Without Mercy
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It's time to stop searching for a grand plan that explains the Universe and accept that Nature is imperfect, argues Professor Marcelo Gleiser.

From the Australian Broadcasting Corporation:

Einstein spent the last thirty years of his life looking for the unifying force, as did the brilliant pioneers of atomic physics, Heisenberg, Pauli, and Schrödinger.

Following in their footsteps, I grew up a Platonist, fascinated with the idea of unification: the idea that all the forces of nature are but different expressions of a single force. So, I went to graduate school in England to pursue this intellectual Holy Grail and worked on superstring theories, the epitome of the unification dream.

But as the years passed I watched with growing apprehension as hundreds of my colleagues published papers on ideas so far-removed from reality that they couldn't (and still can't) be tested: papers proposing six invisible dimensions of space curled up in a ball a trillionth of a trillionth of a billionth of an inch; or proposing that there are an infinitude of universes out there popping in and out of existence throughout eternity, ours being only one of them; papers suggesting that whenever a measurement is made, reality forks into separate paths, each a different universe.

Were they playing intellectual games? Were they delusional, pursuing a fantasy? Had they lost their sense of commitment to their true vocation, the description of natural phenomena? Were they even physicists?

Surely, there are natural laws, and they reflect observed patterns of organised behavior. But are these laws the true blueprints of physical reality? Or are they logical descriptions that we create to represent it?

I realised that the order we see in Nature is the order we seek in ourselves. And this can be a dangerously misleading game to play.

More here.

Rosa DeLauro's Introduction to Alan Wolfe and Ira Katznelson's new book:

To be sure, I am not a political scientist or theologian; nor do I study religion’s role in politics with an academic’s eye. But as a public official, a Democrat, and a Catholic, I do experience it firsthand on an almost daily basis. And so this article is not to be any kind of final analysis but rather something closer to a work in progress: I intend to offer a snapshot of my own faith and its effect on my work as a policy maker today. In the process, I hope to provide a practitioner’s opinion on the role that religion ought to play in American democracy.

Religion is an integral part of our national discourse, and there is no doubt that it has played a key role in the last three presidential elections. It is clear that the perspectives and influence of religious communities weigh heavily on our policy debates, whether the issue is poverty, war, the environment, stem-cell research, or reproductive health. Often, this can be a constructive thing: these trends, in no small part, moved Catholic Democrats in the House of Representatives, including me, to draft a Statement of Principles declaring that our faith does have bearing on the broad range of issues that we champion in the Congress and in our communities. It also moved me to work with my colleague, Representative Tim Ryan of Ohio, to draft legislation that seeks common ground on the sensitive issue of abortion.

Other recent developments at the intersection of religion and public life, however, give me reason for concern: legitimate scientific conclusions manipulated toward ideological ends; religiously affiliated organizations allowed to discriminate with taxpayer dollars; and a communion controversy that flared up in 2004 and continues to threaten every Catholic politician’s ability to participate in our faith’s most sacred ritual. Indeed, too often religious faith has been used cynically as a political weapon and an election-day wedge. Our challenge today—in the Congress, in academia, and even for those in the Church’s hierarchy—is to respond by presenting a better alternative.

Paul Sullivan in The National:

The world of contemporary classical music is a traditionally foreboding place. As the British critic David Stubbs underlines in his recent book Fear of Music, the sonic avant-garde, in many ways, lacks the mainstream resonances of its visual equivalent (the volume’s pithy subtitle is Why People Get Rothko But Don’t Get Stockhausen). Yet Stubbs’s thesis ignores one or two key facts: contemporary composition amounts to much more than abrasive anti-melodic experiments, 30-minute instrumental loops and minutes at a time of subversive silence. Leading this charge of adventurous new music that doesn’t make listeners leap for the eject button is Nico Muhly.

Effortlessly straddling the academic and the popular, the 29-year-old Muhly’s sprawling oeuvre spans pieces premiered by the Chicago Symphony and American Symphony orchestras, film scores for Choking Man and The Reader, special commissions for the American Ballet Theatre, not to mention a long-term working relationship with Philip Glass (as editor, keyboardist, and conductor for numerous film and stage projects), and a multitude of creative exchanges within the upper echelons of the alt.pop world: think Antony and the Johnsons, Björk, Bonnie Prince Billy and Grizzly Bear.

