I’VE MISSED A COUPLE POSTINGS OVER THE PAST FEW DAYS

That’s because this year, not only did I get a flu shot, I got the flu! Been a long time since this 67 year old has felt the whiplash of the flu on his old bones and let me tell you, I see how flu can kill seniors and children. I was physically devastated for 24 hours. Not one inch of me was free of pain, and I feared that I’d soon be unable to breathe. I was afraid that by the time I knew I really needed medical help, I’d be too far gone to get it to me on time (or me to it) yet, like so many men of my generation I just toughed it out and by the third day I was on the mend.

DO PAST MEMBERS OF SECRET COLLEGE SOCIETIES RUN AMERICA?

I recall reading many years ago that a roomful of rich Texans stood up and cheered when President John Kennedy was assassinated. It seems to me that a reporter who happened to be in the room when it happened was the one who mentioned it in the context of another story he (she?) was writing, but, since it’s not always safe to trust our memories, I decided to try a Google search to see what I could find. Under my search input of “’president kennedy’ assassinated + texas men cheer” I came up with a site which is full of information about the secret Yale fraternity “Skull and Bones” which the Bush family is part of and so was John Kerry. It’s a site full of conspiracy theories which transcend political parties. The site claims that America is being slowly taken over by the rich who own both political parties, the media and the financial interests of America. Then it discusses the idea that these Skull and Bones fellows could eventually control the American electoral process through electronic voting machines.

Though their control of us might not be a reality just yet, how far farfetched is it that this control could eventually be created if a secret society formed in college truly gets to run government by controlling both political parties for the benefit of the rich?

Please don’t make me paranoid!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

SOUTHERN HYPOCRISY

You should look at a recent statistical map which shows the skyrocketing rate per 100,000 of women in the United States with the AIDS virus. The map roughly mirrors similar colorful maps which in the past have shown the rates of poverty, poor educational results, the murder rate, the amount of money per student invested in education, the greatest poverty rates... on and on. On every map over recent years, the deep South always shows the worst results—the most deaths, the dumbest children, the most impoverished people. Face it, the conservative philosophy sounds great to the uneducated mind, but in the long run, ordinary people always come out worse when they have to live it. It just takes them awhile to figure it out.

Admitted, in this AIDS map, New York, Pennsylvania, Maryland, New Jersey and a few other New England states show the same high rates as those in the deep South and Florida and, always, in Bush’s home state of Texas, but most of the northern states and the west manage to show more enlightened, liberal attitudes which make life better and safer for the average Joe and Jo. The border states do pretty well too. Perhaps that’s because they remained in the North during the Civil War.


MORE AMERICAN ATROCITIES

Look on page 28 of the December 20, 2004 NEWSWEEK to verify what I’ve quoted below. Add this one to the number of atrocities American troops have committed while in Iraq’s wartime situations. Anybody with half a brain could see this coming. All us peaceniks saw it coming. That’s why we say war should be a last resort—cause of what it does to men in combat, cause of the ruined lives, cause, of course, cause it wasn’t necessary. And it’s so bad because of the senselessness of the war, it’s utter lack of real purpose. In such senseless situations, Vietnam taught those of us wise enough to learn, men do even more senseless things than when they feel their war is just and useful. Anybody with half a brain knows what a useless mess this war was.

O, Swiftboat liars of the future, who lie about men like Kerry who tell the truth, shove this one down your gullets:

[open quote] BY BABAK DEHGHANPISHEH

It was supposed to be a routine search. Hunting for gunmen and weapons in Baghdad's Sadr City, a squad of GIs raided a house, slapped a set of plastic cuffs on the lone occupant and left him outside. But the squad found only a single AK-47, allowed for self-defense under U.S. military rules. Spc. Allen Crandall partially disabled the weapon, then cut the Iraqi's cuffs and led him inside with Sgt. Michael Williams. Crandall set the AK-47 on a table by the door and turned to leave. As he did, he says he heard Williams saying, “I feel threatened.” Then two shots from Williams’s M16. Testifying on the Aug. 28 incident last week in Iraq, Crandall told an Army panel: “[Williams] said the Iraqi went for his weapon.”

Something went monstrously wrong in “the 1-41"—the U.S. Army’s First Battalion, 41st Infantry Regiment. Out of 500 or so battalion members, Williams is one of six now facing murder charges in five separate shooting incidents since August. Two of the victims were also 1-41 troops, gunned down at a Kansas farmhouse in September. In a courtroom last week at Camp Victory,
outside Baghdad, 1-41 members described a dysfunctional unit with too much bloodlust and not enough accountability. Witnesses said the battalion’s Charlie Company held a macabre contest to see who would get the first confirmed kill of the unit’s second Iraq tour.

Three 1-41 members gave their lives on the battalion’s first tour last year. After a few months’ rest in Fort Riley, Kans., the battalion began a new tour this summer. Things soon went bad. On Aug. 18, Company C was hunting insurgents in Sadr City. Williams’s squad stopped a dump truck, and an Iraqi climbed out. “Light
him up!” the sergeant ordered, according to testimony, and the squad opened fire, killing the unarmed man. Williams and a squadmate reportedly got into an argument over which of them had scored Company C’s first kill.

Staff Sgt. Johnny Home pleaded guilty last week to killing a wounded 16-year-old Iraqi the same day. He insisted it was a mercy killing. A squad-mate, Staff Sgt. Cardenas Alban, is awaiting trial for murder in the same incident. Ten days later, during the Aug. 28 search, Williams and Spc. Brent May led another unarmed Iraqi back into his house, where they allegedly left him dead. "May asked if he could shoot this one,” testified their squadmate Spc. Tulafono Young. “Specialist May was sort of bragging ... that he had shot the guy in the head.”

Then came the deaths in Kansas. Aaron Stanley and Eric Colvin stayed behind when 1-41 returned to Iraq in July. The two sergeants were facing a list of drug charges, including distribution of amphetamines, use of amphetamines and possession of marijuana with intent to sell. On the night of Sept. 13, they were at Stanley’s rented farmhouse near Clay Center, 30 miles from Fort Riley, when Staff Sgt. Matthew Werner and Spc. Christopher Hymer drove up—and were fatally shot. Police arrived after Stanley called 911 to say he had shot two men trying to break in. Nevertheless, on Oct. 16 the Army filed charges of premeditated murder against Stanley and Calvin. So far the Army has kept a tight lid on its 1-41 investigations. But the slowly emerging details keep getting uglier.

With COURTNEY CLOYD in clay center. [close quote]
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"The war situation has developed not necessarily to Japan's advantage." —Emporer Hirohito of Japan (Bush could take a lesson here.)

HOW MORALITY EVOLVED

The following paragraphs are, like everything else lately in my weblog, scanned from Wilson's CONSILIENCE, pp. 252-254:

[Open quote.] A way of envisioning the hypothetical earliest stages of moral evolution is provided by game theory, particularly the solutions to the famous Prisoner’s Dilemma. Consider the following typical scenario of the Dilemma. Two gang members have been arrested for murder and are being questioned separately. The evidence against them is strong but not compelling. The first gang member believes that if he turns state’s witness, he will be granted immunity and his partner will be sentenced to life in prison. But he is also aware that his partner has the same option. That is the dilemma. Will the two gang members independently defect so that both take the hard fall? They will not, because they agreed in advance to remain silent if caught. By doing so, both hope to be convicted on a lesser charge or escape punishment altogether. Criminal gangs have turned this principle of calculation into an ethical precept: Never rat on another member; always be a stand-up guy. Honor does exist among thieves. If we view the gang as a society of sorts, the code is the same as that of a captive soldier in wartime obliged to give only name, rank, and serial number.

In one form or another, comparable dilemmas that are solvable by cooperation occur constantly and everywhere in daily life. The payoff is variously money, status, power, sex, access, comfort, and health. Most of these proximate rewards are converted into the universal bottom line of Darwinian genetic fitness: greater longevity and a secure, growing family.

And so it has likely always been. Imagine a Paleolithic hunter band, say composed of five men. One hunter considers breaking away from the others to look for an antelope on his own. If successful he will gain a large quantity of meat and hide, five times greater than if he stays with the band and they are successful. But he knows from experience that his chances of success alone are very low, much less than the chances of a band of five working together. In addition, whether successful alone or not, he will suffer animosity from the others for lessening their own prospects. By custom the band members remain together and share the animals they kill equitably. So the hunter stays. He also observes good manners while doing so, especially if he is the one who makes the kill. Boasiful pride is condemned because it rips the delicate web of reciprocity.

Now suppose that human propensities to cooperate or defect are heritable: Some members are innately more cooperative, others less so. In this respect moral aptitude would simply be like almost all other mental traits studied to date. Among traits with documented heritability, those closest to moral aptitude are empathy to the distress of others and certain processes of attachment between infants and their caregivers. To the heritability of moral aptitnde add the abundant evidence of history that cooperative individuals generally survive longer and leave more offspring. It is to be expected that in the course of evolutionary history, genes predisposing people toward cooperative behavior would have come to predominate in the human population as a whole.

Such a process repeated through thousands of generations inevitably gave birth to the moral sentiments. With the exception of stone psychopaths (if any truly exist), these instincts are vividly experienced by every person variously as conscience, self-respect, remorse, empathy, shame, humility, and moral outrage. They bias cultural evolution toward the conventions that express the universal moral codes of honor, patriotism, altruism, justice, compassion, mercy, and redemption.

The dark side to the inborn propensity to moral behavior is xenophobia. Because personal familiarity and common interest are vital in social transactions, moral sentiments evolved to be selective. And so it has ever been, and so it will ever be. People give trust to strangers with effort, and true compassion is a commodity in chronically short supply. Tribes cooperate only through carefully defined treaties and other conventions. They are quick to imagine themselves victims of conspiracies by competing groups, and they are prone to dehumanize and murder their rivals during periods of severe conflict. They cement their own group loyalties by means of sacred symbols and ceremonies. Their mythologies are filled with epic victories over menacing enemies.

The complementary instincts of morality and tribalism are easily manipulated. Civilization has made them more so. Only ten thousand years ago, a tick in geological time, when the agricultural revolution began in the Middle East, in China, and in Mesoamerica, populations increased in density tenfold over those of hunter-gatherer societies. Families settled on small plots of land, villages proliferated, and labor was finely divided as a growing minority of the populace specialized as craftsmen, traders, and soldiers. The rising agricultnral societies, egalitarian at first, became hierarchical. As chiefdoms and then states thrived on agricultural surpluses, hereditary rulers and priestly castes took power. The old ethical codes were transformed into coercive regulations, always to the advantage of the ruling classes. About this time the idea of law-giving gods originated. Their commands lent the ethical codes overpowering authority, once again—no surprise—to the favor of the rulers. [Close quote.]
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"No other factor in history, not even religion, has produced so many wars as has the clash of national egotisms sanctified by the name of patriotism." —Preserved Smith

CURRENTLY READING

Joseph Campbell’s MYTHS TO LIVE BY and
Charles Baudelaire’s THE FLOWERS OF EVIL and
of course my NEWSWEEK


IRAQ? ANOTHER VIETNAM IN ONE SUBTLE WAY. LISTEN UP!

