AIN'T NO gOD

2011-11-14T20:14:00.000-08:00

RODIN'S DOG

The following is nearly self-explanatory. Read the letter by Rodin's dog to Clark County Commissioner, Tom Mielke, then read Mr. Mielke's comments to the Columbian newspaper here in Clark County. Rodin's Dog's letter and his creative work were stimulated by Mr. Mielke's comments. The conceptual piece of art, called Rodin's Dog, consists of a photo of Commissioner Mielke as manipulated by the dog's own work. The entire collection of letters, columns and art are being submitted to the Clark County Art's Commission as an exercise in conceptual art.

Monday Nov/14/11

Dear Commissioner Mielke,

As a suitable comment upon and in honor of your sophisticated taste in art, I am submitting this artistic work entitled, “Rodin’s Dog”, to be considered as a future work to be placed outside the Commission’s meeting room. As you will recognize, it is a perfect analogy to the sort of mass produced work that superb salesman Thomas Kinkade has grown rich selling to his doting public.

The work may be viewed as a work of conceptual art or as a construct whichever you prefer. It may be hung on a wall or placed in a corner with a doggie dish nearby.

I will be glad to frame it appropriately if and when my work is selected to be so honored. I’m attaching the price of $1500 dollars to my effort. Copies of my submission are going to the Arts Commission, your fellow commissioners as well as to the Columbian.

Thank you for considering my carefully conceived work of art,

Rodin’s Dog

2011-11-13T11:12:00.000-08:00

TAKE STOCK IN AMERICAN FUTURES

2011-11-08T19:19:00.000-08:00

INFO ABOUT NASTY OLD SENIORS
ROLLICKING IN THE LAP OF LUXURY

2011-11-08T15:14:00.000-08:00

SOMEBODY UP THERE ISN'T LISTENING!!!

2011-11-07T11:44:00.000-08:00

HAS THE TEA PARTY BEEN SOLD
OR IS IT SELLING A BILL OF GOODS?

2011-10-26T17:04:00.000-07:00

2011-10-12T10:59:00.000-07:00

CAPITALISM'S IMPOVERISHED SENIORS

Details like this tell the whole story of the failure of capitalism to supply enough good paying jobs so that all Americans can retire with dignity. You might be able to blame some of the seniors for their own poverty, but you cannot blame 25% of them for their current situations. Capitalism thrives on the poor. Capitalism rewards the rich few because it impoverishes a very large number of the rest of us. A strong middle class requires that everyone is middle class as far as earnings go.

2011-10-09T21:04:00.000-07:00

THE FUTURE IS HERE AND IT AIN'T LOOKIN SO HOT FOR
THE HUMAN SPECIES

2011-09-12T23:23:00.001-07:00

They are all, every one of them beholding to Tea Party nonsense and, thus, tainted beyond election. No one but a hardright neocon Cheneyite could vote for them.

Also...I like our flag. I've got nothing against it as a symbol of our nation, but to see 3 grown men and women with hands over hearts as in kindergarten...? Can't help it; that's what that image brings to my mind, those days when I was a child. There must be a more grownup way to salute our flag, like maybe just standing at attention with eyes focused on it?
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

Tom Coburn: President Obama Will Back Down On Budget Bill Veto Threat (VIDEO)

2011-07-22T07:07:00.001-07:00

The Republican Tea Party has been quick to hold a gun to the head of our economy in order to "cut, cap and kill" Medicare, an effective, efficiently managed national health care plan for the elderly. Let's hope that for once, Republican selfish has gone too far. This idea that we must gut and fillet the poor in order to protect the filet mignon tax cut that Bush gave himself, his family and his friends is a disgrace in a wealthy nation. Specially since all of us paid taxes that bailed this country out of a Republican economic mess.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

Gonorrhea Superbug: First Antibiotic-Resistant STD Strain Discovered

2011-07-11T07:54:00.001-07:00

Evolution in spades. But, of course, evolution doesn't exist, does it? Then what created this super bug? It will be something like this super bug, only deadly, which will sweep the world pretty much clear of the human species.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

Minnesota Shutdown 2011: Budget Dispute Continues, Negotiations Resume (LATEST UPDATES)

2011-07-07T08:21:00.001-07:00

The Republican Tea Party is as cold as dead fish. They care not who they harm just so long as they keep the wealthy wealthy and in control of their party and the nation. They got us into this mess, but we must first bail them out, then suffer all the cuts, while the wealthy go right on raking in the dividends from their global economy companies. Tom Delay is partying hearty down in Texas for certain with who knows what oil man from the Middle East?
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

Obama Says 'Nothing Can Be Off-Limits' In Budget Talks

2011-07-02T09:26:00.001-07:00

The Bush tax cut for the wealthy must be returned to the treasury. The wealthy created this mess with their greed and malfeasance. We bailed the wealthy out with our tax dollars and now we are cutting funding for services that help the unemployed, the underemployed, the permanently unemployable for physical and mental reasons and also those on fixed income. AT WHAT POINT DO THE WEALTHY CONTRIBUTE THEIR SHARE TO CLEANING UP THE MESS THAT THEY CAUSED? If this isn't class warfare, the rich plundering the poor, then this is not 2011.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

Mitt Romney Backtracks: Economy Not Worse Under Obama

2011-07-02T09:14:00.001-07:00

I suggest Romney (as well as many other of us) ought to read The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives:

"It may come as an epiphany merely to recognize the ubiquitous role of random processes in our lives; the true power of the theory of random processes, however, lies in the fact that once we understand the nature of random processes, we can alter the way we perceive the events that happen around us."

Leonard Mlodinow, pp. 217-18.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

2011-05-02T15:14:00.000-07:00

MY CREDO FROM A REAL HUMANIST HERO

I must tell you that my world view changed just as Vonnegut's changed once I decided to accept the facts of evolution and the happenstance from which natural selection picks its winners. Take the miraculous out of the world and, then, one must accept the facts or go crazy. This is why so many who accept the miraculous go around proclaiming how crazy the world is or how horrible life is. They keep wanting to be transported into a better world, even though it means their dying to get there. In truth, life is very understandable, if mean, once one accepts the biological processes that drive human behavior.

But let Vonnegut speak. He captures the change with such humor and precision. In Breakfast, the author sometime intrudes himself into the story, and the following passage is something the author is saying about the characters he has created. This follows earlier passages in a preceding chapter in which the author speaks of his having been told he is schizophrenic and speaks of wanting to die.

from BREAKFAST OF CHAMPIONS by Kurt Vonnegut

I had no respect whatsoever for the creative works of either the painter or the novelist. I thought Karabekian [a fictional minimalist] with his meaningless pictures had entered into a conspiracy with millionaires to make poor people feel stupid. I thought Beatrice Keedsler [fictional gothic novelist] had joined hands with other old-fashioned storytellers to make people believe that life had leading characters, minor characters, significant details, insignificant details, that it had lessons to be learned, tests to be passed, and a beginning, a middle, and an end.

As I approached my fiftieth birthday, I had become more and more enraged and mystified by the idiot decisions made by my countrymen. And then I had come suddenly to pity them, for I understood how innocent and natural it was for them to behave so abominably, and with such abominable results: They were doing their best to live like people invented in story books. This was the reason Americans shot each other so often: It was a convenient literary device for ending short stories and books.

Why were so many Americans treated by their government as though their lives were as disposable as paper facial tissues? Because that was the way authors customarily treated bit-part players in their made-up tales.

And so on.

Once I understood what was making America such a dangerous, unhappy nation of people who had nothing to do with real life, I resolved to shun storytelling. I would write about life. Every person would be exactly as important as any other. All facts would also be given equal weightiness. Nothing would be left out. Let others bring order to chaos. I would bring chaos to order, instead, which I think I have done.

If all writers would do that, then perhaps citizens not in the literary trades will understand that there is no order in the world around us, that we must adapt ourselves to the requirements of chaos instead.

It is hard to adapt to chaos, but it can be done. I am living proof of that: It can be done.

[Things haven’t changed much, have they? For me, it was the black and white movies I loved as a kid. I realized eventually that I thought that life could be changed by a major speech by a major character (think Jimmy Stewart in "Mr. Smith Goes To Washington") or that a critical, very dramatic moment of denouement would altar the course of my life or someone else's life. One lives dramatically under such delusions, posing and making speeches, rather than getting down to work. The alcoholic is specially susceptible to those beliefs. Pay close attention to people who are drunk. You'll catch them at it.

Even more thrilling to me is when we add in what Steven Hawking just wrote in The Grand Design: our bodies operate by the same physical laws that direct the Cosmos, and we are as determined by natural laws as is the Universe. As he says, "...we are all biological machines. Free will is an illusion." That means, not only are we acting as if we are characters in books or plays, but we imagine we have some choice in the matter about being the characters we are, when in all truthfulness, we are who we are by genetic accident and nurture, both of which have created, create and continually tweek the synaptic patterns through which we receive the world into ourselves and by which our actions in the world are directed.

I know this seeming chaos is scary to some people, but until we accept it, we'll remain children, frightened and rejecting of the world as it is, living in childhood fantasies rather than in reality.]

2011-05-02T12:23:00.001-07:00

ON BIN LADENS' DEMISE:

Did anyone notice the most vituperative and dogawful response by public figures was by a Christian with a supposedly loving god, i.e. the fundamentalist Mike Huckabee?

I'm also glad the deed is done, that justice is done, but only a Christian, I think, would get pleasure at imagining an enemy burning forever in a lake of fire with all the accompanying suffering that would entail. Why are these Christians (who plan and hope for an early and rapturous release from their suffering—why do they suffer so?) so full of rage? Why does a belief in a loving god create such unloving thoughts in them? It's all a mystery, isn't it?
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

2010-12-30T10:05:00.000-08:00

CONSCIOUSNESS

Here's something by Steven Pinker about consciousness, free will and determinism.

2010-12-17T15:19:00.000-08:00

FREE WILL AND DETERMINISM

Here's the total picture on the World Pantheism Movement website about free will and determinism—all my thoughts as well as the thoughts of other bright-minded men and women.

2010-12-08T12:25:00.000-08:00

FREE WILL IS A FEELING, NOT A REALITY

Hey! I'm getting there, to the robot self brain flow. The following is another entry on the World Pantheism Website:

Walt writes: A FAAP Free-Willist asserts that ultimately all our choices are determined in a physicalist way by nerve action potentials, etc. but that for all practical purposes, (due to irreducible complexity) we have free will, or what is operationally indistinguishable from free-will.

I would not say FAPP "we have free will." Free will is traditionally defined as the conscious human animal control of our human behaviors. What FAPP is saying in reality is that because no computer can copy a mind well enough to duplicate and/or predict a human act (a human act as understood as a series of synaptic firings), then to that computer (which does not possess a consciousness function via language that corresponds to "I"), the action would automatically be channeled into a category or storage function that would register as "misunderstood and/or random activity" versus another category that would be counted as "understood and predictable behavior i.e. copyable behavior". Since to that computer all human activity would be counted as "misunderstood and/or random behavior", no human behavior can be counted as copyable behavior. Free will and determinism do not exist for an unconscious computer. Only copyable or nonsense behavior as recorded in its memory banks.

Taking consciousness out of the discussion eliminates the concepts of free will and determinism. Only consciousness through language can assign meaning to those words. It's the paradox.

The human brain, because it must understand other human activities so as to respond to those behaviors appropriately for survival purposes, functions as if there is an understandable behavior (purposive function) operating in the counterpart it observes outside itself. So the default mechanism operating in the brain is assigned the words FREE WILL by all the robots operating on the global environment, whereas what an individual brain is actually doing is interpreting and responding to stimuli which a computer would send into the "misunderstood and/or random behavior" memory bank. A computer can not generate an appropriate response to any human activity whereas the human brain, because its program is identical to the program operating in its human counterpart, imagines its response to the other human brain as a FREELY WILLED behavior. It experiences its responses to the OTHER as self-generated behavior because it senses its actions as occuring within its carcass. The SENSATION or FEELING of SELF-GENERATED ACTIVITY is interpreted, via language, as a free will activity because the computer brain can't catch itself being a computer, but it can use consciousness to label its felt activities as free will activities when, in all actuality, the brain is just a computer, with quantum capabilities, responding to another computer with quantum capabilities outside of its housing or carcass.

Can I try to say this more succinctly? Yes, maybe: The brain is a computer which feels itself functioning. The sensation caused by its functioning gives the brain a sense that it controls those activities. The brain's feeling of its own functions is consciously encapsulated in the words FREE WILL which it has assigned to those sensations of function that it experiences. Just as we assign the word "love" to a set of physiological sensations we experience so we assign the words "free will" to the physiological sensations of computation we experience.

2010-12-07T09:39:00.000-08:00

BEYOND FREEDOM AND DIGNITY

Paul, you wrote: Even the messages you have just written contain values. You seem to value freedom from instinct, rationality, and science highly. Yet these too are "labels for the electrochemical biases (i.e. emotions) which drive or control human decisions." If you are just a robot, why would you value these? Which part of your robot-self is rooting for them and why?

Freedom value? Probably my brain is reacting through the settings that were created in its quantum functions as a child when my parents divorced and when, possibly, I was locked in closets as a child as punishment. My mother was locked in closets as punishment. I know (speaking as my brain) that when I was 1 or 2, my mother used to tie a card table down over my crib so that I was imprisoned while she left the St. Louis apartment to run errands and to meet with sailors while my father was at work. So I believe the electrochemical settings in my brain physically crave "freedom of movement", probably in the same way that a tiger captured in the wild prowls his zoo cage. And don't forget my adult experience that night in the jail basement when I was locked in a small padded cell and doused with buckets of ice water.

See? I'm describing my values as electrochemical settings (which they are) created by environment and genes and not as human choice values. A value is only an emotional setting for the regulation of the mechanics of the human animal.

My wish is to undermine all values, to show them to be mere electrochemical settings. Once the human animal has that idea in brain, what brain would die or kill for an electrochemical setting? At root, that freedom setting (i.e. value), if it must be so described, is probably tied deeply to my survival instincts. Also the brain that calls itself I must value science and rationality because those intellectual habits led it to understand its human condition as a robot in a hostile environment where people use values to kill one another. So all three of the values my brain seems to emphasize have to do with its survival in a hostile environment. It is the brain that calls itself I that instinctively employs these electrochemical settings, not the conscious I that the brain creates through language. I see the I of myself as an observer of the brain robot, in touch with that brain at one remove, unable to do anything but observe and comment.

The commentary function is really vital to the brain that calls itself I. The I function allows the brain robot to gather more and less-immediate survival data so the brain's I function is of some real value to the brain. At this very moment, it's using its I function to speak with you about its status in the world. It probably hopes that this interchange with your brain will add something of survival value to its memory base.

Again, the brain that calls itself I asks you to understand that it is speaking as it does so that it can see back into itself with ever more clarity. It's probably trying to escape the free will illusion that speaking of itself as I gives to its language and its interchanges with you. The better the brain can escape the free will illusion that the use of "I" creates, the better it can be in touch with its instinctual settings and emotional biases. Probably, the better it knows itself, the safer it feels.

Again, speaking more traditionally, I believe that if the brain begins to speak to itself as a robot rather than as a free will "I", some new electrochemical connections may form out of the quantum effects of the process called thinking which might actually alter the frontal lobes' connections (electrochemical pathways) to the limbic system and sensory devices so as to create a new reality for itself which, through consciousness, would be more directly connected to its instinctual functions.

As I said, when I growl, "Damn all human values," I'm aware of some pretty interesting feelings that arise in my body, feelings of freedom and distance from humanity and humanity's gruesome ways of doing things. But that distance also frightens me because its such a lonely place... speaking for my brain, that is, and not as the free will conscious "I". My brain suggests that your brain try such thought patterns on for size.

By the way, by this way of speaking, I'm suddenly made conscious of a possible connection between this way of speaking and the writings of Beckett or Kafka, both of whom attracted my brain during some of those most disturbing years of my life which led to my suicide attempt and alcoholism. Fortunately, being sober allows me to play in their mental fields without the terror my brain used to feel.

Finally, I want any who read this to understand that I'm not a split personality. I'm very aware of what I'm trying to do and to achieve, speaking, that is, as an interpreter for my brain functions.

2010-12-02T09:49:00.000-08:00

ANOTHER IN THE HUNDREDS OF WAYS OF SAYING THE SAME THING

Ron,

I think my perspective on this subject is a result of my past versus my present circumstances. When I reflect back to those days of drinking and feeling powerless which led to my intentionally speeding around a curve and crashing my Volkswagen, I can see that without having any conscious philosophical position on my situation at that time, I was FEELING powerless and hopeless and utterly in the hands of fate—deterministic.

I recall that a young friend asked me as I was beginning my psychological journey from those pits, "Do you feel like life just happens to you?" It was the perfect question at the perfect time because I suddenly FELT my predicament to the bone and answered, "Yeah."

My escape from those suicidal depths through counseling was gaining the FEELING that I AM NOT POWERLESS (the feelings about myself that my childhood had engendered in me), but that I can do something to alter my FATE. Empowerment, I think the ladies call it.

Paradoxical indeed that nowadays I can intellectually accept the idea that my decisions are being made for me by the electrochemical processes operating in my brain, rather than by my thoughts, but the FEELING of powerless does not accompany that awareness, whereas in the past I had the FEELING of being powerless without having an accompanying intellectual awareness of determinism. Perhaps, it's because I now trust my body to make the right decisions which is the result of a recovery in counseling that leaned heavily on processing my grief, i.e. emotional rather than rational processes. Thus I can believe firmly in the deterministic nature of my body's decision mechanisms while escaping any feelings of hopelessness that others might feel when confronted by determinism.

2010-11-23T10:18:00.000-08:00

POETRY AND THE DETERMINED MIND

Joe Bescop said (on the Pantheism website):

"Most of the arts require a focused mind, without which, the physical mechanisms tend to become as dysfunctional as the unfocused mind.

"I find with the musical and literary arts this is the case in my practices--more so in the musical than literary arena."

I replied:

At 73 (just had a birthday last month), I notice I've lost the capacity for poetic concentration. It was concentration (Joe's focused mind) that led to my best poetry. It's a state of mind out of which arises metaphorical and happy connections about concrete objects in the material world. Sometimes, however, poems came with me out of sleep. All I needed to do was write the words down and arrange them on the page to look like poetry.

The following is one such poem which was selected for Intro 9, a collection of the best poetry to come out of writing programs around the US that year:

EXPLORATION BY CANOE

The savages had left them.
By accident, by searching, hidden
in bushes, we found them—
canoes of animal skin.
Where water was stillest, we pushed in,
then worked out where it ran swiftest.
Someone had lost our maps—
by a not knowing, we got along.

This river we've not seen the end of
empties to a sea we've not tested,
a sea horizon we must think beyond—
over its edge another place to go or,
up, an endless black the stars gleam through
like small hopes we feel inside of us that say,
Yes. Our boats are working out a long journey.
From this river, the sea's imagination away
and beyond that the endless black or…
over the edge in our animal skin canoes!

I just now realize how much determinism is in that poem which I wrote while a believer in AA. Most fascinating about this concentration process (call it meditative too) is that when the poet focuses purely on a physical activity, like flying a kite, and, following that line of concentration, emotively and accurately describes the physical situation, he often discovers that his brain is talking, giving him words, about an intellectual process that evokes similar feelings. Making the "I" conscious of a connection between the feeling brain and outside world.

Thus a poem I wrote about flying a kite as a child, many years later I understood as a search for God, at the end of which my line came down with the kite, and I came "to lay my line along the earth". I can still recall the powerful way those lines felt when they struck into my consciousness, accompanied by powerful feelings of RIGHTNESS. That process is so powerful a feeling that ancient poets often thought they were possessed by a spirit of poetry. What interests me, nowadays, when the poems no longer come my way, is how a physical activity can equate emotionally to a mental process through the act of accurately and emotionally describing the physical world. It's got to be as powerful as early humanoids felt when they began to become conscious of the physical world they lived in. Thus internal emotional states took on spiritual clothing that we are only just now beginning to unravel.

MORE OF SAME LATER...

In a discussion of poetic inspiration on another thread, I got another slant on free will, consciousness and determinism. It is that poetry, art and music are the means by which the body speaks about its connections within itself and to the world outside of itself. Since most good poetry arises mystically, through deep concentration, and is concerned with discussing physical objects, as metaphor, and the body's relationships to that metaphorical and physical world, I'd say that good poetry is free of the "I-ness" quality of consciousness... whereas more abstract and intellectual "I" conscious poetry is not that good, doesn't resonate with the body. How often in writers writing about writing does one come across the idea that one needs to get away from abstractions and get into the material world with metaphors rooted in the material world? Through poetic inspiration I derive another argument that the human species has little free will since free will is located in consciousness whereas poetry is located in pre-conscious connections in the synaptic landscape.

If the body can write poetry without need of consciousness, why does it need consciousness to make other types of decisions? Decisions are always first a feeling in the body (like poetry) which then through activation of the body parts are realized in the real world in such a way as to allow observers to judge the intent and purpose of the actor's behavior. Emotional decisions can be made and not acted upon if other factors, such as fear or shyness or love, hem in the potential for action in the physical world.

Poetry is powerful because it speaks to the emotional parts of the brain where all decisions are ultimately made, and, again, if poetry can, through inspiration arise without conscious intent, and then influence another body to action, where does the power of decision rest... as we normally think of it? And if poetry has this unconscious power to arise unasked into consciousness and, then, to influence personal behavior and, by transmission, influence the decisions of other listeners, why not recognize that all language operates exactly as poetic language operates? And language began I believe with naming things. Before that, human life was all feeling, with no access to language. It's this power of consciousness that continually obscures our discussions of free will and makes us think we have conscious power over the emotions that deeply make our decisions for us.

In a discussion of poetic inspiration on another thread, I got another slant on free will, consciousness and determinism. It is that poetry, art and music are the means by which the body speaks about its connections within itself and to the world outside of itself. Since most good poetry arises mystically, through deep concentration, and is concerned with discussing physical objects, as metaphor, and the body's relationships to that metaphorical and physical world, I'd say that good poetry is free of the "I-ness" quality of consciousness. Whereas more abstract and intellectual "I" conscious poetry is not that good, doesn't resonate with the body. How often in writers writing about writing does one come across the idea that one needs to get away from abstractions and get into the material world with metaphors rooted in the material world? Through poetic inspiration I derive another argument that the human species has little free will since free will is located in consciousness whereas poetry is located in pre-conscious connections in the synaptic landscape.<br /> <br /> If the body can write poetry without need of consciousness, why does it need consciousness to make other types of decisions? Decisions are always first a feeling in the body (like poetry) which then through activation of the body parts are realized in the real world in such a way as to allow observers to judge the intent and purpose of the actor's behavior. Emotional decisions can be made and not acted upon if other factors, such as fear or shyness or love, hem in the potential for action in the physical world.<br /> <br /> Poetry is powerful because it speaks to the emotional parts of the brain where all decisions are ultimately made, and, again, if poetry can, through inspiration arise without conscious intent, and then influence another body to action, where does the power of decision rest... as we normally think of it? And if poetry has this unconscious power to arise unasked into consciousness and, then, to influence personal behavior and, by transmission, influence the decisions of other listeners, why not recognize that all language operates exactly as poetic language arises? It's this power of consciousness that continually obscures our discussions of free will and makes us think we have conscious power over the emotions that deeply make our decisions for us.

