March 9th, 2010

significant objects

The blog Un-canny Ontology recently took a look at the website significantobjects.com from the point of view of Heidegger’s object-orientated philosophy.

For those of you not familiar with the site significantobjects.com, the goal of the site was to see if given significance, random everyday objects could take on objective significance, as well. As the site explains:

A talented, creative writer invents a story about an object. Invested with new significance by this fiction, the object should — according to our hypothesis — acquire not merely subjective but objective value. How to test our theory? Via eBay!

As demonstrated from some of the entries, these objects are not “rare” or “important” objects by any means. In fact a lot of the times these objects are purchased from thrift stores or garage sales for just a couple of bucks (max). A “fictional” account of the object’s significance is added and then sold and bought on eBay – usually purchased for way more than the item was originally worth. But what I find fascinating about this experiment is that it is purposefully doing something that we often do without thinking about it – that is, adding significance to objects. This led me to question, what is significance and how/why is it important for our understanding of object-oriented philosophy?

More of that post here.

Significant Objects is an interesting experiment, although I would argue that a lot of the significance created around these objects comes from the fact that they are featured on the website as part of the project, and not necessarily from the made-up stories.

March 4th, 2010

123

Shakespeare’s Sonnet CXXIII:

No, Time, thou shalt not boast that I do change:
Thy pyramids built up with newer might
To me are nothing novel, nothing strange;
They are but dressings of a former sight.
Our dates are brief, and therefore we admire
What thou dost foist upon us that is old,
And rather make them born to our desire
Than think that we before have heard them told.
Thy registers and thee I both defy,
Not wondering at the present nor the past,
For thy records and what we see doth lie,
Made more or less by thy continual haste.
This I do vow and this shall ever be;
I will be true, despite thy scythe and thee.

March 3rd, 2010

the experiencing self vs. the remembering self

Widely regarded as the world’s most influential living psychologist, Daniel Kahneman won the Nobel in Economics for his pioneering work in behavioral economics.

Using examples from vacations to colonoscopies, Nobel laureate and founder of behavioral economics Daniel Kahneman reveals how our “experiencing selves” and our “remembering selves” perceive happiness differently. This new insight has profound implications for economics, public policy — and our own self-awareness.

From TED Talks 2010

March 1st, 2010

the cinema as chapel

It’s easy to dismiss science fiction and other genre movies (and books, and games) as mindless entertainment. But the reason for the popularity of Star Wars, Twilight, and Lord of the Rings can’t simply be that our culture craves vapid adventure stories to while away the idle hours. I think we consume these modern epics because, for many of us, traditional institutions don’t cut it anymore. Church, family. and government once handed over fairly rigid instructions on “how to live”: how to be a good citizen, neighbor, spouse, or parent. The cultural revolution of the 1960s and ’70s changed all that. Vietnam, political assassinations, government corruption, and the rise of the corporate state left us suspicious of conventional authority and religion. We got jaded.

Is it no wonder, then, that many now seek moral guidance and spiritual example not in mosques and chapels, but huddled in darkened movie theaters or bathed in the holy glow of our Blu-rays? Our new gods and priests might be writers, movie directors, and actors. When, in The Lord of the Rings, Sir Ian McKellen as Gandalf the wise intones to Frodo, “All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us,” it’s hard not to prick up our hobbity ears and nod our heads in agreement. Yes, that’s damned good advice. And for many of us, it’s guidance much easier to swallow than the kind shouted from the pulpit on a Sunday morning.

More.

February 25th, 2010

the psychology of possibility

The Boston Globe has an interesting bio of phsychologist Ellen Langer:

Langer is a famous psychologist poised to get much more famous, but not in the ways most researchers do. She is best known for two things: her concept of mindlessness – the idea that much of what we believe to be rational thought is in fact just our brains on autopilot – and her concept of mindfulness, the idea that simply paying attention to our everyday lives can make us happier and healthier. She was Harvard’s first tenured woman professor of psychology, and her discoveries helped trigger, among other things, the burgeoning positive-psychology movement. Her 1989 book, “Mindfulness,” was an international bestseller, and she remains in high demand as a speaker everywhere from New York’s 92d Street Y to the leadership guru Tony Robbins’s Fiji resort. And now a movie about her life is in development with Jennifer Aniston signed on to star as Langer.

