New Book of short fiction is being released

It's been quite a week to look woebegone: no new SH podcasts. But at least we're closer to removing the National Boil!

In the absence of any new SH work, here's a shameless plug for my newest book:

A Thousand Ways to Fail, & Other Stories
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B081XHKGNC

#174: Life & Mind, with Richard Dawkins

This was a nice, juicy one and a great introduction to a Sam Harris conversation for any Sam-curious folk.

I don't have an over-arching theme to extract from the conversation, but here are a few tidbits that struck me as interesting:

Dawkins points out that we are mostly descended from young ancestors, which is why the species doesn’t live very long. In general, what promotes a species' ability to reproduce at an early age is usually antithetical to living to an old age. The classic example is a brightly colored songbird--the great colors in sure his appeal to the opposite sex, but also his visibility the predators

Dawkins invented the word "meme" to be some concept or artifact adopted by a human population. (I don't think other species can have memes...?) 

Dawkins introduces an elaboration, the "meme complex" such as buildings or religion. He is careful to explain these are not the same as "extended phenotypes." The latter are dictated by genes. So a cave dwelling might be an extended phenotype if every human, naked and unprotected and looking for shelter, would move in an stay there. But a castle or apartment building, whose design has to be learned through the surrounding culture, is a meme complex.

Here's a fun little throwaway most of the way through the conversation: "the only remaining problems in genetics are the origin of life, sex, and consciousness." Oh, is that all?

They moved into religion and mysticism later on, and Sam monologued for quite a while on the paradox that those enlarged spirits in history had to interpret their epiphanies through some iron-age mysticism. But he says that in this modern age we should be able to reach an profound understanding of reality through isotropic drugs or meditation. You don't need some primitive superstition, but instead an understanding of the plasticity of consciousness.

This invokes one of my objections to Sam’s belief in meditation as a way to free one’s ego from illusion. He thinks that because you cannot identify where a thought comes from, and that means it doesn’t come from you. But it seems to me that not being able to identify where you are located, where your seat of consciousness exists, in no ways means that it doesn’t exist. It just means that you can’t see the other side of a mirror. For Godel, it made sense that you couldn't measure the span of a mathematical system from within the system.

In his closing statements at the end of the interview, Sam talks about gives reasons to the skeptic for trying meditation. I felt that this really spoke to me, as I have become less and less enamored with his meditation app, the further I get into it. I have begun to suspect that people who meditate are in search of some sort of mystical non-reality, an escape from their day-to-day mind. Perhaps some out-of-body experience? Proof that our existence is more than mere software inside a meat computer? Why spend an hour upon hour trying for some elusive goal of non-experience? 

Sam suggests that the doubting novitiate might consider himself an explorer or a scientist embarking on the study of his own mind. What if he is more like a fisherman sitting by the bank of an empty lake, waiting for nothing to bite?

#172: Among the Deplorables, with Andrew Marantz

Another intellectual from the not-terribly-left-of-center who finds himself butting heads with Sam over subtleties that Sam seems genetically unable to perceive!

As expected, the Reddit chatter seems to favor Sam over Marantz early on. Yet I was encouraged by the growing group of people who understood what Marantz had to say, didn't dismiss him out of hand, and shared some of the feeling I have that Sam has a rather noticeable blindspot where it comes to "wokeness." Kind of ironic for the author of the Waking Up podcast.

I won't weigh in on the conversation any further than to post this for your entertainment pleasure, the title poem from my recently released collection:

Confession to the Cockroaches

Apparently, you’ve learned to read

and come upon this volume. Know, then:

it lead to your rise.

You might scoff: “These poems didn’t

lead the humans toward their final war!"

But dig a little deeper.

The missiles haven’t launched yet,

but the masses have begun their spiral.

Their vitriol grows daily.

Okay, it wasn’t just this author. It was

the readers, too. All of us who, unmindful,

worshiped the idol of Merit:

“of course the elite should get the best,”

we declared, anointing ourselves

with all rights and privileges. With crowns.

We stacked the deck, blinded by our

narrative of just rewards.

We hogged the wealth. Off-shored it.

As the masses lost livelihoods,

we only shrugged: “Their fault!

They should go to college. Get retrained.”

As though honest work shouldn’t pay.

As though college was for everyone.

As though we deserved our good fortune.

Already I hear the distant drumbeat.

Dumpster fires warm the whole globe.

Cheering, at the precipice.

#169: Omens of a race war

It was amusing to listen to Sam so unwilling to distinguish between white nationalists and white supremacists. He really didn't have much energy for Kathleen Belew's thesis that "white supremacy" is not a useful identifier because it describes most of the world: she thinks the entire structure of western civilization is built around the oppression and exploitation of the non-white races. And one gets the sense that she is not exactly an extremist compared to the rest of academia, where she works.

I have to acknowledge that as a white person it may be too easy for me to dismiss that point. And maybe Sam is just as unwoke as I am. But it may also be that I'm taking a more woke and not less woke position: I say that western civilization is structured around the oppression and exploitation of all races, whites included. I think the one-percenters--those doing all the oppressing and exploiting--really don't give a fig what your race is, so long as they can milk you of your cash and your labor.

Sam and I share another blind spot: we were both uneducated about the role that the white nationalist movement played in Timothy McVeigh's terrorist attack on the federal building in Oklahoma City. But Kathleen does make a compelling case for the circumstantial evidence that adds weight to that role, even if McVeigh never explicitly admitted to it.

One other eye-opening aspect of this conversation was the lackadaisical history of the FBI in investigating and prosecuting white-power terrorist groups. One only wonders if the growing antipathy between the FBI and the kooks who are being taught to fear the "deep state" will ultimately lead the FBI to take a more serious interest in these kinds of movements.

