the unlikely story of how America slipped the surly bonds of earth & came to
believe in signs & portents that would make the middle ages blush
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This post is a little demo of what I call "reading bookstores." The shelf is more than the sum of its books. The store more than the sum of its shelves. The supply chain more than the sum of its outlets. Synergy. The American Heritage Dictionary, 4th Edition
defines it as: "The interaction of two or more agents or forces so
that their combined effect is greater than the sum of their individual effects." Something like that, but in a context where you weren't expecting it.
I had half an hour to kill this afternoon. This is how I spent it at the Boulder Barnes & Noble. I had never seen any of these books before today.
Given the subtitle, I was surprised to find no entries for Attachment in the index. Lots for Autism, of course. I suppose it's naive of me to be shocked that the sales of so many science books these days are driven by the ever ongoing meme popularity contest. Perhaps attachment has nothing to do with autism, if the latter is a purely congenital aberration of neurophysiology. But it sure as hell has a lot to do with "How We Connect with Others."
One Bruce Gregory writes a funny, less than enthusiastic review, including the parenthetic admonition: Don't anthropomorphize neurons; they hate it when you do that.
Important! But unfortunately, at $38, also the most expensive of these three books. Informed by recent attachment studies and theory. Sadly, not much historical discussion, as far as I could see on brief inspection (aside from bib cites), of Steven Mitchell's work (e.g. Hope and Dread in Psychoanalysis and Relational Concepts in Psychoanalysis). Mitchell is well represented in the author index, however. This one is strictly for professionals (hot tip: refuse to be discouraged by such caveats; be a professional).
This one is the comic-relief entry. Whenever I hear the word quantum, I reach for my devolver. Of course, as in so many such cases, Jung is prominently invoked.
From Mindell's Wikipedia page: "While in Zurich, Mindell became aware of the work of psychiatrist C.G. Jung and shifted his emphasis to study Analytical Psychology at the C.G. Jung Institute, where he graduated as a Jungian analyst."
From the Amy and Arny Mindell website: The video linked below must be seen to be believed. Finally! Proof positive of quantum entanglement!
The attached short video sent by Susan Cogan is a brilliant and organic example of one of the most mysterious and wonderful parts of process oriented psychology: namely, the mystery of quantum entanglement and role switching.
Plus (no surprise here), the Mindells are among the growing horde of I'm-not-really-New-Agers jumping on Jill Bolte Taylor's brandy-new brain-damage bandwagon.
Listen to what she says about her right hemisphere, it sounds like what we have been calling, dreamland's nonlocality and essence levels.
The author won the Nobel prize in physics in 1969 "for his contributions and discoveries concerning the classification of elementary particles and their interactions." The bit most relevant to Mindell's Quantum Mind is Gell-Mann's Chapter 12: "Quantum Mechanics and Flapdoodle." There he explains how many bogus New Age memes such as "nonlocality" -- (im)pressed into service to rationalize paranormal notions such as "remote viewing" -- are based on willfully brainless misreadings of Bell's Theorem.
isn't it just like a dream
sirens and people and everything
the driver tried to swerve
but he just didn't see ya
now you're buried 'neath the wheel
just like a tortilla
beck - sucker without a brain
“JILL BOLTE TAYLOR was a neuroscientist working at Harvard’s brain research center when she experienced nirvana.”
Thus begins an article in today's New York Times titled A Superhighway to Bliss. Significantly, it's in the Fashion section.
And appropriately so. She has spoken at TED. She was listed among TIME magazine's 2008 roster of The World's Most Influential People. She's been on Oprah, where it says that "her consciousness shifted away from reality... and into a place of inner peace and Nirvana." The intended inferences having been drawn, she's also been featured on What is Enlightenment?, the website of self-proclaimed enlightened master, Andrew Cohen. Here's a clip from that last one...
Jill Bolte Taylor suffered a stroke one day...and paid attention to what was happening every step of the way, including sensations and insights that could only be described as mystical. Her powerfully moving story raises important questions about the relationship between the mind, the brain, and the nature of spiritual experience.
No less august a journal than Scientific American chimes in with an article titled Searching for God in the Brain. Though the image depicting this is now evidently missing in action, the first paragraph explains that...
