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Comment by doone on April 22, 2012 at 10:46am

THE TYRANNY OF THE MANY IS (PERHAPS) AS BAD AS THE TYRANNY OF ONE

Tauriq Moosa in Big Think:

A society that forces its citizens to be shaped into the mould of whatever prevailing opinion thinks true or good, by virtue only and through the use of majority viewpoints, is as dangerous as any oppressive regime. Just because the weapon is prevailing opinion doesn’t mean it is any less oppressive of those who happen to dissent.  Instead of a powerful individual throttling the freedom of the many, it is now the many who, by virtue of number, become powerful enough to throttle the freedom of the individual.

The reason we ought to be on our guard, then, rests in the incredible power tyranny fueled by prevailing opinion has. It rivals any of the great tyrants and tyrannies of history and today: it’s a tyranny that has built into it a watchdog alertness to individual activities, requiring no cameras or bugged houses, only paternalistic quidnuncs with idle hands, assertive self-righteousness and morally sensitive personalities; it’s a communication device with a thousand tongues, willingly able to turn into a vengeful arm of enforcement through coercion and ostracism; it sustains itself in, for example, media outlets that are twisted to take its form, as these are businesses who do not want to lose their clients and so will feed what most of them, being the majority, want to hear and see.

More here.

Posted by Abbas Raza at 08:04 AM | Permalink 

Comment by doone on April 16, 2012 at 9:00pm

What Is Consciousness Made Of?

Tim Parks grabs a beer with philosopher Riccardo Manzotti, who believes that consciousness is a process:

His favorite example is the rainbow. For the rainbow experience to happen we need sunshine, raindrops, and a spectator. It is not that the sun and the raindrops cease to exist if there is no one there to see them. Manzotti is not a Bishop Berkeley. But unless someone is present at a particular point no colored arch can appear. The rainbow is hence a process requiring various elements, one of which happens to be an instrument of sense perception. It doesn’t exist whole and separate in the world nor does it exist as an acquired image in the head separated from what is perceived (the view held by the "internalists" who account for the majority of neuroscientists); rather, consciousness is spread between sunlight, raindrops, and visual cortex, creating a unique, transitory new whole, the rainbow experience. Or again: the viewer doesn’t see the world; he is part of a world process.

(Street art by Pablo S. Herrero and David de la Mano in Montevideo, Uruguay, viaColossal)

Comment by Adriana on April 15, 2012 at 5:14pm

Yes, it is very likely that compassion and empathy, and thus ultimately, morality, originated from maternal love. Altruism over predatory instinct....hmmm...not so much, I think.

Comment by doone on April 14, 2012 at 9:58pm

Prehistoric Compassion

by Zoë Pollock

On a panel with Roger Ebert, Michael Fink, the man behind the CGI dinosaurs in Terence Malick's The Tree of Life, confirmed what we all believed:

The premise of the four-shot scene was to depict the birth of consciousness (what some have called the "birth of compassion") -- the first moment in which a living creature made a conscious decision to choose what Michael described as "right from wrong, good from evil." Or, perhaps, a form of altruism over predatory instinct. Here's the relevant passage from a 2007 draft of Malick's screenplay:

Reptiles emerge from the amphibians, and dinosaurs in turn from the reptiles. Among the dinosaurs we discover the first signs of maternal love, as the creatures learn to care for each other. Is not love, too, a work of the creation? What should we have been without it? How had things been then? Silent as a shadow, consciousness has slipped into the world.

Previous Dish on the film here and here.

