Rational Philosophy

On the importance and unimportance of naming things.

A new kind of ant has descended on the coastal belt outside Houston. The ant beats out other pests for food, is a prodigious reproducer, and has no known enemies (except the homeowners and exterminators who live on the coastal belt outside Houston). But there’s one thing this new ant lacks that other ants have — a bone fide name. (Locals call them running ants, but there’s as yet no official scientific name.)

But, when it comes down to it, whether those hordes of tiny insects have a name or not must seem irrelevant when they’re infesting your yard.

David Brooks picked up on the idea that Obama, obliquely criticized by Bush’s speech in Israel to the Knesset, may not have intended to espouse a philosophy of appeasing terrorists. To his credit, Brooks contacted Obama and asked him to explain more about his foreign policy ideas, and, in particular, his ideas about handling the likes of Hezbollah.

That’s where the credit ends. Brooks sounds a little like Bush in his instinctive response to Obama’s remarks. And just as ill informed and naive about the history of diplomacy. As I wrote yesterday, when it comes to achieving peace, there’s no progress without communication of some sort or another.

“Does Obama believe that even the most intractable enemies can be pacified with diplomacy?” Brooks asks. “Is Obama naïve enough to think that an extremist ideological organization like Hezbollah can be mollified with a less corrupt patronage system and some electoral reform?” (I’ve inverted the sequence of these two quotes.)

Through the seventies, eighties, and nineties, when the Provisional IRA (the IRA) carried out apparently endless campaigns of violence against other Irish citizens, the British army, and British citizens, there seemed to be no way to reach a peaceable conclusion. For a very long time, the British trotted out the line that they wouldn’t have anything to do with terrorists. And what happened in the end? In 2005, after much discussion and compromise on both sides, the IRA renounced violence. The political wing of the IRA has been integrated into Irish politics.

Is Obama naive, or are those who refuse to talk naive?

And although the courts in California have decided that gays can wed, anti-gay wedders society (epitomized by Randy Thomasson, head of Campaign for Children and Families) now seek an amendment to the state constitution defining marriage as a union between a man and a woman.

What do these three stories have in common? you may be wondering. Well, it strikes me that from a philosophical perspective these three stories pivot on the naming of something.

• The new ants have no name. This somehow makes them seem more threatening.
• Bush and others, having slapped a terrorist sticker on an organization, want to use this label to rule out anything that might be seen as legitimizing that group’s concerns.
• And the brouhaha over gay marriage seems to be more about nomenclature than practicalities. Not that there aren’t practicalities to be debated, there are, of course, but the emotion seems to derive from whether the label “marriage” can be applied to a same sex union.

But here we have the really difficult question, do names matter, philosophically speaking. Psychologically, they clearly do. But if we can narrow a concept and label it have we achieved anything more or less than narrowing a concept and labeling it?

There are two answers: Without names or labels for concepts we can’t discuss anything, we can’t communicate. But without qualifications to those names and labels, and careful use, we risk encamping behind words that evoke emotion but not reason.

On George Bush in Israel, video game workouts, and predictions of neural Buddhism.

In a bold and boldly quirky opinion, David Brooks predicts that current research into the workings of the mind will lead toward more widespread acceptance of the spiritual concepts of Buddhism, and away from adherence to the textual “patina of different religions.”

This research has shown, says Brooks, that the mind “does not operate like a computer. Instead, meaning, belief and consciousness seem to emerge mysteriously from idiosyncratic networks of neural firings. Those squishy things called emotions play a gigantic role in all forms of thinking. Love is vital to brain development.”

I can’t help but quote his pivotal paragraph whole:

“First, the self is not a fixed entity but a dynamic process of relationships. Second, underneath the patina of different religions, people around the world have common moral intuitions. Third, people are equipped to experience the sacred, to have moments of elevated experience when they transcend boundaries and overflow with love. Fourth, God can best be conceived as the nature one experiences at those moments, the unknowable total of all there is.”

I think that Brooks may have gone a little loopy. Not because what he’s saying is nutty, but he’s saying it without any seeming objectivity or pause for reflection.

To parse and unpack adequate individual responses to each of Brooks statements in his opinion would take many posts. So I’ll focus on the aspect of his opinion that represents a common thread: Conviction. Brooks writes as if he is convinced of his opinion. He writes as if others will be convinced of the research findings. And he writes as if a person who has a sense of the interrelated self, or inherent morality, or the sacred, or God, will necessarily have a belief in those same things in spite of or despite a more nuanced understanding or wherefrom and why those senses derive.

