Parts 1 and 2. What’s interesting is how The Daily Show is such a premier forum for political discussion en masse. Jon Stewart has the gift of playing the intelligent everyman for us all, with a unique combination of sincerity, warmth and humor. There are more scholarly outlets to be had, but none that feels more like home.
Serious Eats covers 10 delicious cauliflower dishes at New York restaurants.
If you’re an atheist, or even if you’re sort of religious (or spiritual) but tend towards a scientific viewpoint, there’s a good chance that you think that everything in the entire universe is just matter. That is, there’s the physical universe, and that’s it. It may be big and mysterious, but ultimately it is all physical stuff. That’s certainly the dominant viewpoint in science. It’s just not true.
Of course there are academic literatures around these and similar areas. They fall way short of the goal. They do not capture the nuance, intensity, and complexity of real life experience. Psychology and a lot of the social sciences end up being a hodgepodge of the dry, the vague, the inapplicable, the trivial, the obvious, the simplistic, the dogmatic, and worse. What’s rigorous tends to the maddeningly narrow, and what tries to be more significant shades into gibberish. I think this has roots in the fact that the mind is not, ultimately, a machine. That’s what science would like it to be, but that doesn’t make it so.
So what is the mind, then? I think of it as a communication from a kind of intelligence, though we do not know the nature of that intelligence. We can only speculate.
You’ll be talking to someone, and suddenly, micro-fissures erupt in the conversational landscape: a slight inflection is taken wrong; “there are good people who like to skate” is taken to mean that “all good people” like it; your hesitating breath pausing to take stock is taken to indicate disagreement; your hasty and confused attempts to clarify things only confuse them further. Some magical bird normally so swift it is invisible, employed to sail meaning across gusts of words, has been interrupted in flight and revealed to be a crude chewing-gum-and-aluminum affair.
—
Then there’s the subtle pressure to conform, in the presence of family or friends, to the picture that they have always had of you. Not because it is a good picture, not because it is accurate, but simply because it is what they know and expect, or so you feel. To change would be somewhat shameful somehow, to admit a mistake, to fall into the trap of earnest effort in an age of irony, to be accused of cheesiness, to forgo the keen, self-satisfied aura of professional invincibility that normally shields your moves and to be humble once more and subject to others’ laughter.
For a long time I struggled with a simple question: why couldn’t I do what was supposedly in my best interest? Most people face this kind of conflict frequently. Why can’t they exercise or do their homework or whatever when they intellectually acknowledge that it’s the right thing for them to do, that it will benefit them to do it? Why don’t they feel like doing those things?
Often you have to exert twice the effort you had planned for half the result you wanted. The alternative is to put in less and get nothing at all, or worse than nothing.
William James was not only a genius philosopher and psychologist but a word artist so delicately honed he could make you feel–for a moment–as if you, too, were sharing his piercing and intricate vision of reality.
“…the definite images of traditional psychology form but the very smallest part of our minds as they actually live. The traditional psychology talks like one who should say a river consists of nothing but pailsful, spoonsful, quartpotsful, barrelsful, and other moulded forms of water. Even were the pails and the pots all actually standing in the stream, still between them the free water would continue to flow. It is just this free water of consciousness that psychologists resolutely overlook. Every definite image in the mind is steeped and dyed in the free water that flows round it. With it goes the sense of its relations, near and remote, the dying echo of whence it came to us, the dawning sense of whither it is to lead. The significance, the value, of the image is all in this halo of penumbra that surrounds and escorts it–or rather that is fused into one with it and has become bone of its bone and flesh of its flesh; leaving it, it is true, an image of the same thing it was before, but making it an image of that thing newly taken and freshly understood.
What is that shadowy scheme of the ‘form’ of an opera, play, or book, which remains in our mind and on which we pass judgment when the actual thing is done? What is our notion of a scientific or philosophical system? Great thinkers have vast premonitory glimpses of schemes of relation between terms, which hardly even as verbal images enter the mind, so rapid is the whole process.”
-William James
The purpose of this blog is to be a sort of repository for my inane ideas, comments, thoughts, and other flotsam and jetsam of the mind, mainly centered around my life experiences and thoughts about psychology, philosophy, politics, and what-not. A sort of high-class mental garbage dump is the idea. I may toss in some information about my favorite restaurants in New York from time to time.
