14 posts tagged “book”
This is a great book on the evolutionary origins of morality in primates. The core concept is that any genetic trait that does does a better job at reproducing itself over time will become a characteristic of that particular species to which it belongs.
The benefit of a group cohesion trait such as aid in finding food, collective knowledge, and added security are obvious. Yet this trait also must compete against more selfish, non-group, traits. The resolution of this conflict ranges from strict hierarchical dominance behaviors (Baboons) to more egalitarian reciprocal exchange behaviors (Bonobos). Humans and Chimps are somewhere in the middle. This middle ground includes individual concern about the general state of relationships in the group. In Chimps this results in the dominant male breaking up fights with the females and adolescent males seeking peaceful reconciliation between high ranking male rivals. Only humans though seem to value altruistic behavior on a group wide basis and reward contributions to the quality of the social environment (page 34).
This book take the reader through all the stages towards morality with various and detailed examples of observed behavior including those from intelligent non-primates.
Chimp groups will enforce their will against individuals. When two chimps stayed outside at a zoo thus delaying the feeding of the rest of the group they were beaten the next morning when the group could get at them (page 89). Yet the fear of punishment is not the best way for a group work together. A better way is to internalize the submission to the group rules so that the group does not have to expend time and effort to keep each other in line which also risks destabilizing the group if revenge attacks start to occur. Rule internalization is exemplified by a need to please as shown in dogs and wolves leading the famous ethologist Konrad Lorentz to call dogs the animals with a conscience. In humans rule internalization is motivated by the desire to belong to, and be accepted by, a group. In return one will play by the group's rules.
Chimps mostly group conform due to fear of punishment but even then they do seem to have sense of guilt. When the ranking male is away low ranking males will seek to copulate with the females. If successful and the high ranking male returns a low ranking male will exhibit wide submissive grins and avoid the high ranking male. (page 110). Chimps are great at deception and trickery working to get their selfish way within the group rules.
Yet chimps also exhibit compassion to other group members when reciprocity can be expected. This compassion also only occurs as long as the behavior of the one needing help is not too different from the norm in which case compassion turns to fear and ostracism (as shown in the polio outbreak among the wild chimps at Gombe). An example of compassion is when a chimp will lower a rope to its mate trapped in a moat (page 82). Another example is when a chimp will keep a friend away from an angry higher ranking member (post page 88 pictures)
Yes chimp juvenile will even test group rules by teasing their elders just to see what happens as when one throws a stick at a resting elder. (post page 88 pictures)
Chimps have a sense of justice as indicate by their emotional responses when an expected reciprocity is not forthcoming. If it is a lack of food sharing a temper tantrum will result (page 93). In the case of help against a rival where the helper is not protected against a revenge attack the helper will then angrily chase the one it previously helped (page 97).
After conflicts chimp males often reconcile with a formal display of the loser bowing and then receiving a kiss and an embrace from the winner. (page 104).
This book shows that the basic morality of getting along derives from our evolutionary inheritance and that appeals to some god for authority is not needed for moral rules. The rule are within us with behaviors that benefit the group considered good and those that harm the group as bad.
(Personal opinion of reviewer) Yet humans go one step further. Humans add culture to groups, which are completely arbitrary beliefs and patterns of behavior that signal group identification. While hints of pre-culture exist in chimps and bonobos in terms of certain patterns of tool use and gestures they do not seem important in terms of group identification. That is chimps are not hostile to chimps that do not exhibit these traits, in contrast to humans. Culture allows evolution to work at a higher level of organization. Those cultures with ideas that promote better group survivals relative to others will tend to expand. This in turn lead humans to evolve strong emotional attachments to these cultural rules and consider upholding these cultural rules as morally good, on par with earlier pro-group behaviors.
This is the latest book by Paul Davies who has always been one of my favorite popular physics authors. I was lucky to come across one of his earlier books in high school which kept me interested in physics despite the mundane physics class.
The greatest value of this book lies in its clear descriptions of the latest developments in physics as it affects cosmology such as dark matter, dark energy, anti-gravity, cosmic inflation. No other recent book does as good a job.
The great achievement of modern cosmology was the publication in 2003 of the WMAP satellite's high resolution microwave background radiation image that shows the state of our universe only 380,000 years after its creation in the Big Bang, a time when the universe had cooled just enough to allow electrons to be captured by hydrogen and helium atoms freeing light to run free for the first time.
Yet the attempt by Paul Davies to delve into metaphysics is weaker due to his scientisim worldview in which nothing can exist beyond of the material universe. But at least he is attempting to deal with these hard questions in print which is really something special for a professional physicist.
His reasoning that nothing can exist beyond our own material universe starts with his conclusion that time itself cannot exist outside of the universe (page 68). He bases this on Einstein's General Relativity equations which shows that the space-time continuum goes to zero when the matter term is set to 0. All this equation says is that time and space cannot exist within our own universe if matter goes to zero. Time is the dimension that allows matter to move (more generally it allows causal signals to go from place to place) while space is the dimension that allows matter to have form. One cannot apply General Relativity to higher dimensional spaces outside of our universe, especially if these spaces are not involved in the self-assembly of structure. One can reasonably say that if any causal movement exists within some higher dimensional space then some time dimension will exist.
