I'm Away

Click on the Random Read Generator for a chance post. I'm off for the holidays. Merry Christmas and Happy New Year. I'll be back in January.

Nobody Dies

Cast a cold eye
On life, on death.
Horseman, pass by!
W. B. Yeats, "Under Ben Bulben"

The law of conservation of energy states that the total amount of energy in an isolated system remains constant over time. In an isolated system, energy can be neither created nor destroyed. Just what is an isolated system. Is it bigger than a bread box? Robert Lanza, a stem cell researcher, claims that consciousness energy occurs in the universe itself as a closed system. The system is as big as the universe, or rather, the multi-verse. The universe/multiverse, he would say, is in your head. He discusses his views in his book Biocentrism. Here are some of his views.

"Although individual bodies are destined to self-destruct, the alive feeling--the 'Who am I?'--is just a 20-watt fountain of energy operating in the brain. But this energy doesn't go away at death. One of the surest axioms of science is that energy never dies; it can neither be created nor destroyed. But does this energy transcend from one world to the other?"

"Consider an experiment that was recently published in the journal Science showing that scientists could retroactively change something that had happened in the past. [Actually, this is relatively old as a generic experiment and you can read about it in Mind Shadows in John Archibald Wheeler: Time Machines & Delayed Choice.] Particles had to decide how to behave when they hit a beam splitter. Later on, the experimenter could turn a second switch on or off. It turns out that what the observer decided at that point, determined what the particle did in the past. Regardless of the choice you, the observer, make, it is you who will experience the outcomes that will result."

"In the end, even Einstein admitted, 'Now Besso' (an old friend) 'has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That means nothing. People like us...know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.' Immortality doesn't mean a perpetual existence in time without end, but rather resides outside of time altogether." More

Einstein's statement is reminiscent of a previous Mind Shadows article on Julian Barbour and Time.

A comment on the article says this: "Hindu philosophy posits that the Atman (self) and the Brahman (universe) are actually manifestations of the same thing. We are at once the universe becoming singular, and the self becoming universal."

Long ago William Hazzlitt (called The First Modern) wrote a compelling argument on how to overcome the dread of death. His thoughts can be found in Mind Shadows in On The Fear of Death.

Shakespeare's Hamlet puts the matter succinctly. Death is "the undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveller returns."

Julian Barbour: Killing Time

Physicist Julian Barbour: Time and motion are illusions. They are put into the external world by our brains, but don't exist there. Linear stories are illusions. If we could see the totality we would understand that nothing is linear. If you could look at the hemoglobin molecules in your blood you would see millions and millions of them not recognizing any "me" from one instant to the next. Your wrist watch measures the average of all nows.

He holds the controversial view that time does not exist as anything other than an illusion, and that a number of physics' problems arise from assuming that it does exist. He argues that we have no evidence of the past other than our memory of it, and no evidence of the future other than our belief in it. "Change merely creates an illusion of time, with each individual moment existing in its own right, complete and whole. He calls these moments "Nows." It is all an illusion: there is no motion and no change. He argues that the illusion of time is what we interpret through what he calls "time capsules," which are "any fixed pattern that creates or encodes the appearance of motion, change or history."

Barbour lives near Oxford, England. Since receiving his Ph.D. degree on the foundations of Einstein's general theory of relativity at the University of Cologne in 1968, he has supported himself and his family without a job in academia, working part-time as a translator.

Here is another Mind Shadows article on Julian Barbour.

The video below is in English with Dutch subtitles.

H.L. Mencken on the Cosmos & Religion

"To sum up: One, the cosmos is a gigantic fly-wheel making 10,000 revolutions a minute. Two, man is a sick fly taking a dizzy ride on it. Three. Religion is the theory that the wheel was designed and set spinning to give him a ride."

"Imagine the Creator as a low comedian, and at once the world becomes explicable."

"We must respect the other fellow's religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart." H.L.Mencken

News and The Diligent Reader

Here are some news items to show what vital information the diligent reader can learn.

Off For The Holidays

I'm gone. No posts. Only turkey and family. Back 1 December. Click on the Random Read Generator for a chance post.

If you started your Christmas shopping early, here is a gift idea for all the difficult people in your life.

Without Zen inThe Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (Sorry, Robert Persig)

Still, like Persig's novel, it is an inquiry into values.

"When Matthew Crawford finished his doctorate in political philosophy at the University of Chicago, he took a job at a Washington think tank. 'I was always tired,' he writes, 'and honestly could not see the rationale for my being paid at all.' He quit after five months and started doing motorcycle repair in a decaying factory in Richmond, Va. This journey from philosopher manqué to philosopher-mechanic is the arc of his new book, Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work. . . . ."

"Princeton economist Alan Blinder [argues that] the labor market of the next decades won't necessarily be divided between the highly educated and the less-educated: "The critical divide in the future may instead be between those types of work that are easily deliverable through a wire (or via wireless connections) with little or no diminution in quality and those that are not." Binder goes on to summarize his own take: "You can't hammer a nail over the Internet." Learning a trade is not limiting but, rather, liberating. If you are in possession of a skill that cannot be exported overseas, done with an algorithm, or downloaded, you will always stand a decent chance of finding work. Even rarer, you will probably be a master of your own domain, something the thousands of employed but bored people in the service industries can only dream of." More here.

Ida: An Evolutionary Link Missing and Now Found

By now, you are probably aware of the remarkable find of an evolutionary missing link. On somebody's wall as an art decoration, it was bought by the University of Oslo and extensively studied. Here are some details.

Scientists say they have found a primate fossil that shows our connection with other mammals and our earliest human ancestor.Norwegian fossil scientist Dr Jørn Hurum, University of Oslo Natural History Museum, has secretly conducted a detailed forensic analysis of the extraordinary fossil, studying the data to decode humankind's ancient origins. At 95% complete, Ida is set to revolutionize our understanding of human evolution.

Discovered in Messel Pit, Germany, the fossil is twenty times older than most fossils that explain human evolution. Known as 'Ida', the fossil is a transitional species showing characteristics from the very primitive non-human evolutionary line (prosimians, such as lemurs), but she is more related to the human evolutionary line (anthropoids, such as monkeys, apes and humans). This places Ida at the very root of anthropoid evolution - when primates were first developing the features that would evolve into our own.

