Speedlinking 1/3/08

Quote of the day:

"The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. But the opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth."
~ Niels Bohr

Image of the day (Buck Forester):


BODY
~ Why Bodybuilders Should Stretch -- "What many guys don’t realize is that some of the most flexible athletes around are not the gymnists or the hockey goalies. Rather, they’re body builders. Body builders have excellent range of motion, which is a prerequisite for excelling at their skill."
~ So You Think You Know Strong -- "Can you do three chin-ups with 135 pounds strapped to your be-hind? No, then you ain't "strong" according to Coach Boyle! How much can you bench? Really? Because he doesn't really care. Find out what true strength means to him in this article!"
~ Oveweight Children Risk Heart Attacks as Adults -- "Two new studies in the same issue of the New England Journal of Medicine show the probable impact of childhood obesity on heart attack rates."
~ Why are push-ups a good exercise? -- "Closing the kinetic chain by putting your hand on the floor promotes co-contraction of the rotator cuff. This can improve glenohumeral stabilization. Because the scapula is free to move, you must rely on active stabilization of the scapula. The greater your scapular stability, the greater your potential glenhumeral stability."
~ The Effects Of High-Dose Vitamin C On Non-Hodgkin Lymphoma Patients -- "Scientists at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital and Jefferson's Kimmel Cancer Center have received approval for a first-of-its kind study on the effect high dose vitamin C has on non-Hodgkin lymphoma patients. Researchers from the Jefferson-Myrna Brind Center of Integrative Medicine and Kimmel Cancer Center in conjunction with the National Institutes of Health will study whether high doses of vitamin C can slow the progression of the deadly disease."
~ Exercise Eases Some Menopause Symptoms -- "Exercise is not a cure for hot flashes, but it does help postmenopausal women cope with stress, anxiety and depression, a Pennsylvania study has found."
~ Exercise Balls -- "The use of different balls during exercise can lead to improved muscle strength, muscle endurance and cardiovascular fitness. Exercising with balls brings many benefits."
~ Spices - Health Benefits -- "Not only do spices add flavour to your food, they are also good for your health. This article focuses on 6 of the best."
~ Practice Yoga to Lose Weight -- "The proven benefits of Yoga include toning, strength, endurance, improved balance, and enhanced body awareness, plus relaxation, stress relief and a boost in self-esteem."


PSYCHE/SELF
~ Bored? -- "Don't blame your job, the traffic or your mindless chores. Battling boredom, researchers say, means finding focus, living in the moment and having something to live for."
~ Preexisting Anxiety Compounds PTSD Risk -- "Emotionally ravaging events like those involving physical or sexual abuse, natural disasters, terrorist attacks, or the passing of loved ones can affect patients across the social spectrum, often preceding the development of disabling mental health conditions. But lives riddled with any number of recurring anxieties leave subjects more likely to suffer from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder in the wake of particularly disturbing events."
~ The year in sex and psychology -- "Psychologist Dr Petra Boyton has just completed her yearly review of the past year in sex, revisits last year's predictions and looks forward to possible developments in 2008."
~ Anxious Depression Predicts Poorer Treatment Results -- "A new study examining the results of the STAR*D data has found that people who have “anxious depression” have a more difficult time in treatment than those without. A person with anxious depression experiences a major depressive episode and clinically meaningful levels of anxiety as well."
~ Lighten Up! -- "Having a too serious mindset isn’t that great all the time. It can lead to taking things way too seriously and create big problems and negative feelings and events from pretty much nothing. Lightening up can help you to drop unimportant stuff and leave you with more time and energy for the really important things in your life."
~ Personal Growth Books -- "A summary article of excellent personal growth and development books from well known authors." Some good, some not so much.
~ 50 Very Simple Ways to Be Romantic -- "Ok, so maybe Valentine's Day isn't for another month, but that doesn't mean you can't show your partner some special attention now. In fact, I invite you to join me in this experiment. The plan is to show your love for your partner in a small and different way each day for a whole month and see what magic happens."
~ Serotonin Receptors Don't Always Activate the Same Way -- "There are a number of synthetic drugs designed to trigger serotonin receptors and thus restore the brain to a healthy balance. These drugs are used to treat major disorders such as depression and schizophrenia, and there has been so much success with them that many more are in development. Those rushing to develop must pause, though, to read a study published last week by the Ohio State University Medical Center."
~ Humans And Apes Have Ability To Laugh -- "Humans are not the only animals with the ability to empathize and mimic, and perhaps also to laugh; it seems orangutans also have a sense of empathy which forms part of our ability to laugh. A study in Biology Letters suggests that the ability to laugh could possibly come from an early primate ancestor to both contemporary apes and humans. The researchers found that facial expressions were contagious among the orangutans."


CULTURE/POLITICS
~ The end of postmodernism: the “new atheists” and democracy -- "The conflict between science and religion promoted by secular intellectuals such as Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens is a smokescreen. Behind it, a far more important argument about global power and justice in a post-postmodern age is becoming unavoidable, argues Tina Beattie."
~ Can Atheists Be Parents? -- " After six years of childless marriage, John and Cynthia Burke of Newark decided to adopt a baby boy through a state agency. Since the Burkes were young, scandal-free and solvent, they had no trouble with the New Jersey Bureau of Children's Services—until investigators came to the line on the application that asked for the couple's religious affiliation."
~ Fast Food and Proximity to Schools: What’s Wrong With the Picture? -- "Childhood obesity is an ever-growing problem in our society. Many schools are making a valiant effort to fight weight problems more and more children face today. These efforts include revising lunch menus, eliminating soda and vending machines and incorporating better fitness programs. While revising the lunch menu with healthy food choices is a great idea, what do we do about food choices right around the corner?"
~ Likely Voters Prefer Evolution Over Creationism [Greg Laden's Blog] -- "It is common knowledge that most Americans are creationists, and prefer creationist stories of human origins and evolution in general over the findings of evolutionary biology. But this is only true if you ask the questions a certain way, and a new study shows very different results."
~ The editor as curator -- "In the future, therefore, according to Jarvis, editors like me will become "curators", overseeing a vast network of blogs from which we may select the best content to feature on our publications' websites."
~ Cultural elite does not exist, academics claim -- "The "cultural elite" brought up on opera and the higher arts, which supposedly turns up its nose at anything as vulgar as a pop song or mainstream television, does not exist, according to research published by Oxford University academics."
~ Hungry for America -- "The world wants America back. For the next several years, world politics will be reshaped by a strong yearning for American leadership. This trend will be as unexpected as it is inevitable: unexpected given the powerful anti-American sentiments sweeping the world, and inevitable given the vacuums that only the United States can fill and that others will increasingly demand that it fills."
~ The Iowa Scam -- Christopher Hitchens -- "It is quite astonishing to see with what deadpan and neutral a tone our press and television report the open corruption—and the flagrantly anti-democratic character—of the Iowa caucuses. It's not enough that we have to read of inducements openly offered to potential supporters—I almost said "voters"—even if these mini-bribes only take the form of "platters of sandwiches" and "novelty items" (I am quoting from Sunday's New York Times)." Couldn't agree more.
~ Science And Religion -- "As Iowans prepare to go caucusing, the journal Science offers a ten-page special report* on four Democrats and five Republicans' views on science and science policy; the introduction laments that, "So far, with the exception of global warming, [these issues] are not getting much play" in the press. The journal's editor, Donald Kennedy, spells out the reason they deserve more in the issue's editorial: r-e-l-i-g-i-o-n. It's a reactive position, but understandable."


