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Continued by other means... Death is the imperative to expand, carried beyond our biological limits*. — Josh Mitteldorf *I don’t claim to know this as a fact, but it is the most optimistic among scientifically plausible views of the relationship between consciousness and our physical brains, and thus of death. Quantum mechanics is not well understood at its foundation, but the best-accepted view of QM holds consciousness to have an existence independent of matter. Thus when a system is observed by a conscious entity, its probability wave collapses discontinuously to a single state, and its physical evolution instantaneously changes course. It is possible that consciousness has created living forms, and brains in particular as vehicles for itself. Since childhood, I have always had an intuitive sense of who I am that manifests as a sense of absurdity whenever I try to identify the entity to which I attach the pronoun ‘I’ with this individual animal. If this view of consciousness is correct, it probably leads to an affirmation of the message we have received from every mystic: that our existence as individuals is an illusion, and that the underlying consciousness of all beings is one consciousness. |
22 November 2009
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Astronomical Slide Show from Seed Magazine |
21 November 2009
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Socialist, pacifist, idealist ‘I believe that the hope for the future lies in a new social and economic order which demands the abolition of the capitalistic system. War itself is only the most horrible and dramatic of the many evil fruits of our present organized system of exploitation and the philosophy of life which exalts competition instead of cooperation. I am convinced that the hope of peace lies not so much in statesmen, who have already shown themselves bankrupt of ideas, but in people of all countries who demand the cessation of war in which they pay so horrible a price.’ Norman Thomas was leader of the Socialist party during a tumultuous era when socialists had a place at the table of American politics. He opposed World War I with a pacifist’s passion, and supported US entrance into WW II only after Pearl Harbor. He carefully distinguished democratic socialism from communism, and broke early with the Soviet regime. Every four years, like clockwork, he ran for President on the Socialist Party ticket. Norman Thomas was born one hundred twenty-three years ago today. |
20 November 2009
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Wherever You lead me, I will follow Instead of going to the choir to wait for the others she, returned to her cell, knelt down on the floor again, and unfocused her eyes. Blessed is that servant whom the master finds awake when he comes. Pure awareness stripped her of everything. She became an ember carried
upward by the heat of an invisible flame. Higher and higher she rose,
away from all she knew. Powerless to save herself, she drifted up toward
infinity until the vacuum sucked the feeble light out of her. Nova. More luminous than any sun, transcending visibility, the flare consumed everything, it lit up all of existence. In this radiance she could see forever, and everywhere she looked, she saw God’s love. The above excerpt is from Lying Awake, by Mark Salzman. It is a book which describes quite convincingly the experiences of a California Carmelite nun from two perspectives: Sister John has direct experiences of God, which she records effortlessly as ecstatic poetry. Sister John has a benign tumor in the brain which causes intermittent delusions and headaches. |
19 November 2009
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Keep moving Regular exercise is one of the more effective and inexpensive measures that can be undertaken to prevent or treat many different types of disease. This month’s issue of the German medical journal Deutsches Ärzteblatt is devoted to medical benefits of exercise. Exercise helps protect against heart disease, various cancers, depression, Alzheimer’s, auto-immune (including arthritis) and infectious diseases. A little exercise is a huge improvement over none. More is better. Most adults exercise...less than 30 minutes daily...It seems hard to imagine that, for millennia before the present, most people engaged in heavy physical activity several hours a day... Previously sedentary men who began participating in sports after age 50 were able to halve their mortality within 10 years compared to sedentary men of the same age. Only one-sixth of the fibers in a muscular nerve serve a motor function; the largest number (more than 40%) are sensory fibers (4). Thus, the musculature can be thought of as the body’s largest sense organ, which influences all organ systems and regulatory circuits through its complex connectivity with the central nervous system. Muscular work, for example, induces hormonal and autonomic changes that explain many of its remarkable effects on the mind and the immune system. — Dieter Leyk, in an introduction to this special issue of Deutsches Ärzteblatt |
18 November 2009
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Pride 
Even rocks crack, I’m telling you,
and not on account of age. For years they lie on their backs in the heat and the cold, so many years, it almost creates the illusion of calm. They don’t move, so the cracks stay hidden. A kind of pride. Years pass over them as they wait. Whoever is going to shatter them hasn’t come yet. And so the moss flourishes, the seaweed whips around, the sea bursts forth and rolls back — and still they seem motionless. Till a little seal comes to rub up against the rocks, comes and goes. And suddenly the rock has an open wound. I told you, when rocks crack, it comes as a surprise. All the more so, people. — Dahlia Ravikovitch, born this day in 1939 |
17 November 2009
