Integral Options Cafe

Thursday, May 15, 2008

Keith Olbermann on Bush's Statements in the Politico Interview

As usual, Bush opens his mouth and huge piles of feces accumulate on the floor around his feet. Olbermann, as over the top as always, yet strangely sensible when compared to Bush, lays waste to Bush's statements.

Antonio Damasio on Emotion

Found this at Channel N, a blog of brain science videos. Very cool, although highly geeky.

title Advances on the Neurobiology of Emotion: Taking Stock
description In a long, slightly-muffled lecture, the legendary Antonio Damasio talks about issues to do with emotions and the brain, spanning his career and looking forward.
producer Princeton University
featuring Antonio Damasio
format Real Video or WMV
date 16/11/06
length 01:44:30
link http://www.princeton.edu/WebMedia/lectures/
direct video link http://realserver.princeton.edu:8080/ramgen/lectures/20061116damasioVN350K.rm
direct video link http://www.princeton.edu/WebMedia/lectures/20061116damasioVN350K.asx

Princeton has a whole mess of cool videos online, free to download -- check them out here.

Eric Dolphy - God Bless The Child

Eric Dolphy is one of the giants of old school jazz whose name is seldom mentioned in the same breath as Miles Davis and John Coltrane, but he was just as good and just as influential.

Check out this killer (if strange) rendition of God Bless the Child.

via videosift.com

Mark Bittman: What's Wrong With What We Eat

Another excellent TED Talk, this time on the ways our food system is killing us and killing the planet. I don't eat much red meat, but now I will stop eating any. The evidence is overwhelming that cow production is one of the worst things we can do for the planet.

His mom coked like my mom. His views on protein are incorrect, but then we can get protein without eating cows.

Bittman's view of health is essentially an integral view, which is the only way we are ever going to fix this problem -- to see all the elements that contribute to the issues.

In this fiery and funny talk, New York Times food writer Mark Bittman weighs in on what's wrong with the way we eat now (too much meat, too few plants; too much fast food, too little home cooking), and why it's putting the entire planet at risk.
Although Mark Bittman never formally trained as a chef, his pursuits as a curious and tenacious foodie have made him a casual culinary master. His weekly New York Times food column, The Minimalist, meshes accessible and inexpensive ingredients with "anyone-can" cooking techniques to produce exceedingly delicious dishes. Bittman's funny, friendly attitude and trademark informal approach to food-craft extend to his blockbuster TV programs (which retain delays and mishaps that other producers would edit out) and ambitious cookbooks, like How to Cook Everything and The Best Recipes in the World.
After a decade as the "Minimalist," Bittman has emerged a respected spokesperson on all things edible: He's concerned about the ecological and health impacts of our modern diet, which he characterizes as overwhelmingly meat-centered and hooked on fast food. His criticism has the world listening: His revolutionary How to Cook Everything Vegetarian (sequel to How to Cook Everything), is a bestseller, and his memorable talk at the 2007 EG Conference (available now on TED.com) delivered a stinging condemnation of the way we eat now.
In addition to his columns, cookbooks and TV programs, Bittman also writes about home cooking at his blog, Bitten.

Satire: Hillary Vows to Fight on for Edwards' Endorsement

Andy Borowitz on the campaign trail.

Hillary Vows to Fight on for Edwards' Endorsement
Just moments after former presidential candidate John Edwards endorsed Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill) for president, Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-NY) vowed to "continue the fight" for Edwards' endorsement.
"My friends, I will fight for the endorsement of John Edwards, even if it takes all summer," she told supporters in Louisville, Kentucky. "I have not begun to fight for this endorsement!"

The New York senator appeared to brush off Mr. Edwards' endorsement of Sen. Obama, saying, "I don't know what that has to do with anything."

While Sen. Clinton acknowledged that Sen. Edwards had made a joint appearance with Sen. Obama in which he endorsed the Illinois senator, she said, "If you think that's going to make me give up trying to get John Edwards' endorsement, you've got another thing coming."

She said that she was also "unconcerned" that Sen. Edwards had recently gotten a new phone number and not shared it with her.

"Anyone who believes that I'm going to be deterred by an obstacle like that doesn't know what I'm made of," she said. "Mark my words, I am going to get that endorsement."