Have You Had A Spiritual Experience? What Does It Mean?

"According to polls, there's a 50-50 chance you have had at least one spiritual experience — an overpowering feeling that you've touched God, or another dimension of reality."

But is all this the result of neurons firing in your brain? Or is it an actual spiritual experience? Put differently, scientists can track neurons in your temporal lobe while you are having the experience, but does this "mean that there's nothing spiritual going on?

'No,' [one scientist, Devinsky,] says simply.

Think about a man and woman who are in love, Devinsky says. They look at each other, and in all likelihood, something fires in their temporal lobes.

'However, does that negate the presence of true love between them?' he asks. 'Of course not.' " More

Science has its own dogma and doctrine, with reductionism as part of them. In terms of scientific reductionism, there is this to consider, which can stand against reductionism without help from the dogma or doctrine of religion, if that is your choice. The writer is himself a secular Jew. His "religious education did not take." Here is what he says:

"Whatever the elementary particles are doing, they are not forming political alliances, or looking on one another with mute incoherent longing, or casting an anxious eye at the clock, or waking with a start in the early hours of the morning, wondering what it all means, or coming to realize that they are destined to fall like leaves of the trees leaving not a trace behind." Found in this.

I don't regard gaps in our knowledge as evidence for the divine; neither do I deny it. (I hold to what John Keats called Negative Capability.) Some gaps, but not all, will be narrowed, not closed, by reductionist methods. The divine? That requires faith and belief, a different approach.

With reductionist investigation a degree of mystery will always remain. Some call the mystery God. Others call it God of The Gaps, to diminish or disappear as they narrow.

I'm Away

Off this week, which includes Veteran's Day. Click on the Random Read Generator for a chance post. Until I return, I'll leave you with this--

"If I hadn’t spent so much time studying Earthlings,” said the Tralfamadorian, “I wouldn’t have any idea what was meant by free will. I’ve visited thirty-one inhabited planets in the universe, and I have studied reports on one hundred more. Only on Earth is there any talk of free will.” (Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse–Five)

"There's a very large question here." (Winnie The Pooh)

Spending Five Months In Silence

If you have ever tried gazing at a wall for hours a day, every day of the week, you can appreciate the account below. I have done it. I have attended Zen sesshins, sitting in lotus position, following my breath, noticing the occasional wayward thought or sensation as it skittered across a somewhere called the mind. Meditation, deep and prolonged, changes things. It alters how you look at the world and how you look within. Read on about meditating in Nepal.

"My childhood nickname was 'Chatterduck.' But last year, I decided to spend five months on silent meditation retreat, mostly in Nepal. What, my friends have asked (at least the ones who didn't think I'd lost my mind), is it like to spend five months without talking, writing, or even updating my facebook status? Short answer: not what you'd expect, but more powerful.

First of all, not talking is the easy part. You don't go crazy, and you don't forget how to speak."

". . . What's the point of noting all these mundane sensations, feelings, and thoughts? Well, enlightenment, of course, which comes as a result of seeing directly and in one's own experience that perceptions arise and pass of their own accord, that none of them ever really satisfies, and that there's no self or soul separate from the sensations, feelings, and thoughts themselves. Consciousness just happens, and the interiority of our experience is an illusion. There's no there, here. . . . There weren't many weird mystical fireworks that shot off during my months of silence -- just a lot of time to see the ordinary very, very clearly. This is true in everyday experience, too. It's not like most of us don't know what's good for us; we do. We're just too busy chasing the next pleasant experience to live up to our own ideals. Sure, what really matters is timeless and free -- but the timeless and free is also boring. So we get back on the hamster wheel and start spinning." More

Warren Buffett, Colanders, and Cookie Sheets

For $34 billion Warren Buffett bought up Burlington Northern Santa Fe. The railroad is a major coal carrier and Buffett foresees an increased demand for that form of energy. Apparently, severely reduced carbon dioxide emissions are not in his crystal ball. In the short term he is probably a good soothsayer, but in the long term--by mid-century--drastically decreased water supplies due to global warming will have caused nations and their politicians to have acted because of overwhelming refugee masses and perhaps destabilized governments. They will find themselves in an emergency to severely reduce consumption of coal and other emitters. Many very respected experts say that by then the planet will have passed the point of no return. Buffet reminds me of one definition of a cynic: somebody who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.

For all that, he is an interesting character. He has a humble and plain-folks personality, although in him is a fierce competitiveness and desire to be top-dog. He is a man of contradictions.

Many tales have been told about the Wizard of Omaha, one of the world's richest people. One I like describes how he routinely took an elderly aunt, I think, to a hamburger joint for their regular meal together. He likes spaghetti, cheese hamburgers, and meat and potatoes, but has little use for exotic cuisine. Now, a biography is out, and it provides anecdotes as well as a psychological understanding of Buffet. Here is a review of the book, The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life By Alice Schroeder:

"Kind, but absent as a parent, Warren Buffet was used to the attention of his first wife as a 'sort of a single mother. . . . [and was] so undomesticated that once, when she was nauseous and asked him to bring her a basin, he came back with a colander. She pointed out that it had holes; he rattled around the kitchen and returned triumphantly bearing the colander on a cookie sheet. After that she knew he was hopeless. . . .

Here is one of the odd things about the man whom Schroeder describes: the plain facts of his young character assemble themselves into something like a portrait of a universal loser--and yet right from the start Buffett himself seems to have been able to believe that the universe was wrong and he was right. . . . In the most important social departments, he started out well behind his classmates and, as he puts it, 'I never caught up, basically.' He had terrible social anxieties and, right up until the time he married, at the age of twenty-one, a special lack of talent with girls. . . . As a man he would reserve his harshest criticism for those who lied or cheated or stole, but as a boy he shoplifted pathologically--not because he wanted a particular thing, but simply for the pleasure of stealing. . . . Buffett did well in only one class, typing. . . .

