Is It Possible to Explain How Consciousness Works?

The neuroscientist Antonio Damasio has distilled his theories about consciousness in "Feeling & Knowing," paring things down and using an accessible style.

We all know what it means to be conscious. Consciousness is what distinguishes being awake from being in a coma or a state of dreamless sleep. I am now conscious, and so (presumably) are you. Many animals — probably all mammals — have conscious minds, but plants and bacteria do not. Nor do computers (so far). Nor do stars, or rocks.

Why is consciousness important? Well, in a way, it's the basis of everything that's important. Without consciousness, there would be no pleasure or pain; no good or evil; no experiences of beauty, or of love. In a universe that never evolved conscious minds, nothing would matter.

Intimately familiar though we are with it, consciousness confronts us with a mystery. It doesn't readily fit into our scientific conception of the world. Consciousness seems to be caused by neural firings in our brains. But how can these objective electrochemical events give rise to ineffable qualitative experiences, like the smell of a rose, the stab of a pain or the transport of joy? Why, when a physical system attains a certain degree of complexity, is it "like something" to be that system?

(continues)

Books & dogs

Forget Amazon. The Best Gifts Are Closer Than You Think.

It's time to revive the tradition of puttering about in our favorite shops, looking for something that would make a loved one's eyes light up.

The supply-chain crisis has hit bookstores hard, too, and at a particularly devastating time: For many independent bookstores, holiday sales determine whether they will survive another year. So I do my shopping at Parnassus Books, where the people who work there have become my friends. Even if the book I have in mind for a particular friend or family member isn't available, a knowledgeable bookseller will help me find something even better. That's true at every bookstore I've ever been in. Bookstores are places where supply-chain problems can be easily compensated for.

There are excellent reasons to respond to the supply-chain crisis by buying nothing new at all this holiday season. You could pass along family treasures instead, plan a shared outing, shop at thrift stores, make a donation to a nonprofit dear to your beloved's heart. That plan would have the beneficial side effect of reducing waste at the same time, and I'm not talking about a modest amount of waste: The United States produces 5.8 million tons more waste in December than in any other month, according to the Center for Biological Diversity.

But where we spend our money matters, too, and the current supply-chain disruptions are giving us a taste of what will happen if Amazon manages to drive all the local shops out of business and leaves us at the mercy of a logistics system that was fragile even before the pandemic. If we want these dear local places to survive, we have to spend money there, during the holidays more than ever.

I was in Parnassus last week to buy a copy of a new book by Ann Patchett. Not "These Precious Days," the book of essays she has coming out later this month, but a tiny book about the history of the store, which is celebrating its 10th anniversary on Nov. 15. "The Shop Dogs of Parnassus" tells the story of how Ms. Patchett and Karen Hayes, a former sales rep for Random House, founded the store in 2011.

By then all the independent bookstores in Nashville, not to mention the Borders chain, had gone out of business, killed by the online goliath. But Ms. Patchett and Ms. Hayes trusted Nashville to support a store that was just the right size — small and cozy, with comfortable chairs, lovingly chosen books and, perhaps most crucially, dogs. Dogs who offer their bellies for rubbing and who will patiently listen to a child read them a story and sometimes even jump through a hula hoop...

Margaret Renkl, nyt

Another chance

 LISTEN. Another look at the Dilemma of Determinism today, in CoPhi (previously discussed in Happiness), and at John Kaag's "Determinism and Despair" chapter in Sick Souls, Healthy Minds: How William James Can Save Your Life.

The dilemma of this determinism is one whose left horn is pessimism and whose right horn is subjectivism. In other words, if determinism is to escape pessimism, it must leave off looking at the goods and ills of life in a simple objective way, and regard them as materials, indifferent in themselves, for the production of consciousness, scientific and ethical, in us... (continues)

We'd have to be pessimists, if we didn't think our various regrets might ever actually lead to constructive action on our part, to ameliorate the world's deficiencies and wrongs. We'd be conceding our permanent impotence in the face of its inexorable injustice. That's the left horn... (continues)

What Winter-Haters Get Wrong

Chasing the sun usually isn’t worth it. Learn to like the climate you’ve got instead.

“How to Build a Life” is a weekly column by Arthur Brooks, tackling questions of meaning and happiness. Click here to listen to his new podcast series on all things happiness, How to Build a Happy Life.

Atlantic 

Veterans Have Become Unlikely Lobbyists in Push to Legalize Psychedelic Drugs

Lawmakers find it hard to "just say no" to combat veterans seeking support for drug decriminalization efforts gaining traction around the country.

..."I will not be told no on something that prevents human beings from killing themselves," Mr. Martinez said.

Jesse Gould, a former Army Ranger who started Heroic Hearts Project, an organization that connects veterans to psychedelic therapies available in Latin America, also measures the desperation in the daily barrage of emails he gets from vets seeking help.

The waiting list for a treatment slot, he said, has stretched to 850 people.

"The federal health care system has failed us, which is why veterans have to seek care outside the country," he said. "They are already turning to psychedelic options in droves so we can either decide to call these veterans criminals, which is what we do now, or we can make sure they can get effective care here at home."

Recent studies have buttressed anecdotal accounts of benefit and helped to quantify the therapeutic value of substances like LSD, psilocybin and MDMA, the drug better known as Ecstasy. A study in Nature Medicine found that MDMA paired with counseling brought marked relief to patients with severe PTSD. Another in the New England Journal of Medicine highlighted the potential of psilocybin therapy for treating severe depression.

Although current federal law largely prohibits the medical use of these compounds, researchers expect MDMA-assisted talk therapy to win approval from the Food and Drug Administration in the next year or two, followed soon after by psilocybin, which has already received agency approval as a "breakthrough therapy" for severe depression. In 2019, the F.D.A. gave approval to esketamine, a nasal spray derived from the anesthetic ketamine, for treatment-resistant depression. Off-label use of ketamine for depression has also become increasingly popular... nyt

WJ site, Kaag's "American Philosophy: A Love Story"

 Here's a terrific legacy site devoted to William James's philosophy...