A fairly recent NEWSWEEK report (December 6, 2004) reveals that veterans returning from Iraq are showing a 17 to 20 percent rate for post-traumatic stress disorder. That’s PTSD to you. The report goes on:

[Open quote] Without treatment, some conditions such as chronic PTSD can be lethal. Five years after the Vietnam War, epidemiologists studying combat veterans found that they were nearly twice as likely to die from motor-vehicle accidents and accidental poisoning than veterans who didn’t see combat. In a 30-year follow up, published in the Archives of Internal Medicine this year, the same combat vets continued to die at greater rates and remained especially vulnerable to drug overdose and accidental poisoning. “We had the John Wayne syndrome,” says Vietnam veteran Greg Helle, who grappled with severe PTSD for decades. “We were men, we’d been to war. We thought we could tough it out.” Doctors hadn’t developed effective treatment for PTSD and besides, says Helle, seeking help was an admission of weakness.

Doctors now know that PTSD is the product of subtle biological changes that occur in the brain in response to extreme stress. Using sophisticated imaging techniques, researchers now believe that extreme stress alters the way memory is stored. During a major upheaval, the body releases massive doses of adrenaline which speeds up the heart, quickens the reflexes and, over several hours, burns vivid memories that are capable of activating the amygdala, or fear center, in the brain. People can get PTSD, doctors say, when that mechanism works too well. Instead of creating protective memories (ducking at the sound of gunfire), says Dr. Roger Pitman, a psychiatry professor at Harvard Medical School, “the rush of adrenaline creates memories that intrude on everyday life and without treatment, can actually hinder survival.”

Why some people get PTSD and others don’t remains a mystery. Recent studies suggest that a predisposition to the disorder may be genetic and that previous traumatic experiences can make soldiers more vulnerable to it. Once a soldier has it, though, says Dr. Matthew J. Friedman, executive director of the Department of Veterans Affairs National Center for PTSD, the good news is that the medical community now knows that “PTSD is very real and very treatable.” [Close quote]

Now it gets interesting. Let's ask again, "Why do combat veterans get PTSD? What is this stress they encounter? We know it’s having bullets flying from every which way towards them and their comrades, plus walking down streets where any friendly face might have planted a bomb waiting to blow them to smithereens around the next bend. But let’s zoom in on a specific case mentioned in the NEWSWEEK article.

“Help came too late for Marine reservist Jeffrey Lucey. In July 2003, he returned home to Belchertown, Mass., from Iraq and gradually sank into a deep depression. His family looked on in anguish as he began drinking too much and isolating himself from their close-knit clan. By spring of 2004, he’d stopped sleeping, eating and attending college. When his sister Debra Lucey tried to have a heart-to-heart, “he’d describe the terrible things he’d SEEN AND DONE [capitals mine],” she says, “and he’d always end by saying, ‘You’ll never be able to understand’.” Frantic, family members had him committed to a psychiatric hospital but he was soon released. A few weeks later he crashed the family car, and the following month a neighbor found him wandering the streets in the middle of the night dressed in full camouflage with two battle knives he’d been issued in Iraq. Last June, Jeffrey Lucey hanged himself in the basement of his family home.”

Now we know how the Bill O’Reillys and Limbaughs and Roves of the world speak of sissies who need psychiatric care. “We don’t need no help,” we have heard them smugly say. And how they love to lay it onto liberals who “are always the victims who blame others for their troubles and/or encourage the victim mentality in others”. O, yeah!

Okay, “Fug ‘em,” as Norman Mailer would have someone say in THE NAKED AND THE DEAD because that was another conservative time in American history when his novel about WWII came out. He had to use euphemisms. Conservatives don’t like plain speaking of truths. They like Bush secrecy and hidden plans and end runs around legalities and fine points of law. Bush loves his Keriks until he gets caught. But, hey, that particular brand of conservative bullshit still ain’t my point.

Recall the Swift Boat swifties who attacked John Kerry about his testimony before Congress about the atrocities in Vietnam? And recall all the letters to the editor in your local paper from vets who had seen no atrocities in Vietnam? So you gotta ask, “What did this Lucey trooper DO that was troubling him so badly? What did he SEE being DONE? Did he observe what was going on in Abu Ghraib, for instance? Or that trooper who shot dead the wounded and unarmed Iraqi just a couple of weeks ago? Plain to see, ain’t it, that our troopers are witnessing and performing acts of violence (atrocities?) that trouble them badly?

Folks, war is making monsters of men and their consciences are beginning to smart a bit. Just what I knew would happen when I went on my first peace march long before bloody bucker Bush sent in the first death waves of missiles and bombs. Anybody with one-quarter of a brain knows this stuff inside and out. They wouldn’t stand for a president who sends our troops off to war for no good reason or, at least, for a hidden reason to make his oil buddies rich, but we got a very dumb electorate here in America, and we’re paying for our dumbest links in the evolutionary chain of events which has brought us to our current situation in modern America.

Now who will be the Kerry who steps up to reveal what’s going on in Iraq? In fact men are already doing it. That’s how we discovered Abu Ghraib. Let’s just hope that none of the truth tellers want to run for president twenty years from now, ‘cause conservative men will still be trying to hide the truths from civilians in the future too, and they’ll be ready to make their little lying films about heros like Kerry too. The irony! The irony! And just weeks after Kerry was defeated by liars like these.
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"Show me a man who doesn't want his gun registered, and I'll show you a man who shouldn't have a gun." —Homer Cummings

"Guns don't kill people. People with guns kill people." —Geo

MODERN PRIMITIVE THOUGHT IN EVANGELISTIC AMERICA

C. R. Hallpike has written about how people in preliterate societies reason in THE FOUNDATIONS OF PRIMITIVE THOUGHT (Oxford Press, 1979) which E. O. Wilson summarizes in CONSILIENCE, p. 208:

“...intuitive and dogmatic, bound up with specific emotional relationships rather than physical causality, preoccupied with essences and metamorphosis, opaque to logical abstraction or arrays of the hypothetical possible, prone to use language for social interaction rather than as a conceptual tool, limited in quantification mostly to rough images of frequency and rarity, and inclined to view mind as stemming partly from the environment and able to project back out into it, so that words become entities with power unto themselves.

“It will become at once apparent, and should be a working premise of economists and other social scientists, that the same preliterate traits are commonplace in [some] citizens of modern industrial societies. They are intensified among cult members, the deeply religious, and the less educated. [capital letters mine] Systematic logico-deductive thought, which is very much a specialized product of Western culture, comes hard on the other hand....”

The preliterate qualities of religious and less educated thought is a concept which is pretty widespread in the literature of science which studies language and the mind. I tend to believe it. What are the rest of us to make of it? Aren’t we slipping back into preliterate times with America’s current decline in literacy? I think we must all keep our eyes on this backward slide of the mental life of American citizens. I do believe we are trending in a way which will cost us our position of leadership in the modern world, and we can blame it clearly on conservatism and religiosity, two of the most destructive forces in American life today. They both are and historically have been retrogressive rather than progressive forces whenever they appear in whatever culture.



MORE ON THE AMERICAN RETREAT
FROM INFORMATION

I wrote the following on December 6, 2004:

When we ask ourselves what’s wrong with our educational systems and why our kids are not learning, I think we all need to look in the mirror and ask ourselves how respectful of intelligence am I?

I could ask, “Do I read for pleasure and fun or just when I have to? Do I respect the intellectual elite or do I feel inferior to them, expressed in and hidden by my contempt? If I’m angry at people who read more than I do and who, therefore, are better informed than I am, do I blame them for my own failure to read and get information in depth? Do I read widely and learn about many things or do I read narrowly only to buttress my own beliefs? For example: If I’m an evolutionist, have I read a “Bible” or “Koran” or the “Tibetan Book of the Dead” lately? And if I’m a creationist, have I read Darwin’s “Origin of the Species” or Richard Dawkins’ “The Blind Watchmaker”? In short, do I really know what I’m talking about or why I feel threatened by a difference in ideas? And, more, to return to the opening idea, shouldn’t I ask, if I have no respect for the literate, well-informed citizen who thinks differently from me, then why do I expect my children to respect intelligence and learning and the facts of a situation?
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“If it weren’t for pickpockets, I’d have no sex life at all.” —Rodney Dangerfield

OLD GUY XMAS

You know? I just realized that at my age I’ve been listening to Xmas hymns and songs for 67 years now, and I have earned the right to be a curmudgeon about carole listening. I’m tired of them. I’m tired of the false hope that this seasonal orgy gives to the disheveled. I’m tired of orgies of giving on false pretexts. I’ve earned the right to my view, and I need not feel ashamed of not going along for the sleight of hand “ride”. Or is that “job”? What a relief—to see I’ve earned my hard-earned skepticism. And here’s a big fat phaaaaarrt in the imagined savior’s face to go along with my skepticism! Now, is that shocking, or what?


THESE DAYS

Today, December 17, 2004, new reports show that Bush operatives are holding prisoners in Guantanamo in secret. And that Bush’s next budget will decimate programs for the poor, the handicapped and the mentally ill so that his tax cuts for the rich can be made permanent. Further Bush’s U.S. refuses to be part of the world wide emission control efforts represented by the Kyoto Accord while another report shows that the rich are spending richly at high end stores while the rest of us cut back on our gift giving because, frankly, we just can’t afford it.

Irresponsible, cruel, secretive—what more do we need to know before we realize that this Bush character has tricked his wife Laura into thinking he’s a nice guy? (This morning just heard we ought to have a new bumper sticker that reads, “IMPEACH LAURA!”.) Many a mafioso wife didn’t know the full range of her husband’s murderous ways. As for those unrelated Republicans who support him—well, my fear is that most of them don’t read and get most of their news distorted and censored straight out of the mouths of sex addict O’Reilly and the drug addict Limbaugh.

And locally, we see Republicans like Kate McCaslin who is working hard to destroy the reputation of Spokane’s Regional Health District head, Thorburn. Kate doesn’t like the Health District leader doing a good job because if the job is done right, some of Kate’s friends might be forced to shut down their businesses. Would anyone expect a Republican to put public interest above personal profit? I know better. I hope that you all do too.


BELIEVE IT OR NOT?

