Thinking Aloud

What does it mean to be human?

2012-01-22T07:18:00.000-08:00

I've just splashed out for another book I can't afford. This time it's Beyond Human Nature: How Culture and Experience Shape Our Live by Jesse J Prinz. New Scientist had an interview with Prinz in the 21 January 2012 issue. (There is a link to the interview, Humans Are Learning Machines, but you need to be a subscriber to access it). Also, there was a favourable review of it in the London Times this morning. but it also requires a subscription to view. If I were going to digress (which is of course exactly what I am doing obviously), I'd say something moody here about the free dissemination of knowledge disappearing and how I guess soon only the rich will be able to afford the luxury of information.

Prinz emphasizes flexibility, nurture and cultural influences as the important ingredients in arriving at what we are and what we might become. He makes short work of evolutionary psychology's claims that our natures are largely the result of our evolutionary origins. He disagrees with their assertions that since we evolved from higher simians--bonobos, gorillas and some of the higher apes-- we must still be like them in critical ways.

The section on the cultural roots of depression were enlightening. For example, he claims that depression does not have its origins in genetics only. He discusses the alarming increase in depression rates among young Americans. He thinks they result in changes in culture. In 1955 only 2% of twenty-five-year-old Americans were depressed. Now the number is closer to one in every four American in that age group have had a severe bout of depression. Prinz says the increase is due in large part to peer interaction. That is that we're learning from each other how to be depressed.

The Second, Third, and Fourth Cultures and Their Discontents

2012-01-20T04:52:00.000-08:00

Felix, qui, potest rerum cognoscere causa

(“Fortunate is he who is able to know the causes of things”)
~Virgil

I actually had two comments posted to one of my recent blog entries, and that seemed strange. I think of this process as the solipsistic beginning of my writing day. It's a sort of warm up where I give myself permission to write about what I thought about when I couldn't sleep or when I was waiting in a long queue in a shop.  [Since these are solitary and disorganized, I need to unlink this blog from my social network links. No-one could read these ramblings without becoming totally crazed with boredom).

Last night my sleep was interrupted by thoughts on C. P. Snow's account of the two cultures, science and the arts, and the hostility and the lack of communication between them. Raymond Tallis' in "The Eunuch at the Orgy: Reflections on the F. R. Leavis" (1995) outlines some of the systemic problems which dog attempts to communicate across the cultures of sciences and the humanities, but it seems a slightly dated now. The arrogance and airs of 'omnescience' which Tallis saw among humanities intellectuals have now largely been displaced by the a pervasive drive to make science and scientific research the sole arbiters of cultural relevance and 'truth'. In other words, the sciences won the culture wars a long time ago. now few reputable thinkers make assertions which are not demonstrably valid within a naturalistic, scientific framework.

The beginnings of the ascendency of the sciences can in small part be traced to a classic online essay published in 1991 by John Brockman, Edge: The Third Culture. The essay is for Brockman part cri du coeur and partly a call to scientists to reinforce the the barricades against the dubious thinking of unscientific infidels. It's a master class in how to rebrand science to guarantee its cultural ascendency. In the essay, he makes no mention of any thinker who is not a credentialed  scientist, other than to lament that Snow's original speech included a "new definition by the 'men of letters'" [but] "excluded scientists such as the astronomer Edwin Hubble, the mathematician John von Neumann, the cyberneticist Norbert Wiener, and the physicists Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, and Werner Heisenberg."

Brockman was advocating that   "third-culture [scientifically proficient] thinkers...avoid the middleman and endeavor to express their deepest thoughts in a manner accessible to the intelligent reading public."

What has happened in the two decades since Brockman's Edge essay is that the pendulum has swung strongly away from any consideration of the humanities except as inferior attempts at explanation best left to professional scientist.

Now don't think that I'm some sort of anti-science Luddite who thinks we should all return to studying the classics and leave science and scientific literacy as the purview of the scientists. That is not my point at all. This is the twenty-first century. We all need to be conversant about the major new trends in the sciences. Obviously they are of critical cultural importance.

Still, for a number of reasons, I think it's time to give this trend of making science to arbitator of all culture some deep and critical thought. Jonah Lehrer, who wrote Proust Was a Neuroscientist , has begun to popularize what he's labelled the Fourth Culture. As he defines it:

If we are serious about unifying human knowledge, then we'll need to create a new movement that coexists with the third culture  but that deliberately trespasses on our cultural boundaries and seeks to create relationships between the arts and the sciences. The premise of this movement--perhaps a fourth culture--is that neither culture can exist by itself. Its goal will be to cultivate a positive feedback loop, in which works of art lead to new scientific experiments...