Cancel

2010-11-15T06:53:00.000-08:00

ARGUMENT FOR A TEXTBOOK

Lily and Graham,

Before you get too deeply invested in your opposition to the facts about dominance hierarchies which is another name for "intrinsic hierarchical structures", I implore you to read Buss's The Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology". Specially Part V which is entitled "GROUP LIVING" and, specifically, Chapter 23, "Dominance, Status and Social Hierarchies".

I believe we human animals must accept (1) that we are just like all other animals that have survived via evolved instinctual mechanisms like dominance hierarchies or (2) that we are a special creation outside of the animal kingdom. Evolutionary psychology, which sticks to what can be observed and tested and, thus, is outside of pleasant moral considerations that make us human animals feel good about ourselves, reveals that we are buried deeply in our animal heritage and are not outside of or beyond our evolved animal natures.

We human animals sometimes catch ourselves anthropomorphizing our fellow mammals. The interesting thing about evolutionary psych is that it doesn't allow us to anthropomorphize our fellow mammals. It pays us humans the opposite compliment by animalizing or instinctualizing our human behaviors. The following is a short passage from Buss's "Introduction" to the evolutionary psychology textbook which goes a little way toward explaining why we don't catch ourselves being the animals we are:

Instincts are invisible to our intuitions, even as they generate them. They are no more accessible to consciousness than our retinal cells and line detectors but are just as important in manufacturing our perceptions of the world. As a species, we have been blind to the existence of these instincts, not because we lack them but precisely because they work so well. Because they process information so effortlessly and automatically, their operation disappears unnoticed into the background. Moreover, these instincts structure our thought and experience so powerfully we mistake their products for features of the external world: Color, beauty, status, friendship, charm—all are computed by the mind and then experienced as if they were objective properties of the objects they are attributed to. These mechanisms limit our sense of behavioral possibility to choices people commonly make, shielding us from seeing how complex and regulated the mechanics of choice is. Indeed, these mechanisms make it difficult to imagine how things could be otherwise. As a result, we take normal behavior for granted. We do not realize that normal behavior needs to be explained at all. [The boldface passage is my doing.]

When I understand reality and my place in it through these findings of evolutionary psychology, I feel profoundly my place in the Cosmos, so completely a part of the natural world that even my choices are as instinctual as a gazelle's. In those moments of vision (like right now) I feel a near mystic oneness with nature. I am at one with nature and not separated from it through some magical power which other animals don't have. The only difference between me and any other animals is the evolutionary complexity of the sound system by which I communicate with my fellow human animals and ruminate about my instinctive behaviors. I feel another sort of mystic power when my instincts cause me to communicate with you two as I'm doing just now. I feel this writing instinct so powerfully that I imagine I had a choice about writing these comments..,

BUT I DON'T or DIDN'T!

MORE ON DETERMINISM, FREE WILL AND HAPPINESS

In a later entry on the pantheism website, I added the next commentary.

I wrote: Evolutionary psychology, which sticks to what can be observed and tested and, thus, is outside of pleasant moral considerations that make us human animals feel good about ourselves, accepts that we are buried deeply in our animal heritage and are not outside of or beyond our evolved animal natures.

I'm 73, and I have personally experienced a struggle between my genetic attributes and my cultural sensibilities. I was born with a heavy dose of genetic material from my artsy-fartsy mother, complicated by a heavy cultural dose from my loving grandmother who churched me and who raised me between the ages of 4 and 8, and then, further complicated by a cultural dosing from a traditional Catholic stepmother who was psychologically and physically abusive. I understand nurture to be an alteration by chemical processes of my genetic base, a combination of which created the chemically-derived instinctual person I now am.

For a long portion of my life, I struggled with accepting my genetic inheritance. Here was I, genetically bent toward an artsy-fartsy nature in a man's world, verbal by nature and very much aware of my emotional life. I am empowered by talking about my emotional life with other people. I'm into self-revelation to the point of it hampering my interactions with more traditional males who have no idea what I'm talking about. All of my chemically derived traits separated me from the more genetically average male personality who succeeds in American life in the role of father, provider and husband. Fortunately for me, I'm not attracted to males or I'd be as gay as you please and having also to deal with that. As it is, I had a lot of trouble accepting my nature which did not fit comfortably into the machine shop, factory working life I lived while trying to make it as a writer.

I blamed myself for being what, by genes and nurture, I am. This is why I found evolutionary psychology to be so helpful. Instead of hating myself as a flawed male, I'm able to see myself as genetically determined to be what I am. I found that by honest acceptance of who I am (rather than by fighting it) I learned I'm nothing to be ashamed of. With my happy acceptance of genetic determinism, I even came upon a woman whose own genetic makeup causes her to cherish a male who has strong female instincts when it comes to self-revelation. Many women thought they liked that trait in me (it's poetic) until they discovered the other parts of that instinctual nature which made me a poor role-player when it came to protecting and providing. It takes a truly free and self-actualizing woman to appreciate me. However, I should point out that by accepting my genetic makeup and not being afraid of it, I have been able to contribute more in the protecting and providing side of my current partnership. In fact, I discovered that the best sort of relationship is founded in mutual protecting and providing rather than in traditional roles. Took three divorces to learn that.

Now this brings me to the idea of statistical analysis of human traits. Women hate evolutionary psychology because they think that if they're determined by their female natures, they'll be shut out from positions of power or from scientific pursuits. They fear this finding, even though it's not universally true. So, in order to feel good about themselves, to feel empowered, they reject the facts buried in the findings of evolutionary psych and grasp hold of blank slate, free will hypotheses. They're encouraged in their rejection of the facts by insecure males who tell women what they want to hear in order to grab hold of an insecure female, and they are attacked by another sort of insecure male (think Rush Limbaugh—I do) who hates women for asking him to be more of a male and less of the queer he actually is. [Aside to gays: I don't use the word "queer" with any malice toward homosexuality but to turn it's traditional nastiness back upon Rush and his kind who are so dishonest about their own homosexual tendencies.]

All any of us has to do is accept who we are and be comfortable with the strengths of who we are as individuals. Granted, perhaps, the statistics suggest that women, on average, won't be scientifically apt, but neither are males, on average, scientifically apt. Males sure like to tinker with mechanical gadgets, but that's not science. However, statistics will reveal that some females are quite good at science or at running a company... but not all women. It behooves each and every one of us to find out our own strengths and to play to our strengths rather than our weaknesses. If some woman is a bang up housewife and child-rearer, let her revel in that and let each of us revel in it too rather than beat each other up with labels. If a man is a poor provider, let him accept that genetic and cultural sport and cherish his other traits. Why must each of us want to be what we are not and to hate ourselves for being who we are?

I suggest that instead of allowing ourselves to be emotionally determined by the fact of determinism, we find out about our true and INDIVIDUAL natures, accept ourselves for what we are and discover peace in the world harmony such honesty would bring about.

2010-11-10T08:00:00.000-08:00

PANTHEIST WEBSITE: THE NATURE OF TIME

Peter,

I like your thoughts. I see the seeds in it of the way I often see the world as divided between these huge concepts which don't seem to exist in the world in a way that my senses can access and the real world that triggers my survival behaviors and make me an animal more than a philosopher..

I've had an idea for some time about the origin of time consciousness in the human species, how it evolved quite intimately connected to biology. It offers a sensory base to time that precedes conceptual ideas about time by locating time in the biology of the brain.

Here it is. Predation would be at the root of our time sense, in that any prey which escapes an attack before it is actually in the jaws of its predator, can, in a sense, be said to be seeing into the future. The fear that a prey feels and which causes its running, freezing or any escape procedure is an anticipation of a future event i.e. the arrival of a predator. Throughout geological time various species have extended the zone of anticipation, the contemplation of the future, so to speak. In a sense, humans are successful adaptions because they've run anticipation of danger out toward the farthest future to an astonishing degree. Doesn't this mean that the physical structures in our brains could be said to have naturally generated our sense of time?

But, our ability to anticipate danger far into the future seems to alleviate any sense of fear about those distant events... like the collapse of our global environment and loss of potable water. We poor humans still don't respond until the "predator" is at the doorstep. And, of course, what about war?

2010-11-08T09:56:00.000-08:00

FREE WILL DOESN'T EXIST—WHAT ONE DOES IS ALWAYS DETERMINED

The following flows out of a continuing discussion on the World Pantheism website:

Graham wrote: What is real about ‘I’? I ask ‘ when does control start or finish in any situation?’ If we have free will then why would we allow any psychological suffering to ourselves? We could just say ‘ this is horrible, I’ll end it’. I tend to do this, ironically, by accepting that I have no control.

As I see it, language brought the I along with it. It's the key feature of self-awareness. I imagine the human species had language (very primitive) before it had self-consciousness. Historically, humans probably had 30 or 40 sounds, like other animals did and do, they could produce—things to do with warnings and alerts and anger or love (i.e. grunts suggesting procreation). By some process (still under debate) human word symbols grew more more numerous and more complex and language's recursive nature (maybe) created self-consciousness. Somehow we became aware of ourselves being aware. (I just had the thought that maybe we became aware of our brute's being a brute rather than of ourselves being aware.) Anyhow, the question of this thread is "did this trick of language called self awareness (I-ness) also break us free of instinct or is being aware of ourselves just another deterministic quality of being a brute?"

Critically, your solution to your own suffering is key to many philosophies and it also is another proof of determinism. In AA we learned to "let go and let God". Buddhists also can speak of "letting go". Letting go in AA was also associated with the concept just don't think about it. Almost all philosophies contain an answer to conscious suffering that has to do with escaping it by leaving it out of the equation. The fact that consciousness creates emotional anguish reveals that thinking about a situation is futile and pain-producing. For example, in my case, I deeply felt that without alcohol, I couldn't be funny and being funny was my key to getting laid. It was a deep-seated electrochemical response. Certain situations in mixed company would trigger the feelings along with the thoughts connected to the anguish. The situation created the feelings and the feelings found the associated thoughts. The conflict between my staying sober versus wanting to approach and humor women always produced anguished feelings when I confronted it. In AA they rationalize that anguish as the feeling of "powerlessness"—fear we won't get what we want and fear that we'll lose what we have—powerlessness in the face of reality.

Through sober time and repeatedly encountering powerless situations, my body learned synaptic patterns that led it to stop thinking about things that it had no control over, which is just about everything in the Cosmos. My body became conditioned to healthier responses. Since the information about "letting go" came to it from outside its awareness, my brute can take no credit for its receiving the information into its conscious element and memorizing it. Nor can it take credit for being forced to encounter its powerlessness over and over until it formed new mental connections that led to new instincts forming that related to humorous behaviors, women and social situations with mixed company.

All the I of my brute has ever been able to do is observe what's going on with its brute and discuss it with itself and with other I's in its experience. Like you, my brute has learned the synaptic solution to conflict—acceptance of conditions beyond its control. It's I realizes what the brute has learned, but its I did not teach the brute to do anything. It only acted as an interpreter through which my brute heard of a potential solution to its troubles, i.e. sobriety. Always... always... always, in counseling and in life, the feelings change before the behavior changes and, then, the consciousness explains to itself and to other conscious I's what happened.

My years of one on one counseling proves it to me. I cried a lot, deep sobbing moments when recalled experience caused powerful moments of grief to engulf me. Thinking about intellectual concepts was never useful. It was recalling from my past in strong detail experiences which, then, caused emotions from the past to sweep through me. I could see no purpose in all my crying and re-feeling of experience while the process was going on. None at all. I do know that after these moments of deep feeling, my brute would walk out of its counselor's office altered in some way. Everything in the environment took on deeper colors for it. It felt deeply refreshed. Its voice came from a deeper center in the chest. Voice overheard reverberated differently.

Through a long process of grieving (feeling only) my brute became changed. The proof that my brute had changed is evidenced to its interpreter the I of me in that the brute is now happily married after three failed attempts. I continually recognize that my brute feels but does not respond to his penchant to desire incest victims and other damaged women to have sex with. He's contented with his present situation. If he was not, he'd find some way to ruin it. Not only that my brute's spouse is delighted at the weird humor of the brute who I interpret for. She likes the humor that my brute gives me to offer her through his non-verbal slapstick as well as the words his humors offer up to her through verbal means.

A key step in my getting sober was in my body learning to deal with situations in which was triggered the feeling of powerlessness. People who are damaged as children, when they are truly powerless over what adults do to them, often have deeply seated psychological responses to situations in which they feel powerless as adults. Any amateur psychologist knows that damaged people's responses to powerlessness can range from blushing to murder.

My view is that the conscious I is an interpreter for its brute's behavior. Consciousness is out of the behavior loop even though it is very aware of the information informing the decisions its brute-self is making. Because the human animal is more aware of and can rationalize (i.e. think about and discuss) its behaviors, the conscious I imagines it has more control than it actually has. Underneath consciousness, the brute is still humming along as it always has, making decisions through emotional triggers that fire or don't fire according to basic survival features still active today. Consciousness merely interprets its behavior to other brutes in its vicinity and even to its own brute.

In short, thinking about possible outcomes causes anguish while ignoring one's thoughts and heeding one's instincts leads to successful conclusions. Mental states, if one is willing to let go of thinking and trust the brute's feelings (i.e. instincts), will always work themselves out successfully.

Lastly, my interpretations run from one subject to the next as my brute's whims lead it. Time flies. My brute wants to get on to its math lessons which give it pleasure. My brute wants me to stop here and go to math. So it signals this need to change activities through a sensation I interpret as impatience. I'm aware in my function as language master and interpreter for the brute that so much of this essay is incomplete and ill-formed. IT DOESN'T FEEL RIGHT. So another piece of the brute wants me to keep working over his essay. Even the instincts for language are influenced by the brute's feeling-based decision mechanisms. Even as I seem to be free of him, through language, he informs even the way I interpret his needs and wants. Which brutish feeling will win out? Will I go on to math or keep slaving over this essay. I am never free of him, the brute. He causes my every action.

2010-11-07T08:02:00.000-08:00

MORE FREE WILLIES AND DETERMINISTS

Ron,

Thanks for the response, Ron. My brain has never felt sharper, except in remembering the faces of all its favorite movie stars. I think your basic, clear explanation about predictability clearly reveals why one can be deterministic or free willist even with all the evidence in. However, let me respond and add more considerations.

The brain is also rolling dice when it acts but is much more deterministic in result than the dice because in the millions of synaptic firings going on simultaneously in the brain, only a few (7-10) will make the decision and initiate action. If I know a person well enough and that person is facing a familiar situation, I'll be more accurate in predicting their response than I will in predicting the dice roll. For example, I knew a man who always checked with his wife before he'd take an independent action. By watching him, I learned how better to get along with a wife. In fact he was so consistent that some of us could make good natured jokes about the situation. I doubt whether I'd be so accurate in deciding what a dice roll would come up as. And how many of us know people who have favorite expressions for certain situations. Like God Bless.

Further, mental damage will groove compulsions in people so that they'll repeat certain actions or words frequently. All we have to do is limit supposed free will by a tiny bit, and humans can become even more predictable in many ways, even more predictable than a dice roll.

Another proof of the deterministic nature of human behavior is how well we know our friends. Think in how many ways we know our friends and their actions. The fact that we can recognize our friends and their behaviors and proclivities among strangers is a solid proof of the deterministic nature of the human brain. We hardly notice how habitual their behavior is. Think how often one little difference in a friend's behavior causes us to worry and to ask them questions or to ask friends if they've noticed a change in our mutual acquaintance? In fact the behaviors of our friends are so predictable and familiar to us that the only behavior that really gets our attention is a behavior that stands out from the familiar behavior. It stands out and screams for attention. Differences from the deterministed is what alerts our brains.

Because our brains respond so automatically to the deterministic world they live in, we are hardly aware of that determinism because the brain concentrates attention on the new and different. We don't know strangers and our brains focus on them and notices how different their behavior seems. Since we encounter more strangers than friends during a day, our brain is pickled in the unpredictable. It's always the odd act or different behavior that gets the brain's attention. That's the thing the brain must evaluate, the thing that stands out from all the deterministic events that bombard it. So, of course, a human brain, after a few years of practice, hardly notices just how many deterministic events it observes and ignores. It always notices the new thing. It's function is to notice the new thing and learn whether to trust or distrust that new thing. So, again, noticing free will is the default setting of a brain. It hardly notices how determined life is. It ignores the safe and predictable which is what most of life is.

2010-11-05T10:22:00.000-07:00

MORE OF DISCUSSION OF FREE WILL VERSUS DETERMINISM

Walt wrote: George has written that he found adopting his 'robotic' stance has made him feel more empowered (George, correct me if I misunderstood your point).

Walt, I described the moment that I (identical with the concept brain) realized that it (identical with the concept he) was a robot. The brain that is I/me woke up one morning, realized suddenly that its first conscious thoughts were not freely chosen by itself but that thoughts arrived with this quality it possessed called consciousness. This made it consciousness of the fact that it was always functioning even when it slept and had been functioning since the day that it became viable enough to function on in its own. That realization was not its own invention. The realization resulted from a couple of years of reading evolutionary psych which prepped the brain (identical with the concept of me) for the realization of its predicament. Next it experienced a nerve-tingling, joyous feeling accompanied shortly thereafter by a set of words that arose automatically into its consciousness function to explain the feeling it was experiencing. The words were exactly, "I've never felt so free!" The connection of emotional biases to language units caused that set of words to arise and make sense of its situation in the world along with the psychological and emotional acceptance of its plight.

The operant word in that sentence about freedom was "felt". Since emotional biases make all our decisions for us, that's a key realization about free will. Let me also call an emotional bias a set of synaptic connections that runs through the limbic system and into other areas of the brain, making them function together. Any emotional bias will always fire up when the brain (beneath consciousness) in its monitoring of the outside world in search for safe behavior in any situation randomly considers that bias along with many other emotional biases that are triggered by the familiarity of the situation to a past situation. If any bias or set of biases becomes the preferred bias upon which the brain acts in any situation, the set of words connected with that bias will also arise into consciousness shortly after the bias becomes active as a set of behaviors visible to the outside world. The brain follows this line of authority: observe, react (select safe behavior) connect words to it (become conscious of what its observed and acted upon).

Consciousness is a secondary characteristic of the function by which long term memories are formed. The more powerful the learning experience, the more it will stick in memory and be available to consciousness in similar situations. Another important element in my brain's awareness scenario described above is that from that moment on, this brain (now divulging itself on this page) finds itself possessed of a strong consciousness of and an emotional bias for discussing its robotic behavior in all other situations. The brain that is identical with the meme "I" strongly feels the need to spread these memes about free will and determinism. It has never forgotten that morning because the experience was so powerful. Again: the strength of the emotion in an experiential moment functions to enter the experience and all behaviors attached to it into memory and the words that go along with it too.

So what did the brain experience in that moment. What was it free of? And how does all this go along with my falling into and climbing out of the experiential state, called alcoholism? Paul finds this ability to change, reform, rehabilitate, to be central to his concept of the human condition called free will. To keep it simple, I'll stop here. The answer to Paul's conditions for free will is another lengthy dissertation.

2010-10-31T11:50:00.000-07:00

MORE DEBATE ON THE WORLD PANTHEISM SITE:

Lot's to respond to here. First, I apologize for any too cranky remarks I may have sent Paul Harrison's way. The only thing that got my dander up (the only thing) is that someone named Beth Love entered the site and introduced two topics—hierarchies and where are the women. Dominance hierarchies seemed very much a part of the free will discussion. Then, when Ms. Love positions were debated, she withdrew, and, next, I hear from Paul that it was my continuing interest in free will that is driving people off the site. Since I'm only interested at this time in those issues and most of my free time reading revolves around neuroscience and evolutionary psychology, I felt that I was being asked to quit participating because one angry and cranky woman complained. Paul, I didn't know that numbers are falling and that you are trying to decide why, but, truly, do you think one discussion thread or two can be blamed for falling numbers? Paul, I can find no movement in the history of humankind where schisms haven't occurred. The more intelligent and forceful (argumentative?) the participants, the more likely that differences will appear.

Thom wrote: I just had that déja vue feeling that we are engaged in little more here than that age old freshman psychology debate about "nature vs. nurture".

Thom, when you say that, I see that you don't approach the topic quite as I do. Our genetic structure lays down a whole host of potential neural pathways. Every experience then strikes lines of meaning (i.e. synaptic connections) across those neurons. Unused neurons begin to die off as experience grooves the most used pathways. All through life, nurture alters the neural pathways. Thus the influences of experience upon neural structures and their genetic proclivities both work by first establishing and next altering the neural architecture of the neural pathways. Thus it is both our genes and our experiences that form the electrochemical substrate of each continuing decision. Since both nature and nurture form the basis for each following decision (a decision is an electrochemical action) and then the results of that decision are electrochemically folded into the next decision (in an unbroken chain), I can't see where my brain can claim free will except in the most ruminative way. Imagination can alter the electrochemical settings. Because our brains do imagine future and past situations, they also experience the sensation of having free will even though the human brain is as bound up by genes and experience as a steer waiting to be branded. Even visions and reflections that arise into consciousness are predetermined by preceding electrochemical states.

Interestingly, Thom, believe it our not, I think something Frost wrote years ago about writing and which has stuck with me ever since may be one of the electrochemical settings that became part of my brain's current electrochemical arrangement when it comes to decisions. He wrote that experience is like throwing large stones into a marshy field so that one may, in future, strike lines of meaning across those stones and travel across. That image of the creative process has always seemed to be most accurate. Did I already mention that elsewhere? Old age plays tricks on me.

Walter replied to Ron asking: "Can we define a term which unites the idea of useful fiction and real phenomena?" by writing "I think perhaps the phrase would be "emergent properties."

Walter and Ron, when I read your discussions of "emergent properties", I guess my paragraph above is already accepted and I'm tonguing a loose tooth to feel the pain. Does this mean that you think that free will will emerge fully in time or will it remain an emergent property that can never be fully grasped or realized? If I continue to do tongue my loose tooth, it's because I'm still trying to get the exact description of free will that satisfies me because all around me every day, I talk with people who can't imagine the complexity of their own bound situations in the real world. With humility and because of having spent most of my working life in machine shops, factories and shipyards, I say that sometimes I imagine that I stand on a hill observing the comings and goings of people in a valley who don't have the view I have, and that makes me feel lonely. Thus, to be anywhere where people are at least discussing from the same viewpoint is refreshing. Of course, my imagination also tells me that I'm most likely standing on a foothill and that just behind me, out of sight, are people standing on the mountain who see not only the people in the valley, but me too, with my limited perspective. Not only that, my imagination informs me that down in that valley are others who also imagine that they stand on foothills or mountains from whose preeminence they also look down on me and others. My very best friend in the world says (as did Jacob Bronowski) that imagination is the most important human faculty in the world. He's a creative genius and, in this day and age, pursues a lonely path of self-publishing. The academic world of writers and the commercial writers of hack fiction and poetry and my pal's imaginative world are at odds with one another, and his view is not particularly cherished at the moment. His view remains personal and limited. He doesn't claim to know anything much beyond his own experience of the world. His name is Geoff Peterson and you can find his work on Amazon. His work is highly personalized and very imaginative.

Two more items.

1) I'm still waiting for the remaining free will advocates to show me how a grizzly's seasonal trips to the salmon run are not exercises of free will, given their definition of the phenomenon.

And 2) Thomas wrote: To a physicist trained in reductionism and statistics, the best tests of free will are either-or propositions. Even an individual electron is free to decide which slit it will go through (or both?) in Young's double slit experiment, yet a barrage of those electrons falls into a predictable interference pattern on the other side.