Sen. Clinton's aides refused to comment on her quest for Edwards' endorsement, saying that they were too busy hiding copies of this week's Time magazine from her.

Wednesday, May 14, 2008

Science Proves Nothing (Thoughts on Expectations)

[image source]

Science Proves Nothing. A statement like this can get me some serious hate mail. But it's not my statement, it's from Gregory Bateson, in Mind and Nature (1980), the first of his basic presuppositions about reality (another famous one, quoting Korzybski, is that the map is not the territory).

In order to prove his point, he offers the following thought experiment, which I think has profound implications for how we make sense of the world.

Suppose I give you the following sequence of numbers, with the presupposition that the sequence is ordered.

2,4,6,8,10,12

I then ask you to tell me which number comes next in the sequence. Most likely, you will say, "14."

But if you do, I will say, "Sorry, you are incorrect. The next number is 27." The answer you gave (that the series was the series of even numbers) was generalized from the available data, but was proved to be wrong (or only approximate) by the next (then unknown) event.

So, allow me to provide more data, creating a series as follows:

2,4,6,8,10,12,27,2,4,6,8,10,12,27,2,4,6,8,10,12,27 . . .

Now if I ask you to give me the next number, you will likely say, "2." Given the available data, the series has gone through three repetitions, if you applied Occam's razor (as any good scientist would), you would have come to the conclusion that "2" was the next number in the sequence.

Quoting Bateson:

You assume that you can predict, and indeed I suggested this presupposition to you. But the only basis you have is your (trained) preference for the simpler answer and your trust that my challenge indeed meant that the sequence was incomplete and ordered.

Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately), it is so that the next fact is never available. All you have is the hope of simplicity, and the next fact may always drive you to the next level of complexity (p. 30-1).

[Emphasis added.] This is the key point here. Our minds seek the "logical" next data point, which is never given, when trying to solve a puzzle, whether that puzzle is a sequence of numbers or the nature of God.

We trust in an ordered universe. But we never know for certain if the order we have come to expect might just stop in the next moment, or the next, or the next. We really have no way of knowing, other than our expectations based on prior experience.

Once a series or an outcome has repeated three or four times -- in whatever form, whether it is verbal, visual, kinesthetic, or even painful -- we form a belief, and it becomes familiar and understandable.

But the pattern may be changed or broken by addition, by repetition, by anything that will force you to a new perception of it, and these changes can never be predicted with absolute certainty because they have not yet happened.

We do not know enough about how the present will lead into the future. We shall never be able to say, "Ha! My perception, my accounting for that series, will indeed cover its next and future components," or "Next time I meet with these phenomena, I shall be able to predict their total course."

Prediction can never be absolutely valid and therefore science can never prove some generalization or even test a single descriptive statement and in that way arrive at final truth (p. 31).

His premise is that science is a way of making "sense" of our precepts.

As a method of perception -- and that is all science can claim to be -- science, like all other methods of perception, is limited in its ability to collect the outward and visible signs of whatever may be truth.

Science probes; it does not prove.

I'm sure a good many scientists would disagree with these statements, but I find them useful in a way Bateson might later reveal in the book, but hasn't so far.

Psychology has proven time and again that our perceptions of the world shape our experience of the world. We see what we expect to see. If we expect people to be mean and hurtful, that is what we focus on in our interactions with others. If we expect people to be kind and generous, then that is what our attention will be drawn to when meeting others.

Attention (our means of gathering information about the world) follows our presuppositions, our beliefs.

What if we could cease to have expectations about certain things? Obviously, I am expecting gravity to keep me seated in this chair, and that this post will end up on my blog where you can read it. But what about our expectations of others, or of ourselves?

Perhaps these are hard expectations to change. Anyone who has tried to change a behavior, which is little more than a programmed response to a certain set of expectations, knows how hard it is. But the behaviors might be much easier to change if we instead focused on the expectations and beliefs that support the behavior.

If we have no expectations, then any outcome will be good, or it can be reframed in a positive light. For example, if I do not have any expectations about becoming ill, not becoming ill (most of the time) is a positive outcome. If I do become ill, it isn't that I somehow failed to think positive enough thoughts (or some other BS), it's that my immune system needed to upgrade to protect me from becoming sick in the future by creating new antibodies in response to a pathogen.