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The training of the human plant After Luther Burbank made his name breeding and crossing plant varieties, he turned his attention to education of young humans. In a 1922 book, Burbank advocated an approach to education based in respect, freedom and love of nature. Eugenics was in fashion at the time, and many proponents of human breeding were tainted by racism and cultural imperialism. Burbank drew on his experience with plants to make a case for the importance of diversity. He foresaw great benefit for the improvement of the human condition by mingling races and cultures. Waves of immigration to the US from Europe, Asia and Africa were a source of utopian hope. ‘...so may we hope for afar stronger and better race if right principles are followed, a magnificient race, far superior to any preceding it... ‘We [the US in 1922] are more crossed than any other nation in the history of the world, and here we meet the same results that are always seen in a much-crossed race of plants: all the worst as well as all the best qualities of each are brought out in their fullest intensities. Right here is where selective environment counts... ‘Not only would I have the child reared for the first ten years of its life in the open, in close touch with nature, a barefoot boy with all that implies for physical stamina, but should have him reared in love...By working with vast patience upon the great body of the people, this great mingling of races, to...surround them with all the influences of love... ‘Bear in mind that this child-life in these first ten years is the most sensitive thing in the world...Children respond to ten thousand subtle influences which would leave no more impression upon a plant than they would upon the sphinx...One cannot think of being dishonest with them.... ‘Pick out any trait you want in your child...be it honesty, fairness, purity, lovableness, industry, thrift, what not. By surrounding this child with sunshine from the sky and your own heart, by giving the closest communion with nature, by feeding this child well-balanced, nutritious food, by givint it all that is implied in healthful environmental influences, and by doing all in love, you can thus cultivate in the child and fix there or all its life all of these traits.’ |
16 November 2009
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Sanity and Freedom Continuously, we are free. In each moment, we may decide what to think, how to direct our attention, how to express ourselves, what overt actions to take. Our freedom is so vast that to exercise it moment-to-moment would be a surrender to chaos, and an act of madness. Thus it is tempting to focus on the restraints rather than the freedom, to delude ourselves into thinking that because of some disability, because of a pain or an obligation, even because of insufficient money, we are not free after all. This is a way to avoid madness, but it is dishonest. Many people (excluding present company of course, dear reader) remain mired in the perception of constraint, and never acknowledge their freedom. For those of us who wish to embrace freedom without continually second-guessing ourselves, it is necessary to seek profound knowledge of our own hearts, to commit ourselves to principles and to goals with which we reliably identify, and then to organize our lives around all that we yearn for most deeply. Habits, routines and commitments are the means by which we avoid being overwhelmed by a need for choice in each moment. We may consciously adopt our habits, routines and commitments, and organize our lives to be harmonious with the whispers of our deepest selves. This is the fundamental act of integrity with which we organize and dedicate our life energies. — Josh Mitteldorf ...or perhaps it is freedom that is the illusion, and if we should ever try to take it we would find out just how limited are our powers to resist internal and external determinants There’s just one way to find out. |
15 November 2009
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Not so easy being a heretic It’s the 400th anniversary of the telescope. When Galileo looked at Jupiter, he discovered four companion dots - the largest four of Jupiter’s moons, which followed Jupiter through the sky, and changed their positions periodically with respect to the planet. The obvious conclusion was that Jupiter’s moons are revolving around Jupiter. But this was wrong, as everyone knew. The earth is the center of the universe, and everything revolves around the earth. The telescope must be a flawed instrument, and if it offered such clearly-fallacious views of the heavenly bodies, then nothing that it revealed was to be trusted. (Among the astronomers who considered deceptive the telescope of Galileo, the best known is Martin Horky.) We laugh at the ways scientists deceived themselves 400 years ago, but experience tells us that it is easy to see our mistakes once we are surrounded by people who see our mistakes. It is a good rule of thumb to take observations more seriously than theories, but experiments, too, can be flawed. At what point do we discard a broad, well-established theory that has served us well and say that it has been falsified by observation? Truth is a social phenomenon. Even those of us who regard ourselves as rugged individualists and dyed-in-the-wool positivists rely more than we like to think on the views of our community of enlightened individuals for judgments about what is real. Which of the favorite theories that form the foundation of our world view in the 21st Century will ultimately be discarded and discredited? If I had to bet, my answer would be: all of them. Being Heretic in the Knowledge Society, by Emanuela Scridel |
14 November 2009
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Listen to what Derek Bermel has done with two African folk songs. |
13 November 2009
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Variation On A Theme By Rilke |
12 November 2009
