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3/29/04

Manufacturing Consent VI: A Brief History of The FCC and Related Legislation


Manufacturing Consent VI: A Brief History of The FCC and Related Legislation

First, this by George Orwell--"Unpopular ideas can be silenced, and inconvenient facts kept dark, without any need for official ban." I will add that the silence and the darkness are all the easier if a media elite owns most information outlets, which is where we are today.

Senator John McCain, at a congressional hearing--"When is the endpoint to all of this? Why not have Rupert Murdoch buy another company, then Comcast another, and on it goes. At some point, you'll have many voices--and one ventriloquist."

We don't know when it will all end. Here is a breakdown of shrinking media ownership--



  • In 1983, 50 owners
  • In 1987, 29
  • In 1990, 23
  • in 1992, 14
  • In 1997, 10
  • In 2004, 6 owners for 94 percent of the entire media

    Understand that this is a sketch of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and omits important information in some instances. Its chief advantage is that it is presented in chronological order.


    • Other Mind Shadows posts on the media:
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    Manufacturing Consent V: What About Terrorists or Arsenal Security Elsewhere?


    Manufacturing Consent V: What About Terrorists or Arsenal Security Elsewhere?

    Of the news that occurs, we can always trust the media to surface important events into the public consciousness. Right? For example, the public can rest assured that they will learn of breaches of security, especially concerning weapon stockpiles in former Soviet states, with implications for increased nuclear or terrorist threat. We would like to think so. Unfortunately, that is not the case.

    The gate keepers of media conglomerates determine what we see and hear, and once again the public is unaware of an important story, which I will provide shortly. First, though, think about this. In 1983, media ownership had shrunk to 50 conglomerates. This raised great concern, but nothing was done. In 1989, it had reduced to 29; in 1990, 23; in 1992, 14; in 1997, 10. Today, 6 conglomerates own 94 percent of the media. Soon, one will own them all. *

    The important story I mentioned--it occurred just a few days ago. It is scary, and should have received extensive and high profile coverage by the major media outlets. If the gate keepers chose to give it less than that, one would think they would still gave it some attention. It fell through the cracks, remaining only a wire release, and that fact provides a harbinger of things to come.

    Think about this in terms of various issues, not only weapons stockpiles. Watergate, for example. The hotel break-in would have remained a curiosity and allowed to die a quiet death without Deep Throat,** a public official, and Woodward and Bernstein, two investigative journalists. Without intense and difficult investigation, even Deep Throat's tips would have been forgotten, and President Nixon's involvement would not have been uncovered. But investigative journalism had its death knell, and today the conglomerates only like news feeds, as they are cheaper. ** (Woodward promises to reveal his identify after Deep Throat dies.)

    Anyhow, here is the story, and its omission from public consciousness is an example of what the media has come to. If a former Soviet state is capable of this kind of neglect, what else should we be concerned about?

    Ukraine Says Hundreds of Missiles Missing by Anna Melnichuk

    KIEV, Ukraine (AP) 03/26/04--Several hundred decommissioned Soviet-built surface-to-air missiles are unaccounted for in Ukraine's military arsenal, the defense minister told a newspaper.

    Defense Minister Yevhen Marchuk, in an interview published in the newspaper Den, appeared to suggest the missiles may have been dismantled without proper accounting, rather than stolen or sold.

    ``We are looking for several hundred missiles,'' Marchuk was quoted as saying in Thursday's edition. ``They have already been decommissioned, but we cannot find them.''

    Other Mind Shadows posts on the media:
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    3/26/04

    The Altruism of Vampire Bats

    The Altruism of Vampire Bats
    altruism of vampire bats Darwin



  • Altruism (al' troo-iz-em) n. regard for the welfare of others; benevolent practices. al' tru-is' tic, adj. al'tru-is' ti-cal-ly, adv.


    • Here is a word that evokes a puzzle for sociobiologists. If the gene is selfish, to use Richard Dawkins' concept, why do we witness unselfish behavior? * Altruism involves helping others at the cost of our time, our effort, and our resources. Sociobiologists puzzle over this behavior because they see individuals of species struggling for self-survival, and it simply does not promote that end.

    Yet altruism is not a phenomenon observed only among human beings. Many animals live social lives, in bonded cooperation. They lavish devotion on offspring and spend hours grooming others. Why?

    At one time, speculation had altruism as behavior for the greater good of the group, a position held by many during the early Twentieth Century. Since then, however, it has fallen out of favor. Of course, on the surface such behavior would seem to promote the survival of a species. If individuals give up their own lives to protect the lives of others, this would help insure continuance of their kind into the next generation.

    With a deeper look, the explanation appears less plausible. Assume a tribe of wolves in which each member catches rabbits for every other wolf. Yes, the pack would live in harmony, but not for long. Assume now that an interloper arrives and when he is fed, he never bothers to feed others. He simply does not hunt, but waits for his meal. He has more time on his hands, including time to mate with alpha bitches. His pups will inherit this selfish gene, and they will again pass it on. Over generations the pack eventually becomes selfish as the altruistic individuals die out, unable to compete against those who take rather than give.

    Current sociobiologists find that the selfish gene helps explain altruism. Your children are the only way your genes can survive beyond your lifetime. Parental care, then, becomes an important means to accomplish this. The behavior also works with kin. Monkeys share food and other resources with their relatives because they thereby have a better chance of getting more of their genes into the next generation. Of course, recognition is key to altruism. The individual must be able to perceive his kin, an ability that not all animals have. Primates do possess it, as well as elephants, dolphins, and vampire bats.

    These bats are tiny and cannot go without blood or a meal beyond two consecutive nights, otherwise they die. Blood meals, though, are usually feasts, and more than any individual bat needs at one time. They are shared between vampires in an arrangement wherein score is kept--who owes what to whom.