HABITATS/TECHNOLOGY
~ Time is running out - literally, says scientist -- "Scientists have come up with the radical suggestion that the universe's end may come not with a bang but a standstill - that time could be literally running out and could, one day, stop altogether."
~ Thinking Like a Monkey -- "What do our primate cousins know and when do they know it? Researcher Laurie Santos is trying to read their minds."
~ Annalee Newitz: Technology in Wartime -- "Gizmos that a decade ago would have been viewed entirely as communications tools and toys are now potential surveillance and killing machines."
~ Stanford Scientist Links Rising CO2 Emissions and Increased Mortality -- "Stanford researcher finds first link between rising levels of carbon dioxide and increased human mortality, a finding that could bolster efforts by California and 15 other states to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from automobiles."
~ Alaskan Oil Leases Assailed as Environmentally Dangerous -- "The government's plan to award new petroleum leases covering an area the size of Pennsylvania is ripped for lack of due diligence and the potential harm to the area's wildlife."
~ Natural Causes to Arctic Warming, Too, but Man Still a Huge Factor -- "Not all of the Arctic thaw is caused by man. Nature plays a role, too, but that doesn't let us off the hook for the damage we've done."
~ Two Explosive Evolutionary Events Shaped Early History Of Multicellular Life -- "Scientists have known for some time that most major groups of complex animals appeared in the fossils record during the Cambrian Explosion, a seemingly rapid evolutionary event that occurred 542 million years ago. Now paleontologists, using rigorous analytical methods, have identified another explosive evolutionary event that occurred about 33 million years earlier among macroscopic life forms unrelated to the Cambrian animals."
~ Quest For A New Class Of Superconductors -- "Fifty years after the Nobel-prize winning explanation of how superconductors work, scientists are suggesting another mechanism for the still-mysterious phenomenon and exploring new superconductor candidates. Among the classes of materials that appear capable of superconductivity without phonons are the so-called heavy electron superconductors, certain organic materials, and the copper oxide materials that superconduct at up to twice the temperature at which nitrogen liquefies."
~ Gadgets to Go Green at Electronics Show -- "Consumer electronics aren't exactly easy on the environment - they consume electricity that contributes to global warming, and toxins leach out of them when they end up in landfills."


INTEGRAL/BUDDHIST BLOGS
~ The Power of Now -- "I’ve been operating on the premise that I, in fact, AM responsible for my own happiness, having seen time and again how I choose the dulling comfort of the status quo when faced with the possibility of deep personal change. So, naturally I assume most other adults choose a life of relative ignorance and suffer the consequences accordingly."
~ The Atheists are Coming (Gasp…!) -- "The two, hour-long videos of Hitchens, Dennett, Dawkins and Harris talking on atheism are making their way through the Integral Province. I made a short comment on them at Open Source Integral and was asked to expand on the thoughts. One of the main reasons for pursuing the matter further was it gave me the chance to quote this essay by the late Richard Rorty called Universalist Grandeur, Romantic Profundity, Humanist Finitude in which he deftly stated some cultural perceptions that parallel my own."
~ What to Do About Politics? -- "I still regard myself as a novice when it comes to many aspects of the Buddhist teachings. Having now a ten-year daily meditation practice, and having read quite widely in the literature, I do not yet think of myself as a "student" in the the sense that a true student immerses himself or herself deeply and without reservation in the teachings. I am frankly an amateur of Buddhism."
~ God and “Living Biblically” -- "For Christmas, one of my several thousand close friends gave me The Year of Living Biblically by A.J. Jacobs. It’s about one man (an editor at Esquire) who attempts to live for a year by following the literal word of the Bible (8 months to the Old Testament and the remainder to the N.T.). It’s an entertaining, thoughtful exploration of spirituality that mixes a dash of politically-minded satire - i.e., Biblical literalists can be either hypocrites or frightening - with a good measure of silliness."
~ Iowa Hocus Caucus -- "I like Obama's character and charisma. I respect Clinton's political experience. I have a soft spot for the soft-spoken Edwards and his policies. But truth be told, I would more likely vote for someone like Kucinich because he strikes me as the boldest yet most embracing of the Democratic hopefuls. Too bad he doesn't stand a chance in the Iowa Caucus, so he's throwing his support on Obama instead...."
~ Transformation in Jodo Shinshu Buddhism -- "Jodo Shinshu Buddhism is an unusual sect in Buddhism because it eschews what it defines as “self-power” (jiriki, 自力) practices. By self-power we mean practices that are calculated or contrived to bring about Enlightenment."
~ Should Integralists Storm the Religious Battlefield? -- "I've been covering the New Atheists on my blog (since the middle of 2006) way before the "New Atheist" label was in fashion. I even collectively criticized them and called their ideas FLAT. Looking back to my previous criticisms of the New Atheists, I admit that I was too quick on the draw. My bad. I've made a cardinal mistake of treating them as a leviathan with three heads [Dawkins, Dennett, Harris]. However, the more I learn about each of them, the more I realize that their ideas are as diverse as the believers they criticize."

Tags: atheism, Integralists, religion, Jodo Shinshu, Buddhism, Iowa Caucus, Living Biblically, politics, atheists, power of now, green gadgets, superconductors, evolution, oil leases, Alaska, CO2 emissions, technology, war, time, primates, science, Christopher Hitchens, Iowa scam, America, international relations, cultural elite, editor as curator, creationism, voters, fast food, schools, democracy, postmodernism, laughter, empathy, serotonin, romance, personal growth books, lighten up, anxious depression, sex and psychology, PTSD, anxiety, boredom, yoga, spices, exercise balls, menopause, vitamin C, non-Hodgkin lymphoma, push-ups, overweight children, strength, stretching, speedlinking

Daily Dharma: How Does One Be a Buddha?

[photo by Declan McCullagh]

Today's Daily Dharma from Tricycle:

How does one be a buddha?

There is a simple way to become a buddha: When you refrain from unwholesome action, are not attached to birth and death, and are compassionate toward all sentient beings, respectful to seniors and kind to juniors, not excluding or desiring anything, with no designing thoughts or worries, you will be called a buddha. Do not seek anything else.

