Charles Rykken
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I listen to music at least four to five hours every day. I recently acquired a pair of Phillips hearing aids(my high pitch hearing ain’t what it used to be and the audiologist suggested Philips as they were the choice of musicians because they could be more finely tuned in the sense of equalizers). Anyway, getting to the point… One of my favorite forms of music is jazz and Keith Jarrett and Bill Evans are my Jazz Gods. There is a YouTube video about Keith Jarrett that speaks directly to hemispheric influence in the production of music. There is no mention of hemispheres but what Keith Jarrett has to say about his relationship to the process of making music is one of the most beautiful descriptions that I have ever heard. Paul Simon says something similar during an interview about his new album “Seven Psalms” Here is the link to Keith Jarrett
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fDbOKHOuy9M
and Paul Simon’s interview is at
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It sounds like you have not had an easy life. CBT is a lot like Buddhism. In fact, I think of CBT as a secular form of Buddhism without all the karma talk and rebirth. I also see enlightenment as opening a free channel of communication or awareness or being with your right hemisphere. However, the subconscious priming from early life or serious trauma from any period but especially early life makes the Buddhist approach problematic. The idea (non-idea?) of emptiness is very abstract and I have met more than a few quite bright people who seem to not be able to get it. The reason for pure land Buddhism is honesty about that. I am presently immersed in developing the ability to heal and/or learn to live with whatever scars are not going to vacate the premises of my subconscious. I believe that the pursuit of wisdom is the best choice for having joy and happiness with staying power. The world is pretty messed up but that doesn’t necessarily mean we have to give up. I like the way they say it in South Korea. They put their fist in the air and “fighting” in English. Between fight, flight and freeze, I choose fight. It is extremely sad (and shocking) to see how many people are dying of fentanyl overdoses. I keep close to my passions and loves. That’s a helluva lot better than doping out!
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I haven’t posted much to this thread lately but I did watch The European Conservative
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EvG44mwPsbk
The feudalism remark was in a recent Q&A by Dr. McGilchrist. I know I am a bit of a quirky individual. I have been near fanatical about being honest with myself since the age of eight. I was an early devotee of William James and Goethe. It was Goethe who convinced me that the philosophy of science should be based on relationships, not objects and properties. I was 18 at the time and a high school senior. I agree very much with William James and Friedrich Nietzsche that the philosophy a person is drawn is mediated by their character or personality. Most religions have a holy trinity. In Christianity it is the Father, Son, and the Holy Ghost. in Hinduism it is sat, chit, ananda (suchness, consciousness, joy), and in Buddhism it is Buddha, dharma, sangha. My own version using more common terms is honesty, courage, and love. Honesty=father=sat=dharma while courage=son=chit=Buddha and love=holy spirit=ananda=sangha. I have been studying self deception for almost ten years now. I see it as the number one obstacle to spiritual realization. More recently I have been looking at semantic memory and the right hemisphere. The process of enculturation where an individual internalizes the gestalts of his/her culture/family are like more a right brain feature. But it is largely subconscious. So quieting the chattering monkey of the left hemisphere (the point of emptiness in Buddhism, I believe) only brings the right hemisphere to the foreground. There was a very interesting interview by Stephen Batchelor of Sharon Salzberg who told the Dalai Lama of the difficulty she was having with her students because of self loathing. The Dalai Lama was astounded that a whole nation could be beset with self loathing. Anyway the link is here :
https://tricycle.org/magazine/dharma-liberation/
The Dharma of Liberation, An Interview with Sharon Salzberg
By Stephen Batchelor SPRING 1993
a little comic relief from Jim Morrison
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U-6jiVoUOsQ
<yt-formatted-string force-default-style=””>Fear and Self-Loathing in Las Vegas</yt-formatted-string>
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I see this is not going as you had hoped. Dr. McGilchrist in TMAHE spent much time on extolling the wisdom of ritual and other ways to communicate with the laity within the Catholic Church.. I have been very enthusiastic in my interest in religion since I was seven years old. My take has been consistently right brain in that I really had no time for theology. I believed then, as a seven year old (1955), that the message of Jesus was a message to the heart. I grew up in a small (pop ca 3000) town in North Dakota. I read Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn at that time and was in full agreement with Mark Twain that the vast majority of parishioners were hypocrites. This set up a dichotomy for me from the beginning of the difference of a genuine spiritual sensibility as opposed to an allegiance