Kay Graham once asked him for a dime to make a phone call and Buffett, finding only a quarter in his pocket, went off to make change. " More

Steven Pinker on Consciousness and Pulling The Plug

To dictate his memoir The Diving Bell and the Butterfly: A Memoir of Life in Death, Jean-Dominique Bauby used his eyelid to signal the words to his typist. That was all the communication he had available. In December of 1995, at 43, the editor in chief of France's Elle magazine suffered a stroke which severely damaged his brain stem. After several weeks in a coma, he woke to find that he was one of the rare victims of a condition called Locked-In Syndrome" or LIS, which had left his mind functioning but his body almost completely shut down. He was in a coma for weeks and then awakened to find that he understood others but could not communicate with them--almost. His mind functioned as usual but his body was completely paralyzed--except for one eyelid. The book was made into a profound and deeply engrossing movie. After finishing his book, Bauby died in 1997.

Consider, then, this situation as described by Steven Pinker. It is not LIS, but a condition called Persistent Vegetative State. Here is a woman whose brain was more profoundly injured than Bauby's, yet it reflected consciousness of events going on around her. Was there an "I" in her mind, aware of all that was going on but unable to communicate?:

"The young women had survived the car crash, after a fashion. In the five months since parts of her brain had been crushed, she could open her eyes but didn't respond to sights, sounds or jabs. In the jargon of neurology, she was judged to be in a persistent vegetative state. In crueler everyday language, she was a vegetable.

So picture the astonishment of British and Belgian scientists as they scanned her brain using a kind of MRI that detects blood flow to active parts of the brain. When they recited sentences, the parts involved in language lit up. When they asked her to imagine visiting the rooms of her house, the parts involved in navigating space and recognizing places ramped up. And when they asked her to imagine playing tennis, the regions that trigger motion joined in. Indeed, her scans were barely different from those of healthy volunteers. The woman, it appears, had glimmerings of consciousness."

Pinker says this about her condition: "Try to comprehend what it is like to be that woman. Do you appreciate the words and caresses of your distraught family while racked with frustration at your inability to reassure them that they are getting through? Or do you drift in a haze, springing to life with a concrete thought when a voice prods you, only to slip back into blankness? If we could experience this existence, would we prefer it to death? And if these questions have answers, would they change our policies toward unresponsive patients--making the Terri Schiavo case look like child's play?" More

Is Mormonism Christian?

I regard the question as academic and not worthy of serious consideration. I think this way because after Jesus' death the Jesus teachings took many forms, and many interpretations until becoming codified into the orthodoxy it is today. Centuries after Jesus' death, Constantine's Council of Nicaea, after days of wrangling and debate, decided what would be accepted as official Church doctrine, and what would not be. In the 19th Century, Joseph Smith's ideas came far too late to be accepted or rejected as orthodoxy by Council members--that's all. In short, the matter of orthodoxy was decided by men, some wise, some foolish. Barring his polygamy and other possible heresies, they might have accepted some of Joseph Smith's claims had he and his ideas been of the times and assimilated by the culture. Still, I offer the writer's comments below as they are interesting.

" . . . there has been more smoke than light, particularly about the fundamental question of what Mormons actually believe. Journalists, never particularly interested in doctrinal matters, tend to focus on the contemporary influence of the church or on intriguing chapters from its past history—most prominently the practice of polygamy, which officially was ended in 1890. Scholarly studies do little better, in part because they tend to focus on the history of the church, particularly its formative era from 1820 to 1890, or on its contemporary sociology and culture.

All this has led to considerable misunderstanding about what Latter-day Saints believe about the central subject of Christian religion: Jesus Christ and his atonement for sin. One can find innumerable assertions that Mormons do not believe Jesus was the messiah, that they do not believe he atoned for the sins of the fallen human race, and that they believe salvation comes by works.

All of these statements are false, and they reflect incomprehension of Mormon beliefs and doctrine." More

Penn and Teller On The 7 Basics of Magic

Holding a cigarette, Teller wants his tricks to expose how we construct reality. Every day of our lives we perpetuate fraud on ourselves, unaware of our self-deception. T.S. Eliot said mankind cannot bear too much reality and he apparently was right.

Our brains were adapted for evolution. A rock could be a bear, a stick a snake, and too much stimuli could overload the brain. Instead it pictures "reality" for us. It is wired to reveal to us how things are supposed to look.

Although not psychologists, magicians have an intuitive grasp of our ability to deceive ourselves. "Every time you perform a magic trick, you're engaging in experimental psychology," Teller says. "If the audience asks, 'How the hell did he do that?' then the experiment was successful. I've exploited the efficiencies of your mind."

We can gaze open-mouthed as the lady emerges unscathed after seemingly being sawed in half. We know it was a trick. We knew we would be deceived, but we cannot see how it was possible. We trust our vision, our hearing, our common sense, which deceive us each time a magician steps on stage.

Watch the video below to understand the basic rules of deception in magic.

Psychopaths I Have Known

I can count psychopaths among my acquaintances. They committed no crimes and had never been in prison, but psychopaths they were. One acquaintance was the most notable. He rose to become head of a large organization and those who worked for him suffered greatly from his callous disregard for common decency. Numerous formal complaints were lodged against him, but somehow he manipulated the perceptions of those who received the complaints so that either (1) his bosses were afraid of him or (2) they truly believed his employees simply had grudges against him.

Herman Goering, Hitler's Luftwaffe Marshal, was a psychopath. Like so many of his kind, he was likable in superficial meetings, but was vain, indifferent to others' feelings, and the super hero of his own story--so much so that he thought everybody else must admire him as much as he admired himself. Under-appreciated at the Nuremberg War Crimes Trial, he was shocked to discover the judges considered him a criminal. He hanged himself.

Estimates vary for male psychopaths in the population, from one out of ten to one out of a hundred to four out of a hundred . An estimate for women is one out of three hundred. The essential point is this. They are more common than people think. Your next door neighbor may be one. The statistics would include some readers of this blog.

"It is well observed that psychopaths (a.k.a. sociopaths) are found both in prison and in managerial positions. In The Sociopath Next Door, Martha Stout analyzed many individuals with psychopathy and most of them were not part of the offender population. I think that leadership researchers have somehow overlooked these types of "leaders" or organizational psychopaths who have inflicted pain to many but succeeded in maintaining their positions (even been promoted). More

I found a checklist by Robert Hare for psychopathy. He lists the following traits:

(1) interpersonal or affective defects (e.g., glibness or superficial charm, grandiose feelings of self-worth, conning or manipulative behavior, lack of remorse or guilt, shallow affects, callousness or lack of empathy)
(2) social deviance and antisocial (irresponsibility, parasitic lifestyle, impulsivity, and unstable relationships, criminal versatility).
(3) other attributes.

