MINDFULNESS

Neuroscience is still trying to unravel the nature of consciousness and the origin of mind in the human animal. Here are some more theories.

[OPEN QUOTE]
This also led to speculation as to which species did or did not have theory of mind and at what point in evolution it appeared in humans (Povinelli & Preuss, 1995).

There are two distinct origin scenarios for our capacity to understand intentional agency, to create representations of other agents' behavior, beliefs, and intentions. A widely accepted social intelligence scenario is that higher primates evolved more and more complex intentional-psychology systems to deal with social interaction. Having larger groups, more stable interaction, and more efficient coordination with other agents all bring out, given the right circumstances, significant adaptive benefits for the individual. But they all require finer and finer grained descriptions of other agents' behaviors. Social intelligence triggers an arms race resulting from higher capacity to manipulate others and a higher capacity to resist such manipulation (Whiten, 1991). It also allows the development of coalitional alliance, based on a computation of other agents' commitments to a particular purpose (hunting, warfare; Kurzban & Leary, 2001), as well as the development of friendship as an insurance policy against variance in resources (Tooby & Cosmides, 1996).


Another possible account is that (at least some aspects of) theory of mind evolved in the context of predator-prey interaction (Barrett, 1999, this volume). A heightened capacity to remain undetected by either predator or prey, as well as a better sense of how these "other" animals detect us, are of obvious adaptive significance for survival problems such as eating and avoiding being eaten. Indeed, some primatologists have speculated that detection of predators may have been the primary context for the evolution of agency concepts (van Schaik & Van Hooff, 1983). In the archaeological record, changes toward more flexible hunting patterns in modern humans suggest a richer, more intentional representation of the hunted animal (Mithen, 1996). Hunting and predator avoidance become much better when they are more flexible, that is, informed by contingent details about the situation at hand, so that the human does not react to all predators or prey in the same way. [CLOSE QUOTE]

—H. Clark Barrett, “Adaptations to Predators and Prey” in Handbook Of Evolutionary Psychology, pp. 105-106

Re. the photo: Some species still don’t have a conscious mind. Think of the most illustrious of Crawford, Texas’s citizens.

TODAY, MY SUBJECT IS HELL

FIRE AND ICE

Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I've tasted of desire
I hold with those who favour fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.

—Robert Frost

SUBJECT: HELL: EXOTHERMIC OR ENDOTHERMIC

The following is supposedly an actual question given on a chemistry mid-term. The answer by one student was so "profound" that the professor shared it with colleagues via the Internet.

Bonus Question: Is Hell exothermic (gives off heat) or endothermic (absorbs heat)?

Most of the students wrote proofs of their beliefs, using Boyle's Law (gas cools when it expands and heats when it is compressed).

One student, however, wrote the following:

First, we need to know how the mass of Hell is changing in time. So we need to know the rate at which souls are moving into Hell and the rate at which they are leaving. I think that we can safely assume that once a soul gets to Hell, it will not leave. Therefore, no souls are leaving.

As for how many souls are entering Hell, let's look at the different religions that exist in the world today. Most of these religions state that if you are not a member of their religion, you will go to Hell. Since there is more than one of these religions and since people do not belong to more than one religion, we can project that all souls go to Hell. With birth and death rates as they are, we can expect the number of souls in Hell to increase exponentially.

Now, we look at the rate of change of the volume in Hell because Boyle's Law states that in order for the temperature and pressure in Hell to stay the same, the volume of Hell has to expand proportionately as souls are added.

This yields two possibilities:

1. If Hell is expanding at a slower rate than the rate at which souls enter Hell, then the temperature and pressure in Hell will increase until all Hell breaks loose.

2. If Hell is expanding at a rate faster than the increase of souls in Hell, then the temperature and pressure will drop until Hell freezes over.

So which is it?

If we accept the postulate given to me by Teresa during my Freshman year that "it will be a cold day in Hell before I sleep with you" and take into account the fact that I slept with her last night, then number 2 must be true, and thus I am sure that Hell is exothermic and has already frozen over.

The corollary of this theory is that since Hell has frozen over, it follows that it is not accepting any more souls and is, therefore, extinct, leaving only Heaven, thereby proving the existence of a divine being, which explains why, last night, Theresa kept shouting, "Oh my God!"

Photo in Gehenna (Hell of Bible) courtesy Mark Hodge.

COULD WE REALLY GET TO BE THIS GROWN UP? HA!