with a church. When I was eight my father used the following analogy to exemplify the importance of being honest with one’s self. Imagine yourself on an open plain(This was very easy to do in the area of North Dakota where I lived) where you can see all the way to the horizon with great clarity. Then imagine that when you tell yourself a lie you plant a tree. The tree(lie) obstructs your view so that not only do you see the lie but you fail to see the truth that is covered up by the tree(lie). If you tell yourself enough lies you end up in a forest of lies where you can’t see any truth at all. That is you become lost in a forest of lies. That analogy terrified me and I made a sacred oath (one of less than ten such sacred vows I have made in my life, almost all before the age of eighteen) that I would never knowingly lie to myself. I went to all the churches in my small town to see the differences. There were only about six or seven. They were all protestant except one Catholic church. More than 80% of the inhabitants of this small town(Tioga) were of Scandinavian descent and so all but one of the churches besides the Catholic church were some variety of Lutheran church. My best friend at the time came from a Catholic family so we went together to see if I could attend a service at the only Catholic church in town. The priest of the church told me he would not allow me to attend unless I converted to Catholicism. That was a non-starter for me since that would require me to lie to myself. I have never attended a Catholic service. When I was twelve and moved to a larger town (Williston) with a quite large public library(maybe 50,000 to 100,000 books) I began to study Hinduism. I read “The Autobiography of a Yogi” as well as “The Third Eye” by Lobsang Rampa. See https://www.lobsangrampa.org/ for details as well as a free pdf of his book. I had grownup in a family of serious physical violence, almost entirely from my mother and my elder brother. My youngest brother committed suicide when he was only nineteen years old and I very nearly did the same on the winter solstice of 1977, two months after my twenty-nineth birthday. That was one of the occasions where I took another sacred vow that I would not commit suicide no matter how screwed up the world got. Although I do consider myself to be very sympathetic to the soul of Christianity, there are very few Christian organizations with which I would care to associate. One example would be the Quakers. I see hierarchy as a road to authoritarian rule. I also see it as an enemy of reason as there is a credo and liturgy(theology or left brain horseshit about God). I see the Nicene Creed as an example a of stupid mind fuck by the Roman Empire. Almost all of the protestant churches adopted the Nicene creed. That is why I see the so called Protestant Reformation as pure bullshit. The Nicene Creed was a creation of the Roman Empire to enslave the minds of the people. You should read “The Gnostic Gospels” by Elaine Pagels.
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/126049/the-gnostic-gospels-by-elaine-pagels/
It goes into the early history of Christianity. You see, I see the dark side of human nature because of my early experience with violence and my adherence to self honesty. I see many people who want to lord it over other people for nefarious purposes. Nagarjuna, the second Buddha, never started his own school nor did he associate his name with any school at his time. There is the statement that unless you become as little children you cannot enter the kingdom of heaven and later says that the kingdom of heaven is among you. Also the bible says “For where two or three gather in my name, there am I with them”
https://biblehub.com/matthew/18-20.htm
The idea of community is held sacred among all the wisdom traditions but it is also true that where you have community you have various varieties of thugs and bullies. This is the dark side that few want to confront honestly. I believe it is the fear of death that holds such “spiritual” communities together and the thugs who run the scam know that and use it to their advantage. I have tried to associate myself with a few religious communities(never the Catholic Church) but the inevitable politics and bullies ascending to leadership positions have left me with very deep skepticism as to whether it is possible to have a genuinely honest group of people have a shared spiritual practice. One of the major blocks is how the left brain wants to create a credo and liturgy that is aimed at stifling open discussion. Part of that problem is the ugly fact that it is likely that only one in a thousand people have a chance to be be able to converse on such deep topics. As Dr. McGilchrist has pointed out, most of them (The one in a thousand who are able to have deep philosophical discussions. For the record I am 1 in 6,300 in IQ and 1 in 1,000 in openness to experience, both of which, I believe, are prerequisites to a deep discussion of philosophical topics)) have been co-opted by left brain capture, primarily mechanistic materialism. The Zen Buddhists who eschew all talking are guilty of falling into the bully trap as is shown by Brian Victoria in his books “Zen at War” and “Zen War Stories” This tendency of cowardice and wanting to suck up to the top dog is a deep seated flaw in the human character. It does not end well. The Quakers have tried their best to not allow anyone to bully anyone else and that is why I admire them most among all the Christian practitioners.
