BG 202: Resolving the Questions that Drive Us
Episode Description:
We finish up our discussion with meditation teacher Ken McLeod, touching on a number of fascinating and challenging topics. Ken speaks about the distinction between answering the questions that drive us, as opposed to simply understanding “what the Buddha taught.” He gets into where he thinks these questions originate from, and also what meaning evolution might have on our personal stories.
Ken also explores the dichotomy of lay vs. monastic practice, and uses several analogies to illustrate the differences, including from both music and sports. Vincent and Ken get into a spirited and philosophical discussion as to how far one can take these analogies and how accurate they might be when applied to Buddhist theory and practice.
This is part 2 of a two-part series. Listen to part 1, Pragmatic Buddhism.
Episode Links:
Transcript
One of the senior Western teachers of Buddhism today, Ken McLeod is also one of the most innovative. Known for his ability to explain difficult and subtle teachings, "he distills the nature and purpose of Buddhism to make it accessible for any newcomer without dumbing it down." (Phil Catalfo, Yoga Journal, July 2001).
Website: Unfettered Mind
Twitter: @KenMcLeod
Thursday, January 06, 2011
Buddhist Geeks 202: Resolving the Questions that Drive Us (Ken McLeod)
Wednesday, January 05, 2011
Dr. Pierre-Michel Bernier - Your Brain, Behind the Scenes
Your Brain, Behind the Scenes
Dr. Pierre-Michel Bernier discusses the incredible calculations your brain performs to plan even the simplest movements.
(istockphoto)We are always moving objects around us. But the seemingly trivial movements that we do all day (reaching for a coffee cup, grabbing a jacket, etc.) turn out to be not so simple after all. Behind the scenes and totally unconsciously, our brains are doing a tremendous number of calculations to establish where we are in relation to objects around us. As our vision is such a primary sense, it had been thought that the first step for the brain in planning movement was to create a visually based map of objects around us — even for objects that we couldn’t see. But in a recent paper in the journal Neuron, Dr. Pierre-Michel Bernier demonstrates that the method the brain uses for planning movement completely changes depending on the sensory inputs that the brain has to work with. Dr. Bernier, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Santa Barbara, discusses how the brain plans even very simple movements — like pointing — totally differently depending on whether the lights are on or off.
Jonah Lehrer - In Defense Of Therapy
Cool to see a neuroscientist defend therapy. Following this article from Jonah Lehrer (The Frontal Cortex), I want to include a look inside the battle over the DSM-5, also from Wired. We may never know the truth about what happened behind the scenes in the making of the new DSM because of a very restrictive nondisclosure agreement that all insiders were required to sign. That sucks.
If the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) have their way, we will not be doing psychotherapy, but rather, clinical neuroscience.
There has been more bickering and more behind-the-scenes chaos in the making of the new version of the Diagnostic and Statistics Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM for short) than most people who have not been following this process could ever imagine.In Defense Of Therapy
- By Jonah Lehrer
- December 14, 2010
Every period has its signature disorder. We live in the age of depression. Consider a brand new survey published in the Archives of General Psychiatry: Between 1998 and 2007, the percentage of Americans being treated for depression increased by more than 20 percent. Other studies estimate that somewhere between 20 and 40 percent of American adults will suffer from depression at some point in their life.
Obviously, there’s a dizzying array of forces that are causing this rise. Part of the problem is diagnosis, as people like Alan Horwitz and Jerome Wakefield have argued. Thanks to changes in the DSM, Horwitz and Wakefield insist that we’ve medicalized sadness, transforming anguish and its synonyms into a clinical condition.
But it remains unknown how much of the rise in depression is accounted for by changes in diagnosis. And I think it’s extremely important to not dismiss the likely possibility that, even if our diagnostic standards had remained constant, there would still be a rise in depression. In other words, is there something about the way we live now that’s making us extremely sad? Are these intensely negative feelings symptoms of a larger societal problem?
Hard questions, no easy answers. In this blog post, I’d like to focus instead on one of the troubling data points in this most recent medical survey, which is that the percentage of depressed subjects seeking psychotherapy for treatment declined dramatically between 1998 and 2007, from 53.6 percent to 43.1 percent. (This drop has come despite the fact that a majority of subjects say talk therapy is their preferred method of treatment.) Needless to say, pills have taken the place of therapists, as more than 75 percent of depressed patients are now treated with anti-depressants, which has led to a dramatic increase in medical spending on the disorder. Between 1998 and 2007, Medicare expenditures for depression increased from $0.52 billion (1998) to $2.25 billion (2007).
When anti-depressants work, they are little blue miracles. But they often don’t work, at least not at rates higher significantly higher than placebo. (Plus, they often have unpleasant side-effects, which leads more than half of patients to stop taking the drugs shortly after the worst symptoms disappear. And then they relapse, which helps explain why patients treated with SSRI’s have relapse rates above 75 percent.) And that’s why I’m troubled by the drop in talk therapy, as most studies demonstrate that the most effective treatment for depression is pharmaceuticals coupled with a good therapist. Furthermore, many different kinds of therapy can be effective. For instance, the same December 2010 issue of the Archives of General Psychiatry also contains an interesting comparative study of anti-depressants and mindfulness therapy in preventing relapse following an extended depressive episode. The mindfulness therapy itself was straightforward stuff, if time intensive. There were eight weekly group sessions of two hours each, plus a full day retreat and optional one-hour meditation classes. The subjects learned how to reflect upon their feelings with “non-judgmental awareness” and “self-compassion.” They were urged to apply their new mindfulness skills to everyday life challenges.
The results were stark. Not surprisingly, patients who escaped depression with the help of anti-depressants, and then stopped taking the drugs, relapsed about 70 percent of the time. The chemical boost was temporary. However, during the 18 month follow-up period, only 28 percent of patients in mindfulness therapy slipped back into the mental illness.
What we often forget is that therapy alters the chemical brain, just like a pill. It’s easy to dismiss words as airy nothings and talk therapy as mere talk. Sitting on a couch can seem like such an antiquated form of treatment. But the right kind of talk can fix our broken mind, helping us escape from the recursive loop of stress and negative emotion that’s making us depressed. Changing our thoughts is never easy and, in severe cases, might seem virtually impossible. We live busy lives and therapy requires hours of work and constant practice; our cortex can be so damn stubborn. But the data is clear: If we are seeking a long-lasting cure for depression, then it’s typically our most effective treatment.
In my opinion, as a distant observer of the whole process over the past many years, I see two issues at the heart of most of the conflict - money and worldview.