 

See also: Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Philosophy pages...

Questions Nov 15/16

 K ch1; WJ, The Dilemma of Determinism

1. Calvinism set out, for Henry James Sr., what impossible task?

2. Kaag thinks the Civil War gave WJ his first intimation that what?

3. WJ's entire life had been premised on what expectation?

4. What did WJ say (in 1906, to H.G. Wells) about "SUCCESS"?

5. What Stoic hope did young WJ share with his friend Tom Ward?

6. What thought seeded "the dilemma of determinism" for WJ?

7. As WJ explicated determinism in 1884, the future has no what?

8. WJ found what in Huxley's evolutionary materialism alarming?

9. Determinism has antipathy to the idea of what?

10. To the "sick soul," what seems blind and shallow?

Wm James Hall 

Map of William James's Cambridge... 

• Do you feel more resentful or grateful to have been "thrown" into the world? 11
• Do you agree with Jennifer Michael Hecht? “None of us can truly know what we mean to other people, and none of us can know what our future self will experience. History and philosophy ask us to remember these mysteries, to look around at friends, family, humanity, at the surprises life brings — the endless possibilities that living offers — and to persevere. There is love and insight to live for, bright moments to cherish, and even the possibility of happiness, and the chance of helping someone else through his or her own troubles. Know that people, through history and today, understand how much courage it takes to stay. Bear witness to the night side of being human and the bravery it entails, and wait for the sun. If we meditate on the record of human wisdom we may find there reason enough to persist and find our way back to happiness. The first step is to consider the arguments and evidence and choose to stay. After that, anything may happen. First, choose to stay.” Stay: A History of Suicide and the Arguments Against It by Jennifer Michael Hecht

• Does Calvinism "set out an impossible task"? 13
• Do you agree with WJ's father about "the point of life"? 
• Can there be a constructive, non-violent "moral equivalent of war"? 21
• Do you agree with James about "our national disease"? 22
• Would it be bad if all your wishes "were fulfilled as soon as they arose"? 23
• Was "Mark" right about the three parts of a person? 26
• If there's no "soul" is determinism true? 28
• If humans are animals, do we have no soul? 31
• Were Nietzsche and Buber right about suicide? 34-5
• Are you one of the lucky "once-born"? Does that make you "blind and shallow"? 40
• If we possess free will, would it be wrong to insist on a coercive demonstration that we do? DD 566
• Do you believe you regularly experience opportunities to really choose between alternative futures? Could you decide, for instance, to take an alternate route home from school today? 573
• Are some regrets appropriate and unavoidable? 577
• Does determinism define our universe as one in which it is impossible to close the gap between how things are and how they ought to be? 578
• Which is better, pessimism or subjectivism? 584f.
• Does life lose zest and excitement, if things were foredoomed and settled long ago? 594

==

LISTEN (11.4.21). The World Series may be over, but "radical evil gets its innings" still (wrote William James in the "Sick Soul" chapter of Varieties of Religious Experience). That's what's really at stake in the free will-determinism debate: whether we'll get ours, and have a shot at amelioration. 

William's philosophy was, among other things, the working-out of a strategy to prolong the game and not surrender to fated failure. Determinism as he understood it is the functional equivalent of a rainout that cancels the game and gives the win to the evil visitors. The home team doesn't even get another chance to score and maybe walk off with winged victory.

And, William's philosophy was a quest for real success in living, not the squalid, fake, morally-flabby cash-value form he diagnosed as our national disease in a 1906 letter to H.G.Wells ("the moral flabbiness born of the exclusive worship of the bitch-goddess SUCCESS. That with the squalid cash interpretation put on the word success is our national disease")... (continues)

==

 

Sick Souls, Healthy Minds: How William James Can Save Your Life

by John Kaag (author of American Philosophy: A Love Story and Hiking with Nietzsche)

In 1895, William James, the father of American philosophy, delivered a lecture entitled "Is Life Worth Living?" It was no theoretical question for James, who had contemplated suicide during an existential crisis as a young man a quarter century earlier. Indeed, as John Kaag writes, "James's entire philosophy, from beginning to end, was geared to save a life, his life"--and that's why it just might be able to save yours, too. Sick Souls, Healthy Minds is a compelling introduction to James's life and thought that shows why the founder of pragmatism and empirical psychology--and an inspiration for Alcoholics Anonymous--can still speak so directly and profoundly to anyone struggling to make a life worth living.

Kaag tells how James's experiences as one of what he called the "sick-souled," those who think that life might be meaningless, drove him to articulate an ideal of "healthy-mindedness"--an attitude toward life that is open, active, and hopeful, but also realistic about its risks. In fact, all of James's pragmatism, resting on the idea that truth should be judged by its practical consequences for our lives, is a response to, and possible antidote for, crises of meaning that threaten to undo many of us at one time or another. Along the way, Kaag also movingly describes how his own life has been endlessly enriched by James.

