Big Think - Back to School with Punkle Henry (Rollins)

Henry Rollins has become a regular feature on Big Think, and that is a very good thing. In this post, Rollins suggests that kids today might want to consider developing a set of moral beliefs, some personal ethics for how they want to live their lives. 

That may sound funny coming from the Icon of Punk, but Rollins has always been sure of his ethics and forceful in sharing his ethics, either through music, or spoken word, and books, or on the radio. With all the rage he had as a young man, had he not had some ethical foundation in his life, he may easily be another dead rock star.

Back to School with Punkle Henry (Rollins)

Jonathan Fowler and Elizabeth Rodd on September 17, 2012

Henry Rollins says he thinks he's starting to sound like "a cranky old man." His advise to young people today is to develop "a moral and civic backbone, to have a moral and civic true north." That means young people need to develop a heroic altruism, or, to put it another way, "almost Boy Scout-like." These might be qualities that young people might want to rebel against, which is ironic considering that Rollins himself is the ultimate rebellious role model. 

And yet, Rollins is remarkably consistent in his rebelliousness. He says rebellion should not involve chest-beating or flag-waving but merely upholding a sense of decency, which is itself a rebellion against all of those who would put you down. 

Watch the video here:



Image courtesy of Shutterstock

Chris Hedges and Dinesh D'Souza Debate American Power

This is a little challenging for me to listen to - when D'Souza spouts his conservative Christian dogma my skin crawls . . . right off my body and hides in the closet. But I'm sure conservatives feel the same way when Hedges speaks.

The real topic of the debate is the "film" D'Souza made, which is supposed to be about Obama, 2016: Obama’s America (currently at a 30% level among critics on Rotten Tomatoes), which has been described by Entertainment Weekly’s Owen Gleiberman as:

“an outrageously unsubstantiated act of character assassination,” which espouses “the standard right-wing argument that Obama has always been out to hide what a radical he is,” and the “underlying message is that Obama is a stranger, a man you “don’t know,” a refugee from another land, another culture,” and that “[d]eep down, he’s an angry Third World upstart just like his father.”

The story and links are courtesy of Utne Reader. Below the article, I have posted the original article from Uprising.

Listen: Chris Hedges and Dinesh D'Souza Debate American Power

9/18/2012

by Sam Ross-Brown

This morning, KPFK, a listener-sponsored Pacifica radio station in Los Angeles hosted a debate between Chris Hedges and Dinesh D’Souza. The debate is moderated by Sonali Kolhatkar, host of the KPFK show Uprising and author of Bleeding Afghanistan: Washington, Warlords, and the Propaganda of Silence. Hedges and D’Souza touch on the War on Terror, the Arab Spring, and the 2012 election, among other topics. Both authors have been fiercely critical of U.S. foreign policy and the Obama administration, but for very different reasons. You can listen to the full hour-long debate below, courtesy of KPFK.
 
Listen: Chris Hedges vs. Dinesh D'Souza
 

About the Speakers 

Chris Hedges is a journalist and author, who spent nearly 20 years as a war correspondent in Latin America, the Balkans, and the Middle East. In 2002, he was part of a team of reporters at the New York Times who received the Pulitzer Prize for its coverage of global terrorism. He is the author of War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning and Death of the Liberal Class. His latest book, Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt, was coauthored with artist Joe Sacco, and describes inequality and poverty in 21^st century America. Hedges is currently a senior fellow at the Nation Institute and writes a weekly column for TruthDig. 

Dinesh D’Souza is a New York Times bestselling author, filmmaker, and president of King’s College in New York City. A vocal critic of the Obama administration, D’Souza served as a policy advisor to Ronald Reagan before moving on to fellowships at the American Enterprise Institute and the Hoover Institution. Since then, he has debated with Michael Shermer and Christopher Hitchens, and authored several books defending conservative Christian values. D’Souza is the director of a new film called 2016: Obama’s America, which appeared this summer and has already grossed close to $30 million. The film is based on D'Souza's 2010 book, The Roots of Obama's Rage.

This is the full article from Uprising.

Obama’s America: 2016 – a Debate between Dinesh D’Souza and Chris Hedges

Published 18 Sep 2012

Listen to the entire program
 
Timed for release in the thick of the 2012 presidential campaign season, a new film called 2016: Obama’s America has hit 2000 theater screens nationwide and earned an estimated $30 million to become a box-office success. The film is based on the best-selling book by conservative commentator, Dinesh D’Souza, called The Roots of Obama’s Rage, and produced by Gerald R. Molen, who has been a producer for such Academy award winning films as Schindler’s List and Rain Man. The Hollywood Reporter called it “perhaps the most popular conservative doc of all time.” 2016: Obama’s America questions President Obama’s allegiance to the United States and makes inferences from Obama’s 1995 memoir, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance.

Since it first screened at a theater in Houston in July, the low-budget documentary was heavily promoted by Houston-based conservative talk show host, Michael Berry after which it spread by word of mouth and opened in even more theaters locally and then nationally. 2016: Obama’s America has since been endorsed by Glenn Beck, Rupert Murdoch and others. In fact Murdoch tweeted the following after watching the film: “Truly scary if no answer. Every voter should see and decide for self what future they want for America.”

But Entertainment Weekly’s Owen Gleiberman has called the film “an outrageously unsubstantiated act of character assassination,” which espouses “the standard right-wing argument that Obama has always been out to hide what a radical he is,” and the “underlying message is that Obama is a stranger, a man you “don’t know,” a refugee from another land, another culture,” and that “[d]eep down, he’s an angry Third World upstart just like his father.”

President Obama’s reelection campaign has also responded, calling the film “nothing more than an insidious attempt to dishonestly smear the President by giving intellectual cover to the worst in subterranean conspiracy theories and false, partisan attacks.”

Secular Buddhist Podcast, Episode 133 - Ginger Campbell and Dana Nourie: Consciousness and the Complex of Mind

I am a long-time fan of Dr. Ginger Campbell's Brain Science Podcast show - I think I have listened to most if not all of the 88 shows she has done so far. So it's a treat to hear her on the other end of the microphone, being interviewed by another of my favorite podcasts, the Secular Buddhist Podcast.