The money issues comes from Big Pharma and their influence over the process - the more things that they can find a way to pathologize and treat with drugs, the more money they make. For example, depression is no more responsive to Paxil than to sugar pills (and has a lot of serious side effects) but its maker brings in billions of dollars a year. So why not treat sadness as part of the depression spectrum, then they can throw some pills at it and make even more money (except that withdrawal from Paxil is sometimes life-threatening).
They other issue in my perspective is worldviews - the mechanistic, objective view that sees mind and consciousness (and anything we might consider a self) as a function of the brain. On the other side are those who value subjective experience as important and possibly prior to brain states (i.e., experience shapes brain chemistry) so that talk therapy can change the brain and make it function better.
In reality, for most of us out here, it's both/and, not either/or - but in the DSM process there seems to be a pissing war. And we, the therapists (and you, the patients) are the real losers.
Read the whole article.Inside the Battle to Define Mental Illness
Every so often Al Frances says something that seems to surprise even him. Just now, for instance, in the predawn darkness of his comfortable, rambling home in Carmel, California, he has broken off his exercise routine to declare that “there is no definition of a mental disorder. It’s bullshit. I mean, you just can’t define it.” Then an odd, reflective look crosses his face, as if he’s taking in the strangeness of this scene: Allen Frances, lead editor of the fourth edition of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (universally known as the DSM-IV), the guy who wrote the book on mental illness, confessing that “these concepts are virtually impossible to define precisely with bright lines at the boundaries.” For the first time in two days, the conversation comes to an awkward halt.
But he recovers quickly, and back in the living room he finishes explaining why he came out of a seemingly contented retirement to launch a bitter and protracted battle with the people, some of them friends, who are creating the next edition of the DSM. And to criticize them not just once, and not in professional mumbo jumbo that would keep the fight inside the professional family, but repeatedly and in plain English, in newspapers and magazines and blogs. And to accuse his colleagues not just of bad science but of bad faith, hubris, and blindness, of making diseases out of everyday suffering and, as a result, padding the bottom lines of drug companies. These aren’t new accusations to level at psychiatry, but Frances used to be their target, not their source. He’s hurling grenades into the bunker where he spent his entire career.
One influential advocate for diagnosing bipolar disorder in kids failed to disclose money he received from the makers of the bipolar drug Risperdal.As a practicing psychotherapist myself, I can attest that this is a startling turn. But when Frances tries to explain it, he resists the kinds of reasons that mental health professionals usually give each other, the ones about character traits or personality quirks formed in childhood. He says he doesn’t want to give ammunition to his enemies, who have already shown their willingness to “shoot the messenger.” It’s not an unfounded concern. In its first official response to Frances, the APA diagnosed him with “pride of authorship” and pointed out that his royalty payments would end once the new edition was published—a fact that “should be considered when evaluating his critique and its timing.”
Frances, who claims he doesn’t care about the royalties (which amount, he says, to just 10 grand a year), also claims not to mind if the APA cites his faults. He just wishes they’d go after the right ones—the serious errors in the DSM-IV. “We made mistakes that had terrible consequences,” he says. Diagnoses of autism, attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, and bipolar disorder skyrocketed, and Frances thinks his manual inadvertently facilitated these epidemics—and, in the bargain, fostered an increasing tendency to chalk up life’s difficulties to mental illness and then treat them with psychiatric drugs.
The insurgency against the DSM-5 (the APA has decided to shed the Roman numerals) has now spread far beyond just Allen Frances. Psychiatrists at the top of their specialties, clinicians at prominent hospitals, and even some contributors to the new edition have expressed deep reservations about it. Dissidents complain that the revision process is in disarray and that the preliminary results, made public for the first time in February 2010, are filled with potential clinical and public relations nightmares. Although most of the dissenters are squeamish about making their concerns public—especially because of a surprisingly restrictive nondisclosure agreement that all insiders were required to sign—they are becoming increasingly restive, and some are beginning to agree with Frances that public pressure may be the only way to derail a train that he fears will “take psychiatry off a cliff.”
At stake in the fight between Frances and the APA is more than professional turf, more than careers and reputations, more than the $6.5 million in sales that the DSM averages each year. The book is the basis of psychiatrists’ authority to pronounce upon our mental health, to command health care dollars from insurance companies for treatment and from government agencies for research. It is as important to psychiatrists as the Constitution is to the US government or the Bible is to Christians. Outside the profession, too, the DSM rules, serving as the authoritative text for psychologists, social workers, and other mental health workers; it is invoked by lawyers in arguing over the culpability of criminal defendants and by parents seeking school services for their children. If, as Frances warns, the new volume is an “absolute disaster,” it could cause a seismic shift in the way mental health care is practiced in this country. It could cause the APA to lose its franchise on our psychic suffering, the naming rights to our pain.
Allen Frances is worried that the DSM-5 will "take psychiatry off a cliff."
Photo: Susanna Howe; photographed at Café Sabarsky, Neue Galerie, NYCThis is hardly the first time that defining mental illness has led to rancor within the profession. It happened in 1993, when feminists denounced Frances for considering the inclusion of “late luteal phase dysphoric disorder” (formerly known as premenstrual syndrome) as a possible diagnosis for DSM-IV. It happened in 1980, when psychoanalysts objected to the removal of the word neurosis—their bread and butter—from the DSM-III. It happened in 1973, when gay psychiatrists, after years of loud protest, finally forced a reluctant APA to acknowledge that homosexuality was not and never had been an illness. Indeed, it’s been happening since at least 1922, when two prominent psychiatrists warned that a planned change to the nomenclature would be tantamount to declaring that “the whole world is, or has been, insane.”
Some of this disputatiousness is the hazard of any professional specialty. But when psychiatrists say, as they have during each of these fights, that the success or failure of their efforts could sink the whole profession, they aren’t just scoring rhetorical points. The authority of any doctor depends on their ability to name a patient’s suffering. For patients to accept a diagnosis, they must believe that doctors know—in the same way that physicists know about gravity or biologists about mitosis—that their disease exists and that they have it. But this kind of certainty has eluded psychiatry, and every fight over nomenclature threatens to undermine the legitimacy of the profession by revealing its dirty secret: that for all their confident pronouncements, psychiatrists can’t rigorously differentiate illness from everyday suffering. This is why, as one psychiatrist wrote after the APA voted homosexuality out of the DSM, “there is a terrible sense of shame among psychiatrists, always wanting to show that our diagnoses are as good as the scientific ones used in real medicine.”
