Happiness Readings and The Three Princes of Serendip

In culling out old links, I isolated Mind Shadows posts on happiness. They are an eclectic lot, about aspects of the subject.  What you will discover for yourself will be a case of serendipity, the term coined by Hugh Walpole about the story of the Three princes of Serendip, who discovered by accident. Enough of that. Enjoy the serendipity. Here are the Mind Shadow links:

What Happened to The Women Involved?: Feminism and Abu Ghraib

Feminism and Abu Ghraib Prison

England and Charles Graner
Give Thumbs Up

Of the seven U.S. soldiers charged with sickening forms of abuse in Abu Ghraib, three were women: Spc. Megan Ambuhl, Pfc. Lynndie England and Spc. Sabrina Harman.

Abu Ghraib tells us that as Barbara Ehrenreich put it years back in the New York Times,  "a uterus is not a substitute for a conscience."

Barbara Ehrenreich:

"The photos did something else to me, as a feminist: They broke my heart. I had no illusions about the U.S. mission in Iraq — whatever exactly it is — but it turns out that I did have some illusions about women.

Lost at Sea: Richard Halliburton's Wildly Improbable Life and Some Who Knew Him

Richard Halliburton's Wildly Improbable Life

In the human scheme of things, some are born lucky, some less lucky, and some unlucky.   None of us chose to be born nor did we choose the circumstances of our birth.

By accident Richard was born with a predisposition he valued highly, knowing he was lucky.  Of his "restless nature" he wrote, "I'm very grateful, because I wouldn't take $1,000,000 for it."  It was precious to him because he had visions of the possible where others saw only walls.

He was extraordinarily gifted in disposition—his life attests to that, as it is one that few are able to parallel.  People could only read about all he did and saw because they were bound to the morning coffee and evening newspaper of their days.  In Halliburton they found somebody who had slipped the bonds holding them and with sometimes wild energy delighted in a life that for them was not only improbable but impossible.

In the 1920s and 1930s Richard Halliburton was one of the most famous persons in America, even more than Amelia Earhart, and today he is forgotten.

Pancho Barnes' Wildly Unusual Life, Her Battle With US Air Force, & Richard Halliburton

(Not to mention that she knew John Wayne, General Jimmy Doolittle, Test Pilot Chuck Yeager, Aimee Semple McPherson, and many movie stars.Read on.)

The man who would pilot Richard’s biplane on their round-the-world flight, Moye Stephens brought Richard to Pancho Barnes' San Marino mansion. Stephens knew Pancho as a fellow pilot.

In a Sunday, November 20, 1932 letter from Hollywood, Richard wrote his parents that on Saturday afternoon he went to visit Pancho Barnes, “the woman flyer I’m so fond of, and she took me to Ramon Novarro’s, a lot of drunk movie people were there, so we left early.” Such a good boy, he. The line was clearly for mom and dad.

Stephens was about to marry an Italian contessa. Richard added that on December 4th he would be taking her to Moye’s wedding, although he would miss it, “an especially fine one.”

Richard had already met Hollywood’s Roman Novarro, who became another romantic interest in his life.

Slum Golf

"Anil Bajrang Mane grew up in a slum in Chembur, a suburb of Mumbai. His home – a single 10ft x 10ft room – was right over the wall from the 10th hole of the members-only Bombay Presidency Golf Club, which sprawls across 100 acres of land: prime real estate in a city where the average population density is 31,700 people per sq km.

When Mane was just 14, he dropped out of school to become a caddie on the other side of the wall. But it wasn’t until three years later, when he was 17, that he took his first swing, when a club member handed him a 7 iron and told him to have a go. The 150-yard shot changed his life, he says: he realised golf was his shot at fame and glory, the chance of a better life.

There was only one problem: the club didn’t allow caddies to play on the course, insisting it would detract from its “exclusivity”. Mane earned his livelihood in a world that wouldn’t allow him to participate. Every night, he would cross back from the verdant, genteel club into his own world of single-room tenements, corrugated tin rooftops and poverty.

'My mother’s health was frail and my father had suffered burns when a kerosene stove burst in our kitchen,” he says. “I had no option but to give up school and take up work.' " The Guardian

Jill Price: At What Cost Super-Memory?

In an old vaudeville routine, a straight man asks his partner, "Who was the lady
you were with at 7:18 pm on the night of July 23, 1903?" to which the comic, scratches his head, looks puzzled at the audience, then answers, "That was no lady. That was my wife."

The audience laughed partly because of the improbability of remembering specifics of an exact date and time, and partly because of the unexpected reply.

When Jill Price is asked such a question, unlike vaudeville audiences people don't laugh at all.  They are astounded by her memory.  She can recite details of the days of her life since she was fourteen years old, be they sad or happy. The details can be what she had for dinner or saw on the TV.