Eloquent, inspiring, and filled with insight, Sick Souls, Healthy Minds may be the smartest and most important self-help book you'll ever read. g'r

==

THE DILEMMA OF DETERMINISM
By William James

A common opinion prevails that the juice has ages ago been pressed out of the free-will controversy, and that no new champion can do more than warm up stale arguments which everyone has heard. This is a radical mistake. I know of no subject less worn out, or in which inventive genius has a better chance of breaking open new ground--not, perhaps, of forcing a conclusion or of coercing assent, but of deepening our sense of what the issue between the two parties really is, of what the ideas of fate and of free will imply. At our very side almost, in the past few years, we have seen falling in rapid succession from the press works that present the alternative in entirely novel lights. Not to speak of the English disciples of Hegel, such as Green and Bradley; not to speak of Hinton and Hodgson, nor of Hazard here --we see in the writings of Renouvier, Fouillée, and Delbœuf how completely changed and refreshed is the form of all the old disputes. I cannot pretend to vie in originality with any of the masters I have named, and my ambition limits itself to just one little point. If I can make two of the necessarily implied corollaries of determinism clearer to you than they have been made before, I shall have made it possible for you to decide for or against that doctrine with a better understanding of what you are about. And if you prefer not to decide at all, but to remain doubters, you will at least see more plainly what the subject of your hesitation is. I thus disclaim openly on the threshold all pretension to prove to you that the freedom of the will is true. The most I hope is to induce some of you to follow my own example in assuming it true, and acting as if it were true. If it be true, it seems to me that this is involved in the strict logic of the case. Its truth ought not to be forced willy-nilly down our indifferent throats. It ought to be freely espoused by men who can equally well turn their backs upon it. In other words, our first act of freedom, if we are free, ought in all inward propriety to be to affirm that we are free. This should exclude, it seems to me, from the freewill side of the question all hope of a coercive demonstrations,-- a demonstration which I, for one, am perfectly contented to go without.

With thus much understood at the outset, we can advance. But not without one more point understood as well. The arguments I am about to urge all proceed on two suppositions: first, when we make theories about the world and discuss them with one another, we do so in order to attain a conception of things which shall give us subjective satisfaction; and, second, if there be two conceptions, and the one seems to us, on the whole, more rational than the other, we are entitled to suppose that the more rational one is the truer of the two. I hope that you are all willing to make these suppositions with me; for I am afraid that if there be any of you here who are not, they will find little edification in the rest of what I have to say. I cannot stop to argue the point; but I myself believe that all the magnificent achievements of mathematical and physical science--our doctrines of evolution, of uniformity of law, and the rest--proceed from our indomitable desire to cast the world into a more rational shape in our minds than the shape into which it is thrown there by the crude order of our experience. The world has shown itself, to a great extent, plastic to this demand of ours for rationality. How much farther it will show itself plastic no one can say. Our only means of finding out is to try; and I, for one, feel as free to try conceptions of moral as of mechanical or of logical rationality. If a certain formula for expressing the nature of the world violates my moral demand, I shall feel as free to throw it overboard, or at least to doubt it, as if it disappointed my demand for uniformity of sequence, for example; the one demand being, so far as I can see, quite as subjective and emotional as the other is. The principle of causality, for example--what is it but a postulate, an empty name covering simply a demand that the sequence of events shall some day manifest a deeper kind of belonging of one thing with another than the mere arbitrary juxtaposition which now phenomenally appears? It is as much an altar to an unknown god as the one that Saint Paul found at Athens. All our scientific and philosophic ideals are altars to unknown gods. Uniformity is as much so as is free will. If this be admitted, we can debate on even terms. But if anyone pretends that while freedom and variety are, in the first instance, subjective demands, necessity and uniformity are something altogether different, I do not see how we can debate at all... 

...determinism leads us to call our judgments of regret wrong, because they are pessimistic in implying that what is impossible yet ought to be. But how then about the judgments of regret themselves? If they are wrong, other judgments, judgments of approval presumably, ought to be in their place. But as they are necessitated, nothing else can be in their place; and the universe is just what it was before,--namely, a place in which what ought to be appears impossible. We have got one foot out of the pessimistic bog, but the other one sinks all the deeper. We have rescued our actions from the bonds of evil, but our judgments are now held fast. When murders and treacheries cease to be sins, regrets are theoretic absurdities and errors. The theoretic and the active life thus play a kind of see-saw with each other on the ground of evil. The rise of either sends the other down. Murder and treachery cannot be good without regret being bad: regret cannot be good without treachery and murder being bad. Both, however, are supposed to have been foredoomed; so something must be fatally unreasonable, absurd, and wrong in the world. It must be a place of which either sin or error forms a necessary part. From this dilemma there seems at first sight no escape. Are we then so soon to fall back into the pessimism from which we thought we had emerged? And is there no possible way by which we may, with good intellectual consciences, call the cruelties and treacheries, the reluctances and the regrets, all good together?

...

The dilemma of this determinism is one whose left horn is pessimism and whose right horn is subjectivism. In other words, if determinism is to escape pessimism, it must leave off looking at the goods and ills of life in a simple objective way, and regard them as materials, indifferent in themselves, for the production of consciousness, scientific and ethical, in us... (continues)

https://www.uky.edu/~eushe2/Pajares/JamesDilemmaOfDeterminism.html 

It’s Not a ‘Stream’ of Consciousness

But still it flows…

IN 1890, the American psychologist William James famously likened our conscious experience to the flow of a stream. "A 'river' or a 'stream' are the metaphors by which it is most naturally described," he wrote. "In talking of it hereafter, let's call it the stream of thought, consciousness, or subjective life." 

While there is no disputing the aptness of this metaphor in capturing our subjective experience of the world, recent research has shown that the "stream" of consciousness is, in fact, an illusion. We actually perceive the world in rhythmic pulses rather than as a continuous flow…

nyt

Final report blog posts

The final report blogpost, worth 20 points, is due Dec. 3. (Last class & Exam 3 is Nov.30/Dec.1). Post early drafts if you want potentially-constructive feedback. In our final class sessions I'll ask everyone to give us a brief teaser/trailer for your final report. I encourage you to read and constructively critique your classmates' final reports.

Indicate your final report topic in the comments space below. You can further develop your midterm presentation topic, OR select something else related to one of our final texts (Why Grow Up? and Sick Souls, Healthy Minds).

If you're not yet an author on our site, request your author invitation.

In your blog post, include bloggish elements (images, videos, hyperlinks to relevant sources).

Habit

  LISTEN. Today in Happiness our focus is Habit, a chapter in James's Principles of Psychology and an anchor of the happy life.