Arianna Huffington says that we Democrats need to stick to our populist roots, our “left-leaning” roots, which stress economic fairness and social justice. She believes that a drift to the center only exacerbates our cause by suggesting that our core values were false all along. I tend to agree with her, though, currently, I know I feel fear at the thought of losing any more battles because the American center has temporarily lost its way, its heart and its mind. But, actually we must believe that fairness is an American trait which will eventually reassert itself after this current Republican madness fades away.
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"The last time I tried to make love to my wife nothing was happening, so I said to her, "What's the matter, you can't think of anybody either?" —Rodney Dangerfield

US OLD GUYS WORTH SOMETHING AFTER ALL

According to a Scientific American article in November, 2004, about 30,000 years ago “older adults outnumbered younger ones for the first time. The boost in longevity may have been critical in the development of human culture, as elders passed down knowledge and helped to knit together complex societies.”

These ancient wise elders who passed on practical knowledge like how to barter and where to hunt and how to shape the best stone spear points are not to be confused with current wise elders who bore young people to death with horrendous tales of long walks to school in snowy winters when drifts clear to the top of the Empire State Building were not uncommon.


CONTRADICTION TO LA CERRA’S
ORIGIN OF MINDS?

If you recall how La Cerra explained the “plastic” piece of brain in the bumblebee and it’s ability to store changing information about directions to pollen, pollen yields related to the color and shape of healthy flowers (in short, La Cerra’s explanation of adaptive memory in bees and the “plasticity” of that memory), a fairly current piece of information in the November Scientific American (p.36) about ants seemingly undermines the plastic memory idea. Ants do no seem to be able to adapt as easily as bumblebees.

Research with ants suggests that “a hardwired navigation system computes distance and controls the ants will to fight.” Ants near home fight more than ants far from home. By picking up and moving ants after they have moved sufficient distances from home, researchers found that ants return to a place where home should have been rather than to where home is. Since the ants believe they are home, they will fight to defend home even though home is not nearby. This fight response, unconnected to an actual home, suggests that the ants are hardwired to calculate the distance from home.

The key words to note are the words “hardwired” in ants versus “plastic” in La Cerra’s bees.


ARTSY SMARTSY!

CONSILIENCE, p. 218: “The arts are innately focused toward certain forms and themes but are otherwise freely constructed. The archetypes spawn legions of metaphors that compose not only a large part of the arts but also of ordinary communication. Metaphors, the consequence of spreading activation of the brain during learning, are the building blocks of creative thought. They connect and synergistically strengthen different spheres of memory.”

Wilson reports that “Kurt Vonnegut Jr., master fantasist, once pointed out, the arts place humanity at the center of the universe, whether we belong there or not.”

Hey, Jimbo! Here’s a fantasist we can talk about.
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“It seems th’ less a statesman amounts to th’ more he loves th’ flag.” —Frank McKinney Hubbard [These modern day folk have completely lost the ability to separate themselves from the state as these old-timers can. And these flag waving conservatives have the nerve to accuse liberals of wanting more power for the state!]

SO OLD IT’S ALMOST NEW

Commenting on the Enlightenment, E. O. Wilson notes, “Most [figures of the Enlightenment] engaged from time to time in absurd digressions and speculations, such as looking for hidden codes in the Bible or for the anatomical seat of the soul.”

What to make of Bushites trying to decide when the ensoulment of the individual occurs or how ‘bout that fundamentalist who recently claimed to have found yet another code in the Bible? The distance these men and women are out of touch with reality amazes me to no end.


CHRISTIAN ADOPTERS, SHOW UP!

An AP report last month reveals that “More than 100,000 children who have been abused or neglected by their biological parents are languishing in foster care, waiting to be adopted.”

That doesn’t seem like a lot of children in a nation the size of the United States, so the pro-life Christians just need to get busy and adopt. You want ‘em, you got ‘em!


RELIGION? ISN’T IT DREAMY?

According to E. O. Wilson and others, “Natural sleep and drug induced dreams have long been viewed in Western civilization as a portal to the divine.... Joseph’s [dream] witness established one of the two essential pillars of Christian belief, the other being the disciples’ account of the Resurrection, also dreamlike.” (CONSILIENCE, p. 73)

Dreams are currently explained by the activation-synthesis theory which runs as follows:

“The... more modern hypothesis of the basic nature of dreaming is the activation-synthesis model of biology. As created during the past two decades by J. Allan Hobson of Harvard Medical School and other researchers, it pieces together our deepening knowledge of the actual cellular and molecular events that occur in the brain during dreaming.

“In brief, dreaming is a kind of insanity, a rush of visions, largely unconnected to reality, emotion-charged and symbol-drenched, arbitrary in content, and potentially infinite in variety. Dreaming is very likely a side effect of the reorganization and editing of information in the memory banks of the brain. It is not, as Freud envisioned, the result of savage emotions and hidden memories that slip past the brain’s censor.

“The facts behind the activation-synthesis hypothesis can be interpreted as follows. During sleep, when almost all sensory input ceases, the conscious brain is activated internally by impulses originating in the brain stem. It scrambles to perform its usual function, which is to create images that move through coherent narratives. But lacking moment-by-moment input of sensory information, including stimuli generated by body motion, it remains unconnected to external reality. Therefore, it does the best it can: It creates fantasy. The conscious brain, regaining control upon awakening, and with all its sensory and motor inputs restored, reviews the fantasy and tries to give it a rational explanation. The explanation fails, and as a result dream interpretation itself becomes a kind of fantasy. That is the reason psychoanalytic theories relating to dreaming, as well as parallel supernatural interpretations arising in myth and religion, are at one and the same time emotionally convincing and factually incorrect.” (CONSILIENCE, p. 75)

“In dreams we are insane. We wander across our limitless dreamscapes as madmen,” Wilson summarizes. So... if Christianity’s major pillars are dream induced, and if dreaming is a form of madness, does that mean that Christianity is the dreamy religion of madmen? Or the madness of dreamy religionists? Or the religious dreams of madmen?

You get the picture.
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"There are days when it takes all you've got just to keep up with the losers." —Robert Orben

SCHIZOPHRENIA AND GEORGE BUSH

According to E. O. Wilson, all schizophrenics “share one trait: mental activity that breaks with reality. In some cases the patient believes he is a great personage (the Messiah is a popular choice) or the target of a clever and pervasive conspiracy. In others he hallucinates voices or visions, often bizarre, as in a dream while fully awake.” (CONSILIENCE, p. 143)

Though Wilson won’t say it, I will. Since there is no evidence whatsoever that a hypothetical superbeing, called god, exists, don’t those who claim there is a god suffer from a break with reality? Of course, the fact that it’s a widely held misconception, “mass hysteria” some might say, gives the delusion added weight, but for those of us in touch with reality, living on earth feels, sometimes, like being locked in a mad house with certifiable nut cases. So if you hear us roar from time to time, you understand the cause of our frustration.

Seriously, does George Bush consider himself to be a great personage, inspired by god, or does he realize that he’s only the barely elected president of the United States? What about the neocons who support Bush and who see enemies and conspiracies everywhere? Even more crazy is that Pat Robertson fellow of the 700 “crazies” Club who claimed that god gave him a vision or spoke to him, to inform him that Bush’s election would be a landslide. I know! I’ve already said that in another posting, but we need to shout it from the rooftops. We need to call people’s attention to the nut cases in Bush’s corner.


IT’S SOON TO BE CHRISTMAS

Decorations everywhere as we enter the season of the madmen who believe in something which does not exist in the real world. What have I really to say about it?

For so many years, Xmas was no more than a trouble for me, trying to get enough money together so that the kids could have gifts. Usually that money consisted of charging the credit card up and then spending the entire year paying it down for the next year. Eventually, by the time I had my first divorce, I was not able to get my credit card paid down from Christmas to Christmas. In 1973 when I set out from Dayton to go West, I owed 800 dollars on my card. That was a lot for the time, and at that time, no credit card had an interest rate above 10 percent.

How did we allow the interest on credit cards to get so high and to stay so high? Well, you damn well know, they’re cheating us. They pretend now to tie their APR to the prime rate, but they ought to truly tie it to the prime rate and get down below 8 percent, which is what it ought to be had the interest rate gone up with the rising Federal rates and come down again with the Federal rates. The damn banks went up with the Federal rates, all right, but they never came fully down with them. People being so stupid, illiterate and uninformed and historically unaware, have not a clue at how their being bamboozled by capitalism.

Anyhow... joy to the world; may your being ripped off continue until you get wise to the Bushites running the world.
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“You can’t beat the gentiles in December. We were stupid to make Hannukah then.” —Ralph Schoenstein’s grandfather

CHRISTIANITY EMERGED FROM THE PALEOLITHIC OOZE

My point will not be Wilson's point. He's talking about the epigenetic roots of the arts in paleolithic humans. My point, when I look at the archetypes listed as part of Wilson's writing here, is that Christianity is just one branch of those religions which go back into prehistory. It's myths are no more realistic or truthful than the myths of other religions of those times. I think that the invention of writing is the only reason that current religions are harder to escape. Their longevity has nothing to do with the authenticity of their dogmas, but religion may very well be deeply rooted in the psyche of the human animal. Again, that doesn't prove anything except that believing in something larger than ourselves may have been more crucial in earlier times to human survival than currently. I do like Wilson's phrase "shocking recognition of the self" to explain the human dilemma in the final paragraph.

All the following paragraphs are scanned from CONSILIENCE, pp. 223-224.

(begin quote) WHAT CAN WE truly know about the creative powers of the human mind? The explanation of their material basis will be found at the juncture of science and the humanities. The first premise of the scientific contribution is that Homo sapiens is a biological species born of natural selection in a biotically rich environment. Its corollary is that the epigenetic rules affecting the human brain were shaped during genetic evolution by the needs of Paleolithic people in this environment.

The premise and corollary have the following consequence. Culture, rising from the productions of many minds that interlace and reinforce one another over many generations, expands like a growing organism into a universe of seemingly infinite possibility. But not all directions are equally likely. Before the scientific revolution, every culture was sharply circumscribed by the primitive state of that culture’s empirical knowledge. The culture evolved under the local influence of climate, water distribution, and food resources. Less obviously, its growth was profoundly affected by human nature.

Which brings us back to the arts. The epigenetic rules of human nature bias innovation, learning, and choice. They are gravitational centers that pull the development of mind in certain directions and away from others. Arriving at the centers, artists, composers, and writers over the centuries have built archetypes, the themes most predictably expressed in original works of art.

Although recognizable through their repeated occurrence, archetypes cannot be easily defined by a simple combination of generic traits. They are better understood with examples, collected into groups that share the same prominent features. This method—called definition by specification—works well in elementary biological classification, even when the essential nature of the species as a category remains disputed. In myth and fiction as few as two dozen such subjective groupings cover most of the archetypes usually identified as such. Some of the most frequently cited are the following.

