January 2008 Archives

Will new psycho-pharmaceuticals make a more authentic you? Reason Magazine -

http://www.reason.com/news/show/124543.html

You have developed some nagging doubts about your partner's fidelity. Although you sometimes think your doubts are irrational, you remember certain lingering looks at parties, and your happiness is spoiled. You're not the sort to hire a private detective, but you have heard of a new pharmaceutical, the anti-doubt pill, Credon. Credon lulls your suspicious nature, but doesn't make you gullible to car sales people. It works only in the context of intimate relationships. The manufacturer does warn that Credon has sometimes generated excessive trust between lovers. So off you go to "The Pharmacy of the Future" for Credon.

The Future of Marriage

Only in the early 19th century did the success of a marriage begin to be defined by how well it cared for its members, both adults and children... These new marital ideals appalled many social conservatives of the day. "How will we get the right people to marry each other, if they can refuse on such trivial grounds as lack of love?" they asked. "Just as important, how will we prevent the wrong ones, such as paupers and servants, from marrying?" What would compel people to stay in marriages where love had died? What would prevent wives from challenging their husbands' authority?

They were right to worry. In the late 18th century, new ideas about the "pursuit of happiness" led many countries to make divorce more accessible, and some even repealed the penalties for homosexual love.

THEOI GREEK MYTHOLOGY:, Exploring Mythology & the Greek Gods in Classical Literature & Art

The site now contains more than 1,500 pages profiling the Greek gods and other characters from Greek mythology and 1,200 full sized pictures.

The American Scholar - Moral Principle vs. Military Necessity - By David Bosco

During the hot and desperate summer of 1862, a senior American commander found himself consumed with the question of insurgents. Major General Henry Halleck had become general-in-chief of the Union armies in July of that year, and he soon discovered that the army had no laws or regulations to govern its contacts with the bands of irregular Southern forces in the field. A lawyer by training, Halleck found the absence of guidance maddening. Union troops were encountering an array of rebel forces, some uniformed, some not. "The rebel authorities claim the right to send men, in the garb of peaceful citizens, to waylay and attack our troops, to burn bridges and houses and to destroy property and persons within our lines," Halleck vented in a letter sent on August 6.

A Jesuit's Perspective on Abortion By William Blazek

"Thou shalt not kill,' not kill yourself, not kill time (because it belongs to God), not kill trust, not kill death itself by trivializing it, not kill the country, the other person, or the Church."

These words, spoken by Trappist martyr Dom Christian De Cherge, seem especially apropos as a tool for reflection on this 35th anniversary of the Roe v Wade abortion decision. Jesuit spirituality suggests that it is good to reflect frequently...

On the 30th of September 2007, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens sat down for a first-of-its-kind, unmoderated 2-hour discussion, convened by RDFRS and filmed by Josh Timonen. Here is part 1:

All four authors have recently received a large amount of media attention for their writings against religion - some positive, and some negative. In this conversation the group trades stories of the public's reaction to their recent books, their unexpected successes, criticisms and common misrepresentations. They discuss the tough questions about religion that face to world today, and propose new strategies for going forward.

Link here for part 2 from Google Video.

What if Napster stocked textbooks? Engineering professor Richard Baraniuk talks about his vision for Connexions, an open-source system that lets teachers share digital texts and course materials, modify them and give them to their students -- all free, thanks to Creative Commons licensing.

Link here to the TED site to see more information and discussions related to this video.

Spirituality and Teilhard de Chardin By Louis Savary

Father Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a French Jesuit priest who died in 1955, offered the first Christian spirituality that fully integrated Christian doctrine with modern scientific and evolutionary findings.

For starters, Teilhard pointed out that divine revelation did not begin with Abraham or even the first humans. The discoveries of science show us, says Teilhard, that God has been revealing God's self from the first moment of the Big Bang. We now know that that first burst of creation from God goes back almost 14 billion years, while human civilization has only been around for less than 30,000 years. (Civilized homo sapiens accounts for only about 0.000002 of that time, a two-millionth part of the whole divine revelation story.)

