History, Evolution, and the Darwin Debate
Chameleon Magnets: Ability to Switch Magnets ‘On’ or ‘Off’ Could Revolutionize Computing
ScienceDaily (May 28, 2011) — What causes a magnet to be a magnet, and how can we control a magnet’s behavior? These are the questions that University at Buffalo researcher Igor Zutic, a theoretical physicist, has been exploring over many years.
ScienceDaily (May 27, 2011) — Recalling painful memories while under the influence of the drug metyrapone reduces the brain’s ability to re-record the negative emotions associated with them, according to University of Montreal researchers at the Centre for Studies on Human Stress of Louis-H. Lafontaine Hospital. The team’s study challenges the theory that memories cannot be modified once they are stored in the brain.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/05/110526064802.htm
Is Iceland’s Rejection of Financial Bullying a Model for Greece and Ireland?
Breakup of the Eurozone?
By MICHAEL HUDSON
http://www.counterpunch.org/hudson05272011.html
Last month Iceland voted against submitting to British and Dutch demands that it compensate their national bank insurance agencies for bailing out their own domestic Icesave depositors. This was the second vote against settlement (by a ratio of 3:2), and Icelandic support for membership in the Eurozone has fallen to just 30 per cent. The feeling is that European politics are being run for the benefit of bankers, not the social democracy that Iceland imagined was the guiding philosophy – as indeed it was when the European Economic Community (Common Market) was formed in 1957.
UK training Saudi forces used to crush Arab spring
British military personnel run courses for snipers
Human rights groups furious over Riyadh link
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/may/28/uk-training-saudi-troops
Published on Saturday, May 28, 2011 by In These Times
Labor in Palestine: The Work of Resistance Gets a New Push
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/05/28-5
by Michelle Chen
There are a few values that trade unionists generally agree on: the power of collective action, basic economic security, fair job opportunities. Things get messy when those bread-and-butter issues clash with one of the most vicious and bitter political conflicts in modern history. The intersection of the labor movement and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict adds a twist to the expansive, convoluted battle for land, sovereignty and justice in the Middle East.
Published on Saturday, May 28, 2011 by TomDispatch.com
In Washington, Middle Eastern Sound and Fury Signifying… Nothing?
by Tom Engelhardt
It’s been like dueling banjos in Washington this week. President Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu each got to say the same thing at length and at least twice. Last Thursday, the president gave his “Arab Spring” speech in which — after a reportedly “furious phone call” between Netanyahu and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton — he included the following line: “We believe the borders of Israel and Palestine should be based on the 1967 lines with mutually agreed swaps, so that secure and recognized borders are established for both states.”
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/05/28
Published on Saturday, May 28, 2011 by Deutsche Welle (Germany)
In Germany, Massive Nationwide Protests Call for an Immediate End to Nuclear Energy
Demonstrators across Germany are calling for an immediate end to nuclear power after an official commission recommended a decade-long phase out. Some members of the government are concerned about the economic impact.
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2011/05/28-1
Published on Saturday, May 28, 2011 by Foreign Policy in Focus
The New Face of War
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/05/28-4
by Conn Hallinan
The assassination of al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden did more than knock off U.S. Public Enemy Number One. It formalized a new kind of warfare, where sovereignty is irrelevant, armies tangential, and decisions are secret. It is, in the words of counterinsurgency expert John Nagl, “an astounding change in the nature of warfare.”
This type of war requires a vast intelligence apparatus, which now constitutes almost a fourth arm of government that most Americans are almost completely unaware of.. According to The Washington Post, this murky world includes 1,271 government agencies and 1,931 private companies in more than 10,000 locations across the country, with a budget last year of at least $80.1 billion.
“At the heart of this new warfare,” notes The Financial Times,” is high-tech cooperation between intelligence agencies and the military” that blurs the traditional borders between civilians and the armed forces. This fits with the U.S. penchant for waging war with robots and covert Special Forces.
Harris’ negation of free will in the name of science it totally wrong, and totally unnecessary: a close look at world history shows the way that the assumptions of freedom are reflected in the data.
