Memes, Genes, and God

Memes, Genes, and God

Originally proposed in Richard Dawkins' book, The Selfish Gene, 1976, memes can be defined as any self-referential belief system with inherent instructions for its own propagation. As Dawkins explained, they can be "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. . . . . As [Dawkins'] colleague N.K. Humphrey neatly summed up . . . 'Memes should be regarded as living structures, not just metaphorically but technically'."

Memes are analogues for genes, which is to say they are analogues for natural selection. The two may reinforce one another or come into competition. Celibacy is a meme but as a gene has no biological survival value, although culturally it may have such value. Priests or nuns transmit the meme to young boys or girls who are trying to make a life choice. Suppose the celibacy meme made better priests and nuns because they are not distracted by family duties. If this supposition is true, then celibacy does have better cultural survival value. On the other hand, a gene for celibacy almost by definition would not produce celibate offspring. Rather, no offspring would ensue from it.

Like genes, memes rest on one fundamental principle. All life evolves by varying survival abilities of replicating entities.

When we die we leave behind memes and genes. Of the two, our genes will be forgotten in three generations. Our child, maybe our grandchild, can bear a resemblance to us in face or musical talent, but our characteristics soon become negligible in succeeding generations. If we have memes such as Shakespeare's we become part of deathless literature. The same can be said for Einstein, Socrates, or Leonardo da Vinci.

Dawkins and other meme theorists regard religious memes as dangerous to human futurity. The idea of God is a particularly strong meme, and has persisted from before recorded history until the present day. It has extremely high survival value. According to Dawkins, its survival results from its psychological appeal. He says that it "provides a superficially plausible answer to deep and troubling questions about existence. It suggests that injustices in this world may be rectified in the next. . . . God exists, if only in the form of a meme with high survival value, or ineffective power, in the environment provided by human culture."

Here, Dawkins is bent by his Western understanding. Some, as in Christianity and Islam, claim to have the one true meme. It and it alone must be propagated at the risk of damnation by God. He doesn't understand that Buddhist memes make no claim to exclusivity and Hindu memes espouse tolerance.

When Dawkins says religious memes provide "a superficially plausible answer to deep and troubling questions about existence," he reveals a rather rudimentary understanding. Superficially plausible? Without Dawkins' intensive study, meditation, and effort, Buddha's teachings would not be immediately accessible to him because Buddha speaks of the quality of various experiences. Science tends to ignore the qualities of experiences and assumes all experience to be the same for its purposes. Once studied, pondered, and filtered through life experiences, the implications of Buddha's teachings open an entirely new way of seeing, one which reveals the flaws in conventional world views, particularly those which assume all experience is equal and only objective observation is necessary. Those views are superficial. (See the discussion of experience quality in Cartesian anxiety: Francisco Varela, 6 January.)

Dawkins would attach little or no credence to people such as Nisargadatta, Ramana Maharshi, or medieval Germans, Meister Eckhart or Jacob Boem as they all spoke about what might be called the "God meme." The single interesting facet of their contribution has much to do with all memes, however.

Each of them, Nisargadatta, Maharshi, Eckhart, and Boem, said that human beings can reach a point when mimesis is realized as empty phenomena. That is, they observed that the mind replicates as its natural function, but that this replication can be seen through.

This implies that the "God meme" has a basis not in superstition, but in an intuitive, innate human recognition, a recognition that mimetics derives from the source of all memes. To determine that, of course, Dawkins and others must learn attitudes, mental skills and concentration currently unknown to them; they must stop theorizing and immerse themselves in an initially alien perspective in order to experience directly whether the "God meme" is superstition or not.

From memes to genes. Dawkins would have no problem if I said that individual organisms, "selfish" or not, reveal a compulsion to perpetuate their genes and that this compulsion is a dynamic of biological regularities not apparent in an isolated system. The dynamic cannot be described in terms of DNA biochemistry. In fact, no definitive explanation can be found in any isolated system. Yet we observe among organisms the selfish gene, as Dawkins calls it.

Would he have a problem if I replace "a compulsion to perpetuate their genes" with a phrase about a compulsion to seek God? The only difference between accepting one statement and rejecting the other is not logic but mind set.*
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* ". . . I have never found it possible to dismiss the content of religious thinking simply as simply part of an outmoded phase in the consciousness of mankind. . ." Werner Heisenberg, Physics and Beyond

Meme theory is not a science, nor at present has much chance of becoming one, although it does provoke stimulating and lively discussion.

