Mind Shadows

Coming Soon: McDonalds on Mt Everest

2024-11-16T16:30:00.000-08:00

Actual Traffic Jam on Everest

Those who climb it nowadays have more luck than brains . . .

In the evenings they watched films on a flat-screen TV in the cinema tent.
One Russian expedition had liters of vodka on hand and a wireless Internet connection for which the expedition leader paid $5,000 a month.

"Anyone looking for a mountain adventure shouldn't go for Everest," says Billi Bierling.

"Without the Sherpas and infrastructure -- such as fixed ropes leading right up to the summit -- some 90 percent of climbers wouldn't even reach the top," she believes. . . .

"Many don't know how to put on crampons or even how to hold an ice pick," Bierling says. She was even more astonished to find that she didn't need to use her own ice pick to reach the summit. . . .

"They have more luck than brains. I feel sick when I see 20 trusting people all hanging onto a fixed rope at the same time. Before the big expeditions came, people still knew what they were doing. . . . "

In base camp she met "a New Zealander who was cooking provided team members with mousse au chocolat and fresh strawberries flown in from Katmandu by helicopter. In the evenings they watched films on a flat-screen TV in the cinema tent. One Russian expedition had liters of vodka on hand and a wireless Internet connection for which the expedition leader paid $5,000 a month. 'It was pretty crazy,' says Bierling." Spiegel

The Duel Over von Trautmansdorf's Moustache

2024-11-13T09:55:00.000-08:00

“In Hamburg in 1834, a handsome young army officer named Baron von Trautmansdorf challenged a fellow officer, Baron von Ropp, to a duel. The precipitating offense was a poem that von Ropp had written and circulated among his friends about von Trautmansdorf's moustache, stating that it was thin and floppy and hinting that it might no be the only part of his physique to which those adjectives could be applied.
The feud between the barons had originated in their shared passion for the same woman, Countess Lodoiska, the grey-green-eyed widow of a Polish general. Unable to resolve their differences amicably, the two men met in a field in a Hamburg suburb early on a March morning. Both were carrying swords; both were still short of their thirtieth birthdays; both would die in the ensuing fight.

In this last aspect, the event was no exception. From its beginnings in Renaissance Italy until its end in the First World War, the practice of duelling claimed the lives of hundreds of thousands of Europeans. In the seventeenth century, duels were responsible for some five thousand deaths in Spain alone. Visitors to that country were advised to take extra care when addressing locals, lest they accidentally offend their honour and end up in the grave. “Duels happen every day in Spain,” declares a character in a play by Calderon. In France, meanwhile, Lord Herbert of Cherbury reported in 1608 that there was “scarce any man thought worth the looking on, that had not killed some other in a duel,” and in England, it was widely held that no man could be termed a gentleman unless and until he had “taken up his sword.”

Although occasional duels were sparked by matters of objective importance, the majority had their origin in small, even petty, questions of honour. In Paris in 1678, for example, one man killed another who said that his apartment was tasteless. In Florence in 1702, a literary man took the life of a cousin who had accused him of not understanding Dante. And in France under the regency of Phillipe d'Orleans, two officers of the guard fought on the Quai des Tuileries over the ownership of an Angora cat.

For as long as it lasted, duelling symbolised a radical incapacity to believe that one's status might be one's own business, a value one decided on and did not revise to accord with the shifting judgments of others. In the dueller's psyche, other people's opinions were the only factor in forming a sense of self. The dueller could not remain acceptable in his own eyes if those around him judged him to be evil or dishonourable, a coward or a failure, foolish or effeminate. So dependent was his self-image on the views of others that he would sooner die of a bullet or stab wound than allow unfavourable assessments of him to go unanswered.” In Alain de Botton, Status Anxiety

The Smartest Person Ever Born?

2024-07-05T07:01:00.000-07:00

The following essay is about William James Sidis, whom Robert Persig (Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance) discusses in his novel, Lila. Sidis's one great passion in life was collecting street car transfers.

The account comes from a web page I saved to my hard drive. Before uploading it, I checked it and found it dead, but still want to give credit, so here is the obsolete URL--http://members.aol.com/popvoid/TOC.html. Jim Morton, the essayist, uses Peridromophilia as a term for Sidis's love of street car transfers.

Peridromophilia Unbound:William James Sidis
By Jim Morton

The great geniuses of mankind are often said to be "born ahead of their time." William James Sidis, on the other hand, seems to have been born out of his time completely; on the wrong world, in the wrong dimension. Perhaps someday the world will understand "Willie" Sidis's strange genius, but that day is far off indeed.

Sidis was born in 1898. His father, Boris Sidis, taught psychology at Harvard and was considered one of the foremost psychologists of his day. The boy was named after William James, a leading psychologist and brother to author Henry James. Boris argued that traditional approaches to child-rearing obstructed the learning process. The elder Sidis was determined not to make the same mistake with his son.

He started by stringing words together with alphabet blocks above the child's crib. He eschewed the usual "googley-goo" baby-talk that adults lapse into around infants, speaking instead to the child in the same way he would speak to an adult. If the boy showed any interest in a subject, Boris encouraged his curiosity and study.

The effect of all this on the boy Sidis was astounding. By the time he was two, Willie was reading literature meant for adults; by age four he was typing letters in French and English; at age five he wrote a treatise on anatomy and dazzled everyone with a mathematical expertise few adults could match.

William Sidis graduated from Brookline High School when he was eight years old. When he applied at Harvard, the entrance board suggested he take a few off to let his personality catch up with his intellect. Willie spent the time between high school and college reading books in French, German, Latin, Greek, Russian, Turkish and Armenian.

The boy entered Harvard at age eleven, becoming the youngest student ever to attend the school. Later that year he gave a speech in front of the Harvard Mathematical Society 0n the subject of "Four-Dimensional Bodies." After the speech, Professor Daniel Comstock of MIT told reporters that the boy would someday be the greatest mathematician of the century. From that moment on, William Sidis's world was never the same. Reporters followed his every move. He was a celebrity. His classmates treated him indifferently. The boy kept to himself, walking to his classes alone.

Suddenly Sidis realized his intellect was not admired; it was stared at. He wasn't merely intelligent; he was a freak. Within a year, the boy suffered a nervous breakdown. The boy was taken to his father's Psychotherapeutic Institute and treated. A few months later, Willie was back at Harvard, studying as diligently as ever.

He graduated cum laude at the age of sixteen. In 1918, he began teaching mathematics at Rice University in Texas. The annoyance of constant media attention finally took its toll. Quitting his teaching post, the young man moved back to Boston and, after a notorious arrest at a socialist march, disappeared from sight.

In 1924, a reporter found him in New York City, working in a Wall Street office for menial pay. Sidis told the reporter that he was not the boy-wonder he once was. He wanted anonymity and a menial job that made no demands on him. Soon afterwards, he dropped out of sight again.

As an adult, Sidis had one great passion. A passion that has intrigued psychologists and writers for years. Sidis spent hours every day in search of street car transfers. He would chase them through windy lots, chisel them from icy sidewalks and rescue them from rainy gutters. During his lifetime, he collected over two thousand of them, all different.

In 1926, he published a book on the subject of his hobby. The book, Notes on the Collection of Transfers, is, to say the least, esoteric. Sidis filled it with page after page of detailed information on how the transfers are interpreted, how to use them to their best advantage and the techniques used by the devoted "peridromophile" (his term for a someone who collects street car transfers) to find abandoned transfers. For those with merely a passing interest in the subject, he provided a chapter of bad street car jokes. Sidis used the pseudonym, "Frank Folupa" to throw the press off the track, but it did not work. The book was quickly ascribed to him and once again, Sidis had to flee from the curious eyes of the press. Losing himself in the crowded streets of New York City.

Sidis managed to stay out of view for many years after that. Until 1937, when a writer working for New Yorker magazine found him in a run down rooming house in South Boston. Sidis told the reporter that he was no longer the mathematical genius he once was. "The very sight of a mathematical formula," he claimed, "makes me physically ill." When the New Yorker article appeared, Sidis sued for invasion of privacy. Acting as his own attorney, Sidis offered to take an I.Q. test to prove just how normal he was. The suit was thrown out of court.

Again the world forgot about him, until 1944, when, at the age of 46, William James Sidis died of a cerebral hemorrhage.

Several articles and a book have been written about Sidis. All of them point to Boris Sidis as the misguided mastermind behind Willie's fall. Boris Sidis, the writers argue, by depriving the boy of a "normal" childhood, turned him into a freak, incapable of ever fitting comfortably into society.

It's a neat argument. It follows the accepted pattern of parental folklore. It sounds logical, but it's all wrong. In the first place, contrary to popular belief, Boris Sidis was not a slave driver coaxing his son to "learn, learn learn!" Rather, he used positive reinforcement to encourage his son's exploration of subjects that interested him. The knowledge the boy gained was based not on his father's iron will, but on the boy's own curiosity. Boris Sidis was one of the leading psychologists of his day, he knew the dangers of indoctrination and parental aggression.

In the second place, Sidis had little difficulty fitting into society. He found jobs easily and always worked hard. If he moved from one job to another, it was because of the press; or because someone at this job recognized him. Whenever he was recognized, his employers quickly sought to take advantage of mathematician in their midst, but Sidis no longer wanted to be that mathematician. If he used his talent at math, he wanted no strings attached. At one establishment, his knowledge of mathematics led him to completely rework their statistical tables. The bosses were impressed and tried to get him to use his talent for their advantage. Sidis soon quit.

"All I want to do is run an adding machine, but they won't leave me alone."

Sidis was only a failure in terms of goals assigned to him by others. If he did not become "the greatest mathematician of the century," as Professor Comstock predicted, the failure lies in Comstock's skill as a prognosticator, not in Sidis's refusal to live up to the prediction. One thing is certain: Sidis's knowledge of street car transfers is unexcelled. He was, and is, the greatest peridromophile in history. For this, we salute him.

You Were Born and It's All Your Fault

2024-07-02T15:50:00.000-07:00

Existence is a predicate without a basis.

The self does not see. Instead, there is a sense of self. That is the seen. It is seen so it cannot be the seer.

The distinction with finite is not infinite. It is unknown.

The seeing.

Perceive: discern, recognize, become aware of. Typical belief is that the organism perceives, that perception is biological sentience. If it is biological sentience, whatinhell is sentience?

Like existence, sentience is a predicate without a basis. It is universally thought of as consciousness.

The sense of self evolved in human community. Tribes into villages into towns into countries, the sense furthered survival of individuals within community by fostering moral behavior.

Moral behavior and responsibility means nothing if a person is alone on a desert island.

The belief in free will and personal responsibility is contingent on the belief in moral behavior and life within communities.

Communities tend to cull out those lacking behavior necessary for their continuance. The culling results in prisons.

Communites depend on belief. It's called convention. Conventions depend on belief.

On the sometimes value and sometimes uselessness of belief:

A. There’s an elephant in your basement.

B. I see no elephant.

A. That’s because it’s invisible.

B. But I see no droppings.

A. His droppings are invisible.

B. Does he ever do anything visible?

A. No, not for thousands of years.

B. So then this beast that never does anything might as well not exist. And do tell what makes you think there are invisible elephants?

As B implies, A does not have useful belief, which is found in religion. A would say the holy book told him so.

Other social beliefs can be useful and still remain beliefs.

An explanation.

Kathleen Vohs' and Jonathan Schooler had some students read passages from Francis Crick's The Astonishing Hypothesis. It posits universal determinism. We have no free will. The students read that their behavior was "no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules. Who you are is nothing but a pack of neurons.”

They had another group read inspirational books. You know, the kind that assert we make our own decisions and forge our own paths in life

Each group separately played a video game with arithemetic problems and knew they could cheat if they wanted. The answer appeared because of a computer glitch. The students were told that no one would know when the space bar was pushed to give the right answer.

Both groups were asked not to cheat.

Guess which group cheated the most?

The group that read Crick's words.

The "inspirational" group demonstrates that we hold ourselves responsible when we think we choose our actions.

The flip side of belief:

Due to a technical glitch during your presentation at work, your information is not well-received. You feel embarassed and apologize though it was not your fault.

Yet your embarrassment is deeply rooted in the belief that it was your fault. You are responsible to the community, which necessarily maintains this convention.

The flip side. All your fault. Here is the biggest social belief of all:

Capitalist societies need this belief for their continuance. As if you didn't know.

2024-06-26T12:47:00.000-07:00

Decapitated Heads Remaining Conscious?

Q. Would a guillotined person die instantly or would the severed head live long enough to feel itself hit the ground? How could anyone but those executed ever know? A guillotined head opened its eyes its name. This is the bizarre story of Monsieurs Beaurieux and Languille and a macabre study done in 1905.

In France in the days of the blade, some of the condemned were asked to blink their eyes to show continued consciousness after decapitation, and a few heads blinked for up to 30 seconds, says Dale McIntyre in New Scientist. "How much of this was voluntary and how much due to nerve reflex action is speculation. Most nations with science sophisticated enough to determine this question have long since abandoned decapitation as a legal tool."

Addressing the reflex issue, Dr. Beaurieux observed the execution of a murderer in 1905, told in History of the Guillotine by Alister Kershaw. First he saw in the head spasmodic movements of eyes and lips for 5-6 seconds. Then the face relaxed, the lids half closed, "exactly as in the dying whom we have occasion to observe every day in the exercise of our profession."

"It was then that I called in a strong sharp voice: 'Languille!' " The lids lifted, and Languille's "undeniably living eyes" fixed on the doctor, after which they closed again. Moments later he called out again, fetching another look by Languille. But a third call went unheeded.

"I have just recounted to you... what I was able to observe. The whole thing had lasted 25-30 seconds."

The above excerpt comes from the Cincinnati Inquirer (cincinnati.com), 26 August 2002*.

The beheading account below, by Cecil Adams, derives from a site called The Straight Dope (straightdope.com) and is dated 12 June 1998*:

After Charlotte Corday was guillotined for murdering Jean-Paul Marat, the executioner slapped her cheek while holding her severed head aloft. Witnesses claimed the cheeks reddened and the face looked indignant. According to another tale, when the heads of two rivals in the National Assembly were placed in a sack following execution, one bit the other so badly the two couldn't be separated.