Lerher's earlier article in Seed on the roles of science and art is a good place to get more background on his position.

A quick list of some of the books and thinkers I consider fourth culture thinkers [even if they lived long before the twenty-first century] would be:

1. Giordano Bruno...I'm rereading him right now, and he was an amazing [if technically pre-scientific thinker], even if his writing style is ornate and egotistical for 21st century readers.
2. The Cambridge Quartet by John Casti (Many critical reviewers don't appreciate the fact that sometimes the only way to fully understand a period of time, is to think about it imaginatively.)
3. A Certain Ambiguity by Suri. More books like this one might be a first step to begin to expose the 'culture wars' for what they often are: Dictatorial posturing and overtures to false 'certainties'.
4. H. Allen Orr's piece in The New York Review of books entitled The Science of Right and Wrong. I added this after finding it referred to in a comment section, being impressed and mildly amazed by how well it fits the points I was making here earlier today.

I could make this list a lot longer, but I need to get to my REAL projects. Nobody pays for solipsistic ramblings. If they did, I'd be quite rich obviously.

Giordano Bruno, Free Thought and Its Suppression

2012-01-19T05:43:00.000-08:00

One summer long, long ago and far, far away, I went to the Houston Public Library. It was a way for my mother to get me out of the house and silence my complaints that there was 'There's nothing to do.' It was before kids with similar complaints could find relief in a game console.

In my desultory browsing I found a book with an intriguing title, The Cosmology of Giordano Bruno by Paul-Henri Michel. I was obsessed with cosmology and had been since my my dad had given me a subscription to a children's science magazine on my tenth birthday, the same birthday that I'd been given my first telescope.

My odd slightly neurotic preoccupation with the univese was a lot like Woody Allen's in Annie Hall. So when I found a whole book on the enigmatic subject, I was immediately enthralled and decided to try reading it, even though its adult vocabulary made was a bit of a hard slough for me. Within the first five pages I was hooked. I found a comfortable chair facing a large window, and read for hours. Whenever I looked up, I'd see hard-hatted workers in the massive highrise, which was under construction across the street from my window, flying paper air planes and leaning out to see if their latest attempt was more air worthy or not.

It seemed to me to fit with what I was reading. I read to page 179 before my mother came to collect me. I stopped with this sentence, "The Earth, the Moon, the Sun and the planets are so many 'worlds' which. taken together constitute a 'system' and any organism whose laws we are permitted to know... consequently, there is a plurality of worlds in a universe which is unique because nothing exists outside of it."

That was my first introduction to Giordano Bruno, and I've been intrigued by him ever since. So much so that I've been to Rome four times on the anniversary of his being burned alive by the Vatican on the 17th of February 1600. He still intrigues me, and I've noticed that with the recent discovery from NASA of so many exoplanets [which predict that there are prehaps as many as one for each star in our galaxy], Bruno seems more topical then ever. It will be 412 years since he was burned alive for holding what the Catholic Church claimed were heretical ideas.

Since no one reads this, I will likely use this forum to think aloud about how culture views of Bruno have changed since he was first widely reintroduced by Frances Yates, who was a brilliant scholar, but was almost certainly mistaken when she painted him as a magical thinker seeped in medieval tinged hermetics. It took a number of years before Bruno's image was revised through the thorough new interpretations by Hilary Gatti, Ingrid Rowland and others.

Religion and Free Thinking

2012-01-06T04:01:00.000-08:00

I've been reading a lot lately, and one of the most interesting area I've been delving into is evolutionary psychology. Before actually reading some books, journal articles and chapter essays in a few science book, I had a very dim view of the whole discipline, but that has changed.
Here's a list of my reading so far:
Sex and War: How Biology Explains Warfare and Terrorism and Offers a Path to a Safer World by Malcolm Potts
Spent: Sex, Evolution and Consumer Behavor by Godfrey Miller
Why We Believe in God: A Concise Guide to the Science of Faith by J Anderson Thomson
A chapter in Future Science: Cutting Edge Essays from the New Generation of Scientists [edited by Max Brockman
Specifically Children's Helping Hands by Felix Warnerken, pages 17-29
The Moral Life of Children by Paul Bloom [New York Times May 5, 2010]

Is Mathematics Invented or Discovered: Thinking about the Mystery of the Primes

2011-10-28T08:22:00.000-07:00

Prime numbers are what is left when you have taken all the patterns away. I think prime numbers are like life. They are very logical but you could never work out the rules, even if you spent all your time thinking about them.

~The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon

I was recently given a book, The Mystery of the the Prime Numbers by Matt Watkins. It is an eccentric and addictive read. I’ve become so obsessed by the primes that I’m also reading Marcus du Sautoy’s Music of the Primes at the same time.

