Advancing Humanism

The Power of Now (Pt I)

2012-02-03T07:41:00.004-06:00

"I come clad only in the garments of today, with no mantle of history about me."

Every once in a while I'll be reading a book (usually fiction) and my progress will come to a crashing halt when I come upon a totally brilliant sentence. The above quote slammed me and I had to stop reading and ponder it.

I should point out that I have not yet read the Eckhart Tolle book whose title I borrowed for this post. I suppose that's because I see a lot of potential in the title, and I'm a bit afraid that the book itself will disappoint. (This despite 1,200+ readers' mostly high opinions of the book.)

I started think about the power of now not long ago while listening to a friend of mine talk about how she and her husband wanted a new camper (and the requisite class 3 tow vehicle) in the next two years. The last time I had any solid plans for the next two years of my life I was in grad school, and the plan was simply to finish grad school. (And this was about 10 years ago.) I had to wonder if I did (or should) envy her...

Now, perhaps, you can understand how I came to fixate on the above quote. (To be fair, for other reasons, I was also thinking about how the past is frequently a barrier to moving forward, in relationships and/or life in general.) If one were to construct a ritual for moving beyond some painful moment, either personally or in relation to another, I can see that sentence forming the basis of such a ritual. An expression of forgiveness, in response to an apology. A more elegant way of saying "It is forgotten." (Such are the digressions of my mind, stemming, I suspect, from heavy exposure to science fiction.)

Then, of course, I had to wonder exactly how far one could push the concept of now-centric living and now-centric relationships. Conventional, bald-tv-psychologist wisdom says that past behavior is the best predictor of future behavior. Is it really wise to ignore the past, especially if it contains some powerful indicators of how one might be hurt in the future? What is the difference between acknowledging the lessons of the past, and being held hostage by the past? Is it as dysfunctional to cling to the 'lessons' of the past as it is to cling to idealistic dreams of a better future?

I was a little surprised to see that Tolle had a section on relationships in his book. Though the languages they speak are quite different, Tolle and bald-tv-psychologist wisdom agree on one thing: "The greatest catalyst for change in a relationship is complete acceptance of your partner as he or she is, without needing to judge or change them in any way." (p. 98) Now I was curious to see what Tolle had to say about dealing with/ moving past past behavior...

"Millions are now living alone or as single parents, unable to establish an intimate relationship or unwilling to repeat the insane drama of past relationships. Others go from one relationship to another, from one pleasure-and-pain cycle to another, in search of the elusive goal of fulfillment through union with the opposite energy polarity. Still others compromise and continue to be together in a dysfunctional relationship in which negativity prevails, for the sake of the children or security, through force of habit, fear of being alone, or some other mutually 'beneficial' arrangement, or even through the unconscious addiction to the excitement of emotional drama and pain." (p. 100)

I won't pretend to be a fluent speaker of the language in which Tolle's answer was couched - "egoic mind patterns" and the "pain-body" - so I'm not quite sure how he gets to his conclusion. "So whenever your relationship is not working, whenever it brings out the 'madness' in you and in your partner, be glad." Er? "Being the knowing creates a clear space of loving presence that allows all things and all people to be as they are." Eh?

But Tolle soon converges with conventional wisdom again. "Learn to give expression to what you feel without blaming. Learn to listen to your partner in an open, nondefensive way. Give your partner space for expressing himself or herself." (p. 102) Still... I don't see that the emphasis there is particularly now-centric...

Every decision we make, every path taken (or not), represents an allocation of resources towards one goal at the expense of others. Such assessment of priorities is only possible in light of a hierarchy of knowledge about the past. What guides our actions in the absence of a 'mantle of history'?

The Dance of the Dissident Daughter

2011-07-31T14:20:00.000-05:00

"The stupidest norm was happier; he could feel that he belonged. We did not, and because we did not, we had no positive - we were condemned to negatives, to not revealing ourselves, to not speaking when we would, to not using what we knew, to not being found out - to a life of perpetual deception, concealment, and lying."

Yesterday I participated in a mock interview exercise. (I don't really know why I did it; interviews don't scare me. Having to be inappropriately employed scares me...) We got to the end of the mock interview, and the gentleman, in reviewing it with me, says, with all apparent sincerity, "I can tell you're a really genuine person." At which point I almost said "You bought that load of bullshit?!?"

Admittedly it wasn't complete bullshit. But let's just say that the past and I have choreographed a set of moves that hides our respective flaws and that can appear quite... genuine when necessary. Upon reflection, I suspect the gentleman (whom I've known to be quite insightful) might have intentionally planted that statement to cause me to reflect on what I was really doing in playing this game. Why was I so good at projecting a genuineness that wasn't entirely genuine? And why was I willing to do it at all?

If there has been an underlying theme of reflection in my summer thus far, it has been Authenticity. Several autobiographies that chronicle women's struggles to find and be their authentic selves have presented themselves at (one might say) oddly synchronous times. I've lately come to terms with the fact that my weight fluctuates in direct proportion with how (pardon the phrase) inauthentically I'm living at the time. And in a rather uncharacteristic display of temper, I recently lost it at the person who suggested that I "probably shouldn't tell people that you have a Ph.D." (For the record, telling people that I have a Ph.D. is not something I do, but in context, the suggestion was that I should 'dumb down' my level of discourse, especially if I "wanted to attract a husband.") Perhaps my reflecting on authenticity is also what caused me to give the gentleman more credit than he may deserve in making his statement about my genuineness.

Living an 'authentic life' is a hot topic right now in quasi-spiritual literature. "The idea of being authentic has caught our attention much like the word empowered did a few years ago." (q) Despite the prevalence of advice on authentic living, I have not dwelt much on other people's thoughts on the subject. (What can I say? I have a general aversion to received wisdom. People's brutally honest autobiographies, however, are another story.) One meta-reflection has stood out to me though. According to Maslow, "the most basic level of needs must be met before the individual will strongly desire (or focus motivation upon) the secondary or higher level needs." Rough translation - you won't be worrying about "becom[ing] everything that one is capable of becoming" if you are worried about being homeless. That so many people (including my unemployed self) can be concerned at all with living an authentic life says something...

Perhaps the struggle for authenticity isn't what Maslow was referring to in his description of struggling for/towards self-actualization. Maslow did describe self-actualized people as possessing "an unusual ability to detect the spurious, the fake, and the dishonest in personality," as well as "embrac[ing] reality and facts rather than denying truth." Yet you could argue that authenticity is merely one of the characteristics of self-actualization. But if the need for authenticity does not emerge as a part of the need for self-actualization, then where does it come from? What gives rise to the feeling of misery when one compromises authenticity to fulfill the more basic need for (economic) safety?

"Being authentic is being able to say yes when you mean it and no when you need to." (q) And in a world where doing so would not negatively affect your ability to meet any of your lower level needs, you could probably do that. Most of us are stopped from being authentic in that way because we have learned that compromise is necessary in order to meet the needs for safety and love. To suggest otherwise is to suggest a radically different view of what reality is, and leaves us with visions of a universe that rewards desire, want, and selfishness. Dissident thoughts indeed.

One of the few things I remember from Sunday School is that JOY was presented to us as an acronym. In order to have joy in your life, you needed to put Jesus first, Others second, and Yourself last. And indeed, to make misery bearable, we often tell ourselves that love is putting yourself last. So which is it? Putting yourself first and living 'authentically', or putting yourself last in the spirit of service to others/a higher purpose? Ironically, both perspectives are attached to 'spiritual' ideas about what reality is - ideas that provide justification and reward for those who follow their tenets, though the rewards take radically different forms.

Perhaps the truth is simply that people will be as selfish as they can comfortably be in any given situation, and will adopt whatever philosophy (or combination of philosophies) is necessary in order to feel better about their choices...

Avoiding Stultifying Affairs

2011-07-20T16:27:00.000-05:00

"One must avoid stultifying affairs."

During this heat wave I'm enticing myself to get up and walk very early in the morning by listening to Walter Isaacson's biography of Einstein on the ipod while I walk. This morning I got to the portion of Einstein's life where he is unemployed after graduation. A friend offers to help Einstein obtain a job at his company: an offer that Einstein refuses with the proclamation that "one must avoid stultifying affairs." I laughed when I heard that.

Currently unemployed myself, I have recently submitted a number of applications for positions that I find to be... less than optimum. I feel decidely unhappy when I do this, in marked contrast to the surprising feeling of general well-being that has pervaded my days since becoming unemployed. Past experience indicates that I should be feeling quite anxious given my situation. And we constantly hear about how difficult it is to find a good job these days, which should only add to my anxiety. Intellectually, I know that this means I should leave no stone unturned in my job search, including those stones that aren't so shiny, but emotionally... Emotionally, I seem to disagree, feeling anxious only when I apply for a position that I don't particularly want.

For awhile now I've been wondering about my general lack of anxiety. My past experience with unemployment says that I should be feeling highly anxious. The idea that I should be feeling anxious is supported by Maslow's hierarchy of needs: the second need in the pyramid being the need for safety, including economic safety. And I'm certainly not sitting on a pile of money. However, instead of feeling anxious, I feel relatively calm. The disparity has been great enough to prompt some introspective spelunking in an attempt to answer the question: From what wellspring issues forth this fountain of tranquility?

Have I reached a threshhold of sustaining metaphysical belief? Is this feeling of well-being externally imposed? Have I been doing something that has managed to supplant my feelings of anxiety? Or is it simply that I currently have a day-to-day existence that is almost completely free of "stultifying affairs"?

Einstein's phrase has been stuck in my head all day. It occurred to me that there are actually two possible ways to interpret it. 1) One must avoid those situations (affairs) which, by their nature, render one incapable of enthusiasm. 2) One must avoid bringing about a state of affairs that thwarts one's own interests, such as taking a job that does not represent a change for the better in one's life. Either interpretation represents wisdom, IMHO.

Today I decided to avoid stultifying affairs by spending a few hours blogging.

Born This Way

2011-06-05T09:36:00.000-05:00

"Yes, you're struggling and you're suffering and it's hard to be you. But the flip side of that that's really exciting is... [p]eople like you have invented great things."

"You can tell your child that he has been given the label 'gifted' as long as he also knows that it doesn't mean he is smarter or better than anyone, just that he performs well on a certain kind of test."

Ah, the irony of seeing (in this morning's paper) a family movie review for X-Men: First Class right next to a parenthood advice column containing the two approaches to take with a 'gifted' child noted above. Can you tell which one came from an 'expert' and which one came from another parent? I bet you can't.

The entire plot of X-Men: First Class revolves around how two groups of equally 'gifted' young adults end up on diverging paths with respect to how they perceive their relationship with those who are not similarly 'gifted'. A recurring desire expressed by mutants on both sides in the movie is the desire to feel normal, or to feel accepted for one's true self. To not have to hide. To not feel like a 'freak'. "They tend to feel different from their peers." (q) This sentiment is eloquently highlighted in the following trailer...

There's an obvious, though not overtly compared, difference between Charles and Erik with respect to their upbringings. Charles grew up with security and privilege, while Erik grew up in the shadow of someone who used torture to motivate. Erik could not escape being a target as a result of his 'gift', and consequently believed that the only safety was in being more powerful than those who would target or oppress you. Charles, perhaps because of his wealth/security, did not acquire the same set of learned perceptions of and responses to that which Erik perceived as a threat. X-Men: First Class has a lot to say about the contribution of nurture to the makings of a hero or a monster.

The only characters we are supposed to sympathize with in X-Men: First Class are mutants. There are simply no non-mutant characters of note. This works because there is some part in all of us that can identify with feeling like an outcast. Yet who but those who have felt truly isolated by an apparently unbridgeable gap between themselves and others can understand what it means to be with others who were like them? For the exceptionally smart - the ones who are typically labeled 'gifted' by schools - being with others like them may mean not having to deliberately downplay one's intellect. It may mean being able to exercise the full range of one's abilities without having to worry about the social consequences.

There is inherent suffering in having to hide any portion of one's true self. Yet we all make concessions of one sort or another to the social environments in which we live. The more extreme the concessions, the more extreme the suffering. Perhaps the most painful concessions are those which are predicated on the belief that something about our genetic makeup is unacceptable. The fact that you were born this way, and know no other way to be with respect to these traits, makes denying them especially painful.

If there is something to be learned from X-Men: First Class, perhaps it is that the message to parents of a gifted child (or of any child who struggles with being different in a significant way) should be: Find your child a social environment where s/he feels accepted and safe, and where s/he is encouraged to express his/her full range of abilities and true nature.

Let Me Be Myself

2011-05-26T12:00:00.000-05:00

"Tell me please would you one time
Let me be myself
So I can shine with my own light"

I've been thinking a lot about our sense of self lately. Perhaps because mine feels so... different right now. No, I'm not on any medications that would account for this change, but that didn't stop me from being intrigued by a recent paper in the journal Neuroethics called Authenticity Anyone? The Enhancement of Emotions via Neuro-Psychopharmacology, by Felicitas Kraemer.

Kraemer begins by extensively discussing Peter Kramer's 1993 book Listening to Prozac (which I own, but have not yet read). Kramer describes a woman who, by all accounts, was never particularly happy and outgoing, as experiencing such a positive change in personality on Prozac that she didn't want to stop taking it because "she is not herself anymore without it." She now identified with a 'true self' that hadn't emerged until she'd been medicated. "...Kramer described the process as one of a redefinition of the self" where "the socially competent and cheerful self that is prevalent under Prozac is declared as the 'real self,' whereas the less welcome, shy and depressed one, is not experienced as real anymore." The implication, of course, is that since the 'new' self conforms to a (socially-approved of) "better or even 'ideal' self", then that self must be a more authentic representation of the real person. The paradox, of course, is that since we typically define authenticity as a combination of naturalness of origin and consistency with the past, how can a sense of self arising from an "artificial enhancement device" like Prozac lead to a more authentic self?

Or, to reframe Kraemer's reframing of the question, is Prozac creating something that was never there and is thereby inauthentic, or is Prozac enabling us to access something that was always there, always possible, and which can thereby be deemed to be authentic? Is Prozac simply peeling back a slightly rotten top layer of the emotional onion, revealing something 'better' that has been there all along? What is the genuine article with respect to our emotions and the behaviors arising from them?

Is an emotion genuine because I feel it, or is it genuine because it is consistent with how I have previously felt and how I think that I should feel? Or is the difference between the two only worth debating if I'm unwilling to accept and integrate the new emotions into my sense of self? With respect to consenting adults who have unrestricted access to these technologies, you might leave it strictly up to the individual to decide what is or is not 'authentic'. But because many self-altering medications are prescribed to minors who may have barely had a chance to develop a sense of self on par with that of consenting adults, and because social pressure is the source of most of our ideas about what an acceptable sense of self is, the issue of authenticity is of broader concern.

To what degree do we owe it to a person to allow them to develop as naturally as possible? I have a friend whose child has been diagnosed with ADHD. The child's 'wild' behavior creates difficulties for the parents and teachers, but the child is boisterous, gregarious, and happy, and does not appear to be suffering. So far the parents have not medicated this child, but their doctor has put it out there as an option for the future. I wonder about whose needs/desires will ultimately take precedence in this situation. Will 'the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the one', or will the child be allowed to continue as his 'wild' happy self because that is who he is?

And when will the child be self-aware enough to realize that something may have been taken away from him if he were medicated? Kraemer claims to "support the more general, conceptual thesis that people do not experience artificial emotions when taking drugs of whatever kind," a thesis that I reject. I believe that it is possible to be self-aware enough to realize (simultaneously with the occurring emotion) when an emotional response is inconsistent with one's previous history of responses to similar circumstances, and that that inconsistency is enough to cause one to deem the emotion 'artificial' or 'inauthentic'. And forcing an inconsistent emotional response upon a person is a deep violation of the very essence of our experiencing, sentient selves.

Kraemer concludes (wrongly, IMHO) that the distinction between 'natural' and 'artificial' is only relevant with respect to the source or means by which the emotion is produced, and not with respect to how the emotion is experienced. (p. 55) Yet, ironically, Kraemer goes on to argue that an emotion can be claimed to be authentic "if the individuals experiencing it recognize their own feelings really as their own and identify with them." (p. 58) We seem to be disagreeing about the degree of equivalency between 'natural' and 'authentic', and between 'inauthentic' and 'artificial'...

It may very well be possible that a person can be unaware enough of the differences in felt emotions to appreciate which ones arise from the use of an artificial technology. Further, it's entirely possible that they just don't care about the inconsistency between the way they responded emotionally in the past and the way they are currently responding. But this should not be considered to be a reasonable assumption with respect to all people, and the law should be designed to protect those who notice a difference and are bothered by it.

It's entirely possible that one's sense of self will 'evolve' over time to accommodate the new set of emotional responses. It's even possible that this new sense of self will be appreciated and deemed qualitatively better than the flawed, old self that experienced emotions or had responses that were 'not desirable'. But it's my belief that such changes should never be forced upon anyone, either by the law or by social pressure. (Kraemer's article includes illustrations from Kramer's book of people who were very bothered by discrepancy between how they felt and how they knew they should feel.)

Our social norms do include a historical appreciation and respect for authenticity, but how will this respect sustain itself (or not) in the face of increasingly easier (and more radical) ways to modify oneself? Kraemer critically cites transhumanist Nick Bostrom's work as an overly simplistic view of how easy making 'emotional improvements' would be. She points out that "[c]hanging our emotional life means changing our cultural and epistemic norms." Perhaps more importantly though, judgments about the authenticity of emotions reside first and foremost with the subjective experiencer, determined by the degree to which they are or are not able to integrate the emotional changes into their existing sense of self. And it is inconsistency that erodes our sense of self. As Kraemer puts it, "[o]ur emotions depend on each other in a fragile nexus that can easily be destroyed by uncontrolled manipulation." And without a strong, consistent sense of self, who are we?

Hero/Monster

2011-04-27T09:50:00.000-05:00

"Who's gonna fight for the weak?
Who's gonna make 'em believe?
I've got a hero, I've got a hero Living in me"
- Hero, Awake by Skillet (track 1)

"The secret side of me, I never let you see
I keep it caged but I can't control it
So stay away from me, the beast is ugly
I feel the rage and I just can't hold it"
- Monster, Awake by Skillet (track 2)

I've got a lawyer living in me. And a lawyer that has been cross-pollinated by a psychologist is a dangerous thing indeed: a dangerous thing with an interest in neuroethics...

It amazes me what people will attempt to use as a defense for committing a crime (or for just behaving badly). It amazes me, perhaps, because every attempted defense is a statement of sorts about what we believe it is that makes us who we are. At a very basic level, it's a statement about what it means to be human. Are we our nature, or are we our nurture? From whence cometh the hero, or the monster?

[ASIDE: As a huge fan of multi-dimensional modeling (huge!), I once commented that, as we all agree that the truth is some combination of nature and nurture, the prudent course would be for science present the nature/nurture debate from an 'overlapping windows' perspective. Not all aspects of the phenotypical expression of our genetic nature are equally susceptible to the nurturing (or lack thereof) of environmental influence. Furthermore, a single aspect of our genetic nature may not be equally susceptible to environmental influence at different points within our lifespan. There are critical windows in development where the influence of nurture can have a much more dramatic impact on the way our nature develops. This really isn't news to anybody, when you stop to think about it, yet the idea that a single gene is somehow 'responsible' for our behavior persists, and convinces juries.]

The dangerous idea in both cases is that we are somehow not responsible for who we are, and by extension, for what we do. As the social and biological sciences advance, we believe that we are acquiring increasing power to explain why we do what we do. But having a partial understanding of why we might behave in a particular way is itself not enough to absolve any individual of responsibility for a particular action.

There is now a pathological characterization for people who are obsessed with brain pathologies as acceptable legal excuses - Brain Overclaim Syndrome, "the essential feature of which is to make claims about the implications of neuroscience for criminal responsibility that cannot be conceptually or empirically sustained." Morse's allegation that "[b]rains do not commit crimes; people commit crimes" brings up (yet does not answer) an interesting question: what is a person, if not his/her brain?

"For a materialist, the brain always plays a causal role in behavior. Despite all the astonishing recent advances in neuroscience, however, we still know woefully little about how the brain enables the mind, and especially about how consciousness and intentionality can arise from the complicated hunk of matter that is the brain." (Quoting a slightly different version of this paper which appeared in Neuroethics: An Introduction with Readings (2010).) But the legal arguments need only demonstrate that "an agent’s capacity for rationality might be diminished by faulty neurotransmitters, psychological stress, trauma, or a host of other causes" (q, my emphasis) in order to argue that criminal responsibility for a particular action (which is based on certain presumptions of rationality) need not apply.

Morse's argument hinges around the idea of responsibility: an idea that was developed from and predicated on what we subjectively understand about our mental experiences. He argues that the correct perspective (and therefore also the correct use of neuroscience) is one which accepts the idea of responsibility (the internalist perspective). In contrast, an externalist perspective is based on the idea "determinism... is true or that our mental states play no role in explaining our behavior", and is therefore outside the current framework of our understanding of responsibility. In other words, the externalist perspective states that everything that we experience as human beings is essentially irrelevant in explaining our behavior. Morse argues (correctly, IMHO) that this perspective is inconsistent with the entire notion of responsibility.

Morse has written a fascinating and beautifully-nuanced argument in either source, and the real world-oriented humanist would do well to give some consideration to the question raised above: What is a person, if not simply his/her brain? I suspect that Morse never intended to answer that question, but rather only to illustrate that since our understanding of the brain is partial (one might even say minimal), a person should be judged by behavioral criteria of responsibility, rather than by what we think we may know about their brain. The use of neuroscientific 'evidence' should be used to support, rather than override, behavioral observations.

In the larger picture, the same can be said for other attempts to 'blame' behavior on various (usually oversimplified) aspects of genetics or environment. "Partial knowledge about causation does not mean that there is partial causation." Likewise, "[c]ausation cannot be an excuse per se for an internalist, who accepts responsibility, because all behavior is caused and thus all behavior would have to be excused." Morse, a determinist himself, believes that responsibility is compatible with determinism, however he defers the explanation of such compatibility to a realm other than science. "Science cannot resolve the dispute because the issue is metaphysical and normative and it is unlikely ever to be resolved by logic."

"As the biological and behavioral sciences offer ever more sophisticated understandings of normal and abnormal behavior alike, there will be constant pressure to use their findings to affect assessment of criminal responsibility and other legal doctrines. A lot will be at stake morally, politically and legally, and much will be debatable." I concur.

The Good Shepherd (Pt II)

2011-04-06T11:58:00.000-05:00

"And there is great power to be had by being the one to initiate a new order."

Our Fair State is currently awaiting the official results of yesterday's elections. And the results of the most high-profile race on the ballot - Supreme Court Judge - are close. Very close. (As of 11:40 AM, only 200 votes separate the candidates, with just one precinct not yet reporting. (via)) This race is viewed by many as a referendum on the recent right-wing power grab that involved a legislative attempt to take collective bargaining away from public employees.

In addition to shock and anger at the consequences of this "non-fiscal" budget repair bill, a sense of solidarity among workers of all kinds has emerged. What has not yet emerged in this situation is a single individual as the face/voice of the movement. There has been no 'Joe the plumber', no Joe Hill... and no Anton Drexler. Perhaps it is simply too early. Perhaps the outrage is still too fresh.

And perhaps it is naive to hope that this movement, this sense of solidarity and community, will continue uncorrupted. Eventually there will be an organized response, above and beyond attempts to recall current legislators or endorse candidates in races where the candidacy was already determined when the collective shit hit the fan. (Pardon the pun.)

Another episode in the ongoing series of weird coincidences that permeate my life began when I was in the library recently, looking for research material on workers' rights. While I didn't find what I was looking for in the area of workers' rights, as I perused the early-300s I did come across a book called Warrior Politics: Why Leadership Demands a Pagan Ethos, by journalist Robert D. Kaplan (2002). (If you know me, you know that that book was bound to go home with me.) It was a bit unsettling, given the current situation, to see sentence two of Chapter One - "The Nazi party began as a crusade for workers' rights organized by a Munich locksmith, Anton Drexler, in 1919, before Hitler took it over the following year." This sense of creepy coincidence developed further when I saw a published letter to the editor of a local news outlet this morning. The letter was a single line - "Ich bin ein pro-labor Wisconsinite." I have to wonder how many readers understood the significance of that letter. And I have to say, it probably would have gone right over my head had I not just been reading Kaplan's book.

As personal as the current situation in Our Fair State feels to me, and as much as it has pissed me into political activism, I also don't want our collective response to lose its sense of purity. Right now we are angry and in shock. Right now public employees are trying to figure out what to do if/when their take-home incomes are suddenly cut by $350 a month. Right now My City of 25,000 is poised to lose over 1000 years - years - of teaching experience as many public school teachers make the difficult decision to retire. (It shocked me too, but 30 teachers averaging 35 years each adds up.)

But it won't be long before the political interests involved find a face for the outraged masses to rally behind. And so we are forced to consider the first sentence of Kaplan's treatise - "The evils of the twentieth century arose from populist movements that were monstrously exploited in the name of utopian ideals, and had their power amplified by new technologies." Can there be a reasonable response to what has happened in Our Fair State and is happening in states across the country? Absolutely. Can it be an effective response without large-scale organization, financial resources, and leadership? I would love to believe that it's possible, but I have doubts...

One thing I have noticed in recent weeks is that people desperately want to be told who to vote for, and more generally, how to funnel their outrage. No one has time to do all the research themselves, they doubt their ability to 'get it right', and they are looking for a reliable source of information and direction. Here's just one example of a directive to the public that has gathered momentum, even though it may be only tangentially related to the average voter's actual source of ire. (I've also heard more than one person say that they'd like Russ Feingold to become the governor of Our Fair State.)

While emotions continue to run high, we the average voters also need to consider how to shape an effective political response to the actual issues, without getting lost in sentiment and rhetoric. We've seen what democracy looks like, but what will organized leadership look like? You turned out at the polls yesterday, far in excess of the 20% normally seen for this election. Don't lose your momentum; continue to demand the best from yourselves and any leaders you choose to follow!

We Are One

2011-04-04T09:14:00.000-05:00

“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”

"On April 4, 1968, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis, where he had gone to stand with sanitation workers demanding their dream: The right to bargain collectively for a voice at work and a better life. The workers were trying to form a union with AFSCME." (q)

(h/t)

Free To Be... Limitless

2011-03-19T18:26:00.000-05:00

"I don't have delusions of grandeur. I have an actual recipe for grandeur."

The question that never comes up in the movie Limitless? Is it okay to take NZT?

Limitless follows one man's experience with an illicitly-obtained drug called NZT. Though the term is never used in the film, NZT is described (via the portrayal of its effects) as a cognitive enhancer. The actual mechanism(s) of NZT are never explained, and its ability to enhance memory and processing capability are largely portrayed as wonderful. Withdrawal from the drug is a bitch, of course. And then there was that 18-hour memory gap, during which the protagonist may or may not have committed a murder... But you leave the movie with a generally-positive view of cognitive enhancers. No one in the movie ever wonders if it's fair to take NZT. (And they only briefly wonder if it's safe to take NZT.)

Cognitive enhancers - a.k.a. smart pills, neuroenhancers, or study drugs - are getting attention again. Recently the Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism released a report that found, among other things, that "[o]verall use of Adderall is increasing on campuses, and the drug is regularly abused by those with or without a prescription." (q) It's not entirely clear what motivated the WCIJ study, though the findings focused on the illegality involved in obtaining the drug, and on the medical dangers of abusing the drug.

Others have raised the issue of fairness though, likening the use of cognitive enhancers to "the use of performance-enhancing drugs in sport" saying that "[t]heir use could lead to problems of coercion, where there is pressure on individuals to take the drugs even if they do not wish to. Similarly, if such drugs were available to only a proportion of competitors, they could be seen as giving an unfair advantage, or to be a form of cheating." (q) (I said something similar awhile back.)