James wrote Principles better to understand the origin of consciousness, but habit's great gift is its harnessing of the power of unconscious autonomous activity, thus freeing the conscious mind for other pursuits. Turn over as much of life's necessary and repetitive little tasks to unconscious habit as you can, James advises, and watch your mind and spirit soar.

John Kaag says James wanted to be somebody, to make his mark in the world, and that "makes being happy rather difficult." But James was always going to find happiness a challenge, ambitions or no. He knew intuitively that we are, as Aristotle said, the product of our habitual acts... (continues)

Maybe

 LISTEN. Entering class today for the first time in the Covid era without a university-imposed mask mandate, in  a red state and with shaky guidance from our school's president to "encourage our community members to consider the use of masks as circumstances warrant" and "encourage our students, faculty and staff who have not been vaccinated to consider taking this precaution."

Great. Do please consider it, all who've previously chosen to disregard minimal considerations of public health and responsible citizenship.

Wonder who was consulted about this.

But okay. Here we go... (continues)

Stay

 LISTEN (11.2.21). In Happiness CoPhi we turn to John Kaag's Sick Souls, Healthy Minds: How William James Can Save Your Life.

Audacious title, but if a life can be saved by philosophical intervention I think James is as plausible a lifesaver as any old dead philosopher. He intervened successfully on his own behalf, in one of the great shifts of vision in the annals of self-recovery.

Young William James felt "pulled in too many directions" and worried that we might be nothing but cogs in the machine of natural necessity. He wanted to find a single direction he could commit to, and a resolute will with which to do it. 

His age, like ours, was distinctively obsessed with the quest for meaning and beset by anxiety, depression, and fear. He found a new way, Renouvier's,  to think about things, decided to try it, and the rest is the historical founding myth of pragmatism I like to purvey... (continues)

Carl Sagan

It’s the birthday of the man that Smithsonian Magazine called “truly irreplaceable:” that’s astronomer Carl Sagan (books by this author), born in Brooklyn (1934). Sagan was a popular guest on TV shows, especially The Tonight Show, but he was also a serious scientist who worked as a consultant on several unmanned NASA missions. Sagan was involved in the “Golden Record” project associated with the Voyager missions. The record was imprinted with images and recordings from Earth, in case it should be discovered by a form of intelligent life. It was on this project that Sagan met Ann Druyan. She was the creative director of the project and, eventually, Sagan’s wife. Druyan later said, “Carl and I knew we were the beneficiaries of chance, that pure chance could be so kind that we could find one another in the vastness of space and the immensity of time. We knew that every moment should be cherished as the precious and unlikely coincidence that it was.”

Most people know him best as the co-creator and host of the hugely popular PBS show Cosmos, which aired in 1980. Sagan originally planned to call the show Man and the Cosmos but he considered himself a feminist so he decided to leave off the “man.” Seth MacFarlane, the creator of the animated TV series Family Guy and a lifelong astronomy enthusiast, collaborated with Ann Druyan, Sagan’s widow, to bring Cosmos back to television in 2014. MacFarlane also donated money to the Library of Congress so that the library could purchase Sagan’s papers from Druyan. And there were a lot of papers: almost 800 boxes.

Sagan received a lot of fan mail over his career, many letters from people who shared their dreams and experiences, or their theories of extraterrestrial life, or simply thanked him for teaching them about astronomy. The more “out there” of the letters were filed in a box labeled “F/C,” which stood for “fissured ceramics” — Sagan’s code name for “crackpots.” People wrote to him about aliens that they had imprisoned in their basement or the planets they had discovered. He was also approached by Timothy Leary, the former Harvard professor and leader in the counterculture movement of the 1960s. Leary wanted to build a kind of “space ark” and transport hundreds of people to a different star and he consulted Sagan to find out which star he should aim for. Sagan had to tell him that the technology to pull off such a feat did not currently exist. Leary wrote back, “I am not impressed with your conclusions in these areas,” and suggested that all that was needed was “exo-psychological and neuropolitical inspiration.”

Sagan died in 1996 of complications from a rare bone marrow disease. He was 62. He didn’t believe in life after death and once told his daughter, Sasha, that it was dangerous to believe in something just because you want very badly for it to be true. But he also told her, “We are star stuff” and made her feel the wonder of being alive.

From Sagan’s book Pale Blue Dot (1994), the title of which refers to a photo of Earth taken from billions of miles away:

“That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it, everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you have ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives […] [E]very king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every revered teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there — on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.” WA

My dad would’ve been 87 today. I wish I could know him as an 87-year-old. I know so many of you miss him dearly and every year on this day I am so moved by the outpouring of love for him from around the world. Thank you so much for keeping his memory and work alive #CarlSaganDay

— Sasha Sagan (@SashaSagan) November 9, 2021

Today would have been Carl Sagan's 87th birthday. We remember him as the humanist & cosmologist who brought (and who continues to bring!) joy to millions of people across the globe. This post in his memory. Watch the video, listen to Sagan's profound words, & like/RT. pic.twitter.com/Xtm8PFb1at

— Humanists UK (@Humanists_UK) November 9, 2021

"Carl admired James's definition of religion as a "feeling of being at home in the universe," quoting it at the conclusion of Pale Blue Dot..."

Who’s this remind you of?

	Jason Haider ⁦‪@jason__haider‬⁩ Resolutely moving food sources far greater than it in mass and size, the dung beetle's strength and perseverance is stunning. For a great study identifying underlying rules of leg coordination for dung #beetles during ball rolling: go.nature.com/3k0wyK6 #MondayMotivation pic.twitter.com/OvE3aFwrkZ   11/7/21, 11:05 PM

Questions Nov 10/11

Kaag, Sick Souls (K) Prologue; William James (WJ), Is Life Worth Living? (Link to full text below... or you can order the Library of America's terrific William James : Writings 1878-1899... vol.2 is William James : Writings 1902-1910).

