Everything I Know: Buckminster Fuller’s Visionary Lectures Free Online (1975)

Open Culture has offered up all of the Everything I Know lectures from visionary Buckminster Fuller. Fuller (or Bucky as he was known as by friends) is widely considered one of the greatest minds of his generation - not too bad for a guy who flunked out of Harvard . . . twice.

During the last two weeks of January 1975 Buckminster Fuller gave an extraordinary series of lectures concerning his entire life's work. These thinking out loud lectures span 42 hours and examine in depth all of Fuller's major inventions and discoveries from the 1927 Dymaxion house, car and bathroom, through the Wichita House, geodesic domes, and tensegrity structures, as well as the contents of Synergetics. Autobiographical in parts, Fuller recounts his own personal history in the context of the history of science and industrialization.

The stories behind his Dymaxion car, geodesic domes, World Game and integration of science and humanism are lucidly communicated with continuous reference to his synergetic geometry. Permeating the entire series is his unique comprehensive design approach to solving the problems of the world. Some of the topics Fuller covered in this wide ranging discourse include: architecture, design, philosophy, education, mathematics, geometry, cartography, economics, history, structure, industry, housing and engineering.

If you would rather read the lectures, The Buckminster Fuller Institute has also made transcripts of Everything I Know — "minimally edited and maximally Fuller" — freely available. There were originally 42 hours of lecture material, but the edited YouTube version comes to just over 17 hours in six sections (I have embedded all of them into the video below).

At the bottom I have included a biography of Fuller from the Institute dedicated to his legacy.

Everything I Know: 42 Hours of Buckminster Fuller’s Visionary Lectures Free Online (1975)

August 8th, 2012

Think of the name Buckminster Fuller, and you may think of a few oddities of mid-twentieth-century design for living: the Dymaxion House, the Dymaxion Car, the geodesic dome. But these artifacts represent only a small fragment of Fuller’s life and work as a self-styled “comprehensive anticipatory design scientist.” In his decades-long project of developing and furthering his worldview — an elaborate humanitarian framework involving resource conservation, applied geometry, and neologisms like “tensegrity,” “ephemeralization,” and “omni-interaccommodative” — the man wrote over 30 books, registered 28 United States patents, and kept a diary documenting his every fifteen minutes. These achievements and others have made Fuller the subject of at least four documentaries and numerous books, articles, and papers, but now you can hear all about his thoughts, acts, experiences, and times straight from the source in the 42-hour lecture series Everything I Know, available to download at the Internet Archive. Though you’d perhaps expect it of someone whose journals stretch to 270 feet of solid paper, he could really talk.

In January 1975, Fuller sat down to deliver the twelve lectures that make up Everything I Know, all captured on video and enhanced with the most exciting bluescreen technology of the day. Props and background graphics illustrate the many concepts he visits and revisits, which include, according to the Buckminster Fuller Institute, “all of Fuller’s major inventions and discoveries,” “his own personal history in the context of the history of science and industrialization,” and no narrower a range of subjects than “architecture, design, philosophy, education, mathematics, geometry, cartography, economics, history, structure, industry, housing and engineering.” In his time as a passenger on what he called Spaceship Earth, Fuller realized that human progress need not separate the “natural” from the “unnatural”: “When people say something is natural,” he explains in the first lecture (embedded above as a YouTube video above), ”‘natural’ is the way they found it when they checked into the picture.” In these 42 hours, you’ll learn all about how he arrived at this observation — and all the interesting work that resulted from it.

(The Buckminster Fuller archive has also made transcripts of Everything I Know — “minimally edited and maximally Fuller” — freely available.)

Parts 1-12 on the Internet Archive: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12
Parts 1-6 on YouTube: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6

Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall.

Biography

R. Buckminster Fuller, 1895 - 1983

Hailed as "one of the greatest minds of our times, R. Buckminster Fuller was renowned for his comprehensive perspective on the world's problems. For more than five decades, he developed pioneering solutions that reflected his commitment to the potential of innovative design to create technology that does "more with less" and thereby improves human lives.

Born in Milton, Massachusetts, on July 12, 1895, Richard Buckminster Fuller belonged to a family noted for producing strong individualists inclined toward activism and public service. "Bucky," as he came to be called, developed an early understanding of nature during family excursions to Bear Island, Maine, where he also became familiar with the principles of boat maintenance and construction.

Fuller entered Harvard University in 1913, but he was expelled after excessively socializing and missing his midterm exams. Following his expulsion, he worked at a mill in Canada, where he took a strong interest in machinery and learned to modify and improve the manufacturing equipment. Fuller returned to Harvard in the autumn of 1915 but was again dismissed.

From 1917 until 1919, Fuller served in the U.S. Navy, where he demonstrated his aptitude for engineering by inventing a winch for rescue boats that could remove downed airplanes from the water in time to save the lives of pilots.

As a result of the invention, Fuller was nominated to receive officer training at the U.S. Naval Academy, where he further developed his ability to study problems comprehensively. In 1926, when Fuller's father-in-law, James Monroe Hewlett, developed a new method of producing reinforced concrete buildings, he and Fuller patented the invention, earning Fuller the first of his 25 patents.

In 1927, after the construction company failed, Fuller was unemployed and contemplated suicide, but he had a remarkable realization. Deciding that he had no right to end his own life, he concluded that he had a responsibility to use his experiences and intellect in the service of others. As a consequence, he spent nearly two years as a recluse, deep in contemplation about the universe and how he could best contribute to humanity.

One of Fuller's lifelong interests was using technology to revolutionize construction and improve human housing. In 1927, after inventing an easily built, air-delivered, modular apartment building, he designed the Dymaxion™ House, an inexpensive, mass-produced home that could be airlifted to its location. Originally called the 4D House, it was later renamed by a department store that displayed a model of the house. The word "dymaxion" was coined by store advertisers and trademarked in Fuller's name. Based on the words "dynamic," "maximum," and "ion," it became a part of the name of many of Fuller's subsequent inventions. The word became synonymous with his design philosophy of "doing more with less," a phrase he later coined to reflect his growing recognition of the accelerating global trend toward the development of more efficient technology.

These inventions included the Dymaxion Car, a streamlined, three-wheeled automobile that could make extraordinarily sharp turns; a compact, prefabricated, easily installed Dymaxion Bathroom; and Dymaxion Deployment Units (DDUs), mass-produced houses based on circular grain bins. While DDUs never became popular for civilian housing, they were used during World War II to shelter radar crews in remote locations with severe climates, and they led to additional round housing designs by Fuller.

After 1947, one invention dominated Fuller's life and career: the geodesic dome. Lightweight, cost-effective, and easy to assemble, geodesic domes enclose more space without intrusive supporting columns than any other structure; they efficiently distribute stress; and they can withstand extremely harsh conditions. Based on Fuller's "synergetic geometry," his lifelong exploration of nature's principles of design, the geodesic dome was the result of his revolutionary discoveries about balancing compression and tension forces in building.

Fuller applied for a patent for the geodesic dome in 1951 and received it in 1954. In 1953 he designed his first commercial dome for the Ford Motor Company headquarters in Dearborn, Michigan. The U.S. military became one of his biggest clients, using lightweight domes to cover radar stations at installations around the Arctic Circle. According to the Buckminster Fuller Institute, today there are more than 300,000 geodesic domes around the world, ranging from shelters in California and Africa to radar stations in remote locations, as well as geodesic structures on countless children's playgrounds.

Fuller was a pioneering global thinker. In 1927, at the beginning of his career, he made a now-prophetic sketch of the total earth which depicted his concept for transporting cargo by air "over the pole" to Europe. He entitled the sketch "a one-town world." In 1946, Fuller received a patent for another breakthrough invention: the Dymaxion Map, which depicted the entire planet on a single flat map without visible distortion of the relative shapes and sizes of the continents. The map, which can be reconfigured to put different regions at the center, was intended to help humanity better address the world's problems by prompting people to think comprehensively about the planet. In the early 1950's he coined the now familiar phrase "spaceship earth" to describe the integral nature of Earth's "living system." Beginning In the late 1960s, Fuller was especially involved in creating World Game®, a large-scale simulation and series of workshops he designed that used a large-scale Dymaxion Map to help humanity better understand, benefit from, and more efficiently utilize the world's resources.