The author goes on to say that this is the same solution the Christian Saint Augistine took when he claimed that God was outside of (transcended) space and time because he created space and time. Augustine was trying to reconcile a changeless God (a changeless nature being an expected property of eternity) with an act of change. Yet as previously mentioned without time no changes, no causal signal flows, are possible so the whole idea of some cause producing thing transcending time is false.
Then one comes to string or membrane theory which is the theory of everything while at the same time being a theory of nothing. By using vibrating strings or membranes that can vibrate in multiple spatial dimensions (with those spatial dimensions being compacted so small that matter can't enter them) having any shape and with the strings or membranes taking any shape string theory makes nearly anything possible. The author does not state how the idea of other dimensional spaces in string theory can be reconciled with the idea that no other space exists outside of our expanding universe. I assume cosmologists think they can just add as many compacted spaces as they want to the General Relativity equations without any good reason beyond making the equations so general that they can describe everything. This does not make a theory which are supposed to provide constraints on what is possible. This is why string theory is also a theory of nothing.
One of these "everything is possible" with string theory is the idea of the multiverse in which the universe just keeps on creating new parts forever much like bubbles in a bubble bath with the water running keep expanding. In this way there is no creation just infinite growth! Well, metaphysically continued growth has never been thought of as a property of eternity. Another reason for multiverses is that the physical constants can be random with the result that we, intelligent conscious beings, only appear in those universes with the right physical constants (about 20 of them must have their values determined from experiement and are not derived from any deep theory). While multiple such universes may be plausible this multiverse idea is not the way to go about it.
[Edit: added April 30, 2007] The recent finding that the universe is not only expanding but accelerating is very significant because it gives an answer to how the universe will end (page 124). As space expands it carries all objects embedded within it along. Eventually all galaxies will move out of sight of each other as they move out beyond each others event horizon (light can no longer cover the distance in the time since creation). As the expansion continues the event horizon around each material object continues to shrink in diameter. From the point of view of our of our then dead sun the stars will disappear one by one, then the remaining planets will disappear, then the atoms making up the sun will begin disappearing from each other. So what happens when all matter is cut off from each other? No one knows. Perhaps matter and its space will then disolve back into the primoridial chaos (higher dimensional space) from which it came.
[Edit: added April 30, 2007] The cause of this spatial acceleration is dark energy. All the normal matter that makes up the self-assembled structure of the universe only makes up 4% of the total. Some unknown matter that seems to hover invisibly around the galaxies makes up another 22% while the dark energy uniformly distributed throughout the universe makes up the remaining 74%. (page 123).
[Edit: added April 30, 2007] Dark energy is negative energy. The standard reference point for negative energy is represented by the orbits of matter around each other. If a planet falls straight into a star from its orbit it releases positive energy. While in orbit this same amount of energy is called the planet's potential energy (energy cannot be destroyed or created but only transformed). So where is the extra energy when the planet fell into its orbit? This extra energy has to be represented as a component in the gravitational field and since falling into orbit releases positive energy it must have been absorbed by the gravitational field as negative energy so the total energy equals 0. Since energy is equivilent to matter via E = mc2 this negative energy equals negative gravity. Recent estimates show that this total negative energy is equal to the total postive energy represented by all the matter in the universe so while gavity locally is attractive at the universal scale it is repulsive just enough to cancel out the attraction. From this data the universe should neither be expanding nor contracting. (page 43).
[Edit: added April 30, 2007] The remaining anti-gravity comes from dark energy measured to be mass equivelent to 10-28 grams per cubic centimeter. The most likely candidate for this dark energy is the negative energy from other non-gravity force fields. In terms of quantum mechanics these force fields are represented by virtual particles which "borrow" positive energy (making the energy negative) for short amounts of time. How this works is that each particle sets up its set of potential paths and interaction options (the wave like quantum potential) which then interacts with those from other particles. This quantum potential field is continuosly updated. Eventually some interaction event between the two particles will be triggered resulting an exhange a virtual force carrying particle. This is somewhat analogous to the triggering of an action potential (an interaction event) in a neuron when its threshold is exceeded, but with the neuron having a randomly varying threshold.
[Edit: added April 30, 2007] Yet physics has a big problem in that their calculations for this dark energy are way off! (page 148) Calculations show that the dark energy equivelent should be 1093 grams per cubic centimenter which is different from the measured value by a factor of 10120. Physicist Stephen Hawking quipped that this must be the biggest failure of physical theory in history (page 147). Personally I tend to think this is a problem with their metaphysics in that they are treating fields classically instead of from an information processing point of view more in conformance with quantum mechanical interactions as described in the previous paragraph. Do non-gravity fields really exist continuously in the absence of two interacting particles? Classically a field is formed from only one particle but that does not seem to be consistent with quantum mechanics.
Still, despite my disagreements over the metaphysics this is one of those must read books for anyone interested in physics, cosmology, and metaphysics.
While not as good overall as Howard Brody's placebo response book that I reviewed here this book is a good complement since it discussed how culture affects the placebo response.