    Priest and scientist, Pierre Tielhard de Chardin would have had a different view of altruism, and his position on reflective thought sets him apart from modern sociobiologists. He maintained that reflection is what distinguishes man from other species. He argued that a discontinuity exists between man and the other creatures. As I say in the article on him, "If he is right, then sociobiologists are wrong." (See Tielhard de Chardin, 21 March 2004.)

    Apart from de Chardin's theories, an issue remains. Clearly, we cannot, must not, confine ourselves to a moral view circumscribed by genetics. That served for tribes, but will not do so for the future of humankind. Survival-of-the-fittest has become part of economic theory, with corporations vying to become top dog, only taking care of their own, else go under. Nations are manipulated by them while Islamic fundamentalists see a new kind of threat, dollar imperialism, and retaliate with terrorism. (Pakistan has a nuclear arsenal and Pervez Musharaff's hold on power does not inspire confidence.) In the meantime, the planet gets warmer, the rivers dirtier, and the skies greyer.

    Is the brain hard-wired, as many sociobiologists contend? If so, we are doomed. But I don't think it is. I hold that our minds are conditioned by our beliefs.** We are our meanings. Evil can only prevail if good people do nothing.
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    3/25/04

    Deconstruction As Fashionable Nonsense


    Deconstruction As Fashionable Nonsense

    As a child, I could hear fog horns on San Francisco Bay during the night. Beeee-oohhhh, they would groan in deep bass, then repeat themselves, beeee-oohhhh, until the sky cleared some time next morning. It made me think of the Life Buoy commercial with a fog horn going beeee-oohhhh, with b-o meaning body odor. Fog was my friend, then. It made me feel warm and cozy in bed and hopeful of light drizzle on the walk to school next day. Even today I enjoy misty weather and dark pavement glistening with moisture under street lights. But, of fog, there are two kinds of atmospherics, and I have come to like the other type less as I grow older. It has to do with intellectual fog.

    Recently I opened a book titled Entropy: A New World View, by Jeremy Rifkin, and read this as an application of the Second Law of Thermodynamics: "Every day we awake to a world that appears more confused and disordered than the one we left the night before. Nothing seems to work anymore. Our lives are bound up in constant repair. We are forever mending and patching. Our leaders are forever lamenting and apologizing. Every time we think we've found a way ouf of a crisis, something backfires. The powers that be continue to address the problems at hand with solutions that create even greater problems than the ones they were meant to solve."

    Now, that sounds quite powerful, that prose--it has a roll, and a tone, but it means nothing. If Rifkin said to the reader that he is taking license with the scientific concept, entropy, then I would string along with him. But he is quite serious in applying the Second Law where it does not belong. He says this about that: "The entropy law destroys the notion of history as progress. The entropy law destroys the notion that science and technology create a more ordered world."

    Sorry, Mr Rifkin, but it does no such thing. In fact, your statement is intellectual nonsense. Entropy is a complex, and difficult concept of physics that cannot be elevated to some over-arching philosophical principle. By no stretch of the imagination can it support a theory explaining what is wrong with modern society. It offers no universal filter by which to understand history.

    Such misapplication is typical of a highly fashionable form of academic criticism, Deconstruction. Although useful in some instances, it is a theory that adopts scientific concepts as attempts to pry open the workings of society, politics, and literature. Its chief practitioner, Jacques Derrida, is capable of whoppers like his essay, "Differance." Here is an excerpt, and I would like to know what it means--

    "Retaining at least the framework, if not the content, of this requirement formulated by Saussure, we will designate as differance the movement according to which language, or any code, any system of referral in general, is constituted 'historically' as a weave of differences. 'Is constituted', 'is produced', 'is created', 'movement', 'historically', etc. necessarily being understood beyond the metaphysical language in which they are retained, along with all their implications. We ought to demonstrate why concepts like production, constitution, and history remain in complicity with what is at issue here. But this would take me too far today--toward the theory of the representation of the 'circle' in which we appear to be enclosed--and I utilize such concepts, like many others, only for their strategic convenience and in order to undertake their deconstruction at the currently most decisive point. In any event, it will be understood, by means of the circle in which we appear to be engaged, that as it is written here, differance is no more static than it is genetic, no more structural than historical. Or is no less so; and to object to this on the basis of the oldest of metaphysical oppositions (for example, by setting some generative point of view against a structural-taxonomical point of view, or vice versa) would be, above all, not to read what here is missing from orthographical ethics. Such oppositions have not the least pertinence to differance, which makes the thinking of it uneasy and uncomfortable."

    Sorry to inflict that on you, but you see my point. Science holds that the best explanations lie with elegance and it in turn lies with simplicity of explanation. Professor Derrida's approach is not elegant, only befuddling, and is nothing new in professorial writing.* The fog factor has always been fashionable, except now it has become an entire academic school of theoretical nonsense. Then again, perhaps I'm being too harsh. After all, pretentiousness has often been a successful ploy in academe, and literature PhDs must get that promotion somehow.

    * (Paul Dirac said that, for him, the truth of an equation lay in its aesthetic appeal, which is to say its simplicity. Understand that I don't disagree that aesthetics can also be found in complexity, such as poetic language. I just take issue with pretensions, particularly when language is used to disguise its own meanings, and all to support a fashionable theory that will eventually be buried next another vogue, now dead, New Criticism. Such people should instead write novels or poems, if they can.)

    * ( Physicist Alan Sokal submitted an article, "Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity," to Social Text, a fashionable cultural-studies journal. In it he parodied the journal's typical contents, and filled his piece with absurdities and glaring non-sequiturs. It mocked as old-fashioned and dogmatic the standard conceptions by which scientists investigate and derive evidence, and proclaimed that both social and physical reality are socio-linguistic constructs. He intentionally made his leaps of logic obvious and arrived at the conclusion that "the [Pi] of Euclid and the G of Newton, formerly thought to be constant and universal, are now perceived in their ineluctable historicity; and the putative observer becomes fatally de-centered, disconnected from any epistemic link to a space-time point that can no longer be defined by geometry alone."