~ Zen Master Dogen, Moon in a Dewdrop, edited by Kazuaki Tanahashi; from Everyday Mind, a Tricycle book edited by Jean Smith.

Tags: Daily Dharma, How Does One Be a Buddha?, Tricycle, Zen Master Dogen, Moon in a Dewdrop

Poetry Reviews - Six New Books Reviewed by Willam Logan

William Logan, writing in The New Criterion, December 2007, reviews six new books of poetry by well-known and major authors.

The Biplane Houses, by Les Murray
Gulf Music, by Robert Pinsky
Expectation Days, by Sandra McPherson
Littlefoot, by Charles Wright
Waterlight: Selected Poems, by Kathleen Jamie
Time and Materials, by Robert Hass

Logan is known to be a harsh critic, and that is definitely on display here. Only Scottish poet Kathleen Jamie comes out pretty much unscathed. One wonders how his own rather pedestrian verse would stand up to one of his reviews. Wright and Hass are both more highly regarded than Logan as a poet, so maybe there is some ego involved here.

Here are some snippets from each review:

Les Murray:

This is typical Murray: over-baked metaphors, the occasional oafishness in tone or diction (perhaps that should be dictionhood), the list that becomes a longing, the long view across centuries, the deep intimacy with the past—his history has a dark physicality reminiscent of Heaney's. Murray often seems the Diderot of contemporary verse: the world is everything that is the case, and all of it ripe for poetry.

Robert Pinsky:

Robert Pinsky's poems are so professional, you feel he dresses in a suit and tie before sitting down at his desk. Even when he goes a bit wild, as he does at times in Gulf Music, merrily discarding verbs, yodeling when he feels like it ("Mallah walla tella bella. Trah mah trah-la, la-la-la"), or simply making things up, his rashness is the soul of caution—he has all the reckless daring of Walter Mitty. Pinsky's new poems are often political, politically political in that contemporary way, kowtowing to the golden idols of the moment, casting dung upon the correctly incorrect villains, all without a breath of cross-grained opinion.

Sandra McPherson:

Too many of these new poems, however, are private and elusive, rising into quasi-religious vacancy—the world is cast down in fragments, thought cast down in fragments, too. Though meaning may be the more valued for being won bitterly, the cloudy and broken phrases emphasize the difficulty McPherson has in rendering whole a talent for discrete glances. Her poems are so often about happenstance, it seems odd when she has in mind a particular subject—the illustrations on an old book of needles, say, or the death of a bat from the bat's point of view.

Charles Wright:

Wright isn't writing poems any longer—he's laying down a coat of sensibility, as if sensibility were somehow enough; but sensibility isn't like house paint. You have to have a house to paint. America is a forgiving country, and old geezers can write old-geezer poetry for decades without suffering any punishment worse than having a sack of awards dumped on their heads. Wright's late poetry has fallen into a kind of dumb rumination—like the beasts of the field, he has to be prodded not to chew the same damn thing over and over.

Kathleen Jamie:

Jamie's English poems, however, offer a mind with a mortal view. There's nothing preplanned about their architecture—they seem accidental, full of the random imposition of the ordinary. She loves long, implicating sentences that take time to catch her restless intelligence—like Amy Clampitt, she treats syntax as the machine of thought. If many poems seem slight or offhand, Jamie is a poet defined by her limitations as well as determined in them. She's a poet of senses as well as sensibility, interested in the sculpted presence of the world but in little she cannot see. (Scotland has a long tradition of skeptical thought, though Hume would not have written these poems.) The poems look better the more you know of them, and the more of them you know—they live halfway in the shadows, like a predator waiting to strike.

Robert Hass:

Hass wants to say the unsayable; yet his poems imply that happiness must always be guilty, because someone somewhere is dying. The poems are often novel in conception, full of wrenching juxtapositions for which the term discordia concors might have been coined—after a while, though, you recognize that he possesses a rigid set of mannerisms: if he mentions poetry, it's to belabor the self-consciousness of it; if a woman, to spring into bed with her (there's a lot of heavy breathing in this book); if war, to condemn the inhumanity of it. No one would deny him his tastes, but why does he think they're in any way remarkable?

Despite his tendency toward meanness, Logan is a pretty good reviewer, so this whole article is worth the read.

Tags: Poetry, Reviews, Willam Logan, The New Criterion, The Biplane Houses, Les Murray, Gulf Music, Robert Pinsky, Expectation Days, Sandra McPherson, Littlefoot, Charles Wright, Waterlight: Selected Poems, Kathleen Jamie Time and Materials, by Robert Hass

Earth Photography from Frogview

Frogview hosts forwarded emails -- you can upload your own or send the ones that are there. Some of them are photo collections, such as this one, called Earth Photographs.

Here are a few of the amazing photos in this collection. Click on the image to enlarge.

Tags: Earth Photography, Frogview, nature, art, animals

TED Talks - Peter Gabriel

In this TED Talk, musician and activist Peter Gabriel starts his talk by sharing the painful, personal story behind his own investment in human rights causes. He relates some of the terrible stories he's encountered throughout his extensive travels, and explains how these stories inspired him to create the human-rights watchdog group WITNESS, which distributes digital cameras to ordinary citizens so they can document injustice and abuse.


via videosift.com

Tags: TED Talks, Peter Gabriel, witness, activism, human rights, music, inspiration, change

Gratitude 1/2/08 - Seeing Ourselves

I'm lucky -- and grateful -- to have some people in my life who remind me that I am a good person. It's easy sometimes to get caught up in the inner voices so many of us have that tell us we are not good enough, or not smart enough, or not pretty enough, or whatever nonsense our inner parts foist on us.

Today's Daily Om addresses this topic in a useful way.

You Are Beautiful
Seeing Ourselves

Many of us do not take the time to notice and acknowledge how beautiful we are as humans. We may be great lovers of beauty, seeing it in the people, places, and things around us, while completely missing it in ourselves. Some of us feel that it is vain to consider our appearance too much, or we may find that when we look at ourselves, all we see are imperfections. Often we come to the mirror with expectations and preconceived notions about beauty that blind us from seeing ourselves clearly. As a result, we miss the beauty that is closest to us, the beauty we are. Sometimes we see our beauty in a shallow way, noticing how well we are conforming to social norms, but failing to see the deeper beauty that shines out from within and that will continue to shine regardless of how we measure up to society’s ideal.

If we can cut through all these obstacles and simply appreciate how beautiful we are, we free up so much energy. We also become less dependent upon the opinions and feedback of others since we become our own greatest admirers. Many of us know that after a great yoga practice or a long, deep meditation, we are more able to see how beautiful we are. This is because we have released some of our baggage, thus unburdening ourselves and summoning forth the spirit that dwells within us. It is the heady combination of the divine spirit and the human body that conveys beauty more accurately than anything else.