If you are not a mathematician or interested in mathematics, you might well be asking yourself “What is so interesting about prime numbers anyway? Aren’t they just the numbers we learned about in school through the rote definition: ‘A prime is a number whose only factors are 1 and itself. That means there is no whole number that evenly divides the prime number.’” Yawn!

Yes, teachers of mathematics do often tend to limit rather than enhance our sense of curiosity. However, if you think that the primes can be limited to this stale definition, you owe yourself an exploration into the strange, amazing landscape of the primes. For example, there is no largest prime number, and we can never draw up a complete list of primes. Why? Well, according to the Fundamental Theorem of Arithmetic a counting number must either be prime or split up into primes-there’s no third option. Think about it for a minute, as Euclid did many centuries ago. If there were only a finite number of primes, as he pointed out, then multiplying them all together and adding 1, would produce a number which was not divisible by an prime at all, and that’s impossible. Yes, there is an infinitude of primes.

Also fascinating is the fact that the primes refuse to conform to any pattern and for that reason they have uses in the real word for encryption and information security. Strangely enough, as Riemann realized, they can be turned into wave functions. These are, of course, the patterns of music, of quantum waves and much more. As du Sautoy points out in his book that for the physicist Michael Berry these waves are “not just abstract music, but can be translated into physical[if cacophonous] sounds] that anyone can listen to.”

If you’re deeply interested in fleshing this out, you might be interested in some specific work, not covered in either book , of Fields Metalist, Terrance Tao who has described one approach to proving the prime number theorem in poetic terms–in listening to the “music” of the primes. We start with a “sound wave” that is “noisy” at the prime numbers and silent at other numbers; this is the Von Mangoldt function. Then we analyze its notes or frequencies by subjecting it to a process akin to the Fourier transformation; this is the Merlin transformation. Then we prove, and this is the hard part, that certain “notes” cannot occur in this music. This exclusion of certain notes leads to the statement of the prime number theorem. According to Tao, this proof yields much deeper insights into the distribution of the primes than the “elementary” proofs.

I’ll likely write more on this. I can’t stop thinking about it.

PHILOSOPHY AND THE ELECTRONIC PANOPTICON

2011-09-21T02:36:00.001-07:00

I'LL BE POSTING A ON THIS SOON.

IYI here are 25 things that Google knows about you, and remember this list was created in 2009 BEFORE we had Google +.

Here’s a thought experiment. Imagine for a moment that you are sitting watching a video entitled Philosophy and the Panopticon. Pretend also that the video is about the fact that electronic surveillance data is being gathered on every move you make from the time you get up in the morning until you go to bed at night. For the purposes of this though experiment ask yourself how you would feel if you knew that almost all the activities you engage in every day are captured by various method: surveillance cameras, records of electronic transactions and internet traffic logs. Interested parties, whether they are governmental, advertising or just curious individuals, can gain access to views of streets you walk, the exterior of the office building where you work and even the house where you live in. They know what you buy either on the net or in shops by electronic transition. Ask yourself how you would feel if without your knowledge or permission those who are interested can find out which movie you’ve rented, which magazines you read, which website you visit and how often you visit them. Also what if your data is just one profile in vast electronic consumer or bureaucratic databases? What if every time you used Google for an internet search or send or receive e-mail you’d left a digital trail others can follow.

