science
Where the Fleshless Abide
The goggles I wore displayed the view from a camera pointing at my back. Ehrsson tapped my chest with one plastic rod while using a second one to synchronously prod at the camera. I saw and felt my chest being prodded at the same time as I saw a picture of myself from behind. Within ten seconds, I felt as if I was being pulled out of my real body and was floating several feet behind it.A year after removing his subjects from their own bodies, Ehrsson learned how to trick them into acquiring new ones. This time, the volunteers’ goggles showed them the view from a camera on the head of a mannequin looking at its own plastic torso. Simultaneously poking the arm or stomach of the mannequin and the volunteer a few times was enough to convince the subjects that they were the dummy. They could even stare at their old bodies from their new ones and shake hands with their old self, all without breaking the spell. “It really is very intense and incredibly fast,” says Mark Hallett, a neurologist from the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, who experienced it first hand.In his latest trick, published in May, Ehrsson convinced people that they had jumped into a tiny Barbie doll. When he prodded the doll’s legs, the volunteers thought they were being prodded by giant objects. And when Ehrsson tested the illusion on himself and a colleague touched his cheek, he says, he looked up and “felt as if I was back in my childhood and looking at my mother”.…He also occasionally gets angry letters from people who have had out-of-body experiences themselves. “They believe that their souls have left their bodies, and they feel threatened that a similar experience can be induced in a lab,” says Ehrsson. He offers a diplomatic response, saying that he has “no way of disproving their ideas”. Metzinger is more forthright. “Henrik’s work speaks to the idea that there is no such thing as a soul or a self that’s independent of the brain,” he says.
Hee hee. It’s like Schopenhauer said — if forced to choose between a personal deity and personal immortality, people would turn atheist in a heartbeat. Who cares about arguing over God’s nonexistence? It’s far easier to disprove the idea of an immaterial soul, and far more devastating to traditional religious conceptual frameworks. Even most theodicy has to rely on some invocation of God’s mysterious ways, which aren’t readily apparent to the untrained eye. Few believers would be willing to allow an average life on Earth, bounded by the physical events of birth and death, to stand as proud affirmation of the inherent worth of existence.
If You Wish to Strive for Peace of Soul and Happiness, Then Believe; If You Wish to be a Disciple of Truth, Then Inquire
Some Western Buddhists have argued that principles such as reincarnation, anatta, and enlightenment are not essential to Buddhism. In Buddhism Without Beliefs and The Faith To Doubt, the British teacher Stephen Batchelor eloquently describes his practice as a method for confronting—rather than transcending—the often painful mystery of life. But Batchelor seems to have arrived at what he calls an “agnostic” perspective in spite of his Buddhist training—not because of it. When I asked him why he didn’t just call himself an agnostic, Batchelor shrugged and said he sometimes wondered himself.All religions, including Buddhism, stem from our narcissistic wish to believe that the universe was created for our benefit, as a stage for our spiritual quests. In contrast, science tells us that we are incidental, accidental. Far from being the raison d’être of the universe, we appeared through sheer happenstance, and we could vanish in the same way. This is not a comforting viewpoint, but science, unlike religion, seeks truth regardless of how it makes us feel. Buddhism raises radical questions about our inner and outer reality, but it is finally not radical enough to accommodate science’s disturbing perspective. The remaining question is whether any form of spirituality can.
Yeah, the article is almost nine years old, but it’s new to me. And since I was just going on about the same topic, I had to excerpt it.
The Question Is Which Is to be Master—That’s All
More from that same Owen Flanagan piece:
The first half of my book, The Bodhisattva’s Brain: Buddhism Naturalized is devoted to the question of whether Buddhism is science friendly. The current Dalai Lama is personally very interested in science. He says that the belief in rebirth would have to go if science proved it impossible. The trouble is however, the standard of proof and disproof he recommends makes it impossible to prove or disprove the existence of anything. All the empirical evidence in the world can’t disprove the claim that I am a reincarnation and that I will have a rebirth nor can it prove that you are reading these words. There is truth and there is proof. Only mathematics trades in proof and disproof. Proof to one side, the 14th Dalai Lama is very interested in and enthusiastic about establishing neuroscientifically that Buddhist practices, and in particular meditation, can make one happy. I examine the question of whether happiness is something in the head that can be assessed by MRI. Before that though, I need to address the question of whether Buddhism promises happiness. If so, what kind? My answer to this is that there is no good evidence that Buddhists are happier than anyone else. The second half of the book takes up the question of what Buddhism would look like if one subtracted the hocus pocus about karma and rebirth. Can there be such a thing this is “Buddhism Naturalized”? My answer to this is that Buddhism can be naturalized, and that what is left is a deep, credible philosophy for our time.