The placebo response is based on the release of various body control chemicals by the brain in response to expectations. The brain is forming expectations and acting on those expectations all the time. In vision it fills in the retinal blind spot where the optic nerve leaves the eyeball. The brain also fills in the gaps between image updates to provide an appearance of continuous motion. If the medio-temporal area of the cortex is damaged the patient sees the world in a strobe light fashion as a series of disconnected images (Quest for Consciousness by Cristof Koch, page 140)
The color and number of pills affects the placebo response (page 47). American medical students were given either one or two pink or blue pills before a lecture and told one would be a stimulent and another a sedative but not told which was which. In reality the pills were inert. So the study consisted of four groups. The groups who received the two pills had a greater response than those that took one pill (6 out of 119 had severe responses with one pill while 26 out of the 119 had a severe response with two pills). In addition 66% of the students who took the blue tablet reported boredom from the lecture while only 26% of those who took the pink tablet reported boredom. The blue innert tablets enhanced the sedative effect of the lecture while the pink tablets acted to counter-act the lecture's sedative effect.
Shots are more effective than pills. In a study of a blood pressure reducing medication those receiving pills of both the drug and the placebo did not have much of a response but those that instead received shots had a significant response. Those getting the shots of both of the drug and placebo (sterile saline solution) every other week for 12 weeks had significant reductions in blood pressure for 47 (drug) to 59 (placebo) weeks. (page 52). Yet in Europe shots are no better than pills in triggering placebo responses showing how culture can affect expectations (page 79)
Chapter 8 is a very good chapter showing how placebo effects interact with the known neurochemical pain pathways in the brain. This shows better than anything else the connection between mental expectations and neurochemistry.
The placebo response occurs when expectations developed by the brain affect body processes. The biochemical pathways that accomplish this are an active area of research but at least the general outlines are clear. The author mentions three major pathways: the endorphin (pain relief) pathway, the stress - relaxation pathway, and the psychoneuroimmune pathway. In practice these pathways overlap to a considerable degree with the general term for these chemical messengers being called cytokines . They interface with the brain via the hypothalamus - pituitary gland and via the vagus nerve (and probably others).
The author calls whatever chemicals are responsible for the placebo effect the "inner pharmacy" which makes sense when one considers that all drug work by connecting to certain cellular receptor sites and that those sites only exist to bind to the body's own inner chemicals.
The author mentions that doctors prior to the 1940's frequently depended on using the placebo response to heal patients. They often made up their own medicines for this. Healing instead of truth was the basis for medical ethics then. Yet this meant patients often did not trust their doctors and this could lead to sad consequences. The author gives an example of a negative placebo (Nocebo) response.
A patient was in a hospital for some tests. She had a mild congestive heart condition that was stable due to medication. The senior cardiologist came into her room with a bevy of students and interns and said out loud that she had TS (tricuspid stenosis). The patient interpreted that to mean "Terminal Situation". Within hours her lungs began filling with fluid as she displayed a general anxiety response. No matter how much the staff told her that TS did not mean "terminal situation" she would not believe them since "you doctors never tell the truth". She died that evening.
On average a third of all people in a study will have some level of placebo response. Medical drug are only approved as effective if they are better than the placebo response. The placebo response is a real effect and it was the best form of healing ancient humanity had and it can still be useful today.. but probably not by normal medical doctors who now must be truthful about everything. This would seem to open up a place for alternative healing practioners if done in coordination with regular doctors.
The placebo response exists in other animals besides humans. Rats can develop simple expectations based upon classical conditioning. In the 1980's Dr. Robert Adler did an experiment in which he gave rats an immune system suppressing drug called cyclophosphamide combined with the artificial sweetener saccarine on various classical conditioning schedules. When the training was complete and the rats only received saccarine their immune system decrease was almost as strong as with cyclophosphamide!
For many more placebo response examples read the book.
This defines consciousness as the absence of unconsciousness. The result is that the definition does not distill out what may be the core or root of consciousness which is our conscious sensations (also known as Qalia). Qalia is that something that allows us to see "red" when all it is in our brains is a pattern of action potentials on some neurons. All other components of consciousness are probably the effects of the brain's information processing on qalia producing neurons (and their proteins)."Consciousness consists of those states or sentience, or feeling, or awareness, which begin in the morning when we awake from a dreamless sleep and continue throughout the day until we fall into a coma or die or fall asleep again or otherwise become unconscious" (page 11).
Another limitation is this book's hypothysis that consciousness so defined is an emergent property. Somehow complex networks such as the brain cause consciousness to emerge. The analogy the author uses is the old idea of vitalism Many at the beginning of the 1900's could not see how chemistry alone could store all the information needed to define complex biological structures so these people believed some sort of new undiscovered vitalistic force was needed. That turned out not to be the case, therefore another complexity, this time consciousness, must be similar. Yet consciousness is not information which is a measurement of state quantity.
Yet the author goes on to say "Although consciousness is fully compatable with the laws of physics, it is not feasible to predict or understand consciousness from these." (page 11) which is a contradiction of emergence. All emergent properites such as pressure leave a trail back to more fundamental levels of physics, in this case the statistical mechanics of air molecules. All emergent properties are still affected by matter and energy (physics). Physics does not affect conscousness directly, only by affecting the biochemistry of neurons can consciousness be affected by physics.
