Science of the SpiritS


Footprints

The inner nature of freedom

Cranach the Elder Adam and Eve
All the while, that reign of desires savagely tyrannizes and batters a person's whole life and mind with storm's ranging in all directions. On this side fear, on that side desire, on this side anxiety, on that side empty spurious enjoyment, on this side torment over the loss of something loved, on the ardor to acquire something not yet possessed, on this side sorrows over injuries received, on that the burning desire to redress it. Whichever way one turns greed can pinch, extravagance squander, ambition enslave, pride puff up, envy twist, laziness overcome, stubbornness provoke, submissiveness oppress-these and countless others throng the realm of lust, having the run of it.

~St. Augustine, On the Free Choice of the Will
In an earlier article with Ben Burgis, we argued that it was a mistake to claim that the fundamental divide between the political Left and Right was between an emphasis on equality by the former and liberty by the latter. As we put it, almost "everyone values freedom" regardless of where they stand on the political spectrum. Or, at least, they profess to do so, although things often turn out quite differently in practice. The primarily political differences, therefore, emerge over how best to realize freedom, and of course, what freedom itself means. Does it simply mean the absence of coercion by state authorities, or should we develop a more substantive conception? Professor Burgis and I defended the latter position.

Here, I want to build upon some of these earlier themes by examining a somewhat different issue. That is: to what extent can an individual be uncoerced by the state, and yet remain unfree? This is, of course, a far more speculative question than the purely political one examined earlier, and I do not intend to answer it here. Instead, I want to show how major figures in philosophy and other disciplines have long acknowledged that freedom is not simply a matter of non-coercion, but has an important inner dimension. In the conclusion, I will briefly spell out the political consequences we might infer from taking such an inner conception of freedom seriously.

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SOTT Focus: MindMatters: Do You Believe In God? Jordan Peterson on Consciousness and Faith

believe in god
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"Do you believe in God?" It's the mother of all loaded questions. What does the questioner really want to know? That you're part of their tribe? Whether or not you're a superstitious simpleton? What do they mean by belief? What do they mean by God? It's not a simple question, and the answer is never so simple as yes or no.

In his recently published talk, "Who Dares Say He Believes in God?", Jordan Peterson gives his reasons for not liking the question. But he goes deeper into the question behind the question than he ever has. What does it really mean to believe in God? What implications does that have for who you must be as a person? And given those implications, who can dare to even utter the words without the fear of God reducing them to a mass of lightning-struck insignificance?

Today on MindMatters we discuss our thoughts on Peterson's talk, bringing out the connections to other streams of philosophy, psychology, and early Christian belief. It turns out that the Apostle Paul probably would have given an answer very similar to Peterson: belief without action is hollow, because a true belief will transform you completely.


Running Time: 01:04:31

Download: MP3 - 59.1 MB


Family

How to raise mentally strong and resilient children

father and child
My five-year-old was a blubbering, hot mess. He tackled kindergarten fine nine months before, but the first day of summer camp was too much for him.

"I don't want to go. I don't want to go," he moaned, sobbing fat crocodile tears.

Most parents have been in situations like this. It's one of the toughest jobs of being a parent, helping kids through situations like this. But nudging them through is important.

Resiliency - in both children and adults -is achieved by confronting and pushing through the challenges our brain and body want to shrink from. Maybe it's getting on the school bus. Maybe, for adults, it's applying for one more job after being rejected a dozen times that month. Maybe it's facing a scary test result or a bully.

Whatever the challenge is, the important thing is recognizing you can face it. And the truth is you probably can. Both history and research offer evidence of a near-infinite human capacity to endure hardship and confront obstacles, even terrifying ones.

Brain

The mindfulness conspiracy

consumption illustration
© Illustration: Patryk Sroczyński
Mindfulness has gone mainstream, with celebrity endorsement from Oprah Winfrey and Goldie Hawn. Meditation coaches, monks and neuroscientists went to Davos to impart the finer points to CEOs attending the World Economic Forum. The founders of the mindfulness movement have grown evangelical. Prophesying that its hybrid of science and meditative discipline "has the potential to ignite a universal or global renaissance", the inventor of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR), Jon Kabat-Zinn, has bigger ambitions than conquering stress. Mindfulness, he proclaims, "may actually be the only promise the species and the planet have for making it through the next couple of hundred years".

So, what exactly is this magic panacea? In 2014, Time magazine put a youthful blonde woman on its cover, blissing out above the words: "The Mindful Revolution." The accompanying feature described a signature scene from the standardised course teaching MBSR: eating a raisin very slowly. "The ability to focus for a few minutes on a single raisin isn't silly if the skills it requires are the keys to surviving and succeeding in the 21st century," the author explained.

Comment: The above point is well taken, but as always, the devil is in the details. Becoming more self-aware, recognizing the source of one's unnecessary suffering and working to resolve it doesn't necessarily make one complacent. Self-awareness is a tool that will, ideally, make one similarly aware of the outside world, together with all its injustices and disparities. Unfortunately, mindfulness has come to be a synonym for navel-gazing. Hyper-focus on the self can be detrimental if it's not paired with an equal hyper-focus on the world as it is (not how we wish it to be), and a greater awareness of how our own biases taint our ability to see the world objectively. It is only by seeing anything, on the micro or macro level, objectively that can we truly affect change.