Whether Buddhism contains a philosophy that really could be attractive to 21st century secular humanists means that it would require at a minimum, that Buddhist theory was consistent with science and thus broadly naturalistic, and so beliefs in karma, rebirth and nirvana would have to go. Can there be Buddhism without these beliefs?
There can be meaningful existence without those beliefs, but I, for one, would not want to wade into the tar pit of argumentation over who rightly gets to claim the Buddhist label for themselves, any more than I wanted to over what constitutes zazen. I agree that the thing he’s referring to, the crucible of metaphysics, epistemology and ethics he names “Buddhism naturalized” is a fine guide to living and one that deserves to have attention called to it, but I’m not the least bit interested in the bitter fights over copyright and branding that are sure to follow. In the tug of war over language, I offer no resistance. You can have whatever words you want. I’ll stick with the experience, which I don’t really need to talk about anyway.
Dry Bones
Why does Nietzsche write in such an unusual, more aphoristic style?
The explanation really comes in the first chapter of the book where Nietzsche tells us that the great philosophers are basically fakers when they tell you that they arrived at their views because there were good rational arguments in support of them. That’s nonsense, says Nietzsche. Great philosophers, he thinks, are driven by a particular moral or ethical vision. Their philosophy is really a post-hoc rationalisation for the values they want to promote. And then he says that the values they want to promote are to be explained psychologically, in terms of the type of person that that philosopher is.
The relevance of this is that if this were your view of the rational argumentation of philosophers, it would be quite bizarre to write a traditional book of philosophy giving a set of arguments in support of your view. Because in Nietzsche’s view consciousness and reasoning are fairly superficial aspects of human beings. What really gets us to change our views about things are the non-rational, emotional, affective aspects of our psyche. One of the reasons he writes aphoristically and so provocatively – and this, of course, is why he’s the teenager’s favourite philosopher – is connected to his view of the human psyche. He has to arouse the passions and feelings and emotions of his readers if he’s actually going to transform their views. There’d be no point in giving them a systematic set of arguments like in Spinoza’s Ethics – in fact he ridicules the ‘geometric form’ of Spinoza’s Ethics in the first chapter of Beyond Good and Evil.
The longer I live, the more convinced I am of the truth of this idea. It’s not impossible for rational arguments to persuade someone to change a course of action, of course, but even I, as far-seeing and judicious as I am, can struggle to present such a change to myself in a way that doesn’t make me feel diminished or threatened by it. How much more difficult, then, for ordinary mortals to face up to the crushing awareness that they are wrong, wrong, wrong!
This also reminded me of a passage from Thomas Levenson’s Newton and the Counterfeiter:
As Newton developed his thinking, his new physics grew ever more hospitable to his vision of an omnipresent, omnipotent, all-knowing, and above all, an active deity, fully present in the material cosmos of space and time. He explicitly offered the Principia as testimony to the existence and glory of all-creating divinity: “When I wrote my treatise upon our System, I had an eye on such Principles as might work with considering men for the beliefe of a Deity,” he wrote to Richard Bentley, an ambitious young clergyman preparing the first of the series of lectures Robert Boyle had endowed in defense of Christian religion. “Nothing can rejoice me more,” Newton added, than that his work would prove “useful for that purpose.”
…Newton’s God existed everywhere, “substantially”—really, materially there, able to impinge on matter instantly, through all of space and time. The observed fact of cosmic order, combined with Newton’s demonstration that human mathematical reason could penetrate that order, implied (necessarily, to Newton) the existence of that perfect being from whom both order and intelligence derived. Newton’s natural philosophy was thus, as he told Bentley, explicitly an inquiry into what could be discovered through the properties of nature about the divine source of all material existence.
Newton was convinced. Nonetheless, some uncharitable louts remained unpersuaded, disdainful. Leibniz, for one, ridiculed the notion of a divine sensorium and what he saw as Newton’s flight to an occult explanation for gravity. What was wanted, what Newton sought, was an eyewitness demonstration of divine action in nature. Hence, alchemy. Alchemy seemed to offer a way for him to rescue his God from the threat of irrelevance—salvation through the ancient alchemical idea of a vital agent or spirit.