    The article was accepted and published. Not only that, it appeared in a special issue of Social Text devoted to rebutting the criticisms levelled by several distinguished scientists against postmodernism and social constructivism. Then Sokal told the editors it was all a hoax and full of gibberish. I don't know what they thought, but "shot in the foot" comes to mind.)
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    3/21/04

    Tielhard de Chardin: Implications For An Intelligent Universe




    Tielhard de Chardin, Noogenesis, No-Self, and Implications For An Intelligent Universe

    A Jesuit priest born the year before Darwin's death, Pierre Tielhard de Chardin sought the Vatican's approval for his manuscripts, but never got it. His superiors continually denied permission for their release, believing that his theories would not accord with Church doctrine. Published posthumously in 1955 as The Phenomenon of Man, the book assembles his ideas and is based on his work as both a philosopher and paleontologist. His ideas matured in the 1940s while he was in China studying the fossil remains of Peking Man.

    In short time his book met with praise and detraction. Its detractors accused Tielhard of imposing teleology, some end goal, on biology and evolution. His phrase for it was the Omega Point. They claimed that he had imported his religious views into science. In his noogenesis, or the origin of human reflective thought, his supporters found evidence that human history cannot be explained by evolutionary theory.

    Tielhard de Chardin premises his theory on discontinuity, which cannot be explained by evolutionary theory. He posits a few key transition points when radical changes occurred in evolution, and likens them to water, first lukewarm, then brought to a boil. Its state undergoes a discrete alteration, from water, a liquid, to steam, a gas with properties wholly different.

    Similarly, he finds major transitions on a grand scale, the appearance of matter, the formation of Earth, the origin of cells, and the rise of reflective thought. Central to his argument is that, with each emergence, the old rules became subsumed under the new. The new rules became preeminent in the evolutionary pattern.

    De Chardin wrote of "an explosion pulverizing a primitive quasi-atom . . . then a swarming of elementary corpuscles." Matter thus moves to greater complexity. This is somewhat akin to the Big Bang Theory, which was not in vogue during the 1940s, although de Chardin provides a kind of preview.

    After slow eons, life emerged as something wholly, cataclysmically, new. Among his scientific peers today, de Chardin would find few dissenters in this.

    De Chardin posits another discontinuity. From the earliest unicellular organisms to mammals, he sees a direction, not random but pointed at the origin of man. With this creature comes noogenesis, reflective thought, a major departure.

    If he is right, then sociobiologists are wrong. They maintain that human beings can be studied by finding parallels between people and animals. Animal societies can help explain human societies. Animal ethology and human ethology are not distinctly different for purposes of tracing behavior origins, say most sociobiologists.

    But reflective thought can be argued as an emergent property and exhibits features unique to people, not chimpanzees. De Chardin would insist that a real discontinuity in programming exists between primates and humans.

    The essential question here, then, bears upon Tielhard de Chardin's key concept of noogenesis (occurring in what he calls the noosphere).

    Of those who have studied him, many see the central questions as these--Is reflective thought a discontinuity? Or does it evolve out of an earlier order? I see another question as more important, which nobody has addressed.

    Rather, one must ask, Just what is reflection? Examination of consciousnesss reveals that any "self-reflected" thought is not generated by a self. It happens and a self arises to take ownership of the thought after the fact. Nobody reflects. Put it this way, if you want--reflecting reflects. There is only the illusion that somebody does so. Scotsman David Hume was one of the first Westerners to point this out, although a history of testimony begins in the East before Buddha. Hume and others have observed that no personal identity underlies perceptions that come and go. They are like images on a movie screen, a series of single pictures to which smoothness, a sense of continuity, is imparted. *

    Reflective thought is a naturally occurring phenomenon. Just as the eye incessantly moves although it generates a sense of stability, so does the mind, and it fosters a sense of self. The idea of a self that reflects is an epiphenomenon to help explain understandings which come as a result of thought.

    Reflective thought may or may not be a substantial discontinuity, but it does not bring man closer to the angels, as the good priest would like it to have done.

    Tielhard de Chardin never considered self as without evidence. If he had, he would still have been faced with another question, one that can redeemed by mystery, although not of his orthodox kind. The question he could have posed, is this--Whence this understanding? How is it, for example, that so many people throughout history can recognize the absence of self? Clearly, understanding understands, if we must phrase the situation so that a process be operated upon.

    However we phrase the issue, we must confront the view that the universe itself is intelligent and not the blind thing of the materialists. When the sense of self is seen through as an arising and falling away, understanding remains.

    On this, the materialists will eventually have to cede to Tieldhard de Chardin--matter provides insufficient explanation for our world. Consciousness can only do so. Quantum physicists can no longer accept the materialist explanation, except as a handy way to communicate among colleagues. They know that the weirdness of their experiments can not be explained by a traditionally physicalist perspective.
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    3/17/04

    Wislawa Szymborska: Determinism or Free Will ?


    Determinism or Free Will ?


    Wislawa Szymborska Terrorist He's Watching

    The Terrorist, He's Watching

    The bomb will go off in the bar at one twenty p.m.
    Now it's only one sixteen p.m.
    Some will still have time to get in,
    some to get out.

    The terrorist has already crossed to the other side of the street.
    The distance protects him from any danger,
    and what a sight for sore eyes:

    A woman in a yellow jacket, she goes in.
    A man in dark glasses, he comes out.

    Guys in jeans, they are talking.
    One seventeen and four seconds.
    That shorter guy's really got it made; and gets on a scooter,
    and that taller one, he goes in.

    One seventeen and forty seconds.
    That girl there, she's got a green ribbon in her hair.
    Too bad that bus just cut her off.
    One eighteen p.m.
    The girl's not there any more.
    Was she dumb enough to go in, or wasn't she?
    That we'll see when they carry them out.

