Charles Rykken
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Charles Rykken
MemberApril 13, 2023 at 1:16 am in reply to: Suggestions of how discussions might be framedJust a very small addendum that I just discovered where an attempt is made to rescue the reputation of D. T. Suzuki that Brian Victoria trashed.
https://otani.repo.nii.ac.jp/?action=repository_uri&item_id=8128&file_id=22&file_no=1
https://tricycle.org/magazine/fog-world-war-ii/
I haven’t had a chance to read these two articles carefully(they are connected) but if there are credible opposing views I try to include them.
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Charles Rykken
MemberApril 13, 2023 at 12:31 am in reply to: Suggestions of how discussions might be framedMy main concern is with the question of power that maintains structure. The weakness of democracy is the belief in one person, one vote. When I was a teenager I bought into the idea that if most of the people intelligent enough to wield the levers of communication in a competent manner would do so in the direction of the general welfare. However, I had the counter idea that intelligence was NOT the critical factor but instead greed and lust for power were the primary motivators. The press was supposed to be the source of information in the marketplace of ideas but I wasn’t so stupid as to actually believe that line. I knew in grade school that the governments of Europe at the time of Columbus had been basically gangster operations. The American Revolution was intended to put a stop to that dynamic. Initially, only white male property owners were given suffrage. The “founding fathers” understood that the right to vote should not be granted willy nilly. I believed as mentioned above that those who were way too simple minded to meaningfully participate in the marketplace of ideas would have opinions that were randomly(Ein Rand dumbly?) spread so that their sum at the voting booth would cancel out and the “signal” from the “wiser voices” would prevail. That view held sway in my mind for about one or two years while in high school (1965 to 1966). But my studies of the human condition continued and the gangster hypothesis took stronger hold and has been the dominant theme ever since. Greed and power lust has been a powerful undercurrent in human affairs for more than 5000 years. It is a lot like an addiction. In the 1980s The U. S. and the U. K. chose Reagan and Thatcher as their leaders and the greed is good meme rose to prominence once again with the imprimatur of the head of government. When I was in my senior year of high school(1966) I read Goethe’s idea that science should be based on the study of relationships. It was immediately obvious to me that he was correct. His analysis that the reductionist approach of objects and properties where infinite regression was rejected and the nihilism inherent in that view reigned supreme among the intellectuals too stupid to understand they were participating in the death of humanity. Goethe’s meme of a bargain with the devil(Mephistopheles in Faust) was entirely apt. Academics lined up to follow people like B. F. Skinner and the existentialists who embraced nihilism and now we have the social pestilence of postmodernism. But with Maggot Thatcher and Wrong old Raygun the dark side of humanity could surface shamelessly and old Christian wisdom about the love of money being the root of all kinds of evil (1 Timothy 6:10) was dismissed. Reagan declared during an interview when asked by Larry King “What is the purpose of life” Reagan answered without hesitation “The purpose of life is to get rich.” Larry King’s jaw dropped and his eyes bugged out and after a few seconds needed to regain composure replied something to the effect “Oh surely, Mr. President, you don’t really mean that” to which Reagan replied without any hesitation “yes I did”. Yes, God really is dead and the nihilists are well on their way to marching humanity to the fiery end in a global mass murder-suicide. For me, the question is first how to change that direction and install a system that is sustainable. High flying abstract rhetoric won’t cut it. Dr. McGilchrist or his assigned helpers who choose which questions are asked during his live Q&As have consistently passed over my questions about how the Zen Buddhists were ardent supporters of the Japanese militarist government prior to and during WWII. Here are two references that discuss this
https://www.globalbuddhism.org/article/download/1091/926
https://www.thezensite.com/ZenEssays/CriticalZen/Critical_Analysis_of_Brian_Victoria.html
Also the early history of Christianity exposes the same dynamic of left brain power hungry people vs the RH folks. This book is very short and hyper-excellent(imho) and I can’t recommend it too highly.
https://www.amazon.com/Gnostic-Gospels-Elaine-Pagels/dp/0679724532
This is one of the places where I part company with Dr. McGilchrist, he extols the Catholic Church, I see it as an abomination on Western Civilization. I see his simultaneous embrace of the Catholic Church and Zen Buddhism as highly suspicious. I do see the need for a structure of government where only those who are genuinely competent in the TMAE sense to make decisions in some area of governance are allowed to make those decisions. That could be described as feudal like and that is what I hope Dr. McGilchrist meant by his comment. The problem is how to get there and stay there(sustainability).
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Charles Rykken
MemberFebruary 3, 2023 at 9:17 pm in reply to: CONTROL MODES VS EXPERIENTIAL MODES OF THE BRAINThere is one thing that I believe is very important but so far I am aware of no research being done on this topic. We all know about the evolutionary argument from Dr. McGilchrist about eating(left brain) and not being eaten(right brain). There is a genetic trait that has been postulated having its existence explained by something similar. Elaine Aron has postulated the evolutionary reason for the highly sensitive person genetic trait may be due to having a relatively small portion(about 20%) of the population of a social animal species is that they would serve as sentries to warn the population of the presence of predators. This highly sensitive genetic trait exists across a wide swath of social animals. https://hsperson.com/a-future-headline-hsps-the-key-to-human-survival/ I have looked for research that ties this area of research to the work of Dr. McGilchrist and so far I have found nothing. Do you want to know if you are an hsp? Go here to take the test https://hsperson.com/ . Michael Pluess is a leading researcher in this area. Rather than hsp he uses the expression “sensory processing sensitivity” https://highlysensitiverefuge.com/HERES-EVERYTHING-RESEARCHERS-KNOW-ABOUT-HIGH-SENSITIVITY-AS-OF-2021/ I believe HSPs are born with right brain dominance hardwired in from birth but, like I said, I have not seen experimental verification of this hypothesis.