Free Will Illusion: Goswami, Balsekar, Benjamin Libet

The Illusion of Free Will: Physicist Amit Goswami, Sage Ramesh Balsekar, and Neuroscientist Benjamin Libet

Balsekar: [On free choice:] A personal awareness of that choice comes about 1/2 second later than a "readiness potentia" that appears in the brain wave, per brain surgeon Benjamin Libet. Thus there can be no free will, that most precious "possession" in the West. The Indian sage Ramana Maharshi said the same thing. You see the way I interpret it, in simple language, is this. In the ocean of consciousness there are possibilities. And quantum mechanics as I understand it, what is going to happen then is not really known. . . . And in that pool of consciousness which particular possibility becomes a fact, is not known. So if I say, "I have a thought," this means, as I understand it, what it really means is that thought has occurred half a second before I say, "it is my thought."

Goswami: That's right. That identity takes half a second to come about.

Balsekar: My interpretation as a layman is this . . . that a thought comes as one of the actualities from the pool of possibilities, and what comes from the pool of possibilities is outside my control, there is nothing I can do. And that thought arises, the brain reacts to that thought, and the reaction of the brain is what I choose to call my action, whereas it is not my reaction. It is a reaction of the brain to a thought that occurred a half-second earlier. Which I say is my thought!

Goswami: One can say that there is a choosing consciousness but certainly that's not the ego function.

Balsekar: Yes. Quite. So from the pool of consciousness, consciousness selects a particular thought.

Goswami: And that consciousness is what we variously call God, or the universal God.

Balsekar: On this particular thing, would you like to expand it? As it says, "the most prized possession of the West."

Goswami: I'd like to just make the Western view a little bit more palatable, by saying that the West does not make a complete mistake of this, because the very good thinkers of the West recognize that the action of free will is actually the action of surrender. There is action of free will by the human because human beings are separate from God, so the only way the only status the human being can have is to surrender to God's will. And there is no real distinction because there is only one world operating, so as soon as we learn to surrender then we are actually accepting free will.

Balsekar: So that means, what you are really surrendering is your concept of living . . . isn't it? What else do you have to surrender, what capital do you have to surrender to God from whom you have received everything? You have only the concept that you have free will to surrender. So that is why I often say, my only point is that nothing is in your control. Anything that happens is part of the impersonal functioning of the totality of consciousness, or the will of God.

Goswami: Libet is a very good neurophysiologist. He had done another experiment, related to the other experiment which shows clearly what you are saying. First of all, people are asked to will to raise their hand when they choose. So they will to raise their hand. Of course as indicated by the other experiment, half a second before they are willing, the experimenter looking at the EEG machine of course already knows that. But let me tell you. Then he said, "even after you become aware of your willing, try to see if you can stop yourself from raising your hand". So they did the experiment, and they found that when they were given the choice of negating the action, they could do it. So the conclusion is that the only little amount of escape hatch that consciousness retains in a state of identification with the ego is the ability to say no to a conditioned action. There is no free will there. We can stop ourselves even at that ego identification. More from The Online Bulletin of Science Within Consciousness
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My comments: Given that, as Libet's experiments suggest, the sense of conscious will is illusory, what then? His findings have implications for both belief in conscious will and for disbelief. Conditioning changes, depending on belief or disbelief. Belief in the sense begets one kind of conditioning; disbelief, another. Belief that one does have conscious will has brought about the conditions which provided for technological and political advances of the West. The essential point: even if conscious will is an illusion, belief or disbelief in conscious will has consequences conditioned by mind set toward the issue. These conditioned consequences shape individual lives and whole cultures.

Apart from illusions, the question of belief value arises. If something is judged as illusory, does that mean it is not valuable? It certainly had evolutionary survival value. If valuable in the context of human effects, illusion or not, it profits humanity.

The effects of Shakespeare or an elegant mathematical formula can be regarded as illusory. (Eastern thinkers would brush aside such effects as part of the dream called life. This is not the Western temperament. In his later years, Mark Twain was deeply troubled by questions of reality, exploring them in his works. In The Mysterious Stranger, the story's conclusion yields a Western, not Eastern, perspective. He wrote, Dream bigger dreams and better.)