At least one university has now labeled the "misuse" of these types of drugs as 'cheating', raising the question of whether or not a ban on "brain boosting drugs" is a good idea. Lamkin attempts to deflect attention away from the drugs, and onto the method and purpose of higher education. "If our goal is to promote students' engagement in education, we should realign student incentives with the appreciation of education's internal benefits, so that students are not rewarded for taking shortcuts." That's great, in theory. However, even if universities and colleges are able to "realign" themselves so as to render the use of smart drugs undesirable, it simply pushes the problem of smart drugs into the arena of the workplace.

It's in the workplace where the protagonist (Eddie Morra) of Limitless meets with success as a result of his use of NZT. He finishes his book in 4 days, makes obscene amounts of money as a day trader, and catches the eye of a wealthy mogul who offers him the opportunity to use his talents in exchange for even more-obscene amounts of money. **SPOILER ALERT** By the end of the movie, Eddie has achieved a level of material success that cannot be taken away from him. His ability also allowed him to make the money that 'bought' him his continued freedom, via the efforts of a top defense attorney, after the missing 18 hours come back to haunt him. He even used his money to engineer a way to wean himself off the drug, avoiding insanity and death while retaining the cognitive enhancements permanently. In short, he won. (Sorry, Kyle. If anything, this movie is effectively an advertisement for cognitive enhancers.)

In arguing for societal acceptance of cognitive enhancement, two assumptions have been made. One, that such drugs will eventually be risk-free, and two, that they will eventually be available to everyone. (Neither assumption is true today.) But, to my mind, the bigger ethical issue is still the one that I addressed over a year ago... How do you argue for the cognitive liberty of the individual when the exercise of that liberty may result in a decrease in liberty for those who follow? This presupposes that cosmetic neurology would restrict rather than broaden the range of what we accept as 'normal'. (Think about a neurological version of The Stepford Wives...)

If there is an argument to be made against enhancement technology, it might very well be that redefining what is possible will also redefine what is acceptable, even tolerable. And consequently, individual liberty may be lost rather than gained.

Free To Be... Smarter Than You

2011-03-14T14:20:00.000-05:00

"To clothe the fiery thought
in simple words succeeds,
For still the craft of genius is
To mask a king in weeds."

In honor of Einstein's birthday, I've decided to devote some more blog space to the issue of neurodiversity.

True story: Two employees were internal applicants for the same position. Neither employee was given the position, but for different reasons. Employee 1 was told that she wasn't always 'nice enough' about being smarter than some of the other employees who had been with the company much longer than she had. Employee 2 was told that he wasn't being hired for the position because, despite working in the department for several years, he hadn't already been trained to do the things that the position required. The company was not willing to increase their investment in either candidate, and one might argue that the issue in play in both cases was an unwillingness to tolerate/foster an increased neurodiversity among coworkers. (Of course such a statement was never made openly, but it was agreed that she 'was too abrasive' and he 'was a little slow'.) The end result was that both employees were forced to do essentially the same job for which they had applied, but with significantly less compensation than new hires to the same position.

Now, one employee had a medical diagnosis that falls squarely under the purview of 'neurodiversity' and for which coworkers expressed a certain sympathy. The other had to endure rude taunts and comments. One was given full leeway of expression; the other was expected to stifle whatever made others uncomfortable. One employee was much less likely to object to receiving significantly less compensation, and so was tolerated; the other was simply 'encouraged' to leave.

Discrimination: "The process by which two stimuli differing in some aspect are responded to differently."

Discrimination: "unequal treatment of persons, for a reason which has nothing to do with legal rights or ability. Federal and state laws prohibit discrimination in employment, availability of housing, rates of pay, right to promotion, educational opportunity, civil rights, and use of facilities based on race, nationality, creed, color, age, sex, or sexual orientation." (q) (my emphasis)

So here's your thought question for the day... Were either of these employees discriminated against, and if so, in what way? Or, to rephrase the question, which actions toward/against the employees were acceptable, and why?

It Can't Happen Here

2011-03-10T09:23:00.000-06:00

"Without labor nothing prospers."

As most of the country (and quite a bit of the world) knows by now, there is currently a situation in Our Fair State. In an attempt to balance the state's budget (which everyone agrees is a good and necessary goal), the Republican governor and the Republican majority in the legislative houses have decided that it is necessary to ask public employees to contribute more to the cost of their healthcare and pension. Except that they quit asking and moved to attempting to pass legislation that simply strips public employees of their rights to collectively bargain for healthcare and pension benefits. (Wages are already prohibited from increasing above inflation without a public referendum.)

Faced with the prospect that the legislation would be railroaded through both houses with a minimum of debate, discussion, or public engagement, the 14 Democratic Senators fled the state - in theory, to keep the Senate from having the quorum necessary to pass the bill. In the past few weeks there have been massive demonstrations outside the capitol to preserve the ability to collectively bargain, and public employee union spokespeople have said that the unions will agree to the additional healthcare and pension costs that they are being asked to bear.

Oddly, this situation has mirrored aspects my own employment situation, which involved a struggle over employment status and the right (or lack thereof) to benefits (insurance and PTO). As is often the case with those not operating from a position of power, I lost. And not just benefits, but, as of yesterday, my job as well. This morning I learned that the Senate in Our Fair State managed to passed a bill (whose exact wording is a mystery at this point) that strips public employees of their collective bargaining rights. They claim to have managed this (legally) without the necessary quorum by 'removing fiscal effects' from the bill. (q)

While on the surface this situation may appear to be about balancing the state's budget, some of the lesser known provisions of the proposed bill have much broader ramifications. Including making union dues purely voluntary and prohibiting their collection by payroll deduction. (q) Labor unions make significant contributions to political candidates, and 93 cents of every dollar spent by labor unions in the last six election cycles in Our Fair State have gone to a Democrat. (q) And while no one wants to be forced to join a union anymore than they want to be forced to accept untenable employment terms, it's worth noting that the agenda behind this 'union busting' proposal may go far beyond a simple attempt to balance the state budget.

"...[T]here are two parties, the Corporate and those who don’t belong to any party at all, and so, to use a common phrase, are just out of luck!"

Reflecting back, I see a pattern of Labor fighting The Company that spans my entire life. It started with the job I had in high school, where the boss didn't want to pay me overtime, until I proved to him that I knew it was the law. I watched my father being forced to take early retirement after 27 years of service and then being hired back through a consulting firm for an additional 10 years. And I've watched the rapid growth of 'independent contractor', part-time and temporary positions being used as a way to scale back costs by not having to pay benefits.

It is a difficult job to organize people into an effective fighting force. Many years ago I worked at a company where the workers wanted to unionize to improve their working conditions. Rather than organize themselves, they tossed around the idea of joining an already-established union. While I was for organizing to improve working conditions, I was opposed to simply letting a big union in the door to tell us what to do. The fact that I attended a meeting where these issues were discussed was enough to cost me that job. And the gripes we had then seem simple when compared to some of the issues and situations I've encountered since then.

One of the best outcomes recently in Our Fair State is the return of former 'maverick' senator Russ Feingold to the political arena, with the launch of his grassroots campaign (Progressives United) to combat corporate influence in politics. But the daily battles of workers who may not know their rights, or who may be too afraid to act on those rights, continue. And if there is a cause ripe for humanists, it might very well be engaging the ideas and participating in the struggles that will define how labor will be treated in this country in the years to come...

World Interfaith Harmony Week

2011-02-04T09:06:00.001-06:00

"Recognizing that the moral imperatives of all religions, convictions and beliefs call for peace, tolerance and mutual understanding,

1. Reaffirms that mutual understanding and interreligious dialogue constitute important dimensions of a culture of peace;

2. Proclaims the first week of February every year the World Interfaith Harmony Week between all religions, faiths and beliefs;

3. Encourages all States to support, on a voluntary basis, the spread of the message of interfaith harmony and goodwill in the world’s churches, mosques, synagogues, temples and other places of worship during that week, based on love of God and love of one’s neighbour or on love of the good and love of one’s neighbour, each according to their own religious traditions or convictions; ..." - part of UN General Assembly Resolution 65/5 (my emphasis)

Note that part 3 is actually parsed to include secular humanists. It's a bit ironic that, while some of the registered events worldwide seem to focus on the Children of Abraham commonality in a specific subset of religions, local events (all two of them) during this week are being held in 1) a Unitarian Universalist church, and 2) a public library.

As I am unable to attend either of these events, I've decided to mark this week by finding and reviewing the seven other UN resolutions mentioned in this particular resolution. I'm a bit shocked that the UN General Assembly finds it necessary to repeatedly resolve to promote "a culture of peace and non-violence", and I'm curious as to the language of such resolutions...

Updates to this post after I digest the aforementioned data.

How To Create An Enemy

2011-01-14T20:11:00.000-06:00

by Sam Keen

Start with an empty canvas.
Sketch in broad outline the forms of
men, women, and children.

Dip into the unconsciousness well of your own
disowned darkness
with a wide brush and strain the strangers
with the sinister hue of the shadow.

Trace onto the face of the enemy the greed,
hatred, carelessness you dare not claim as
your own.

Obscure the sweet individuality of each face.

Erase all hints of the myriad loves, hopes,
fears that play through the kaleidoscope of
every infinite heart.

Twist the smile until it forms the downward
arc of cruelty.

Strip flesh from bone until only the
abstract skeleton of death remains.

Exaggerate each feature until man is
metamorphosized into beast, vermin, insect.

Fill in the background with malignant
figures from ancient nightmares - devils,
demons, myrmidons of evil.

When your icon of the enemy is complete
you will be able to kill without guilt,
slaughter without shame.

The thing you destroy will have become
merely an enemy of God, an impediment
to the sacred dialectic of history.

I found this poem at the beginning of Juan Gomez-Jurado's international bestseller The Moses Expedition (2007). Perhaps more moving than the poem itself was the author's plea at the end of the acknowledgments... "Dear reader, I don't want to end this book without requesting a favor. Go back to the beginning of these pages and reread the poem by Sam Keen. Do it until you memorize every word. Teach it to your children; send it to your friends. Please." I trust that neither author will mind that I chose to share their words here.

Viruses of the Mind (Pt I)

2011-01-10T16:06:00.001-06:00

"If human beings are capable of both good and evil, what can be done to ensure the realization of their positive potential?"

Any honest blog post has a back-story, and this one is no different. Recent events brought to mind, among other things, an episode of Law and Order: SVU that I had seen recently. The title of the episode was Infected, and the plot revolved around a scientific study that could 'explain' why a young boy shot and killed a man. The 'explanation' is captured in this bit of dialogue: "This study equates gun violence with an infectious disease. Anyone exposed to it is infected." Today, as I was reading the paper, it occurred to me to wonder if this particular episode hadn't perhaps been 'inspired' by an actual scientific study...

A little googling brought me to a popular press report of just such a study. A lot of googling brought me to a copy of the actual study, published in Science in 2005. [pause for a disparaging glare at those publications that lock valuable knowledge behind pay walls] After measuring 153 other factors, including demographic, temperament, behavioral and family data, the authors concluded simply by saying "[W]e estimate that being exposed to firearm violence approximately doubles the probability that an adolescent will perpetrate serious violence over the 2 subsequent years." The catchiest bit of the idea that had brought me here - that violence could be likened to an infectious disease - didn't show up in the original paper, but rather in comments by the authors to the popular press publication.

By this point I had scented a potential blog post, but what to say about all of this...? Did this study have any bearing on the recent event that still dominated today's front page? Is the value in the whirling creation and spread of the meme 'violence as contagion'? Where has this meme gone from here? (Follow-up studies, whose existence was hinted at, were hard to find.) Was a digression into memetics appropriate? Should I invoke the secular guru's essay, Viruses of the Mind? And what of a 'cure' for this 'infection'? If "viruses don't win every time", what keeps them from taking over, and how do we transmit that to the infected?

It's the last question that finally brought me back to this blog. Not because I think that I have the answer, but because I want the answer.

Desiderata

2010-12-04T11:49:00.000-06:00

Go placidly amid the noise and the haste,
and remember what peace there may be in silence.

As far as possible, without surrender,
be on good terms with all persons.
Speak your truth quietly and clearly;
and listen to others,
even to the dull and the ignorant;
they too have their story.
Avoid loud and aggressive persons;
they are vexatious to the spirit.

If you compare yourself with others,
you may become vain or bitter,
for always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself.
Enjoy your achievements as well as your plans.
Keep interested in your own career, however humble;
it is a real possession in the changing fortunes of time.

Exercise caution in your business affairs,
for the world is full of trickery.
But let this not blind you to what virtue there is;
many persons strive for high ideals,
and everywhere life is full of heroism.

Be yourself. Especially do not feign affection.
Neither be cynical about love,
for in the face of all aridity and disenchantment,
it is as perennial as the grass.

Take kindly the counsel of the years,
gracefully surrendering the things of youth.
Nurture strength of spirit to shield you in sudden misfortune.
But do not distress yourself with dark imaginings.
Many fears are born of fatigue and loneliness.

Beyond a wholesome discipline,
be gentle with yourself.
You are a child of the universe
no less than the trees and the stars;
you have a right to be here.
And whether or not it is clear to you,
no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should.

Therefore be at peace with God,
whatever you conceive Him to be.
And whatever your labors and aspirations,
in the noisy confusion of life,
keep peace in your soul.

With all its sham, drudgery, and broken dreams,
it is still a beautiful world.
Be cheerful. Strive to be happy.

- Max Ehrmann, 1927

This poem was quite popular in the late 60s and early 70s. I only recently discovered it, in a frame at a thrift store.

To The Best of Our Knowledge

2010-11-07T07:24:00.002-06:00

"A sign of health in the mind is the ability of one individual to enter imaginatively and accurately into the thoughts and feelings and hopes and fears of another person; also to allow the other person to do the same to us." - attributed to Donald Winnicott

"We believe our interpretations of reality intensely, and we want other people to join us in our interpretations to make us feel secure. We believe our interpretations are reality and if we can get enough votes we will prove it."

(For the gentleman we encountered last night.)

As usual, this blog post reflects a combination of things that have crossed my path or been on my mind recently. This post is about, in a word, skepticism. More specifically, it is about the intersection of skepticism and compassion/empathy. And the point I'm trying to make is illustrated in the following (true) story...

Some time ago I found myself in a conversation with an older gentleman during a reception. Having never met this man before, we began with the usual exchanges - where do you live, what do/did you do for a living, etc. Nothing about his responses was out of the range of the perfectly ordinary. But at some point (and I forget what the trigger was) the conversation took a distinct turn. He began to talk about UFOs, and then about shape-shifting aliens that lived among us.

Now, to the best of my knowledge, there are no shape-shifting aliens living among us. Which is to say, I have never met a shape-shifting alien. I have never personally known anyone (other than this gentleman) who had met or believed in the existence of shape-shifting aliens among us. And I had never seen any pictures/videos, etc., that suggested to me that there might be shape-shifting aliens living among us. Granted, I had never gone looking for such evidence, nor had I ever really given the matter much thought.

Curiosity runs strong in me, and this gentleman seemed sincere, though part of me suspected that he might just be waiting to see how long it would take me to call 'Bullshit!'. But it mattered not a whit to me that he be convinced that my view about shape-shifting aliens was the correct view. He seemed to want/need to talk about the topic of UFOs/aliens at some length, and something about me seems to say 'sympathetic/non-judgmental ear', so the conversation continued with a minimal amount of back channeling on my part. An occasional 'Wow' or (my personal favorite) 'I don't know what to do with that' was all that was required to keep him talking, until we were joined by another gentleman who was more insistent upon redirecting the conversation.

Perhaps the point I'm getting at with that story is that, once I was not concerned about establishing agreement about 'the truth' of the topic under discussion, I was free to enjoy (or at least try to understand) this person for who he was. Perhaps the point I'm getting at is that agreement about 'the truth' should not stand in the way of compassion. Perhaps the point I'm getting at is that I find myself experiencing a growing distaste for the sale of 'the truth' to one group of people at the expense of another. Or perhaps it's just a growing distaste for the dogmatic insistence upon one's own particular view of the truth.

Perhaps I'm just acquiring a new appreciation for the phrase "to the best of my knowledge"...

The Good Shepherd (Pt I)

2010-10-31T07:01:00.002-05:00

"I am quite aware that it is necessary for the success of any complex undertaking that one man should do the thinking and directing and in general bear the responsibility. But the led must not be compelled, they must be able to choose their leader."

What I wish political elections reminded me of... "He who takes the greatest danger, he who bears the heaviest burden, that man is King."

What political elections actually remind me of... "All history is only one long story to this effect: Men have struggled for power over their fellow men in order that they might win the joys of earth at the expense of others, and might shift the burdens of life from their own shoulders upon those of others."

People are reasonably smart about choosing a leader. In small groups. In real-world settings. In situations where they have seen the options in action.

They will follow the person who is the smartest. Who has the best information and/or can use it the most effectively. Who can communicate to the group what the group needs to know. Who acts for the good of the group.

They do respect the person who takes on the dirty or difficult jobs that no one else wants to do. Who will bear the responsibility of a bad outcome without trying to shift the blame. Who does not have unreasonable expectations of them. Who is not afraid to consult them about what they know.

So why does the process of choosing leaders for much larger groups (e.g., states or nations) deviate so much from these simple yet effective criteria and observations?

That's largely a rhetorical question. I have no intention of trying to summarize the psychology of political elections. I am merely baffled by the discrepancy in how people behave in elections and how they decide to follow/nominate a 'leader' in their immediate circumstances/environment. And since I have a blog wherein I can rant about such things, here are just a few thoughts on leaders and leadership...

A leader should fill a recognized need of the group. A group may need direction in completing a task, or they may need a representative voice, but they should have a clearly defined need before seeking a leader to fill that need. A leader should also be clear about the needs that s/he has been called to fill, and how s/he will go about filling those needs. The absence of a need should mean the absence of a leader.
A potential leader should be assessed on his/her merits alone, not in comparison to 'the other guy'. Nothing is so dispiriting to the group psyche as feeling like you have only chosen 'the lesser of two evils'. Nothing (to me) embodies the antithesis of leadership so much as a potential leader who will encourage any perception of 'I'm not as bad as...'.
Leadership is a burden that should be borne gracefully, not a title that should be sought desperately. Leadership should be a situation-specific response, not a coveted status. Nothing makes a leader so useless to his/her group as his/her own self-interest in preserving the status of 'leader'.

I've cast my votes in this election already, but not without thinking a great many thoughts in line with those stated above...

The Second-Class Employee

2010-10-25T17:52:00.003-05:00

"Nothing, I am sure, calls forth the faculties so much as the being obliged to struggle with the world."

"The company also expects to use 150 to 250 seasonal, or "casual," employees who would do the same work as regular, full-time employees but for less pay and no benefits." (q)

Welcome New Employee,

We are pleased to have you on board as a [casual/seasonal/temporary] worker here at Company X. If you've been reading the newspapers lately, you'll have noticed that positions like yours are becoming an increasingly-popular way for companies to cut labor costs. Of course, you're probably just happy to have a job at this point, but let me spell out a few things for you about your new position...

The most important thing is, of course, that you are expendable. You were hired to fill a need, but that you will also be the first to go once that need has been met, regardless of how well you perform and/or how poorly the permanent employees perform in comparison to you.

You will have no benefits. This is the primary difference between you and a permanent employee. We don't want to incur the additional expense of your health insurance and your paid time-off. Voila! To avoid this expense, all we have to do is lay you off every now and then.

Because you are expendable, it will be assumed by everyone that eventually you will no longer be here. We will act accordingly and not invest too much effort in getting to know you. Also, the fact that you make less money and have no benefits makes us uncomfortable and reminds us just how close we might be to losing our jobs/benefits. So be prepared to only socialize with those sharing your status.

There's a good chance that we permanent employees sold you out to save our own jobs, but no gratitude will be forthcoming. We'll mostly just assume that you are stupid for agreeing to do this job for less pay and no benefits.

You will have to work harder than a permanent employee to be perceived as valuable. Since you aren't going to be here that long, we aren't going to invest a lot of time or effort in your training, so you'd better catch on quickly, and don't ever let us see you slacking.

Insecurity is your new companion. Really. You have to keep in mind that this job will soon end, and you should be thinking about what you're going to do after this. We also reserve the right to move up your end date at will, according to our needs.

Good news! We might keep you on longer than we said we would. Nothing about your status changes though, so don't get comfortable. (It'll be up to you to notice if we are violating any labor laws by having you as a de facto permanent/full-time employee without compensating you as such.)

Perhaps the most valuable piece of advice we can give you is this - It is not in your interest to help us improve our processes. Any such improvements will only result in us no longer needing your services that much sooner.

Like we said before, you're probably just happy to have a job - any job - right now. This isn't the kind of job you take out of anything except need/desperation. We know this, and frankly, it doesn't raise our opinion of you. Expect us to act accordingly. But do keep showing up to work with a smile on your face!

We can't tell you how restructuring our labor force to include [casual/seasonal/temporary] workers is not contributing to the development and perpetuation of a caste-system in the American labor force. We can tell you that 1) we will realize substantial savings in our labor costs, and 2) we will be reluctant to let those savings go once we can no longer plead this as a necessity of 'the economy'. Ironically, the continuous flux of you [casual/seasonal/temporary] workers in and out of the work force might actually contribute to a much slower economic recovery. But that's not really our problem.

Any psychological problems you might be having as a result of your second-class status can be directed to our Employee Assistance Hotline. But we advise that you try not to dwell on the inequalities. After all, doing a job well is its own reward!

Welcome Aboard!

Your New Employer

Free To Be... Disabled?

2010-10-18T17:53:00.004-05:00

"...by intentionally bringing a child into the world who has a disability, it significantly violates the child’s right to an open future."

"The capacity to empathize with others is undeniably a revered characteristic in our society." (q)

"But if we want to continue to have exceptional, creative geniuses, those pathological traits are an absolute necessity."

Ask and ye shall receive.

For a few weeks now, I've been chewing on the issue raised by this post: Is it morally correct to select for a genetic trait that most people consider to be a disability? The post uses the example of non-syndromic, autosomal recessive deafness, but also touches on the autism spectrum disorders (ASD). In both cases, advocacy movements have formed to promote (among other things) the right to intentionally reproduce atypical/disabled offspring. In the case of non-syndromic, autosomal recessive deafness, preimplantation genetic diagnosis makes this possible (though not yet with ASD).

In some more-recent, unrelated web surfing, I came across the idea that people with Asperger's syndrome actually had higher levels of (affective) empathy than neurotypical (NT) controls. (Additional web surfing brought me to numerous instances of aspies affirming this claim.) That brought me right back to this section from Buchman's post... "This is because of the “dual nature” of ASD, that is, while these individuals may have difficulties negotiating the social world and possess other traits that might be regarded as disabling, some individuals with ASD tend to be intellectually gifted and others even possess savant-like qualities. Indeed, Ludwig Wittgenstein, arguably one of the most influential philosophers of the 20th century, was believed to have had Asperger syndrome. Since Wittgenstein’s (and others) intellectual giftedness is inseparable from other traits causing disability, then obliging to not bring such individuals into the world would be a loss to society as a whole. This latter dilemma is what Gillett refers to as the unwitting sacrifice problem: the ethical challenges that arise when selecting for disabilities that can cause suffering in the individual, but can also be advantageous to both individuals and society. Gillett notices that, in selecting for disability, these individuals are born as unwitting sacrifices to society’s or parent’s desire for certain genetic traits that are deemed valuable. Ought we permit somebody to be an unwitting sacrifice?" (My emphasis.) Does increased empathic sensitivity (and its presumable decrease in the desire to cause suffering in others) add to the balance to 'justify' selecting for individuals with Asperger syndrome, and how is that weighed against the suffering of the individuals involved?

[SIDE NOTE: Creativity seems to be another area where the advantage/disadvantage line might get a little blurry.]

Historically, people have been mostly free to mate with whomever they choose, with all the incumbent hopes of capturing a portion of something from that person in the resultant offspring. The genius, the athletic prowess, the personality, or the simple outward aesthetic. In this respect, the child was subject to the whims of the parents. Any damage or disadvantage to the child as a result of that particular genetic pairing may have been deemed unfortunate, but the child could not hold the parents to account for his/her misfortunes. Obviously, genetic testing technology changes that critical portion of the relationship between parent and child. Before 'genetic awareness', a parent could not be held responsible for the genetic 'condition' of the child. A child could not blame the parents for wilfully inflicting a genetic disadvantage upon him/her, or for failing to give him/her any specific genetic advantage. After 'genetic awareness', a parent has a new set of choices to (possibly) regret later, and a child has a new criterion by which to judge his/her parents. I can't help but wonder how the parent-child relationship will change as the parent's ability to design the child increases.

But what finally prompted me to write this post was the following thought...

We currently know quite a bit about what is needed to successfully nurture a child, yet we do next to nothing to regulate the environment, stimulation, etc. that a parent must provide for their child. Why should we presume any greater responsibility in regulating how parents choose to 'nature' their child? If parents are free to make poor choices with regards to the nurturing of their children, are they equally free to make poor choices in the 'naturing' of their children? (And at what point do 'differing values' become 'poor choices'?) How have adult children responded to the knowledge that their parents (knowingly) did not give them every nurtural advantage, and what might this tell us about how children will react to being given a natural (genetic) disadvantage?

[This is not intended to be a definitive opinion on the topic of genetic selection, but rather a small contribution to a larger, longer discussion.]

A Creed for the Third Millennium

2010-10-11T17:39:00.003-05:00

"Give these pages to the world, and there shall be another mighty religion, another priesthood, another Us and another Them, one set against the other. In a hundred years, a million will have died for the words we hold in our hands; in a thousand years, tens of millions. All for this paper."

(Because I've now heard 'non-overlapping magisteria' one too many times in recent weeks.)

Who knew? Certainly not I, back when I decided to study science. Or the person I was when I was a professional scientist. I even managed to make it through graduate school without getting seriously immersed in (or even really being aware of) the idea that science might be at war with religion. Or that the idea of 'God' was something on which a scientist would/should ever be pressured to comment. All this I learned from the blogosphere. (sigh)

In my head things are a little simpler. (And devoid of Latin.)

Spirituality - The individual experience of the Unknown. The curiosity, the anomalous, the wonder, the introspection, the yearning. The subjective experience, and its consequences.
Religion - The communal enterprise with respect to the Unknown. What Man chooses to share with his fellows. The objective experience - what is done with/for/by others with respect to the Unknown.

Having defined religion thusly (and distinctly from spirituality), it is (only) now possible to compare science and religion. Gould's idea of the relationship between science and religion - called non-overlapping magisteria - has been summarized as follows... "[T]he magisterium of science covers the empirical realm: what the Universe is made of (fact) and why does it work in this way (theory). The magisterium of religion extends over questions of ultimate meaning and moral value." I think that this is an absurd statement, for reasons you may be able to infer from my above description of religion.

Religion was the precursor of Science in Man's attempt to explain the past and predict the future. Because Man benefits by perceiving Order rather than Chaos, those explanations which most satisfactorily explain the past and enable successful predictions about the future survive. When (and where) Man had insufficient facts with which to explain or predict, he (historically) sought to establish Order in his perceptions via the simplest route - a single source, generally conceived in the image Man knew best... his own. A God, whose motivations and desires (being similar to Man's) might be understood, and having been understood, might be acted upon in a way that would benefit Man. Because Man also benefits by being part of a cohesive social unit, and cohesion is defined in large part by shared beliefs, it behooved Man to instruct his fellows and control the behavioral cohesion of his social unit.

This has been the historical function of Religion (the communal enterprise) - to explain and predict, and instruct and control. To perceive 'explain and predict' as the sole purview of Science is to ignore the entire historical context of Religion, and the foundation by which Religion holds its ability to instruct and control. (It also fails to acknowledge those aspects of human experience that (mainstream) Science has not (yet) adequately explained. Like it or not, Religion still offers an explanation for many of these experiences.)

Yet, to function as it was intended, Science cannot be concerned with exerting social control. Control requires suppressing contradiction and stifling contention in favor of maintaining cohesion. Such is contrary to the nature and spirit of true Science. This means that Science, though it can inform us, cannot and should not be held up as the final arbiter of what human beings should do. Science can say 'If you do X, then everything we have observed to date tells us that Y will happen as a result." But Science must stop there, and remain our servant in that respect, and Scientists must never become another set of masters to whom we defer. Science cannot give us a creed, set in stone, without ceasing to be an enterprise of inquiry.