Throughout his life, Fuller found numerous outlets for his innovative ideas. During the early 1930s he published Shelter magazine, and from 1938 until 1940 he was science and technology consultant for Fortune magazine. During the 1940s he began to teach and lecture at universities, including Harvard and MIT, and in the late 1950s he became a professor at Southern Illinois University (SIU), where he and his wife lived in a geodesic dome when he was in residence. In 1972 he was named World Fellow in Residence to a consortium of universities in Philadelphia, including the University of Pennsylvania. He retained his connection with both SIU and the University of Pennsylvania until his death. He was the author of nearly 30 books, and he spent much of his life traveling the world lecturing and discussing his ideas with thousands of audiences. Some of Fuller's many honors highlight his eclectic reputation: For example, because he sometimes expressed complex ideas in verse to make them more understandable, in 1961 he received a one-year appointment to the prestigious Charles Eliot Norton Professorship of Poetry at Harvard. After being spurned early in his career by the architecture and construction establishments, Fuller was later recognized with many major architectural, scientific, industrial, and design awards, both in the United States and abroad, and he received 47 honorary doctorate degrees. In 1983, shortly before his death, he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor, with a citation acknowledging that his "contributions as a geometrician, educator, and architect-designer are benchmarks of accomplishment in their fields."

After Fullers death, when chemists discovered that the atoms of a recently discovered carbon molecule were arrayed in a structure similar to a geodesic dome, they named the molecule "buckminsterfullerene."

R. Buckminster Fuller died in Los Angeles on July 1, 1983.
Source: The Estate of R. Buckminster Fuller

Further Biographical Information

• Chronological Biography
• Fullers Influence
• Who Was Buckminster Fuller? by E.J. Applewhite
• Introduction to Buckminster Fuller by Victoria Vesna
• Dymaxion American Excerpt from Time Magazine, 1964.
• Guinea Pig B by Buckminster Fuller
• Experiencing and Experience by Allegra Fuller Snyder
• Notes on Anne and Bucky Fullers Deaths by Allegra Fuller Snyder

Pascal Vrtička and Patrik Vuilleumier - Neuroscience of Human Social Interactions and Adult Attachment Style

Regular readers of this blog will recognize in the title three of my favorite topics - neuroscience, social psychology, and attachment theory. Best of all, this paper is open access at the Frontiers of Human Neuroscience site.

I recently posted a rant against the DSM (Diagnostic and Statistics Manual - the diagnostic bible for mental illness) and proposed the foundations for a more relationally-based diagnostic model - this research is essential to the possibility of developing such a model.

Neuroscience of human social interactions and adult attachment style

Pascal Vrtička^1,2* and Patrik Vuilleumier^1,3

• ¹Swiss Center for Affective Sciences, University of Geneva, Geneva, Switzerland
• ²Laboratory for the study of Emotion Elicitation and Expression (E3 Lab), Department of Psychology, FPSE, University of Geneva, Geneva, Switzerland
• ³Laboratory for Neurology and Imaging of Cognition, Department of Neuroscience, University Medical Center, University of Geneva, Geneva, Switzerland

Since its first description four decades ago, attachment theory (AT) has become one of the principal developmental psychological frameworks for describing the role of individual differences in the establishment and maintenance of social bonds between people. Yet, still little is known about the neurobiological underpinnings of attachment orientations and their well-established impact on a range of social and affective behaviors. In the present review, we summarize data from recent studies using cognitive and imaging approaches to characterize attachment styles and their effect on emotion and social cognition. We propose a functional neuroanatomical framework to integrate the key brain mechanisms involved in the perception and regulation of social emotional information, and their modulation by individual differences in terms of secure versus insecure (more specifically avoidant, anxious, or resolved versus unresolved) attachment traits. This framework describes how each individual's attachment style (built through interactions between personal relationship history and predispositions) may influence the encoding of approach versus aversion tendencies (safety versus threat) in social encounters, implicating the activation of a network of subcortical (amygdala, hippocampus, striatum) and cortical (insula, cingulate) limbic areas. These basic and automatic affective evaluation mechanisms are in turn modulated by more elaborate and voluntary cognitive control processes, subserving mental state attribution and emotion regulation capacities, implicating a distinct network in medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC), superior temporal sulcus (STS), and temporo-parietal junction (TPJ), among others. Recent neuroimaging data suggest that affective evaluation is decreased in avoidantly but increased in anxiously attached individuals. In turn, although data on cognitive control is still scarce, it points toward a possible enhancement of mental state representations associated with attachment insecurity and particularly anxiety. Emotion regulation strategies such as reappraisal or suppression of social emotions are also differentially modulated by attachment style. This research does not only help better understand the neural underpinnings of human social behavior, but also provides important insights on psychopathological conditions where attachment dysregulation is likely to play an important (causal) role.

Full Citation: 

Vrtička P, and Vuilleumier P. (2012, Jul 17). Neuroscience of human social interactions and adult attachment style. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience. 6:212. doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2012.00212

Here is the introduction to the paper and the first section that introduces attachment theory with a brief overview.

Introduction

In mammals, including humans, attachment is a major dimension of behavior that can come into play in several domains (Fisher et al., 2006). This includes bond formation and maintenance between children and parents (parental care), love and sexual fidelity between long-term partners (partner attachment), but also various social links between individuals in a group. How much people value and react to interactions with others is undoubtedly a major ingredient of human life and emotions. In recent years, important progresses have been achieved by neuroscience research concerning the brain circuits involved in basic sexual and parental bonding (Insel and Young, 2001), as well as the close functional interactions between social and emotional/motivational systems in the brain (Lieberman, 2007), but the neural processes subserving affective attachment of humans to others in various conditions still remain to be elucidated.

The notion of attachment is a central feature of a prominent theoretical framework of social-emotional behavior in developmental psychology, known as attachment theory (AT) (Bowlby, 1969, 1982). This framework relies on the assumption that every human being is born with an innate attachment system, whose biological function is to obtain or maintain proximity to significant others in times of need or presence of threats, and thus to regulate support seeking behavior. Such a function is crucial for survival in early life, as a child cannot live on its own without the care of his/her primary attachment figure—mainly the mother. This is especially vital in mammals, as the mother is the main resource for food, and even more so in humans, because the time span during which an offspring is dependent on external care is particularly long. Importantly, however, AT suggests that repeated interactions with attachment figures (e.g., parents), and the responses of the latter to the proximity seeking attempts of the child, will induce the formation of differential cognitive schemes for representing the self and others, and for behaving in interpersonal relationships later on in life. These processes are thought to lead to the establishment of so-called internal working models of attachment (IWMs), encoding expectations of care and allowing a “mental simulation and prediction of likely outcomes of various attachment behaviors” (Mikulincer and Shaver, 2007) when interacting with significant social partners. This will then constitute the foundation of a person's individual attachment style, which remains fairly stable into adulthood and may provide a template for determining how people perceive and react during various types of social encounters. Thus, although adult attachment style (AAS) may influence response patterns during close relationships with other individuals (e.g., romantic partners), it is considered to also operate during interactions or social appraisals with unknown people, as well as during a range of different emotional situations throughout life (Niedenthal et al., 2002; Fraley et al., 2006; Mikulincer and Shaver, 2007). The impact of individual differences in AAS on social and affective functioning is therefore thought to go far beyond the specific behaviors associated with parental and partner attachment (Fisher et al., 2006).