Since 1980, when the DSM-III was published, psychiatrists have tried to solve this problem by using what is called descriptive diagnosis: a checklist approach, whereby illnesses are defined wholly by the symptoms patients present. The main virtue of descriptive psychiatry is that it doesn’t rely on unprovable notions about the nature and causes of mental illness, as the Freudian theories behind all those “neuroses” had done. Two doctors who observe a patient carefully and consult the DSM’s criteria lists usually won’t disagree on the diagnosis—something that was embarrassingly common before 1980. But descriptive psychiatry also has a major problem: Its diagnoses are nothing more than groupings of symptoms. If, during a two-week period, you have five of the nine symptoms of depression listed in the DSM, then you have “major depression,” no matter your circumstances or your own perception of your troubles. “No one should be proud that we have a descriptive system,” Frances tells me. “The fact that we do only reveals our limitations.” Instead of curing the profession’s own malady, descriptive psychiatry has just covered it up.
The DSM-5 battle comes at a time when psychiatry’s authority seems more tenuous than ever. In terms of both research dollars and public attention, molecular biology—neuroscience and genetics—has come to dominate inquiries into what makes us tick. And indeed, a few tantalizing results from these disciplines have cast serious doubt on long-held psychiatric ideas. Take schizophrenia and bipolar disorder: For more than a century, those two illnesses have occupied separate branches of the psychiatric taxonomy. But research suggests that the same genetic factors predispose people to both illnesses, a discovery that casts doubt on whether this fundamental division exists in nature or only in the minds of psychiatrists. Other results suggest new diagnostic criteria for diseases: Depressed patients, for example, tend to have cell loss in the hippocampal regions, areas normally rich in serotonin. Certain mental illnesses are alleviated by brain therapies, such as transcranial magnetic stimulation, even as the reasons why are not entirely understood.
Some mental health researchers are convinced that the DSM might soon be completely revolutionized or even rendered obsolete. In recent years, the National Institute of Mental Health has launched an effort to transform psychiatry into what its director, Thomas Insel, calls clinical neuroscience.
Joseph Bottum: Charles Taylor Is an Underrated Philosopher
here.But he is also Catholic, which I suspect has resulted in his dismissal from the philosophical elite (Zizek, Deleuze, Habermas, and others).
Here is some brief background on his views, via Wikipedia:
Joseph Bottum, in Standpoint, argues that it is a mistake to not acknowledge Taylor among the elite, while instead recognizing flash-in-the-pans such as Nassim Nicholas Taleb.Views
In order to understand his views it is helpful to understand his philosophical background, especially his writings on Hegel, Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty. Taylor rejects naturalism and formalist epistemologies.
In his essay To Follow a Rule, Taylor explores why people can fail to follow rules, and what kind of knowledge is it that allows a person to successfully follow a rule, such as the arrow on a sign. The intellectualist tradition presupposes that to follow directions we must know a set of propositions and premises about how to follow directions. But how do we know whether or not the directions are adequate?
Taylor argues that Wittgenstein's solution is that all interpretation of rules draws upon a tacit background. This background is not more rules or premises, but what Wittgenstein calls "forms of life." More specifically, Wittgenstein says in the Philosophical Investigations that "Obeying a rule is a practice." Taylor situates the interpretation of rules within the practices that are incorporated into our bodies in the form of habits, dispositions, and tendencies.
Following Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Michael Polanyi, and Wittgenstein, Taylor argues that it is mistaken to presuppose that our understanding of the world is primarily mediated by representations. It is only against an unarticulated background that representations can make sense to us. On occasion we do follow rules, but Taylor reminds us that rules do not contain the principles of their own application.
Communitarian critique of Liberalism
Taylor (as well as Alasdair MacIntyre, Michael Walzer, Michael Sandel, and Gad Barzilai) is associated with a communitarian critique of liberal theory's understanding of the "self." Communitarians emphasize the importance of social institutions in the development of individual meaning and identity.
In his 1991 Massey Lecture, "The Malaise of Modernity," Taylor argued that political theorists, from John Locke and Thomas Hobbes to John Rawls and Ronald Dworkin, have neglected the way in which individuals arise within the context supplied by societies. A more realistic understanding of the "self" recognizes the social background against which life choices gain importance and meaning.
You can watch some videos of Taylor speaking at the links below.
The philosopher Charles Taylor is a tall man — tall tall, as Hollywood agents say, to distinguish ordinary people from the stratospheric types — and he sprawls in his chair as he talks. Sprawls on the dais as he teaches.Sprawls on the page as he writes, for that matter, which may be why he seems a little underrated these days. In one sense it's absurd to suggest the man needs more appreciation. In 1989, he published Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity, which has only Alasdair MacIntyre's 1981 After Virtue as competition for the most-praised book of philosophy in English over the past 30 years. He came to Britain from his native Canada as a Rhodes Scholar and stayed to complete his D.Phil under Sir Isaiah Berlin and G. E. M. Anscombe. Along the way, he become a fellow of All Souls and the Chichele professor at Oxford, all while maintaining a professorship back home at McGill University, Montreal.
You may think philosophy doesn't pay — and in that, you'd be joined by every philosopher's wife, from Xanthippe onward — but Taylor's work has won him both the £1 million Templeton Prize in 2007 and the £375,000 Kyoto Prize in 2008.
And yet, in another sense, Taylor has faded. He's an eminence, everyone admits, and then they go away to talk about whatever latest bit of ephemera is making the move from the fringe of upper-middlebrow academics to the ballyhoo of the general public. Nassim Nicholas Taleb's The Black Swan, for an annoyingly present example — a book that takes a few reasonable observations about statistics and builds them into a rickety tower of rules for life and business. (The takeaway? It's better to be lucky than good.)
The sprawl of Taylor's prose has always prevented the reduction of his work to this kind of catchphrase, as does, in truth, the sprawl of his thought. Where Sources of the Self took up everything from Homer to Hegel, Taylor's latest major work, the 2007 A Secular Age, examines the sources of modern social structures by describing everything from the early Middle Ages to Wittgenstein. It's a testament to the book that, at 896 pages, it became as popular as it did.
Besides, every pseudo-philosophical business book like The Black Swan — or pseudo-scientific atheist book like Richard Dawkins's The God Delusion, or pseudo-intellectual economics book like Levitt and Dubner's Freakonomics — is finally an exercise in instrumental reason. We want to get something useful out of them, and Taylor has spent decades decrying the instrumentalising of reason, the disenchantment of the world that follows from the self-contradictory demand for usefulness.
