shown the causal impact of positive emotions on broadening the mind, could it be that broadening the mind also brings on positive emotions?
2. What are the roles of mindfulness meditation and LKM and how do they complement one another?

Images: Our World of Symbols by conskeptical, Maternal Instinct by Tambako the Jaguar

References:
Fredrickson, B.L., Coffey, K.A., Pek, J., Cohn, M.A., & Finkel, S.M. (2008). Open Hearts Build Lives: Positive Emotions, Induced Through Loving-Kindness Meditation, Build Consequential Personal Resources. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 95, 1045-1062.

Fredrickson, B. (2009). Positivity: Groundbreaking Research Reveals How to Embrace the Hidden Strength of Positive Emotions, Overcome Negativity, and Thrive. New York: Crown.

Garland, E., Gaylord, S., & Park, J. (2009). The Role of Mindfulness in Positive Reappraisal. Explore, 5, 37-44.

Tags: Psychology, meditation, Mindfulness, Bang for Your Buck, Kirsten Cronlund, Positive Psychology, Lemonade From Lemons

Gregory S. Cootsona - The Telos of Beauty: A Common Quest for Theologians and Scientists

Gregory S. Cootsona's "The Telos of Beauty: A Common Quest for Theologians and Scientists," in the new issue of The Global Spiral, is a great essay on the nature of beauty from both a subjective and objective perspective. The article examines beauty "as the central purpose of the universe."

The Telos of Beauty: A Common Quest for Theologians and Scientists

By Gregory S. Cootsona

The twentieth-century mathematician and philosopher, Alfred North Whitehead, offered this provocative statement in his mature philosophical work, Adventures in Ideas:

The teleology of the Universe is directed toward the production of Beauty.¹

This sentence from Whitehead points toward a rich and stimulating conception of beauty—not as mere ornamentation (ultimately as cosmetics), which one can place at the periphery or which possesses merely commercial important—but astonishingly as the central purpose of the universe. With this provocative assertion, Whitehead points toward the purposive or teleological element of beauty—what I will call the telos of beauty. As Whitehead is wont to do, he extends his claim as far as possible: beauty structures and directs the final aim of the universe. Or more simply, beauty directs the universe. Whitehead makes an assertion that combines beauty in science with art and metaphysics, which is not a far distance from theology.

Whitehead’s citation provides an intellectual springboard for a new place of beauty in the dialogue between science and theology, namely, as a nexus for common understanding. And so, after some clarifying definitions and a word about my personal motivations, I begin this essay by unfolding a theological understanding of beauty. I develop the concept of divine glory by building on key biblical texts and two major thinkers in the Reformed tradition, the eighteenth century American theologian and philosopher, Jonathan Edwards, and the twentieth century Swiss theologian, Karl Barth.

This choice immediately raises a question: Why select the Reformed tradition when Catholic theologians have pursued the concept of beauty with greater intensity? Why chose Edwards when any theology of beauty evokes the name of Hans Urs Von Balthasar, undoubtedly the greatest exponent of a theological aesthetics in the past two hundred years? And secondly, why Barth, who expressed a long-standing antipathy to “natural theology,” a category into which he would seem to place the concept of beauty as common vocabulary for the science-theology dialogue? As a theologian in the Reformed tradition, I would like to rehabilitate Reformed reflection on the topic on beauty. And there are profound and substantial insights in this tradition. Edwards in particular has been forgotten. For example, I have found no mention of him in von Balthasar’s massive multivolume study, The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics. And yet there are at least two qualities of Edwards that are relevant to this study: first of all, Edwards self-consciously fashioned his work in the wake of Newtonian physics and thus engaged in an ongoing dialogue with scientific insight. Secondly, his ideas themselves were beautiful, enough so that he has been called “one of America’s five or six major artists, who happened to work with ideas instead of with poems or novels.”² In other words, Edwards sought the beauty of thought both materially and stylistically. As for Barth, though this theologian of revelation was not particularly interested in the insights of science, his theological reflections on beauty and particularly its relation to divine glory are potent and provide remarkable theological groundwork for finding intersections between scientific and theological concepts of beauty.

