Can Science Explain the Spiritual Without the Aid of Religion?

Can science explain spirituality?

As the debate between believers of religion and the atheists continues unabated, many are turning towards science to understand why humans seem to not only want religion, but need it as well.

Once again the battlefield is the human brain as some neuroscientists are attempting to explain spiritual experiences through scientific means that make an end run around religion. This group is basing its findings around the study of interoception. Sandra Blakeslee attempts to understand why she feels a spiritual presence and why she can reject religion at the same time in Flesh Made Soul. Here’s a brief excerpt:

Can science help?

I think it can, although the research is in an early stage. A stunning new description of how the human body and brain communicate to produce emotional states — including our feelings, cravings, and moods — has all the elements needed to explain how the human brain might give rise to spiritual experiences, without the necessary involvement of a supernatural presence, according to Dr. Martin Paulus, a psychiatrist at the University of California in San Diego who is also a Zen practitioner.

Called interoception, it offers a radically new view of human anatomy and physiology based on how information from the body reaches the brain and how that information is processed uniquely in humans.

e-mail response time and what it says about you

how do you respond to e-mails?

In an age of instant communication many are accustomed to prompt response when sending a message to others. Unfortunately for some, a prompt response isn’t always a certainty.

How quickly do you respond to e-mails? Dr. Karen Renaud of the University of Glasgow tells us that people break down into three groups when replying to e-mails: relaxed, driven, and stressed.

Women, in particular, felt more pressure to respond quickly to a new email than men, she said.

‘The relaxed group don’t let email exert any pressure on their lives,’ Dr Renaud, an expert in computer science, said.

‘They treat it exactly the way that one would treat the mail: “I’ll fetch it, I’ll deal with it in my own time, but I’m not going to let it upset me”.

‘The second group felt “driven” to keep on top of email, but also felt that they could cope with it. The third group, however, reacted negatively to the pressure of email.

read the rest here

Toronto Lands a Spot On World Monopoly

Toronto’s inferiority complex gets a boost

It’s either a good thing or a bad thing from the perspective of a city wanting to be world class, but Toronto has made it, albeit symbolically. Hasbro Inc. has announced that Toronto is to appear on the new World Monopoly gameboard.

Landing a spot will sooth Toronto’s inferiority complex, but it will also be aggravated by the fact that not only are we stuck between Kiev and Istanbul, Hogtown is also a property of lesser value behind Vancouver and Montreal. Toronto needs a better PR department :)

Small Pleasures #2 – Ice Cream

I couldn’t resist posting this image :)

Happiness isn’t all that it’s cracked up to be…….Viva Melancholia!

Edgar Degas’ Melancholy (1874)

Ask a person what they most want in life and most will automatically reply “happiness”. It’s more than a fair answer and happiness in life is a worthy goal but is it the alpha and omega of our being? One must feel sadness and loss to understand the absence of happiness and to magnify its benefits. It’s these range of emotions that make us all the more human.

In our technologically driven world, many seek happiness by canceling out sadness through medication. Prozac is one of the more popular medications on the market and like other anti-depressants it has been criticized for making people “less human” since it limits the range of their emotions. Soma was used in Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World” for much the same reason (amongst other reasons).

Americans are notorious pill-poppers, especially those that can result in some form of “happiness”. After all, it fits into their country’s mission statement: “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” all too well. But is happiness everything? Eric G. Wilson says it isn’t and that by eliminating feelings of melancholy Americans are missing out on an essential part of life. Read his excellent article: In Praise of Melancholy. Here’s a short excerpt:

I for one am afraid that American culture’s overemphasis on happiness at the expense of sadness might be dangerous, a wanton forgetting of an essential part of a full life. I further am concerned that to desire only happiness in a world undoubtedly tragic is to become inauthentic, to settle for unrealistic abstractions that ignore concrete situations. I am finally fearful of our society’s efforts to expunge melancholia. Without the agitations of the soul, would all of our magnificently yearning towers topple? Would our heart-torn symphonies cease?

My fears grow out of my suspicion that the predominant form of American happiness breeds blandness. This kind of happiness appears to disregard the value of sadness. This brand of supposed joy, moreover, seems to foster an ignorance of life’s enduring and vital polarity between agony and ecstasy, dejection and ebullience. Trying to forget sadness and its integral place in the great rhythm of the cosmos, this sort of happiness insinuates that the blues are an aberrant state that should be cursed as weakness of will or removed with the help of a little pink pill.