Also note that Balsekar says that Consciousness chooses ("selects a particular thought"). No chooser, only the sense of choosing: this concept need not be fatalistic, but taken in the context of Balsekar's other writings it must be construed as fatalistic. Balsekar has said that his life has already been "chalked up."

But Quantum Theory indicates no fatalism in the universe. Rather, its evidence reveals indeterminism (Bohr) or determinism (Bohm), depending on the theorist, and this is an entirely different understanding. Nothing is already "chalked up." To use Balsekar's concept that Consciousness chooses, one can also infer that choice occurs in the moment, that nothing is predetermined. (See Daniel Dennett and choice machines, 8 January article above.)

Goswami points out that Libet's subjects can negate a hand's rising, "telling" it not to rise. This ability to negate an action is significant in that it accords with Eastern teachings, which stress attention to one's thoughts, deeds, and movements. Attention is taught as the only escape from ignorance. With attention, one can be alert to thought, deeds, and movements; by this alertness, he can stop their arisings and eventually decondition himself.

Goswami says this negation in Libet's subjects is not free will. Why is it not? If he means actions are not initiated and freely selected out of a field of opportunity, yes, he is correct. But it can still be considered a form of free will in that it either ratifies or vetoes an action arising in the sequence of conditioning. (As a term, free will has become too all-encompassing.)

Hughes Mearns: As I was walking up the stair I met a man who wasn't there

Hughes Mearns

(This post is from a time when the blog was under a different title, Inveterate Bystander, and carried this picture as well as the verse by Hughes Mearns.)

Readers have been curious about the verse in the sidebar ("As I was walking up the stair I met a man who wasn't there."), so this will provide a sketch of its author, William Hughes Mearns (1875-1965). An educator, Mearns wrote two books, Creative Youth (1925), and Creative Power (1929), which influenced a generation of scholars in the field of education, particularly on the teaching of writing in American pubic schools.

English teacher, writer, and head of the Lincoln School ( Teachers' College at Columbia University), Mearns made Lincoln School a laboratory for Dewey's ideas on progressive education.

The great progressive educator and philosopher, John Dewey, also at Columbia, urged personal, creative self- expression in children, which strongly influenced public school curriculum for decades.

For Lincoln School students, Mearns emphasized self-expression rather than grammatical correctness. Out the door went penmanship and spelling. In came what Mearns called creative writing. Mearns saw the teacher as guide, not instructor. Writing, he said, is "an outward expression of instinctive insight [that] must be summoned from the vasty deep of our mysterious selves. Therefore, it cannot be taught; indeed, it cannot even be summoned; it can only be permitted."

Hughes Mearns developed a "theory of permittings" for the child as a natural creative artist needing little instruction. "The child is a genuine primitive," said Mearns. "He needs little or no instruction."

Of such thinking, historian Laurence Cremin observes, "And thus was born at least one of the several caricatures of progressive education." Cremin sees Mearns as confusing planlessness with spontaneity and chaos with education.

This seems to be the majority view of Mearns among current academics in the field of education. John Dewey consistently warned his followers against confusing child-centered education with the abandonment of intellectual standards and the assumption that anything children think or do is correct. Many progressive educators chose to ignore Dewey's warnings against mindless forms of child-centeredness.

Whatever. Written in 1899, the sidebar verse, "Antigonish," suggests that Mearns missed his calling as the founder of a modern metaphysical school of light poetry. Here is another by him:

As I was sitting in my chair,
I knew the bottom wasn't there,
Nor legs nor back, but I just sat,
Ignoring little things like that.

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Feral Children The Wild Boy of Aveyron John Ssabunnya

Feral children. Can humans survive if raised by animals in the wild? They do not learn how to communicate and behave in a human manner. Read about children such as The Wild Boy of Aveyron (1798) and John Ssabunnya (1991). More

Carlos Castaneda and Tin Cups

Bruce Wagner was not convinced of the author's accounts of don Juan Matus, the Yaqui nagual, or sorcerer. Castaneda's tales of shape-shifting crows and coyotes in the Sonoran desert seemed far-fetched. Wagner was fortunate enough to get an interview with the reclusive author, an interview which reveals Castaneda in a different light.