As the explanations offered by Religion are challenged and surpassed by those offered by Science, it becomes possible to challenge the instructions and controls passed down by Religion as well. In many areas this is overdue. Yet this does not mean that any idea put forth by Religion as a moral restraint or control is necessarily a bad idea. It simply means that the dialogue about what is right and what is wrong will have to continually evolve as humanity wrestles still more self-determining power from the realm of the Unknown. Scientists should be prepared to engage in that dialogue, but without assuming the demeanor of conquerors or kings.

Advancing Humanism vs. Transhumanism

2010-09-26T08:08:00.002-05:00

"Well, if you insist on tagging me, call me a meliorist."

This post started to percolate when I read this... "The cowardice I see out there is astonishing. Smart, productive, de facto transhumanists that are just too damn stodgy to use the T-word to describe themselves."

It continued to brew after I read this... "All humans have the right to become transhumans. If not, then the transhumanist movement is no longer humanist."

And what would a blogpost be without controversy? "An international, intellectual, and fast-growing cultural movement known as transhumanism... intends the use of biotechnology, genetic engineering, nanotechnology, cybernetics, and artificial intelligence as tools that will radically redesign our minds, our memories, our physiology, our offspring, and even perhaps... our very souls."

Seven or eight years ago I had a real fascination with transhumanism. It seemed like the kind of cool, progressive movement that a smart, sci-fi loving geek like me could relate to and embrace. Yet here I am, 'regressed' back to ordinary humanism. Why? What changed?

I began to feel that the transhumanist movement was limited in its unflagging reverence of technology. Like the man said, "At best, we can say that we have effectively become 'slaves' to the technology we create." (q) Technology was/is presented by transhumanists as the only, the inevitable, and even the superior course through which humanity can, will, and should evolve. I began to believe that there was another way for humanity to evolve, and for the definition of what it means to be human to significantly change; one that did not involve the hybridization of man and machine.
I began to believe that transhumanism was too focused on the far future, and was dangerously disconnected from the problems that we currently face. Don't tell me about the glories of a cyborg body; tell me about the various expressions of humanity that stand to be wiped out by improvements in genetic screening technology. Tell me about the current sociological consequences of our rush to seek 'normalcy' via neuropharmacology.
Transhumanist writings began to seem more like the fantasies of an isolated elite, and less like a practical, mainstream philosophy or an attempt to address current real-world concerns. Yes, on some level we like to be entertained with visions of the future, but where/what is the transhumanist approach to hunger, poverty or illiteracy? What does transhumanism have to say about the fact that coveted biological 'amplifications' aren't available to everyone?

I appreciate that it's exciting to talk about and plan for a far future; one that might be utopian or dystopian, as your mood permits. Even I find it more exciting to talk about the possibility of mind-uploading than the future of Brazil as an agricultural world power.

But I also want to talk about what happens when you force the ordinary factory worker to engage a slow, flawed piece of software for eight hours via voice recognition. How does the company's desire for increased productivity rate against the psychological and neurological change (one might even say 'damage') that the new technology inflicts upon the worker? And I want to talk about the freedom to resist the pressure to modify one's consciousness according to the current social norms.

Embracing the race toward a better future via technology is transhumanism. Being concerned for those who suffer along the way is humanism. We really shouldn't be transhumanists without first being humanists...

My Name Is Memory

2010-09-11T23:02:00.003-05:00

"A poem is but a thought, a mere memory caught at play. From hand onto paper, bleeding thoughts emerge."

Where were you, and Who am I.
Catching moments passing by.

Buried deep, yet a sight away.
A song evokes another day.

Little things, like what you wore,
All of this and more I store.

Holding love, and loss: identity.
Feed me well, but cautiously.

Mark this day 'save', and this 'forget'.
Season nothing with regret.

As the moment comes again,
the time returns: another when.

Yet swear by me not, for I deceive,
Colored by what you want to believe.

So we dance together and you try to lead.
Held in check, I accede.

But today I held the upper hand,
Not quite under your command...

Labor Day

2010-09-06T14:06:00.003-05:00

Yours truly is still learning about humanism.

It seems to me that humanists would/should have something to say about labor and the conditions under which people labor. Googling various expressions of 'humanism' and 'labor' brought up nothing so frequently as it did Marxist-Humanism. Having been brought up in the era of Marxism=Communism=BAD, and having little direct knowledge of the man's work, I didn't know quite how to react to this association. But it's made for some interesting reading...

"He must constantly look upon his labour-power as his own property, his own commodity, and this he can only do by placing it at the disposal of the buyer temporarily, for a definite period of time. By this means alone can he avoid renouncing his rights of ownership over it." (q) (I seize upon the word 'temporarily', as I can imagine nothing so frightful as a voluntary captivity of 20+ years with a single employer.)

"The workers’ antagonism to the machine has traveled a long way from the time when they simply wished to smash it. Now what they want to have done with is their very work. They want to do something entirely different – express all their natural and acquired powers in an activity worthy of them as human beings." (q) (Self-actualization, anyone?)

"Marx's aim was true man - living under emancipated conditions of labor and not disintegrated by the division of labor. His vision of humanity's future was founded on the assumption that such a man was not only possible, but the necessary result of social development and essential to the existence of a truly human society." (q)

"More specifically, real liberty does not exist unless workers effectively control their workplace, the products they produce, and the way they relate to each other. Workers are not fully emancipated until they work not in the way domesticated animals or robots work, but voluntarily and under their own direction." (q) (My emphasis.)

"The opposite of war is not peace, but social revolution." (q) (Just because it's an interesting thought...)

And speak to me like you know me - the theory of the alienated worker...

"The most basic form of workers’ alienation is their estrangement from the process of their work. An artist, unlike an industrial worker, typically works under his or her own direction; artists are in total control of their work. (That is why artists usually do not mind working long hours and even under adverse conditions, because their creative work is inherently meaningful, and an expression of their most personal desires and intuitions.)... In modern industry, however, workers typically do not work under their own direction. They are assembled in large factories or offices, and they work under the close supervision of a hierarchy of managers who do most of the important thinking for them. Planners and managers also divide complex work processes into simple, repetitive tasks which workers can perform in machine-like fashion... " (q) (Yours truly never considered herself an artist, until she started blogging.)

"In what, then, consists the alienation of labor? First, in the fact that labor is external to the worker, i.e., that it does not belong to his nature, that therefore he does not realize himself in his work, that he denies himself in it, that he does not feel at ease in it, but rather unhappy, that he does not develop any free physical or mental energy, but rather mortifies his flesh and ruins his spirit. The worker, therefore, is only himself when he does not work, and in his work he feels outside himself. He feels at home when he is not working, and when he is working he does not feel at home. His labor, therefore, is not voluntary, but forced--forced labor. It is not the gratification of a need, but only a means to gratify needs outside itself. Its alien nature shows itself clearly by the fact that work is shunned like the plague as soon as no physical or other kind of coercion exists." - Marx (via) (Shunned like the plague, people.)

"A person with very few possessions, but with an intensive life, comes much closer to Marx' idea of a happy human being than a well-paid worker who can afford to buy many consumer goods, but who is neither informed enough to understand the society in which he lives, nor has the motivation to shape, in cooperation with fellow-workers, his working conditions or the political system in which he lives. A worker who is overweight, who spends most of his time watching commercial television, whose main conversations with colleagues deal with the sports page, and who is too tired or apathetic to participate in the political process--such a worker is not well off in Marx' eyes, but a victim of a system that is ripe with alienation in every sense. Marx was not so much interested in what people might have, but in what they could be. He was interested in people being alive, informed, and in control of their destiny." (q) (Yours truly was just commenting yesterday that the two most-miserable years of her life were the years when she earned the most money.)

Some things to think about this Labor Day...

Religion Did This

2010-08-29T07:49:00.002-05:00

"There is no need for temples, no need for complicated philosophies. My brain and my heart are my temples; my philosophy is kindness."

"I was not commenting and I will not comment on the wisdom of making a decision to put a mosque there."

I'll comment. My opinion on putting a mosque near Ground Zero? Do it.

Remind the world that religion made this heinous thing possible. Remind everyone what happens when men cede their secular influence to those who claim to know the will of God. Remind people that they cannot seek knowledge of or comfort from a God via other men without also being knowledgeable and wary of the flaws of men. Remind us all about the dangers of dogma and unquestioning belief.

Remind us that there are people in this world who so despair of their condition and place in it that they will live and die based on promises of an afterlife. Remind us that there are men who will exploit that despair for secular gain.

Remind us that the structures of organization feed everything that is bad about religion.

Of course, putting only a mosque near Ground Zero for those reasons would feed the illusion that those dangers are only present in the religion of Islam. And who else looks at the Christian churches near Ground Zero and sees in them everything I've just said? Only the idea of a mosque near Ground Zero triggers such an outcry. And that tells me that we are not having the necessary discourse on this topic. Because only when we no longer see the terrorists of 9/11 as Muslims, but rather as men who were preyed upon by other men, will we have truly understood what happened that day and made real progress towards a world free of terrorism.

Let the proximity to Ground Zero be a reminder to everyone who walks through the doors of any nearby church, mosque, or temple that what you seek in there should not be 'found' without a great deal of questioning and doubt on your part. Let all religions build a sacred space near Ground Zero, and let their proximity to each other remind us all of our common humanity and our common fallibility in presuming exclusive knowledge of the unknown. And let the proximity to Ground Zero serve as a reminder that suffering is universal, and that what is good about any religion is that which seeks to alieviate that suffering with something other than unprovable words and empty promises.

The Jungle

2010-08-08T09:35:00.002-05:00

"He had learned to hate poverty, and the limitations it put on his desire for learning, as well as its crushing effect on the dignity of men and women... Now here it was in its ugliest aspects, the worst of which was the ignorance of its victims themselves. With the exception of a very small minority, they had no idea that they had the right to a better way of life. It was moral, spiritual, and physical degradation, a 'jungle' in which humans lived barely above the level of animals."

So fundamental is the idea that a person must labor - that is, exchange something of themselves (be it time, intellect, or physical exertion) for the necessities of life - that few people question it, or the conditions under which, or the reasons why, a person can reasonably be expected to surrender something of themselves. While the idea that one person can own another outright is no longer acceptable in the civilized world, we are only slowly catching on to the potential for oppression of identity and spirit represented by currently acceptable forms of labor. We have coined the terms 'wage slavery' and 'intellectual slavery' to indicate that we recognize an extreme imbalance of power inherent in certain labor situations, and we routinely despair of and satirize the conditions under which many of us labor. So, while physical labor conditions have certainly improved in the last centuries, we seem to agree that there is still room for improvement in other aspects of what it means to 'work'. We would all like to feel as though we did not labor under conditions of "moral, spiritual, and physical degradation", yet few of us would consider our jobs to represent ideal conditions under which to spend our time. And so the question becomes - What is this "better way of life" to which we are told by Sinclair that we have the right to? Would he be content with the labor reforms set in place since The Jungle, or would he agree that we have fallen short of some ideal condition of labor?

I first came across The Jungle many years ago in the R&D library of a company that will remain unnamed. Having already battled a former boss about the laws regarding overtime pay, I was sympathetic to the labor plights that Sinclair had intended to be the focus of his book. Unfair treatment of workers remains something of a hot button with me. But now I'm also interested in broader questions with respect to labor...

Transhumanist thought on labor seems to deem it sufficiently ideal for machines to simply take over 'manual' labor. AI proponents would like to think that a sufficiently advanced intelligence could remove the needs for many forms of intellectual labor as well. Are we destined for (and do we desire) a future where all that remains for us to do is to create art, and to have as many experiences of ourselves as we desire and no more? Thinking about a future with no 'labor' as we now understand it can give us a great deal of insight into what labor currently represents... For example, does mitigating the need for any form of labor contribute to a more equal perception of individuals? How much are our ideas about 'personhood' and equality (historically and currently) based upon judgments what that person can potentially contribute in the form of labor?

I find, however, that I'm ultimately more interested in discussions aimed at improving current conditions. What practical corrective measures can be employed today to give us more-ideal conditions under which to labor until the need for us to labor is gone?

It's interesting to me that the Buddha, who supposedly had reached a state of detached enlightenment, felt compelled to state the importance of 'right work' when he laid out the Eightfold Path to the cessation of suffering. On the surface, this is simply an instruction to ensure that one's livelihood does not harm other living beings. Note that harm to oneself is not addressed in the standard interpretations of this instruction. Yet is the current state of 'working' in which most of us find ourselves more degrading to the psyche of the worker, or ennobling? And when one's options for employment are forcibly limited, how easy is it really to find meaningful, useful work that does not directly or indirectly produce harm to oneself or others?

I hope to devote more time and energy to the topic of labor in the year to come. The question I'm going to leave you today with is this... If the ideal conditions under which to labor are ones that permit self-actualization without harming others, then how do we create or embrace an economic system that rewards such an intangible outcome?

Good Samaritan Health Care

2010-08-01T10:15:00.002-05:00

"Go and do likewise."

A recent blog post prompted me to resurrect an almost-post of my own from some months ago...

[DISCLAIMER: This is not a post about universal health care or its merits. This is a post about the perils of using the Bible as the primary justification of your argument. I try not to get involved in these kinds of things, but the guy who presented this argument was a lawyer. And the argument annoyed me.]

[DISCLAIMER: All religious puns are completely intentional.]

It annoys me when people use the Bible in an attempt to justify public policy. It really annoys me when they do it badly.

Unsuspecting Me recently attended a talk ('sermon' would be a more accurate term) called The Moral Dimensions of Public Policy. Unsuspecting Me was more than a little disappointed that said talk was nothing more than a singular argument for universal health care. While I have no problem with a discussion on universal health care - indeed, I think that it should be widely discussed - I do have a problem with the fact that the speaker's sole justification for universal health care was the story of the Good Samaritan. For ease of reference, I'll insert the relevant Biblical passage here...

On one occasion an expert in the law stood up to test Jesus. "Teacher," he asked, "what must I do to inherit eternal life?" "What is written in the Law?" he replied. "How do you read it?" He answered: " 'Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind'; and, 'Love your neighbor as yourself.' "You have answered correctly," Jesus replied. "Do this and you will live." But he wanted to justify himself, so he asked Jesus, "And who is my neighbor?"

In reply Jesus said: "A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, when he fell into the hands of robbers. They stripped him of his clothes, beat him and went away, leaving him half dead. A priest happened to be going down the same road, and when he saw the man, he passed by on the other side. So too, a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side. But a Samaritan, as he traveled, came where the man was; and when he saw him, he took pity on him. He went to him and bandaged his wounds, pouring on oil and wine. Then he put the man on his own donkey, took him to an inn and took care of him. The next day he took out two silver coins and gave them to the innkeeper. 'Look after him,' he said, 'and when I return, I will reimburse you for any extra expense you may have.'"Which of these three do you think was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of robbers?" The expert in the law replied, "The one who had mercy on him." Jesus told him, "Go and do likewise."

The speaker removed certain elements of this story and twisted them to suit his argument for universal health care - namely, that the idea of 'neighbor' transcends tribe, ergo everyone is our neighbor, and our instruction to do 'likewise' means that we have an obligation to provide health care to everyone.

And here's why that argument simply won't do. Let's examine what the Samaritan actually did...

He did stop for an injured man that he came upon while travelling.
He treated the man with his own materials and knowledge.
He transported the man at the cost of his time.
He spent a further day caring for the man upon coming to the inn.
He paid for the injured man's care at the hands of another when he (presumably) could no longer stay himself.

...as well as what he did not do...

He did not compel anyone else to give money or care to the injured man at their expense.
There is no indication that he bankrupted himself (or was willing to) to provide for the injured man.
He did not specify for what care he would or would not pay.
He did not assume any future health care burdens beyond the immediate recovery from injury.

Perhaps the most irksome point of this lawyer's presentation came right before yours truly was about to speak her piece. The lawyer mentioned that his own sister did not have health care insurance, and that he was worried about her. Seriously - the mic was in my hand when he said this. Of course what I was about to say would now fall on deaf ears. (sigh)

As you may have guessed, my response comes down to this...

The Samaritan responded to an immediate need that was before him. Universal health care is a level of abstraction that shifts our attention away from what is going on in our immediate environment. Upon hearing stories about sick people without health care insurance who are going without care or treatment, how can our only response be to gripe/argue/whine about the need for universal health care? Take the person to a doctor! Help them buy their meds! Don't "pass by on the other side" and wait for someone else (i.e., universal health care) to show up on the scene and save the person; if they need a doctor now, help them get help now. Yes, it may cost you, but that is the point of this parable. Individual action and sacrifice makes the difference.

The Samaritan did what he could with what he had. HE did it. He did not compel anyone else to help him at a loss to themselves. Universal health care legislation is about compelling others to bear financial burdens that are not their own. The Samaritan voluntarily gave what he could. The difference between what one does voluntarily and what one does because one is compelled to do so is huge. One could even argue that the most critical point of this story is that the Samaritan was not compelled to give aid, and yet he did. And while he did give aid, there is no indication that the Samaritan bankrupted himself (let alone anyone else or future generations) in the process of caring for the injured man. He did not make himself a victim by failing to live up to his own pre-existing obligations.

It's probably a good time to repeat that this is not a post about universal health care. It's a post about my annoyance with an argument that assumes that 1) the moral authority of the source would permit only the speaker's interpretation and conclusions, and that 2) because one is presenting an argument that is based on the Bible that one's argument is rendered unimpeachable.

But if this post also makes a few valid points about universal health care, I can live with that.

We Lose Them At Our Peril

2010-07-09T07:41:00.002-05:00

You may recall my passion for libraries... I certainly wouldn't be where (or who) I am today without them. Here is the text of a recent opinion piece from the L.A. Times on libraries...

U.S. Public Libraries: We Lose Them At Our Peril

by Marilyn Johnson (author of This Book is Overdue!)

"The U.S. is beginning an interesting experiment in democracy: We're cutting public library funds, shrinking our public and school libraries, and in some places, shutting them altogether.

These actions have nothing to do with whether the libraries are any good or whether the staff provides useful service to the community. This country's largest circulating library, in Queens, N.Y., was named the best system in the U.S. last year by Library Journal. Its budget is due to shrink by a third. Los Angeles libraries are being slashed, and beginning this week, the doors will be locked two days a week and at least 100 jobs cut. And until it got a six-month reprieve June 23, Siskiyou County almost became California's only county without a public library. Such cuts and close calls are happening across the country. We won't miss a third of our librarians and branch libraries the way we'd miss a third of our firefighters and firehouses, the rationale goes … but I wonder.

I've spent four years following librarians as they deal with the tremendous increase in information and the many ways we receive it. They've been adapting as capably as any profession, managing our public computers and serving growing numbers of patrons, but it seems that their work has been all but invisible to those in power. I've talked to librarians whose jobs have expanded with the demand for computers and training, and because so many other government services are being cut. The people left in the lurch have looked to the library, where kind, knowledgeable professionals help them navigate the government bureaucracy, apply for benefits, access social services. Public officials will tell you they love libraries and are committed to them; they just don't believe they constitute a "core" service.

But if you visit public libraries, you will see an essential service in action, as librarians help people who don't have other ways to get online, can't get the answers they urgently need, or simply need a safe place to bring their children. I've stood in the parking lot of the Topeka and Shawnee County Library in Kansas on a Sunday morning and watched families pour through doors and head in all directions to do homework or genealogical research, attend computer classes, read the newspapers. I've stood outside New York city libraries with other self-employed people, waiting for the doors to open and give us access to the computers and a warm and affordable place to work. I've met librarians who serve as interpreters and guides to communities of cancer survivors, Polish-speaking citizens, teenage filmmakers, veterans.

The people who welcome us to the library are idealists, who believe that accurate information leads to good decisions and that exposure to the intellectual riches of civilization leads to a better world. The next Abraham Lincoln could be sitting in their library, teaching himself all he needs to know to save the country. While they help us get online, employed and informed, librarians don't try to sell us anything. Nor do they turn around and broadcast our problems, send us spam or keep a record of our interests and needs, because no matter how savvy this profession is at navigating the online world, it clings to that old-fashioned value, privacy. (A profession dedicated to privacy in charge of our public computers? That's brilliant.) They represent the best civic value out there, an army of resourceful workers that can help us compete in the world.

But instead of putting such conscientious, economical and service-oriented professionals to work helping us, we're handing them pink slips. The school libraries and public libraries in which we've invested decades and even centuries of resources will disappear unless we fight for them. The communities that treasure and support their libraries will have an undeniable competitive advantage. Those that don't will watch in envy as the Darien Library in Connecticut hosts networking breakfasts for its out-of-work patrons, and the tiny Gilpin County Public Library in Colorado beckons patrons with a sign that promises "Free coffee, Internet, notary, phone, smiles, restrooms and ideas."

Those lucky enough to live in those towns, or those who own computers, or have high-speed Internet service and on-call technical assistance, will not notice the effects of a diminished public library system — not at first. Whizzes who can whittle down 15 million hits on a Google search to find the useful and accurate bits of info, and those able to buy any book or article or film they want, will escape the immediate consequences of these cuts.

Those in cities that haven't preserved their libraries, those less fortunate and baffled by technology, and our children will be the first to suffer. But sooner or later, we'll all feel the loss as one of the most effective levelers of privilege and avenues of reinvention — one of the great engines of democracy — begins to disappear."

(my emphasis)

If you've ever used a library, think about how you can support the libraries where you live now so that we can all continue to enjoy those privileges.

The Art of Loving (Pt III)

2010-05-30T06:03:00.002-05:00

"Having a relationship with [her] is like waking up to discover there is a unicorn in your garden... It's a completely unique circumstance and something of a shock. You've never encountered anything quite like it. Suddenly, standing there in the middle of your life, is something that proves the presence of magic in the universe. You've always believed that the magic was real, but now you can actually see it - and almost touch it. Almost, but not quite. Because first you have to get closer, and yet how do you approach such a skittish, exotic creature? Do you even dare? And are you worthy? There is no frame of reference for such an encounter, no one can tell you how to go about it.

Then there is the issue of that very sharp horn. As lovely and gentle as the unicorn appears to be, you have a strong sense that it could also inflict serious injury, even mortal wounds, intentionally or not. Magic cuts both ways. So while it is beautiful and enchanting, and you know that you have been somehow blessed by its presence in your garden, it's more than a little dangerous - and also highly disconcerting for the average mortal..." - The Book of Love, by Kathleen McGowan

(Couldn't resist that one. ;)

"The practice of the art of loving requires the practice of faith.

What is faith?... Is faith by necessity in contrast to, or divorced from, reason and rational thinking?... [R]ational faith is a conviction which is rooted in one's own experience of thought and feeling. Rational faith is not primarily belief in something, but the quality of certainty and firmness which our convictions have. Faith is a character trait pervading the whole personality, rather than a specific belief...

In the sphere of human relations, faith is an indispensable quality of any significant friendship or love. 'Having faith' in another person means to be certain of the reliability and unchangeability of his fundamental attributes, of the core of his personality, of his love. By this I do not mean that a person may not change his opinions, but that his basic motivations remain the same; that, for instance, his respect for life and human dignity is part of himself, not subject to change.

In the same sense we have faith in ourselves. We are aware of the existence of a self, of a core in our personality which is unchangeable and which persists throughout our life in spite of varying circumstances, and regardless of certain changes in opinions and feelings... Unless we have faith in the persistence of our self, our feeling of identity is threatened and we become dependent on other people whose approval then becomes the basis for our feeling of identity. Only a person who has faith in himself is able to be faithful to others, because only he can be sure that he will be the same at a future time as he is today and, therefore, that he will feel and act as he now expects to... What matters in relation to love is the faith in one's own love; in its ability to produce love in others, and in its reliability...

To have faith requires courage, the ability to take a risk, the readiness even to accept pain and disappointment. Whoever insists on safety and security as primary conditions of life cannot have faith; whoever shuts himself off in a system of defense, where distance and possession are his means of security, makes himself a prisoner. To be loved, and to love, need courage, the courage to judge certain values as of ultimate concern - and to take the jump and stake everything on these values...

To love means to commit oneself without guarantee, to give oneself completely in the hope that our love will produce love in the loved person. Love is an act of faith, and whoever is of little faith is also of little love. Can one say more about the practice of faith? Someone else might; if I were a poet or a preacher, I might try. But since I am not either of these, I cannot even try to say more about the practice of faith, but am sure that anyone who is really concerned can learn to have faith as a child learns to walk." - The Art of Loving, by Erich Fromm

Einstein's Exasperation

2010-05-09T15:39:00.002-05:00

"Whenever a poet or preacher, chief or wizard spouts gibberish, the human race spends centuries deciphering the message."

"Be ye lamps unto yourselves."

(This one's for DFB. Because he asked.)

It annoys me when people talk about Einstein's vision of God. It annoyed me when Dawkins did it. It annoyed me when Epstein did it. And it was really annoying me that there was a book out there called Einstein's God. (As it turns out, there are two books out there with that title, but I'm referring to the recently-published book by Krista Tippett.)

As if Einstein had some special insight into God and spiritual truths. As if we should place more importance on his vision of God than any other. Let me restate my position on God, just to be clear...

I'm an apatheist. For me, the question of God is not important. I think that debating Its existence is distracting us from other, very real problems. (Religion, however, as an institution and a societal force, is worth discussing critically.)
I believe that no man should place himself between another man and God. I also believe that no man should place another man between men and God. That's why this idea that Einstein's vision of God should be worth understanding or emulating bothers me.

Aside from the Einstein issue, I'm enjoying Tippett's book, which is subtitled Conversations About Science and the Human Spirit. It's essentially a collection of interviews that she has conducted over the years, interspersed with her commentary. (A collection of interviews, by a journalist, with a title that annoys me... This sounds familiar... ;) I like hearing what people think about the overlap between science and spirituality. I like the fact that I don't know who some of these people are. But I am intensely annoyed whenever the conversation is directed towards what Einstein (or Darwin) believed.

Perhaps it's because the issue of authority is so problematic within our current religious structures. Perhaps it's because people appeal to the authority of Einstein or Hawking to justify their own views on issues of god and science. (I'm thinking of a recent episode of Nightline. Once Einstein was invoked/quoted by Deepak Chopra, Harris (or Shermer, I forget who) fired back by invoking Hawking.) Almost everyone falls to the temptation of fighting appeals to authority by using appeals to authority.

I suggest that the 'enlightened' atheist would support and foster independent, critical thinking on the part of the individual regarding any idea, religious or otherwise. The unenlightened atheist is simply interested in transferring the allegiance of the individual to structure in which he holds power. This unenlightened atheist is the one who projects the idea that his beliefs are right. He is in line with (or seeks to emulate) the Great Ones within his power structure. He knows the truth, and is happy to tell it to you. Forgive me for believing that Einstein was 'enlightened' enough to reject the idea that his views should become the new dogma.

The next time you hear someone quote Einstein on religion, think of this...

A quote out-of-context is blind. A reference to authority is lame.

The Art of Loving (Pt II)

2010-04-18T07:17:00.002-05:00

"What does one person give to another? He gives of himself, of the most precious he has, he gives of his life. This does not necessarily mean that he sacrifices his life for the other - but that he gives him of that which is alive in him; he gives of his joy, of his interest, of his understanding, of his knowledge, of his humor, of his sadness - of all expressions and manifestations of that which is alive in him. In thus giving of his life, he enriches the other person, he enhances the other's sense of aliveness by enhancing his own sense of aliveness. He does not give in order to receive; giving is in itself exquisite joy. But in giving he cannot help bringing something to life in the other person, and this which is brought to life reflects back to him; in truly giving, he cannot help receiving that which is given back to him. Giving implies to make the other person a giver also and they both share in the joy of what they have brought to life. In the act of giving something is born, and both persons involved are grateful for the life that is born for both of them."

- The Art of Loving, by Erich Fromm

The Role of the Radical Intellectual

2010-04-10T10:30:00.003-05:00

"Now watch what you say or they'll be calling you a radical,
a liberal, fanatical, criminal."