Although very prominent in developmental psychology (Mikulincer and Shaver, 2007) and some psychopathological theories (Fonagy and Luyten, 2009), the social-affective phenomena associated with attachment style as well as their impact on human behaviors and their neural mechanisms have only rarely been investigated in a human neuroscience perspective. The current review therefore aims at providing an overview of recent investigations that combined an AT perspective with cognitive and neurobiological approaches. Doing so may offer novel and promising avenues for future research, not only to better understand normal social behaviors in humans, including individual differences in AAS; but also to illuminate some conditions or pathologies associated with disturbances in social emotional functioning, such as autism (Andari et al., 2010), schizophrenia (Abdi and Sharma, 2004; Marwick and Hall, 2008), borderline personality (Fonagy and Luyten, 2009; Fonagy et al., 2011), or violence and sociopathy (Decety et al., 2009; Blair et al., 2011a,b). In this review, we will first introduce the general theoretical aspects of AT and discuss how it may offer a fruitful framework in social cognitive and affective neuroscience. We will then mainly focus on the functional neurobiological mechanisms of social and affective processing that may underlie individual differences in attachment style.

Attachment Theory

Distinct individual profiles in attachment style have been described and can be identified in adults by specific questionnaires or semi-structured interviews (see Mikulincer and Shaver, 2007 for an overview). In the case of an available and responding attachment figure providing a “secure base” for restoring emotional balance in times of distress, a positive model of others linked with supportiveness and trustworthiness can be developed, paired with positive self-attributes such as worthy, competent, and lovable. This allows the formation of a secure attachment style. In contrast, an insecure attachment style will emerge if attachment figures are repeatedly experienced as unresponsive or inconsistent in their responses in times of need and stress. Two major patterns of insecurity have been classically distinguished: either avoidant or anxious attachment, associated with the establishment of attachment system de-activation or hyper-activation as secondary attachment strategies, respectively, (Mikulincer and Shaver, 2007).

In the case of attachment avoidance, proximity seeking is perceived as futile or even dangerous because of the distress felt by failing to achieve proximity to an attachment figure. Consequently, avoidant individuals develop a dismissive approach to and a negative model of others, operating through the denial of positive traits in others. They disavow needs for attachment, avoid affective closeness and intimacy, but seek independence with the goal to prevent the felt rejection by others. Concomitantly, they tend to suppress negative aspects of the self and boost their positive features instead, leading to the emergence of a positive self-model. In addition, attachment avoidance is associated with a preferential use of (expressive) suppression to regulate emotions (Mikulincer and Shaver, 2007), allowing the individual to keep the attachment system in a low activation state and to prevent others of perceiving their internal emotional states (Vrticka et al., 2012a).

The other main form of insecurity is attachment anxiety, where a perceived failure to handle threats autonomously will encourage subjects to intensify their support-seeking attempts despite the fact that attachment figures are experienced as inconsistent. In this case, others are still viewed as (partly) positive due to the desire for attention and protection. However, repeated experience of rejection leads to an increased sense of helplessness and vulnerability, paired with doubts about self-worth and -efficacy, leading to a negative internal model of the self and poor self-esteem. Such individuals become highly vigilant to potential threats and rejections. This style is also thought to imply a distinctive emotion regulation strategy, with preferential use of re-appraisal but in the “wrong” direction: instead of decreasing the impact of negative emotions, these subjects actually tend to intensify the impact of negative social signals due to their hypersensitivity to the latter (Bartholomew, 1990; Bartholomew and Horowitz, 1991; Griffin and Bartholomew, 1994; Mikulincer and Shaver, 2007).

Besides these three main categories of secure, avoidant, and anxious attachment styles, a fourth attachment orientation has been proposed, referred to as fearful or disorganized (Main et al., 1985; Bartholomew and Horowitz, 1991; Griffin and Bartholomew, 1994; Mikulincer and Shaver, 2007). It is either characterized by the presence of both avoidant and anxious attachment traits, reflecting negative models for both the self and others, or by disoriented attachment behaviors indicating the lack of a coherent attachment strategy. The latter type is also called unresolved attachment, in contrast to the resolved/organized attachment orientations corresponding to the secure, avoidant, or anxious styles. Such a dissociation between resolved versus unresolved attachment categories is particularly prominent in psychopathology research, where it has been proposed that attachment dysregulations in terms of an unresolved attachment orientation might lay at the core of some emotional disturbances, including borderline personality disorder (BPD; Fonagy and Luyten, 2009), as well as schizoaffective disorder, bipolar disorder, and major depression (Berry et al., 2007).

On the ground of such descriptions of secure and insecure AAS, Mikulincer and Shaver (2007) have proposed that an extensive list of human social behaviors might be importantly modulated by these psychological traits. This includes (1) romantic and sexual behavior, (2) self-regulation and personal growth, (3) emotion regulation and coping, (4) interpersonal regulation, as well as (5) family functioning and parental care. In addition, AAS may also influence more general behaviors related to affect and motivation, including pain and medical care (Meredith et al., 2006; Hooper et al., 2012). Thus, attachment dysregulations are nowadays recognized as important contributors to various emotional and social disturbances, a fact which bolsters the need of better understanding their cognitive underpinnings as well as their neural substrates.

However, the current distinction of AAS into three, four, or even five main categories has been questioned by some researchers who proposed instead to conceive these individual differences along a single continuum of emotional security (e.g., Fraley and Spieker, 2003a). For example, attachment and affective social behaviors might be mapped on two independent dimensions of anxiety and avoidance (Bartholomew and Horowitz, 1991), with the secure style corresponding to both low anxiety and low avoidance, and the disorganized style to high traits in both anxiety and avoidance. Thus, it remains to be clarified whether individual differences in AAS mainly refer to a true taxonomy of personality traits or to some underlying mechanisms that might result in distinct patterns of attachment behaviors. Nevertheless, this issue does not undermine the general assumptions of AT (Waters and Beauchaine, 2003), and both classification schemes seem equally useful for analyzing individual differences in attachment security and social interactions (Fraley and Spieker, 2003b).

Furthermore, some aspects of AAS might partly overlap with other important psychological dimensions associated with individual personality traits, such as neuroticism, reward dependence, and novelty seeking (Chotai et al., 2005). Hence, it also remains to be better determined what the specificity of these different constructs really is. Importantly, functional neuroimaging studies might help to address this issue, for example by showing that differences in attachment anxiety and avoidance correlate with functional modulations in distinct brain systems. Moreover, some of these effects on brain activity may be specific to attachment traits and do not correlate with other personality or anxiety measures (see Vrtička et al., 2008; Vrticka et al., 2012a). Yet, as we describe below, we are only just beginning to unveil the cerebral architecture of various components that are potentially at play in the emotional and behavioral features of AAS.

Z-Net - Reality Denial: Steven Pinker's Apologetics for Western-Imperial Volence

Here is a radically different perspective on Steven Pinker's recent book, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, than you are likely to find anywhere else. The book largely has been praised for its more optimistic outlook and for its expression of the "more evolved = more compassion" argument inherent in many versions of evolutionary psychology (of which Pinker is the best-known proponent).

Here is the beginning of the article, which comes from Z-Net.

Reality Denial : Steven Pinker's Apologetics for Western-Imperial Volence

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By Edward S Herman and David Peterson

Wednesday, July 25, 2012

 

Edward S Herman and David Peterson's ZSpace Page

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It is amusing to see how eagerly the establishment media have welcomed Steven Pinker’s 2011 tome, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined,[1] which explains not only that “violence has been in decline for long stretches of time,” but that “we may be living in the most peaceful era in our species' existence.”[2]  A professor in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University since 2002 and a two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist in the general nonfiction category,[3] Pinker’s lovable theme coincides with the Nobel Peace Laureate’s current engagement in wars on at least four separate continents (Asia, Africa, Europe, and South America); his regretful partial withdrawal from invaded and occupied Iraq; his victorious termination of the 2011 war in Libya; his buildup and threats to engage in even larger wars with Syria and Iran, both already underway with aggressive sanctions and an array of covert actions;[4] his semi-secret and ever-widening use of remote-controlled aerial gunships and death squads in global killing operations;[5] and his declaration of the right to kill any person anywhere for “national security” reasons—officially making the entire world a U.S. free-fire-zone.[6]  The Barack Obama regime, and before it the Bush-Cheney regime, have also supported and protected Israel’s escalated ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, and the hostile U.S. actions and threats involving Iran and Syria are closely geared with those of Israel.  

