Robert Boyle once described the natural world as “brute and stupid.”  This view gained prominence in institutions like the Royal Society, helping to disenchant the world, meaning the non-scientific question whether there are values in the world (out there) or not was usurped by science in favor of the latter.  This criticism of science’s ostensible overreach has been made by not simply philosophers.  Lawrence Krauss, for example, has recently embraced something like this view.  (This issue is separate from the question of the existence of god or gods.)  It seems  to be part of the zeitgeist, having now made it even to the hands of David Brooks who contorts it in his David Brooksian way, in the NYT:

This new wave of research [on the neural instantiation of transcendent experiences] will not seep into the public realm in the form of militant atheism. Instead it will lead to what you might call neural Buddhism.

If you survey the literature (and I’d recommend books by Newberg, Daniel J. Siegel, Michael S. Gazzaniga, Jonathan Haidt, Antonio Damasio and Marc D. Hauser if you want to get up to speed), you can see that certain beliefs will spread into the wider discussion.

First, the self is not a fixed entity but a dynamic process of relationships. Second, underneath the patina of different religions, people around the world have common moral intuitions. Third, people are equipped to experience the sacred, to have moments of elevated experience when they transcend boundaries and overflow with love. Fourth, God can best be conceived as the nature one experiences at those moments, the unknowable total of all there is.

In their arguments with Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins, the faithful have been defending the existence of God. That was the easy debate. The real challenge is going to come from people who feel the existence of the sacred, but who think that particular religions are just cultural artifacts built on top of universal human traits. It’s going to come from scientists whose beliefs overlap a bit with Buddhism.

From Newsweek:

Despite the fact that humans have been known to be eaten by bears, sharks and assorted other carnivores, we love to place ourselves at the top of the food chain. And, despite our unwavering conviction that we are smarter than the computers we invented, members of our species still rob banks with their faces wrapped in duct tape and leave copies of their resumes at the scene of the crime. Six percent of sky-diving fatalities occur due to a failure to remember to pull the ripcord, hundreds of millions of dollars are sent abroad in response to shockingly unbelievable e-mails from displaced African royalty and nobody knows what Eliot Spitzer was thinking.

Are these simply examples of a few subpar minds amongst our general brilliance? Or do all human minds work not so much like computers but as Rube Goldberg machines capable of both brilliance and unbelievable stupidity? In his new book, “Kluge: The Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind,” New York University professor Gary Marcus uses evolutionary psychology to explore the development of that “clumsy, cobbled-together contraption” we call a brain and to answer such puzzling questions as, “Why do half of all Americans believe in ghosts?” and “How can 4 million people believe they were once abducted by aliens?”

According to Marcus, while we once we used our brains simply to stay alive and procreate, the modern world and its technological advances have forced evolution to keep up by adapting ancient skills for modern uses–in effect simply placing our relatively new frontal lobes (the home of memory, language, speech and error recognition) on top of our more ancient hindbrain (in charge of survival, breathing, instinct and emotion.) It is Marcus’s hypothesis that evolution has resulted in a series of “good enough” but not ideal adaptations that allow us to be smart enough to invent quantum physics but not clever enough to remember where we put our wallet from one day to the next or to change our minds in the face of overwhelming evidence that our beliefs are wrong.

More here.

From The New York Times:

The skies may be the next frontier in travel, yet not even the wealthiest space tourist can zoom out to, say, the Crab Nebula, the Trapezium Cluster or Eta Carinae, a star 100 times more massive than the Sun and 7,500 light-years away.

But those galactic destinations and thousands of others can now be toured and explored at the controls of a computer mouse, with the constellations, stars and space dust displayed in vivid detail and animated imagery across the screen. The project, the WorldWide Telescope, is the culmination of years of work by researchers at Microsoft, and the Web site and free downloadable software are available starting on Tuesday, at www.WorldWideTelescope.org.

More here.

Chammika Jayawardane. Perforated Wall.

More on this Sri Lankan artist here.

Teatro UNAM is a mobile theater company based in Mexico D.F.  Hauling a specially engineered trailer that transforms into a stage complete with prop and wardrobe storage, the company travels through Mexico.  Upon each stop, the company themselves set up the stage and perform, often in rural areas where stage drama is unheard of, before driving on.  The video shows one such transformation, in a high school in Mexico City, for a performance of Synge’s “The Playboy of the Western World,” under the direction of Alonso Ruizpalacios.

While a great wind of change was blowing in the social realm, political speeches breathed dogmatism and preached (often unwittingly) the imposition of dictatorship. For those who, like me, came from a land of “real socialism,” all this was a chimera.