In the third section, I will connect these theologians’ concepts of God’s glory and therefore beauty with how scientists have described the beauty of their discipline, particularly drawing on Henri Poincaré, Werner Heisenberg, and Alfred North Whitehead. I will exegete these comments and reflections on beauty from twentieth-century scientists, seeking to their understandings of beauty. I will then offer some reflections and a synthesis of these insights. This procedure leads to my final section, in which I will pose questions and present directions for a future research program on beauty as a nexus for the science-theology dialogue.

Some Preliminary Clarifications

We do not want merely to see beauty… We want something else that can hardly be put into words—to be united with the beauty we see, to pass into it, to receive it into ourselves, to bathe in it, to become part of it.
—C.S. Lewis

Before proceeding, I offer an initial caveat: it may appear that I have begun with a conception of beauty, which I then sought to apply to science and theology (and by extension, art). My procedure is actually the reverse and therefore more modest. I have researched the way scientists and theologians (especially in the Reformed tradition) describe beauty as rightly perceiving, and theorizing about, their objects of study and as a goal in their lives and work. I have then sought to connect these leading concepts with one another. Science and theology possess a significant overlap in their definitions of beauty. The fact that this paper proceeds in reverse is simply the desire for clarity. It is easier to begin with the general concept of beauty and then sound it out in specific locations.

I submit a few preliminary clarifications. In my definition, beauty is the grasp of rightness. It arises for both theologians and scientists through rightly perceiving and theorizing about their objects of study. It is thus a perception of truth. Beauty also provides a lure for study. In this sense, it is telic. For theologians, it can be grasping God’s true nature, God’s creation, and our ethical life. For scientists, it is the rightly perceiving, and theorizing about, nature. When this perception is made, it is accompanied by a sense of completeness.

One of the corroborating features of defining the telic aspects of beauty is historical continuity. There is a correspondence with elements of the Augustine’s triad of unity, order, and proportion, as well as the related definition of Thomas: integrity, consonance, and clarity (integritas, harmonia, claritas). With Thomas, consonance stands out most clearly in connecting with a right perception of God and nature. It is also close to integrity—that things fit together. Nevertheless, I do not present my definition as exhaustive. Instead it is the locus of significant overlap between science and theology. There are certainly other aspects to beauty in Thomas’ and Augustine’s definitions, let alone subsequent formulations. Secondly, beauty offers telos in that beauty is motivation, fulfillment, and direction. Beauty offers direction by luring theologians and scientists in their work. Theologians might even point to a glimpse of eschatological wholeness. Something beautiful points to the One who is Beauty. This teleological element of beauty is a component of the well-known insight that beauty pleases us. Though this pleasure has often been focused on the eyes, I submit that we receive beauty through a variety of faculties, and perhaps most importantly for this paper, intellectually, or through the “eyes of the mind.’ The examples below from scientists and theologians will sufficiently exemplify this point.

To set this definition in the context of theology (which is my specialization), beauty represents a component of the doctrine of creation. It is a part of the way that a creative, beautiful God has left a footprint in the creation. Beauty thus expresses itself in these forms: God and the world understood rightly (the domain of theology and metaphysics) and therefore life lived rightly (the related discipline of ethics). It is also when human beings understand nature understood rightly (science).

I realize that my definition of beauty—a beauty that can be grasped in science and theology—runs in the face of the common, narrow fixation on beauty as the physical perfection of women’s bodies, a fact that can be discovered by a simple Google or Amazon search. In this latter case, beauty equals cosmetics or sexual appeal. Though beauty certainly includes attractive women and men, this is an entirely restrictive view of the entirety of beauty’s scope. One does not want to subsume all beauty ultimately under sexual attraction and thus under fertility and survival (which is the general vector of neo-Darwinian thinking). Neither, however, can beauty be defined in a way that omits sexuality. Beauty as telos, I submit—but cannot unfold here—provides a resolution.

This project of unfolding the telos of beauty as a common quest for theology and science brings together for me a fifteen-year period of research into the dialogue of these two disciplines. Stated simply, I have observed that both science and theology recur with descriptions of beauty. I then join this observation with my earlier degree in comparative literature, where aesthetics plays a critical role.³ If theologians have largely forgotten how to talk about beauty, scientists in the past century or so do more frequently, but maybe less willingly. The study of literature then educated me with sensitivity to the aesthetic aspects of human life, whether that human be a scientist or theologian. And ultimately, I believe that we are all humans first and thus share a drive toward beauty—or perhaps better stated, beauty lures us all and motivates us in whatever discipline we find ourselves.

