The enlightenment returns.

 OhMyGawd..... I just came across the following MindBlog post from March 31, 2009, celebrating Obama's statement on restoring government guided by rationality and scientific integrity.  I pray that I can do do a similar post next March with Biden's name replacing Obama's.....

I have been almost reduced to tears of gratitude by Obama's statements on restoring an American government that is guided by rationality and scientific integrity rather than a conservative religious faith that distorts both. Kurt Gottfried and Harold Varmus (see below) write an editorial in Science Magazine that salutes this (Here is the President's memorandum):

The authors of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States were children of the Enlightenment. They understood the power that flows from combining human reason with empirical knowledge, and they assumed that the political system they were creating would thrive only in a culture that upheld the values of the Enlightenment. And thrive it did, in large part because our people and government upheld those values throughout most of U.S. history. Recently, however, the precepts of the Enlightenment were ignored and even disdained with respect to the manner in which science was used in the nation's governance. Dogma took precedence over evidence, and opinion over facts. Happily, as was made clear by two policy announcements by President Barack Obama on 9 March 2009, the break in the traditionally harmonious relationship between science and government is now ending

As the president put it, "promoting science isn't just about providing resources--it is also about protecting free and open inquiry … free from manipulation or coercion, and listening to what [scientists] tell us, even when it's inconvenient--especially when it's inconvenient." In using the words "manipulation" and "coercion," the president was not speaking purely in the abstract; he was alluding to recent breaches of a code to which government must adhere if science is to play its proper role in advising the government on such complex issues as public health, climate change, or environmental protection. When the government systematically disregards this code, it undermines the historic role of science as a bulwark of an enlightened democracy.

In the president's Memorandum on Scientific Integrity last week, addressed to the heads of all executive departments and agencies, he directed those officials to neither suppress nor alter scientific and technological findings solicited in the process of policy formulation. He also asked that scientific information developed or used by the government be made readily available to the public. To put these directives in place, the president requested the director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy to develop, within 120 days, recommendations "designed to guarantee scientific integrity throughout the executive branch" and to ensure "that scientific data is never distorted or concealed to serve a political agenda."

(Kurt Gottfried is a cofounder of the Union of Concerned Scientists and chair of its board of directors. He is professor of physics emeritus at Cornell University. Harold Varmus is president of the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, a cochair of the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, and a former director of the National Institutes of Health.)

For a tranquil start to your week, Debussy with flowers

In my slow cruising through old MindBlog posts, I just came across the following post from Monday, March 2, 2009.....perhaps a faintly calming antidote to our current uncertain times. Enjoy:

I got an email from the fellow who made this video asking if he could use my YouTube videorecording of the Debussy Reverie. I said 'sure, go ahead'.... I'm not too keen on the electronic 'enhancements' he added to my basic piano track to make the first half of the video, but here it is...

MindBlog's half-sour pickle recipe

This posting falls under the "random curious stuff" category mentioned in the title box of this blog. At the social/musical at my Twin Valley home on June 29*, several people asked for the recipe for the half-sour pickles we had served with gazpacho as a garnish. Here it is, the result of several trials to get them the way I like them. Not guaranteed to please all....

Deric's final half sour pickle recipe:

-2 lbs pickling cucumbers
-1 bundle of dill heads and stalks
-Wash cukes and dill, cut dill stalks to ~2-3 inch lengths, cut ends off cukes, slice cukes lengthwise if they are large.
-layer dill and cukes in container (~2 quart jar or plastic container)
-pour in water to cover, then pour this water into quart (4 cup) measuring cup to determine its volume, i.e. the desired volume for the pickling mixture to be added (should be ~ 4 cups).
-add 1/4 cup sea or kosher or pickling salt to 2 cups water, dissolve
-add 1/3 cup rice wine vinegar (or other very mild vinegar), 1/2 teaspoon whole black peppercorns, 3-4 whole coriander seeds, 1/2 teaspoon mustard seeds, 4-6 cloves fresh garlic, finely chopped.
-add water to obtain the volume determined above (~4 cups) while mixing thoroughly and pour over pickles.
-rotate jar or container at intervals to mix thoroughly, leave two days at room temperature, until a few bubbles start to appear, then put in refrigerator.
-pickles should be ready to eat after ~ 4 days, flavor improves over two weeks.

*(Note: I just made this recipe a few days ago from pickling cucumbers in our garden at my Austin Texas home.  Then I came across this post from 6/29/2008...done after a social occasional at my former Wisconsin home,  and decided to re-post it here.  As I look back over old posts during my COVID-19 mandated leisure, I notice that I used to do many more personal posts like this.)