“Logocentric thinking is also associated with efforts to subsume diversity under identity, to reduce the other to the same. Jim Cheney, in his postmodern critique of radical environmentalism, argues that there are strong authoritarian tendencies in environmentalist thought due to this refusal to acknowledge difference. He argues against the claim that all knowers are essentially alike, and hence are able to resolve differences by appeal to objective standards of reason. Each person's history and place in the world is distinct, and their perspectives incommensurable with all others. The thesis of the sameness of all knowers can only be an ideological tool designed to coerce agreement, to socialize people to a particular conception of reality. There are potentially an infinite number of truths corresponding to the equally infinite number of different places that people inhabit in the world, and to claim that any position has priority over other positions is to be engaged in a rhetorical exercise in order to justify and enforce domination. Cheney calls for respect for otherness, letting differences exist without any pressure to compromise so that each entity is given full latitude to develop the way that best expresses its own individual existence.” —Arran E. Gare in Postmodernism and the Environmental Crisis, pp. 92-93, Routledge, New York (1996)

PS: I don’t think that the unfortunately named J. Cheney’s position is the position that Gare would accept. I’ve included it in my blog as an interesting take on objectivity. Frankly, I think if we all were more objective, we would have fewer conflicts, even though we disagree, because scientific objectivity usually comes to pretty factual conclusions. Right? Objectivity is a method for arriving at factual data and has nothing to do with leaving one’s opinions out of it until, that is, the facts are established. Now—as to opinions about non-factual, therefore unreal and nonsensical, matters, like how close one’s nose must come to the ground while bowing to Mecca or what a god’s asshole looks like, there are no facts involved. It’s pure opinion and therefore entirely relatively, and we should never dispute these matters one with another. Eh?


NEW DENSE ELEMENT DISCOVERED

A major research institution has just announced the discovery of the densest element yet known to science. The new element has been named "Bushcronium." The symbol for Bushcronium is "W".

Bushcronium has one neutron, 12 assistant neutrons, 75 deputy neutrons, and 224 assistant deputy neutrons, giving it an atomic mass of 311. These particles are held together by dark forces called morons, which are surrounded by vast quantities of lepton-like particles called peons.

Bushcronium's mass increases preternaturally over time when morons randomly interact with various elements in the atmosphere and become assistant deputy neutrons in a Bushcronium molecule to form isodopes. This characteristic of moron-promotion leads some scientists to believe that Bushcronium is formed whenever morons reach a critical density. This hypothetical concentration is referred to as "Critical Morass."

When catalyzed with money, Bushcronium activates Foxnewsium, an element that radiates orders of magnitude more energy than Bushcronium itself, albeit in the form of incoherent noise since Foxnewsium has 1/2 the peons but twice more morons.

Folks, I’m sorry, but I don’t know who to credit this piece of writing too. I believe it’s one of those free-floating internet pieces that I scoop up in my daily ramblings. Now it’s been months since I stored it in my desktop file, Blog/ Future Stuff, and, well, who knows? It’s damn good though.

THE EVER-CHANGING SELF

Most of us who know the least little bit at all about biology (fundie Xtians excused) know that our cells replace themselves. Roughly every seven years, we are “evolved again” (my word). Of course, I didn’t know until Antonio Damasio taught me that the “precious neurons in our brains, the muscle cells of the heart and the cells of the lens” do not replace themselves. (The Feeling of What Happens, p. 144) In his marvelous study of how consciousness evolved, I find a great deal of interesting reading and one fascinating passage is the following one so marvelously poetic about the constant replacement of the body as it ceaselessly reinvents the structure that evolution has given it.

[SNIPPLE]
We are not merely perishable at the end of our lives. Most parts of us perish during our lifetime only to be substituted by other perishable parts. The cycles of death and birth repeat themselves many times in a life span—some of the cells in our bodies survive for as little as one week, most for not more than one year; the exceptions are the precious neurons in our brains, the muscle cells of the heart, and the cells of the lens. Most of the components that do not get substituted—such as the neurons—get changed by learning. (In fact, nothing being sacred, even some neurons may get substituted.) Life makes neurons behave differently by altering, for instance, the way they connect with others. No component remains the same for very long, and most of the cells and tissues that constitute our bodies today are not the same we owned when we entered college. What remains the same, in good part, is the construction plan for our organism structure and the set points for the operation of its parts. Call it the spirit of the form and the spirit of the function.

