Dear Zachary: a letter to a son about his father

This is a documentary I watched a few weeks ago. I don't know if a movie has ever made me feel so deeply, but I don't want to give too much away, since it has one of the most gut wrenching twists I've ever experienced.



One of the biggest issues that the documentary brings up is the insanity of bureaucracy. On one hand, having a standardized way of doing business or government is essential to allowing for regulation and equality standards. But on the other hand, I think it becomes too easy for officials to hide behind rules and protocol, and miss out on what's really going on around them. In any case, the documentary is great, and it's free on netflix so check it out!

Dancing

When you are dancing and you start to get really into it and you close your eyes do you ever think maybe there are all these people staring at you, thinking about how great of a dancer you are? But then when you open your eyes, all ready to make eye contact with all your admirers, and you look around and realize that everyone else has their eyes closed?

Maybe its just me.

Peter Russell--Watch this Video!!

I admit that this guy may first appear to be of the "woo-woo" category, and yet I constantly find myself, since I first watched this video last January, coming back to his ideas. I'm embedding the short version (10 minutes) to wet your tongues, and then the full one, if you have the time. Basically, he starts with trying to solve the "hard problem" of consciousness, or how it comes to happen that 'unconscious' matter like the atoms we are made up of eventually comes to have consciousness. Through this explanation, he explains how light, and it's manipulation of time and space, could be the key to understanding our own consciousness.

Short Version


Long Version


Let me know what you think!

Free Will and Science

I just returned from a talk by Brian Knutson, who is an assistant professor at Stanford University doing fMRI investigations into decision making. Through brain scans, Dr. Knutson has been able to pinpoint portions of the brain that are activated before we make certain decisions. These are the first steps to being able to predict individual choices.

And which decisions, you might wonder is Dr. Knutson studying? Which essential decision making process is he doing his best to flesh out? You guessed it: the decisions we make when we...spend money. The experiments he presented were based in trying to figure out when someone is going to buy something or not, or when they are going to make risky investment decisions. A majority of neuroscience research into decision making, in fact, has been focused on economic choices of the individual, as you can find here. I'm not going to speculate on why, when it comes to the vast array of decisions human beings make on a day to day basis neuroscientists have been most engaged with how people make economic decisions, but so it is.

But anyway, what it does bring to the forefront is something that has been looming in neuroscience, and science more generally, for a while now. Basically, what has always been an implicit project of science, figuring out specific causes of events so that they can predicted in the future, has now become an explicit project of neuroscience, and our conception of free will hangs in the balance.

Scientists disagree widely about when or how or even if these discoveries will be made. But to me, the point is that thousands of scientists in our country are engaged in the project of making it happen right now. Even if they are only mildly successful, our current notions of free will and moral responsibility will be fiercely challenged. If scientists are looking for ways that they can use your neurological and genetic information to predict events and behavior that you will experience, where does your free will lie? This is hardly a new question posed by science, but I think it is becoming more urgent that we think long and hard about how to address it. This way, if the data arrives, we will know how to interpret and communicate it long before we are actually presented with it.

Groups like the law & neuroscience project are already starting to deal with these issues as they come to the forefront in legal matters. But this is not enough to address the effects this information will have on average individuals' conception of themselves. How can we experience ourselves if we come to know all the reasons we will do the things we do? Sometimes, I think that there is no way to conceive of there not being free will, and that's enough to keep the concept intact. But at other moments, when I concentrate really hard, I can imagine reliable information about what decisions I'm going to make or experiences I'm going to have could be at the same time freeing and extremely limiting.

This is both exciting and scary to me. Could we be on the edge of a new paradigm, a whole new way of looking at the universe and ourselves? It would be exhilarating---but I have no answers, only questions. And the hope that we can get more smart people to really think about this question.