That idea has come up several times in these discussions and something always troubles me about it. Let me see if I can say what that is. It has something to do with perspective. Maybe our perspective is skewed by whether we base our conclusions on observing physical phenomena like the laws of physics at work or physical phenomena like organic brains at work. We assume that discoverable laws are at work behind the phenomena of the physical universe, but when it comes to observed human phenomena, we seem to assume something quite different is at work, and we assume that we will never be able to conclude what drives human behavior, therefore, human behavior, being unpredictable, is free behavior. I can't for the life of me come to that conclusion.

Further, the tester is an observer outside of the situation or entity she is observing. At the moment any decision separate from the observer becomes observable to the observer, the act of decision has already activated the phenomena the observer is testing. Just because the observer can't predict or tell whether the decision is a free act or a determined act does not define that act as a free act. It just tells us the tester needs more information. This is perhaps why Paul would conclude that our discussion is already beyond solution. And perhaps it is beyond our testing, but I say it is a matter of such importance, it's almost as important as was the conclusion that the Earth is round and that Earthpeople are not the center of the Universe. Just how much would human psychology change if humans could see themselves as less guilty and more determined? Would not forgiveness and compassion result from such an observation, fully realized in the human psyche?

Also when one observes a natural event in the world of physics, for example, the observer already assumes that the outcome is determined by preexisting laws which she is trying to discover. However, when observing human behavior, we seem to already assume that there is free will involved in human actions. If we unconsciously assume that humans do or don't have free will before we observe a human being being human, how does that affect our observation? I think we must hypothesize at the outset, by all evidence in the natural world, that humans are not free and then set up our tests to prove that conclusion. I believe all assumptions and discussions before evolutionary psych and modern neuroscience came into existence were biased by the idea that humans possess free will and are responsible individuals.

2010-10-23T17:29:00.000-07:00

A FINAL THOUGHT BEFORE I MAKE HAM AND EGGS FOR DINNER

Another thought rushed in as I was signing off.

Free will is a meme which humans have assigned to a phenomenon which does not exist in the real world. A most fruitful path to follow would be back through time to find the causes of that illusion arising in the brain of the human animal. I'm sure it arose simultaneously with the feeling of injustice in a human animal, the moment when one human first realized that the psychic pain it felt could be connected to the action of another human animal. There is a real connection between that pain-causing activity of one human and the pain of the other human, but that does not make the painful action an act of free will, but it certainly led we humans to assign blame and from blame arose the illusion of free will.

How's that for a flash of thought?

2010-10-23T15:59:00.000-07:00

THE DEBATE CONTINUES

Walter Alan Mandell said:

George writes:" It bears repeating... evolutionary psychology has been the lens though which the world culture, from top to bottom, makes sense."

With which I partially agree. But I must also point out there there many human cultures, each of which plays out our common genetically inherited drives, and emotions, and talents in different ways. While the commonalities between all cultures may well be genetically selected for, and hence hardwired into our species, there is little or no evidence that the many differences between different cultures is genetically based. Evolutionarily selected genetic determinism goes just so far. There is also cultural determinism. And ecological determinism. And economic determinism. And perhaps even linguistic determinism ---- while all languages with some effort can be made to express any concept, each language forces its speakers to think in terms of certain categories --- for example highly gender typed gender languages such as Spanish or French force their speakers to associate a masculine or feminine gender to even inanimate objects. And languages with complex tenses force their speakers to automatically think of time in complex ways.

Or to put it more simply, yes, genes determine human culture(s), but so do memes.

To which George "the I of me" replied:

Walter,

I agree with you 100% and your "meme" settings with their accompanying emotional valences in the brain's synaptic landscape are subsumed under the general heading of the "influences of... nurture" which I also allow for in a deterministic landscape. Even at the unconscious level, every sensory impression (with sufficient strength) that reaches the brain, is recorded and makes an impression on the electrochemical hardware of the synaptic pathways. Of course, the bigger influences are the impressions with the biggest emotional baggage. Thus our place of birth with all its accompanying impressions (language, geography, family home and faces, playgrounds and streets, familiar odors and sights, et cetera will have an enormous electrochemical influence on brain structure and predispose us to act and believe in certain ways.

One of the things I'd most like to accept is that all the debating in the world is not going to much change anything (it would allow me to relax and shut up) except a sliver of good feeling arises at the thought that every idea I put into the melting pot of global exchange might subconsciously influence the synaptic structure of other brains in the global debate. Then, of course, I realize that my faint hope that I might somehow disengage is foolish in light of my electrochemical settings which predispose me to equivocate and debate. Had it been different my whole life would have been lived differently.

It's very interesting to me that I speak of things that the I of me is and will be doing or hopes to be doing. As if "I" had a choice, but, as far as I can figure it out, I don't. I consider, hope and wish for many sorts of behavior but am not able to do anything that my emotions don't direct me to do. I'd like to imagine I'd make a good non-theistic Buddhist, but when I try to do it, my sense of it is inauthentic and is quickly abandoned. I tried meditation, but it didn't feel authentic. An atheist I am and until something basic changes an atheist I'll remain.

The meme authentic stirs up some interesting ideas in me about free will and consciousness and our sense of being who we are. Perhaps authenticity is the feeling (or sense) that arises when our acts and thoughts are balanced with each other in a synaptic harmony. And inauthenticity is the feeling that is generated when some synapses are in conflict with other synapses within us.

2010-10-23T12:36:00.000-07:00

DOMINANCE HIERARCHIES AND SEEMING INSANITY

Joe, please note several of my previous posts in reference to your position on these matter. In the deepest sense, I agree with you, yet in another I notice your own moral, that is, emotional biases edging into the discussion.

Instead of valuing "inequality" in either a positive or a negative light, we must accept that "inequality is." I agree and I believe that's what you're saying, plus you are objecting to those cultural forces which are trying to eradicate inequality by redistributing wealth? And that's where your own emotional valences come in. It pisses you off! Your sense of entitlement is deeply a part of your own sense of place in the human dominance hierarchy. It's part of your genetic makeup and much of what causes you to value and accept the rewards that you feel ought to accrue to those who win their way up the dominance hierarchy. Your emotions (your value system and behavior triggers) all work together to make up who you are.

I also suggest that those human animals around you who are trying to moderate the situation of unequal wealth distribution on the globe are also demonstrating the sort of stuff you see in monkey tribes where middle-ground individuals seem to wish to moderate extremes and bring a harmony between conflicting individuals.

Me... I seem to be stuck in a place where I'm trying to find emotional contentment (by various rationalizations) in what very little I've achieved, being as how I gave the others of my generation a 23 year head start while I drank and played the artistic type.

There could not be more evidence of the dominance hierarchy at work than in all the ways all the parties in these conversations rationalize and justify their own positions and sense of status in the current cultural hierarchy.

What is interesting to me, the one playing (rationalizing) the outsider role, is that the middle ground of the whole debate is the realization that no one can take any credit about who they are and what they've achieved or for their current status in the global dominance hierarchy. In my deterministic view, everyone is acting according to their inherited genetic makeup and the influences of their nurture upon the chemical switches that activate their every behavior in the current moment. Again, what's confounding about this, is that each of us must continue to rationalize our behaviors in order not to feel out of control. If we didn't imagine that we were responsible for who we are and what we've become, we'd feel out of control and insane which, by the way, is what it felt like to me from about 1966 through 1976 when my psychological makeup was undergoing a hell of a realignment of the synaptic switches of my traditional upbringing and the switches that the culture of the 1960s were activating. I often thought that the world or I or both were crazy. In short, I suppose I'd say that the rationalizations which create in individuals their necessary sense of control are the very rationalizations that lead human beings into disagreement and conflict or...

What makes most of us feel sane inside our individual skulls is what makes the behavior beyond our control sometimes seem insane.

Whataparadox!

Of course my view allows me to imagine that the only reason that things have ever seemed insane is that I didn't have sufficient intellectual tools to comprehend the situation within me and/or my culture. It bears repeating... evolutionary psychology has been the lens though which the world culture, from top to bottom, makes sense.

2010-10-15T08:43:00.000-07:00

FREE WILL, CONSCIOUSNESS AND THE LIVING WORD

More discussions on the World Pantheist Movement website:

Walter I like the way you laid it down in your last entry. I'm sure there's a psychological necessity that we humans feel as if we exercise free will. If I felt my moment to moment activities were not in my control, my existence would be anxiety filled. I'd feel out of control, and having, in my past, felt what it feels like to feel out of control, I'd hate to feel that way all the time, so I do believe it's a psychological necessity for humans to feel they are the captains of their ships. In fact, I feel more in control of my life now that alcohol abuse is a long time back in my past, and I don't feel anxiety during most of a day as I did back then when my fears overwhelmed me. So the sense that I control my existence adds to a calm and mostly worry free emotional existence but, of course, I believe I lived my way to my current sense of well-being and did not think my way to it. Thoughts follow acts. Not the other way around.

Ron, you wrote, Can I intentionally as a conscious act of free will fire a neuron? Yes any time that I choose at random or by a whim,to remember in detail some particular memory.

Yes, but what fired up that synaptic whim or randomly fired up the thought that you are going to consciously go through all your memories in order to choose one memory and bring it to consciousness? Unless you consciously search through all your memories in order to choose one to bring into consciousness, then I maintain, something out of your control triggered your reflection and chose the memory to be experienced or to enter consciousness. I'm absolutely certain that we humans are incapable of stopping our thoughts on a dime (without cause) and deciding to have a memory moment. Something triggered the moment that brought you to experiencing a memory moment.

My view of mental life both as (1) experienced consciously in fragments and (2) as existing in memories stored in synaptic patterns waiting to be called into action and/or consciousness to guide our behaviors in the moment is that it commenced somewhere in the womb when the brain was mature enough to retain a synaptic impression. I truly believe we human animals consciously experience our births, but they're so traumatic that we repress them. Imagine the sensations that accompany being squeezed through that birth canal, being expelled into light and sounds so much different than those we'd had in the womb. Suddenly being hit by unfamiliar smells, sounds, sensations of all kinds. We've all experienced what it's like to be an alien in an alien environment.

Once the brain is mature enough to begin retaining impressions in the womb, it NEVER shuts down. One sensation flows into the next, sleeping or awake, and when we awake each morning out of dreams or out of unconsciousness nights (nights of unremembered dreams) our very first actions are not chosen but are decided by habitual actions or necessities and our conscious thoughts flow right out of sleep to trigger our first conscious thought of the day which triggers the next and the next and the next. Our bodies have been carrying us along for several years before most of us recall our first conscious moment. The body is in charge of our lives long before we come to imagine that we control our bodies. Our bodies are carrying us along and we experience what is going on in fragmented moments of consciousness.

I challenge you to an act of imagination, for I believe it requires imagination to get to the point where you have the moment of aha? and you sense that your body and your consciousness are one, that you are an animal in the human environment, that your body is making all the important decisions that keep you alive and well and content in the human environment of buildings and jobs and crowds. I superimpose an image of a stag in its environment over my imagination of buildings and et cetera. Like a stag I move through my environment, following the lead of my instincts. Consciousness slips away into second place in order of importance. My staglike body is powerful and leading where consciousness follows. It's a pretty powerful image. This imagination moment must transcend the conscious thoughts my words on this page trigger in your consciousness. The imaginative leap must be so powerful that you FEEL it, experience it so that you feel you are landing on a new undiscovered continent or planet.

In recovery from alcohol abuse, I often understood the words of some helpful hint, but until the words penetrated through my consciousness and struck fire in my emotional life, they were a dead set of words. Live words are in touch with the realities of the body and its decisions; they are in direct contact with the emotional triggers that lead our lives for us.

2010-10-14T10:04:00.000-07:00

A REAL FACT OF EXISTENCE FOR ME

The following arises from my discussions on the WPM website:

Paul, you write "George, I'm glad you retracted the "remarkable naivete" comment. The "Paul you are truly disturbed" comment is also way off the mark. I could respond by speculating on the psychological reasons why you seem so obsessively attached to the idea that you and all the rest of us are robots, why you seem compelled to raise the topic is almost every discussion you visit, but I won't. Ad hominem arguments have no bearing on the merits of the arguments here."

Here's why I think (obsess ?) about the problem of free will. If free will is only an illusion, then how can we continue to thin the human herd of dangerous, more aggressive and less inhibited human animals if they are not truly free to be other than they are? I think we have faith in free will because it allows us to rid ourselves of dangerous predators among us without the qualm of conscience biting us. However, since our reactions to dangerous humans among us is also not a free will action and is also determined by psychological factors beyond our control, then the two considerations cancel each other out. But, further, it's pleasant and realistic to hold in memory the idea that the Universe is an amoral and benignly indifferent place to live in. That contact with reality is, to me, a better stance than an idealist, romantic or religious stance that offers comfort through a lie. Better discomfort through the truth than comfort through a lie. Having once been an implacable romantic most of my life, arriving at the truth about free will has brought me a peaceful resolution to my battle with reality. I've now accepted reality and no longer fight it.

2010-10-02T06:24:00.000-07:00

RESPONSE TO A QUESTION ON THE PANTHEISM WEBSITE

"Some of us may use the phrase "The Earth is Sacred, the Universe is Divine" or similar phrases to express our Pantheism.

But what does a Pantheist really mean by using these words?

Although the Pantheist Credo (the WPM Belief statement) states "We revere and celebrate the Universe as the totality of being, past, present and future" and speaks of " our aesthetic and religious feelings about reality", nowhere does it contain the words "sacred" or "divine".

This discussion forum is the place for us to discuss whether the terms "sacred" and "divine" are meaningful in the context of Naturalistic Pantheism, and if they are, just what do they mean.

And my response is?

I have never been a friend of creeds of any kind, and when you ask me about "words" in relation to my behavior system, I'm brought into a personal struggle. As far as I can see, my affiliations have never been based in a shared belief system. I'm a regular on this website because I recognize the intelligence here. I'm a member of the Greater Portland Humanists, but I barely tolerate the reading of Humanist principles with which we begin our Sunday meetings 52 times a year. I identify with the people I see there and with whom I share interesting lunchtime discussions. I love interacting with people who have reached a certain level of self-awareness and Cosmic consciousness even though so many of them leave my piddling consciousness in the dust.

Since I believe that the human animal is a robot whose language life is an adaption for survival by passing on basic information but which plays little role in the minute to minute regulation of human behavior, I guess I act as if intellectual life is really of little importance, and, so, I pay little attention to creeds while I do pay close attention to human behaviors. Thus my infatuation with evolutionary psychology rather then in the study of religious beliefs and creeds.

The study of creeds and the emphasis on creeds would, I think, tend to make someone more or less rigid in his behavior. He would be emphasizing the intellectual rules for his behavior rather than his behavior itself. He could quote from and believe in Jesus and the Sermon on the Mount and, yet, in all his behavior act in a very different manner. A recent study showed that atheists know more about the Bible than do Christians. This is good for us atheists, because it means most Christians are decent folk generally interested in their neighbors rather than in the dogmas of their multitudinous faiths. The dangerous dogmatists are those TV evangelical folk who spend all their time awash in the language of the Bible looking for meaning there rather than in the daily life of America among fellow citizens who all love the Constitution.

I don't know why I am as I am when it comes to my inability to orient my life toward the words of creeds or dogmas as opposed to feeling my way along, because I do delight in a good debate, but when you ask me about the words sacred and divine in the context of pantheism, the question is hard for my brain to get its synapses around.

PS: I mean no disrespect by my response. I am truly puzzled by my interest in debate while not being so much interested in the material with which to debate.

2010-10-01T05:54:00.000-07:00

MY VANITY WAS FINALLY DEFEATED

After 7 decades of being too vain to use the vanity press to self-publish, (think about the paradox of it) I have self-published a short book of some poetry that I wrote at a specific period in my life in the early 1990s. This was after my third divorce and after a couple of years of one on one counseling and getting to see myself in all my male charm in an honest and forthright way.

The book is called Gray House By Cold Mountain. You can buy it at Amazon or AuthorHouse. If you're embarrassed by sexual matter, the 2nd half of the book is not for you. If you consider sex to be a natural part of the human experience, you'll enjoy the second half of the book.

2010-10-01T05:48:00.000-07:00

PECKING ORDER or DOMINANCE HIERARCHIES

My following comments also appear on the World Panthiesm Movement website:

Most of the statistics I go by are contained in the 1st and 2nd editions of The Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology ed. Buss which is filled with overviews of the literature in that field.

From analyzing my own situation in and struggles against reality as it is conceived of in the brains of my fellow animals of the human species, I think there's a basic disagreement among us about what a pecking order is. It's not a political structure; it's a sense within an individual brain of where it fits within the culture in which it finds itself competing for goods and services by which to procreate itself. The brain is constantly analyzing its situation—who to trust, who to make alignments with, who not to trust, who can offer us an advantage, who makes us feel comfortable? All these evaluations take place within a mental picture in our brains of the social structure in which people are worse or better positioned to aid us or harm us. Our evaluations of those around us naturally fall into an hierarchical structure as we evaluate who we can help and who can help us—our allies and our enemies.

If someone is struggling against their place in a culture, they are, by default, acknowledging the pecking order. If there is not a perceived pecking order within our brains, against what are we struggling? What does it mean to be dissatisfied with our station in the pecking order? In short, to me the pecking order is indistinguishable from our sense of being in harmonious alignment with the culture we are born into. Or not. It's an intensely personal psychological phenomenon, rarely acknowledged for what it is, because we are so busy arguing about the politics of it. We have our heroes in the struggle (those we raise UP in our psychological fundament and our goats (those we put DOWN in our psychological hierarchy). We are always looking up and down the scale. Our friends are usually people who stand at a relatively equal place in the hierarchy.

Beth, no one has replied, I don't think, to my comments about sports. If there is a common phenomenon in worldwide culture, it's sports, specially football, soccer, rugby and all the permutations of that game called football. In that arena we find the pecking order being played out for us, a game to decide who is most fitted to rule the roost. Since most play is practice for living within a culture, football is childhood play raised into the adult sphere. Here is an arena where people vote with their dollars and their feet. There's no power structure holding them in place. In the last 60 years, we've gone to great lengths to raise the awareness of women as to their opportunities in sports. Women are playing many sports at the professional level now, yet women do not seem to want to flock to the WNBA, for example. Women seem less interested statistically in physically competitive sports. Not only do they not have a great interest in their sex playing sports, they usually don't much care about the opposite sex's participation in sports either. No one can keep a woman from watching a competitive sport if she so desires, thus, their failure to attend says something about how deeply they don't respond to hierarchical physical game play.

Most evolutionary psychological studies reveal that women do compete and do have a sense of where they stand among their contemporaries, but—IF THEY ARE WANTING TO HAVE CHILDREN—then they are constantly looking for ways to further that ambition, and, if they want their child-rearing efforts to be fruitful, they are constantly evaluating the male's fitness to nurture children either with time or with resources. Most all of this evaluating goes on under the conscious level. To be conscious of it would be too embarrassing. Women recognize a hierarchy of resources. I long ago painfully accepted that most outstandingly beautiful women would prefer a rich man to poor little old me. Nowadays, however, my psychology has begun to compensate by finding the Twiggys amongst us not to be physically beautiful. Too damn skinny. I now catch myself adjusting my psychological measuring stick to fit my circumstances. My wife is beautiful and sexy to me, and that's all I need to know, and since I'm 72 and my libido is not the same as it was when I was younger, my wife must be specially sexy and beautiful to me because our sex life is purring right along.

Evolutionary psychology is a much harder science than counseling and other fields of psychology. If you check into that field or into neuroscience, you'll discover tons of hard data about the human animal's brain. the inside of which is teeming with evaluations based on a pecking order, but the pecking order isn't a single chain of lower to higher. It's an accumulation of evaluations all based on various strategies for survival and procreation. It's this fundamental human drive that keeps us mentally shoving our fellow animals into hierarchies of various kinds.

2010-09-29T08:58:00.001-07:00

ANOTHER PANTHEISM DICUSSION

Beth Love said

I was attacked by a German Shepard, and i can tell you, I most certainly did not think everything through, I was lucky enough to have a fully functional instincual reactor...and instantly determined that there was nought to be done than kick some dog ass. I went for him, and he turned and ran, tail tucked. There's a place for intellect, an important place, but it isn't everything it thinks it is.

Reply by George Thomas

That is my point exactly. I'm a strictly materialistic, reductive determinist. WOW... lotta verbiage there, eh?

I go with the definition by evolutionary psychology that emotions evolved for the regulation of behavior or the mechanisms of behavior. My behaviors are strictly determined by the emotional signals (i.e. preference determiners) that control me. Emotions are physiological electro/chemical states in the body that range from intense to barely noticeable, but all action is preceded by a "preference" (i.e. an emotional setting in the synaptic landscape created by genetic and environmental conditions) that sets off a series of synaptic firings that reveal to the outside world what my behaviors actually look like. A spoken thought is also a behavior but my natural human duplicity makes my spoken thoughts untrustworthy or trustworthy, depending on the circumstances of the moment in which they come forth out of my mouth and body. The interesting thing is that language can be used to hide our true selves whereas our actions can't hide our "true self".

What is a true self? To my way of thinking, my true self is my biological self as expressed through its behaviors which are controlled through my electro/chemical makeup at the time of any action. Of course, experience is constantly readjusting (reevaluating) and altering that electro/chemical substrate. Also my tendency to think about or not think about my past behaviors also influence my current electro/chemical state. If I visualize a past experience and have feelings about it, that experience of having feelings about the past is readjusting my electro/chemical substrate. Thus our intellectual life reveals the process by which behavior is changed. Being reflective or un-reflective is a genetic condition, I believe, and also one of those conditions that separate the Hamlets (liberals) from the Genghis Khans (conservatives). PS: I'm revealing an emotional preference here, but I'm not feeling particularly fond of either one at the moment. I expect I respect the middle of the road average responder to the environment.

2010-09-26T08:58:00.000-07:00

WHAT HAPPENS TO THE HUMAN WHO SUSPENDS JUDGMENT?

Currently, slowly, working my way through a Darwin biography.... I couldn't help drawing a comparison between a repeated comment (by the biographers) about why an Owen or a Lyell hesitated to make the jump to "transmutation"... i.e. "evolution" while a handful of others, like Darwin, did, and similar comments by people discussing free will versus determinism. Always, those reluctant naturalists stated "fears" that it degraded mankind to put him in the biological line of monkeys.

In almost every situation when we're discussing free will, those opposed to determinism fear that we will lose "moral accountability" if we agree that human behavior is determined by electro/chemical factors beyond our control. Darwin's reply in his journals was that he opposed the arrogance of that idea which put humankind on a pedestal in the discussion of biology. He got this from his Fueguian [sp] experiences.

There is nothing scientific about a moral or fearful objection to the facts of natural selection or determinism. Of course, I know there's nothing scientific about my conclusion that we can measure the accuracy of the facts by the depth of the fear that they arouse in the human subconscious, but it's interesting to contemplate: the deeper the fear the nearer the truth. But who or what is fearing the concept of powerlessness? And why? Would accepting our powerlessness be harmful to our survival or would it create an entirely new world consciousness?

Imagine how fearful we would be if we had to suspend our judgment about all human behavior since those judgments are vital to our survival....... but........ only in a hunter/gatherer society?

2010-09-26T08:17:00.000-07:00

YELLING AT THE PRESS

Lou,

I've hounded you in past about the paper becoming more relevant. This instance of the girl who has injured herself with acid is a case in point.