    One nineteen p.m.
    No one seems to be going in.
    Instead, a fat baldy's coming out.
    Like he's looking for something in his pockets and
    at one nineteen and fifty seconds
    he goes back for those lousy gloves of his.

    It's one twenty p.m.
    The time, how it drags.
    Should be any moment now.
    Not yet.
    Yes, this is it.
    The bomb, it goes off.

    by Wislawa Szymborska
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    3/14/04

    Manufacturing Consent IV: The Bewildered Herd

    Neil Postman Amusing Ourselves to Death Manufacture Consent Mass Media
    Manufacturing Consent, IV: The Bewildered Herd

    This article provides background to the earlier articles on manufacturing consent in the United States, a phenomenon with a scale unprecedented among wealthy nations. Somehow, consent toward corporate values has become assimilated into Mother Culture of America. Few people even think to question how they get the memes that form their opinions, view points, and beliefs about matters social and political. This, Part Four, touches upon early views of social engineering, as well as upon recognition that it has become a major instrument of government. (For articles on memes, see Memes, Genes, and God, 31 December 2003; Memes and Why Evolution Favored The Irrational Brain, 26 February 2004; Beyond Memes, 6 March 2004.)

    Two hundred years ago, the idea of democracy was ripening, and would blossom into the French and American Revolutions, although not everybody thought it a good thing. The masses were regarded with suspicion, and aristocracy with favor. Some, though, simply looked at the situation objectively. Eighteenth Century philosopher David Hume found "nothing more surprising" than

    " to see the easiness with which the many are governed by the few; and to observe the implicit submission with which men resign their sentiments and passions to those of their rulers. When we enquire by what means this wonder is brought about, we shall find, that as Force is always on the side of the governed, the governers have nothing to support them but opinion. 'Tis therefore, on opinion only that government is founded; and this maxim extends to the most despotic and most military governments, as well as to the most free and most popular." (Essays Moral, Political, and Literary)

    Walter Lippmann, early Twentieth Century political and social pundit, wrote that "the public must be put in its place" so that we may "live free of the trampling and the roar of a bewildered herd," which serves to be "interested spectators of action," and not participants. As a "responsible" pubic intellectual, he saw his duty as guiding the voice of the herd in case government does not have sufficient sway over the public. (The Phantom Public)

    Gore Vidal, a prominent, current, novelist and intellectual, has a different take on the situation: "To deny inconvenient opinions a hearing is one way the few have of controlling the many. But as Richard Nixon used to say, ' That would be the easy way.' The slyer way is to bombard the public with misinformation. During more than half a century of corruption by the printed word in the form ' news' --propaganda disguised as fact--I have yet to read a story favorable to another society's social and political arrangements. Swedes have free health care, better schools than ours, child day-care center for working mothers. . . but the Swedes are all drunks who commit suicide (even blonde blue-eyed people must pay for such decadent amenities). Lesson [for the bewildered herd]? No national health care, no education [with high national budget priority] , etc. . . . ."

    "Of the billions now spent each election cycle, most is donated in checks of $1,000 or more. But less than one-tenth of one percent of the general population make individual contributions at this rate. These happy few are prepared to pay a high and rising price for the privilege of controlling our government. In the 1998 election cycle, the average winning House candidate cost the owners about $600,000. The average winning Senate candidate a bit over $5 million. Multiply both figures by two if you want the cost of dislodging an incumbent from office (in a system where, last time around, over 97 percent were re-elected). To finance a race in big media markets like New York, or California, it's a bit more expensive: as of election day 1998, something like $36 and $21 million respectively."

    "The corporate grip on opinion in the United States is one of the wonders of the Western world. No First World country has ever managed to eliminate so entirely from its media all objectivity--much less dissent."

    "Of course, it is possible for any citizen with time to spare, and a canny eye, to work out what is actually going on, but for the many there is not time, and the network news is the only news even though it may not be news at all but only a series of flashing fictions. . . ." (The Decline and Fall of The American Empire)

    Nothing manufactures consent like fear. It guarantees that the bewildered herd will be tamed to conform to the expectations of the governing elite. A common threat marginalizes dissidents, activates supporters, and sways the undecided. It silences all opposing voices. If terrorists strike again in America, the November elections will be decided on only one issue, the war against terrorism. The economy, joblessness, health insurance, worker pensions, social security, environment, the budget deficit--these and other issues will be rendered null and void for practical purposes.

    "Bewildered herd" refers, of course, to you and me, who have a voice only once very four years. Do you feel bewildered? I don't.

    Other Mind Shadows posts on the media:
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    3/13/04

    Invisible Gorillas and Inattentional Blindness

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    3/12/04

    Evolutionary Psychology and Moral Dilemmas

    Evolutionary psychology and moral dilemmas
    Evolutionary psychology and moral dilemmas
    MRI Brain Scans
    Evolutionary Psychology and Moral Dilemmas

    Evidence of evolutionary psychology and brain research suggests that morality is based on what feels good rather than on what is right. That is, moral judgments tend to be emotional rather than rational. Eighteenth Century philosopher David Hume anticipated this situation when he argued that people call an act good if it makes them feel good, not because it is rationally good. Moral knowledge, he said, comes partly from an "immediate feeling and finer internal sense."

    In terms of simple morality, research indicates that subjects have no problem. Magnetic Resonance Imager (MRI) brain scans show that that they have straight-forward reactions to simple moral situations. They easily choose not to kill, as an example.