So why is the author against the other major theory for consciousness suggesting that it is a property of some higher dimensional space? He says this:
To answer his main concern. First matter (mass/energy) is not transmitted out of our universal space. From the equations of General Relativity matter defines space. If matter goes to zero so does space. The same principle holds in quantum mechanics, if matter goes to zero so does the quantum amplitude which is responsible for defining the paths of matter. In short our space is a confinement field for matter. Yet significantly, material properties exist in physics that are not the matter of the equations, terms like electrical charge and so on. Nothing prevents charge from flowing in a closed loop to some hbigher dimensional space as long as the total quantity in our universe stays the same. By changing the flow rate or the vibration of this flow, information can flow across the spatial barrier. Therefore certain folding neural proteins could affect this flow. If everything else is impossble, the remaining alternative, no matter how unlikely it seems, is the answer."While logically consistent, strong dualist positions are dissatisfying from a scientific viewpoint. Particularly troublesome is the mode of interaction between soul and brain. How and where is this supposed to take place? Presumably, this interaction would have to be compatable with the laws of physics. This however, would require an exchange of energy that needs to be accounted for. And what happens to this spooky substance, the soul, once its carrier, the brain, dies? Does it float around in some hyperspace, like a ghost?"
Because of the author's broad definition of consciousness the rest of the book is about the brain function which is always fascinating. He does point out that the conscious sensations of color are most likely localized in the 4th stage (V4) of visual feature definition in a region called the fusiform gyrus (page 138). This localization of conscious sensation production is another piece of evidence against the emergent model. If emergence depends on complexity of the whole brain how does one type of conscious sensation become localized to one part of the brain? Sensory conscious sensations can be more than color. The sensation that an object is moving is also a conscious sensation and this is located in medial temporal area (page 139). If this area is damaged in a stroke, the person's vision consists of a sequence of widely separated images similar to a scenes in a strobe light. This also shows that perception is not a passive process but is instead an active process in which the brain fills in the gaps from internally generated signals. This would explain why all brain regions are reciprocally connected.
So why do we have conscious sensations or more broadly consciousness? At least the author and I agree that conscious sensations have a evolutionary purpose. He says this:
"I am not claiming that such an Uber zombie could not exist or could not be built by artificial means. I don't know about that. What I am claiming is that natural selection favored brains that make use of a dual strategy" (page 237)
Zombies are human-like unconscious robots. The author proposes the evolutionary reason for conscious sensations (qalia) is:
This statement ignores the general strategy of the brain's information processing which is intersecting context control all done in a highly parallel fashion. The thalamus is the main brain region effecting this strategy. Nothing additional is needed. If the authors statement is true then how does non-energetic qalia affect energy demanding neurons in other parts of the brain? (his main arguement against higher dimensional spaces). I would propose that the most likely answer for the evolutionary purpose of qalia is not in aiding the brain's information processing but in aiding in a very general and loosely coupled way group coordination via methods not yet accounted for by physics (such as charge transfere). This group coordination would involve emotional and perceptual biasing broadcast out to the tribal group. In the end though the final way to put this arguement to rest is to to simulate brains with electronic computers to the greatest degree possible."To handle this information efficiently the brain has to symbolize it.This in a nutshell is the purpose of qalia. Qalia symbolize of tacit and unarticulated data that must be present for a sufficient amount of time. Qalia, the elements of conscious experience, enable the brain to effortlessly manipulate this simultaneous information" (page 242)
That conscious sensations do not produce the strongly connected communication needed to aid in the brain's information processing is shown by experiements in split brain patients. By cutting the corpus collosum in siezure prone patients to reduce the severity of those seizure scientists can study this effect.
A very rare patient in which both brain hemispheres have a language ability shows this very clearly in a report form neurologist Victor Mark (90% of people only have language ability in the left hemisphere meaning the right hemisphere can't talk or understand language).
"One half of the brain quite literally does not know what the other half does, which can lead to situations somewhere between tragedy and farce. .. When asked how many seizures she had recently experienced, her right hand held up two fingers. Her left hand then reached over and forced the fingers on her right hand down. After trying several times to talley her seizures, she paused and the simultaneously displayed three fingers with her right hand and one with her left. When Mark pointed out this descrepancy, the patient commented that her left hand frequently did things on its own. A fight ensued between the two hands that looked like some sort of slapstick routine. Only when the patient grew so frustrated that she burst into tears was one reminded of the sad nature of her situations" (page 291)
With both brain hemispheres able to speak "this led to frequent back-and-forth between them, as when Mark echoed one of her statements that she did not have feelings in her left hand. She then insisted that her hand was not numb, followed by a torrent of alternating Yes's and No's, ending with a despairing "I don't know". (page 291)
(Edit: This paragraph added March 31, 2007) The alternative to the proposal that conscious sensations evolved in us is the idea that conscious sensations are simply a side effect of biology, an epiphenomenon, like the noise of a heart beat. This idea seems to have been first proposed in an 1884 speech by Thomas Huxley, the famous defender of Darwin (page 238 of Koch's book). Yet all epiphenomena are by products of entropy, the emergent property of statistical mechanics that all physical processes involving a transformation of energy are not perfectly efficient. Epiphenomena represent these energy leakages but since conscious sensations have nothing to do with energy this idea has no merit. If one argues that conscious sensations represent some other sort of leakage then one must explain what the neurons that produce conscious sensations are doing differently from neurons that do not produce conscious sensations.
While I disagree with the author's interpretation of conscious sensations this is the best book about consciousness that I have come across because of the sheer volume of hard neurological data. Even with that the author does not investigate the emotional, feeling level of conscious sensations.