When we have no expectations of ourselves or others, we are free to create interpretations based on our experience rather than on our presuppositions. Moreover, and this is the crucial point, we free to create our own reality within the bounds of natural laws and such.

In change theory, only an open system is capable of change because it is constantly interacting with the environment and is open to new information (meaning that its beliefs are not set in stone). A closed system, however, does not allow in new information -- and many of us are closed systems as far as our beliefs and expectations are concerned.

But we can change that by first of all becoming aware of our expectations and beliefs -- the premises upon which we base our interactions with the world. We cannot change that of which we are not conscious. One way to do this is through journaling. Another way is meditation.

When we look at our behaviors, we can begin to ask why we do these things, what beliefs or presuppositions generate a given behavior. We can ask ourselves what we believe about the world, about ourselves, about those we love. These beliefs shape our actions.

If you have read this far, thank you. I would like to hear what others think about this topic. Have you ever looked at what your beliefs are? Have you ever tried to become an open system, with limited beliefs or expectations?

More on Science and Religion

I posted yesterday on science and religion, and here are a couple more articles. These articles are from New Scientist, and each takes a different angle on religion and its relationship to and with science.

First up: Perspectives: Why humanity needs a God of creativity, by Stuart Kauffman

WITH economic and communications globalisation, some form of a global civilisation is beginning to emerge, perhaps homogeneous, perhaps forever diverse. We all face the challenges of global warming. We face peak oil, that year after which we shall never recover so much oil again - with unknown economic consequences, including hunger and resource wars. And all the while, our diverse cultures are being crushed together.

One response is a retreat into fundamentalisms, often religious, often hostile. This is hardly surprising, as humanity is still split between 3 billion who believe in the Abrahamic God (the majority of whom are Muslim, though a powerful minority are fundamentalist Christians), a billion who, like myself, believe in no supernatural god (though some of these are militant atheists), and the other traditions such as Buddhism. Clearly there is an urgent need for some new thinking.

That is why I wrote Reinventing the Sacred, though I am well aware that the very possibility and wisdom of such an enterprise is suspect. For those of faith, it is sacrilegious; those who are not religious remember Galileo recanting before the Inquisition and the millions killed in the name of God, and want no part of a God or a sacred that demands retreat from the truth of the world.

The process of reinventing the sacred requires a fresh understanding of science that takes into account complexity theory and the ideas of emergence. It will require a shift from reductionism, the way of thinking that still dominates our scientific world view. Perhaps the purest and simplest version of reductionism was voiced in the early 19th century by the mathematician Simon Pierre Laplace. He envisioned a "demon" - an intelligence which, if supplied with all the current positions and velocities of all the particles in the universe, could, using Newton's laws, compute the entire future and past of the universe.

This world view has two features. One is determinism, abandoned in part when quantum mechanics began to emerge a century or so later. It is also the "nothing but" view of the universe which, for example, sees a man found guilty of murder as nothing but particles in motion. As the physicist Steven Weinberg put it, the explanatory arrows all point downwards from societies to people to organs to cells to biochemistry to chemistry and ultimately to physics.

Now we appear to be at the frontier of a new scientific world view. Many physicists, from Philip Anderson back in the 1970s to, more recently, Robert Laughlin, are coming to doubt the adequacy of reductionism. I am with them: I do not believe that the evolution of biosphere, economy and human culture are derivable from or reducible to physics. Physicists cannot deduce, simulate or confirm the detailed evolution of the biosphere that gave rise to the organised structure and processes that constitute, for example, your heart. Entities such as hearts, that have causal consequences, are "real" in their own right.

The second transition in our view of science is based on Darwinian pre-adaptations. Were we to ask Darwin what the function of the heart is, he would say, to pump blood; but the heart also makes heart sounds and these are not the function of the heart, which was selected, and hence exists, because pumping blood was of selective value. Darwin's idea of a pre-adaptation refers to a property of an organism - heart sounds, say - that is of no selective value in the present environment, but might become of selective value in some different environment and therefore be selected. An example is human middle-ear bones, which are derived from three adjacent jawbones of an early fish. Did a new function come to exist in the biosphere as part of human hearing? Yes. Did that development have consequences for the evolution of the biosphere? Yes.

Read the rest of this post. Kauffman is arguing in favor of a resacralizing of the world, a project I endorse. After all, in the Buddhist view, all things contain Buddha-nature, which makes all things sacred.