As you’ve probably already guessed this is not a farfetched scenario. It’s pretty much the world as we find it in the 21^st century. And I made this video because I just signed up for Google+. Have you? If you have, have you ever felt apprehensive about the information that is electronically collected about every move you make? Because I do, and that made me wonder what philosophy might have something to say on this state of affairs? Well, perhaps the best place to start is with Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832), one of the founders of Utilitarianism which is the philosophical idea that we should aim for the greatest happiness of the greatest number of people. Something that is slightly less well known is most a an unusual architectural program he advocated which he called the Panopticon.
Though it was never actually built during his lifetime, the Panopticon is Bentham’s vision for what he thought would be a scientifically-designed maximum security prison. Circular in shape, the structure features a central tower with individual cells radiating outward uniformly like spokes in a wheel. The characteristic feature of this arrangement is that there is a complete asymmetry of knowledge, and hence power: the guards in the central tower can see into any of the cells at any given time, but due to special blinds the inmates cannot see the guards, or if they are being watched at any specific moment.
Bentham was a social reformer genuinely believed that social order and control could be fostered if the prisoners internalized the sense that they were being observed by unseen eyes. He also believed that the idea behind the Panopticon could be utilized in schools, factories, and hospitals. It’s a certainty that he could never have imagined the uses his idea is now being put to in the form of internet surveillance. Bentham was serious when he claimed that “Morals reformed – health preserved – industry invigorated – instructions diffused … all [brought about] by a simple idea in Architecture.” Not everyone was as optimistic as Benthan. When Bentham’s contemporary Edmund Burke saw the plans for the Panopticon he called it “a spider in the web.”
The postmodernist philosopher, Michel Foucault (1926-1984), contended that the nature of the oneway surveillance in the Panopticon – what he referred to as the gaze – resulted in an asymmetry of knowledge, and therefore of power. Ultimately, Foucault argued, the omniscient surveillance created conditions whereby the observed themselves became instruments of their own suppression. So whereas Bentham viewed his Panopticon as a technology for reforming men, Foucault saw a method for creating “docile bodies.” Foucault writes that the major function of the Panopticon is:
To induce a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power. So to arrange things that the surveillance is permanent in its effects, even if it is discontinuous in its action; that the perfection of power should tend to render its actual use unnecessary; that this architectural apparatus should be a machine for creating and sustaining a power relation independent of the person who uses it; in short, that the inmates should be caught up in a power situation of which they themselves are the bearer.
For Foucault who died in 1984, the Panopticon was the result of the misuse of power permeated modern institutions from governments to corporations. With the accelerated use of digital surveillance technologies within modern democratic states, are we in danger of creating an ‘electronic Panopticon’? And would this necessarily be a bad thing? Jeremy Bentham would probably say no. As a Utilitarian who once famously described civil and natural rights as “nonsense on stilts, “Bentham might argue that “the greatest good for the greatest number” outweighed quaint notions about human dignity. If the Panopticon principle can guarantee peace, order, and stability in social affairs and unlike Orwell’s nightmarish vision of ‘Big Brother’ the modern surveillance state is turning out a lot more like an electronically-monitored ‘consumer paradise’ or ‘Disneyworld’ where “people are seduced into conformity,” not forced. If so, perhaps there is a sense in which each of us – in so far as we approve of and acquiesce in the continued construction of the surveillance state will be soon be a society of social
Foucault’s analysis of the Panopticon principle, on the other hand, appears to assume some sort of conception of human nature and human dignity. This is surprising from a philosopher associated with post-modernism. But Foucault’s analysis and criticism of the Panopticon principle can remind us of all we stand to lose in the surveillance state. That constant surveillance tends to promote self-censorship, breeding conformity not creativity. That eliminating deviancy can also mean eliminating eccentricity and the exceptional. And that though the surveillance state promises to answer so many of our needs there is at least one need it cannot answer – the need to be left alone in peace to think and act as we desire.

Reality? Video about an interview with Leonard Suskind in Scientific American

2011-07-05T07:39:00.000-07:00

pp

It's difficult to explain Susskind on YouTube, where everybody is feed the dubious idea that human beings are looking at "objective reality."

Suskind is very good in explaining why this simplistic view of 'reality' has serious problems embedded within it.

In the 21st Century Is It Naive to "Look for Meaning?"

2011-03-26T09:59:00.000-07:00

I'm reading a number of books right now. As usual, I'm reading more than one at a time. The one I'm racing through is one by Huburt Dreyfus and Sean Dorrance Kelly, All Things Shining: Reading the Western Classics to Find Meaning in a Secular Age. It's gotten fairly mixed reviews, but it's proving a fairly engaging read.

UPDATE: After finishing this book, I can see why the reviews for it were so tepid. The best summation is of its flaws is a review from the New York Times Review of books by Gary Wills. I don't read ancient Greek, so I didn't understand the depth of the book's flaws. I just knew that the ideas seemed trite and superficial. Wills with his usual brilliance made the case far better than I ever could.