Bonobos are a great ape species that split from chimpanzees 3 million years ago (only recently discovered). Humans in turn split from the common Bonobo - Chimpanzee ancestor 6 million years ago. Humans specialized for savanna living while Chimpanzees specialized for mixed forest and savanna living while Bonobos specialized for pure forest living. These different specializations led to different group behaviors.
The forest provides all the protein the Bonobos need from just foraging. In contrast both chimpanzees and humans have to hunt to get enough protein on the savanna. This means males must do the hunting as the females are burdened with young ones. In addition the human - champanzee groups cannot climb trees when threatened on the savanah but instead must defend themselves, another male function. All this favors male bonding and the development of physical aggression which is then carried over into group dynamics. The result is male domination of the group.
These male characteristics never evolved (or were lost) in Bonobos because their environment did not require them. This leaves the Mother as the authority figure for all young Bonobos, and mothers are just not attackable. Even grown male Bonobos will follow their mothers around in the forest. This motherly authority and lack of male bonding resulted in female cooperation for group decisions.
In both Bonobo and Chimpanzee society the males stay with their birth group leaving the females stray out to other groups in order to prevent inbreeding. This pattern seems to be the dominant cultural pattern in most ancient human cultures as well.
The evolutionary drive for male bonding in Chimpanzees is that cooperation will allow a small group of males to dominate the group and thus have better access to females at mating time. In contrast, the drive for female bonding in Bonobos seems to be the cooperation to get food without injury to each other. The only behavior as strong as the urge to eat is sex. As a result Bonobo society is built around sex of all kinds all the time with female - female sex being a prevelent as male - female sex. In general sex is a general reducer of social tension within Bonobo society. If food is tossed between two females they will have some sex before both approach the food which they then proceed to share. The males are forced to wait until they are done.
Males still have a ranking order in Bonobo society that gives higher ranking males greater odds of producing offspring but that ranking parallels that of their mothers. Yet exact paternity cannot be known by the males. One result of this seems to be the lack of infanticide when a new set of dominant males takes over the group. This infanticide is common and ranges from "lions to prairie dogs, and from mice to gorillas" (page 118). Infanticide as a proportion of all infant mortality in Mountain Gorillas is 37% (page 118). The advantage of infanticide to the male is that females without young will be willing to mate with the new dominant male or males much sooner.
This is a great, easy to read book, one that deserves to be read by anyone interested in Wicca along side that of Scott Cunningham's Wicca, a Guide for the Solitary Practitioner. While not described as a beginner's book in the sense of introducing the terminology, holidays, and items used in Wicca it is a beginning book in the sense of introducing the spiritual aspects of Wicca, something that is often forgotten by those who think Wicca is real life "Harry Potter".
It starts out discussing the approaches used by the different religions:
"Christian's most often, seek salvation from our own sinful natures and deliverance from the evils of the world. Put very simply, Buddhists seek enlightenment - a transcendence of the physical realm in order to pursue the spiritual one. Wiccans, along with a number of others, seek union." (page 5)
I would expand on this in more concrete terms. Religions give their members peace of mind and contentment using one of three approaches. One approach I define as tribalism in which the members for all practical purposed adopt a culture. These religions are indicated by submission to a fixed belief system (dogma) and are exemplified by Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. If one is not a member of this type of religion's culture the tendancy of these religions is to ignore, ban, or persecute the outsider (I realize that these religions also preach love but they have a dual nature as evidenced by their history). The second approach is withdrawal and dis-engagement from the world and one's emotions, a reduction in all attachments. This is exemplified by Buddhism. The final way is the seeking and experiencing of connectness, oneness, attunement, and union. This is the way of mysticism in general and of Wicca in particular. Most religions seem to incorporate the other two approaches in lessor degrees but the major component is the defining one. Hinduism seems to be the only major religion that mixes every approach more of less equally with the result that it does not have much focus.
The author goes on to say:
"This book is a sort of manual on how to start a personal (spiritual) practice of your own, with the goal of Divine union as a beacon. The path I am describing here is, in essence, a way of treating our religion as, well, a religion, twenty-four hours a day." (page 14)
"Our relationship with the gods must be one of give and take, not just take. This is a common mistake I see among pop Wiccans: cast the spell, invoke whoever you feel roughly corresponds to what you want, and poof! the Goddess will hand down Her miracles like a fairy godmother. To me this is a symptom of one of the modern diseases of conscience, particularly in the West -- a concept of dominion and self-centeredness whereby I am the axis the universe tilts upon and whoever has the biggest reality wins." (page 15)
"but I''ll share a secret with you right here and now: if you live a magical life, one filled with spirit and in contact with Divinity, you won't need so many spells." (page 15)
The author next goes on to discuss the nature of the Divinity in Wicca
"We try to think of the God and Goddess the same way we thought about Yahweh, or Allah or Jehovah, instead of rebuilding the concept of the Divine from the ground up. We forget that the Wiccan view of the universe is fundamentally different from what we grew up with, so of course our gods must be. We should therefore approach our relationship with Diety from a new direction" (page 24)
"In the usual Wiccan worldview, Deity exists in everything, around everything, and as everything ... Diety can't be pigeonholed into inside or outside the universe. Deity is the universe ... not wholly immanent, not wholly transcendent, yet more than both -- manifest. (page 25)
After this great lead-in the author does not go on to define the Wiccan Divinity in any metaphysical detail. I will only add that unless metaphysics has a plausible tie in with physics it is no more than myth, a speculative story. Right now all so called metaphysical ideas in print are just a rehash of past ideas .. meaning they have no connection to modern physics.