Muhly’s natural eclecticism and Herculean work ethic have made him a poster boy for the edgier side of the classical scene, with newspapers and magazines on both sides of the Atlantic drooling over his multifarious talents and infectious energy. In what can be seen as a breakthrough moment, The New Yorker published an in-depth profile of him in 2008, while the UK’s Daily Telegraph has hailed him “the planet’s hottest composer”.

Mary-Kay Wilmers in the LRB:

Papers speak through their writers. And of all the London Review’s writers Frank Kermode was the one through whom we spoke most often and most eloquently. In all he wrote nearly 250 pieces for the LRB, the first in October 1979, a review of J.F.C. Harrison’s book on millenarianism, the last, in May this year, a review of Philip Pullman’s The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ. ‘Eloquently’: was that the right word? Not really. Frank’s writing was so much more exact, more stylish, more patient, more ironic, more playful, more attentive, more cunning, more cagey than ‘eloquence’ can suggest. ‘Stealthy’ is another possibility – a word Michael Wood used in introducing the collection of Frank’s essays we published to mark his 90th birthday. But as I pile on the epithets I hear Frank’s voice in my head and I stop.

Last February Frank gave a lecture at the British Museum – one of three LRB ‘Winter Lectures’. It had been going to be a talk about Shakespeare, to be called ‘The Shudder’, he said when asked for a title; he also said he had no idea what it would be about. In the event the ‘shudder’ turned out to have little to do with Shakespeare and much to do with T.S. Eliot, and also with Frank. When we printed the piece in the paper, Don Coles, a Canadian poet, wrote in to say that he thought ‘the four pages of this essay the finest I have read in the LRB, this issue or any other’. Before publishing the letter we sent it to Frank. ‘What an odd fan letter that was,’ he replied while thanking us for sending it. ‘Still, no harm done.’

Linda Asher in the San Francisco Gate:

In his celebrated fiction (“The Joke,” “The Book of Laughter and Forgetting,” “The Unbearable Lightness of Being”), the world-renowned writer Milan Kundera has always shown a penchant for the witty essayistic aside. His book-length study, “The Art of the Novel,” singled out for special praise the philosophical novel of Marcel Proust, Robert Musil and Hermann Broch, with its love of reflection and rumination.

So it is no surprise that this author should also take confidently to the essay form. “Encounter” is, in fact, Kundera's fourth volume of essays to appear in English. Ably translated by Linda Asher, it allows us, if nothing else, to enjoy the company of this cultivated, worldly, charming and spirited observer as he roams freely over literature, music and art. The prospective buyer is still entitled to ask: How well does the collection stand up on its own? Another way of putting the question: We know he is a first-rate fiction writer; how good an essayist is Kundera, really?

From the World Science Festival:

What exactly is geoengineering? First, consider the distinction between weather and climate. Weather is what’s happening more or less right now. Climate is the accumulation of weather over a standard average of 30 years. What geoengineering proposes to do is to modify climate, to deliberately intervene in natural processes, lowering global average temperatures and thus ameliorating the human effects that are warming the climate. There are two broad ways to do this: carbon dioxide removal (CDR) and solar radiation management (SRM). Carbon dioxide removal would use various methods to reduce anthropogenic CO2 levels in the air. Solar radiation management would send more sunlight back into space, reducing the input of what scientists call radiative forcing and what laypeople call heat. The former method works slowly, while the latter method can work within months. The authors of a 2009 Royal Society report said that geoengineering “is very likely to be technically feasible,” although it is not a substitute for reducing emissions in the first place. But the lack of political will to reduce emissions, the increasing levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, the present and future effects of climate change, and the need to act fast to counter these trends have led a number of scientists and policymakers to give geoengineering serious consideration as a research endeavor and as a potential partial solution to near-term climate change.

more from Christopher Cokinos at The American Scholar here.