Don't Thank Me, Just Apologize for Not Thanking Me

Lil Wayne just came out with a new mixtape, No Ceilings, I recommend going to DatPiff.com and downloading it and all of his tapes if you don't have em already...so he made the video below to promote it. It's pretty great, David already pointed out some of the best lines from 'run this town' "im colder than B-R,add another 3 R’s,watch me like D-V-D, V-C-R,pump to your chest I aint talkin CPR,riding this track like a muthafucking street car,New Orleans coroner,his name is Frank Minyard, fuck with me wrong, you’ll be waking up in his yard"

I admit it can be slow at times...but I am so in love with him it doesn't really matter. If you share this infatuation just press play and prepare to be charmed. I just think he's so sweet all the time. Only 41 days till Rebirth comes out! And he says it's a double! I'm psyched.

Any one have any ideas?

Need funding? I found this website the other day and I just love it:

Kickstarter.com

Basically, if you have an idea of a project you want to do (usually an artistic project), then you post it on this website and ask for people to fund it through pledges (can be large or small). The 'kicker' is, unless you raise all the money you need through pledges, you don't get money at all. This encourages people to pledge a little more liberally, and makes sure that anything you pledge money to gets accomplished. I love the concept, perhaps most especially because in my future imagination of the world everyone will work together to do everything, and it will all be run through the internet. Plus, everyone wins--you either get your awesome idea funded or get to spend that cigarette money on allowing someone to create something awesome!

Atheism vs. Theism does not equal Science vs. Religion

Atheists have begun a new ad campaign to inform other atheists that there are many atheists in the country---and that their numbers are growing! Rational humanism, naturalism, the brights, United Coalition of Reason, are just a few examples of the groups these atheists have developed.

The stated or understated message of these groups is this: a naturalist, or rational world view is what makes sense, and as more and more people come to their senses, belief in God will end. In a lot of ways, I think this movement is a good thing. Religious beliefs that cause harm to other individuals, like homophobia, should be ferociously attacked and I’m glad people are taking them head on.

But the fight against religious beliefs that lead to intolerance, violence, and pain is not the same fight as a debate over God’s existence. If atheists honestly want to engage in a debate, they must argue against theism, not religion in general. Religion is an organization of people that share a belief in a specific brand of theism, just as “the brights” are an organization of people that share a belief in a specific brand of atheism. To criticize the actions of “the brights” is not a valid argument against belief in atheism generally, and the same goes in reverse.

Atheists who claim it is “rational” to be atheists have lost track of themselves. I can understand this confusion. For, as science has progressed, it has disproven many of the most sacred teachings of various religions. The sense of 'disprove' here means that the teachings have been shown to NOT be rational fact. This has served to be a red herring for those involved in the atheism vs. theism debate, as it leads to such “rational conclusions” as “the theory of evolution is a rational fact, thus there is no God.”

Atheists are engaging in a belief, not a rational conclusion. They are choosing to believe that the reality that we experience and come to understand through the scientific method, or ‘empirical reality’ as Kant called it, is the ONLY truth or reality. For atheists, there is no knowledge, truth, or reality beyond what humans can know through reason.

Theism, then, is the belief that there is knowledge beyond what humans can possibly know. We can call this knowledge, or reality, or truth, God. It is not, however, necessarily the claim that we know, in the same way we ‘know’ scientific fact, something about this knowledge. Many theists do think they ‘know’ something about God in the same way that they ‘know’ the sky is blue. But in my mind, this God is by definition something that we cannot know. Yet, once one engages in the belief of this God’s existence, there are some things that can be shown to follow logically. And this is the stuff of religion. The important point is that there is nothing inherent in theism that is counter to science.

We can imagine that eventually a vast majority of people in the world will accept that the facts derived through the scientific method are the most objective, and thus truthful way that humans can understand the world. But this will not end the debate of theism vs. atheism. The question is not whether the scientific method can create an objective viewpoint through which universal human truths can be derived. Rather, it is whether these truths are truly ‘reality’, or the ultimate truths about the world.

This debate is one that rests on faith. There is no logical path that will lead you one way or the other. This is the essential fact that I believe atheists need to do a better job of understanding and promoting. Perhaps through this, the debate can begin to transcend its current stalemate and investigate the fascinating questions about truth and reality that are constantly present in our lives.