The Great Explosion
We don’t understand the ‘soul’ question on its own terms, let alone its evolutionary track. But we suspect that ‘soul’ man, homo sapiens, came into existence fairly rapidly in some period after 200K BCE. The frequent distinction of anatomically versus behaviorall ‘modern’ man is surely related to this. The anatomy of man is probably indifferent relative to the soul questions. We don’t understand what this even means, let alone how it emerged. But we suspect it is related to the issues of ‘will’ and ‘not yet quite free’ will, creativity, so-called self-consciousness, and probably also language.
It is pretty hard to understand how this could happen, leastwise by natural selection. Design arguments resurface here, but we should at once that theistic design arguments won’t work here, so we really don’t know.
http://darwiniana.com/2011/05/27/carroll-article-on-soul-question/
I am almost sorry to have brought in the issue of the Sufis here, but then again, it is time for some shock treatment on the ‘soul’ question.
But this issue maybe should be exported to The Gurdjieff Con.
In any case, sorting out the ‘soul’ issue from the ‘rebirth’ question is very difficult, and perhaps we should wait a few days more to sort out the Buddhist question.
What I wanted to say here was: don’t get snared by anything I say about sufis into a futile search for any of this. And in fact, sufis themselves should ask themselves if my take rings any bells. If it doesn’t it probably means you are caught up in one of the endless types of fake sufism. Hightail it out of sufi land, a deceptive world of disinformation and much wrong search, with some smart devils like Gudjieff, and many ways to enslave you with the ‘soul’ come on, exploiting your fear of death. The very few who find the deep sufism are, ironically, more to be pitied than envied. They end up in a strange exploitation of a new kind.
Being on the outside is a peculiar blessing.
Meanwhile you already have a soul, of sorts, (a beat up jalopy no doubt), and can opt to give that up in a Buddhist path toward nirvana.
The contrast of soul/beyond soul is obscure to westerners stuck in the science/religioin debate, a debate totally braindead.
Another issue arises, with some suspense,to seemingly justify the skeptics: if man has a soul, what about animals? The suspected answer is that the question of soul must be relevant to animality but only takes off with man, homo sapiens. And that this process is still going on in human Paleolithic history, all the way to modern times, and the future!
The confusion then is complete. Best of luck, you are on your own!
http://www.samharris.org/site/full_text/killing-the-buddha/
We have commented on this several times here: http://darwiniana.com/index.php?s=harris+killing+buddha
Sam Harris on Killing the Buddha has produced a dreaful set of mistakes (enshrined at Shambala Sun of all places). He has taken the classic Zdn thought of ‘killing the buddha’, intended to help those mesmerized by books, and the form of the teaching, and made it into an excuse to undermine the whole of Buddhism.
Harris says we should dispense with religion, fine. And with Buddhism, as an ism, therefore. fine.
But that doesn’t not entail the basics of the ‘buddhist dharma’, which point to the path of enlightenment, passing beyond the round of rebirths, and much else. Harris is cleverly and dishonestly trying to play Zen againt any buddhism at all, to promote his brand of scientism. It is a pitiful viewpoint, but it will snare many.
I should note that I am not a buddhist, have nothing to do with the religion, but find Harris’ statements here to be totally wrong-headed, and destructive.
Killing the Buddha
By Sam Harris
“Kill the Buddha,” says the old koan. “Kill Buddhism,” says Sam Harris, author of The End of Faith, who argues that Buddhism’s philosophy, insight, and practices would benefit more people if they were not presented as a religion.The ninth-century Buddhist master Lin Chi is supposed to have said, “If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him.” Like much of Zen teaching, this seems too cute by half, but it makes a valuable point: to turn the Buddha into a religious fetish is to miss the essence of what he taught. In considering what Buddhism can offer the world in the twenty-first century, I propose that we take Lin Chi’s admonishment rather seriously. As students of the Buddha, we should dispense with Buddhism.