1. Young William James's problem, as he felt "pulled in too many directions" and worried that we might be nothing but cogs in a machine, was ____.

2. What is distinctive about "our age" that makes James particularly relevant?

3. What happened on Feb. 6, 2014 that prompted Kaag to write this book?
4. "Too much questioning and too little active responsibility lead" to what?

5. Human history is "one long commentary on" what?

6. A "wider world... unseen by us" may exist, just as our world does for ___.

7. The "deepest thing in our nature," which deals with possibilities rather than finished facts, is a "dumb region of the heart" called (in German) ___.

==
Discussion questions:

• Have you ever felt "pulled in too many directions"? 2 How did you respond?
• Do you approach philosophy as a "detached intellectual exercise," an "existential life preserver," or something else?
• Where would you place yourself on the spectrum between "sick soul" and "healthy-minded"? Does that change, over time?
• Can belief that life is worth living become self-fulfilling?
• Do you know any "sick souls"? 3 Or "healthy minds"? 4 Are they the same person?
• Do you agree that believing life to be worth living "will help create the fact"? 5
• Do you like WJ's answer to the question "Is life worth living?" 9
• Is suicide always "the wrong way to exit life"? 10
• Have you ever visited the Harvard campus? What were your impressions?
• Is "maybe" a good answer to the eponymous question of James's essay below?
• Do you like Whitman's poetic expression of "the joy of living"?
• Have you ever been as happy as Rousseau at Annecy?
• Do you agree that nature cannot embody the ultimate "divine" spirit of the universe? What if you remove (or re-define) "divine"? 489
• Do you agree that "sufferings and hardships do not, as a rule, abate the love of life..."? 491
• Does the "purely naturalistic basis" suffice to make life worth living? 494
• Does life feel like a "real fight" to you? 502

==
IS LIFE WORTH LIVING?

When Mr. Mallock's book with this title appeared some fifteen years ago, the jocose answer that "it depends on the liver" had great currency in the newspapers. The answer which I propose to give to-night cannot be jocose. In the words of one of Shakespeare's prologues,—
"I come no more to make you laugh; things now,

That bear a weighty and a serious brow,

Sad, high, and working, full of state and woe,"—

must be my theme. In the deepest heart of all of us there is a corner in which the ultimate mystery of things works sadly; and I know not what such an association as yours intends, nor what you ask of those whom you invite to address you, unless it be to lead you from the surface-glamour of existence, and for an hour at least to make you heedless to the buzzing and jigging and vibration of small interests and excitements that form the tissue of our ordinary consciousness. Without further explanation or apology, then, I ask you to join me in turning an attention, commonly too unwilling, to the profounder bass-note of life. Let us search the lonely depths for an hour together, and see what answers in the last folds and recesses of things our question may find... (continues)

Another "moral equivalent:" At 83, ‘Nimblewill Nomad’ Enters the Appalachian Trail Record Book

M.J. Eberhart, known by his trail name, hiked into Dalton, Mass., on Sunday and became the oldest known person to hike the more than 2,000 miles of trail from Georgia to Maine.

...Every day, he said, he overcame the temptation to quit.

"I knew what was coming," he said. "And day to day, the challenge."

But he pushed on.

"Every foot of that trail," he said...
nyt 

How Self-Reliant Were Emerson & Thoreau

Transcendentalism, the American philosophy that championed the individual, emerged from an exceptionally tight-knit community.

 ...a new vision of Thoreau has taken shape. He is the townsman who turned his withdrawal into a conspicuously individual performance—"his well-built house" by Walden Pond "readily visible to passersby on the carriage road"—in order to take his neighbors and family along on his journey. Thoreau and his family were ardent abolitionists (his sister Helen was a friend of Frederick Douglass's), and he continued to hide enslaved people on their flight to Canada even while living at the pond.

The famous early chapters of Walden—which seem so brutally insulting toward greedy, wasteful, acquisitive farmers and townsfolk—turn out to have been delivered, face-to-face, as lectures to his neighbors in the Concord Lyceum in 1847, by a self-revealing Thoreau under the title "History of Himself." Such chastisement was in the old New England spirit of calls to the congregation. "Thoreau never sloughed off the heritage of Ezra Ripley and the message of community," Gross writes. "In his mind he was never alone. The community came with him." 

Atlantic 

Youth culture

Diana Ross is 77.
This is the photo on the cover of her new album.
I think we're expected to say "Wow! Good for you! Defying ageist stereotypes" etc
But no 77yo could look like this without a lot of work.
Isn't it a dishonest fantasy, reinforcing unrealistic 'feminine' ideals? pic.twitter.com/EVJ6JiwVbU

— Julian Baggini (@JulianBaggini) November 9, 2021

Moral Equivalence

 LISTEN. "The war against war is going to be no holiday excursion or camping party," begins James's "Moral Equivalent of War." This is no idle metaphysical dispute about squirrels and trees, it's ultimately about our collective decision as to what sort of species we intend to become. It's predicated on the very possibility of  deciding anything, of choosing and enacting one identity and way of being in the world over another. Can we be more pacifistic and mutually supportive, less belligerent and violent? Can we pull together and work cooperatively in some grand common cause that dwarfs our differences? Go to Mars and beyond with Elon, maybe? 

It's Carl Sagan's birthday today, he'd remind us that while Mars is a nice place to visit we wouldn't probably want to live there. Here, on this "mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam," is where we must make our stand. Here, on the PBD. The only home we've ever known.

In light of our long human history of mutual- and self-destruction, the substitution for war of constructive and non-rapacious energies directed to the public good ought to be an easier sell. Those who love the Peace Corps and its cousin public service organizations are legion, and I'm always happy to welcome their representatives to my classroom. Did that just last year... (continues)

Yuval Noah Harari Believes This Simple Story Can Save the Planet

"We need to stay away from the apocalyptic thinking that it's too late and the world is ending and move toward a more practical thing: 2 percent of the budget."