In the beginning, the people are created by gods, or the mating of giants, or the clash of titans; in any case, they begin as special beings at the center of the world.

The tribe emigrates to a promised land (or Arcadia, or the Secret Valley, or the New World).

The tribe meets the forces of evil in a desperate battle for survival; it triumphs against heavy odds.

The hero descends to hell, or is exiled to wilderness, or experiences an iliad in a distant land; he returns in an odyssey against all odds past fearsome obstacles along the way, to complete his destiny.

The world ends in apocalypse, by flood, fire, alien conquerors, or avenging gods; it is restored by a band of heroic survivors.

A source of great power is found in the tree of life, the river of life, philosopher’s stone, sacred incantation, forbidden ritual, secret formula.

The nurturing woman is apotheosized as the Great Goddess, the Great Mother, Holy Woman, Divine Queen, Mother Earth, Gaia.

The seer has special knowledge and powers of mind, available to those worthy to receive it; he is the wise old man or woman, the holy man, the magician, the great shaman.

The Virgin has the power of purity, is the vessel of sacred strength, must be protected at all costs, and perhaps surrendered up to propitiate the gods or demonic forces.

Female sexual awakening is bestowed by the unicorn, the gentle beast, the powerful stranger, the magical kiss.

The Trickster disturbs established order and liberates passion as the god of wine, king of the carnival, eternal youth, clown, jester, clever fool.

A monster threatens humanity, appearing as the serpent demon (Satan writhing at the bottom of hell), dragon, gorgon, golem, vampire.

I F T H E ARTS are steered by inborn rules of mental development, they are end products not just of conventional history but also of genetic evolution. The question remains: Were the genetic guides mere byproducts— epiphenomena—of that evolution, or were they adaptations that directly improved survival and reproduction? And if adaptations, what exactly were the advantages conferred? The answers, some scholars believe, can be found in artifacts preserved from the dawn of art. They can be tested further with knowledge of the artifacts and customs of present-day hunter-gatherers.

This is the picture of the origin of the arts that appears to be emerging. The most distinctive qualities of the human species are extremely high intelligence, language, culture, and reliance on long-term social contracts. In combination they gave early Homo sapiens a decisive edge over all competing animal species, but they also exacted a price we continue to pay, composed of the shocking recognition of the self, of the finiteness of personal existence, and of the chaos of the environment. (end quote)
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"I stopped believing in Santa Claus when my mother took me to see him in a department store and he asked for my autograph." —Shirley Temple

DOCTOROW DOCTORS THE RECORD

In Doctorow's Ragtime, the novel, "Younger Brother said, '...You are a complacent man with no thought of history. You pay your employees poorly and are insensitive to their needs.... The fact that you think of yourself as a gentleman in all your dealings... is the simple self-delusion of all those who oppress humanity.... You have traveled everywhere and learned nothing, he said. You think it’s a crime to come into this building belonging to another man and to threaten his property. In fact this is the nest of a vulture. The den of a jackal. He put on his coat, ran his palms over his shaved head, placed his derby on his head and glanced at himself in the mirror. Goodbye, he said. You won’t see me again.'"

So he says, but I think we will see the likes of Younger Brother again though the fictional Brother dies in Mexico fighting with Zapata. Younger Brother is a man, a character in Doctorow's novel, RAGTIME, who has been radicalized by his experience in early 20th Century America just as so many of us were radicalized by our experiences in the 1960s and 70s. Now, we all believe we have passed beyond those times and are entering a new Century, but Bush will bring a new depression down on our heads with his ideological and farfetched desire to destroy the last of Roosevelt's reforms.

How else can we explain a man under whose leadership the mentally ill, the wheelchair bound and children are being abandoned and left behind? Under his economic policies, the system which lifted so many elderly out of poverty is being destroyed. More people are in poverty now than were in poverty before he began his regime. And Bush does not seem to care or even to acknowledge his failures. According to Bush, he has made no mistakes.

It's to Bushites that Younger Brother now speaks, to Bush and to his cronies, to his oil men and his Cheney's. It won't be till a generation or so has passed from the earth before this speech will arise again onto the lips of new generations. But mark my words, unless we repudiate the direction Bush is taking us, our children and grandchildren will have to say these words and die saying them as the children and grandchildren of past generations have been forced to say them. And future governments will be so adept at spying and eavesdropping that the rebellion to displace them from power will be bloodier than any humanity has known before. We can do this peacefully or we can do it with blood. Future generations await our decisions at future ballot boxes whether we will save them from bloody rebellion or no.


READING RAGTIME I REMEMBERED

. . . the conditions again in 1906 which made many city dwellers into socialists. Two generations back—recent immigrants of the first two decades of the 20th Century and the Depression generation—knew poverty first hand and hardship and personal failure no matter how hard they tried to succeed at the American dream. They experienced the impartial grinding down that poverty does to the human soul. So they wanted to help one another to get a fair shake, an even deal. They wanted to level the playing field for everyone before they asked them to compete. And they felt that government was the only tool to break the capitalistic chains which held so many of them down in the valleys of the uneven playing field. They voted their consciences and for one another.

This current generation which sells the weakest among them to the lowest bidder is spoiled and are easy marks for the shills and cons who populate the televangelist dream world and the canyons of Wall Street. Reaching for the fast buck, they swim into the lobster traps set for them by the clever cons who lurk within the chimera of the American dream. So that one in a million can get rich, they doom themselves to social and economic inequality rather then all living in reduced but comfortable circumstances. Pursuing the dream that only a very few will achieve, they make life for themselves and others into a grinding, unhappy endless toil, driven by fear and pain. These current Americans, always ready to escape to the "burbs", are spoiled and selfish and divided. Divided, in conflict with each other, they are easy marks for the cons swimming in the dream between their ears.

Rah, rah, rah boom-ti-e!!!!!!!!!!!!!
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"He who looketh upon a woman loseth a fender." —sign in auto body shop

THE OPPRESSION BEGINS

Not long ago, the fundamentalist religion in America managed to stop cold a line of fashion clothing and personal products from a British Company named, "French Connection, United Kingdom". They forced Federated Department Stores to remove a line of French Connection's merchandise from its shelves because they did not like the acronym the company's name spelled out: FCUK. Imagine a church power which can shut down a free enterprise line of clothing and perfume?

Imagine a fundamentalist man so unsophisticated that he'd drape a cloth over a classical statue because the statue was not fully clothed. America has not heard of such prudery since the days of Mark Twain. That nincompoop was Republican religious fundamentalist John Ashcroft.

These injustices are only the beginning of the abuse of power America will see under the auspices of Bush's crusading fundamentalists. Next, read a letter to the Spokesman Review by a Spokanite who tipped us off to how the fundamentalist church in America is not only stifling free trade, but it is already shutting down the freedom of religions not like theirs:

"For the most part, people in America think of Christians as members of groups who hold conservative social and political opinions, including the literal biblical interpretations of creationism and the sinfulness of homosexuality.

"The United Church of Christ is another kind of Christian church, one that does not find conflict between science and the truth of the Bible and considers both the context of culture and the spirit of Jesus’ life in its understanding of God’s word.

"The UCC is making an effort with a national television ad campaign to let America know that there is another way to be a Christian and to invite those disenfranchised from the church to experience God's inclusive love in the United Church of Christ.

"It is troubling to me that one of the UCC ads has been refused airtime by CBS and NBC. The ad (http://stillspeaking.com) with its invitation to inclusive worship is considered by our major networks to be a controversial message. This controversy ought to be a wake-up call to anyone who values freedoms of speech, press or religion." (SR, 12/11/04)

After reading that letter I checked out the story on the Internet. The website for the United Church of Christ reports that,

"According to a written explanation from CBS, the United Church of Christ is being denied network access because its ad implies acceptance of gay and lesbian couples—among other minority constituencies—and is, therefore, too 'controversial'. Similarly, a rejection by NBC declared the spot 'too controversial'."

Read the article entire at the UCC website.

The fundamentalist Republican church in America is also beginning to suppress the creative arts, one of the first groups which fascist powers always silence.

"THE Hollywood adaptation of Philip Pullman’s trilogy His Dark Materials, in which two children do battle with an evil, all-powerful church, is being rewritten to remove anti-religious overtones.

"Chris Weitz, the director, has horrified fans by announcing that references to the church are likely to be banished in his film. Meanwhile the 'Authority', the weak God figure, will become 'any arbitrary establishment that curtails the freedom of the individual'.

"The studio wants alterations because of fears of a backlash from the Christian Right in the United States. The changes are being made with the support of Pullman, who told The Times last year that he received “a large amount” for the rights." (reported by Sam Coates) Read the full story.

There you go! Material altered, an alternative viewpoint silenced, without the power of the Republican fundamentalist church even having to lift a finger. That kind of mindless censorship also flowed directly out of a like-minded situation during the McCarthy Era when fear silenced people of good will and empowered the dark forces of Republican fundamentalism to silence its critics. Their oppressive religious power can kill democracy where it stands.

You may say that Republican fundamentalists surely can't be that bad, but remember that Republicans supported the death squads in Nicaragua which killed peasants struggling for their own freedoms. Republicans actively supported the overthrow of the legally elected government of Allende in Chile in 1970. When you put all these anti-democratic occurrences together, they reveal a corrupt religio/politico power which can stifle any view it doesn't agree with. Can you see why some Americans no longer trust even the vote count of the last two elections? Fundamentalist Republicans who would shut down freedom of speech and freedom of trade and begin to censor the views of America's creative people can not be trusted to carry out an honest election, can they?

LIKABLE MAIN CHARACTERS

My wife and I recently rented a little gem of a movie called “Young Adam” with Ewan McGregor and Tilda Swinton (The Deep End). When it was over, I said to her, “I remember when I was sending novels out, and they came back rejected because they’d say that my main character was not likable or was unsympathetic. This movie, none of the characters are likable; they’re just human and real.” And it struck me hard that the characters in “Young Adam” aren’t the happy ending type. Most of them just are and are just real and flawed and not particularly good or bad. And that’s the way we all are, and why can’t we see more movies like that, with real flawed human beings in them so we can all let ourselves off the hook and get comfortable with the darkness within us all?


NO MORE TINY TIMS

Watching TV tonight and an ad came on for a local charity. A voice proclaimed, “Can you imagine Christmas with no toys under the tree?” Something like that. Then the pitch for whatever charity it was to donate toys and money.

I’ve got a better idea. . .

Eliminate Christmas. If we get rid of Christmas, we get rid of dishonesty and fakery. Quit creating an expectation in children large and small, grown up and prepubescent, that some nonexistent being will reward them for being good or bad throughout the year. Quit telling people that there’s some pie in the sky ending to life where the good will get their final reward and the bad their comeuppance. Just use your common sense. If we hadn’t been brainwashed as children, who would believe such nonsense?