…He knew that all the theorizing, all the theological argument, all the indirect evidence from the perfect design of the solar system could not match the value of one actual, material demonstration of the divine spirit transforming one metal into another in the here and now. If Newton could discover the method God used to produce gold from base mixtures, then he would know—and not just believe— that the King of Kings would indeed remain triumphant, forever and ever.
Moreover, Kant, one of Nietzsche’s favorite targets, was startled into the thinking that would result in his Critique of Pure Reason by David Hume’s radical skepticism, thinking that was explicitly enlisted to “beat back reason to make room for faith.” It didn’t honestly work, of course; the fact that so many people took, and continue to take, seriously Kant’s idea of a noumenal realm existing outside our apprehension or comprehension (which can somehow magically still be asserted to exist at all) simply speaks to the yearning so many have felt these last few centuries to keep finding a way to believe in the personal God of monotheism — a God, it greatly amuses me to point out, who was apparently done away with by the rigorous search for pure, objective truth engendered by monotheism to begin with.
Across The Youniverse
[C]hemicals organize[d] themselves into complex patterns requiring the coordination of trillions of molecules. And they did this with no instructions. No human organized them. Nor did they have a genetic blueprint that guided their actions. Their own intrinsic self-organizing dynamics directed these complex interactions…. The deep truth about matter, which neither Descartes nor Newton realized, is that, over the course of four billion years, molten rocks transformed themselves into monarch butterflies, blue herons, and the exalted music of Mozart.
This scientific story, the authors argue, should make us rethink our own relationship to the environment, and call into question our tendency to see the non-living world as inanimate. In fact, physics shows us that the non-living world is incredibly dynamic, surprising, and creative — it’s just that the creativity happens over very long scales of time. It’s an important fact, they write, that the universe is itself ‘set up’ for creativity. The universe, they argue, isn’t anarchic, meaningless, absurd, or pointless; it’s creative in its essence. This should make a difference in the way we think about the meaning of our own lives: By being creative and creating novelty, we’re participating in a universe-sized process.
As Bakunin said, the urge to destroy is also a creative urge. What I mean by invoking that in this context is that molten rocks also transformed themselves into lethal viruses, genocidal tyrants and nuclear weapons, and thus we’re still left with the age-old question of how to live meaningfully in a world frequently indifferent or hostile to individuals, and that question isn’t resolved by simply trying to make the focus of one’s identity the universe itself. It’s true that we really are all one in an important way, but we can’t live day-to-day on that level of awareness. No one is comforted in a meaningful way by the fact that our atoms, which may once have been part of a comet or an underwater volcano, will also one day be part of other living organisms, and perhaps return to being stardust countless years hence. It’s sublime to contemplate, sure; but sublime is not the same thing as beautiful, you know.
You Will Know Them by Their Froot Loops
Religion provides answers to such questions as “How shall I live?” and “What is the meaning of the universe?” that science has no capacity to answer. But because answers to such questions are incapable of empirical testing by scientific methodology, how can we evaluate the answers that various religions give? As I have said above, the truth of religious beliefs can be seen in the lives of people who live by those truths. And if we see remarkable individuals in other traditions than our own we can accept that they have some kind of truth even if it is not completely the same as ours.
I don’t feel like batting this one around like a cat mercilessly tormenting a small rodent. Let’s just get right down to elucidating what he’s saying here.
How do we know if religious beliefs are worthy? By looking at the actions of people who claim to be inspired by them.
Whoa, hey, hold up, you say. Most of us have seen religiously inspired actions that run the full gamut of human psychology, from selfless generosity to utter depravity. How can we tell which one of these wildly varying types truly represent the “truth” of a religion?
By only accepting as evidence the actions that we describe as remarkable (leaving aside that “remarkable” is a pretty value-neutral word from where I sit).
But, you may interrupt once again (awfully rude of you, you know), take Christianity. It’s been widely accepted in biblical scholarship since Albert Schweitzer that Jesus was just another apocalyptic cultist whose central concern was what he believed to be the imminent end of the world and the day of judgement to follow, a self-styled Jewish prophet who didn’t seem all that concerned with the worth of Gentiles. Why do we favor the insipid platitudes of the Sermon on the Mount as examples of Christianity’s “truth” rather than the numerous other examples where judgement, condemnation, and retribution are shown to be integral to its worldview?