In this project, I am also seeking to undercut the emphasis that arose in the Enlightenment via Immanuel Kant and David Hume —and I believe the concept of the telos of beauty can do this—that beauty is purely subjective and that it therefore does not lead the perceiver to the “thing in itself” (das Ding en sich). Hume’s lapidary formulation is certainly worth citing: “Beauty is no quality in things themselves: it exists merely in the mind which contemplates them; and each mind perceives a different beauty.”⁴ Kant’s resistance to the knower’s inability to penetrate to the reality of a thing “in itself” certainly includes human beings finding beauty. On the other hand, theological and scientific descriptions highlight that beauty can be discovered (and here I am leaning on the more literal meaning of “uncovered.”)

I propose that the discovery of the telos of beauty means that beauty has cultural variations to be sure, but there are also objective components in beauty that inhere in the object. In some way—but certainly with regional variations—theology and science (and art) seek truth of expression, whether it’s God’s, the world’s, or other forms. My definition of beauty therefore relates to both ontology and epistemology. Beauty exists outside of the knower. As well, it can be understood by the human mind. (Both of these assertions are important.) Accordingly, I am committed to a critical realism, in which reality exists outside of the mind of the knower and yet the interests and limitations of the knower interact with what is known. I take this position to be the current consensus in the dialogue of theology and science, and since not every related issue can be pursued here,⁵ I will proceed accordingly without further elaboration.

Read the whole article.

Tags: Gregory S. Cootsona, The Telos of Beauty, A Common Quest, Theologians, Scientists, Religion, Science, beauty, theology, Alfred North Whitehead, purposive, teleological, Werner Heisenberg, art

Natural World - A Farm for the Future

This film makes me happy that I grew up on a very small family farm (designed to feed a family of four) and also make sme wish I could go back to living that way right now - alas, it will have to wait.

Wildlife film maker Rebecca Hosking investigates how to transform her family's farm in Devon into a low energy farm for the future, and discovers that nature holds the key. With her father close to retirement, Rebecca returns to her family's wildlife-friendly farm in Devon, to become the next generation to farm the land. But last year's high fuel prices were a wake-up call for Rebecca. Realising that all food production in the UK is completely dependent on abundant cheap fossil fuel, particularly oil, she sets out to discover just how secure this oil supply is. Alarmed by the answers, she explores ways of farming without using fossil fuel. With the help of pioneering farmers and growers, Rebecca learns that it is actually nature that holds the key to farming in a low-energy future.

Tags: farming, Nature, Environment, Natural World, A Farm for the Future, Rebecca Hosking, Devon, food production, wildlife friendly farming

The Unexpected Is A Key To Human Learning

It seems we learn better when dealing with unexpected outcomes. More importantly, they have a better sense of which parts of the brain are active in this form of learning. Basic finding: "a lucky win seems to be retained better than a probable loss."

Penn Neuroscientists Find That The Unexpected Is A Key To Human Learning

The human brain's sensitivity to unexpected outcomes plays a fundamental role in the ability to adapt and learn new behaviors, according to a new study by a team of psychologists and neuroscientists from the University of Pennsylvania.

Using a computer-based card game and microelectrodes to observe neuronal activity of the brain, the Penn study, published this week in the journal Science, suggests that neurons in the human substantia nigra, or SN, play a central role in reward-based learning, modulating learning based on the discrepancy between the expected and the realized outcome.

"This is the first study to directly record neural activity underlying this learning process in humans, confirming the hypothesized role of the basal ganglia, which includes the SN, in models of reinforcement including learning, addiction and other disorders involving reward-seeking behavior," said lead author Kareem Zaghloul, MD, PhD, postdoctoral fellow in neurosurgery at Penn. "By responding to unexpected financial rewards, these cells encode information that seems to help participants maximize reward in the probabilistic learning task."

Learning, previously studied in animal models, seems to occur when dopaminergic neurons, which drive a larger basal ganglia circuit, are activated in response to unexpected rewards and depressed after the unexpected omission of reward. Put simply, a lucky win seems to be retained better than a probable loss.

"Similar to economic theory, where efficient markets respond to unexpected events and expected events have no effect, we found that the dopaminergic system of the human brain seems to be wired in a similar rational manner; tuned to learn whenever anything unexpected happens but not when things are predictable," said Michael J. Kahana, PhD, senior author and professor of psychology at Penn.