Comment by doone on April 12, 2012 at 8:40pm

BOTH OF US DISGUSTED IN MY INSULA

It is often said by scientists that our understanding of the neural basis of empathy is in its infancy, the suggestion being that it is only a matter of time before problems will be solved, as if the difficulties facing the research field are merely technical. But the implication of my paper is that the issues confronting empathy theorists are as much theoretical or, say, philosophical, as they are technical or scientific. Adam Smith’s name is today routinely evoked in introductory remarks on the nature of empathy. But how many people realize that for Smith empathy (or sympathy) was not a natural phenomenon or an automatic process of resonance with the feelings of another? Rather, according to him sympathy was conditioned by an inherent theatricality that, by making persons into actors and spectators who distance themselves from each other and even from themselves, forestalls the possibility (the dream) of complete sympathetic merger or identification.43 Freud expressed the same difficulty, indeed impossibility, in his own way when he made psychical ambivalence—the constitutive impossibility of separating Eros and Thanatos, love and hate, immersion and distance—central to his understanding of the sympathetic-identificatory phenomenon. According to Freud, rivalry with the other is as inherent in human nature as is love, and indeed is inseparable from love: the taming of these emotions is the necessary but endless task of civilization.44 For such thinkers, then, our knowledge of other minds cannot be explained by an appeal to a simple mechanism of mutual resonance or mutual attunement of the sort I have analyzed here. A further implication of my paper is that the problem of emotional empathy can only be rendered the more intractable if investigators persist in adopting the theoretical assumptions and experimental methods associated with the Basic Emotions View and the mirror neuron hypothesis.

more from Ruth Leys at nonsite here.

Posted by Morgan Meis at 08:56 AM | Permalink

Comment by doone on April 10, 2012 at 12:46pm

THE CHOCOLATE-AND-RADISH EXPERIMENT THAT BIRTHED THE MODERN CONCEPTION OF WILLPOWER

Psychologist Roy Baumeister reflects on his groundbreaking 1998 research on self-control and shares how it became the dominant theory despite its unpopular Freudian roots.

Hans Villarica in The Atlantic:

In the first part of the trial, Baumeister kept the 67 study participants in a room that smelled of freshly baked chocolate cookies and then teased them further by showing them the actual treats alongside other chocolate-flavored confections. While some did get to indulge their sweet tooth, the subjects in the experimental condition, whose resolves were being tested, were asked to eat radishes instead. And they weren't happy about it. As the scientists noted in their eventual Journal of Personality and Social Psychology paper (PDF), many of the radish-eaters "exhibit[ed] clear interest in the chocolates, to the point of looking longingly at the chocolate display and in a few cases even picking up the cookies to sniff at them."

After the food bait-and-switch, Baumeister's team gave the participants a second, supposedly unrelated exercise, a persistence-testing puzzle. The effect of the manipulation was immediate and undeniable. Those who ate radishes made far fewer attempts and devoted less than half the time solving the puzzle compared to the chocolate-eating participants and a control group that only joined this latter phase of the study. In other words, those who had to resist the sweets and force themselves to eat pungent vegetables could no longer find the will to fully engage in another torturous task. They were already too tired.

In the psychology world, the key finding of this seemingly silly study was a breakthrough: self-control is a general strength that's used across different sorts of tasks  -- and it could be depleted. This proved that self-regulation is not a skill to be mastered or a rote function that can be performed with little consequence. It's like using a muscle: After exercising it, it loses its strength, gets fatigued, and becomes ineffectual, at least in the short-term. Perhaps more importantly, this research would go on to serve as the foundation for at least 1,282 other studies involving everything from consumer to criminal behavior.

More here.

Posted by Abbas Raza at 06:06 AM | Permalink

Comment by Dallas the Phallus on April 7, 2012 at 10:30pm

Comment by Michel on April 7, 2012 at 9:56pm

Politics is how large-scale human affairs are conducted. I'm with Neal, I feel I need to understand how it works to earn the right to complain =)

Comment by Neal on April 7, 2012 at 9:21pm

I'm not agreeing with that one. =(

With out a discussion of ideologies you forfeit having knowledgeable input when utilizing a basic democratic apparatus; voting. 

something like that. 

Comment by Dallas the Phallus on April 7, 2012 at 7:46pm

Oh, that's not my comment. I just pasted that from another site. But I agree, talking politics gets tedious. A truer line has never been said: Politics makes us stupid.

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