    Other situations are not as easily decided, particularly when at least one decision scenario conflicts with basic emotional repugnance against a deed. As an example, see The Buck Stops Here: A Moral Dilemma and Thought Experiment, 11 February 2004, in which one moral choice involves laying hands on another human to kill him. In that regard, especially see How Your Brain Is Hard-Wired: The Trolley Problem 25 March 2014. In addition to the choices offered in that article, consider this one: You can simply re-route the runaway trolley so to kill one person rather than many. In MRI experiments, subjects are less troubled by this option as it involves an impersonal operation of a mechanical track switching mechanism. This is similar to Version 3 in the 11 February article, wherein one need not personally lay hands on another human to kill him in order to save others.

    When a child, I was told by my parents to eat all my food and to think of the starving children in China. This had little moral affect on me as I simply could not think of them. They were too many and too far away. This attitude seems hard-wired into the human brain, although from a rationally moral standpoint, there should be no conflict between the starving children and a scenario with a drowning infant. Suppose you are out for a walk in a park and see an infant fallen into the water, drowning. You must run into the water immediately but you wear brand new $150 shoes that will be ruined by a plunge into the pond. Most people do not hesitate to say that they would try to rescue the baby. Yet, in Africa thousands of children die daily because of disease or hunger. That same $150 could buy medicine and food, although somehow the thought crosses few people's mind when they eat at a restaurant or shop at a shoe store. Evolutionary psychology provides one explanation for their failure to make a connection between the two scenarios. Morality became altruism toward the tribe or family as such behavior promoted survival of the group, but was excluded from anybody outside.

    Earth's problems include global warming, which most people recognize while they continue to look the other way. Populations continue to explode in have-not countries while famine and disease increase. Technology has become a machine that money serves rather than one that serves the people. Today we need a view of the world that transcends evolutionary morality, although it remains only a possibility.

    People respond to the weather, a smile, food in the stomach, but switch channels on beholding a child, belly distended from hunger. Is it a matter of brain hard-wiring? Or can human reason prevail? If it should, how so? Immanuel Kant believed that reason alone leads us to moral truths. Was he right? Or was John Stuart Mill? Mill held that right and wrong is determined by the greatest good for the greatest number. Kant put right before good while Mill put good before right. Kant believed in a God Who ordered the universe while Mill did not. *

    A variant of the last episode of M*A*S*H has villagers hiding in the basement while enemy soldiers search the house above. Among the hiding villagers, a baby starts to cry, and its noise will draw the soldiers to the basement to kill everybody. Either the baby dies or everybody does. Would you kill the baby? Why? Why not?

    If your brain were scanned by MRI, it would probably display areas registering emotional repugnance to the problem. People have a natural tendency to turn away from such issues. Perhaps this also helps explain why they turn away from environmental issues or those in need on far-off continents.

    * (Mill: "God is a word to express, not our ideas, but the want of them." Kant: "We see things alter, come into being, and pass away; and these, or at least their state, must therefore have a cause.")

    (For another moral dilemma and thought experiment, see John Rawls and Social Justice, 7 January 2004.
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    3/10/04

    Ramesh Balsekar's Inconsistencies



    Ramesh Balsekar's Inconsistencies

    Ramesh Balsekar's InconsistenciesFormer general manager of the Bank of India in Bombay, Ramesh Balsekar studied under Nisargadatta, often translating as Nisargadatta's native language was Marathi. After the sage's death in 1981, Balsekar held speaking engagements in countries such as Germany, the United States and India. The author of many books, he is retired in Bombay, recently still meeting with visitors almost each morning although he is favored mainly by Westerners rather than by Indians. A good summary of his teachings can be found in the anonymous Consciousness Writes, a title styled after Balsekar's own book, Consciousness Strikes.

    Having read his accounts of the enlightened life, I find his explanations are sometimes contradictory as well as self-gratulatory. These two items provide an example.

    Item. Here he aligns against mechanistic determinism. "Sir Isaac Newton's physics assumed that the future of the world was precisely predictable from the state of the present. However, the new physics of quantum mechanics has come to the confident conclusion that the future is not determined totally by the past [my emphasis]. In other words, quantum mechanics says that the Source, or Consciousness, has a causal influence on the future. At any point in time, we are told, out of the thousands of probabilities, one probability collapses into an actuality in the present moment. The scientific conclusion is precisely what the sages have been saying for ages." (The Ultimate Understanding)

    My comments: In the wave function collapse of quantum physics, the observer begets one observation out of all probabilities allowed by Superposition Theory. One interpretation is that the experiment seems to be a function of its intersection with consciousness. Balsekar means that the present moment contains within itself the probabilities of Superposition Theory until human consciousness "collapses reality" into a deed or thought upon "observation." (For Superposition Theory see Schrödinger's Cat, 2 January 2004.) Balsekar also means that with wave function collapse this situation is indeterministic. Balsekar indicates that "sages have been saying for ages" that the present moment is indeterministic. What does indeterministic mean here? Note his phrase, "the future is not determined totally by the past." He means that randomness in the present moment creates a situation undetermined until the outcome is observed.

    Item. In this interview he says the opposite: "If you analyze any action which you consider to be your action, you will find that it is the reaction of the brain to an outside event over which you have no control. A thought comes--you have no control over what thought is going to come. Something is seen or heard--you have no control over what you are going to see or hear next. All of these events happen over which you have no control. And then what happens? The brain reacts to the thought or to the thing that is seen, heard, tasted, smelled or touched. The reaction of the brain is what you call 'your action'."

    Elsewhere in the same interview, he is asked this: "Are you saying that everything is predestined? That everything is preprogrammed from birth?"

    Balsekar: "Yes. I use the word "programming" to refer to the inherent characteristics of the body/mind organism. "Programming" to me means genes plus environmental conditioning"     [my emphasis]. (What is Enlightenment magazine interview, "Close Encounters of The Advaita Kind," no date.)

    My comments: In one instance, he says that indeterminism is the case while in another he argues for determinism and this second instance is clearly counter to most quantum theory. The difference between him and Ramana Maharshi is that Maharshi spoke from what he understood and had no interest in intellectual discourse. Maharshi: "There is neither freedom nor destiny. This is the final truth." In his own teachings, Ramana kept the conceptual to a minimum, and by this freedom/destiny statement he again regards concepts as pointless in matters of Consciousness.