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Rose

Science says silence is much more important to our brains than we think

silence shush
In 2011, the Finnish Tourist Board ran a campaign that used silence as a marketing 'product'. They sought to entice people to visit Finland and experience the beauty of this silent land. They released a series of photographs of single figures in the nature and used the slogan "Silence, Please". A tag line was added by Simon Anholt, an international country branding consultant, "No talking, but action."

Eva Kiviranta the manager of the social media for VisitFinland.com said: "We decided, instead of saying that it's really empty and really quiet and nobody is talking about anything here, let's embrace it and make it a good thing".

Finland may be on to something very big. You could be seeing the very beginnings of using silence as a selling point as silence may be becoming more and more attractive. As the world around becomes increasingly loud and cluttered you may find yourself seeking out the reprieve that silent places and silence have to offer. This may be a wise move as studies are showing that silence is much more important to your brains than you might think.

Comment: It seems that the constant din of environmental noise is getting louder as our technological society continues to progress. The saying "silence is golden" becomes more and more applicable with each passing day. Placing a value on silence, and working to experience it periodically, could be a way to reset the brain for proper functioning.

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SOTT Focus: MindMatters: The Triumph of Irrationalism and the Death of Metaphysics

metaphysics
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Between hysteria, censorship, endless war and climate catastrophe it seems the world has fallen victim to chaos and irrationality. On today's show we take a hard look at the origins of this madness and what to do about it, utilizing a work by one of our favorite philosophers, R.G. Collingwood.

Collingwood, an English philosopher, archaeologist and historian, passed away in 1943. But just three years before he passed he published An Essay on Metaphysics and left the world a rigorous defense of truth, ethics, and metaphysics, as well as a warning as to what would happen if these 'ancient sciences' were neglected or cast aside by future generations.

On today's show we utilize the work that he left behind in order to understand why the world is the way it is, and to explore what it takes to be rational in a time of complete chaos.


Running Time: 01:16:07

Download: MP3 - 69.7 MB


Butterfly

For health and well-being, spend two hours a week in nature

Nature
© CC0 Public Domain
Spending at least two hours a week in nature may be a crucial threshold for promoting health and well-being, according to a new large-scale study.

Research led by the University of Exeter, published in Scientific Reports and funded by NIHR, found that people who spend at least 120 minutes in nature a week are significantly more likely to report good health and higher psychological well-being than those who don't visit nature at all during an average week. However, no such benefits were found for people who visited natural settings such as town parks, woodlands, country parks and beaches for less than 120 minutes a week.

The study used data from nearly 20,000 people in England and found that it didn't matter whether the 120 minutes was achieved in a single visit or over several shorter visits. It also found the 120 minute threshold applied to both men and women, to older and younger adults, across different occupational and ethnic groups, among those living in both rich and poor areas, and even among people with long term illnesses or disabilities.


Comment: For more on Mother Nature's bountiful benefits, see:


Info

The hippies were right: It's all about vibrations, man!

vibrations
© Getty Images
Why are some things conscious and others apparently not? Is a rat conscious? A bat? A cockroach? A bacterium? An electron?

These questions are all aspects of the ancient "mind-body problem," which has resisted a generally satisfying conclusion for thousands of years.

The mind-body problem enjoyed a major rebranding over the last two decades and is generally known now as the "hard problem" of consciousness (usually capitalized nowadays), after the New York University philosopher David Chalmers coined this term in a now classic 1995 paper and his 1996 book The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory.

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Doberman

Dogs mirror owner's stress

patting dog
The levels of stress in dogs and their owners follow each other, according to a new study from Linköping University, Sweden. The scientists believe that dogs mirror their owner's stress level, rather than vice versa. The study has been published in the scientific journal Scientific Reports.

Researchers at Linköping University have examined how stress levels in dogs are influenced by lifestyle factors and by the people that the dogs live with. Previous work has shown that individuals of the same species can mirror each others' emotional states. There is, for example, a correlation between long-term stress in children and in their mothers. The recently published study arose from scientists speculating whether similar mirroring of stress levels over long time periods can also arise between species, such as between the domesticated dog and humans. The researchers determined stress levels over several months by measuring the concentration of a stress hormone, cortisol, in a few centimetres of hair from the dog and from its owner.

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Arrow Up

Free will is real

choice free will

Philosopher Christian List argues against reductionism and determinism in accounts of the mind
I can live without God, but I need free will. Without free will life makes no sense, it lacks meaning. So I'm always on the lookout for strong, clear arguments for free will. Christian List, a philosopher at the London School of Economics, provides such arguments in his succinct new book Why Free Will Is Real (Harvard 2019). I met List in 2015 when I decided to attend, after much deliberation, a workshop on consciousness at NYU. I recently freely chose to send him some questions, which he freely chose to answer. -John Horgan
Horgan: Why philosophy? Was your choice pre-determined?

List: I don't think it was. As a teenager, I wanted to become a computer scientist or mathematician. It was only during my last couple of years at high school that I developed an interest in philosophy, and then I studied mathematics and philosophy as an undergraduate. For my doctorate, I chose political science, because I wanted to do something more applied, but I ended up working on mathematical models of collective decision-making and their implications for philosophical questions about democracy. Can majority voting produce rational collective outcomes? Are there truths to be found in politics? So, I was drawn back into philosophy. But the fact that I now teach philosophy is due to contingent events, especially meeting some philosophers who encouraged me.

Comment: More from Christian List: Free will is real - you make choices, even if your atoms don't