I'm Away

I'll be back June 7. Click on the Random Read Generator (The Red Dice) for a chance read until my return.

Proust, Marshmallows & Meaning In Life

Tweet With his In Search of Lost Time (formerly Remembrance of Things Past) as one of the few 20th Century works of literary genius, Marcel Proust found memories in the taste of a petite madeleine. They were some of the most unique things about himself. A recluse, he did not go on expedition to the arctic nor did he venture far from his cork-lined room in Paris, but his life was an interior adventure in which he sought to unravel the mysteries of time. With involuntary memory he looked for the permanent and significant amidst the transitory and trivial. Quite simply, he created great art from trivia. In each of us, the trivia is the most important thing about us--"impressions clustered in small knots," Proust said. This trivia he called "inner time" and it is the past that "still lives in us." It is "what we are and is remaking us every moment." An hour is a vase, "filled with perfumes, sounds, places, climates."

From a trivial marshmallow, in 1972 Walter Mischel worked an experiment that helped predict the personality and future of children as well as give us insight into the nature of what is popularly called free will.

Time, Consciousness, & The Human Brain

When David Eagleman was eight years old, he fell off a roof and kept on falling. In the years since, Eagleman has collected hundreds of stories like his, and they almost all share the same quality: in life-threatening situations, time seems to slow down. If Eagleman’s body bears no marks of his childhood accident, his mind has been deeply imprinted by it. He is a man obsessed by time.

Poppa Neutrino Is Dead

"David Pearlman, an itinerant philosopher, adventurer and environmentalist widely known as Poppa Neutrino, who founded his own church, crossed the Atlantic on a raft made from scrap and invented a theoretically unstoppable football strategy, died on Sunday in New Orleans. He was 77. . . .

The cause of death was congestive heart failure, his daughter Jessica Terrell said.

Mr. Pearlman, whose improbable life was chronicled by the New Yorker writer Alec Wilkinson in 'The Happiest Man in the World' (Random House, 2007), became Poppa Neutrino when he was 50.

Mary Midgley & The Solitary Self

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Among moral philosophers Mary Midgley has a razor-sharp mind, and when she speaks I listen. Her new book is The Solitary Self: Darwin and the Selfish Gene. As the title suggests, in the book she takes up her long-standing disagreement with Richard Dawkins and his The Selfish Gene, an extremely important book which nonetheless appeals to a rather limited understanding of Darwin, according to Midgley. In the video below, she points out that Dawkins' title is anthropomorphic and therefore off the mark.

In the video she discusses the linkage between a rather shallow but prevalent societal view of individualism and Darwin's concerns about evolution and human morality. I will add that in the USA, both the politics of economics and politics in general are based on a flawed, Spencerian understanding of human nature. What do I mean? In The Descent of Man, Darwin points out that humans are aware of their life as a whole and the effect of their actions, good or bad, upon the entire culture, unlike other animals. This is Darwin's understanding of human nature and it does not imply modern market economics ideology in which Ayn Rand's Nietzschean and wealthy superheroes save the masses from themselves. (19th Century America "unfortunates" have become "losers" in the 21st, so to distinguish them from the only other possibility, "winners.")

The Selfish Gene, Midgley argues, represents an extreme neo-Darwinism. She allows that Dawkins didn't invent this view, but piggy-backed upon a Spencerian survival-of-the-fittest myth prevalent in society since the Nineteenth Century. (These are not her words, but I am sure she would concur.) The success of Dawkins' book stems from its resonance with  post-industrial myth.

She challenges a reduction of human motivation to self-interest. Human psychology is not so neat, she says. Instead, reductionist individualism can be traced to the Eighteenth Century and, before that, Thomas Hobbes' contribution to Enlightenment thought. Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged represents a heroic independence that is not a realistic aim for Homo sapiens. Darwin called it right. As natural selection reveals over and over, "fittest" does not mean "strongest," but an ability to adapt, often through "cooperation" with other organisms. We humans evolved to cooperate, to interact constantly with one another and as a dependent and tiny part of complex and huge ecosystems. Too bad that a more enlightened understanding of human nature has not found its way into economics and politics.Tweet

Hawking Vs. Wittgenstein on God

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"Hawking Said, 'Let There Be No God!,' and There was Light!

That headline flashed to all corners of the media universe . . . ."

"In his new book, [The Grand Design, Stephen] Hawking, the celebrated author of A Brief History of Time (1988), declares on the first page that 'philosophy is dead' because it 'has not kept up' with science, which alone can explain the universe. 'It is not necessary to invoke God,' the authors [Hawking & Leonard Mlodinow] write, 'to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going.' [Is the role for that claim in Hawking's job description?]

Are Parts of Human Experience Beyond Scientific Understanding?

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My opinion on the question in the post title--beyond scientific understanding? It's a joke.

Rare Photo of The 1940 Tour de France