Dr. Campbell has a recent book, Kindle only I believe, called Are You Sure? The Unconscious Origins of Certainty (Brain Talk: Conversations with Neuroscientists) - only $2.99.

Secular Buddhist Episode 133 :: Ginger Campbell and Dana Nourie :: Consciousness and the Complex of Mind

The Secular Buddhist Podcast

by Ted Meissner

 

Dr. Ginger Campbell

Dr. Ginger Campbell and Dana Nourie speak with us about the complex interrelated processes we refer to as consciousness.

What is self? Is it your body, so if you lose your left pinky finger, is that really losing part of you? Is it your memories? Or some other aspect of mind, like consciousness? And for that matter, what is consciousness?

There are many different ideas about these questions, from a variety of disciplines. Scientific thought may not say the same thing as philosophy, which in turn has a wide variety of concepts that may not merge so well with an equally complext set of religious views. However we answer the question of what is consciousness, it is a rich area of thought, discussion, debate, and exploration.

Dr. Ginger Campbell is an experienced emergency physician with a long-standing interest in mind-body medicine, the brain, and consciousness. She is also interested in a wide variety of other topics including the history of science and ideas, began podcasting in 2006, and has discovered that it is a great way to share ideas with people from around the world. Her Brain Science Podcast explores how recent scientific discoveries are unraveling age-old mysteries, such as intelligence, emotions, personality, and memory.

Dana Nourie

Dana Nourie does not label herself a Buddhist, though she does practice Buddha’s teachings and associates with Secular Buddhists. She has been a guest on The Secular Buddhist podcast many times, and has been the primary blogger on the Secular Buddhist Association website.

So, sit back, relax, and have a nice Downy White tea.

Podcast: Download

:: Discuss this episode ::

Corvid Brains - Crows and Jays Show Human Traits

There were two very cool stories about corvids in the press last week, one from the University of Washington in Seattle on how crows can remember faces (confirming previous studies) and another from the University of California Davis on the fact that scrub jays mourn their dead, not just individually but as a group.

The cool thing about the crow study was that the researchers developed a less invasive and traumatizing method for conducting the research. Anything that can be done to reduce the trauma is good in my book.

Both of these studies reaffirm the intelligence of corvids in particular and birds/animals in general.

Crows recall faces with human-like brain activity

U. WASHINGTON (US) — Like humans, crows recognize faces and form associations with them—and to accomplish this, the two species’ brains appear to work in similar ways.

Posted by Sandra Hines-UW on Wednesday, September 12, 2012

The findings reveal that similar processes take place in the brains of crows and humans, both of which recognize faces and form positive and associations with them based on experience. "Our approach has wide applicability and potential to improve our understanding of the neural basis for animal behavior," write the University of Washington researchers.
“The regions of the crow brain that work together are not unlike those that work together in mammals, including humans,” says John Marzluff, University of Washington professor of environmental and forest sciences. “These regions were suspected to work in birds but not documented until now.

“For example it appears that birds have a region of their brain that is analogous to the amygdala of mammals,” he says. “The amygdala is the region of the vertebrate brain where negative associations are stored as memories. Previous work primarily concerned its function in mammals while our work shows that a similar system is at work in birds.

“Our approach could be used in other animals—such as lizards and frogs—to see if the process is similar in those vertebrates as well.”

 

The “caring” and “threatening” masks both have neutral expressions, so the researchers could be sure the crows were remembering and responding to positive or negative associations. 

Marzluff is the lead author of a paper published this week in the online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Previous research on the neural circuitry of animal behavior has been conducted using well-studied, often domesticated, species like rats, chickens, zebra finches, pigeons, and rhesus macaques—but not wild animals like the 12 adult male crows in this study.

The crows were captured by investigators all wearing masks that the researchers referred to as “the threatening face.” The crows were never treated in a threatening way, but the fact they’d been captured created a negative association with the mask they saw.

Then, for the four weeks they were in captivity, they were fed by people wearing a mask different from the first—this one called “the caring face.” The masks were based on actual people’s faces and both bore neutral expressions so the associations made by the crows was based on their treatment.

Awake and active
In most previous neurological studies of animals, the work usually starts by sedating the animals, Marzluff says. Instead, the new approach involved injecting a glucose fluid commonly used in brain imaging into the bodies of fully alert crows that then went back to moving freely about their cages.

The fluid flooded to the parts of the crow brains that were most active as they were exposed for about 15 minutes to someone wearing either the threatening or caring mask.

Then the birds were sedated and scans made of their brains. All the birds were returned to the wild once all the work was completed.

“Our approach has wide applicability and potential to improve our understanding of the neural basis for animal behavior,” write Marzluff and co-authors Donna Cross, Robert Miyaoka, and Satoshi Minoshima, all faculty members with the radiology department. The department funded the preliminary work while the main project was conducted using money from the University’s Royalty Research Fund.

Most neurological studies to date in birds have concerned their songs—how their brain registers what they hear, how they learn and come up with songs of their own. This new approach enables researchers to study the visual system of birds and how the brain integrates visual sensation into behavioral action, Marzluff says.

Stress reduction
Among other things the findings have implications for lowering the stress of captive animals, he says.

“By feeding and caring for birds in captivity their brain activity suggests that the birds view their keepers as valued social partners, rather than animals that must be feared. So, to keep captive animals happy we need to treat them well and do so consistently,” he says.

Intriguingly, Marzluff says the findings might also offer a way to reduce conflict between birds and endangered species on which they might be feeding. In the Mojave Desert, for instance, ravens prey on endangered desert tortoises. And on the West and East coasts, crows and ravens prey on threatened snowy plovers.

“Our studies suggest that we can train these birds to do the right thing,” Marzluff says. “By pairing a negative experience with eating a tortoise or a plover, the brain of the birds quickly learns the association. To reduce predation in a specific area we could train birds to avoid that area or that particular prey by catching them as they attempt to prey on the rare species.”

Collaborative work among neuroscientists and ecologists could be used to better understand the neural basis of cognition in widely diverse animals, says co-author Cross. For example, her suggestion to use the glucose technique prior to brain scans, so the crows could be fully awake, could be used for other animals.