Leaving the South took extraordinary fortitude. What dreams and disappointments the North and the West held no one could have foreseen. Wilkerson, somewhat too sketchily, considers postwar urban history—white flight, the closing of factories (that Campbell’s Soup factory has been closed for more than two decades), the disappearance of industrial jobs. Now that there’s no more Jim Crow, she observes, there’s “hypersegregation”: in the 2000 census, Detroit’s population was eighty per cent black; Dearborn’s was one per cent. Most often, she outlines debates about what historians call “the second ghetto,” only to dismiss them. “Perhaps it is not a question of whether the migrants brought good or ill to the cities they fled to or were pushed or pulled to their destinations,” she writes, “but a question of how they summoned the courage to leave in the first place or how they found the will to press beyond the forces against them and the faith in a country that had rejected them for so long.” The questions of social scientists (What is the structure of poverty?) and of policymakers (How can this be fixed?) are not Wilkerson’s questions. “We watch strange moods fill our children, and our hearts swell with pain,” Wright wrote. “The streets, with their noise and flaring lights, the taverns, the automobiles, and the poolrooms claim them, and no voice of ours can call them back.” When Ellison read “12 Million Black Voices,” he fell apart.

more from Jill Leopre at The New Yorker here.

John Aubrey (1626–97), the source for so many anecdotes about other people’s lives, left scant record of his own. He imagined the autobiography he began to draft would be “interponed as a sheet of wast paper only in the binding of a book”. Among his jottings is a striking image of his mind at work: “My wit was always working . . . my idea very clear, fancy like a mirror, pure crystal water which the least wind does disorder and unsmooth”. William Poole, the organizer of the Bodleian Library’s exhibition, John Aubrey and the Development of Experimental Science, and author of the accompanying book, John Aubrey and the Advancement of Learning, assembles a wealth of supporting evidence for Aubrey’s description. The exhibition coincides with the 350th anniversary of the (unofficial) founding of the Royal Society in London (its official charter dates from 1662). Aubrey was a founding fellow (the 127th to be elected), but the roots of his interest in experimental science had been set down earlier in Oxford.

more from Ruth Scurr at the TLS here.

In Basho's House
…………………………
In Basho’s house
there are no walls,
no roof, floors
or pathway—
nothing to show

where it is,
yet you can enter
from any direction
through a door
that’s always open.

You hear voices
though no one
is near you—
you’ll listen without
knowing you do.

Time and time
you get up to greet
a stranger coming
towards you.
No one ever appears.

Hours and seasons
lose their names—
as do passing clouds.
Rising moon and setting sun
no longer cast shadows.

Sounds drift in
like effortless breathing—
frogsplash, birdsong,
echoes of your
own footsteps.

It all ceases
to exist in Basho’s house—
the place you’ve entered
without knowing
you’ve taken a step.

Sit down. Breathe
in, breathe out.
Close your tired eyes.
Basho is sitting beside you—
a guest in his own house.

by Peter Skyzynecki

From The Telegraph:

Carl Zimmer in The New York Times:

Why are worker ants sterile? Why do birds sometimes help their parents raise more chicks, instead of having chicks of their own? Why do bacteria explode with toxins to kill rival colonies? In 1964, the British biologist William Hamilton published a landmark paper to answer these kinds of questions. Sometimes, he argued, helping your relatives can spread your genes faster than having children of your own. For the past 46 years, biologists have used Dr. Hamilton’s theory to make sense of how animal societies evolve. They’ve even applied it to the evolution of our own species. But in the latest issue of the journal Nature, a team of prominent evolutionary biologists at Harvard try to demolish the theory. The scientists argue that studies on animals since Dr. Hamilton’s day have failed to support it. The scientists write that a close look at the underlying math reveals that Dr. Hamilton’s theory is superfluous. “It’s precisely like an ancient epicycle in the solar system,” said Martin Nowak, a co-author of the paper with Edward O. Wilson and Corina Tarnita. “The world is much simpler without it.”