Supercooled giant magnets generate intense fields around the nun’s head in a high-tech attempt to read her mind as she communes with her deity.
Oh wait... I think I found that missing graphic.
I wrote this merely to go on record that I find Jill Bolte Taylor incredibly tedious and annoying...
("Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor, the Singin' Scientist,
performs The Brain Bank Jingle!")
Back in February, 2003, Daniel Dennett gave a talk at TED. You know about TED, right? If not, here's what the site's source code says:
<meta name="description" content="TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) is an invitation-only event where the world's leading thinkers and doers gather to find inspiration..."
If you didn't know about TED, that's probably because you weren't invited. And that would be because you're essentially nobody. Me, I was never invited.
But moving on to Dennett's talk, which was titled Can we know our own minds? Here's a clip from a few minutes into it...
“...as Rod Brooks was saying yesterday, what we are, what each of us is, what you are, what I am, is approximately a hundred trillion little cellular robots. That's what we're made of. No other ingredients at all, we're just made of cells, about a hundred trillion of them. Not a single one of those cells is conscious. Not a single one of those cells knows who you are, or cares.”
As far as I could make out, Dennett was talking about various ways your brain tricks you when you're really not there at all. In keeping with his method of demonstrating how this works, I have purposely misdirected your hypothetical brain by highlighting the word "conscious" in the quote above. Thus, I have tricked you -- as has Dennett -- into thinking this has something to do with consciousness. What the sleight of hand has made all but cognitively invisible here is the offhand reference to Rodney Brooks.
Having worked at the Carnegie Mellon Robotics Institute in the early '90s, I first encountered Books deep in the context of that particular <koff> scientific pursuit. And I've since kept track of his career trajectory, in an admittedly amateurish sort of way. For instance, I know that he was once the subject (among three others) of a movie called Fast, Cheap and Out of Control. Here's a still from the film...
I also know that, in addition to teaching at MIT, he is co-founder and Chief Technology Officer of iRobot Corporation, the cute name a tip-o-the-hat to Isaac Asimov and his three laws of robotics. Let's recap those Laws, shall we?
A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
A robot must obey orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.
It's pretty clear from this that the First Law is primary in more ways than one. Something about not injuring human beings, if I read it correctly. But who knows? I'm no scientist.
Here's a really cool robot iRobot makes...
As the graphic makes clear, this is the Small Unmanned Ground Vehicle. But what about FCS? The iRobot page explains a bit more...
As a key partner in the U.S. Army’s Future Combat Systems (FCS) program, iRobot is developing a next-generation SUGV, a portable, reconnaissance and tactical robot that can enter and secure areas that are either inaccessible or too dangerous for soldiers. SUGV provides real-time intelligence and complete situational awareness while keeping troops out of harm’s way.
So far, so good. Not injuring human beings or, through inaction, allowing human beings to come to harm. Fucking laudable.
But hmmm. The U.S. military is always more interesting than it first appears in the PR handouts. So google, google, look a little deeper. Now, these FCS guys don't look quite so harmless...
Nor does this explanatory graphic from an FCS/DARPA PDF.
Or try the "DarpaTech Future Combat Systems Communications Poster" from this DARPA page.
In conclusion, do not be led astray by ultra-hip TED presentations by Santa Claus lookalike DOD-whoring "philosophers" like Daniel Dennett, who would like you to believe that the hundred trillion tiny robots that make up your non-conscious mind are subliminally telling you to fund billions of dollars worth of not-so-tiny military robots. DARPA's robotics and artificial intelligence fantasies have always been about injuring a great many human beings, however much their sick dreams are couched in fancy-ass First-Law double talk. The following is from The Geeks of War: The Secretive Labs and Brilliant Minds Behind Tomorrow's Warfare Technologies (p. 125) in the chapter titled "Fitter Fighters."
"[A few years after the research was conducted], we reported experiments in primates showing that a brain-machine interface could, indeed, control a robot arm," says Nicolelis. "While this was a first-generation system, it proved to us that there was an enormous opportunity to pursue research leading to clinical applications. We are extremely grateful to DARPA for their vision in establishing a program that will provide the crucial support to launch this effort."
(graphic added)
And you thought that whole Cyberdyne Systems thing was science fiction. Guess again.