Just this morning I was watching a televangelist and her spiel about how to be happy by turning your negative thoughts loose. Quite the opposite from AA which says we can’t think our way to a new way of living but can only live our way into a new way of thinking, this woman said that we couldn’t be happy until we changed our minds.

Got it all backward, she does. Then, of course, she made a pitch for a book and tapes which would show people how to get to the imaginary superbeing that she says exists in order to have a reason to sell things to people. Cons, cons, just about all of them a pile of cons. No wonder the average fundamentalist, no matter how intelligent, couldn’t see through George Bush. Lied to from birth to death, they don’t have a mental standard for divining the truth. Sad. Sad. . . .


MORE RIGHT WING CONSERVATIVE, NEOCON TORTURE COMING OUT

“The memos reveal behind-the-scenes tensions between the FBI and U.S. military and intelligence task forces running prisoner interrogations at Guantanamo and in Iraq as the Bush administration sought better intelligence to fight terrorists and the deadly Iraq insurgency.”

A recent AP report reveals that the torture of prisoners in Iraq and Guatanamo is more wide spread and condoned by more higher ups than Bush administration people want to let on. But there is no surprise in this. Right wing, conservatives for as long as I can remember and as far back in history as I can read are the kind of people who walk on human rights like so many stepping stones to power. From Nicaragua to Chile, from Guantanamo to Munich and Stalingrad, from South Africa to the American South, conservatives are the kind of people who do not care what happens to others just so long as they maintain power over the people. The sad thing is how often religious people are duped into following conservatives, but I think that is a condition which naturally flows from religions which look up into the sky for their leadership rather than looking to their own humanity for their guidance.

Mark my words, if you need a power greater than yourself in order to feel safe, then some power will come along to fill that need.
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"I would rather go to bed with Lillian Russell stark naked than Ulysses S. Grant in full military regalia." —Mark Twain (Think about it!)

ONCE MORE, DEAR KERNAN, INTO THE BREACH

As I continually run into my frustration with people who want to relativize the debate between science and religion, I find this analysis of the situation by Kernan enlightening. He faced the breakdown of the standards of truth while teaching at Yale and Princeton.

from IN PLATO’S CAVE, p. 273:

“... postmodernism also brought to history... what Gertrude Himmelfarb called, ‘radical skepticism, relativism, and subjectivism that denies not this or that truth about any subject but the very idea of truth as something to aspire to even if it can never be fully attained.’ It became increasingly hard to know what value except disputation the historian could claim for his or her work if facts had become a ‘fetish’ and all methodology ‘problematic’.”

But on the same page in my pen and paper journal, at the top of the page, I come across this reassuring comment by E. O. Wilson:

“The laws of physics are in fact so accurate as to transcend cultural differences.” (CONSILIENCE, p. 49)

“...transcend cultural differences....” Unless, I should add, you’ve the brain of an apish fundamentalist. I can only mock their density. We must laugh them into their kingdom come.


AND, ANYHOW, LET THERE BE LIGHT

In a blinding flash, E. O. Wilson shows again and again how science is trustworthy to the senses of the sensible, as opposed to being only relative truth, and how untrustworthy less hard sources of knowledge can be to the search for truth. When I continually come across these ideas in the writing of scientists, I am amazed at the impenetrable density of the fundamentalist’s gray matter:

“Visible light, we have learned, is not the sole illuminating energy of the universe, as prescientific common sense decreed. It is instead an infinitesimal sliver of electromagnetic radiation, comprising wavelengths of 400 to 700 nanometers (billionths of a meter), within a spectrum that ranges from gamma waves trillions of times shorter to radio waves trillions of times longer. Radiation over most of this span, in wildly varying amounts, continually rains down on our bodies. But without instruments we were oblivious to its existence. Because the human retina is rigged to report only 400—700 nanometers, the unaided brain concludes that only visible light exists.

“Many kinds of animals know better. They live in a different visual world, oblivious to part of the human visible spectrum, sensitive to some wavelengths outside it. Below 400 nanometers, butterflies find flowers and pinpoint pollen and nectar sources by the pattern of ultraviolet rays reflected off the petals. Where we see a plain yellow or white blossom, they see spots and concentric circles in light and dark. The patterns have evolved in plants to guide insect pollinators to the anthers and nectar pools.

“With the aid of appropriate instruments we can now view the world with butterfly eyes. Scientists have entered the visual world of animals and beyond because they understand the electromagnetic spectrum. They can translate any wavelength into visible light and audible sound, and generate most of the spectrum from diverse energy sources. By manipulating selected segments of the electromagnetic spectrum they peer downward to the trajectories of subatomic particles and outward to star birth in distant galaxies whose incoming light dates back to near the beginning of the universe. They (more accurately we, since scientific knowledge is universally available) can visualize matter across thirty-seven orders of magnitude. The largest galactic cluster is larger than the smallest known particle by a factor of the number one with about thirty-seven zeroes following it.

“I mean no disrespect when I say that prescientific people, regardless of their innate genius, could never guess the nature of physical reality beyond the tiny sphere attainable by unaided common sense. Nothing else ever worked, no exercise from myth, revelation, art, trance, or any other conceivable means; and notwithstanding the emotional satisfaction it gives, mysticism, the strongest prescientific probe into the unknown, has yielded zero. No shaman’s spell or fast upon a sacred mountain can summon the electromagnetic spectrum. Prophets of the great religions were kept unaware of its existence, not because of a secretive god but because they lacked the hard-won knowledge of physics.” (CONSILIENCE, pp. 46-47)

WHO CARES

My malaise continues. With Bush’s victory, I’ve sunk into complete disinterest with the daily paper. I’m going nearly dormant until four years from now when I’ll reawaken. I really doubt my own words because I’m sure the things Bush is going to try during the next four years will alarm me to no end. But, for now, I’ve got a relative peace of mind.


PARTY FIRE UP

I did notice that the parties at the conventions responded differently. The Republicans seemed more fired up than us Democrats. Maybe it was just me, and I wasn’t there; I was only observing through the medium of TV. When I was young and naive, I got fired up too. Nowadays you couldn’t fire me up with dynamite under my butt. Not that I voted any differently; I was just beyond being inspired. Was it really Kerry’s failure to fire me up? I don’t think so.

I’m just too old to let speeches turn me on. Which, I think, does show that the Republicans had a lot more first time voters and new people involved in the process than the Democrats. They’d be more likely to show naive partisanship at the empty words of politicians. In speechmaking, it’s great to promise more than can be delivered. And people all fired up with youthful enthusiasm are bound to be grabbing at any opportunity to roar. I was fired up too when I was young and new to the process. The tendency for enthusiasm to wear thin after a few decades of effort may be one of the chief reasons that the fortunes of political parties rise and fall with the decades.


SPEAKING OF YOUTH

Sophomore year or junior year, early Sixties, at the University of Dayton, I was taking a course in the novel from Larry Ruff, a very sophisticated and knowledgeable professor. I recall him saying that literature was dead and dying and that by this current century, the 21st, readers of serious literature would be considered a quaint lot, antiquarians. I do think we’re approaching that state now. I doubt that the average American knows the work of many serious contemporary novelists. I know I don’t. I’m reading in the sciences now as any reader of this Blog would know. I may even have mentioned this before in an earlier post.

Anyhow, just thought I’d also enter Alvin Kernan’s comment on this very issue while I’m at it:

“The canon of great books, authors and their powerful imaginations, the formal perfection of the literary text, and the belief that literature was a central pillar of culture—these foundations of literature were all crumbling.” (IN PLATO’S CAVE, p. 224)

And speaking of his own favorite undergraduate course in Shakespeare which for years had sustained him, Kernan came to say, “As I tried to talk about... Shakespeare... a terrible hopelessness would come over me, making it almost impossible to go on as I realized that the students were not in the slightest interested.” (p. 276)

I feel a lot better now, myself, now that I’ve given up on literature and the high falutin’ concept that to know literature was to be one of the cognoscenti of history.
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“History is a nightmare from which we are trying to awaken.” —James Joyce

MIND, MEANING AND CONSCIOUSNESS

Yes, here’s a few more very clear passages from CONSILIENCE by E. O. Wilson.

(p. 109) “Mind is a stream of conscious and subconscious experience. It is, at root, the coded representation of sensory impressions and the memory and imagination of sensory impressions.”

(p. 109) “Some of the impressions are real, fed by the ongoing stimulation from outside the nervous system, while others are recalled from the memory banks of the cortex. All together, they create scenarios that flow realistically back and forth through time. The scenarios are a virtual reality.”

(p. 110) “Who or what within the brain monitors all this activity? No one. Nothing. The scenarios aren’t seen by some other part of the brain. They just are. Consciousness is the virtual world composed by the scenarios.”

(p. 110) “There is no single stream of consciousness in which all the information is brought together by an executive ego. There are, instead, multiple streams of activity, some of which contribute momentarily to conscious thought and then phase out. Consciousness is the massive coupled aggregated of such participating circuits. The mind is a self organizing republic of scenarios....”

(p. 115) “What we call meaning is the linkage among the neural networks created by the spreading excitation that enlarges imagery and engages emotion. The competitive selection among scenarios is what we call decision making.” [Note how this last line recalls the explanation that Peggy La Cerra came up with in THE ORIGIN OF MINDS. What Wilson calls “scenarios” is what La Cerra names “adaptive representational networks,” ARNs. Both call these scenarios the information which biases our decisions. ]


IT STILL BOILS DOWN TO MODERN PEOPLE VERSUS
RELIGIOUS PEOPLE

I recall that I wrote an entry to this blog months back in which I defined the post-Freudian and the pre-Freudian types who split this world between them. The following two paragraphs by Wilson say the same thing in a kinder way. I’m serious folks—the split between the myth-blindered religious mind and the modern mind is a serious problem for those of us who, I think, are modern people.

(pp. 96-97) “All that has been learned empirically about evolution in general and mental processes in particular suggest that the brain is a machine assembled not to understand itself, but to survive.... It throws a spotlight on those portions of the world it must know in order to live to the next day and surrenders the rest to darkness. To thousands of generations, people lived and reproduced with no need to know how the machinery of the brain works. Myth and self-deception, tribal identity and ritual, more than objective truth, gave them the adaptive edge.

“That is why even today people know more about their automobiles than they do about their own minds.”


MOVIEBEAM UP TO DREAMING SCHEMERY

MovieBeam lies! MovieBeam lies!