One of your commentators mentioned "Munchausen's syndrome". That syndrome, as well as many more, are being deeply explored in the fields of neuroscience and/or evolutionary psychology. Unlike psychology of the past, these new fields are hard science, based in new techniques for imaging and analyzing the brain and its functions.

Central to their findings is the idea that the brain is not and has never been a blank slate upon which any culture can write any lesson which they care to. The core finding of these new sciences is that the brain is an accumulation of hundreds and thousands of minute adaptations over time (minute computing devices with specific and limited duties) which have culminated (for the moment) in the modern brain which first appeared between 50 and 100 thousand years ago with all its strict limitations and its soaring strengths.

Reading in these fields will open any mind (and the minds of your readers) to what an amazing device the brain is. It contains all that is us, all the chemistry of our feelings and thoughts. The brainRus, so to speak, and its physical functioning produces every nuance of personality that others perceive in us. These states which we label "emotions" and talk about as if they were some sort of soul-state or airy-fairy presence within us are actually electro-chemical states of the body which evolved for the regulation of human decisions. Understanding these basic facts would go a long way toward humanity's beginning to get ahold of ourselves and our actions. Right now, we humans are pretty much by nature out of control of our actions.

These new findings are as important in the long run as Darwin's discover of the mechanisms of natural selection in the biological world. Is it not the duty of a newspaper to inform the public of new findings which may alter humanity's self-perceptions and our functioning in the Cosmos?

David Brooks, the once-upon-a-time conservative writer, brought up this new field of science in a recent conversation with Charlie Rose. He sees its importance as much as anyone in your line of work. That's why I mention him.

Good luck and good reading,
--
George Thomas

2010-09-18T09:43:00.000-07:00

YEP. NO! YEP... OKAY, WE'RE STILL DETERMINED

(The following is taken from another contribution of mine in a continuing discussion about free will on the World Pantheism Movement website I belong to.)

I sometimes think that a person needs to be involved in crisis situations before they can uncover the determinism that drives their own human behavior. Because we can reflect ahead (interesting turn of phrase, eh) in most cases, we seem able to ignore that the ultimate determinant in any decision is our emotional life (the mechanisms evolved for the regulation of our behaviors). We can tell other people, "I'm not going to the dance because Emily's going to be there." Or we can say we can't go because we "have homework to do". In discussing our decisions with others, language makes us supply calculations or reasons for our decisions, but quite often we don't relate the feelings that actually determined our decisions. Often we're not even aware of the emotional currents that underpin our decisions. If it was fear of the hurt of seeing ex-girlfriend Emily that kept us from going to the dance, we seldom say that we were afraid. We leave it up to our friends to understand what's going on. And people spend a good deal of their lives reflecting upon other people's behaviors, and they generally do so by trying to think about what others are/were feeling when they made a decision. Note the verb "to make" in the phrase? It reveals that we imagine decision making as an activity that can be formed or shaped. Language colors all our discussion about human behavior.

By the way, if you want to get deeply into the difference between a liberal and a conservative mentality, I believe it's in their capacity for self-knowledge, their capacity for getting in touch with the emotions that underlie their behaviors. The liberal tends to be a Hamlet and the conservative leans toward Genghis Khan. Action versus reflection. The reason we go at each other so mercilessly is that we don't accept that the others' underlying emotional life predetermines their thoughts and actions. So we blame them for their actions. We imagine them in out mental lives as responsible for their emotional reflexes.

Anyhow... to return to the theme of crisis in decisions. In a barroom brawl is one instance where our determinism becomes apparent. Think about all the immediate decisions that can flow from the conflict. Anywhere from running from the bar to participating joyously in the fray or, in the middle, seeking a balcony view where one can watch from safety. Among those who participate, are some who'll grab a beer bottle, break it and try to cause serious harm to an opponent. While another can only use his fists. Another might pick up a handy pool cue. Of course, depending upon which opponent faces you, you might graduate to a broken beer bottle if your opponent has one.

My point is that these decisions in crisis situations are flowing from every piece of experience that has formed our emotional cores up to the moment of decisions, the mechanisms which control your behavior. You may have rehearsed your behaviors all your life by imagining them through, but in crisis your decisions are based upon the exact alignment of all your experiences at the moment they trigger your action. And when I say alignment, I mean every synapse and chemical reaction that has been repeatedly rehearsed by every imagining of behavior and every feedback for every behavior that you've had in the past. You are so primed for action that you don't need to think about it. The switches activate and the behavior begins, but those behaviors are conditioned by so much individual experience as well as genetic inheritance that no person can take any credit for how he acts in a crisis.

Later, after the crisis passes, we often discuss our behavior with others, but by then, we're already shading our discussions, feelings and reactions to the crisis even from ourselves. How many people can tell a relative stranger, "Man, am I a coward! I ran from that bar like a chicken with its head cut off!" No we'll say, "Them damn fools was a trying to kill each other. I got the hell out of there!" Our fear is obvious to another person, but think about all the shades of meaning that can attach to an action that is motivated by fear? No wonder, the more civilized we get, the less we are in touch with crisis situational thinking. A hunter gatherer was always in crisis and those who hunted the mastodon effectively (fearlessly) stood out and became the leader and those of us more cautious became the shamans. Et cetera!

I still side with determinism even though our less dangerous existences nowadays allow us time to imagine (reflect) upon our behaviors and imagine that we control them when, deep down, it's a single uncontrollable synapse that tips the balance of behavior in each decision.

2010-08-29T07:47:00.000-07:00

THE PECKING ORDER LIFE REVEALED

In more detail, here's why films like "Avatar" are damaging to the human species. I think all of us must recognize that rooted in our evolutionary adaptions is a "pecking order". We can't help but navigate the world with an underlying judgment structure that places us in value-based human relationships within our cultures. Every time we make a judgment (based on feelings), we are asserting our place in the pecking order. It's a key survival tool. We rationalize our individual pecking orders when we make judgments about others that we put into words. Those we feel negatives about are below us and those we like are equal to or above us. At the level of far above us are our heroes. Of course, we also loathe those we fear and who are in a transcendent place in our value systems. You can see this at work when the mob enjoys the downfall of their "favorite" movie star or the disappointment we feel when one of our heroes in the culture wars falls from society's grace.

We can see our places in the pecking order by taking a careful look at those we place above us and those we place below us and those we judge as equals (i.e. those we are most ourselves with). Even though we may not be consciously arranging our relationships on these value levels, our brains automatically do it. That's the pecking order at work. It's the monkey in us.

My contention about almost all Hollywood films is that they automatically try to trigger our "pecking order" functions in order to trigger us to shell out good dollars. They trigger the "good guy, bad guy" structures in our brains. Every time we shell out dollars to these men who are plying our "pecking order brains" for our bucks, we are allowing our nervous systems to be exercised and our pecking order brain functions are strengthened and reinforced almost automatically. You can see this revealed in almost any conversation about films and/or drama. People automatically like or dislike characters and usually talk about films with this in mind. When you put evil versus good into these films, you begin to push pecking orders into religious realms. I think religious persons are really stuck in a royal pecking order—witness their heavenly and/or religious hierarchies—lords, kings and princes all!

The directors are directing not only the actors but our emotions to make us feel identity with characters in the films and to keep us coming back. This is why people don't like downer films which aren't fun to watch because they trigger emotions and consequent thoughts which are unpleasant. People don't like to watch their REAL SELVES up there on the big screen. They don't want to learn from film and drama. They don't want to think about unpleasant realities. Most people go to films to escape. Most people are always in an escape mode. Anytime I hear someone tell me that they go to movies to escape, I usually lose interest in them because they don't like dealing with reality at any other time in their lives. Okay, I have a pecking order too.

I still recall the first time I told myself that I ought to be rooting for the native Americans in John Wayne movies. I wasn't a kid by any means. It was a great leap forward in one way, but, as my identity with the downtrodden increased so also did my alcoholism, and soon my identifying with the underdog led me to also become an underdog and a loser. The more I hated those "above" me in the pecking order, the lower I fell in the ranks of the pecking order. The more I resolved not to compete with the bastards, the more I was unable to compete. I sank pretty low before the friends of Bill W. helped me stop using the depressant alcohol as a treatment for my depression. By age 31 or 32, I was so low that I spontaneously crashed my car one cold Winter's eve by speeding into a turn I knew I could not negotiate at speed. By the time I climbed out of the bottom of the pecking order, a good part of my earning life was over so my retirement is not in the greatest of financial straits, but I'm content because the "demons" are gone from my life. Like that "demon" metaphor? The religious among us also like to use that term.

Two recent films that demonstrate a way to make films that escape the "pecking order" are Rachel Getting Married and The Last Station. Films that worked against the pecking order in the past were Fellini's 8 1/2 or Juliet of the Spirits. In Fellini films, the characters are always at battle with the pecking orders in their heads, the distorted views of reality they carry around in their imaginations. It's wonderful and enlightening to come to in a Fellini film. Another great film which defies the pecking order is Sante Sangre. A serial killer is portrayed sympathetically, and I came across that film just when Silence of the Lambs was making a killing by portraying a serial killer in an almost evil light. Also, the last scene in The Truman Show was a vital metaphor. When Truman stepped through the containing wall into the real world, he was leaving the god-dominated, false world and entering the real world. That was my emotional response to that film. Scorsese's Taxi Driver approached the "pecking order" from another satirical angle. By making an insane and violent scene become the making of a hero, Scorcese revealed the whole fake pecking order nightmare we live in, surrounded by people whose "pecking order" responses are nearly automatic and not reflective.

2010-08-20T09:33:00.001-07:00

MORE DEBATE ABOUT FREE WILL

Ronhorgan wrote: Thus my problem with the determinist position is that it may be demotivating.

Ronhorgan,
My distant computer friend is only one of many reasons that I believe my behavior is determined by factors beyond my control.

The argument that determinism is "demotivating" cannot be a legitimate reason to disregard the evidence for our determinant situation. I note a tendency to bring morality into this particular discussion quite a lot. People cite the lack of moral accountability that seems to accompany a materialistic view of human behavior. People note that we won't be able to hold people accountable for their behavior if we come to the conclusion that human decisions are determined by factors not in their control. But the fear of a particular scientific conclusion is not itself a scientific fact that ought to keep us from arriving at the truth. We would all be Bible literalists if we failed to accept the truth because of irrational fears.

I have to note that we long ago decided that some people are not in control of their behavior when we allow insanity as a plea in trial cases, but insanity, itself, is a label that we put on behavior that does not fit into the normal range of human behavior. In short, it's asocial behavior that our fear of death causes us to angrily respond to. For a time, I believe, in some countries, the rage of a jealous husband was an allowable defense for murder of a rival. If we now realize that such a view of jealousy is unacceptable, it is because slowly a new social norm has arisen into human consciousness, but that new norm is a group phenomena that is evolving as we speak, one brain at a time. We also do not, in America, allow a Muslim father to kill his daughter for asserting her right to fit into American culture. We also are beginning to reign in a parent's religious right to kill his children through neglect of their health needs. As to our overall debate about the death penalty, we seem, because we can debate the issue, to believe that we have free will, but if each of us were honest about our own individual decisions about the death penalty, we would see that individually, our decision were emotional decisions over which we had no control. For myself, my brain is able to consider that—maybe—we ought not to allow the death penalty, but my emotions have not come to that conclusion at all. All arguments against the death penalty fall on my deaf emotional ears so I have made no decision about that particular reality external to my own. Just don't ask me to be the executioner, then, I fear, I would be immobilized by emotional considerations. Future human cultural decisions, if they are basically self-regarding, will naturally lead the human species to the best survival strategies though it will be one individual at a time.

Let me return to another fact that causes me to believe that we are not in control of our own behavior—the moment to moment functioning of the human brain. At any one moment the brain is being bombarded by information arriving from its sensory apparatuses. All of this information is aiming to arrive into our consciousness, all at the same time. Through chemical reactions beyond our control, chains of synapses are firing or being shut down by processes beyond my control. Which impulse from which sensory apparatus that arrives into our consciousnesses is completely out of our control. We hear a sound (a loud crack or a bee buzz) and we instinctively duck and cover. All evidence shows that we commence to duck before we are conscious that we will duck. In short, action precedes awareness.

As to bees, why do we so instinctively duck? It's because those that didn't duck in the evolutionary past and for whom a bee sting was toxic are no longer among us. We now have bee sting kits, et cetera for those who are allergic to bee stings. Same with peanut butter. We have new cultural phenomena arising based on past experience which we are now conscious of, but these are group phenomena. In the individual brain, the duck or don't duck remains an instinct.

My conclusion is that if I cannot control any of the synapses which are firing in my brain and, thus, cannot control which sensory data reaches my consciousness, I cannot be said to be in control of my behavior. Behavior is going on under the radar of my consciousness constantly which, when I become aware of it, I am proud or ashamed of (to name but two possible emotional reactions). Since emotions are the adaptations that regulate human behavior (according to evolutionary psychologists) and emotional reactions are also beyond my control, I conclude here, too, that I am not a free agent. I cannot even choose which thoughts I will think. I conclude we are all day dreamers every moment of our lives while our biological frameworks go about functioning of their own volitions.

PS: I must add here that some of us are able to refrain from hitting the human who is irritating us while others among us can't control that hit reaction. And don't we pride ourselves on our restraint in our afterthoughts? Yet, if most of us were honest with ourselves, we'd see that we were afraid to strike out at our antagonist because we feared the result of that action more than the emotional resolution that hitting our antagonist would bring to our limbic systems. It's fear that keeps us in check, and if we're honest, we wouldn't be so proud of what we can't control.

By the way, an additional consideration here, is that some discussions of my fear-based view of human behavior might label me as conservative rather than liberal. Steven Pinker concludes in his book, The Blank Slate, that the conservative view of human behavior is probably more attuned with evolutionary psychology's findings than the liberal view is. Liberals are hopefully naive while conservatives are pessimistically inhibited. Wouldn't that knowledge of his alignment to evolutionary psychology drive a religious conservative nuts?

2010-08-18T09:54:00.000-07:00

MORE ON DETERMINISM

The following is a response I entered on the Pantheism website in response to Ronhorgan's comment:

Ronhorgan said: The problem with the hot potato is that free will is both true and false. As a young man I could not escape the absolute truth that I was wholly predetermined; a very cheerless place to live.

My response was: I had the opposite experience. The exact moment that I decided in late-middle life that I was a robot, I was filled with an immediate sense of elation, and a paradoxical thought lept into my mind, I have never felt so free. As a youth I tried to believe in a sort of Freudian determinism, but all his explanations for human behavior (also Jung's explanations) seemed endlessly ambiguous and unsatisfying answers to what human consciousness labels cruelty and deceit. Actually no human act is cruel or deceitful; they are emotional labels consciousness, instructed by emotion, applies to the human brain doing its thing. A greater consciousness, an emotionless deterministic robot, observing from afar, would only see actions and not the emotions. It would be able to see how certain actions lead to certain results. It would even be able to quantify the results of the actions it observes. The funny thing is that good science is that distant and robotic observer. And evolutionary psychology is now putting human behavior under the microscope and it can quantify human behavior. For example, it reveals that the degree of kinship has a statistical correlation to the degree of favoritism that one human shows to another. Stuff like that.

When I began to read the works of evolutionary psychologists, every problem I had understanding human history disappeared. My understanding was complete, and I would never have to moan again, "Why O why, Lord?" The Lord is in there because consciousness brought with it dualism. As soon as the brain's auditory functions became complex enough to be multi-layered and recursive, there appeared in nature the brain speaking to itself and the brain directing the body's movements. The brain thinks and the brain that thinks (i.e. overhears its auditory bits rumbling along) has assigned God (the unknown and a concomitant conscious moral system) as an explanation for why the body is doing what it does. In a way, saying that Adam and Eve ate the apple is as good as any explanation for why one human animal harms another human animal as any other. The cause of the harm is buried in the purely physical body and is determined by electro/chemical activities which defy conscious control. Thus the label evil arises from a fairy tale.

Memories (synaptic memories of actions) are stored with emotions and emotions are also the trigger mechanisms for directing human behavior. Thus any act of the body has a memory in the synaptic patterns which are connected to the emotional captain of the ship. The emotional captain of the ship is separate from the rationalizing function of the brain which tries to explain and excuse every action that it has no control over except to rationalize and explain its behavior to itself and to its fellow chimps in the human network. Thinking is as deterministic as action is. Emotions, memories and thoughts swirl around each other, continuously stimulated by input from the environment. A certain emotion will stimulate a certain memory and vice versa.

An input from the environment will trigger an emotion which raises up memories of an action and an impulse to do that action, but that impulse to action (or thought) is then modulated by other emotions labeled as shame or guilt which are attached to other memories of past actions and events and results. Eventually, through that mixture of memory and their attached emotions an action is triggered by whichever chemical mixture wins the competition to act (or not act). From an array of potential actions one action has the chemical strength to cause the action to happen. The strength of an action is determined by the emotional (chemical) power that releases the action. Thus one man in a bar fight breaks a bottle and drives the shards of that bottle into his antagonist's face while another never goes beyond using his fists. His drive (emotional power) to do harm by his actions is modulated by other emotions (chemical determinants) that restrain his acts. The resolutions of his entire brain with all its emotions and memories just can't generate the emotional/chemical response that makes for a killing.

As usual, I wrote far more than I intended, but every avenue down which I follow determinism is endlessly fascinating. Writing about paradoxical stuff like conscious control as opposed to determinism constantly tantalizes me and causes words to flow.

2010-08-17T20:46:00.000-07:00

MORE BATTLING IN THE COLUMBIAN, VANCOUVER, WA

“There is an old saying that: ‘Politics is like a dysfunctional marriage--every fight is really about something else...’ This applies to the travel to Spain by Michelle et al, the Mosque Cultural Center in Manhattan, along with the old standby ‘wedge issues’ like ‘Guns, God and Gays’.”

Thank you, MJT. While we get sucked into the daily nit picking, certain truths stand unaccounted for. Step back everybody and get the big picture.

What party has been against minimum wage increases, the 40 hour week, sick leave, paid vacations, OSHA, unions, Labor and Industry protections, social security, equal pay for women, mine safety, subsidizing public transport and unemployment insurance? What party since 1930 has labeled as Socialism every benefit aimed toward the welfare of the average wage earner? On its other face, what party since 1980 has backed every change that has allowed the wealthiest Americans to become so wealthy it’s like the 1920s again when 85% of American wealth was in the hands of 15% of the American populace? What party’s policies have shrunk the income of the middle class and created the current huge gap between America’s richest and America’s poorest while seeing the wealthiest earn obscene bonuses that they then protect with lowered taxes and minimal inheritance taxes? What party has helped create a class of citizen whose inherited power, wealth and prestige equals the sort of inherited power and privilege that our founding fathers found disgusting in Great Britain?

If you’re a wage worker and you vote for the Republican/Tea Party, you will have betrayed your class.

The sad thing is that I like Sarah Palin. Sarah Palin is actually a woman of the people, but, like her Southern brethren, she is as uninformed as a boulder at the bottom of the Salton Sea, dumb as a post, blind as a mole.

2010-08-09T15:52:00.000-07:00

DOWN WITH THE BURKHA AND VEIL!

To spread freedom and democracy as widely as possible, America will need to become extremely feminist in its leanings; the way toward a truly worldwide celebration of liberty leads through the veiled and burkha-clad women of the world. It begins at home in America with making certain that the government loses all control over the feminine reproductive system. A woman's abortion rights are inalienable civil rights.

When we've proven that we really believe that a person (a woman) has complete control over their own bodies, then who knows what ideas might occur to a woman living behind an imposed veil or within the voluminous and smothering burkha. Those crazy, suppressed and fearful Moslem men sense that their greatest fear of American freedom is in how we treat our women as valuable and free people. That's what Islam fears in America, and, to tell the truth, what, also, fundamentalist Christians also fear in their own country—women who can decide for themselves how to deal with their own sexuality.

2010-08-05T14:27:00.000-07:00

POLITICS AS USUAL

DeeLittle left a comment on your wall:

RE YOUR REPLY:

before the gvt decided to step in, our country took care of the poor. right here in vancouver, on 78th where there's a community garden...that used to be the 'poor farm' where people who couldn't support themselves, lived & farmed there. the ymca/ywca, catholic missions, people give

ing their neighbors food and helping them get back on their feet....

this country's people help those who cannot help themselves.

the problem isn't 'can't help', the problem is 'won't help' themselves.

do you believe the country owes these people? or is it the duty of their families?

Dear DeeLittle,

Your reply came through garbled. I respect that you cared to reply also and I hear your concerns.

As a young man I met many men of the Depression Era working in machine shops with me. Two informed me that they were married but did not live with their wives anymore. In order to qualify, during the Depression, for welfare, a woman needed to show that she had no husband present in the house. These two men both had departed their homes and hoboed around the nation taking whatever work was available so that their families could eat. By the time the Depression was over, their marriages were in tatters. They’d grown apart. One of these men was an alcoholic by the time I met him. The other was just an old man batching it and still getting by. So the past is not necessarily a model for the present.

Also private charity which you seem to favor has at least two drawbacks. When charity is connected with religious organizations, the charity often comes with proselytizing. Proselytizing to broken people takes unfair advantage of those wounded people. Second, private charity has never, in the history of mankind, been able to meet the real needs of those who for one reason or another have not effectively competed with their fellow humans in the free market system.

As to families taking up the burden: I think you’ll find that the reason many people are failing to compete is the result of them not having substantial family resources or support. To ask families to care for people that they have already not supported with emotional or financial resources will not meet the demand. The working poor rarely have the resources to get their children into educational levels sufficient for them to compete with the children of the rich whose education is paid for by their parents. The rich, though they sometimes also fail, always get a boost up that their poorer neighbors do not get.

Finally, the real issue is whether or not free market capitalism needs poverty for it to exist. Can the free market provide enough jobs with adequate pay so that workers can earn enough to take care of their families, educate them, meet their health needs and retire without poverty? I see no place in the world, past or present, where free markets supply all the jobs necessary to creating such a plentiful nation. So poverty seems to be a natural result of free market economies. Even though communism is a failed experiment, it was obvious that the financial gap between the rich and the poor there, at the end of the Soviet experiment, was not as great as it is in America so a planned economy also has at least that strength.

But here’s the bottom line of my morality. If capitalism will always create a class of citizen who is in poverty, isn’t it the responsibility of those who are most benefiting from the capitalistic system to make sure that they share some of their wealth with those who must be at the bottom in order for the whole system to operate efficiently?

The conservative argument always seems to me to adhere to the Social Darwinian belief that those who can’t compete must sink into the mire and live there unredeemed and unaided. I agree that life is not and never has been fair, but as a citizen, I’m willing to tax myself in order to create a semblance of humanity within the free market system. So many of the rich (lucky to be born into wealth and into good genes and with reasonable intelligence) who benefit from free market economies seem to think that the world owes them this living and that they have no responsibility to return anything to the system that was so rigged as to make them rich while it impoverishes the other.

2010-06-17T11:53:00.000-07:00

WASHINGTON STATE MATH FAILURE RATE IS 42%

The following are my remarks to the Comments Section in the Columbian newspaper following the story about Washington State's math failure rates:

Mathematics requires logical and rational mental skills. We live in a nation in which a large percentage of us still believe that the supernatural and irrational Genesis tales make up a true story. In fact there's an interesting correlation between the percentage of Americans who believe that Genesis is a true story and the percentage who aren't logical enough to pass a simple math test.