A researchers wore the “caring mask” to feed the crows. (Credit: Jack DeLap/U of Washington)

Source: University of Washington

* * * * * * *

Scrub jays react to their dead

Posted On: September 11, 2012

Western scrub jays summon others to screech over the body of a dead jay, according to new research from the University of California, Davis. The birds' cacophonous "funerals" can last for up to half an hour.

Anecdotal reports have suggested that other animals, including elephants, chimpanzees and birds in the crow family, react to dead of their species, said Teresa Iglesias, the UC Davis graduate student who carried out the work. But few experimental studies have explored this behavior.

The new research by Iglesias and her colleagues appears in the Aug. 27 issue of the journal Animal Behaviour.

Western scrub jays live in breeding pairs and are not particularly social birds.

"They're really territorial and not at all friendly with other scrub-jays," Iglesias said.

Working in the backyards of homes in Davis, Calif., Iglesias set up feeding tables to encourage visits from the jays. Then she videotaped their behavior when she placed a dead jay on the ground. She compared these reactions with the birds' behavior when confronted with a dead jay that had been stuffed and mounted on a perch, a stuffed horned owl, and wood painted to represent jay feathers.

On encountering a dead jay, prostrate on the ground, jays flew into a tree and began a series of loud, screeching calls that attracted other jays. The summoned birds perched on trees and fences around the body and joined in the calling. These cacophonous gatherings could last from a few seconds to as long as 30 minutes.

Western scrub-jay at a backyard bird feeder in Davis, CA. UC Davis researchers found the birds gather for noisy "funerals" when they encounter a dead jay. (Photo Credit: Stephanie Macey-Gallow, UC Davis.)

Jays formed similar cacophonous gatherings in response to a mounted owl, but ignored painted wood. When confronted with a mounted jay, the birds swooped in on it as if it were an intruder.

Jays typically gathered within seconds of the first bird calling, Iglesias said. If they did not, the first jay would often fly higher into a tree, apparently to call more widely.

"It looked like they were actively trying to attract attention," she said.

The purpose of the calls seems to be to alert other birds of danger, Iglesias said. But why the calls summon others, rather than warning them off, is unclear. Having more jays present might mean more eyes to locate a predator, or more numbers to drive it away, she speculates.

There might also be a learning component to the gatherings, if they help teach young jays about dangers in the environment, Iglesias said.

While reactions of animals to their dead are sometimes called "funerals," that does not imply that there is an emotional or ritual element to the behavior, Iglesias said. We simply don't know enough about the emotional life of animals to understand that.

But Iglesias isn't ruling it out. "I think there's a huge possibility that there is much more to learn about the social and emotional lives of birds," she said.

Source: University of California - Davis

Philosophy v Science: Which can answer the big questions of life? - Julian Baggini and Lawrence Krauss

From The Observer (UK), this is an interesting conversation between a philosopher and a physicist on whether philosophy or science is better suited to answer life's most pressing questions. Although, I have to say this is somewhat pointless since neither alone will ever answer all of the questions, or any one question in full.

Each needs the other - philosophy of mind and consciousness have certainly been influenced and improved by neuroscience; and there could certainly be more philosophy of ethics included in the world of science.

Philosophy v Science: Which can answer the big questions of life?

Philosopher Julian Baggini fears that, as we learn more and more about the universe, scientists are becoming increasingly determined to stamp their mark on other disciplines. Here, he challenges theoretical physicist Lawrence Krauss over 'mission creep' among his peers

• Julian Baggini and Lawrence Krauss
• The Observer, Saturday 8 September 2012

Does philosophy or science have all the big answers?

Julian Baggini No one who has understood even a fraction of what science has told us about the universe can fail to be in awe of both the cosmos and of science. When physics is compared with the humanities and social sciences, it is easy for the scientists to feel smug and the rest of us to feel somewhat envious. Philosophers in particular can suffer from lab-coat envy. If only our achievements were so clear and indisputable! How wonderful it would be to be free from the duty of constantly justifying the value of your discipline.

However – and I'm sure you could see a "but" coming – I do wonder whether science hasn't suffered from a little mission creep of late. Not content with having achieved so much, some scientists want to take over the domain of other disciplines.

I don't feel proprietorial about the problems of philosophy. History has taught us that many philosophical issues can grow up, leave home and live elsewhere. Science was once natural philosophy and psychology sat alongside metaphysics. But there are some issues of human existence that just aren't scientific. I cannot see how mere facts could ever settle the issue of what is morally right or wrong, for example.

Some of the things you have said and written suggest that you share some of science's imperialist ambitions. So tell me, how far do you think science can and should offer answers to the questions that are still considered the domain of philosophy?

Lawrence Krauss Thanks for the kind words about science and your generous attitude. As for your "but" and your sense of my imperialist ambitions, I don't see it as imperialism at all. It's merely distinguishing between questions that are answerable and those that aren't. To first approximation, all the answerable ones end up moving into the domain of empirical knowledge, aka science.

Getting to your question of morality, for example, science provides the basis for moral decisions, which are sensible only if they are based on reason, which is itself based on empirical evidence. Without some knowledge of the consequences of actions, which must be based on empirical evidence, then I think "reason" alone is impotent. If I don't know what my actions will produce, then I cannot make a sensible decision about whether they are moral or not. Ultimately, I think our understanding of neurobiology and evolutionary biology and psychology will reduce our understanding of morality to some well-defined biological constructs.

The chief philosophical questions that do grow up are those that leave home. This is particularly relevant in physics and cosmology. Vague philosophical debates about cause and effect, and something and nothing, for example – which I have had to deal with since my new book appeared – are very good examples of this. One can debate until one is blue in the face what the meaning of "non-existence" is, but while that may be an interesting philosophical question, it is really quite impotent, I would argue. It doesn't give any insight into how things actually might arise and evolve, which is really what interests me.

JB I've got more sympathy with your position than you might expect. I agree that many traditional questions of metaphysics are now best approached by scientists and you do a brilliant job of arguing that "why is there something rather than nothing?" is one of them. But we are missing something if we say, as you do, that the "chief philosophical questions that do grow up are those that leave home". I think you say this because you endorse a principle that the key distinction is between empirical questions that are answerable and non-empirical ones that aren't.