This is not to say that Buddhism has nothing to offer the world. One could surely argue that the Buddhist tradition, taken as a whole, represents the richest source of contemplative wisdom that any civilization has produced. In a world that has long been terrorized by fratricidal Sky-God religions, the ascendance of Buddhism would surely be a welcome development. But this will not happen. There is no reason whatsoever to think that Buddhism can successfully compete with the relentless evangelizing of Christianity and Islam. Nor should it try to.
The wisdom of the Buddha is currently trapped within the religion of Buddhism. Even in the West, where scientists and Buddhist contemplatives now collaborate in studying the effects of meditation on the brain, Buddhism remains an utterly parochial concern. While it may be true enough to say (as many Buddhist practitioners allege) that “Buddhism is not a religion,” most Buddhists worldwide practice it as such, in many of the naive, petitionary, and superstitious ways in which all religions are practiced. Needless to say, all non-Buddhists believe Buddhism to be a religion—and, what is more, they are quite certain that it is the wrong religion.
The Buddha’s Teachings About the Soul, frrom Lewis Richmond
We cited an article by him here last week, at the start of our rebirth discussion. He has obviously visited here, but remained silent. I found this post at Huffpost by accident. I find that typical, and a reminder that the buddhist snob elite will not help you much. You are on you own. In any case, this post from him is quite interesting indeed. We began the anatta discussion with my observation I too was confused by the anatta doctrine, and this post shows the reason.
I think, and have always thought, that Gautama’s teaching backfired here, witness this dialectical profundity on the ‘soul’ destined to confuse many, and produce what we see now, pseudo-buddhists who deny the rebirth doctrine.
The atman/brahman teaching was almost clearer, despite the multiple ways of producing confusion with that approach. In any case, this is not a disagreement with Gautama’s perspective (but we must document these passages, and check their lineage, and historical status), quite the contrary. As a student of Kant and Schopenhauer I am probably one of the few to understand it (maybe!). Gautama’s remarks make complete sense from the perspective of the self as phenomenon and the self as noumenon. Trying to explain that without the later framework that supports the distinction will lead to just this kind of almost opaque and yessing and no.
The self we experience in normal psychology is a phenomenal surface (here Freud, ripping off Schopenhauer, produced his ‘unconscious’ theme and therapy racket), while the noumenal aspect is beyond our knowledge.
This was really the core of the ‘atman’ doctrine, and also of Buddhism. But Gautama’s nuanced profundity here, while altogether original and deep, has created a set of misunderstandings, perhaps.
I am not a buddhist, so I can’t say whether I have rightly interpreted Gautama here, and I follow my own understanding. In general I find that a right understanding of Kant/Schopenhauer often helps in clarifying these ancient doctrines/confusions. This passage from Gautama will leave many baffled, and paralyzed. But it dissolves on contact into plain sense with the perspective of Kantian transcendental idealism.
Just as Schopenhauer rediscoverd samkya, Gautama seems to have discovered ‘Kant’ before he existed!
Vacchagotta — Vaccha for short — was one of the many religious wanderers whose spiritual dialogue with Gautama the Buddha is recorded in Buddhist scripture (the Aggi-Vacchagotta Sutta). Vaccha was full of questions, particularly about the soul. The soul — or atman in the language of ancient India — was thought at the time to be the eternal aspect of the human personality, one that would transmigrate and be reincarnated lifetime after lifetime.
Vaccha had other metaphysical questions, too. He wanted to know whether the universe was finite or infinite, whether it was eternal or not eternal, whether an enlightened person like the Buddha would be reborn or not, and especially whether the soul existed or did not exist. To each of Vaccha’s questions the Buddha would not give a definitive answer. Whatever Vaccha asked, the Buddha would reply, “No,” or “That does not fit the case, Vaccha.” As the dialogue proceeded, Vaccha became more and more irritated, finally asking, “Well, has the Venerable Gautama any opinion on anything?”
To this the Buddha replied, “The term ‘opinion,’ Vaccha, has been discarded by [me].” He went on to explain that he understood the soul, or atman, not through logic or opinion, but through his direct experience of meditation. From this experience he concluded that the seemingly singular, permanent self or soul was actually composed of five ever-changing components, which he called skandhas, or “heaps.” These five aggregations are form (the material world of the senses), feelings, perceptions, emotions and consciousness. Together, these five create the illusion of a fixed identity and continuous self. It is our clinging to this fixed self that creates all our unnecessary suffering this world. That is what the Buddha taught.