    On the other hand, Ramesh Balsekar perhaps appeals to people of the West, analytic by culture, because he reflects the analytic tendency in some of Hindu discourse, as distinct from Zen Buddhism's resistance to excess analysis. With his penchant for intellectual explanations, Balsekar reveals a notable inconsistency for somebody who hangs a "guru" shingle outside his shop window.

    Admonishing against a desire for explanations, an old Zen parable has a student asking Master Ichu to write something of great wisdom.

    With his brush, Ichu stroked "Attention."

    "Is that all?," asked the student.

    Ichu stroked "Attention. Attention."

    That seems shallow, said the student.

    Ichu wrote three times, "Attention, Attention. Attention."

    The frustrated student asked, "What does this word mean?"

    Putting down his brush, Ichu turned to him and answered, "Attention means attention."



  • For more on problems with Ramesh Balsekar's explanations, see Two Sages and  A Taoist, 9 January 2004 and The Illusion of Free Will, 28 December 2003. Also see Some Notes on Enlightenment, 17 December 2003.
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    3/8/04

    A Thought Experiment: Where Are You?


    A Thought Experiment: Where Are You?

    Where are you? Most people say that they are behind the eyes. Blind people often feel themselves at their finger tips when reading Braille, or at the handle of their cane when walking. Sometimes people feel themselves at the edge of a car as they almost have an accident with a passing vehicle.

    But where are you? Plausibly, scientifically, you reside in your central nervous system, your brain. Electrodes attached to its different areas can stimulate various memories, feelings, and movements.

    The question remains, though.

    As part of a thought experiment originally proposed by Daniel Dennett, assume that your brain has been removed from your skull and placed in a vat of chemicals that nurture it. Your body has total, unimpaired ability to move about, although minus your brain. Instead, in your cranium is a transmitter that sends sights, sounds, touches, and scents, back to the brain. While your body roams freely, your brain remains in the vat, experiencing whatever the body encounters.

    Where would you locate yourself? Most people would say they would believe themselves not in the vat but wherever their body goes. They would still feel that they lived somewhere behind the eyes. Only a transmitter is located there.*

    So where, then, is the self, this seemingly basic element that everybody senses as present, and discusses as if it is real? What about all the words referring to it--I, you, him, or her? Apparently, because the self cannot be located, they belong to the metaphysics of grammar. (See The Metaphysics of Grammar, 17 January 2004.)

    We feel that we are a central observer, but wherever we look we don't find him or her. We are the teller of our tale. We have a narrator, so we believe, and this narration shapes our lives. Where is the narrator?

    If we cannot find the teller, then what about the tale? We have memories and hopes. We locate ourselves in space and time. Still, without a teller, where is the tale? (See Perception, 8 December 2003.)

    In quantum physics, evidence mounts to indicate that consciousness is non-local. This would not surprise a Ramana Maharshi or a Dogen Zenzi. (For an article on non-local consciousness, see John Bell's Inequality Theorem and Alain Aspect's experiments, in Looking For Reality, 10 November 2003.)

    Even non-local consciousness does not fully explain the fact that whenever we look for the self we cannot find it.

    For further discussion of the elusive self, see Shakey, Beavers, and Cartesian Theater, 12 February 2004, Cartesian Anxiety, Francisco Varela and The Emergent Self, 6 January 2004 and Benjamin Libet's experiments in Looking for Self, 8 November 2003, as well as various other articles at this site.

    For another brain/vat thought experiment, see Brain In A Vat, a different proposal, 20 November 2003.

    * (Is this similar to the phantom limb syndrome, in which one feels a foot itching even though the leg was amputated?)
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    3/6/04

    Manufacturing Consent III: Which Frog Is It?


    Manufacturing Consent III: Which Frog Is It?

    (This article is in a series, The Manufacture of Consent. Other parts will be found at the bottom.)

    The range of media ownership is unprecedented in history. Conglomerates now shape American culture and society, from movies and television to music, book publishing, and the web. They impose a different kind of Big Brother over the nation--not Orwell's totalitarian dystopia, but a social engineering that determines even teen values and voter preferences. They cross generations, these conglomerates.

    If we believe the conglomerates, we have more choices, and this is true. We have more options to buy the same package merchandised under different labels.

    A handful of owners push their products on magazine racks, cable channels, web sites, television programs, radio shows. With their diverse outlets and labels, they can sell the same or slightly altered material without paying for additional staff. With minor revisions, a few journalists can feed news and information to the many outlets of companies under the same conglomerated umbrella. By this means conglomerates make more money more quickly.

    As already explained in The Manufacture of Consent, Part One, the free market is not so free for you and me. Conglomerates threaten our culture and our society. Our entertainment, our diversions, our news and information come at a very high price, indeed.

    At one time, books were published by people who loved them. At Scribner's, Maxwell Perkins sat down with young writers like Thomas Wolfe and Ernest Hemingway to help them on manuscripts. He tutored them, took them out to lunch, wrote letters. He developed friendships with them, cared about their craft. To modern publishers, he sounds quaint, amusing, although in a Barnes and Noble book store, Hemingway, Wolfe, and other cultural icons are posted on walls. The book browser can gaze on pictures of Herman Melville, Edgar Alan Poe, Emily Dickinson, all to impart a sense of high art. In truth, publishers no longer care for literature. The bottom line alone counts. The watchword is follow the money.

    Today only the product matters, not its value to society or culture, but its value to economies of scale. The present idea of free markets accepts this as the way things should be. But at what price, this acceptance? At what price to us and future generations?