2011-01-06T09:16:00.000-08:00

The Star Thrower

PART ONE

I have caught a glimpse of what man may be, along an endless wave-beaten coast at dawn. It began on the beaches of Costabel. I was an inhumanly stripped skeleton without voice, without hope, wandering alone upon the shores of the world. I was devoid of pity, because pity implies hope.
In a dingy restaurant I had heard a woman say,“In Costabel, my father reads a goose bone for the weather.”
Perhaps that was why I had finally found myself in Costabel, and why all men are destined at some time to arrive there as I did. I concealed myself beneath a fisherman’s cap and sunglasses, so that I looked like everyone else on the beaches of Costabel, which are littered with the debris of life. There, along the strip of wet sand that marks the tide, death walks hugely and in many forms.
The sea casts them repeatedly back upon the shore. The tiny breathing pores of starfish are stuffed with sand. The rising sun shrivels their unprotected bodies. The endless war is soundless. Nothing screams but the gulls. In the night, torches bobbing like fireflies along the beach, are the sign of the professional shellers. Greedy madness sweeps over the competing collectors, hurrying along with bundles of gathered starfish that will be slowly cooked and dissolved in the outdoor kettles provided by the resort hotels for the cleaning of specimens.
It was there that I met the star thrower. As the sound of the sea became heavier and more menacing, I rounded a bluff into the full blast of the offshore wind. Long-limbed starfish were strewn everywhere, sprawling where the waves had tossed them as though showered down through the night sky. The sun behind me was pressing upward at the horizon’s rim ~ an ominous red glare amidst the tumbling blackness of the clouds.
Ahead of me, over the projecting point, a gigantic rainbow of incredible perfection had sprung shimmering into existence. Toward its foot I discerned a human figure standing, as it seemed to me, within the rainbow. He was gazing fixedly at something in the sand. He stooped and flung an object beyond the breaking surf. I labored another half a mile toward him and by the time I reached him, kneeling again, the rainbow had receded ahead of us. In a pool of sand and silt a starfish had thrust its arms up stiffly and was holding its body away from the stifling mud. “It’s still alive,” I ventured. “Yes,” he said, and with a quick, yet gentle movement, he picked up the star and spun it over my head and far out into the sea.
“It may live if the offshore pull is strong enough,” he said. In a sudden embarrassment for words I said, “Do you collect shells?”
“Only ones like this,” he said softly, gesturing amidst the wreckage of the shore, “and only for the living.”
He stooped again, and skipped another star neatly across the water. “The stars,” he said, “throw well. One can help them.”
He looked full at me with a faint question kindling in his eyes. “No, I do not collect,” I said uncomfortably, the wind beating at my garments. “neither the living nor the dead. I gave it up a long time ago. Death is the only successful collector.” I nodded and walked away, leaving him there with the great rainbow ranging up the sky behind him.
I turned as I neared a bend in the coast and saw him toss another star, skimming it skillfully far out over the ravening and tumultuous water. For a moment, in the changing light, the Sower appeared magnified, with the posture of a god. But, my cold world-shriveling view began its inevitable circling in my skull. He is just a man, I considered sharply, bringing my thought to rest. The star thrower is a man, and death is running more fleet than he, and Death is running along every beach in the world.

PART TWO

I adjusted the dark lens of my glasses and, thus disguised, I paced slowly past the starfish gatherers, past the shell collectors, with their vulgar little spades while they snatched at treasures in the sand. I chose to look full at the steaming kettles in which beautiful voiceless things were being boiled alive. Arriving in the darkness of my room, I lay quiet with sunglasses removed.
There is an analogue for the mind of man and the known universe, the analogue between the conflicts of man-imposed mathematical order and of eternal chaos, the instability that lies at the heart of the world, where each species and each individual holds tenaciously to its present nature, where the present momentarily persists and the future is potential only.
As a boy growing up in the great plains, a usually predictable landscape, I came to realize that the trickster cyclone which descends out of nowhere like a maleficent primordial mind, illuminates a hidden dualism that has haunted man since antiquity, the conflict between good and evil, chaos versus anti-chaos, torn between the original Biblical darkness and the dancing light of our wistful present-day human form.
Between the admonition of Jesus –“tarry thou, till I come again” – and the deep-hidden human psyche which begs for longevity beyond the body, I have yearned for the lesson of transcendence that is prepared in the mind itself.
Backward we gaze through evolution, into the contracting cone of life, until words leave us and all we know is the simple reptilian brain, where sentience subsides into the simple-celled animalcule.
We have played such roles infinitely longer than we have been men. Identity is a dream. We are a process, not reality, for reality is an illusion of our day.
The evolutionists saw life rushing outward from an unknown center, just as today the astronomer senses the galaxies fleeing into the infinity of darkness. From the Darwinian thesis we moved to Freud’s inner world where the mind is revealed as a place of contending furies.
For this reason I had come to Costabel.
And now I lay on my agonized bed. “Love not the world,” the Biblical injunction runs. “But I do love the world,” I whispered to the empty room. I love its small ones, the things beaten in the strangling surf the singing bird which falls and is not seen again, the lost ones, the failures of the world.” Thus was the renunciation of my scientific heritage.
I had seen the star thrower cross that rift and he had reasserted the human right to define his own frontier. He had moved to the utmost edge of natural being. I had been unbelieving, hardened by the indifference of maturity. I arose with a solitary mission, to find the Star Thrower beneath his rainbow.