Noam Chomsky came to town this week to accept an award for "lifetime contribution to critical scholarship." I know of Chomsky mainly for his work in linguistics and cognitive psychology, but he is even more well-known for his political views/writings. He gave a talk entitled "The Role of the Radical Intellectual: Some Personal Reflections." Foreknowledge of this event filled me the kind of anticipation that one reserves for something that they believe will be especially profound.

Foreknowledge is a dangerous thing. For a week, I tried to figure out what the great man would say about the role of the radical intellectual. In my head, I tried to construct what I believed to the role of the radical intellectual, and I tried to identify (based on my definitions of 'radical' and 'intellectual') any radical intellectuals of my generation.

Chomsky argues that with the privileges conferred "from political liberty, from access to information and freedom of expression" comes a responsibility "to seek the truth lying hidden behind the veil of distortion and misrepresentation, ideology and class interest" and "to speak the truth and to expose lies." He is particularly concerned with social wrongs and the deceptions of governments. Yet as a scientist, his work spoke to almost none of this. This was Chomsky as something more than a scientist. And nowhere (that I've found) in his arguments does Chomsky confuse the role of science in determining moral right and wrong. "Science studies what’s at the edge of understanding, and what’s at the edge of understanding is usually fairly simple. And it rarely reaches human affairs. Human affairs are way too complicated."

At some point, while I was sorting through my thoughts on intellectuals, scientists, and their relationships and responsibilities to morality and political agendas, I came back to something that I'd thought about before... I believe that you are only ever an authority on one thing - your own experience. Even if the rest of the world acknowledges you to be the authority on, let's say, string theory, you are really only an authority on your experience in studying string theory. If you misread or misinterpreted or failed to investigate just one thing, your experience is not the absolute truth of string theory.

In thinking about morality and responsibility, I finally broke down and watched that 20-some minutes of video that's been the 'buzz in secular circles'. I am loathe to talk about it because I think Harris does a disservice to science. But in the spirit of 'speak the truth to power', I'm going to rant about it just a little bit...

The fatal flaw in his presentation comes when Harris himself is willing to disregard the expressed opinion of the individual in favor of what he perceives to be a greater moral truth. "I'm happy." "You can't be happy; this is wrong." "No, I'm pretty happy." "Well, then you've been brain-washed. Don't worry; I'll save you." Chomsky addresses this issue, albeit with respect to Communist China rather than women in burkas. "Nothing is said about those people in Asian cultures to whom our 'conception of the proper relation of the individual to the state' may not be the uniquely important value, people who might, for example, be concerned with preserving the 'dignity of the individual' against concentrations of foreign or domestic capital, or against semi-feudal structures (such as Trujillo-type dictatorships) introduced or kept in power by American arms. All of this is flavored with allusions to 'our religious and ethical value systems' and to our 'diffuse and complex concepts' which are to the Asian mind 'so much more difficult to grasp' than Marxist dogma, and are so 'disturbing to some Asians' because of 'their very lack of dogmatism.'"

Harris has effectively placed his interpretation of moral right and wrong, and the perpetuation of that definition, ahead of individual equality. However, it is not necessary to capitulate to moral relativism in order to avoid making this mistake. Indeed the foundation of any worthwhile-definition of morality must be respect for the integrity of the individual and their ability to express their wants, desires, and feelings. You cannot simply declare such expressions to be invalid because you believe you know better. (You may, in fact, know better, but that does not allow you to impose your will on another human being, simply to bring them in line with your vision of how the world should be.) Each person must be treated as the authority on his/her own experience.

This brings me to my second gripe with Harris. Arguing against religion is not, and should not, be the same thing as arguing for science. Science is not a viable alternative source of morality. Science acquires and examines information, but scientists frequently fail to agree on the interpretation of data, and occasionally they can even fail to agree on whether the data exists at all.

The institution of science is no more capable of deciding what is morally right or wrong for the rest of humanity than an individual scientist is. The process of reaching consensus by which scientists agree on facts about the world is not a process of argument and reasoning that is unique to science. Critical thinking is not limited to science, nor should scientists assume that they are the best at it. I doubt that Harris intends to exclude the rest of humanity from such a debate on morality, but he appears to want to give science the key role of arbitrating the facts from which such judgments can be made. However, these facts don't exist in a vacuum; they exist within the limited scope in which they were collected. And Harris would do well to note that science has not given us morality. It has given us knowledge, but those who apply that knowledge have not been guided by the moral intentions of the scientists involved in its discovery. Though science has not given us morality, the converse is not true. Morality and moral considerations have given us science, largely by dictating what type of research can/will be permitted/funded.

Harris also fails to consider that the function of science and the function of religion are diametrically opposed. The function of science is to progress in our knowledge and understanding of the world, which means abandoning ideas once they are no longer supported by evidence, while the function of religion is to maintain a sense of certainty based in the past. (Spirituality allows for and encourages progress, but religion fights it every step of the way.) The function of religion is not to provide morality, but to provide certainty. And certainty is something science cannot provide. To claim otherwise is to grossly misconstrue the nature of science. While Harris could have made a much more compelling argument for the role of science in the dialogue of morality, he damages his case by misunderstanding what science provides relative to religion.

So what is the role of the scientist with regards to morality? Can the scientist confine herself simply to the "technical problems", and leave the "ideological types" to "'harangue' about principle and trouble themselves over moral issues and human rights"? Is the scientist simply another employee, paid to employ a specialized skill set? Or does her proximity to knowledge and revolutionary discovery convey upon her the added responsibility for moral judgment that Chomsky expects from intellectuals? Is the scientist an arbiter of morality, a servant of it, or something else?

I don't have a remarkably 'radical' opinion on that issue... The individual scientist should always be guided by her conscience. In this way she is like every other human being. She should not be coerced into using unethical research practices, either by overt or implicit threats regarding her employment status.

But the scientist (particularly the academic scientist), is contracted to collect and publish data. He is not paid to filter his findings based on his own moral judgments. In this respect he is being asked to give blind allegiance to the higher imperative to disclose data in the face of what he might perceive to be negative moral consequences of doing so. How is it that we can demand this type of unthinking obedience of these paragons of critical thinking? And what does it say about the relationship between science and morality if scientists are asked to blind themselves to the potential moral implications of their work?

Chomsky's work is not relevant to this point, nor does Harris address this issue. Nor (sadly) can I think of any particularly salient piece of writing on this topic. Which probably means that I'll be blogging about it again...

Rebirth and Renewal

2010-04-04T09:30:00.002-05:00

Some thoughts on rebirth and renewal...

What is Life? by Samuel Coleridge

"Resembles Life what once was held of Light,
Too ample in itself for human sight ?
An absolute Self--an element ungrounded--
All, that we see, all colours of all shade
By encroach of darkness made ?--
Is very life by consciousness unbounded ?
And all the thoughts, pains, joys of mortal breath,
A war-embrace of wrestling Life and Death ?"

"Sweetly the summer air came up to the tumulus, the grass sighed softly, the butterflies went by, sometimes alighting on the green dome. Two thousand years! Summer after summer the blue butterflies visited the mound, the thyme had flowered, the wind sighed in the grass. The azure morning has spread its arms over the low tomb; and the full glowing noon burned on it; the purple of sunset rosied the sward. Stars, ruddy in the vapour of the southern horizon, beamed at midnight through the mystic summer night, which is dusky and yet full of light. White mists swept up and hid it; dews rested on the turf; tender harebells drooped; the wings of the finches fanned the air - finches whose colours faded from the wings how many centuries ago! Brown autumn dwelt in the woods beneath; the rime of winter whitened the beech clump on the ridge; again the buds came on the wind-blown hawthorn bushes, and in the evening the broad constellation of Orion covered the east. Two thousand times! Two thousand times the woods grew green, and ringdoves built their nests. Day and night for two thousand years - light and shadow sweeping over the mound - two thousand years of labour by day and slumber by night. Mystery gleaming in the stars, pouring down in the sunshine, speaking in the night, the wonder of the sun and of far space, for twenty centuries round this low and green-grown dome. Yet all that mystery and wonder is as nothing to the Thought that lies therein, to the spirit that I feel so close.

Realizing that spirit, recognizing my own inner consciousness, the psyche, so clearly, I cannot understand time. It is eternity now. I am in the midst of it. It is about me in the sunshine; I am in it, as the butterfly floats in the light-laden air. Nothing has to come; it is now. Now is eternity; now is the immortal life. Here in this moment, by this tumulus, on earth, now; I exist in it." - Richard Jefferies

Future Most Probable

2010-03-21T08:26:00.003-05:00

"The empires of the future are the empires of the mind."

When I think about the future, I see a complicated web. Attempting to isolate one problem or issue to discuss is difficult, but here goes...

A couple weeks ago I had occasion to be in the pharmacy section of a large drugstore chain on a busy Saturday. And the pharmacy was handing out prescription after prescription - both at the counter and at the drive-thru. Prescriptions frequently came with verbal admonitions ('warnings') about possible side-effects. Several things occurred to me in those minutes...

1) Culturally, we have a 'there's an app for that' approach to illness, rather than a holistic approach to health.

2) Belief in the power/safety of the app is more important than understanding the actual workings of the app.

3) Our individual willingness to invoke an app is generally not equalled by our individual ability/willingness to measure its effects or critically examine the outcome.

Pause for a story...

We'll call our protagonist Lady. Lady was experiencing episodes of extreme emotion (sadness) in her life. She knew that these episodes were 1) out of character for her, and 2) did not correlate to any easily-identifiable psychological triggers. She had done a fairly-thorough assessment of her life to try to determine if there was in fact something psychological going on. Was she unhappy with her job? (No.) Was she experiencing a mid-life crisis? (No. She was mostly content with what she had.) Having talked to Lady extensively during this time, I was impressed by the depth of her introspection.

Eventually Lady began to look for a chemical explanation for these episodes. Were they tied to her menstrual cycle or birth control? (No.) Perhaps something she was eating? Through a combination of internet research and an elimination diet, she was able to isolate Chemical X as the causal agent. Eliminating this chemical from her diet also eliminated the episodes of extreme emotions. Reintroducing the chemical brought them back. Lady 1) suffered unnecessarily for a period of time, but 2) was able, through introspection and rational analysis, eliminate the source of her suffering.

This story is representative of much of what I see (and hope for) in the near future. I see a continuing growth in the realization that simply because something is available does not mean that it is safe. I see our increased reliance on pharmaceuticals and artificial chemicals bringing us to a crisis point with respect to the issue of Safety, and also with respect to the issue of Identity.

To some degree these two issues are intertwined, and there very well may be an Event in the near future that captures our collective attention and highlights this. (It's amazing to me that we still have as high a tolerance/acceptance for pharmaceutical intervention as we do, given all the stories about ineffectiveness and unintended side-effects that have surfaced.) But it is not difficult to predict that as more people gain more experience with a wider range of pharmaceuticals/chemicals and their psychological consequences, the issue of Identity will be brought to the forefront of our collective consciousness. Questions like What am I if a drug can make me do/feel this? will demand answers as never before.

The nature of human-ness, consciousness, and our sense of identity will be topics of increasing popular interest. When I think about where people will turn for the answers to these questions, I see no ready area of information. The word 'spirituality' comes to mind, but I would like to see that word replaced by something that indicates an informed, supportive environment that can facilitate introspection and self-awareness, as well as provide knowledge (scientific knowledge) about the phenomenology of consciousness. This does not currently occur in our educational system, nor in most systems of religious instruction. It is something that must be sought out and/or developed by the individual; it is not currently a part of our societal awareness. I hope that this will change, and there are promising indications that this can happen.

I predict that we will also need to increase the scope and breadth of our collective dialogue as to our responsibilities to the next generation. To what degree do they deserve (and can we impose on them) modification without representation? Several months ago I sent a letter to the Center for Cognitive Liberty and Ethics, asking (among other things) about the status of their organization. It seems to me that their public activities (publishing, etc.) have fallen off quite a bit since the mid-2000's. I still have not received a reply. This disturbs me because I think that we are only beginning to see the complexity of the issues that will arise as neurological modification becomes more prevalent.

I should take a minute to point out my own biases in this area. I am generally hyper-aware of the cognitive effects of drugs in my system. I can distinguish and describe the cognitive effects of ibuprofen and acetaminophen, even though neither drug is intended to produce them. I came of age during the height of the 'war on drugs', and that may have predisposed me to have a negative or cautionary view of pharmaceutical intervention. (It's a possible bias; I acknowledge it.) I have a background in biology and an appreciation of the complex role that a single chemical can play within a living system. Perhaps this is why I have reservations about casually introducing a chemical into that system, especially if all of its potential effects are not know up front.

So perhaps I am projecting my own concerns into my vision of the future. Or perhaps there really will be an increasing collective movement towards understanding the conscious experience that we call 'human'. Perhaps we will take up the following questions together... Who are we when our Identity - our behaviors and the way we process information - has been visibly altered? When our conscious continuity with the past is significantly disrupted by artificial means - when we are no longer predictable in the same way as we were before - how responsible are we for those changes and the resulting actions? What responsibility do we bear to others who have lost their much of their Identity to something like Alzheimer's? Upon who, and why, and how, can we inflict attempts to modify Identity for the better, or to serve our own ends?

It's easy to tout individual responsibility (and I am very proud of Lady for the way she approached and took control of her own well-being), but this ignores the issues surrounding those who are dependent on us and who cannot make informed decisions for themselves. And it ignores the ethics of exercising power over others because we feel justified in doing so.

I guess it's pretty clear by now that I see this as one of the most pressing and challenging philosophical and ethical issue that we face in the near future. I am happy to see conferences attempting to address these issues. (I'll be at this one, and I plan to blog about it.) But so much of the thinking on these issues remains isolated within the academic/intellectual realm. So much of what is in the larger sphere - what the general public is exposed to - seems to be a reinforcement of the 'there's an app for that' mentality. Selling the app, and convincing us that we need it: these are the media images that surround us.

The lack of general knowledge and appreciation for biological complexity, combined with easy access to pharmaceuticals, is beginning to be socially-problematic, yet we have no targeted approach for educating children (or adults) about these issues. (Our Fair State only recently OK'd teaching birth control in sex education classes. I have never understood how perpetuating ignorance solves a problem, but that's a topic for another post...) It's easy to say that education is the answer, but I believe that the answer is going to be whatever facilitates an appreciation for the fragility and malleability of consciousness and identity. We will need to socially reinforce the idea that integrity of mind is sacrosanct. How exactly this should be accomplished, I do not know (though I have some ideas), but I do see it as the most-probable philosophical and ethical crisis point for which humanists and transhumanists should be preparing.

The Future of Aging

2010-03-14T09:26:00.004-05:00

Change is the constant of sentience.

I'm staring down the barrel of another birthday and, although it's not one of the 'big ones', for some reason I find that I am acutely aware of aging. Perhaps it's because my hair started to go gray en masse this past year. Perhaps it's the unsolicited invitation to a fertility clinic that I received a week ago, based (I presume) on nothing other than my age.

Yet, though I am faced with physical reminders of age, I don't feel old. I feel like there is so much that I haven't done, therefore I can't be getting old. I haven't been married, born children, or owned property, therefore I can't be getting old, right? Right? I know; I'm confounding physical age with a more-ambiguous trait that is the product of experience. [Insert various platitudes on 'age is a state of mind'.] But physical aging creepeth up on me and perhaps this makes for good future-fodder for the blog...

A seemingly-unassailable position of many futurists/transhumanists is that aging is a bad thing, or, at least, that it is an obstacle to be overcome. Aging, you see, is the road to death. One transhumanist says this of aging and death...

"So we tell ourselves curing aging will cause too many problems and that aging has a lot of natural beauty to it and creates a lot of meaning and that all of that is good. But I think there is one other reason. Imagine we suddenly discover we can cure aging. It’s simple, cheap, universal, and we manage to quickly adapt society to deal with an undying population. All of the impacts described by bioconservatives don’t exist, anti-aging is a glorious and beautiful time and everyone lives for centuries.

The cost is the realization that every death was preventable. That billions of people have been, in effect, tortured for decades by nature and because we could not change it we described it as beautiful and honorable. The crisis in our collective psyche would be something of unparalleled magnitude. Our species is a master at making virtue of necessity, but what becomes of our virtue when that necessity ceases to be? Does it cease as well?"

When I pause to reflect on myself, I see a heavily-modified consciousness walking around in a comfortably-owned body. The heavily-modified consciousness is a topic for another day, but the comfortably-owned body is worth discussing. Certainly that body is not perfect. It's probably quite far from anyone's definition of perfect. Knowing this, I might ask myself - Why haven't I done more to change it? Why haven't I pushed harder to lose those extra pounds? Why have I accepted the damage that has accumulated over time?

Munkittrick's question was 'Why do we accept aging?', but I do not think that the answer is as 'We accept it because we have no choice.' Certainly there are people who fight it every step of the way, with diet and exercise and (sigh) surgery. The primary objection to aging seems to be to the deterioration of the physical body and the reduction of its capabilities, yet there is a large portion of our society that is all-too-willing to engage in activities that prematurely or unnecessarily damage the body, or who at least seem unwilling to take proper care of their bodies. (That whole diet and exercise thing?) It's like we're inviting aging, and challenging it to ravish us. Do we do this because we're faced with inevitable death, and happiness can only be found in embracing, nay hastening, that outcome? I don't think so.

Age also marks various degrees of status, and life seems to be a race to get to that pinnacle age/status, followed by a prolonged battle to stay there. Evolutionary biologists will tell you that our genes are programmed to seek prime reproductive material, and that we respond to signs of physical age accordingly. Presumably this is also the source of all our efforts to camouflage our physical age. So what happens as we become better and better at hiding those signs of age? And what happens as physical age becomes further-dissociated from one's ability to reproduce? What status/traits will replace physical age as the primary determinant of desirability, and how will they be signaled? [Here I pause for extensive thought on what and how I am/should be signaling with respect to reproduction and the fact that, while I have relationship aspirations, I don't have an overwhelming desire to bear children and would be perfectly happy not doing so. Should I quit coloring my hair and display the markings of age with pride, or continue to engage in the youth-is-beauty driven attempts to 'stay young'? My introspection is messy; this post has been heavily-edited to remove most traces of it.]

It may take quite a bit of time before we evolve past our (genetic?) reaction to the physical signs of aging. In the meantime, we'll continue to fight the physical process of aging with science and technology. As we do so, we must not ignore the pressing social issues of aging that we are currently faced with, such as care and quality of life, and the right to die. We can't ignore the fact that a great many people live lives that they wouldn't necessarily want to prolong. We should strive to have a firm handle on these ethical issues before we are gifted with greatly-extended lifespans. (Fodder for future posts.)

Having managed to find my soapbox again, it's probably time to stop writing, but after spending several hours thinking about how I felt about aging, I find that I am not so troubled by my gray hair. I believe in what I've done with my life so far, and I do believe in the platitudes that say that age is a state of mind.

"None are so old as those who have outlived enthusiasm."

"People like you and I, though mortal of course like everyone else, do not grow old no matter how long we live...[We] never cease to stand like curious children before the great mystery into which we were born."

Back to the Future... The Prisoner's Dilemma

2010-03-02T07:38:00.005-06:00

"Transhumanists have inherited the tension between Enlightenment convictions in the inevitability of progress, and Enlightenment’s scientific, rational realism that human progress or even civilization may fail." (q)

The thing I've always like about transhumanism is that it is focused on the future. (Regular ol' humanism seems to be largely concerned with the past, or at best, the present.) So, because this is my blog and I can do anything I want with it, I'm going to arbitrarily dedicate the month of March to blogging about the future. [Insert ooh-ing and ah-ing.]

And a good place to start is with an interesting perspective on progress vs. risk...

A common conception of the future now includes the idea of a technological singularity. Briefly, this singularity is the point at which some form of superhuman intelligence (usually conceived of as an AI, rather than augmented human intelligence) has evolved beyond our capability to understand or control it. Enter human extinction scenarios, as we start to worry that "superhuman intelligences may have goals inconsistent with human survival and prosperity."

So... 1) The Singularity will (probably) be the result of man's work in deliberately advancing computer intelligence to this point. 2) There's a very good chance things won't end well for us once this intelligence gets outside of our control. Probably a better chance that they won't end well than that they will, though I'd like to see a statistical analysis on that.

There are two approaches to avoiding our extinction at the hands of an uberintelligence... 1) Don't make an uberintelligence! 2) Convince yourself that your uberintelligence will be different and/or incapable of harming humanity, and blissfully go about creating it.

Enter the Prisoner's Dilemma... (The classic version of this dilemma is presented below.)

"Two suspects are arrested by the police. The police have insufficient evidence for a conviction, and, having separated both prisoners, visit each of them to offer the same deal. If one testifies (defects from the other) for the prosecution against the other and the other remains silent (cooperates with the other), the betrayer goes free and the silent accomplice receives the full 10-year sentence. If both remain silent, both prisoners are sentenced to only six months in jail for a minor charge. If each betrays the other, each receives a five-year sentence. Each prisoner must choose to betray the other or to remain silent. Each one is assured that the other would not know about the betrayal before the end of the investigation. How should the prisoners act?"

Now I'm going to overlay the structure of the Prisoner's Dilemma to the issue of the Singularity.

There is currently insufficient advancement in the technological realm to support an artificial intelligence that would be capable of reaching 'singularity'. In order to ensure that this critical state of technological development is not reached, each 'player' must forgo certain potentially beneficial advances in computer technology/algorithms. This is the only way to ensure that no participant suffers with respect to negative consequences of a technological singularity. If one player defects from that objective and begins to experiment with AI, he may wind up with a 'better' short-term outcome for himself (in terms of job, prestige, etc.), but in a very real sense, he is willing to risk the potential futures of every other player (and the rest of us). He is gambling, and his rewards may come at the expense of everyone else. He is the betrayer in the Prisoner's Dilemma. (And don't buy that "devoted his life to improving the lot of humanity" crap.)

In some sense, this argument can be made about the development of any potentially dangerous technology. And so we must weigh our belief in progress vs. the risks that progress represents. If the history of progress has shown us anything, it is that there is always going to be somebody who is willing to plunge on ahead, perhaps out of deluded self-confidence, or in search of glory/fame, or just because s/he can, risks be damned. The rest of us are just along for the ride. I'll echo Hughes at this point...

"Remaining always mindful of the myriad ways that our indifferent universe threatens our existence and how our growing powers come with unintended consequences is the best way to steer towards progress in our radically uncertain future." Unfortunately, wisdom is largely the product of hindsight.

"We need to carefully deliberate how best to reduce risks and expedite beneficial applications. We also need forums where people can constructively discuss what should be done, and a social order where responsible decisions can be implemented." Welcome to the month of March in my blog, wherein I'll try to do some of this.

But today I'm still bothered by two things...

If much of the work on AI is driven by a desire to avoid the negative consequences of a technological singularity, why don't we simply stop working on trying to produce an artificial intelligence that's capable of reaching a singularity point? (The argument seems to be 'Well, somebody's going to do it; it might as well be me because I can do it better/safer.')
What benefits do we expect to derive from the creation of an artificial intelligence that outweigh the potential risks? (Maybe I should read this...)

Update 03/05/10: I don't intend to do a lot of debating about the issue of AI, but I'm more than happy to give you access to both sides of the story. Heck, if I hadn't come of age in the era when computer languages were still ridiculously simplistic, I might have been intrigued enough by the idea of AI to work on it myself.

If I Could Change the World

2010-02-28T08:49:00.002-06:00

"There is one thing more powerful than the armies of the world, and that is an idea whose time has come." - Victor Hugo

No, I'm not at 'church' this morning. I decided it was time to pick up the Humanist reading program again instead. On the table for consideration were two books - The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness, and How to Love.

The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness is a major work by Erich Fromm. I've owned it for some time, but have studiously avoided reading it. How to Love is a new mini-book by Gordon Livingston, M.D. that I came across at the library. Major tome on man's capacity for evil, or practical advice on how to have a better life? Hmm...

As much as I love everything I've ever read by Fromm, I had to go with Livingston. Naturally, I also had to over-think all my reasons for that decision. :)

Livingston wouldn't have won if I hadn't been impressed by something (besides the title) when I scanned his book. He had me with this... "Happiness, like art, can be difficult to define, but it is clear that an essential component of a fulfilling life is the quality of our closest relationships... One would think, therefore, that every high school curriculum would contain at least one course devoted to forming and sustaining close relationships." (Yes! Yes! Yes! Agree with me that more psychology should be taught in high school! You win!)

Still, this doesn't sufficiently address the reasons why I've put off reading The Anatomy for so long. In thinking about this decision, I discovered that I hold a somewhat conflicting set of beliefs.

First - You don't end evil/sin by talking about evil/sin. This is something that always bugged me about the Lutheran church services that I had to attend as a kid/teenager - if you keep telling me that I'm evil/sinful, instead of teaching me how to be better, how do you expect me to be a better person?

Second - It is necessary to recognize the warning signs that might lead someone to commit an evil act if you want to prevent such things from happening. This requires an extensive study of the history of such acts, with the aim of deconstructing and understanding them.

The second belief kicks us firmly into the realm of academics - people who have special training, and who can study such things with a degree of detachment. But what is the value/effect to the average person of immersing him/herself in such a 'study' of evil?

Perhaps I simply have no expectation of gaining something valuable/useful from reading The Anatomy. 500+ pages of man's inhumanity to man sounds fairly depressing. (Okay, the 40 pages on benign aggression sounds intriguing.) And how does having this knowledge make me a better person or help me exert a better influence within my limited sphere? Not seeing it.

Upon reflection, I also have to wonder what motivated Fromm to write The Anatomy... Published only seven years before his death (in 1980) at the age of 79, and followed only by To Have or To Be? and a work on Freud as works published during his lifetime, I have to wonder if he had grown increasingly disenchanted with humanity's prospects. Was he seeking personal understanding in writing this book, which would be understandable, given that his lifetime spanned two world wars and that this work was in progress during the Vietnam War? Perhaps he saw it as a necessary contribution to a world plagued by violence.

But when forced to make a decision about what to immerse myself in, I choose something more positive and hopeful. Again. Maybe The Anatomy will win out one of these days, but I'm not holding my breath. In the meantime, How To Love...

Good Without God

2010-02-24T11:11:00.002-06:00

"What do you call an atheist with children?
A Unitarian Universalist."

Something has been bugging me for awhile now. It started while I was reading Greg Epstein's new book on Humanism - Good Without God. (By the way, far and away the best book on Humanism I've read to date.) He describes humanism and atheism as evoking a negative image for a large segment of the population, simply because they are 'godless' and the assumption seems to follow that a godless person cannot be a good person.

The fact the Epstein relayed this perception didn't bother me as much as the fact that, despite being eager to read his book, I didn't feel comfortable taking it with me to my temp job and reading it there. That brought home to me that there is a serious PR problem with being seen as 'godless'. Now, I'm not saying that I would have been overtly harassed, as happened when I took The God Delusion to my previous job to read, but rather that I simply didn't want that 'strike' against me in developing/maintaining relationships with my coworkers.

The statement I quoted above was something that I heard during one of the UU services I attended a few weeks ago. The discussion had turned to a similar issue - making life easier for one's children by giving them a 'church' they could identify with when asked 'And where do you go to church?' It was simply easier than being known as the one who doesn't go to church, especially in more-conservative communities.

Whether we agree with it or not, the perception is out there that one can't be good without God, that we would digress to the very worst forms of selfishness and exploitation without some sort of threat to prevent us from doing so. How do you combat that perception? Is it necessary to form supportive communities that teach humanistic values (such as the Unitarian Universalists do)? Is it necessary to be seen publicly as someone who is actively trying to sublimate his/her baser instincts for the common good (perhaps by attending such 'churches')?

While public affiliation with a group that encourages good behavior is no guarantee of such behavior actually being displayed, it does seem to imbue upon the attendant of such congregations a sort of 'benefit of the doubt' when it comes to judgments about his/her capacity/willingness to behave morally. We simply don't like or trust someone who doesn't respect a common authority when it comes to determining what is moral.