Whereas in Pinker’s view there has been a “Long Peace” since the end of the Second World War,[7]  in the real world there has been a series of long and devastating U.S. wars: in the Koreas (1950-1953), Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia (1954-1975), Iraq (1990-), Afghanistan (2001- or, arguably, 1979-), the Democratic Republic of the Congo (1996-), with the heavy direct involvement of U.S. clients from Rwanda (Paul Kagame) and Uganda (Yoweri Museveni) in large-scale Congo killings; and Israel’s outbursts in Lebanon (1982 and 2006), to name a few.  There were also very deadly wars in Iran, invaded by Saddam Hussein’s Iraq (1980-1988), with Western encouragement and support.  And with the stimulus-excuse of 9/11, the U.S. political and “defense” establishment was able to declare a global “War on Terror,” open-ended and still ongoing, to assure that the “Long Peace” would not be interrupted by a conflict that met the Pinkerian standards for a real war.

In the same time frame as Pinker’s “New Peace,” alleged to have begun with the dissolution of the Soviet bloc, the Warsaw Pact, and of the Soviet Union itself (1989-1991), we have also witnessed the relentless expansion of the U.S.-led NATO bloc, its 1990s war on and dismantlement of Yugoslavia,[8] its acceptance of new “out of area” responsibilities for “security,”[9] its steadily enlarging membership from 16 to 28 states, including the Baltic and former Eastern European satellites of the Soviet Union, and a growing U.S. and NATO encirclement of and threats to China and Russia.[10]  And during the first decade of the 21st century, the United States openly embarked on the systematic use of  “enhanced interrogations” (i.e., torture) and the frequent resort to “extraordinary renditions” that send captives to torture-prone clients for some not-so-angelic working over.[11]

Pinker’s standard for an interruption of the “Long Peace” would be a war between the “great powers,” and it is true that the major Axis and Allied powers that fought each other during World War II have not made war among themselves since 1945.  But Pinker carries this line of thought even further: He contends not only that the “democracies avoid disputes with each other,” but that they “tend to stay out of disputes across the board,” (283) an idea he refers to as the “Democratic Peace.”[12] (278-284)  This will surely come as a surprise to the many victims of U.S. assassinations, sanctions, subversions, bombings and invasions since 1945.[13]  For Pinker, no attack on a lesser power by one or more of the great democracies counts as a real war or confutes the “Democratic Peace,” no matter how many people die.

“Among respectable countries,” Pinker writes, “conquest is no longer a thinkable option.  A politician in a democracy today who suggested conquering another country would be met not with counterarguments but with puzzlement, embarrassment, or laughter.” (260)  This is an extremely silly assertion.  Presumably, when George Bush and Tony Blair sent U.S. and British forces to attack Iraq in 2003, ousted its government, and replaced it with one operating under laws drafted by the Coalition Provisional Authority, this did not count as “conquest,” as these leaders never stated that they launched the war to “conquer” Iraq, but rather “to disarm Iraq, to free its people and to defend the world from grave danger.”[14]  What conqueror has ever pronounced as his goal something other than self-defense and the protection of life and limb?  It is on the basis of devices such as this that Pinker’s “Long Peace,” “New Peace,” and “Democratic Peace” rest.  (See “Massaging the Numbers,” below.)       

And it is in this kind of context Pinker throws-in his “gentle commerce” theme by advancing the so-called “Golden Arches Peace” idea—that “no two countries with a McDonald’s have ever fought in a war.”  The “only unambiguous” exception that he can name occurred in 1999, “when NATO briefly bombed Yugoslavia.” (285)  In an endnote he mentions that an “earlier marginal exception was the U.S. attack on Panama in 1989,” but he dismisses this U.S. war as too insignificant to make the grade—“its death count falls short of the minimum required for a war according to the standard definition,”[15] though according to the UN Charter and customary international law, there was nothing sub-standard about this unambiguous U.S. aggression against a sovereign country.  Here as in many other places, Pinker selects the estimated death toll that minimizes the U.S.-inflicted casualties and fits his political agenda.[16]

Pinker mentions in passing that the post-World War II peace among the giants was possibly a result of the immense cost of wars that might involve a nuclear exchange—and it did extend to the Soviet Union during its post-World War II life—but his explanation focuses mainly on the cultural evolution and biological adaptations of the Civilized,[17] in contrast with the Uncivilized of the Third World.  Why this new peaceableness of the Civilized does not stop their violent interventions abroad he fails to explain.  The exclusion of wars against the Uncivilized from his definition of a “Long Peace” reflects gross political bias. 

Pinker attributes the sense of increased violence to multiple “illusions,” one of which he believes is caused by the development of media and other advanced forms of communication that allow a rushing to the spot of bloody events, and recording them and transmitting them to the world.   As he explained in a guest appearance on CBS TV’s The Early Show in mid-December 2011: “Not only can we send a helicopter with a film crew to any troubled spot in the world but now anyone with a cell phone is an instant reporter.  They can broadcast color footage of bloodshed wherever it occurs and so we’re very aware of it.”[18]  Apparently Pinker believes that the media cover the world on a non-discriminatory basis, reporting on Guatemalan peasants slaughtered by their army, civilian victims of U.S. drone warfare in Afghanistan, Honduran protesters shot dead by their own military, and dead and injured U.S. soldiers as aggressively as they report on civilian protesters shot dead on the streets of Tehran, or the victims of the Syrian government or of the late Muammar Gaddafi in 2011.[19]  The naiveté here is staggering.  

Pinker’s “Long Peace” and “New Peace” and their alleged declines of violence not only coincide with the numerous and ongoing attacks by the giants on the midgets, the huge expansion in arms, and the new “burgeoning” of  torture,[20] but runs parallel with the increasing structural violence of a global class war that has resulted in growing inequality within and between countries, systematic dispossession of vast numbers, a widespread seizure of the commons, major migrations, growing cities of slums, increased ethnic tensions and anti-Islamic fervor, deliberately stoked in a troubled, receptive environment, mass incarceration of minority populations, and more vocal oppositional forces both here and abroad.[21]  These do not constitute “violence” in Pinker’s accounting system.  

Read the whole article.

Rolling Stone - Tom Waits' Big Reveal: New Clip for 'Hell Broke Luce"

If you are on the Tom Waits mailing list, you have been getting some intriguing images over the last couple of days promising a "big reveal" Tuesday morning - and the reveal was a new and very cool/strange (would you expect any less) video for the song "Hell Broke Luce," from the 2011 Bad As Me album.

Rolling Stone posted the video and some background to go with it.

Tom Waits' Big Reveal: New Clip for 'Hell Broke Luce'

Singer dropped vague hints about video over the past week

By Rolling Stone

August 7, 2012

What a build-up: Tom Waits has spent the past week dropping hints about an announcement he had planned for today, and the Web was thick with speculation: Could it be a tour? New music? A concert cruise? Nope. Turns out it was the release of a new video for "Hell Broke Luce," a scabrous, blackly comic anti-war song from last year's Bad As Me. The clip was the source of various surreal images posted on Waits' website last week, depicting the singer sporting an eyepatch and a scimitar, underwater flanked by boxy sharks (that turn out to be submarines) and poking an oversized spoon at a roaring fire.

Directed by Matt Mahurin, the video is as gritty as the song, as Waits pulls a small house through an arid, blasted landscape; over the ocean while surrounded by warring flotillas; and under water, trailed by boxy shark submarines.

Waits addressed the speculation over his clues in a statement: "As most of you guessed, it’s a tour . . . a tour de force!" The singer said he and Kathleen Brennan, his wife and songwriting partner, envisioned the song as "an enlightened drill sergeant yelling the hard truths of war to a brand new batch of recruits. The video grew from the gnawing image of a soldier pulling his home, through a battlefield, at the end of a rope. I think you will agree, it's uplifting and fun."