Dr. Zaghloul worked with Michael J. Kahana and Gordon Baltuch, MD, PhD, associate professor of neurosurgery, in a unique collaboration among Psychology, Neurosurgery, and Bioengineering researchers. They used microelectrode recordings obtained during deep brain stimulation surgery of Parkinson's patients to study neuronal activity in the SN, the midbrain structure that plays an important role in movement, as well as reward and addiction. Patients with Parkinson's disease show impaired learning from both positive and negative feedback in cognitive tasks due to the degenerative nature of their disease and the decreased number of dopaminergic neurons.

The recordings were analyzed to determine whether responses were affected by reward expectation. Participants were asked to choose between a red and blue deck of cards presented on a computer screen, one of which carried a higher probability of yielding a financial reward than the other. If the draw of a card yielded a reward, a stack of gold coins was displayed along with an audible ring of a cash register and a counter showing accumulated virtual earnings. If the draw did not yield a reward or if no choice was made, the screen turned blank and participants heard a buzz.

"This new way to measure dopaminergic neuron activity helped us gain greater understanding of fundamental cognitive activity," said Dr. Baltuch, director of the Penn Medicine Center for Functional and Restorative Neurosurgery.

The work is supported by grants from the National Institutes of Health, the Conte Center and the Dana Foundation.

Tags: Psychology, learning, research, neuroscience, unexpected outcomes, basal ganglia, Kareem Zaghloul, dopaminergic neurons

Behavioural Science Blog - Unconscious Perceptual Processes

[image source]

Cool and illuminating blog post.

Unconscious perceptual processes

This article was inspired by a lecture given by Pamela Smith at the Radboud University Nijmegen.

The purpose of perception is to support behaviour.

Why do we perceive things in the first place? What is the point of it? Is it so we can understand the world? That sounds logical, but that cannot be the whole story. For example a frog can taste, smell and see, but hardly understands. If you look at “lower level” animals you see the direct connection of perception and behaviour.

Frogs have two perceptual systems, one is for finding small objects (=get it and eat it) and the other one is for avoiding large objects (hop away and hide). Thus (at least in frogs) behaviour always follows perception.

But we humans are pretty elaborate creatures (at least we like to see ourselves that way). Do we also have that direct perception-behaviour link? When we see a cup, we do not necessarily have to grasp for it.

What makes us different?

There are two theories of why humans do not react directly to perception (at all times). One of them is called the facilitator-hypothesis and it states that there needs to be another source of energy (facilitator) in order (for the individual) to become active.However another hypothesis has received much more experimental attention and results: The inhibition-hypothesis:

Perceptions always elicits action, but action can be inhibited (Gilbert, 1989).
The inhibition option makes sense, because important parts of the brain are the same as in reptiles. However we have some new structures as well. The neocortical area is sort of built on top of older parts of the brain, so it would make sense that it “adds” a function to the basic brain functions. Another important source of information are patients with prefrontal cortex damage. They often have problems controlling their actions and (re)act impulsively. It would seem that their “inhibition” system has somehow become damaged.

Experimental proof for the inhibition hypothesis

Seeing-Grasping
Tucker and Ellis (1998) looked at how we perceive objects. Participants had to say whether objects show where right up or upside down. All objects had handles either pointing to the right or the left. They found an interaction effect between handle side and object orientation. For example when the participants saw a teapot pointing to the right they were faster pushing the right key, even when object orientation was irrelevant to the task. The results of this experiment is usually interpreted as proof for the existence of automatic tendencies to interaction with the object. (If you find that interesting read some studies about embodied, embedded cognitions.)

But this is not the only experiment supporting the inhibition hypothesis. There is a brain circuit that is connected to a grasping motion (Chao and Martion 2000). Chao and Martion showed participants different tools. Objects that could be grasped elicited activated that specific brain circuit, even though grasping was not a relevant feature of the task.

Seeing - Taste
Simmons et al. (2005) showed that looking at food pictures activates taste perception. In a study by Zwaan and Taylor (2006), participants turned a button either clockwise or counter-clockwise to indicate whether a sentence makes sense or not. Some of the sentences proposed a clockwise or counter-clockwise motion. Those sentences that implied a certain motion facilitated turning the button in this direction. Again it is important to notice that turning the button was irrelevant to the task.