Other biologists are sharply divided about the paper. Some praise it for challenging a concept that has outlived its usefulness. But others dismiss it as fundamentally wrong. “Things are just bouncing around right now like a box full of Ping-Pong balls,” said James Hunt, a biologist at North Carolina State University. Dr. Hamilton, who died in 2000, saw his theory as following logically from what biologists already knew about natural selection. Some individuals have more offspring than others, thanks to the particular versions of genes they carry. But Dr. Hamilton argued that in order to judge the reproductive success of an individual, scientists had to look at the genes it shared with its relatives. We inherit half of our genetic material from each parent, which means that siblings have, on average, 50 percent of the same versions of genes. We share a lower percentage with first cousins, second cousins and so on. If we give enough help to relatives so they can survive and have children, then they can pass on more copies of our own genes. Dr. Hamilton called this new way of tallying reproductive success inclusive fitness.

More here.

Two weeks ago in Mexico City, the very talented and insightful Pamela Echeverría showed us Etienne Chambaud's On Hospitality, which was at the time being exhibited in her gallery. It's now gone, but it was stunning. For anyone on their way to Distrito Federal, I highly recommend stopping in at the Labor Galeria de Arte in Roma. Gideon Lichfield in More Intelligent Life:

A side-street in Mexico City, in a residential neighbourhood sprinkled with small workshops and cafés, doesn’t feel like the place to encounter an architectural paradox. Yet there it is: a four-tonne mobile, like something out of a child’s hypertrophied imagination, made of massive steel tubes with chunks of volcanic rock hanging from the ends. The contraption intersects and passes through both storeys of an art gallery: if you stand on the upper level you can see only the tubes, and in the dim-lit basement, only the rocks, suspended by steel cables that pass through holes drilled in the gallery floor. The paradox? The whole thing hangs from a single cable passing through the building’s roof, held by a crane standing in a neighbouring parking lot. The mobile is contained within the gallery without actually being supported by the building itself.

The mobile is part of a three-part exhibit entitled On Hospitality, by Etienne Chambaud. For most of July and August it hung at (if “at” is the right preposition for the object’s curious physical relationship to its exhibition space) Labor, a gallery in the up-and-coming Colonia Roma neighbourhood. Pamela Echeverría, a veteran curator who has worked at the state-run Carrillo Gil museum and a leading Mexican contemporary-art gallery called OMR, founded the space earlier this year.

Like so many such installations, the exhibit’s stated message is obscure and bland. It is about “negativity, misunderstandings and separations”. Of the mobile, subtitled ie, Exclusion, the blurb reads, it “is a mobile that doesn't fit within its own exhibition space… its totality can never be experienced… its objecthood is always challenged by the mental image it must necessarily conjure in order to exist as a whole.” That might be strictly true, but is frankly boring.

Fortunately, a more interesting interpretation than the one the artist offers would seem to be suggested by the title, On Hospitality, and also by a second part of the exhibit, down in the basement. (The third part, consisting of jewellery pieces meant to be worn by the gallery staff, was so unobtrusive as to have no impact.) This section, subtitled The Cave of Polyphemus or The Invention of Misunderstandings, consists of a still photograph and a short film projected on to screens, dimly illuminating the hanging rocks. They depict a cave in the hills of Sicily where Mr Chambaud and his crew spent several days filming the haunting interiors.

David Hirschman in Big Think:

In his book “Consciousness Explained,” Tufts University philosopher Daniel Dennett calls human consciousness “just about the last surviving mystery,” explaining that a mystery is something that people don't yet know how to think about. “We do not yet have all the answers to any of the questions of cosmology and particle physics, molecular genetics and evolutionary theory, but we do know how to think about them,” writes Dennett. “With consciousness, however, we are still in a terrible muddle. Consciousness stands alone today as a topic that often leaves even the most sophisticated thinkers tongue-tied and confused. And, as with all of the earlier mysteries, there are many who insist—and hope—that there will never be a demystification of consciousness.”

On a base level, consciousness is the fact of being awake and processing information. Doctors judge people conscious or not depending on their wakefulness and how they respond to external stimuli. But being conscious is also a neurological phenomenon, and it is part of what allows us to exist and understand ourselves in the world.

