Do Fish Have Feelings, Too?

"To many, the notion that we should care about the suffering of fish seems absurd.

For most, fish amount to little more than swimming protein, a healthy food to be plucked from rivers and seas.

But, as a disturbing new book shows, scientists are now confident that fish, once symbolic of dumb, primitive stupidity, do not only feel pain, but have a complex emotional life, too.

Indeed, as the book's author says, there is 'no logical reason why we should not extend to fish the same welfare considerations that we currently extend to birds and mammals'.

Rethinking Mind

Marilynne Robinson Robinson has written three highly acclaimed novels: Housekeeping (1980), Gilead (2004) and Home (2008). Housekeeping was a finalist for the 1982 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (US), Gilead was awarded the 2005 Pulitzer, and Home received the 2009 Orange Prize for Fiction (UK). Home is a companion to Gilead and focuses on the Boughton family during the same time period.

She is also the author of non fiction works including Mother Country: Britain, The Welfare State, and Nuclear Pollution (1989), The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought (1998) and Absence of Mind: The Dispelling of Inwardness from the Modern Myth of the Self (2010). She has written articles, essays and reviews for Harper’s, The Paris Review and The New York Times Book Review.She currently teaches at the Iowa Writers' Workshop and lives in Iowa City. She has this to say about science and consciousness:

"For the religious, the sense of the soul may have as a final redoubt, not as argument but as experience, that haunting I who wakes us in the night wondering where time has gone, the I we waken to, sharply aware that we have been unfaithful to ourselves, that a life lived otherwise would have acknowledged a yearning more our own than any of the daylit motives whose behests we answer to so diligently. Our religious traditions give us as the name of God two deeply mysterious words, one deeply mysterious utterance: I AM. . . .

By identifying the soul with the mind, the mind with the brain, and noting the brain’s vulnerability as a physical object, [Steven Pinker] feels he has debunked a conception of the soul that only those who find the word meaningless would ever have entertained. . . .

This declension, from the ethereality of the mind/soul as spirit to the reality of the mind/brain as a lump of meat, is dependent, conceptually and for its effects, on precisely the antique dualism these writers who claim to speak for science believe they reject and refute. . . .

Physicists say a change in a split photon occurs simultaneously in its severed half, at any theoretical distance. As if there were no time or space, this information of change passes instantly from one to the other. Is an event that defies any understanding we have of causality a physical event? . . .

[If so] then perhaps we cannot claim to know the nature of the physical, and perhaps we ought not to be so confident in opposing it to a real or imagined nonphysical. More

Awake During Surgery: 'I'm in hell'

"When Carol Weiher was having her right eye surgically removed in 1998, she woke up hearing disco music. The next thing she heard was "Cut deeper, pull harder."

She desperately wanted to scream or even move a finger to signal to doctors that she was awake, but the muscle relaxant she'd received prevented her from controlling her movements.

"I was doing a combination of praying and pleading and cursing and screaming, and trying anything I could do but I knew that there was nothing that was working," said Weiher, of Reston, Virginia.

Weiher is one of few people who have experienced anesthesia awareness." More

Getting Nearer To God

"Being a Modern Man, I like to fancy that my spirituality is evolving; it is showing 'progress.' Whether it is in fact or not, it certainly has gone through stages. My first lessons about what a rosary was came from the hardscrabble ethnic Catholic world, primarily from working-class Irish and Italians. My primary Irish influence was my maternal grandmother, who began life as a peasant girl in Cork. My primary Italian influence was her best friend Lill, who lived in the apartment next door. (My grandmother claimed to have a deep prejudice against Italians, yet all of her closest friends were Italian. Attempting to embrace such contradictions played a big role in my early spiritual development.) . . .

I have a theory (of course). If God is everywhere at all times, then we are not really 'summoning' God when we pray. The thing that actually stands between God and ourselves is….ourselves. We get in our own way, because we can’t easily remove ourselves from our thoughts about ourselves and all the trash that constantly runs through our minds. This may mean that anything that facilitates removing ourselves as a barrier to God is prayer. There seem to be many, many ways to do this. Many roads lead to God. What looked to me (and perhaps would still be for me) like the pious superstitions of my grandmother in her prayer was actually a way that she could focus on her prayer, on praying it carefully and removing herself by concentrating on this. Lill’s practices, which to me now resemble almost a form of voodoo, were a way she could sanctify her entire environment — not to my satisfaction, but to hers. . . .

Years ago I spent a night in a Japanese Zen monastery on Mount Koya." More