Related

• Tom Waits Teases Announcement With Mysterious Pirate Photo
• 100 Greatest Singers of All Time: Tom Waits
• Album Review: Tom Waits, 'Bad As Me'

Chris Dierkes - Jesus the Shaman (from Beams and Struts)

Chris posted a very interesting and in-depth article over at Beams and Struts a week or so ago. The idea of Jesus as a shaman is nothing new - I was reading about that back in college 25 years ago, and those books were 25 or more years old. Jesus was also linked with Mithra, Osiris, and Dionysos by various authors, all of whom are mythic figures in the shamanic archetype.

A little background on my take on this, which owes much to Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy. Nietzsche analyzed drama in terms of two archetypes, the Dionysian and the Apollonian. Dionysos is the god of wine and ecstasy, an earthy puer who charms the women and enchants the beasts. Apollo is the Golden Boy, pure light and reason, but also charming and seductive, a smooth talker.

Dionysos represents the horizontal orientation in the world, the earthly, the shamanic. Apollo represents the vertical orientation in the world, the heavenly, the prophetic. Nietzsche saw these two forces - also conceptualized as "reality undifferentiated by forms" (Dionysos) versus "reality differentiated by forms" (Apollo) - living in constant interplay. The birth of the tragic form in Greek drama embodied these two opposing forces.

In the Old Testament, the prophetic form prevails - Moses and his descendents are mostly prophets who convey to the people the vision God has form them and their offspring. The orientation is exceedingly vertical, and the Word of God is experienced as the archetype for human conduct. The laws of man come from God.

In the New Testament, the Word (Logos) is made flesh in the form of the Christ. Jesus is both of the world, the prophesied Son of Man, and not of this world, the Son of God. His orientation while on Earth is horizontal. He speaks about how we conduct our lives in community, he heals the sick, he feeds the starving, he rejects the Temple money changes because we need no intermediary between us and God - for the Kingdom of God is on Earth.

Moses was a prophet. Jesus was a shaman.

It's been a couple of weeks since I read this, so I don't remember if Chris gets into all of that kind of stuff. If not, well, there ya go. If he did, well, there ya go.

Thus endeth Humanities 401 for this morning. Enjoy Chris's article.

Jesus the Shaman

Written by  Chris Dierkes



In a previous piece on Beams I looked at the remnants of shamanic consciousness on contemporary fairy tale-based tv shows like Grimm and Once Upon a Time. The journey into shamanic forms of experience and healing is one that I've found myself on over the last year. This has been an unexpected but beautiful turn in my life. Up until this switch, I had followed a path that would be characterized, in yogic terms, as one of bhakti (devotional practice), karma yoga (the path of service), and jnani yoga (the contemplative mind). Those others elements all remain rooted in my being but something else has developed recently. Or at least something I'm now giving more time and attention to--which for lack of a better word I'll call shamanic.

Shamanism includes things like kundalini energy or the experience of the chakras (especially the 6th, aka the third eye) and auras. It's the seat of imagination, intuition, and what is often termed energy work. It's also the home of The World Soul (Anima Mundi). This realm is often encountered through the use of entheogens or in (genuine) Pentecostal experiences: e.g. speaking in tongues, bodily ecstasy (aka holy rolling),  and so on. While shamanic consciousness is by no means solely reducible to these phenomena, they do constitute an important set of core elements in the shamanic tradition.

In the Western world many of these phenomena like auras and chakras are typically thought of as New Age. And certainly there are those who would label themselves New Age who are connecting to those forms of experience. New Agers however don't have a monopoly on such experience--these are simply domains of possible experience available to all. Human beings (traditionally called shamans) have founds ways of accessing, learning from, and working with those domains for many thousands of years across the globe: from aboriginal Australians to The Americas to the Siberian tundra to sub-Saharan Africa...and even the Middle East (as we'll see in a moment).

My experiences over the last year have opened my eyes to my own sacred scriptures and to Jesus.

Jesus practiced shamanism.

What I find most interesting is that these shamanic forms of practice surrounding Jesus are the stories that embarrass liberal Christians the most: exorcisms, healings, and apocalyptic language. Weirdly these elements have become largely confined to much more conservative forms of Christianity like evangelicals and Pentecostals. They therefore have a bad rap. And yet when we stop running from what's right in front of our noses, the evidence is overwhelming that Jesus was a shaman.

The reason historically that liberal Christians denied these elements of Jesus' life were because they were seen as irrational. Influenced as they were by the Western Enlightenment, liberal Christians emphasize reason and tolerance. They see Jesus as a Teacher of Morals and Eternal Wisdom. One great counterexample to this is the liberal Christian scholar and priest Marcus Borg. Borg's book on the historical Jesus argues correctly that Jesus was a charismatic healer and exorcist. Borg however stays safely within the domain of the scholar, not a practitioner nor an advocate of this path.

The costs to liberal Christians of denying this reality are enormous.

Read the whole article.

First Thought, Best Thought?

Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche taught this idea, to not over think things. But is it always the best approach to decision making or anything else. Sometimes. Maybe.

This article is from  Sam McNerney at his Moments of Genius blog for Big Think.

Why The Future of Neuroscience Will Be Emotionless

Sam McNerney on July 18, 2012

 

Hello readers. I've been on vacation for the last several days. Here's an old post from my previous blog WhyWeReason.com to fill the void. It's about a paper by the NYU neuroscientists Joseph LeDoux, who argues that cognitive science needs to rethink how it understands emotions.  

In Phaedrus, Plato likens the mind to a charioteer who commands two horses, one that is irrational and crazed and another that is noble and of good stock. The job of the charioteer is to control the horses to proceed towards Enlightenment and the truth.

Plato’s allegory sparked an idea that perpetuated throughout the next several millennia in western thought: emotion gets in the way of reason. This makes sense to us. When people act out-of-order, they’re irrational. No one was ever accused of being too reasonable. Around the 17^th and 18^th centuries, however, thinkers began to challenge this idea. David Hume turned the tables on Plato: reason, Hume said, was the slave of the passions. Psychological research of the last few decades not only confirms this view, some of it suggests that emotion is better at deciding.

We know a lot more about how the brain works compared to the ancient Greeks, but a decade into the 21^stcentury researchers are still debating which of Plato’s horses is in control, and which one we should listen to.

A couple of recent studies are shedding new light on this age-old discourse. The first comes from Michael Pham and his team at Columbia Business School. The researchers asked participants to make predictions about eight different outcomes ranging from American Idol finalists, to the winners of the 2008 Democratic primary, to the winner of the BCS championship game. They also forecasted the Dow Jones average.

Pham created two groups. He told the first group to go with their guts and the second to think it through. The results were telling. In the American Idol results, for example, the first group correctly predicted the winner 41 percent of the time whereas the second group was only correct 24 percent of the time. The high-trust-in-feeling subjects even predicted the stock market better.

Pham and his team conclude the following:

Results from eight studies show that individuals who had higher trust in their feelings were better able to predict the outcome of a wide variety of future events than individuals who had lower trust in their feelings…. The fact that this phenomenon was observed in eight different studies and with a variety of prediction contexts suggests that this emotional oracle effect is a reliable and generalizable phenomenon. In addition, the fact that the phenomenon was observed both when people were experimentally induced to trust or not trust their feelings and when their chronic tendency to trust or not trust their feelings was simply measured suggests that the findings are not due to any peculiarity of the main manipulation.

Does this mean we should always trust our intuition? It depends. A recent study by Maarten Bos and his team identified an important nuance when it comes to trusting our feelings. They asked one hundred and fifty-six students to abstain from eating or drinking (sans water) for three hours before the study. When they arrived Bos divided his participants into two groups: one that consumed a sugary can of 7-Up and another that drank a sugar-free drink.