In 1960 Castaneda was a graduate student in anthropology at University of California Los Angeles. He said that on a field trip in Arizona researching the medicinal properties of plants, he met don Juan, an old Yaqui Indian shod in huaraches, who offered to help. Don Juan also happened to be a sorcerer.

Narrating the story of the old peasant, Castaneda wrote his first book, The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge, now a classic, and a runaway best seller when first published. Written in California during the days of LSD and peyote, Castaneda learns how to fly, talk to a bilingual Coyote, and behold wondrous columns of singing light. This and other books made Castenada famous.

Like authors J.D. Salinger, and Thomas Pynchon, his celebrity drove Castaneda into life incognito. Reporters clamored for interviews but he was nowhere to be found. He slipped out back doors as they came in the front, you might say. Photographs of him are publicly unavailable. On a 1973 cover of Time magazine, only eyes are visible against the the dark outline of a head, but then Time discovered that the person wasn't Castaneda. Other magazines have tried to reconstruct his face based on the memories of old colleagues and erstwhile acquaintances. When Wagner asked how he should describe Castaneda, Carlos replied, "You may say I resemble Lee Marvin." (A macho Hollywood star now dead.) In fact he was a short, pudgy Peruvian. His ex-wife, Margaret Runyon, said he looked like a Cuban bellhop.

When they met at a cafe of a hotel in Beverly Hills, Wagner shook the hand of a man who "smiled broadly" and then sat down. All seemed well, and Wagner began to frame his first question when Castaneda's forehead wrinkled, his body convulsed, and his lower lip twitched. " 'Please!,' he declared, a shaky truce with facial muscles just enough to spit out the words, He bore down on [Wagner] in needy supplication. 'Please love me!' "

"We are apes with tin cups," Castaneda said after his sobbing stopped. "We're too busy holding onto mommy's hand," he explained, adding that "the scenarios of our lives have already been written by others." Contrary to this, he also said, "We are sublime--but the insane ape lacks the energy to see--so the brain of the beast prevails. We cannot grab our window of opportunity."

Wagner asked him "But if we have a choice, why do we stay in the gutter?"

"It's too warm. We don't want to leave."

Castaneda later said, "We must see ourselves as beings who are going to die. Once you accept that, worlds open up for you. But to embrace this definition you must have balls of steel." He went on. "What's real?," he asked. "This hard, shitty, meaningless, daily world? Are despair and senility what's real?" Castaneda claimed his system of opening worlds derived from twenty seven generations of sorcerers, bequeathed him by don Juan.

In Castaneda's books, don Juan helped him to perceive energy directly, teaching that we are magical beings who mistake ourselves for egos rather than spirits

Castaneda had encountered people like Bruce Wagner, skeptics of his accounts. Castaneda recalled a party where he met a scientist who read the first book but said he wanted proof, not anecdotes. Castaneda replied that to understand the book, the scientist would have to take Sorcery 101.

Somewhere in his article, Wagner asks himself, "What if it turns out Castaneda is inventing nothing? If that's true, you are in a very bad spot."

Of course, Wagner's suspicions might have been groundless and Castaneda was no fraud. Then again, he could have found support in Amy Wallace. In her memoirs, The Sorcerer's Apprentice: My Life with Carlos Castaneda, she recalls the May-December affair she had with Castaneda--she young, he aging. She met him at one of his workshops where he lectured on body movements, including sexual, as taught by his twenty seven generations of sorcerers. At a seedy Los Angeles motel they got into bed. "Carlos was so nervous that he insisted we leave our clothes on. He seemed anxious to complete the act quickly and was strangely businesslike, evidently struck with performance anxiety," Wallace writes. "As he fumbled with buttons, I stopped him and whispered, 'Let's relax for a while--Carlos, let's kiss for a while'. "

At a lecture by Castaneda in San Francisco, and attended by Wagner, a young man asked Castaneda how people could achieve all his experiences if they could not have access to a sorcerer such as don Juan. Castaneda replied that the fellow didn't need don Juan. Instead, he needed a lot of energy, "and for that you have to work your balls off."

Castaneda ended his lecture by saying that "don Juan used to say, 'One of us is an asshole. And it isn't me.' That's what I came to tell you today."

Although Wagner didn't, the audience roared with laughter and Castaneda disappeared through the back door. While the audience laughed, Wagner responded differently to Castaneda's remark. He made up his mind about Castaneda, and one imagines him thinking of P.T. Barnum's phrase, "There's a sucker born every minute."