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Peace Peace comes from being able to contribute the best that we have, and all that we are, toward creating a world that supports everyone. But it is also securing the space for others to contribute the best that they have and all that they are. The good we secure for ourselves is precarious and uncertain until it is secured for all of us and incorporated into our common life. One is left with the horrible feeling now that war settles nothing; that to win a war is as disastrous as to lose one. War is not the continuation of politics with different means, it is the greatest mass-crime perpetrated on the community of man. When I despair, I remember that all through history the way of truth and love has always won. There have been tyrants and murderers and for a time they seem invincible but in the end, they always fall -- think of it, ALWAYS! |
11 November 2009
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Not bored I believe that yawning should be integrated into exercise and stress reduction programs, cognitive and memory enhancement training, psychotherapy, and contemplative spiritual practice... Several recent brain-scan studies have shown that yawning evokes a unique neural activity in the areas of the brain that are directly involved in generating social awareness and creating feelings of empathy...Numerous neurochemicals are involved in the yawning experience, including dopamine, which activates oxytocin production in your hypothalamus and hippocampus, areas essential for memory recall, voluntary control, and temperature regulation. These neurotransmitters regulate pleasure, sensuality, and relationship bonding between individuals, so if you want to enhance your intimacy and stay together, then yawn together. ...Try it right now... Your eyes may start watering and your nose may begin to run, but you’ll also feel utterly present, incredibly relaxed, and highly alert. — Andrew Newberg, UPenn
Center for Spirituality and the Mind |
10 November 2009
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Dissent is what rescues democracy from a quiet death behind closed doors. — Molly Ivins |
9 November 2009
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New Age-y Hokum Spiritual teachers from Lao Tze to Jesus to Eckhardt Tolle have taught the unity of all life. Our very existence as individual humans is an illusion. My welfare is intimately tied to yours, and there is nowpeaking of what is good for me apart from what is good for you. The European Enlightenment was rooted in analysis and reductionism. The pinnacle of its triumph was the atomic theory, based on the premise that everything about the world can be deduced fro m the behavior and interactions of constituent atoms. Science looked with a jaundiced eye upon mysticism, and philosophers from Nietzsche to Sartre declared that ‘God is dead’. But a funny thing happened to 19th century atomic physics: it became empirically untenable, and the quantum theory which was developed in its stead is far more ambiguous about — some might even say friendly toward mysticism and the unity of nature. One of several essential weirdnesses of QM is that particles do not have independent existence. Yes — you heard that right. The way QM works is stranger than can be conveyed in words. Separate electrons cannot be tracked. The essential descriptor in QM is the wave function, and there is no separate wave function for each particle; rather there is a single wave function that describes the probability amplitude for simultaneously finding particle A in location 1, particle B in location 2, etc. What is more, the dynamical equation for the wave function takes explicit account of the possibility that particle A swapped places with particle B while we weren’t looking. This situation is so wildly non-intuitive, and so intractable to calculate, that people doing practical atomic calculations almost always find approximations in which the particles are separate, and experiments are designed in such a way as to instantify situations where In practical daily life, the approximation of separate particles works well for atoms, because they stay far enough apart that only rarely does one nucleus swap places with another. But electrons are a different story. Electrons in the solids and liquids most familiar to us truly have no separate existences, and can only be described as a collective wave. ...Maybe you have to have a certain sensibility to these things in order to perceive a connection to universal love. — Josh Mitteldorf |
8 November 2009
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Are you serious? “A man sufficiently gifted with humor is in small danger of succumbing to flattering delusions about himself, because he cannot help perceiving what a pompous ass he would become if he did” — Konrad Lorenz, born this day in 1903 “It is a good morning exercise for a research scientist to discard a pet hypothesis every day before breakfast. It keeps him young.” |
7 November 2009
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Invitation to language Right here in this place words |
6 November 2009
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The widest human collaboration since the Great Wall of China Across the world, Wikipedia is consulted 50-80 thousand times per second. There are 3 million English language articles, and 10 million more in other languages. There are thousands of people who devote substantial portions of their working lives to editing and researching Wikipedia articles (the top 4,000 are listed here, and each one of them has contributed at least 10,000 edits.) Wikipedia’s open structure inherently makes it an easy target for Internet trolls, spamming, and those with an agenda to push. Nevertheless, it is found to be among the most reliable general sources of knowledge on the planet. ‘Wikipedia’s potential lies in harnessing the “wisdom of crowds”; however, those crowds are only as wise as they are diverse.’ ‘Why do Wikipedians spend countless hours improving the site, often doing mundane, repetitive tasks they would never do for money?’ You may as well ask why JJM puts an hour or so each day into the Daily Inspiration.