To keep ourselves in touch with our own beauty, we can surround ourselves with images that reflect our beauty back to us—photos of a relative or child who has our eyes, images of teachers who embody spirit, or self-portraits that capture our essence in a way that allows us to see ourselves anew. The best way to keep ourselves in touch with our own beauty is to keep looking deeply into our own souls and opening our eyes to the human being we see in the mirror every day.

It can be useful to look at our faults, since that is the only way we can correct them. But if that is all we focus on, we lose sight of our inner and/or outer beauty. Meditation is a good way to become more objective about these things, partly because this is a good way to distance ourselves from those critical inner voice. However we do it, though, we need to be able to see our own beauty and to accept that as a part of who we are.

Tags: Gratitude, Seeing Ourselves, Daily Om, You Are Beautiful, personal growth, self exploration, shadow work, inner voices, meditation

Speedlinking 1/2/08

Quote of the day:

"Maturity is a bitter disappointment for which no remedy exists, unless laughter can be said to remedy anything."
~ Kurt Vonnegut

Image of the day:


BODY
~ The Mobility Complex -- "We'll admit it. Warm-ups suck. They're no fun, but we realize their importance. Luckily, Jimmy Smith has come up with a couple that are hugely effective while still being tolerable to us warm-up haters."
~ Keep On Track With My Food and Fitness Journals -- "A lot of us have resolved to get healthy in 2008, this includes eating healthy, drinking more water, and exercising more. One of the best proven ways to stay on track with healthy choices is by keeping a food and fitness journal because it allows you to examine and to be accountable for your lifestyle choices."
~ Beat the Crowd with Dumbbells -- "January means the gym's crowded, and a 15-minute routine can last an hour or more. Grab a pair of dumbbells, carve out some floor space, and get jacked in a jiffy with this 5-move rush routine from our Muscle Guy."
~ Tips To Get Into Shape Without Leaving The House -- "Don't have the time, money or the desire to sign up for a gym membership? That shouldn't keep you from making a New Year's resolution to get fit. Colleen Greene, wellness coordinator with MFit, the University of Michigan Health System's health promotion division, says you don't have to invest a lot of money in a gym membership or equipment to develop a successful and sustainable fitness regimen."
~ Bring In The New Year With A New Fitness Routine -- "It's that time of year again you have had your final glass of eggnog and your last bite of pumpkin pie. Now you are ready to start the year off right with a new exercise plan and to keep it up throughout the year so that fitness becomes a routine rather than just another resolution."
~ Cocaine Vaccine in the Works -- "The vaccine stimulates the immune system to attack cocaine molecules."
~ The very old may benefit from L-carnitine -- "The dietary supplement L-carnitine can lessen fatigue and boost mental function in very old people, Italian researchers report."
~ Testosterone pills not much help for men -- "Testosterone supplements don't do older men much good, Dutch researchers said on Tuesday." This study is bullshit. The dose was too small and they used pills instead of a patch or injections. Don't believe everything you read.
~ Over Half Of All Cancers Can Be Prevented By Daily Lifestyle Choices -- "Nearly half of all Americans make New Year's resolutions, most of them health-related. Stop smoking. Start exercising. Lose weight. Eat better. Unfortunately, only 10 to 15 percent of these resolutions are ever kept. Even more unfortunate is that these are exactly the things that can help everyone prevent cancer."


PSYCHE/SELF
~ Science: The science of dreams - the results -- "Roger Highfield unveils the results of Telegraph research into the science of dreams and discovers that dreams are much more likely to be shaped by events of the past week than a childhood trauma."
~ Happiness may be good for your health -- "A happy heart just might be a healthier one as well, new research suggests."
~ Study Of Religious Activity Finds Benefit In Mental Health Of Women -- "For many, religious activity changes between childhood and adulthood, and a new study finds this could affect one's mental health. According to Temple University's Joanna Maselko, Sc.D., women who had stopped being religiously active were more than three times more likely to have suffered generalized anxiety and alcohol abuse/dependence than women who reported always having been active."
~ Some Antipsychotic Drugs May Be Missing Their Mark -- "Drugs that treat schizophrenia, depression and other psychotic conditions and that target a particular protein on brain cells might not be triggering the most appropriate response in those cells, new research suggests. The study by researchers at The Ohio State University Medical Center examined the serotonin 2A receptor, a protein on brain cells sensitive to the neurotransmitter serotonin."
~ Is Play "Rational?" Toys and Ambiguous Causal Structure [Developing Intelligence] -- "Play is more often simply observed than studied scientifically - play behaviors occur unpredictably and, when they do occur, are highly chaotic, making it very difficult to study them in the laboratory. Despite these challenges, new work is beginning to make play accessible from a rigorous scientific framework."
~ New Year a Time for Reflection, Improvement -- "Unfortunately, this high tide of fitness zeal will likely ebb over time: surveys have shown that only about 10% of us maintain our New Year's resolutions."
~ We are Blessed, You are Blessed, I am Blessed -- "The very first day of a New Year. A good time to realize how blessed we are. Remember this as you go about your day. Remember it every day. Use it as a mantra when things get you down. Think of all your blessings, whatever they may be. Use it literally as a tool to improve your life at every step of the way. This has nothing to do with religion. It is awareness and mindfulness."
~ Change: Altered Ego -- "How to change your personality--just a little."
~ A Little Art Therapy -- "The ‘painting a day’ movement had been featured in our local paper and I was inspired by these people who had the discipline to develop such a healthy, creative habit. Everyone should have some sort of outlet. Something they truly enjoy doing and can become lost in. It is very similar to meditation in some respects. Thoughts recede, the mind quiets down and time disappears."


CULTURE/POLITICS
~ Books That Will Change the World -- "Twelve authors on war and peace, dissent, the environment and the empowerment of the poor provide inspiration to transform the world in 2008."
~ From the Air to the Page: The Poetry of John Ashbery -- "Prolific poet and writer John Ashbery has long been honored as one of the country's most important writers. Ashbery shares some of his poetry and talks to the NewsHour about his life and artistic endeavors."
~ Upgrading to Philosophy 2.0 -- "There was no theorizing about ghosts in the machine at an annual meeting of philosophers last Friday. Instead, they embraced technology’s implications for their field, both within the classroom and beyond."
~ Healthy food getting more expensive: study -- "The price of fruits and vegetables is climbing faster than inflation, while junk food is actually becoming cheaper, the findings of a new study suggest." This is why it's so hard for so many lower income people to eat healthy foods.
~ Virgin or Slut: Pick One -- "Welcome to contemporary American adolescence, where sexuality is either up for sale or moralized into nonexistence."
~ Could you vote for a man who abides by Moronish wisdom? -- "The recent contortions of presidential hopeful Mitt Romney show why faith should not trump reason in the public square."
~ Return of the Swift Boaters -- "Christopher Hayes | The shadowy group that smeared John Kerry in 2004 has reorganized and stands poised to do its dirty work again."
~ Bopp: The Eve of Destruction? -- "Is Mike Huckabee the stake in the heart of the Reagan Coalition?"
~ Last full day of campaign in Iowa -- "Presidential candidates are making a final plea to Iowans: turn out for tomorrow's caucuses. Democrat Barack Obama says the "only thing that counts" is showing up. And Republican Mike Huckabee is urging followers to "rent a van" or even "hijack your church's bus" to get bodies to the precincts. Polls are tight for the leading Republicans and Democrats."