Number 3 leaves the door open and such characteristics as irresponsibility describe criminals rather than those who have careers. Quoting the checklist, the writer, Key Sun, says he has "encountered about three or four psychopaths in organizational settings in the past. I observed they were frequently abusive, disregarding the feelings and rights of others; they caused disasters to everything they put their hands on. However, they appeared to never be found responsible for the harms they did. I always wonder how those who are neither emotionally nor socially intelligent (namely, they lack the basic leadership qualifications suggested by some researchers) operate so well, whereas nice people in the same settings are frequently reprimanded or punished."

Note "they appeared to never be found responsible for the harms they did." That was precisely my experience in observing my former acquaintance.

The writer has "tentative explanations:
1. Psychopaths know how to ingratiate themselves with people of higher status.
2. They prey on nice victims who they know are unlikely to jeopardize their positions.
3. They know how to take others' achievements as their own credits, and blame their mistakes on others.
4. They are good at using both fear and tear to menace and confuse others.

Here are excerpts I found while surfing for information on psychopaths:

Only 20-25% of those in prison are psychopaths.

When asked a question such as “What does remorse feel like?” for instance, the typical psychopath will become irritated, deflect the question, or attempt to change the subject.

Psychopaths “know the words but not the music.” Those that turn to crime are generally considered “unsuccessful psychopaths” due to their failure to blend into society. Those who do succeed can do so spectacularly.

While it may sound like a cynical joke, it’s a fact that psychopaths have a clear advantage in fields such as law, business, and politics. They have higher IQs on average than the general population. They take risks and aren’t fazed by failures. They know how to charm and manipulate. They’re ruthless.

It could even be argued that the criteria used by corporations to find effective managers actually select specifically for psychopathic traits: characteristics such as charisma, self-centeredness, confidence, and dominance are highly correlated with the psychopathic personality, yet also highly sought after in potential leaders. More.

And More. In the interest of brevity, I did not want to include this, but it eloquently captures the problem of psychopathy, so here it is:

"The high incidence of sociopathy in human society has a profound effect on the rest of us who must live on this planet, too, even those of us who have not been clinically traumatized. The individuals who constitute this 4 percent drain our relationships, our bank accounts, our accomplishments, our self-esteem, our very peace on earth.

Yet surprisingly, many people know nothing about this disorder, or if they do, they think only in terms of violent psychopathy - murderers, serial killers, mass murderers - people who have conspicuously broken the law many times over, and who, if caught, will be imprisoned, maybe even put to death by our legal system.

We are not commonly aware of, nor do we usually identify, the larger number of nonviolent sociopaths among us, people who often are not blatant lawbreakers, and against whom our formal legal system provides little defense." More

Does Spontaneity Promote Happiness?

"Despite considerable research on the topic, I've discovered very little explicitly relating spontaneity to happiness. Admittedly, it's doubtful that any straightforward, one-to-one correspondence actually exists. Still, what various theorists have said about this ideal state of consciousness suggests that, however indirectly, spontaneity does play a crucial role in its achievement. For whether these writers talk about the importance of living in the moment (or 'mindfulness'), liberating oneself from self-consciousness, or even 'being in the zone,' the underlying notion of living more spontaneously to foster a greater state of well-being is generally not far below the surface."

Spontaneity. Hmmm. Long ago when I took French, I read a novel by Andre Gide, Lafcadio's Adventures (in French Les Caves du Vatican, or The Vatican Cellars), in which the protagonist tried to do a completely gratuitous act--something undetermined by him. Without premeditation, so he thinks, without a plan, he murders a man, by shoving him off a train. But the act was not gratuitous, for at the last minute Lafcadio Wluki had intent. He could not escape the cause and effect which informs our lives. For Gide, this was a philosophical novel on what the novelist regarded as the conflict between human freedom and determinism. So much for literature vis-à-vis neuroscience, which cannot find a ghost in the machine.

Which raises the question, Is anything ever spontaneous? Yes, says Robert Burton (On Being Certain: Believing You Are Right Even When You're Not). Yes, by implication in the sense that we think we know something because a conscious thought (our belief) arose as a sensation produced by the unconscious mind. The conscious thought that we are right is produced by an unconscious association and is therefore spontaneous. Burton has an interesting argument and from a neurological perspective he is dead on about many things, but it is too long for my purpose here. Read the book if you want to understand more.

Burton, though, was a neurologist, now retired to write novels, and his book is not about happiness. For a psychologist's perspective on happiness and spontaneity, read on. More

Anterograde Amnesia

What would it be like to be Rip Van Winkle every thirty seconds? That is, to remember at most in thirty second segments, and to forget everything beyond that time span? According to the video below, it is like continually waking up. It is like a repeated surprise. Oh, so this is new! Oh, so that is new! Soon, the continual newness gets old.

The movie Memento puts a Hollywood spin on the condition. The lead character suffers from anterograde amnesia and searches for the man he believes raped and killed his wife during a burglary. His brain incurred severe trauma during the attack on his wife and he cannot store new memories. To compensate, he takes copious notes and photographs, as well as tatoos, to keep information about himself, others, and his wife's killer.

"In most cases of anterograde amnesia, patients lose declarative memory, or the recollection of facts, but they retain non-declarative memory, often called procedural memory. For instance, they are able to remember and in some cases learn how to do things such as talking on the phone or riding a bicycle, but they may not remember what they had eaten earlier that day for lunch. In addition, patients have a diminished ability to remember the temporal context in which objects were presented." More

In brief, anterograde amnesia applies to those who can't remember after the event that caused the memory loss. Retrograde amnesia applies to people who can't remember what happened before the event. Some people suffer both kinds.

The man in the video below cannot remember beyond fifty or sixty seconds. He tells the woman that each time he feels like he has just awakened. He feels continual amazement. He cannot remember dreams, or what he did five minutes ago. He knows he is aging and by listening to him you understand he feels that without memory he is losing his life. As soon as he wakes up he makes a diary entry to the effect that he has just awakened. Then he wakes up again and crosses out the previous entry because he believes he has just awakened this time instead .