Misreading the mind - Los Angeles Times

Our sensations have been reduced to a set of specific circuits. The mind has been imaged as it thinks about itself, with every thought traced back to its cortical source. The most ineffable of emotions have been translated into the terms of chemistry, so that the feeling of love is just a little too much dopamine. Fear is an excited amygdala. Even our sense of consciousness is explained away with references to some obscure property of the frontal cortex. It turns out that there is nothing inherently mysterious about those 3 pounds of wrinkled flesh inside the skull. There is no ghost in the machine.

In Praise of Melancholy - ChronicleReview.com

I for one am afraid that American culture's overemphasis on happiness at the expense of sadness might be dangerous, a wanton forgetting of an essential part of a full life. I further am concerned that to desire only happiness in a world undoubtedly tragic is to become inauthentic, to settle for unrealistic abstractions that ignore concrete situations. I am finally fearful of our society's efforts to expunge melancholia. Without the agitations of the soul, would all of our magnificently yearning towers topple? Would our heart-torn symphonies cease?

Why Capitalism is Good for the Soul

The problem for those of us who believe that capitalism offers the best chance we have for leading meaningful and worthwhile lives is that in this debate, the devil has always had the best tunes to play. Capitalism lacks romantic appeal. It does not set the pulse racing in the way that opposing ideologies like socialism, fascism, or environmentalism can. It does not stir the blood, for it identifies no dragons to slay...

It is quite the opposite with socialism. Where capitalism delivers but cannot inspire, socialism inspires despite never having delivered. Socialism's history is littered with repeated failures and with human misery on a massive scale, yet it still attracts smiles rather than curses from people who never had to live under it

Why Giving Makes You Happy - December 28, 2007 - The New York Sun

It is a fact that givers are happier people than non-givers. According to the Social Capital Community Benchmark Survey, a survey of 30,000 American households, people who gave money to charity in 2000 were 43% more likely than non-givers to say they were "very happy" about their lives.

The Trouble With Mary

"You are to an extraordinary degree guided by, or misguided by, what you believe," Mr. Harris said. "If you're a racist, that is a result of what you believe about race. If you're a jihadist, that is built on what you believe about the Koran and supremacy of Islam. So belief is doing most of the work humans do. And it's an engine of conflict and reconciliation, so it really matters what people believe."

by Dennis Overbye

It could be the weirdest and most embarrassing prediction in the history of cosmology, if not science.

If true, it would mean that you yourself reading this article are more likely to be some momentary fluctuation in a field of matter and energy out in space than a person with a real past born through billions of years of evolution in an orderly star-spangled cosmos. Your memories and the world you think you see around you are illusions.

Letter from a Birmingham Jail - Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

MY DEAR FELLOW CLERGYMEN:

While confined here in the Birmingham city jail, I came across your recent statement calling my present activities "unwise and untimely." Seldom do I pause to answer criticism of my work and ideas. If I sought to answer all the criticisms that cross my desk, my secretaries would have little time for anything other than such correspondence in the course of the day, and I would have no time for constructive work. But since I feel that you are men of genuine good will and that your criticisms are sincerely set forth, I want to try to answer your statements in what I hope will be patient and reasonable terms.

Climate Debate Daily

Climate Debate Daily is intended to deepen our understanding of disputes over climate change and the human contribution to it. The site links to scientific articles, news stories, economic studies, polemics, historical articles, PR releases, editorials, feature commentaries, and blog entries. The main column on the left includes arguments and evidence generally in support of the IPCC position on the reality of signficant anthropogenic global warming. The right-hand column includes material skeptical of the IPCC position and the notion that anthropogenic global warming represents a genuine threat to humanity.

The Moral Instinct by Steven Pinker

Which of the following people would you say is the most admirable: Mother Teresa, Bill Gates or Norman Borlaug? And which do you think is the least admirable? For most people, it's an easy question. Mother Teresa, famous for ministering to the poor in Calcutta, has been beatified by the Vatican, awarded the Nobel Peace Prize and ranked in an American poll as the most admired person of the 20th century. Bill Gates, infamous for giving us the Microsoft dancing paper clip and the blue screen of death, has been decapitated in effigy in "I Hate Gates" Web sites and hit with a pie in the face. As for Norman Borlaug . . . who the heck is Norman Borlaug?

A Questionable Moral Instinct -- A response to Pinker

Steven Pinker's New York Times magazine piece on morality, The Moral Instinct, drips with disdain for cultural and historical traditions of morality in favor of an ominous sounding "science of moral sense." I read it front to back, slammed it shut and decided to call Natalie Carnes, a PhD student of theology and ethics at Duke and my in-house expert on matters of morality.