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I have a strong background in science in spite of the fact I am a serious arts and humanities person. I believe that when discussing science you must have access to data. By access I mean not only the actual data but the competence to understand what it says. An example of a lack of understanding is the work done by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky on behavioral economics where they demonstrated that only a minority have more than the foggiest comprehension of basic statistics. As you are well aware, as a student of psychology, statistics has become a mainstay of epistemological assertions in almost all areas of science except mathematics. Ironically, statistics I am sure you also know about the fact that psychology has the worst record in the recent replication crisis. When you are discussing qualitative aspects of relationships with no reference to grounding discussions, especially in the case of discussions about a scientific topic like climate change, you are leaving out the most important elephant in the room. There is a very interesting talk at TEDx by the Law professor at Yale, Dan Kahan
<yt-formatted-string force-default-style=””>Are Smart People Ruining Democracy? | Dan Kahan | TEDxVienna</yt-formatted-string>
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1KFtQV7SiII<yt-formatted-string force-default-style=””>
</yt-formatted-string>BTW, I am a poster child for the “science curious” I am a polymath in philosophical journalism. What that means is I am interested in any topic that has relevance to philosophical questions like what is reality, truth, beauty, the good etc. Presently I am in the middle of a full immersion in genetics, evolution and neuroscience.
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References please!
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I have not made this a special area of investigation but a quick and dirty search on Google Scholar returned this reference.
Taken from “Meta-analyses of the determinants and outcomes of belief in climate change”
https://eprints.qut.edu.au/93213/1/93213.pdf
“Recent growth in the number of studies examining belief in climate change is a positive
development, but presents an ironic challenge in that it can be difficult for academics,
practitioners and policy makers to keep pace. As a response to this challenge, the current
paper reports the first meta-analysis of the correlates of belief in climate change. Twenty seven variables were examined by synthesizing 25 polls and 171 academic studies across 56
nations. Two broad conclusions emerged. First, many intuitively appealing variables (such as
education, sex, subjective knowledge, and experience of extreme weather events) were
overshadowed in predictive power by values, ideologies, worldviews and political
orientation. Second, climate change beliefs have only a small relationship with the extent to
which people are willing to act in climate-friendly ways. Implications for converting skeptics
to the climate change cause – and for converting believers’ intentions into action – are
discussed.”
also
“The largest demographic correlate of climate change belief is political affiliation.
People who intend to vote for more liberal political parties are more likely to believe in
climate change than those who align themselves with relatively conservative political parties.
The tendency for (conservative) Republicans to express more skepticism than (liberal)
Democrats has long been identified within the U.S., and has been credited with contributing
to a growing ideological gulf between skeptics and non-skeptics.5-8 The current data further implicate political alignments in acceptance of climate change; its effect is roughly double the size of any other demographic variable. “
I wonder how you can say there is no such correlation. Have you bothered at all to even try to validate that assertion? I try not to sound academic but big assertions like that should have as references peer reviewed articles. My article search was less than five minutes. I am sure I could come up with a considerable bibliography on this topic with a few hours effort. I don’t have that kind of time at the moment.
BTW, I have no idea why the 403 Forbidden appears below. A simple copy/paste led me directly to the article.
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I am not at all sure how much the difference between men and women is nature over nurture but my bet is on nature being more important than nurture. I was thirteen before I felt like politics made any sense at all. It takes an epiphany of gestaltic awakening for me to be able to see how to absorb an alien thought process. Prior to that all my social awareness was centered on understanding particular individuals. There were a very few abstractions that I embraced prior to age thirteen. one of them was that men and women were different. I also realized at age nine that the use of violence to resolve conflict (might makes right) was a major theme in human history. I knew that WMDs like the hydrogen bomb changed the calculus of huma relations in a fundament way. That is why I took a vow of non-violence a year later at age ten. I was influenced by my reading of Jung. One of his statement (paraphrased) that when he began therapy with a patient he made a serious effort to focus solely on the particulars of a patient’s idiosyncratic case. before he attempted to theorize what was going on.