Because they comport with the values that we have come to cherish by way of rational secularism.
So… religion provides us with “truths” that science can’t, and the way we know this is by judging those supposed truths in the light of rational consideration from as objective a perspective as we can attain, which, not coincidentally, happens to be a key component of a scientific outlook? Isn’t this just an incredibly convoluted way of projecting your own capacity for making critical distinctions onto an arbitrarily-chosen external authority to avoid having to accept full responsibility for your own life? Isn’t this an example of, pun intended, bad faith, ba-dum-bum-tssh?
*Crickets.*
Why Ask Why?
Many “why” questions are really “how” questions in disguise. For instance, if you ask: “Why does water boil at 100C?” what you are really asking is: “What are the processes that explain it has this boiling point?” – which is a question of how.Critically, however, scientific “why” questions do not imply any agency – deliberate action – and hence no intention. We can ask why the dinosaurs died out, why smoking causes cancer and so on without implying any intentions. In the theistic context, however, “why” is usually what I call “agency-why”: it’s an explanation involving causation with intention.So not only do the hows and whys get mixed up, religion can end up smuggling in a non-scientific agency-why where it doesn’t belong.This means that if someone asks why things are as they are, what their meaning and purpose is, and puts God in the answer, they are almost inevitably going to make an at least implicit claim about the how: God has set things up in some way, or intervened in some way, to make sure that purpose is achieved or meaning realised. The neat division between scientific “how” and religious “why” questions therefore turns out to be unsustainable.…But for the moment, we can say that any religious belief that involves an activist, really-existing God and claims that religion has something to say about why things happen, must also be encroaching on questions of how they happen, too. And if that’s true, the easy peace which many claim should exist between science and religion just isn’t possible.
It’s not unidirectional, though. Perhaps politeness forbids him from suggesting that science and rationality can, in the course of delineating the hows, do away with the whys by process of elimination, leaving them nowhere to rest but in incoherence. The more we learn about how things work, the more we come to see the futility of trying to make the universe fit the Procrustean bed of purpose and meaning on a human scale. I speak to you from personal experience here, my friends: when you allow your desperate need for objective meaning rooted in abstract universal truth to atrophy, wither and fall away, life is still worth living.
He’s Mean, He’s Mean, You Know What I Mean
Dennett says that I am concerned that Dawkins is “too darned clear, too brutally frank when he articulates his case” against religion. It is not Dawkin’s clarity that concerns me. It is his condescension towards believers and his labeling of this large group of people as non-thinkers.
…Dennett reminds me that Richard Dawkins is deeply appreciative of the art, music, and poetry that religion has engendered, but it is just that Dawkins believes that religion, on balance, has accomplished more harm than good.
I would find it difficult to attempt such a tally. Whatever the results of such a balance, does that mean we, like Dawkins, should throw out religion wholesale, take a condescending attitude toward people of religious beliefs, label people of religious beliefs as non-thinkers imperious to scientific evidence? No. It means that we should continue to oppose those practices of religion that do damage, we should continue to oppose irrational thinking on issues that require rational thinking and evidence. But, at the same time, I would argue that we should allow our existence to encompass some things that we cannot explain by rational argument and proof.
If you read Dennett’s earlier essay, you’ll notice that in the second sentence, he says:
…Alan Lightman joins a long line of atheist apologists who feel compelled to respond negatively to Richard Dawkins’ campaign but find it hard to put forward a crisp, fact-based objection.
So Lightman responds by once again complaining that Dawkins is condescending and rude without ever providing a specific example, such as, say, a quotation where Dawkins attacks believers themselves, as opposed to faith or belief in the abstract, in such personal, denigrating terms. Brilliant.
I like that last sentence too. “We should allow our existence to encompass some things that we cannot explain by rational argument and proof.” Again, who fails to do this, aside from people with burlap bags for heads and straw sticking out from their collars and shirtsleeves? Who demands rationality and proof in art, poetry and music? Ironically enough, it’s people like Lightman who seem inclined toward a strict dichotomy rather than a continuum when it comes to questions of faith; as he says earlier, he thinks that if the existence of an intelligent creator or an objective meaning of life can’t be disproved by science, they are just as valid as any other belief and are required to be taken seriously. But lumping faith in a personal God in with faith in what we understand of scientific laws is disingenuous in the extreme; there are massive degrees of difference between them when it comes to evidence and likelihood.
