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.

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

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.

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"

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!

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?

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.

THE ROBOTIC HUMAN THINKING MACHINE

I get a kick out of calling myself a robot in various social situations. Some think I’m joking. Others might be offended, and, as for myself, I don’t know how serious I am, but the evidence continues to mount up that this wonderful reasoning process we humans pride ourselves on is nothing more than an adaptation, an instinct for thinking. Well, if thought is instinctive, how much credit can we take for employing it consciously? If we are not really consciously applying logic and reason, then what does it mean to think? The following is an brief bit of a paper by two evolutionary psychologists which seems to indicate that thinking is instinctive rather than consciously employed. If you can, you should try to get ahold of the entire paper, if not the book in which it appears.

“Taken together, the data showing design specificity, precocious development, cross-cultural universality, and neural dissociability implicate the existence of an evolved, species-typical neurocomputational specialization.

“In short, the neurocognitive system that causes reasoning about social exchange shows evidence of being what Pinker (1994) has called a cognitive instinct: It is complexly organized for solving a well-defined adaptive problem our ancestors faced in the past, it reliably develops in all normal humans, it develops without any conscious effort and in the absence of explicit instruction, it is applied without any conscious awareness of its underlying logic, and it is functionally and neurally distinct from more general abilities to process information or behave intelligently.” Leda Cosmides and John Tooby in “Neurocognitive Adaptations Designed for Social Exchange,” Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology (p. 585)

MONDAY MORNING AT THE MON AMI

Service on the internet is pretty slow this morning. 

Such weather—three straight days of hundred degree temps and, then, a 90 and, now it's 72 degrees, overcast with a nice drizzle to make things wonderful. Saturday, Mertie and I went to see Woody Allen's latest flick, "Vicky Christina Barcelona". Bardem is in it and he's really something (going from psychopathic killer in "No Country For Old Men" to intense Latin lover) as well as Penelope Cruz and Scarlett Johannson. A marvelously complicated love triangle repeated in several combinations of three. Like shooting craps with five dice, three dice. Mertie and I loved it. 

It's strange having this WiFi loaded computer with me this morning. I feel different. The pattern of reading and noting things down in my handwritten journal is all smashed to smithereens. And I notice how much I've changed when I try to write something creatively, like the review above. All the emotional tangles that used to inform and connect my words have disappeared. I'm completely well as far as my past darknesses are concerned. My mental kinks are ironed out and so, also, is my writing. When I was young, I was so filled with emotions that my mind couldn't sit still. When I wrote something, my mind grabbed ideas and images from everywhere at once. Not that this was particularly successful, but it was the way my brain worked. Now it's so different. I hardly feel connected to what I put down on this computer. Most of the time, I'm at peace and not driven by emotions to odd behaviors. This is either the aging process or it's the work I did all those years with John paying off. Or, it's having this computer which completely changes the initial impulse to write, distances it from the connection my hand/eye used to have when a pencil or pen is involved. 

I don't know what to feel about the current mental situation. I'm so at peace. Last week I told my doctor, Sugarman, that I've never felt so healthy, mentally—and physically for the most part—that I think about death all the time, I mean, in the sense that I don't want my life, as it is now, to end. I recall the days when I thought I'd be dead by thirty years of age. Then, that turned into the time I crashed my car on purpose at around age 31 or 32 and tried to end my life in sort of a accidental way. Never mind the details, but I didn't send my car head on into a bridge abuttment or anything like that. I wouldn't be here. It was more of going around a curve too fast so that I rolled and crashed. Now, here I am today, sort of untroubled by deeply painful confusion and fears and feeling a little detached and not certain I like it. 

Scarlett Johansson plays a women who doesn't know what she wants but who does know what she doesn't want. My words exactly when I was in my late 20s and early 30s. I'm sure I even said those exact words or some words very close to them. I must admit, though, to wondering just who I am these days. I'm not driven by anything. And when my emotions aren't telling me what to do, I don't always know what I am supposed to do. 

AT THE MOVIES

Before I run on I need to exclaim some disgust with fellow movie goers' tastes in commercials. And stop there. The current onscreen ad about lollipops being used to tear off a man's body hair is stolen from "The 40 Year Old Virgin" and the ladies behind me still thought it was funny, chortling away. Also the vomiting baby stock broker disgusts me, but psychology has taught ad men that a baby's face draws attention like a pile of money. People who don't know this are, to me, suckers. Which brings me to an old thought of mine about how sad it is that in order not to be manipulated by the advertising of psychological con men and hucksters, we have to turn off so many psychological entrance points that influence other people that we are not able to interact with people who don't know when they're being manipulated and, frankly, probably don't even care about it like I do. 