MindBlog statistics.

I'm a complete dunce at paying attention to or understanding the number of people who make use of Deric's Mindblog, which started in 2006. Yesterday I clicked on "analytics" in the blogger platform I use (the bottom graphic), and also looked at what feedburner.google.com says about traffic at mindblog.dericbownds.net (the top two graphics). In the all time history the latter reports ~5.5 million page views, while the former reports ~1.8 million. Whatever.... I'm doing this post to show these numbers for my future reference (click to enlarge figure). 

Nostalgia... Remember Disco??

On my current tour through old MindBlog posts I came across this one from Jan 24, 2018, done during my early snowbird years in Fort Lauderdale, good energy to recal:

I saw this video (So Many Men, So Little Time - Miquel Brown) during happy hour at the local bar (Georgie's Alibi) several evenings ago and was totally transported back to my days of disco dancing in the late 1970's, early 1980's, getting hot and sweaty, tearing off the shirt, etc. The same moves at my current age would probably be life-threatening. I'll bet a number of you remember this kind of energy...

A perky bit of piano - Haydn Fantasia in C major, glitches included

I've generated almost 5,000 posts since this blog started in 2016 (before the first iPhone was released in 2017!, seems an aeon ago.) As a diversion during my self isolation until proper testing or a vaccine appears for COVID-19, I'm scanning through these posts from their beginning, and will be passing on a few. Coming across this bit of my piano playing perked me up yesterday, and I pass it on here, a Haydn fantasia.

An "Apostle's Creed" for the humanistic scientific materialist?

(Note: I have begun to slowly go though the posts on MindBlog, which began in Feb. of 2006, over 14 years ago.  Here I repeat the post that appeared on March 14, 2006.  I could have written it yesterday, without changing a word.)

The classical Christian apostle's creed, over 1600 years old and formulated soon after the writing of the New Testament, is a series of "I believe....." statements. Without thinking too much about it, I've decided to quickly write down a few sentences to suggest the very different creed that I follow. Here they are:

I believe the most fundamental content of our minds to be the sensed physical breathing and moving body, a quiet awareness that underlies our surface waves of emotions and thoughts.

I believe that this awareness can begin to experience a larger process, closer to the machinery that is generating a self, a process that observes rather than being completely defined by the current narrative "I" chatter of who-I-am or what-it-is-I-do.

I believe that this awareness can expand to feel its part in a a drama of evolving life on this planet and an evolving universe - a theater much more universal than conventional cultural or religious myths.

I believe that this awareness can enhance the depth, sanity, and sensed completion of each moment. It provides a sense of wholeness and sufficiency from which actions rise. It makes contact with other humans more sane and whole.

Self, purpose, and tribal mentality as Darwinian adaptations (or…Why why aren’t we all enlightened?)

This is a post like the one I offered on March 13 that passes on a bit of writing that I think might develop into a longer piece of work. I hope the following ideas and assertions make some sense to readers:

One ultimate cause of human behaviors is the endless cycling of a “Darwin machine,” operating at the level of cells, individuals, and groups of humans. As entities - from the most simple virus particles to complex human cultures - reproduce or renew themselves to persist through time, small errors or variations that end up enhancing reproductive fitness become dominant in the population. The grand master is multilevel selection, and there is a conflict between individual-level selection (individuals competing with other individuals in the same group) and group-level selection (competition between groups). Within groups selfish individuals beat altruistic individuals, but groups of altruists beat groups of selfish individuals. E.O. Wilson risks the oversimplification of suggesting that individual selection promoted sin, while group selection promoted virtue.

The array of social emotions supporting tribal cultures that have occupied most of human history, as well as the more recent emergence of language, thought, and material culture, can be rationalized with this model. Taken together, they have enabled formation of large complex societies bonded together by laws, religions, and assumptions about purpose, meaning, and self that are unique to modern humans.

Nations and religions link language and meaning to more ancient evolved instinctive social emotional behaviors that bond groups of humans and other primates. This link is revealed when logic and language are turned inward (by both ancient meditative traditions as well as modern neuroscience) in a way that reveals that our common experiences of self or purpose are confabulations, or illusions - illusions nevertheless that have been necessary for forming complex human linguistic cultures, illusions which our emotional hormones and nerve circuitry have evolved to support.