After waiting a few minutes to let the sugar reach the brain the students assessed four cars and four jobs, each with 12 key aspects that made them more or less appealing (Bos designed the study so an optimal choice was clear so he could measure of how well they decided). Next, half of the subjects in each group spent four minutes either thinking about the jobs and cars (the conscious thought condition) or watching a wildlife film (to prevent them from consciously thinking about the jobs and cars).

Here’s the BPS Research Digest on the results:

For the participants with low sugar, their ratings were more astute if they were in the unconscious thought condition, distracted by the second nature film. By contrast, the participants who’d had the benefit of the sugar hit showed more astute ratings if they were in the conscious thought condition and had had the chance to think deliberately for four minutes. ‘We found that when we have enough energy, conscious deliberation enables us to make good decisions,’ the researchers said. ‘The unconscious on the other hand seems to operate fine with low energy.’

So go with your gut if your energy is low. Otherwise, listen to your rational horse.
Here’s where things get difficult. By now the debate over the role reason and emotion play in decision-making is well documented. Psychologists have written thousands of papers on the subject. It shows in the popular literature as well. From Antonio Damasio’s Descartes’ Error to Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow, the lay audience knows about both the power of thinking without thinking and their predictable irrationalities.

But what exactly is being debated? What do psychologists mean when they talk about emotion and reason? Joseph LeDoux, author of popular neuroscience books including The Emotional Brain and The Synaptic Self, recently published a paper in the journal Neuron that flips the whole debate on its head. “There is little consensus about what emotion is and how it differs from other aspects of mind and behavior, in spite of discussion and debate that dates back to the earliest days in modern biology and psychology.” Yes, what we call emotion roughly correlates with certain parts of the brain, it is usually associated with activity in the amygdala and other systems. But we might be playing a language game, and neuroscientists are reaching a point where an understanding of the brain requires more sophisticated language.

As LeDoux sees it, “If we don’t have an agreed-upon definition of emotion that allows us to say what emotion is… how can we study emotion in animals or humans, and how can we make comparisons between species?” The short answer, according to the NYU professor, is “we fake it.”

With this in mind LeDoux introduces a new term to replace emotion: survival circuits. Here’s how he explains it:

The survival circuit concept provides a conceptualization of an important set of phenomena that are often studied under the rubric of emotion—those phenomena that reflect circuits and functions that are conserved across mammals. Included are circuits responsible for defense, energy/nutrition management, fluid balance, thermoregulation, and procreation, among others. With this approach, key phenomena relevant to the topic of emotion can be accounted for without assuming that the phenomena in question are fundamentally the same or even similar to the phenomena people refer to when they use emotion words to characterize subjective emotional feelings (like feeling afraid, angry, or sad). This approach shifts the focus away from questions about whether emotions that humans consciously experience (feel) are also present in other mammals, and toward questions about the extent to which circuits and corresponding functions that are relevant to the field of emotion and that are present in other mammals are also present in humans. And by reassembling ideas about emotion, motivation, reinforcement, and arousal in the context of survival circuits, hypotheses emerge about how organisms negotiate behavioral interactions with the environment in process of dealing with challenges and opportunities in daily life.

Needless to say, LeDoux’s paper changes things. Because emotion is an unworkable term for science, neuroscientists and psychologists will have to understand the brain on new terms. And when it comes to the reason-emotion debate – which of Plato’s horses we should trust – they will have to rethink certain assumptions and claims. The difficult part is that we humans, by our very nature, cannot help but resort to folk psychology to explain the brain. We deploy terms like soul, intellect, reason, intuition and emotion but these words describe very little. Can we understand the brain even though our words may never suffice? The future of cognitive science might depend on it.

Iain Thomson - Bridging Continetnal and Analytic Philosophy with a Synthetic Integration of All Philosophical Models

This is an intriguing essay - it deserves more thought than I have been able to devote to it thus far. So for now, I offer it up for your evaluation and entertainment (that is, if you, like me, find these things entertaining). The article is posted at Academia.edu, but it was published originally in the The Southern Journal of Philosophy in the June 2012 Issue.

Iain Thomson is Professor of Philosophy and Director of Graduate Studies at the University of New Mexico. He is the author of Heidegger on Ontotheology: Technology and the Politics of Education (Cambridge University Press, 2005), and Heidegger, Art, and Postmodernity (Cambridge University Press, 2011). His essays have appeared in leading scholarly journals, essay collections, and reference works, and his work has been widely reprinted and translated into seven languages. He is currently writing a philosophical biography of Heidegger as well as a study of Heidegger’s phenomenological understanding of death and its philosophical impact.

Full Citation:

Thomson, I. (2012, Jun). In the Future Philosophy Will Be Neither Continental nor Analytical but Synthetic: Toward a Promiscuous Miscegenation of (All) Philosophical Traditions and Styles. The Southern Journal of Philosophy, Volume 50, Issue 2.

IN THE FUTURE PHILOSOPHY WILL BE NEITHER CONTINENTAL NOR ANALYTIC BUT SYNTHETIC: TOWARD A PROMISCUOUS MISCEGENATION OF (ALL) PHILOSOPHICAL TRADITIONS AND STYLES

Abstract: In this paper, I suggest that the important philosophy of the future will increasingly be found neither in the “continental” nor in the “analytic” traditions but, instead, in the transcending sublation of (all) traditions I call “synthetic philosophy.” I mean “synthetic” both in a sense that encourages the bold combinatorial mélange of existing styles, traditions, and issues, and also in the Hegelian sense of sublating dichotomous oppositions, appropriating the distinctive insights of both sides while eliminating their errors and exaggerations, and thereby creating new syntheses in which the old oppositions are transcended.

“In poetry, which is all fable, truth still is the perfection.”
—Shaftesbury, Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times(1)

For this special fiftieth anniversary issue of The Southern Journal of Philosophy, I have been invited to address the question of the future of “continental philosophy” in light of its past and present, with the suggestion that I might do so by way of the broader question: “What is philosophy?”(2) Since I must be brief, I shall spare you the standard qualifications and cautionary remarks. Of course it is difficult to make general claims about the future of philosophy from my own limited, local, and individual perspective—but where else could I make them from? The antiscientistic gamble of phenomenology is precisely that one’s own personal experience might have broader importance (and so amount to more than an arbitrary generalization from a statistically insignificant sample size). The only way to find out if such a gamble is a good one is to articulate one’s views publicly and then see how others confirm, contest, or modify them. In that spirit, then, and well aware of the dangers inherent in prognostication (the calculable and incalculable risks one inevitably takes with its performative dimension), let me share a few thoughts on a topic I have long lived with and through. I shall not pretend that these thoughts—though long written on the back of my mind, as it were—amount to more than a quick sketch meant (maieutically, poietically) to help discern the broad outlines of a philosophical future already struggling to arrive.

As one of fourteen philosophers from five continents addressing the future of continental philosophy, I will focus primarily on the philosophical scene I know best, the one where I received my own training—from such diverse teachers of “continental philosophy” as Hubert Dreyfus and Jacques Derrida. I risk the ingratitude of initially mentioning only two of my wonderful teachers because, besides being famous philosophers (and deservedly so, as two of the most brilliant hermeneuts ever to walk the earth), Dreyfus and Derrida also happened to be the leading representatives of the “analytic” and “continental” wings of “continental philosophy” in America.(3) From the perspective of a student deeply immersed in the study of Martin Heidegger, it was clear that their important work on Heidegger was complementary, and both generously encouraged my efforts to combine and build on their distinctive insights. I think the fruits of those efforts show them to have been worthwhile, yet it quickly became clear to me that the ecumenical, big-tent vision of philosophy they both encouraged was not widely shared in the profession. I remember being disillusioned, for example, by witnessing the mirror-image, allergic reactions that could be provoked by appealing sympathetically to Derrida at a meeting of the American Philosophical Association or to Dreyfus at a meeting of the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy.(4)

Indeed, my own repeated experiences (some of which I have discussed elsewhere) of being “too continental” for the proudly “analytic” and “too analytic” for the ideologically “continental” eventually taught me that the “continental philosophy” label is political: it gets used by the narrow-minded on both sides of the continental–analytic divide in order to exclude people who do not sufficiently resemble them, to rationalize largely ignorant decisions about what they will read, who they will hire, and so on.(5)

Rejecting the thoughtless exclusions of extremists on both sides of the divide, I have learned to embrace being something of a philosophical coyote—that is (in the “tri-cultural” terms of New Mexico), a border-crosser, smuggler, and trickster. For, I have become convinced that the most innovative philosophical issues and approaches will always be discovered by those who are not afraid to steal across the borders between the established territories. Today I would like to take a step toward generalizing this perspective by suggesting that the important philosophy of the future will increasingly be found neither in the “continental” nor in the “analytic” traditions but, instead, in the transcending “sublation” of (all) traditions that I shall call “synthetic philosophy.” In order to help motivate this synthesis (which is all I can really hope to do here), I shall provide a brief overview of the traditional philosophical opposition that stands in need of such dialectical resolution.