While other researchers might blanch at the Hollywoodization of their work, for Langer it’s almost an organic development – part of a long journey to bring the message of her research to the masses. Langer’s reputation in the field of social psychology rests on a set of ingenious experiments that expose the strange power of the mind to fool itself and to transform the body. In one of her best-known studies, she found that giving nursing home residents more control over their lives made them live longer. In more recent work, she made hotel maids lose weight simply by telling them that their work burned as many calories as a typical workout. And in the study at the center of the Aniston movie, a team led by Langer found that instructing a group of elderly men to talk and act as if they were 20 years younger could reverse the aging process.

Read more at the Boston Globe. (via 3qd)

February 23rd, 2010

d.h. lawrence and the second brain

Speaking of the second brain… A friend has brought it to my attention that D. H. Lawrence has written with tremendous relish on the subject of the second brain, or solar plexus:

In that little book, “Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious,” I tried rather wistfully to convince you, dear reader, that you had a solar plexus and a lumbar ganglion and a few other things. I don’t know why I took the trouble. If a fellow doesn’t believe he’s got a nose, the best way to convince him is gently to waft a little pepper into his nostrils. And there was I painting my own nose purple, and wistfully inviting you to look and believe. No more, though.

You’ve got first and foremost a solar plexus, dear reader; and the solar plexus is a great nerve center which lies behind your stomach. I can’t be accused of impropriety or untruth, because any book of science or medicine which deals with the nerve-system of the human body will show it to you quite plainly. So don’t wriggle or try to look spiritual. Because, willy-nilly, you’ve got a solar plexus, dear reader, among other things. I’m writing a good sound science book, which there’s no gainsaying.

Now, your solar plexus, most gentle of readers, is where you are you. It is your first and greatest and deepest center of consciousness. If you want to know _how_ conscious and _when_ conscious, I must refer you to that little book, “Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious.”

At your solar plexus you are primarily conscious: there, behind you stomach. There you have the profound and pristine conscious awareness that you are you. Don’t say you haven’t. I know you have. You might as well try to deny the nose on your face. There is your first and deepest seat of awareness. There you are triumphantly aware of your own individual existence in the universe. Absolutely there is the keep and central stronghold of your triumphantly-conscious self. There you _are_, and you know it. So stick out your tummy gaily, my dear, with a _Me voilà_. With a _Here I am!_ With an _Ecco mi!_ With a _Da bin ich!_ There you are, dearie.

(from read print)

And:

The primal consciousness in man is pre-mental, and has nothing to do with cognition. It is the same as in the animals. And this pre-mental consciousness remains as long as we live the powerful root and body of our consciousness. The mind is but the last flower, the _cul de sac_.

The first seat of our primal consciousnesses the solar plexus, the great
nerve-center situated behind the stomach. From this center we are first dynamically conscious. For the primal consciousness is always dynamic, and never, like mental consciousness, static. Thought, let us say what we will about its magic powers, is instrumental only, the soul’s finest instrument for the business of living. Thought is just a means to action and living. But life and action take rise actually at the great centers of dynamic consciousness.

The solar plexus, the greatest and most important center of our dynamic consciousness, is a sympathetic center. At this main center of your first-mind we know as we can never mentally know. Primarily we know, each man, each living creature knows, profoundly and satisfactorily and without question, that _I am I._ This root of all knowledge and being is established in the solar plexus; it is dynamic, pre-mental knowledge, such as cannot be transferred into thought. Do
not ask me to transfer the pre-mental dynamic knowledge into thought. It cannot be done. The knowledge that _I am I_ can never be thought: only known.

This being the very first term of our life-knowledge, a knowledge established physically and psychically the moment the two parent nuclei fused, at the moment of the conception, it remains integral as a piece of knowledge in every subsequent nucleus derived from this one original. But yet the original nucleus, formed from the two parent nuclei at our conception, remains always primal and central, and is always the original fount and home of the first and supreme knowledge that _I am I._ This original nucleus is embodied in the solar plexus.

(from online literature)

Terrific! Thanks very much, Alice.

See also this glorious diagram of the network of nerves in the abdomen, including the celiac plexus or solar plexus @ wikipedia).

February 15th, 2010

ayurvedic tea

Sri Dhanvantari

A friend sent me some “kapha” tea — a stimulating blend of spices — and this led me to do a little reading on what kapha means. It led me to Ayurveda, an ancient but persisting philosophy of medicine, originating in India over 5000 years ago.

Ayurvedic medicine places individuals into one of three types or “doshas”. Following ayurvedic medicine, one is encouraged to adopt certain dietary and lifestyle habits specific to their dosha, in order to attain balance and a feeling of well-being.