After deciding on his opinion of Castaneda, he says of Carlos running into the alley, "I wanted to chase him down, calling 'Please love me!' " Wagner says "that would have been a good laugh, anyway. But I forgot my tin cup."

At his Los Angeles home, Castaneda died in 1998 of liver cancer. He was 72. His death went almost unnoticed by the press.
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This article derives from various sources, including Details magazine, March 1994, "You Only Live Twice," by Bruce Wagner.

Control and The Stages to Postmodernism

Control and the stages to postmodernism. 1) "In Moby Dick. . everybody's working, doing their job too. But the captain goes insane, the ship snaps in two, the crew drowns and the captain gets dragged to the bottom of the sea." 2) "In Star Trek, every story is the same. There they are, the crew, working, working, working. Then somebody says, 'Captain! I've lost control of the ship.' The rest of the episode is about gaining control of the ship." Laurie Anderson

Lost control and post-post modernism .To use John Von Neumann's phrase, is technology rapidly pushing us toward "some essential singularity"? Are we accelerating toward a post-biological intelligence? Are we reaching a Prediction Wall?-- which manifests as "a growing inability of human minds to credibly imagine our onrushing future, a future that must apparently include greater-than-human technological sophistication and intelligence. At the same time, we now admit to . . . increasingly interconnected technological systems that no one human being understands. The Millenial generation assumes the normality of living in a world of . . . technological systems, erected like vast beehives or termite mounds, systems maintained and incrementally improved by large swarms of partially-aware human beings, each of which has only a very limited conceptualization of the full potentialities and inherent developmental trajectory of the new technological environment that is emerging."  (from Singularity Watch web site, now gone.)

Postmodernism as such is really fashionable nonsense. Read about the misconceptions of science by post-modernists in Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Philosophers' Abuse of Science, by Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont. More

Some Notes on Enlightenment

Some Notes on Enlightenment

These comments don't pertain mainly to enlightenment as such, but to the silliness that surrounds it.

Guru popularity correlates with guru self-confidence and articulateness. Because enlightenment cannot be identified by consensus, such as agreeing on the color red, many people turn to authority figures. Such followers are attracted to those who express themselves well and have an air of complete self-confidence. To follow them, people discard critical intelligence, confusing reasonable validation tests with the "demands" of higher consciousness.

Venerated as a model of transformation, Ramana Maharshi had disciples who saw to the needs of his ashram and to his meals. In his life he never had to work, nor did he encounter other stresses. Had he encountered them, what might his life have been like? (1. His disciple Paul Brunton faulted this passivity. UG Krishnamurti was amused watching Maharshi read comic books. 2. Unlike Zen, which is relatively pragmatic in its teachings, advaita tends to escapism because the world is regarded as totally illusory.)

All religion, including Buddhism and Hinduism, begins with faith. Maharshi's ashram followers had faith in him as a model of what they might become. He was their authority and so, observing him daily, they shaped their behavior after him. (This is rather like Nineteenth Century Japanese rendering even the scroll work on the muzzles of Admiral Perry's cannons. Uncertain of the physics principles, they scrupulously copied the ordinance so that nothing might go wrong.)

In Zen, Buddha is sometimes called a shit stick, or students are told, If you meet the Buddha on the road kill him. The point of this is not irreverence for its own sake.

After disciplined effort, meditators and other introspectors discover they cannot find the self, that it has disappeared. Thus they conclude they have "arrived." Instead they manifest a principle long known in biology: emergent phenomena in an organism cannot be explained in terms of its parts. So, too, sense of self cannot be explained by the usual mental baggage.

Under the light of conscious investigation, sense of self disappears and frees the individual from usual anxieties, and mental chatter. It has not gone away, however. It has retreated to the decentralized nodes of consciousness.

Understand that it does not reside there as some invisible entity. (See the earlier comment on biology and emergent pheonomena; it cannot be located in its neural parts.) Rather, the Buddhist explanation nicely accounts for it as form emerging from emptiness. This is similar to quanta potentia in Quantum Theory.

(As an experiment in perception, stare at a blue dot lit against a yellow background. After a few minutes the blue merges with the yellow.)