Read the whole article.

Bookforum Omnivore - Philosophical Inquiry and the Popularity of Philosophy

Here are three different collections of links on philosophy and philosophy-related topics courtesy of Bookforum's Omnivore blog. There are some interesting articles and reviews of some books that look enticing. Enjoy.

Philosophical inquiry

Jul 20 2012  

11:00AM

• A new issue of Childhood and Philosophy is out. 
• Iain Thomson (UNM): In the Future Philosophy Will Be Neither Continental nor Analytic but Synthetic: Toward a Promiscuous Miscegenation of (All) Philosophical Traditions and Styles. 
• Gianni Paganini (UNIPMN): The Quarrel over Ancient and Modern Scepticism: Some Reflections on Descartes and His Context. 
• Roberto Andorno (Zurich): Do Our Moral Judgements Need to Be Guided by Principles? 
• From Conversations with History, an interview with Samuel Scheffler on philosophical inquiry. 
• A review of The Nature and Future of Philosophy by Michael Dummett. 
• From Brainstorm, is philosophy a science? Michael Ruse investigates (and part 2 and part 3 and part 4 and part 5). 
• An interview with Patricia Churchland, the really nice guy materialist. 
• A review of The Ultimate Why Question: Why Is There Anything at All Rather than Nothing Whatsoever? 
• A review of Saul Kripke, ed. Alan Berger. 
• The first chapter from Pursuits of Wisdom: Six Ways of Life in Ancient Philosophy from Socrates to Plotinus by John M. Cooper.

The popularity of philosophy

Aug 1 2012 

7:00PM

• A new issue of Philosophy in Review is out.
• Kevin Tobia, Wesley Buckwalter and Stephen Stich (Rutgers): Moral Intuitions: Are Philosophers Experts?
• J. David Velleman (NYU): Foundations for Moral Relativism.
• From NDPR, a review of The Ethical Project by Philip Kitcher; a review of The Ethics of Need: Agency, Dignity, and Obligation by Sarah Clark Miller; a review of Moralism: A Study of a Vice by Craig Taylor; and a review of Against Moral Responsibility by Bruce N. Waller.
• From The Utopian, an interview with T. M. Scanlon.
• The new leveller: An interview with Elizabeth Anderson.
• A review of Philosophers Past and Present: Selected Essays by Barry Stroud.
• Is philosophy literature? Analytic philosophy is reputed to be overly dry and technical, but a host of 20th century works are lyrical, engaging and a delight to read.
• Addicts, mythmakers and philosophers: Alan Brody explains Plato’s/Socrates’ understanding of habitually bad behavior.
• Public forums for the discussion of ideas are flourishing everywhere, from festivals to pubs, but will the popularity of philosophy groups have any lasting impact?

A third critical theory

Aug 2 2012 
11:00AM

• Ali Rizvi (UBD): A Critique of Modern Philosophy. 
• James Mensch (Charles): Violence and Existence: An Examination of Schmitt's Political Philosophy. 
• From Marx & Philosophy Review of Books, a review essay on Jurgen Habermas. 
• You are all proletariats: A review of Towards a New Manifesto by Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer (translated by Rodney Livingstone; Verso 2011). 
• A review of Adorno for Revolutionaries by Ben Watson. 
• A riposte to the Habermases, Rawls and Bidets of the world: A review of Proletarian Nights: Workers’ Dream in Nineteenth Century France by Jacques Ranciere and 1839: The Chartist Insurrection by David Black and Chris Ford. 
• A review of Critical Ecologies: The Frankfurt School and Contemporary Environmental Crises. 
• Rasmus Fleischer on Robert Kurz and the collapse of modernity: A quarter of a century ago, the Nurnberg school of Wertkritik (value-critical theory) emerged as a project to develop a third critical theory, pertinent to the third industrial revolution. 
• Paul Mason and/or Karl Marx: Paul Le Blanc on occupations, insurgencies and human nature.

Michael S. Gazzaniga - The "Interpreter" in Your Head Spins Stories to Make Sense of the World

This article from Discover Magazine is an excerpt from Michael Gazzaniga's recent book, Who's in Charge?: Free Will and the Science of the Brain. In this piece from the book, Gazzaniga looks at some split-brain studies (he was/is the pioneer in this research) to show how our left hemisphere generates an causal explanation for actions that occur outside of its domain. If there are sufficient facts, then the causal explanation will make sense, if facts are lacking, the explanations can be quite interesting, but generally they will be consistent with previous or projected experience.

The "Interpreter" in Your Head Spins Stories to Make Sense of the World

Our left hemisphere tweaks 
the facts and allows us to feel like we’re 
in charge, experiments with 
split-brain patients reveal.


by Michael S. Gazzaniga

From the Brain special issue; published online August 1, 2012

---

 

iStockphoto

Michael Gazzaniga is a leading neuroscientist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and has worked for decades with patients whose brains have been surgically split in half. In this excerpt from his book Who’s in Charge? Free Will and the Science of the Brain, he looks at what this procedure reveals about human consciousness. 

We humans think we make all our decisions to act consciously and willfully. We all feel we are wonderfully unified, coherent mental machines and that our underlying brain structure must reflect this overpowering sense. It doesn’t. No command center keeps all other brain systems hopping to the instructions of a five-star general. The brain has millions of local processors making important decisions. There is no one boss in the brain. You are certainly not the boss of your brain. Have you ever succeeded in telling your brain to shut up already and go to sleep?

Even though we know that the organization of the brain is made up of a gazillion decision centers, that neural activities going on at one level of organization are inexplicable at another level, and that there seems to be no boss, our conviction that we have a “self” making all the decisions is not dampened. It is a powerful illusion that is almost impossible to shake. In fact, there is little or no reason to shake it, for it has served us well as a species. There is, however, a reason to try to understand how it all comes about. If we understand why we feel in charge, we will understand why and how we make errors of thought and perception.

When I was a kid, I spent a lot of time in the desert of Southern California—out in the desert scrub and dry bunchgrass, surrounded by purple mountains, creosote bush, coyotes, and rattlesnakes. The reason I am still here today is because I have nonconscious processes that were honed by evolution.

I jumped out of the way of many a rattlesnake, but that is not all. I also jumped out of the way of grass that rustled in the wind. I jumped, that is, before I was consciously aware that it was the wind that rustled the grass, rather than a rattler. If I had had only my conscious processes to depend on, I probably would have jumped less but been bitten on more than one occasion.

Conscious processes are slow, as are conscious decisions. As a person is walking, sensory inputs from the visual and auditory systems go to the thalamus, a type of brain relay station. Then the impulses are sent to the processing areas in the cortex, next relayed to the frontal cortex. There they are integrated with other higher mental processes, and perhaps the information makes it into the stream of consciousness, which is when a person becomes consciously aware of the information (there is a snake!). In the case of the rattler, memory then kicks in the information that rattlesnakes are poisonous and what the consequences of a rattlesnake bite are. I make a decision (I don’t want it to bite me), quickly calculate how close I am to the snake, and answer a question: Do I need to change my current direction and speed? Yes, I should move back. A command is sent to put the muscles into gear, and they then do it.