Boston Review
article by Evgeny Morozov |
5 November 2009
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“Don't let yesterday use up too much of today.” — Will Rogers, born this day in 1879 |
4 November 2009
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Sharing raw data The impetus comes from genomic sequence data, which requires big, expensive machines, and can be used to answer many diverse questions. But the principle is quite general: sharing experimental data on line is a huge boost to science. Any individual researcher may not want to share his data, because it gives others the opportunity to interpret it, stealing some of his thunder. But we all want the other guy to share his data. It’s coming. Scientific journals have space for ‘supplemental materials’ on the web, and are starting to expect that authors post the data from which their conclusions are drawn. This is a big and important trend. Science is politicized to a greater extent than any of us wants to admit, and, of course, politics is poison to the workings of science. The trend toward expensive equipment and large grants to fund it has centralized scientific investigation to everyone’s detriment. The trend toward cheap computing power has democratized science, to everyone’s benefit. As data sharing becomes an expected part of the process, there will be less opportunistic interpretations of data and more diverse and creative modes of analysis. — JJM
Old article in Science magazine.
New
articlein Science magazine. |
3 November 2009
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Puzzles I believe that puzzles are miniature models of the inner workings of the imagination and thus, in doing them, we gain insights into ourselves. This unconscious process is, in my view, what makes them so appealing — and frustrating at the same time, when the answer is not found. Self-knowledge is always its own reward. This is why when we do get the answer we feel that everything is right in the world; when we don’t we get a sense of chaos and veritable angst. It is difficult to put aside an unsolved puzzle, isn’t it? From the beginning of time, people have been fascinated by riddles, visual conundrums, games, etc. because they provide a kind of relief from the drudgery of everyday life and, in so doing, give insight into who we are. In the ancient world, puzzles were part of rituals and the so-called mystery cults. Solving them was felt to to constitute a process of self-revelation and, unlike the great mysteries of existence, they led to concrete answers. – Marcel Denesi
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2 November 2009
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Perfection You have chosen wisely and performed perfectly every task that has been laid before you. All that remains is for you to read and absorb the message on this page. — Josh Mitteldorf |
1 November 2009
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Ode on a Grecian Urn I V — John Keats, born 1795 on All Hallows Eve, lived just 25 years |
31 October 2009
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The universe began as an undifferentiated gas. Why didn’t it stay that way? In the Big Bang theory, the Universe started out in ‘thermodynamic equilibrium’, the state of maximum entropy, meaning that there was no physical motive for change. Another way to say this is that there was no usable energy, and no information. Nothing interesting could happen. Well, a lot of interesting stuff happened after that. How did the Universe go from a state of maximum entropy to a state of low entropy, enabling galaxies, stars and life? It all came from the expansion. One way to describe what happened is that the maximum entropy of the expanding Universe got bigger faster than the actual entropy could keep up. Another way to describe it is that gravitational collapse has the potential to release enormous amounts of energy that aren’t part of the original entropy calculation. The paradox just described is intimately related to another deep question in physics: why time is ‘directional’. Left and right, forward and backward are arbitrary directions in space, but ‘before’ and ‘after’ are physically quite different. If the Universe were contracting, would we experience time going backward, so we would say it was expanding? Believe it or not, this is a deep question, on which physicists can disagree. Watch
Sean Carroll talk about the arrow of time, why it is mysterious, and
where he thinks it comes from. (Carroll’s view is that the arrow of time comes from cosmology and the nature of the Big Bang. I think he’s wrong and the arrow of time comes from quantum mechanics. Neither of us is sure. -JJM) |