#168 Mind and Motion

#168 Mind, Space & Motion With Barbara Tversky

This was one of the more interesting podcasts I've heard in a while. Maybe because she sounds like someone's wise old aunt from Massachusetts. Maybe because I didn’t know much of this stuff before listening. 

The starting point was how our understanding of spatial relationships is more fundamental than abstract thought or language, which turns out to be Law Number Six in the "Nine Laws of Cognition" that she proposes.

Here are a few random factoids which came out of the conversation:

Blind children use their hands to describe directions. The gesturing helps complete the thought. 

Children’s drawings naturally tend to exaggerate those parts of the body (head, hands) that have a lot of neuron connections. 

People recognize videos of their own body motion better than they do strangers or even friends. It’s like trying on a piece of clothing to see if it fits—"and here it’s trying on a pattern of motion."

Moving in space can be better for old people to preserve cognitive alacrity than doing crossword puzzles. 

And here are Barbara’s Nine Laws of Cognition. I'm not sure about calling these laws--I'd be more inclined to downgrade them to the 9 Observations of Cognition. Because they seem to be more heuristic than theoretical: 

1st law: There are no benefits without costs. 

E.g. being creative is the antithesis of learning. 

2nd law: Action moulds perception.

E.g. our perceptual learning is done by moving in the world. 

3rd law: Feeling comes first

E.g. you know you like something before you recognize it. 

4th law: the mind can override perception

E.g. there was a study in a mental hospital where fake patients quit faking it after a while and began to act "normal," but those psychologists continued to interpret their actions as symptomatic of psychoses. 

5th law: Cognition mirrors perception 

E.g. within mentally imposed categories, differences are ignored, while between categories differences are exaggerated. 

6th law: Spatial thinking is the foundation of abstract thought

I.e. we learn how to manipulate abstract ideas by imagining prepositional relationships between them--over, under, above, within &c. 

7th law: The mind fills in missing information

E.g. If you see a guy sitting behind a desk, you guess he has legs, even if you can’t see them.

8th law: When thought overflows the mind, the mind puts it in the world

E.g. cavemen blurted out their thoughts into carved bones, indigenous people into hieroglyphs, and modern people into tweets.

9th law: We organize stuff in the world the way we organize stuff in our minds

E.g. we keep food in the kitchen, tools in the garage, children in school, and art in museums.

Shameless plug for my novel

This post is only distantly related to anything to do with Sam Harris. To wit:

Imagine a dystopian future world. Now imagine that world through the eyes of one of your fellow Sam Harris audience members. Maybe it would look like my novel, The Unsettler.

The second installment of my novel The Unsettler has come out, and here's what my publisher has to say this time: 

In this coming issue of SERIAL Magazine, the theme is SURVIVAL. We’ve got 5 short stories and two novel installments all about surviving whatever life may throw at you....

SERIAL MAGAZINE, Issue 11[In] the second installment of The Unsettler by Charles Joseph Albert..., Javier would like nothing more than to stay in the resource-deprived City he crew up in. You either run or adapt to survive and Javier has adapted quite well to the only life he’s ever known. Unfortunately, he doesn’t have a choice about whether he stays or not. In ISSUE TEN, Javier was kidnapped by a childsnatcher and dumped in the wilderness. In ISSUE ELEVEN, we see him meet an unlikely companion who guides him to a “better life.”

#165 Journey Into Wokeness with Caitlin Flanagan

This podcast begins with a sample Waking Up episode, which takes the place of this episode’s housekeeping. 

(I’m going to editorialize a tiny bit here; you can take this ignorant opinion or leave it at your pleasure.) About two months ago, Sam had some British guy on--I think he's a writer--who pushed back on the notion that meditation has any real impact on the meditator. He found it boring and decided--whether through a knee-jerk reaction or through really trying it--that it was a big fat waste of time. It wasn't going to lower his blood pressure or cause him to reconcile with his ex or any other claims stretching credulity. But I say, as long as if it’s fun and it distracts you from your mortality for ten minutes, then it's all well and good. And yet I have to agree with that guest--thinking that you're going to learn how to recognize the important from the inconsequential, as Sam promises in this sampler, just because you meditate—well, that's just silly.

CF is an interesting left-leaning but not-really-feminist feminist, who skewers hypocrites right and left. Since she’s the mother of two sons, she isn’t so quick to vent about toxic masculinity.

She wrote an expose of the nanny industry pointing out that many privileged white upper class Harvard graduates who make it to the top of their New York investment banks end up hiring a illegal aliens as nannies. And somehow, Biffy doesn't pay Consuela's social security on the proposition that she's a “member of the family.” 

And yet, CF reports, Consuela is always mysteriously fired within five years.

Here's another droll CF comment: men say women are hysterical. But if women are more hysterical, it’s probably because of all the sexual assaults they’re repressing.

One last thought: CF makes a fascinating point that Harvard is making use of minority students to bolster their image, but it is not being straightforward with them about what will be needed for them to succeed in highly competitive fields like STEM. This means Harvard is condemning their minority students--even those who are superlative students--to compete in an unfair field against Palo Alto kids with three years of AP physics, kids who have done unbelievable experiments already in their high-school labs. Harvard owes it to their social-engineering admissions to prepare them in some way, offer them the remedial or even advanced prep classes that they might not have been given, and yet instead of doing that, the kids are callously left to sink or swim at their peril, never mind the psychological damage that might be inflicted on them.

I knew a couple of kids in that category from when I was in school, kids who were dumped in the deep end without adequate preparation. Hell, when it comes down to it, I was one of those kids myself. Admitted to Berkeley from a mostly minority high school and left to flounder without the least concern of how badly of my depth I was. So I can attest--CF knows what she's talking about here. This stuff is real.