Dr. Antonio Damasio, a neuroscientist from the University of Southern California who has studied the neurological basis of consciousness for years, tells Big Think that being conscious is a “special quality of mind” that permits us to know both that we exist and that the things around us exist. He differentiates this from the way the mind is able to portray reality to itself merely by encoding sensory information. Rather, consciousness implies subjectivity—a sense of having a self that observes one’s own organism as separate from the world around that organism.

“Many species, many creatures on earth that are very likely to have a mind, but are very unlikely to have a consciousness in the sense that you and I have,” says Damasio. “That is a self that is very robust, that has many, many levels of organization, from simple to complex, and that functions as a sort of witness to what is going on in our organisms. That kind of process is very interesting because I believe that it is made out of the same cloth of mind, but it is an add-on, it was something that was specialized to create what we call the self.”

Alphabetical list of blog names followed by the blog post title:

(Please report any problems with links in the comments section below.)

For prize details, click here.

And after looking around, click here to vote.

1. 3 Quarks Daily: Raising Neanderthals: Metaphysics at the Limits of Science
2. Blog of Noah Greenstein: The Field Theory of Natural Selection
3. Brian Leiter’s Nietzsche Blog: Katsafanas on “Nietzsche’s Philosophical Psychology”
4. Entia et Nomina: A Rant about “Deductive”
5. Experimental Philosophy: Further Experimental Work on the Bank Cases
6. Experimental Philosophy: Is the Armchair Sexist?
7. Flickers of Freedom: Can There be Partial (as opposed to impartial) Desert?
8. Flickers of Freedom: Does Consciousness Matter?
9. Guardian Science Blog: Is quantum mechanics messing with your memory?
10. In Living Color: Other People’s Icons
11. In Search of Enlightenment: In Pursuit of the Play Dividend
12. Justin Eric Halldor Smith: More on Non-Western Philosophy (the Very Idea)
13. Minds and Brains: The Myth of Sensory Immediacy – Why Berkeley Was Wrong
14. Old Translations: Complexity and the Substantial Form: Leibniz’s Theories of Matter and Their Implications for Modern Biology
15. P.A.P.-Blog: Why and How Do We Separate State and Church? And What Are the Consequences for Religious Liberty?
16. PEA Soup: Am I a Consequentialist?
17. Philosophy, et cetera: Can Death Harm Non-Persons?
18. Philosophy Sucks!: Pain Asymbolia and A Priori Defeasibility
19. Philotropes: Do folks think that consciousness matters for moral responsibility?
20. Playtonic Dialogues: Musicians Debate Methods Of Political Dissent
21. Siris: On Myers on Baber
22. Specter of Reason: Ryle On Rules And Creativity
23. Strange Doctrines: Getting Really “Hard Nosed” about Real Realism
24. Talking Philosophy: Skeptic “Ataraxia”
25. The Evangelical Libertarian Philosopher: The Lockean Proviso and Federally Managed Lands
26. The Immanent Frame: Circling the Line
27. The Immanent Frame: Secularism, atheism, antihumanism
28. The Lure: A lotta Hart, but is there a “there” there?
29. The Philosophy of Poetry: The Leap
30. The View from Hell: The Patriarchy, the Gynocracy, and Other Comforting Myths of Struggle
31. Tomkow: Retributive Ethics
32. Tomkow: The Retributive Theory of Property
33. TTahko: Counterfactuals and Modal Epistemology
34. Underverse: We Just Live In It
35. Vis Viva: On Handwaving
36. Yeah, OK, But Still: Marriage

To vote, click here.

George Packer in The New Yorker:

What President Obama called the end of the combat mission in Iraq is a meaningless milestone, constructed almost entirely out of thin air, and his second Oval Office speech marks a rare moment of dishonesty and disingenuousness on the part of a politician who usually resorts to rare candor at important moments. The fifty thousand troops who will remain in Iraq until the end of next year will still be combat troops in everything but name, because they will be aiding one side in an active war zone. The proclaimed end of Operation Iraqi Freedom has little or nothing to do with the military and political situation in Iraq, which is why Iraqis were barely aware when the last U.S. combat brigade crossed into Kuwait a few days ago. And for most of us, too—except, perhaps, those with real skin in the game, the million and a half Iraq war veterans and their families—there’s hardly any reality or substance to the moment.