Can the brain be proven to remain conscious for a duration after decapitation? This didn't seem like the sort of question that could ever be conclusively resolved.

Or so I thought. Then I received a note from a U.S. Army veteran who had been stationed in Korea. In June 1989 the taxi he and a friend were riding in collided with a truck. My correspondent was pinned in the wreckage. The friend was decapitated. Here's what happened:

"My friend's head came to rest face up, and (from my angle) upside-down. As I watched, his mouth opened and closed no less than two times. The facial expressions he displayed were first of shock or confusion, followed by terror or grief. I cannot exaggerate and say that he was looking all around, but he did display ocular movement in that his eyes moved from me, to his body, and back to me. He had direct eye contact with me when his eyes took on a hazy, absent expression . . . and he was dead."

I have spoken with the author and am satisfied that the event occurred as described. One can of course never be certain about these things. Nonetheless I repent my previous skepticism.

Cecil Adams

__________________________________________________

During my stay in Paris, the sight of a public execution revealed to me the weakness of my superstitious belief in progress. When I saw the head divided from the body, and heard the sound with which they fell separately into the box, I understood, not with my reason, but with my whole being, that no theory of the wisdom of all established things, nor of progress, could justify such an act; and that if all the men in the world from the day of creation, by whatever theory, had found this thing necessary, it was not so; it was a bad thing, and that therefore I must judge of what was right and necessary, not by what men said and did, not by progress, but what I felt to be true in my heart.

Leo Tolstoy
__________________________________________________

Of his marvelous invention, Doctor Joseph Guillotin said that it was swift, merciful, and that its victims would only feel a rush of fresh air. Was his confidence based on the testimony of somebody like Languille? :-)

__________________________________________________

*I didn't do archival research. This post is from one of my much older blog posts.

The Man Who Found Einstein's Brain

2024-06-26T09:23:00.000-07:00

Steven Levy said that he had almost a religious experience when he found it in Wichita, Kansas. A journalist for a magazine, New Jersey Monthly, he knew it had been missing since Einstein's death. Yes, missing. The most brilliant mind of all time was buried without his head intact when he died in 1955. By 1978, when Levy's editor told him to find it, the trail had gone cold. People speculated as to where it might be, but nobody had found it. After some investigation, Levy concluded rather logically that the brain might still be in the possession of the man who did the autopsy, the pathologist who examined the great scientist's corpse.

Levy tracked the former Princeton pathologist, Dr Thomas S Harvey, to Wichita, Kansas. The day he chatted with Harvey in the physician's office, he asked the man about the brain. Harvey, after some time, admitted that he had it. Where? asked Levy. Here, replied the doctor. Here? Yes, right here. Rather sheepishly he told Levy that it was in the very office where they sat.

He walked to a box marked Costa Cider and pulled out two big mason jars. Awestruck, Levy then gazed at the brain that changed the world, as the journalist put it. Most of the brain had been sliced, except for the cerebellum and parts of the cerebral cortex.

Before he died at 76, Einstein had wanted his body cremated but granted that his brain be examined by science. Clearly, that didn't happen until the brain was found. In 1985 a study examined Einstein's brain against eleven men who died at age 64. The scientists examined the ratio of glial cells to neurons (nerve cells), in Einstein's brain and compared them to the control group of men. They found nothing to indicate a remarkable difference.

In 1996 a study revealed that Einstein's brain weighed 1,230 grams as compared to the average adult male brain at 1,400 grams. The physicist's cerebral cortex was thinner than each of five control brains while his neurons were denser.

A 1999 paper revealed that the surface of Einstein's brain had unusual groove patterns on both right and left parietal lobes, as compared to the brains of 35 men, average age 57. This lobe area is thought important for math and spatial reasoning. His brain had a much shorter lateral groove, which was partly missing.

What does all this prove? Nothing, really. Nothing at all. He was a genius who allowed that he didn't know where his ideas came from. You can't find the mind in the brain. No ideas, just meat is there. You can't slice the mind on a dissecting table.

Don't get me wrong. Some day science may find a solid physical correlation between brain matter and genius. I suppose that the information will be useful.

But I find something else more useful. I speak of the mystery of life, of consciousness. It is that which pervades our being as the source of our lives. It is the fount of life. Some call it mystery. Others call it God.

A good read--

Driving Mr Albert: A Trip Across America With Einstein's Brain, by Michael Paterniti.

Richard Halliburton Lived Several Lives in One

2021-10-31T12:07:00.001-07:00

This art-deco image of a pilot, scarf flying over a vintage biplane, evokes for me an entire era, and one man helps capture that era. A while back I found a book in a used book store. It was about Richard Halliburton, written by his father, Wesley. I bought it and set it aside for reading on some day when I had both free time and the inclination. When I did read it I was hooked. I learned Richard Halliburton was a travel-adventure writer and wrote many books. I bought them all and read them all. I could go on but that would not compare to the life I read about. Instead, I provide a summary from my book.

Richard Halliburton was a misfit, a rebel, in an America coming of age in the world. In the 1920s and 1930s he was one of the most famous persons in America, even more than Amelia Earhart, and today he is forgotten.

He knew many people who would not fit in the handy boxes society offered them. Paul Mooney sailed across the Pacific with him in a Chinese junk. Moye Stephens flew as a stunt pilot in Howard Hughes' silent movies. Elly Beinhorn was Germany's Amelia Earhart. Pancho Barnes founded the Happy Bottom Riding Club. Halliburton met history makers like Lenin's widow and the man who shot the Czar. He chatted with Herbert Hoover, was friends with F. Scott Fitzgerald.

He was a maverick and couldn't see himself fitting into the America of his youth, although he was very much its product with his can-do attitude and things-will-get better belief. For all that, he was a round peg with nothing but square holes awaiting him as he reached adulthood. He could not see things the way most people saw them. His parents wanted him to play by the rules, to live an even tenor, and he scorned the rules, especially the phrase "even tenor." He said no to their even tenor and in doing so he turned his back on an America that held those values. Despite having little respect for rules, he became wildly successful because his life was wildly improbable as a travel-adventure writer. Because he dared, he became an icon of his era, more famous in his day than Amelia Earhart, with farmers' wives in Topeka, factory workers in Detroit, and newspaper boys in Cleveland buying his books.

Available through Amazon, Barnes & Noble or other book stores. Click

Pain & Pleasure: The Lobster Reconsidered & David Foster Wallace

2021-08-27T21:49:00.000-07:00

A few years back I read about George, a 140 year-old lobster that did not wind up on somebody's dinner plate. Instead, he was returned to the ocean at Kennebunkport, Maine. Lobster age is calculated by weight and this one weighed 20 pounds. George would have provided a dinner at over $100 in a good restaurant. Because of his age, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals asked the restaurant, City Crab and Seafood, that the lobster be returned to the ocean. After holding George in a tank for ten days, restaurant management released him to the animal-humane organization.

Then I read about this more recently: Fish "sensors flare when . . . a hook rips through their scales and into their flesh. In the lab, when trout lips are injected with acid, the fish do not merely respond at the site. They rock their entire bodies back and forth, hyperventilating, rubbing their mouths against their tanks’ sides or gravel bottoms. These behaviors cease when the fish are given morphine. Such actions call the ethics of the research itself into question. But the experiences of lab fish are nothing compared with those endured by the trillions of aquatic animals that humans yank, unceremoniously, out of oceans and rivers and lakes every year. Some fish are still alive, hours later, when they’re shoveled into the sickly lit, refrigerated intake tubes of the global seafood supply chain."

Those items item led me to some thoughts about pleasure and pain.

René Descartes is called the Father of Modern Philosophy and is also known for his Cartesian Coordinates. In his Meditations, Descartes argued that animals can't feel pain. Nor can they reason, think,or suffer. They are pure physical entities rather like an animated banana. They have no mental or spiritual substance. Pure matter, they are. In his separation of consciousness, the "I" from the body, Descartes also split animals into the physical. They are machines. Burn a dog in a fire, and its howls are merely responses from the mechanism. A dead canine is like the ashes of a banana.

Though few human beings agree with Descartes about animals and pain, all of us have a remarkable capacity to inflict pain on others. In famous experiments, Stanley Milgram argued that there is a torturer in everybody. (See my The Genetic Predisposition to Violence.) As authority figures in scientists' white lab coats, Milgram and others pretended to conduct experiments on the effects of electrical shock. Actually, the experiments were about the volunteers who did the shocking. Under instruction of people in white coats, volunteers repeatedly turned up the voltage to shock others (actually actors feigning pain). So long as the man in the white coat said a higher shock was necessary for the "experiment" the volunteer complied, although with frequent protests ("can't you see he's in great pain?). Few simply got up and walked out. Sympathy for the supposed pain of another was tuned down because the volunteer deferred to the authority of the person in the white coat. Often, if the scientist accepted full responsibility, the volunteer continued turning up the "voltage."

We have problems with pain, not our own but others'. The problems are that pain and morality get mixed up, so we don't always get clear-cut answers as to right behavior. In Milgram's experiments the volunteer could cede responsibility to the authority figure.

In our cerebral cortex we have mirror neurons, which do not simply copy what another does, but also "mirror" the feelings of the other, be they pain or pleasure. These neurons help make us human. Over-ridden by selfish impulse, they do not prevent us from evil. Fortunately, we also have the ability to reason, which can take a moral shape. This is where we encounter the problem of no clear-cut answers.

Morality also helps make us human, but we draw lines in the sand for our moral behavior. As a boy spending summers on an Iowa farm, I took chickens out to the tree stump and chopped their heads off. I didn't like doing it, but on the farm I learned that food does not come in clean containers as it does in tidy grocery stores. If we were transported back in a time machine to their day, our hunter-gatherer forbears would laugh at any one of us so-called modern men and women. We would starve unless they showed us how to cope. We would learn to kill in order to have food for the fire. Morality draws the line at survival.

I thought about George the lobster and fish because people draw the line at what they eat. If we do know how it's done, we simply don't want to think about how an animal is killed or prepared for a meal. We don't want to think about the suffering and pain an animal endures in order to satisfy our hunger. We thus keep intact our sense of ourselves as moral beings.

Moral thoughts spoil our appetite.

If you have thought about it, if you have investigated, you found that, for example, cows are expedited humanely, with a pneumatic pellet shot into the brain. But what about their fear and cramped, inhumane conditions before they are killed? On the other hand, maybe you became a vegetarian knowing that. As for lobsters? Boiled to death.

Do lobsters feel pain or don't they? They can't talk or communicate to us, so the humane, the moral, thing would be to come down on the side of affirmation. Yes, they do feel pain, probably extreme.

There are scientific studies that suggest as much. Lobsters and other decapod crustaceans react to injury when painkillers such as morphine are applied. Their systems as well as their behavior reflect stressed response to noxious (painful) stimuli. Sensing pain is crucial to the survival of human beings and all animals. You yank your finger back from a fire immediately. Drop a lobster into a boiling pot and it will scramble, apparently frantically, to get out.

As to pleasure and pain, then, (re)consider the lobster. I refer you to a celebrated piece about the Maine Lobster Festival done by one of our finest writers, David Foster Wallace, (Infinite Jest, among other novels) for Gourmet. The title of his article is "Consider The Lobster."

Here is an excerpt from Wallace's piece, particularly about the pleasure/pain issue, and with a link to the full article. Bold face emphases are mine:
-----
"Before we go any further, let’s acknowledge that the questions of whether and how different kinds of animals feel pain, and of whether and why it might be justifiable to inflict pain on them in order to eat them, turn out to be extremely complex and difficult. And comparative neuroanatomy is only part of the problem. Since pain is a totally subjective mental experience, we do not have direct access to anyone or anything’s pain but our own; and even just the principles by which we can infer that others experience pain and have a legitimate interest in not feeling pain involve hard-core philosophy—metaphysics, epistemology, value theory, ethics. The fact that even the most highly evolved nonhuman mammals can’t use language to communicate with us about their subjective mental experience is only the first layer of additional complication in trying to extend our reasoning about pain and morality to animals. And everything gets progressively more abstract and convolved as we move farther and farther out from the higher-type mammals into cattle and swine and dogs and cats and rodents, and then birds and fish, and finally invertebrates like lobsters."

"The more important point here, though, is that the whole animal-cruelty-and-eating issue is not just complex, it’s also uncomfortable. It is, at any rate, uncomfortable for me, and for just about everyone I know who enjoys a variety of foods and yet does not want to see herself as cruel or unfeeling. As far as I can tell, my own main way of dealing with this conflict has been to avoid thinking about the whole unpleasant thing. I should add that it appears to me unlikely that many readers of gourmet wish to think hard about it, either, or to be queried about the morality of their eating habits in the pages of a culinary monthly. Since, however, the assigned subject of this article is what it was like to attend the 2003 MLF, and thus to spend several days in the midst of a great mass of Americans all eating lobster, and thus to be more or less impelled to think hard about lobster and the experience of buying and eating lobster, it turns out that there is no honest way to avoid certain moral questions."

"There are several reasons for this. For one thing, it’s not just that lobsters get boiled alive, it’s that you do it yourself—or at least it’s done specifically for you, on-site. As mentioned, the World’s Largest Lobster Cooker, which is highlighted as an attraction in the Festival’s program, is right out there on the MLF’s north grounds for everyone to see. Try to imagine a Nebraska Beef Festival at which part of the festivities is watching trucks pull up and the live cattle get driven down the ramp and slaughtered right there on the World’s Largest Killing Floor or something—there’s no way."