If you want a real explanation for our modern problems, study what neuroscience is revealing about human brain function. We are living with a consciousness that evolved between 100,000 and 50,000 years ago to meet the needs of small tribes of hunter-gatherers, living in a Neolithic culture. Their math skills were simple counting skills and their intuitions were adapted to aid them in living together in SMALL communities. They were good at hunting, fishing and gathering and in working together in small social units. When farming arrived, larger communities came into being and new social skills were needed. We're still trying to catch up to cultural change, to bring our brains up to speed with the fast-changing technical culture we live in. Change only gets faster. Those who are falling behind are frightened and, thus, angry.

A sign that one's brain is adaptable enough to live in a modern, technological culture is its ability to think logically and rationally and that will be reflected in mathematical test scores. Not that intuition is no longer needed (intuition is NOT logical nor rational). Intuition evolved from our living within cultures. It’s our brain’s adapted tool by which we evaluate one another and decide who to trust or not to trust in our daily lives. Good intuitive skills are needful to survival, but logic’s mathematical skills are becoming really necessary to being able to adapt to modern requirements.

2010-06-01T20:36:00.000-07:00

THE DEBATE GOES ON: HOW CONSCIOUS IS HUMAN CHOICE?

These conversations go on on the World Pantheism Movement website:

Jim,
Perhaps I ought to admit that I completely understand any human beings desire to say that writing a symphony is many orders higher than my little vacuuming machine, but if you take the day by day composition of a symphony (and I've written four, yes, unpublished novels, plus many other false starts, long projects, plus ten or so volumes of poetry, TV scripts, several big near misses but no cigars) and break it down minute by minute as the hours pile up each day, each decision that is constructing that novel (or symphony) is a feeling by feeling, irrational, process of words coming forth "out of nowhere" that arise from an intense concentration on the job at hand. As far as the bird metaphor, I'm sticking to the facts that the bird is "making decisions" that guide his flight path just as surely as a man walking down a street is making decisions about every twist and turn of his journey. It's when we do our journey while distracted and arrive at our destination with no memory of how we got there that we understand that our decisions are exactly like the bird's. Here's a poem of mine that has been published in a reputable literary magazine from which I'll build a further case for the supremacy of feeling over consciousness as the director of human behavior:

MEMORY OF ALL THE RELIGION I'LL EVER NEED

Back to the wind, I held it
And tied to it a knotted tail.
Spring, and all that wind was with me.
Muddy feet that made me clearly dirty,
I was a thing of earth who sought the sky.
Then I ran and let it go and let it out,
And felt it lift to take the wind. Whipping
Madly in a rush, it sought a surface far above me
Until I lost control of it and it flew itself,
And what I held was something in the wind,
A line that curved to nothingness.

For one full windy afternoon, I watched it
Whip and twist at nothing I could see.
All control I had was in the knotted tale
I'd been sure to fasten to it
To hold it straight and true into the wind.
And then that wind became a calm,
And it began to flutter down and
Down, to lay my line along the earth.
END

"Muddy feet that made me clearly dirty, I was a thing of earth who sought the sky... Whipping madly in a rush, it sought a surface far above me... And what I held was something in the wind... A line that curved to nothingness." How well I recall to this day the skin-tingling elation with which those words, sans any meaning other than a sort of music that came with them, arrived into my consciousness out of nowhere. The choices were being made for me.... By Whom? By What?

In retrospect, you'd think that this poem with its very clear metaphor of kite flying is a conscious and rational process of putting together a creative work about the search for God that ends in atheism, but that ain't so. The title which eventually encapsulated what I imagine the poem is about came long after the basic lines were on the page. As an afterthought, that search is what the poem seems to be about, but there was nothing conscious or willful about the trip from the first words that spilled out of my unconscious onto the page. At first the writing flowed from a feeling about kite flying, a memory loaded with emotion about childhood, and a descriptive process, words tumbling after words, filled with elation but no sense of where it was going to land. At the time, I was still not the atheist that I am now, so the ending was a delightful surprise to me when it arose from the sky down into my awareness.

Later, too, I realized, another flash of insight, that if one describes something in the material world with enough accuracy and emotional force, that material description comes to "feel like" a comparable intellectual process, i.e. kite flying and searching for God. A canoe trip that ends with falling off the end of the world into existentialism. A combat flight that ends up with being shot down and finding a grape arbor from which one selects a grape and eats it like a sip from a chalice of blood.

The interesting thing about good poetry is that it's a discovery, a discovery of a poet's inner landscape that was hidden from him until a metaphor, firmly lodged in the material world, tugged out the flow of words that become the poem. A good poem is as much a delight of discovery to the reader as it is to the poet who created it. The more conscious the poetic process, usually, the worse the poetry. Even the polishing that goes on is an unconscious process. On rereading and rewriting, the poet goes over the work dozens if not hundreds of times and, in each reading, new words and arrangements of words suggest new directions and set off more feelings of correctness. The final "choice" of each word is based on a "sense of rightness" that is not logical or reasonable. It's an emotional choice. The writing of a poem is a purely emotional process during which the words come out of nowhere (usually triggered by an emotion laden metaphor that came out of nowhere, stimulated by something in the landscape, inner or outer). Unbidden, the words scramble out of the unconscious to pass swiftly across the screen of consciousness, unbidden and blindly scurrying to join the other words that call to them to come join their brothers already on the page.

My understanding of the poetic and novel-writing process is, in my declining years, further proven to me by the fact that the level of concentration from which arose my best poetry has fallen off. I haven't written a successful poem in years because the unconscious connections can't be called upon without the missing intense emotional concentration. Some of that may also be due to my emphasis on rational forms like working algebra problems. It's no accident, either, that many poets in the past have refused counseling because they were afraid it would harm their art by making them more conscious of the artistic process. Some of them ended in suicide. You might put Hemingway in that camp to name but one. The healthier I become, the more difficult to contact my muse which probably was a very nasty muse, something like the one that plagued Ernest Dowson. And, again, I did not have the courage to pursue that particular muse any farther, but wonder of wonders, the less emotional my approach to writing, the more I am able, far beyond anything I've ever experienced before, to explain and describe rational processes that escaped me before, yet, as always, the words flow out of nowhere and tell me what I'm thinking, rather than the other way around.

I hope all concerned will understand that the preceding arguments are ON TOPIC and have everything to do with my belief that when it comes to decision-making (specially at those higher creative levels that some of my friends on this site cite as proof that man is more free than I imagine he/she is) humankind is making the decisions first in the unconscious and the rationality comes afterwards. Even mathematicians say there are proofs more beautiful than others. I agree with that as a further proof of my argument. What is beauty other than a most personal emotional response to a woman, a book or a painting, a mathematical proof? Afterward, we try to justify our choices, but the choices are emotional and determined beforehand by the entire synaptic landscape of hidden connections beneath the rational world.

James Doerfel said:

I have no problem classifying both birds and humans as eukaryotes, nor calling the organ housed by a bird skull and the organ housed by the human skull both “brains,” nor placing human intelligence and bird intelligence on a continuum, nor relating bird behavior and human behavior to their eukaryotic organisms. I do wish to maintain that birds and humans are different species—they cannot viably mate. I recognize a different design in bird bodies and in human bodies, despite the fact that they are made from roughly the same stuff. [Given a cup of bird stuff (molecules) and a cup of human stuff I doubt you could tell me which one belonged to which.] I recognize different structures in their respective brains, including structures in human brains which never evolved in bird brains. I also wish to point out for the record that no bird yet discovered is a scientist or an Olympic competitor or a pantheist. And I account for a bird navigating by the stars and a human being composing a symphony by different explanatory matrixes—you know, like science does. Biologists speak of humans evolving a capacity for deliberative choice beyond that of any other known species, and they identify this capacity as the number-one reason for our species’ success on planet earth.
Regarding math, my philosophical aporia does not owe my distrust of mathematics but to the comparative absoluteness of my/our trust in mathematics. What makes math so &%$@ trustworthy… so decisive? I consider mobility, the ability to move up and down the various levels of complexity and emergence, the ability to pan in and pan out, to synthesize a coherent representation from multiple points of view, the benchmark of reason and the scientific method—you know the reason and method we Pantheists respect “as our best way of understanding nature and the Universe.” And, yes, we have the evolution of our bodies with their big brains—brains capable of reason and science—to thank for that.
George Thomas said:
James Doerfel said:
I can see no difference between a bird's flying by the stars and human's learning things to store in memory, memory being the storage capacities of synaptic patterns in the brain for recall when something in our environment compels those favorable memories back into the thin sliver of awareness. Memories, of course we all know, are stored with emotions and people without the capacity to feel (some of whom have been studied) that summons the connected thoughts, are unable to make decisions. (This last sentence is why I say that first comes the feeling (the instinct), then follows the thoughts that some of us believe are the impulse toward a behavior when, actually, it is the voiceless feeling that triggers the behavior, not the thought.) What we and birds do instinctively, we humans have learned the clever trick of discussing (ruminating, predicting) it afterwards. Step by step these improvements in learning capacities increased and at each step, the instinct preceded the thoughts about that capacity.

Jim, I can't help noticing that you express a distrust of the abstractions of mathematics but that in discussions of free will and/or consciousness, you do believe in going "up" several levels of abstraction and speak of "top down" reasoning toward the problems of consciousness and free will.

2010-05-30T11:55:00.000-07:00

Title: THE LAST MAGICAL PROPERTY IN THE COSMOS

WAIT, PAUL, I AM A ROBOT, DARN IT. AND I CAN PROVE IT!

It’s now 9 am and as I awoke, my thought machine fired up. Here’s where we are now: I agree with Paul that my unconscious is part of the total package that is described as “me” and that my unconsciousness makes decisions for me. Therefore I must agree that I’m an object in the Cosmos that runs around making decisions without being conscious of making them (pause) except when reflecting upon those decisions afterward, sometimes within seconds of making them. These decisions are stored in memory for consideration at a later date when similar or different situations call my memories back into consciousness. Fair enough? And I have a memory of thinking, a memory that could be called the essence of consciousness because it allows my memories to loop back upon themselves and to become RECURSIVE.

Now… let’s construct a simple carpet vacuuming machine that guides itself. We already have them in existence. We attach to it a simple computer and speaker that fires up when you plug it in and bring it to LIFE. As it runs around vacuuming a carpet, it reports things like, “I’m vacuuming the carpet. Last week I vacuumed the carpet. Tomorrow, when I come to life again, you’ll see that I’ll start vacuuming the carpet again,” et cetera. Next, let’s connect these ruminations to the things Mr. Vacuum is actually doing. When it turns right, it says, “I just turned right.” When it hits an obstruction and can’t move, it says, “I can’t move.” When it backs up to free itself, it says, “You can’t keep a good vacuum down.” Et cetera. Further it stores in memory activities it did yesterday so that it tells you what it did the day before when you awake it to vacuum. And we might as well give it predictive powers so that as long it’s vacuuming a familiar carpet, it can do the same carpet, or household, repeatedly. Once Mr. Vacuum has done his job, he knows how to do it over and over.

I’ve just described a being that runs around making “unconscious” decisions that it can talk about. I’ve just described myself, minus my feelings. I more or less got that concept of robotics from Daniel Dennett’s book Consciousness Explained.

Next! Feelings are described in evolutionary psychology as adaptations for the regulation of the human machinery. So here’s what we add next. We attach a set of tubes and vials with chemicals and pumps and gages rigged into them. We’ll call them the limbic system. And we set the vacuum on an unfamiliar terrain. When the vacuum cleaner hits the end of its carpet world and senses the hardwood edge of a carpet (or a defining wall or object), it pauses, a pump fires up and sends chemicals from a full vial labeled CALM to an empty vial labeled PAIN, and Mr. Vacuum informs you it’s in PAIN. When the PAIN vial fills up, a switch is activated that gives Mr. Vacuum an order to turn right. It turns right but senses hardwood (or obstruction) again and the PAIN vial stays full. The computer automatically orders another direction, and Mr. Vacuum continues to try movements until one of the movements puts it in contact with carpet again at which time the PAIN vial returns its contents to the CALM vial while Mr. Vacuum “calmly” goes on its way vacuuming and, perhaps, if you’re a clever programmer, it hums Church In The Wildwood.

Of course Mr. Vacuum gives a running commentary of everything it is experiencing and doing. It can also be storing all this activity in memory for referral next vacuuming day. Soon, it will have memorized a new household or carpet. So… I’ve successfully added intervening mechanisms for the regulation of vacuuming into Mr. Vacuum’s circuitry. The machine is “feeling” its way through its life and talking about it. I claim, therefore, that I’m a robot just like Mr. Vacuum only I’ve got what is called LIFE. No one has to plug me in, but, wait a minute (pause) I wasn’t plugged in myself until my father plugged into my mother, was I? So I’ve been plugged in too, just like Mr. Vacuum, only it takes me a lifetime to finish my carpet.

Now all that’s left to do is define LIFE in purely material terms, define myself as a collection of matter that is arranged in such a way as to give an observer of my behavior the illusion that I’ve got this MAGICAL PROPERTY called LIFE. And since these other computers (people) need this capacity for projection to recognize my behavior as their behavior so that they can react (find the carpet) correctly for their survival, they give themselves the idea that they LIVE.

Are we, indeed, robots that have come to “life” (just like in science fiction), become cognizant of self and invented the concept of consciousness to describe the process of recursion? I think so. That’s right, we are matter through and through and there is no magical property of life that a power greater than ourselves has bestowed upon us. It’s rocks all the way down. And that's what I, as a naturalist pantheist, understand my condition to be in relation to the Cosmos. "Yep! He's got rocks in his head," some may say, but is that true?

2010-05-30T03:25:00.000-07:00

MORE DISCUSSIONS FROM THE PANTHEISM WEBSITE

Okay, Paul, it's 3 am and I woke up thinking about this (damn, I hate this part of thinking), and I got this much. Are you saying that if my unconscious processes make the decisions, then, technically, "I" am making the decisions even if the decisions are unconscious decisions?

Okay, I got that, but then I moved to the problem of determinism. Do I make decisions or does the environment make me make my decisions? Then I had to ask if my choices are "either/or decisions" in that the environment offers my "synaptic self" (LeDeux?) choices that my unconscious processes select from among? Or are my decisions merely "reactions" to the environment and, thus, not free at all?

Then I was really splitting hairs, lying there in the dark. How about this? Those choices that are determined by my genetic makeup are my "free" choices because they lie within me? Any choices made by environmentally influenced distortions of my synaptic self are choices "determined" by forces outside myself and, thus, not free?

But, now, I think, as I wrote the last sentence, probably determined by that last sentence, "My genes are handed to me by my parents. I have no choice in that so even my "genetic choices" (for the sake of expression) are predetermined!"

I just thought also that I'm trying to dethrone reason from its mighty high perch in human affairs. Perhaps, it's rationality I'm quibbling with. And in the term "reason" I don't include the methodology of science because science is tightly linked to the world outside the self whereas all these rational arguments we are having involve the arrangement and rearrangement of words and definitions in order to explain to the unconscious what it's doing and to try and get other beings to see and agree with our inner selves, with our conscious selves.

2010-05-13T07:07:00.000-07:00

YES, WE ALL ARE ROBOTS

I think I see something critical and essential to the discussion in the concept of emergence. From my viewpoint there is a direct, physical causality that links me in this present moment all the way back to the Big Bang. I am at the end of a chain of successful "changes" in the physical world that go all the way back through species to and through the first organic single-celled being which all brains agree to call living into the changes that preceded that arrangement. Just because different arrangements of matter act in ways that seem different (emergent) from what came before, does not mean that the chain of physical causality has been broken.

There is a past vision I have had when I imagined myself as not different from a mountain, a tree or an atom but as just a collection of non-living chemical and electrical impulses organized so as to act in such a way as to be called "life-like" by all the physical brains interacting with and perceiving this arrangement of atoms. The body which is me is just a collection of inorganic materials, all arranged and working to represent the affect of what other brains have agreed to define as "life" and "thought". In short, there is no such thing as "life". Life is completely and totally material, turtles all the way down. That vision hit me quite strongly, early on, when I was just starting to explore this fascinating world of evolutionary psychology. I know almost for sure that this act of imagination came to me as I was reading Consciousness Explained by Daniel Dennett in the passages where he explains robotic behavior so as one can interpret is as "conscious" behavior, indicating "life". I believe that that moment of imagination has kept me pretty close to a physical explanation of life all this long time since. Perhaps that is the distinction that keeps some of us passing in the dark.

If nothing else, my vision of reality eliminates the difficulty of defining and explaining the emergence of life, since life itself is just a definition for a certain arrangement of materials in the material Universe.

2010-05-11T13:24:00.000-07:00

SUPREME COURT VICTORY FOR ATHEISM

Spread the happy word! The decision by the five activist and conservative mis-judgers that a crucifix is not a special religious symbol and can, therefore, be displayed in any public place is actually in agreement with atheist thought. We agree with them in seeing the cross as an empty symbol that stands for a non-event in the history of humanity. The crucifix and the crucifixion it symbolizes means nothing. Don't we agree with that? Of course we do. The cross is an empty symbol standing for nothing. The cross is just a cultural icon like a smiley face and Uncle Sam pointing at you, like Mormon bigamists, like McDonald's arches and apple pie, like the now famous Mustang Ranch in Nevada and going postal. The cross is just an ordinary cultural symbol which has no intrinsic meaning and stands for no religious beliefs. We need to thank those justices for tearing the meaning of the crucifixion down to the nothing we know it is.

I invite you all to embellish on this beginning while asking yourself if those judicial activists are really our allies and had to come up with this very tricky decision that seems to make Christianity a semi-official state religion but which really supports the Constitutional separation of church and state or did they just outsmart themselves as so many pompous a-holes often do.

2010-05-11T06:59:00.000-07:00

A TOPIC ON PANTHEISM WEBSITE

A discussion thread had to do with why we pantheists call ourselves pantheists. My reply follows:

The consciousness that rides along within and is generated by the activities of the brain that calls itself I, since it is the slave of biology and physiology, interacts strangely with these attempts or any institution's attempts to use the language of consciousness to define what consciousness, carried along by the body's activities, finds itself being and thinking from day to day.

I call myself pantheist because the brain that calls itself I and that carries the I of me along with it is deeply enmeshed in the biology and physiology of the airy reality into which it found itself swimming (existing). The collective brains who make up the category "scientist" have physically interacted with the Cosmos in such a way as to give other brains, through the senses of their eyes (reading) and ears (hearing), a new kind of information about that reality. The brain that calls itself I has learned from this set of scientific brains (who form opinions, expressed mathematically, only after by materially testing the physical Universe) that it is not enough to trust language, the creator of consciousness, and, thus, does not accept any reality that exists solely within the language and which is not physically present (so as to be sensed) in the material Cosmos. Thus concepts like "god" which exist only in the realm of the untrustworthy consciousness and which can't be smelt, touched, sensed by the physical body are foreign to it (the brain that calls itself I). The brain that calls itself I and finds itself afloat in air like a fish in water knows itself as a part of the physical Universe and not part of the conscious Cosmos.

If "MY" speechless physical body has any relationship with the physical Universe, it is much like a zygote to a mother's body than it is a consciousness to a higher consciousness which language has made up totally and completely. Since it is my speechless body that exists in the Cosmos and "I" am the language it is hearing as thought, it/I am completely and totally dependent on the physical Cosmos for my continued existence. And since a speechless zygote can't worship it's source, so my body can't worship the Cosmos, except through hearing itself in the thoughts that are generated within its synaptic patterns by its daily efforts to procreate, win friends, have sex with the opposite sex, surround itself with comfort and surplus, et cetera.

Sometimes the body that experiences its own self in consciousness as I will sense itself so safe for a moment in the Cosmos that a wonderful feeling of well-being (i.e. flood of dopamine or other chemical) fills it and that feeling will generate a thought to explain to itself what it's feeling and that thought is "worship".

The previous philosophical notations have made me understand something very interesting to me—the human robot (i.e. animal) through consciousness (the naming with words of the outer reality) has been returning from the naming of the outer world back to the naming of itself, to its physical reality as a robot that is experiencing and responding to the physical Cosmos. The namer is discovering the silent source of its naming function and, perhaps, someday the namer and the named will become as one.

Anyway, that's why I (or the brain that names itself I) name myself "pantheist" for this moment in time. It's purely an emotional thing, separate from all the conscious quibbling that goes on in the insubstantial world of consciousness where disagreements about naming are common.

2010-05-09T01:30:00.000-07:00

ANOTHER OF MY LONG PHILOSOPHICAL JAUNTS ON THE PANTHEISM WEBSITE! I KINDA LIKE IT:

Well, here I am, awake later than I want to be because of a dissatisfaction with the way something is coming down in my life, so what better time to spout off a little? When I tune in on discussions anywhere, about any "spiritual" path, I'm always impressed by the effort and time that some of your reflections show in pursing the knowledge about if not actually setting out on the path of various religious or philosophical programs. So much effort, so much accumulated knowledge, shows how much unhappiness there is in the world, for one would not be searching the world for a better philosophy if the philosophy that one has is working as one expected it to work out.

Frankly, Buddhism or not, no religion starts out with an accurate picture of the human condition and without an accurate view of reality, how can anyone expect to build a philosophy/religion that can lead to any good? Right up front, I don't expect any formal way of structuring the chaos of existence with a goal to happiness will ever work out for anybody. The human psyche is not set up to experience happiness on a continuous basis. The brain is a computational device evolved to solve millions of small computational problems, from separating a vertical line and a horizontal line, to identifying a predator or other threats, from deciphering another human's behavior with a goal of deciding whether or not to trust that person to calculating what behaviors will best serve in seducing the woman it's attracted to. These continuously running calculations are always operating in the now and without a sense of time and mostly outside of consciousness. The emotions inform this give and take between the brain and its environment, and they make the decisions for us. If it were not for negative emotions, we wouldn't know what behaviors to avoid, and we'd run out in front of cars without a hint of danger.

For me, the sciences of neuroscience or evolutionary psychology provide the best description of how the brain creates reality and functions in view of that reality. The difference between those sciences and Buddhism is that they provide a description of reality not a panacea for it. When I began to understand how accurately they explained all the dilemmas of my life, past and present, I was drawn to them like a thirsty man to a Heinekens. All my struggles with identity, masculinity, the opposite sex, social relations with both sexes and family, peer pressures, courtship, work relations and finances are being answered to my satisfaction by these sciences, but they don't, and neither do any religions or philosophies, give me any special comfort in view human behavior, my own or yours.

I guess, if I have a philosophy it's a psychological one; it would be based on a rough and ready understanding of my own behavior and how they have affected people in the past who loved me or whom I loved and a handful of mental tricks to try and soothe the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. Those slings and arrows are going to keep coming, and I can't stop them and I must feel them because the sciences I trust have told me that that's my fate as a member of the human species.

But all is not for naught. Living has taught me some valuable lessons and science shows me just what pieces of human nature I was dealing with while making wrong and painful decisions. For example, for awhile in my life I was a "take this job and shove it" sort of guy. Hey, if it's good enough for a country western singer, it's good enough for me! But I'd do that "take job shove it" routine when my problem was poverty and its accompanying complications, and I was smarting at the unfairness of some job situation. Somehow, leaving a job never solved the basic poverty I was dealing with. I'm specially sensitive about money issues and can be trusted to overreact when someone other than me is spending our surplus. (Thus, I am awake tonight, see?) So I go someplace, like an AA meeting, and I tell on myself. I identify the behavior, admit to it, laugh at myself, and then return home and apologize... if needed.