With realization itself, consciousness shifts and one can live differently afterward, but troubles don't go away, and "enlightenment" is a transient state like an orgasm. So have more sex. (Norman Mailer wrote of the Apocalyptic Orgasm ; - )

Buddha's quest for enlightenment began with abandonment of his wife and child. If a woman had founded Buddhism, would it have folded an abandonment myth into its traditional culture?* What implications would it have in dogma for Buddhist non-attachment? *(She certainly wouldn't have called her child Fetter, the English equivalent of how the Buddha myth has it.)

Which is more heroic? The search for Truth? Or working with AIDS victims in Mozambique?

Buddha resolutely resisted speculations on metaphysical questions, such as whether God exists, why the universe was created, why evil exists and whether individual consciousness persists after death. (Buddha's followers transformed his teachings into a religion, complete with theological dogma, moral strictures and rituals.)

Some current spiritual teachers claim they have answers, albeit to the same questions Buddha resisted.

Religious cultural and phenomenological baggage surrounds the enlightenment experience. The essential is this: to become enlightened means awakening to the dream and into its source, not from it. Nobody leaves samsara fully behind, so enjoy it.

Charles Tart Paranormal Experience When Patty Hearst Kidnapped

Hearst joined her captors; here holds an assault rife in front of the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA) logo.

Charles Tart and The Day Newspaper Heiress Patty Hearst Was Kidnapped by The Symbionese Liberation Army

He didn't consider himself psychic, so at first he had little tolerance for his experience. On 4 February 1974 Dr Charles T. Tart was driving to a meeting with a colleague in Berkeley, California, and about to turn off San Pablo Avenue onto Ashby. He found himself thinking about bad neighborhoods with criminal gangs. He thought this silly as he was headed to a nice section of Berkeley. "The thought not only persisted, it quickly built into a frightening set of obsessions about being beaten up, about gangs of people with guns, shooting, violence, and the conviction that [he] would be mistaken for a burglar and shot. . . . [He] became very frightened and wanted to turn the car around and drive away as fast as possible." The closer he got to his destination, the worse he felt.

The fear intensified and he pulled over twice, about to make a U-turn and return home, but he refused to surrender to what he called "this craziness." He did reach his colleague but felt ashamed. They went to a coffee shop and nothing was said about it.

Some years later he received a letter from the colleague, then on the East coast. The man told him that "While he was waiting for me in front of the Institute, he started feeling paranoid, worrying about people with guns and getting shot! He too felt pretty silly and ashamed."

"The next sentence in his letter was the real shock, though. Had [Tart] known that the heiress Patty Hearst had been kidnapped, just down the street, a few minutes after we had left?"

Tart had fought off panic and his colleague felt paranoid a few minutes before nine in the morning, when three members of the "Symbionese Liberation Army, the SLA, had already kidnapped Peter Benenson, a mathematician at Berkeley's famous Lawrence Radiation Laboratory. He had gone grocery shopping at the Berkeley Co-operative Shopping Center on Shattuck Avenue, in the north end of town where [Tart] was coming from." The SLA members drove with Peter Benenson to Benvenue Avenue, where they parked.

"The two men each carried an automatic rifle containing cyanide tipped bullets, the woman waved a .38 automatic pistol. Benenson was in a state of terror for some time, as his car was driven around while he crouched on the floor. There was indeed plenty of fear and a gang with guns around for [Tart and his colleague] to pick up on!"

Looking for a parking place, Tart had driven up and down that section of Benvenue. He wonders if he drove past the SLA gang and if he walked right past them after he parked. He was frightened about armed gangs in cars. He knows for certain that if the SLA weren't there when he arrived, they were on their way.

Benenson's kidnappers parked his car in Patty Hearst's driveway. Armed with automatic rifles and pistols, they knocked on her apartment door. Her boyfriend, Steven Weed, opened it, whereupon they threw him to the floor, then beat and kicked him. Patty Hearst was grabbed and carried screaming from the apartment. A curious neighbor was beaten and knocked unconscious to the floor, already soaked in Weed's blood. Two women were driven back into their apartment by automatic rifle fire. The SLA gang sped off with Hearst panicked in the trunk, Benenson terrified on the back seat floor.

Tart realizes now that he was driving into danger and he says, "Part of my mind was telling me to get away. I misinterpreted it as my craziness. Luckily nothing worse happened to me or [my colleague] than fright and shame."