"However stuporous the lobster is from the trip home, for instance, it tends to come alarmingly to life when placed in boiling water. If you’re tilting it from a container into the steaming kettle, the lobster will sometimes try to cling to the container’s sides or even to hook its claws over the kettle’s rim like a person trying to keep from going over the edge of a roof. And worse is when the lobster’s fully immersed. Even if you cover the kettle and turn away, you can usually hear the cover rattling and clanking as the lobster tries to push it off. Or the creature’s claws scraping the sides of the kettle as it thrashes around. The lobster, in other words, behaves very much as you or I would behave if we were plunged into boiling water (with the obvious exception of screaming). A blunter way to say this is that the lobster acts as if it’s in terrible pain, causing some cooks to leave the kitchen altogether and to take one of those little lightweight plastic oven timers with them into another room and wait until the whole process is over.

"There happen to be two main criteria that most ethicists agree on for determining whether a living creature has the capacity to suffer and so has genuine interests that it may or may not be our moral duty to consider. One is how much of the neurological hardware required for pain-experience the animal comes equipped with—nociceptors, prostaglandins, neuronal opioid receptors, etc. The other criterion is whether the animal demonstrates behavior associated with pain. And it takes a lot of intellectual gymnastics and behaviorist hairsplitting not to see struggling, thrashing, and lid-clattering as just such pain-behavior. According to marine zoologists, it usually takes lobsters between 35 and 45 seconds to die in boiling water. (No source I could find talked about how long it takes them to die in superheated steam; one rather hopes it’s faster.)" The New York Times

The article on fish and pain can be found in The Atlantic. (Do Animals Have Feelings?)

Mercedes de Acosta Met Ramana Maharshi: Here Lies The Heart

2021-08-09T13:42:00.000-07:00

Descended from the legendary Dukes of Alba, daughter in a wealthy Cuban family, Mercedes de Acosta was born in 1893 in New York, raised near Fifth Avenue, and had a beautiful sister Rita de Acosta who was a model for artists John Singer Sargent and Giovanni Boldini. Married to painter Abram Poole, Mercedes was socialite, poet, playwright, Hollywood set and costume designer as well as script writer. She knew many of the greats of her day: Bessie Marbury, Rodin, Edith Wharton, Stravinsky, Sarah Bernhardt, Elenora Duse, Picasso, Cecil Beaton, Elsa Maxwell, and Krishnamurti. Near the end of her life, she met and befriended Andy Warhol, and introduced him to many of the people who would count in his career.

Consuelo (Hatmaker) Sides, whose husband had been the World War I French flying ace Charles Nungesser, accompanied Mercedes on her passage to India. After arriving, de Acosta met former President Woodrow Wilson's daughter, Margaret, a devotee at Sri Aurobindo's ashram.

In 1960, she published an autobiography, Here Lies The Heart, dedicated to Maharshi, in which she wrote, To Bhagavan Ramana Maharshi, the only completely egoless, world-detached, and pure being I have ever known. She spent three days with him and remembered them as the most significant of her life.

At a dinner party she became interested in Maharshi after she met Paul Brunton, an Englishman who had spent time with the sage, and had published A Search in Secret India, chronicling his transformative experiences at Arunachala.

She later read Brunton's book and of it, she wrote that it "had a profound effect on me. . . . It was as though some emanation of this saint was projected out of the book to me. . . . Nothing could distract me from the idea that I must go and meet this saint. . . . . I felt I would meet the Maharshi and that this meeting would be the greatest experience of my life."

As the car neared Maharshi's home she says,"the driver explained he could take me no farther. I turned toward the hill of Arunachala and hurried in the hot sun along the dust-covered road to the abode about two miles from town where the Sage dwelt. As I ran those two miles, deeply within myself I knew that I was running toward the greatest experience of my life."

"When, dazed and filled with emotion, I first entered the hall, I did not quite know what to do. Coming from strong sunlight into the somewhat darkened hall, it was, at first, difficult to see; nevertheless, I perceived Bhagavan at once, sitting in the Buddha posture on his couch in the corner. At the same moment I felt overcome by some strong power in the hall, as if an invisible wind was pushing violently against me. For a moment I felt dizzy."

"Then I recovered myself. To my great surprise I suddenly heard an American voice calling out to me, 'Hello, come in.' It was the voice of an American named Guy Hague*, who originally came from Long Beach, California. . . . " [*Some say Guy Hague is Somerset Maugham's Larry Darrell in The Razor's Edge. The Wanderling says his mentor was Maugham's inspiration.]

After I had been sitting several hours in the hall listening to the mantras of the Indians and the incessant droning of flies, and lost in a sort of inner world, Guy Hague suggested that I go and sit near the Maharshi. . . . I moved near Bhagavan, sitting at his feet and facing him. . . ."

"He moved his head and looked directly down at me, his eyes looking into mine. It would be impossible to describe this moment and I am not going to attempt it. I can only say that at this second I felt my inner being raised to a new level-as if, suddenly, my state of consciousness was lifted to a much higher degree. . . ."

"[I asked Maharshi,] tell me, whom shall I follow--what shall I follow? I have been trying to find this out for years by seeking in religions, in philosophies, in teachings."

"Again there was silence. After a few minutes, which seemed to me a long time, he spoke. 'You are not telling the truth. You are just using words--just talking. You know perfectly well whom to follow. Why do you need me to confirm it?' "

"You mean I should follow my inner self?" I asked.

"I don't know anything about your inner self. You should follow the Self. There is nothing or no one else to follow."

I asked again, "What about religions, teachers, gurus?"

"If they can help in the quest of the Self. But can they help? Can religion, which teaches you to look outside yourself, which promises a heaven and a reward outside yourself, can this help you? It is only by diving deep into the spiritual Heart that one can find the Self."

"He placed his right hand on his right breast and continued,

Here lies the Heart, the dynamic, spiritual Heart. It is called Hridaya and is located on the right side of the chest and is clearly visible to the inner eye of an adept on the spiritual path. Through meditation you can learn to find the Self in the cave of this Heart. . . ."

"Bhagavan pointed out to me that the real Self is timeless. 'But,' he said, 'in spite of ignorance, no man takes seriously the fact of death. He may see death around him, but he still does not believe that he will die. . . .' "

"To write of this experience with Bhagavan, to recapture and record all that he said, or all that his silences implied, is like trying to put the infinite into an egg cup. . . . On me he had, and still has, a profound influence. . . .I definitely saw life differently after I had been in his presence, a presence that just by merely 'being' was sufficient spiritual nourishment for a lifetime. . . ."

"I sat in the hall with Bhagavan three days and three nights. . . . I wanted to stay on there with him but finally he told me that I should go back to America. He said, 'There will be what will be called a "war," but which, in reality, will be a great world revolution. Every country and every person will be touched by it.' You must return to America. Your destiny is not in India at this time.' . . . ."

"Bhagavan Ramana Maharshi died on April 14,1950. He had said, 'I am going away? Where could I go? I am here.' By the word 'here' he did not imply any limitation. He meant rather, that the Self 'is.' There is no going, or coming, or changing in that which is changeless and Universal. . . . millions in India mourned the Maharshi. A long article about his death in the New York Times ended with, 'Here in India, where thousands of so-called holy men claim close tune with the infinite, it is said that the most remarkable thing about Ramana Maharshi was that he never claimed anything remarkable for himself, yet became one of the most loved and respected of all'."

Her meeting with Maharshi was perhaps most remarkable in view of her life that preceded it. Alice B. Toklas once said of her, "you can't dispose of Mercedes lightly, she had the two most important women in US., Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich." Other lovers of Mercedes included the great actresses Alla Nazimova and Eva Le Gallienne and the legendary innovator of dance, Isadora Duncan. "I can get any woman away from any man," she liked to tell her friends. But what de Acosta eventually wanted more than anything was the 1938 interview with Ramana Maharshi. A woman of great appetites, she sought somebody who taught the quenching of appetites.

Mercedes de Acosta moved to a 68th Avenue apartment and died in relative poverty in 1968. In her autobiography she had revealed too many secrets about her friends, who then cut her out of their circles.

Her book is Here Lies The Heart.

The Revolt of Pancho Barnes

2021-04-05T01:15:00.000-07:00

Born to immense wealth, Pancho had an arranged marriage to a minister. Newspapers proclaimed the marriage of a socialite to a pastor. Tired of the marriage, she couldn't get a divorce so each Sunday morning she climbed into her biplane and dove down over the steeple, buzzing his church during his sermons, drowning out the service. While a school girl she led her horse into her dorm. Called on the carpet, she "sweetly" explained to the headmistress she thought the animal was lonely. In the depth of the Great Depression she spent the last of her money to help fellow aviators but, broke, became a capable business woman, building The Happy Bottom Riding Club and Rancho Oro Verde Dude Ranch in the Mojave Desert and was a surrogate mother to test pilot Chuck Yeager. Years later, using her usual colorful language she told off the commanding officer of Edwards Air Force Base and he got back by trying to bulldoze her Happy Bottom Riding Club.

Pancho Barnes is included in Don't Die in Bed: The Brief, Intense Life of Richard Halliburton.
She grew up on South Garfield Avenue in San Marino, California in a three-story thirty-five room mansion with eighteen foot ceilings, wood-paneled walls with hand-carved moldings ,and a massive crystal chandelier hanging from one ceiling. A harpsichord chime summoned the family to dinner.
Silver spigots serviced upstairs baths of marble. Water lilies decorated a large patio pool. Guests ambled to tennis courts for a few sets or to the stables, where they rode a mile course. In Laguna Beach stood another fine mansion on the cliffs above Emerald Bay. Next it she had a landing strip for her airplane.

Born In 1901, Florence Leontine Lowe was supposed to have grown into a debutante whose coming-out would be into the best Southern California society. But Pancho was born to rebel while her mother wanted a young lady who conformed to social expectations. Pancho loved animals and wanted to be a veterinarian but her mother thought that too common. Pancho took after her grandfather and father, both of whom doted on her.

Her grandfather was Thaddeus S.C. Lowe, photographed from below by Matthew Brady as Lowe floated in a balloon at a Civil War battle. He spied on Confederate troop movements while Union soldiers held ropes to keep the balloon from drifting over Johnny Reb’s ranks.

Abraham Lincoln appointed Lowe Chief Aeronaut of the Balloon Corps and Pancho claimed this made him founder of the US Air Force because he was de facto pioneer of American military aviation. In his balloon he became a favorite target of Rebel sharpshooters but fate favored him to grow old and become rich.

Around 1918, Florence attended the Bishop School in La Jolla, her fourth school in eight years. She roomed with Ursula Greenshaw (Mandel), who wrote an autobiography, I Live My Life, saying that life with “Florence was “never DULL!” “One night when I entered our room, I stumbled against a body. I switched on the light and there lay Florence on the floor in a pool of blood. Pinned to her chest with a dagger was a note saying that she had decided to end it all. I soon discovered the blood was red ink and the dagger wound faked.”

Florence was called on the carpet at the principal’s office one day because she led her horse, Dobbins, inside her building and up the stairs. The principal demanded to know the reason for the outrage. “She feigned innocent surprise and soon was expressing deep sympathy for the horse.” She sweetly said, “He must have been so lonesome that he even came upstairs to look for me.”

Florence continued to rebel but for a while, at least, her mother had the upper hand and decided that an arranged marriage would cool her daughter’s spirit. In 1921, Pancho wed Episcopalian Reverend C. Rankin Barnes of Pasadena and ten years older. The newspapers announced that a society aviatrix married a Pasadena reverend.

Three nights after the marriage, they finally slept together and begot a son. After that night they slept apart. William Emmert was born nine months later and grew up close to his mother, dying in 1981 when his WWII fighter, a P-51 Mustang, crashed.

Theirs was not a match made in heaven.

In her unpublished autobiography Pancho wrote, “I had married a clergyman and that was to be my life.” She tried to make it work. “I taught Sunday school. I had a class of boys about nine years old. I bribed them with jackknives to learn the catechism.” But Pancho after all was Pancho, not Florence. She wrote that “More and more I spent time with my horses.” She wanted a divorce but he did not want the scandal.

She tried provoking him into it. After she learned to fly, on Sundays she swooped her biplane low over her husband’s church and buzzed it, drowning out the choir and his sermon. He still refused. But no proper minister could remain married to a woman who publicly said “Flying is like being a sex maniac in a whore house,” one of Pancho’s celebrated quips. Years later, in 1941, he did grant a divorce.

Florence became Pancho in an adventure wholly typical of her. When friends decided to hire on as seamen on a banana boat, Pancho, the only woman, decided to join them. She cut her hair short, donned baggy pants, and signed on a tramp freighter as an ordinary seaman, Jacob Crane. There she met Roger Chute. She cussed and played poker with the crew but Chute, a Stanford-educated fisheries expert, saw through her disguise. They became alarmed when at sea. The captain hoisted the Panamanian flag—they discovered the ship ran guns to Mexican revolutionaries. At San Blas, she and Chute jumped ship before it became caught between revolutionary forces and sunk.

Deep in Mexico riding horses, Chute on a white steed, she said he reminded her of Don Quixote. He said she looked like Pancho, Don Quixote’s squire. No, she said, you mean Sancho Panza, but she liked the name and kept it because there was nothing dignified about it and because it gave the raspberry to her mother’s proper lady.

The Depression was not good to Pancho. With only a Hollywood apartment left, in 1935 she sold it and bought eighty acres in the Mojave Desert. Almost out of money and flying her Lockheed Vega, one day she looked down on the land below and saw a lush, green alfalfa field and thought it would be a good place to raise her son Billy. March Army Air Base was there and next it was Muroc Field.

She bought a struggling alfalfa ranch and transformed it, having also bought out a dairy called Adair. She sold milk and eggs to the base. She grew alfalfa, had a dairy herd of cows and goats, farmed pigs, raised chickens, grew corn. She had a sweet deal with her garbage business, feeding her hogs on trash the base paid her to haul away and then selling pork back to it. She was an able businesswoman and with profits from her ranch she bought more land.

Near her ranch she built the Happy Bottom Riding Club, because General Jimmy Doolittle once told her he had a happy bottom. It was also known as Rancho Oro Verde Fly Inn Dude Ranch, where she eventually built a dance hall with glamorous hostesses, a gambling casino, a swimming pool, horse stables, and a championship rodeo stadium.