What I find interesting is that you can go to almost any religion and find someone who'll share the same insight about behavior, owning it and making amends. Sometimes the words change. It's so universal that you begin to see that it comes with the human animal territory; it's a morality (a behavior pattern) that transcends religion. Monkey see, monkey do. And what amuses me is that all the superstructure of religions, their holy ones, their seventh heavens and nine portals and twelve gates, their dogmas and creeds and learning them tit for tat has nothing to do with how one actually deals with the constant barrage of emotions and reactions caused by them which one must feel if one is to be alive. I can see some practices like meditation and chanting or even prayer (if not the desperate sort) can be helpful. Chanting creates breathing patterns that can release stress and meditation can calm down brain waves, but these aren't religious practices, are they? They're physiological practices like running which also reduces stress.

Let me restate so I can understand myself. Religions are collections of concepts. Learning them are useless, specially if they're founded on unscientific assumptions. What one needs is a way of accepting his emotional life just as it is, allowing them into his life, allowing them to inform his decisions, and finding ways to reduce their negative influences. These helpful lessons come with living and are mental (psychological) lessons and practices, not religious ones. Almost all people who suffer the most are the ones trying desperately not to suffer. They are people who always go to the happy movie because they tell you that "life is bad enough and one has to escape". Now me, I've always liked unhappy movies. They rub my nose in my escapism and force me to confront my silly wish to escape, escape, escape. When I was young, those movies scared the hell out of me, but nowadays, I don't find my "life" to be that bad at all, and I revel in a good story with real and complex characters.

Well, am I sleepy yet? I guess I'll find out.

2010-04-25T19:17:00.000-07:00

AVATAR, SCIENCE FICTION AND REALITY

The following is a ramble I entered on the World Pantheism Movement website in a discussion of the film Avatar which, I'm proud to say, I didn't run off to see:

This rambles, but at root, it's a critique of Avatar from many angles. When I was in the Navy in the 50s, I was in the Science Fiction Book of the Month Club so, at one time, I was a fan of that genre, and I got to know it fairly well. I still think Fahrenheit 451 is an excellent film. I found and bought a beat up tape in a library sale that I still own. And the film Gattaca far surpasses any of the Star Wars films. I like Gattaca for its cinematic artistry, its style and the staging and sets. Simple and beautiful and based in character. What always sets most science fiction apart from serious art is that science fiction is nearly always idea driven rather than character based. That's okay and I'll go see a science fiction film, but I'm hyper critical. Matrix is just one single idea stretched over three films. Good guy versus bad matrix. A waste of time and effort. One was enough. The recent Star Trek movie could only appeal to Trekkies. Lines repeated from the TV show to titillate the infant mind. Why do I say that? Think... at what age are children delighted to have the same phrase or fairy tale repeated again and again? It arises at a specific emotional and intellectual stage of development! I don't know how many times I winced when TV Captain Picard uttered the tiresome phrase, "Make it so!" Right out of WW II just like Lucas's air battles. Bradbury wrote a few good books in which character predominates. I admit that I no longer dabble in science fiction literature, and I've heard that in the literary arts some writers are working on some interesting concepts. I suppose it might benefit me to find and read a few good science fiction books.

Two recent films that use scientific research in fascinating ways are Momento and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and they are outstanding because character predominates over their scientific ideas. Here's an interesting detail. I think it was Antonio Damasio (The Feeling of What Happens) who wrote that someone in Hollywood called him at one time to ask if it would be possible to erase the memory of a bad love affair. Though Damasio didn't name names, I'd swear that someone involved in Eternal Sunshine must have been his caller.

Finally, I think Fellini's "8 1/2" is a fantasy neuro-scientific film that broke down the barriers between memory, hallucination, fantasy and dream life and reality about as well as anyone could. I may have been simple-minded when I first saw that film, but, let me tell you, it really challenged me, and I didn't understand it for the longest time. I didn't understand his technique or what he was about, but when it finally hit home that he was giving us a stream of consciousness presentation of life through the dreams, imagination, memory and life of a single individual without attempting to frame the shifts for us to understand, that taught me more than any Avatar could ever teach me about humanity's imaginative life or future.

I'll admit that taste is an opinion and everyone is truly an expert on his own tastes, so who am I to quibble? I only quibble because I'm afraid that the sort of films that entertain me might not be made anymore, and I don't like the thought of that one bit. Nor do I like special effects films like Avatar which aren't up to my standards but which will make films ever more expensive, and I'm not even entertained by them, no matter how much they cost nor what gimcrackery they employ.

O, I just thought of The Truman Show, another excellent film that opened my brain up anew. That far surpasses any recent science fiction yarn that I can think of made in the last decade, Avatar, I Robot or not.

This is an addition to my ramble on the Avatar thread. I also, at a very young age, was a fan of Asimov's Foundation novels. F A S C I N A T E D! I think I read them all in high school.

2010-04-17T08:09:00.000-07:00

O NO... AMERICA'S GROWING WEIGHTIER!

Was your mommy a fatty? What does that mean for you? What does it mean for the US? Of course who cares what a mom weighs as long as she loves us even if it dumb us down a little bit?

"Omega-3 fatty acids are a limiting factor in building brains, and are stored in a woman's hips and thighs. New evidence shows a relationship between a woman's stores of these essential fatty acids and her cognitive ability and that of her offspring...
Waist-Hip Ratio and Cognitive Ability: Is Gluteofemoral Fat a Privileged Store of Neurodevelopmental Resources? by William Lassek & Steven J.C. Gaulin, In Evolution and Human Behavior 29, 26-34 (2008). Click here for more"

2010-04-17T07:58:00.000-07:00

AN POWERFUL LETTER BY A PERSON OF INTEGRITY

Dear Catholic Church: Excommunicate Me - An Open Letter

by Paul Constant
Apr 6, 2010

Bishop Richard Malone
c/o Roman Catholic Diocese of Portland
510 Ocean Avenue, P.O. 11559
Portland, Maine 04104

I am addressing this letter to you because my entire life as a Catholic took
place in Maine. I was baptized into the Catholic Church at St. Matthew in
Limerick a few weeks after my birth in 1976. And I was confirmed 16 years
later at St. Anne's in Gorham.

Even though I have never believed in God or the afterlife or anything else
that Catholics profess, I did get confirmed in the church of my own free
will, and though every baptized human being is supposedly a "full Catholic"
at the moment of baptism, the consensual sacrament of confirmation*
supposedly, in the words of the church, "renders the bond with the church
more perfect."

My father, Joseph Constant, worked his whole life, adored his wife for 45
years, and loved us no matter what. And I decided when I was 16 that as long
as I was living under his roof, I would continue to be a full member of his
church. He wanted to meet us again one day in heaven, and he believed that
there was only one way to do that: by believing in the One Holy Catholic and
Apostolic Church. My confirmation was a tribute to him, but it only went so
far: After I struck out on my own, I lived as an atheist.

But I suppose that, technically at least, I'm a Catholic, one of the
millions of Catholics whom American bishops profess to lead and, when the
church inserts itself into our political process, claim to speak for.

Today, Bishop Malone, I am demanding that you excommunicate me. I cannot in
good conscience belong to your church anymore; I do not want to be counted
with the 200,000 Catholics in Maine, or the 68,115,001 Catholics in the
United States of America, or the 1.1 billion Catholics in the world.

I have been watching the events of the last few weeks with horror. The pope
(an ex-Hitler Youth whom your fellow bishops used to refer to, lovingly, as
"God's rottweiler") whined during a Palm Sunday homily about what he called
"petty gossip." That "petty gossip" is a tsunami of reports of child rape
perpetrated by Catholic priests across the globe and attempts by bishops,
archbishops, cardinals, and the pope himself to cover up that child rape by
moving ordained rapists to new parishes where they could, and did, rape
again. That "petty gossip" includes one case in which the pope halted an
internal investigation of a Catholic priest in Wisconsin who is alleged to
have raped more than 200 deaf boys.

And then, on March 30, Bill Donohue of the Catholic League for Religious and
Civil Rights placed an ad in the New York Times dismissively accusing the
Times of "looking for dirt" that "occurred a half-century ago" and saying
that the church's "pedophilia crisis" has "all along" been a "homosexual
crisis." He accused the Times of flogging this story to further a
progressive agenda that includes "abortion, gay marriage, and women's
ordination."

I demand to be excommunicated because I do not believe women are
second-class citizens. I demand to be excommunicated because your
missionaries are informing impoverished citizens of third-world countries
that birth control is a sin when it is in fact the single most important
thing they could do to gain some small amount of control over their economic
situation and health. I demand to be excommunicated because your church has
become a hate group as virulent as any this world has ever seen, one that is
unnaturally obsessed with the sex lives of good men and women across the
planet. I demand to be excommunicated because I do not condone child rape or
the concealment of child rape.

You might ask, Bishop Malone, what my father will think of all this. Joseph
Constant died on August 20, 2009, after a long battle with acute pulmonary
fibrosis. The sacrament for the sick gave him great comfort at the end, and
I thanked the priest for administering it. But then, at a mass that was
dedicated in Joseph's name in September, instead of a homily about how
Joseph lived the kind of life that other Catholics should emulate-generous,
faithful, good, true-the priest showed a video. You came on the screen that
had been set up on the altar (as you did in all the other Catholic churches
across Maine that weekend), and my family was forced to watch as you gave a
hate-filled lecture about why Maine's pending gay marriage law must not be
allowed to come into force, and then you had every church under your control
pass the collection plate a second time solely to collect funds to fight
marriage equality. (Thanks in large part to the Catholic Church's
efforts-efforts that included threats to remove charitable Catholic
organizations from the state if the law was approved-gay marriage remains
illegal in Maine. You must be so proud.) You took an occasion intended to
celebrate my father's life and spoiled it with hate speech.

And so it is with deep personal satisfaction, sir, that I say-and I'll put
it so you can understand it-to hell with you, Bishop Malone. To hell with
your church. To hell with the pope, especially. If you think the Catholic
God actually smiles down on you from heaven for your hatefulness, then to
hell with that God, too. I renounce your church, your God, and your
traditions. I will not be a part of any organization that welcomes and
comforts hatemongers, child rapists, or you.

I demand that you excommunicate me immediately and that you send me
confirmation as soon as possible that you have expunged me from the roster
of the Catholic Church.

Paul Constant
c/o The Stranger
1535 11th Avenue, Third Floor
Seattle, Washington 98122

2010-04-16T14:46:00.000-07:00

PASSING OF A FRIEND

Geoff Hays died December 19th, 2009 of cancer. Not from smoking. The first time I met him in 1976, he was exiting a woods south of Cheney, Washington where he'd spent the night sleeping between two matresses among the trees. Like several of us in that Cheney crowd, he got sober after that with AA and continued sober most of his life save for a very early slip whose date I can't recall. From that time on, he remained free of alcohol. Though his life never achieved the financial rewards his intelligence ought to have given him, he was the kindest of men. In his later years, he always seemed able to turn any character defect that I said I was struggling with into a positive character trait. He was that kind and that considerate. A physically big man, he was a gentle giant, and I could always count on his compassion and caring. I miss him and love him—a comrade of many years.

RAISING THE LEVEL OF DISCOURSE

Here's another comment on the Columbian newspaper website which I recently entered.

Darel,

I hear you and I understand, but your thinking ought to be broadened. As long as we keep our discussions well within the premises of Darwinian evolution and our appeal is to bottom line of survival and self-interest, all of us will continue to argue and debate and scream at one another like monkeys not long out of the tree.

In the history of humankind, the average worker, be he/she hunter-gatherer fresh out of Africa, carpenter in Nazareth, vassal on a knight's domain, Russian peasant under the Czars, factory worker in 19th Century England or mine worker in early 20th Century America has rarely, if ever, made enough to take care of his daily needs and, simultaneously, put enough away to fare well [welfare] in old age. Unlike monkeys and most mammalian cultures which have rigid dominance hierarchies like ours, conscious humans speak out when they feel unjustly treated. Out of this conscious knowledge of economic unfairness and from Acts in the Bible, the idea of Communism arose as a possible solution to the problem of basic animal genetic inequality. Communism failed because it didn't allow for the selfishness factor that remained even though it was supposed to alleviate Darwinian selfishness. People with the genetic qualities to transcend rose to the top of Communist societies too, but, in those cultures, the democratic ideal was not strong enough and dictatorships arose. Not only that, it's true that some people tried to milk the culture and so didn't work hard and rode along on the labor of people who did believe in communism and worked hard at it.

Capitalism's design seems pretty close to the right economic system to allow for good distribution of goods and services, but it was designed when more than 90% of the people lived and worked on farms and most humans lived in small caring (as long as you conformed) communities . Communism arose in closely clustered human industrial societies where the JOB had become critical to survival because, now, items necessary to survival had to be purchased with wages.

It seems that no matter what economic system humans invent, those with the most aggressive genetic qualities rise to the top (then try to maintain power) while the passive ride along for free and the person in the middle works his behind off and, at the end of life, has to depend on his children to support him. Or he/she depends on charity near life's end.

I'll conclude by saying America's system seems fair enough as long as those with the most favorable genetic inheritance realize, like FDR, that no economic system will allow most of us to retire with dignity unless we all agree that those with the most must contribute, through taxes, to keep the bottom from desolate poverty and to support comfortable old age for anybody who has worked throughout her life at low wage jobs necessary to society.

In any event, our discussions about economics must rise above Darwinian shouting at one another.

2010-03-06T12:08:00.000-08:00

THE SOURCES OF CONSCIOUSNESS IN LANGUAGE

Here's another entry of mine on the website World Panthiesm:

Antony wrote: "the authors speculated that language probably arose for situations like hunters going out for the hunt, and coming back and telling the young or inexperienced the story of the hunt."

Antony, I like to take that discussion back further... to where language participated in the evolution of consciousness. I think language (thus consciousness) did evolve from two human functions—sex and work sounds, both vital to survival.

Years ago, when I was a teaching assistant, I came across the idea (50 years ago—don't remember from which book) that the sounds made by working people turned into language when the sound was associated with the work. Imagine that different sounds were forced from the men (and women) doing work—grunts and whooshes of various kinds. Eventually one more conscious member of the human species would summon another male to the kind of work that was associated with that grunt, wheeze or whoosh. The more facile the user of sounds the more he could use others to aid him. By being able to do that, his chances of survival would increase, consciousness be selected for and passed on. Another theory was that the imitation of animal sounds summoned others to the hunt for whatever sound he was imitating. Thus, a sound becomes associated with a specific animal and language facilitates the evolution of consciousness.

One idea about language I found for myself, but others, I'm sure, also know this... at some point during my days of the mutual seduction between the sexes that goes on and ends in the bedroom, I began to realize that it was not so much what I said as how I said it that ended up with coupling. The sound of my voice would change, soften and deepen, become less tense and more relaxed. So I tied that idea to the one I'd already heard about work. Soothing, comforting sounds led to sex and, eventually, one sound more than another, came to mean "let's do that sound, let's fuck!" Thus the four letter word came into existence and helped procreation and thus helped consciousness survive. I also know that perhaps humans listened to other species have sex and imitated those sounds to indicate a desire for sex.

Ain't love and work grand!? It may be no accident that Freud believed that if a person had love and work, that person was functioning okay.

By the way, this supports my idea that the so-called mysterious mind is just the brain listening to itself use words and rewatching images in a recursive fashion. I don't think the mind is as mysterious as some would have us believe.

2010-03-06T08:23:00.000-08:00

THERE AIN'T NO SPIRITUAL DIMENSION

The following is a response to a discussion I'm part of on the World Pantheism website:

I think we confuse emotions and spiritual feelings because they are both the same thing. One enters a cathedral, constructed in the medieval period to put the peasants in awe, and one has a "feeling" as one enters that space. Another person enters a rain forest on the Olympic Peninsula and entering that space a similar "feeling" of awe is created. Both situations pluck the same emotional instrument in the human nervous system which evolution has constructed to help an individual make decisions (a physical emotional process ultimately) by which to thrive and procreate. The physical world plays our emotional nervous systems like a guitarist plucks a guitar.

I challenge people to try and describe a "spiritual" experience without eventually having to refer to the emotions or using emotional terminology. A spiritual experience is an emotional response experienced by the physical body as it responds to the physicality of the natural world. Emotion is not experiencing anything beyond the physicality of the natural world, but when I understand myself as a feeling species responding to its environment with exactly the same sort of emotional apparatus as a tadpole in its environment or a bee in its, or beaver in its, then I'm really in awe of what the human animal has evolved into. I'm no different than a slug, just a little more complicated bit of machinery. The added fact that I can cogitate upon my reductionist architecture is the real ace in the hole.

Beowulf is a poem where I got an image of how the monkish religious people projected their fears into the primal forests where monsters and all sorts of dangers lurked. I could see the good religious folk linking their fears onto old pagan tales that they found when they entered the Germanic territories. Another idea that taught me about how fears got religion is a comment in a history book about travel in the Dark Ages when only a handful of people would dare to travel even to the next town because of the dangers in the forest. I got this picture of these tiny isolated communities, surrounded by nearly trackless wilderness with people frozen by fear into immobility. Pedlars were the courageous explorers of that era. Extend that back to hunter gatherers who were constantly moving about in efforts to find game and "collectibles". These folk had no idea about human anatomy and the nervous system. They just had feelings about unknown versus known situations. The known was safer than the unknown, but the known might be a depleted berry patch or a fire-burned emptiness, so they had to experience that feeling of facing the unknown and go to an unknown place with fear and trepidation—that fear of the unknown they must go into was god to them, was awe to them, was a religious (i.e. spiritual) experience to them, but all they were experiencing was their emotional apparatus being triggered by their imaginative (images based on what their eyes had experienced heretofore) contemplation of the unknown. I thrill just describing the physicality of the world in which I find myself placed by an unbroken chain of successful adaptations that go back to my first single-celled ancestors.

2010-02-21T17:08:00.000-08:00

the following two brief essays are comments in the comment section of the Columbian newspaper about an article on cell phone use, texting and accidents:

EVOLUTIONARY HISTORY AND CELL PHONES

A modern human's lack of fear about texting while driving is a perfect example of the things that evolutionary psychology (a branch of neuroscience) is discovering about human behavior. Most of the human species is still uneasy about deep water, snakes, spiders and et cetera but has evolved no instinctive fear of more modern dangers. This is because the modern brain evolved about 40000 to 100000 years ago (when cave painting began). Left over in our brains are adaptations for (or instinctive fears of) those kinds of dangers that caused death in prehistoric times. If your brain (you) didn't have a strong fear of those dangers, your genes weren't still around. Thus with texting... those who don't fear it while driving will have more deaths and their genes will slowly (I mean real slowly) cease to exist. Those who by genetic accident or normal attrition have higher fears of texting while driving will slowly become more numerous. After millions of years that fear will be strong and automatic enough to be called instinctive.

It takes forever for change in species to evolve. Goodness knows how many millennia it will take before we learn to fear texting. Perhaps autos will be extinct before the human species adapts for those dangers. OR more interesting yet, maybe the human species will be extinct before that adaptation becomes fully realized. People who still like to get away from the rest of us and live in mountains and rural regions probably are more afraid of urban living. Will that really be a better survival adaptation than clustering together for safety? My children are drinking bottled water. They've got a fear of tap water. I still drink tap water. Right now, our differences are purely cultural and informational differences. Millions of years later, one or the other might be instinctive... maybe....

Probably the reason some people don't or can't fear global warming is that it is just way too large for our individual alarm system to comprehend. How can I personally fear an ice cap melting at the poles? Picture information makes it more real than my ancestors two-hundred years ago could realize it. I don't fear global warming myself (not like I feared death by atom bomb when I was young), but I think the possibility that we are contributing to it is probably real, so the current cash crop of humans owes it to the next generation to mitigate the situation. Besides, it's a win win situation if we can avoid future wars over natural resources. But those dangers are way too far in the future for less highly evolved brains to see.

CAUTIONARY EVALUATIONS OF CELL PHONE USE

Maybe another study will cast doubt on the first study, but for right now, all we've got is the statistics to prove the danger of cell phone use while driving. It's a good thing that someone goes to the trouble of doing the studies. Without them, all we'd have are anecdotes to yell at each other and appeals to common sense. And those two items are notoriously wrong however effective. And common sense is made up of the common thoughts of each of us, so common sense on the individual basis is nothing but personal opinion.

The most interesting thoughts to me were dropbury's ruminations because he takes into account the relativity of what each of us fears or doesn't fear and how far an individual might go to protect himself from accident. All life's decisions result from chemical imbalances in the brain between fear and pleasure and which way they tilt the human animal from moment to moment. The most cautious of us will, by a statistically slim number, be better survivors that those with minimal psychological alarm mechanisms. Evolution will be the final arbiter of winners and losers.

Sadly, young people are more prone to accidental death than older human primates, and the more adventurous (ie testosterone laced) the youth is, the more likely (by a small statistical amount) he is to risk death and to die in accidents. Cell phone use isn't going to go away. Change is inevitable. We can only hope careless cell phone users will kill only themselves and NOT ME!

2010-02-17T17:13:00.000-08:00

TODAY'S CONTRIBUTION TO THE COLUMBIAN

I notice shouted questions flying about... like "are you against" or "are you for" as if many of the complex issues America faces can be solved by a knee-jerk huge emotional yell. YES! NO!

I remember old men who used to come into bars where I drank (way back when in the East) missing limbs and fingers and hands or eyes. They were mine workers from the coal mines of West Virginia. These men worked those mines before any federal agency cared to look into mine conditions. My own hearing is nearly gone because when I was young and stupid, nobody required or offered me hearing protection in noisy shipyards, factories and job shops. Also young and stupid, I smoked until I was 41, but, finally, the information got through because federal agencies got a loud enough public voice to cut through the day in and day out cigarette adverts that filled the airwaves and blocked my hearing.

Knowing my own youthful sense of immortality, I'd be an idiot to give a straight out shout: YES! NO! about many federal programs or regulatory agencies. Not one of those agencies would be in existence if somewhere out there in the great free enterprise system some conscienceless schemer hadn't endangered others public safety through some thoughtless plan to get rich. Federal agencies aren't invented out of whole cloth over nothing, though there are some who would like us to believe that all government is bad government.

Always, in every case, men and women of good will need to go over these matters and make wise decisions about reducing, increasing, eliminating or creating wise policies and institutions for the good of the whole. Doubtless, many bad things could be improved. That's what we elect our representatives to D.C. and Olympia to do, not sit on their hands and draw their pay. Of course... I agree with those who say that the good of the whole is usually some measure of good individual sense, magnified through a resonate ballot box, but I little trust men and women who think that only the selfish whims of the most powerful Americans should be honored and who completely distrust their fellow men. After all, we can tell much about our trust of ourselves by how much we trust others. We can only know another human's capacity for ill doing, by knowing our own capacity for it. Our measure of others is made of the ruler that we hold against ourselves.

2010-02-03T09:47:00.001-08:00

Now, if we only get tough with America's religious right which openly advocates putting their faiths into public schools and who routinely put their religious tomes above the Constitution of the United States.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

2009-12-17T14:08:00.000-08:00

I SENT THIS TO SENATOR MCCAIN

Thank you for trying to reinstall the Glass-Steagall Act. I wish you great success. As a Dem, I was happy that we again led the way in getting a minority candidate elected President as we did with the first Catholic president. I wish a handful of truly responsible Congresspersons would get together and make some honest decisions about what the Federal government can do better and more cheaply than the private sector and, then, fund those things well and turn the rest over to private enterprise.