We do genuinely desire usefulness, even while we never quite seem to ask what makes usefulness a desirable thing. Where MacIntyre sees the incommensurability of differing systems of ethical reasoning, Taylor insists that modernity has bequeathed us a surprisingly comprehensive consensus: on the instrumentality of nature, yes, but also on human rights, the reduction of suffering, self-determination, freedom and equality.
What we lack, however, is something whose absence threatens the existence of these common goods, for we do not share any account of why they are good. We have been beaten down by modernity so systematically that we refuse, like a badly broken horse, the least suggestion of a source for morality. That allows people like Dawkins to ride us around the show ring for a while, but once all the reasons to be moral have finally been debunked, there will come a day — call it Peter Singer Day — when people start noticing that morality itself has become as illusory as they believed the sources of morality to be.
Throughout Taylor's work there have been certain constants. His rejection of the naturalism of the scientific revolution as a reasonable metaphysics, a coherent account of the world, for example. So, too, his insistence, manifest most clearly in his 1992 The Ethics of Authenticity, that selves are formed in community, even when the community has somehow decided, communally, that we each carry around our own unique, non-communal selves.
Taylor is the very model of a post-analytic philosopher, using the precise tools of arid British philosophy to dig in the rich but sloppy soil of Continental thought. He's also something of a postmodern, or perhaps post-postmodern, as when, in A Secular Age, he historicises and deconstructs Nietzsche's historicising and deconstructing of belief in God. Most of all, he's a devout Catholic — that great escape, as Chesterton once put it, from the terrible burden of being a child of one's time — and he has always seen the ways that God, the true source of morality, keeps slipping through the attempts to squeeze Him out of human life and human culture.
No wonder such books as Sources of the Self and A Secular Age sprawl across their pages. Charles Taylor is a tall man — tall tall, as they say — and perhaps we're not used to looking up enough to see how far he's reached. But surely we could raise our eyes, just a little more.
- Can Human Action Be Explained?; Charles Taylor gives a lecture at Columbia University
- A Political Ethic of Solidarity; Charles Taylor gives a lecture on a future politics self-consciously based on differing views and foundations in Milan
- The Future of The Secular; Charles Taylor gives lecture at the New School
- "Spiritual Forgetting"; Charles Taylor at awarding of Templeton Prize
Keith Parsons: The "Case for Theism" Is a Fraud; Abandons Philosophy of Religion
Over the past ten years I have published, in one venue or another, about twenty things on the philosophy of religion. I have a book on the subject, God and Burden of Proof, and another criticizing Christian apologetics, Why I am not a Christian. During my academic career I have debated William Lane Craig twice and creationists twice. I have written one master’s thesis and one doctoral dissertation in the philosophy of religion, and I have taught courses on the subject numerous times. But no more. I’ve had it. I’m going back to my real interests in the history and philosophy of science and, after finishing a few current commitments, I’m writing nothing more on the subject. I could give lots of reasons. For one thing, I think a number of philosophers have made the case for atheism and naturalism about as well as it can be made. Graham Oppy, Jordan Howard Sobel, Nicholas Everitt, Michael Martin, Robin Le Poidevin and Richard Gale have produced works of enormous sophistication that devastate the theistic arguments in their classical and most recent formulations. Ted Drange, J.L. Schellenberg, Andrea Weisberger, and Nicholas Trakakis have presented powerful, and, in my view, unanswerable atheological arguments. Gregory Dawes has a terrific little book showing just what is wrong with theistic “explanations.” Erik Wielenberg shows very clearly that ethics does not need God. With honest humility, I really do not think that I have much to add to these extraordinary works.
A Philosopher of Religion Calls it Quits
Keith Parsons announces that the "case for theism" is a fraud, and sparks a firestorm.
By Julia Galef
When philosophy professor Keith Parsons posted an announcement on his blog, The Secular Outpost, explaining why he had decided to abandon philosophy of religion, he expected only his handful of regular readers to take notice. After a decade teaching philosophy of religion at the University of Houston, during which time he founded the philosophy of religion journal Philo and published over twenty books and articles in the field, Parsons hung up his hat on September 1st:
I have to confess that I now regard “the case for theism” as a fraud and I can no longer take it seriously enough to present it to a class as a respectable philosophical position—no more than I could present intelligent design as a legitimate biological theory. BTW, in saying that I now consider the case for theism to be a fraud, I do not mean to charge that the people making that case are frauds who aim to fool us with claims they know to be empty. No, theistic philosophers and apologists are almost painfully earnest and honest... I just cannot take their arguments seriously any more, and if you cannot take something seriously, you should not try to devote serious academic attention to it.To his surprise, the announcement went viral. Posted and reposted on blogs such as Leiter Reports, The Prosblogion, and Debunking Christianity, it generated hundreds of comments in the subsequent weeks about the status of the field and whether Parsons’ criticisms were warranted. “It’s not that often philosophers renounce fields!” says Brian Leiter, a philosopher at the University of Chicago, at Leiter Reports. Parsons’ incendiary choice of words likely also bore some responsibility for the reaction. “I’m afraid what precipitated the thing going viral is that I said it was a fraud, which I shouldn’t have said, because ‘fraud’ implies an intentional attempt to fool people,” Parsons says.
The "miracle" is that people believe at all
His word choice may have been the spark, but it landed on some particularly dry kindling: a general tension over the legitimacy of philosophy of religion in philosophy as a whole. Against the very nonreligious field of philosophy (73% of philosophers identify as atheist, according to one recent survey), the Christian-dominated subfield of philosophy of religion stands out.
“I think most philosophers basically agree with a book John Mackie wrote many years ago called The Miracle of Theism, the idea being that it was a miracle anybody could believe that,” Leiter says. To philosophers who feel like the case against God was settled hundreds of years ago, philosophy of religion often seems like apologetics, an effort to rationalize preexisting beliefs. “The brouhaha about Parsons brought to the fore something that does exist, a contempt or skepticism about the validity of philosophy of religion by many philosophers,” says John Fischer, another philosopher of religion based at the University of California Riverside, who, like Parsons, is an atheist.
Of course, post-hoc rationalization happens in other subfields as well, whether because philosophers are bringing their own personal beliefs to the discussion, or because they have already committed publicly to a particular viewpoint and thus have an incentive not to back down. “For many people, in just about any area of philosophy, if they have a professional stake in their view they’ll accept some pretty implausible results,” Fischer says. But philosophy of religion is arguably a special case.