 According to the best reports I've read, if we now start investing 2 percent of global annual G.D.P. in developing eco-friendly technologies and eco-friendly infrastructure, that should be enough to prevent catastrophic climate change.

...Many of the philosophical questions that have bothered humanity for thousands of years are now becoming practical. Previously philosophy was a kind of luxury: You can indulge in it or not. Now you really need to answer crucial philosophical questions about what humanity is or the nature of the good in order to decide what to do with, for example, new biotechnologies. So maybe I've reached people because I've come from the perspective of history and philosophy and not biology or economics. Also, my most central idea is simple. It's the primacy of fictions, that to understand the world you need to take stories seriously. The story in which you believe shapes the society that you create... nyt mag

Five (!) gold gloves

 

Historic showing for Cardinals

The Cardinals became the first team in history to have five Gold Glove winners in one season. Only catcher Yadier Molina finished as a finalist for St. Louis but did not win.

Play on

  LISTEN. A good weekend for me includes at least two leisurely morning dogwalks (unhurried by pressure to join the daily stress-parade on I-24) and afternoon bikerides in the neighborhood, on the Richland Greenway to Centennial Park, and in Warner Parks. Check, check, and check. Crisp cool mornings and sunny afternoons in the 60s made our walks and my rides a delight.

This weekend's highlight, though, was an internet live stream from Venice, Florida. I was here, but wife and Younger Daughter were there to honor our dear friend Patricia. She died a year ago, but the pandemic prevented a proper memorial at that time. 

We participated in a ceremony to honor her service as a Unity minister in July at Unity Village in Kansas City... (continues)

How to Turn a Red State Green

Ford's plans for multi-billion dollar manufacturing sites for electric vehicles has Tennessee and Kentucky singing a different tune on cleaner energy.

...These electric car and battery plants are just the most visible manifestation of the green future that is coming, even in the reddest of red states. It doesn't matter in the least whether Republicans like it. As with the Ford Motor Co., they can participate in and profit from it, or they can get left behind. And they are finally showing signs that they don't wish to be left behind.

All deathbed conversions smack of hypocrisy, and this level of overt hypocrisy is almost unbelievable. Green technology is economically viable today only because Democrats seeded this field years ago. Obama-era funding for clean energy research and electric vehicles, for example, is a key reason for growth in those sectors during even the environmentally hostile Drumpf years. Red-state politicians have worked unceasingly to subvert policies that created the very economic harvest they are now reaping themselves. It is truly nothing less than enraging.

But rage, no matter how justified, should not obscure the real point here. The point is for human behavior to change in time to save this gorgeous, teeming, irreplaceable, suffering planet. Deathbed conversions happen because time has run out, and our time has run out.

If even dug-in science deniers such as Marsha Blackburn and Mitch McConnell can come around on climate issues when they are convinced that doing so would benefit their constituents in visible and measurable ways, then it's conceivable that an environmentally sound future is possible even in regions now tightly tethered to fossil fuels. It's even conceivable that renewable energy could cease to be a political issue and become simply a common-sense strategy for a country that doesn't want to run the planet into the ground.

It's really only a matter of understanding that human beings — not just endangered species and imperiled ecosystems but also our red-state brothers and sisters — stand to benefit from a green future, too. And nature is already making that point very clearly.

Margaret Renkl

"Hello Happiness"

Woke to this podcast on BBC 4 this morning, uncharacteristically "positive" and un-ironic for a British production. They were saying it's okay to be happy even as "earth burns," since (by analogy) you can't help other passengers on a doomed flight 'til you've donned your own oxygen mask. Wonder if they were, as the Brits say, "having us on"?\

Recently we’ve had an opportunity to survey the world we’ve created and the society we’re all a part of and ask ourselves: is this what makes me happy? And what is happiness anyway? ...

https://wellcomecollection.org/series/YQwZHhEAACEAnvPK

Elon Musk Is Building a Sci-Fi World, and the Rest of Us Are Trapped in It

From Mars to the metaverse, tech moguls are forging a new kind of capitalism: an extreme, extraterrestrial version.

...As a teenager, he read Douglas Adams's "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy"; he plans to name the first SpaceX rocket to Mars after the crucial spaceship in the story, the Heart of Gold. "Hitchhiker's Guide" doesn't have a metaverse, but it does have a planet called Magrathea, whose inhabitants build an enormous computer to ask it a question about "life, the universe and everything." After millions of years, it answers, "Forty-two." Mr. Musk says that the book taught him that "if you can properly phrase the question, then the answer is the easy part." But that is not the only lesson of "Hitchhiker's Guide," which also didn't start out as a book. Adams wrote it for BBC Radio 4, and, starting in 1978, it was broadcasted all over the world — including to Pretoria.

"Far back in the mists of ancient time, in the great and glorious days of the former galactic empire, life was wild, rich and, on the whole, tax-free," the narrator intones at the beginning of an early episode. "Many men, of course, became extremely rich, but this was perfectly natural and nothing to be ashamed of because no one was really poor, at least, no one worth speaking of." "Hitchhiker's Guide," in other words, is an extended and very, very funny indictment of economic inequality, a science-fiction tradition that stretches all the way back to the dystopias of H.G. Wells, a socialist... nyt

Questions Nov 8/9

WGU conclusion

Study Questions

1. What mixed messages keep us in states of immaturity?

2. The older you get, the more you know what?

3. What does the U-bend tell us about aging?

4. Growing up means realizing what?

5. Philosophy is an attempt to wrestle with what three questions, according to Kant?

6. The young have only vague and erroneous notions of what, according to de Beauvoir?

7. Shakespeare's As You Like It is a gloss on what modern message?

8. Philosophers seek answers to children's questions such as what?

Discussion Questions:

• "Children make more compliant subjects and consumers." 193 Are we a nation of children, in this sense? 
• Do you know any adults who never grew up, or who say they admire Peter Pan, or who are "young at heart" and "open to the world"? 194 Or any young people who missed out on the joys of childhood? 
• Do you wish you looked older than you do? Why?
• Is life like a journey in Neurath's boat? 196
• "Maturity cannot be commanded, it must be desired." 198 Do you desire it?
• "I wish I'd known enough to ask my teachers the right questions before they died." 198 Do you (now) have questions for people it's too late to ask? 
• "Most people grow happier as they grow older." 198 Does this surprise you?
• "Growing up means realizing that no time of one's life is the best one," just as each season of the year brings its own unique joys. 202 "To be interested in the changing seasons is, in this middling zone, a happier state of mind than to be hopelessly in love with spring." (George Santayana) Do you agree?
• Do you understand what Kant meant by saying you have duties to yourself? 203
• Have you yet discovered the pleasures of generativity and generosity? 204
• Do you know anyone who treats people as means to their own ends? 206 Do you want to?
• Did you grow up in "a home filled with good books and articulate people"? 209 Do you intend to provide such a home for your children? 
• If musicians and bilingual speakers have more neural connections than others, why aren't music and languages more heavily emphasized in our schools? 210
• Do you see college as an opportunity to "expand your judgment and enlarge your mind"? 213
• Is "think for yourself" necessarily vague? 215
• Are you glad you didn't live before the Enlightenment, when your life would have been largely determined by your father's (and his, and his...)? 216
• Do you agree with Leibniz, that most people would choose on their deathbed to live their lives again only on the condition that they would be different next time? 
• Do you prefer Nietzsche's version of eternal recurrence (220), or Bill Murray's in Groundhog Day, or Hume's preference for the next ten years and not the last (221), or none of the above? 
• Do you enjoy the music of any older popular musicians (Dylan, Springsteen...)? 225
• "The fear of growing up is less a fear of dying than a fear of life itself." 230 Agree?
• Was Shakespeare really saying life sucks and then you die? Or was he mocking that view?

 

FL

• If/when you become a parent, will you be "anxious, frightened, overprotective" and constantly worried about the threat of child-napping? 326
• What do you think of "the message of The Courage to Heal"? 328
• What accounts for the "rising chorus of panicky Christian crazy talk"? 330
• Do you know any real "Devil worshippers"? Do you believe devils exist? Why? 334
• What do you think of Bakersfield's "big outbreak" and LA County's "Satanic Panic"? 337
• "Younger people know nothing about [our Satanic Panic of just a generation ago], and almost nobody is aware of its scale and duration and damage." True? 340
• What's the harm of obsessing about flying saucers etc.? 345
• Do you know anyone who believes that "everybody has been in on" a one-world government conspiracy orchestrated by space aliens? 347-8
• Were the Branch Davidians fundamentally different from mainstream Protestantism? 350
• What do you think of The X-Files? 354

Taking chances

  LISTEN. The World Series may be over, but "radical evil gets its innings" still (wrote William James in the "Sick Soul" chapter of Varieties of Religious Experience). That's what's really at stake in the free will-determinism debate: whether we'll get ours, and have a shot at amelioration. 

William's philosophy was, among other things, the working-out of a strategy to prolong the game and not surrender to fated failure. Determinism as he understood it is the functional equivalent of a rainout that cancels the game and gives the win to the evil visitors. The home team doesn't even get another chance to score and maybe walk off with winged victory.

And, William's philosophy was a quest for real success in living, not the squalid, fake, morally-flabby cash-value form he diagnosed as our national disease in a 1906 letter to H.G.Wells ("the moral flabbiness born of the exclusive worship of the bitch-goddess SUCCESS. That with the squalid cash interpretation put on the word success is our national disease")... (continues)

MTSU students walked door-to-door to share details of class action lawsuit against Rutherford County

Around 200 people filed 300 claims for settlements in a class action lawsuit against Rutherford County.

Aiyana Gallant encountered a range of emotions this semester as she canvased a neighborhood off Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, flyers in hand, to inform residents about the Oct. 29 deadline to join a class action lawsuit against Rutherford County.

One family told Gallant about a son who was always in front of Juvenile Court Judge Donna Scott Davenport, and believed he did not get a fair shot in the justice system.  

Some families learned about the $11 million settlement — monetary retribution for the county's history of illegally arresting and jailing minors — through media reports, but were unaware they could join the settlement.

Over time, some families shared stories; potential abuses of power by the local government, some of which date back more than three decades. Trauma that impacted a large number of people of color... (continues)

Meaningful work

LISTEN. Braves win in six. Choppers top Cheaters. Okay, winter's coming quick now. Pitchers and catchers report in about 113 days.

Continuing in CoPhi with Why Grow Up?, we note a "hallmark of modernity" in the reversal of Plato's and Aristotle's preference for contemplation over activity. Those who only sit and think would think better to get up and do something, or make something, or till the earth. Create fungible assets. Invent money. Accumulate capital. Buy and spend, create a tax base.

Or move, at least. Don't just sit there. But of course, peripatetics are also contemplatives. They may or may not be good pursuers of property, but they're excellent pursuers of happiness... (continues)

Questions Nov 3/4

WGU

Study Questions (-192)

1. What hallmark of modernity reversed Plato's and Aristotle's judgment?

2. What gives life meaning, for Kant?

3. In a truly human society, according to Marx, how would our capacities to work develop?

4.  Most jobs involve what, according to Paul Goodman? 

5. People were certain, as late as 2008, that what?

6. What alternatives to consumerism have small groups begun to develop?

Discussion Questions

• Was Locke's "sweet" labor theory of value invalidated by the invention of money? 166
• Do we have a duty to our own humanity to work? 167
• Was Arendt correct about the distinction between labor and work, and about their rootedness  in natality? 168-9
• Was Rousseau right about the value of learning to work with your hands, particularly carpentry?  172
• Do you worry, as Paul Goodman did, that there may be "no decent work to grow up for"? 173
• Is it a "travesty" to call people who work in advertising "creatives"? 175
• Is consumer capitalism infantilizing?
• Do you regularly discard "unfashionable" clothes or other goods before they wear out or break down? Should you? 179
• Do you want to produce something of value? Why? 181
• Do you expect to find meaning in your work? If not, where will you find it? 185