As part of its campaign for new customers, the movie rental company which promises to deliver 100s of movies to your home every month, tells the viewer that one of the benefits of receiving movies at home through their system is that the home owner pays no late fees. Yes, you may not pay late fees, but you pay a monthly charge of 8 or 9 bucks that more than meets the average amount of overtime charges a customer picks up in a year. Of course, if you’re a dimwit who can’t keep your records straight, then you might benefit from a low monthly surcharge on your films. I believe I’ve paid no more than 8 or 9 dollars a year in movie late fees in any one year of my life, and in some years, I’ve paid no late fees. I think in making our decision to take the poor waif MovieBeam into our homes, we must consider this extra tax they charge each and every month which, of course, once they get their foot in the door will go up annually, just like Comcast endlessly raises its fees.
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"There's a sucker born every minute." —P.T. Barnum [Think of all those who voted for Bush!]

AMERICA DUMBING DOWN: WE DON'T LIKE ELITES

Actually this posting isn't about American elites. It's about our waning power in the world of science. Not only do we no longer produce as many scientists as we used to, we don't allow the scientific elites from other nations to come to America to be educated and, once here, produce much of our vaunted leadership in science and technology. Because of anti-foreigner emotions in America and restrictive immigration policies caused by 9/11 fears, we aren't even getting foreigners to come over here and do our white collar work for us. I also can't help blaming the American anti-intellectual bias for putting us in this position. We haven't been in this position since the days of Eisenhower, the last period of conservative, anti-intellectual fevers.

A recent Newsweek report by Fareed Zakaria, excerpted below, from November 29, 2004, p. 33 gives us some details:

"The dirty secret about our scientific edge is that it’s largely produced by foreigners and immigrants. Americans don’t do science.

"The facts are plain. U.S. visa procedures have become far too cumbersome, and bureaucrats are turning down far more applications than ever before. One crucial result is the dramatic decline of foreign students in the U.S.—the first shift downward in 30 years. Three new reports document the magnitude of this fall. Undergraduate enrollment from China dropped 20 percent this year; from India, 9 percent; from Japan, 14 percent. The declines are even worse in graduate schools: applications from China have dropped 45 percent; from India, 28 percent.

"The NSB put out another report this year that showed the United States now ranks 17th (among nations surveyed) in the proportion of college students majoring in science and engineering. In 1975 the United States ranked third. The recent decline in foreign applications is having a direct effect on science programs. Three years ago there were 385 computer-science majors at MIT Today there are 240. The trend is similar at Stanford, Carnegie Mellon and the University of California, Berkeley.

"...the single most deadly effect of this trend is the erosion of American capacity in science and technology. The U.S. economy has powered ahead in large part because of the amazing productivity of America’s science and technology. Yet that research is now done largely by foreign students. The National Science Board (NSB) documented this reality last year, finding that 38 percent of doctorate holders in America’s science and engineering work force are foreign-born. Foreigners make up more than half the students enrolled in science and engineering programs. The dirty little secret about America’s scientific edge is that it’s largely produced by foreigners and immigrants.

"Western ideas about the benefits of free markets and free trade have become the global standard. This may have much to do with Western foreign and trade policies. But surely this shift has been strengthened and facilitated by the fact that so many of the people in the ministries of finance, trade and industry in the developing world were educated at Western universities.
Falling foreign enrollments will produce a broader but no less profound loss for the United States. America has spread its interests, ideas and values across the world by many means, but perhaps the single most effective one has been by educating the world’s elites."

Strangely, I feel that if you're reading this and, in fact, read for pleasure and information, you already know what I'm putting down here. It's all those talk radio heads who get "Rushed" information and the Southerners in their pews of ignorance who need to hear and to think about this American plight, but who'll inform them? Informed, compassionate people are always more liberal people, and Hannity doesn't want that. Who with a grain of sensibility listen to him?
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"Whom the gods would destroy they first make mad." —Euripides [Who imagines he's doing god's will? Who thinks god is speaking to him and through him? Isn't that a form of madness?]

WHAT DO WE EXPECT?

It’s all propaganda anyway. Over and over we are told how brutal and inhuman our enemy in Iraq is. Of course, we’re told that! What would we expect, that we would praise those who have killed and wounded our servicemen, those brave, naive young men and women Bush has sent over there to a foreign land to die in a war he shouldn’t have started?

If some of us ever quit thinking we were fighting the “bad guy” that would be the end of Bush’s presidency. Also, now that 51% of us have accepted full responsibility for the deaths of our soldiers, that 51% has got a stake in justifying Bush’s and their war. The rest of us can still have easy consciences. The blood is not on our hands.

But the real issue of this blog entry is the simplistic bad guy idea. How would you fight if you were facing overwhelming, Goliath size power and nearly all you had were the equivalent of David’s slingshot and stones? Of course you’d be forced to fight as dirty and underhanded as necessary to overcome superior firepower and overwhelming force. Imagine rifles and hand held rockets versus helicopter gun ships and tanks.

We are without doubt the big bad guy on the schoolyard of Iraq, so our enemies must fight with dirty tactics. They have no other means to win. Bush put them in that situation, not daring to send our troops armed with only rifles and machine guns against men equally armed with rifles and machine guns. Why give the little guy a fair chance to defeat us? So we have no grounds to complain about the tactics of the jihadists; they’re doing what they must do to have any chance of success. We can no more expect them to fight a fair fight than we are.


RIBBONS SMIBBONS!

Most all my life, I’ve been driving a car with an invisible yellow ribbon on it in support of all our troops all the time. I drove one with an invisible yellow ribbon even when we weren’t fighting a war. I’ve been driving three and four cylinder cars and being patriotic and conserving our natural resources since the mid-Sixties when I first learned about non-renewable resources. I’ve been doing my bit for the war effort all along, just like the people on the home front did in World War II when gas was rationed. I’d like to see gas rationing now and listen to the patriotic ones roar with frustration when they can’t fill their tanks. So you gas hog driving, unpatriotic, mindless pump pimps in your SUVs—get a gas saver and wear a real ribbon.


WHO’S CONSPIRACY OBSESSED?

from Newsweek, November 29, 2004, p. 36:

“...many Iraqis accuse the Americans of reckless disregard for civilian lives. A conspiracy-obsessed form of logic has taken over, and every bit of information is evidence of something sinister on the part of the foreign occupiers. Some Iraqis even accuse the Americans of having a ‘hidden hand’ in the CARE director’s death. Baghdad schoolteacher Mona Kareem, 47, suspects that the Americans orchestrated the murder as a way of both discrediting the insurgents and keeping the Iraqi people dependent on U.S. assistance. ‘Killing [Hassan] results in harming the reputation of the resistance and Iraqis in general,’ Kareem argues. ‘[It] makes all humanitarian organizations think twice before coming into the country, not to mention investment companies.’ The bottom line: ‘Less services and more unemployed people, and an open field for the Americans and Iraqi government to do whatever they want.’ Such a line of reasoning might leave Americans scratching their heads, but it seems utterly sensible to many Iraqis.”

Who’s scratching what head? Mona Kareem’s logic is impeccable, given the Republican history of dirty tricks going back to Nixon and the ones which defeated John Kerry, from the straightforward lies of the Swifties to the Republican planting of a story about Bush’s guard service that blew up in Dan Rather’s face. The Kareem woman could be right. The naiveté of Republican voters, exposed by the way they bought the Bushite lies about just about everything during the campaign, could very well lead Republican leadership to think they can get away with almost any deception in Iraq.
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“Sex is the most fun you can have without smiling.” —Unknown

ALL CHRISTIAN ALL THE TIME

Recently an acquaintance of mine informed me that I’ve been right about my fears of fundamental Christianity’s threat to American freedoms. She thought all these years I’d been exaggerating in my letters to the editor and in my blog entries. But, as a poll worker in the recent election, she observed one of the hysterically demented Christian ones when her precinct voting place was invaded. Bullying, threatening, controlling and mad, this Xtian tried to drive liberals away from the poll; this woman thoroughly convinced my friend of the correctness of my observations about the madness of the convicted ones.

Not only did this conservative Christian hound decent voters, she brought in mentally challenged voters who voted for Bush because, “He’s going to give me lots of money if I vote for him.” I do believe anyone has a right to vote, but you can see how this one was probably mislead and coached to vote as the Christians wanted him to vote. Many Christians are just that naive, uninformed and mentally challenged, and they can vote too. Pretty scary!

I was born and raised in southern Ohio, near enough to the Bible belt to be beaten by it from time to time, and I can testify to the power and insanity of Christian fundamentalism. Later experience with them during my stay in the South did nothing to alter my views. I’m sorry to say it, I really am, but they are just not sane, fair or reasonable people, by and large.


DON’T BELIEVE ME?
WHAT ABOUT THE “LEFT BEHIND” SERIES?

The following three paragraphs actually come to me via the Internet, passed on by John Hill from some other web site I’ve forgotten:

“The ‘Left Behind’ series, the best selling novels, enthusiastically depict Jesus returning to slaughter everyone who is not a born-again Christian. These books depict the world's Hindus, Muslims, Jews, and secular humanist, along with many Roman Catholic and Unitarians, as being heaved into everlasting fire: ‘Jesus merely raised one hand a few inches and ...they tumbled in, howling and screeching.’

“If Saudi Arabians wrote an Islamic version of this ‘Left Behind’ series, we would furiously demand that sensible Muslims repudiate such hatemongering.

“Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins, co-authored the series of books. They state that their books do not celebrate the slaughter of non-Christians but simply present the painful reality of Scripture. Jenkins said, ‘We can't read it some other way just because it sounds exclusivistic and not currently politically correct.’”

Well, guys, this is the scary reality of non-Christian thinking. You two Xtians are a couple of lunatics to take such nonsense seriously, and if other of you Xtians think you are not also crazy lunatics, then get busy and drive these other lunatics out of your doors. Disown them. Mock them. Put them away from thee!

The troubling thing to realize in this ‘left behind’ nonsense is the wishful thinking expressed in it by the insane one’s who believe this nonsense. They actually believe their superstitious twaddle. When you count up the number of people who believe this stuff, you can see that our United States is crammed full of insanity. Back when I was a kid and people began to talk about the insanity in America, they were talking about the beliefs of these crazy people. It had poisoned America and threatens to do so again.

PS: Jenkins and LaHaye’s unrepentant condemnation of me, my Buddhist wife and others of faiths not like theirs, relieves me of the need to feel any restraint as I criticize them and their crazy beliefs. They’re insane, really and literally and truly insane!


SPEAKING OF THE ISLAMIC VERSION OF AMERICAN FUNDAMENTALISM “LEFT BEHIND” PHILOSOPHY

“The fighter's ideology [in Iraq], as far as they have one, derives from a doomsday vision known among Islamic experts as the Takfiri philosophy. Adherents consider themselves empowered to decide who is a good Muslim and to exterminate everyone else (the kafirs) in the name of creating a pure Islamic state.” (from Newsweek, November 29, 2004, p. 36)

All I can say is, “Imagine a world without fundamentalists of any kind, Jewish, Moslem or Christian. Just imagine it. We’d have a little mopping up to do in Dafur and in Haiti, but just imagine a world without fundamental religionists. Aaaaaah, so very peeeeaceful...
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"Being well dressed gives a feeling of tranquility that religion is powerless to bestow." —Ralph Waldo Emerson (quoting a friend) [Anyhow, what do you think of that!]