Chameleon Effect
What about if you see somebody performing a certain behaviour? Are you more likely to perform the same behaviour? Yes: It is called imitation and it makes other people like you. It is what Cartrand & Bargh (1999) call he Chameleon effect. A participant described different pictures together with a confederate. In one condition the confederate did rub their face and shook their feet. Participants did rub the faces and shook their feet more if the confederate did so. The best explanation of why they did so seems to be that through imitation they can build rapport with the other person.

Couples’ facial expressions
Another example is the imitation of emotional expressions. From a functional point of view this might help understand emotion (Zajonc et al. 1987). Zajonc looked at romantic partners. If you spend a lot of time with a certain person you naturally mimic that person a lot. If that happens for decade you develop the same sort of wrinkles, because you are making the same sort of facial expressions every day, again and again. Observers rated husband and wife as looking much more similar than random paired strangers.

Priming “elderly” reduces walking speed
Reading about old people makes you walk to the elevator much slower (Bargh, Chen, & Burruws, 1996). In their experiment the task was to make sentences with words that included words that primed participants with the concept of elderly. Thought the spreading of activation with activate the concept of elderly, which in turn activates the concept of elderly. This actually influences walking speed on the way back to the elevator (dependent measurement).

Smell of cleaning fluid makes you behave in a clean way
Rob Holland could show that the same effect can be shown using smell as the activator of a concept (Holland et al. 2005). People filled out an questionnaire in one room. Some participants sat in a room where there was a bucket of water with a little bit of cleaning fluid. Then all participants went into a room free of smells. They then had to eat a biscuit that crumbles a lot (very messy). Participants were recorded on video and observers counted how many times participants picked up the crumbs/cleaned the table. People who first sat in the room with the smell of cleaning fluid did pick up the crumbs significantly more often. Thus we see the concept of perception and action coming back once again. Presumably the smell of the cleaning fluid activated the concept of “clean”, which then became connected to action while eating the biscuit.

Conscious or unconscious?

Owen at al. (2006) put patients that were in a vegetative state in the FMRI and they were given instructions to visit different situations, such as playing tennis or visiting the rooms in their home. You can clearly see that the brain activity in the patient and the control show pretty much the same activation pattern. So the patient was able to understand the instructions and act upon it. However was the patient really conscious or could the effect also be explained by unconscious processes?

Read the whole article.

Tags: consciousness, Psychology, Behavioural Science Blog, Unconscious Perceptual Processes, inhibition hypothesis, perceptions, behavior, Pamela Smith, Martin Metzmacher

Cameron Freeman - Creative Tension at the Edge-of-Chaos: Towards an Evolutionary Christology

Another new issue of The Global Spiral is out, with the usual collection of amazing articles. Here is the first one that caught my eye - a look at an evolutionary version of Christianity, or as the article suggests, Christology.

Creative Tension at the Edge-of-Chaos: Towards an Evolutionary Christology

By Cameron Freeman

This exploration aims to resolve the fundamental split between two diametrically opposed worldviews in the present day: the critical disjunction between the evolutionary story of the universe as described by modern science since the time of Darwin (1859) and the traditional Gospel story of God’s self-communication in Jesus Christ that informs the lives of up to 2 billion Christians in the world today.

Karl Rahner, the influential Catholic theologian whose writings were behind the many of the reforms of Vatican II initiated this critical inquiry in the 1970s with a pioneering paper titled “Christology within an Evolutionary View of the World.”¹ In seeking out an intrinsic unity between the decisive event of God’s self-revelation in the person of Jesus and the 13 billion year process of cosmic, biological and human evolution, Rahner maintained that in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ “the basic tendency of matter to discover itself in spirit . . . reaches it’s definitive breakthrough.”² So for Rahner, in Jesus Christ we discover New Creation—the necessary and permanent beginning of the divinization of sentient life in the evolving universe, an event signifying to us that the absolute self-communication of God to the world-historical process of evolution has been irrevocably inaugurated and is even now moving towards its far-off goal.³

As is well known, the orthodox Neo-Darwinian theory of evolution, as upheld by the likes of Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett has consistently maintained an opposing viewpoint: evolution is a blind and purposeless process—natural selection simply sifts through whatever is thrown up by random mutations in the genes, and over hundreds of millions of years things such as eyes and nervous systems are accidentally cobbled together. According to Neo-Darwinian theory, all such forms of adaptive complexity (including ourselves) are the result of cunning survival strategies that ‘just happen’ and which are then honed through natural selection⁴ mechanically sifting through these random mutations in the genes—just some of which are lucky enough to be beneficial in increasing an organism's probability of reproductive success.