This is basic Buddhist doctrine, explained in detail in many Buddhist textbooks, such as Walpola Rahula’s “What The Buddha Taught,” or the more contemporary “A Path With Heart” by Jack Kornfield. But the full complexity and subtlety of how the Buddha taught is not so easily understood. In some sermons, the Buddha seems to acknowledge the existence of a soul. In others, he seems to deny the soul. And still others (as here in his replies to Vaccha), he declines to say one way or the other. In reading through all the many sermons of the Buddha, it seems that he adjusted his teachings to the needs and capacities of his listeners.
The translation of the Aggi-Vacchagotta Sutta which I am using here is from “The Buddha: His Life Retold” by Robert Allen Mitchell — a book with its own compelling story. Mitchell (1917-1964) studied graduate astronomy at Harvard, but due to the early death of his father he could not pursue a career as a scientist. Later on he became fascinated with the teaching of the Buddha, taught himself Pali (the language spoken in the Buddha’s lifetime) and set about translating Buddhist texts — a solitary avocation that he practiced for the rest of his life. The manuscript of “The Buddha: His Life Retold” was found in his attic after his death and published in 1989; it is one of the best summations of the Buddha’s basic teachings that I know. It is now technically out of print, but not too hard to find.
The dialogue between Buddha and Vaccha continues on the subject of the soul and its purported rebirth:
Vaccha asks, “But Reverend Gautama, where is the person … reborn?”
“To say that he is reborn¸Vaccha, does not fit the case,” replied the Buddha.
“Then he is not reborn?”
“To say that he is not reborn does not fit the case.”
“Then he is neither reborn or not reborn?”
“To say that, Vacchagotta, does not fit the case.”
In the same way the Buddha continues to reply “that does not fit the case” to each of Vaccha’s queries.
Finally, in complete exasperation, Vaccha said, “Venerable Gautama, have you nothing to say about the existence of the soul? Does the soul exist?”
At these words Gautama was silent.
“How is it, Venerable Gautama? Is there no such thing as the soul?”
Gautama was again silent.
What are we to make of this teaching? Why won’t the Buddha say one way or the other? How can we trust a religious teacher who won’t answer our questions, who remains silent when we implore him to respond? Do we, like Vaccha, walk away in confusion and bewilderment?
As Vaccha turns to go, the Buddha calls out to him, “Vaccha, this teaching … is profound, subtle, hard to see, hard to comprehend, beyond the sphere of mere logic, to be understood only by the wise.”
Indeed. This sermon about Vacchagotta is the precursor of many later strains of Buddhist teaching, including the Middle Way school of Nagarjuna (a key component and source of Tibetan Buddhist philosophy), as well as Zen.
Throughout Buddhist history, there are many recorded dialogues like the one between Buddha and Vaccha. Students of Zen will be familiar with the story (“Blue Cliff Record” Case 55) of Master Tao Wu and his disciple Chien Yuan. Master and student were paying a condolence call to the family of a recently deceased person when Chien Yuan suddenly rapped on the coffin and exclaimed, “Alive or dead?”
The master calmly replied, just as the Buddha did to Vaccha, “I won’t say.”
All the way home Chien Yuan kept after his teacher. “Alive or dead?” he kept repeating.
The teacher’s answer was always the same: “I won’t say.”
Those not familiar with the Buddhist world-view may find this story, like the previous one about Vaccha, confusing and frustrating. They may think, “Why won’t the teacher say? The corpse is obviously dead. He should just say so!”
But the whole truth is not so simple. At the heart of the Buddha’s teaching is something not graspable by intellect alone, not expressible in words alone, not comprehensible by logic alone. This “something” Buddhists called prajna, or “transcendent wisdom,” and it is the beating heart of the Buddhist Path — the inner source of compassion and the Buddha’s message of liberation from suffering.