  FL 35-36

• Is there something self-contradictory about being a "committed relativist," if all knowledge claims are "self-serving opinions or myths"? 308
• Have you had any "nonjudgmental Squishie" teachers who taught that reason was not for everyone, or that "someone's capacity to experience the supernatural" depends on their "willingness to see more than is materially present"? 308 
• What do you think of Schwartz's "synchronicities"? 310
• What do you think of Jodi Dean's defense of UFO "abductees"? 311
• What do you think of "the boy who came back from heaven," etc.? 314
• Have you had any textbooks similar to Responsive Ed's science texts? 315
• Will COVID give survivalism more momentum? (317) Will it boost alternative medicine? 318
• Are Survivalists and Preppers "wacky and sad"? 319 Why is this such an American phenomenon?
• Do you agree with Jefferson's statement about freedom of and from religion? 320
• COMMENT, in light of recent events?: "Some American fantasies have become weaponized, literally." 321 
• Do you agree "that so many of our neighbors are saying so many loony things [and Kurt Andersen wrote that before the Q-Anon conspiracy loonies surfaced, and before January 6] is doing us real injury"? 322  

Grantland Rice

 It’s the birthday of the sportswriter Grantland Rice (books by this author), born in Murfreesboro, Tennessee (1880). The most popular sportswriter of his day, he wrote an estimated 67 million words in his 53-year career. In 1925, when other newspapermen were happy with a weekly salary of $50, Grantland Rice was making $1,000 a week, about the same as Babe Ruth.

He was known for the extravagant style he used to describe sporting events; he once compared four Notre Dame football players to the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. And in addition to his newspaper articles, he also wrote many poems about sports. The well-known saying “It’s not whether you win or lose, it’s how you play the game” originated with his poem “Alumnus Football,” which ends with the lines: “For when the One Great Scorer comes / To write against your name, / He marks — not that you won or lost — / But how you played the game.”

Grantland Rice’s own favorite sport was golf. He wrote: “Golf is 20 percent mechanics and technique. The other 80 percent is philosophy, humor, tragedy, romance, melodrama, companionship, camaraderie, cussedness, and conversation.” WA

==

At the corner of Church and College:

"I Just Turned 60, but I Still Feel 22"

Sorrow in the face of aging would be a poor response to this good fortune.

...On the days when headlines are full, yet again, with firestorms and catastrophic flooding and biodiversity collapse and endless pandemic and a depressingly effective disinformation campaign to deny the climate emergency — on those days...I am glad to be 60 because it means I almost certainly won't live to witness the cataclysm that is coming if humanity cannot change its ways in time.

But that's not the way I think on most days. On most days I am simply grateful for the 60 years I've had....

Margarent Renkl, nyt 

Our upcoming Lyceum speaker

 Tadd Ruetenik is Professor of Philosophy at St. Ambrose University. He is the author of The Demons of William James: Religious Pragmatism Explores Unusual Mental States (2018) and Secretary of the William James Society.  

What does American philosophy mean to you?  

Since the term “American” signifies continents, “American philosophy” does not signifies more than “United States philosophy.” I take it to refer to philosophy related to life in the Western Hemisphere, and in contrast especially to Europe.  

I do not see a particular need to assert that American philosophy is strongly tied to  pragmatism. In fact, I have come to see that term “pragmatism” as problematic, since in almost all popular usage it means either an unscrupulous power play on  the world, or some kind of compromise that favors non-populist centrist politics. I  know that many philosophy terms have common usages that differ or even work  against the word in its philosophical sense—“idealism” and “metaphysics,” for  example—but I am having difficulty motivating myself for the battle of meanings. I  have been drawn to the term “pluralism,” or better, “radical pluralism” to describe  the philosophy in this part of the globe. If it wasn’t so occult-sounding, I’d suggest  “transcendental pluralism” which can refer to the problem of “the one and the many” that William James, perhaps presciently, said was the fundamental problem  of philosophy. But then we would still begin to run into troubles with the common  usages of the word. Perhaps I’ll be able to retire at that point.  

How did you become an American philosopher?  

Since an early age I have had a personal antipathy for nationalism, patriotism, and any types of large, political allegiance, especially as this relates to the United States. My early interests were in existentialism and philosophy of religion, and it does puzzle me a bit why I became interested in American philosophy to begin with. After a world religions course at a community college piqued my interest in philosophy, I enrolled at Eastern Michigan  University. The counselor had recommended I take just 4 courses, but I was a somewhat  older student, and thought I was ready for more, so I picked up the phone—it was the  beginning of touch-tone registration back in the early 1990s—and I added the first  philosophy class I could find. This happened to be American Philosophy, and was taught by a great professor for whom this was not in her area of specialization. There was something of a radical and environmentalist take to the class, but I remember being  especially drawn to Emerson and Thoreau... (continues)

Maturity

 LISTEN. Happy Halloween, happy November.

"Becoming adult" is our next chapter in Why Grow Up...

Stephen Law tweets: "I'm 60. Yet I don't feel that I am a 'grown up', and feel I would be a fraud if I pretended to be one (I do know how to *act* like a 'grown up')."

To which I say: just wait four years. 

A student asked the other day, in response to my approving citation of Susan Neiman's statement that it's a mistake to think the best years are between 16 and 26 (or 18 and 28?): What is the best? Sixty-four, I said. Next year I'll say sixty-five. When I stop updating my answer, you'll know my time is past. Not dead yet.

While I'm here, I'll still keep on trying to think for myself. That's Kant's definition of maturity. Are we there yet? (continues)