ABC News: Pursuit of Happiness: Your Behavior

Davidson would agree. He has studied the brains of Buddhist monks, men who spend their lives deliberately forcing positive emotions, and their happiness is off the charts. His new data claims that if a person sits quietly for a half-hour a day just thinking about kindness and compassion, their brain will show noticeable changes in just two weeks.

Evolutionists at war over altruism's origins

An intellectual war of words has broken out between two of the world's leading evolutionists. Oxford University's Richard Dawkins and Harvard's Edward Wilson have gone head to head over the evolution of altruism in the animal kingdom, and whether it can have come about as a result of something called group selection.

The Group Delusion by Richard Dawkins

EDWARD WILSON has given us a characteristically fascinating account of the evolution of social insects (see page 6 and BioScience, vol 58, p 17). But his "group selection" terminology is misleading, and his distinction between "kin selection" and "individual direct selection" is empty. What matters is gene selection.

Nickel and Dimed -- Making Ends Meet

''Most civilized nations,'' Ehrenreich writes, ''compensate for the inadequacy of wages by providing relatively generous public services such as health insurance, free or subsidized child care, subsidized housing and effective public transportation.'' So what should we think about the fact that in America we are sending the poor out to make it on their own on little more than a quarter of a living wage? Shame, Ehrenreich suggests, might be an appropriate response.

Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness -- David Chalmers

Consciousness poses the most baffling problems in the science of the mind. There is nothing that we know more intimately than conscious experience, but there is nothing that is harder to explain. All sorts of mental phenomena have yielded to scientific investigation in recent years, but consciousness has stubbornly resisted. Many have tried to explain it, but the explanations always seem to fall short of the target. Some have been led to suppose that the problem is intractable, and that no good explanation can be given.

Obsidian Wings -- Andy Olmsted

I'm dead, but if you're reading this, you're not, so take a moment to enjoy that happy fact.

Mother Nature is Not Our Friend -- Sam Harris -- The Edge

While the process of natural selection has sculpted our genome to its present state, it has not acted to maximize human happiness; nor has it necessarily conferred any advantage upon us beyond the capacity raise the next generation to child-bearing age. In fact, there may be nothing about human life after the age of forty (the average lifespan until the 20th century) that has been selected by evolution at all. And with a few exceptions (e.g. the gene for lactose tolerance), we probably haven't adapted to our environment much since the Pleistocene...

But our environment and our needs -- to say nothing of our desires -- have changed radically in the meantime. We are in many respects ill-suited to the task of building a global civilization. This is not a surprise. From the point of view of evolution, much of human culture, along with its cognitive and emotional underpinnings, must be epiphenomenal. Nature cannot "see" most of what we are doing, or hope to do, and has done nothing to prepare us for many of the challenges we now face.

A Nation of Wimps -- Psychology Today

The perpetual access to parents infantilizes the young, keeping them in a permanent state of dependency. Whenever the slightest difficulty arises, "they're constantly referring to their parents for guidance," reports Kramer. They're not learning how to manage for themselves.

Think of the cell phone as the eternal umbilicus. One of the ways we grow up is by internalizing an image of Mom and Dad and the values and advice they imparted over the early years. Then, whenever we find ourselves faced with uncertainty or difficulty, we call on that internalized image. We become, in a way, all the wise adults we've had the privilege to know. "But cell phones keep kids from figuring out what to do," says Anderegg. "They've never internalized any images; all they've internalized is 'call Mom or Dad.'"

Scientists create machine that knows what you are thinking | the Daily Mail

The device's possibilities can, however, be extended and the team envisage a time when it will be used to conduct infallible lie detector tests, while the accurate interpretation of a person's intentions could allow police to arrest criminals before they break the law, as seen in the film Minority Report.

Teen brain key to understanding criminal behavior - CNN.com

"It doesn't mean adolescents can't make a rational decision or appreciate the difference between right and wrong," he said. "It does mean, particularly when confronted with stressful or emotional decisions, they are more likely to act impulsively, on instinct, without fully understanding or analyzing the consequences of their actions."

Online Etymology Dictionary

Timeline of Art History -- The Metropolitan Museum of Art