When we discover what we are made of and how we are put together, we discover a ceaseless process of building up and tearing down, and we realize that life is at the mercy of that never-ending process. Like the sand on the beaches of our childhood, it can be washed away. It is astonishing that we have a sense of self at all, that we have—that most of us have, some of us have—some continuity of structure and function that constitutes identity, some stable traits of behavior we call a personality. Fabulous indeed, amazing for certain, that you are you and I am me.

But the problem goes beyond perishability and renewal. Just as death and life cycles reconstruct the organism and its parts according to a plan, the brain reconstructs the sense of self moment by moment. We do not have a self sculpted in stone and, like stone, resistant to the ravages of time. Our sense of self is a state of the organism, the result of certain components operating in a certain manner and interacting in a certain way, within certain parameters. It is another construction, a vulnerable pattern of integrated operations whose consequence is to generate the mental representation of a living individual being. The entire biological edifice, from cells, tissues, and organs to systems and images, is held alive by the constant execution of construction plans, always on the brink of partial or complete collapse should the process of rebuilding and renewal break down. The 
construction plans are all woven around the need to stay away from the brink.
[PASTIE]

I am doing this at two to three in the morning as the object, George Bush, arising from my memory banks, has chosen to impinge its ghastly presence upon my hapless organism, rendering it alert and sensing danger when it should be replenishing itself with sleep.

PS: Call the tree, raising its arms into the sky, a "forest monster". Does it give you that eerie feeling like forests do in some of these recent children's movies like Harry Potter, those boring, endless Ring tales and that old Wizard of "if you've seen it once, you've seen it a thousand times" Oz?

DÉJÀ VU

According to recent research, which makes very good sense, déjà vu is a memory problem. Well “of course” we all say. What else could it be! As for me—the article goes on to say that it tends to happen more as one ages and is also a problem in Alzheimer’s patients. I don’t know about the rest of you, but I used to have a lot more déjà vu moments when I was younger, when I was drinking, which also makes a lot of sense when I think about it. It’s been a long time since I’ve had a déjà vu experience, a long time. What about you? Read the whole article here.

PS: If you notice that I’m making fewer or shorter blog entries that’s because my interest in writing creatively seems to have reappeared. I’ve begun my first novel in more than 15 years—or longer—and I’m combing over my poetry with an eye to putting together a book of my best writing there too. Currently, I'm working through a book on neuroscience called, The Feeling of What Happens and a book by Tobin about Ernie Pyle, called Ernie Pyle's War.

SO MUCH FOR BIBLE AND CONSTITUTION

I have lately begun reading from time to time the writings of Thomas Jefferson collected in a book which I bought from the Monticello Foundation. A mind so clear as his could never become the kind of fundamentalist that fundamentalists like to consider our American founders were.

The two paragraphs below are from his autobiography and show some of the ways that Jefferson thought specifically about two Bible laws which he considered as a Representative to his own Virginia Legislature after he had already written and revised the American Constitution as a Representative to the Continental Congress. You’ll see that he had little regard for old Hebrew Law in at least these two cases. In other places which I hope, in future, to include in this blog, you’ll see that he uses the word “liberal” to describe his own mind and the minds of the men he found congenial to his own. What? A “liberal” fundamentalist!

[SNIP]
Mr. Pendleton wished to preserve the right of primogeniture, but seeing at once that that could not prevail, he proposed we should adopt the Hebrew principle, and give a double portion to the elder son. I observed that if the eldest son could eat twice as much, or do double work, it might be a natural evidence of his right to a double portion; but being on a par in his powers & wants, with his brothers and sisters, he should be on a par also in the partition of the patrimony, an such was the decision of the other members. . . .

On the subject of the Criminal law, all were agreed that the 
punishment of death should be abolished, except for treason and murder; and that, for other felonies should be substituted hard labor in the public works, and in some cases, the Lex talionis [the law of retaliation]. How this last revolting principle came to obtain our approbation, I do not remember. There remained indeed in our laws a vestige of it in a single case of a slave. It was the English law in the time of the Anglo-Saxons, copied probably from the Hebrew law of "an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth," and it was the law of several antient people. But the modern mind had left it far in the rear of it's advances.
[PASTE]

OF ABSOLUTELY NO CONSEQUENCE

Discovered the other day while watching a PBS show that Picasso was painting “Guernica” while I was in the womb. I do wonder how much my 17 year old mother considered these events while I was ahatching? She was a singer and played the clarinet for awhile and tried to draw and sculpt. She was quite a person for her time, but, buried in Southern Ohio mores, her path out was blocked and became, at least for her, inescapable.