HABITATS/TECHNOLOGY
~ A Divide as Wolves Rebound in a Changing West -- "Sheltered for many years by federal species protection law, the gray wolves of the West are about to step out onto the high wire of life in the real world, when their status as endangered animals formally comes to an end early this year."
~ Spawning Something Fishy -- "How mackerel can breed bluefin tuna — and why that’s cause for quiet celebration."
~ Stressed Squirrels Wig Out -- "Not only do squirrels feel stress, they react to it in some surprisingly familiar ways."
~ Noble or savage? -- "The era of the hunter-gatherer was not the social and environmental Eden that some suggest." Old news, but a good article.
~ Oil Shoots to $100 Per Barrel -- "Oil prices hit $100 a barrel Wednesday for the first time ever, amid an unshakeable view that global demand for oil and petroleum products will continue to outstrip supplies."
~ Carbon sink capacity in northern forests reduced by global warming -- "An international study investigating the carbon sink capacity of northern terrestrial ecosystems discovered that the duration of the net carbon uptake period (CUP) has on average decreased due to warmer autumn temperatures."
~ Scientists find missing evolutionary link using tiny fungus crystal -- "The crystal structure of a molecule from a primitive fungus has served as a time machine to show researchers more about the evolution of life from the simple to the complex."
~ Giraffes And Frogs Provide More Evidence Of New Species Hidden In Plain Sight -- "Two articles provide further evidence that we have hugely underestimated the number of species with which we share our planet. Today sophisticated genetic techniques mean that superficially identical animals previously classed as members of a single species, including the frogs and giraffes in these studies, could in fact come from several distinct 'cryptic' species."


INTEGRAL/BUDDHIST BLOGS
~ The Debeaking Machine -- "The Buddha’s teaching on Right Speech admonishes us to not lie and, though I’m not aware of the Buddha’s ever having said so, I think he’d agree that among the most damaging lies are the ones we tell ourselves. When I lie to myself, I do so to avoid the consequences and implications of the truth, and if I don’t or won’t acknowledge the truth, I can’t be guided by it. It’s unworthy to lie to others, particularly for your own advantage and especially if you think you’ve gotten away with it, but it’s tragic to succeed in lying to yourself."
~ Edge 2008: What Have You Changed Your Mind About? -- "Edge is indeed "like the crack cocaine of the thinking world." Now if only our political and religious leaders would follow suit and honestly reflect on this same question..."
~ "I Am Legend"... And A Bodhisattva? -- "Heard of the difference between eating to live and living to eat? These "dark-seekers", who crave for human flesh are the latter. "I am Legend" is the "legend" of how the self-sacrificial protagonist became legendary."
~ Regarding Honen -- "Honen is the teacher of Shinran, who founded Jodo Shinshu, and himself started the whole Pure Land movement in Japanese Buddhism as we know it.* After a nice New Year’s Day service, I felt like going back and reading about Honen."
~ An Integral Recovery Model for Drug and Alcohol Addiction -- "This article describes the Integral Recovery model in some detail, including an overview of the AQAL framework. It shows how the AQAL (“all quadrants, all stages, all lines, all states, and all types”) approach offers a refreshingly new way of looking at addiction, opening the possibility of a much more integrated and effective treatment modality."
~ The Story of Us -- "Where have we come from? Where are we going? These questions are as relevant today as they have ever been. As the older stories we have told each other about 'us' become increasingly irrelevant & sometimes dangerous, it becomes necessary that we evolve new stories, new visions and practices that will help us adapt to our global life conditions, and move forward into an uncertain future."
~ The benefits of understanding Buddhist Epistemology and Psychology -- "Buddhism asserts the mind is not merely a function of the brain nor is it an emergent property of physical processes. Buddhist epistemology - a branch of philosophy that investigates the origin, nature, methods, and limits of knowledge - defines consciousness as: that which is clear and knowing. Consciousness, knower and awareness are synonymous. Awareness is ‘clear’ as in it is not obstructed by physical phenomena."
~ ...and now for something a little different -- "So, this year we're going to try using Thoughts Chase Thoughts as a place where opposing ideas meet, based on what we find out there in the blogosphere. We're going to take representations of opposite sides of a dispute and see how they can be reconciled. Or, at the very least, we're going to see if we can understand what the crux of the dispute is."

Tags: Thoughts Chase Thoughts, Buddhist Epistemology and Psychology, Buddhism, story of us, integral recovery, addiction, Honen, I am Legend, Edge Question, 2008, right speech, lies, diversity, DNA, evolution, carbon sinks, oil, hunter-gatherers, biology, stressed squirrels, gray wolves, Iowa campaigns, Mike Huckabee, swift boaters, Mitt Romney, adolescent sexuality, healthy food, philosophy 2.0, economics, John Ashbery, books, art therapy, personality change, gratitude, new year's resolutions, play, psychiatric drugs, serotonin, religious belief, happiness, dreams, cancers, testosterone, l-carnitine, fitness routines, workout at home, dumbbell training, fitness journals, warm-ups, speedlinking

Twilight of the Greats?

This is from The Times (UK) online edition. With the death of many "greats" this year, from philosophy to film, Appleyard wonders if we have seen the end of greatness. He thinks not, and names some names to watch.

Twilight of the greats?

This year saw the death of so many big names. Perhaps it saw the end of greatness, too. So, where do we go from here to find the artists that matter?

Bryan Appleyard

It was a year in which a certain type of person died — Michelangelo Antonioni, Ingmar Bergman, Norman Mailer, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Jean Baudrillard. These were intellectually pungent, culturally potent individuals, angrily dismissed as often as they were called “great”, “seminal” or “genius”. And with Luciano Pavarotti dead, another type of greatness vanished from the planet.