Lucubrations, no. 7
Sittin’ here in the wee hours, just contemplating the usual middle-of-the-night issues: the nature of self, the nonexistence of God, other lighthearted fare. Daniel Dennett keeps popping up in my readings tonight:
Yes, many unanswered questions persist. But these are early days, and neuroscience remains immature, says Churchland, a professor emerita of philosophy at University of California at San Diego and author of the subfield-spawning 1986 book Neurophilosophy. In the 19th century, she points out, people thought we’d never understand light. “Well, by gosh,” she says, “by the time the 20th century rolls around, it turns out that light is electromagnetic radiation. … So the fact that at a certain point in time something seems like a smooth-walled mystery that we can’t get a grip on, doesn’t tell us anything about whether some real smart graduate student is going to sort it out in the next 10 years or not.”
Dennett claims he’s got much of it sorted out already. He wrote a landmark book on the topic in 1991, Consciousness Explained. (The title “should have landed him in court, charged with breach of the Trade Descriptions Act,” writes Tallis.) Dennett uses the vocabulary of computer science to explain how consciousness emerges from the huge volume of things happening in the brain all at once. We’re not aware of everything, he tells me, only a “limited window.” He describes that stream of consciousness as “the activities of a virtual machine which is running on the parallel hardware of the brain.”
“You—the fruits of all your experience, not just your genetic background, but everything you’ve learned and done and all your memories—what ties those all together? What makes a self?” Dennett asks. “The answer is, and has to be, the self is like a software program that organizes the activities of the brain.”
And here he responds to Alan Lightman’s faith-based twaddle from last week:
Is there any rational grounding for a belief in a miracle-making interventionist God? (No.) Do we need God to account for the brilliant design of living things? (No.) Do we need God to somehow underwrite or ground our confidence that our ethical convictions are not just parochial prejudices? (No.) There is nothing gloriously, ineffably, tantalizingly imponderable about these questions, carefully crafted and vetted by philosophers and scientists over the centuries.
Lightman fails to consider the possibility, moreover, that the reason many theological questions continue to evade the bright light of rational inquiry is that they have been ingeniously crafted by theologians to do just that. As the traditional concepts of God, heaven and hell crumble in the collision with science, the theologians invent new, more “sophisticated” concepts to take their place. They are improvements only in the sense that they are more immune to falsification by any imaginable discovery.
…Like many atheists, Dawkins — as Lightman surely knows — is deeply appreciative of all the glorious art and music and poetry that religion has engendered. But still he trots out the canonical list of glories to float the implication that we atheists are a philistine lot. Shame on him. That is what I call faith-fibbing. Not so much a bald-faced lie as a carefully indirect misrepresentation. He can’t actually claim that Dawkins doesn’t weigh the many contributions of religion to the arts against the damage it has wrought. Dawkins does just that, and arrives at a judgment with which Lightman apparently disagrees: All things considered, religion’s blessings are outweighed by the harm they do. The problem is that Lightman doesn’t tackle that difficult issue; he prefers to sing the praises of faith without holding it to account.
Evil All the Way Down
On two previous occasions, I have found Ron Rosenbaum to be a fatuous twit when it comes to all things metaphysical. The passing of time has not improved matters any:
“My main goal,” says Baron-Cohen, “is replacing the unscientific term ‘evil’ with the scientific term ’empathy.’ ” What he means is that instead of calling someone evil we should say they have no empathy.
Baron-Cohen goes to great lengths to posit an “empathy circuit” in the brain whose varying “degrees” of strength constitute a spectrum, ranging from total, 100 percent empathy to “zero degrees of empathy.”
This empathy circuit, he tells us, consists of 13 specific regions of the brain involved in the generation of nonevil choices, among them “the medial prefrontal cortex,” “the inferior frontal gyrus,” and “the posterior superior temporal sulcus.”