Compared to more esoteric subfields like philosophy of language or metaphysics, philosophy of religion is much more likely to attract people with deep-seated, lifelong beliefs about the topic. Because viewpoints in philosophy of religion are so emotionally fraught and bound up with a person’s lifestyle, values, and relationships, changing one’s mind is a daunting prospect. The central point of contention—the existence of God—is most fraught of all, not to mention starkly binary. “In philosophy of religion you do have this gap—either God exists or not. There’s no middle ground,” Parsons says. However, even philosophers bent on keeping their core beliefs can help move discussions forward. As in other subfields, much of philosophy of religion consists in working out the logical implications of arguments, which is less a matter of finding the right path than mapping out which paths exist.
Even in paleontology, the bones are there
Take, for example, the evolution of the “argument from evil,” which holds that the existence of evil in the world is incompatible with a deity that is simultaneously all-knowing, all-powerful, and all-good. In the 1970s, several leading philosophers of religion broke the argument down into a “logical” version (that any amount of evil is logically incompatible with such a god) which most philosophers consider defeated, and an “evidential” version (that certain amounts or types of evil we observe in our world are evidence against such a god) which remains a thorny problem. "Distinguishing between the logical and the evidential arguments helped clarify the types of theistic arguments that might serve as rebuttals,” says Craig Duncan, a philosopher at Ithaca College. “So even if people aren’t changing from theism to atheism and vice versa, the positions in the field get stated with increasing sophistication.”
It’s also easier to be an atheist philosopher of religion if your main motivation is exploring interesting paths, regardless of where they begin or end. Fischer, for example, says, “I find the arguments extremely creative and subtle, and so I find it interesting to explore them even though I myself do not accept religious starting points.” (In fact, he suggested, the very pressure that some philosophers of religion feel to rationalize their beliefs may be to thank for the subfield’s high levels of creativity.) By contrast, Parsons’ background in the sciences (he obtained his doctorate in the history and philosophy of science at University of Pittsburgh) made him wary of unfettered reasoning. “There’s so little empirical grounding and constraint in philosophy. Even in paleontology, a so-called soft science, the bones are there,” Parsons says. “You can go measure them, look at them. You can’t say anything the bones won’t let you say.”
Keeping an eye on the truth was also a matter of practical importance for Parsons, who was alarmed by the support for Intelligent Design creationism among philosophy of religion’s most influential names. These include Alvin Plantinga and Peter van Inwagen, who led the subfield’s resurgence in the 1970s and ’80s, and William Lane Craig, an Evangelical who popularizes the subfield’s arguments for God in widely-attended public debates. “One of the things the really active conservative Christians covet enormously, more than anything else, is intellectual respectability. And they think they have found it in some of the arguments from these philosophers of religion,” Parsons said.
Although Parsons is done arguing with a field that seems committed to a particular perspective, he concludes his post by saying that he hopes others will continue the fight. But what he doesn’t make explicit in his post is a disheartening subtext to his decision: that in our pursuit of truth, argument may only take us so far. “Philosophy of religion,” says Parsons, “is inevitably speculative and inconclusive.” Although he has no doubt that the theistic arguments for God’s existence have been thoroughly rebutted, he allows that the atheistic arguments he finds persuasive might not be nearly as persuasive to another rational person who happens to have different intuitions.
“There are certain things William Lane Craig takes to be metaphysical intuitions, like that it’s undeniable that the universe must have had a cause—and for me it’s not. My intuitions are quite different,” Parsons says. And what then? He adds, “And then, once we’ve reached that point, there’s just no further to go.”
~ Julia Galef is a New York-based writer and public speaker specializing in science, technology, and rationality. She serves on the board of directors of the New York City Skeptics, co-hosts their official podcast, Rationally Speaking, and co-writes the Rationally Speaking blog. She received her B.A. in statistics from Columbia in 2005.
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Repressing The Inner Voice - Giving Away Power
Repressing The Inner Voice
Giving Away Power
Giving away our power is something we have been taught since childhood by unaware adults in our lives.
In many ways, we are taught from the time we are children to give away our power to others. When we were told to kiss and hug relatives or friends of the family when we didn't want to, for example, we were learning to override our inner sense of knowing and our right to determine for ourselves what we want to do. This repression continued, most likely, in many experiences at school and in situations at work. At this point, we may not even know how to hold on to our power, because giving it away is so automatic and ingrained.
To some degree, giving our energy to other people is simply part of the social contract, and we feel that we have to do it in order to survive. It is possible to exchange energy in a way that preserves our inner integrity and stability. This begins in a small way: by listening to the voice that continues to let us know what we want, no matter how many times we override its messages.
Other examples of how we give away our power are buying into trends, letting other people always make decisions for us, not voting, and not voicing an opinion when an inappropriate joke is made. But with not giving our power away we must also be aware of the opposite side, which is standing in our power but being aggressive. Being aggressive is a form of fear, and the remedy is to let our inner balance come back into play.
As we build a relationship with our power, and follow it, we begin to see that we don't always have to do what we're being asked to do by others, and we don't have to jump on every trend. All we have to do is have the confidence to listen to our own voice and let it guide us as we make our own decisions in life and remember the necessity for balance.
Tuesday, January 04, 2011
My Review - David Richo's Daring to Trust: Opening Ourselves to Real Love and Intimacy
David Richo is a psychotherapist and well-known author. His many popular books combine Buddhism, poetry, and Jungian psychology to create tools for personal and spiritual transformation. I have enjoyed several of his books in the past, including the the three listed below.- How to Be an Adult in Relationships: The Five Keys to Mindful Loving
- When the Past Is Present: Healing the Emotional Wounds that Sabotage our Relationships
- Shadow Dance: Liberating the Power and Creativity of Your Dark Side
Here is a brief bio of David Richo from his page at Amazon.com:
David Richo, PhD, is a therapist and author who leads popular workshops on personal and spiritual growth. He received his BA in psychology from Saint John's Seminary in Brighton, Massachusetts, in 1962, his MA in counseling psychology from Fairfield University in 1969, and his PhD in clinical psychology from Sierra University in 1984. Since 1976, Richo has been a licensed marriage, family, and child counselor in California. In addition to practicing psychotherapy, Richo teaches courses at Santa Barbara City College and the University of California Berkeley at Berkeley, and has taught at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, Pacifica Graduate Institute, and Santa Barbara Graduate Institute. He is a clinical supervisor for the Community Counseling Center in Santa Barbara, California.