Given the clear scientific evidence, why don’t we transcend these evolved linkages between our biology and our illusions? Why have those regarded as spiritually ‘enlightened’ throughout history remained a small minority of the population? Perhaps it is because those who become enlightened or awakened to the illusory nature of the self are granted a perspective on basic emotional drives that can divests them of much of their power. Enlightenment is subtle, not noisy, it doesn't engage the passions as well as blind devotion to nations and gods. This is why secular humanism, with its more muted versions of spirituality (‘I’m spiritual but not religious’) finds it difficult to compete with the ego-rich passions of nationalism and theism.

Because our evolved social brains incline us to cling to a complex array of nations, religions, and tribal identities that parse the world into ‘us’ and ‘them,’ we find it difficult to accept that we are a common humanity that would most effectively face our current pandemic and environmental crises by joining together.

MindBlog passes on a note: on the relief of not being yourself.

I am going to start occasionally doing MindBlog posts on ideas that I think might have the potential of developing into longer pieces of work, but that usually remain as notes in my personal journal. This first one follows in the thread of Monday’s post on the work of Sam Harris. It came together when I woke during the middle of the night to find my mind clogged with a traffic jam of discursive thought. Then what appeared in my mind, in what felt like a mini-epiphany, was the words that I pass on below. They may make little sense to many readers, but please be assured that I have not gone wacko or nutter....

What a relief to know that this is not me, it is just the contents of my consciousness, which shift around all the time and are never the same twice. What has changed, after 45 years of doing an introspective personal journal, is that this sentence has become clear and true for me. It is a prying loose from the illusion of the sensing and executive “I”, self, the homunculus inside.

There is a particular feeling of renewal, starting over, in the first moments of the transition to seeing - rather than immersed in being - one of the contents of consciousness. Meditation practice can be seen as training the ability to inhabit this state for longer periods of time, to experience the self or I as co-equal with other contents of consciousness like seeing, hearing, feeling. It is having thoughts without a thinker, having a self without a self.

What is inside is the animal mirror of expanded consciousness, no longer locked into one or another of its contractions. This feels to me like a potentially irreversible quantum bump, a phase or state change in my ongoing awareness (perhaps a long term increase in my brain’s attentional mode activity alongside a decrease its default mode’s mind wandering?...also frontal suppression of amygdalar reactivity?)

(I would add the note, as I did to Monday's post, that experiences of the sort I describe here can be very disorienting to some people, and should be approached with caution. A google search for the names Willoughby Britton and Jarred Lindahl will take you to their papers on this issue.)

MindBlog is starting its 15th year...

I’ve just realized that MindBlog, whose first post was on February 8, 2006, has just entered its 15th year. That first post, “Dangerous Ideas” looks like it could have been posted today. It summarized responses to an 'annual question' presented by Edge.org , whose last question, "What is the last question?," was asked in 2018. Here is the 2006 post:

Dangerous Ideas.......

Edge.org is a website sponsored by the "Reality Club" (i.e. John Brockman, literary agent/impressario/socialite). Brockman has assembled a stable of scientists and other thinkers that he defines as a "third culture" that takes the place of traditional intellectuals in redefining who and what we are.... Each year a question is formulated for all to write on... In 2004 it was "What do you believe is true even though you cannot prove it?" The question for 2005 was "What is your dangerous idea?"

The responses organize themselves into several areas. Here are selected thumbnail summaries most directly relevant to human minds. I've not included cosmology and physics. Go to edge.org to read the essays

I. Nature of the human self or mind (by the way see my "I-Illusion" essay on my website):

Paulos - The self is a conceptual chimera
Shirky - Free will is going away
Nisbett - We are ignorant of our thinking processes
Horgan - We have no souls
Bloom - There are no souls, mind has a material basis.
Provine - This is all there is.
Anderson - Brains cannot become minds without bodies
Metzinger - Is being intellectually honest about the issue of free will compatible with preserving one's mental health?
Clark - Much of our behavior is determined by non-conscious, automatic uptake of cues and information
Turkle - Simulation will replace authenticity as computer simulation becomes fully naturalized.
Dawkins - A faulty person is no different from a faulty car. There is a mechanism determining behavior that needs to be fixed. The idea of responsibility is nonsense.
Smith - What we know may not change us. We will continue to conceive ourselves as centres of experience, self-knowing and free willing agents.

II. Natural explanations of culture

Sperber - Culture is natural.
Taylor - The human brain is a cultural artifact.
Hauser- There is a universal grammar of mental life.
Pinker - People differ genetically in their average talents and temperaments.
Goodwin - Similar coordinating patterns underlie biological and cultural evolution.
Venter - Revealing the genetic basis of personality and behavior will create societal conflicts.