Ideally all of these act together empathetically to defeat “single minded focus,” which appears to be Baron-Cohen’s explanation for what was previously called evil. Single-mindedness is the inability to “recognize and respond” to the feelings of others. A healthy empathy circuit allows us to feel others’ pain and transcend single-minded focus on our own. This theory does, however, seem to carry a presumption that when one “recognizes and responds,” one will do so in warm and fuzzy ways. But what about those who “recognize and respond” to others’ feelings with great discernment—and then torture them? It happens.
One troubling aspect of Baron-Cohen’s grand substitution of a lack of empathy for evil is the mechanistic way he describes it.
He characterizes those who lack empathy as having “a chip in their neural computer missing.” He tells us “empathy is more like a dimmer switch than an all-or-none switch.” The big problem here is that by reducing evil to a mechanical malfunction in the empathy circuit, Baron-Cohen also reduces, or even abolishes, good. No one in this deterministic conceptual system chooses to be good, courageous, or heroic. They just have a well-developed empathy circuit that compels them act empathetically—there’s no choice or honor in the matter.
…Many neuroscientists, confronted by the “hard problem of consciousness,” evade it by citing a quarter-century-old experiment by one Benjamin Libet, which purported to reveal that apparently conscious decisions are actually made unconsciously—preconsciously—some 500 milliseconds (half a second) before the illusion of a conscious decision is made conscious. (A recent paper puts it at a full second.) But Libet’s study fails to explain how the initial unconscious decision is made by the electrified piece of meat—he just kicks the can into the preconscious, you might say—or why we have the illusion of consciousness at all.
You get the idea. It’s like the God of the gaps theory, except the setting is the brain itself rather than the fossil record. No matter what studies show, Rosenbaum is going to insist that there is an unaccounted-for area at the beginning of the thought process that can only be satisfactorily “explained” by positing some sort of noumenal vacuum beyond space and time whence all human decisions spring, uncaused. And once again, this is only an issue at all because we insist on perpetuating a distinction between “me” and “my brain”.
Clear I-sight
The conscious decision to push the button was made about a second before the actual act, but the team discovered that a pattern of brain activity seemed to predict that decision by as many as seven seconds. Long before the subjects were even aware of making a choice, it seems, their brains had already decided.As humans, we like to think that our decisions are under our conscious control — that we have free will. Philosophers have debated that concept for centuries, and now Haynes and other experimental neuroscientists are raising a new challenge. They argue that consciousness of a decision may be a mere biochemical afterthought, with no influence whatsoever on a person’s actions. According to this logic, they say, free will is an illusion. “We feel we choose, but we don’t,” says Patrick Haggard, a neuroscientist at University College London.You may have thought you decided whether to have tea or coffee this morning, for example, but the decision may have been made long before you were aware of it. For Haynes, this is unsettling. “I’ll be very honest, I find it very difficult to deal with this,” he says. “How can I call a will ‘mine’ if I don’t even know when it occurred and what it has decided to do?”
The only reason this seems so unsettling to people is because of the ingrained assumption that “I” am distinct from “my brain”, and that my brain would do one thing if it were allowed to run on autopilot, but “I” would do something differently. This research doesn’t deny that we choose between alternatives, it just demonstrates that more of the decision-making process is unconscious than we thought.
A Lamp Unto Yourself
Flanagan isn’t talking about Buddhism as it’s actually practiced around the world, in a bewildering array of different traditions. His subject is “Buddhism naturalized” — that is, Buddhism stripped down to a core set of philosophical (and, crucially, non-supernatural) claims. Naturalize Buddhism, and you’re left with a basically materialist, deterministic view of the world. If it existed, the “Buddhist Credo,” Flanagan writes, would be something like: “I believe that everything is impermanent, that everything (including my state of mind) is subject to the principles of cause and effect, and that given that I am among the things-that-there-are, I am impermanent and subject to the laws of cause and effect.” Physicists, biologists, philosophers, and neuroscientists would agree. Today, it’s a scientific fact that human beings live in a material, determined world, and are themselves determined and material.…The real value of Buddhism, in short, is that it finds moral meaning in our material world. That, Flanagan points out, makes our Western obsession with “happy” Buddhists seem pretty shallow by comparison. Buddhism isn’t about being happy, but about seeing the world as it is, and figuring out how to respond to the facts responsibly. Our Western moral systems, upended by the Scientific Revolution, are still figuring out how to do that — for Buddhists, there was never anything to upend. In fact, Flanagan argues, Buddhist tradition records 2,500 years worth of “experiments in living” with materialism.