But while Neo-Darwinian evolution highlights what is taken to be the blind aimlessness of an evolutionary process basically ‘red in tooth and claw’, in recent years an increasing number of biologists⁵ have expressed their belief that other explanatory features are at work in the overall trajectory of the evolutionary process from atoms to molecules to organisms to reptiles, mammals and the higher primates, and particularly in regards to the relatively abrupt origination of new forms of life in the aftermath of unexpected catastrophic events. As a result, these more marginal evolutionary biologists have broken with the dominant paradigm and argue that the mechanism of Darwinian selection winnowing through random genetic mutations (while true enough) does not adequately explain the dynamic patterns and directional trends in evolution towards increasing exterior complexity and interior consciousness, what Whitehead called evolution’s creative advance into novelty.⁶

Self-organization (Kauffman)

It now seems that the formative features of a new integration of the evolutionary epic of modern science and the Christian story of creation and redemption, will come from some of the more recent developments at the leading edge of scientific research—a field known as the “sciences of complexity.” Also called the evolutionary systems sciences, the sciences of complexity is a field that includes a wide range of scientific disciplines that describe the dynamic patterns of change that connect across disparate domains (physical, chemical, biological, psychological, socio-linguistics)⁷ with profound implications for the ongoing dialogue between evolutionary science and Christian theology.

The general claim of the sciences of complexity is that evolution exhibits some dynamic patterns, its formative features are invariant, and evolution repeats itself through in general ways so that we may now be able to glimpse its fundamental nature for the first time.⁸ The core insight of sciences of complexity is that matter on planet earth has the capacity to be ‘self-organizing’ on the account of the inherent nature of the processes that atomic, molecular, chemical and biological entities undergo. ⁹ So in contrast to the infamous Second Law of thermodynamics that dictates an overall increase in disorder (in isolated systems) leading to the ultimate ‘heat death’ of the universe, it is becoming increasingly clear that complex systems in open energy exchange with their environments can become unpredictable and chaotic in their observable behavior and then ‘self-organize’ or propel themselves onto new, higher levels of exterior complexity (and interior consciousness), commonly called 'order out of chaos'.

In other words, it is now recognized that when a constant energy flow is passed through dynamic open systems, they have the propensity to undergo abrupt transformations and organize themselves into new and unexpected forms of order characterized by an increase in structural organization and complexity.¹⁰ In fact, all evolving systems in the real world exist in open energy exchanges with their environments and when driven ‘far from equilibrium’ have this tendency to undergo chaotic instabilities and propel themselves to new and highly organized regimes. ¹¹ And since self-organization in complex systems occurs across all levels of the known universe, evolution can now be seen to be engaged in an irreversible or ‘uni-directional’ pattern of change creating “order out of chaos” and pushing complex systems towards higher levels of structural organization and complexity.¹²

Evolution on the Edge-of Chaos

Now, evolving systems on the 'edge-of-chaos' are very different from closed systems at thermodynamic equilibrium¹³ and tend to be poised at a critical threshold between order (periodic change) and chaos (a periodic or random change).¹⁴ Commonly named the “edge-of-chaos”, it is precisely here in this critical state delicately poised between too much rigidity and too much fluidity that evolving systems in open energy exchange have the significant tendency to evolve towards new, more complex adaptive structures.¹⁵

The edge-of-chaos is therefore the “source of order” in the universe (Kauffman), bringing “order out of chaos” (Prigogine), and moving evolution towards new dynamic regimes with higher levels of complexity and spontaneous “emergent order” (Phillip Clayton). As Kauffman explains, “Self-organization is a natural property of complex genetic systems. There is ‘order for free’ out there, a spontaneous crystallization of generic order out of complex systems, with no need for natural selection or any other external force.”