III. Fundamental changes in political, economic, social order

O'donnell - The state will disappear.
Ridley - Government is the problem not the solution.
Shermer - Where goods cross frontiers armies won't.
Harari -Democracy is on its way out.
Csikszentmihalyi- The free market myth is destroying culture.
Goleman - The internet undermines the quality of human interaction.
Harris - Science must destroy religion.
Porco - Confrontation between science and religion might end when role played by science in lives of people is the same played by religion today.
Bering - Science will never silence God
Fisher - Drugs such as antidepressants jeopardize feelings of attachment and love
Iacoboni - Media Violence Induces Imitative Violence - the Problem with Mirrors
Morton - Our planet is not in peril, just humans are.

MindBlog Changes

I want to explain to readers who check MindBlog daily why the drumbeat of a post each weekday (4,700 posts over the past 13 years) has stopped. My 78th year starts next week, and performative professor Deric has decided to spend more time doing other things, to try a few new tricks. I will continue to occasionally post on interesting material I encounter.

A bit of digital detox - rehearsing a Mendelssohn Piano Trio

I have been fortunate to find in Austin TX two accomplished string players, violinist Andrea Gore and cellist Karen Foster Cason, who join me in sight reading interesting piano trios. We have decided to work up a few of the pieces we like to do for a house concert in late May, - a musical/social occasion of the sort I used to do in the 1860 stone schoolhouse that was the living room of my Twin Valley Road residence in Madison Wisconsin. I thought I would pass on to MindBlog readers a bit of our rehearsal this past Thursday, working on a Mendelssohn piano trio.

The "digital detox" phrase in this post's title is a clip from Jia Tolentino's recent New Yorker Article "What It Takes to Put Your Phone Away." I'm very much in the mood these days to get away from the "invasion of your cognitive landscape" that it describes and that I have permitted by being open to so many digital input streams as I spend a large fraction of my days hovering over screen and keyboard.

I find that the exercise of playing music is an antidote to this malaise, and I want to spend more time doing it. Don't be surprised if MindBlog posts become less frequent. Anyway, here is the 1st movement of the Mendelssohn Piano Trio No. 2 in C Minor, in a video recording done with my iPhone XS Max with a Shure condenser microphone plugged into its USB port:

Feedspot: MindBlog in top 100 psychology blogs

I am clueless about monitoring traffic on MindBlog, have been puzzled why I get 3-5 emails a week wanting to contribute content, share content, sell me some editing or other services, assist in 'monetizing' my site more effectively. Google is constantly on my case to place advertisements on MindBlog. My cut and paste answer to all such emails is "I must decline your kind offer. MindBlog is my own idiosyncratic hobby, and I only post content that I initiate. I am not concerned about number of followers, and have no interest in revenue." A recent offer to provide editing services finally clued me in to at least one source that contributes to all these emails. They sent their solicitation to the top 100 Psychology Blog identified by feedsport.com. Turns out that MindBlog is currently number 46.

MindBlog is on vacation Aug. 31 - Sept. 22

Deric and Len just arrived in Amsterdam today. We will hang out here for a few days before getting on a Viking river boat cruise from Amsterdam to Budapest, Sept. 4 - Sept. 18.  MindBlog posts will probably be infrequent or absent until late September.  Having banged out 4,522  posts since MindBlog's start in 2006, maybe it's time for a break!

A Valentine's Day musical offering - Respighi's Intermezzo Serenata

A piano transcription by Respighi of the Intermezzo Serenata from his comic opera Re Enzo.  Making a recording of a piano piece I like motivates me to learn it a bit more thoroughly and is necessary if I plan to play it for one of our house social/musical occasions.  I never manage a playing without some minor error,  so from the four takes I did yesterday I pass on with one with the smallest number of glitches. Readers who are Apple groupies might note the Apple watch camera app displaying the scene being recorded by the iPhone X camera and the shutter button on the watch starting and stopping the recording.

MindBlog's 12th anniversary. Blogs as relics or rebirths?

Today marks the 12th anniversary of MindBlog's start.  In yesterday's MindBlog post I passed on Andrew Sullivan's comments on the demise of blogs, noting several, such as the Awl, Hairpin, and Gawker, which have appeared and disappeared since the Feb. 2006 beginning of MindBlog.  They were not economically viable...editors have to eat.  (I haven’t had that problem, living on a retired professor's annuity, and so being able to decline weekly offers to help me better 'monetize' this site.) Here is a clip from the Polentino article mentioned by Sullivan:

Blogging, that much-maligned pastime, is gradually but surely disappearing from the Internet, and so, consequently, is a lot of online freedom and fun.