Out of interest I took a (probably not very reliable) test that placed me in the Kapha type (as opposed to Pitta or Vata).

Good thing I was already sent the appropriate tea, then.

Whether or not i’m entirely sold on Ayurveda, I do like the kapha tea, especially with a drop of milk (although that’s probably not traditional). There’s a recipe for kapha tea online, but it differs from the commercial blend I have. The recipe here lacks black pepper, for one thing, which gives the commercial blend a nice kick.

(Right: Dhanvantari who, according to wikipedia, is “said to be an avatar of Vishnu from the Hindu tradition and God of Ayurvedic medicine”)

February 7th, 2010

evolution respects gays?

From the excellent EurekAlert!:

Male homosexuality doesn’t make complete sense from an evolutionary point of view. It appears that the trait is heritable, but because homosexual men are much less likely to produce offspring than heterosexual men, shouldn’t the genes for this trait have been extinguished long ago? What value could this sexual orientation have, that it has persisted for eons even without any discernible reproductive advantage?

One possible explanation is what evolutionary psychologists call the “kin selection hypothesis.” What that means is that homosexuality may convey an indirect benefit by enhancing the survival prospects of close relatives. Specifically, the theory holds that homosexual men might enhance their own genetic prospects by being “helpers in the nest.” By acting altruistically toward nieces and nephews, homosexual men would perpetuate the family genes, including some of their own.

Two evolutionary psychologists, Paul Vasey and Doug VanderLaan of the University of Lethbridge, Canada tested this idea for the past several years on the Pacific island of Samoa. They chose Samoa because males who prefer men as sexual partners are widely recognized and accepted there as a distinct gender category—called fa’afafine—neither man nor woman. The fa’afafine tend to be effeminate, and exclusively attracted to adult men as sexual partners. This clear demarcation makes it easier to identify a sample for study.

Fascinating article — if, at the very least, only to hear of the Fa’afafine as an accepted third gender in Samoa — and an interesting theory… Although I’m not sure where it leaves lesbians. Are they super aunties? Article at EurekAlert!

January 26th, 2010

one cubic foot

Edward O. Wilson (The Diversity of Life) has a nice article on the National Geographic website on one of his favourite topics… biodiversity:

When you thrust a shovel into the soil or tear off a piece of coral, you are, godlike, cutting through an entire world. You have crossed a hidden frontier known to very few. Immediately close at hand, around and beneath our feet, lies the least explored part of the planet’s surface. It is also the most vital place on Earth for human existence.

More @ National Geographic

January 17th, 2010

their stuff is shit and your shit is stuff

Thank god for that; I needed a laugh.

January 10th, 2010

language learning ent a sport

Steve Kaufmann (aka The Linguist) argues the point that language learning is more than a task to be completed wholly, a skill to be learned to a specific point of satisfaction or superlative. As he says, “it’s not about performance”:

Athletes compete to see who can run faster, or jump higher, or execute their moves with more precision, or score more goals. Athletes train in order to improve their performance. Learning languages is different. It is, for me, about communicating and enjoying another culture. In fact the learning process, itself, is enjoyable, regardless of the outcome, regardless of the performance. It is possible to enjoy languages without performing at all, without speaking. And when we speak we do not want to be judged, or at least I do not.

I often get comments on my foreign language youtube videos along the lines of:

“your Portuguese is not very good, don’t you care?”
” your Japanese sounds a little American, you should work on your accent.”
” you made a mistake in your Russian.”

Well, I don’t care. I am not in competition with native speakers, nor with other non-native learners of any language. If my mistakes are pointed out, it is likely that I will make the same mistake the next time. I know what gives me trouble in these languages. I try to pay attention to these things when I listen, read or speak. But I know that I will continue to make mistakes and will only gradually improve.

More here. There is further discussion in the comments section of that post.