Fellow aviator Moye Stephens recalled that among aviators she commanded respect as an able pilot, and she flew as a test pilot for Lockheed. She, in turn, respected other pilots and gravitated to them.

Pilots went to Pancho’s where she could talk airplanes with them. She was queen of her bar, and the fly boys came to have fun and kid with her. She said she hosted the fastest and bravest men on earth. Pancho did not charge military test pilots for their drinks but triple-charged the civilian test pilots because of their fat salaries.

A 1948 Time magazine article described her place: “Pancho’s Fly-Inn (or the Happy Bottom Riding Club)” has its own airport, lighted at night, “so that guests, friends and airborne wayfarers can fly in at all hours. . . . Chuck Yeager has roared low over the ranch in every sort of airplane, including the fastest jets. When he buzzes the place in a jet plane, the slap from the zipping wing jounces the bar.” The Time cover shows Yeager in his test pilot’s helmet as the man who broke the sound barrier in the Bell X-1.

Pancho married again. And again. Three months after divorcing the Reverend she married Robert Nichols, Jr. It lasted a few weeks. He was in his twenties, about the same age as her son, Billy; she was approaching 40. After that marriage, she waited a bit longer and in 1945, she wed Don Jose Shalita, a handsome performance dancer. He left after four months. In 1953, she married her ranch foreman, Mac McKendry, thirty-two to her fifty-one. Her good friend Air Force base General Al Boyd flew cross-country in a B-47 for the wedding. He gave the bride away in the ceremony. Bell X-1 test pilot Chuck Yeager was her best man. Indian Chief Lucky blessed the union. Six hundred fifty people attended for a fifty-eight second wedding. Age slowed her down. It took fourteen years for her to divorce McKendry.

Al Boyd, the previous commander, had been an old school aviator, and had even given Pancho away in her wedding to McKendry but in the 1950s the new Edwards Air Force Base commander took an immediate dislike to Pancho and she was not about to change. With her what you saw was what you got.

Brigadier General J. Stanley Holtoner felt she and her place were unfit moral examples for his young airmen and called her a madam, her Happy Bottom Riding Club a cat house, and he placed it off limits. This hurt. The pilots and air crews had been her boys. She had taken them under her wing, cared for them. The general also decided to expand the Base to make room for a new runway, which conveniently meant condemning Pancho’s land by right of eminent domain. The General low-balled an offer for her 380 acres.

No, said Pancho. Her land had not figured in any previous Edwards expansion plans. Besides, with her businesses the real estate was worth far more than the offer. “They picked the wrong gal to push around!," she said.

She was David against Goliath, and Goliath had an unending supply of lawyers on its payrolls. Years could pass under judicial review and during those years a David could go bankrupt while Goliath played golf on Sundays and had well-paid lawyers. That may have discouraged and defeated others but not her. She was joined at the hip to the Air Force for, as she would argue in court, her grandfather founded the United States Air Force. She went to a law library to study books and legal briefs. There, she met Shirley Hufstedler, an attorney who was impressed by Pancho’s generous spirit and real grit. Shirley, her husband, and a friend, both also attorneys, took on the case.

Her case became a cause célèbre with the press following Pancho’s every comment. Everybody favored underdog Pancho. The news spread around the world as “The War of the Mojave.” The courtroom was packed with people who came to attend the trial, spectators, reporters, military personnel. When both sides had rested their arguments, the jury retired to deliberate, and the courtroom atmosphere was tense as people waited for the jury, and waited, and still waited. After several hours, the jury returned with their verdict.
They filed back into the courtroom, and everybody stood for them. Honorable US District Court Judge Gilbert Jertberg asked them, “ladies and gentlemen of the jury, have you finally reached a unanimous decision?” “Yes we have your honor,” came the chairman’s reply.

They found against the United States Air Force and The United States government. They found for Florence Leontine "Pancho" Barnes. Cheers filled the courtroom. Judge Jertberg stated that Pancho was a courageous, forthright individual. In her compassion and concern for her military customers she had shown herself a friend of the Air Force. He awarded her a settlement of $414,500, much more than the $185,000 offered by the Air Force.

Today, little remains of The Happy Bottom Riding Club.

While Pancho was away shopping a fire mysteriously started, destroying it. Just before the end of the trial, on November 13, 1953, it burned down. The fire marshal believed it a case of arson, but could not locate a proximate cause. The general had told Pancho that if she didn’t sell he could have her ranch “napalm bombed off the desert.”

After the hullabaloo faded the Air Force took over her land for a runway. The Happy Bottom ruins are listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

She died in 1975, age 74. Scheduled to be keynote speaker at the annual Barnstormer’s Reunion of the Antelope Valley Aero Museum, she could not be reached when a friend called her. Pancho’s son, Bill, stopped by her little rock house in Boron, California to investigate and found her dead. The coroner concluded that she had died several days earlier of a heart attack. She had requested that her body be cremated, the ashes strewn from an airplane over the 380 acres of her Happy Bottom ranch.

To this day Edwards Air Force Base celebrates an annual Pancho Barnes Day.

She said “We had more fun in a week than most of the weenies in the world have in a lifetime.” Perhaps most notable, she should be remembered for this: “If you have a choice, choose happy.” She took a very large bite out of life.

Leader of the B-25 raid on Tokyo, General Jimmy Doolittle learned that Pancho had died and thus would not appear as keynote speaker for the Barnstormers Reunion. He prepared a testimonial to her life. So many there, so many of her friends, from Hollywood to aviation. Susan Oliver, Richard Arlen, Chuck Yeager, Buzz Aldrin. General Doolittle said this:

“Good Evening. Ladies and gentlemen, we have recently lost a true friend. In this day and age, real friends you can depend on in a pinch are rare indeed. Florence Lowe Barnes left us late last month. She was an expert pilot and a good organizer. She had a fine mind, and was intensely loyal. When the going was rough, you knew that she would always offer a willing hand. There was no extent to which she would not go to help a friend who was in need . . . In a few words, she put great store by courage, honor and integrity. She despised dishonesty and cowardice. She was straight forward and couldn't abide dissimulation, abhorred sham. She was outspoken, and she said exactly what she thought and believed. You know, I can just see her up there at this very minute. In her inimitable way, with a wry smile, she is probably remarking to some old and dear friend who preceded her, 'I wondered what the little old bald-headed bastard was going to say.'

God love her. And may I now propose a toast: Ladies and gentlemen, to Pancho Barnes. Pancho Barnes!”

The Air Force has never built its runway on Pancho’s land. The dairy barn below is among the ruins that remain.

Don't Forget This: The Triumphal Parade of Ancient Rome

2021-03-11T08:20:00.014-08:00

In ancient Rome, a general, many to become emperors, presided over The Triumph (Triumphus), a victory parade through the streets of the city with throngs watching him pass by. In a chariot he lead the parade, and heard the ovations of the masses. He wore a purple tunic, for purple was a rare dye only the nobility and powerful could afford. Behind him walked all his army, his men and women captives, soon to become slaves, followed by his other spoils of war. A slave held his golden crown, but the main role of the slave was to occasionally whisper in his ear,

Memento mori, memento mori.

Translated it means, Remember, you will die.

I dedicate this story to all politicians of power and high station.

Meditation, The Narrator, and Self-Therapy

2021-02-24T12:52:00.002-08:00

The years have piled up on me and through them I have at times been happy, have been sad, have suffered, have been calm. Over the years and as a lesson hard-won, looking at mind with its ups and downs, I find one thing stands out. If mind identifies with a narrator, somebody who tells his or her story, then dukkha, suffering, is greater. The narrator is a voice, a series of thoughts, or images, that seems to have continuity, but in fact it comes and goes. I also found that a narrator impartially takes credit for bad feelings as well as good ones when in fact either kind of feeling doesn't depend on a narrator. They just happen. They arise and fall away, just as the narrator arises and falls away. There is no continuous stream. The continuity is ego's necessary fiction. Yes, in life we have a story-line. We were born at a certain place. Went to school somewhere. Married. Etc.

But all that is in what we call the past. The narrator needs the past (and the future) to maintain itself. We have only now as our thoughts and feelings arise and pass away. We can add something to them or just watch them happen. The narrator thinks they're you but in a moment they disappear as it does also.

We can't get rid of the narrator but we can see through it. Seeing through it helps relieve us from suffering. ( I distinguish suffering (mental) from pain (physical).)

We can see through it by noting when we feel good. The feeling doesn't need a narrator to increase it. It's just there, sometimes with a narrator. When we feel bad, the feeling doesn't need a narrator. Indeed, when a narrator is added the bad feeling worsens. ("Nobody understands me." "It's all hopeless." "This is the story of my life." These are just examples. Each of us can choose our own favorite story line.)

I don't know much about Taoism but a phrase resonates. The Tao that can be seen is not the true Tao. What you are is what mind cannot grasp. Maybe you want to save that for later in your investigations, though. I'll just ask you to think about this: Are you your brain? If so, where does the "me" thought come from? Can you find it? Are you in your body? Etc. The point here is that whatever you can identify is itself another object, physical or mental. Are you an object? Or are you that which sees objects? Similarly you see objects in space but not space itself.

A few people grasp all that without ever meditating. I am not one of them. It took many years of meditation for me. So that's my advice. In the beginning five minutes of meditation daily can help. Over time the five can be extended to ten, the ten to twenty, etc. Whenever it is neglected the mind wants to take over, get itself back in control with thoughts such as "I have no time for this," or "This is a waste of time," or "It just isn't my cup of tea," etc. Notice that the ego is involved in each denial. Meditation, as it deepens, reveals the folly of clinging to egoic assertions.

Buddha & Absolutes: Hindu Thought & The View from Nowhere

2020-06-23T14:35:00.014-07:00

I found an interesting article at the Skeptic site, called The View from Nowhere or Somewhere? Maja Caron reviews a novel by Rebecca Goldstein, 36 Arguments for The Existence of God. ( I read her book Plato at The Googleplex, and it is a tour de force.) In the review Caron brings up Thomas Nagel's classic work, The View from Nowhere, discussing Nagel in terms of the views of Cass Seltzer, Goldstein's protagonist.

Somewhere in her very interesting and good article Caron says this:

"If the universe is both personal and universal, as both Seltzer and Nagel suggest, and it’s not possible for an individual to wrap his/her logical thinking process around the notion, one should neither assign mystical significance to this nothing, nor should it seek to empirically dissect it as a 'thing in itself'."

I have this to say about that. Of course. The central tenet of many of the Upanishads, the Bhagavad-Gita, and Buddhism is that the universe is both personal and universal. But. The difference between Hindu teachings and Buddhism--as I understand them--is that India goes metaphysical with Brahman while Buddhism does not go there with anatta, or no-self. India took the next step. Buddha, a son of India, did not delve into metaphysics.

Both Hinduism and Buddhism argue that the universal/personal cannot be understood by mind. But Advaita--to use an example teaching--took a leap of faith while Buddhism--in its non-dogmatic teachings--says you are that, you are both personal and universal, but it's only part of your experience and to be realized empirically.* What lies "beyond" your experience cannot be known by the human mind and there is no point in taking a leap of faith because any statement of faith is only an assumption. *(Realized in human experience that is not claimed as metaphysical revelation and as stated in The Heart Sutra: "Form is emptiness; emptiness form.")

Buddhist teachings go on to say that the so-called awakening experience, because it is not metaphysical and only a non-conventional possibility of experience, should not be exceptioned as beatitude. It should not be regarded as special because it is only another experience. It is liberating but not magical, not other-worldly religious, and certainly not revelation from God. Buddhism is agnostic about any absolute. "If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him; if you meet a ghost kill the ghost," goes an old Zen koan. (Attributed to Zen Master Linji, founder of the Rinzai sect.) In short, don't follow mind in its old tricks about absolute/not-absolute. The ultimate trickster is mind and its musings that keep ego involved in trying to find a "groundless ground."

Yeats said it well: "Like a long-legged fly upon the water his mind moves on silence." With its attendant experiences the silence is as far as we can go.

What Is Time? Julian Barbour's Answer

2020-01-12T17:30:00.001-08:00

Tell me what time is. You cannot. The future does not exist, nor does the past. Nor the present. You cannot live in the present. Snap your fingers and it is gone. By the time you say "now" it is already past. You cannot apprehend any part of time you talk about. All you have are words to explain something that eludes you and the words only confuse you all the more.

In 1908 John McTaggart wrote The Unreality of Time, and using his A and B series of time he argued that our perception of time is an illusion. Of the A series, he argues this:
"If time exists it must be explained by the A series, which is how we normally think about time. This is a tensed series, as in past, present, and future. A cup of coffee was hot in the past, is lukewarm in the present, and cold in the future. The United States was created in the past, exists in the present, and will no longer exist in the future. In this series are three distinct instances."

McTaggart juxtaposes a B series against the A series. This series is relational, or durational. One way to think of it is as events before the now and after the now. A cup of coffee had hot temperature, is colder temperature in the present, and colder after the present. Put in another way to think about it, the United States was founded in the past, exists after its founding, and will no longer exist after its founding. From both perspectives the instances are not distinct, but relational, enduring from one into another. The B series can be likened to space. The wall is there, and a window elsewhere. They are spatially related. The B series as relational is not inherently separate (distinct) from other time-moments, just as space has no difference in it. As the wall is there, the window elsewhere, so events in the B series can be located as before and after.

Many rich and profound complications arise from thinking about the two series but the central point is that they are contradictory. One is tensed, the other tenseless. The A series depends on personal experience and perspective. "I am drinking hot coffee today." The B series does not. The experience and perspective are not there. "I recall drinking hot coffee today."

Because they are contradictory, McTaggart says time is not real. His legacy is that he left A theorists and B theorists debating which kind of time is true, continuing a discussion traced back to Parmenides (reality is timeless, unchanging) and Heraclitus ("You can't step into the same river twice").

So what is time? If nobody asks, I know. If they ask and I try to explain, I do not know. (St Augustine, Bishop of Hippo, 354-430.)

In his book, The End of Time: The Next Revolution in Physics, Julian "Barbour asserts that time simply doesn't exist." Barbour starts with the notion that time is just a way of describing change. He means that to measure time you have to have something that moves. How long does it take to get from point A to Point B?