THE BASIC BRAIN MATTER

[The following is a long section from E.O. Wilson's book CONSILIENCE. It reflects to me explanations from many other books I've recently read, such as LeDoux's The Synaptic Self, Pinker's How the Mind Works, La Cerra's The Origin of Minds and, finally, McCone's Going Inside; a tour around a moment of consciousness. I'm a novice, but, if you ask me, what is included in this passage from Wilson's book is what we novice's want to know about the evolution of mind. It specially struck up memories of McCone's Going Inside. Anyhow, take your time and read it. Copy it out and study it. To understand this passage is to understand that there just can't be no god thing nowhere, nohow, notime out there anywhere.]

from CONSILIENCE by biologist E.O. Wilson (pp. 106-115):

WHAT MORE CAN be said of brain structure? If a Divine Engineer designed it, unconstrained by humanity’s biological history, He might have chosen mortal but angelic beings cast in His own image. They would presumably be rational, far-seeing, wise, benevolent, unrebellious, selfless, and guilt-free, and, as such, ready-made stewards of the beautiful planet bequeathed them. But we are nothing like that. We have original sin, which makes us better than angels. Whatever good we possess we have earned, during a long and arduous evolutionary history. The human brain bears the stamp of 400 million years of trial and error, traceable by fossils and molecular homology in nearly unbroken sequence from fish to amphibian to reptile to primitive mammal to our immediate primate forerunners. In the final step the brain was catapulted to a radically new level, equipped for language and culture. Because of its ancient pedigree, however, it could not be planted like a new computer into an empty cranial space. The old brain had been assembled there as a vehicle of instinct, and remained vital from one heartbeat to the next as new parts were added. The new brain had to be jury-rigged in steps within and around the old brain. Otherwise the organism could not have survived generation by generation. The result was human nature: genius animated with animal craftiness and emotion, combining the passion of politics and art with rationality, to create a new instrument of survival.

Brain scientists have vindicated the evolutionary view of mind. They have established that passion is inseverably linked to reason. Emotion is not just a perturbation of reason but a vital part of it. This chimeric quality of the mind is what makes it so elusive. The hardest task of brain scientists is to explain the products-tested engineering of the cortical circuits against the background of the species’ deep history. Beyond the elements of gross anatomy I have just summarized, the hypothetical role of Divine Engineer is not open to them. Unable to deduce from first principles the optimum balance of instinct and reason, they must ferret out the location and function of the brain’s governing circuits one by one. Progress is measured by piecemeal discoveries and cautious inferences. Here are a few of the most important made by researchers to date:

• The human brain preserves the three primitive divisions found throughout the vertebrates from fishes to mammals: hindbrain, midbrain, and forebrain. The first two together, referred to as the brain stem, form the swollen posthead on which the massively enlarged forebrain rests.

• The hindbrain comprises in turn the pons, medulla, and cerebellum. Together they regulate breathing, heartbeat, and coordination of body movements. The midbrain controls sleep and arousal. It also partly regulates auditory reflexes and perception.

• A major part of the forebrain is composed of the limbic system, the master traffic-control complex that regulates emotional response as well as the integration and transfer of sensory information. Its key centers are the amygdala (emotion), hippocampus (memory, especially short-term memory), hypothalamus (memory, temperature control, sexual drive, hunger, and thirst), and thalamus (awareness of temperature and all other senses except smell, awareness of pain, and the mediation of some processes of memory).

• The forebrain also includes the cerebral cortex, which has grown and expanded during evolution to cover the rest of the brain. As the primary seat of consciousness, it stores and collates information from the senses. It also directs voluntary motor activity and integrates higher functions, including speech and motivation.

• The key functions of the three successive divisions—hind- plus midbrain, limbic system, and cerebral cortex—can be neatly summarized in this sequence: heartbeat, heartstrings, heartless.

• No single part of the forebrain is the site of conscious experience. Higher levels of mental activity sweep through circuits that embrace a large part of the forebrain. When we see and speak of color, for example, visual information passes from the cones and interneurons of the retina through the thalamus to the visual cortex at the rear of the brain. After the information is codified and integrated anew at each step, through patterns of neuron firing, it then spreads forward to the speech centers of the lateral cortex. As a result, we first see red and then say “red.” Thinking about the phenomenon consists of adding more and more connections of pattern and meaning, and thus activating additional areas of the brain. The more novel and complicated the connections, the greater the amount of this spreading activation. The better the connections are learned by such experience, the more they are put on autopilot. When the same stimulus is applied later, new activation is diminished and the circuits are more predictable. The procedure becomes a “habit.” In one such inferred pathway of memory formation, sensory information is conveyed from the cerebral cortex to the amygdala and hippocampus, then to the thalamus, then to the prefrontal cortex (just behind the brow), and back to the original sensory regions of the cortex for storage. Along the way codes are interpreted and altered according to inputs from other parts of the brain.

• Because of the microscopic size of the nerve cells, a large amount of circuitry can be packed into a very small space. The hypothalamus, a major relay and control center at the base of the brain, is about the size of a lima bean. (The nervous systems of animals are even more impressively miniaturized. The entire brains of gnats and other extremely small insects, which carry instructions for a series of complex instinctive acts, from flight to mating, are barely visible to the naked eye.)

• Disturbance of particular circuits of the human brain often produce bizarre results. Injuries to certain sites of the undersurface of the parietal and occipital lobes, which occupy the side and rear of the cerebral cortex, cause the rare condition called prosopagnosia. The patient can no longer recognize other persons by their faces, but he can still remember them by their voices. Just as oddly, he retains the ability to recognize objects other than faces by sight alone.

• There may be centers in the brain that are especially active in the organization and perception of free will. One appears to be located within or at least close to the anterior cingulate sulcus, on the inside of a fold of the cerebral cortex. Patients who have sustained damage to the region lose initiative and concern for their own welfare. From one moment to the next they focus on nothing in particular, yet remain capable of reasoned responses when pressed.

• Other complex mental operations, while engaging regions over large parts of the brain, are vulnerable to localized perturbation. Patients with temporal lobe epilepsy often develop hyperreligiosity, the tendency to charge all events, large and small, with cosmic significance. They are also prone to hypergraphia, a compulsion to express their visions in an undisciplined stream of poems, letters, or stories.

• The neural pathways used in sensory integration are also highly specialized. When subjects name pictures of animals during PET (positron emission tomography) imaging, a method that reveals patterns of nerve-cell firing, their visual cortices light up in the same pattern seen when they sort out subtle differences in the appearance of objects. When, on the other hand, they silently name pictures of tools, neural activity shifts to parts of the cortex concerned with hand movements and action words, such as “write” for pencil.

I HAVE S P0 K E N so far about the physical processes that produce the mind. Now, to come to the heart of the matter, what is the mind? Brain scientists understandably dance around this question. Wisely, they rarely commit themselves to a simple declarative definition, Most believe that the fundamental properties of the elements responsible for mind—neurons neurotransmitters, and hormones—are reasonably well known. What is lacking is a sufficient grasp of the emergent, holistic properties of the neuron circuits, and of cognition, the way the circuits process information to create perception and knowledge. Although dispatches from the research front grow yearly in number and sophistication, it is hard to judge how much we know in comparison with what we need to know in order to create a powerful and enduring theory of mind production by the brain. The grand synthesis could come quickly, or it could come with painful slowness over a period of decades.

Still, the experts cannot resist speculation on the essential nature of mind. While it is very risky to speak of consensus, and while I have no great trust in my own biases as interpreter, I believe I have been able to piece together enough of their overlapping opinions to forecast a probable outline of the eventual theory, as follows.

Mind is a stream of conscious and subconscious experience. It is at root the coded representation of sensory impressions and the memory and imagination of sensory impressions. The information composing it is most likely sorted and retrieved by vector coding, which denotes direction and magnitude. For example, a particular taste might be partly classified by the combined activity of nerve cells responding to different degrees of sweetness, saltiness, and sourness. If the brain were designed to distinguish ten increments in each of these taste dimensions, the coding could discriminate 10 X 10 X 10, or 1,000 substances.

Consciousness consists of the parallel processing of vast numbers of such coding networks. Many are linked by the synchronized firing of the nerve cells at forty cycles per second, allowing the simultaneous internal mapping of multiple sensory impressions. Some of the impressions are real, fed by ongoing stimulation from outside the nervous system, while others are recalled from the memory banks of the cortex. All together they create scenarios that flow realistically back and forth through time. The scenarios are a virtual reality. They can either closely match pieces of the external world or depart indefinitely far from it. They re-create the past and cast up alternative futures that serve as choices for future thought and bodily action. The scenarios comprise dense and finely differentiated patterns in the brain circuits. When fully open to input from the outside, they correspond well to all the parts of the environment, including activity of the body parts, monitored by the sense organs.

Who or what within the brain monitors all this activity? No one. Nothing. The scenarios are not seen by some other part of the brain. They just are. Consciousness is the virtual world composed by the scenarios. There is not even a Cartesian theater, to use Daniel Dennett’s dismissive phrase, no single locus of the brain where the scenarios are played out in coherent form. Instead, there are interlacing patterns of neural activity within and among particular sites throughout the forebrain, from cerebral cortex to other specialized centers of cognition such as the thalamus, amygdala, and hippocampus. There is no single stream of consciousness in which all information is brought together by an executive ego. There are instead multiple streams of activity, some of which contribute momentarily to conscious thought and then phase out. Consciousness is the massive coupled aggregates of such participating circuits. The mind is a self-organizing republic of scenarios that individually germinate, grow, evolve, disappear, and occasionally linger to spawn additional thought and physical activity.

The neural circuits do not turn on and off like parts of an electrical grid. In many sectors of the forebrain at least, they are arranged in parallel relays stepping from one neuron level to the next, integrating more and more coded information with each step. The energy of light striking the retina, to expand the example I gave earlier, is transduced into patterns of neuron firing. The patterns are relayed through a sequence of intermediate neuron systems out of the retinal fields through the lateral geniculate nuclei of the thalamus back to the primary visual cortex at the rear of the brain. Cells in the visual cortex fed by the integrated stimuli sum up the information from different parts of the retina. They recognize and by their own pattern of firing specify spots or lines. Further systems of these higher-order cells integrate the information from multiple feeder cells to map the shape and movement of objects. In ways still not understood, this pattern is coupled with simultaneous input from other parts of the brain to create the full scenarios of consciousness. The biologist S. J. Singer has drily expressed the matter thus: I link, therefore I am.