January 7th, 2010

understanding others

Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.
Carl Jung

The reality of the other person is not in what he reveals to you, but in what he cannot reveal to you. Therefore, if you would understand him, listen not to what he says but rather what he does not say. Kahlil Gibran

January 5th, 2010

caught in the act of make-believe

davis
Miles Davis. Photo: LIFE

Brian Eno on Miles Davis (and music in general):

When you listen to Miles Davis, how much of what you hear is music, and how much is context? Another way of saying that is, ‘What would you be hearing if you didn’t know you were listening to Miles Davis?’ I think of context as everything that isn’t physically contained in the grooves of the record, and in his case that seems quite a lot. It includes your knowledge, first of all, that everyone else says he’s great: that must modify the way you hear him. But it also includes a host of other strands: that he was a handsome and imposing man, a member of a romantic minority, that he played with Charlie Parker, that he spans generations, that he underwent various addictions, that he married Cicely Tyson, that he dressed well, that Jean-Luc Godard liked him, that he wore shades and was very cool, that he himself said little about his work, and so on. Surely all that affects how you hear him: I mean, could it possibly have felt the same if he’d been an overweight heating engineer from Oslo? When you listen to music, aren’t you also ‘listening’ to all the stuff around it, too? How important is that to the experience you’re having, and is it differently important with different musics, different artists?

Miles was an intelligent man, by all accounts, and must have become increasingly aware of the power of his personal charisma, especially in the later years as he watched his reputation grow over his declining trumpeting skills. Perhaps he said to himself: These people are hearing a lot more context than music, so perhaps I accept that I am now primarily a context maker. My art is not just what comes out of the end of my trumpet or appears on a record, but a larger experience which is intimately connected to who I appear to be, to my life and charisma, to the Miles Davis story. In that scenario, the ‘music’, the sonic bit, could end up being quite a small part of the whole experience. Developing the context – the package, the delivery system, the buzz, the spin, the story – might itself become the art. Like perfume…


More.

(via peter serafinowicz’s twitter page)

January 3rd, 2010

Now men are all separate little entities.

I’ve been enjoying D. H. Lawrence’s essay “A propos to Lady Chatterly’s Lover”. I’ve transcribed a few pages for ease of reading, for whomever is interested.

Back, before the idealist religions and philosophies arose and started man on the great excursion of tragedy. The last three thousand years of mankind have been an excursion into ideals, bodilessness, and tragedy, and now the excursion is over. And it is like the end of a tragedy in the theatre. The stage is strewn with dead bodies, worse still, with meaningless bodies, and the curtain comes down.

But in life, the curtain never comes down on the scene. There the dead bodies lie, and the inert ones, and somebody has to clear them away, somebody has to carry on. It is the day after. Today is already the day after the end of the tragic and idealist epoch. Utmost inertia falls on the remaining protagonists. Yet we have to carry on.

Even when I don’t agree with his opinions, I’m always thrilled by the scope and passion of his ideas and descriptions.

Read more after the jump (or, alternatively, at the sources from which I transcribed the excerpt: here and here).

Thanks, Alice.
Read the rest of this entry »

December 31st, 2009

being foreign

Foreigner_and_Wrestler_at_Yokohama_1861
A foreigner is shown a harsh welcome at Yokohama, 1861.
Today it’s much easier to be foreign in Japan. Photo: wikipedia commons.

I thoroughly enjoyed this article at the Economist; hoovered it up.

Ernest Hemingway, set the ground rules for the writer as foreigner when he was part of the 1920s expatriate community in Paris: live in Saint-Germain-des-Prés (or equivalent), work in cafés, meet other artists, drink a lot.

Not everyone can be Hemingway. Many foreigners today are threadbare students, overworked managers, trailing spouses. The male expatriate in Bangkok is a great deal freer than the female expatriate in Jeddah. The lot of unwilling foreigners is far worse still. A life of foreignness imposed by poverty or persecution or exile is unlikely to be enjoyable at all.

Even so, all other things being equal, foreignness is intrinsically stimulating. Like a good game of bridge, the condition of being foreign engages the mind constantly without ever tiring it. John Lechte, an Australian professor of social theory, characterises foreignness as “an escape from the boredom and banality of the everyday”. The mundane becomes “super-real”, and experienced “with an intensity evocative of the events of a true biography”.

I often feel a homesickness for places i’ve visited as a foreigner, but rarely (or ever?) for my real homeland.

Beware, then: however well you carry it off, however much you enjoy it, there is a dangerous undertow to being a foreigner, even a genteel foreigner. Somewhere at the back of it all lurks homesickness, which metastasises over time into its incurable variant, nostalgia. And nostalgia has much in common with the Freudian idea of melancholia—a continuing, debilitating sense of loss, somewhere within which lies anger at the thing lost. It is not the possibility of returning home which feeds nostalgia, but the impossibility of it.

From the Economist. Thanks, Christine.