My contention is that the chief philosophical questions are those that grow up without leaving home, important questions that remain unanswered when all the facts are in. Moral questions are the prime example. No factual discovery could ever settle a question of right or wrong. But that does not mean that moral questions are empty questions or pseudo-questions. We can think better about them and can even have more informed debates by learning new facts. What we conclude about animal ethics, for example, has changed as we have learned more about non-human cognition.

What is disparagingly called scientism insists that, if a question isn't amenable to scientific solution, it is not a serious question at all. I would reply that it is an ineliminable feature of human life that we are confronted with many issues that are not scientifically tractable, but we can grapple with them, understand them as best we can and we can do this with some rigour and seriousness of mind.

It sounds to me as though you might not accept this and endorse the scientistic point of view. Is that right?

LK In fact, I've got more sympathy with your position than you might expect. I do think philosophical discussions can inform decision-making in many important ways, by allowing reflections on facts, but that ultimately the only source of facts is via empirical exploration. And I agree with you that there are many features of human life for which decisions are required on issues that are not scientifically tractable. Human affairs and human beings are far too messy for reason alone, and even empirical evidence, to guide us at all stages. I have said I think Lewis Carroll was correct when suggesting, via Alice, the need to believe several impossible things before breakfast. We all do it every day in order to get out of bed – perhaps that we like our jobs, or our spouses, or ourselves for that matter.

Where I might disagree is the extent to which this remains time-invariant. What is not scientifically tractable today may be so tomorrow. We don't know where the insights will come from, but that is what makes the voyage of discovery so interesting. And I do think factual discoveries can resolve even moral questions.

Take homosexuality, for example. Iron age scriptures might argue that homosexuality is "wrong", but scientific discoveries about the frequency of homosexual behaviour in a variety of species tell us that it is completely natural in a rather fixed fraction of populations and that it has no apparent negative evolutionary impacts. This surely tells us that it is biologically based, not harmful and not innately "wrong". In fact, I think you actually accede to this point about the impact of science when you argue that our research into non-human cognition has altered our view of ethics.

I admit I am pleased to have read that you agree that "why is there something rather than nothing?" is a question best addressed by scientists. But, in this regard, as I have argued that "why" questions are really "how" questions, would you also agree that all "why" questions have no meaning, as they presume "purpose" that may not exist?

JB It would certainly be foolish to rule out in advance the possibility that what now appears to be a non-factual question might one day be answered by science. But it's also important to be properly sceptical about how far we anticipate science being able to go. If not, then we might be too quick to turn over important philosophical issues to scientists prematurely.

Your example of homosexuality is a case in point. I agree that the main reasons for thinking it is wrong are linked with outmoded ways of thought. But the way you put it, it is because science shows us that homosexual behaviour "is completely natural", "has no apparent negative evolutionary impacts", is "biologically based" and "not harmful" that we can conclude it is "not innately 'wrong'". But this mixes up ethical and scientific forms of justification. Homosexuality is morally acceptable, but not for scientific reasons. Right and wrong are not simply matters of evolutionary impacts and what is natural.

Read the rest of the discussion.

Understanding Libertarian Morality: The Psychological Dispositions of Self-Identified Libertarians - Jonathan Haidt, et al

Jonathan Haidt (author of The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion) and his team published a recent article in PLoS ONE on the psychological disposition of libertarians (self-identified).

The challenge with this kind of study is in how one defines the term (this is also an issue with his definitions of liberal and conservative, which is why he likely prefers the "self-identified" approach). Haidt traces the origins of libertarianism back to the Enlightenment, with its emphasis on the individual. Much of the nuance of philosophical libertarian thought is lost on those who now call themselves libertarians, such as the tea party crowd.

Haidt catches the gist of the current perspective in this excerpt:

Libertarianism provides an ideological narrative whereby the opposition to high taxes and big government is not just an “economic” position: it is a moral position as well. This narrative provides the basis for principled opposition to a government seen as unfair (because it takes from the productive and gives to the unproductive), tyrannical (because it violates the negative liberty of some people to promote the positive liberty of others), and wasteful (because governments rarely achieve the efficiencies generated by the competition of private firms).

The downside of this is that a lot of social conservatives, because they also want a smaller government and lower taxes, have self-identified as libertarian, like Ron Paul. He believes in limited government, except when it comes to social issues - he believes we should ban abortion, discriminate against LGBT people, and his organization has been implicated in racism several times. He is a fundamentalist Christian, and those beliefs reject true libertarian philosophy.

The article is open access.

Understanding Libertarian Morality: The Psychological Dispositions of Self-Identified Libertarians

Ravi Iyer^1*, Spassena Koleva¹, Jesse Graham¹, Peter Ditto², Jonathan Haidt³

1 Department of Psychology, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, California, United States of America, 2 Department of Psychology and Social Behavior, Irvine, California, United States of America, 3 Department of Psychology, Charlottesville, Virginia, United States of America

Abstract Top

Libertarians are an increasingly prominent ideological group in U.S. politics, yet they have been largely unstudied. Across 16 measures in a large web-based sample that included 11,994 self-identified libertarians, we sought to understand the moral and psychological characteristics of self-described libertarians. Based on an intuitionist view of moral judgment, we focused on the underlying affective and cognitive dispositions that accompany this unique worldview. Compared to self-identified liberals and conservatives, libertarians showed 1) stronger endorsement of individual liberty as their foremost guiding principle, and weaker endorsement of all other moral principles; 2) a relatively cerebral as opposed to emotional cognitive style; and 3) lower interdependence and social relatedness. As predicted by intuitionist theories concerning the origins of moral reasoning, libertarian values showed convergent relationships with libertarian emotional dispositions and social preferences. Our findings add to a growing recognition of the role of personality differences in the organization of political attitudes.

Full Citation: 
Iyer R, Koleva S, Graham J, Ditto P, Haidt J (2012) Understanding Libertarian Morality: The Psychological Dispositions of Self-Identified Libertarians. PLoS ONE 7(8): e42366. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0042366

Michel Serres: Biogea - A Review by A. Staley Groves

I have not read this book - Biogea by Michel Serres - or heard of it until now, but the review makes it sound very enjoyable and likely to expand my understanding of how science and the humanities overlap.