What then is a humanist and/or atheist to do? What is as reassuring to others of our morality as the common fear of immortal vengeance? (We'll skip over the contradiction wherein the biggest part of Christianity is salvation from such vengeance without having to perform good works/be good. In light of that, this whole argument should go away, but the perception that godless people aren't as good is still with us.)

Maybe it's time to start treating this like a PR war. And I mean more than simply laying claim to now-dead famous people who were atheists/humanists/UUs/etc. I mean being examples of positive virtues, rather than of negative attitudes/actions. For some time now I've followed a catch-all humanist blog feed in hopes of finding something to inspire this blog. What I've found is largely simple repetition of the same stories/commentaries attacking religion in many of the individual blogs. So not inspiring. There are two ways to approach a PR war - attack your 'enemy', or paint a better picture of yourself. We regularly decry politicians who engage in 'attack ads' during political elections; why should people feel any differently about a 'humanism' or atheism that is perceived primarily through its attacks on religion?

Epstein's book was filled with examples of positive actions and organizations that are affiliated with humanism. I hope to explore a few of these and report on them in this blog. In the meantime, try to remember that people, like moths, are attracted to light. I've taken a couple of Christians with me to the UU 'church', and they were both impressed with the atmosphere and values it reflected, even though God was absent. Would that more of humanism and atheism put their emphasis on good, instead of God.

The Winner Stands Alone

2010-02-21T12:39:00.002-06:00

Trust me, I have enough charisma and ego to be dangerous.

This post relates to humanism in that it discusses (again) the perils of having any movement/idea be too-closely connected to a specific person. But first the set-up...

My search for local humanists took me to a local Unitarian Universalist Society where the humanists were meeting. Being the inquisitive sort (and having nothing better to do on a Sunday morning), I started attending this 'church' with no God. They have something that resembles a church service - meeting every Sunday morning, music, a choir, and a presentation on a particular topic. (Today's music was all Beatles songs, which is appropriate, I guess.)

Today's topic was the Maharishi Effect, as presented by someone who had first-hand experience with the TM (Transcendental Meditation) program. I know of the Maharishi Effect, but have no first-hand experience with the training, or real knowledge of the whole TM movement. (I should also point out that I have not read Gilpin's book, so I'm only going on what I understood of his opinions from what he said today.) Yours truly was completely unaware that the TM movement was largely the product of one person, or that said person came to have so much power as a result of his teaching/ideas. [Start keeping track of the irony points anytime...]

My question to Gilpin had to do with the modern-day TM/Maharishi movement, which is associated with scientists, and what ethics had (or had not) have been taught as a part of the TM training. After learning that the Maharishi had adopted a very authoritarian attitude towards ethical considerations, I guess I wasn't too surprised by all the other revelations about the Maharishi's accumulation of personal power. And I started to wonder which came first - the belief in one's own merit, or the desire for power?

I don't know anything about the Maharishi (other than what was told to me today), but the same pattern of 'teacher/leader accumulating influence leading to his/her own self-destruction' has been repeated often enough in history. You have to wonder if the whole thing is inevitable once you start down that path... The whole thing also reminded of something from a book I'd read - The Ways of the Mystic, by Joan Borysenko. While 'mystic' in this book is firmly associated with God, the points she makes about the varieties of mystical feeling are applicable even to humanistic mystics.

I profiled as someone whose secondary path was Path Three. I'll spare you all the details of what that means, and skip to what this whole thing reminded me of...

Suggestions for the Path-Three Mystic:

1) Beware of power. "It has been said that power has the ability to corrupt." (Nuf said there.)

2) Beware of charisma. "People are naturally attracted to charismatic, or gifted, individuals. If you take this attraction personally... you may end up in unwanted personal entanglements. The attraction that people feel for you may also take a sexual form." (No comment.)

3) Seek conscious communion with God. (Or something higher than yourself.)

4) Take time for yourself. "A person with passion and charisma is generally busy and in demand... but you will last longer if you take time out to rest and care for yourself physically and emotionally. ...Some of the best creative ideas come in leisure moments when our own minds are quiet..."

5) Nurture your relationships. "... Becoming isolated and out of touch is a hazard for a Path-Three mystic... [O]ur friends and loved ones are best able to give us feedback about where we may be going off-track."

6) Cultivate a sense of humor. "... Taking yourself too seriously is a growing is a sign of growing pride and conceit... No matter how wonderful your contribution may be, you are still just one more Bozo on the bus." (That last line should be a bumper sticker.)

7) Cultivate patience. "What most people consider patience is actually impatience stretched to the limit. Even dreams and ideas that are fully formed may take a long time to get into circulation. Have faith. ...Perhaps the hardest lesson to learn is not to be attached to the results of our actions." (I love that first line!)

Having reread/typed all this out just now, I have to wonder... Would this advice have saved the Maharishi (assuming he needed saving from something)? Would the impact of his teachings be any different today had they not been so closely associated with him personally? (I'm thinking of the ethics question again.) And perhaps the most disturbing question of all... Do we need to see our leaders/teachers fall, in order to remind us not to rely on others for truth/power?

The Art of Loving (Pt I)

2010-02-13T21:00:00.000-06:00

"One other frequent error must be mentioned here. The illusion, namely, that love means necessarily the absence of conflict. Just as it is customary for people to believe that pain and sadness should be avoided under all circumstances, they believe that love means the absence of any conflict...

Real conflicts between two people, those which do not serve to cover up or to project, but which are experienced on the deep level of inner reality to which they belong, are not destructive. They lead to clarification, they produce a catharsis from which both persons emerge with more knowledge and more strength. This leads us to emphasize again something said above.

Love is possible only if two persons communicate with each other from the center of their existence, hence if each one of them experiences himself from the center of his existence. Only in this 'central experience' is human reality, only here is aliveness, only here is the basis for love. Love, experienced thus, is a constant challenge; it is not a resting place, but a moving, growing, working together; even whether there is harmony or conflict, joy or sadness, is secondary to the fundamental fact that two people experience themselves from the essence of their existence, that they are one with each other by being one with themselves, rather than by fleeing from themselves. There is only one proof for the presence of love: the depth of the relationship, and the aliveness and strength in each person concerned; this is the fruit by which love is recognized."

- The Art of Loving, by Erich Fromm

Saving My Immortal Self

2010-01-30T08:29:00.002-06:00

"I studied it with the sort of zeal Sumerian priests reserved for the divinatory entrails of butchered goats."

I study consciousness. It's what I do. There's no shortage of data; it's glorious. Like the man said, "Every person's mind is a laboratory." Lately I've been focused on the idea of 'self' and it's relationship to others. Heaven help me, I think I may have even had a minor epiphany on that topic within the past few weeks. (I'm still working to hammer out the details.)

I bring this up now because certain areas of the blogosphere have been ripe with talk about preserving the 'self' in the face of illness or death via artificial/technological means. (It's nice to see that a single site can embrace both the practical aspects of consciousness based in an artificial substrate, and the philosophical curiosity and questioning that might lead one to reject such a transfer.) Since the driving purpose of this blog is to figure out what I believe, I had to ask myself - What do I believe about the urge to preserve life/consciousness via technological means?

When the question is phrased like that, you can't help but answer - "But we do that all the time! That is what modern medicine does!" And when viewed that way, cryonics and mind-uploading are simply a logical progression of the belief system that embraces the artificial heart. (Whether those technologies represent a viable way to preserve the 'self', or that complex web of things that defines a life or person, remains to be seen.)

When pressed to answer the question above, I find myself saying - I have no wish to die, but I believe that what is 'me' is a manifestation of this time and place, and every other 'me' that knows 'me'. I believe that my biological substrate is not sufficient to reproduce 'me', therefore cryonics alone doesn't hold the promise of any meaningful 'salvation' from death. I believe that a sense of self might emerge from cryogenic suspension, but that it would not be 'me' in the same sense that I am 'me' now, though it might think it is.

With such a belief about what is 'me', I can also say that I put no more concern into making my 'self' immortal than I do in ensuring the welfare of my immortal 'soul'. While answering the questions about 'self' and consciousness that might eventually enable artificial consciousness intrigues me, I am not driven to do so by an overwhelming desire or belief that I can preserve 'me' or make 'me' immortal in any meaningful way.

Believe it or not, it feels oddly empowering to say that. When freed from a preoccupation with surviving death, we are free to focus on life. This life. Making a difference now. There is a kind of immortality in that for which I believe we can and should strive... "What we have done for ourselves alone dies with us; what we have done for others and the world remains and is immortal."

Nice To Win

2010-01-06T06:04:00.003-06:00

"[Being nice] signals the hell out of your maturity, humility, and general awesome."

Several days ago I dropped a comment in blogosphere that said, in part...

"It’s fine to attack a particular idea or action, but attacking a *person* or a group of people accomplishes nothing of lasting value, and most likely simply fuels an antagonistic response. Stressing in group/out group dichotomies and us/them identities simply encourages each side to further entrench themselves in their respective positions and engage in group-branding behaviors. Anybody (regardless of belief or group identity) who engages in these types of behaviors is probably bringing the collective social consensus about his/her group (and whatever they stand for) down."

That statement could be condensed to - Being an asshole is a losing tactic. This got me thinking... Do I care that you are not being nice because I believe in 'nice', or do I care that you are not being nice because you're exhibiting poor tactical judgment and I play to win?

There are plenty of pragmatic reasons to be nice. (Nice post!) Evolutionary psychology would have us believe that niceness is really selfishness in disguise. "[W]hat appears to be altruistic cooperation is only costly in the short term." If we suppose that inherently-selfish motivations drive all behavior, then I have to ask - Is it humanism if you're betting on 'nice' to win?

Perhaps I have my religious upbringing to thank for the nagging ideas that sacrifice is a virtue worth embracing, and that worthwhile belief-systems are supposed to encourage you to be something other than selfish. I have previously stated in this blog... "While HM2 extols empathy, compassion, and "the cultivation of feeling and love" as desirable virtues, it fails to provide a reason why these things should be cultivated, especially if their cultivation would threaten one's survival... What reason have you given me for behaving thusly, save that you recognize that these traits are something you want others to express? Why are these held up as ideals, rather than strength and power?"

Are humanists willing to declare that our collective survival and progress as a species depends on our ability to be 'nice' in the face of overwhelming individual temptation to behave otherwise? And as individuals, how do we make the choice to be nice? What can we reasonably be expected to sacrifice in order to uphold/display an ideal of 'niceness'? When does our obligation to the collective outweigh personal desire? Is it enough to be nice for selfish reasons?

Human Light

2010-01-04T13:30:00.002-06:00

"No matter how powerful a single individual may be, it is impossible for that person to be successful all alone."

“But HumanLight is NOT about what we DON’T believe in. We’re not here today just to negate theism, and we don’t want to criticize anyone’s religious holidays. Instead, this is an occasion to celebrate the values and ideals of humanism – the things we DO believe in." (Can I get another chorus of that, please?)

I had intended to end 2009 by breaking out and meeting fellow humanists at the local HumanLight celebration, but a rather nasty winter storm kept me home. The HumanLight celebration was (unofficially) going to be the tipping point that determined how and if I advanced my interest in the humanist philosophy.

I have had some disappointing reactions to certain aspects of humanism during this past year, but I still believe that humanity is worth understanding, celebrating, and helping. I still believe that there is a need for fellowship among like-minded people, and a need to remind each other of our higher ideals. I believe that there are huge problems in this world that require us to overcome our differences and work together to solve. To the extent that humanism represents that, I want to represent humanism.

I have no idea what went down at the HumanLight celebration. (Heck, I didn't even know that December 23rd was a quasi-official Humanist holiday.) But my imagination loves metaphor, so it fused an old-school Christian holiday tradition - the dipping of one's unlit candle into the lit candle of one's neighbor, and then passing the light on - with a newer Christian song (minus just a line or two that mentions Jesus), to form the symbolic message that we all possess the ability to behave virtuously and compassionately, and that these behaviors represent light in this world. A better world is one where light has increased and darkness has decreased.

Christians and Humanists agree on the need for 'light' in this world: the need for hope, reason, and compassion towards one's fellow man. They simply disagreed about the source of that light. If there is a need to 'be right' about the source of the light, then let us first make sure that there is no shortage of it to be studied.

Generosity: An Enhancement

2009-12-23T15:46:00.002-06:00

"Freely given and freely received; freely bestowed and freely embraced. This is the way of love. For love never forces itself upon another, nor obligates another to accept what love gives. And love gives hopeful that the gift will be received and appreciated, but with no thought or expectation of getting something in return."

(For K, who was stuck on having to buy Christmas gifts.)

Well, it's officially Winter here, and my poor car has survived its first-ever winter weather accident. Unemployment is less than a week away, but we who were left behind have heavily medicated ourselves with baked goods and mirth.

The winter holidays are traditionally a time of generosity. The giving of gifts to family and friends, and the sharing of wealth and self with those less fortunate, can add meaning and pleasure to the holidays. But as with so many things that have become ritualized, something that is expected is never quite as pleasurable as something that is spontaneous.

The phrase 'freely given' has come to my mind several times this holiday season. I had thought that phrase to be pagan in origin, but googling it produces results that are largely Christian in context. The origin of the phrase is perhaps less important than the idea it conveys - there is something better about, if not critical to, the notion of giving when the giving is done without the expectation of something in return.

Too often acts of generosity come with the expectation of a reward of some kind: recognition, or reciprocation in kind. We have Christmas gift exchanges where we set limits on what can be given so that no one feels cheated by the exchange, and perhaps also so that no one feels overly prideful about the exchange. We stress equality because we do not give and receive freely.

There is perhaps no more incompatible worldview for the future of humanism than the one that treats everything as a potential medium of exchange. Human beings revolt at the idea that certain things can/should be bought, sold, or traded instead of freely given. That response may be irrational in light of evidence that anything really can be bought, sold, or traded, but it is fundamentally human to want to give. Spontaneously doing/giving something to make another person happy or in response to a genuine need feels good. Why should this be?

Why do people who donate blood without receiving compensation stop doing so when plans are revealed to charge patients for the freely-donated blood? Why does nothing kill genuine desire like the expectation of having to put out? Why does giving feel better than a commercial exchange? Why does the TSO song Old City Bar always bring tears to my eyes?

Of course the flip side to giving freely is receiving freely, without attempting to 'clear the debt' of the giver's gift. It's difficult, for example, to take a compliment without feeling obligated to return it. As a society we have evolved a whole set of unspoken rules about the expected reciprocity of giving. One of my favorite examples of this unspoken expectation of reciprocity is the persistent idea that "the cost of a wedding gift should equal the the cost of the guest's meal." (That one kept me from going to a wedding once; the bride had been very explicit about how much the dinner was costing.)

Or the third date rule. (sigh)

If there's an enhancement to be made to our notions of 'giving' and 'generosity', let it be that what we give, we give freely, without expectation of something in return. What we have been given, we receive freely, without being put under obligation. It's not always the easiest thing to do. Sometimes you have given so much that you can't help but feel as though you are owed something. But you move from 'giving' to 'trading' only when the terms of the exchange are spelled out before the exchange takes place.

In the absence of such terms, what you have been given is a gift. Take it freely, without obligation.

Right Before Your Eyes

2009-12-17T06:40:00.003-06:00

"What is for sure is I'm gonna to go
I'm gonna to live and I'm going to learn"

They say that self-knowledge is the key to enlightenment. And there's nothing like a major life change for pushing you to answer the questions 'Who am I?' and 'What do I want?'. Imminent unemployment has pushed my coworkers and I to answer these questions in concrete terms.

It's fascinating to watch the process of self-discovery unfold. And for all the power that self-knowledge puts at your disposal, it's amazing how little of it some people have. Which leads me to a few questions - Do other people always know your better than you know yourself? Are we built to hide certain truths from ourselves about who we are, in favor of certain ideals that we've been programmed to believe in? If so, how well can the process of self-discovery take place in isolation?

I'm continuing to struggle with being honest about who I am and what I want. I've always thought - and to a certain extent still do think - that there were certain things I had to do, and certain things that it was better to be. In the past, I've had a hard time identifying what I really wanted to do because I couldn't ignore what I thought I had to do. If I'm willing to take the trouble to carefully identify what I believe, shouldn't I be as honest as possible in identifying what I believe about myself too?

Who am I?

INTJ - The Mastermind. (I can hear your laughter.) "Although they are highly capable leaders, Masterminds are not at all eager to take command, preferring to stay in the background until others demonstrate their inability to lead. Once they take charge, however, they are thoroughgoing pragmatists...." "Masterminds do not feel bound by established rules and procedures, and traditional authority does not impress them, nor do slogans or catchwords. Only ideas that make sense to them are adopted; those that don't, aren't, no matter who thought of them. Remember, their aim is always maximum efficiency." "Problem-solving is highly stimulating to Masterminds, who love responding to tangled systems that require careful sorting out. Ordinarily, they verbalize the positive and avoid comments of a negative nature; they are more interested in moving an organization forward than dwelling on mistakes of the past." [Disclosure: The 'I' and the 'N' are solid; the 'T' and the 'J' are closer to the middle of the spectrum.]
I thrive on challenge, but I refuse to have the same fight over and over again.
I enjoy being creative. I especially enjoy being creative in response to challenge.

What do I want?

This is where things get more difficult. I've never had a clear goal about where I wanted to end up in life. Do I want to be a published writer/public speaker? Do I want to spend my days blissfully solving problems in an ivory tower somewhere? Or do I want to be on the front lines, taking on important issues and making a difference in real-time?

For eight years I thought that there was something that I had to say. In the process of saying it, I was surprised to discover that there was something else that I wanted to say. Over the last year or two, I've become less attached to the idea that I had to be a scientist, and more comfortable with the idea that I could do something equally important by establishing groundbreaking precedents and arguments in the field of cognitive liberty.

I'm still in the process of gathering information. (Thanks to B and M for independently pushing 'leadership'!) In terms of practical moves, I'm looking at what it takes to get an agent and/or a publishing deal for The Book. (The good news is that I have a good start on having a marketable 'platform'.) I'm also looking at gaining some experience in a legal environment to see if I have what it takes to be a lawyer. (I'm guessing it's more than just an exceptional ability to formulate razor-sharp arguments. ;)

And no worries - this blog will resume its regular schedule of philosophical musings.

A Vindication of Love (Pt II)

2009-12-11T12:31:00.002-06:00

Some more thoughts on love, expressed in quotes...

"Sensible people are not inspired people. Sensible people, in fact, are often shortsighted people. They cannot penetrate into the secrets of the universe... To see into the core of things, you have to be transported. You have to be in love."

"In order to be inflamed intellectually, we need to be enlisted emotionally. In the absence of emotional engagement, most people do not interrogate themselves about topics for which there is no immediate or pragmatic urgency... Love makes us explore. Love makes us blaze through new subjects and new cultures; it makes us hatch new visions."

"The love between the two thinkers was not exclusive, but inclusive. It asked. It comprehended. It cherished. And it survived."

"The two philosophers began by identifying the truths about each other and ended by identifying the truths about their time."

"It is curious that only those incapable of producing great work believe that the contrary is the proper conduct: to take science, art, or politics seriously and disdain love affairs as mere frivolities."

"They knew that, far from representing an act of weakness or docility, women's love - like men's - is a struggle. It is conquest and self-conquest. Far from proving incompatible with a muscular intellectual life, it is its natural counterpart. Strong thoughts engender strong emotions. A woman accustomed to reasoning for herself is unlikely to leave courting, desiring, sacrificing, swaggering, or indeed self-dramatization to the opposite sex. She is unlikely to shrink from a fight."

"Love, for the strong-hearted and strong-minded woman, is a game like all others - albeit perhaps the most important game."

"We had played too many games for me not to try this one too."

"Still, after all they had been through together, he understood her more than any other man on earth."

"...even while lovers are striving to be truthful about their feelings to their quarry, they must hold something back for the quarry to hunt in them."

A Vindication of Love (Pt I)

2009-11-30T15:11:00.002-06:00

From a book that I happen to be reading - "A Vindication of Love: Reclaiming Romance in the Twenty-First Century" by Cristina Nehring (2009) ...

"For women authors in general, love - whether it be reciprocal or spurned, happy or sad, chaste or promiscuous - seems to be a public relations gaffe, a death blow to one's credibility as a thinker... To be respected as a thinker in our world, a woman must cease to be a lover. To pass for an intellectual of any distinction, she must either renounce romantic love altogether or box it into a space so small in her life that it attracts no attention."

"The reputation of a male thinker is either untouched or improved by an erotically charged biography. The reputation of a female thinker is either subtly undermined or squarely destroyed."

"Men, in other words, are defined by the missions they have accomplished, the dragons they have slain, the prizes they have won, while women are defined by the men they have loved. This is indeed unforgivably reductive..."

True that. (sigh)

I intend to return to this topic post-chaotic employment mess.

Tend and Befriend

2009-11-27T08:01:00.002-06:00

"The dominant model of human responses to stress has been the fight or flight response.... From the standpoint of human beings, however, this analysis of stress responses is incomplete." - Wikipedia

It's been an eventful couple of weeks. Yours truly found out that her company has fallen prey to the economy, and will be closing by the end of this year. She shares this stressful state of job loss with a cohort of coworkers.

There's a part of me that tries to remain a detached observer with regard to group dynamics, and this situation is no exception. As we all move closer to unemployment, it's been interesting to see how we, individually and collectively, respond to the stress of having our jobs/income ripped away. As hinted at in the quote above, the traditional model of stress response - fight or flight - seems inadequate to describe the observed responses to this particular threat.

Indeed, the nature of the threat is such that neither fighting nor flight are really possible. There is nothing any of us can do to make the jobs come back (fight), nor can we successfully escape the threat of a lost income (flight). If I wanted to argue that the fight or flight response did explain my response to this stressful situation, I might do so in the following way... Initially, the fight response prompted me to question our right to severance. (We have none, due to the nature of our company and the reasons for its closing.) I might also say that the fight response prompted me to mobilize my resources for a campaign to regain an income. (Alternative stress response: use humor to offset tension. We are now on 'a campaign to regain our income.')

But this line of reasoning seems to me to be too much of a stretch from the original observations that led to a 'fight or flight' theory of stress response. (I generally hate overgeneralizations.) Much about our current situation and the behaviors that I have observed in myself and others reminds me of an alternative model of stress response that I only recently learned about - tend and befriend.

Tend and befriend has been presented as a predominantly female response to stress. The model was developed after Shelley Taylor, a health psychologist, realized that most of the studies leading to the fight or flight model had been conducted on male animals. I don't particularly like that overgeneralization, but I can't really use observations from my current situation to argue with it either.

The more critical difference between how the two models might be applied to the situation of job loss seems to be in the nature of the threat. Job loss may represent a range of stresses - from losing a critical component of one's identity, to losing one's friends/associates, to losing food/shelter as a result of losing income - rather than the single, immediate threat of a predator. The things that you stand to lose when you lose a job are things that come from interaction and exchange with other people. Regaining what you've lost requires setting up a replacement network of interaction and exchange. (Hello again, Facebook!)

Additionally, regaining an income requires information about potential new jobs. Surviving the threat of job loss requires interaction with other people. Whether you choose to call engaging in this interaction 'fighting' or 'befriending' probably reflects aspects of your personality/worldview more so than it reflects the actual behavior and the reasons for it. Or maybe it reflects actual gender differences in preference for a particular worldview. I have to wonder - Is there a measurable difference in success and/or personal happiness, independent of gender, that comes from internalizing one of these models over the other? "I wondered which one is right. Or, are they both right?" (q)

As to my personal application of the tend and befriend response... I believe I'll spend the better part of today 'tending' my humble abode, which is in dire need of such. I generally ignore this particular chore, but somehow I find it oddly soothing right now. Likewise, I'll probably attempt to tend/befriend coworkers and friends alike with the application of baked goods. ;)

A Multi-dimensional Assessment of Belief

2009-11-09T14:40:00.008-06:00

"But out of limitations comes creativity."

I find myself lamenting the limitations of the standard believer/nonbeliever dichotomy. More specifically, I hate that the word 'skeptic' has come to signify a dogmatic group to which one belongs, rather than an esteemed state of critical thinking. It got me thinking about why a person holds a particular set of beliefs, and how we might more accurately identify the reasons for a person's adherence to a particular belief.

So here's today's two-bit attempt at improving the world.

Think of this as a Myers-Briggs type personality assessment. (I'll have a name for it by the end of this post.) Let me explain the dimensions...

Self <-------> Authority (Source of Beliefs)
This dimension reflects the likely source of a person's beliefs. Is he a critical thinker who examines arguments and evidence for himself before reaching a decision? Or is he content to let an accepted authority figure tell him what is right/wrong?

Diverse <-------> Homogeneous (Environmental Preference)
This dimension reflects a person's preference for social environment. Does he prefer a diverse group of friends with differing beliefs? Or is he more comfortable associating with people who possess similar beliefs and values?

Uncertain <-------> Certain (Tolerance for Uncertainty)
This dimension reflects a person's tolerance for uncertainty. Is he willing to act on information that he is not completely certain about (high tolerance for uncertainty), or is he likely to hold off on acting in the face of uncertainty?

I would argue that these dimensions are autonomous enough that a score on one scale does not necessarily predict scores on the other scales. But that's just my hunch. Certainly you could see where a person who had a higher tolerance for uncertainty might prefer a more diverse social group, but it need not follow. A person who is required by some other aspect of his life to have a high tolerance for uncertainty may actually prefer a more homogeneous social group. (There are limits to our ability to tolerate uncertainty.)

What would this scale be useful for? In theory, it could predict a person's tendency toward affiliations with belief-based groups, and their willingness to act based in support of that affiliation. A person who prefers a homogeneous social group, but who is not willing to accept 'truth' from authority, may be less likely to commit aggressive acts in the name of that group's agenda. A person who prefers a homogeneous social group, and who has a low tolerance for uncertainty, may react more aggressively to perceived threats to that group's stability, whether ideological or social.

Here's an interesting quote that I found in the blogosphere today - "We can signal loyalty to a group by showing our confidence in its beliefs. And our ability to offer many reasonable arguments for its beliefs suggests such confidence. But sometimes we can show even stronger loyalty by showing a willingness to embrace unreasonable arguments for our group’s beliefs. Someone who supports a group because he thinks it has reasonable supporting arguments might well desert that group should he find better arguments against it. Someone willing to embrace unreasonable arguments for his group shows a willingness to continue supporting them no matter which way the argument winds blow." (q) This quote suggests that parsing the reasons why a person holds a particular beliefs (especially one whose 'truth' value is questionable) might be of value in predicting their actions.

For all I know, something similar already exists. I still don't know what to call my proposed assessment, so I'm having a hard time googling for something similar. (I did find a few interesting things though.) My apologies if I reinvented your wheel.

In addition to the uses I've just described, I'd like to see people substitute this three-part self-assessment any time they feel like identifying themselves as a 'believer' or a 'skeptic' of any kind. At the very least we'll be getting a more honest picture of why you hold that viewpoint.

So... who has some grant money for me to develop this idea? :)

Between Man and Man (Pt II)

2009-11-06T07:01:00.003-06:00

"You have to turn the sheep loose before you can start to herd them."

"Authority is easily abused. But authority can do good. It takes power to make the real changes needed in the world. A good person who is good at dealing with power can make the world a better place for everyone."

"Only thing that's on my mind is who's gonna run this town tonight."

The ironic thing about power is that everyone thinks they're good at managing it. Even me. But that doesn't mean that I'm actually good at managing it. Judgments about your own use of power are only valid when made by someone else.

Recently I was empanelled on a six-person jury in a trial for two civil offenses. In Our Fair State, only a five-person majority is required in order to convict in this situation. But we were asked to try for a unanimous verdict.