And why should it be otherwise? Many of the most important aspects of our life cannot be grasped by the intellect or put into words. Consider love. We can say “I love you,” but those are mere placeholder words for something we can’t really describe or explain. And yet our love for spouse, partner or children may be our greatest treasure. We don’t know love through books or words, or by asking people to define what love is. As Forrest Gump says, “I may not be a smart man, but I know what love is.” We apprehend love directly. When we love, we just know.
And so it is with Buddhist wisdom teachings. When Buddha said to Vaccha, “That does not fit the case,” or when Tao Wu said to Chien Yuan, “I won’t say,” these answers are not actually designed to obfuscate, confuse or conceal. They are just honest responses pointing to a deep truth that — like love — lies deep in the inexpressible core of the human heart.
http://darwiniana.com/2011/05/27/links-to-rebirth-postsdebate/
Many scientists and philosophers realized log ago that free will could not be squared with our growing understanding of the physical world. Nevertheless, mny still deny this fact. … The problem is tat no account of causality leaves room for free will … Our belief in free will arises from our moment-to-mement ignorance of specific prior causes. (Pp. 103-5)
I am getting suspicisous here, that Sam Harris has written a book on morality, and skipped the study of the history of ethics (note, btw, the resemblance to Peter Singer’s utilitarianism. He seems unaware of the history of the issues: his study of science has come to dominate his entire perspective, thus his inability to address the issue of causality and freedom, thence free will. There is no ethics without free will (or will in some sense), and the assumption that science/scientism requires us to negate the potential of free will may be acceptable in chemistry labs, but it is almost pathological, and misinformed, in the context of general culture.
Has Harris never studied Kant? To attempt to sermonize on ethics to the public ignorant of that thinkers discussions of causality and freedom is inexcusable.
The public should respect science in its causal studies, and retreat from its obsessive dogmatism trying in vain to propose scientific/causal universalism.
It is almost amateurish on the part of scientists to be so ignorant on this question. Stop taking them seriously.
The question of free will is no picnic, and I am critical here myself, but neither history nor evolution in relation to man make sense in purely causal terms.
Students Struggling With Math May Have a Neurocognitive Disorder Called Dyscalculia: Disorder Affects Roughly as Many People as Dyslexia
ScienceDaily (May 28, 2011) — Students who struggle to learn mathematics may have a neurocognitive disorder that inhibits the acquisition of basic numerical and arithmetic concepts, according to a new paper. Specialised teaching for individuals with dyscalculia, the mathematical equivalent of dyslexia, should be made widely available in mainstream education, according to a review of current research published in the journal Science.
Nuclear Radiation Affects Sex of Babies, Study Suggests
ScienceDaily (May 27, 2011) — Ionizing radiation is not without danger to human populations. Indeed, exposure to nuclear radiation leads to an increase in male births relative to female births, according to a new study by Hagen Scherb and Kristina Voigt from the Helmholtz Zentrum München.
High Risk of Parkinson’s Disease for People Exposed to Pesticides Near Workplace: Pesticide Ziram Implicated as Possible Cause for Disease
Center for Biological Diversity: Feds Deny Endangered Species Act Protection for Atlantic Bluefin Tuna
http://www.commondreams.org/newswire/2011/05/27-4
Greg Guma: Truth Decay: Theories and Hoaxes Are Blurring Reality
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2011/05/27-3
César Chelala: Gaza Will Survive
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2011/05/27-8
Michelle Chen: Women Rise to the Challenge in the Arab Spring
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2011/05/27-0
Gar Alperovitz: The New-Economy Movement
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2011/05/27-5
Robert Naiman: Asserting War Powers, House Moves To End Afghanistan, Libya Wars
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2011/05/27-6
Police Attack Demonstrators in Barcelona
http://www.commondreams.org/video/2011/05/27-1
Wisconsin Judge Declares Walker’s Collective Bargaining Bill “Null and Void”
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2011/05/27-1
House Votes Suggest Growing War Weariness
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2011/05/27
Egyptians Gather for Second ‘Day of Anger’
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2011/05/27-0
Police Fire Rubber Bullets at Protesters in Barcelona
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2011/05/27-4
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