At first glance, this heritage has almost entirely disappeared (with the exception of the peculiar popularity of French Trotskyite leaders in presidential elections). But, a few years later, the project of a violent social transformation reappeared in the doctrines dubbed neoconservative. The neoconservatives entered the corridors of power in the US and they now have influence in France, too. The permanent revolution that the 68ers used to preach has changed in its objectives but not in its nature: the eradication of the enemy is still what is called for. And often by the same people as in 1968! This is a heritage that truly does deserve to be abandoned.

more from Prospect Magazine here.

Greg Miller in ScienceNOW:

Say you have a load of donated food to deliver to an orphanage in Uganda. But due to circumstances beyond your control, you’re forced to make a hard choice: give some of the children enough meals to stave off hunger for several days and let the rest go hungry, or evenly distribute a smaller amount of food so that each child feels full for just a few hours. A study published online today in Science is one of the first to investigate how the brain wrestles with such morally charged tradeoffs.

Ming Hsu, a behavioral economist now at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and colleagues Cédric Anen and Steven Quartz at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, California, used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to monitor brain activity in 26 volunteers as they grappled with a version of the orphanage conundrum.

NEW YORK—Director Michel Gondry has spent nearly a week developing his latest flight of artistic fancy by playing make-believe in a large corrugated cardboard box, sources close to the daring filmmaker announced Tuesday.

The 45-year-old Gondry, who directed the critically acclaimed films Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind and Be Kind Rewind, reportedly dragged the washing-machine box into the foyer of his $2.1 million Upper West Side apartment after it was discarded by a neighbor Saturday morning. Using only a crayon and his imagination, Gondry was able to effortlessly transform the box into a submarine, a spaceship, and a castle.

He also reportedly turned the box into a super-secret fort.

more from The Onion here.

Karen Wright in Psychology Today:

It starts innocently enough, perhaps the first time you recognize your own reflection.

You’re not yet 2 years old, brushing your teeth, standing on your steppy stool by the bathroom sink, when suddenly it dawns on you: That foam-flecked face beaming back from the mirror is you.

You. Yourself. Your very own self.

It’s a revelation—and an affliction. Human infants have no capacity for self-awareness. Then, between 18 and 24 months of age, they become conscious of their own thoughts, feelings, and sensations—thereby embarking on a quest that will consume much of their lives. For many modern selves, the first shock of self-recognition marks the beginning of a lifelong search for the one “true” self and for a feeling of behaving in accordance with that self that can be called authenticity.

A hunger for authenticity guides us in every age and aspect of life. It drives our explorations of work, relationships, play, and prayer. Teens and twentysomethings try out friends, fashions, hobbies, jobs, lovers, locations, and living arrangements to see what fits and what’s “just not me.” Midlifers deepen commitments to career, community, faith, and family that match their self-images, or feel trapped in existences that seem not their own. Elders regard life choices with regret or satisfaction based largely on whether they were “true” to themselves.

Questions of authenticity determine our regard for others, as well. They dominated the presidential primaries: Was Hillary authentic when she shed a tear in New Hampshire? Was Obama earnest when his speechwriters cribbed lines from a friend’s oration?

‘If there were no God, it would be necessary to invent him,’ Voltaire stated. This premise, as expressed in what is possibly one of the most famous lines in the history of philosophy, perfectly summarizes the paradoxical relationship Western societies have had to the idea of faith or belief in the existence of a divine being since the days of the Enlightenment. While most of us seem to believe that there is no such thing as God, and have by and large accepted the rather bleak fact that there is ultimately no meaning to our existence, many of us are (secretly) still searching for a higher power to provide an explanation for the mystery, marvel and misery of the world around us. This desire to conceive of a force capable of providing some guidance and direction for the life we live remains firmly engrained no matter how little belief in God persists.

In the sphere of visual art, Belgian artist Kris Martin provides one of the most striking explorations of this dilemma of faith. Martin is a believer, it would seem, and his work clearly challenges the generally accepted assessment of our life as stripped of meaning, without any enduring substance. Most of his practice circles (in one way or another) around the subjects of life and death, and the ephemerality and fragility of our existence. While it seems that a large number of contemporary artists tackle issues of such significance, it is in fact rather unusual to come across one whose work and artistic motifs are so clearly related to considering these fundamental questions, and whose own position is firmly rooted in a belief in Christian values and the existence of God.

more from Frieze here.

