V.S. Ramachandran: Consciousness, Qualia, & Self

Ramachandran has an ability to open up access to difficult subjects--not that he explains them away, but that he, well, he makes them more accessible to understanding. He has great stories about some of his patients, one being the son who, after an auto accident, called his mother an imposter when he saw her, but immediately warmed to her when he talked to her on the phone. (That is not part of this video. It is called the Capgras Delusion and can be watched here.)

Some of his talking points:

• What is consciousness? He and his colleagues want to understand the logic of consciousness. There are two important problems regarding it:
  
• One is qualia. Francis Crick and Kristof Koch championed the view that it is sensations you're conscious of. (My opinion: this seems tautological. The hard problem of consciousness is to explain in the third person what we all experience in the first person.)
• The qualia problem: You cannot communicate your experience of green to anybody else.
• The second problem is that of self. Not only do you experience qualia but you know that you experience qualia and you know that you know that you experience qualia.
• There is no such thing as a free-floating qualia without a self and there is no such thing as a self without a qualia.
• Ramachandran: The two co-evolved in evolution and are intimately linked to language. Self and qualia are two sides of a Möbius strip.
  

Barbara Ehrenreich, Positive Thinking, & Smiley Faces Like Tony Robbins & Joel Osteen

When author Barbara Ehrenreich was diagnosed with breast cancer, she was bombarded with wildly optimistic, inspirational phrases. But a cheerful outlook, she argues, does not cure cancer.

In her new book, Bright-Sided, Ehrenreich explores the negative effects of positive thinking, and the "reckless optimism" that dominates America's national mindset.

"We need to brace ourselves for a struggle against terrifying obstacles," Ehrenreich writes, "both of our own making and imposed by the natural world. And the first step is to recover from the mass delusion that is positive thinking." More

All the Oprah-ready gurus you would expect to populate this polemic [about positive thinking] show up to share some advice—here’s Joel Osteen warning us never to "verbalize a negative emotion," there’s Tony Robbins exhorting us to "Get motivated!" In turning the United States into a 24-hour pep rally, charges Ehrenreich, these professional cheerleaders have all but drowned out downers like "realism" and "rationality." Their followers are trained to dismiss bad news rather than assimilate or reflect upon its importance. Motivators counsel an upbeat ignorance—the kind of illusory worldview that might, say, convince a president that his soldiers will be greeted as liberators in a foreign state, or a mayor that his city’s crumbling levees can withstand the force of a hurricane.. . . .Life coach/professional-motivator-types are soft targets. They don’t seem particularly bright, they use verbs in dumb ways (as in "God will prosper you"), and they cultivate a general air of overcaffeinated quackery. One wonders how anyone takes them seriously. But no one takes them more seriously than Ehrenreich, who believes them capable of driving Americans toward a bizarre array of conflicting behaviors. In blaming so much evil on positive thinking, she casts optimism as both an opiate—numbing us into a kind of stoned complacency, as with the wronged employers—and a stimulant, pumping us up for an ill-advised investment or attack on a foreign nation. More