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