I was a fan of Richo's When the Past Is Present, so when the opportunity arose to review this new book, I accepted. However, I was sent an unformatted galley for the Kindle, so any material I quote will not have page numbers, and the Kindle locations will be approximate because of the lack of layout in the galley.
On to the review . . . .
So, think back on all of your failed relationships. Can you identify a common factor in all of them that caused them to fail? If you, like me, can identify a lack of trust (which manifests in many ways, including emotional distancing, not being vulnerable, or even more obvious issues such as cheating), then this is the book that may help change that pattern.
Richo argues that trust (and its failure) is at the root of most relationship problems. Many authors would have written a book that simply looks at the issue of trust and offers various platitudes or strategies to reframe our issues with trust - perhaps with some silly argument that men and women are from different planets. Fortunately for us, Richo did not write that book.
Rather, in the vein of his earlier book, When the Past Is Present, Richo asks us to look at our own lives and make honest assessments of our ability to attach with others:
We can address, process, resolve, and integrate the pain and dysfunction of our past. To address means to reflect upon, appraise, and challenge our beliefs about an experience. We then process our experience—that is, feel the feelings that arise and notice how they connect to our past. Then we can move toward resolving our issue. This means no longer being held up in our move toward relating with others. We then integrate our work into our lifestyle. We do this when we take the necessary but risky steps toward trusting others without being stopped or driven by fears that restrained us in the past. - Highlight Loc. 400-404
Doing our own work, real shadow work (remember that Richo employs Jungian theory in his books), is a crucial part of the process. It's also a way that we can identify and begin to heal some of our attachment failures from childhood.
Our trust capacity is proportional to the trustworthiness we have found in all our fellow travelers on life’s voyage, especially in Mom and Dad. Thus, we are not alone in building our flotation skills on life’s tempestuous sea. Trustworthy people in our lives from childhood to the present moment live on in our psyches as accompanying and stabilizing presences. They become part of our inner resources, the psychological and spiritual structures in ourselves that give us power to face threats and deal with our needs. - Highlight Loc. 67-70
Richo employs attachment theory frequently, although not in such a way that non-psychologist readers will struggle with the terminology or the meaning. Essentially, out attachment patterns (secure of several forms of insecure) that we acquire in childhood have a powerful influence on our adult relationships.
Richo explains three of the insecure forms of attachment (avoidant, ambivalent, and disorganized) in the following passage (I'm presenting this as bullet points for clarity):
- Anxious-avoidant children seek constant assurance, approval, and attention from their caregivers, and then as adults, they may demand this from partners. They may cling to others and come across as excessively dependent. They are more pessimistic about themselves and others and cannot easily trust themselves. They also find it hard to trust others because they believe they are unworthy of meriting enduring love from them.
- Anxious-ambivalent children are compulsively independent. As adults, they may continue that style. They see themselves as self-reliant and give the impression of not needing close bonds with others. They often conceal their authentic feelings. If someone rejects them, they simply absent themselves, making the resolution of issues in the relationship impossible. If their partner clings, they become distant or aggressive, being quite alert to what feels like engulfment.
- In addition, there is the category of the disorganized person. This person can focus neither on self nor on other because the original experience of engaging and responding was threatening and bizarre. In childhood, he felt fright with no remedy possible, a style not sustainable for long. As a result, a disorganized person becomes fragmented easily. He can fall apart in stressful situations since he lacks the resilience and equanimity that come from security. - Highlight Loc. 451-60
He comes back to attachment theory in various ways throughout the book, which I appreciated quite a bit. When we can begin to see that most people we know and with whom we may enter into relationship are doing the best they can with the emotional patterns learned as infants and toddlers (including ourselves), it fosters in us a compassion for others, and an unwillingness to so easily blame empathic failures on intent - we see the wounding behind the action, and we understand that it is rarely intentional.
* * * * *
In order to get fully on board with Richo in this book, knowing his definition of trust and how it functions is important:
Trust is not a feeling. It begins as a belief about the other, based on our own surmise or on the promises made to us. Then, as the evidence mounts that someone is indeed reliable, our trust becomes an ongoing quality of the relationship. A sense of safety and security flows from that reliability, though, of course, trust can be damaged at any time. Safety refers to an inner sense that no harm will come to us for freely being ourselves in feeling, word and deed. Security refers to an inner sense that someone will be there for us. - Highlight Loc. 159-62Most importantly, however, he is asking us to be adults in how we conceive of trust:
The foundation of adult trust is not “You will never hurt me.” It is “I trust myself with whatever you do.” We will still be stunned, confused, and grieved by the betrayals of those we trust. But “Please don’t ever hurt me” strikes a note of victimization. Within our stronger self, we might realize: people sometimes break promises, turn out differently from what we expected them to be, change their preferences, and so forth. The adult response may sound like this: “I am prepared to deal with disappointment if and when that might happen—hopefully, never. The more invested I am in my own ideas about reality, the more those experiences will feel like victimizations rather than the ups and downs of relating. Actually, I believe that the less I conceptualize things that way, the more likely it is that people will want to stay by me, because they will not feel burdened, consciously or unconsciously, by my projections, judgments, entitlements, or unrealistic expectations.” - Highlight Loc. 178-85This sounds easy enough, don't you think? In my own experience I can say it's much easier than it sounds. For years, my idea of trust was "please don't hurt me if I open myself to you." And I always got hurt. I was operating under this premise that Richo names - a projection we put onto the other person.
We imagine that implicit in “I love you” is “I won’t leave you.”
Over the years, I have learned to open myself to those who feel trustworthy (based on experience) and to know that if I get hurt, it will be okay, I will be sad but I will survive. I think this is what Richo is asking of us in this book.
As a neuroscience geek, I generally look for some evidence that the author has done adequate research in this area as well. So when we talk about trust, one of the things we must address is the physical element of trust that grows through touch. When we touch or are touched, our brains release oxytocin, "the cuddle hormone," as it has been dubbed in the press. This is also an element of our primary attachment to a caregiver when we are infants.