Marilyn Vos Savant, Ron Hoeflin, and High IQ

Marilyn Vos Savant: "the surname is real, it was her mother’s maiden name – has had a unique claim to fame since the mid-1980s. It was then, almost 30 years after she took a test as a schoolgirl in downtown St Louis, Missouri, that her IQ came to light. In 1985, Guinness World Records accepted that she had answered every question correctly on an adult Stanford-Binet IQ test at the age of just 10, a result that gave her a corresponding mental age of 22 years and 11 months, and an unearthly IQ of 228.

Steven Pinker's Enlightenment Now: Manipulating Data for Effect

A critical review of his book, Enlightenment Now:

"[Unlike Pinker] the great writers of the Enlightenment, contrary to the way they are often caricatured, were mostly skeptics at heart. They had a taste for irony, an appreciation of paradox, and took delight in wit. They appreciated complexity, rarely shied away from difficulty, and generally had a deep respect for the learning of those who had preceded them.  .  .  ."

"It is not entirely clear what Pinker means by 'the Enlightenment.' At one point he calls it 'a cornucopia of ideas, some of them contradictory,' but at another a coherent 'project.' .  .  .  . "

"But he wraps his arguments up in such a thick layer of exaggeration and misinterpretation that the book does more harm than good. It makes use of selective data, dubious history, and, when all else fails, a contempt for 'intellectuals' .  .  .  ."

"Like a TED Talk, Enlightenment Now is easy to summarize." The Nation

What Is It Like When You Don't Know That You Don't Know?

What if a thief believes he won't get caught because he thinks he is invisible?  This really happened.

First, some insight into how we tick.  The anchoring effect. Human brains have built in thought-saving functions to enable action.

In 2006 at MIT Dan Ariely, Drazen Prelec, and George Loewenstein asked students to bid on a bottle of wine. As a sales pitch, they described the great quality of the bottle. The anchoring effect occurred when each student had to write down the last two digits of his or her social security number as if it were the price of the item. The anchoring effect influenced their judgement. Say the last two social security digits were 11, then the student bid $11 or a relatively lower offer. If 33. the bid was $33 or in that range. If, say, 55, the the bid was higher yet. The outcome was that students with higher numbers paid up to 346 percent more than those with lower numbers. The experiment demonstrates that people are tricked by inherent functions of their own brains, in this case something they saw before biased them to a judgement not based on rational processing.

In the evolution of species we didn't have time to mull things over. It was act or die. Thus the anchoring effect.

I am not saying the anchoring effect bears on the thief's situation.  I am saying none of us uses reason as much as we believe we do. What follows is different. It shows self-delusion of a different kind. The thief's kind.

Anosognosia is a term to describe a deficit of self-awareness. It describes a clinical condition in which a person with some disability seems unaware of its existence.

The Dunning–Kruger effect is a term for a cognitive bias. (David Dunning, Justin Kruger.) The bias can occur in people of low ability. It imparts an illusory superiority in which they mistakenly assess their cognitive ability as greater than it is. As Errol Morris put it, "Our incompetence masks our ability to recognize our incompetence."

This report of a crime suggests both.

"At 5 feet 6 inches and about 270 pounds, bank robbery suspect McArthur Wheeler isn’t the type of person who fades into the woodwork. So it was no surprise that he was recognized by informants, who tipped detectives to his whereabouts after his picture was telecast " (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, article by Michael A. Fuoco, 1995, o/a January 13).

Read on for what happened as well as the thief's response.

Intellect and The Parable of The Poisoned Arrow

What do I know? This. Something sees a dissected brain on a laboratory table and what sees is not an object like the thing cut open on the table. Can I explain beyond that? No.

Sure, I can talk about brain neurons and the optical cortex, and that does provide an objective correlative to explain the processes involved in seeing. But it does not explain the seeing itself.

I found the study of consciousness through brain science quite helpful in providing objective explanations about mind.  There is, for example, neuro-plasticity, which provides evidence that intention (roughly, the "will" part of free will) can help the brain change itself. (See Paul Bach-y-Rita, who taught his father to walk after a stroke). But that was as far as it went.

In The Parable of The Poisoned Arrow (more later), Buddha was in effect talking about intellect but not the kind brain scientists used to discover neuro-plasticity. So this article is about what he meant and what he did not mean.

As I already knew would happen, none of my readings in neuroscience and the philosophy of consciousness got me any closer to seeing as seeing.  Buddha meant that I start with experience. Not my everyday experience, although I could use it, but instead what reveals itself in deep meditation.

A sensation arises in a leg attended by a sensation of the leg itself. The sensation comes with the leg as something "there." The edges of this body are sensations of a location. But all arises in the empty space of consciousness. The space can have faint, wispy boundaries but they too are sensations. Sensations arising and falling away, to be followed by new ones arising and passing.