~ "There's only change, not time. Things move around; time may just be a way of noting that. But Barbour goes further. He says there's no such thing as motion either. Instead, Barbour sees a universe filled with static instants -- instants that contain 'records' that fool any conscious beings who happen to find themselves encased in one into believing that things have moved and time has passed."

~"This common-sense view was one of many forever altered by Einstein's theories. We see time this way, he made clear, only because we move so slowly. If you could peddle your bicycle at something almost in the neighborhood of the speed of light, relative to an observer, your watch and your aging process would appear -- to that observer -- to slow. (From your own perspective, time, unfortunately, would still keep chugging along at its usual dispiriting pace, which makes it unlikely that anyone will figure out how to turn this phenomenon into a wrinkle cream.)"

~"Relativity found time a home as one of the four dimensions in something called spacetime. But it hardly settled the question of what time is. And the idea that time slows down in certain circumstances made it easier to imagine that time was just a construct of us observers, not itself a fact of nature."

~"What if, Barbour wonders, we just imagine a kingfisher to be flying? After all, it isn't exactly the same bird at perch A and perch B: Its molecules constantly change; its atoms constantly change. What if our brain has captured a few snapshots of kingfisher-in-flight that it plays -- movie-like -- in such a way that we think we see continuous motion?"

~"What if the instants we inhabit somehow happen to be filled with 'records' -- images of kingfishers with their wings spread, tread marks, 'memories,' fossils -- that manage to delude us into thinking that birds fly, cars lurch, species become extinct; 'records' that manage to delude us into thinking that we are scurrying along some sort of path from the past to the future? Isn't it true that all we know now about the past or the future comes from thoughts or objects we experience now -- in the present?"

~"What if, Barbour then asks, we're always trapped in one moment or another and everything else -- your sense, for example that X number of minutes ago you moved your hand and clicked on FEED -- is a kind of illusion, somehow evoked by the structure of this particular, all-encompassing moment? What if, in other words, our whole sense that things move is an illusion, as -- in another context -- our sense that the earth does not move proved to be an illusion."

~"This is, if it helps any, quite similar to the view of time presented in Kurt Vonnegut's 1969 novel Slaughterhouse Five, which Barbour has not yet read. ('I know,' he says. 'People keep telling me I should look at it.') Vonnegut describes most earthlings as trapped in moments like 'bugs in amber.' Billy Pilgrim, the book's main character, however, repeatedly comes 'unstuck in time': He jumps, in no particular order (though in accordance with the needs of Vonnegut's narrative), from one point in his life to another. Moreover, on the planet Tralfamadore, which Pilgrim visits, 'all time' is visible at once, as we 'might see a stretch of the Rocky Mountains. It does not change. It simply is.' That Rocky Mountain-like view of all time is remarkably similar to Barbour's Platonia."

The above comments are excerpts from a review of his book published in the now defunct Feed Magazine on July 14, 2000 by Mitchell Stephens. I wanted to link you to the review but the link is dead. More of the review is below. Or click her for a Nature article on why time is an illusion according to classical physics.

The Question of Time

Barbour's theory meets one test of important new ways of looking at the universe: It doesn't, on the face of it, make a lot of sense. That puts it right up there with relativity (Space is curved?), quantum mechanics (Particles are waves?) and Copernicus's ideas (The earth, despite all indications to the contrary, moves?). In fact, Barbour's assertion that the instants we experience do not follow each other in a temporal sequence seems as likely to elicit a "Go on!" as any theory physicists have dreamt up in the past half millennium. The question is whether his theory meets the other test of important new ways of looking at the universe: Is it, in other words, remotely possible that he is right?

There are two ways of determining that, given the absence, to date, of experimental evidence: first, by grappling with the theory itself or, second, by figuring out whether this guy seems worth trusting. Neither, in this case, is easy. Barbour's thinking is complex and his credentials eccentric.

Just what time is has always been difficult to figure. "Time is the biggest mystery," states the physicist Brian Greene, who leads an accessible and fascinating expedition through contemporary physics in his recent book, The Elegant Universe. Our sense -- and this might be called the Newtonian view -- is that a kind of perfect, invisible celestial clock, invariable and indefatigable, is ticking away somewhere out there. Sundials, Swatch watches, and the human aging process each, in its less-than-perfect way, reflects this absolute time. It seems as inescapable and inevitable as death -- its enforcer.

This common-sense view was one of many forever altered by Einstein's theories. We see time this way, he made clear, only because we move so slowly. If you could peddle your bicycle at something almost in the neighborhood of the speed of light, relative to an observer, your watch and your aging process would appear -- to that observer -- to slow. (From your own perspective, time, unfortunately, would still keep chugging along at its usual dispiriting pace, which makes it unlikely that anyone will figure out how to turn this phenomenon into a wrinkle cream.)

BARBOUR, who lives near Oxford in England, is one of the only living physicists you will read, or read about, nowadays who is not in the employ of a college or university. In fact, Barbour, while he does have a Ph.D. in physics (earned in Cologne), has never taught physics. He calls himself "an independent." Barbour supported his family for decades by translating Russian scientific publications. His physics was done in his free time, at his own pace. Since Barbour's ideas have not been blessed by a tenure committee, and are radical, "people might naturally question," as one physicist puts it, "whether he is a crackpot."

There is considerable evidence to the contrary. Barbour's book, to begin with, is published by Oxford University Press. (As an Oxford author myself, I see this as clear proof of the book's merit.) Barbour has published, sometimes in collaboration with a genuine academic, some influential papers. He gets invited to important conferences. The back of his book is graced by an impressive collection of blurbs, including one from John A. Wheeler, one of the most accomplished physicists of the second half of the twentieth century. And then there is the enthusiastic (if difficult to follow) review his book received in the New York Times ("a masterpiece"), not to mention the designation bestowed upon it in one of many respectful articles in the London broadsheets: "much talked about."

The book itself describes a personal, spirited, sometimes stubborn, and mostly lonely intellectual quest. This gives it a slightly moist feel, as if we'd been invited directly into one man's cerebral cortex. But Barbour fulfills his main task -- explaining -- with industry and cleverness.

Not many physicists, including Barbour's respectful blurb writers, seem convinced that he is right about time. "Julian and I are very happy to disagree," is how the matter is worded, with respect and affection, by Fay Dowker, a physicist at Queen Mary and Westfield College, University of London. Still, most who are familiar with his work believe, as that physicist who mentioned the term certainly does, that, very far from being a "crackpot," Barbour is "an interesting, delightfully unusual, guy," who gets his math right and understands the equations in question. "Although his work is not widely known by the high-energy community in general," Dowker explains, "among a small, diverse group of physicists it is seen as challenging and interesting."

And these physicists are hesitant to simply dismiss his radical ideas. After all, physics was transformed early in the twentieth century by a set of radical ideas emanating from a fellow who also was not employed, during many of his most productive years, by a university.

BARBOUR STARTS WITH THE NOTION that time is just a way of describing change. "If you try to measure time," he told me in a recent telephone interview, "you have to have something that moves. It is remarkable how many people haven't considered this, including even Einstein, who never thought seriously about what a clock is." (Artie will enjoy learning that he may have been a step ahead of Einstein on this one.)

Without clock hands moving (or digital numbers flashing), without any motion, Barbour is convinced, there would be no time. Then he tries to prove -- more tentatively -- that there is no such thing as motion.

What if, Barbour wonders, we just imagine a kingfisher to be flying? After all, it isn't exactly the same bird at perch A and perch B: Its molecules constantly change; its atoms constantly change. What if our brain has captured a few snapshots of kingfisher-in-flight that it plays -- movie-like -- in such a way that we think we see continuous motion? What if the instants we inhabit somehow happen to be filled with "records" -- images of kingfishers with their wings spread, tread marks, "memories," fossils -- that manage to delude us into thinking that birds fly, cars lurch, species become extinct; "records" that manage to delude us into thinking that we are scurrying along some sort of path from the past to the future? Isn't it true that all we know now about the past or the future comes from thoughts or objects we experience now -- in the present?

For Barbour, what exists is not a universe moving through time; what exists is an endless, timeless series of possible configurations of everything in the universe -- each just an instant wide. There are configurations in which we each are born, presumably configurations in which we each die, and configurations in which we read articles about weird new theories. All these many, many possible instants are sitting in a "configuration space," which Barbour dubs (with a nod to another fellow who thought we were often deluded by appearances) "Platonia." These instants -- these "nows" -- are all there, like words in a book, at once. We experience many, many such instants -- and not necessarily in chronological order.

"I'm not a solipsist," Barbour insists, reassuringly. "I'm convinced that you're there. Equally I conclude that something I can call 'myself' is in other instants of time -- all the ones I remember from my past." Nevertheless, for Barbour possible instants -- a huge number of them, some containing him or us, some not -- are collected like cards in a deck. And it is not clear what instant might be dealt next (though the word "dealt" is probably too active and "next" too time-dependent for Barbour's theory).

If there is no time, though, how come we, unlike [Kurt Vonnegut's] Tralfamadorians, believe that we are moving continuously and chronologically through it? Vonnegut has an extraterrestrial character suggest that the human perspective is akin to looking at a mountain range from a railroad car through a tiny hole: We glimpse only a narrow stream of events, not the whole, timeless vista. Barbour's answer is more complex.

It is based on the (difficult-to-get-your-mind-around) notion in quantum mechanics that, until we actually observe them, particles have no definite location. All we can do is determine, through probabilities, where they are most likely to be. Hanging over Platonia, Barbour suggests, is a "blue mist" of similar probabilities. Barbour surmises that the mist must be thickest, the probabilities highest, over those configurations of the universe that are good at deluding us into thinking time flows and things move. Those are the instants in which we are most likely to find ourselves suspended. According to his theory, there presumably was a high probability that you would find yourself in this particular instant -- an instant in which you are reading this article and believing (I assume) that a series of movements led up to your reading this article.

IT'S AMAZING how badly all this stuff goes over at dinner parties.

Most of the time you don't even get a respectful "Hmm" or a "Really?" Just a curt, "Oh, come on!" before everybody gets back to grumbling about the presidential campaign. Sure, we've all experienced some situations -- while watching Eyes Wide Shut, for example -- where time seems to slow, if not stop completely. Still, Barbour's idea that time always stands still, that nothing really moves, is, shall we say, counterintuitive, the evidence for motion in this world being rather compelling. It's not just kingfishers flying. Consider SUVs muscling down a highway, or Hillary Clinton perambulating through upstate New York. In describing the world, we feel the need to have recourse to verbs. Barbour's all-noun theory is awfully hard to accept.

For Theodore Jacobson, a professor of physics at the University of Maryland, the rub is the flow of time: We feel it. Barbour's theory denies it. Bugs trapped in amber don't flow. "Still," Jacobson cautions, "you have to be careful about being too dogmatic in dismissing Barbour's idea. It's a creative idea. I'd hate to be objecting to it because I wasn't imaginative enough to see how it could be right. Besides, from one point of view, this is what quantum gravity suggests."

That's right: quantum gravity. Barbour's "timeless" theory, like most truly ambitious physics theories these days, has a go at reconciling those two great, well-tested, but on some level incompatible twentieth-century formulations: relativity and quantum mechanics. The key seems to be coming up with a quantum description of the main player in Einstein's general relativity: gravity. (The current favorite for accomplishing this is "string theory," but Barbour hasn't yet focused much on that.)

Physicists have gotten themselves into tangles, Barbour suggests, by trying to thread time through their equations on quantum gravity. His solution? Cut the thread! "Maybe," Barbour says, "the fundamental equations of the universe don't contain time at all." (The actual equations -- the sort we general readers are known to find off-putting -- are not included in his book, but Barbour does make an earnest and enterprising effort to explain their significance.) He maintains that, when time is subtracted from some of those crucial equations, quantum gravity begins to make a kind of timeless sense.

"People working in this field have known for decades that there is a major problem with time," Barbour states. "Why am I the first to write about the possibility that time does not exist? The answer may be that I'm an independent."

There's more. Barbour argues that the best attempt to produce a quantum equation that might apply to the whole universe, an effort generally credited to John A. Wheeler and Bryce DeWitt, works best when the universe is seen as being in a stationary, i.e., timeless, state. "The Wheeler-DeWitt equation tells us," Barbour writes, "that the universe in its entirety is like some huge molecule in a stationary state and that the different possible configurations of this 'monster molecule' are the instants of time."

I haven't seen any evidence that physicists are dismissing Barbour's interpretation of these equations as obviously wrong. Although he has not read Barbour's book, Edward Witten, of the Institute for Advanced Studies, another of our most accomplished physicists, acknowledges in an e-mail exchange that in at least one set of fundamental equations "Time does not appear explicitly in the equations in the same sense that space does." And Witten, whose work has been crucial to string theory, also notes, intriguingly, that string-theory "processes with strong time dependence" have proved "perplexingly difficult to understand." Witten's conclusion? "I suspect that there is a secret hidden here, but, of course, I don't know what it is." But Barbour thinks he knows. Cut the thread!

NEVERTHELESS, even Barbour admits that his "timeless" interpretation of crucial physics equations may prove wrong. This is one point upon which there is agreement. "It might be that when we get to a new level of fundamental ideas we will see space but absolutely no glimmer of time," suggests Brian Greene, a professor of physics and mathematics at Columbia. "That's possible, but that isn't my gut feeling on how it will turn out." (Greene imagines a different, though also radical, solution: "My own feeling is that 'space' and 'time' are the wrong language to be using to begin with and that we will find some new ideas. And we will see that space and time are just approximations of these new fundamental ideas.")

Even if Barbour's approach and his eviction of time from those fundamental equations were confirmed, he would have a long way to go before he could produce a science powerful enough to explain the huge role this supposedly nonexistent time appears to play in the universe. Motion in time, for example, seems to provide a reasonably efficient explanation for how kingfishers (or their molecules or atoms) get from here to there and the universe expands. Barbour's probability "mists" in Platonia would represent just a first step toward an alternative explanation.