Health care is one of those things that the federal government can do better, so why not get on board there, Senator? The private insurance health industry has admitted repeatedly that they can't do the job as inexpensively as the feds can. Aside from a few really important and public things that the feds can do, most business should be private enterprise, as long as the private sector is well regulated. The private sector proved that when they are let to run loose, they are greedy and irresponsible as anyone.

Thanks for you years of service to our nation. Many long years ahead. Why don't you try to build up a strong independent party that could take Congress out of this endless cycle of hateful irresponsibility that excessive partisanship has created?

Obama Jobs Summit Will Include Business Leaders: Google, Disney CEOs To Attend

2009-11-30T13:08:00.001-08:00

I'm so far to the left that people in the middle might call me a Socialist, or worse, a Communist, but I believe in free markets and small businesspeople as the best way to distribute wealth (even though they're the ones who'd probably call me a Socialist). Somewhere in the real middle of all this current economic chaos is a position which realizes that government is necessary and useful to provide certain social benefits that the private market is not suited to provide and that, yes, it may take higher taxes for all (who can afford them) in order to build the sort of safety net that makes being on the bottom less onerous. Of course we need to guard the door very carefully through which we decide to send those in need of aid so that the undeserving don't make it through, but we need to be fair... some people just can't compete in today's markets for one of many reasons. Should we let them and their children starve? Also, we ought to admit that religious charity isn't the best way to handle poverty because the religious just can't help making their charities opportunities to preach. Thus the vulnerable become the most susceptible to religious indoctrination.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

Shocked--or Not? New Data Shows Abortion Quite Common on Most Red States

2009-11-30T12:51:00.001-08:00

Well, here's another list that, as usual (if it's unfavorable traits the Southland tops it and if it's a list of favorable traits the Southland comes in toward the bottom) proves it's better to live anywhere but in the American South.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

2009-11-29T17:02:00.000-08:00

WHEN THE AMERICAN DREAM FAILS

How will we know if the American Dream has failed? I can think of two sure signs:

1) If there were only one religion and 2) if there were no atheists.

2009-11-17T09:13:00.000-08:00

GLOOM AND DOOM...

Rainy coastal weather today and I've just come from my physical therapy for recovery from torn rotator cuff surgery. Almost done with it and will soon just have exercises at home.

Sitting at Tulley's, having me wee bit a caffeine and thinking (always trouble) about this writing thing I'm struggling with again. Every time I approach the idea of working on my memoir, I feel conflicted (tense), then when I decide I won't write today because I don't feel like it, I feel conflicted again. I used to struggle the same way back in the drinking days, long ago. Can't win for feeling, yet I've got to get a good way of proceeding or I'll stop again, just like I've stopped so many other times on long projects. Part of my trouble is that I can't imagine this having any outcome but for myself. No realistic idea of publishing it, and without that aim, I find it hard to justify the work I'll need to put into it. Already have more than 150 pages and far enough along not to stop, but this is where I've stopped so many times in the past. If I try to tell myself I'm doing it to give to my progeny on flash drives, then I hesitate to put some of the stuff I need to put into it for the sake of honesty.

2009-11-13T15:00:00.001-08:00

THE REPUBLICAN HATE FRONT

Republicans love to claim that we all hate Palin, but what about the hateful things Republicans like Lynn Vincent and Sarah Palin say about other Americans? Lynn Vincent, Sarah's ghost writer, is notoriously anti-gay and wants to deny them the CIVIL right of marriage even though the Constitution says nothing about gays. Only in the Bible are gays so defamed, and the Bible is not the basis of American law, the Constitution is. If these Bible Bibbers would only put the Constitution ahead of their religious books, then America could get on with being a nation of laws rather than a medieval cesspool on the verge of another Inquisition. Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

2009-10-30T14:38:00.000-07:00

ANSWER THE CHARGE OF HATRED OF GOD

In response to the following statement "(1) God doesn't exist, and (2 they hate him" which appeared on the Columbian newspaper website from a man attacking "liberals",
I entered the following response:

Let me assure you, I don't hate god. I have absolutely no feeling whatsoever about the tremendously generalized idea about a superbeing that created this universe. I care about as much about this hypothetical superbeing as I do about Martians in space ships visiting the Earth or the idea of Santa Claus which I used to put a great deal of stock in. I was tremendously disturbed when I heard that Santa didn't exist, but I got over it.

The idea of god is a scientific hypothesis about how and why the universe appears as it does to the human consciousness. Currently, the god hypothesis has no evidence whatsoever for its validity. One proof, of course, would be to find and photograph the angels waving their swords at the entrance to the Garden of Eden to keep us humans from getting at the Tree of Eternal Life. They were put there to be seen and should still be there. I can't find anywhere in the Bible that they were relieved of duty so where are they?

Currently all the evidence available to us supports the idea that the beginning of the universe came about 15 billion years ago in a tremendous and unexplained explosion which is evidenced to our ears in TV static and to our eyes through the Hubble telescope and our being able to tell by light shift that the Cosmos is expanding at an ever increasing speed out in all directions. As far as we can measure and think, the material universe itself is as infinite and eternal as any possible spiritual entity, if and when we can ever, through our material senses, record this supposed "spiritual" realm that some have great hope in to reward them for obedience and to torture everyone else who doesn't agree with them... like me, for example. As far as I know about who hates who, my wishes for Christians aren't half so hateful as to include a place where they'll be eternal tortured for not agreeing with me.

AS TO A LOCAL PRAYER BREAKFAST (the Xtian tool for corrupting our Constitutional guaranteed secular governance),

I replied:

My wife suffered the unintended oppression of working for an organization in another city in which some members networked every day at lunch on the job with the boss to pray together. Quite naturally when people meet together on a regular basis, drawn together by a common purpose, they tend to grow closer together than those who don't share their common purpose and don't meet with them. "In" people tend to trust "in" people more than the "out" people in any organization. This is a well-documented phenomena in group dynamics. It's also the problem that all minorities of any kind deal with daily in any culture. That's why our Constitution is specially designed to protect minorities from the oppression of the majority. It's why "separation of church and state" was implemented in our Constitution. Our founding fathers knew what it meant to be oppressed by religious majorities.

To return to my wife's case. Turns out that every time an opening occurred in the management network of the place where my wife worked, people who networked together in prayer (several also attended the same church) were selected more often to fill the openings. Not only that, certain of the males who networked together in prayer, openly espoused the Christian idea that women's work was in the home. One of those men eventually came into authority over my wife, and when she was asked to do some (what seemed to her) questionable things, she respectfully disagreed with the Christian in charge and suggested other ways to handle the situation at hand. Her manager (like so many Christian males) was not able to handle being disagreed with by a woman who ought to be at home (and who did not pray as he prayed) and soon he fired her for insubordination. I should mention that all my wife's suggestions were offered within the framework of staff meetings where such matters are supposed to be offered up and discussed. This Christian male was way out of line.

My wife is a quiet, conscientious sort of employee. It's not her usual way to create disturbances where she works. When she recently received her Masters in Public Administration and was honored at an awards ceremony for their top students, her supervising professor said, "M______, no matter what, she's always the consummate professional."

My wife could have, of course, pursued this injustice as a sex discrimination case, but, as I said, my wife's a quiet sort who doesn't seek trouble and we didn't really have the resources to embark on such a course of action. However, she was so much in the right that the president of that little incestuously Christian office, after a sweaty and nervous apology to my spouse, wrote a glowing letter of recommendation for her. It was so glowing that one wonders why she was fired? Get the idea?

My point is that no matter how unintended, when people join together in groups (prayer or otherwise), they are building networks which favor the in people and exclude the out people. It doesn't help that I know for certain that many of the people in attendance at these little pools of incipient prejudice are there only to protect their prestige and standing with others who might benefit them in business. Sad that freedom of belief is so suppressed in our culture that average businessmen must pretend to a strong belief that they don't necessarily have in order to further their business interests. Very few people in America are courageous enough to buck the prejudices of the majority Christians until after they've retired and are free to think differently than the majority. It's an age old tale.

If I found a businessman whose services or products I needed who was courageous enough to buck the Christian power elite of Vancouver, I'd do business with him/her in heartbeat. I'd know he had integrity for sure, whereas all those in attendance at these well-publicized networking opportunities for the majority Christian power structure are highly suspect in my eyes.

2009-10-16T06:17:00.000-07:00

AN ADAPTATION CALLED MORALITY

The following is a commentary I entered into the debates that go on all the time on the Columbian website in Vancouver, Washington:

Ray M.... Since it's now tomorrow, I don't know if you'll read this.

You mention a couple of excellent rules for behavior within a culture and, then, credit them to the Bible. Actually, those ideas are inherent within the human animal as we evolved through time. You will find those rules within all cultures and religions, past and present, with slight modifications. I'm an atheist, and I don't need a hypothetical superbeing to tell me that I ought to feel bad if someone steals something of value from me. My feelings inform me pretty well as to how nasty stealing feels, so of course I want laws to protect me from thieves. Bible people just wrote down what people were feeling at the time about the thieves among them and the adulterers, et cetera. Now, of course, we've learned that adulterers are always among us and that, often, those most vociferous about the evils of adultery are the ones practicing it on the sly.

Some will now say, "But what about people whose feelings don't agree with yours?" There are such people as that. They're called sociopaths, and they threaten cultural norms, but most people have evolved the same feeling structure as their neighbors and, thus, agree as to common rules for good social harmony. Less threatening and more helpful are those people who aren't comfortable within whatever culture they're born into. They are always demanding that we reevaluate our cultural priorities. If we didn't change and adapt, of course we'd die out as a species, so those people are healthy in a society. People like the latter brought us democracy. Though I'm an atheist, I recognize that Martin Luther brought needed reform to the Catholic Church, and Protestantism soon followed. Hopefully, Richard Dawkins will help end Protestantism and usher in Humanism as an ethical basis for cultural cohesion.

People interested in the subject of how morality is an adapted trait might like to read The Moral Animal by Robert Wright.

2009-10-12T21:29:00.000-07:00

THE TWO OF US IN PORTLAND'S
JAPANESE GARDENS

This is for Kerly to see the two of us lovebirds: George and Mertie in Vancouver, WA.

The photo is by a friend called Carl who I once upon a time taught English to at Vandalia-Butler
High School. We then became hippy friends after my first divorce and shared a walkup flat with others of like mind. We often drove up to Yellow Springs to watch foreign films at the Little Art Theater.

2009-09-11T07:38:00.001-07:00

MY COMMENT ON A COLUMBIAN ARTICLE

Read the article here.

Gosh, I wish I was rich enough to own 83 foot schooners, then I might be able to see through the eyes of a rich person, to walk in his shoes. But I made my shot at it and, like most, was not able to find room in that 1% of Americans who rule America and its economic fortunes. So I do my best to vote in such a way to narrow the gap between the rich and the poor and to keep the American middle class from being further eroded by the decisions of politicians who are in the pockets of schooner owners.

The best way to protect America and its Constitution is to do everything in our power to make sure that a good strong middle class continues to exist and that poverty does not grow to undermine social stability—even if it might mean increased taxes and allowing Bush's tax breaks for the wealthiest Americans to lapse. Thus defended, the Constitution won't be so stressed in its efforts to protect all Americans as to fail. Laws without a human touch are bound to fail eventually.

Most interesting is the name of the schooner. Sounds like just in pre-WW II Spain, in South America, and in the Catholic Church during Hitler's regime, religion is being put into the service of the wealthy to suppress the poor and other minorities. One of the things to guard against that history has taught us is when the church forgets Christ's message to serve the poor and begins to politicize itself and become a mouthpiece for the rich. Such a historical trend is now coming to America in a big way. Since we're a younger country and have not learned that lesson, I fear we'll someday have our turn at fascism too.

2009-09-10T08:59:00.000-07:00

THE COLUMBIAN (VANCOUVER WA PAPER) WON'T ACCEPT THIS LENGTH

I like free market principles. Here in America they've done a wonderful job of stopping inflation dead in its tracks. With so many people out of work, no one except the richest 12% can afford to buy anything. That definitely keeps prices in check. And wages too.

Let's see: the free market (i.e. unbridled greed) has brought us outlandish CEO benefits and income, the Savings and Loan mess, the dot.com bust, the great Depression and current great Recession, bank failures galore, exploding gold values (for those who can afford gold), the collapsing dollar, corporate corruption, corporate ownership of the Republican part of the US Congress (think Tom Delay and his K Street project), a widely increasing gap between the richest Americans and the poorest, a continually shrinking middle class, the outsourcing of our entire manufacturing base (in search of profits first) along with its good-paying jobs, mortgage failures, the destruction of unions by which working men and women used to have some say about their pay rather than being totally dependent on what their bosses want to pay them (except when Dems manage to raise the minimum wage), financial collapse, cheap come-on printers with expensive ink, ownership of much of America by China and other big investors. Yes, the one thing we do not want is for we voters to have any control whatsoever over the economic forces that dominate our lives.

As to private health care insurance—haven't we seen where that takes us? The public option for health insurance is just that, an OPTION. No one has to use it, so let's try it out and see what happens. If we don't like it after 5 years or so, we can change it, drop it or keep and expand it. It's optional for Pete's sake. What's to fear? Only those who know it might succeed as well as Medicare to hold costs in check fear the public OPTION.

Another thing about private insurance with many competing plans. We've seen how the financial industry has bamboozled the average American with small print and hidden clauses and devious practices when it comes to credit cards. They have no scruples when it comes to profits. To make correct health care choices, one even now has to be an insurance whizzbang to always make the correct choices, and the insurance industry will do everything in its power to fool and trick the average American who, every year, becomes less literate and less able to inform himself by carefully reading the small print. We already have much anecdotal evidence about health insurance surprises for people who did not know exactly what they were getting when they tried to save money on health insurance. I've had occasion to appeal a health insurance claim. Talk about devious decisions and lawyer-like ways to use language to obfuscate an issue! They're masters at it already.

I'll tell you this, when I see widespread honesty at the highest levels of corporate life and a desire to balance profits with social responsibility, then I'll turn my economic welfare over to unregulated, free market capitalism. I can at least vote for change when it comes to politicians and a public OPTION in health care insurance.

2009-09-06T08:19:00.000-07:00

SEEING IS NOT HEARING or MUCH ADO ABOUT SOMETHING

We went to see our play and our seats were three-quarters back on the lower level, maybe a bit farther from the stage than that, so I couldn't hear about 3/4 of the play. My ears are truly shot. I can understand that I could have used hearing aids in that one situation of live theater. I think they'd have helped, but in a movie theater, not usually. I try not to remember when I sat in theaters and could hear everything. Not hearing well distances me from people and situations, but even hearing devices that I use in movies don't help when there's background music or street sounds or when characters whisper. If I'd been able to get seats closer, I'm sure I'd have heard just fine. The last time my wife and I went to Interplayers in Spokane I could hear just fine and my son's improv performances are always hearable.

I'm looking for science to find a way to re-stimulate the little hairs that increase hearing, but the hearing aid and hearing aid battery industry is so huge, I wonder if research is really underway on hearing defects. Hearing aids, like vision aids, are in the control of non-professionals whose sole purpose is to sell devices. They'd hate to see medical treatments that would improve hearing, yet I'm sure that someday, it'll be as simple as a drug or other treatment to restore almost complete hearing ability.

PS: It didn't rain, not a whisper of it.

2009-09-04T20:11:00.000-07:00

EATING EXPENSIVELY

We've eaten at two pricey restaurants in this tourist town of Ashland in which Southern Oregon University is located and the Shakespearean Festival. We conclude that all spendy restaurants feature at least two things. One is slow service. The other is food without much flavor. We conclude that Wolfgang Puck has an audience of jumble-brained patsies. Bring me some roast and fried potatoes.

2009-09-04T16:58:00.000-07:00

DEMONSTRATING IGNORANCE TO MANY PEOPLE

Today, my wife and I drove over to the Crescent City on the Northern California coast. Coming back along I-5, we passed a garage or shed with its back to the highway. On its surface in large letters, its owner had written: PRAISE GOD.

My wife and I laughed. Praise God. Is that the being who doomed the entire human race to die because they exercised the supposedly free will he'd given them to use in a free way? What's to praise? Seems he really didn't mean them to have free will except as limited by his king like orders. So they weren't actually free. So, for disobeying a little thing like eating and becoming as wise as god imagined he was wise, this god fellow murders every human being on earth, constantly, each and every day. Then, as atonement for his unrelieved cruelty toward the human race, he makes it up by killing his own son. That's right, two wrongs somehow make a right.

Then there's another piece of insanity in that whole scenario. As I recall, this hypothetical superbeing was afraid that his human slaves would eat of the tree of life and have eternal life. Now wait a minute. I thought these human being already had eternal life. That's why god decided that they must die, that he must take away their eternal lives, but then why was he afraid that they'd eat of the tree of life since they already had eternal life before he doomed them to die? Something awfully circular and crazy in this whole account of the origins of the human species and life and death. Funny no one ever noticed these things back in the darkest days of human intelligence. Seems that for humankind to really get wise and intelligent, they took many millennia. Why did this hypothetical superbeing think that ignorant twosome had grown wise in the first place? They were pretty ignorant after all, so if their intelligence, dim as it was, nearly equaled his intelligence, he (the hypothetical one) was himself dumb as a post. Lot's of twists and turns in here, aren't there?

Praise god, my ass. Glad to be rid of the hypothesis of him, I'd say.

2009-09-04T08:18:00.000-07:00

HELLO FROM SHAKESPEARE

So... for the first time since I've lived out west (30+years), I've come down to Ashland, Oregon with my spouse, Mertie, for to see its Shakespeare Festival which runs nearly year round. We two groundlings are going to see Much Ado About Nothing on Saturday night, and, of course, there's a 60% chance of rain on Saturday night with temps down into the 50s. We've chosen a play being presented in the open air arena, a mockup of the Stratford theater where Mr. Shakespeare, himself, presented his plays. Of course, everyone we talk to down here tells us it never rains when a play is being presented, miraculously. Yes, the weather is in sympathy with Shakespeare. Or is it the doubling and troubling three witches up on the barren hillsides that surround Ashland who control the weather? Or could it be the local chamber of commerce, making sure that such rumors float North on the lips of groundlings like Mertie and I?

More later.

2009-09-02T17:30:00.000-07:00

MORE CHURCH SIGN NONSENSE

A recent local church sign read: "Character—what you do when no one's looking."

Of course, I thought. But then I thought deeper. Pride, I believe, is one of the 7 deadly sins. Well, if one becomes aware of having done a "good" deed, then he is being pridefully self-congratulatory. If one takes self-worth or pride in what he's done, then he's got the character of a sinner. In order to be free of the sin of pride, he must also be unaware of what he's done. In short, the only good deed is a thoughtless one or one done without thought at all. Actually the only act which could be considered an act free of pride (self-congratulation) would have to be an unconscious act. Of course, one can always counter-balance a good deed by telling everyone that's he's done the good deed. That would counter-balance his pride and make his act an act of good character.

Christians just never get it right, do they?

2009-08-25T08:57:00.000-07:00

THAT WONDERFUL INTERNET

The following three communications have been a pretty consistent thing between me and my new newspaper here in Vancouver, Washington. It's a constant problem. When you think how twisted up the relationships between software designers, computer manufacturers, ISP providers, website operators and telephone/wifi/cable operators, it's no wonder that one must go to college just to understand what's going on. The whole sheebang needs to be simplified and standardized for those of us who use the internet for small daily personal transactions.

Dear Scott Campbell [Columbian's owner publisher],

> You need to get a new website manager. I spent a good half hour working on a
> comment to the article on Baird in today's paper. I've tried to enter the
> comment three times in a row now and still not getting through. This happens
> regularly, at least once a week if not more. Some people at the Columbian
> like to say that problems always occur on the internet. Well, I've never
> experienced such continuing problems on my blog at Blogger or on any of the
> regular sites that I visit. The Columbian's website is pretty awful,
> specially the comment function. I comment regularly on HuffPo and certainly
> don't experience the troubles that I have with the Columbian website.

> George [me]:
>
> I wanted to make sure that your issue has been addressed since this original
> email. I am the web editor but we have had issues with our browser-based
> commenting system, especially where people spend significant amounts of time
> composing the comments. We have worked with your vendor to try and diagnose
> this problem but there have been no answers on their part. I would like to
> know if you are still having problems and, if so, what you're seeing.
>
> I apologize for the problems you have been having and sincerely want to know
> more.
>
> Thanks,
>
> jeff bunch
> web editor
> columbian.com
> jeff.bunch@columbian.com
> (360) 735-4699
>
> We Deliver Clark County | Reaching 64% of all adults
>
Geoff ,

The problem has been intermittent but pretty steady. Seems like about once or twice every two weeks, but I’m not keeping records.

Yes, this last time it did occur after I spent considerable time composing my comment in the comment box which is what makes the problem really frustrating. Then, of course, if I decide to write the comment on my Office Word for Mac software, and copy and paste it, the comment feature sometimes doesn't work either. I even backspaced to my original comment after several failures of the comment feature and copied the original, then left the Columbian website and returned to it and pasted that in to no avail.

Another email I sent to Lou [Columbian managing editor] listed the many ways I've tried to get around the copy and paste problem from different type faces to different browsers.

Good luck working with my vendors. I used to have a helpful, technically proficient outfit called Icehouse in the Spokane area as my ISP. I clung to them as long as I could, but Qwest made it nearly impossible to use them after we moved from Spokane to here. Now, of course, MSN, my ISP with Qwest, claims not to be able to officially work with my system. They always claim they must get out special books to answer my questions, plus I'm dealing with people in the Philippines. Sometimes, I get someone who can help an old man like me who is not at all computer literate so my experience with the Philippines isn't all bad. You'd think if a company went to the trouble to force me into their system, they'd at least feel responsible to handle my gear proficiently.

I truly believe it's time to standardize the equipment and software like phones are standardized—at least for those of us who want to use our computers to write, bank, watch snatches of news videos, and browse the internet for information. For those who like to make and steal movies, etcetera, let them spend their lives working with computer problems.

As it is right now, for example, I don't have the time to learn everything about my Microsoft Office Word word processor 2008. I'll bet I use about only 20% of its potential as it is. Why do I need the constant upgrades? I think the computer geeks who invented all this stuff have really enslaved us to their profit machine. And they did it by hooking the youth market into it which was less able to make realistic decisions.

Computers and the internet are the only businesses I know of where the business tells the consumer what he must buy and when he must buy it. It's like going into Sears and having a Sears salesmen take you to a refrigerator and telling you you must buy it because your old machine will stop working on December 5, 2009, guaranteed. It's as if they control the electrical system as well as the refrigerator manufacturing business so that they can shut you off at home and force you to come to them to buy the latest model with the latest plug. You've heard it all before, I'm sure, but my analogy is pretty accurate.

When I point these things out to members of the youth market, they don't even seem to care that their free will has been partially hijacked. "Never mind, old man, just leave me alone and let me twitter my brains out." Of course, the latest neuroscience seems to indicate that the human brain is just a fancy collection of mini-computers, and psychologists taught us long ago that it can be conditioned to accept almost anything as long as the conditioning is done correctly. This computerized world we live in makes the human automaton condition ever more evidence to people who see the bigger picture.

Well, I hope you can make contact with those who laughingly supply me with service,
--
George Thomas
Vancouver, Washington 98684

2009-08-22T15:43:00.000-07:00

CHURCH BULLETIN BOARD, MY STYLE

I read the following on a church bulletin board: God, please help me to be the man my dog thinks I am.

