Science of the SpiritS


Arrow Up

Free will is real

John Horgan
Scientific American
Mon, 03 Jun 2019 00:01 UTC
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

Read More...
Brain

Imagination can change perception of reality on a neural level

Tessa Koumoundouros
Science Alert
Mon, 10 Jun 2019 17:55 UTC
brain
© K H Fung/Science Photo LibraryAn artificially coloured 3D magnetic resonance imaging scan of a human brain.
Imagining something into reality is probably a desire as old as imagination itself, but there might just be a slight bit more to it than mere wishful thinking.

A new study reveals how imagining a scenario that takes place in an emotionally neutral place can change our attitude to that place in reality.

To puzzle out how we learn from imagined events, researchers from Harvard University and the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive Brain Sciences conducted an experiment, first in the US and then they replicated it in Germany.

Participants were asked to provide a list of people they really liked, people they disliked and a list of places they had neutral feelings towards. Then, while lying in an fMRI scanner, they were asked to imagine meeting someone from their liked-list at one of their neutral places.
Read More...
Info

New discovery showing how the nervous system passes information to progeny

Cami Rosso
Psychology Today
Tue, 11 Jun 2019 16:28 UTC
Neuron Cell
© Als News Today
Can knowledge acquired during a lifetime be passed on to future generations? Using innovative technologies such as CRISPR-Cas9, optogenetics, and small RNA-sequencing analysis, scientists are closer to answering this question. On June 6, 2019, researchers at Tel Aviv University published in Cell a landmark study that shows how cells in the nervous system pass on information to future generations in worms.

A research study led by professor Oded Rechavi at the Department of Neurobiology, Wise Faculty of Life Sciences and Sagol School of Neuroscience, at Tel Aviv University led to the discovery of an RNA-based mechanism that enables neuronal responses to environment to be translated into heritable information that affects the behavior of progeny in Caenorhabditis elegans (C. elegans) nematodes, a type of worm.

"We propose that small RNA regulation is a mechanism that allows the nervous system to communicate with the germline affecting the behavior of the next generations," wrote the team in the study co-authored by Rechavi's students Rachel Posner, Itai Toker, and their research collaborators.

The researchers wrote that the concept "that the nervous system can control the progeny" directly challenges "one of the basic dogmas of biology"- the Weismann Barrier.
Read More...
Galaxy

Caitlin Johnstone: On authentic spirituality

Caitlin Johnstone
Source
Tue, 11 Jun 2019 11:40 UTC
contemplation sit tree
Spirituality, as it is implemented in our world today, is almost entirely useless.

No, that's not fair, I take that back. Spirituality as it is implemented in our world today has been very useful for giving people pleasant narratives to tell themselves about the nature of reality, for helping people to compartmentalize and dissociate away from their feelings and their psychological trauma, and for giving people a sense of belonging and the egoically pleasing feeling of having superior beliefs to other people.

Spirituality as it is implemented in our world today is great for escapism, in the same way that doing drugs, playing video games or binging on Netflix is great for escapism. I think it's fair to say that more than 99 percent of what is generally practiced and recognized as spirituality today is nothing other than glorified escapism, whether you're talking about organized religious spirituality, casual spiritual-but-not-religious spirituality, or even individuals who've made potentially authentic spiritual practices totally central in their lives.

Comment: See also: And check out SOTT radio's:

Read More...
Headphones

How listening to music 'significantly impairs' creativity

Lancaster University
Medical Xpress
Wed, 27 Feb 2019 12:00 UTC
music laptop listen
The popular view that music enhances creativity has been challenged by researchers who say it has the opposite effect.

Psychologists from the University of Central Lancashire, University of Gävle in Sweden and Lancaster University investigated the impact of background music on performance by presenting people with verbal insight problems that are believed to tap creativity.

They found that background music "significantly impaired" people's ability to complete tasks testing verbal creativity - but there was no effect for background library noise.

Comment: Could it be that because listening to particular kinds of music already engages creativity, memory recall, visualization and so on, attempting to do more than just listening to the music is akin to multi-tasking?

Read More...
Play

Stoic practices that can make us happier ...or less unhappy

Eric Barker
Barking Up The Wrong Tree
Sun, 22 Jan 2017 00:00 UTC
ancient philosophers
Learn from the Stoics - turns out they knew a thing or two - and try these 4 rituals for a happier life.

Alright, you've probably read a zillion articles about happiness online and you're not a zillion times happier. What gives?

Reading ain't the same as doing. You wouldn't expect to read some martial arts books and then go kick ass like Bruce Lee, would you? All behavior, all changes, must be trained.

The ancient Stoics knew this. They didn't write stuff just to be read. They created rituals - exercises - to be performed to train your mind to respond properly to life so you could live it well.

From The Daily Stoic: 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living:
That's why the philosophers warn us not to be satisfied with mere learning, but to add practice and then training. For as time passes we forget what we learned and end up doing the opposite, and hold opinions the opposite of what we should. - Epictetus, Discourses, 2.9.13-14
And what's fascinating is that modern scientific research agrees with a surprising amount of what these guys were talking about 2000 years ago.
Read More...
Brain

Men more likely than women to face mental illness and substance abuse

Beth Connolly
PEW
Mon, 03 Jun 2019 17:24 UTC
medication doctor
© Getty Images
June marks National Men's Health Month, an opportunity to examine the prevalence of drug misuse and substance use disorders (SUDs) in men. Compared to women, men are more likely to engage in illicit drug use and to begin using alcohol or drugs at a younger age. These risk factors contribute to a rate of substance dependence in men that is twice that of women; men are also more likely to experience an opioid overdose. In fact, of the 47,600 opioid-related overdose deaths in 2017, two-thirds were among men.