30 October 2009
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You can’t have one without the other “It was out of the rind of one apple tasted that good and evil leapt
forth into the world, like two twins cleaving together.” – Paul Auster, in a fictional quote from Milton’s Paradise Lost In my meditation this morning, I realized for the first time that
I like exhaling better than inhaling. |
29 October 2009
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Where were you when the Velociraptors ambushed the Diplodocus? When you were a tadpole and I was a fish Mindless we lived and mindless we loved We were amphibians, scaled and tailed, Loud I howled through the moonlit wastes, I carved the fight on a reindeer bone Our trail is on the Kimmeridge clay — Excerpted from Evolution by Langdon Smith |
28 October 2009
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How life began In one of the best science articles I’ve seen in many a year, Nick Lane pulls together several strands of evidence to propose some new twists in the story of the origin of life. The major new clue is about energy metabolism. The life with which we are familiar today depends (ultimately) on sunlight for energy; but photosynthesis is complicated, and it is clear that it developed much later in life’s history. Lane takes a clue from the unexpected way that life stores energy, using not chemical bonds but electrochemistry. Pumping hydrogen ions across a membrane is a process common to all of life, from bacteria to archaea to eukaryotes (that’s us). Perhaps life began in a place where electrochemical energy was free and plentiful, where acid welled up from vents deep in the ocean, and where rocks were perforated with tiny pores, providing catalysis, protection and a basis for competition, before cell membranes were ‘invented’.
Read the whole story in New Scientist magazine |
27 October 2009
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How to be happy We do not know that all is hopeless, we just conclude it from time to time, based on our emotional state, not our knowledge. Having sufficient humility to recaognize that we do not know is a key stepping stone to improving our wellbeing. ...The first premise of this inquiry is that we improve our chances by affirmatively seeking to understand. By not becoming tired, satisfied, or complacent. This is a pursuit that does not involve a competition for resources. We all have the power to improve our understanding and improve our lives. But we must keep asking questions. The second premise of this inquiry is that ... we must each develop our own theory of happiness, figure out what it might look like, and then test it, continuously, throughout our lives. A third premise, perhaps most important, is that the mere fact that we have tried and failed so many times tells us nothing. It is the spirit of inquiry that matters. ... If we preserve a spirit of inquiry, this spirit itself is quite directly connected to, and a harbinger of, happiness. The spirit of inquiry requires self-doubt – not a lack of self-esteem; but, rather, the recognition that all of our understanding is provisional, and all of our understanding is susceptible to improvement. — from Ehard’s Blog |
26 October 2009
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Circularity Since virtue is its own reward, often the most virtuous thing we can do is to create an opportunity for someone to offer a kindness to ourselves, or to another. — Josh Mitteldorf |
25 October 2009
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Brother Sun and all God’s creatures “I am a religious Russian Orthodox person and I understand ‘religion’ in the literal meaning of the word, as ‘re-ligio’, that is to say the restoration of connections, the restoration of the ‘legato’ of life. There is no more serious task for music than this.” Sofia Gubaidulina, 78 years old today, continues to conceive some of the most interesting sounds in music. The Canticle of the Sun, also known as the Laudes Creaturarum (‘Praise of the Creatures’), is a religious song composed by Saint Francis of Assisi. It was written in the Umbrian dialect of Italian but has since been translated into many languages. It is believed to be among the first works of literature, if not the first, written in the Italian language. Gubaidulina created a setting of the Canticle for cello, choir, and percussion, as a birthday present for Mstislav Rostropovich in 1997. All praise is yours, all glory, all honor, and all blessing.