Oxytocin enters the bloodstream through closeness, cuddling, touch, orgasm. It is also released in women during breast-feeding, so that the mother-child connection can happen in a calm atmosphere. Less stress means more safety, comfort, and security, the essential elements of trust that facilitate bonding. For instance, brain scans have identified how areas in the brain that contain oxytocin become activated when we remember the people we love or look at photos of them. From a physical perspective, the orbitofrontal cortex is crucial to our capacity to handle our emotions, to understand and receive the emotions of others, and to manage the stresses of daily life. Its growth is directly influenced by interactions within a mother-child bond, especially in physical touch. Thus, our original home and community environment as well as the behavior of our primary caregivers have a direct impact on the evolution of structures in our infant brain, structures that are not fully developed for five years. Our emotional and physical relationship with our parents and significant others is a driving force in how we become who we are. - Highlight Loc. 255-63
And more:
Regarding touching, it is central to trusting. Without it we may wonder if someone really cares about us. Many of us are, and have always been, touch-starved. We may have suppressed our needs for contact and communion—which is a form of despair about finding what we need in others. In adulthood we may look to sex as a substitute for the touch and holding we need. Then we use our genitals and those of others to do what hearts are supposed to do. - Highlight Loc. 266-69Once we get the reality that trust is both an interpersonal quality in our relationships AND an intrapersonal experience of our resilience and ability to handle pain and hurt, then we can move on to look at how we manifest trust (or love) in our relationships. For this, Richo offers the "five A's": attention, acceptance, appreciation, affection, and allowing.
The practice of the five A’s is a path out of grandiose narcissism into the possibility of relatedness: Paying attention to a partner frees a person from self-absorption. Acceptance of the other frees a partner from judgment of the other. Appreciation is a loving alternative to indifference and resentment. Showing affection without always demanding that it lead to sex facilitates a rich and deep closeness. Letting go of control makes it possible to honor the freedom of the other, the real meaning of allowing. - Highlight Loc. 882-85As important as these Five A's are to a relationship, however, this is only one of six qualities that must be in place in order for us to be in a healthy relationship (this list also comprises his definition of a long-term relationship):
It is wise to trust when we see at least these six factors consistently present in the relationship: 1. Sincere work on letting go of ego for the success of the relationship. 2. A continual giving of the five A’s, shown by attunement to our feelings. 3. The abiding sense that the relationship offers a secure base from which each partner can explore and a safe haven to which each can return. 4. A series of kept agreements. 5. Mutuality in decision making. 6. A willingness to work problems out with each other by addressing, processing, resolving them together. This includes a willingness to declare our pain about what is missing in the relationship and our appreciation of what is fulfilling. These six also serve as the definition of long-term commitment. Trust then can be defined as what happens in us in response to evidence that a commitment has been made to us. Otherwise, we live on guard and our ego has to grow proportionally as our protector, albeit always afraid underneath. - Highlight Loc. 894-901
Richo suggests that when we experience the Five A's from a partner, our ego gets to relax its vigilance, need for authority, and its fear and stress in favor of love and the increased self-esteem that these experiences can offer: "being valued; making useful changes; being approved, admired, and understood; being pleased about our body; and having the space to make the choices that reflect who we are."
Throughout the book there are exercises, meditations, and worksheets to help is implement these ideas in our lives and our relationships.
Based on the quality of the information, the offering of tools, and the wisdom Richo brings to the text, I would recommend this book alongside John Welwood's Perfect Love, Imperfect Relationships: Healing the Wound of the Heart or Robert Augustus Masters' Transformation Through Intimacy: The Journey Toward Mature Monogamy. If you have been reading my blogs for any length of time, you'll know that is high praise.
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More on Antonio Damasio's Self Comes to Mind
For balance, below this I will also post another less-than-favorable review of the book, via John Bickle at the New Scientist's Culture Lab blog.
Where Consciousness Comes From
For Antonio Damasio, author of Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain, the human mind is certainly an astounding thing, but it’s not as unique as many of us may think.
“One of the main points about this book is to dispel the myth that we are alone in the specialness of mind and consciousness,” Damasio said to the full house at the RAND Corporation. “I believe what we call mind and conscious mind are the current end product of a long period of evolution.”
Damasio went on to explain where the mind began, how it works, and what it allows humans to do — from thinking about the weekend to building civilizations.
Bacteria, fish, and us
The story of the mind begins even before the story of the brain, with unicellular creatures. Today, animals, including simple ones like frogs and fish, are quite likely to have what Damasio called a “proto-self.” “I cannot prove it in the final quality of proof — which would be to get their testimony, but the fish can’t tell me, nor can the frog,” Damasio said. In any case, he added, “The burden is on us to disprove that they don’t rather than prove that they do.” The rate of brain evolution, Damasio noted in Q&A, is a mystery, though it’s clear the proto-self is millions of years old.
Beyond the proto-self is what Damasio called the “core self”, which does require a complex interaction between an organism and the world around it. It’s still not anywhere near as complex as the third part of the self — the autobiographical self. “We have a sense of personhood that is very elaborate,” he said. “Everyone in this room knows who he or she is. Everybody in this room has a narrative of the past.” Damasio imagined asking all the audience members who they were, anticipating that most would offer where they were born, what they like and dislike, and “some kind of trajectory”.
“If one is a very literary person, it will become beautiful with great words,” he said. “If one is a politician it will come with all sorts of embroidery…. If you’re an actor, probably it will come with aspects of vanity, and the same thing if you’re a professor neuroscience.”
Autobiographical selves are of course unnecessary for survival, as Damasio noted in Q&A. Single-cell bacteria have “a complex social life” — fighting in groups, building alliances — without having minds. But the complexity of human survival required the mind.
Your dog is special but not as special as you
Damasio predicted another audience response: “You can say, ‘Are you sure that my dog doesn’t have an autobiographical self? My dog does. My dog knows who I am and a sense of what was before,’” he joked. “I will grant you that your dog is very special and has an autobiographical self.”
But, Damasio said, dogs do not have a sense of the anticipated future. “You cannot say my dog is actually very preoccupied with a certain gift he wants for Christmas,” he explained. For all the humans worried about gifts and other future plans, he said, “That is something that is incredibly beautiful and distinguishes human beings. We live every moment, every second of our lives poised between the lived past and the anticipated future.”
Humans have a “particularly bizarre” ability to create memories of the future. “Every time you think what you’re going to do next weekend, you’re going to put that in your memory,” Damasio said. “So you have a memory of the future that you hope to live.”
This process is constantly moving in time, and not “an object like a bottle,” not rigid. “There are some of you that suddenly started thinking what they’re going to do this weekend, and you’ve already probably put something in your memory,” Damasio said. Even though other animals, like chimps, do plan, Damasio argued that this type of planning — the constant movement between past and future, the reaction to the present based on a remembered past and expected future — is uniquely human.