I found him on a projecting point of land in the sweet rain-swept morning.
Silently, I sought and picked up a still-living star, spinning it far out into the wave. I spoke once briefly. “I understand,” I said, “call me another thrower.” Only then I allowed myself to think. He is not alone any longer. After us there will be others. We were part of the rainbow – like the drawing of a circle in men’s minds, the circle of perfection.
I picked and flung another star. I could feel the movement in my body. It was like a sowing – the sowing of life on an infinitely gigantic scale. I looked back over my shoulder, and small and dark against the receding rainbow, the star thrower stooped and flung one more. I never looked back again. The task we assumed was too immense for gazing. I flung and flung again while all about us roared the insatiable waters of death, the burning sun, for it was men as well as starfish that we sought to save, a thrower who loved not man, but life.

YouTube Discussion Questions

2010-12-22T03:36:00.000-08:00

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TENTATIVE DISCUSSION QUESTIONS:
1. What was your overall impression of the book? What rating would you give it and why?

2. What do you think of the mother/daughter relationship? How did your view of it change as the book progressed?

3. Was the ending what you expected or were you surprised? If you were surprised what were you expecting?

4. There were some gruesome scenes in this book. Did you have any difficulties with the content in the book?

5. How did the abduction experience change Annie and what parts of herself did she retain throughout the novel? Why were those parts important?

6. Do you think the Stevens was effective in her method of having this story a one sided narration told by Annie to her psychotherapist?

7. Obviously the abduction changed her life completely. In what ways did she change? Were all the changes negative? If you don't think so, which ones weren't and why?

8. The scene in the motel near the end of the book (pages 331-336), why was it so important for Annie to be in control?

9. Was "The Freak" a believable and consistent character throughout?

10. Have you read anything similar and if so what was it and would you recommend it?

Extra Background Question:
If you've read Stephen King's novel, "Misery" what are the similarities and the differences in the two novels? Think about it especially from the gender perspective.

Self-Referencial Thinking Out Loud

2010-07-22T01:07:00.000-07:00

I'm beginning a series that is really a way for me to think out loud...This time, it's going to be about self-reference, and I'm going to include self-reference in:
Language
Art
Mathematics
Computers
and maybe more in this prolonged thought experiment.

I love doing stuff like this,and I even like the fact that this blog is read by no one but me...It gives me the freedom to think out loud without some well intentioned person telling me exactly how I should be going about it...

Our Insane Ride into the Future

2010-07-12T07:32:00.000-07:00

We do need to see our situation as it truly is...BUT If we want to change the world, we have to be smarter than our circumstances, especially if those circumstances seem dire. Making suffering the measure of all things is tempting, but it is neither adaptive nor productive. Suffering is not being discounted if we come to terms with the necessity to move beyond the primal fact of it.

I don't think the future is going to be easy, and yes, I see us making a lot of mistakes, but concluding from those facts that all life is futile will simply exacerbate our already critical and dire problem.
Here are some links if you have the time to check them out:
The Transition Movement develops strategies for a post-petroleum world.
QUICK FIX: If you're feeling powerless and you think the world is horrible, do something fast [and yes selfish] give a little bit to a charity you like. This site is another good one to check for good charities.

[We might not be able to give very much, but if a lot of us give something that can't be a bad thing.
Jacqueline Novogatz's TED Talk
Esther Duflo's TED Talk

Books:
Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight
The Transition Handbook

Some animal rights organizations that I like...These are just my choices:
Action for Animals
This group is one I know from the U.S. which works to find alternatives to animal testing.

2010-07-06T03:57:00.000-07:00

Some lines from Quentin Pierce's essay as quoted in David Bartholomac's book:

Man will not survive, he is [an]asshole
....
The stories in the books are mean[ing]less stories and I will not elaborate on them.

This paper is mean[ing]less. just like the book, but I know the paper will not make it.
STOP

....
I don't care.
I don't care.
about man and good and evil. I don't care about this shit. [F]uck this shit, trash and should be put in the trash can with this shit.

....
I lose again

These are quotes from David Bartholomae's book "The Tidy House Basic Writing in the American Curriculum" Macmillan: New York.

Quentin Pierce wrote these lines in a timed writing exam at the University of Pittsburgh. Of these lines Bartholomae says that they are crafted as a rebellious tirade against teachers from his past. According to Bartholomae, the rant has "skill and force," despite (or perhaps because of) the obscenities and the angry tone. In another context, Quentin's rant might be considered a great piece of radical poetry. But in the context of a placement exam, the text is considered "remedial" and not much more. Bartholomae's narrative is instructive on several levels. First, the extent to which the rhetorical situation of a placement exam fails to give basic writers any agency is striking. Because it is a situation that is usually decontextualized and fake, basic writers are not permitted to have any "voice" or authorial liberty. Normally, holistic graders pay lip service to their desire for original, risky writing. But writing that transgresses politically or stylistically, like Quentin's rant, is often punished with a low score and the transgressive student is disciplined with a low placement. Once again, the assessor has the power, and the student is the “other.”