    This question has little resonance in the corridors of money and power because the free market is part of American mythos, regarded as almost a force of democratic nature. Its ideological father, Adam Smith, said that if each person pursues his own profit, then profit comes for everybody, all guided by the invisible hand of nature. This invisible hand was the metaphysical Great Machine of the Eighteenth Century, a Deism in which all worked out for the best.

    In our times the commonweal has become confused with uncommon wealth.

    In fact, free markets don't exist. All markets are artifacts of human societies, bound by rules. We find these proscriptions in the stock exchange, the World Trade Organization, the bond market, even the black market. The monopolistic free market is economic theory become democratic theory. It is a king of the heap ideology. It is not what Adam Smith meant with his belief in a benign nature guiding the invisible hand.

    The problem is that the new rules involve a corrupted moral theory, that somehow society benefits when only individualism is primary. Money alone matters, and all will sort itself out for the best if people only compete in an open market. In the meantime, fish die in our rivers, the climate warms each season, the skies turn grey above cities, the ozone gets thinner, drug use increases, criminality reaches down to twelve year olds. We buy distilled water to avoid drinking from the tap while our waste dumps are leaching into water tables.

    Through the memes of media conglomeration we are distracted from these issues. Instead, the public consciousness is allowed media access which makes money for the corporations. People have a choice to turn off the televison, or switch channels, so the simplistic argument goes. This naive view is part of the brainwashing imparted by media pundits themselves, be they talk radio hosts, or Sunday morning TV gurus, all of them allowed under the scrutiny of conglomerate executives. The view assumes that society is comprised of individuals. But people also unconsciously process the countless memes that daily invade their minds. As usual, the disciples of rugged individualism fail to acknowledge unconscious factors allowing little awareness of choice--in particular memetics. (For a discussion of memes, see Memes and Why Evolution Favored The Irrational Brain, 26 February 2004, Memes, Genes, and God, 31 December 2003, and Beyond Memes, 4 March 2004.)

    This view prevails even as the conglomerates look to amassing more influence over society and people's lives, not in the interests of Orwellian Big-Brotherhood, but for the sake of greater profit. If people saw them as Big Brother perhaps the alarm bells would have rung long ago.

    In terms of the public, children are fair game. They are influenced, of course, in the interests of sponsors and revenue.

    So long, Mr Rogers, and your soft, gentle voice. Children once watched The Brady Bunch as entire families sat down in front of the television. The episodes had morals, reflected personal integrity, and provided points of view,although such perspectives are now implied as platitudes by media-memes imposed on today's youth. Modern programming targets specific youth age groups. Kids' TV, especially Saturday mornings, reveals no Mr Rogers and his slow, caring ways. The programs move frantically, hysterically, violently, and persuasively, and even the commercials do so. It is all part of the Big Sell. It is Adam Smith gone amuck.

    As for MTV, it has no interest in encouraging good, solid citizens among youth, nor of promoting their happiness. Its only interest is to get them to watch what Viacom wants to sell. Their "increased choices" arrive only by management decision as to what will raise ratings. In fact, the options for youth's minds and their future happiness are not increased but narrowed by ever more cynical and ironic presentations that cater to their innate anti-authoritarian bent. They are not prepared for entry into society, as MTV gives them ironic, self-serving coolness without any broader context.

    Just a few decades ago, advertisers and media had scouts in youth cultures to stay abreast of changes in attitudes, fashions, and events. They no longer need to do so. Today, youth culture and markets are shaped by those who control the media. Back then, teenagers didn't care where they bought clothes, and if a company wanted to advertise their products they would give the kids, say, a company T-Shirt. Kids never would pay to wear an advertisement. Today brand logos are fashionable because fashion is shaped by the entertainment and commercials youth watch.

    Consumer media has shaped them into good, obedient consumers who will pay to advertise consumption.

    Take a look at advertising from the 1920s forward. From about the mid-1970s it gradually evolved into a new mode. Call it coolness. Now it's no longer about a community of friends, about sharing, but about how you stand out, how you look. The implicit values have become superficial.

    We are not talking about American conglomerates. These are huge. They are trans-national, saddled with monstrous debt, forced always to look at the bottom line. They live in a dog-eat-dog world and compete with one another for the public consciousness. They can't afford to think about the public good, although their executives pay lip service to it when interviewed by one of their program anchors or arraigned before Congress. Don't kid yourself. They have little to no concern for standards in taste, morals, and family values. To survive, they will merchandise what they can. Their argument will always be that they only provide people with what the public wants, which is an argument that morally corrupts Adam Smith's free market. It is a view that has run his theory amuck. They aim straight for the pleasure centers of the lowest common denominator. Noblesse oblige? Forget it.

    This is corporate theocracy, a new kind, a creeping totalitarianism. Democracy assumes, nay, requires, that its public be able to separate propaganda from truth and fact. *

    Something is happening to America and it is frightening.* A few decades ago, the largest media companies produced only newspapers, made only movies, owned only one TV network. Conglomerates will soon control our culture, if they don't already. That is no understatement. He who controls a culture will control a society. He who controls a society, will shape its government. *(For an extended discussion of this, see The Manufacture of Consent, Parts One and Two, linked below.)

    This handful of conglomerates belongs to the best of clubs, to which you and I have no access. They make deals, have cronies, shaping the minds of youth and the general public. They can do what they want without public consent, or public retribution. In fact, in terms of their memetic influence on society and culture, they can almost do what they want to the public.

    Item. In 1996, radio, a public property, was deregulated by the Telecommunications Act of that year. It lifted ownership restrictions, allowing a single company to own as many stations as they wanted rather than a mere 28. It allowed them to own up to eight in the largest markets. Overnight, big companies went to huge. Did it arouse any debate in congress? Duhh. Did Congress hold any hearings? Of course not. Its members' campaign chests held media money. Did you or I hear about any of this as major media news pieces? Did any network give it even the program half hour that it at least deserved in order to raise public awareness? No again. That would have been downright stupid on the part of the media moguls.