HERE’S MY SCIENCE HAIKU FOR THE DAY

Following, you’ll find a hiaku, seventeen syllables, but broken into the two contrasting thoughts or images. Then comes a quote from a current book I’m reading. It’s my fourth Steven Pinker book and he’s always as interesting as hell:

computational neuroscience:
Tinkertoy chickens cross the road

“The idea that shapes can be cognitively melted down into schematic blobs—skewered on axes originally came from a theory of shape recognition by the computational neuroscientist David Marr. Marr noted how easily people recognize stick figures and animals made from pipe cleaners or twisted balloons, despite their dissimilarity from real objects in their arrangement of pixels. He proposed that we actually represent shapes in the mind in blob-and-axis models rather than in raw images, because such a model is stable as the object moves relative to the viewer, while the pixels in the image are all over the place…. Not only do nouns for shapes (like ribbon, layer, crust, hunk, and groove) get their definitions from this world of pipe cleaners, cutouts, and balloons, but we seem to conceive of the objects around us in these terms. Few people think of a wire as a very very skinny cylinder and of a CD as a very short one, though technically that’s what they are. We conceive of them as having only one or two primary dimensions, respectively. Nor do we ordinarily imagine a lake as a translucent chunk with a flat top, sharp edges, and numerous bulges molded to the shape of the lake bottom. We think of it as a 2-D[imensional] surface.” Steven Pinker, The Stuff Of Thought, (pp. 181-82)

PHYSICS IN THE BRAIN—
AN ADAPTED SCIENCE?

The following passage is from Dancing Wu Li Masters, pages 181-82:

[SNIP]
The general theory of relativity shows us that our minds follow different rules than the real world does. A rational mind, based on the impressions that it receives from its limited perspective, forms structures [synaptical patterns of firing] which thereafter determine what it further will and will not accept freely. From that point on, regardless of how the real world actually operates, this rational mind, following its self-imposed rules, tries to superimpose on the real world its own version of what must be.

This continues until at long last a beginner's mind cries out, "This is not right. What 'must be' is not happening. I have tried and tried to discover why this is so. I have stretched my imagination to the limit to preserve my belief in what 'must be'. The breaking point has come. Now I have no choice but to admit that the 'must' I have believed in does not come from the real world, but from my own head."

This narrative is not poetic hyperbole. It is a concise description of the major conclusion of the general theory of relativity and the means by which it was reached. The limited perspective is the perspective of our three-dimensional rationality and its view of one small part of the universe (the part into which we were born). The things that "must be" are the ideas of geometry (the rules governing straight lines, circles, triangles, etc.). . . . The long-held belief was that these rules govern, without exception, the entirety of the universe. What Einstein's beginner's mind 
realized was that this is so only in our minds.

Einstein discovered that certain laws of geometry are valid only in limited regions of space [and the human brain]. This makes them useful since our experience physically is limited to very small regions of space [and the human brain], like our solar system [and the human brain]. However, as our experience expands, we encounter more and 
more difficulty in trying to superimpose these [adapted brain] rules upon the entire expanse of the universe. Einstein was the first person to see that the geometrical rules which apply to one small part of the universe as seen from a limited perspective (like ours) are not universal. This freed him to behold the universe in a way that no person had seen it before.

What he saw is the content of the general theory of relativity.
[GLUE]

What is not made clear in the foregoing paragraphs is that the human mind, or brain, with its “limited perspective” is limited not necessarily by choice or stubborn whim or prejudice (though prejudice is also an adapted trait) but by its long accretion of adaptations which shaped it to “see” reality exactly as survival dictated that it should see reality. Later it adapted a language instinct through which, interestingly, Zukav in his blindness is trying to explain the peculiar blindness of physics. I think that physics and evolutionary psychology must merge before further advances can be made in the physical sciences. By this I mean that we must first understand the mental rules or processes by which the physical brain grasps, interprets or interacts with the physical universe before we can make decisions about how it webs those connections into physics and the Cosmos. Or—could the dancing of sub-atomic particles in and out of existence actually be the dancing into and out of existence the firing synapses or something like that?