In his essay Hands Up. You're Free, Thomas Rickert asks in an essay, "Who is Quentin? Where did he come from? What possessed him to write this piece? Bartholomae compares [Quentin's] lines to Leaves of Grass and Howl...

A careful reading of Quentin's paper shows that it disrupts the exchange circuit on which successful communication depends...Certainly it can be considered memorable and, for Bartholomae, even haunting...[For Quentin, attempts at communication result] in nihilism and daily humiliation. [He] knows all too well that "effective communication" is a trap for him; his defense is to relegate it all into meaninglessness...

2010-04-25T07:42:00.000-07:00

These links provide background:

Parke Burgess on Violence
(6:18 minutes)

I think it would be fair to say that Žižek's take on Burgess' video, would probably be similar to his general dismissal of Buddhism which has often been a target of his fury. He labels it "the paradigmatic ideology of late capitalism". The idea here is that the Asiatic religion fails because its interior cultivation of detachment allows people to go with the flow without going nuts -- even if the flow is a horror show. I think though that that critique misses the depth of Parke Burgess's thinking about violence.

Slavoj Zizek on Violence
[10:00 minutes)

[It's difficult to find the time to watch the other 11 parts, but you might want to do that.

Go Deeper:

Our Tragic Flaw by Parke Burgess
Violence by Slavoj Zizek
Review of Violence by Burgess
Another review of Violence
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The picture I use in this video is an exquisite corpse.

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I've been thinking a lot about the machine within twenty-first century materialistic reductionism. Beginning with Descartes's automata theory and followed by
Julien Offray de La Mettrie's L'homme machine ("Machine man") materialistic machine represent a new kind of consciousness which in the eighteenth century began supplanting older ideas of religion and metaphysics.

THINGS TO DO WHEN YOU'RE DEAD

2010-04-02T06:47:00.000-07:00

[CLICK ON THIS PHOTO TO ENLARGE IT]
I've been thinking a lot about what it will mean when we've reached the scary point that Ray Kurzweil and other futurists advocate: THE SINGULARITY. In the mind map above I took the concept, What to Do when You're Dead, as a way to begin to think about why the possibility seems scary...[To me if to no one else]. So the center of my mind map I label "Things to do when you're dead: Identity and transcendence." Then I added ways we can or might soon devise to survive our own existences:

1. WOW World of Warcraftt and games make us accept the delusion that our deaths are temporary. Could that be one of the reasons they are so addictive?

2. Things to Do In Denver When You're Dead Yes, I know...Bad movie, but Andy Garcia's character, Saint, has a company at the beginning of the movie called "Afterlife Advice." People could tape videos for their children and relatives to watch after they were dead. It is a kind of rudimentary "techo-transcendence"...There will be more and more of that in the near future with the baby boomers reaching their termination dates.

3. Transhumanism as techno-transcendence

Giordano Bruno and Infinite Inhabited Worlds

2010-02-25T23:05:00.000-08:00

I have been intrigued by the philosophical thought of Giordano Bruno for most of my life. When I was pretty young, I found a book in my local library, The Cosmology of Giordano Brunoby Paul Henri Michel. I spend the next two days reading, and I was amazed that someone so far away from me in time and geography had wondered about the same things I was wondering about at that particular moment. When I completed that book, I immediate went back to my small local library and put in an inter-library request to find more books on Bruno. I'm sort of mystified about why I find Bruno so engaging, but obviously I do. I think it was his obsession with infinite, inhabited worlds which intrigued me so much.

My parents bought me my first telescope when I was ten, and I have been looking at the stars ever since. Even at ten I liked nothing better than spending time by myself hunting up the familiar stars and following them on their orbits though the night sky.

In fact, after all this time I still to find the topic of exoplanets interesting. I'm now reading The New Worlds: Extrasolar Planets by Fabienne Casoli.

2009-12-20T06:46:00.001-08:00

I've posted another video in the Mapping the Matrix series. My videos never appear in YouTube tag searches any more. I'm not sure why. I make my videos in order to think out loud about philosophical ideas which I find interesting in some way. Views aren't my principle reason for posting. Still, it would be great if a few more people actually saw my videos...

Right now I'm intrigued the overlap of self-reference, iteration and reflexive thought, so I tried to include all of those in this three minute video.

Mapping the Matrix

2009-12-09T08:08:00.000-08:00

I am beginning a new series of videos. It will be my attempt to explore the cultural subtexts that both limit and enable our conception of reality. The video I include concerns the popular and ancient idea that we can never know what is real from what is illusion, and attempts to debunk that obvious fallacy without falling into the easy trap of misplaced materialism.