The author next goes on to discuss magic and prayer.
"Prayer, in its purest form, is a formalized way of having a dialog with your gods. It's conversation -- an exchange of love and energy -- most often in words but also through song, dance, art, or any creative endeavor. Prayer is any time you talk to the Goddess or God, whether to express gratitude, joy, desire, or grief. It is a way to open yourself to the Dvine. It is communion, not command, and involves both speaking and listening." (apge 34)
With the nature of the Divine so undefined in Wicca yet so important to its practices I should point out that a new concept of Divinity can come out of considering the nature of our conscious sensations. Conscious sensations can be elicited by electrical stimulation only in certain regions of the brain, the deep emotional centers and in the primary sensory cortices. (for a review see here). This means they are not needed for intelligence yet they evolved for some evolutionary purpose with the most likely purpose being some sort of loosely coupled telepathy for group emotional and perceptual biasing. So what Wiccans and all spiritual people are doing is tapping into this group telepathy. The sum of various generated feelings and emotions used in this telepathy are called spiritual or psychic energies. In total they represent the Divine. If Wiccans want to be truly metaphysical with a new and deep theology they would base their ideas on this principle. This means that all gods and goddesses of whatever conception are simply personifications of those spiritual energies that need to be worked with in prayer or in spell casting."Magic is often thought of simply as "prayer with props", but I think the difference goes deeper than that. A spell is not a prayer for guidance, a quiet dialogue. It is a creative act, fusing our desire and will and vision with the Divine energy within/around us to reach a specific goal. Magic is dependent on our relationship with the Divine (page 35)
Chapter 3 is a discussion of ethics centered around the Wiccan Rede "An' it harm none, do what you will" Why should one follow this rede? ... just because. This is a weakness in the present theology of Wicca. Right now Wicca has no metaphysical or mythological reason for its ethics like other religions. Yet a metaphysical foundation for Wiccan ethics is available via considerations of conscious sensations that I mentioned in this other book review.
The author goes on in the rest of the book giving good practical advice on how to build a spiritual practice within Wicca. The final treat is her "Book of Moonlight" at the end of the book which gives lot of great invocations for many occasions, most are short enough that I am sure I could even memorize them!
The author has a blog entitled Dancing Down the Moon.
Earliest Existing Documents for Genesis
Modern translations of Genesis and most of the Old
Testament derive from ancient Bible copies known as the Masoretic Text (MT),
and the Septuagint, (LXX). The earliest
complete Hebrew language Masoretic Text dates from 1009 A.D. (the
Codex) although it is based on the earlier though now incomplete 915 A.D.
Aleppo Codex. Earlier more partial
fragments dating to around 880 A.D. have been found in an old
synagogue. Other fragments dating to 135 A.D. were found hidden in the cliffs
of the Wadi Murabbat by the participants in Bar Kokhba's revolt against the
Romans. The earliest Genesis fragments
are found in the Dead Sea Scrolls (300 B.C. to 68 A.D.) but these have verses
which are slightly different from each other in addition to being slightly
different from the standard Masoretic Text suggesting that different versions
circulated in
outside the tradition preserved by the Israelite scribes.
The Septuagint was the early Christian Greek version of the Old Testament whose first translation from Hebrew began around 100 B.C. in . Based on the many minor differences between available copies the translation of the Hebrew must have occurred over a period of time by different authors using different versions of the Hebrew text. Many complete copies exist from around 1500 A.D. onward and fragments go back to the first century B.C. yet no consistent trail of translation can be found linking the existing complete texts with the earliest fragments as with the Masoretic text. Consequently most Bible translators now base their English translations on the Masoretic Text using the Septuagint only to correct those few places where the Masoretic text seems corrupted.
The Formation of Genesis as a Book
The book of Genesis is a combination of three different sources or traditions called J, E, and P. The J and E traditions are mainly differentiated by their use of differing names for God with the J tradition calling God "Yahweh" and the E tradition calling God Elohim (the plural of the Canaanite creator god EL). Earlier English generations knew Yahweh as Jehovah and it is translated as Lord in the King James version ("Yaheweh" is linguistically closer to the Arabic "Allah" than the Indo-European "God" so it is obvious that both Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are referring to the same being).
These source can be further differentiated by other word usage. For example, J uses the word "create" while E uses the word "make" (in Hebrew of course). The E source, in general, is orderly and philosophical while J has the style of a story teller where God is very human like. The E source is also concerned about linking Jacob with the name of the northern Hebrew kingdom, Israel. Also the E tradition is more influenced by the Babylonian traditions while the J source is influenced by the more ancient Sumerian traditions.
All this points to the E source as coming from the northern kingdom of Israel so it must have been written after King Solomon's time of 970 B.C. when the northern kingdom first became independent yet before its destruction by Assyria in 720 B.C. The J source belongs to the southern kingdom of Judah and it must have been written between 884 and 700 B.C. based on its reference to Calah in the table of nations (Genesis chapter 10) which was the capital of Assyria between 884 and 700 B.C. Both, however, must have included earlier oral traditions although based on the history revealed in table of nations the furthest folk memory seems to go back no farther than 1250 B.C. Thus one can imagine each source as being a collection of separate writings located in the various holy places of each kingdom.