Of his experience, he says, "Now I wonder how many other people are tuning into the world around them this way and unnecessarily suffering because they think it's their own craziness? What could we be like if we could understand and deliberately use this kind of psychic sensitivity?"

This, and similar accounts can be found at TASTE (The Archives of Scientists' Transcendent Experiences), Dr Tart's web site.

Common sense has time compartmentalized into past, present, and future, but is it? In relation to Tart's experience, how can it be ? We speak of the unconscious mind, but is it merely an aspect of consciousness depending on circumstantial evidence? How, then, does consciousness depend on circumstantial evidence?
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My comment: during that same event I lived only a few blocks away and hadn't a clue but I wasn't faced with any danger. I read about it in the newspapers.

On Daniel Dennett, Free Will, and Modern Spiritual Teachers

On Daniel Dennett, Free Will, and Modern Spiritual Teachers

This blog has addressed scientific experiments with implications for free will. (Libet and Wegner) Some implications of the experiments have been that free will is illusory. Dennett's new book, Freedom Evolves, presents the subject in a different light.

A brief review. Libet showed that neural activity begins about a half second before a conscious decision to act. Wegner calls this the intention invention to explain that the idea of conscious decision is invented by the mind. Volition is an illusion. Thus the individual thinks he is in charge but is not. This of course has enormous implications for humanity. Are all actions subject to random events? Or are they predetermined? Are penal justice systems based on an illusion that the convict could have done otherwise? (Not that prisons should be abolished.)

Along comes Daniel Dennett. Pointing out that neurologists are stuck on old paradigms, he distinguishes between two kinds of will, the interventionist and the compatibilist. He observes that most philosophers have abandoned the interventionist perspective, a view rather like a controller stepping in behind and before physical activity to determine the course of that activity. Instead, he favors a compatibilist explanation, which holds that a single moment of decision is not needed. That is, no intervention occurs. Agency exists, according to this view, but as an ongoing control and responsiveness to action or other cognitive activity.

Given this view, the convict may have been imprisoned for a single crime, but the robbery or murder resulted from a long chain of events, both physical and psychological. It began the first time he entertained such thoughts, continued with minor misdeeds, and culminated in his felony. The compatibilist view holds that there is not one moment and time for his crime, but that it evolved into itself.

Analyzing the world into doing and non-doing, certain popular living spiritual teachers proclaim that agency is totally illusory, and one even says that his life was "chalked up" from the beginning, and nothing can be done about it. Many of his followers take his every word as gospel.

Zen has a saying, Sin lies in the ignorance that precedes the crime. Zen Roshis teach students attention. When asked by a student what it means, a roshi replied Attention means attention.

Remembrance of A Death Foretold

Brueghel: The Triumph of Death

Remembrance of A Death Foretold

Several years ago I received a letter from an old navy buddy. . . "By the time you read this, my last letter, I'll be gone and my ashes will be scattered in the North Atlantic Ocean.". . . . We commute to work, resolved to get the promotion, finish the project, become a better parent, not cheat on the spouse. We look at the buildings we pass, edifices of public authority, proclaiming that this is the world, that it is right and fitting to bend our lives to the edict. Sometimes we stop to ask if the lie doesn't penetrate deeper, but then we shake our heads as if caught dreaming, and we scurry to the elevator to get off at the ninth or tenth or eleventh floor.

At home, the question of the lie returns before we fall asleep. We glimpse the lie of authority; listening to the nightly news, watching the commercials, we ask Is this the Good Life? But we nod off in our easy chairs, dreaming that when we retire things will get better. Better always means when. When wealthy, healthy, happy. Better always allows us to postpone the questions, Who am I? , What is the lie? Am I just John Doe, husband, father, entrepreneur; am I only dedicated, loving, ambitious, methodical, rational, or impulsive? Is it merely the lie of authority, conformity, normality, or sanity?; of capitalism or communism or democracy or autocracy?