December 29th, 2009

a decade of technological oppression

From NewScientist:

“THE age of melancholy” is how psychologist Daniel Goleman describes our era. People today experience more depression than previous generations, despite the technological wonders that help us every day. It might be because of them.

Our lifestyles are increasingly driven by technology. Phones, computers and the internet pervade our days. There is a constant, nagging need to check for texts and email, to update Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn profiles, to acquire the latest notebook or 3G cellphone.

The author prescribes a triangular approach to breaking free of these shackles of oppression. One must strive for autonomy, a sense of competence, and a sense of relatedness to those around us.

The first is autonomy – the feeling that our activities are self-chosen and self-endorsed. When we feel in control, we are able to organise our priorities and place effective boundaries around them. But when we feel we have insufficient control, it leaves us vulnerable to our impulses and causes us to abdicate decisions to other people. It is easy to see how technology undermines autonomy, but also how to regain it. This may be as simple as switching off mobile phones during meals and family time, setting aside specific times to answer emails, and being available only when we choose to be.

We also need a sense of competence, a belief that our actions are effective. In this respect our relationship with technology is complex, because many of us feel competent when we deal with an email, when we have the newest BlackBerry, or because 50 people enjoyed the holiday snaps we posted on Facebook. But being truly competent must be a continuation of our autonomy: knowing which activities are important to us and carrying them out in the most effectual way possible, making use of technology where applicable.

More at NewScientist. I think that’s enough blogging for today!

December 26th, 2009

The world is a dynamic mess of jiggling things, if you look at it right.

Richard Feynman relishes the secret nature of rubber bands — part of a series of clips on youtube taken from the BBC TV programme ‘Fun to Imagine’ (1983).

In the next video Feynman points out that when we touch a solid object, we are experiencing physical repulsion from the object caused by electrical forces. It’s such a familiar phenomenon — so predictable and consistent — that we take it for granted. If the particles didn’t repel us, we would move straight through them as with low density liquids and gases. Feynman explains it all much more excitingly and inspiringly than I, so check it out!

It certainly is fun to think about these things; to gain a new perspective or understanding of something you thought you knew well — or found uninteresting — is to be reminded of the potential all around us. Good old science!

Update: I’ve watched all the videos now and my favourite revelation comes in the latter half of clip #2 on fire, carbon and trees.

December 7th, 2009

reverence for life

Hippopotamus-2
Photo: Patrick Gijsbers.

Albert Schweizer:

At sunset of the third day, near the village of Igendja, we moved along an island set in the middle of the wide river. On a sandback [sandbank?] to our left, four hippopotamuses and their young plodded along in our same direction. Just then, in my great tiredness and discouragement, the phrase “Reverence for Life” struck me like a flash. As far as I knew, it was a phrase I had never heard nor ever read. I realized at once that it carried within itself the solution to the problem that had been torturing me. Now I knew that a system of values which concerns itself only with our relationship to other people is incomplete and therefore lacking in power for good. Only by means of reverence for life can we establish a spiritual and humane relationship with both people and all living creatures within our reach. Only in this fashion can we avoid harming others, and, within the limits of our capacity, go to their aid whenever they need us.

(via wikiquote)

Ethics, according to Schweitzer, consists in the compulsion to show toward the will-to-live of each and every being the same reverence as one does to one’s own. Circumstances where we apparently fail to satisfy this compulsion should not lead us to defeatism, since the will-to-live renews itself again and again, as an outcome of an evolutionary necessity and a phenomenon with a spiritual dimension.

The will to live is naturally both parasitic and antagonistic towards other forms of life. Only in the thinking being has the will to live become conscious of other wills to live, and desirous of solidarity with it. This solidarity, however, cannot be brought about, because human life does not escape the puzzling and horrible circumstance that it must live at the cost of other life. But as an ethical being one strives to escape whenever possible from this necessity, and to put a stop to this disunion of the Will to live, so far as it is within one’s power.

Albert Schweitzer nourished hope in a humankind that is more profoundly aware of its position in the Universe. His optimism was based in “belief in truth”. He persistently emphasized the necessity to think, rather than merely acting on basis of passing impulses or by following the most widespread opinions, common among those found ignoring the conflationary elements so apparent in religious identity.

Respect for life, resulting from contemplation on one’s own conscious will to live, leads the individual to live in the service of other people and of every living creature. Schweitzer was much respected for putting his theory into practice in his own life.

(via albert schweizer@wiki)

« Older Entries





Powered by Wordpress. Theme info.
Original content © MMIX Jonathan Beaton, all rights reserved.