The later P source is indicated by the priestly concerns of genealogy and covenant event interpretations. It has some parallel passages with the J source and can be differentiated from it by word usage. Based on its reference to the Scythians in the table of nations who only arrived in the area after 680 B.C. it must have been written after that date. Most scholars suspect that all three traditions were combined by the P source priests in Jerusalem sometime after the destruction of the northern kingdom by Assyria in 720 B.C. when large numbers of northern refugees settled in the sourth requiring the need for a new combined tradition.
The book entitled "The Hidden Book in the Bible" by Richard Elliott Friedman is the best scholarly reconstruction of the J source.
References
The Anchor Bible Genesis by E.A. Speiser,
Doubleday, 1964:
Anchor Bible Dictionary with David Noel Freedman as editor-in-chief, Doubleday, 1992.
In the words of the Anchor Bible editors, David Noel Freeman and the late William Foxwell Albright: "The Anchor Bible is a project of international and interfaith scope: Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish scholars from many countries contribute individual volumes. The project is not sponsored by any ecclesiastical organization and is not intended to reflect any particular theological doctrine. Prepared under our joint supervision, THE ANCHOR BIBLE is an effort to make available all the significant historical and linguistic knowledge which bears on the interpretation of the biblical record. THE ANCHOR BIBLE is aimed at the general reader with no special formal training in biblical studies; yet it is written with the most exacting standards of scholarship, reflecting the highest technical accomplishment."
Overall I found this book to be a very good introduction into the New Age movement by presenting what seems to be the common core ideas. For the author the core idea of New Age spirituality is the connectedness between all conscious beings. His only limitation is that he and the New Age movement in general do not have a theory to describe how this might be possible even though such a theory does exist. He relies on intuition which in his case is rather good.
The first chapter entitled "Early Intuitions" give a quick review of spiritual trends since the 1960's. This paragraph sets the tone for the rest of the book:
"Immediately, we realized that his focus within, this analysis of our personal history, was helpful and important. Yet, in the end, we found that something was still missing. We found we could analyze our inner psychology for years, only to have our same old fears and reactions and outbursts come back again every time we were in situation of high stress and insecurity.
By the end of the 1970's, we realized that our intuition of more could not be satisfied by theapy alone. What we were intuiting was a new awareness, a new sense of self, and a higher flow of experience that would replace the old habits and reactions that plagued us. The fuller life we sensed was not about mere pschological growth. The new awareness necessitated a deeper transformation that could only be called spiritual." (page 4)
For the author this spiritual interconnectedness is best exemplified by meaningful coincidences popularly known as synchronicity, a term first coined by Carl Jung. Now coincidences could be just that or they could be due to some sort of inter-conscious telepathy. Our brains are wired to "see" cause and effect in coincidences at a deep emotional level. This is known as classical conditioning. Even simple brains such as sea snails have simple neural circuits that accomplish it. So it is natural to see cause and effect in coincidences and if it was not for the existence of conscious sensations I would leave it at that.
But conscious sensations exist so they must have some evolutionarily advantage to our and perhaps other species. Conscious Sensations are elicited via electrical stimulation in awake neurosugery patients only in deep emotional and primary sensory cortex regions of the brain meaning they are not needed for intelligence. This seems to leave some sort of loosely coupled (weak) emotional and perceptual biasing telepathy as the only remaining evolutionary reason. This means spiritual connectness is rationally plausible and that it is something more that intuition.
This interconnectedness of consciousness seems to explain all forms of religious experience beyond that attributible to psycholgical effects. Using the principle of Occam's Razor one does not need to postulate the existence of a human like (emotional and intelligent) god or goddess to account for spirituality.
Not having this theory of conscious sensations the author says this:
"Synchronicity, as well as the overall new spiritual awareness that we're building, is merely a consciousness of the way the divine operates in our lives. All major religions - Hindu, Buddhist, Jewish, Christian, Islamic - as well as the many shamanic traditions shar the notion of being responsive to the will of God. To put it differently, all are concerned with our growth toward unity with a Godhead or coming into communion with the creative force behind the human condition." (page 26)
The fact that the author had to base his core concept of spiritual
connectedness only on intuitive arguments seems to have bothered him
so much that he spends a good part of the book trying to debunk science
in general and some scientific theories in particular. This is the biggest downside of the book since
the author does not know what he is talking about here.
Because of this lack of theory the author mistakenly equates spiritual psychic energies (the sum total of one's various conscious emotions) with real physical energy. He like many other New Age followers seems to think quantum physics makes this possible when it does not. The author then goes on to describe how various inter-personal interactions affect psychic energies in a simplistic but easy to grasp psychology. If one considers the complexity of human emotions and the variety of our motivational dimensions one can easily realize just how simplistic this psychic energy psychology really is. Still it is a good first order approximation of inter-personal behavior and it is easy to use it to describe general concepts.