...Roomba's manufacturer, iRobot, takes in U.S. tax dollars ($51 million of them from the DoD in 2006, more than a quarter of the company's revenue) and turns them into PackBots, tactical robots used by U.S. troops occupying Iraq and Afghanistan, and Warrior
X700s -- 250-pound semiautonomous robots armed with heavy weapons such as machine guns, that may be deployed in Iraq this year.
In addition to selling millions of Roombas to civilian consumers, the company uses government tax dollars to make money on the civilian side of its business. According to the company's December 2006 annual report (which listed as its "Research Support Agencies" the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency [DARPA], the U.S. Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command, the U.S. Army Tank-Automotive and Armaments Command, and the U.S. Army Armament Research, Development and Engineering Center), government funding "allows iRobot to accelerate the development of multiple technologies." Yet iRobot retains "ownership of patents and know-how and [is] generally free to develop other commercial products, including consumer and industrial products, utilizing the technologies developed during these projects." It's a very sweet deal. And iRobot is hardly alone.
Following up on my I Can Get It For You Wholesale post of a couple-three days ago, no sooner had I hit the send key on that sucker than some Valued -- now elevated to 33rd Degree Most Highly Valued and Esteemed -- Reader paypal'd me $68 to buy the entire set (pictured again here in the right column). Steve Jones totally blew my mind when he did that. Dude! And so I immediately went and bought the entire Library of World Bullshit off my own Amazon wish list. It arrived today!
As promised, I'm looking forward to getting many engaging and insightful posts out of this fabulous set. But I need to work on bridling my enthusiasm. I need to p a c e m y s e l f.
Take special note that, unlike Richard Bach, neither Muhammad Asad nor St. Augustine of Hippo has yet to see his magnum opus reworked into DVD format. And let's not even mention the Grammy-winning score from Neil Diamond!
I was so overwhelmed with supernal joy at this discovery, on merely dipping my metaphorical baby toe into 50 Spiritual Classics, that I had to stop right there and contemplate the wonder that is God. I had to close my eyes and breathe a little prayer of gratitude that my heart could be so deeply touched by this perky little beach bum of the air. I had to -- and quick! -- find another book.
Such is the Quantum Mystery of Life that I didn't have long to wait. I walked into the Boulder's Barnes & Noble store this afternoon -- after discussing 50 Spiritual Classics with a local client over lunch -- and almost immediately ran into 50 Signs of Mental Illness: A Guide to Understanding Mental Health. Here was the homeopathic hair of the seagull I so needed!
It has lines like "When you are psychotic, and therefore not thinking clearly..."
LOL, yeah, I know what you mean. Like it's really a trip when...
Oh, I'm sorry, was I writing something?
That's in the section on Hallucinations, which explains that hearing voices can make you feel as if you're going crazy. Which is probably because, if you're hearing voices, technically, you are crazy. "On the other hand," the author says, "if you have experienced hallucinations for a long time, you may grow accustomed to seeing or hearing them every day."
LOL, yeah, I know what you mean. I was serenely independent and content before we met. Surely I could always be that way again, and yet... I've grown accustomed to... your... trails.
Never mind. Inside joke. Way inside the Beltway of the Mind, you could say. Curiously, the book doesn't seem to have a chapter on Inscrutable Private Jokes You Nonetheless Think Are Worth Blogging About. Unless it's the chapter on Mania. "Mania is a term psychiatrists use," says our guide, "to describe a state of elevated mood, rapid speech, grandiose thinking and agitation..." LOL, I know what you mean, it's like when my fly-by-night familiar has suffered a traditional game played with the knucklebones of sheep and the fish of your memories out of a living horse. I would kill to become the first man to die in a balloon over scenic Morocco. The world's number-one fingerprint, picture my dream: charter buses lined up along Route 66, lost Apache gold in Tuscaloosa, pagan oracles and tortoiseshell clarinets, a three-ton box of black-and-white photographs. I am real! My shoes are real!
That sort of thing, I imagine. Readers may find this roughly familiar territory.
The Yale University Press page for the book lists only about half of the 50 signs of mental illness, here ticked off to indicate the ones I "have."
As you can see, I'm doing pretty good on my intoxication and self-mutilation scores. So far. But let me tell you, the sloppiness / euphoria combo is a real bitch.