I suggest that such a board ought to read: Dog, please help me to be the god man thinks I am.

2009-08-15T13:42:00.000-07:00

JUST A RANT

Folks... I think we ought to quit getting our views from the Internet. It's just like getting facts from village gossips back in the days when there was no TV, radio, newspapers, news magazines nor logic or scientific methodology. Hardly anyone had an inkling of education. Most people never got farther from home than a day's walk, and every nation was led by a king, prince, king of kings, warlord or other potentate. People used to believe anything back then, things like "if you split open a rock from Golgatha, inside will be a little tongue, crying out about the death of Christ." Yes, miracles everyday, a world of everyday miracles. With a lifespan of about 30 years, ignorant of most facts, people trudged their streets in Babylon or Nazareth, didn’t know a thing except how to survive. Dirty and hungry they had no method for separating fact from fiction. They’d believe most any news that came from afar. In fact they’d be biased toward news that gave them hope and might not look too closely at long distance news. It's sort of like getting your news in a fundamentalist religion's holy book or from a blogger who comes to you from afar with news you want to believe is true. In short the Internet is sort of an ignorant global community full of what used to be called, in the good old days, superstitious and ignorant “back fence gossips”. We can believe none of it.

TORN ROTATOR CUFF

If you think the pace of my entries has slowed down... watch. I just tuesday came out of surgery to repair the above. My right arm's in a sling for 6 to 9 weeks. This is a one finger exercise and there won't be many of these.

2009-07-21T06:48:00.001-07:00

JUST WHAT I'VE ALWAYS SUSPECTED

"The study tracked subscriptions for a top-10 seller of online adult entertainment (2006-2008) and using ZIP code data associated with those subscriptions, compared the data with numbers from the FCC that tracks the amount of broadband Internet users in any given state. One of the findings from the study revealed that online subscriptions are 'more prevalent in states where surveys indicate conservative positions on religion, gender roles and sexuality.' "

Source: Red Light States: Who Buys Adult Entertainment, By Benjamin Edelman ; FCC Report: High Speed Services for Internet Access

But where's the Bible Belt in this? My expectations were disappointed when I didn't see Alabama and Georgia, North and South Carolina. Florida is understandable. Lots of seniors there who might need a little lift off boost for the Viagra ride.

2009-07-20T16:01:00.000-07:00

FROM HUFFPO TO US:

The following reference to pain is from The Princess Bride by William Goldman: "Life is pain and anyone telling you different is selling something."

Now that's true and it goes for everybody from religious people to plastic surgeons, but, on the other hand, watch out for someone who wants to sell you a vision of the world that's all pain too. Usually, they've got something behind their back that they want to sell you after they convince you that the world's going straight to hell in a hand basket. I can always spot a fundamentally bent Christian because he's telling me how evil the world is, and, later, he wants to sell me Jesus's love to make me all better. Like most approaches to the "evils" of the world, the best view is a balanced view.

2009-07-17T23:55:00.000-07:00

MY RECENT LETTER TO THE EDITOR

Conservatives claim Sotomayor’s humanity might bias her judgments in law. Fact is, if she were liberal, she’d be less likely to enforce biased judgments. Recent brain imaging studies show that the conservative brain is less able to entertain two competing ideas. In short, conservative biases are unyielding whereas liberals might alter an outworn bias through new information. Adaptive change is the key to survival.

No one is objective, least of all someone who imagines they’re objective. Recent findings in neuroscience suggest human behavior is more robotic than we’d like to think. The synaptic connections which determine human personality are limited by genetic makeup and altered by life experience. By imaging brain activity, we observe that human actions are triggered before the brain becomes conscious of choice. For example, words form before we’re conscious of choosing them. The batter’s nervous system begins to swing milliseconds before he thinks to swing.

2009-06-30T13:15:00.000-07:00

LONG TIME NOSEE

I've got to make an entry. It's been so long. That's because I'm working my way through an algebra textbook, working on my book Boomed Out: a mythical memoir of a Silent between generations, and trying to keep up on my personal reading and my reading of books for "Page Turners", my book club. Currently reading Three Cups of Tea ghosted by David Relin for Greg Mortenson for the book club.

Came across this idea while reading Three Cups of Tea. The Taliban would be right at home in America's deep south Bible belt. In Afghanistan, while they were in power, the Taliban set up a "Department of the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice". These people were book burners and anti-science almost as thoroughly as Bush's White House. The Taliban wouldn't let medical students study anatomy or view drawings of human anatomy. Imagine how much they loathed evolution! That's why the Taliban is a perfect fit for the American South. All those promise keepers who've gone on to cheat on their wives would flock to the Taliban whose values are just like their own.

2009-05-15T10:47:00.000-07:00

THOSE MIXED UP NEURONS

After I retired a few years back, I took a couple of algebra/mathematics courses. I noticed a strange quirk in my mental processes. Frequently four years ago when I meant to write down x, I would write down the numeral 8. Recently, I've begun working through my old algebra textbook in order to get to a new unused textbook I bought and wasn't able to use back in Spokane because my wife and I moved to Vancouver. This morning, I was doing the exercises at the end of a section, and I wrote down 4 when I meant to write down +. I'm still also confusing quite frequently the 8 and the x.

So, according to my poor befuddled neurons
8 looks like x sometimes and
4 looks like + sometimes also.

These slips occur when I'm lost in the overall algebraic function I'm doing and not always paying attention to the finer details that my hand is putting on the paper. But I can see how certain neurons which are responsible for curves and curlicues can get confused between x and 8 and I can see how the neurons responsible for lines that are vertical and horizontal and which intersect in the figures for numeral 4 and a + sign can also get confused when I'm not paying strict attention and am slightly distracted.

Now isn't that fascinating to catch our neurons at work like that?

2009-05-12T13:19:00.000-07:00

A WHOLE IN ONE

The other day I had an insight as to the whys and wherefores of my life. I think what I have to say might sound almost mundane, but like so many things in a man's life, I may have known something for the longest time, but until I actually focus awareness on it, the real force of the insight remains lost.

I've been an atheist probably as far back as I can think, with some lapses and backsliding into belief under the duress of painful times. In short, when I am most weak and helpless is when I make decisions about gods and powers of greatness that I normally would not make.

I don't know why I came to be an atheist, but as a teen, I probably said I was an atheist in order to shock people. The other day, though, I understood something about atheism that I'd not noted before. I was thinking about the book I'm writing and was trying to phrase a central theme of it when I chanced upon the following thought: my life seems to be directed toward the purpose of seeing myself as I truly am beyond or outside of the consciousness of a judging god.

To live godless builds a truly human way of evaluating life. I think atheism is allowing me to quit having a split nature, seeing myself at one time as a human animal and at another time as a constructed creature at the mercy of a whimsical god like the gods of the Bible or Koran. The end of dualism is the end of being split, coming to live within existential doctrine. I'm sure that's what the existentialists were hoping for—to quit living as dual people and to be as one.

To think as an atheist one escapes the duality of good and evil. As long as one is encumbered by the good versus evil continuum, he cannot help but be judgmental. His consciousness is bathed in good and evil thinking rather than in evaluating life on less onerous and practical terms.

2009-05-10T11:27:00.000-07:00

WRITING FROM SPACE

Long time since last entry.

I'm at Tully's in Vancouver. Just got back from the Humanists of Greater Portland meeting. At the meeting this morning, I felt light-headed and couldn't follow the talk on "dark matter" very well. Suddenly I was struck by the thought that I didn't belong among these "smart" people so I didn't go to lunch with the sub-group that always meets for lunch following the Sunday presentations and drove straight back here to Vancouver. On the drive back I was filled with fear and a sense of worthlessness—fear and worthlessness, my old nemeses from college drinking days. As soon as I pulled into Tulley's, a place familiar to me, I was okay again.

Like most fears, this morning's fear gathered strength and spread the more I indulged it. First thing I knew I was imagining my old age, myself in a nursing home, whining for help, trembling and begging. Not a pleasant set of feelings and imaginings. But that's just the way it goes with me sometimes, rather fewer times than in my old drinking days and in early sobriety. But my bouts with insecurity seem to be increasing in frequency again. Maybe stimulated by working on Boomed Out? Dark matter indeed!

2009-03-25T16:04:00.000-07:00

ATHEISTS HAVE THE MOST SUSTAINABLE ETHICS

How often have we atheists been asked how atheists can have any
sense of "morality" since we have no godly law which supports our
ethical beliefs? I'm currently reading a collection of essays called,
The Sense of the Sixties, and in it, Robert Penn Warren (he wrote All
The King's Men) appeals to the same source for my guiding lights as do
most atheists and agnostics. Warren was writing an essay directed to
the situation between blacks and whites as they existed in the
mid-1960s, but his conclusions as to a good foundation for ethics is a
universal I also subscribe to.

"It would be an even more vicious illusion to think that in
trying to solve the problem he would be giving something away, would
be "'liberal," or would be performing an act of charity, Christian or
any other kind. The safest, soberest, most humble, and perhaps not the
most ignoble way for him to think of grounding action is not on
generosity, but on a proper awareness of self-interest.

"It is self-interest to want to live in a society operating by
the love of justice and the concept of law…. It is self-interest to
want all members of society to contribute as fully as possible to the
enrichment of that society…. It is self-interest to seek out friends
and companions who are congenial in temperament and whose experience
and capacities extend our own…. It is self-interest to want to escape
from the pressure to conform to values which we feel immoral or
antiquated…. It is self-interest to want to escape from the burden of
vanity into the hard and happy realization that in the diminishment of
others there is a deep diminishment of the self." —Robert Penn Warren

2009-03-09T16:25:00.001-07:00

CONVICTION LEADS TO ERROR

The following paragraphs come from a book I'm reading presently, The Great Equations by Robert P. Crease. Laughing at Ehrenhaft, I'm forced to say that I'm 71 and I can't even find a podium. So my mumbling and grumbling about religion usually occurs in the presence of my lovely wife. Ehrenhaft, fundamentalist religious nuts of all religions and me...

"It took place in September 1946 in New York City at one of the first postwar annual meetings of the American Physical Society. At one session, the presentation by the young Dutch theorist Abraham Pais, who was struggling to explain the strange behavior of a puzzling, recently discovered new particle, was interrupted by Felix Ehrenhaft, an elderly Viennese physicist. Ever since 1910, Ehrenhaft had been claiming to have evidence for the existence of 'subelectrons,' charges whose values were smaller than the electron's, and his efforts to advance his claims had long ago exhausted the patience of the physics community. Now approaching seventy, Ehrenhaft was still seeking an audience, and approached the podium demanding to be heard.

"A young physicist named Herbert Goldstein—who told me the story—was sitting next to his mentor and former colleague from the MIT Radiation Laboratory, Arnold Siegert.

" 'Pais's theory is far crazier than Ehrenhaft's,' Goldstein asked Siegert. 'Why do we call Pais a physicist and Ehrenhaft a nut?'

"Siegert thought a moment. 'Because,' he said firmly, 'Ehrenhaft believes his theory.'
The strength of Ehrenhaft's conviction, Siegert meant, had interfered with the normally playful attitude that scientists require, an ability to risk and respond in carrying forward their dissatisfaction. (Conviction, Nietzsche said, is a greater enemy of truth than lies.) What makes a crackpot is not simply our prejudices, nor necessarily the claim, but our recognition of the disruptive effects of the author's conviction. For conviction tends to wipe out not only the dissatisfaction but also the playfulness, the combination of which produces such a powerful driving force in science." —Robert P. Crease

2009-02-20T15:01:00.000-08:00

THE SENSE OF THE SIXTIES

I'm reading a collection of materials from a book about the 60s. Almost all the essays seem to have appeared in the time frame between 1964 and 1966. I came across a couple of enticing comments. The two comments I have in mind came from the pen of Andrew Kopkind, one of which I'll bet he recalled (or not) not too long after he'd made it and wished he'd not made it. What political figure do you think Kopkind's remarks were about?

First and with a lot of spin toward the last resident of the White House: He "continually pressed the Johnson Administration on a Vietnam settlement" and "criticized the President for regarding the war as 'purely a military problem.' "

The next Kopkind comment is a stronger clue to the political identity I have in mind: "He can afford the luxury of the free rein because he has a precious commodity—time. Nothing much is likely to happen to him for five years, maybe more."

2009-02-18T17:38:00.000-08:00

A ROMANTIC, ONCE I WAS
till birds did ask me leave their nest
and go among the peopled world
there to beat my breast
and leave them curled
in peace and quiet rest.

As I get further into old age and farther from the romanticism that cursed my early and mid life before science took a strong hold on my imagination and my rational brain received more nourishment than my intuitive brain, I can see how the spirit of the poem, "Song", held my senses fast. Reading a little Tennyson today, I was struck by the melancholy and somber tone of this Romantic's work, and I did get a brief glimpse of what it meant to be the romantic that I was. When I say "romantic" I don't mean it as a synonym for romantic love. I mean to imply the entire death-oriented, religion swallowing, grail-questing, hero-worshiping, pie in the sky, good versus evil seeing mental blob that is the romanticism that drives fundamentalism of all brands to go out and beat their enemies bloody, tilt at windmills and bring down towers with airplanes. I subsume religion under the heading of that romanticism.

If you need further proof, look at the picture of Tennyson.

2009-02-12T08:00:00.000-08:00

WHAT ARE THE ODDS things are going to get worse in future rather than better? According to a New York Times article, two satellites have collided and the debris is spewing higher and lower through space:

"For decades, space experts have warned of orbits around the planet growing so crowded that two satellites might one day slam into one another, producing swarms of treacherous debris.

"It happened Tuesday. And the whirling fragments could pose a threat to the International Space Station, orbiting 215 miles up with three astronauts on board, though officials said the risk was now small."

PLEASE SAY IT ISN'T SO, ROMEO!

New research shows—according to an article on CBS news—that love acts like addiction in the brains of those who suffer under the lash of love. I could have told them that. Painful withdrawal symptoms can create craving, but it's wonderful when love works out. Like 20% of the couples in one study, my wife and I still bill and coo, and our VTAs must light up like the Fourth of July:

"In humans, there are four tiny areas of the brain that some researchers say form a circuit of love. Acevedo, who works at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, is part of a team that has isolated those regions with the unromantic names of ventral tegmental area (VTA), the nucleus accumbens, the ventral pallidum and raphe nucleus.

"The hot spot is the teardrop-shaped VTA. When people newly in love were put in a functional magnetic resonance imaging machine and shown pictures of their beloved, the VTA lit up. Same for people still madly in love after 20 years.

"The VTA is part of a key reward system in the brain."

What more should we expect, since emotions are adaptations for the regulation of our animal behavior? Robotics, anyone? Again we can see that feeling love toward an imaginary god in one's head would self-reward the believer for his faith with chemical enhancement. Pity the poor atheist who can only love life which and people who do not always reward him with as much feeling in return. Of course, people of faith, who are truly honest about the reality which their god has given them, must feel terrible most of the time because living is not always a friendly process. Taking that a step further—couldn't we say that Christians and Muslims and Jews are in very destructive (even sadomasochistic relationships) with their gods?

2009-02-10T16:54:00.000-08:00

FAUX NEWS IS A REPUBLICAN GROUPY OUTFIT

From a blogger at Huffington Post comes the following. Read it and weep with laughter at the totally biased Faux (Fox) News people:

"Critics of the Fox News Channel intimate all the time that they take their marching orders and construct their dizzy little metanarratives from concise memoranda from straight out of the Republican messaging machine. But if you were to accuse the network of doing so, they'd typically respond, "Zounds! Thou wound mine honour, goode fellowe, verily!" Or, they'd have chief flack-and-Sith Lady Irina Briganti cut you, with dirty knives. But Media Matters has caught the foxy newsies in flagrante delicto passing off a press release from the Senate Republican Communications Center as their own enterprise reporting."

2009-02-07T08:24:00.000-08:00

IF YOU THINK FOX NEWS VIEWERS ARE IGNORANT OF FACTS, YOU ARE...

The following excerpt is from The Carpetbagger Report:

"I have naively believed for years that staying informed about current events by getting some news is better than blissful ignorance derived from getting no news. Then Fox News Channel helped demonstrate just how wrong I was.

The Program on International Policy Attitudes at the University of Maryland conducted a thorough study of public knowledge and attitudes about current events and the war on terrorism. Researchers found that the public’s mistaken impressions of three facets of U.S. foreign policy — discovery of alleged WMD in Iraq, alleged Iraqi involvement in 9/11, and international support for a U.S. invasion of Iraq — helped fuel support for the war.

While the PIPA study concluded that most Americans (over 60%) held at least one of these mistaken impressions, the researchers also concluded that Americans’ opinions were shaped in large part by which news outlet they relied upon to receive their information.

As the researchers explained in their report, “The extent of Americans’ misperceptions vary significantly depending on their source of news. Those who receive most of their news from Fox News are more likely than average to have misperceptions. Those who receive most of their news from NPR or PBS are less likely to have misperceptions. These variations cannot simply be explained as a result of differences in the demographic characteristics of each audience, because these variations can also be found when comparing the demographic subgroups of each audience.”

Almost shocking was the extent to which Fox News viewers were mistaken. Those who relied on the conservative network for news, PIPA reported, were “three times more likely than the next nearest network to hold all three misperceptions. In the audience for NPR/PBS, however, there was an overwhelming majority who did not have any of the three misperceptions, and hardly any had all three.”"

...CORRECT!

Read the whole article here.

2009-02-06T19:27:00.000-08:00

JUST THE FACTS, MAM

Historical population figures for Hammond, Indiana:

Census Pop. %±
1880 699
1890 5,284= 655.9%
1900 12,376=134.2%
1910 20,925= 69.1%
1920 36,004= 72.1%
1930 65,559= 82.1%
1940 70,18=3 7.1%
1950 87,595 = 24.8%
1960 111,698= 27.5%
1970 107,983= −3.3%
1980 91,985= −14.8%
1990 84,236= −8.4%
2000 83,048= −1.4%

You might ask, "George, what are you doing, posting this list of the rising and falling population of Hammond, Indiana?"

Well... in the first place, I'm crazy.

Actually, since I was born and raised in Dayton, Ohio, I feel particularly akin to Hammond folk, and I was doing some research on a man named Jean Shepherd. He wrote "A Christmas Story" which has become a Christmas classic about a kid named Ralphie who wanted a Red Ryder bee bee gun and whose mother was worried he'd shoot his eye out. Jean was born in Hammond and raised there and worked in the steel mills before serving in WWII in the signal corps. He died living on one of the keys in Florida, I believe. I came across the population figures and they reminded me of what happened to Dayton, Ohio. The same rise and fall in population and industry. Dayton took quite a hammering, losing Delco and National Cash Register during those years. We're talking 100,000 or more jobs. Horrible stuff. Hammond's plight is/was Dayton's plight, and they occurred in overlapping historical dates.

Anyhow, I was struck by a bolt of nostalgia, seeing those population figures for Hammond. Sometimes nostalgia takes me for a real trip, recalling my childhood and youth in the Midwestern state of Ohio, southern Ohio. And I just wanted to put that down for whoever might run across it and also have nostalgic memories. Jeez, I hate nostalgia. When I was young, I swore I'd never let nostalgia get me, but it has.

2009-01-20T15:47:00.000-08:00

OBAMA PROMISES AMERICA'S DAY!

I recall walking a memorial walk with many African-American students and youths the day after Martin Luther King was assassinated and how we felt and how far away the American Dream of equality and freedom felt on that day. I have been in tears more than once over the past months and days and hours as I witness America's reawakening. I feel, at age 71, as if the America of my youth has returned, those past days when with innocent and hopeful feelings, I believed in the American Way and its hope and promise for the world. These past 8 years I witnessed American leaders who thought nothing of torturing helpless captives, spying on Americans and acting in ways I've always associated with the worst of world leaders. Now those dark days are past, I hope for good.

2009-01-18T20:27:00.000-08:00

SCIENCE: IT'S TRAGIC AND IT'S FUNNY

According to an article in the London Times...

"40% of coma patients in a ‘vegetative state’ may be misdiagnosed,
says a new report: Trapped inside their bodies, apparently switched off to the world, but still alive: they are the undead. Or so we thought. Forty per cent of patients in a ‘vegetative state’ are misdiagnosed. Now British scientists are leading the field in trying to put that right

"But here’s at least one mordantly amusing and true story told to me by a psychologist at Putney’s Royal Hospital for Neuro-disability. "Young man with motorbike head injury in a coma. His mum, a keen evangelical, comes every day with friends to sing Onward, Christian Soldiers by his bedside. She’s hoping to stimulate his brain into action. It works: he comes round, but he can’t speak. So they fit him up with one of those Stephen Hawking-type laptops, and the first words he speaks are: For God’s sake, Mum, shut it!” That’s about as funny as it gets on a brain-injury ward, but there’s a serious take-home message. Even minimally aware patients can retain emotions, personality, a capacity to suffer—and, as the young biker showed, attitude."

Read more about PVS here.

According to another article in the Times of London, studies by evolutionary psychologists show that:

"Wealthy men give women more orgasms"

You don't believe it, read more here.

2009-01-15T15:54:00.000-08:00

ATHEISM AND AGNOSTICISM DELINEATED

Atheists agree that the phenomenal identity named god does exist in the synapses of the brain and can, therefore, be discussed in abstract terms, but they claim no brain has contacted an identity in the material world outside the human synapse that correlates to the synaptic construct named god. Thus atheists conclude that god does not exist in the material world except as a synaptic pattern in the material human brain.

Atheists further maintain that “in synapsizing about the mental construct god”, the synapsizer or brain is, by necessity, restricted wholly to its own synaptic reality without reference to the real and material world by which human sensory organs interact with the phenomenal world outside the brain. Therefore, atheists are necessarily materialists, whereas agnostics, since their synapsized conclusions about the unprovability of a “god phenomenon” in the material world remains wholly a creation of the synapses of the human brain, are idealists.

The agnostic argument is a valid syllogism, but it has no implication for or reality in the material world. This discrepancy results because the agnostic has no evidence of the “phenomenon of god” in the material world which is as cogent as the synaptic phenomenon of “not-god” in the synapses of the brain. The two concepts are not equally evidenced to the synapses of the material brain. An agnostic, therefore, must ignore material reality in order to maintain the equality of the god/not-god evidentiary and syllogistic balance in the agnostic brain.

Agnostics are, I repeat, idealists while atheists are realists.

I have invented three terms in the foregoing discussion. Each term is based on the mental phenomenon of synapse, an evolved technique by which the material brain recognizes itself throughout its carcass and overhears itself communicating within its residence in the skull. Synapsizing is a more concrete and specific way of referring to the “activity of thinking”. Synapsized is the past tense of synapsizing, and, finally, the synapsizer refers to the brain/body which senses (feels) itself doing the synapsizing or thinking.

You may ask why I would invent terms. I do it to try and be more concrete or real about the processes that are happening within the human carcass when the brain idealizes or realizes the world it’s in contact with through evolved sensory equipment. I can see that if it were a philosopher/brain speaking here, “the brain that calls itself I” would need to invent and define a lot more terms in order to make itself understood to other brain/bodies. I have no training as a philosopher, and so this attempt seems silly and unrealistic even to me, though I sense that what I’m doing verges on an attempt to communicate what I think is a reality unique to this particular “brain that calls itself I”. However, this I-brain may not be unique at all.

“Ah, the humility! The humility!”