In the meantime, the mystery remains. What is this "dimension" of "spacetime" that, unlike the other dimensions, has the obnoxious quality of only permitting travel in one direction? Why does it appear to have such a firm grip on the world, on the universe, and on us mortals? If Barbour accomplishes nothing else, he has at least challenged other physicists to work harder to explain what it means to say that time or motion do, in fact, exist.

For us non-physicists, Barbour's radically counterintuitive speculations may be just plausible enough to warrant trying to get our minds around. After all, the wonderful thing about physics -- not counting all the practical stuff, like figuring out how to make hydrogen bombs -- is the opportunity it affords us to stretch our minds. Julian Barbour might not be Copernicus, or Einstein. He may very well turn out to be as wrong as he seems to be. But he does get you thinking.

Here is a link to Mitchell Stephens works.

Ota Benga: Man in A Zoo Cage

2019-12-07T19:56:00.000-08:00

In September 1906 a caged human being was put on display in the Bronx Zoo. A sign on the cage read:

The African Pygmy, "Ota Benga."
Age, 23 years. Height, 4 feet 11 inches.
Weight, 103 pounds. Brought from the
Kasai River, Congo Free State, South Central Africa, by Dr. Samuel P. Verner.

Benga was exhibited in the afternoons during September. Zoo officials clothed him in animal skins for viewers to gawk In youth his teeth had been filed to sharp points as was the custom of his people. Many New Yorkers thought they were for eating human flesh and called him a cannibal. Chimpanzees were put in the cage to suggest a comparison between him and them. Nearly a quarter million people saw him--fathers holding children high to see over the shoulders of those in front, women standing in front of the cage so a picture could be taken of them with Ota Benga safely behind the background bars. Zoo attendance in September doubled over the previous year. "Bushman Shares a Cage with Bronx Park Apes," read a New York Times headline, which declared that "the human being happened to be a Bushman, one of a race that scientists do not rate high in the human scale."

The boyish-looking Benga sat on a stool in silence. In the first week Benga seemed resigned to his fate. The next week he kicked, bit, or hit attendants as they tried to put him in the cage. By Sunday September 16th, Benga was allowed to roam the park while watched by park rangers. 40,000 people visited the zoo that day. Hordes followed him. The rowdies chased him. They cornered him, poking him in the ribs or tripping him. Others laughed at his fright. He struck back at them. But he wouldn't go back to the monkey house. Three rangers had to force him back.
.
Zoo director William Temple Hornaday wrote to the man who brought him, Samuel P. Verner, on Monday September 17th: “I regret to say that Ota Benga has become quite unmanageable.” Hornady lamented that “He has been so fully exploited in the newspapers, and so much in the public eye, it is quite inadvisable for us to punish him; for should we do so, we would immediately be accused of cruelty, coercion, etc., etc. I am sure you will appreciate this point.”

Eventually he was released from the zoo. African-American clergymen had protested the exhibit. One Monday afternoon in September the Reverend James H Gordon, known as “one of the most eloquent Negroes in the country,” led a small group of ministers to see the exhibit. They got off the train at the zoological gardens and at the primate house, they watched Ota Benga in a cage with Dohang, the orangutan.

James H. Gordon went home to write, "Our race, we think, is depressed enough, without exhibiting one of us with the apes." Other clergymen backed him.

Ota Benga became caged in the zoo because of a series of events beginning with history and imperialism. As a member of the Mbuti people he lived in equatorial forests of Congo Free State. Thereby hangs a tale. (Congo Free State was captured as metaphor in Joseph Conrad's The Heart of Darkness.) The Congo was by no means free. It was created by Belgian King Leopold II in order to plunder it, principally for rubber and ivory. British consul Roger Casement brought home from the Congo confirmation of mass atrocities under Leopold’s rule. Men had come to Casement with missing hands. Casement said the rampant practice of mutilation “is amply proved by the Kodak.” Photographs showed at least two dozen mutilated victims. Congolese were chained by their necks and forced to work for the "free" State. Leopold created the Force Publique in order to enslave and control the people. Benga's people were attacked by the Force. Ota returned from a hunting expedition to find his wife and two children murdered. Later he was captured by slave traders.

In 1904 Samuel Phillips Verner found Ota Benga among the traders and claimed to have bought his release for a pound of salt and a bolt of cloth. Verner was under contract from The Louisiana Purchase Exposition (St Louis World's Fair) to return with an assortment of natives for the exhibition. W.J. McGee wanted an exhibit to represent "all the world's people . . . from smallest pygmies to the most gigantic . . . from the darkest blacks to the dominant whites." In this new age of Darwinism he sought them to demonstrate a cultural evolution. In short, ranging from inferior to superior cultures.

As Verner tells it, Benga agreed to return to America with him and encouraged a group of Batwa tribesmen to accompany them. They did not trust Verner, a white man, because of atrocities committed by King Leopold's Force Publique. Benga told them Verner had saved his life and that they had developed a bond. Four Batwa males as well as other Africans accompanied them to St Louis.

At the World Fair, Apache chief Geronimo, on exhibit also, came to admire Benga and gave him an arrowhead.

Verner returned Benga and the other Africans to the Congo, where Benga married a Batwa woman who died of snakebite. Without his Mbuti people, Benga did not feel he belonged with the Batwa and returned with Verner to the states.

While tending other business, Verner negotiated with curator Henry Bumpus for Benga to stay at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. Benga was given a linen suit to wear but became homesick for his own culture. He was inside all the time, when outside he was in a big city. The museum itself was silent with hard, barren surfaces. Outside was concrete without birds, breeze, anything to hunt. He was presented as a savage. The museum was a prison. Guards kept him inside and he tried to slip past them in the large crowds at the entrance. Once he was asked to seat a wealthy donor's wife. He pretended to misunderstand and threw a chair, barely missing her head. One can only imagine him thinking, "So here's the savage you want." Verner found him another home.

It was the Bronx Zoo, where this story began. William Hornaday, zoo director, had Benga help maintain animal habitats. But people noticed Benga more than they did the animals. Hornaday eventually featured Benga in an exhibition. We know how that ended.

The African-American clergyman who protested the treatment of Benga re-enters this narrative here. James H. Gordon put Benga in the Howard Colored Orphan Asylum, a church-sponsored orphanage in Brooklyn, which Gordon supervised. At the Orphan Asylum 1906 wore into 1910 and the press was relentless in pestering Benga and Gordon for stories about the pygmy.

Gordon arranged with the McCray family in Lynchburg, Virginia, for Benga to move there. He bought him American clothes and had Benga's filed teeth capped so that he could better fit in. Anne Spencer, a poet of the Harlem Renaissance, tutored him in English. He attended elementary school at the Baptist Seminary in Lynchburg.

At the time Lynchburg was a city of nearly 30,000 people. Benga would have ridden on its electric street cars, at the back of course, and traveled its cobbled streets. He lived with Mary Hayes Allen and her seven children in a yellow house across the road from the seminary. Allen was widow of the Seminar seminary's former president.

Benga found the forest near the house as something reminiscent of home. In it he taught neighborhood boys how to make bows from vines, how to hunt wild turkeys and squirrels. He told of his days hunting elephants.

He went to work at a tobacco factory. For a sandwich and root beer he told people his life story. The sandwich, the root beer, and the life story suggests he might have become settled by then and leads to the question, Was he happy by then? Had he adjusted to a way of life far from the forest, the animals, the people, and the culture he grew up in?

As he grew older he lost interest in teaching neighborhood boys the ways of a hunter. He wanted to go back to Africa.

He would have gone too, except for the assassination of Arch-Duke Ferdinand in Sarajevo, Serbia, which would grind up men as cannon fodder. In !914 World War I began and Germany launched submarine warfare. Passenger ship were only one more target for torpedoes.

A largely European war kept an African man from his native equatorial forests

Old men recalled those war years and themselves as boys listening to Benga sing a song he learned at the Theological Seminary, “I believe I’ll go home / Lordy, won’t you help me."

The old men remembered the late afternoon of 19 March 1916, as they watched Benga gather wood to build a fire in the field. They watched him dance around the fire. He chanted and moaned. It was about a world he lost, they knew that, but he had done it before.

They went to sleep. In the still night with cicadas chirping, Ota Benga crept into a shed near the yellow house. Before daybreak they heard a loud shot. He had hidden a gun there and fired one bullet through his heart.

Ota Benga, 1883-1916

Belief Shapes Behavior, Free Will or Not

2019-06-11T20:26:00.000-07:00

Whether You Think Free Will or Determinism, Belief Shapes Behavior

Popular wisdom has it that everybody will do right or wrong based on moral choice, and that moral choice is just―well, just a personal thing. One person can be as moral as another despite any difference in underlying beliefs about the world. Maybe, but Kathleen Vohs' and Jonathan Schooler's experiment gives us pause to think about the questions. What are the implications for society if people come to believe they have no free will? No moral responsibility?
They had some students read passages from Francis Crick's The Astonishing Hypothesis--a very deterministic view of the universe and the human place in it. We are creatures without God and without free will. The students read this: " ‘You,’ your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules. Who you are is nothing but a pack of neurons.”

They had other students read inspirational books on how we make our own decisions and forge our own paths in life

They then let each group play a video game in which the groups were allowed to cheat. The students were told to do 20 arithmetic problems and to press the space bar when a question appeared, otherwise the answer would also pop up because of a computer glitch. The students were told that no one would know when the space bar was pushed. Still, the students were asked not to cheat.

So guess who cheated?

The group that read Crick's words.

What are the implications of this? We hold ourselves responsible when we think we choose our actions.
___________________
An interesting commentary on the experiment can be found at Mindful Hack.

Evolution Didn't Design You To Be Happy

2019-05-06T16:25:00.000-07:00

Happiness and Evolution

When people are asked what they really want out of life most respond that they want to be happy. They
may think more money, a better job, improved status, social recognition will make them happy. Or they may think of all that as superficial and that they want inner happiness. Whichever, people regard happiness as a good unto itself.
This is what Aristotle said. He held happiness as the central purpose of human life and an end in itself. It has no goal beyond it. To be happy is to arrive.

But happiness by itself does not propagate genes. It has no survival value. In terms of natural selection, we are not programmed to be happy. It's in our DNA.
Psychologist at University of Pennsylvania, Martin Seligman noted the bias in his field toward mental illness in the basic psychiatric reference work Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders from psychosis to schizoaffective disorder. He found no comparable manual for minds that worked well. He set out to correct this view in, among other books, Authentic Happiness and has a web site, complete with surveys, explaining his approach.

Maybe, though, the notion that shit happens is rooted in our natures. Maybe we are more inclined to worry and anxiety because of their survival value. Think about the word happy. It derives from the same root as our modern happens. In Middle English, happ applied to chance, fortune, accident. We have the application in the modern word happenstance. Given the Middle English root, if you are happy you are lucky. If shit does not happen to you, then you are happy. Happiness, then, carries a tragic view of life. Things occur that are out of your control. You may be happy today and struck down by a car tomorrow.

So what about the survival value of worry and anxiety?

"It is the year 100,000 B.C., and two hunter-gatherers are out hunter-gathering. Let’s call them Ig and Og. Ig comes across a new kind of bush, with bright-red berries. He is hungry, as most hunter-gatherers are most of the time, and the berries look pretty, so he pops a handful in his mouth. Og merely puts some berries in his goatskin bag. A little later, they come to a cave. It looks spooky and Og doesn’t want to go in, but Ig pushes on ahead and has a look around. There’s nothing there except a few bones. On the way home, an unfamiliar rustling in the undergrowth puts Og in a panic, and he freezes, but Ig figures that whatever is rustling probably isn’t any bigger and uglier than he is, so he blunders on, and whatever was doing the rustling scuttles off into the undergrowth. The next morning, Og finally tries the berries, and they do indeed taste O.K. He decides to go back and collect some more.

Now, Ig is clearly a lot more fun than Og. But Og is much more likely to pass on his genes to the next generation of hunter-gatherers. The downside to Ig’s fearlessness is the risk of sudden death. One day, the berries will be poisonous, the bear that lives in the cave will be at home, and the rustling will be a snake or a tiger or some other vertebrate whose bite can turn septic." New Yorker

Ben Underwood Clicks His Tongue To See

2019-04-21T01:15:00.000-07:00

"To society he's blind," said Ben's mother, "but that doesn't make him handicapped. He just can't see."

She also said, "One thing that I truly get back from Ben being blind is that he truly sees people from within.
When he hears someone say that someone else is ugly, or anything negative towards someone else. He says, 'That's whats wrong with sighted people, you all look at one another and judge what you look like,' I see that statement being so true. "

His eyes removed because of cancer, Ben grew up without sight, but at age five learned to click with his tongue about every half second—to echolocate—to ride his bike, shoot hoops, play video games, and throw pillows at his sisters. Echoes informed Ben as to the position of objects, how big they were, their general shape, and how solid they were. Ben recognized a pole as tall and narrow, a building as tall and very broad. A pillow was soft and not dense.

Sadly, just shy of his 17th birthday this amazing and inspiring boy died of another cancer after the one that took his eyes. The obit video can be watched here. Also read another Mind Shadows post on echolocation, bats, dolphins, and Ben Underwood.

By clicking, Ben avoided curbs while riding his bicycle in his Sacramento, California neighborhood. Even though he couldn't see the hoop, he could sink a basketball through the basket. He played video games by distinguishing sounds. He wrote a novel, typing it at 60 words per minute on a standard keyboard. "I can hear that wall behind you over there. I can hear right there--the radio, and the fan," Ben told one reporter.

Ben was not the only blind person who developed echolocation. Others are Daniel Kish, 40, of Long Beach, California, who leads other blind people on hikes in the wilderness or in mountain biking. "I have mental images that are very rich, very complex,” says Kish. James Holman (1786-1857) used the sound of his tapping cane to travel alone around the world.

See the piece on Graham Young, a man who is blind but somehow can see. Young can sense moving objects but doesn't know how he does it. In that article V.S. Ramachandran, a neuroscientist, explained Young's ability.