Myths of What Makes Us Happy

We think we know what will make us happy, but do we? Extensive research on happiness reveals a rather surprising conclusion. Few people know what will make them happy. Most people think they know, but really don't. This failure to understand themselves leads them into lives with unfulfilling careers and relationships.

One explanation for the failure to understand can be found in the natural tendency to cognitive bias. Cognitive bias sneaks up on us, even though we know it exists. We try to be objective in our decision making, but often don't have a clue as to how we are prejudiced in our reasoning criteria. Our brains are hard wired for cognitive biases and we often cannot see through that fact. This had an evolutionary advantage. If it moved and was as big as a boulder, it probably might eat us. Our ancestors ran. They didn't have to think about it. People tend to believe a certain way because others do. This, too, had an advantage, for those who didn't fit in were cast out into the wilderness. Then there is confirmation bias, the tendency to look for explanations that fit our preconceptions. This may have facilitated decision making when life was simple, nasty, brutish, and short, and decisions had to be made quickly.

Interestingly, many people think fame would make them happy. This is a relatively new phenomenon, one rare in communitarian societies, as well as in America and Europe as recently as the nineteenth century. I regard it as due to alienation in modern society. People want recognition that closer social connections once offered. As an example, self-esteem once came from love, concern, and warm relationships with others in close-knit communities.

The video below discusses the myths about happiness and points out what has been found to make people happy. A very brief commercial precedes it.

Living With Epilepsy

In High school, walking between classes, I saw a group of kids standing around something. When I got to the crowd, I saw a boy on the lawn, his legs and arms jerking spasmodically. He was wholly unconscious. Fourteen years old, I didn't know what to do. I had never seen anybody behave like that and had no idea how to help him.

Suddenly, two teachers and the school nurse pushed through the crowd. We went on to our next classes. They took care of the boy. That afternoon, I learned that he had an epileptic fit. I didn't know the boy but I felt sorry for him. As a teenager, he had been publicly seen in a very un-cool situation. I didn't understand that was the least of his worries, although I am sure he felt stigmatized. Much later, I learned the terminology. The boy had what was then called a grand mal seizure. That was a big-time problem.

Seizures are strange things. "Depending on the part of the brain affected, seizures can produce hallucinations, anxiety, feelings of religious ecstasy or bizarre psychological tics such as 'hyperfamiliarity,' a delusional sense that you're already acquainted with everyone you meet."

I wonder if the boy is still alive, or how long he lived. "There is some debate about the long-term risk from repeated seizures." Some scientists believe seizures can cause brain damage. Most certainly uncontrolled seizures can lead to "lasting memory problems, cognitive deficits, personality changes—and death."

Curiously, specific recurrent events can cause seizures. Oliver Sacks described a woman who went into a seizure whenever she heard Neapolitan music.

Nowadays some epilepsy can be controlled by electronic devices such as the vagal nerve stimulator. It sends an electric signal to the brain through the vagus nerve in the neck. More

Were The Essenes Authors of The Dead Sea Scrolls?

Discovered between 1947 and 1956, the Dead Sea scrolls altered the historical view of Biblical times and were of great importance in our understanding of Christ and antiquity. Found in eleven caves at Wadi Qumran on a shore of the Dead Sea, the roughly 900 documents include copies of Biblical documents. Written on parchment or papyrus and in Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek, the manuscripts range in date from 150 years before Christ to 70 years after his birth. The scrolls are most commonly identified with the ancient Jewish sect called the Essenes.

Scholars have put forth many well-reasoned doubts as to whether the Essenes existed, or were invented by Greek and Laton historians. Rachel Elior is one of them. More

Caloric Restriction & Long Life

It happened long ago, and yet popular culture lacks knowledge of ground-breaking experiments on how to live longer. The year was 1934. The scientists were Clive McCay and Mary Crowell of Cornell University. The experiment was simple. McCay and Crowell fed laboratory rats a diet with severely reduced calories while insuring nutrition remained adequate. This diet resulted in life spans twice as long as otherwise expected. In humans, a calorie-restricted diet could lead to life spans of 115 to 120 years, the maximum that longevity evidence indicates. That increase in years would be attended by relatively good health until death.

Roy Walford and Richard Weindruch conducted similar experiments on mice. In 1986, Weindruch reported that restricting the calorie intake of laboratory mice proportionally increased their life span compared to a group of mice with a normal diet. The calorie-restricted mice also maintained youthful appearances and activity levels longer and showed delays in age-related diseases. Walford and Weindruch summarized their findings in a book, The Retardation of Aging and Disease by Dietary Restriction (1988).

The findings apply to more than rats and mice. Many people have taken up the practice of caloric restriction (CR) and there are web sites dedicated to it. Because life is short, they have chosen not to wait for research on the possibility of parallel physiological links in humans.

The findings have been significant. In 2002 at Washington University, 30 participants were engaged in trials on longevity and caloric restriction. Dr. Luigi Fontana found that the practitioners appear to age more slowly than the general population. In the caloric restriction group,with a mean age of 55, systolic blood pressure had a mean of 110, about that of a 20-year-old. More here and here.

Cloning Neanderthals: Within Our Reach

Let's say that our cousins the Neanderthals can be cloned and brought back to life. Although our ancestors wiped them out, rendered them extinct, we modern humans allegedly have found a way to bring them back. That is, "a team of researchers led by geneticist Svante Pääbo at the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig, Germany" have. They have "completed a draft sequence of the genome of Neanderthal humans."

Mind you, they won't be brought back because of compassion for having rendered them extinct. Rather, "evolutionary biologists believe that comparing the Neanderthal genome with our own will throw considerable light on the genetic changes that gave us our big brains, language, and the ability to create culture."

How much will it cost? Some say about $30 million, peanuts with the right grants and sponsors.

There is an ethical problem in all of this. "Neanderthals are human beings, too. The ancestral lineage that led to both Neanderthals and modern humans diverged from the chimpanzee line nearly 6 million years ago.Archaeological evidence also indicates that Neanderthals behaved in ways similar to modern humans. They controlled fire, wore clothing, made and used tools, and buried their dead."

The same laws that protect us, must protect them. They would not be chimpanzees in a laboratory. More.