EMOTIONS ARE NOT INCORPOREAL, MORAL ENTITIES
BUT VERY PHYSICAL THINGS

I know that anyone who has really thought about his or her emotional life probably knows the information which follows, yet, for me, it was not that long ago that I fully realized that emotions are really nothing more than physical states in the body. The names we give to various of those body states make us believe that emotions have an existence other than their embodied existence as neurological and chemical states, but Antonio Damasio explains the situation very thoroughly in the following paragraphs from his book, The Feeling of What Happens (pp.50-52). Once one begins to think of emotions as purely chemical or neurological states, he can begin to rethink so much he has been taught about the “morality” of emotional states. Emotions are neither wrong nor right, sinful or wholesome; emotions just ARE.

[SNIP]
The mention of the word emotion usually calls to mind one of the six so-called primary or universal emotions: happiness, sadness, fear, anger, surprise, or disgust. Thinking about the primary emotions makes the discussion of the problem easier, but it is important to note that there are numerous other behaviors to which the label "emotion" has been attached. They include so-called secondary or social emotions, such as embarrassment, jealousy, guilt, or pride; and what I call background emotions, such as well-being or malaise, calm or tension. The label emotion has also been attached to drives and motivations and to the states of pain and pleasure.

A shared biological core underlies all these phenomena, and it can be outlined as follows:

1. Emotions are complicated collections of chemical and neural responses, forming a pattern; all emotions have some kind of regulatory role to play, leading in one way or another to the creation of circumstances advantageous to the organism exhibiting the phenomenon; emotions are about the life of an organism, its body to be precise, and their role is to assist the organism in maintaining life.

2. Notwithstanding the reality that learning and culture alter the expression of emotions and give emotions new meanings, emotions are biologically determined processes, depending on innately set brain devices, laid down by a long evolutionary history.

3. The devices which produce emotions occupy a fairly restricted ensemble of subcortical regions, beginning at the level of the brain stem and moving up to the higher brain; the devices are part of a set of structures that both regulate and represent body states, which will be discussed in chapter 5.

4. All the devices can be engaged automatically, without conscious deliberation; the considerable amount of individual variation and the fact that culture plays a role in shaping some inducers do not deny the fundamental stereotypicity, automaticity, and regulatory purpose of the emotions.

5. All emotions use the body as their theater (internal milieu, visceral, vestibular and musculoskeletal systems), but emotions also affect the mode of operation of numerous brain circuits: the variety of the emotional responses is responsible for profound changes in both the body landscape and the brain landscape. The collection of these changes constitutes the substrate for the neural patterns which eventually become feelings of emotion.
[PASTE]

GEORGE BUSH: THE POLITICALIZATION OF EVERYTHING,
EVEN YOUR HEALTH AND SAFETY

In a compelling article for Rolling Stone Magazine, Tim Dickinson tracks down the lies and obfuscations which George Bush/Cheney and Company have used to make certain that the American public is confused on the issue of global warming. If the American public were not confused on the issue, they certainly would not be giving Georgie an astounding 29% approval rating. How can it be that high after all we now know about the lying, crooked George Bush regime? An intelligent, informed electorate would have him down to 10 or 15% by now. Some people do have IQs less than 70 percent, and they can be forgiven since they are too illiterate to read and understand written, complex reasoning processes—and Fox watchers. Then there all those Republican politicians who have been bought and paid for by the oil lobbyists. Maybe that is 29% of the American public? The administration’s plan is completely political, ignoring science and favoring the corporate polluters, all to the detriment of my, your and our children’s and grandchildren’s health, future and safety. Read the whole thing here.

[SAMPLE SNIP]
Cheney took full advantage of the president's cluelessness, bringing the CEQ into his own portfolio. "The environment and energy issues were really turned over to him from the beginning," Whitman says. The CEQ became Cheney's shadow EPA, with industry calling the shots. To head up the council, Cheney installed James Connaughton, a former lobbyist for industrial polluters, who once worked to help General Electric and ARCO skirt responsibility for their Superfund waste sites.