Blogs are necessarily idiosyncratic, entirely about sensibility: they can only be run by workhorses who are creative enough to amuse themselves and distinct enough to hook an audience, and they tend to publish like-minded writers, who work more on the principle of personal obsession than pay. The result is editorial latitude to be obscure and silly and particular, but the finances are increasingly hard to sustain; media consumption is controlled these days by centralized tech platforms—Facebook, Twitter—whose algorithms favor what is viral, newsy, reactionary, easily decontextualized, and of general appeal. 

I'm a bit incredulous that MindBlog has persisted for 12 years... When I click on "Stats" in the Google Blogger platform that hosts this blog, I see (as I'm writing this post on 1/30/18) :

Pageviews today 4,052 

Pageviews yesterday 1,163 

Pageviews last month 32,880 

Pageviews all time history 4,513,922

Deric's MindBlog is a quirky and idiosyncratic effort, reflecting my particular interests. It passes on selected material that I would be reading about in any case. It makes it easier for me to recall and look up stuff that I have read and found interesting. A reliable readership has evolved that seems to share these interests. Occasional positive comments from readers have reinforced my motivation to continue slugging away, rescuing me from even thinking about starting to watch daytime television! 

Debussy La plus que lente - a first musical offering from Austin Texas.

This is a personal post, a musical offering of the sort I have done on MindBlog in previous years. The Steinway B that I have used since 2002 recently moved with me from Fort Lauderdale, Florida to Austin, Texas, not to the family house I moved back into, but to the larger living room of my son's home which can manage the kind of musical socials I have given for many years.  Techie MindBlog readers might be interested in my discovery that the video camera on my iPhone X is better than the Canon video camera I had been using, and that a small USB Zoom iQ6 condenser microphone attached to its Lightning connector gives audio quality comparable to the much larger C1 Studio condenser microphone whose output had to be tediously synchronized with video from the Canon camera stripped of its inferior audio sound track.

MindBlog has moved to Austin Texas.

A personal note.  Len and I have just moved back into the family house in Austin Texas where I grew up, through high school. My son and his family recently moved from this house into a larger home, where my Steinway B now resides in a much larger living room. The annual snowbird commute will now be between Madison WI and Austin Texas, rather than Madison and Fort Lauderdale. The picture shows an Essex upright (Steinway sub-brand) that just arrived at the smaller family house to serve as a practice piano.

Monday morning Schubert

On Sunday Feb. 19 I gave a recital dedicated to the memory of David Goldberger, who I had performed with in several four hands recitals several years ago. He gave a recital on his 90th birthday in the summer of 2015, after his diagnosis with stomach cancer, and died in May of 2016. Franz Schubert was his passion, and his magnum opus on the life and music of Schubert was left unfinished at his death. Here is one of the pieces I played at his memorial recital.

MindBlog’s 11th anniversary…some statistics.

Today is MindBlog’s 11 anniversary. I let the 10th anniversary pass without noticing, so I want to briefly comment this year. Google analytics tells me that there have been about four million views of the 4,115 posts that have appeared thus far. After I have weeded out the 4-5 comments submitted each week whose purpose is to insert a link to a commercial site, authentic comments on the posts are few and far between. I also receive 1-2 emails each week from sites wanting to contribute a post and get a crosslink to their site. My cut and paste response is: “I must decline your kind offer. MindBlog is my own idiosyncratic hobby, and I only post content that I initiate.  I have no interest in revenue.”

The blog passes on material that I would be reading even if I were not doing the blogging gig, and it would seem a shame not to share what I find interesting. While I do write occasional posts that are entirely of my composition, most of the posting is better described as ‘curated content.’ I keep a queue of 5-10 completed posts that are post dated for automatic 3 a.m. daily posting by the Blogger platform. My actual writing occurs in bursts. (It is not happening this week, while my husband and I are on a Caribbean cruise!)

Each day MindBlog receives about 1,500 page views. A typical post, on its first day, will gather 300-600 views, rising to ~1,000 views after two weeks. MindBlog’s RSS feed has ~750 followers, and the automatic reposts to twitter have ~1450 followers. I haven’t monitored the response to reposts on Facebook and Google+.

I’m grateful that this many people seem to find the material interesting. The occasional emails from readers who express gratitude for my efforts motivate me to continue.