Military Dogs Returning to Multiple War Tours Suffer Stress, Nightmares

In WWI they called it shell shock. In WWII it was combat fatigue. Today, soldiers experience Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Dogs also go to war.

Timi, a 5 year-old German shepherd, is an Iraq war veteran, and "according to his medical file, he has nightmares 'characterized by violent kicking.' His veterinarian says he has had 'readjustment issues' since coming home--although not severe enough to prevent him from returning to the field. Timi started thrashing about in his sleep. . . . . 'He was kicking the . . . kennel down. . . . When I got him out of it, he'd have that bewildered look, and it would take him a minute to know where he was. Then he'd fall back asleep, and it would happen again and again.' For two years, Walter Burghardt, chief of behavioral medicine at the Department of Defense Military Working Dog Veterinary Service, has been studying the effects of combat on dogs. More

Consciousness (Not) Explained

For most of us, our emotions are stirred, powerful feelings arise, and that is what we are likely to remember.

"Bill Noonan hasn't suffered any obvious physical damage to his brain. Yet for more than two decades after his return from Vietnam, he has re-experienced the most terrifying event of his life several times a week as a waking dream. 'It was a night ambush,' he remembers. 'The first seven guys to my right were machine-gunned down. My gas mask was shot right off my hip. That was my first fire fight.' Bill knew his flashbacks weren't real-but they seemed so real that it made no difference. 'I didn't know what was happening,' he says. 'The biggest fear I had was that I was crazy. ' "

Not so, all of us. Far from traumatic experiences, Marcel Proust sought a kind of metaphysics in memory. He found his most meaningful events in the taste of a cookie, or the angle of his feet while he gazed at a building. "The past," he wrote, "still lives in us . . . has made us what we are and is remaking us every moment!" He says, "it is a vase filled with perfumes, sounds, places and climates! . . . So we hold within us a treasure of impressions . . . that become certain moments of our past." (Formerly Remembrance of Things Past, now In Search of Lost Time.)

In either case, Proust's or Noonan's, the mind is the mystery. It is the source of our sense of self, our sense of being in the world, our sense of choice. Some say it is merely a function of consciousness, which in turn arises from the brain, an emergent phenomenon, physical at its root. Others argue that to insist on only the physicality is to deny a spiritual aspect to our lives.

Long before Descartes came up with his "I think, therefore I am," Buddha had said, in effect, "I am, therefore I think." Consciousness itself remains a mystery, arising as Eastern sages say, out of the great I AM.

In the West, science hopes to explain much of it. Nonetheless, as they study it, they understand that the victims of mental disease or brain damage provide "stark demonstrations of how fragile reality can be. Most people agree, within limits, on the objective character of the world around them. Yet while the victims of mental disorders are certainly conscious and aware, their worlds are profoundly different from those of most of us." More

I'm Away

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Survival of The Kindest

In Good Natured (1996) Frans de Waal provides an account of an old male bonobo leading a blind female around by the hand, and another of an ape who helped an injured bird by climbing a tree, spreading the bird's wings, and sending it off into the air. The primate somehow knew the kind of help the bird needed. Throughout the world of primates, observers have noted how apes reveal a capacity to assist others insightfully.

De Waal studied the field work of researchers, and the "veneer theory" of people such as Jane Goodall, who held that apes and humans share an innate tendency toward agression and violence. In human society this tendency is veiled by the veneer of civilization. Instead, he finds, and argues for, a wide range of ape behavior, from agression to tenderness and explores what this might mean in human society.

"When a bird flew into the glass enclosure of a bonobo named Kuni, de Waal recounts, she picked it up and tried to help it fly away again. Rather than comforting the starling like a fellow ape, Kuni carried it to the top of a tree, carefully spread its wings, and launched it gently into the air, showing that she recognized its needs as distinct from her own--a remarkable act of empathy. Humans show the same inclination when they help strangers without regard to their own reward, such as stopping to assist accident victims or giving away money to people they have never met."

“I think our motivations often transcend the reason why a behavior evolved,” de Waal says. “Acts of helping may have originally evolved in context for their survival value, but are now applied to situations outside that.”

Notice the words "transcend" and "evolved" above. He refers to transcending evolution. Here, de Waal implies a position against the reductionist explanations of evolutionary psychology, which see behavior as a means to perpetuate individual genes. A catch-phrase of reductionism can be found in Richard Dawkins' concept of "the selfish gene."

In Our Inner Ape, de Waal has a section, “Girl Power,” in which he "describes how females run the show in bonobo communities, controlling the food supply and wielding considerable authority over relationships and mating. Even the male bonobo hierarchy, de Waal says, is actually determined by the influence of the mothers." More

Carlos Castaneda & Tin Cups

Carlos Castaneda reached world fame with 12 books that have sold more than 8 million copies in 17 languages. As in the 1960s and 1970s, today he is read for his descriptions of another way of seeing the world through heightened awareness. He rarely spoke in public about his work, but since his death in 1998 he remains widely read, with followers around the globe. To this day controversy surrounds his accounts of his experiences.

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.
_____________________________________
This article derives from various sources, including Details magazine, March 1994, "You Only Live Twice," by Bruce Wagner.

Karen Armstrong, Religions, and The Golden Rule

"As she accepts her 2008 TED Prize, author and scholar Karen Armstrong talks about how the Abrahamic religions -- Islam, Judaism, Christianity -- have been diverted from the moral purpose they share to foster compassion. But Armstrong has seen a yearning to change this fact. People want to be religious, she says; we should act to help make religion a force for harmony. She asks the TED community to help her build a Charter for Compassion -- to help restore the Golden Rule as the central global religious doctrine."

George Koval

Nobody knew it, at least almost nobody, but a man born and bred in Sioux City, Iowa, did great damage to the United States as a spy for the Soviet Union. "Atomic spies are old stuff. But historians say Dr. Koval, who died in his 90s last year in Moscow and whose name is just coming to light publicly, was probably one of the most important spies of the 20th century." George Koval grew up in a small town, made many friends, played baseball and football, ate hot dogs, served in the United States Army in World War II, worked on the Manhattan Project, and eventually defected to the Russians after they thought his cover was blown. Worst, he provided them with key information on how to make an atomic bomb. He was recently honored by Vladimir Putin with the Russian Federation's highest medal. Hero for them, traitor for the United States.