There were others who did not die but, somehow, faded. After a glorious renaissance in the 1990s, with Sabbath’s Theater, American Pastoral and I Married a Communist, Philip Roth began to falter with The Dying Animal and Everyman. After the slightly dodgy Cosmopolis, Don DeLillo produced the not very interesting Falling Man, about 9/11. Francis Ford Coppola, maestro of The Godfather, The Conversation and, greatest of all, Apocalypse Now, produced Youth Without Youth, which is, by all accounts, terrible. Having made the dismal Kill Bill, Quentin Tarantino released Death Proof — not so much a film as an act of pathological self-indulgence — and convinced even some of his most devoted fans that the game was up.

Something happened in 2007, something ended. Old gods stumbled and fell. New ones sprang up. But they sprang up in their thousands. That’s the point these days.

Technology, hype and the sheer profligacy of the arts when confronted with a large, hungry and wealthy audience have created a climate of excess — just too many artists, too much money, too many works and too much noise. Who knows who, now, is great? Even if greatness existed, how would we find it? Do we want greatness, or would we simply prefer choice?

The further, more troubling question is, what is greatness? The climate of excess is also a climate of uncertainty and tribal dispute. When Bergman died, many said he was just a solemn old bore — a startling, almost unbelievable dismissal of one of cinema’s greatest artists. As with leaders of the Lib Dems, in the arts, when you’re out, you’re out. And artists are being pushed in and out all the time by a cultural hype industry that has increasingly infected the ranks of what should be the independent-minded. The carefully cultivated “buzz” about some artists can be so effective that I — like, I am sure, you — actually find myself questioning my own intuitions or, in extreme cases, sanity. And the “buzz” feeds on change, novelty. The very idea of an old master, an artist who endures and grows, is rapidly becoming incomprehensible.

In an attempt to counter this trend, I shall now attempt to pluck greatness from the ocean of money and hype. The intention is emphatically not to pull the usual new-year stunt of identifying bright young things. You have a public-relations industry to do that for you. Instead, I shall simply try to identify great artists, and to say something of the context of their greatness. I haven’t been able to do this alone. I have taken advice, I have consulted. What follows is, therefore, a compilation based on deep wisdom, blind prejudice and sound counsel.

As a mass-market product, the novel is dominated by women. Women, overwhelmingly, buy novels; and, as a result, women write them. Chick lit and Aga sagas are now distinct and, seemingly, enduring fictional forms. The “great” novel, however, is dominated by men. Ask any collection of reasonably well-read people who are the great novelists of our time and the chances are they will reel off John Updike, Roth and, probably, DeLillo as if they were one gigantic genius of fiction. “They,” says Ian McEwan, “are the gods.”

This is not exactly wrong, but it is oppressive. There’s something a bit testosterone-laden about this view of the great novel. Mailer was probably the most extreme example of writer as big, tough guy, but, with the exception of Updike, it is an attitude that infects all of McEwan’s pantheon, as well as our own dear Martin Amis and Salman Rushdie, both of whom aspire to join the gang. I find this odd. Nobody is preoccupied with the masculinity of Tolstoy or Dickens. In both cases, an excess of maleness would be seen as a limitation Now, though, great-novel writing is regarded as a pursuit as male as heading out to the woods and shooting stuff. I suspect that the desire to ensure the continuance of this butch legacy lies behind the mass adulation being accorded to the American writer Denis Johnson for his novel Tree of Smoke.

One effect of this — on me, at least — is that, having bought into this view, I fell into a kind of literary-critical slumber. I have, over the past couple of years, been violently shaken awake. As a result, I can now announce with total confidence that the two greatest living novelists are women: Marilynne Robinson and Shirley Hazzard. Robinson has written two novels — Housekeeping and Gilead — and a collection of essays, The Death of Adam. They are all shattering, as psychologically profound as they are morally serious. She has a new novel out next year, Home. Hazzard’s The Transit of Venus, according to one of my advisers, is “the most perfect novel written in the past 100 years”. I have just read it, and he may well be right. The Great Fire runs it pretty close; in fact, everything she writes is suffused with extraordinary beauty and almost unbearable insight. She is the greatest of all writers on love. Both Robinson and Hazzard have had their awards and successes, but both are quiet, unhyped and deadly serious. And they’re not men.

The death of Baudrillard left a gaping hole in the cultural landscape. Suddenly, we lack a great POFT — a Pointlessly Obscure French Thinker. Baudrillard, like Kristeva, Foucault, Lacan and many others, was a poseur and rhetorician. But, like some of the others, though certainly not Foucault, he was also a very brilliant man. His insights into the constructed nature of contemporary reality were, while usually buried beneath pointless obscurity, scintillating. If the French could shake off the posturing that has disfigured their post-war thought, they could perhaps recover their role as the great essayists of the world. We need a new Pascal, a new Montaigne.

Well, perhaps they are on their way. Pierre Manent is a philosopher whose book The City of Man is both Augustinian — theologically rooted in the tradition of the benign community, neither modernist individualism nor the abject Maoism of Sartre (the title refers back to Augustine’s City of God) — and liberal. He worked with Raymond Aron, one of the great opponents of the savage totalitarianism of post-war French thought. Manent is not a poseur or rhetorician. He is a thinker in the great French tradition. You may well hear a lot more of him in future. He divides his time between Paris and Boston, and has been tipped as the next editor of The New York Review of Books, one of the world’s supreme intellectual gatekeeping positions.

Michel Onfray is a militant atheist. But, unlike the Anglo-American tribe of MAs, he knows intellectual history. His book In Defence of Atheism is a serious contender; it is also clear and unposey. So, there may be no new POFT, and France may be regaining her intellectual equilibrium.

The deaths of Antonioni and Bergman drew painful attention to the lack of great European auteurs. Only Pedro Almodovar can be said to have fully inherited this role. Italian cinema is dead. French cinema is frequently good, but, on the whole, a pale shadow of its former self. Meanwhile, the east has risen in the mighty form of Wong Kar Wai. In the Mood for Love and 2046 display a feeling for film as pure, subtle and profound as that of Tarkovsky, Ford or Kurosawa. Great? Undoubtedly.Among the Americans, Scorsese’s greatness is uncontestable and well known. I would add Terrence Malick. His Badlands and Days of Heaven, from the 1970s, were masterpieces, and The Thin Red Line, of 1998, though strangely underrated, was perhaps the second best war film of our time, after Apocalypse Now. In 2005, The New World made little impression. It was, however, magical, a story told with delicacy and wonder. Malick, like Wong, can send a shiver down your spine with a singleshot or an actor’s glance. To these I would add the Coen brothers, who, in their body of weird films – Raising Arizona, The Big Lebowski – have created both their own genre and their own critical language. Their latest, No Country for Old Men, due out here next year, is, I have repeatedly been told, wonderful. If the Coens are great, then it is because of their astonishing and unique tone.