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John Horgan, Scientific American Writer, on Daniel Wegner and Free Will

John Horgan, Scientific American writer, on Daniel Wegner and free will

"When I woke this morning, I stared at the ceiling above my bed and wondered: to what extent will my rising really be an exercise of my free will? Let's say I got up right . . . now. Would my subjective decision be the cause? Or would computations unfolding in a subconscious neural netherworld actually set off the muscular twitches that slide me out of the bed, quietly, so as not to wake my wife, and propel me toward the door? . . . "

"[According to Dr Daniel M Wegner, Harvard psychologist, the chief offender is the Illusion of conscious will.] What makes Dr. Wegner's critique more effective than others I've read over the years is that it is less philosophical than empirical, drawing heavily upon recent research in cognitive science and neurology. . . . "

"We think of will as a force, but actually, Dr. Wegner says, it is a feeling — "merely a feeling," as he puts it — of control over our actions. I think, "I'm going to get up now," and when I do a moment later, I credit that feeling with having been the instigating cause. But as we all know, correlation does not equal causation. . . . Wegner calls the idea of free will intention invention." More
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In regard to what Horgan says about Wegner, think about this. In 1927, puzzled by the behavior of quantum particles, Werner Heisenberg wrote, "The ‘path’ comes into existence only when we observe it." (Also click here for my 8 November article on Benjamin Libet's pioneering experiments which have free will implications.)

A founder of modern physics, Heisenberg questioned the classical view of an objective observer. We can also say the paths of our lives do not exist until observed. As concept, a determined future assumes an objective observer. If we cannot know the perceiver, how can there be an objective observer? How, then, can one ever say that the future is predetermined? Read the 8 December article on Perception.

Chris Langan and IQ, plus Obscure fact: Mexico fought in World War II

Chris Langan and IQ, plus Obscure fact: Mexico fought in World War II

For those who are into this kind of thing, Chris Langan is one of the smartest people in America—his reported IQ is said to be off the charts. Yet, if it's a criterion of anything at all, he has not made it big in the business world. More
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When German U Boats attacked and sank two Mexican ships, Mexico joined the Allies against the Axis in 1942 but, because of inadequate equipment and material, not until 1944 did President Camacho decide to send a Mexican military unit into battle. Under Col. P.A. Antonio Cardenas Rodriguez (1905-1969) the , 201st Fighter Squadron was formed.

Squadron 201 was an elite, all-volunteer unit composed of the best military pilots and ground personnel in Mexico, recruited from all branches of the service.

Known as The Aztec Eagles, the squadron was assigned to the Pacific Theater and flew P 47 Thunderbolts, powerful and fast, affectionately known by pilots as jugheads . They flew 59 combat missions. Here are links for information:

Military.com

US Latinos & Latinas in WWII

Misiones: los miembros de la Fuerza Aerea Expedicionaria Mexicana

Losing Control

Losing Control

Control is the central issue in all religions. Loss of control delivers the adherent into God's grace, the bliss of nirvana, or satori. Thy will be done, whatever phrase it takes, is common to them.

Religious doctrines hold that the individual cannot choose this deliverance, but must depend on God's grace, or the happenstance of enlightenment. Man can do nothing to achieve it. Christianity, and the two main Eastern religions help an illustration.

Jesus said that nobody can earn God's mercy. St Augustine said God had preordained who would be saved and who, damned. The later Church taught God's grace comes like a thunderclap that the individual can do nothing about.

In Buddhism, all form arises out of emptiness; all emptiness completes form. The individual (as individual) can do nothing to discover his true nature, which is form and emptiness. It offers no threshold for its discovery, just as there is nobody to discover it. In Hinduism, all is divine play, or lila, which manifests as the world, but is like a puppet shadow show, fleeting, seemingly real, without substance to realize and, again, nobody to realize it.

Some years ago, Alan Watts wrote a book, The Wisdom of Insecurity, which title implies that virtue ensues from realizing the absence of control. The book, too, suggests gaining something in that Watts' implication is we have a better life by letting go of our need for security.

The desire for achievement is inherent in humankind. Yet, the paradox is that religion, or any spiritual seeking for that matter, has as culmination no achievement at all. Control is lost, that's all. But we can't even lose control if it is something attempted by us precisely because effort is involved.

A man stumbled over a cliff and fell. On the way down he grabbed the branch of a shrub and clung to it. Then he shouted to the heavens, Is anybody there? Please help me. He waited and got no answer. Then he prayed. Please, Oh, please. Is anybody there? Please help me!

This time he heard a voice. Yes, I can help you, but you must follow my directions exactly.

Yes, the man answered. What must I do?

Let go of the branch, the voice said.

There was silence. One second. Two seconds.

Then the man asked, Is anybody else there?

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