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This may well be a right brain vs left brain issue. All through my life I have had MANY experiences of “how things are” that were later backed up by hard data. When I expressed those views, I was often scoffed at as someone whose head was in the clouds. One of the most important intuitions was that holism was a better basis for scientific epistemology. Of course, I am sure you are well aware that the main message of Dr. McGilchrist is exactly that. I believe I was born right brain dominant and seeing things in gestalts was my default cognitive style. When I was in graduate school for a PhD in mathematics, many of my fellow grad students thought I was some kind of hyper-genius who was going to become a famous world class mathematician. They based this on the fact that I never took notes in class but still managed to ace the course. Most students of math proceed in a linear learning style where theorem A is understood first before moving on to theorem B etc. My approach was to scan the proofs and statements of a group of theorems that would serve as anchor points, not unlike how a spider weaves a web. Then I would use standard proof techniques to “prove” the theorems in class(homework & exams) using the memorized theorems as I understood them. In effect, I was building castles in the sky. I have been to China and Mexico and have many friends from a wide variety of cultures. If I made a list it would be long. I “saw” the difference between boys and girls as well as men and women from before grade school. In every culture(sub-culture) I have experienced, this quality of relationship has held true. I am really surprised that you fail to see what is screamingly obvious to me. But it is typical of many men I have known that they are totally blind to this reality. I have tried numerous times to have a relationship with men that is similar to that which women experience. In EVERY case I have been accused of being a homosexual. I am really sad to hear you say that you are such a man.
BTW, I just watched a discussion at IAI on this topic. It should be very easy to guess which of the discussants I whole heartedly endorse.
https://iai.tv/video/the-equality-myth
iai.tv
The equality myth | Laurie Penny, Thangam Debbonaire, Louise Perry
Despite advances in women's rights over the last 50 years, many surveys show women's happiness has decreased in this time. Is it time to refocus feminism towards goals of personal fulfilment rather than political equality with men? Or is this … Continue reading
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What I am saying is that men and women are different. I recommend this article
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/09/women-heavy-drinking-alcohol-use/675296/
Back in the 60s (I was there) the male dominated workforce were implacably opposed to women in the workplace. The only option acceptable was that the women fit into the male culture. This was when the word equal made its way into common parlance. Women were willing to accept those conditions as long as they were treated equally (as if they were men) I was strongly opposed to that compromise. As the above article states women have been given a raw deal. The workforce should accommodate women not the other way around. The workforce should respect the need of women as well as those of men. That is why I prefer the word fair. Fair and equal is also very acceptable to me.
BTW here is an excellent recent article about how women and men differ in regards to personal relationships.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40750-020-00155-z
Sex Differences in Intimacy Levels in Best Friendships and Romantic Partnerships
Eiluned Pearce, Anna Machin & Robin I. M. Dunbar
theatlantic.com
Stress Drinking Has a Gender Divide
The uncomfortable truth is that many women today are drinking too much.
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Hi Zachery,
I have been away from just about everything for about a month. By serendipity a cancer in my lower right lung was discovered. I had a lobectomy on August 29 and to make a long story short, the cancer was caught in the early stage one. There was no spread so the lobectomy removed all the cancer from my body. I have only recently, about five days ago, returned home from the hospital and today is my first foray onto the internet.
I wanted to say that what you said about equality mirrors my own view. In fact, it is virtually identical to my view. I graduated from high school in 1966 and was much involved in the so called culture wars. One of the issues at that time was a woman’s right to have a career outside of the home. I was intensely opposed to the idea that women should be expected to behave just the same as the male employees. In fact, I strongly advocated that onsite daycare should be a right like paid vacations. My friends told me I would justify the conservative’s view that if women were allowed into the workplace, they would bring along all their squalling brats and turn the workplace into a nursery. My response was, so what, there is absolutely nothing more important giving children a healthy nurturing environment. I was in a PhD program in mathematics(60 of 72 semester hours of class work, three of four qualifying exams and a faculty at Harvey Mudd College who offered to supervise my dissertation) where equal means equal by definition. In other words, the formalist school, dominant for over a hundred years says that mathematical objects are understood as literal constructs. This is the one of the main contributors to the origin of mechanistic materialism. I am opposed to the equal rights amendment. I think the word fair is better but in legal theory it is a very difficult idea to deal with in the law.
I also objected to the careless way the authors dismissed egalitarian defined by a negative. So egalitarian defined as the lack of domination of one group by another is not acceptable. The best solution is to banish the concept of equality completely from discussions of human relationships. I have been arguing this point since 1966 and seldom find a receptive ear.
So finally, I have found someone who shares my view that equality should never be used to describe human relationships. It probably also holds for most of life but that is another subject.