Our cultural history is very complex, but as a species, we have been suffering from a kind of cultural amnesia.

The Delusion of Infinite Resources to Accommodate Infinite Growth

2009-07-16T06:29:00.000-07:00

I was driven to write this blog in reaction to the comment a user posted about Julien Simon's population theories, which advocated a belief in limitless natural resources.

Since I'm thinking about making a video about this, I'm going to keep adding to this as I think more about it...

My first thought is to make a poll...Of three possible future scenarios...

Scenario One: The world is doomed. The only way out is to force all of human kind into a virtual reality world. Human beings would be warehoused in large silos, and spend their entire existences lost in a wish fulfilling virtual world. This could only be accomplished if all life other than human life were eliminated. These measures would put an end to the suffering of all sentient life forms. [Yes, this is one option often advocated by a popular YouTube 'celebrity' and often commented on favorably by a myriad of YouTube users.

Scenario Two: The world will be able to accommodate the numbers of humans at least up to 10 billion people and even beyond. This can be accomplished through a more coherent and creative use of natural resources...[This is Pyrrho's view and I need to flesh this out later]

Scenario Three: The world is now at a crucial point of environmental stress. We have critical choices to make in the near term. If we don't want to be forced to react to environmental disaster after disaster, we would be wise to take a hard look at the complexity of our situation...and how our predicament is the result of our inability to see that we will have to make some fairly controversial choices. For example, we need to look at our birth rates. Children are too often born into poverty because we take a cavalar attitude to the suffering they will encounter.

I'd just like to have some feedback on the validity of these theories...to encourage a discussion about them...

Would an Alien Language Be Written in Prime Numbers?

2009-06-19T06:56:00.000-07:00

[I wrote this before I made the video above...I have lots more to say about this, but for now I'll leave this as is]

If we ever do encounter an extraterrestrial language, how will we ever be able to find a way to communicate with them? Some astrobiologists think we may be able to converse with ETs using a universal cosmic language based on prime numbers. Prime numbers are a very odd bunch of numbers with some very odd qualities.

A prime number, in case you were a bit fuzzy on it , is any number larger than one which is divisible only by itself and 1. So 2,3,5,7,11 are the first five prime numbers. As you can see, 2 is the only even number prime. Primes can have some very odd qualities.

Why Are Christians and Atheists so Dependent on Each Other?

2009-05-05T03:43:00.000-07:00

I've been an active vlogger on YouTube since November 2007, and in that time I've noticed some odd trends. One of the most interesting is the co-dependence of YouTube atheists and YouTube Evangelical Christians. They both wage a dialectical war of opposition that results in the lowest common denominator of 'debate'.

Just want to say upfront that I'm an atheist, but I don't feel the need to be an evangelical atheist...That doesn't mean that I condone the absurd belief of extreme forms of Christianity. But having said that, I also don't feel the need to support any form of unconsidered and unfounded beliefs...

Those atheists who have the high viewing numbers on YouTube are often those who take strong stands against Christian nonsense. And while I see their point and agree to some extent with their desire to point out extreme Christian fallacies in in thinking, I'm becoming extremely bored with the repetition of it all....

How many times can atheists point out that the story of Noah's flood is nonsense? Who do they intend as their audience for such videos? No rational person, atheist or Christian, believes in the literal 'truth' of Noah's flood. So why are there so many videos from atheists stating this obvious fact, and why do those videos invariably get high ratings and viewer numbers? The only explanation that makes any sense is that the YouTube atheist community has a very high threshold forthe tolerance of boredom.

I would be interested in a videos about the recent Pew poll which shows that Evangelical Christians support torture. It might lead to really talking about something of substance.

But the truth is, I think YouTube does something to the attention span of the average viewer. It fragments concentration and makes viewers continually go for the most mindless.

The quality of debate and exchange on YouTube is usually caricature masquerading as profound thought. I just found a blog from Madeleine Bunting which says much of what I'm trying to say here, but says it better. A lot of new atheists are expressing strenuous disagreement with her point of view, but I for one thought it was a refreshingly honest read.

Also of interest is Alain de Botton's new site, School of Life. This is exactly what we need. Ways to explore in order to find the wisdom and depth we will need to live a worthwhile lives.

New atheists will rightly point out that we can't lose sight of what science has done for us, and I agree. Evolution, cosmology, the earth sciences and all the scientific disciplines have made extremely valuable advances in the collective knowledge of humankind. The problem creeps in when those advances are claimed to be a complete ontology of existence, because they are not and could never be that. Furthermore, no true scientist would claim that they are.