[Disclaimer: I'm going to grossly overdramatize my (internal monologue) here to make a point. Though this was not what was running through my mind at the time, the fact that I can think about it this way now indicates that similar knowledge/feelings may have existed in my subconscious at the time. I have nothing but respect for my fellow jurors, especially The Dissenter, who held out for two hours against the onslaught of my brilliant logic and dynamic personality. ;) ]

Once the jury was sequestered, our first task was to appoint a foreman. (Not It! Never be the face of authority.) So I quickly sized up the situation and nominated the person who turned out to be The Dissenter. He was quick, confident, and articulate, and there were no objections. Aside from me, he was probably the most dynamic person in the room. [What an ego, eh? ;) ]

Unfortunately, the first thing he wanted to talk about was something that the defense attorney had mentioned in his opening statement but never during the actual trial. Anything said in the opening or closing statements cannot be considered as evidence. (Silly sheep! Tricks are for kids!) Yours truly feels compelled to pipe up and stop this nonsense before it goes too far. He resists me. I persist. (Fight me! Do it! Bring it!)

[Disclaimer: I like to fight/compete/argue/debate with a worthy opponent. I can kick ass and take names, and I'm good at it. And I like it. Fear me.]

At this point, I realize that someone else (Me!) is going to have to take charge of this discussion, but not in an overt or disruptive way that destabilizes the group dynamic. The first move? Take control of the white board. [Did I mention that I once went to a literary costume ball as The Art of War?] Give everyone your visual of the situation. There were two offenses, each of which was comprised of two elements. We were all in agreement with the first element in each count, and after only a brief discussion, we were in agreement on the second element of the second count. I diagram this for us to reinforce a sense of accomplishment and unity, and to emphasize our point of disagreement - the second element of the first offense - in order to focus the discussion.

The wording of the second element of the first offense was deliberately vague, and as a result we had to come to an agreement not only as to what 'under the influence' and 'impaired' meant, but also whether or not the defendant had been demonstrably impaired. The evidence left enough room for argument on this point, though five of us rather quickly agreed that the defendant was impaired. The Dissenter held out at this point, not out of stubbornness, but because he actually wasn't sure.

And now we deliberated. And by 'we', I mean mostly him and me. (Bring it!) While we both got a little loud, we both heard each other's arguments and responded to the arguments rather than something else. [Nothing but respect for you, dude. Not many people can handle me when I get going. I won't presume to speak for you, but I enjoyed our deliberation.]

Eventually, with the help of the juror next to me, we finally convinced The Dissenter that the defendant had been impaired. I won't rehash all the arguments that were employed, except to say that they were brilliant! [Geez, squash the ego already!]

What's disturbing to me is that it was easy for me to take charge of that situation. And I did it because I thought I was the best-qualified, smartest, and most competent person in the room. [Damn, woman! How did your ego get that big?] I knew enough about human behavior and group dynamics to be able to manipulate the situation and do it. And I was relentless in applying every argument at my disposal to winning - er, convincing The Dissenter that I/we were right. And I liked it. And because the rest of the group was on the same side as me, I was perhaps more focused on convincing The Dissenter that he was wrong than I was on considering the fact that he might be right. [I still don't think he was right. I'm just saying...]

And for hours afterward I was still wound up in that weird way you get wound up after you've fought and won. This disturbed me more than anything - the intensity of the whole thing, and the fact that I liked it.

Almost everyone thinks that they'd be great at handling power. Hell, I'm sure a great many of us think that we're the 'most qualified' to have such power, whether in the workplace or in a group dynamic. But once you have a certain amount of effort invested in getting power or in obtaining a certain outcome, it becomes increasingly difficult to back down from your position. Not that you should want to, but that status and the ability to direct future actions are now attached to your actions, and attempting to hold your position/power may be more about your status than it is about doing the right thing. For some inexplicable reason, power feels good, and when you have it, it's hard to give it up.

In our culture we routinely elevate people to positions of celebrity/influence - in the realms of spirit and science, as well as other realms. We allow the media to build these people up to us as authorities who are worthy of respect, and we give it to them. [Journalists scare me.] We hand them power, without realizing that power changes a person, and there are very few people who can handle it well. Ironically, we also rely on the media to tell us when these authorities have over-stepped some perceived boundary in thought or conduct, and we allow the media to destroy our ability to trust or respect these same people.

An individual is always fallible. An idea may have merit (or not), but too often we choose to focus on the individual instead of his/her ideas. It's easier. It settles that need that most of us have to be dominated. It gives us someone to fight against. It's easier to set up and get excited about contests between man and man than it is to get excited about a contest purely between ideas. But the individual will always make mistakes, and we will cheer and move on. The individual is always fallible.

Rather than choosing between men in whom you will put your trust, choose between ideas. Choosing between ideas is much harder to do. You will want to use the easy cues of the personal charisma and charm of the individual in order to make judgments about his/her ideas, but personal attributes are misleading. And the individual may have an agenda. You are always better off doing the hard work of choosing between ideas, rather than choosing between individuals.

Between Man and Man (Pt I)

2009-11-05T05:21:00.002-06:00

"Pity those who seek for shepherds instead of longing for freedom."

Back in the days of the Coffee Evangelist, I had started to make a list of the things I believed. It's been well over a year now, and I only remember one thing from that list - I believe that no man should place himself between another man and God.

Now, the atheists among you will no doubt read that as an indictment against the notion of priests and organized religion. And it is. But it is also an indictment against anyone who would use any appeal to authority as a way to tell another man what to think about God.

Before I read The God Delusion, my thoughts about it were pretty much limited to "Poor sap. He actually thinks it's about God." After I read The God Delusion, I had to wonder if Dawkins didn't understand the more fundamental truth of things - It's not about God. It's about power over one's fellow man, and man's desire to be reassured that someone smarter/wiser/holier than himself has figured things out and can tell him the answers. You'll remember that TGD begins by describing Dawkins' perceptions of Einsteins' views on God/religion. You'll remember that I was heartily annoyed that Dawkins peppered his book with similar claims about great scientists - He was an atheist, and he was smarter/wiser than you. Do you really think you know better than him? (Sorry Dawkins, but it smacked of that whether you said it openly or not.) For all the convincing arguing Dawkins did about the evidence (or not) for God, he still couldn't resist putting in the appeals to an authority greater than himself.

You see, it's really not about God. God is an unanswerable question, because a fundamental aspect of the idea of God is that S/He is outside of our realm of experience. I have nothing against debating the merits/existence of God if you feel you need or want to do that. But do it respectably, by discussing the only thing you truly have - your own ideas, thoughts, and experiences - without resorting to a tally of which respectable person falls on which side of the debate. (Well done on that point, Horgan.)

And decide if your real problem is with God, or with organized religion (Man). Because I'm betting that almost everything you think you know about God actually came from Man. Even those tablets of inscribed stone/gold that are supposed to have come directly from God. Unless God dropped those tablets at your feet, your knowledge of them came from Man.

I wish that God were something intensely personal. I wish that each man (and of course I mean woman also) questioned the unknown aspects of his universe on his own and decided what to believe based on his own thinking and experience. I wouldn't presume to tell someone that he can't feel the presence of God, or the peace that passes understanding, except to say that if he finds these experiences too distressing, there's probably a medication that can help with that. But when one man thinks his vision of whatever is out there is superior to that of others, then the problems start. When one man becomes convinced that he must share that vision, he becomes an authority, at least on that topic. (And I know what some of you are thinking. Yes, that goes for scientific visions too. Even mine.)

When one man becomes convinced that he must defend his vision, he is no longer working for his own understanding - he is fighting for the loyalty/respect/right to influence other people. And once you are in that position, it's very hard not to resort to appeals to the authority of others who shared your vision. Because you have tasted power, and it tastes good. (Pt II will be about my recent experience as a juror, and let's just say... sometimes I scare me.)

Authority is an inescapable consequence of organized group activity. Any time there is a division of labor - such as is required for a civilized society to function - or task specialization among members of a group, one member comes to know things that the others do not. He becomes a trusted authority in that thing in which he specializes. People come to him when they need advice or information about his area of expertise. And this system can work well, because we usually recognize how it enhances our collective strength. We can't all be doctors - who would put out fires?, etc. I just don't think that our knowledge or ideas about God are something that we need to trust to others. God shouldn't be an acceptable area of specialization. You might specialize in the history of the idea of God, or the reasons people want to believe in God. But you do not and should not claim to specialize in God. You do not and should not claim to have any special authority from God.

Let me say it again - God is an unanswerable question, by definition. Talking about God only shifts our attention away from the real problems that prompted us to think about God in the first place. (I can't believe I'm writing yet another post that talks about God. Really. It annoys me.) And those problems are between Man and Man. Even those problems that appear to have no origin in the actions of Man (e.g., natural disasters) can be alleviated somewhat by the efforts of Man. And because Man is a creature of diverse ideas, he will argue and fight for the right to lead other men according to his vision of how these problems should be solved. But his vision should never be confused with God's vision. Even if he believes God may have communicated something to him, he is the one communicating it to you. And he is a man. You are never being asked to choose between God and Man; you are being asked to choose between man and man. Even when you are choosing between your own experience and the experience of others - man and man.

At some point, you will follow someone whose vision or charisma or other attributes you admire. But never give up the right to question that person, or their actions. Never let them convince you that their position is unassailable, or their authority is beyond reproach.

I know what you're thinking - "You're sounding a little preachy there, missy." And in Pt II I'll tell you exactly why you should never unthinkingly give me power or authority.

By Heresies Distressed (Pt III)

2009-10-30T09:26:00.003-05:00

"I was bold in the pursuit of knowledge, never fearing to follow truth and reason to whatever results they led, and bearding every authority which stood in their way."

Recently I attended a talk on the state of science education in Our Fair City. (My apologies if you choked on something when you saw the link. ;) I live under a pretty big rock sometimes, so I really didn't know what to expect from this talk, save that I thought the emphasis might be on teaching the process of critical thinking, rather than facts about science. And there was a good deal of valuable discussion on that point.

But the main point of discussion was the teaching of evolution in the classroom. Now, Our Fair City is pretty liberal, so I didn't think that this was a problem in our area. But apparently there is a survey out there somewhere that did not give Our Fair State a favorable ranking in science education. And apparently this has a great deal to do with how evolution is taught.

Yours truly was displeased to learn that science education has become synonymous with evolution. [Mini-rant begins.] Science is so much more than that. It is, first and foremost, a process of thinking critically about the evidence in front of you, whether that evidence be a fossil, the light from a star, or the behavior of an individual. Science is not a club you join, or a replacement for spirituality. (The chief doctrine of Buddhism is "Be ye lamps unto yourselves." As in, think critically about what's in front of you, and don't follow along like a sheep. So science does not have a monopoly on critical thinking.) And while science is also a community, it should not be a community that allows its actions to be dominated by an anti-religion agenda. [Mini-rant over.]

During all the back and forth about evolution vs. creation, yours truly was wondering 'Why doesn't the idea of evolution distress me? How did I get to this place?' I didn't get there by simply switching the authority to which I pledged my allegiance. I didn't get there through fear, or peer pressure. I got there by embracing and nurturing the power to ask questions and answer them for myself. I questioned authority, and found it lacking. I also found that authority didn't particularly care if I got hurt when I followed it, and therefore I was often better off thinking for myself.

My next question was 'Why aren't more people doing this?'

"One of the basic human desires is the desire to be dominated. Dictatorships and cults arise from the desire of certain communities to be dominated by some powerful figure. Our primate relatives often live in small packs dominated by one unquestioned leader. Maybe this is how we're programmed to respond. In any case, a dictator doesn't come into power by his personal force alone. He comes into power when people want to be led, when people want to transfer responsibility onto some supposedly greater person.

It's very convenient to be told what to do. You no longer have to think for yourself. You no longer have to make your own decisions. That can be a tremendous relief. It's why some of the smartest people in the world often fall prey to the kookiest cults. They're just tired of being responsible for themselves." - Zen Wrapped in Karma Dipped in Chocolate, Brad Warner (2009). (Good book. Worth the read.)

Assuming that it is advantageous to be a critical thinker, how do you go about giving people (especially children) the ability to be independent thinkers? How do you give them the desire to be independent thinkers? What can you do to influence the next generation if you are neither parent nor teacher? And how do you do it without simply becoming another 'authority' to which they transfer their allegiance? (More thoughts on this are forthcoming.)

Free To Be... Neurodiversity vs. Cognitive Liberty

2009-10-26T12:26:00.003-05:00

“There are two ways of spreading light: to be the candle or the mirror that reflects it.”

I hereby point you to a recent series of posts on neurodiversity and cognitive liberty, beginning with a post by Casey Rae-Hunter, who identifies himself as an adult with Asperger's, and continuing with his follow-up post, which aims to clarify how neurodiveristy differs from cognitive liberty. The discussion is summarized in a post by George Dvorksy that fed to the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies.

Rae-Hunter's Principles of Cognitive Liberty... [My comments are bracketed.]

"1. Cognitive liberty is the basic right of an individual to pursue potentially beneficial psychological/neurological trajectories. If the individual is unable to make these choices themselves, than it is the right of their closest family members to make them, provided they are not coerced by the medical establishment or prevailing social strata. [I don't agree that the last sentence is a forgone conclusion. A non-family advocate, such as a case worker, may do more to actually advocate for the individual in many cases.]

2. Cognitive liberty recognizes that information and education are key to making informed choices. In the absence of such information, cognitive libertarians will advocate for the fullest range of data in when considering treatment options or lifestyle planning.

3. Cognitive liberty recognizes the range of psychological profiles in both the neurotypical world and otherwise. Until and unless an individual's psychology can be determined as infringing on another individual's cognitive liberty, they are free to pursue or not pursue strategies for conventional adaptation, possible enhancement or any other cognitive application — actual or postulatory.

4. Cognitive liberty recognizes the right to pharmacological experimentation, within existing legal structures. Where those structures are not beneficial or unnecessarily inhibit potentially useful individual research, cognitive libertarians reserve the right to challenge legal frameworks (and, where appropriate and with full comprehension of the punitive risks, step beyond them).

5. Cognitive liberty recognizes the essential function of the governmental regulatory apparatus, but places others' cognitive liberty ahead of the societal, legal or bureaucratic status quo. Through education, research and advocacy, cognitive libertarians can and should present information to policymakers that will enhance governmental comprehension of current and emerging issues. Where decisions are made, they must be transparent and open to debate.

6. Cognitive liberty is not an outlier of the neurodiversity movement. It is a separate, but complimentary effort to enhance understanding about the range of possibilities in self-directed cognition."

This is definitely a good start to defining the objectives and guiding principles of cognitive libertarians, but I would like to illuminate one point that may have gotten lost in the initial discussions.

The issues of neurodiversity and cognitive liberty are not restricted to autistics and those in the autism spectrum, though you might be forgiven for thinking that. Dvorsky attempts to extend the discussion a bit by referring to forced modification of sociopathic tendencies, though his support for the idea of cognitive liberty dodges a bit here - "I am admittedly on the fence with this one. My instinct tells me that we should never alter a person’s mind against their will; my common sense tells me that removing sociopathic tendencies is a good thing and ultimately beneficial to that individual. I’m going to have to ruminate over this one a bit further…" (George, dude! I expect a follow-up post from you on this. Give it plenty of thought.)

Potent threats to cognitive liberty can also come from a variety of social pressures faced by 'normal' people, as discussed in a recent posting here, or from the idea that anything that can be classified as a mental pathology should be treated according to current medical guidelines.

We are constantly redefining what it means to be human. Some of these ideas still distress us 150 years after they first appeared. And we now have it within our grasp to artificially change how we express our humanity. It is up to us to make sure that this technology serves our highest ideals about humanity, not our lowest fears.

"One way or another, we all have to find what best fosters the flowering of our humanity in this contemporary life, and dedicate ourselves to that."

By Heresies Distressed (Pt II)

2009-10-15T10:38:00.003-05:00

"Any man who afflicts the human race with ideas must be prepared to see them misunderstood."

Some days ago I asked the questions - "Is there any area of the human condition which science should not explore and report upon with complete impartiality? Should social considerations have a role in determining what areas science is allowed to investigate, and how the results should be disseminated/used?"

After watching the NOVA special on Darwin, I got to thinking about the impact of Darwin's work. Darwin was portrayed as being worried about a very specific implication of his work. His work brought man and animal into the same sphere (those creatures subject to certain types of natural law), and struck a blow to the idea that Man was created in God's image and therefore fundamentally superior to animals. And while the NOVA special didn't portray this aspect of Darwin's thinking in great detail, it did convey that this was an important concern for Darwin. Perhaps his concerns were more for himself - as he undoubtedly knew that he would be vilified for suggesting something so abhorrent - or perhaps he did spend some time thinking about how the broader social consequences that would come with a wider acceptance of this idea.

Perhaps Darwin was also motivated to share the beauty he found in understand new laws of the universe - "There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved." (q) Perhaps he keenly felt the obligation of a scientist - to measure and report. And he was pressured by the need to publish for priority.

The purpose of this post isn't to pass judgment on Darwin, but rather to get at answers to the questions I was asking. Darwin simply provides a compelling case study with which to attempt to answer those questions. After a week of ruminating on what I had watched, I find myself stuck on this thought... While Darwin gave the world valuable evidence for a valid new scientific perspective, what he (arguably) didn't do was to give man anything that alleviated any form of suffering. (One could even argue (although I won't attempt to) that Darwin's ideas have thus far proved to be a cause of additional suffering.) 'That is not the purpose of science,' you exclaim, and of course you're right. But where does the scientist's responsibility to add to the common knowledge of mankind meet his/her responsibility to enhance the collective good of mankind?

Do scientists simply have an obligation to discover and report? Or should they be asking themselves critical questions, such as... Are people suffering needlessly for lack of this knowledge? Would I want my children to have this knowledge, and why?

Assuming Darwin were free from any perceived need to publish for priority, how would he have argued the answers to these questions with respect to his ideas?

We cannot say that there are no other fundamental challenges awaiting us with respect to what it means to be human. The science journalist quoted in the previous post recently posted about free will. He chooses to reject a common scientific perspective - the idea that free will is an illusion - for the following reasons... "Free will works better than any other single criterion for gauging the vitality of a life, or a society. To me, choices, freely made, are what make life meaningful. Moreover, our faith in free will has social value. It provides us with the metaphysical justification for ethics and morality. It forces us to take responsibility for ourselves rather than consigning our fate to our genes or God." I'm sympathetic to the last point, as I've found acceptance of responsibility for one's own actions to be an important criterion for happiness. Does this mean I think that scientists should not persist in challenging the notion of 'free will'?

It's more accurate to say that I hope that scientists who are working with ideas that challenge fundamental notions about what it means to be human will stop to consider the broader social implications of their research, and perhaps even to answer the questions posed above, before proceeding to publish for a lay audience. Not because they are not correct to enhance our collective knowledge, but because we have collectively done such a poor job of receiving that knowledge. (More on that point in a future post.)

Free To Be... Cosmetic Neurology

2009-10-09T11:35:00.007-05:00

(This one's for the 'friend' who recently offered me some of her prescription drugs.)

"We live in a culture that believes medication can solve almost any problem."

"The last thing a person concerned with brain power should do is gamble with using chemicals that influence her brain in ways that we do not understand."

- From a November 2009 Glamour article on 'sharing' prescription drugs.

Ignore the really large cup of coffee on my desk. I don't need it to write well, but it helps. This is the extent of my sympathy with chemically-tailored cognition.

The irony is that I will argue long and hard for cognitive liberty - your right to "the absolute sovereignty of [your] own consciousness." But the current trends towards accepting the expanded use of 'smart drugs' make me nervous.

Maybe it's because I was inundated with anti-drug messages during my formative years. There was a war on drugs that included some fairly-effective propaganda aimed at teenagers and young people. Apparently that message doesn't apply to these drugs.

In her Glamour article on the (apparently) common practice of sharing prescription drugs, the author includes statements like this - "While most experts agree that unsupervised pill popping is always risky, some have actually suggested that stimulants such as Adderall, Ritalin and Provigil should eventually become more available to people as study and work aids. In an editorial published last year in the scientific journal Nature, seven leading experts in medicine, science and law argued that using these drugs to boost mental performance was the way of the future. 'Cognitive enhancement has much to offer individuals and society,' they said." While the article continues on to describe the potential downfall of this type of drug use, we are left with the feeling that the scientific 'stamp of approval' has already been given via the quote from Nature. (That Nature article gets around.)

And the cover story of the current issue of Scientific American tackles the same issue. (Boo! for not making the whole article available online.)

On principle, I object to the fact that the average reader has no access to the actual science that is being used to support various arguments for or against cosmetic neurology, and must rely on secondhand reports and media coverage for information.

But my stronger objection is this... The current practices of cosmetic neurology and cognitive enhancement include plenty of unregulated activity, as illustrated by the Glamour article. The danger is that this activity will/has become so prevalent that it establishes new norms to which others are then obliged and/or pressured to conform.

And therein lies a paradox - How do you argue for the cognitive liberty of the individual when the exercise of that liberty may result in a decrease in liberty for those who follow? Should my children by obligated to take 'smart drugs' to stay competitive in school? Should I be obligated to take antidepressants to maintain a new standard of 'normal' behavior in my workplace?

And while there may currently be no explicit policies in place to mandate this type of drug use, our ideas about what is 'normal' are slowly and surely being altered to conform to new ideas about what is possible. "Our boss has started getting on my case for not being as productive... [as the guy] using unprescribed modafinil to work crazy hours..." (q) Hidden in every article referenced in this post are warnings about the unknown consequences of long-term, unprescribed, or unapproved use of prescription drugs for cosmetic (non-disease treating) purposes. Yet who will have the patience to wait for definitive scientific findings? And who will want to accept that s/he does not have the right to 'dope' his/her brain, especially if the practice is prevalent among peers?

"If we can improve cognitive systems in disease, can we also do so in health? Should we?" - Cosmetic neurology: The controversy over enhancing movement, mentation, and mood. Anjan Chatterjee, MD (2004).

I like my current state of cognition. I'd like the freedom to keep it as it is. If your freedom to change your state of mind interferes with my freedom to not change my state of mind, then we'll have to throw down. In the meantime, let's all make informed choices.

Six-Word Memoirs

2009-10-07T21:34:00.002-05:00

"What is better than telling stories?"

The human condition in six words.

"Six-Word Memoirs: The Legend

Legend has it that Hemingway was once challenged to write a story in only six words. His response? “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.” Starting in 2006, SMITH Magazine re-ignited the recountre by asking our readers for their own six-word memoirs. They sent in short life stories in droves, from the bittersweet (“Cursed with cancer, blessed with friends”) and poignant (“I still make coffee for two”) to the inspirational (“Business school? Bah! Pop music? Hurrah”) and hilarious (“I like big butts, can’t lie”)."

Ooh, a challenge. Must write some.

Sought knowledge. Bought college. Still searching.
The word 'normal' no longer applies.
Randomness refined. No equations. Pure mind.
Honesty in anonymity. Scattered specificity. Hidden.
This couldn't have been an accident.

Yours as comment; I dare you.

By Heresies Distressed (Pt I)

2009-10-06T10:17:00.005-05:00

"Censorship is the height of vanity."

Yet yours truly has actually spent a great deal of time considering the idea that there are some things which perhaps should remain, let's say, 'out of sight' of the general public. I've been having this debate with myself for years with respect to certain ideas/areas in science. Not because I want to see science censored, but because the dissemination of scientific work doesn't always result in (immediate) progress in bettering the human condition. And if it has the potential to make social conditions worse, does the scientist bear a responsibility to censor his/her work?

The immediate impetus for this post was the realization that NOVA was airing a two-hour program tonight called Darwin's Darkest Hour, with the teaser "Charles Darwin must decide whether to make the theory of evolution public." And that reignited my internal debate about the responsibilities of science and the scientist.

Given the respect accorded to science in our society, the generally high inability to think critically about science possessed by a majority of people, and the tendency to apply scientific results inappropriately when creating public programs/policy, one can reasonably ask - Is there any area of the human condition which science should not explore and report upon with complete impartiality? Should social considerations have a role in determining what areas science is allowed to investigate, and how the results should be disseminated/used? (If you are a scientist, chances are that you found that last question offensive. Read on.)

A science journalist recently stated: "First, I think at least one topic is beyond the pale. Claims that certain races are innately less intelligent than others are so noxious—with so much potential to exacerbate racism–that I disapprove of their dissemination; in fact I’d like to see research on race and intelligence discontinued, because it has less than zero social value."

At first blush, I find the idea that any scientific knowledge should be censored to be offensive. I don't want anything to be kept or hidden from me because you think I can't handle it. I find it offensive when someone tells me that I shouldn't read The Bell Curve or The God Delusion. (Full disclosure: These are the only books that I have been actively hassled for reading. Hassled by well-educated friends, whose spontaneous reaction upon seeing me reading these books was 'I can't believe you're reading that', followed by an extensive rant on why that was unacceptable, and (in one case) a recommendation that I read something more 'normal', like Nora Roberts.)

But you don't truly understand a point of view until you can sympathize with it. An infamous hacker chick once vented about how the next 'Darwin' might be put off from going public with any similar ideological/scientific leap, because the social consequences might be a net negative. (If you are wondering how this has any relevance now, consider this essay about one area of science that is waiting to 'find its Darwin'.)

In a weird twist of irony, much of the fiction I've been reading lately also deals with the battle between knowledge and ignorance, and various rationales for failing to disseminate knowledge. I have resolved nothing new in my ongoing debate, save that I'll be watching NOVA tonight with this quote in mind...

"We wander through our lives and then we die. But for all of us there is one moment, one crucial point, where we have to make a decision between what's right and what's wrong, between different visions of who we might be."

The Courage to Become (Pt III)

2009-09-28T13:03:00.003-05:00

"Man has eaten from the tree of knowledge; he has not died, as the serpent had correctly predicted; he has become as God."

I found it amusingly ironic that Kurtz, in his haste to establish secular humanism as a viable alternative to traditional religion, suggested that humanists should adopt Prometheus as their patron saint. His greatness? "He was a champion of human-kind known for his wily intelligence, who stole fire from Zeus and gave it to mortals."

If I'm not mistaken, stealing from God is the opener for 3 major religions. It is the first deed of note that Man performs after being created - stealing from God by eating forbidden fruit from the Tree of Knowledge.

If you're curious, no, there's no other (apparent) reason why Kurtz nominated Prometheus. Just the simple fact that he had the balls to steal something of value from a God who didn't want him/us to have it. Notably, Prometheus and Adam and Eve were all punished for their actions. Yet the stories of taking what we should not have from something greater than ourselves in order to advance have lived on, through the millennia of our collective history.

Which leads me to wonder if we don't retain the notion of 'God' as a cognitive marker of that which is greater than us. As a way to stoke our collective imaginations with stories of unlimited power and knowledge, and what one does with such abilities. Sure, but you can get that in good science fiction, you say. True, but good science fiction is rare, and perhaps we don't yet have enough of it to compete with the collective imaginings of our vast ancestry, who referred to what they imagined was greater than them simply as 'gods'.

For if we cannot imagine what is greater than us, what inspires us to strive and become something more? What holds back the apathy that accompanies the notion that we are simply a genetic program executing itself?

I was more than a little disappointed (for reasons I'll reveal in a future post) when The God Delusion began by seeking to establish Einstein's views on religion/God. As if Einstein would/could somehow invalidate or validate religion or atheism. A similar pattern followed throughout the book - seeking to establish the legitimacy of atheism by claiming various great scientific figures as atheists, or as sympathetic to atheism. These men did what, exactly? Oh, right, they teased the Universe into giving up Her secrets for the good of mankind. They found Knowledge that Man did not yet have, and they took it. (I doubt that Dawkins had in mind to give us a parallel story of Man's struggle to become something greater, but it's amusingly coincidental nonetheless.)

If you've read You Shall Be As Gods (and I hope you will, especially if you think that The God Delusion is the summit of the argument against traditional religion), then you may have come to see religion as (among other things) the story of Man's struggle to strive, challenge, and become that which is greater than He is. That struggle continues today, but we are in danger of missing the goal for all the fighting we do over the correct 'path' to the goal.

"What matters today is not the difference between believers and nonbelievers, but that between those who care and those who do not care."

You Shall Be As Gods

2009-09-18T18:21:00.003-05:00

"For centuries the 'brightest minds' on earth had ignored the ancient sciences, mocking them as ignorant superstitions, arming themselves instead with smug skepticism and dazzling new technologies - tools that led them only further from the truth. Every generation's breakthroughs are proven false by the next generation's technology. And so it had gone through the ages. The more man learned, the more he realized he did not know."