This review by A Staley Groves appeared at Continent and was published under a Creative Commons license.

A New Negentropic Subject: Reviewing Michel Serres' Biogea

A. Staley Groves

 

Download PDF

continent. 2.2 (2012): 155–158

Michel Serres. Biogea. Trans. Randolph Burks. Minneapolis: Univocal Publishing. 2012.
200 pp. | ISBN 9781937561086 | $22.95

Conveying to potential readers the significance of a book puts me at risk of glad handing. It’s not in my interest to laud the undeserving, especially on the pages of this journal. This is not a sales pitch, but rather an affirmation of a necessary work on very troubled terms: human, earth, nature, and the problematic world we made. It is this world that aspirates the silence (so to speak), and therefore the subject which, along with the development of the “made world” exports the excess augmentation of the cosmically missing, this silence of the natural, et cetera. Had we learned from Locke that lesson of “labor,” to consume what we need… but perhaps we need more than what matters?

Serres’ Biogea has several functions on this manner, if it is indeed a book to be consumed. First, readers searching for novelistic entertainment have a place to dwell. Biogea deserves a place in your back pocket; biographical generosity and poetic fluidity should satisfy most textual fetishes. For lay philosophers who want to refresh their acumen, Biogea deserves a place on the book shelf, one already reads a sorely needed postmodern tune-up here. Serres’ style is clearly French; he leaves few cheese crumbs on his words, rather preciseness and breathing in the work give way to a sweeping manner that breaks the narrative line of sight. A circular narrative and anachronistic fragmentation of terms allows an abyssal atmosphere to swell, if only to pump into the book the externality of its broader text. Biogea aspires to a higher standard and the book, at times, is thinking this negentropic problem too. Univocal, the publisher, has crafted a book appropriate for the hands to hold and the translations are an achievement of an otherwise difficult writer to translate.

Terms are the conditions of a broader text. It is important to note that Serres’ content is as much a thinking of terminal ports. There is a regard for the transportation technology of the written word. For me, this is the mark of genius, a craftiness that tells of a book device that I may trust. Serres is an accomplished thinker and a necessary voice to check the putative trendiness of anti-postmodernist and market-driven theory of endless cultural liquidation. Offering interventions on subjectivity as an open system we are given a chance to affirm the human, not merely to discard it, but to engage its poetic image emotion, the calibratory silent sense of the analogic world; the terms on which we base our efforts.¹ The human is the center of its own negation, constantly mediating it. Something deeper at stake appears in the work then, and it is quite obvious from the onset. Certainly, a book is an intensification of possible text and those who brought this actual book into existence have captured a rarity in regards to the subject matter and artistic accomplishment.

I mentioned terms as conditions, so let us understand Biogea as bio-yea, a yes to bios. An affirmation of living and accepting presence for all of its defiance of images, words, and things temporal. Therefore Serres’ existence and its existants plays parts; out of linearity and still like a porous bone pumping blood it manufactures into the fleshy life it becomes. Starting from a man named silence chaos emerges, or the man “Old Taciturn” takes up a journey anticipating a great flood. In other words, a development akin to the one in Genesis. In dealing with this ancestral occupation, fusing Genesis with contemporary philosophical terms, Serres initiates this anachronistic fragmentation under the forming subjectivity of his own autobiography.

This mutation in the open system is precisely one of Serres’ terms. There an abyss is at work, stated, but also measured by heels on the ground—the abyss dispatching earthen tensions, that which plays our tunes, that which we abide by and recognize in volcanoes, rivers, oceans, earthquakes and weaponry in the battles of the world. Set in later stages of the book, such tensions are harnessed through scientific principles in an attempt to unify the terms of natural force if only to terminate the world. Thus the elevation of the earth into the world is clearly set forth.

Here already, and few pages in, a resonance is set forth under appellations such as the river Garonne, a subjectivity as much as it is inhuman, the river is the inhuman that makes us human. I get the sense that Serres is taking up a challenge issued by Wallace Stevens; namely, that the great poems of heaven and hell have been written, but that only the poem of the earth has resisted composition.² On this level we cannot avoid the killing factor of silence, given that our cognition blocks its pure, radical obliteration. Thus a silence of attunement to the earth is in a novel dialectic of the rithmic and rhythm. A technological world, a triumph of termination is set forth. If a text imposes its will given the reader who authorizes it, it is made to convey or convect a presupposition to a reader or its inhabitant(s). Text is therefore both, in-content, contenting, contentedness, and in reading it, a way to navigate self-destruction (dis-content).

Here then would one note that the “inhuman” reveals itself, “an aperiodic rhythm of lovers and beloved…the sea as our friend…but as our enemy…maternal vivifying sea.” The sea is an open book, or vaginal birth canal, where the engagement of text comes forth: “…woman sea, open vulva.” One sees like the sea, but only after it, when the uninhabitable truth of inhabiting it switches the polarity of the sailors soul: “I was seeing like the sea” (9-11). In other words, we are invited to embrace the nonsense of the visible.

At this point I am taken to Jean-François Lyotard’s work The Inhuman, specifically the first entry on negentropy that would be congruent with Serres’ thematic.³ The human being exports, deports, or transplants its relation through text, through the system— and this is its sense or relation to silence, to music. Unaware of Serres’ proximity to this work, the concept of gender interrelation as regards a solar catastrophe runs clear. It would be, on this basis, that Serres references his peers, the other texts that, as mentioned above, are discarded in philosophy today. For students of philosophy what we have here is perhaps a gift, a needed project.

If silence and death are at work, there is a political valence to deal with, and here, much like the domain of the text and the dominion of the reader, we confront the world of natural, fluid violence. The anti-postmodernist critique is in part based on a weak idea that the loss of ideology, of a world vision, motivates the “correlationist” project.⁴ Serres seems to offer another way to view this when he notes that whereas persons “sometimes kill,” it is clearly “the collective” that “always kills” (17). What is the collective today, if not an organizing function we never see yet acts in its favor in the name of truth? One feels a sense of enigma here, if only to link to what Stevens remarked of communism as a “grubby faith,” providing this applies for capitalism as well, namely any ideology of progress overly interested in absolutes. Here we get the sense that the inhuman, silence, this type of killing, always killing, could not be matched by human-made, political dynamos. Or that if it comes to an equilibrium, a catastrophe is never too far from us to read with our heels. We are left to note that the forces of nature presuppose and permeate political systems, the more these systems obtain force, the more the system takes upon itself the proper name of nature that motivates its dissemination, albeit falsely. This note, that in an age of ecocide and technological captivity (sustainability and transparency) political regimes won’t grow our soul-learning ears any larger than our tongues, stands clear to us. The promise of technological desubjectification is here pushed aside.