The fish next door
Because of its ability to recall past and anticipate future events, the human mind has unique emotional capacities, Damasio explained. “If we did not have an autobiographical self, we may have simple joys, but you may not have what we would call bliss,” he said. The same is true for pain, which can be amplified to suffering by the autobiographical self. That self, Damasio explained, also drove the development of memory, our reasoning capacity, language, and our relationships.
“If your sense of life is a constantly moving present, if you’re a fish, you’re probably not going to be terribly worried if the fish next door — if there were doors in the sea — is suffering, if he is being caught,” Damasio said. “But it will have a different impact if you are a person and you see suffering.”
Those relationships in turn spurred the development of civilizations and cultures, the aim of which are generally to maximize well-being. “The best of human states is a state in which we seek consistently well-being for ourselves and others, and a state in which we want to reduce pain and suffering,” Damasio said. He explained in Q&A that it’s certainly not the only state, as all humans have fundamental emotions like anger, happiness, sadness, disgust, and surprise, which are sometimes unruly and in conflict with social emotions like compassion, shame, pride, and admiration. “We did not come to being as nice people living in Santa Monica. We came to being in small tribes that were fighting against each other that had an ideal size of between 15 and 30,” Damasio said.
But the mind did give rise, through civilization, to what Damasio called “a socio-cultural form of life regulation.” Instruments of culture — morality, religion, arts, science, technology, economics, governments, “all of these things you think of as tumbling from somewhere without a cause are in fact the results of extremely direct inventions of human beings in order to make their life better,” Damasio said. As he added in Q&A, returning to Spinoza, the subject of a prior book, “Spinoza always said that the reason why you should be altruistic is that you want to favor yourself…that is a very beautiful idea.”
Like a symphony, and not
Despite having the highest form of self, Damasio said, the human mind isn’t entirely dependent on the most evolved part of the brain, the cerebral cortex. Rather, it’s in one of the oldest parts of our brain, the one whose design we share with reptiles — the brain stem. The brain stem connects “primordial feelings” with the more refined parts of the cerebral cortex. “It’s the dialogue between the very old part of the brain that we share with many other species and a new part of the brain that allows us to have all these very refined operations of mind, that allows us to become Mozarts or Shakespeares,” Damasio said. The mind also can’t be explained by particular neurons or neuro-modulators, like serotonin or dopamine, he said during Q&A. Those molecules are ancient, found in flies and fish, distributed throughout the brain and work in conjunction with other parts of the brain to generate a mind process.
Damasio closed by quoting the first epigraph of his book, from the poet Fernando Pessoa: “My soul is like a hidden orchestra; I do not know which instruments grind and play away inside of me, strings and harps, timbales and drums. I can only recognize myself as a symphony.” Pessoa, Damasio noted, invented several pseudonyms, each with distinct selves, under which to write, and so well understood that the self is a combination of many elements, even if the symphony analogy is imperfect.
“You have a conductor looking at the musicians and you have musicians who have rehearsed a score,” Damasio said. “Our conscious minds are being made as they go. There is no score…. The conductor is himself an illusion that we create.”
See more photos here.
Read Antonio Damasio’s In The Green Room Q&A here.
Read an excerpt of Self Comes to Mind here.Boy the book here.
*Photos by Aaron Salcido.
Video: Where Does Consciousness Come From?
Tuesday, December 07, 2010
(The video would not embed, so you can watch it at the link above or download it with the links below.)
(Image: Tim Hawley/Getty)John Bickle, contributor
Antonio Damasio's Self Comes to Mind has some intriguing new ideas based on solid science and makes a grand claim, but won't get its hands dirty
WHEN combining neuroscience and philosophy, one popular strategy is to present many surprising neuroscientific results and then breathlessly assemble them into a grand speculative claim about "what it all means". A second strategy is to roll up one's sleeves and dig into a specific area of neuroscience, presenting not only the eye-opening results but also the methods and rationales behind them to argue precise philosophical points.
Self Comes to Mind is an example of the first strategy - but neuroscientist Antonio Damasio is in good company. Since the 19th century many great scientists have attempted to sketch a philosophical vision, hard won over years of scientific toil. But despite the broad appeal of this intellectual-cum-popular genre, and the chatter it can raise on the intelligentsia's cocktail party circuit, it is reasonable to ask what lasting impact even the best of these tomes have on real science or philosophy. I suspect not much.
That's not to say that Damasio's book isn't an interesting read. The book sets out to explore how the brain constructs a mind and how the mind in turn becomes conscious. It is a daunting journey, and Damasio introduces some novel ideas along the way. For instance, he argues that at the root of the mind is each individual cell's "desire" to maintain its ideal living conditions, or homeostasis. Homeostasis, he argues, is the most valuable thing a biological organism can possess. Therefore evolution will surely select for anything that best maintains it - even full-blown human consciousness. This hypothesis is worthy of serious investigation.
Damasio also offers an intriguing link between the evolution of consciousness and the brain's propensity to create "maps" - networks of neurons that represent body states. Such maps allow the brain to monitor the body and make sure it doesn't stray too far from the homeostatic ideal. Neural maps, he argues, give rise to the mind - but ultimately they are about the body. I was grateful to see Damasio apply real neuroscience to this often hand-waving notion of "embodied cognition".
Readers familiar with Damasio's previous writings will find a nice continuation in his latest views about the crucial role emotions play in consciousness. But now he gives memory a new significance: the brain's evolved capacity to store vast records of motor skills, facts and events, combined with its ability to process memory records while continuing to perceive the present moment, result in the fully human "autobiographical" self - the key ingredient, he argues, that allows for the mysterious leap from mind to conscious awareness.
In the end, however, the book's adherence to strategy number one is its undoing. Rather than presenting sustained arguments, chapters are broken into often disconnected sections that read like extended aphorisms. When the philosophical going gets tough (that is, interesting), Damasio often switches topics. With a few exceptions, the science is presented similarly. We learn remarkable facts about the brain but next to nothing about how or why these facts were discovered.
Of course, when fleshing out a "synoptic vision", it is not practically possible to explain all of the scientific processes that formed the basis of one's speculative reach. Still, there's something deeply worrisome about books like this. Expounding on scientific results and using them to engage in philosophical speculations without explaining or criticising the processes that generate the data can create a dangerous intellectual conformity paraded as "scientific". Damasio knows his science, but he and others would do well to remember that many readers don't. A little explanation of the scientific process lurking behind the philosophy would go a long way.
Book Information
Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the conscious brain
by Antonio Damasio
Pantheon
$28.95