Why the Internet Makes Identity Theft So Easy

Identity theft is much easier than you might imagine

We humans being the most social of animals leads us to constantly talk about ourselves (some more than others, some much, much more) no matter how mundane or trivial the actual subject can be. New technology such as the internet has only facilitated this urge to speak about ourselves even more in the form of social networking sites.

In a previous post here at vodka/soda we discussed some of the dangers of social networking sites on the internet. One of the most costly dangers is identity theft, a theft made much easier by the amount of personal information available about ourselves and made available by ourselves (and websites) on the web.

Herbert H. Thompson, a professor of computer science and a software developer, shows us how easy it is to steal a person’s identity just by mining data on the internet in: How I Stole Someone’s Identity. Here’s a quote from the article:

I asked some of my acquaintances, people I know only casually, if with their permission and under their supervision I could break into their online banking accounts. After a few uncomfortable pauses, some agreed. The goal was simple: get into their online banking account by using information about them, their hobbies, their families and their lives freely available online. To be clear, this isn’t hacking or exploiting vulnerabilities, instead it’s mining the Internet for nuggets of personal data.

Mark Rothko, Untitled (1960)

Mark Rothko, Untitled (1960)

As readers of this site are already familiar with my favourite piece of art it should come as no surprise to you that I really appreciate the Rothko work shown above. Rothko refused to explain his work leaving us with one of art’s great mysteries. The UK Times is asking us what we think of this piece and what we think it represents. While you ponder those questions, have a look at some quotes by Mark Rothko:

“I am not an abstract painter. I am not interested in the relationship between form and color. The only thing I care about is the expression of man’s basic emotions: tragedy, ecstasy, destiny.”

“The role of the artist, of course, has always been that of image-maker. Different times require different images. Today when our aspirations have been reduced to a desperate attempt to escape from evil, and times are out of joint, our obsessive, subterranean and pictographic images are the expression of the neurosis which is our reality. To my mind certain so-called abstraction is not abstraction at all. On the contrary, it is the realism of our time. “

“Since my pictures are large, colorful and unframed, and since museum walls are usually immense and formidable, there is the danger that the pictures relate themselves as decorative areas to the walls. This would be a distortion of their meaning, since the pictures are intimate and intense, and are the opposite of what is decorative.”

Why Gordon Gekko Got it Wrong: Michael Shermer and Evolutionary Economics

“Greed is Good” – Michael Douglas as the corporate vulture Gordon Gekko in Oliver Stone’s “Wall Street”

The scene is certainly an unforgettable one. Gordon Gekko, the notorious Wall Street corporate vulture, stands in front of a shareholder meeting playing Robin Hood to the unsuspecting people in attendance as he confronts the executives of the company and pulls off a hostile takeover by appealing to peoples’ baser instincts when explaining that “greed is good”.

Although Gekko was meant to represent the cutthroat corporate culture of America in the high-flying 80s, many took his philosophy to heart. The argument went that man’s selfishness is what has propelled human invention and evolution. But is that the case?

Michael Shermer, writer, historian, and founder of The Skeptics Society tells us that this argument is in fact completely wrong. Read the interview with Michael Shermer here. Here’s a sample:

Why, if capitalism is so great, did the Enron scandal occur? Some have suggested that it was a few bad apples in the corporation.

The “bad apples” theory doesn’t explain what really happened at Enron, and it doesn’t explain the nature of corporate evil. Jeff Skilling, the CEO of Enron, set up what he thought was a Darwinian marketing environment. Skilling was a fan of Richard Dawkins’s important book The Selfish Gene, which Skilling misread. He took it to mean that evolution is driven by cutthroat competition and self-centered egotism. He liked the notion of the “survival of the fittest.” Skilling set up a Peer Review Committee, which became known as “rank and yank.” Everybody was ranked on a scale of one to five, and 20 percent of all fives had to be fired. The reviews were posted on a company website with a picture of the employee, increasing the potential for personal humiliation. Good luck being able to go out and have some fun with your teammates. Teammates! These are people who may be taking my job. Once you set up an environment like that, people begin violating rules. Skilling’s evaluation system led to a lot of behind-the-scenes wheeling and back-door dealing between department heads and managers, swapping review evaluation points. In addition to his belief in an outdated and untenable doctrine of social Darwinism, Skilling was a high-risk taker — short on dopamine, we might conjecture. What causes corporate corruption is an environment of evil established by the founders, corporate executives, and managers — a corporate psychology — that creates situations that encourage our hearts of darkness to beat faster.