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I just received my copy of “The Dawn of Everything” by David Graeber and David Wengrow. I started out with chapter 10, “Why the State has No Origin”. It is going to take a while to fully digest the material. Interestingly, I ran across a very new publication that talks about mid-holocene settlements
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-023-35920-z
I will respond to the Dawn of Everything after I have read enough to be able to have a coherent impression. I was amused to find that Noam Chomsky is quoted on the back cover
“A fascinating inquiry, which leads us to rethink the nature of human capacities, as well as the proudest moments of our own history, and our interactions with and indebtedness to the cultures and forgotten intellectuals of Indigenous societies. Challenging and illuminating”
nature.com
Explaining population booms and busts in Mid-Holocene Europe - Scientific Reports
Archaeological evidence suggests that the population dynamics of Mid-Holocene (Late Mesolithic to Initial Bronze Age, ca. 7000–3000 BCE) Europe are characterized by recurrent booms and busts of regional settlement and occupation density. These boom-bust patterns are documented in the temporal … Continue reading
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If you are interested in a particular subject related to Dr. McGilchrist’s work, please let me know and I will respond in whatever way I am able(in a positive constructive way).
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I have been going through a major shift in my thinking lately. I have chronicled a lot of it in my comments above. I am settling into a new “groove” and much of the angst I was going through during the transition chronicled above is beyond passé for me now. I first discovered Iain McGilchrist through his TMAE in 2015. Since a senior in high school in 1966 I have been on a crusade to get science to adopt the vision of Goethe towards science with the primary focus being on the study of relationships from a holistic viewpoint. Goethe himself tried to do some science from that approach. One of his attempts was his theory of colors. That was a fiasco. The systems approach got a major boost in the 90s when Murray Gell-Mann started the Santa Fe Institute. I downloaded almost every article put up on their website back then. I still see what he(Iain McG) is doing in bringing hard science people around to the holistic epistemology approach to science as of extreme importance. My feeling now is that I have vented my spleen on how I see the authoritarian mindset. I started studying political psychology a little before 2000. Right now my main interest as a philosophical journalist is to pursue the research being done in social studies using the pragmatism approach of William James and others. One of the sources of extreme frustration is avoiding people like Charles Taylor. I am interested in a quasi-marxist approach in looking for practical(pragmatic?) approaches that combine psychology, especially personality theory, within a framework of philosophical pragmatism with the intent of facilitating positive change. I am also interested in the philosophy of statistics applied to non-stationary processes. I have no intention of posting anything more about the psychology of conservatives. I have already vented my spleen on that issue and my temper tantrum has abated. I see absolutely no point in continuing that diatribe. I do intend to continue my research on that general issue but I expect it will take me a year or two(or more) before I will feel confidant I have anything to say worth listening to on that subject.
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Thank you for your comments. Since 1966 as a high school senior, I was convinced by Goethe(his writings) that reductionistic mechanistic materialism was not only wrong, it was evil. Science should instead be based on a study of relationships from a holistic viewpoint. I have been trying to convince people of that wisdom all my life(I am now 74). In 2015 someone loaned me his copy of the master and his emissary for a couple of weeks. I soon ordered my own copy and read it voraciously. I was ecstatic. Here was someone who agreed with Goethe but had a mountain of evidence that that pov was deeply grounded in reality. I was surprised by his adulation of the Catholic Church and his bad mouthing the protestants but I let it slide because I believed the message about Goethe’s vision of science was much more important. Very recently, however, I have realized that Dr. McGilchrist has such a poor grasp of science and mathematics that his message is not getting through as well as it might were his understanding of science a bit deeper. I decided to distance myself from him and will not renew my membership in Channel McGilchrist this fall when I am due to renew. But before leaving I decided to go back to my misgivings about his attitude about catholics and protestants. For the last year or two I have been trying to understand why so many authoritarian characters are comfortable in a holistic and ineffable philosophy. I have settled in on the issue of monism. I definitely believe that heritable traits are very real. One of the major issues in philosophy is the nature/nurture or trait/situation debate. Up until recently the only real evidence was from separated monozygotic twins. The numbers in the studies are ridiculously small and have no real statistical power. Now, the cost of sequencing an entire genome has dropped to about $100 to $300. This has made it likely that the problem of heritable traits will be fairly well fleshed out in less than ten years. There are already signs that my belief is correct. What this means philosophically speaking is that it makes no sense at all to speak of humanity or “being human” as a monolithic situation. Above all, it totally destroys existentialism which makes the pure bullshit claim the existence precedes essence. That makes the scientific basis of Heidegger’s philosophy to be pure baloney. This is where the view of William James and Friedrich Nietzsche that a person’s character influences their choice of philosophy. I firmly believe that. So, just like Nagel wondered what it is like to be a bat we humans must also wonder what it is like to be people who are very different from us and how their personality influences their choice of belief.