Here is a web site dedicated to Ben Underwood. Here is his mother's account of him in "Ben's Life."
__________________
Bats send sound signals in rapid bursts at high frequencies. Their sonar can bounce off flying mosquitoes, which the bats swoop on with open mouths. Dolphins find their meals in the same manner. Echolocation, uses sound to identify objects and their locations. As with vision, the brain processes energy reflected off an object—only as sound rather than light.

We Neglect Recluses At Our Peril: Proust, Thoreau, and St Jerome in The Desert

2019-04-16T14:30:00.000-07:00

We Neglect Recluses At Our Peril: Proust, Thoreau, and St Jerome in The Desert

In his prolonged solitude Marcel Proust created a new aesthetic out of tea biscuits, stewed chicken, twinges of jealousy, and found the most authentic thing about himself in that shadow world. Even in his tough Yankee pragmatism, Henry David Thoreau said “I have been thrilled to think that I owed a mental perception to the commonly gross sense of taste, that I have been inspired through the palate, that some berries which I had eaten on a hill-side had fed my genius.” Both men point the way to a time-honored mode of valuing, an inner sense of direction, a regard for the liberating effect of hermitic introspection. This perspective does not come easily as the innerness is revealed only to those ready for it. Isolation has little public appeal, even as a television series. Imagine, though, that this were not the case. Suppose that it become wildly popular, that they introduce a new, introspective fashion. Imagine for a moment two Advertising Age headlines about a different kind of TV series:

Proust Tops Nielson For Five Months!

Sponsors Compete For Space On Prime Time Walden!

Of course both headlines are preposterous and will appear on the same day China becomes the 51st state. Their very absurdity reveals the distance between real public figures and isolatos the likes of Proust and Thoreau. If you wish to know a nation, said Thomas Carlyle, look to its heros. While standing at the checkout counter, glance at the tabloids and the magazines and you will confirm Carlyle's words. The deliberate recluse has no consumer appeal. Toy stores sell no anchorite dolls. Television sit-com writers cannot devise humorous plots around St Jerome in the Calcis Desert. A book on Bodhidharma in a cave makes for a boring read unless one has mystical inclinations.

The public has little taste for weirdos, unless they be hugely muscled bionic action heroes wielding laser guns against cops in the way. Perhaps this is because the recluse is the public divested of its consensus. He is the mirror to be shunned. He is not a laugh from a sitcom joke, an erotic twinge from an underwear ad, a rush of adrenalin with a video game. But he is James Joyce's HCE, a Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker, a Here Comes Everybody, alone in the world’s dream. He is each of us during REM sleep, far from our freeways, our TVs, our offices and without the faces we put on to greet the faces we meet. He confronts what people encounter only in slumber-- isolation, despair, and fear. "We are such things as dreams are made on," said Shakespeare's Prospero, and "our little lives are rounded with a sleep." Sleepwalkers, yes: Freud revealed its own unconscious to the world and despite this revelation people are no happier today as they catch double-entendres on TV sit-coms or approve some senator's thought-saving idea, and they then switch channels to learn of the latest urban rape or the newest Hollywood divorce, until finally they go to bed to arise and begin the next day. Caught up in a world of comings and goings, blind habit, job concerns, parental duties, economic downturns, and war threats, they do what they think they must. They start anew in the cycle described by W.H. Auden: They will be true to the wife. They will concentrate more on their work. ("September 1, 1939") In another poem Auden asks of "[Were they] free? [Were they] happy? The question is absurd: Had anything been wrong, we should certainly have heard" ("The Unknown Citizen").

They may feel isolated, in despair, and fearful, but certainly if something is wrong ten easy steps are at hand. Of such emotions popular wisdom says, Isolated? Then make friends. Despairing? Find a hobby. Afraid? Share it with your spouse. The deliberate recluse does not find acceptable advice here. Like Thoreau, this kind of recluse faces only the essential facts of life so that, before dying, he does not discover he has not lived. If life be mean he would “get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world,” or, be it sublime, “to know it by experience.” (Walden) This is not counsel found in the Sunday newspaper supplement. The public views the deliberate recluse askance. He abdicates their responsibility–the 9 to 5 drudgery, the hours in traffic jams, the children, the noise, the worries. He is seen as what society becomes after things fall apart–self-concerned, selfish, and escapist. The public can't think of him any other way than as a Ted Kazinsky alone in a cabin, using the US Postal Service to terrorize those in positions of responsibility. He is against all stability, this recluse, and threatens the American way of life. It is not nice to ignore Mother Culture.

I am not an isolato. I like people, enjoy being around them, value community. My life has seen a career, wife, and fatherhood. I just see in solitude, deliberate, pensive solitude, a filter for the insanity of the modern world in which Hype is King. People have lost their way. John and Jane have become parrots of the public mind. They do not think to question the idiocy that prevails as received wisdom. Can diet increase intelligence? Are birds smarter than people? Is global warming a fraud? There have always been John's and Jane's; it's just that so many of them have been shaped by our brave new world of information. As for me, I think of our media in terms of signal and noise. There is so much static we have to listen closely for the signal.

Before electronics, Thoreau knew well about signal and noise, well before the terms were coined. He wrote of the man who, upon waking from a nap, asked " 'What's the news?' " This, for Thoreau was a desire for noise. He found more noise in the news hyping "one man robbed, or murdered or killed by accident, or one house burned, or one vessel wrecked, or one steamboat blown up, or one cow run over on the Western Railroad, or one mad dog killed, or one lot of grasshoppers in the winter."

As for signal, it is this. Thoreau tells us that if we read one such event, "we never need read of another. One is enough. If you are acquainted with the principle, what do you care of a myriad of instances and applications?" Thoreau was after real signals. He went to the woods to "live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived." Most people go through their days attuned to the noise, mistaking it for clues on how to live an authentic life. Sadly, that is a statistical fact, obedient to the laws of probability. Although I have not lived my life as a recluse, down the years these words by Thoreau have remained with me: "I do not say that John or Jonathan will realize all this" but "only that day dawns to which we are awake."

Jaron Lanier Disagrees with Dawkins' Memes and Kurzweil's Singularity

2019-04-09T14:30:00.000-07:00

Jaron Lanier Disagrees with Richard Dawkins' Meme Theory and Ray Kurzweil's Singularity

As a goat farmer, Jaron Lanier supported his way through college. While growing up, he lived far from cities and near Mesilla, New Mexico, with his father in tents until they built a house centered around a hippie-esque geodesic dome designed by Jaron. (His father's Ukrainian family fled the pogroms for America. His mother, who survived an Austrian concentration camp, died in a car accident when he was nine.) As assistant to a midwife, he helped deliver a baby. The father gave him a car as a gift. When he was 13 New Mexico State University let him enroll. There he took graduate-level courses.

The phrase virtual reality was coined by Lanier, to his eternal regret. He recalls the early Utopian vision of his fellow youthful hackers and laments how quickly it was corporatised. A prodigy from the start, he helped create Web 2.0, futurism, digital utopianism, and their ideology, which he now calls “digital Maoism.” He accused giants Facebook and Google of being “spy agencies.” He believes the "hive mentality" destroys political discourse. It is the wisdom of the crowd, he says, and it cannot evolve upward but lead only downward. The mentality weakens economic stability. With its alienated processes the hive mentality can destroy our personhood in the sense of social and legal dignity. He sees it all leading to “social catastrophe." He fears a cybernetic house of mirrors that could be manipulated by whoever is "the biggest asshole."

Born in 1960, Jaron Lanier shuns career stovepipes and has taught computer science in various institutions, including Dartmouth, Columbia, and Yale. His books are You Are Not a Gadget (2010), Who Owns the Future (2013), and Dawn of the New Everything (2017). Lanier reacted against an acquaintance of Timothy Leary who once told him to surround himself with gorgeous young people and flatter them. He decided to never fool people and tell the truth, especially when it was unpleasant. He has never taken drugs. A polymath, he a philosophy writer, computer scientist, visual artist, composer of classical music, and founding father of the field of virtual reality. A pianist, he writes chamber and orchestral music. He is also a visual artist. In 2010, Lanier was nominated in the Time 100 list of most influential people. He is sought out as an important contributor to current discussions on matters such as the philosophy of consciousness and the findings of science. His interests are widely divergent, among them the interface between artificial intelligence and biology as well as quantum physics.

In "One-Half a Manifesto", Lanier disagrees with Ray Kurzweil, Google’s Director of Engineering, and a well-known futurist who has scored well with accurate predictions. It is said that since the 1990s his 147 predictions turned out 86 percent accurate. He writes of the Singularity and predicted that by 2029 artificial intelligence (AI) "will pass a valid Turing test and therefore achieve human levels of intelligence" and has 2045 for the Singularity, when effective intelligence will be multiplied by "a billion fold by merging with the intelligence we have created." He finds abhorrent the belief that virtual worlds can be "on an equal footing" with reality.

Lanier says humans are not to be considered to be biological computers. Humans will not be generally replaced by computers in a few decades, even economically. This is highly unlikely. He says "Simply put, software just won't allow it. Code can't keep up with processing power now, and it never will."

In an interview, he was asked about the Meme Theory of evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins. In his classic book, The Selfish Gene, Dawkins explains memes thus:

"Examples of memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches. Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperms or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation. If a scientist hears, or reads about, a good idea, he passed it on to his colleagues and students. . . . If the idea catches on, it can be said to propagate itself, spreading from brain to brain. `. . . memes should be regarded as living structures, not just metaphorically but technically. . . . When you plant a fertile meme in my mind you literally parasitize my brain, turning it into a vehicle for the meme's propagation in just the way that a virus may parasitize the genetic mechanism of a host cell. . . . 'belief in life after death' is actually realized physically, millions of times over, as a structure in the nervous systems of individual men the world over."

Here, then, is the question and Lanier's answer:

"Q: Is culture as important as genes in shaping the future of our brains? I'm not talking about Richard Dawkins' idea of memes here, which I dislike anyway.

A: I think the meme idea is wrong for a variety of reasons. First, there's an obvious sense in which ideas are Lamarckian and genes are not. Memes promote the wrong idea about genes. Richard's idea about genes is that there is a continuity of different creatures that come into being and evolution is walking through an infinite library where each space on the shelf is a slightly different creature. It's like Borges' infinite library, which contained every book that could be written. Every organism that could exist is in Richard's library, and there are two problems with this idea, both of which should kill this metaphor. The first problem is the size of the library. Let's suppose Borges' library was actually created and only held books up to 300 pages. Even in that case the library could not fit into our universe. Our civilization could not possibly survive long enough, even with the biggest starship we could build, to hold it. Just to get from one interesting book to the next would require more energy or space than our civilization has available to it. We're lucky enough to be next to one readable book and that's the only one we'll ever see. You could think of his library as the most efficient, definitely mathematical, perfect, conceivable form of procrastination ever invented.

The second problem is the difference between Borges' and Dawkins' infinite libraries. In Borges' library all the books in between the readable books might not be sensible to us but at least they're printable. But in Dawkins' library, all the creatures between viable creatures are not sensible or even viable. They're just possible creatures. You can't take an arbitrary genetic sequence and have a creature come out." (The link for this no longer exists but you can read his opposition to Memes at Edge, The Reality Club, The Value of Memes, A Powerful Paradigm or a Poor Metaphor?

Polish Exchange Student's Host Parents from Hell

2019-04-08T14:40:00.000-07:00

Christian Fundamentalist Host Parents from Hell for Polish Exchange

Student

Michael Gromek

Landing in Greensboro, North Carolina, Michael Gromek, 19, stepped off the plane from Poland. He had come as an exchange student and looked eagerly for his host family at the airport. When they found one another, he felt like running back toward the plane. They met him holding a Bible, and saying,"Child, our Lord sent you half-way around the world to bring you to us." He spent four hellish months among Christian fundamentalists, with dawn church visits and sex education talks. His new family were bent on banishing Satan from his soul.

Here's what he has to say. "Things began to go wrong as soon as I arrived in my new home in Winston-Salem, where I was to spend my year abroad. For example, every Monday my host family would gather around the kitchen table to talk about sex. My host parents hadn't had sex for the last 17 years because--so they told me--they were devoting their lives to God. They also wanted to know whether I drank alcohol. I admitted that I liked beer and wine. They told me I had the devil in my heart."

"My host parents treated me like a five-year-old. They gave me lollipops. They woke me every Sunday morning at 6:15 a.m., saying 'Michael, it's time to go to church.' I hated that sentence. When I didn't want to go to church one morning, because I had hardly slept, they didn't allow me to have any coffee."

One day I was talking to my host parents about my mother, who is separated from my father. They were appalled--my mother's heart was just as possessed by the devil as mine, they exclaimed. God wanted her to stay with her husband, they said.

The exchange student eventually discovered that they had more than his soul in mind. In short, they had a reason for agreeing to host him. Their generosity had not simply arisen out of the goodness of their hearts. They needed his help to construct a Fundamentalist Baptist church in Poland.

They thought it was God's will, something he could not avoid. He saw the matter otherwise. They had already begun construction in Krakow, and needed his help with translations and filling the church. For him, that was the last straw. His hosts could not understand his refusal, but refuse he did. They were appalled.

I am reminded of the Stockholm Syndrome, in which victims come to identify with their captors. Michael says, "It was a weird situation. After all, these people were my only company at the time. If I hadn't kept in touch with home through e-mail, I might have been sucked into that world." Fortunately, he was sufficiently strong-minded and had access via email to those with perspective.

At this point, four months into his stay, he asked to change his host family. Of his fundamentalist hosts, he explains that "they didn't understand--how could they? They had grown up with their faith and were convinced of it, and then suddenly I turned up and refused to fit in."

He had to wait two months for a new family, two months of hell. "My host parents detested me."

Finally, he went to live with his new family, young, "more friends than host parents," and he was happy.

Found at Spiegel.