I agree fully. My conception of Buddhism is one informed by Western scholars and practitioners of the last half-century. But that’s also why I don’t bother identifying as a Buddhist, because I don’t feel like answering for the myriad other variations on the theme, becoming some sort of multi-hyphenated Buddhist (which seems to be just another way of reinforcing the ego anyway). There was a time when I got a sense of community and solidarity from immersing myself in Buddhist terminology and symbolism, but now it’s enough for me to know that someone – doesn’t even matter who – put these ideas out into the noosphere, where they transmogrify through endless permutations to adapt to different circumstances, as they should. Me, I’m not anything. I just exist for now, and move on.
His Smell Smelled Like No Other
Think of some of your most powerful memories, and there’s likely a smell attached: the aroma of suntan lotion at the beach, the sharpness of freshly mown grass, the floral trail of your mother’s perfume. “Scents are very much linked to memory,” says perfumer Christophe Laudamiel. “They are linked to remembering the past but also learning from experiences.”
But despite its primacy in our lives, our sense of smell is often overlooked when we record our history. We tend to connect with the past visually – we look at objects displayed in a museum, photographs in a documentary, the writing in a manuscript. Sometimes we might hear a vintage speech, or touch an ancient artifact and imagine what it was like to use it. But our knowledge of the past is almost completely deodorized.…Smell is unique among the senses in the way it is processed by the brain – olfactory information travels directly to a brain region linked with the hippocampus and the amygdala, sites of memory and emotion. Scientists have suggested that the way smell is processed makes smell memories particularly strong and persistent. But outside of our memory, smells themselves are ephemeral: They are formed by volatile chemical compounds that can easily disperse and disintegrate. So smell is both a powerful part of our experiences and an evanescent one.
I had heard as a kid that the memory of a scent lasts longer than that of any of the other senses, despite being the least developed of them. (Alas, I recently learned that it’s not true; yet another lie foisted upon my innocent, trusting young mind.) But I’ve always had a heightened appreciation for smells, especially in an artistic context — I find that both visual and musical sensations are made much more intense and vividly particular when combined with powerful aromas. Looking at photography while listening to trance-inducing melodies and rhythms and inhaling certain fragrances is a pleasant enough altered state for me.
I Put the Mean Back in Meaning
This would be a typical response from the atheist scientist who is not spiritual when I ask, “So how do you answer questions that have to do with the meaning of life, big questions such as why are we here, what’s the purpose of my life?” They would answer, “I don’t think those are important questions to be asking.” Those questions just don’t matter. It wasn’t that they had an answer that was different from the general public. They just didn’t think those were important questions. Now, the atheist scientists who are spiritual would give answers to those questions, and they would give them through the sense of being spiritual. They would talk about how they found awe and beauty in nature, they found awe in the birth of their children, they found awe in the very work that they do as scientists. They just couldn’t see that as being explained only by science—there has to be something else out there beyond themselves. But then they did not see that as being God, or needing to name it as theism of any sort.So what should people take away from your study?Many of these scientists who are atheists are not hostile to big questions of the meaning of life. I thought there would be scientists who were religious. I thought there would be probably a lot fewer scientists who were religious than people in the general public who are religious. None of those findings were surprising. But this spiritual atheist finding has really been surprising to me personally.
Yes, this is another installment of “the utterly vapid meaninglessness of the word “spiritual”. But you know what makes people hostile to the “big questions of the meaning of life”? The understanding that there is no one-size-fits-all “meaning of life”. The question itself betrays an inherent confusion that wears just a mite thin after, oh, about the thousandth repetition. What’s the meaning of your life, other than annoying me with facile generalizations about people who supposedly walk around all day thinking of art, music and love in terms of subatomic particles? (Thank you, Martin Figura.)
All Juice, No Seeds
For now, researchers and consumers can only assume that when presented with a full pipeline of new drugs and better data on the safety, efficacy and public acceptability of male contraceptives, pharmaceutical companies will eventually see an opportunity for their profit margins. The hope is, “If you make it, they will come,” NIH’s Blithe says.
Yes. Yes, I suppose they will. Not that they weren’t already. In fact, that’s kind of the problem, isn’t it?
That’s from an article in Scientific American, talking about trying to develop a new male contraceptive. Scientific American. So, uh, I guess it’s safe to say that pun was unintentional…?