Music is in crisis, as downloads take over from CDs and record-company profits slump. The old dispensation in which rock and pop supported the classical catalogue is dead. Classical artists are under pressure to deliver the goods as quickly as pop stars. Young talent can be destroyed by this pressure. Cultural pressure can have the same effect. The Chinese pianist Lang Lang was regarded as potentially the greatest of his time. Now, he has sunk into a kind of state-sponsored stardom, an asset of the 2008 Olympics, and is widely critically dismissed. So, a great pianist? Mitsuko Uchida, who has provided me with my most moving Schubert experiences.

Elsewhere, though, with Pavarotti dead, who will replace him as the superstar tenor? Nobody, says my colleague Stephen Pettitt. Greatness is by its nature unique – we don’t want another Pav. This is wise. Pettitt also points out that, if we are simply looking for great singers, we don’t need to leave the country. Ian Bostridge is a wonderful tenor. He is, unlike the Pav, thin; and, also unlike the Pav, intellectual in his approach. But the one everybody nominates for greatness is the oratorio specialist Mark Padmore. “He,” says Pettitt, “has everything.”

Poetry, our national art, is, of course, dead for the common reader. I shall say again, as I have shouted repeatedly into deaf ears for three decades, that John Ashbery is the greatest living poet in English. But now I shall add a contender – Geoffrey Hill. For some reason, I have been avoiding this man for years. There is something forbidding about him. Finally, I have reached the foothills of this poetic mountain, and, yes, I think he’s up there. Accidentally, via my blog – long story – I introduced him to Ashbery, and he seems to think so too.

The visual arts suffer most from the hype industry. With Russians flooding into London to buy anything anybody says is art, values and reputations are inflated beyond reason. When the Turner prize goes to Mark Wallinger – an otherwise gifted artist – for, among other things, his nonsensical and politically corrupt installation State Britain, it is clear that the old conceptualist axis formed by Saatchi, then Serota is not only dead, but smelly and decomposing.

I’m reluctant to dip my toe into these stagnant waters, but, okay: there is a quiet man who lives in the north. He is incapable of self-promotion, and so, but for a few minor works in the Tate, he is ignored. Many people think he is the finest painter in Britain. Many people may be right. He’s called William Tillyer.

Check him out. Oh, and have a really serious new year. As ever, only great artists can make this happen. They are like Geoffrey Hill’s The Jumping Boy – “He leaps because he has serious/joy in leaping.” And 2008 is a leap year.

Tags: Twilight of the Greats?, Bryan Appleyard, Art, culture, film, Philosophy, greatness

Edge World Question: "What Have You Changed Your Mind About?"

Edge's 2008 question is, "What Have You Changed Your Mind About?" Major thinkers from a wide variety of fields weight in with their answers, which is always interesting.

Here are a few I liked (though don't necessarily agree with), although I haven't gotten through all of them yet. One question arises, though: Why aren't there more women represented? In the first three or four pages, I only noticed one or two women.

DOUGLAS RUSHKOFF
Media Analyst; Documentary Writer; Author, Get Back in the Box: Innovation from the Inside Out

The Internet

I thought that it would change people. I thought it would allow us to build a new world through which we could model new behaviors, values, and relationships. In the 90's, I thought the experience of going online for the first time would change a person's consciousness as much as if they had dropped acid in the 60's.

I thought Amazon.com was a ridiculous idea, and that the Internet would shrug off business as easily as it did its original Defense Department minders.

For now, at least, it's turned out to be different.

Virtual worlds like Second Life have been reduced to market opportunities: advertisers from banks to soft drinks purchase space and create fake characters, while kids (and Chinese digital sweatshop laborers) earn "play money" in the game only to sell it to lazier players on eBay for real cash.

The businesspeople running Facebook and MySpace are rivaled only by the members of these online "communities" in their willingness to surrender their identities and ideals for a buck, a click-through, or a better market valuation.

The open source ethos has been reinterpreted through the lens of corporatism as "crowd sourcing" — meaning just another way to get people to do work for no compensation. And even "file-sharing" has been reduced to a frenzy of acquisition that has less to do with music than it does the ever-expanding hard drives of successive iPods.

Sadly, cyberspace has become just another place to do business. The question is no longer how browsing the Internet changes the way we look at the world; it's which browser we'll be using to buy and sell stuff in the same old world.

*****

HOWARD GARDNER
Psychologist, Harvard University; Author, Changing Minds

Wrestling with Jean Piaget, my Paragon

Like many other college students, I turned to the study of psychology for personal reasons. I wanted to understand myself better. And so I read the works of Freud; and I was privileged to have as my undergraduate tutor, the psychoanalyst Erik Erikson, himself a sometime pupil of Freud. But once I learned about new trends in psychology, through contacts with another mentor Jerome Bruner, I turned my attention to the operation of the mind in a cognitive sense — and I've remained at that post ever since.

The giant at the time — the middle 1960s — was Jean Piaget. Though I met and interviewed him a few times, Piaget really functioned for me as a paragon. In the term of Dean Keith Simonton, a paragon is someone whom one does not know personally but who serves as a virtual teacher and point of reference. I thought that Piaget had identified the most important question in cognitive psychology — how does the mind develop; developed brilliant methods of observation and experimentation; and put forth a convincing picture of development — a set of general cognitive operations that unfold in the course of essentially lockstep, universally occurring stages. I wrote my first books about Piaget; saw myself as carrying on the Piagetian tradition in my own studies of artistic and symbolic development (two areas that he had not focused on); and even defended Piaget vigorously in print against those who would critique his approach and claims.

Yet, now forty years later, I have come to realize that the bulk of my scholarly career has been a critique of the principal claims that Piaget put forth. As to the specifics of how I changed my mind:

Piaget believed in general stages of development that cut across contents (Space, time, number); I now believe that each area of content has its own rules and operations and I am dubious about the existence of general stages and structures.

Piaget believed that intelligence was a single general capacity that developed pretty much in the same way across individuals: I now believe that humans posses a number of relatively independent intelligences and these can function and interact in idiosyncratic ways,

Piaget was not interested in individual differences; he studied the 'epistemic subject.' Most of my work has focused on individual differences, with particular attention to those with special talents or deficits, and unusual profiles of abilities and disabilities.

Piaget assumed that the newborn had a few basic biological capacities — like sucking and looking — and two major processes of acquiring knowledge, that he called assimilation and accommodation. Nowadays, with many others, I assume that human beings possess considerable innate or easily elicited cognitive capacities, and that Piaget way underestimated the power of this inborn cognitive architecture.

Piaget downplayed the importance of historical and cultural factors — cognitive development consisted of the growing child experimenting largely on his own with the physical (and, minimally, the social ) world. I see development as permeated from the first by contingent forces pervading the time and place of origin.

Finally, Piaget saw language and other symbols systems (graphic, musical, bodily etc) as manifestations, almost epiphenomena, of a single cognitive motor; I see each of these systems as having its own origins and being heavily colored by the particular uses to which a systems is put in one's own culture and one's own time.