It’s hard to have an honest emotional response or even know what one feels. After seven years of war, the occasion deserves some weight of feeling, but many Americans stopped paying attention a long time ago. And that’s exactly why the President made his announcement: because Americans want the war to be over, have wanted it for years. Tonight he told us what we wanted to hear. August 31, 2010, will go down in history as the day Americans could start not thinking about the war without feeling guilty.

This is not entirely ignoble, by the way. The war has gone on for a long time—almost as long as the Civil War and America’s part in the Second World War combined—and it has taken a heavy toll on the one half of one per cent of Americans who have fought it, and in a democracy this is an intolerable situation. A checked-out public, a stressed-out military, a war hardly anyone can explain: at some point it had to be declared over, and only the President could do it, and Obama is the President, and he was as good as his word in so declaring it on August 31, 2010, not a day sooner or later. He can claim full credit for sticking to his own date certain regardless of circumstances—for not postponing the artificial event that just happened until some future date certain. And in doing so, he restored a small measure of democratic credibility here at home. This is what it looks like when a wartime President is true to his word and the people are behind him. Strange, that it doesn’t look better than it does.

John Cloud in Time:

One of the most contentious issues in the vast literature about alcohol consumption has been the consistent finding that those who don't drink tend to die sooner than those who do. The standard Alcoholics Anonymous explanation for this finding is that many of those who show up as abstainers in such research are actually former hard-core drunks who had already incurred health problems associated with drinking.

But a new paper in the journal Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research suggests that — for reasons that aren't entirely clear — abstaining from alcohol does tend to increase one's risk of dying, even when you exclude former problem drinkers. The most shocking part? Abstainers' mortality rates are higher than those of heavy drinkers.

Moderate drinking, which is defined as one to three drinks per day, is associated with the lowest mortality rates in alcohol studies. Moderate alcohol use (especially when the beverage of choice is red wine) is thought to improve heart health, circulation and sociability, which can be important because people who are isolated don't have as many family members and friends who can notice and help treat health problems.

But why would abstaining from alcohol lead to a shorter life? It's true that those who abstain from alcohol tend to be from lower socioeconomic classes, since drinking can be expensive. And people of lower socioeconomic status have more life stressors — job and child-care worries that might not only keep them from the bottle but also cause stress-related illnesses over long periods. (They also don't get the stress-reducing benefits of a drink or two after work.)

But even after controlling for nearly all imaginable variables — socioeconomic status, level of physical activity, number of close friends, quality of social support and so on — the researchers (a six-member team led by psychologist Charles Holahan of the University of Texas at Austin) found that over a 20-year period, mortality rates were highest for those who were not current drinkers, regardless of whether they used to be alcoholics, second highest for heavy drinkers and lowest for moderate drinkers.

Ethan Nadelmann in The Nation:

For those of us who fought long and hard to reform the notorious 100-to-one crack/powder cocaine disparity in federal law, the Fair Sentencing Act, signed by President Obama on August 3, is at once a historic victory and a major disappointment. It's both too little, too late and a big step forward.

The Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986, which punished the sale of five grams of crack cocaine the same as 500 grams of powder cocaine, reflected the bipartisan drug war hysteria of the day and was approved with virtually no consideration of scientific evidence or the fiscal and human consequences. The argument for reform has always been twofold: sending someone to federal prison for five years for selling the equivalent of a few sugar packets of cocaine is unreasonably harsh, and it disproportionately affects minorities (almost 80 percent of those sentenced are African-Americans, even though most users and sellers of crack are not black).

The new law increases the amount of crack cocaine that can result in a five-year sentence to twenty-eight grams (i.e., an ounce), thereby reducing the crack/powder ratio to eighteen to one. It also eliminates the five-year mandatory minimum sentence for simple possession (without intent to distribute) of crack cocaine, thereby marking the first time since 1970 that Congress has repealed a mandatory minimum sentence.

What is the broader significance of the new law?

More here.