This disparity is also true for alcohol and other drugs. For example, men are more likely to drink excessively, which is associated with higher rates of alcohol-related deaths, hospitalizations, and risky behavior, such as drinking and driving. For other drugs, such as marijuana, use in males is higher, as is the prevalence of cannabis use disorder.
Read More...
Alarm Clock

Research helps shed new light on circadian clocks


University of California, Irvine
Thu, 30 May 2019 16:43 UTC
Paolo Sassone-Corsi
© Penny Lee / UCI School of MedicineThe future implications of our findings are vast,” says Paolo Sassone-Corsi, senior author of one of the two studies on circadian clocks published today in the journal Cell. He directs UCI’s Center for Epigenetics and Metabolism and is a Donald Bren Professor of Biological Chemistry.
Can your liver sense when you're staring at a television screen or cellphone late at night? Apparently so, and when such activity is detected, the organ can throw your circadian rhythms out of whack, leaving you more susceptible to health problems.

That's one of the takeaways from two new studies by University of California, Irvine scientists working in collaboration with the Institute for Research in Biomedicine in Barcelona, Spain.

The studies, published today in the journal Cell, used specially bred mice to analyze the network of internal clocks that regulate metabolism. Although researchers had suspected that the body's various circadian clocks could operate independently from the central clock in the hypothalamus of the brain, there was previously no way to test the theory, said Paolo Sassone-Corsi, director of UCI's Center for Epigenetics and Metabolism and senior author of one of the studies.

To overcome that obstacle, scientists figured out how to disable the entire circadian system of the mice, then jump-start individual clocks. For the experiments reported in the Cell papers, they activated clocks inside the liver or skin.

"The results were quite surprising," said Sassone-Corsi, Donald Bren Professor of Biological Chemistry. "No one realized that the liver or skin could be so directly affected by light."

For example, despite the shutdown of all other body clocks, including the central brain clock, the liver knew what time it was, responded to light changes as day shifted to night and maintained critical functions, such as preparing to digest food at mealtime and converting glucose to energy.

Somehow, the liver's circadian clock was able to detect light, presumably via signals from other organs. Only when the mice were subjected to constant darkness did the liver's clock stop functioning.
Read More...
Rose

The Healing Power of Gardens: Oliver Sacks on the Psychological and Physiological Consolations of Nature

Maria Popva
Brain Pickings
Sun, 02 Jun 2019 14:04 UTC
Forest
Art by Violeta Lopíz and Valerio Vidali from The Forest by Riccardo Bozzi
"In forty years of medical practice, I have found only two types of non-pharmaceutical 'therapy' to be vitally important for patients with chronic neurological diseases: music and gardens."

"I work like a gardener," the great painter Joan Miró wrote in his meditation on the proper pace for creative work. It is hardly a coincidence that Virginia Woolf had her electrifying epiphany about what it means to be an artist while walking amid the flower beds in the garden at St. Ives. Indeed, to garden - even merely to be in a garden - is nothing less than a triumph of resistance against the merciless race of modern life, so compulsively focused on productivity at the cost of creativity, of lucidity, of sanity; a reminder that we are creatures enmeshed with the great web of being, in which, as the great naturalist John Muir observed long ago, "when we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe"; a return to what is noblest, which means most natural, in us. There is something deeply humanizing in listening to the rustle of a newly leaved tree, in watching a bumblebee romance a blossom, in kneeling onto the carpet of soil to make a hole for a sapling, gently moving a startled earthworm or two out of the way. Walt Whitman knew this when he weighed what makes life worth living as he convalesced from a paralytic stroke: "After you have exhausted what there is in business, politics, conviviality, love, and so on - have found that none of these finally satisfy, or permanently wear - what remains? Nature remains; to bring out from their torpid recesses, the affinities of a man or woman with the open air, the trees, fields, the changes of seasons - the sun by day and the stars of heaven by night."
Read More...
Caesar

What does it mean to suffer consciously?

Sterlin & Aaron
Insightful Innovations
Fri, 13 Sep 2013 00:00 UTC
man and universe
Nobody wants to suffer. In fact, I think the goal of many people's lives is to stay as far away from suffering as possible. Pain is no fun, because you know...it's pain. When we are in pain we spend most of our energy trying to figure out how to get out of pain.

You put your hand in a fire, it burns, the hand moves. That's lesson two in the "Life 101" handbook (unless you like that type of thing then burn on my friend.) Nonetheless, for most of us if we are suffering, or more appropriately, if we are "in suffering" (because we cannot be suffering) it can be a peaceful to practice "conscious suffering".

Most of the time when we are suffering it's because we believe we shouldn't be having the experience we are having. "I shouldn't have cancer", "I shouldn't be going through a break-up", "I shouldn't have lost my job", etc. We are resisting what is happening and therefore fighting the Reality of the situation. We are hurting and we want it to stop dammit!

Pain is typically a warning that something needs to be addressed (although sometimes we inflict pain because it's what we are used to, or we don't know any better). But what's wrong is never the situation itself, that's always neutral, but our thinking or judgement about the situation.
Read More...