"On November 2, 2007, some of Russia’s most senior military and intelligence officials gathered at the Kremlin to honor a Soviet spy whose name was until then completely absent from the annals of espionage history. . . .Russian president Vladimir Putin [paid] tribute to George Koval. Koval was an American citizen born in Iowa to immigrant parents from Belarus. In 1932, Koval, his parents and two brothers, all of whom were US citizens, moved back to the then rapidly developing Soviet Union to escape the effects of the Great Depression. . . . He received Soviet citizenship and returned to the US through San Francisco in October 1940. By that time, Koval was an accredited agent of the GRU, what intelligence professionals usually refer to as a sleeper agent. In 1943, Koval joined the Manhattan Project –the allied effort to develop the world’s first operational atomic bomb. More. Also read this.

Mark Rothko & Trophy Paintings: Or What Is It Really Worth?

It's both a cliché and a truism that "starving" artists depend on discovery by critics and endorsement by rich patrons in order to spread their reputation for genius. It's another cliché and truism that many die undiscovered. In other words, the intrinsic value of a painting depends on the painter's reputation. Investment bankers don't worry about being discovered and they don't worry about where their next meal comes from. The intrinsic value of money may be arbitrary, but a million dollars are still a million dollars. They can buy lots of stuff. *(For my purposes here, read intrinsic as a consensual value which in turn dictates price.)

We are in a recession and in a bear market, and stock prices have plummeted. Toxic assets and banks involve a question of mark-to-market, which is another way of asking whether they have intrinsic value, or whether they simply should cost what the market will pay.

In current economic conditions, how do art prices find their level? How do prices form at all in the art market? Why $73 million for a Mark Rothko and not $7.3 million? So here is one consideration of the question:

"If you want to own things, art is a pretty good bet. Buy art, build a museum, put your name on it, let people in for free. That's as close as you can get to immortality . . . I love art. It is uplifting. If the choice is between buying another building or a Pollock, I'd go for the Pollock every time."

"When a living artist knows his works can sell for tens of millions of dollars--which is the case with Jasper Johns, say, if not quite yet with Damien Hirst--how does he respond to that opportunity? And how does a buyer feel about remunerating a living artist so hugely and directly? To buy a work of art is one thing; to make another man rich is somewhat different. It demystifies the process, at least. More

Alan Weisman: The World Without Us

In that classic movie, On The Beach, the submarine crew finally discover the source of the erratic Morse code they had heard in Australia. Arriving off the coast of California, they take a launch to a deserted industrial site. Prowling its grounds, they discover a window draw string that the breeze has wrapped around the lever of a telegraph key. When the wind blows, the key taps out its "code." In San Francisco, they had looked through a telescope at a deserted city. It was all gone. The United States was gone. The world was gone. Fallen to nuclear holocaust.

Picture a world from which we are all suddenly vanished. Tomorrow. For a few days, there would be silence as grass grows in neighborhoods, street lights burn at intersections, and static hisses on radios and televisions. In a few months, weeds take over. In a few years, wild animals prowl the neighborhoods. Colonies of cockroaches make homes in kitchen cupboards and scamper across floors.

"How would the rest of nature respond if it were suddenly relieved of the pressures we heap on it and our fellow organisms? How soon would, or could, the climate return to where it was before we fired up all our engines?"

And again. "After we're gone, nature's revenge for our smug, mechanized superiority arrives waterborne. It starts with wood-frame construction, the most widely used residential building technique in the developed world. It begins on the roof, probably asphalt of slate shingle, warranted to last two or three decades--but that warranty doesn't count around the chimney, where the first leak occurs. As the the flashing separates under rain's relentless insistence, water sneaks beneath the shingles. It flows across four-by-eight-foot sheets of sheathing made either of plywood or, if newer, of wood-chip board composed of three- to four-ince flakes bonded together by resin."

From The World Without Us by Alan Weisman. It can be found here and here

Buddhism, Animals, and The Desire To Live

Is there a philosophical link between Buddhist thought and the nature of animals? In his book The Ethics of Killing, Jeff McMahan claims that your interest in continuing your life depends on your understanding of the continuity between "you" and later "you's". Animals, he says, are not as connected to their later selves.

As a reviewer of the book puts it, "The interest in going on living that you have at a particular point in your life (your “time relative interest” in going on living) depends—says McMahan—on the “prudential unity relations” between you at that time of your life and you or you at later times."

McMahan says that animals have a tenuous connection to this continuity. The reviewer of his book has questions about McMahan's thesis. The implication is that animals have "a weaker stake in going on living." The problem, as the reviewer sees it, is that "it implies that certain kinds of people have a weaker interest in going on living than the rest of us."

This sounds reminiscent of Buddhist teachings on putting out the fire of desire and living in the now. Or, people who no longer believe in their religion. Or, those who lose themselves in intense activity--Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi's concept of flow. (He has a book titled Flow.) In all these three cases there is less continuity between your present and future self. Does this mean you and animals have a weaker desire to go on living?

The reviewer has this to say about Buddhists: "You’ve taken heed of Buddhist wisdom that desire is the root of all suffering, so you 'live in the present' and limit your desires about the future as much as possible."

As for me, I think McMahan is way off base. Apropos of not very much at all, I once heard a story about a captain, a first mate, an ordinary seaman, and a pig. Floating at sea in a life boat after their ship sank, they discussed how to stay alive with only a cask of water and a pig. They would have to ration the water, but how could they ration the pig? If they killed it, it would rot under the hot sun and they would starve. The captain and first mate thought it best to cut off a little chunk of the pig at a time, first a little here, then a little there. The ordinary seaman then pointed out one small matter. They were in a very small boat and the pig would violently resist any attempt to diminish it.

If you want to read the review of his book, here it is. More

I'm Away

Click on the Random Read Generator for a chance post until I get back. I hope to resume posting on Monday August 31st.

A Summer Camp For The Kids of Free Thinkers and Atheists

No singing of hymns around the campfire for these children. No Bible Study. The summer camp has come under fierce attack by Christian fundamentalists.