Because just to generate consciousness requires an astronomically large population of cells, the brain is sharply limited in its capacity to create and hold complex moving imagery. A key measure of that capacity lies in the distinction made by psychologists between short-term and long-term memory. Short-term memory is the ready state of the conscious mind. It composes all of the current and remembered parts of the virtual scenarios. It can handle only about seven words or other symbols simultaneously. The brain takes about one second to scan these symbols fully, and it forgets most of the information within thirty seconds. Long-term memory takes much longer to acquire, but it has an almost unlimited capacity, and a large fraction of it is retained for life. By spreading activation, the conscious mind summons information from the store of long-term memory and holds it for a brief interval in short-term memory. During this time it processes the information, at a rate of about one symbol per 25 milliseconds, while scenarios arising from the information compete for dominance.

Long-term memory recalls specific events by drawing particular persons, objects, and actions into the conscious mind through a time sequence. For example, it easily re-creates an Olympic moment: the lighting of the torch, a running athlete, the cheering of the crowd. It also re-creates not just moving images and sound but meaning in the form of linked concepts simultaneously experienced. Fire is connected to hot, red, dangerous, cooked, the passion of sex, and the creative act, and on out through multitudinous hypertext pathways selected by context, sometimes building new associations in memory for future recall. The concepts are the nodes or reference points in long-term memory. Many are labeled by words in ordinary language, but others are not. Recall of images from the long-term banks with little or no linkage is just memory. Recall with linkages, and especially when tinged by the resonance of emotional circuits, is remembrance.

The capacity for remembrance by the manipulation of symbols is a transcendent achievement for an organic machine. It has authored all of culture. But it still falls far short of the demands placed by the body on the nervous system. Hundreds of organs must be regulated continuously and precisely; any serious perturbation is followed by illness or death. A heart forgetful for ten seconds can drop you like a stone. The proper functioning of the organs is under the control of hard-wired autopilots in the brain and spinal cord, whose neuron circuits are our inheritance from hundreds of millions of years of vertebrate evolution prior to the origin of human consciousness. The autopilot circuits are shorter and simpler than those of the higher cerebral centers and only marginally communicate with them. Only by intense meditative training can they occasionally be brought under conscious control.

Under automatic control, and specifically through balance of the antagonistic elements of the autonomic nervous system, pupils of the eye constrict or dilate, saliva pours out or is contained, the stomach churns or quietens, the heart pounds or calms, and so on through alternative states in all the organs. The sympathetic nerves of the autonomic nervous system pump the body up for action. They arise from the middle sections of the spinal cord, and typically regulate target organs by release of the neurotransmitter norepinephrine. The parasympathetic nerves relax the body as a whole while intensifying the processes of digestion. They rise from the brain stem and lowermost segment of the spinal cord, and the neurotransmitter they release to the target organs is acetylcholine—also the agent of sleep.

Reflexes are swift automatic responses mediated by short circuits of neurons through the spinal cord and lower brain. The most complex is the startle response, which prepares the body for an imminent blow or collision. Imagine that you are surprised by a loud noise close by—a car horn blasts, someone shouts, a dog charges in a fury of barking. You react without thinking. Your eyes close, your head sags, your mouth opens, your knees buckle slightly. All are reactions that prepare you for the violent contact that might follow an instant later. The startle response occurs in a split second, faster than the conscious mind can follow, faster than can be imitated by conscious effort even with long practice.

Automatic responses, true to their primal role, are relatively impervious to the conscious will. This principle of archaism extends even to the facial expressions that communicate emotion. A spontaneous and genuine smile, which originates in the limbic system and is emotion-driven, is unmistakable to the practiced observer. A contrived smile is constructed from the conscious processes of the cerebrum and is betrayed by telltale nuances: a slightly different configuration of facial muscle contraction and a tendency toward lopsidedness of the upward curving mouth. A natural smile can be closely imitated by an experienced actor. It can also be evoked by artificially inducing the appropriate emotion—the basic technique of method acting. In ordinary usage it is modified deliberately in accordance with local culture, to convey irony (the pursed smile), restrained politeness (the thin smile), threat (the wolfish smile), and other refined presentations of self.

Much of the input to the brain does not come from the outside world but from internal body sensors that monitor the state of respiration, heartbeat, digestion, and other physiological activities. The flood of “gut feeling” that results is blended with rational thought, feeding it, and being fed by it through reflexes of internal organs and neurohormonal loops.

As the scenarios of consciousness fly by, driven by stimuli and drawing upon memories of prior scenarios, they are weighted and modified by emotion. What is emotion? It is the modification of neural activity that animates and focuses mental activity. It is created by physiological activity that selects certain streams of information over others, shifting the body and mind to higher or lower degrees of activity, agitating the circuits that create scenarios, and selecting ones that end in certain ways. The winning scenarios are those that match goals preprogrammed by instinct and the satisfactions of prior experience. Current experience and memory continually perturb the states of mind and body. By thought and action the states are then moved backward to the original condition or forward to conditions conceived in new scenarios. The dynamism of the process provokes labeling by words that denote the basic categories of emotion—anger, disgust, fear, pleasure, surprise. It breaks the categories into many degrees and joins them to create myriad subtle compounds. Thus we experience feelings that are variously weak, strong, mixed, and new.

Without the stimulus and guidance of emotion, rational thought slows and disintegrates. The rational mind does not float above the irrational it cannot free itself to engage in pure reason. There are pure theorems in mathematics but no pure thoughts that discover them. In the brain-in-the-vat fantasy of neurobiological theory and science fiction, the organ in its nutrient bath has been detached from the impediments of the body and liberated to explore the inner universe of the mind. But that is not what would ensue in reality. All the evidence from the brain sciences points in the opposite direction, to a waiting coffin-bound hell of the wakened dead, where the remembered and imagined world decays until chaos mercifully grants oblivion.

Consciousness satisfies emotion by the physical actions it selects in the midst of turbulent sensation. It is the specialized part of the mind that creates and sorts scenarios, the means by which the future is guessed and courses of action chosen. Consciousness is not a remote command center but part of the system, intimately wired to all the neural and hormonal circuits regulating physiology. Consciousness acts and reacts to achieve a dynamic steady state. It perturbs the body in precise ways with each changing circumstance, as required for well-being and response to opportunity, and helps return it to the original condition when challenge and opportunity have been met.

The reciprocity of mind and body can be visualized in the following scenario, which I have adapted from an account by the neurologist Antonio R. Damasio. Imagine that you are strolling along a deserted city street at night. Your reverie is interrupted by quick footsteps drawing close behind. Your brain focuses instantly and churns out alternative scenarios—ignore, freeze, turn and confront, or escape. The last scenario prevails and you act. You run toward a lighted storefront further down the street. In the space of a few seconds, the conscious response triggers automatic changes in your physiology.

The catecholamine hormones epinephrine (“adrenaline”) and norepinephrine pour into the bloodstream from the adrenal medulla and travel to all parts of the body, increasing the basal metabolic rate, breaking down glycogen in the liver and skeletal muscles to glucose for a quick energy feed. The heart races. The bronchioles of the lungs dilate to admit more air. Digestion slows. The bladder and colon prepare to void their contents, disencumbering the body to prepare for violent action and possible injury.

A few seconds more pass. Time slows in the crisis: The event span seems like minutes. Signals arising from all the changes are relayed back to the brain by more nerve fibers and the rise of hormone titers in the bloodstream. As further seconds tick away, the body and brain shift together in precisely programmed ways. Emotional circuits of the limbic system kick in—the new scenarios flooding the mind are charged with fright, then anger that sharply focuses the attention of the cerebral cortex, closing out all other thought not relevant to immediate survival.

The storefront is reached, the race won. People are inside, the pursuer is gone. Was the follower really in pursuit? No matter. The republic of bodily systems, informed by reassuring signals from the conscious brain, begins its slow stand-down to the original calm state.

Damasio, in depicting the mind holistically in such episodes, has suggested the existence of two broad categories of emotion. The first, primary emotion, comprises the responses ordinarily called inborn or instinctive. Primary emotion requires little conscious activity beyond the recognition of certain elementary stimuli, the kind that students of instinctive behavior in animals call releasers—they are said to “release” the preprogrammed behavior. For human beings such stimuli include sexual enticement, loud noises, the sudden appearance of large shapes, the writhing movements of snakes or serpentine objects, and the particular configurations of pain associated with heart attacks or broken bones. The primary emotions have been passed down with little change from the vertebrate forebears of the human line. They are activated by circuits of the limbic system, among which the amygdala appears to be the master integrating and relay center.

Secondary emotions arise from personalized events of life. To meet an old friend, fall in love, win a promotion, or suffer an insult is to fire the limbic circuits of primary emotion, but only after the highest integrative processes of the cerebral cortex have been engaged. We must know who is friend or enemy, and why they are behaving a certain way. By this interpretation, the emperor’s rage and poet’s rapture are cultural elaborations retrofitted to the same machinery that drives the prehuman primates. Nature, Damasio observes, “with its tinkerish knack for economy, did not select independent mechanisms for expressing primary and secondary emotions. It simply allowed secondary emotions to be expressed by the same channel already prepared to convey primary emotions.”

Ordinary words used to denote emotion and other processes of mental activity make only a crude fit to the models used by the brain scientists in their attempts at rigorous explanation. But the ordinary and conventional conceptions—what some philosophers call folk psychology—are necessary if we are to make better sense of thousands of years of literate history, and thereby join the cultures of the past with those of the future. To that end I offer the following neuroscience-accented definitions of several of the most important concepts of mental activity.

What we call meaning is the linkage among the neural networks created by the spreading excitation that enlarges imagery and engages emotion. The competitive selection among scenarios is what we call decision making. The outcome, in terms of the match of the winning scenario to instinctive or learned favorable states, sets the kind and intensity of subsequent emotion. The persistent form and intensity of emotions is called mood. The ability of the brain to generate novel scenarios and settle on the most effective among them is called creativity. The persistent production of scenarios lacking reality and survival value is called insanity.

The explicit material constructions I have put upon mental life will be disputed by some brain scientists, and reckoned inadequate by others. That is the unavoidable fate of synthesis. In choosing certain hypotheses over others, I have tried to serve as an honest broker searching for the gravitational center of opinion, where by and large the supporting data are most persuasive and mutually consistent. To include all models and hypotheses deserving respect in this tumultuous discipline, and then to clarify the distinctions among them, would require a full-dress textbook. Undoubtedly events will prove that in places I chose badly. For that eventuality I apologize now to the slighted scientists, a concession I comfortably make, knowing that the recognition they deserve and will inevitably receive cannot be blunted by premature omission on the part of any one observer.