"The stuff of magic and myth was fast becoming reality as the shocking new data poured in, all of it supporting the basic ideology of Noetic Science - the untapped potential of the human mind."

"The Buddha said, 'You are God yourself.' Jesus taught that 'the kingdom of God is within you' and even promised us, 'The works I do, you can do... and greater.' Even the first antipope - Hippolytus of Rome - quoted the same message, first uttered by the gnostic teacher Monoimus: 'Abandon the search for God... instead, take yourself as the starting place."

From The Lost Symbol, by Dan Brown (September 15th, 2009).

(quiet chuckle)

Humanism for the Individual

2009-09-10T06:58:00.003-05:00

They told me to be a light in the darkness. They did not tell me to drag people kicking and screaming out of the darkness.

(I know, I know - you want the Erich Fromm-y goodness. It's cooking, I promise. But I need to clear something up first.)

If there's a foundation stone to my set of beliefs, it's individual responsibility. My feelings on individual responsibility could be a set of essays unto itself, but I bring it up now because it's critical to understanding what I said earlier. What I said earlier was, admittedly, phrased badly, as is wont to happen when one doesn't calm down before one writes something.

My objection to humanism being confounded with atheism and rabid skepticism was not born out of my feelings for those ideas, but rather of the images of the behavior that they conjure up. Those behaviors are things that I've witnessed, and at some level I know that they don't represent the behavior of all people who hold those beliefs. Nonetheless, they left a bad taste in my mouth, so to speak, when it comes to the ideas that were behind the behaviors.

At the heart of this is the idea that we need to 'save' people from bad ideas. We are justified in doing whatever it takes to 'save' them because we are right and they are wrong. We are fighting the good fight and they wallow in ignorance and will thank us someday. Even if they don't, we are fighting to make the world a better place for the future and the future will thank us. No one ever says 'Hey, I'm feeling cranky today and I'm gonna blow steam by picking on/mocking some (fill in group name). It's okay because I'm right.' The ideas behind these behaviors change, but the behaviors are always the same.

This way madness lies.

Core to the notion of individual responsibility is not only the idea that I take responsibility for my actions, but also that I don't take responsibility for your actions. I don't try to 'save' you, save that I might devote my life to creating something that can educate others. But I do that because of what I believe in, not because I think that I must assume responsibility for you, or that my voice is worth more than yours. (Here the idea of 'individual responsibility' meets the idea of 'equality'. And while no one will overtly say that they don't believe that all men are equal, they will frequently demonstrate that, by virtue of their education or social standing, they really think that they do know more and are therefore better in some critical way that allows them treat others as inferior.)

What I said was not about the ideas behind atheism or skepticism, although you wouldn't know it from what I actually said. :) It was about behavior, and the idea that we have to 'save' people from bad ideas by using whatever tactics we can.

Curiosity usually wins out in the end with me, and because I would like not to have such a visceral reaction to the words 'atheism' and 'skepticism', I'm going to try to engage those ideas in my own way - starting with finally reading The God Delusion, as I understand that Dawkins is the godfather (so to speak) of modern atheism. Who knows what I'll think after I've read that book. I probably won't talk about it here, because I don't think that the power of humanism is the result of rejecting the idea of a God, but rather of embracing the fact that we are all human, and we are all here now, and if we won't help ourselves, a deity probably shouldn't think enough of us to care either.

The Courage to Become (Pt II)

2009-09-02T16:30:00.001-05:00

"Because we cannot tolerate greatness in our midst, we do all we can to destroy it."

"Others see their possibility in the reality of you. Be, therefore, a model to all the world."

Many years ago, during a summer internship, I learned 'The Rules' of Corporate America. Only two of those rules have remained with me through every subsequent job. They are - It's more important to be liked by your co-workers than it is to be good at your job. - and - Being good at your job can keep your from being liked by your co-workers. Presumably the second rule has something to do with the idea that stellar performance only serves to highlight less-adequate performance, and subsequently raises the bar for everyone else. (There's going to be a point in a minute. Hang in there.)

The other day I picked up a book called Tomorrow's God. (I am insatiably curious about alternative views of theology and spirituality.) Due to a well-placed library bar code, I did not realize (until I began reading it) that this book was written by the author of the Conversations with God series. Naturally it quickly became clear that this book was written as a dialogue with God. As far as I can tell so far, the author believes that he was having a conversation with God, or at least it wasn't ever made clear that the author was using dialogue simply as a literary technique. Okay. I occasionally like to indulge in the idea that I'm having a dialogue with the Universe. (The Universe is an amusing conversationalist, with very clever and subtle ways of letting me know that it knows more than I do.) So I'll read this book until I can't take it anymore, or until I reach the end.

I'm about 150 pages into it so far, and now I'm driven to read it because so much of what the author is saying (as 'God') is what any good humanist philosopher would say. (Indeed he has formed something called Humanity's Team, which I haven't investigated yet.) And I'm wondering, with increasing force - Why did the author feel the need to attribute this wisdom to God? Why couldn't he claim it as a legacy of his own thinking and studies? [Disclaimer: Apparently the 'proof' that this wisdom originates from God is in the last chapter, which I haven't read yet.]

I have a theory about this, which goes back to the idea that we don't easily tolerate greatness. If we do tolerate it, we do so by wanting to own it, dissect it, and understand it. And because we also have a tendency to equate greatness with infallibility, we are happy when 'greatness' self-destructs, and we armchair-quarterback the hell out of its mistakes. We also frequently judge our own self-worth by our proximity to greatness, rather than our own accomplishments and sense of satisfaction.

Indeed, Walsch (the author) discusses his perception of others expecting him to be in a place of "high consciousness" all the time. But perhaps this is related to his other fear - "... if I say that I am making this all up, they'll lose their faith in you, in me, and in this whole process." In other words, he fears that our reaction to these ideas is dependent upon our perception of their source. A humble man who claims to talk to God is more easily tolerated than a simple person who dares to say 'I think I might see a better way.' 'God' is more infallible than Man, therefore a more credible source. I don't claim to know what the author was experiencing while writing these books. I can only say that, so far, the ideas in this book frequently reflect the wisdom of our time, culture, and history, with no ideas that I haven't seen before. I don't doubt that the author wishes for a better future for Mankind.

And this brings me to the point. Perhaps one reason we cling to the notion of 'God' is because it provides an excuse for greatness and a defense against the hostility that man visits upon his fellows when he perceives them as a threat to himself. Of course, some have used the idea of being 'touched by God' as an excuse for vile acts as well. Somehow though, overall, we are usually more tolerant of that which makes us look good by comparison, than we are of that which makes us look bad. (Psychological threats - those which impact our beliefs about ourselves and our world - are frequently met with more hostility than purely physical threats.) I would also argue that we frequently suppress our everyday abilities for 'greatness' out of similar fears.

Fans of Erich Fromm may be able to guess where this line of thinking is going next, but for now I'll end with this quote...

"Your friends need what you can be when you are no longer afraid, when you know who you are, and why you are, and what you want. When you are no longer looking for reasons to live, but can simply be."

Humanism as the Next Step?

2009-08-22T20:30:00.002-05:00

Tell me, without digressing into what you don't believe in, why and how I can/should be good and do good.

(This is really all I'm asking of humanism. I don't need humanism to tell me what to think about chiropractors, as I found in Paul Kurtz's The Courage to Become: The Virtues of Humanism.)

There's a reason why I don't join things, and I hate '-isms' - you never like all of what you find, and you will be judged by the worst of it as well as the best. I don't like the fact that humanism is (perhaps hopelessly) confounded with atheism and rabid skepticism. I didn't know until today that the American Humanist Association was behind the creation of the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP). This does not make me happy...

It's my contention that certain aspects of 'paranormal' human experience represent aspects of the human condition that science does not yet completely understand. They are 'supernatural' only in the sense that our ideas of 'nature' do not yet have an adequate explanation for them; they are not 'supernatural' in the sense that their explanation must appeal to something unknowable and beyond the realm of science.

Yet the idea that we must do away with everything about our experience that science has yet to fully claim or explain is so entrenched in some humanist literature as to make humanism appear to be an untenable proposition for the future. The idea that science has adequately described our full range of experiences is also untenable. If humanism is to be a viable ethical and philosophical guide for the future, it must be prepared to accept scientific findings that may radically alter our understanding of what it means to be human. So far I have seen little that indicates that humanism will be adaptable in light of such findings.

Perhaps the trick to appreciating humanism is to go back to the sources of humanistic ideas - those writers who weren't concerned with establishing the '-ism', but with thinking and writing about human experience and ideals. And yet, in reading books specifically dedicated to establishing the humanist ideology, I find that I am getting closer to knowing what I believe.

This quiz from Humanism As the Next Step (Lloyd and Mary Morain, 1998) was quick and helpful...

How to Decide Whether You are a Humanist

1) Do you believe that we will continue to learn more about the past, present, and future of planet earth and its inhabitants? (YES)

2) Do you believe that humans are a part of nature (YES) and that there is no God or supernatural power especially concerned for their welfare? (NO)

3) Do you believe that religions' sacred scriptures and ethical and moral systems were the creations of mortals and that these have served different purposes at different times and places? (YES)

4) Do you believe that the kind of life we live and the helpful and just relationship that we have with other humans is of primary importance? (YES)

5) Do you feel our environment needs to be taken care of and protected for future generations? (YES)

6) Do you frequently experience joy and comfort and an undefined mystic sense from the realization that you are part of nature and of all that lives? (YES)

7) Do you believe that the meaning of life is that which we give it? (YES)

8) Do you recognize that many philosophical questions such as, "What is the meaning of life?" and "Why am I here?" are irrelevant when our existence and experience are viewed as processes within the totality of nature? (NO - What we choose to embrace as 'meaning' or 'purpose' has a very powerful effect on how we structure our goals and choose our behaviors. Therefore these questions are not irrelevant.)

And now I think I need to spend some time bathing my brain in the writings of Erich Fromm.

The Courage to Become (Pt I)

2009-08-13T11:10:00.003-05:00

"Better the illusions that exalt us than 10,000 truths."

So far my exploration of humanism has left me... underwhelmed. The premise of this blog is that we can be better than this. The inevitable question that follow is - Why aren't we? We exalt violence in the name of realism. We encourage immediate gratification and consumption as an anecdote to a plethora of psychological and societal ills. We sacrifice the future for the present in ways too numerous to count. Why aren't we any better than this?

I'm too cynical, you are saying. (Perhaps.)

Or perhaps I'm just wondering how much of our destructive behavior is driven by our beliefs about what we really are. I'm wondering what reasons humanism (and especially the newer, more secular/atheistic humanism) gives us for behaving in accordance with ideals and virtues that often require sacrifice. In short, I'm throwing all my doubts about reality of the human condition at this thing called 'humanism' and seeing what survives.

After reading the Humanist Manifestos, I couldn't help but notice that they all seemed rather reactionary. Especially Humanist Manifesto II, which was written 40 years after the first one, and after we had witnessed "the depths of brutality of which humanity is capable." While HM2 presents itself as "a vision of hope," it very explicitly tears away certain notions that, for better or worse, may enable us to sacrifice for something higher than ourselves. In doing so, it represents a significant deviation from its predecessor.

If I believe that this body is all that I am and ever will be, then its survival becomes paramount. I will see the world in terms of threats to my physical survival. And there is no reason why my survival should not take precedence over yours. HM2 states "we can discover no divine purpose or providence for the human species." They might just as well have said "we have found no purpose or providence, divine or otherwise, for the human species, save survival." And if "[w]e strive for the good life, here and now," what incentive do we have to divert any of our resources to others, save that such actions may possibly buy us the goodwill of our fellows?

While HM2 extols empathy, compassion, and "the cultivation of feeling and love" as desirable virtues, it fails to provide a reason why these things should be cultivated, especially if their cultivation would threaten one's survival. Are we now saying that I can reasonably be expected to sacrifice some portion of my life for yours, and that this is desirable and will ultimately be rewarded, though presumably only by intangible and perhaps posthumous praises? What reason have you given me for behaving thusly, save that you recognize that these traits are something you want others to express? Why are these held up as ideals, rather than strength and power? (It's possible that I watch too much science fiction.)

Reverence for the capacity for self-sacrifice flies in the face of the presumed goal of this non-theistic, non-transcendental vision of humanity - survival. Yet who among us would want to live in a world without compassion or altruistic behavior?

Perhaps we simply cling to these ideals for psychological comfort, not unlike the comfort we can derive from the belief that there is a loving God who has done all this for our ultimate benefit. And after all, what we believe the rules should be doesn't always predict how we actually behave. (Ex: There are the legal rules for driving, and then there are the rules that you follow if you are actually driving. The discrepancy is huge, yet almost everyone is aware of it and behaves accordingly.)

Do we derive courage by embracing these ideals of human behavior, and the rare instances when we witness them in action? Do we derive enough courage to display these ideals ourselves, in the face of a threat to our survival? Or do we require something more? Something that explicitly tells us that we do not need to fear the death of the body? Are we only truly emboldened to sacrifice ourselves and our resources if we are sustained by a vision of something of ourselves persisting beyond this life?

What gives us the courage to become what we hold up as the ideal human being? In the rush to do away with the abuses perpetuated by religious power structures, are humanists also unnecessarily seeking to rid the world of powerful ideas that enable us to behave in the very ways that would bring about a self-actualizing, peaceful world community?

Becoming Enlightened

2009-08-02T19:37:00.002-05:00

"It is better to find new ways of presenting spiritual truths, new words with which to name them."

"The true mystic does not look to other men for enlightenment, does not fix his gaze outward but inward."

- Paul Brunton (the greatest mystic you've never heard of, with many excellent ideas on rational mysticism)

After my last post, it occurred to me to compare self-actualization to enlightenment as an 'ultimate' human state. One is the product of psychology, the other a product of spiritual tradition. One is embraced by humanists, the other... not so much. Which produces a better final state? Which represents a better goal?

Self-actualization

"to become everything that one is capable of becoming"
"the only real motive a person has"
"the final level of psychological development"
"People that have reached self-actualization are characterized by certain behaviors... They embrace reality and facts rather than denying truth. They are spontaneous. They are interested in solving problems. They are accepting of themselves and also others and lack prejudice."

Enlightenment

"'awakening' to the truth", "full liberation from delusion", "cessation... of suffering"
"conscious awareness of an ultimate reality"
perceived to be obtainable by various forms of self-denial and/or routine-disrupting behavior
an end state recognizable only by others who are 'enlightened'

I've had a few issues with the idea of 'enlightenment'...

1) It seems like a long car trip to an unknown destination, which begets the inevitable questioning - 'Are we there yet? Are we there yet?'

2) So you understand the ultimate nature of reality. What do you do with that knowledge? How does it make you a better person?

3) What good is Enlightenment if you cannot weep at the suffering of others? And if you can weep, do you not suffer as well?

Self-actualization, on the other hand, is a process of becoming. It never stops, because there are always new things to learn and become. It lacks the fixation on an unknown destination, allowing you to get on with things. It doesn't require a specially-qualified teacher to get you there, or specific exercises to be undertaken. It is an outcome that can be achieved by anyone, rather than a quasi-mystical state whose attainment may depend on the state of your soul.

I have never had the benefit of religious/Buddhist tutelage on 'enlightenment', so perhaps I am missing something, or have misrepresented something. But as I see it now, self-actualization has my vote for 'best goal to strive for'.

[Aside to our dear Follower - I'm probably going to lose my internet connection soon, so postings will be infrequent for awhile.]

Burning Bright

2009-07-31T07:03:00.003-05:00

"No individual has any right to come into this world and go out of it without leaving behind him distinct and legitimate reasons for having passed through it."

In the last couple of weeks I've come dangerously close to deciding that I knew what I believed. Upon further examination, what I wanted was to believe that I had acceptable answers to the following questions - Why am I here? What should I strive for? How should I prioritize my time and resources? What kinds of risks should I take, and why?

It occurred to me to wonder how humanism deals with these questions. And so I began a more systematic application of the google-fu...

Humanist Manifesto I (1933)

"...the complete realization of human personality to be the end of man's life and seeks its development and fulfillment in the here and now."
"...aim to foster the creative in man and to encourage achievements that add to the satisfactions of life."
"...seek to elicit the possibilities of life, not flee from them"

Humanist Manifesto II (1973)

"The ultimate goal should be the fulfillment of the potential for growth in each human personality..."
"...will tap the creativity of each human being and provide the vision and courage for us to work together."
"Man is at last becoming aware that he alone is responsible for the realization of the world of his dreams, that he has within himself the power for its achievement. He must set intelligence and will to the task."

Humanist Manifesto III (2003)

"We welcome the challenges of the future, and are drawn to and undaunted by the yet to be known."
"We aim for our fullest possible development..."

I've cherry-picked some quotes that seem to illustrate an accepted goal or purpose that humanists can agree on - self-actualization, and the realization of an environment that supports the same opportunity for growth in all human beings. I've stated elsewhere that I believe that the purpose of life is to learn and grow, individually and collectively, so I'm pleased that this is an objective that humanists support so strongly.

What is perhaps less clear is where my responsibility to my own self-actualization should step aside in favor of efforts to help others achieve the same. Herein arises a division of thought that is fundamental, and for which there appears to be no objective resolution. Here is where we are called upon to examine our beliefs about the nature and value of compassion, the relationship of self to other, and the health and well-being of the collective weighed against the health and well-being of the individual.

Is it in my enlightened self-interest to route a portion of my time and resources towards bringing others closer to self-actualization? And if so, how big of a portion?

Who burns brightest - he who fuels others, or he who fuels himself?

Defending Your Life

2009-07-23T11:22:00.002-05:00

"Certified son-of-a-gun
Learns life lesson 101.
Don't fly too high on your own supply
Get burned by the sun."

Hey, we have a 'follower' now. (waving to follower)

So I've been doing a lot of thinking about risk-taking. Actually, I've been doing a lot of introspecting and reflecting about my own willingness to take risks. (Let's face it - thinking in the abstract is all fine and good, but at some point you need to take stock of yourself and match the theory to the reality.)

It's easy to tout romanticized notions about risk-taking and courage, and people like to think they know how they would act in a given situation. I subscribe pretty heavily to the theory that past behavior is the best predictor of future behavior, so I look to my own past behavior in an attempt to identify what factors are more likely to enable/encourage me to take risks.

For example, the sky-diving story... If you are thinking of doing something that other people might look down upon (especially if it fails), it is eminently easier to decide to do this thing if you can convince someone else to do it with you. Yes, my decision to jump out of a perfectly good airplane was made easier by the fact that I was able to convince my new friend to do it with me. Perhaps this says something about my need for validation, or perhaps it just says that I thought the experience would be worth more if it were shared. ('We just jumped out of an effin' plane! How badass are we!' doesn't work when you substitute 'I' for 'we'. Nobody wants to hear it.)

Despite the fact that New Friend bailed on the skydiving trip at the last minute, I persisted in recruiting her for similar adventures. And she persisted in bailing at the last minute. After the mid-winter, too effin' cold, hip-deep snow, camping mis-adventure, I gave up on her. And though I had gone ahead and done these things without her, they never meant as much to me as other adventures I had shared with other friends.

So what is it about having a co-conspirator that increases one's willingness to engage in risky behavior? (Once New Friend had proved to be an unreliable co-conspirator, I ceased to engage in adventures of this magnitude.) Individual risk-exposure doesn't change with the presence of a co-conspirator. (My likelihood of crashing into the ground when my parachute doesn't open is no different when I go by myself than when my friend agrees to jump as well.) This leads me to suspect (in my case anyway) that the potential social costs of engaging in risk-seeking behaviors were at least as important as the potential physical costs. You can only stray so far from the herd before you are no longer a member of the herd. If you take a few of them with you though, you can start a new herd. ;)

As far as I've been able to observe directly (in myself and others), having a co-conspirator does increase one's willingness to engage in risky behavior. That statement almost has the 'well, duh!' quality that one would expect of a well-known fact. Yet I'm struggling to come up with a name of a theory that adequately explains why this should be so. Is it a function of choice-validation and having support when called upon to defend your decision? Is it a function of mitigated social costs - would we all engage in riskier behaviors if there was less social cost associated with them?

There must be an academic study or theory somewhere that adequately addresses this issue, but my google-fu appears to be inadequate for the task of finding it. So the take-home message today is simply this - I'm more likely to jump if you are jumping with me.

Lust for Life

2009-07-18T09:45:00.000-05:00

"For each thing you do, stop and ask yourself if death is to be feared because it deprives you of this."

Back 'in the day' I used to be quite the adrenaline junkie. Nothing too extreme, but the ordinary ways of passing time were little too... Well, let's just say I itched for something more. Thrill, risk, danger, etc. The other night I was watching a documentary film on extreme skiing. While softly swearing under my breath, I was simultaneously wondering where my own hurl-through-the-air, jump-out-of-a-perfectly-good-plane adrenaline junkie had gone. (She messed up her ankle during the landing on her first (solo) jump. Perhaps this taught her to respect the fact that man was not meant to throw himself at the surface of his tiny piece of the galaxy from several thousand feet above it. Then again, perhaps it just taught her that you can't always blindly trust the guy on the ground with the signal sticks.)

Now jump ahead a few days to me doing a lot of walking and reflecting on death. The above quote has doggedly attached itself as a filter to my conscious stream of thought. I sometimes wish that I had a clarity of vision about all of my activities that enabled me to say 'Yes! I don't want to be deprived of this!'. I suspect though that such is not the lot of humankind, nor perhaps should it be. But I realize that I can say 'Yes!' to at least two things, and this brings a clarity of its own.

And while I may have lost the desire to recklessly court danger, I dare say that I have not lost my lust for life. In my cold, tired, caffeine-deprived state, this makes me very happy.

"It's not my time, I'm not going.
There's a fear in me but its not showing...
...There's a will in me and now I know that.
This could be the end of me
And everything I know.
Ooohh but I won't go."

The Mystery of Grace

2009-07-15T15:06:00.002-05:00

Today a strange thing happened to me.
I saw you as the enemy.
I saw what you could do to me
And you became the enemy.
I saw how you could limit me
And then you were the enemy.

Today a strange thing happened to me.
I felt your hostility.
I saw that you were not free.
You saw me as the enemy.
How did this come to be?
Has fear made us enemies?

Today a strange thing happened to me.
I had a vision that we were free.
We had lost our enmity.
I trusted you and you trusted me.
But what it took awhile to see
was that it was trust that had set us free.

Man for Himself (Pt II)

2009-07-13T15:40:00.002-05:00

"Keep your own advantage in mind, act according to what's best for you; by so doing you will also be acting for the greatest advantage of others."

Sometimes I think I'm too suspicious and cynical to be a good humanist. After all, isn't one of the basic tenets of humanism faith in humankind? Yet I have blindspots of possibly-irrational distrust of/in human nature. Like when it comes to having work done on my car.

I'm writing this right now in part so that I can't spend the time thinking of all the ways I could be getting screwed over right now by the people who have my car. (I've had some really bad experiences with car repair. They've made me more than a little suspicious of the entire automotive repair industry.)

I don't generally think that the profit motive is an entirely bad thing. But we're talking about that gray area just beyond the profit motive where the desire for more money causes one to exaggerate the actual need for, or cost of, an item in an attempt to exploit the customer. This area is generally referred to as Greed, and perceived to be a bad thing. These days special attention is paid to Corporate Greed as an especially destructive form of Greed.

It's fair to say that I'm more suspicious of a larger institutional imperative to make money at my expense than I am of the intentions of any single individual. (My regular mechanic is unavailable. My car is currently with a 'larger institution'.) An institution lacks the vulnerability of a single individual when it comes to trust-based transactions. Yet an institution is comprised of nothing but individuals. So how does the behavior of the collective come to reflect attributes that most individuals are sufficiently reluctant to own?

Here we could digress into a discussion on the diffusion of responsibility in situations where "underlings claim that they were just following orders and supervisors claim that they were just issuing directives and not doing the deeds." But as I am looking for reasons to be hopeful (about my car repair, and humanity in general), I'll pass along this instead.

Here is the short version of the "Hippocratic oath for managers" taken by "around half of this year’s graduating class" of Harvard MBAs.

"THE MBA OATH

As a manager, my purpose is to serve the greater good by bringing people and resources together to create value that no single individual can create alone. Therefore I will seek a course that enhances the value my enterprise can create for society over the long term. I recognize my decisions can have far-reaching consequences that affect the well-being of individuals inside and outside my enterprise, today and in the future. As I reconcile the interests of different constituencies, I will face choices that are not easy for me and others.

Therefore I promise:

I will act with utmost integrity and pursue my work in an ethical manner.

I will safeguard the interests of my shareholders, co-workers, customers and the society in which we operate.

I will manage my enterprise in good faith, guarding against decisions and behavior that advance my own narrow ambitions but harm the enterprise and the societies it serves.

I will understand and uphold, both in letter and in spirit, the laws and contracts governing my own conduct and that of my enterprise.

I will take responsibility for my actions, and I will represent the performance and risks of my enterprise accurately and honestly.

I will develop both myself and other managers under my supervision so that the profession continues to grow and contribute to the well-being of society.

I will strive to create sustainable economic, social, and environmental prosperity worldwide.

I will be accountable to my peers and they will be accountable to me for living by this oath.

This oath I make freely, and upon my honor." (from mbaoath.org, longer version here)

Now the real question - Would I feel better about my car repair situation if I knew that one or more of the managers had taken this oath?

Maybe.

All for One, and One for All

2009-07-08T14:30:00.002-05:00

(donning feathered hat)
(unsheathing pen)

Ladies and Gentlemen, I beg your pardon for this bit of unpleasantness, but some things should not go unchallenged...

Madame, as a duly sworn Defender of Knowledge, I really must insist that you unhand that stolen library book. I hate to have to draw pen on you, but as you have failed to listen to my spoken words, I'm afraid you leave me no choice. Your possession of that purloined book is an affront to our Right to Knowledge and I mean to liberate that book and set an example that will discourage others from committing similar misdeeds.

Ah! You thought I was going to accuse you of theft. A wicked thing, theft, but that is not the aspect of your action that galls me most. I see you are puzzled. It's understandable; few have heard of the Right to Knowledge. Allow me...

"Liberty cannot be preserved without a general knowledge among the people, who have a right, from the frame of their nature, to knowledge, as their great Creator, who does nothing in vain, has given them understandings, and a desire to know..." - John Adams, A Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law (1765)

While this may seem like a trivial statement to you, I assure you that the right to knowledge is recognized as a critical aspect in ensuring and preserving other universal human rights.

Libraries are a sacred trust between people to ensure and enhance this right to knowledge. We fund them, and we use them, though perhaps not in equal portion. We work together to create a collection of knowledge greater than that which most of us could possess on our own, and this collection is governed by the principle All for One, and One for All. All of the material in the collection is available for any one user, and any one piece of knowledge is available for all users.

Madame, your actions violate that sacred trust. I am not persuaded to stand down by your passion for this tome. Truly, it is a wonderful book. But that only makes its loss to the collective that much more painful. Nor I am persuaded to back down from my condemnation of your action by your protests that the you paid for the book after declaring it 'lost'. Many such 'lost' items are never replaced - indeed, cannot be replaced - because they are out of print. Which is, no doubt, why you did not simply find a copy elsewhere and purchase it.

Having been thwarted more than once in my own quest for knowledge by the 'lost' status of similarly scarce items, I am particularly prone to reacting harshly to the joy you evince in your possession of this particular volume. Perhaps I am also remembering of all the times that I was similarly tempted by an enticing find, but refrained. And so I am not without some measure of sympathy. I believe that you really do find inspiration and joy in that illicitly-acquired opus, and that you want to share that inspiration. But I cannot conclude that you do service to this receptacle of knowledge, its contents, or the Right to Knowledge, above and beyond what would have been accomplished by letting it remain freely accessible to other library patrons.

And now, again, I really must insist that you unhand that book and return it to its rightful place.