The author describes some common attributes of mystical experiences as (page 97):
- A sense of lightness
- A sense of closeness and connection
- A sense of security, eternity, and love
In the preface the author mentions an insight that was not really developed:
"In most cases to experience higher spiritual experience, we must at least open to the possibility that such perception exists. We know now that one actually has to suspend or 'bracket' skepticism and try in every way possible to open up to spiritual phenomana in order to experience them."
This is very true. Earlier I mentioned how the brain is wired to perceive coincidences as cause and effect. Many other such examples of pre-wired perceptions exist. Another one occurs if we are traveling in a very smooth riding car. In that situation we perceive the world is moving past us, not that we are moving past the world. We have to step back and analyze the situation to realize that we are really the moving one. Likewise, we naturally experience the spiritual when we step back and take down our analytical defenses. This feeling is why some people are pantheists, feeling spirits in everything even though this cannot be the case since conscious sensations are not common to our whole brain and body so one cannot expect them to be common to most of the physical universe. So the key to life is balance with a proper time for every thing.
Once one realizes and feels the interconnectness of everyone and everything one gains a more deteched perspective on life (to use the Buddhist term). The author puts it this way:
"Once we find the transcendent experience and open up to a greater flow of spiritual energy and security within, something profound begins to occurs. We begin to see ourselves and our behavior from a higher perspective, from the viewpoint of our more energized self. Our sense of identity moves past the insecure reactions of our ego self and assumes a witness viewpoint, identified now with all of divine creation and able to see our socially defined self with a new objectivity." (page 105)
Not really developed by the author but perhaps assumed by him is the process of self-discovery to reconcile ones enculturation with ones deep emotions and to reconcile any conflicing emotions by a lifestyle change or a mental detachment from the least wanted motivation. These would seem a pre-requisite to feel and project positive psychic energy.
So we live in a cloud of spiritual energy generated by other conscious beings. Making this cloud's energy more positive benifits everyone and this is the foundation of New Age ethics. By healing one's own psychology one projects postive spiritual energy outward and becomes a living example of enlightenment. The positive energy is then reflected back in a virtual cycle, a positive feedback loop. In contrast negative energies, our negative emotions, are reflected back to us as well both via both realms of physical and spiritual.
Not mentioned by the author but Wicca takes this one step farther by using "tools" to aid in the generation of various types of postive spiritual energy for themselves or for projection outward. These "tools" can be any thing, action, or practice, that has emotional meaning to the person using them. Wiccans also follow the cycles of nature closely since nature itself is a strong generator of postive emotions (psychic energies). Instead of trying to create positive psychic energies out of nothing Wicca grounds the practitioner in mental and emotional constructs to generate various postive feelings and emotions.
Science like any other form of human mental activity works within a certain cultural context, a certain world view of how things work, or in other words it works within a certain paradigm.
Thomas Kuhn states that "normal science" is essentially a puzzle solving profession since it works within the paradigm of existing theories. Things may not be known such as the function of a certain DNA sequence or how many planets orbit distant stars but these facts do not contradict any existing theory. Data that does not fit any theory is often ignored. Data that contradicts a theory may also be ignored unless the experiment is very clear (a rarity). These the author labels as anomalies.
Thomas Kuhn says this about paradigms:
"... one of the things a scientific community acquires with a paradigm is a criterion for choosing problems that, while the paradigm is taken for granted, can be assumed to have solutions. To a great extent these are the only problems that the community will admit as scientific or encourage it members to undertake. Other problems, including many that had previously been standard, are rejected as metaphysical, as the concern of another discipline, or sometimes as just too problematic to be worth the time." (page 37)
Since this book was first written in 1962 this situation has become much worse, especially in the natural sciences. The fields have further specialized with their own journals and funding champions. Graduate students must specialize quickly and that means narrowly in order the reach the frontiers of knowledge so they can establish their career. In addition, too many qualified students are chasing too few academic jobs which is making science highly political and ruthless. It leads to conservative normal science studies mixed with hype claiming discoveries are much more than they are in order to get fame and funding. Academic institutions today are really quite tribal and certainly suitable for investigation by modern day anthropologists.
Yet at least, science makes progress because all theories must answer to controlled experiments. Old "experts" die leaving younger scientists who do not have as much vested in the status quo to make the case for new theories. More often than not these theories are created by people outside or at least not completely inside the "establishment" since they are most likely to see the "crisis" as it is called by the author. Their minds have not yet been trained enough, or emotionally committed enough by money and status concerns to be blinded by the existing paradigm. Einstein was a young patent clerk when he developed his first ideas of Relativity. Aeronautics was developed by two young bicycle mechanics named Wright.
Theories are important and paradigm defining because they tell us what is possible and what is not in a compact way. The goal of modern scientific theories is unification with the underlying objective reality given by the information processing described by quantum mechanics. At no other time in human history has such a unification even been in view. Yet we are still stuck with religions that ignore and even insult science out of ignorance.
Compare this with nonscientific fields of human inquiry. The ideas (I hesitate to raise them to the level of theory) may get more complex as time goes on but nothing really advances. Nonscientific paradigms in religion and spirituality are solely based upon how well they satisfy one emotionally. What one wants to believe does not necessarily make them true. Yet having said that not everything is accessible to scientifically controlled experiments, especially when it comes to mental states and conscious sensations. In this case the best we can do is come up with ideas that are intellectually plausible in that they do not contradict any scientific theory.
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