Over at Jewcy, Jay Michaelson reviews Philip Glass’s Satyagraha:

Satyagraha tells, in non-linear and largely non-verbal fashion, the story of Gandhi’s struggles on behalf of South Africa’s Indian population. During the course of this twenty-year fight for civil rights, he developed the philosophy and political tactics he would eventually use to liberate India from British colonialism. These tactics went on to inspire Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela, and other liberators around the world. But in this period, they were still a work in progress, paid for in risk and blood.

Satyagraha juxtaposes symbolic stagings of key episodes in Gandhi’s struggle with Sanskrit quotations from the Bhagavad Gita, among the most sacred texts of Hinduism. While to some this may seem an obvious choice, it is actually a curious one, as much of the Gita is about why its hero, Arjuna, must go to battle. It’s hardly a nonviolent text.

Yet it is a text, perhaps above all, about knowing and fulfilling one’s holy mission, of virtue in the face of adversity, of duty and moral responsibility. This is why Satyagraha appealed to me as “Jewish”: not because of its composer’s ethnicity, but because it captures the power of sacred text to inspire sacred action.

If you haven’t seen Der Untergang (The Downfall), rent it. It’s really good. Meanwhile here is a pretty funny parody (sorry Hillary supporters, but it IS funny, no?). Warning: Strong Language.

[Thanks to Tony Cobitz.]

Over at Inside Higher Ed, Scott McLemee interviews Neil Gross, author of Richard Rorty: The Making of an American Philosopher:

Q: A common account of Rorty’s career has him starting out as an analytic philosopher who then undertakes a kind of “turn to pragmatism” in the 1970s, thereby reviving interest in a whole current of American philosophy that had become a preserve of specialists. Your telling is different. What is the biggest misconception embedded in that more familiar thumbnail version?

A: Rorty didn’t start out as an analytic philosopher. His masters thesis at Chicago was on Whitehead’s metaphysics, and while his dissertation at Yale on potentiality was appreciative in part of analytic contributions, one of its major aims was to show how much value there might be in dialogue between analytic and non-analytic approaches. As Bruce Kuklick has shown, dialogue between various philosophical traditions, and pluralism, were watchwords of the Yale department, and Rorty was quite taken with these metaphilosophical ideals.

Rorty only became seriously committed to the analytic enterprise after graduate school while teaching at Wellesley, his first job. This conversion was directly related to his interest in moving up in the academic hierarchy to an assistant professorship in a top ranked graduate program. At nearly all such programs at the time, analytic philosophy had come to rule the roost. This was very much the case at Princeton, which hired him away from Wellesley, and his commitment to analytic philosophy solidified even more during the years when he sought tenure there.

But the conventional account is flawed in another way as well.

Over at Princeton University Press, Chapter 1 of Tom Boellstorff’s Coming of Age in Second Life: An Anthropologist Explores the Virtually Human:

The online fieldsite of Coming of Age in Second Life might seem utterly different than Indonesia, but like my earlier work this book touches on broad issues concerning selfhood and society, and like my earlier work this book is a methodological experiment. Building upon a significant body of prior research on virtual worlds, I argue that ethnography holds great promise for illuminating culture online, but not because it is traditional or old-fashioned. Ethnography has a special role to play in studying virtual worlds because it has anticipated them. Virtual before the Internet existed, ethnography has always produced a kind of virtual knowledge. Borrowing a phrase from Malinowski, Clifford Geertz argued that the goal of ethnographic understanding is to achieve the “native’s point of view” (Geertz 1983). The quotation from Malinowski that started this book asked you to “imagine yourself ” in a new place (Malinowski 1922:4), to be virtually there. Representations of persons in virtual worlds are known as “avatars”; Malinowski’s injunction to “imagine yourself ” in an unfamiliar place underscores how anthropology has always been about avatarizing the self, standing virtually in the shoes (or on the shores) of another culture.

Pauline Melville in the FT:

The Wapisiana are savannah Indians. Their territory stretches from the south of Guyana over and into the north of Brazil. Wapisiana is one of two Arawak languages in Guyana. Like many of South America’s indigenous languages, it is under threat from the languages of the old imperial powers – in this case English and Portuguese – and from an invading way of life that has been imposed uneasily on the culture. School lessons are taught in English and, until recently, pupils speaking Wapisiana were punished.

Colette Melville is a sturdily built, lively Wapisiana woman, as hard-working as you have to be when there is no running water or electricity in the house. Wapisiana is her first language. When I suggested that we put some sort of dictionary together, she was enthusiastic. But neither of us had the skills of a lexicographer, or knew anything about phonetics or how to agree on orthography with a language that was barely written down. Even the name Wapisiana is not standardised: Wapishana, Wapityan, Wapitschana, Matisana, Vapidiana, Uapixana have all appeared in literature. In the end we just started writing down words in notebooks. “The correct pronunciation is ‘Wapichan’,” said Colette. “And we are the Wapichannao – the people who come from the west. We’ll call it the Wapichan dictionary.”