Industry swiftly took advantage of its new friend in the White House. In a fax sent to the CEQ [White House Council on Environmental Quality] on February 6th, 2001 - two weeks after Bush took office - ExxonMobil's top lobbyist, Randy Randol, demanded a housecleaning of the scientists in charge of studying global warming. Exxon urged CEQ to dump Robert Watson, who chaired the IPCC, along with Rosina Bierbaum and Mike MacCracken, who had coordinated the National Assessment.

Exxon's wish was the CEQ's command. According to an internal e-mail obtained by Rolling Stone, Connaughton's first order of business - even before his nomination was made public - was to write his White House colleagues-to-be from his law firm of Sidley & Austin. He echoed Exxon's call that Bierbaum, the acting director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, be "dealt." In the end, each of the scientists on Exxon's hit list was replaced. "It was clear there was a strong lobby and activity against me by some in the energy industry—especially ExxonMobil," says Watson.
[PASTE]

Photo: Wilson / Getty

AS WE’VE BEEN POINTING OUT FOR SOME TIME NOW....

A recent article in the Washington Post reveals that “[neuroscientists] are using brain imaging and psychological experiments to study whether the brain has a built-in moral compass. The results—many of them published just in recent months—are showing, unexpectedly, that many aspects of morality appear to be hard-wired in the brain, most likely the result of evolutionary processes that began in other species.”

Yep—altruism is not the result of being forced, by commandments, to treat one another well, but is probably the result of our realizing at a deep evolutionary level that the person we treat well is also made of flesh and blood just as we are. Altruism results from our comprehending that the person (or animal) we help is made up of the same tissue as we are. Link up to the article for more evidence of this fact.

Long ago I came across this idea in a book called The Moral Animal. Now more evidence is accumulating.

SICKO

If you notice that my entries are not as current or as frequent as they have been, it's because I've been recovering from shingles. It's a very debilitating sort of disease, you know—a recurrence of chicken pox, and this old body doesn't bounce back like it did when it carried the consciousness of a ten year old around inside of it. This illness is another reason why this entry is so short.

ON BEING AN ATHEIST

Being an atheist is, if you can picture this, like breaking through the thin layer of an egg shell and crawling out to stand on a pristine, white surface. Here and there, one spots a courageous lad or lassie who has crawled out there with him. Beneath one’s feet, so to speak, trapped within the thinnest of shells, remain the poor, sad lot of his fellows, still trapped in and coated with chicken-yellow goo. The atheist looks up into a black, infinite void and, filled with the most tender sensation of awe, he crows like a rooster to have attained such unlimited freedom.

ON BEING BEN FRANKLIN

“The rapid progress true science now makes, occasions my regretting sometimes that I was born so soon.”—Ben Franklin

If Ben Franklin can say that, imagine how we ought to feel?

DESPOTIC GOVERNMENT AHEAD?

“I agree to this Constitution, with all its faults—if they are such; because I think a general Government necessary for us, and there is no form of government but what may be a blessing to the people, if well administered; and I believe, farther, that this is likely to be well administered for a course of years, and can only end in despotism, as other forms have done before it, when the people shall become so corrupted as to need despotic government, being incapable of any other.”—Ben Franklin

If Ben Franklin can say that, imagine how we ought to feel under the boot heels of GWB?

SHINGLES

Yes, I've had shingles now for the last three weeks, but I managed to make a short dash North to visit friends and family up through Poulsbo and onto Whidbey Island. Then, the next weekend, Mertie and I headed West over to the Washington Coast, Long Beach, to spend two nights, a full day and parts of two days there. All the while I was sick and could not enjoy anything as much as I would have liked to. This shingles stuff is for the birds. I'm hoping I don't get the complication which lasts for months afterwards, where the hurts continue and the tenderness or deadness of the skin remains. The entire left side of my face and my mouth has been affected. Lesions on my face, my gums, and inside my mouth and also the lips. Even the skin on the top of my left shoulder feels extremely tender to the touch. It's a rebirth of the chicken pox in old people.

Anyhow, here's a couple of photos from the Long Beach trip:

Looking sort of North.
The boardwalk West of Long Beach, the longest beach in the whole world?

One of many friends to visit us on a Saturday morning trip
to the Northern tip of the peninsula
upon which Long Beach rests.
To Ledbetter Point State Park.

A sort of primeval creature found on the beach of Stackpole Harbor.

Two more creatures found on our journey the next day at Bruceport Park.

Looking West across the great Pacific waters on Saturday evening.