All this processing takes a long time, up to a second or two. Luckily, all that doesn’t have to occur. The brain also takes a nonconscious shortcut through the amygdala, which sits under the thalamus and keeps track of everything. If a pattern associated with danger in the past is recognized by the amygdala, it sends an impulse along a direct connection to the brain stem, which activates the fight-or-flight response and rings the alarm. I automatically jump back before I realize why.

If you were to have asked me why I had jumped, I would have replied that I thought I’d seen a snake. The reality, however, is that I jumped way before I was conscious of the snake. My explanation is from post hoc information I have in my conscious system. When I answered that question, I was, in a sense, confabulating—giving a fictitious account of a past event, believing it to be true.

I confabulated because our human brains are driven to infer causality. They are driven to make sense out of scattered facts. The facts that my conscious brain had to work with were that I saw a snake, and I jumped. It did not register that I jumped before I was consciously aware of it.

In truth, when we set out to explain our actions, they are all post hoc explanations using post hoc observations with no access to nonconscious processing. Not only that, our left brain fudges things a bit to fit into a makes-sense story. Explanations are all based on what makes it into our consciousness, but actions and the feelings happen before we are consciously aware of them—and most of them are the results of nonconscious processes, which will never make it into the explanations. The reality is, listening to people’s explanations of their actions is interesting—and in the case of politicians, entertaining—but often a waste of time.

With so many systems going on subconsciously, why do we feel unified? I believe the answer to this question resides in the left hemisphere and one of its modules that we happened upon during our years of research, particularly while studying split-brain patients.

Some people with intractable epilepsy undergo split-brain surgery. In this procedure, the large tract of nerves that connects the two hemispheres, the corpus callosum, is severed to prevent the spread of electrical impulses. Afterward, the patients appear completely normal and seem entirely unaware of any changes in their mental process. But we discovered that after the surgery, any visual, tactile, proprioceptive, auditory, or olfactory information that was presented to one hemisphere was processed in that half of the brain alone, without any awareness on the part of the other half. Because tracts carrying sensory information cross over the midline inside the brain, the right hemisphere processes data from the left half of the world, and the left hemisphere handles the right.

The left hemisphere specializes in speech, language, and intelligent behavior, and a split-brain patient’s left hemisphere and language center has no access to sensory information if it is fed only to the right brain. In the case of vision, the optic nerves leading from each eye meet inside the brain at what is called the optic chiasm. Here, each nerve splits in half; the medial half (the inside track) of each crosses the optic chiasm into the opposite side of the brain, and the lateral half (that on the outside) stays on the same side. The parts of both eyes that attend to 
the right visual field send information to the left hemisphere and information from the left visual field goes to and is processed by the right hemisphere.

More than a few years into our experiments, we were working with a group of split-brain patients on the East Coast. We wondered what they would do if we sneaked information into their right hemisphere and told the left hand to do something [pdf].

We showed a split-brain patient two pictures: To his right visual field, a chicken claw, so the left hemisphere saw only the claw picture, and to the left visual field, a snow scene, so the right hemisphere saw only that. He was then asked to choose a picture from an array placed in full view in front of him, which both hemispheres could see. His left hand pointed to a shovel (which was the most appropriate answer for the snow scene) and his right hand pointed to a chicken (the most appropriate answer for the chicken claw).

We asked why he chose those items. His left-hemisphere speech center replied, “Oh, that’s simple. The chicken 
claw goes with the chicken,” easily explaining what it knew. It had seen the chicken claw. Then, looking down at his left hand pointing to the shovel, without missing a beat, he said, “And you need a shovel to clean out the chicken shed.” Immediately, the left brain, observing the left hand’s response without the knowledge of why it had picked that item, put it into a context that would explain it. It knew nothing about the snow scene, but it had to explain the shovel in front of his left hand. Well, chickens do make a mess, and you have to clean it up. Ah, that’s it! Makes sense.

What was interesting was that the left hemisphere did not say, “I don’t know,” which was the correct answer. It made up a post hoc answer that fit the situation. It confabulated, taking cues from what it knew and putting them together in an answer that made sense.

We called this left-hemisphere process the interpreter. It is the left hemisphere that engages in the human tendency to find order in chaos, that tries to fit everything into a story and put it into a context. It seems driven to hypothesize about the structure of the world even in the face of evidence that no pattern exists.

Our interpreter does this not only with objects but with events as well. In one experiment, we showed a series of about 40 pictures that told a story of a man waking up in the morning, putting on his clothes, eating breakfast, and going to work. Then, after a bit of time, we tested each viewer. He was presented with another series of pictures. Some of them were the originals, interspersed with some that were new but could easily fit the same story. We also included some distracter pictures that had nothing to do with the story, such as the same man out playing golf or at the zoo. What you and I would do is incorporate both the actual pictures and the new, related pictures and reject the distracter pictures. In split-brain patients, this is also how the left hemisphere responds. It gets the gist of the story and accepts anything that fits in.

The right hemisphere, however, does not do this. It is totally veridical and identifies only the original pictures. The right brain is very literal and doesn’t include anything that wasn’t there originally. And this is why your three-year-old, embarrassingly, will contradict you as you embellish a story. The child’s left-hemisphere interpreter, which is satisfied with the gist, is not yet fully in gear.

The interpreter is an extremely busy system. We found that it is even active in the emotional sphere, trying to explain mood shifts. In one of our patients, we triggered a negative mood in her right hemisphere by showing a scary fire safety video about a guy getting pushed into a fire. When asked what she had seen, she said, “I don’t really know what I saw. I think just a white flash.” But when asked if it made her feel any emotion, she said, “I don’t really know why, but I’m kind of scared. I feel jumpy, I think maybe I don’t like this room, or maybe it’s you.” She then turned to one of the research assistants and said, “I know I like Dr. Gazzaniga, but right now I’m scared of him for some reason.” She felt the emotional response to the video but had no idea what caused it.

The left-brain interpreter had to explain why she felt scared. The information it received from the environment was that I was in the room asking questions and that nothing else was wrong. The first makes-sense explanation it arrived at was that I was scaring her. We tried again with another emotion and another patient. We flashed a picture of a pinup girl to her right hemisphere, and she snickered. She said that she saw nothing, but when we asked her why she was laughing, she told us we had a funny machine. This is what our brain does all day long. It takes input from other areas of our brain and from the environment and synthesizes it into a story. Facts are great but not necessary. The left brain ad-libs the rest.

The view in neuroscience today is that consciousness does not constitute a single, generalized process. It involves a multitude of widely distributed specialized systems and disunited processes, the products of which are integrated by the interpreter module. Consciousness is an emergent property. From moment to moment, different modules or systems compete for attention, and the winner emerges as the neural system underlying that moment’s conscious experience. Our conscious experience is assembled on the fly as our brains respond to constantly changing inputs, calculate potential courses of action, and execute responses like a streetwise kid.

But we do not experience a thousand chattering voices. Consciousness flows easily and naturally from one moment to the next with a single, unified, coherent narrative. The action of an interpretive system becomes observable only when the system can be tricked into making obvious errors by forcing it to work with an impoverished set of inputs, most obviously in the split-brain patients.

Our subjective awareness arises out of our dominant left hemisphere’s unrelenting quest to explain the bits and pieces that pop into consciousness.

What does it mean that we build our theories about ourselves after the fact? How much of the time are we confabulating, giving a fictitious account of a past event, believing it to be true? When thinking about these big questions, one must always remember that all these modules are mental systems selected for over the course of evolution. The individuals who possessed them made choices that resulted in survival and reproduction. They became our ancestors.

From Who’s in Charge? Free Will and the Science of the Brain by Michael S. Gazzaniga, copyright 2011 by Michael S. Gazzaniga. Reprinted by arrangement with Ecco, an imprint of HarperCollins.