Samuel Johnson has another definition of the dictionary-maker: “A writer of dictionaries, a harmless drudge.” We set about the drudgery.

From The Washington Post:

As we consider who will be our next first lady (or first laddie), Cokie Roberts introduces us to the women who pioneered this most ill-defined of jobs. Ladies of Liberty also portrays a bevy of bluestockings, educators, explorers and even a few intrepid nuns, but it is the first ladies — especially the affable and politically astute Dolley Madison — who steal the show. This might be a good Mother’s Day gift for Michelle Obama, Cindy McCain or even Bill Clinton because the role has evolved surprisingly little.

Although one can imagine Abigail Adams or Dolley Madison having her own political career at a later time in our nation’s history, the first ladies chronicled here overwhelmingly saw their jobs solely in terms of what they could do for their husbands.

More here.

Myles Burnyeat: On 24 April 1993 I took part in a popular weekly BBC radio programme, entitled Ad Lib., chaired by Robert Robinson, in which people in odd professions talked about what they did. Once upon a time, when I was a young fellow at University College London, the BBC would regularly broadcast interesting philosophical talks by the likes of Gilbert Ryle, David Pears, and Bernard Williams, and publish them subsequently in a wonderful weekly journal (sadly, now defunct) called The Listener, which would appear on the newsstands alongside the Economist, Spectator, and New Statesman. Then we were mainstream, not an odd profession. But now the BBC had reclassified us as an oddity, worthy of Robert Robinson’s splendidly acerbic attention alongside two varieties of psychotherapist (broadcast in alternate weeks, lest they fall into a quarrel), lighthouse keepers, and other queer folk. We did not complain. For a moment, queer as we might be, we had the attention of the whole country.

more from Eurozine here.

In the Spring 2008  Bulletin of the Santa Fe Institute (pdf, p. 18).

Aaron Clause has spent nearly three years modelling the statistics of terrorism, but holds  little hope that a mathematical model can predict whether a given man will walk a bomb into a given cafe on a given afternoon. He does believe that in large enough social systems, the capricious behaviors of individuals seem to fade in the face of collective patterns. “A classic question that many historians have asked over the years is, ‘Where does individual control end and statistical behavior take over?’” Clauset says. A physicist and computer scientist by training, he is pursuing that question.

His work to date has led him to conclude that terrorist attacks conform to patterns, at least on a global scale. In February 2007, Clauset, a Santa fe Institute postdoc, and his partners maxwell young (now a graduate student at the university of Waterloo) and Skrede Gleditsch (a reader at the university of essex) published a study in the Journal of Conflict Resolution that made a novel claim: the frequency of severe terrorist attacks, when taken worldwide, seems to follow a remarkably simple equation. the statistical distribution fits severe events like 9/11 to the same curve as more common but less severe ones that kill a dozen or so people. the pattern suggests that such rare and large events are not outliers, as was previously thought, but are somehow interconnected with the smaller attacks. the authors claim that if an underlying connection exists, then taking  measures to discourage small-scale attacks might also prevent severe ones.

THE GREAT Sicilian mystery writer Leonardo Sciascia once quipped, “A man who dies tragically is, at any moment of his life, a man who will die tragically.” For the historical novelist, this is a potent proposal — essentially, the dramatic key to a story in which the ending is predetermined and plot twists are not an option. In Ron Hansen’s novel “Exiles,” the dramatic inevitable belongs to the five drowned German nuns to whose memory the Victorian poet Gerard Manley Hopkins dedicated perhaps his most important work, “The Wreck of the Deutschland,” a poem that was neither understood during his lifetime nor terribly well-liked.

Returning to the religious territory of his acclaimed 1991 book, “Mariette in Ecstasy,” Hansen tells the story of the poet-turned-Jesuit seminarian so moved by news of the 1875 shipwreck that he breaks a seven-year abstinence from writing to compose a tribute. Hansen’s novel, like the poem it’s based on, takes up the dramatic scene aboard the Deutschland, a grisly, slow-motion sequence in which 157 people die from exposure, drowning or battering waves after the German steamship ran aground on a sandbar in the North Sea. “They fought with God’s cold — / And they could not and fell to the deck / (Crushed them) or water (and drowned them) or rolled / With the sea-romp over the wreck.”

more from the LA Times here.