Andy Coghlan takes a different view in Religion a figment of human imagination, in a report on the work of Maurice Bloch.

Humans alone practice religion because they're the only creatures to have evolved imagination.

That's the argument of anthropologist Maurice Bloch of the London School of Economics. Bloch challenges the popular notion that religion evolved and spread because it promoted social bonding, as has been argued by some anthropologists.

Instead, he argues that first, we had to evolve the necessary brain architecture to imagine things and beings that don't physically exist, and the possibility that people somehow live on after they've died.

Once we'd done that, we had access to a form of social interaction unavailable to any other creatures on the planet. Uniquely, humans could use what Bloch calls the "transcendental social" to unify with groups, such as nations and clans, or even with imaginary groups such as the dead. The transcendental social also allows humans to follow the idealised codes of conduct associated with religion.

"What the transcendental social requires is the ability to live very largely in the imagination," Bloch writes.

"One can be a member of a transcendental group, or a nation, even though one never comes in contact with the other members of it," says Bloch. Moreover, the composition of such groups, "whether they are clans or nations, may equally include the living and the dead."

Modern-day religions still embrace this idea of communities bound with the living and the dead, such as the Christian notion of followers being "one body with Christ", or the Islamic "Ummah" uniting Muslims.

Read the rest of this article.

Interesting idea -- the transcendental social. But how do we know other animals do not do this. For example, elephants mourn their dead and return to mark the anniversary of a death in the memory (a group of elephants is, fittingly, a memory). This would require some ability to conceptualize time and individual identity, something usually ascribed only to humans.

Anyway, here is a little more of the article:

Bloch argues that religion is only one manifestation of this unique ability to form bonds with non-existent or distant people or value-systems.
"Religious-like phenomena in general are an inseparable part of a key adaptation unique to modern humans, and this is the capacity to imagine other worlds, an adaptation that I argue is the very foundation of the sociality of modern human society."

"Once we realise this omnipresence of the imaginary in the everyday, nothing special is left to explain concerning religion," he says.

Chris Frith of University College London, a co-organiser of a "Sapient Mind" meeting in Cambridge last September, thinks Bloch is right, but that "theory of mind" – the ability to recognise that other people or creatures exist, and think for themselves – might be as important as evolution of imagination.

It has always been assumed that humans are the only species with or capable of religion, but as I suggested above, that may not be true. Crows also recognize that other creatures exist and think for themselves -- and have a very good memory for those who have harmed them in some way.

Do crows and elephants (and other animals as well) have a God of some form? Does being able to conceive of an other that thinks and has an identity the only criteria for developing a religion? If so, then no doubt animals are capable of having a God.

I like the idea of a transcendent social, but I don't agree that it necessarily imagines a non-existent God. Rather, it might intuit a spiritual reality within or beyond the material world and create a "God" as a metaphor for that perceived truth.

In this sense, these two articles can both be true -- we need a more sacred understanding of the world, perhaps one that Kauffman suggests at the end of the first article:

Shall we use the "God" word? We do not have to, yet it is still our most powerful invented symbol. Our sense of God has evolved from Yahweh in the desert some 4500 years ago, a jealous, law-giving warrior God, to the God of love that Jesus taught. How many versions have people worshipped in the past 100,000 years?
Yet what is more awesome: to believe that God created everything in six days, or to believe that the biosphere came into being on its own, with no creator, and partially lawlessly? I find the latter proposition so stunning, so worthy of awe and respect, that I am happy to accept this natural creativity in the universe as a reinvention of "God". From it, we can build a sense of the sacred that encompasses all life and the planet itself. From it, we can change our value system across the globe and try, together, to ease the fears of religious fundamentalists with a safe, sacred space we can share.

Sounds good to me.

Blue October

Blue October is one of my newest favorite bands. Their radio-hit, Into the Ocean led me to buy the album, Foiled, and a previous album. I like what I hear.

Here are a couple of videos.

Calling You

Great Expectations (fan video) of A Quiet Mind

Hate Me & What if We Could (live)

You Make Me Smile (live - poor quality)

Dharma Quote: Not Seeing

[Tantra - Alex Grey]

A nice dharma quote to start the day.