My plan at this point is to develop a comprehensive conceptual mapping scheme tying together the 50 Signs of Mental Illness with the 250 Classics from the other five books. This is a life's work, of course, and I can only hope that I haven't found my Purpose too late. Wish me luck.
The Department of Veterans Affairs' top mental health official said Tuesday he made a poor choice of words when he sent his colleagues an e-mail about suicide data that started out with "Shh!"
I'm pulling in the Big Covers here so you can fully appreciate some of the pairings: St. Augustine with Carlos Castaneda; Marcus Aurelius with Deepak Chopra; Nelson Mandela with Michael Dell; Adam Smith with Rhonda Byrne (you know, The Secret babe); and -- my all-time favorite -- Sigmund Freud with Malcolm Gladwell. Folks, it just doesn't get much better than this. And at current prices, now you can own this entireLibrary of World Bullshit for only $67.85. Act now while supplies last!
On the off chance that you might be feeling extra generous, I've also added them to my...
Note that by gifting me with these exceptional books, you will be all but guaranteeing many more fine posts to this blog -- impotent rage being the mother of all babbles.
UPDATE: these items no longer appear on my wish list because some magnificently kind (and most likely crazy) reader bought them for me within 10 minutes of posting this.
Conversely, given the recent volcanic eruption in Chile and the cyclone in Myanmar, you might prefer to ignore this asinine balderdash and do something actually useful with the money.
There are no exact numbers for this largely hidden problem, but anonymous surveys among college students suggest that 17 percent of them have self-injured, and experts estimate that self-injury is practiced by 15 percent of the general adolescent population.
...Ben-Shahar is simply repackaging what the happiness researchers now know -- that the people who say they are happy are those who are part of a community, have purpose-driven lives, and don't sweat the small stuff. (The researchers also know from their surveys that the happiest of happy Americans are Republicans, social butterflies, and bigots.)
That last link points to a much deeper analysis in a New Yorker article titled The Experiment. Here's a clip...
According to a counter-terrorism expert familiar with the interrogation of the Al Qaeda suspect, Mitchell announced that the suspect needed to be subjected to rougher methods. The man should be treated like the dogs in a classic behavioral-psychology experiment, he said, referring to studies performed in the nineteen-sixties by Martin Seligman and other graduate students at the University of Pennsylvania. The dogs were placed in harnesses and given electric shocks that they could not avoid; they were then released into pens and shocked again, but this time they were given a chance to escape the punishment. Most of them, Seligman observed, passively accepted the shocks. They had lapsed into a condition that he called “learned helplessness.” The suspect’s resistance, Mitchell was apparently saying, could be overcome by inducing a similar sense of futility. (Seligman, now a psychology professor at Penn, has spoken at a SERE school about his dog research.)
SERE stands for Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape. It's a program run by the US Air Force at Camp Carson outside Colorado Springs, roughly 100 miles south of where I sit typing this. And which city btw, although this fact is of course unrelated, has been called the Evangelical Vatican.
is that a dagger or a crucifix I see
you hold so tightly in your hand? blood of eden
Our text this fine Spring Sunday morning is a book titled Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts. Emphasis in original. As in Original Sin. For yes, brothers and sisters, that's what we're talking about here. But "sin," far from being original, is such a cliché these latter days. So no, this here is more of a cognitive sorta deal with a little Hindoo ego analog tossed in to make it more... gripping. You know all about hurtful acts, don't pretend you don't. Like that time you pissed on the American flag when you thought no one was looking. That's right, we're talking about your well deserved shame.
You see, you never grew up. Never wanted to grow up and face adult responsibilities. All you ever wanted to do was get ripped out of your mind and chant some Hopi bullshit as a neon harvest moon the size of a State Fair ferris wheel rose over the desert somewhere outside Santa Fe that you can't remember now where it was because you were too fucked up on weed at the time to even read the road signs. Think about what you've lost.