    So where will it end? Abraham Lincoln had great faith in the people, believing that the common man and woman had uncommon wisdom to govern their society and themselves. The people, yes, as Carl Sandburg succinctly put it.

    This is what I think. People do not change until the pain of the status quo exceeeds the pain of acting. But the majority feels no pain. All is fine. They get their programming, the dumbing-down that degenerates with each season. They notice a connection between media programming and youth behavior, between it and adult values, attitudes, and political ignorance, but shrug as if to say, What can I do about it? Perhaps they have not yet realized the implications of the situation.

    I am reminded of frogs and boiling water.

    If a frog is dropped into a pan of boiling water it will immediately hop out. If it is first put in a pan of cold water slowly brought to a boil, it will then cook to death.

    The fire is on and the water is becoming hot. Which frog is it?

    Other Mind Shadows posts on the media:
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    3/4/04

    Beyond Memes

    Beyond Memes

    Memes and genes have much in common. Both are selfish in that each "wants" itself replicated.

    As memes develop in human culture, itself a product of mind, they carry only information, which requires consciousness to convey them for further replication. In themselves, memes are part of a blind force.

    As with genes, successful memes beat the competition. They get copied. In a day we meet countless numbers of them, words on a Wheaties box, songs on the car radio, news on television. Remembering maybe less than five percent of a day's experiences, we see or hear Tony Blair, George Bush, John Kerry, Martha Stewart, Big Bird, Mickey Mouse, Teletubbies, Jay Leno, Fords, Chevies, Jaguars, Toyotas, Oscar Mayer weiners, Heinz Catsup, Starbucks Coffee, Bach fugues, Beethoven sonatas, Justin Timberlake, Janet Jackson, Dixie Chicks, McDonalds, email messages, newspaper captions, street posters, the family dog.

    Consciously or subconsciously, those that get remembered have a chance for survival. Others eventually die, their only hope dwindling as fewer and fewer leap from human brain to human brain.

    Poets once wrote of the good, the true, and the beautiful as that which is worthy of survival. Although it can be, this is not necessarily the case with memes. Think of them as viruses.

    Viruses, either biological or computer, seek a host. Memes, then, can be a kind of parasite in that they "piggy back" until one brain passes them on to another.

    Sometimes they survive best in groups of memes.

    Richard Dawkins uses Roman Catholicism as an example of meme groups. By this group, the religion grows. Memes are church teachings, including the catechism and prayer. During mass one sings hymns. Worshippers feel nearer to God as they walk into a catheral with high, vaulted ceilings, the organ music resonating off stained glass windows. These become part of memetic gospel, to have many children so that the faith can be passed on generation to generation. Of course, the pinnacle meme is the promise of everlasting life or its counterpart, fear of eternal damnation. Attendant upon this group is faith in Church dogma and doctrine. God's invisibility is also part of the meme group. Observing people, He notices their deeds and numbers their days. This meme group has been remarkably successful, surviving and prospering for hundreds of years.

    Memes arise in the mind without invitation. They come and go. A tune may haunt somebody for days, its lyrics or melody returning each morning until it wears away and something replaces it. Often planted by society, culture, or religion, they shape entire peoples and dominate lives. They offer no escape from themselves and whole populations become their willing servants.

    Such a meme in the United States is individualism. It evolved out of American history and the struggle to tame the land. Settlers, pioneers, and immigrants of all kinds found themselves in the wilderness without societal resources and dependent only on their own grit. Neighbors lived on the other side of the mountain, in the next valley, down river. When a Nebraska sod farmer saw chimney smoke on the horizon he might pack up his family and move further west because he disliked civilization's encroachment. (Also see Mother Cultures: Individualist and Collectivist, 19 January 2004 at a companion site.)

    Today in the United States, people remain steeped in the myth of individualism, a kind of tough self-responsibility, to the neglect of the ties that bind. Unlike Europeans, Americans think less of their mutal interdependence and more of their own responsibility to make it in the world. This has fostered great respect for the self-made, the billionaires who command corporate empires, but it has blinded them to their need for one another, thereby affecting social institutions.

    As for memes, they continue to arise as unbidden viruses, our minds hosting them. They are welcome guests for minds, although some people know them for their true nature. Memes reveal to us that, for the most part, we don't think. Instead, we are thought. We have no understanding unless we recognize memes for what they are.

    To do this, consciousness must empty itself. Meditation allows one approach; another depends on dwelling upstream from where memes enter. The first, is done by sitting, say, in Buddhist Zazen; the second, by turning the "flashlight" of consciousness on thoughts. Either approach requires months, or years, perhaps decades, of application. Eventually, the investigator may discover that mind itself is the meme of memes, the matrix that sustains them, and is as illusory as they are.

    Meme theorists such as Dawkins and Dennett will continue to manufacture memes disguised as theories about mind, and well they should, for their reasoning has promoted new ways to think about mind. But unless they steadfastly apply themselves to methods known in the East for centuries, they will never really know whereof they speak. Given the tenor of their thought, they might regard "beyond memes" as naive intuition, unsupportable by sophisticated inquiry, but they have achieved no breakthroughs in consciousness study. Instead they ingeniously marshal evidence in new ways. Only investigation into the "beyond meme" concept would allow understanding, not labels. Intellectual work on consciousness is absolutely necessary but much of it misses the point because thinkers and researchers think about it rather than direct attention to experiencing it. Let them get away on a Zen retreat, or put them somewhere in solitude for extended periods, and always with their resolve to pay attention to what happens.

    (Also see Enlightenment Gene, 3 March, Memes and Why Evolution Favored The Irrational Brain 26 February, Memes, Genes, and God, 31 December.) Thorstein Veblen in The Theory of The Leisure Class wrote about memes without having a name for them. Read him on Dogs as a meme 27 May 2004.
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