Regarding politics, Serres illustrates this fact:

Where did this corpse come from? Who was it? Who killed it? I don’t know. I won’t try to find out. I refuse to get vengeance for it. And I only see Garonne. For our victims, today, are the rivers, too. Their waters have irrigated my life, enchanted my thought, invigorated my body; I’ve known them to be threatening, untamable, as dangerous as the sea when it rages. Yes, murderous.
 

They decided to control their courses; dams, sometimes senseless, destroying sites and valleys, reduced entire populations to servile displacements; programs for the irrigation of thirsty farmland, often beneficial of course, completed their drying up.(22)

Serres enters into his idea concerning the captivity of language from the natural into a world system:

For thousands of years, we have been licking things with our tongues, covering and daubing them so as to appropriate things for ourselves. If language boils down to a convention, this convention took place between the speakers without consulting the thing named, become as a result the property of those who covered it in this way with their drawn or voiced productions. Malfeasance analyzes these acts of appropriation.
 

Thus every inert object, every living thing as well, sleeps under the covers of signs, a little in the way that, today, a thousand posters shouting messages and ugly riots of color drown, with their filthy flood, the landscapes, or better, exclude them from perception because the meaning, almost nil, of this false language and these base images forms an irresistible source of attraction to our neurons and eyes. This appropriation covers the world’s beauty with ugliness. (38-39)

Technological concealment coming to bear, we begin to get a sense of another commentary on the condition of sensing, driving home the necessity of a text dealing with such subject matter to be what its terms insist. Thus toward new openings:

The new opening. As low beneath our feet as you like, the Biogea opens us to another space, high enough for us to be able to acquire a wisdom there, that of redeveloping this same place differently from our fathers, this place that’s still politically cut up by old hatreds, beneath the flood of tears and blood that we call history. Without this soft place, spiritually very old, but newly conceived in this way, without the juridical construction of a common good, opposed to our filthy ownership, I don’t see how our planet, hard, will survive. Hardness that depends on a softness, material belonging that depends on this temporary rented location (51).

Serres enters into a summit on the content and the structure of his work. Archimedes is brought in with the concept of three volcanoes. Meaning fire, but as well earth, water, air. For it was Archimedes’ war machines that sought to lift the earth, thus bringing in the question of principles of science: “can a principle be invented while controlling its consequences?” (66-7). May the earth be put in a sentence, terminated by terminology, appellations, gone wild?

By means of these element-dominating laws, this old physicist began to tear nature away from the ancient myths; by a strange return, today we’re plunging our successes back into the anxieties and terrors from which that ancient physics was born. Yes, our new history of science and technology is plunging, today, as though in a loop, into the fundamental human myths from which Empedocles’ first laws came. A major progression and a regression on the nether side of the origins. Consequently, the contemporary time requires that we try to return to that unity in which the principles of hate and love are at the same time human, living, inert and global. We will never attain a deontology of our knowledge and actions without thinking the subjective, the objective, the collective, and the cognitive all together simultaneously. Here, hate and love are the result of these four components.(71)

Working then on the concept of fire-starting mirrors to the atomic annihilation of the Second War, Serres works into the subjectivity in question on the matter of rhythm—say rithmic— precisely at that point:

Knowledge is changing today. The all-political is dying; the monarchy of the sciences said to be hard is coming to a close. The science of the things of the world will have to communicate just as much as the things of the world do, which do it much better than humans do, who don’t always want to do it. Let’s celebrate two changes this morning. The first one strikes a new blow to our narcissism. No, knowledge and the world don’t resemble our analytical enjoyments of refined cutting up, of endless debates and of exclusions full of hate. They, on the contrary, form a bloc and a sum, alliance and alloys. Uniting the fields of knowledge among themselves the way the things are connected among themselves, the second newness puts into place sets united by interlacing, webs and simplexes that combine with the things of the world, themselves combined, the combined knowledge that understands them.(130-1)

Biogea closes on its opening flood thematic, approaching the initial telos of Genesis. Here the trees are brought into a position with atmosphere, the opaque abyssal reservoir, the tomb of the sun, sea in the polarity of the earthen heaven and hell. The poem of the earth then is silent but deadly, indeed, as funny as that phrase is, mainly a tomb gas.

The meaning of the living and the non-meaning of things converge in the muteness of the world; this meaning and non-meaning plunge there and come out, the ultimate eddy. Mundus patet: through a fissure, through an opening, a fault, a cleft come noises, calls as small as these apertures. I’m listening, attentive, I’m translating, I’m advancing in the scaled-down meaning and science. Mundus patet: should the world open greatly, it will launch me into its silence. The totality remains silent. Knowledge expanded in elation. White origin of meaning, fountain of joy. (198)

Final Remarks

One test of a review is the long term trajectory the referee thinks the book will have. I see Serres’ text lending greatly into the vision of Biogea. In fact, in the vision of the novel inquiries of Stephen Jay Gould’s work there is something to be thought on the level of the individual and the species; namely, that humanity and its uniqueness is in its deferral, its thinking and naming, a thinking surrounded by silence that filters into everything, that pulls us through the world, the kinetic pulse we recognize, and all of that we cleave away in the base philosophical maxim of difference itself. Unique individuals are spatial creatures: we dwell, and we ought to get good at it. Yet this is an imaginative space that, if you are crazy enough to believe it, de-term-ine the conditions of its own terms. That is why we are not merely creating spaces on the acceleration of time, or so this ignoramus thinks, to accidentally transcend. Imagination already has this insatiable silence that we drink up and fail to manifest. Space is timeless. The imagination itself, shared by humans for themselves, their objects, and the species as a whole, is a non-defined space of relation; a whole human trajectory as part of nature, and part of worlds that are the other side of thinking nature, the consequence of it, at least our attempt to do so. Our survival is based on our deliberation, our caution, our natural deconstructive sense toward this silence that is already part of the song, sung, singing of this century without end. Good books will let us inhabit this space and recognize a form of life.