The Globalisation of Hip

“Hip” now moves faster and has more “sameness” thanks to globalisation

We can trot out cliches about globalisation like “the world is a global village” all day long, but in my opinion this current trend can be described as the “great leveler”. Globalisation has seen money move to places where the quickest profits can be made only to see it abandon those places once they found a more profitable location elsewhere. In the meantime, the world is becoming more similar from location to location as people consume the same products, are wearing the same clothes, and are exposed to the same culture.

Globalisation is also affecting Hipster culture as trends now move more quickly and with more force than they once did. Previously what was cool in New York wasn’t necessarily cool in Helsinki….but now what’s cool in Paris can be what’s cool in Buenos Aires in a matter of weeks. Tim Walker explores the globalisation of hip in: Meet the Global Scenster. Here’s an excerpt:

“Trends aren’t transmitted hierarchically, as they used to be,” explains Martin Raymond, co-founder of The Future Laboratory, a trend forecasting company. “They’re now transmitted laterally and collaboratively via the internet. You once had a series of gatekeepers in the adoption of a trend: the innovator, the early adopter, the late adopter, the early mainstream, the late mainstream, and finally the conservative. But now it goes straight from the innovator to the mainstream.”

The global scenester stays on top of what’s cool worldwide by reading such urban culture despatches as The Cool Hunter, a blog begun in Sydney four years ago by Bill Tikos, which reports on the hippest fashion, furniture, and design culture. The Cool Hunter has more than 600,000 unique visitors per month, who pore over the contents of its licensed offshoots in the US, UK, Turkey, Italy, China, and Japan. Its global audience allows Tikos to homogenise cool worldwide.

Seeing Berlin by Rooftops

Berlin’s The Weekend Club

In North America Berlin seems to get a bad rap (Europeans know better). When listing off the best European capitals to visit, people will usually start off by naming the holy trinity of European travel destinations: London, Paris and Rome. Beyond that you’ll usually hear Prague and Budapest and maybe Vienna and Copenhagen shortly thereafter.

It’s really quite too bad since Berlin has to be Europe’s most underrated city for tourism. A tectonic fault line worthy of San Andreas during the Cold War, the city manages to balance the old (Unter den Linden) with the new, tradition with technology, art with finance. The city has long been a centre of the arts and especially a nucleus for architecture and design.

The Philosophy of Woody Allen

Nebbish, fatalistic, existentialist, etc….

I was lucky enough to be exposed to Woody Allen’s work at a young age. I vividly recall watching Bananas with my father on television some time in the early 1980s and I remember not only finding the slapstick humour hilarious (which my father is quite fond of) but also noting that there were a lot of “smart jokes” in the film, most of which I was too young to understand. Nevertheless, I filed away the name “Woody Allen” in my mind for future use.

When Arts & Entertainment Television was launched (back in the days when you’d actually get to see some real art on television), the station would play a lot of his films. It was then that I was introduced to his other classics such as Sleeper, Love and Death, Annie Hall, The Purple Rose of Cairo, and my personal favourite to this day, Manhattan. At this point I in my life I was able to catch not just his jokes, but also the philosophical dilemmas in his films that were so self-referencing and personal. His neuroses, his paranoia, his existentialist defeatism, all were on display in all their glory for us to watch, to sympathize with, and often to share. Rather than discuss the merits of Woody Allen’s films, I think it best to simply state that they’ve been both smart and funny: a combination that seems simple yet so foreign in a time when smart and funny rarely intersect. A time in which we now live where smart is often associated with irony and funny is now in the realm of pubescent toilet humour.

Emperor Hadrian’s Favourite Galatian City Throwing Up Archaeological Treasures

Sagalassos, the first city of the Roman province of Galatia (present-day southwestern Turkey)

The archaeological dig at Sagalassos in present-day southwestern Turkey is uncovering some real treasures.

Last year, a massive statue of Emperor Hadrian was uncovered. This week a colossal marble head of Faustina the Elder was found by archaeologists.