Why I changed my mind is an issue principally of biography: some of the change has to do with my own choices (I worked for 20 years with brain damaged patients); and some with the Zeitgeist (I was strongly influenced by the ideas of Noam Chomsky and Jerry Fodor, on the one hand, and by empirical discoveries in psychology and biology on the other).

Still, I consider Piaget to be the giant of the field. He raised the right questions; he developed exquisite methods; and his observations of phenomena have turned out to be robust. It's a tribute to Piaget that we continue to ponder these questions, even as many of us are now far more critical than we once were. Any serious scientist or scholar will change his or her mind; put differently, we will come to agree with those with whom we used to disagree, and vice versa. We differ in whether we are open or secretive about such "changes of mind": and in whether we choose to attack, ignore, or continue to celebrate those with whose views we are no longer in agreement.

*****

NICK BOSTROM
Philosopher, University of Oxford; Author,

Everything

For me, belief is not an all or nothing thing — believe or disbelieve, accept or reject. Instead, I have degrees of belief, a subjective probability distribution over different possible ways the world could be. This means that I am constantly changing my mind about all sorts of things, as I reflect or gain more evidence. While I don't always think explicitly in terms of probabilities, I often do so when I give careful consideration to some matter. And when I reflect on my own cognitive processes, I must acknowledge the graduated nature of my beliefs.

The commonest way in which I change my mind is by concentrating my credence function on a narrower set of possibilities than before. This occurs every time I learn a new piece of information. Since I started my life knowing virtually nothing, I have changed my mind about virtually everything. For example, not knowing a friend's birthday, I assign a 1/365 chance (approximately) of it being the 11th of August. After she tells me that the 11th of August is her birthday, I assign that date a probability of close to 100%. (Never exactly 100%, for there is always a non-zero probability of miscommunication, deception, or other error.)

It can also happen that I change my mind by smearing out my credence function over a wider set of possibilities. I might forget the exact date of my friend's birthday but remember that it is sometime in the summer. The forgetting changes my credence function, from being almost entirely concentrated on 11th of August to being spread out more or less evenly over all the summer months. After this change of mind, I might assign a 1% probability to my friend's birthday being on the 11th of August.

My credence function can become more smeared out not only by forgetting but also by learning — learning that what I previously took to be strong evidence for some hypothesis is in fact weak or misleading evidence. (This type of belief change can often be mathematically modeled as a narrowing rather than a broadening of credence function, but the technicalities of this are not relevant here.)

For example, over the years I have become moderately more uncertain about the benefits of medicine, nutritional supplements, and much conventional health wisdom. This belief change has come about as a result of several factors. One of the factors is that I have read some papers that cast doubt on the reliability of the standard methodological protocols used in medical studies and their reporting. Another factor is my own experience of following up on MEDLINE some of the exciting medical findings reported in the media — almost always, the search of the source literature reveals a much more complicated picture with many studies showing a positive effect, many showing a negative effect, and many showing no effect. A third factor is the arguments of a health economist friend of mine, who holds a dim view of the marginal benefits of medical care.

Typically, my beliefs about big issues change in small steps. Ideally, these steps should approximate a random walk, like the stock market. It should be impossible for me to predict how my beliefs on some topic will change in the future. If I believed that a year hence I will assign a higher probability to some hypothesis than I do today — why, in that case I could raise the probability right away. Given knowledge of what I will believe in the future, I would defer to the beliefs of my future self, provided that I think my future self will be better informed than I am now and at least as rational.

I have no crystal ball to show me what my future self will believe. But I do have access to many other selves, who are better informed than I am on many topics. I can defer to experts. Provided they are unbiased and are giving me their honest opinion, I should perhaps always defer to people who have more information than I do — or to some weighted average of expert opinion if there is no consensus. Of course, the proviso is a very big one: often I have reason to disbelieve that other people are unbiased or that they are giving me their honest opinion. However, it is also possible that I am biased and self-deceiving. An important unresolved question is how much epistemic weight a wannabe Bayesian thinker should give to the opinions of others. I'm looking forward to changing my mind on that issue, hopefully by my credence function becoming concentrated on the correct answer.

*****

TODD E. FEINBERG, M.D.
Professor of Psychiatry and Neurology, Albert Einstein College of Medicine; Author, Altered Egos

Soul Searching

For most of my life I viewed any notion of the "soul" a fanciful religious invention. I agreed with the view of the late Nobel Laureate Francis Crick who in his book The Astonishing Hypothesis claimed "A modern neurobiologist sees no need for the religious concept of a soul to explain the behavior of humans and other animals." But is the idea of a soul really so crazy and beyond the limits of scientific reason?

From the standpoint of neuroscience, it is easy to make the claim that Descartes is simply wrong about the separateness of brain and mind. The plain fact is that there is no scientific evidence that a self, an individual mind, or a soul could exist without a physical brain. However, there are persisting reasons why the self and the mind do not appear to be identical with, or entirely reducible to, the brain.

For example, in spite of the claims of Massachusetts physician Dr. Duncan MacDougall, who estimated through his experiments on dying humans that approximately 21 grams of matter — the presumed weight of the human soul — was lost upon death (The New York Times "Soul Has Weight, Physician Thinks" March 11, 1907), unlike the brain, the mind cannot be objectively observed, but only subjectively experienced. The subject that represents the "I" in the statement "I think therefore I am" cannot be directly observed, weighed, or measured. And the experiences of that self, its pains and pleasures, sights and sounds possess an objective reality only to the one who experiences them. In other words, as the philosopher John Searle puts it, the mind is "irreducibly first-person."

On the other hand, although there are many perplexing properties about the brain, mind, and the self that remain to be scientifically explained — subjectivity among them — this does not mean that there must be an immaterial entity at work that explains these mysterious features. Nonetheless, I have come to believe that an individual consciousness represents an entity that is so personal and ontologically unique that it qualifies as something that we might as well call "a soul."

I am not suggesting that anything like a soul survives the death of the brain. Indeed, the link between the life of the brain and the life of the mind is irreducible, the one completely dependant upon the other. Indeed the danger of capturing the beauty and mystery of a personal consciousness and identity with the somewhat metaphorical designation "soul" is the tendency for the grandiose metaphor to obscure the actual accomplishments of the brain. The soul is not a "thing" independent of the living brain; it is part and parcel of it, its most remarkable feature, but nonetheless inextricably bound to its life and death.

There are many ideas presented in this collection of observations that deserve more attention. In the coming weeks I hope to take a closer look at some of what these great minds have to say.

Tags: Edge, World Question, What Have You Changed Your Mind About?, culture, Science, Psychology, Philosophy, Douglas Rushkoff, Howard Gardner, Nick Bostrom, Todd, Feinberg