Serres’ text moves toward dwelling, as noted, in masterful and accessible ways. The pitched battles are the falling replays of anemic and dead politics. As soon as we realize there is humanity, we may be able to enjoy the end of it, our inhuman capability of listening to silence.

NOTES
 
1. See Michel Serres. The Parasite. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 2007.
2. Wallace Stevens, “Imagination as Value” [ca. 1945], in Collected Poetry and Prose. New York: The Library of America. 1997. 724-39.
3. Jean-François Lyotard. The Inhuman: Reflections on Time. Trans. Geoffrey Bennington & Rachel Bowlby. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. 1992.
4. See the introduction: Quentin Melliassoux. After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency. Trans. Ray Brassier. New York: Continuum. 2008.

EDITOR'S NOTE: This review was updated on August 8, 2012. Substantial edits include block quotes from the book under review as well as the inclusion of comments from the author.

Decoding the invisible forces of social connections - Stephanie Cacioppo and John T. Cacioppo

This is an interesting article that recently appeared in Frontiers in Integrative Neuroscience.  Stephanie Cacioppo and John T. Cacioppo of the departments of psychology, University of Geneva and University of Chicago (respectively), sought to investigate the "neurophysiological mechanisms underlying sensorimotor mapping between interacting individuals"in the hope of creating a "multilevel integrative approach" that can provide a new tool "for investigating the brain networks responsible for understanding acute and chronic social disorders."

The authors looked at the interpersonal forces shaping the neural networks of individuals interacting but at a distance. While they propose the useful of this study for understanding social disorders, it also seems helpful in making sense of intersubjectivity at the neural level.

Decoding the invisible forces of social connections

Stephanie Cacioppo¹* and John T. Cacioppo²

• ¹Department of Psychology, University of Geneva, Geneva, Switzerland
• ²Department of Psychology, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA

By its 20th anniversary, social neuroscience has witnessed an incredible rise in the number of studies demonstrating the effects of perceived social isolation (e.g., loneliness, ostracism), and inversely, the beneficial effects of social bonding (e.g., love, desire, attachment) on social perception, cognition, and behavior and on mental and physical health. The current review underscores the importance of two factors in this literature: (1) where an individual falls along the continuum of isolation/bonding from feelings of rejection and neglect to feelings of strong, stable, trusted social bonds, and (2) whether gauging an individual's general feeling of social isolation/bonding or the specific feeling of isolation/bonding toward the person with whom the individual is interacting. Evidence shows that these factors are related to brain and cognition, including embodied social cognition—a system integrating past self-related actions from which simulation mechanisms can be used to access other people's minds and anticipate their actions. The neurophysiological mechanisms underlying sensorimotor mapping between interacting individuals offers an empirical opportunity to investigate the interpersonal forces that operate on individuals at a distance. This multilevel integrative approach provides a valuable tool for investigating the brain networks responsible for understanding acute and chronic social disorders.

Full Citation: 
Cacioppo S, and Cacioppo JT. (2012) Decoding the invisible forces of social connections. Frontiers in Integrative Neuroscience; 6:51. doi: 10.3389/fnint.2012.00051

From the introduction:

Social species form organizations that extend beyond the individual. The goal of social neuroscience is to investigate the biological mechanisms that underlie these social structures, processes, and behavior and the influences between social and neural structures and processes (Cacioppo and Berntson, 1992; Cacioppo et al., 2000). The forces operating between individuals to create these superorganismal structures form connections that vary in strength and valence. Whether comparing different individuals at a given point in the lifespan or the same individuals across the lifespan, these social forces vary along a continuum of isolation/bonding from feelings of rejection and neglect to feelings of strong, stable social bonds.

Like the forces between chemical elements, the forces operating between individuals are difficult to observe directly but become visible through their effects on individuals. In the present article, we review some of the visible signs that one can use to identify where individuals fall along the continuum of perceived social isolation/bonding. The traditional way of determining where a person falls along the continuum of perceived social isolation to perceived social bonding is through the use of psychometrically validated questionnaires, such as the UCLA loneliness scale (Russell, 1996). One can also decode social bonds at a distance, for instance, by looking at a person's body language, but doing so involves a multitude of processes that are subject to various other influences. For this reason, validated questionnaires remain the most common and effective way of identifying a person's position on this isolation/bonding continuum. In this review, we focus on the effects on brain and cognition, including embodied cognitive operations such as sensorimotor perception, imitation/mimicry, and interpersonal synchrony. Embodiment here refers to the notion that thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are grounded in sensory experiences and bodily states (for reviews see Semin and Smith, 2002; Niedenthal et al., 2005; Barsalou, 2008; Schubert and Semin, 2009; Meier et al., 2012). We begin by reviewing the effects of perceived social bonding/isolation on health.

Charles Perreault - The Pace of Cultural Evolution

Charles Perreault is the Omidyar Fellow at the Santa Fe Institute. He holds a Ph.D. in anthropology from UCLA and a master’s in anthropology from the Université de Montréal.

SFI provided him with the opportunity to collaborate with colleagues from many disciplines, he says, and to incorporate methods and ideas into his work that “are not typically available in the standard social science environment.

While at SFI he will pursue a deeper understanding of cultural evolution through the use of theoretical models and cross-cultural comparisons. As part of this work, he will compare the changes brought by evolutionary forces on both cultural and biological phenomenon.

In this analysis, Perreault shows that cultural evolution is faster than biological evolution, that this is true even when the "generation time of species is controlled for," and that culture allows us to evolve over short time scales. Cool paper - humans are definitely a complex adaptive system.