George Berkeley: Rocks Are Not Physically Real

2019-04-01T07:32:00.000-07:00

Bishop George Berkeley

George Berkeley: A Rock Is A Mental Perception. There Is No Matter. Only Mind and Perceptions

George Berkeley (1685 –1753), known as Bishop Berkeley, was an Irish philosopher whose main theory he called "immaterialism" (later referred to as "subjective idealism" by others). This theory denies the existence of material substance and instead contends that familiar objects like tables and chairs are only ideas in the minds of perceivers and, as a result, cannot exist without being perceived. Berkeley is also known for his critique of abstraction, an important premise in his argument for immaterialism. His famous phrase is esse is percipi (to be is to be perceived). In other words, we are our sensations, mental events, and the things perceived are not material, but also a form of the mental.

Because he said "Westward wends the course of empire," the city of Berkeley, California, known for The University of California at Berkeley, was named after him.

He wrote Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous, which presented his argument. His views are represented by Philonous (Greek: "lover of mind"), while Hylas (Greek: "matter") embodies the Irish thinker's opponents, in particular John Locke. Berkeley argued against Isaac Newton's doctrine of absolute space, time and motion in De Motu (On Motion), which anticipated the views of Mach and Einstein.

With his wife, Anne Forster, in 1728 he moved to America to live near Newport, Rhode Island, where he bought a plantation at Middletown, Whitehall. In 1732 he returned to London.

Here is an excerpt from the Three Dialogues:

Hylas to Philonous: You were represented, in last night's conversation, as one who maintained the most extravagant opinion that ever entered into the mind of man, to wit, that there is no such thing as MATERIAL SUBSTANCE in the world.

Philonous: That there is no such thing as what PHILOSOPHERS CALL MATERIAL SUBSTANCE, I am seriously persuaded: but, if I were made to see anything absurd or skeptical in this, I should then have the same reason to renounce this that I imagine I have now to reject the contrary opinion.

Hylas: . . . can anything be more fantastical, more repugnant to Common Sense, or a more manifest piece of Scepticism, than to believe there is no such thing as MATTER?

(First of The Three Dialogues Between Hylas and Philonous, in Opposition to Sceptics and Atheists.)

When James Boswell told Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) about Berkeley's assertion that matter does not exist, Dr Johnson took offense and said, "Sir, I refute it thus!," kicking a rock away from him.

William Fawke Statue
of Dr Johnson
Kicking Stone

Laurance R. Doyle, SETI Institute, has this to say about the world as traditionally physical: ". . . the elementary particles making up the trees, people, and planets—what we see around us—are apparently just distributions of likelihood until they are measured (that is, measured or observed). So much for the Victorian view of solid matter!"

Ronald Knox, English theologian, priest, and crime writer, wrote these limericks, with a mockery and a reply to the mocker of Berkeley:

Mocker:

There was a young man who said "God

Must find it exceedingly odd

To think that the tree

Should continue to be

When there's no one about in the quad."

Reply:

"Dear Sir: Your astonishment's odd;

I am always about in the quad.

And that's why the tree

Will continue to be

Since observed by, Yours faithfully, God.

Happiness Readings and The Three Princes of Serendip

2019-03-13T15:51:00.003-07:00

In culling out old links, I isolated Mind Shadows posts on happiness. They are an eclectic lot, about aspects of the subject. What you will discover for yourself will be a case of serendipity, the term coined by Hugh Walpole about the story of the Three princes of Serendip, who discovered by accident. Enough of that. Enjoy the serendipity. Here are the Mind Shadow links:

😊Daniel Kahneman, Nobel Prize Winner: Happiness Can Be Had With $60,000 Yearly Income, 17 February 2011

😊We Think We Know What Will Make Us Happy, But Are Bad Predictors of What Actually Will, 19 January 2009

😊Misconceptions About Happiness (Maybe You'd Really Rather Have A Candy Bar)
Hire An Expert: People Aren't Too Good At Estimating Their Own Feelings, 11 October 2007

😊Happiness and Public Policy, 20 July 2005

😊Robert H. Frank, Big Houses, and Happiness, 6 February 2009

😊Martin Seligman and Authentic Happiness Against Eternal Sunshine of The Spotless Rind, 17 October 2007

😊Happiness Isn't What It Used To Be, 29 March 2011

😊Shift Demographics, Inc. Send Right Away For Your Personal Happiness Kit, 16 February 2008

😊Matthieu Ricard, Happiness, and Buddhist Meditation, 7 February 2013

😊On Happiness: Jean François Revel, His Son Matthieu Ricard, and Their Exchange About Buddhism: 10 days in an Inn above Kathmandu, 8 May 2006

😊Happiness: Positive Emotions Versus Life Meaning, 6 January 2009

😊Happiness Anyone? Is It Good For Society, or Does Its Pursuit Harm Society? These and Other Views, Including Martin Seligman and a Psychological Science Article, 1 July 2005

😊You Can Improve Your Life (And That's Not A Platitude), 11 March 2009

😊Does Spontaneity Promote Happiness?, 22 October 2009

😊Happiness is Over-Rated: I, 6 April 2008

😊Happiness Is Over-Rated: II, 29 May 2008

😊From DNA and Consciousness to Snorts, Sighs, and Happiness, 14 January 2010

What Happened to The Women Involved?: Feminism and Abu Ghraib

2019-03-11T18:57:00.003-07:00

Feminism and Abu Ghraib Prison

England and Charles Graner
Give Thumbs Up

Of the seven U.S. soldiers charged with sickening forms of abuse in Abu Ghraib, three were women: Spc. Megan Ambuhl, Pfc. Lynndie England and Spc. Sabrina Harman.

Abu Ghraib tells us that as Barbara Ehrenreich put it years back in the New York Times, "a uterus is not a substitute for a conscience."

Barbara Ehrenreich:

"The photos did something else to me, as a feminist: They broke my heart. I had no illusions about the U.S. mission in Iraq — whatever exactly it is — but it turns out that I did have some illusions about women.

Of the seven U.S. soldiers now charged with sickening forms of abuse in Abu Ghraib, three are women [already named above]..

It was Harman we saw smiling an impish little smile and giving the thumbs-up sign from behind a pile of hooded, naked Iraqi men — as if to say, “Hi Mom, here I am in Abu Ghraib!” It was England we saw with a naked Iraqi man on a leash. . . . ." Found at a 2004 Alternet site.

Barbara Ehrenreich reminds us of the experiments by Stanley Milgram. I am reminded of those by Philip Zimbardo, known as the Stanford Prison Experiments.

What Happened to Them?

Lynndie England remains unremorseful and believes the prisoners ended up better off than she is. Prisoners' "lives are better. They got the better end of the deal.” She was sentenced to three years in prison and was dishonorably discharged from the Army. From Newser 20 March 2012 on Lynndie England..

Sabrina Harman pointing to body of Manadel al-Jamadi,
Iraqi tortured to death at Abu Ghraib

Sabrina Harman wrote a letter home in which she said this: "The only reason I want to be there is to get the
pictures and prove that the US is not what they think. But I don't know if I can take it mentally. What if that was me in their shoes. These people will be our future terrorist. Kelly, its awful and you know how fucked I am in the head. Both sides of me think its wrong. I thought I could handle anything. I was wrong." She served six months in prison, received reduction in rank and a bad conduct discharge.

Ambuhl observing England pull "Gus"
from his cell by a leash.

Megan Ambuhl was convicted by court-martial on October 30, 2004, for dereliction of duty. In punishment, she was demoted to Private, discharged from the Army, and docked half a month's pay. In 2005 Ambuhl married Charles Graner, who was sentenced to 10 years in prison, demotion to private, dishonorable discharge and forfeiture of pay and allowances. He was released after 6 and a half years. Lynndie England during her trial was pregnant with Charles Graner's child.

Ali Shallal al-Qaisi

Ali Shallal al-Qaisi. The hooded man standing on the box. He has undergone six surgeries because of the torture. Al-Qaisi said: "I'm spending sleepless nights thinking about the agony I went through... I even have recurring nightmares that I'm in my cell at Abu Ghraib, cell 49 as they called it, being tortured at the hands of the people of a great nation that carries the torch of freedom and human rights." He owned a football pitch and US soldiers commandeered the pitch, using it to dump "severed body parts and left-over waste from fighting." Qaisi contacted the foreign media and broke the story to them. And that did it. "My picture was published in a news article with my complaints. The Americans then raided my home and arrested me," he said. "I wasn't a military commander or a government official. I was just a resident of Baghdad, where I grew up, and just like any other Iraqi I was against the US invasion and I spoke out against it," Qaisi said.

Not a single commissioned officer was sentenced. Higher-echelon commissioned military personnel also got off Scot-free. In short although those at the bottom of the pay grade scale were punished none of those supervising them were.

Lost at Sea: Richard Halliburton's Wildly Improbable Life and Some Who Knew Him

2019-03-07T16:52:00.000-08:00

Richard Halliburton's Wildly Improbable Life

In the human scheme of things, some are born lucky, some less lucky, and some unlucky. None of us chose to be born nor did we choose the circumstances of our birth.

By accident Richard was born with a predisposition he valued highly, knowing he was lucky. Of his "restless nature" he wrote, "I'm very grateful, because I wouldn't take $1,000,000 for it." It was precious to him because he had visions of the possible where others saw only walls.

He was extraordinarily gifted in disposition—his life attests to that, as it is one that few are able to parallel. People could only read about all he did and saw because they were bound to the morning coffee and evening newspaper of their days. In Halliburton they found somebody who had slipped the bonds holding them and with sometimes wild energy delighted in a life that for them was not only improbable but impossible.

In the 1920s and 1930s Richard Halliburton was one of the most famous persons in America, even more than Amelia Earhart, and today he is forgotten.
He knew many people who would not fit in the handy boxes society offered them. He starred in a movie. He swam the entire length of the Panama Canal as the SS Halliburton. He climbed the Matterhorn in winter. He chatted with Herbert Hoover, was friends with F. Scott Fitzgerald. Halliburton met history makers like Lenin's widow and the man who shot the Czar. The man told him how the Romanov family was assassinated in a basement in Yekaterinburg. For years many believed Halliburton made up the story but he actually interviewed one of the assassins.

In The Eagle, of Reading, Pennsylvania on January 27, 1935, writing a column titled, “As Seen by Her,” Lilly Marsh said Richard Halliburton “is very nice looking. He has all of his hair—a nice grade of wavy auburn—and his swimming and mountain climbing and what not have certainly not done his figure any harm. He speaks with a pleasant if unidentifiable accent, and has the kind of charm that mows down audiences all in a minute. In all honesty, it is only fair to admit, that he could probably speak on the dreariest, dullest subject in the world, and still hold the attention of his listeners. He is very attractive. He has a great deal of personality, and I suppose it would be asking a little too much to require of him a sense of humor, also. We can’t have supermen walking the earth.”

Interviewed by Stan Welsh in 1994, John Booth, a retired Unitarian minister, tells the camera that the influence of Richard Halliburton on him was enormous. Booth traveled the world. He went to Rio de Janeiro, to the Rajong River in Sarawak. He lived in jungle long houses. He traveled in Indonesia. He met Anthony Brooke in Singapore in the late 1950s. Brooke’s uncle was the last reigning White Rajah of Sarawak, a country visited by Halliburton and his biplane pilot Moye Stephens in their round-the-world 1930s flight. During the visit they took the Rani Sylvia Brooke aloft. A Rani is rather like a queen. In those days, it was for her the thrill of a lifetime.

John Booth met Richard when he was a student at Cleveland Heights High in Cleveland, Ohio. Halliburton was there for a lecture on The Royal Road to Romance. When Halliburton walked to the lectern, girls shrieked as they later did with Frank Sinatra. He had charisma, recalled Booth, and was an “extra handsome young man.” Richard was introduced by the school principal. Halliburton talked about climbing the Matterhorn.

Born February 21, 1906, Richard's pilot Moye Stephens in his old age thought about how the course of his life changed by meeting Richard Halliburton. He thought back on those days with Richard, or as test pilot of the Flying Wing, or as a founder of Northrop Aviation. His life came close to many might-have-beens. He might not have given flying lessons to Howard Hughes. He might not have chummed with barnstormers and World War I aces such as Sandy Sandblom, Leo Nomis, Bud Creech, Eddie Bellande, Frank Clarke, Ross Hadley, and Pancho Barnes. He might not have known movie stars Richard Arlen, Ramón Novarro, Sue Carol, Reginald Denny, Wallace Beery, and Dolores Del Rio—or movie executives Cecil B. DeMille, Victor Fleming, Howard Hawks, and Howard Hughes.

With his intense energy and insatiable zest for living, Richard Halliburton undertook his next adventure, a voyage in a Chinese junk, Sea Dragon, from Hong Kong to the San Francisco World's Fair in 1939.

He and his crew were tossed in the junk by a fierce typhoon and were lost at sea.

Lost at Sea, the headlines proclaimed. This was big news to the world. Another famous adventurer had disappeared. The year before, Amelia Earhart with her navigator Fred Noonan had ditched a Lockheed Vega somewhere in the Pacific and was lost to everything but history. Before Sea Dragon's disappearance, across the continent, San Francisco to New York, families had huddled in living rooms, bent to their radio sets to hear of the junk's nine thousand mile progress toward the San Francisco World's Fair, opening in spring of that year.

On March 29, 1939, the Evening Independent of St Petersburg, Florida headlined a report from San Francisco, “Richard Halliburton Is Feared Lost at Sea.” The junk was two thousand four hundred miles from Hong Kong bound for Midway Island. The article explains, “The Sea Dragon was scheduled to reach Midway Island April 5.”

Also on March 29th in Dubuque, Iowa, The Telegraph-Herald stated that the “75 foot craft, with its crew of ten Americans and four Chinese, was approximately one thousand miles west of Midway,” and that “all ships, meanwhile, have been asked to keep a watch for the craft.”

The US Navy launched a search with float planes but neither survivors nor the Chinese junk were found. Richard Halliburton said early in life that he didn't want to die in bed. His life, he said would be active and vividly lived. He got his wish.

Click to read Don't Die in Bed: The Brief, Intense Life of Richard Halliburton.