All for One, but more importantly, One for All!

Man for Himself (Pt I)

2009-07-02T06:40:00.005-05:00

"Having realized his own self as the Self, a person becomes selfless. This is the highest mystery."

This week has been filled with interesting meditations on the nature of Self. I'll spare you the self-portrait I had to draw, but if you keep reading you will have to listen to me hash out some of these other thoughts.

Much of what it means to be human comes from the fact that we have such a pervasive sense of self as an independent, autonomous awareness. 'I am me, and you are not. I am different and separate from you, and you cannot know what it is like to be me.'

But what am 'I'? Where does my sense of self come from? And while we may commonly confuse the two, are sense of self and sense of identity really the same thing? (Though the terms are commonly interchanged, I'm going to try to define them as two different things.) Think about the following example... If my physical body is altered or enhanced with a piece of technology, how and to what degree does that piece of technology become part of my sense of self and identity? There is evidence that my brain can easily incorporate it into its map of how 'I' interact with the outside world, but does my sense of identity incorporate the change so easily, or do I persist in identifying it as foreign to 'me' long after my brain has actually learned to function with it?

I suppose I'm trying out the argument that a sense of self (separateness) is a necessary precursor to a sense of identity (relationships and relatedness). I must first know/feel that I am separate from you before I can begin to identify how I relate to you. If this is so, then a sense of self might be seen as a more primitive, basic construct - perhaps the defining feature of conscious experience [1] - while a sense of identity involves higher-order cognitive processing and understanding of relationships. Acquiring a sense of identity is a natural response to perceiving oneself as separate from another, but our sense of identity is a much more fluid construct than our fairly-resilient sense of being separate from others.

Our sense of identity is acquired from our experiences, and continuously modified. It seems reasonable to say that our sense of identity gives us our basis for moral reasoning, as the acquisition of a more complex sense of identity is often paralleled an accompanying increase in capacity for moral reasoning. In a very real way, identity drives morality. A person's social identity - as defined by the groups to which she belongs - will largely determine the values that she is taught, and which she internalizes and chooses to express through actions. There is already evidence that we choose actions that calibrate our sense of moral identity with regard to social norms, which is arguably identity driving morality. Only to a limited extent can a person choose to alter her social identity to bring it in line with her sense of morality.

Many of our definitions of what is morally correct come from our perceptions about the appropriate balance of self-interest against the needs of others. All theories of morality are predicated on the idea that one person is separate from another, yet can have a significant impact upon another. More specific notions of what is right and wrong are subsequently derived from our ideas about how a particular person is related to another (identity).

When it comes to an individual sense of identity, what is acquired via experience is incorporated as changes to a physical structure (the brain). Science is reaching a level where it has become possible to discuss altering various aspects of the brain to create a 'better' personal identity. (Still waiting to get my hands on the full paper.) In reading this abstract though, it occurred to me to ask - If what is 'moral' has previously been defined largely by one's sense of identity, then what are the implications of allowing morality to define identity?

(h/t Trans-Spirit)

[1] Though it is possible for the sense of identity to expand to include other people and objects, as described in mystical experience, one can argue that there must persist something apart from the experience which is able to note the change and reflect upon it.

Fingerprints of God

2009-06-25T07:03:00.003-05:00

"And it will be interesting also to keep an eye on the functioning of the human mind, or brain, and its valiant and often pathetic efforts to comprehend the nature of things."

It's ironic that I became aware of Fingerprints of God (Barbara Bradley Hagerty, 2009) by reading a physicist's snark about it. Had said physicist actually read the book, he might have come away not with "convincing empirical evidence for the soul's existence", but with an enhanced appreciation for how simple fluctuations in brain activity can dramatically alter our perceptions of what is 'real'.

I'm going to quote the next bit out of context because I think it illustrates the point...

"When the prefrontal cortex malfunctions, you have a sense of calm, serenity, peace, joy, and painlessness. When the primary motor cortex malfunctions, you can't move. When the postcentral gyrus malfunctions, you can't perceive touch or sensation. When the parietal cortex malfunctions, you can't perceive where your body ends and the universe begins, making you feel at one with the universe. When the angular gyrus malfunctions, together with muscle spindles, you can believe you are moving or flying." (p. 224)

Fingerprints of God examines everything from peyote to the God helmet in a quest for answers about the journalist-author's own mystical/spiritual experiences, evoking memories of an earlier book - Rational Mysticism (John Horgan, 2003). What is striking about Fingerprints of God is that the author weaves in her own honest questioning (not outright dismissal) of her Christian Science upbringing/beliefs.

While atheists may be tempted to bypass this book because it does not present its data as an outright refutation of the existence of God, I think that would be a mistake, as the scientific data itself is thorough and worth the read. The author does present (and subsequently question) the idea that God may have designed our brains to be able to communicate with Him. That idea is problematic for at least two reasons. First, it suggests that God has somehow chosen/favored those among us who have more of these mystical/spiritual mental experiences. This seems incompatible with most ideas about a God who loves all of His children/creations. The idea that one/some is/are 'chosen' generally leads to painful social division, rather than promoting social harmony, which also seems incompatible with a loving God.

Second, it ignores the fact that there are many similar types of experiences (hallucinations, etc) , which no one (except possibly the percipient) would argue are from God, and which result not in positive and pro-social attitudes and behaviors but in the exact opposite. Where does one type of experience stop and the other begin, and how can we tell the difference? Perhaps it is best to simply judge the worth of such experiences by the actions that they produce.

I see the data presented in this book as being relevant to humanism in the following ways...

What we experience as humans is fairly constant most of the time, but it is possible to go beyond our ordinary range of spacetime-limited experience in ways that produce meaningful and dramatic physical and psychological changes, and therefore our definition of what it means to be 'human' must accommodate those types of experiences.
When we can pinpoint with such accuracy how deviations in brain activity can give rise to life-altering and belief-shifting experiences, it becomes necessary to consider the ethics of permitting or withholding such experiences, both in terms of individual rights and larger social impact.

And as to any spirituality to which such experiences might speak, I think that such a spirituality should be defined by questions rather than answers. What am I really? What is really out there? Such a spirituality is a journey rather than a destination. Where a destination says 'I am here and you are not', a journey will say 'Share with me what you know. Walk with me awhile.' A destination implies that one can stop, but a journey is ongoing. A destination implies territory that must be defined and defended, but a journey is a group of companions that changes as one moves along. Such a spirituality embraces inquiry and rejects dogma. It is a state of being, not a doctrine.

“Now, when I say this, you could accuse me of being a mystic. And I am, but of a very ordinary kind. I don’t doubt that some people throughout history, and some living today, have heard voices and seen visions. But my mysticism involves no access to other realms, only the deeper experience of this one. Mine is the mysticism of everyday life, of the heaped laundry and the bruised toe, of overcooked broccoli and dew-spangled leaves, of sunrise and sorrow, laughter and linguine, music and mold. This every day mysticism requires no special powers, only imagination, a doting and practiced attention to the ordinary and a willingness to be surprised by grace.”

For the Love of Life

2009-06-18T07:29:00.002-05:00

The core beliefs of humanism center around valuing human life and promoting the betterment of the human condition. Many of the ethical dilemmas we try to solve with reason revolve around certain ideas about life. Let's start with these three ideas...

Life is finite. It has a beginning and an ending. We tend to view the taking of human life as the most abhorrent of acts, and much of our social structure is designed to prevent violence against each other and the ending of human life. But we are not so well-structured as a society when it comes to how we value the beginning of human life.

Life is imperfect. Life is wonderfully complex, and each living creature is unique. To expect perfection of any living creature - whether it be genetically or behaviorally - is to set oneself up for disappointment. Yet we are growing more intolerant of imperfections as we design new ways to anticipate and treat them.

Life exists on a continuum. We tend to value human life above animal and plant life. And, right or wrong, we have succeeded in extending the idea of a continuum into our definitions of human life. We suggest that the rights that we give to an individual be proportionate to the degree of self-awareness and cognitive capacity that the individual possesses. This becomes problematic, however, when the potential for self-awareness and full cognitive capacity is denied.

The point of this blog is to figure out what I believe, not to tell you what to believe, so examine what follows for yourself to determine what you agree or disagree with, and why. Understand that this is a beginning, that this subject is complex, and that thinking (mine and yours) will evolve and change with experience and exposure to new ideas and ways of thinking.

For now my gut reaction starts here...We cannot fully value human life if we do not value the process by which it begins, and life begins at conception. I would not be here today if you had removed any moment of my spatiotemporal existence up to and including the moment of my conception. It does not matter that, while a fetus, zygote, or embryo, I was not a physically or cognitively mature human being. What matters is that these states are necessary precursor states to my being here now. I have a hard time understanding why, if you would not kill me now, you would feel it okay to kill me while I was a zygote, fetus, or embryo. I am not now, and never have been, your property.

If this is what I truly believe, then my actions must reflect it. I must make responsible decisions about sex and birth control, and if I fail to take reasonable precautions against creating a life, then I bear the responsibility for the life that has been created. As there is almost always the possibility that sex can create a life, I've found it easier to make responsible decisions about sex when I ask the following question... Would I be proud to say that I am carrying that man's child? (Yes, this invokes social factors associated with relationship status, and suggests that the father is relevant and necessary to the identity of the child. These should be important considerations.)

But what if I were raped and became pregnant? What would I do then? Fortunately I have never been in that position, and I wouldn't presume to dictate to any woman what she should do if she found herself in that situation. Years ago I was a proponent of a one-choice model - If you made the choice to have sex, then you don't get to make the choice to end the life you created; if you didn't make the choice to have sex, then you still have a choice in dealing with what resulted from that act. One person should never be forced to give her life, in full or in part, for another. Perhaps if the rape resulted in conception, and that pregnancy were voluntarily terminated, the rapist should be accountable for something more than rape and closer to murder, as he forced the creation and subsequent termination of a life.

If I have chosen to create a life, or have failed to take reasonable precautions against creating a life, am I obligated to accept whatever life results from that act of creation? Am I obligated to accept a child who may have genetic differences so severe as to make raising her a significantly more expensive and time-consuming proposition? Am I obligated to accept a child, the time and expense of whose care would significantly detract from that which I am able to provide to my other children?

I would suggest that the resolution to those questions comes not from how we define the zygote/embryo/fetus as life (or not), but from a broader examination of the ethics of valuing human life. What sacrifice can one person reasonably be expected to make for another? What obligations does a parent have to a child? What right or responsibility do we have to ensure that another does not suffer, even if it means ending their life prematurely to stop future suffering? What about groups of people who might face eugenic elimination as our technology advances our ability to predict certain outcomes? What obligation to we have to ensure that the full range of human diversity is allowed expression?

Obviously none of this will be solved in a single blog (or a single post). But it's worthwhile to engage yourself in a dialogue that challenges you to identify and defend your values.

"You could respond that all of this is hypothetical or contingent, but I would suggest that we should think deeply about such decisions before we are ever in a position to make them (or to influence others who might make them). Emerging technologies may put much greater power into the hands of individuals, so it’s not unreasonable for you to imagine what you would do in certain situations and carefully consider the ethics you might apply." (q)

Welcome to the World

2009-06-03T19:03:00.003-05:00

"Now you're coming down to earth
Okay, hello, welcome to the world"

AHS has spent this week courting her inner narcissist. She acquired a Facebook account (under a pen name), and the beginnings of a website to which she is still uploading content. She has discovered that, while she enjoys talking about herself in the third person, she really isn't enough of a narcissist to fully embrace the Facebook experience. (Some of you are probably quite skeptical of that last bit. ;)

(clears throat)

So I've heard that this Facebook thing is addicting, but the biggest buzz I've gotten from Facebook so far is a message from a group I joined that let me know about a lecture (on black holes and cosmology) of which I had been unaware. (Now that is my kind of cyber-crack!)

And after studying the Facebook wall of one of my friends (the one who insisted that I join), I just had to google 'Facebook' and 'narcissism'. My working hypothesis had been that Facebook promoted narcissism, as it appeared to be simply an excuse to share information about oneself. And not even particularly good information. (I'm thrilled that the 'Which Star Wars character are you?' quiz told you that you were Yoda, but come on! How much validation do you need?! Quit with the quizzes already!)

As it turns out, narcissism is easy to spot on Facebook, but that doesn't mean that Facebook promotes or encourages narcissism. If people are becoming addicted to Facebook, what is it exactly that they are addicted to? "But even more addicting were the never-ending possibilities to introduce, enhance and reveal more of myself." (quoted) That sounds vaguely like my own affection for blogging... But where is the line between enjoying the creative process and the battle of wits that one can engage in while blogging/Facebooking, and narcissism?

It's been suggested that we are in the middle of a narcissism epidemic that goes hand-in-hand with the birth of Generation I. "We are witnessing the initiation of a modern custom of absolute exposure, a side effect of the information age." (quoted) Are we barreling headlong into a brave new world where "every one belongs to every one else"? Is the adaptive response then to embrace such exposure by cultivating a greater degree of narcissism? Will we respond to an every-increasing invasion of privacy/expectation of sharing with an increased tendency to love and shield ourselves in a way that puts distance between us and others?

I found, in taking the narcissism quiz as 'research' for this post, that my responses were largely determined by specific experiences that I had had. And while I didn't score particularly high overall, it did make me wonder about how we might acquire narcissistic attitudes, and to what degree such attitudes might be encouraged by participation in things like Facebook. Perhaps not only are we driven by narcissism to participate, but the act of participating also creates narcissism. It would be interesting to see before and after narcissism ratings of Facebook users spanning a year of average Facebook use...

By the way, you can find me on Facebook if you know where to look, and if you can find me, you can friend me. We'll call it 'narcissism research'...

The Other Kind of Smart

2009-05-28T12:52:00.002-05:00

"What they call 'social and emotional knowledge' – the ability to read other people, manage our own emotions and thereby master social situations – doesn't have to be imparted solely through the cut and thrust of lived life. It can be taught, they say, like trigonometry or French grammar." - Drake Bennett, Dallas Morning News, May 3, 2009.

One of the ideas to which I'm irrationally attached is that our program of compulsory education (K-12) should contain more psychology. More specifically, students should be taught more about human behavior and motivation, child development, and critical reasoning and reasoning errors. In an idealistic way (that probably comes from my own passion to understand the human mind), I think that we could turn out more thoughtful, emotionally-aware graduates - who are better prepared for the challenges of adult relationships, responsibilities, and parenting - by adding some basic psychology and applied critical thinking to the average school curriculum.

So I was pleased to see Bennett's recent opinion piece, which expresses part of that sentiment. Bennett's piece is more well-researched than anything I've ever put together, and he does a good job of pulling together both pro and con arguments for teaching social and emotional knowledge skills in schools. Interestingly, one of the arguments against teaching emotional awareness is that "[i]f you know how to understand and manipulate other people's emotions, it can turn into something Machiavellian" - a quote attributed to Moshe Zeidner, co-author of What We Know About Emotional Intelligence. I'm going to take just a moment to share my semi-formal gut-reaction protest of that idea - 'And do you really think ignorance might be a better alternative?'

From a humanist perspective, don't we need to understand more about what our flaws are and how they hamper us, in order to overcome them without relying on supernatural imperatives about what is right and wrong? If I have a better understanding of you and what motivates you, and if I have cultivated the ability to have empathy toward you, am I more or less likely to misunderstand you? Assuming that misunderstandings and the inability to empathize drive a good portion of our ugliness toward our fellow man, shouldn't we be looking for opportunities to cultivate better social and emotional awareness in ourselves and in our children?

Before I start thumping the pulpit too hard, let me back down and point out one of the more compelling con arguments that Bennett mentions - the idea that we might unintentionally be creating a type of emotional conformity about what emotions are 'right' or 'wrong'. Anything that is systematized for mass consumption is likely going to backfire in some way. Would we be indirectly reinforcing ideas about certain emotions being 'bad'? Would this lead to an increased desire to suppress those emotions, via psychopharmocology or other artificial means? And what would be the ultimate cost of that?

Whatever your opinion about what might happen if emotional awareness skills were to be taught on a large-scale, the results of such teaching is showing that "emotional-learning classes can make kids better at controlling themselves when upset" and "less likely to assume hostility in ambiguous social situations."

That sounds hopeful and promising.

Compassion Is Difficult

2009-05-23T16:33:00.002-05:00

"Make no judgements where you have no compassion."

In the panoply of human virtues, compassion is one of the most highly-espoused by both great religious and secular leaders. It's worth mentioning that compassion is an emotional, physical response to the suffering of others, rather than a simple intellectual knowledge about the suffering and the decision to alleviate it. As such, compassion is something you feel, rather than something you decide to have.

But as with other human emotional virtues - e.g., love - we seldom discuss its obscure psychophysiological origins, or what can prevent us from feeling it. A 24-7 state of loving compassion for one's fellow man sounds 'enlightened' and like something to which we should aspire. However, no human being can sustain prolonged bursts of any emotion without becoming, to some degree, dysfunctional. After all, the function of an emotion is to compete with/overwhelm analytical step-by-step processing in an attempt to convey important information and generate a response. You could reasonably aspire to condition yourself to have a compassionate outlook that governs your behavior, but to want to feel compassion all the time seems undesirable. Such an outlook, though, would be an intellectual response, and subject to being overridden by any other emotion that presents itself.

In order to cultivate more true compassion (the emotional, physical response) we need to understand what triggers a feeling of compassion. Perhaps more importantly though, we should ask when don't we or can't we feel compassion for others? What barriers do we have that prevent us from displaying this virtue?

I relate the following story not because I'm particularly proud of or ashamed of my reaction, but because an honest examination of ourselves and our behaviors is a necessary step in advancing our own ability to behave morally... Yesterday morning I went into the store where I normally purchase a paper and a beverage. Upon entering the store at this early hour, I noticed a man at the cash register next to the entryway. It's unusual that anyone is in this store at this hour, and perhaps my gaze lingered a bit too long. He quickly moved toward me and loudly said 'What's your problem, lady?' By this time I had observed, in addition to the man's unkempt appearance and inappropriate reaction to my presence, that there were several dollar bills lying neatly side by side on the counter. (Aberrant behavior!)

My threat assessment was now telling me that this person was likely drunk and/or mentally-ill and off his medication. His judgment was likely impaired and his reaction to me could likely become more unpredictable/irrational. Had I been safely removed from the potential (however small) of being physically harmed by this person, I probably could have viewed him with compassion. But compassion never entered my mind as a thought or an emotion while this 5-second encounter was playing itself out.

Had I not been thinking about compassion for other reasons, I probably wouldn't have given much thought to this encounter. But I was, and so it occurred to me to wonder why, in spite of my assessment that this person was suffering in some very real sense, I did not/was not able to evoke compassion for him. Is compassion something we can only feel when we ourselves feel safe? Are we so hard-wired for self-preservation that a compassionate reaction to our fellow man can only happen in the absence of a perceived threat to ourselves? This may seem obvious in light of some of the things I discussed earlier, but if it is true, then we need to overtly acknowledge it in order to begin to move beyond it.

I spent a lot of time today thinking about this idea. Sadly, I found that it fits other instances where I have failed to behave compassionately towards other, or towards myself.

So if we then argue that the perception of a threat can keep us from behaving compassionately towards each other, then would reducing the level of threat that we perceive in/from the other allow us to respond more positively/compassionately? Would we default to a compassionate reaction to suffering in the absence of a perceived threat? Or is the absence of threat simply a necessary, but not a sufficient, precursor for a compassionate response?

Embracing a Wide Sky

2009-05-11T17:04:00.002-05:00

"Mad Pride is a movement that celebrates the human rights and spectacular culture of people considered very different by our society." - Mindfreedom.org

I've recently noticed a few articles that mention 'Mad Pride'. A Newsweek article spawned a blogpost over at Mindhacks, referencing a New York Times article from a year ago. Today another article appeared which brought the 'mad pride' movement into the limelight.

If you are wodnering what 'mad pride' is, it's been defined as a movement "committed to ending discrimination against psychiatric patients and glorifying madness in all its forms", or more generally, as a movement that celebrates the great range of differences in the human mind.

This movement fascinates me because, had I the wherewithal, I would love to go to law school and, as a lawyer with a Ph.D. in cognitive science, help define the emerging field of cognitive-rights/personhood law. As technology (and psychopharmacology) advance, issues of what is 'normal enough' and what can be mandated to be 'fixed' will only become more common. (You'll probably see a lot of these types of issues discussed in this blog.)

Today it occurred to me to wonder what traditional humanism had to say about mental illness, so I googled 'humanism and mental illness'. I don't know what I expected find - a manifesto of some sort, I guess, that would detail humanism's acceptance of the full range of human mental experience. Nothing of that sort appeared in the top few pages of google results. A paper by Erich Fromm (my favorite humanist philosopher) entitled "The Humanist Concept of Mental Health", (1961) topped the list of results. I've loved everything I've ever read by Erich Fromm, so there will be a blog-writing pause while I read this article...

"What is the normal man, mentally and emotionally speaking? Can he simply be defined as being like the majority? And if the majority is not healthy, would then the individual who is like the majority be a healthy man, or is it possible that the very person who is different from the rest is the healthy one, while the whole society is mad? But is there such a thing as an insane society?" (I love this guy.)

Fromm's paper does not deal with our modern approaches to what we label 'mental illness'. Indeed, he argues for mental health - "Well-being is being in accord with the nature of man." - more than he argues against mental illness, leaving the reader to wonder if he sees any 'goodness' in certain forms of 'madness'. Perhaps there is hope in his parting sentence - "...let us never forget that from the standpoint of the humanist tradition the healthy man is the man who is productive, the man who is related to the world, and concerned with the world, and mental health is never only the absence of illness; it is never only the capacity to function well, but it is a state of mind in which the person is stimulated by the world around him, and hence he can be stimulating to others."

Is this a satisfactory humanist position, particularly if humanism is "a broad category of ethical philosophies that affirm the dignity and worth of all people" (W)? Or is it important that humanist philosophies take a more pro-active stance to affirm the value of a broader range of mental experiences and a wider sky of human potential? In a time when we are hearing that intelligence drugs could/should be as common as coffee, how important is it for humanist philosophy to support a person's right to reject society's increasing-narrow definition of 'normal', along with the increasing pressure to medicate any deviation from 'normal'?

Here Fromm does not fail us - "man is not made for the state, for the purposes of society, but that the state and society have to serve man." And if "the ultimate goal [of humanism] is human flourishing; making life better for all humans" (W), you may be asking - How does it serve man and society to allow him to function at what we percieve to be a less-than-optimal level?

Think about it. (Better yet, drop comments.) We'll come back to this topic.

Because He Had Life

2009-05-09T19:48:00.003-05:00

"Because he had life... He had a chance to be brave and seek the truth, to honor and defend it. He had time in which he could have faced fear and overcome it; to know himself without deceit, excuse, or self-pity; to bear pain without bitterness. He had days in which to laugh, to see beauty, to fill his heart with gratitude. He could have been kind and brave and generous... Above all, there were people he could have loved and learned to forgive."

Why are you behaving this way?, I've often wondered of people I observe. My interest in puzzling out the roots of behavior started many years ago, and continues to this day. Specific behaviors are usually learned, so perhaps a better question is - why/how are you motivated to behave this way?

I've observed over many years that anti-actions (actions which psychologically, emotionally, or physical harm another person) are often a reaction to a perceived threat. The action may be displaced from that actual threat in its target, but the perceived threat that triggered the defensive response usually isn't too hard to find. Conversely, pro-actions (actions which psychologically, emotionally or physically aid another person) are more often seen in situations where the actor is secure in his/her circumstances. This is a fairly-simplistic observation, and one that I am not alone in making.

This leads to the questions - Secure from what? A threat to what? Why do we bother to identify and respond to threats?

When looking at explanations of motivation for behavior, I've been particularly struck by Maslow's proposed Hierarchy of Needs. His elegantly-simple model suggests, for example, that you cannot worry about love, friendship, and respecting others if your basic needs for food and water aren't being met. His model was specifically designed to extend motivating drives into realms beyond the purely physiological, and he declared that certain psychological needs (love, belonging, esteem) were powerful motivators in their own right. In examining motivation, he also acknowledged that motivation may be complex, and that a single motivated behavior may be undertaken to satisfy more than one need. (Perhaps Maslow's most depressing idea though is that "Man is a perpetually wanting animal.", which suggests that we will always be striving for something and will never be completely content.)

As with anything that is beautiful in its simplicity, Maslow's theory often lacks integration with other observations. For example, how the choice of behavior that one engages in to fulfill a particular need is made is not explained by this model. It also does not explain (though it does acknowledge) particular instances of altruism where concern for the safety of a relative may drive one to ignore or suppress one's own basic need for food. It does not explain anticipation of future need-fulfilment, or the various ways in which we identify and process threats to need-fulfilment.

Shaver's observation that those who feel secure are much more likely to engage in pro-actions at cost to themselves is likewise beautifully-simple. What he does not tell us is how we might increase our feeling of security in, what is arguably to many people, a dog-eat-dog world.

Maslow also correctly identifies the importance of feeling secure - "...it is precisely those individuals in whom a certain need has always been satisfied who are best equipped to tolerate deprivation of that need in the future, and that furthermore, those who have been deprived in the past will react differently to current satisfactions than the one who has never been deprived."

The questions then become - At what point, if any, have we acquired a permanent bias in how we see the world and how secure we feel in it? What hope is there for people who chronically engage in anti-actions out of fear? What hope for their children who observe and learn these behaviors? How can we achieve a world where everyone can spare energy and time to worry about self-actualization (our highest need according to Maslow)?

Hopefully, asking the questions takes us a step closer to finding answers.

[Confidential Aside: "But it is time you recalled that, though I am a servant, I am not your servant."]

What Do I Believe?

2009-04-26T17:19:00.002-05:00

"There is a deep hunger for wisdom in our time, but the church offers up little more than sugary nostalgia with a dash of fear." - Saving Jesus from the Church, by Robin R. Meyers (2009)

A year or so ago an evangelical purveyor of coffee asked me what I believed. Having no creed to recite, I promised to think about that question. And here I am. This post isn't a definitive statement of what I believe, but rather a 'Hello! Here's what you should know about me before we get started."

1) I'm not a card-carrying humanist, nor am I particularly well-read in humanist literature. But, as I've said elsewhere, I believe that we are our only hope for a better world. I also believe that we have the keys to unlocking our highest potential as human beings. I think those are fundamental aspects of humanism.

2) I'm appalled that 'humanism' is frequently made to seem synonymous with 'atheism' - usually by atheists who more interested in attacking religion than in advancing a positive, human-based philosophy. I don't automatically defer to religious ideas/ideals as being superior examples of morality or virtue, nor do I exclude them all from discussion simply because of their origins. I have no interest in debating the existence of god, the evils of religion, or the ultimate 'source' of such ideas unless such information is relevant to a specific instance of moral reasoning.

3) I have a background in psychology. Perhaps I'm biased by my education, but I think that many of our worst tendencies as human beings could be avoided if we were simply more aware of our motivations and how they drive our behaviors.

4) I am inclined to believe that Jesus and Buddha were human beings in the same sense that we are human beings. I like to view them as men who observed and learned a great deal about human nature and human potential. Therefore whatever 'miracles' may be attributed to them are either a) attainable by any of us with sufficient study, or b) an erroneous recording of actual events. (I don't dwell on this idea much, but it does explain why I'm reading the book quoted above.)

5) I am interested in how the human condition is changing as the result of advances in science and technology. I'm particularly interested in how such advances will change human cognition. To that extent, I may discuss or reference transhumanist writings, but that should not be construed as an unconditional acceptance of transhumanist goals or philosophies.

6) While I like to think that I spend a lot of time thinking, I haven't spent a lot of time studying systematic ways of thinking. Rationalism, empiricism, etc. (Sometimes I think I blog just so I have an excuse to do research.) You may spot biases in my thinking of which I am unaware. Please feel free to counter me with relevant examples or reasoning.

I hope that this blog will serve the purpose of forcing me to identify and examine my beliefs. If they meet with intelligent criticism, so much the better.

Comments are moderated to maintain a civil atmosphere and idea-centered discourse.