The Pace of Cultural Evolution

Charles Perreaul

Santa Fe Institute, Santa Fe, New Mexico, United States of America

Abstract 

Today, humans inhabit most of the world’s terrestrial habitats. This observation has been explained by the fact that we possess a secondary inheritance mechanism, culture, in addition to a genetic system. Because it is assumed that cultural evolution occurs faster than biological evolution, humans can adapt to new ecosystems more rapidly than other animals. This assumption, however, has never been tested empirically. Here, I compare rates of change in human technologies to rates of change in animal morphologies. I find that rates of cultural evolution are inversely correlated with the time interval over which they are measured, which is similar to what is known for biological rates. This correlation explains why the pace of cultural evolution appears faster when measured over recent time periods, where time intervals are often shorter. Controlling for the correlation between rates and time intervals, I show that (1) cultural evolution is faster than biological evolution; (2) this effect holds true even when the generation time of species is controlled for; and (3) culture allows us to evolve over short time scales, which are normally accessible only to short-lived species, while at the same time allowing for us to enjoy the benefits of having a long life history.

Full Citation: Perreault C. (2012, Sep 14). The Pace of Cultural Evolution. PLoS ONE 7(9): e45150. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0045150

Here is a little bit of the introduction:

Introduction

Humans dominate the earth’s ecosystems [1]. Today, our uncommonly large range encompasses most of the world’s terrestrial habitats, and human populations thrive in environments as diverse as the Amazonian jungle and the Arctic desert. This adaptive radiation has been explained by our capacity to socially learn information (culture) [2]–[4]. Culture is an inheritance system that parallels and interacts with the genetic system [5]–[8]. Cultural variation and innovations accumulate in a population throughout time, allowing for complex cultural adaptations to evolve [9]–[13]. Because it is assumed that cultural evolution occurs faster than biological evolution on average, humans can adapt to new ecosystems more rapidly than other animals [4]. Yet, the evidence for the hypothesis that cultural evolution is faster than biological evolution is anecdotal [3], [14] and there are no systematic comparisons of cultural and biological rates of change. Moreover, we do not know how much faster, if at all, culture can change compared to biological phenotypes.

Cultural evolution is expected to be faster than biological evolution because of its Lamarckian nature, and because cultural information is transmitted through different routes than genetic information. While variation in biological evolution arises from random mutations, Lamarckian-like guided variation, which occurs through modifications to knowledge, skills and technologies made by an individual that are subsequently transmitted to other individuals, is a potent source of cultural variation [3], [5], [7], [15], [16]. Thus, in contrast to biological evolution, which is blind, cultural evolution can be a directed and consequently faster process. The pace of biological evolution is also constrained by the generation time of the species, since genetic information is transmitted vertically through sexual reproduction. While cultural information can be transmitted from parents to offspring, it is also transmitted obliquely, between non-parents from a previous generation, and horizontally, between contemporaries. This transmission mode gives cultural evolution the potential to spread rapidly in a population, much like an epidemic disease [3], [5], [7], [15], [17].

However, it is not entirely obvious that cultural evolution is faster than biological evolution. On the one hand, the archaeological record is full of instances where traditions have remained remarkably stable over hundreds of years. Microlithic tools, for example, appeared in Northern Asia around 17–18,000 Before Present (BP), and remained part of the hunter-gatherers toolkit until after 14,000 BP [18]. In addition, the Japanese sword, which is a much more complex technology, has been fabricated following essentially the same steps for nearly 700 years [19], [20]. On the other hand, biologists regularly observe evolutionary change over much smaller time scales. Darwin’s Finches, a group of bird species inhabiting the Galapagos Islands, undergo morphological change on a yearly scale in what has become a textbook, classic example of biological evolution [21]. These examples indicate that the distributions of biological and cultural rates of change are, at the very least, overlapping ones. Culture might be less constrained than biology and have the potential to change instantaneously. However, much of what we know from anthropological and psychological research tells us that culture will rarely change instantly. Deviation from a group’s social norms can be costly, and can result in punishment [22]–[25], while social and psychological mechanisms, such as the ones that lead individuals to mark their ethnic identity [26] or conformism [27], will also tend to act against rapid change in an individual’s behavior. Thus, given these forces that can act against cultural change, one can ask what is the characteristic pace of cultural evolution, and how does it compare to the pace of biological evolution? In this study, I try to answer these questions by comparing the rates of change in technologies, as observed in the historical and archaeological record to the rates of morphological change, as seen in contemporary and fossil animal populations.

Bookforum Omnivore - The Trouble with Atheists

Last week Bookforum shared a collection of links on their Omnivore blog on all things atheism, under the title, The Trouble with Atheists. 

The title got me to thinking, and I am not sure any of the articles address this, that the problem with the New Atheists and the recent increase in atheist presence in the media, is that atheism has become evangelical (the etymological roots go back to the Greek word for "gospel" or "good news": ευαγγελιον (evangelion), from eu- "good" and angelion "message"), and their gospel is the "good news" that there is no God and no need for religion, which they consistently blame as the source of most if not all warfare (partially true).

I understand their impulse, but I also know that faith and the need for belief in a transcendent organizing principle is built-in to several developmental worldviews. Nearly all human beings pass through these worldviews in their development, so there is no way to eradicate them.

Rather than trying to convince people that their beliefs are wrong or that their faith is misplaced, we should be supporting and nurturing healthy versions of religion. But I do not believe the most vocal atheists will ever understand that principle. 

The trouble with atheists

Sep 11 2012  

9:00AM

• Stephen LeDrew (York): The Evolution of Atheism: Scientific and Humanistic Approaches. 
• There is a pervasive and somewhat lopsided tendency in our society to separate fellow humans into the categories of being either "believers" or "nonbelievers". 
• Akeel Bilgrami on secularism: Its content and context. 
• From The Humanist, Greta Christina on how confrontationalism can open doors; and building bridges or blowing them up? 
• Rob Boston on secular Americans and the future of humanist activism. 
• A review of How To Be Secular: A Call to Arms for Religious Freedom by Jacques Berlinerblau. Francis Spufford on the trouble with atheists. 
• If knowledge is power, then what is ignorance? 
• Let me introduce you to Atheism+, the nascent movement that might be the most exciting thing to hit the world of unbelief (and more). 
• From Bible-Belt pastor to atheist leader: The new heroes within the secular movement are coming from unlikely places — like the pulpit. 
• Ray Nothstine on how, as secularism advances, political messianism draws more believers. 
• Why is a secular magazine interested in what believers think? 
• An interview with Christof Koch on reconciling atheism and meaning in the universe.