March 2008 Archives

Mental Health Insurance Parity - The Murky Politics of Mind-Body - New York Times

From Plato and Aristotle to Descartes, the great thinkers have for millennia argued over what is known in philosophy as the "mind-body problem," the relationship between spirit and flesh. Dualism tends to win the day: The mind and the body, while linked, are separate. They exist independently, perhaps mingling but not merging.

The debate lives on these days in less abstract form in the United States: How much of a difference should it make to health care -- and health insurance -- if a condition is physical or mental?

sp!ked review of books | 'Mill is a dead white male with something to say'

Mill's emphasis in On Liberty was on the freedom to cultivate individuality, which he believed would spur progress; the 'harm principle' was actually a fairly minor part of his thesis, a way of acknowledging that we live in a society of mixed interests and clashing outlooks and not on a desert island. Mill was a sophisticated thinker, seeking to generate an understanding of individuality that did not ignore other people and the context in which we progress our individual selves: his was a true understanding of individual liberty, as opposed to today's cries of 'individual rights' which are frequently about erecting a legal forcefield around individuals to protect them from the alleged harm and poisons of their unthinking fellow men.

Why Web Won't Be Nirvana | Newsweek Technology | Newsweek.com

After two decades online, I'm perplexed. It's not that I haven't had a gas of a good time on the Internet. I've met great people and even caught a hacker or two. But today, I'm uneasy about this most trendy and oversold community. Visionaries see a future of telecommuting workers, interactive libraries and multimedia classrooms. They speak of electronic town meetings and virtual communities. Commerce and business will shift from offices and malls to networks and modems. And the freedom of digital networks will make government more democratic.

Baloney. Do our computer pundits lack all common sense? The truth in no online database will replace your daily newspaper, no CD-ROM can take the place of a competent teacher and no computer network will change the way government works.

The Pre-History of Cognitive Science

Welcome to the Pre-History of Cognitive Science Web--an annoted bibliography of models of human cognition from the Seventeenth through Nineteenth centuries. The bibliography is compiled and maintained by Carl Stahmer, at the University of California, Santa Barbara, as part of a larger dissertation project. The list of authors represented and forthcoming is the result of ongoing research into early models of cognition, with a particular emphasis on those thinkers who sought to understand the relationship between the material world, our physical bodies, and abstract thought. Philosophies of mind that do not contain some reflection on or disscusion of the materiality of thought are not represented. Suggestions for inclusion in the web can be made via email to cstahmer@rc.umd.edu and are greatly appreciated.

It pays to play nice, Harvard study says - Yahoo! News

Common game theory has held that punishment makes two equals cooperate. But when people compete in repeated games, punishment fails to deliver, said study author Martin Nowak. He is director of the evolutionary dynamics lab at Harvard where the study was conducted.

"On the individual level, we find that those who use punishments are the losers," Nowak said his experiments found.

Those who escalate the conflict very often wound up doomed.

"It's a very positive message," said study co-author David Rand, a Harvard biology graduate student researcher. "In general, the thing that is most, sort of, rational and best for your own self-interest is to be nice."

Where angels no longer fear to tread

BY THE standards of European scientific collaboration, €2m ($3.1m) is not a huge sum. But it might be the start of something that will challenge human perceptions of reality at least as much as the billions being spent by the European particle-physics laboratory (CERN) at Geneva. The first task of CERN's new machine, the Large Hadron Collider, which is due to open later this year, will be to search for the Higgs boson--an object that has been dubbed, with a certain amount of hyperbole, the God particle. The €2m, by contrast, will be spent on the search for God Himself--or, rather, for the biological reasons why so many people believe in God, gods and religion in general.

The atheist delusion | By genre | guardian.co.uk Books

It is true that religion has declined sharply in a number of countries (Ireland is a recent example) and has not shaped everyday life for most people in Britain for many years. Much of Europe is clearly post-Christian. However, there is nothing that suggests the move away from religion is irreversible, or that it is potentially universal. The US is no more secular today than it was 150 years ago, when De Tocqueville was amazed and baffled by its all-pervading religiosity. The secular era was in any case partly illusory. The mass political movements of the 20th century were vehicles for myths inherited from religion, and it is no accident that religion is reviving now that these movements have collapsed. The current hostility to religion is a reaction against this turnabout. Secularisation is in retreat, and the result is the appearance of an evangelical type of atheism not seen since Victorian times.

Are You Happy? - The New York Review of Books

Chances are if someone were to ask you, right now, if you were happy, you'd say you were. Claiming that you're happy--that is, to an interviewer who is asking you to rate your "life satisfaction" on a scale from zero to ten--appears to be nearly universal, as long as you're not living in a war zone, on the street, or in extreme emotional or physical pain. The Maasai of Kenya, soccer moms of Scarsdale, the Amish, the Inughuit of Greenland, European businessmen--all report that they are happy. When happiness researcher Ed Diener, the past president of the International Society of Quality of Life Studies, synthesized 916 surveys of over a million people in forty-five countries, he found that, on average, people placed themselves at seven on the zero-to-ten scale.