Tibetan lamas often say: "Not seeing is the perfect seeing." Strange words, perhaps, but they have a profound meaning. They describe the advanced meditator's experience of spacious, universal reality, the experience beyond dualism.

-Lama Thubten Yeshe, "Introduction to Tantra"

Stephen Colbert Has Fun With Bill O'Reilly's "Meltdown" Video

Stephen Colbert shows the now infamous Bill O'Reilly meltdown video and then reveals his own "meltdown."

Measuring the 'Aeneid' on a Human Scale

For the first time in history, apparently, a woman has published a translation of the Aeneid. Sarah Ruden brings the epic into the human scale, and looks at the spiritual meaning underlying the mythic events.

From the Chronicle of Higher Education.

Here is an excerpt.

On the subject of Virgil's attitude toward war, Sarah Ruden warns against casting an ancient tragedy as some kind of modern political statement.

"People make a fundamental mistake arguing about the politics of the Aeneid," says Ruden, a visiting fellow at Yale Divinity School. "It's about things that have to be, about which people have no choice, and that means it's about submission to the divine will."

Ruden acknowledges "a lot of grappling" with that aspect of the Aeneid. "This runs up hard against my Quaker faith because Quakers are not strongly about accepting the divine will," she says. "People are bound to express their faith in God by going out and changing things for the better."

Born in 1962 in Bowling Green, Ohio, and raised in the countryside, Ruden grew up Methodist and became a Quaker late in her graduate training at Harvard University. She had already studied and translated Virgil as a classics major at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, where she wrote her senior thesis on the poet's Eclogues.

"It was all about stylistic hotdogging and emotional grandstanding," she says. "I'd had enough Latin by that time that I could see what an amazing writer he was."

She did her doctoral work in classics at Harvard. There, she recalls, "somebody told me, 'Don't work on Ovid. All of these women work on Ovid.'" Rather than study a writer known for his love elegies as well as the Metamorphoses, she chose the harder-edged satirist Petronius instead.

Scholars, she believes, should be careful not to wall themselves off. "Several generations of women have been trained in classical languages and literature just the same as men. But you still see many, many women working on love poetry — a tiny portion of the works that survive — and talking and writing endlessly about 'gender' in prescribed terms. It's like a seraglio."

Throughout her career, Ruden has not let gender determine which texts she works with or how she approaches them. She has published translations of Petronius' Satyricon, Aristophanes' Lysistrata, and the Homeric Hymns. Last year she arrived at Yale to work on her current project, which she describes as "an exploration of the letters of Paul against the background of Greco-Roman literature."

Ruden intends her translations for popular and classroom audiences rather than for fellow scholars. Like many of Virgil's translators, she is a published poet in her own right. She holds a master's degree from the Johns Hopkins University Writing Seminars.

The article provides a good overview of the recent (and many) translation of Virgil's classic, so go check it out.

Alisa Miller: Why We Know Less Than Ever About the World

Another entertaining and enlightening TED Talk, this one on the failure of US news sources to provide information about the world. I wish she had talked longer.

The news is really making is dumb.

Alisa Miller, head of Public Radio International, talks about why -- though we want to know more about the world than ever -- the US media is actually showing less. Eye-opening stats and graphs.

Alisa Miller is President and CEO of Public Radio International. She oversees the development of ome 400 hours of programming a week, bringing challenging radio programs to millions of listeners. She is responsible for making PRI programs such as This American Life accessible through satellite radio, and for spearheading the development of new programs such as the political humor show Fair Game. And yes, she is the first woman to take the helm of a public radio network.

Miller is an advocate for a global perspective in news programming. She notes that, even while society becomes more globally interconnected, "Americans seem to know less and less about the world around them." (Symptoms include the closure of foreign news bureaus -- and the increasing share of broadcast time devoted to Britney Spears.) Diversity in reporting, she says, is not just important -- it is vital for everyone who seeks to understand and act for good in an interdependent, increasingly complex world.

Animation by Blu - Stop-motion Animated Graffiti

This is making the round, but it's pretty damn cool so I thought I'd post it here for anyone who hasn't seen it. The piece is called Muto: an ambiguous animation painted on public walls. Utne Reader called it, "a stop-motion animated sequence composed of one continuous, outdoor painting." Sounds about right.

Here is a link to Blu's website.

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Thursday, May 15, 2008

Wednesday, May 14, 2008