Be praised, my Lord, through all your creatures,
Be praised, my Lord, through Sister Moon and the stars;
Be praised, my Lord, through Brothers Wind and Air, Listen with headphones, undistracted to the closing movement of the Canticle, performed by Rostropovich and friends. |
24 October 2009
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My delight and thy delight MY delight and thy delight |
23 October 2009
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Does biology exploit quantum duality? Do our brains? Quantum duality is part of the weirdness of quantum mechanics. There is more information in every packet of energy than is available when that packet is absorbed or detected. The extra information is in the form of ‘wave phase’, which can’t be measured directly, but it determines the way a quantum interacts with other quanta. Quantum computers use this principle to process information in parallel, which can, in theory achieve efficiencies vastly greater than any classical computer could attain. One of the great questions of philosophy of mind, in my opinion, is whether our brains are quantum computers. If so, this could certainly explain intuition and the ability to arrive at answers without knowing where they came from. It might even explain telepathy and precognition. But the idea that the brain uses QM has been deeply controversial. Roger Penrose, one of the smartest people in the universe, has argued powerfully for ‘yes’, based on detailed arguments from the structure of neurons. Max Tegmark, a younger physics genius who may well be in Penrose’s league, argues just as forcefully for ‘no’. Now Scientific American reports on the work of Gregory Engel (at UChicago) to the effect that green plants use quantum mechanics in absorbing light, deciding how best to use each photon before committing to how the photon will be routed and where it will be absorbed. This makes plausible then general idea that natural selection has been smart enough to exploit QM where it can gain an advantage that way.
Scientific American article on quantum data processing in plants |
22 October 2009
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Mortification of the flesh, masochism, and self-mutilation explained ‘Real pain can alone cure us of imaginary ills. We feel a thousand miseries till we are lucky enough to feel misery.’ — Samuel Taylor Coleridge, born this day in 1772 ...through caverns measurelss to man, down to a sunless sea. |
21 October 2009
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Among the rocks Oh, good gigantic smile o’ the brown old earth,
— Robert Browning |
20 October 2009
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A scientist discovers something marvelous and loses her objectivity Irene Pepperberg is a psychologist who claims to find meaning, intention and reason in the speech of parrots. Alex was her star pupil. Dr Pepperberg’s pioneering research resulted in Alex learning elements of English speech to identify 50 different objects, 7 colours, 5 shapes, quantities up to and including 6 and a zero-like concept. He used phrases such as ‘I want X’ and ‘Wanna go Y,’ where X and Y were appropriate object and location labels. He acquired concepts of categories, bigger and smaller, same-different, and absence. Alex combined his labels to identify, request, refuse, and categorise more than 100 different items demonstrating a level and scope of cognitive abilities never expected in an avian species. Pepperberg says that Alex showed the emotional equivalent of a 2 year-old child and intellectual equivalent of a 5 year-old. Her research with Alex shattered the generally held notion that parrots are only capable of mindless vocal mimicry.
Article at Science Centric |
19 October 2009
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May illusion be swept aside, uncovering joy. — Josh Mitteldorf |
18 October 2009
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Man’s Place in the Universe Over billions of years, life has transformed the chemical face of the Earth. Over thousands of years (but accelerating in the last 100), human life has transformed both the Earth and the biosphere. As genetic engineering continues to advance, it seems likely that man will also transform his own biology. Will the successors of humankind go on to transform our Galaxy for their own habitation? The Universe is far larger than the Earth, but the available time is also far longer than the few decades in which technology has developed. This slide show offers some perspective on the future of the Universe, starting with our small corner. The premise (if I may give away the punch line in the last slide) is that our legacy may be destined to become an organized intergalactic community that takes control of the evolution of the cosmos, and that we could shoot all that to hell if we as a species don’t manage to survive the next century. I actually find the premise that life’s progeny will someday take control of the motions of stars and galaxies more plausible than the idea that the next century on Earth is crucial. We don’t know if intelligent life is evolving or has evolved elsewhere, and we don’t know if intelligent civilizations would evolve a second or third or hundredth time on Earth should the first few attempts prove too violent or insufficiently communal to manage an ecosystem that can support us. Slide show: http://thefutureofourworld.ytmnd.com/ |
17 October 2009
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Half life
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16 October 2009
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Compassion and the Dismal Science “We all agree that pessimism is a mark of superior intellect.” — John Kenneth Galbraith was born 101 years ago today “Faced with the choice between changing one’s mind and proving there is no need to do so, almost everyone gets busy on the proof.” |
15 October 2009
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