Interrogation: Science and Art -- Central Intelligence Agency

In sum, the articles point to a central finding, one not so much confirmed by rigorous empirical inquiry as it is felt to be true by professionals in the field (the "art" side of the subtitle, I suppose). That conclusion: pain, coercion, and threats are unlikely to elicit good information from a subject. (Got that, Jack Bauer?) As one writer puts it, "The scientific community has never established that coercive interrogation methods are an effective means of obtaining reliable intelligence information." (130) The authors hedge their bets, however, by suggesting repeatedly that more research needs to be done on this question. (Any volunteer

BBC NEWS | Health | Religion 'linked to happy life'

Religious people are better able to cope with shocks such as losing a job or divorce, claims the study presented to a Royal Economic Society conference.

Data from thousands of Europeans revealed higher levels of "life satisfaction" in believers.

The Evolution Wars, Revisited By PHILIP M. BOFFEY

The classic legal battle over evolution is the Scopes "monkey trial" of 1925 - or, perhaps more accurately, "Inherit the Wind," the 1960 movie about the trial. In the movie, the character representing the legendary trial lawyer Clarence Darrow, played by Spencer Tracy, obliterated the character played by Fredric March, representing William Jennings Bryan, the fundamentalist three-time presidential candidate and staunch opponent of evolution, on the witness stand. In real life, Darrow lost the case (the verdict was later overturned on a technicality), but the film was a stirring evocation of the importance of teaching evolution and of keeping religion from interfering with science.

Neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor had an opportunity few brain scientists would wish for: One morning, she realized she was having a massive stroke. As it happened -- as she felt her brain functions slip away one by one, speech, movement, understanding -- she studied and remembered every moment. This is a powerful story about how our brains define us and connect us to the world and to one another.

Link here to the TED site to download the video and participate in discussion.

A Superhighway to Bliss By Leslie Kaufman / May 25, 2008 -New York Times

JILL BOLTE TAYLOR was a neuroscientist working at Harvard's brain research center when she experienced nirvana. But she did it by having a stroke.

Classic Texts in Ethics

Many major works in the history of ethics are now available on-line in electronic versions. Some are simply ASCI or text files; as such, they contain a minimum of formating, but otherwise are quite serviceably. These can easily be searched or downloaded, and take up relatively little room in proportion to the amount of text they contain. The following list is arranged in chronological order.

The Grand Inquisitor's Veto: Bush Vetoes Torture Bill
By Susan Brooks Thistlethwaite / President, Chicago Theological Seminary

Torture, according to the United Nations Convention Against Torture, is "any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession, punishing him for an act he or a third person has committed or is suspected of having committed, or intimidating or coercing him or a third person, or for any reason based on discrimination of any kind, when such pain or suffering is inflicted by or at the instigation of or with the consent or acquiescence of a public official or other person acting in an official capacity."

Time Out of Mind by Stefan Klein

IN 1784, Benjamin Franklin composed a satire, "Essay on Daylight Saving," proposing a law that would oblige Parisians to get up an hour earlier in summer. By putting the daylight to better use, he reasoned, they'd save a good deal of money -- 96 million livres tournois -- that might otherwise go to buying candles. Now this switch to daylight saving time (which occurs early Sunday [3/9/2008]] in the United States) is an annual ritual in Western countries...

...But the quest to spend time the way we do money is doomed to failure, because the time we experience bears little relation to time as read on a clock. The brain creates its own time, and it is this inner time, not clock time, that guides our actions. In the space of an hour, we can accomplish a great deal -- or very little.

Election Madness By Howard Zinn

The very people who should know better, having criticized the hold of the media on the national mind, find themselves transfixed by the press, glued to the television set, as the candidates preen and smile and bring forth a shower of clichés with a solemnity appropriate for epic poetry.

Orderly Universe: Evidence of God? -- ABC News

Since writing my book "Irreligion" and some of my recent Who's Counting columns, I've received a large number of e-mails from subscribers to creation science (who have recently christened themselves intelligent design theorists). Some of the notes have been polite, some vituperative, but almost all question "how order and complexity can arise out of nothing."

Since they can imagine no way for this to happen, they conclude there must be an intelligent designer, a God. (They leave aside the prior question of how He arose.)

Me By Dan Zak
If It's All About You, You're in Trouble. Why a Sense of Entitlement Can Wreak Havoc on Happiness.

"What we really have is a culture that has increasingly emphasized feeling good about yourself and favoring the individual over the group," says the study's co-author, Jean Twenge, a professor of psychology at San Diego State University. "And that has happened across the board, culturally, and it's showing no signs of slowing down."