Confronted with the sheer enormity of life, you feel stunned, conflicted, confused. Understandable for one so morally defective as yourself. Van Morrison once said, "If I ventured in the slipstream,
between the viaducts of your dream..." What he meant by that, precisely, we shall never know, as this left-hand conditional element of his poetic hypothetical was the sideways outcome of some lysergic astral week now long lost to history. Before he went all Celtic on us. Ah well, not important, really. But I was reminded of Van being born again in a ditch where the back roads stop, et cetera, because over the weekend I watched a movie called Slipstream. And that's not really important either, except for this one part where a menacing psychopathic geek played by Jeffrey Tambor says something like: "People say I look like Dr. Phil. Do you think I look like Dr. Phil?"
So me, not knowing who the fuck Jeffrey Tambor was in the first place, I'm going holy shit, they got Dr. Phil to act the part of a homicidal maniac! Probably not all that great a stretch for him, but still, I'm all like wow how hip is that? Chalk it up to unwilling dispensation of misbelief. But it got me thinking about Dr. Phil and Oprah and all the helpful selfers out there in Amazonland.
It will come as no surprise to faithful readers that I have not read Word One of any of the psycho-spiritual books pictured here (emphasis on the psycho). And why is that? It's because, even without the annoyance of slogging through these dismal handbooks of the mod-ren spirit, I already know what they say. Allow me to summarize:
You are miserable.
You don't know why.
But actually, you really do know why.
It's because, deep down, face it, you're a fucking coward.
But cheer up, it's not too late.
If only you would take responsibility for your life.
This is my rifle and this is my gun.
God grant you the wisdom to know the difference.
But in your pride, you have turned away from the Great Spirit, Wakan Tanka -- from the Jewel in the Lotus to the babe in the Porsche -- and so, my friend...
It's all your fault!
It's your fault because, as we all know, you create your own reality! Don't believe me? Just click on that Google search link and see if you don't find, as I just did, 36,000+ hits for that exact phrase. Come on, people, haven't we already been receiving this precious teaching from Jane Roberts (a.k.a. Seth), Esther and Jerry Hicks (a.k.a. Abraham), and J.Z. Knight (a.k.a. Ramtha) for decades now? THAT is what the bleep we know!
And lest you be deceived into thinking that this is merely some New Age spiritual thing, note how nicely this miasmic theory of kultural karma meshes with the agenda of the Republican party. Poor? Well, you created that reality. Old, sick, black, brown, red, yellow? Fucked up on bad morphine in some Veterans Hospital after three tours in the Iraq and such as? Ditto, dude. Get your shit together. Semper Fi, motherfucker. No pain, no Jane.
...(don't ask why; the connections become obvious at a certain point) led me to Mission and Menace: Four Centuries of American Religious Zeal. The book description tells us that "Chapters include: Colonial Beginnings: The City Set Upon a Hill; The Second Great Awakening, Manifest Destiny, Reform and Reaction; From the Civil Rights Movement to the Vietnam War; The Political Distortion of Religion: Triumphant Fundamentalism, Impeachment, the War Against Terrorism; and more."
Oh yeah, so much more.
So no, far from being just some shuck pulled out of the asses of asses, so to speak, this self-fulfilling prophecy of reflexive reality creation is a Universal Truth, an essential element of The Tradition, the philosophia perennis et universalis, if you catch my esoteric drift. There is a cure. And make no mistake, the doctor is IN.
In what may have been the single most revealing paragraph anyone has reported about the Bush administration, the author Ron Suskind, writing in The New York Times Magazine two weeks before the 2004 election, recounted a conversation with a presidential aide who spoke sarcastically of journalists and their "reality-based community." The aide, who sounded uncannily like Karl Rove, informed Suskind with great condescension that a "judicious study of discernible reality" is "not the way the world really works anymore." The aide explained, "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors... and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."
Back in February, 2003, Daniel Dennett gave a talk at TED. You know about TED, right? If not, here's what the site's source code says:
X700s -- 250-pound semiautonomous robots armed with heavy weapons such as machine guns, that may be deployed in Iraq this year.
In what may have been the single most revealing paragraph anyone has reported about the Bush administration, the author Ron Suskind, writing in The New York Times Magazine two weeks before the 2004 election, recounted a conversation with a presidential aide who spoke sarcastically of journalists and their "reality-based community." The aide, who sounded uncannily like Karl Rove, informed Suskind with great condescension that a "judicious study of discernible reality" is "not the way the world really works anymore." The aide explained, "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors... and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."