Self-organization in complex systems finely balanced at the creative tension between opposites has also been termed “chaosmos” (James Joyce) in describing the delicate interplay between chance and necessity, stasis and change, chaotic disruption and emergent novelty in the evolutionary trajectory from inanimate matter to self-replicating life to self-conscious humanity. And in a way that speaks directly to our current global economic crisis, at this critical state of creative tension between opposing forces the outcome of any evolutionary process is said to be unpredictable in detail and inherently indeterminate, i.e. it is impossible to tell whether the system in this state of creative tension (i.e. the existing economic system!) will disintegrate into chaos or leap into a new, differentiated higher level of order.¹⁶

However the important point for the aims of this paper is that modern science has now discovered that the very site of evolutionary change is the creative tension between opposites at the “edge-of-chaos” – an insight which corresponds directly with orthodox Christian theology.¹⁷ For this same paradoxical tension between opposites is central to both dogmatic Christology – the irreducible tension between ‘fully human’ and ‘fully divine’ in the person of Jesus¹⁸ as well as (and more pointedly), the original structure of Jesus’ teachings on the Kingdom of God that reside within the earliest layers of the Christian faith tradition.¹⁹ That is, almost all of the recorded parables of Jesus of Nazareth have the same paradoxical voice-print, the same deep structure, where opposing perspectives are held together in the same creative tension at the “edge-of-chaos” that the sciences of complexity and self-organization have recently discovered at the wildly unpredictable edge of evolution’s creative advance. So Jesus of Nazareth spoke in paradoxes to usher in a new world (the Kingdom of God) and inaugurate a new horizon of what it means to be fully human by evoking the very same tension between opposites that has recently been discovered by the sciences of complexity and self-organization.²⁰

(For more discussion on the deep structure of Christ’s teachings, see my paper previously published by on The Global Spiral: “Towards a Post-Metaphysical Theology” [2008] where it is shown that the same paradoxical structure, what is also called a dynamic pattern of “bi-polar reversals” is clearly evidenced in the narrative center of at least 30 of the parables of Jesus recorded in the synoptic gospels.)

So where the central teachings of Jesus all give voice to the same paradoxical tension between opposing perspectives, the sciences of complexity now provide direct supporting evidence for the view that the creative tension of Christian paradox is indeed the ‘condition of possibility’ for the coming into being of emergent novelty in the structural dynamics of evolution at the “edge-of-chaos”. So the Christian hope for New Creation as is synonymous with this critical threshold between opposing forces described by the sciences of complex emergence, while this paradoxical tension is also attested to by Jesus as the very place in which significant change and transformation can take place.²¹

So where there are new grounds here for a direct correspondence between the creative tension of Christian paradox and the sciences of complexity, and to further unpack this we can briefly turn to the central mystery of the Christian faith where the God of Israel is revealed to us in the scandal of the Cross. As Jesus says in probably his most well known paradox and one which holds the radical tension between opposites: “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross, and let him follow me! For whoever would save his life will lose it; and whoever loses his life for my sake will save it.”(Mark 8:34-35) So where the figure of Christ crucified holds the creative tension between saving (self-expenditure) and losing (self-preservation) one's life we have a direct witness to what Jesus called “the narrow gate’” of transformation at the edge-of-chaos, where the same creative tension between opposites that constitutes the meaning of the Cross²² and the radical core of Jesus’ authentic teachings on the Kingdom of God²³ can also be seen from the worldview of modern science to depict the very contours of evolution when taken to it’s highest pitch and most creative, unpredictable and surprising edge.

So where the centrality of paradox to the Christian faith (and the teachings of Jesus) corresponds seamlessly with the recent discoveries of modern science, with the paradoxes of Jesus at the heart of the Gospel story we also discover the flesh and blood story of a God who becomes human and participates fully in the world’s struggles, pains and convulsions. In Christianity the unsearchable mystery of God’s love is revealed in the capacity of a vulnerable, suffering creature to go all the way and fully embrace the contradictory tensions of existence. For just as it is in the face of death that life is a gift, it is in the face of the cross that resurrection is a word of grace, and it is in the midst of sin and suffering that salvation is freely received, as Jesus absorbs evil with love and transforms this-world into a new world in which the inexhaustible love and radical justice of God can reign. And moreover, in addition to embodying the creative tension between opposites at the edge-of-chaos, the evolutionary worldview of modern science also allows us to depart from the image of an immutable God that is untouched by the world’s suffering and give renewed significance to our sense of God being present in the tangible depths of life’s long, painful, unpredictable and perpetually surprising evolutionary journey.²⁴

Read the rest of the article.

Tags: evolution, Religion, Science, The Global Spiral, Cameron Freeman, Creative Tension at the Edge-of-Chaos, Evolutionary Christology, Darwin, Jesus, Karl Rahner