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Charles Rykken
MemberFebruary 1, 2023 at 9:26 pm in reply to: Personality and Living the Truths of Hemispheric LateralizationThat’s an ongoing work in progress for me. Lately I have been looking at GRE tilt where percentile wise there is a big difference in quant vs verbal scores. I put together a folder on Dropbox that has some interesting contents. For me, the graphic display of the differences in the R code file make downloading R Studio Desktop https://support–rstudio-com.netlify.app/products/rstudio/download/ can make it easy to see. You need know nothing about R programming to do this. The dropbox file is at https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fo/lh1si7qb27nqy23p2teqc/h?dl=0&rlkey=9kkjme5u5jv6dqmiar8ymmolc To your specific question and why this GRE stuff is relevant is from my experience professionally, The STEM majors focus their studies on “Inanimate objects”. The arts and humanities people study real live humans(history being a slight exception). Intuition needs a base of knowledge function well. Inanimate objects do not interact with the experimenter(entanglement being an interesting exception) and from my professional experience as a scientific programmer from 1971 to 1989, STEM people are usually not very well read in literature. Aldous Huxley claimed the novel as the highest art form as the novelist is creating an entire world not just a painting or a poem. As far as my own GRE scores, I am at the 73 percentile for quant scores within math and physics which majors have the highest quant scores among all the STEM majors. My verbal score puts me at the 91st percentile among philosophy majors who have the highest verbal scores among the arts and humanities. If you line up all of the STEM and all of the arts and humanities majors ordered by average verbal scores, you will find the highest verbal scores on the STEM majors(interestingly math and physics) being almost the same as the major with the lowest verbal score among the arts and humanities. That would be anthropology. So thinking of GRE tilt, I am nearly a statistical outlier for being very verbal among all people who take the GRE. Philosophy has the highest average verbal score among all GRE test takers. A few philosophy departments are proud to crow about that. I believe that you can identify through conversation just how high a person is to openness to experience but Dan Kahan from Yale University points to science curiosity as a marker for willingness to change beliefs. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1KFtQV7SiII&t=45s
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Charles Rykken
MemberNovember 30, 2022 at 7:23 pm in reply to: Personality and Living the Truths of Hemispheric LateralizationI began my journey into the study of personality in the 90s. I spent $3000 for a PC and got my dialup account on Compuserve. One of the first things I looked up on Altavista, a search engine which was a precursor to Google, was empathy. I had been making a serious effort to understand political conservatives(PolCs) and had chosen empathy as a likely psychological construct that would help me understand PolCs. It was doing that search that I discovered the idea that “putting yourself in the shoes of the other person”(PYISOP) does not always work because there are some dimensions where the difference is so fundamental that the PYISOP approach was doomed to failure. Instead, with some people, you have to observe them and take notes on behavior and speech and do your best to infer subjective states of mind. Jean Decety does research in social neuroscience. He was an early focus for me(He is mentioned in TMWT on page 300). I also got heavily into political psychology. John Jost https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=9TimlN0AAAAJ&hl=en is one of the researchers in that field who has been a major influence on my thinking. I see myself as a philosophical journalist. Journalists are a strange breed who are gadflies who settle briefly into a specific area of interest(the story du jour) and when the story is ready for publication they fly away to another story. Interestingly, my understanding of the word gadfly was just as described in the prior sentence but when I looked up the definition/etymology of gadfly and found this https://www.etymonline.com/word/gadfly but then I thought I should do a search on gadfly + journalist and found https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gadfly_(philosophy_and_social_science) One of my favorite journalist is Lincoln Steffens who was characterized as a muckraker but I see him as an example of a philosophical journalist along with Hannah Arendt. I see the fifth factor, openness to experience, as a major indicator of someone who is more(or less) likely to embrace Dr. McGilchrist’s ideas on hemispheric lateralization of brain function. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Openness_to_experience for some detail. It so happens I am also someone who has the double short version of the 5-HTTLPR polymorphism. Michael Pluess http://www.michaelpluess.com/ is a researcher in the area of high sensitivity. He wrote an article recently https://scholar.google.com/citations?view_op=view_citation&hl=en&user=gfzx3BwAAAAJ&cstart=20&pagesize=80&sortby=pubdate&citation_for_view=gfzx3BwAAAAJ:b0M2c_1WBrUC where he looks at personality and Sensory Processing Sensitivity(SPS) and openness to experience plays a major role but not all of the six facets of openness are equally important. So… I think my blabbermouth inner journalist needs to be quiet for now. I hope what I have said is helpful in understanding where I am coming from. BTW, I am 74 yo and when I graduated high school in 1966 I was on a crusade against mechanistic materialism due to reading Goethe’s views on philosophy of science. He advocated a relational view as opposed the objects and properties views of the scientists of his day (Laplace, Fourier, the Bernoulli brothers, and others) who advocated for mechanistic materialism which Goethe saw as intrinsically nihilistic. When I read The Master and His Emissary in 2015, it was like I had died and gone to heaven. Finally, I had found someone who understood my pov and had a mountain of scientific evidence to back up the validity of that pov.