"Campers are not told that there is no God; only that they should weigh the evidence. They learn about the scientific method. An amateur biologist invites them to gather creepy-crawlies from a nearby pond. They are told how sensitive each species is to pollution, and asked to work out from this how polluted the pond is. They find several critters that can survive only in clean water, and conclude that the pond is in good shape. The kids are encouraged to explore ethical questions, too. The more argumentative ones sit in a clearing and debate the nature of justice.

"The kind of people who send their kids to Bible camp are appalled. Answers in Genesis, a Christian fundamentalist group, berates Camp Quest for drumming a 'hopeless' world view into young minds. But a humanist camp is less about indoctrination than reassurance that it is all right not to be religious; that it is possible to be moral without believing in the supernatural. Nearly all the kids at Camp Quest say they find it comforting to be surrounded by others who share their lack of belief. Many attend schools where Christianity is taken for granted. Many keep quiet about their atheism. Those who don’t are sometimes taunted or told they will burn in hell.

Atheists are broadly disliked in America." More

Evolutionary Morality: Point & Counterpoint

Some people find offensive the idea that our moral behavior is grounded in the way our brains evolved. That is, evolutionary psychology explains morality as a response to the way our emotions developed over eons. Some of those who take exception believe that human beings should behave ethically, as in the way an adult exercises moral discipline to follow his or her proper upbringing. I express the matter that simply because I have met people who believe it to be that simple--that "resolution is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought," to borrow from Hamlet. In other words, act and you will act properly. Just don't think too much.

The classic trolley problem presents the peculiarity of human morality. One version of it goes like this: A runaway trolley is headed downhill toward a large group of people standing at the bottom. To save their lives consider a thought experiment. You have two choices. The first choice: Push a very large man in front of the trolley, thereby derailing it and saving the lives of the people at the bottom. The second choice: Pull a lever that diverts the trolley onto another track where it will crash into a house below, killing the occupant. In either case, one person will die, but many will be saved. Which would you choose? Typically, the choice is for number two as the idea of physically pushing another person is even more repugnant than pulling the lever. For a cartoon offering a different, humorous, version, click here.

Evolutionary psychologists would call this preference a case of evolutionary morality. Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging would reveal that of the two thoughts, killing a person with a lever does not arouse in the brain feelings as strong as actually pushing a man in front of a trolley.

With regard to morality, I came across an article which offers the standard view. It cites Stanley Milgram's experiments supposedly revealing the torturer in everybody. Then I found a counterpoint to that perspective.

The standard view. First, this excerpt from the article:

"What makes some of us saints and some of us sinners? The evolutionary roots of morality. It isn't surprising that the best-known experiments in psychology (apart from Pavlov's salivating dogs) are those Stanley Milgram ran beginning in the 1960s. Over and over, with men and women, with the old and the young, he found that when ordinary people are told to administer increasingly stronger electric shocks to an unseen person as part of a 'learning experiment,' the vast majority—sometimes 93 percent—complied, even when the learner (actually one of the scientists) screamed in anguish and pleaded, 'Get me out of here!' Nor is it surprising that Milgram's results have been invoked to explain atrocities from the Holocaust to Abu Ghraib and others in which ordinary people followed orders to commit heinous acts. What is surprising is how little attention science has paid to the dissenters in Milgram's experiments. Some participants did balk at following the command to torture their partner. As one of them, World War II veteran Joseph Dimow*, recalled decades later, "I refused to go any further." More

The counterpoint. At another link, I found this comment on the above article:

The standard view article's author "accepts a current popular view of ethics: it is rooted in evolution and grounded in emotions. She briefly runs through the stock argument for the claim that morality is an evolved behavior. Roughly put, the argument is that our primate relatives show what we would consider altruistic behavior (like helping each other or enduring hardship to avoid harming others of their kind). Naturally, the primates are more altruistic with their relatives. It is assumed that our primate ancestors had this same sort of behavior and it helped them survive, thus leading to us and our ethical behavior.

Perhaps this 'just so' story is true. Let us allow that it is." More
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*"I'm not certain about it, but I would attribute it to my upbringing, background, education -- things of that sort," says Dimow as quoted in a review by Michael Smith at WebMD. "And I think something [is] happening in one's life that makes them, not an outsider, but skeptical of going along with the crowd. And it's probably helpful to have some determination to think in an unorthodox manner and to question assumptions."

Dimow says his parents told him at an early age that while he should listen to his teachers, he should know that teachers aren't always right. He taught this lesson to his own children. Science just gives us descriptions of what is. What we should do is a matter of ethics.

Michael Gazzaniga--Human: The Science Behind What Makes Us Unique

I recall when I was in college and read various descriptions of human beings: Man is the only animal that thinks, or the only one that is moral. The one I like best is Mark Twain's, "Man is the only animal that blushes--or needs to." (Those were times when Man was used as a term to encompass humanity, although today we encounter sentences such as "When we think about God we realize that she is, if anything, abundant.") Of course, each of the "only's" became scratched off the list as more knowledge was gained of our fellow creatures.

Michael Gazzaniga also compares us to other creatures. In the comparison, he finds that though most of our activity can be found as antecedents in other animals, something in our species has made us unique. This uniqueness can be found by tracing the evolution of the human brain. In easy to understand language, Dr. Gazzaniga explains findings in fields in neuroscience (his own discipline), molecular biology, genetics, evolutionary and cognitive psychology, and artificial intelligence.

What follows is an excerpt from a review of his recent book, Human: The Science Behind What Makes Us Unique.

" If there is one question that has puzzled humans longer than anything else, it must surely be: who am I? And just what makes me human? In short: why are humans seemingly so different from all other species of animals? Michael Gazzaniga’s new book takes us through a virtuoso cavalcade of research over the last decade in search of the answer. It is a tour de force, because it covers such a wide range of disciplines from ethology and animal behavior to cognitive psychology and neuroscience, at each stage patiently steering the reader through layers of technical complexity to the core gems that lie within.

Mind, if you just want the answer, you could save yourself a long read—Gazzaniga gives it to us in the book’s opening sentences (as it happened, I naturally read it last because it came in a short chapter entitled “Prologue” …):

I always smile when I hear Garrison Keillor say, “Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.” It is such a simple sentiment, yet so full of human complexity. Other apes don’t have that sentiment. More in PDF.