Sure, we operate less like machines than people once thought, but that doesn’t mean that life in all its rich emotion and subjectivity is inevitably mysterious and unknowable, sacred and spiritual. Just because life has evolved to include psychological and physiological responses that evoke transcendent sensory experiences, doesn’t prove that our perception of those transcendent experiences is evidence of something inexplicable.

Video games provide a case in point. Nintendo’s Wii and Wii Fitness take new steps into the realm of virtual reality. As reviewed, Wii Fitness does a good enough job of simulating a fitness regime that people found it winningly good at doing what it set out to do. The human mind nimbly assimilates virtual or perceived realities into its overall perception of the real world. This isn’t surprising. The mind needs to be able to do this in order for us to imagine different scenarios, to predict and plan.

George Bush, still president, still persisting in his perception of himself as a leader, and a leader of some weight, has said this week in Israel that talking to Iran and Syria would be like talking to Hitler.

Again, I feel I should quote him in full:

“Some seem to believe that we should negotiate with the terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along. We have heard this foolish delusion before. As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939, an American senator declared: “Lord, if I could only have talked to Hitler, all this might have been avoided.” We have an obligation to call this what it is — the false comfort of appeasement, which has been repeatedly discredited by history.”

I was left wondering on what level Bush believes this. Surely he can’t believe that anyone who would seek to talk to hostile and dangerous leaders would expect to convince them they were wrong with some “ingenious argument.” Does he believe that’s what they would try to do? Surely not. No. Not even someone as apparently ignorant and deluded as Bush.

(One would of course expect to try to convince them that they have more to gain by peaceable coexistence than by continued hostility. This is not ingenious, it’s just common sense.)

Bush’s difficulties in perceiving accurate versions of reality reveal something about what makes the human mind successful or unsuccessful in guiding us through our lives. As we’ve discussed, we need to be able to use our imagination to conceive of different versions of current and future reality, to assess possibilities and outcomes. But we also need to be able to accept as more concrete the versions that carry more rational weight. This won’t always yield truth, but it will more often than not yield truth.

Bush seems to be able to conjure up a version of reality and attach his belief to it, regardless of evidence to the contrary. This is perhaps his greatest deficiency. He wanted to believe in the link between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein so badly that he ignored all the signs that it was a fiction. He wanted to believe in rapid and easy success in Iraq so passionately that he failed to plan for the more likely scenario that it would be a long, hard, bloody war. He wanted to believe that Hurricane Katrina was a local disaster and required a local response, despite evidence to the contrary, with deadly and horrific results.

Bush is not alone; many leaders delude themselves, as do many of us less prominent citizens. The trouble is that Bush has deluded many others, too, and continues to do just that.

Footnote: As has been noted elsewhere, Bush’s reference to Hitler’s invasion of Poland and the words of an American Senator (attributed by some to William Borah) are hardly new material. Rumsfeld was spouting the same fear-mongering rhetoric back in 2006.

For a rational, science-based explanation of life’s meaning and purpose, please refer to my book: LIFE! Why We Exist… And What We Must Do To Survive.

Following on from yesterday’s post, Craig Newmark (the Craig of Craigslist) graciously agreed to answer a few questions about the phenomenon of a new philanthropy created in part by the boom in the technology economy. Here is the interview:

Q. Is the philanthropy of the likes of Bill Gates, Larry Page, Jimmy Wales and yourself a truly new force in society?

A. I think it’s novel in two senses:

– greater focus on investment in self-sustaining good, where good efforts can sustain themselves or maybe get others to do even more good. example: microfinance

– involve many others in their efforts, creating mass movements. examples: wikipedia, microfinance

Q. Has the rapidity of your success (you’re just 55, I think) made you better able to effect positive change in the world?

A. It’s been thirteen years, not so rapid, probably not a factor.

on the other hand, I’m a nerd, the whole plastic pocket protector cliche. In school, a nerd gets excluded from a lot, and I remember that, and choose to use the Net as a tool for the inclusion of everyone. So it’s not age that’s relevant, but inner reflection followed by action.

Q. You’ve said that you believe in keeping the Internet free. Are there other things you think should be free to everyone (like higher education and healthcare)?

A. I think education and healthcare should be freely available to everyone, but how to make that happen adequately, no one’s quite solved that.

Q. It often seems that governments aren’t able to meet critical social challenges. Is the work of the new philanthropists filling a void or allowing government off the hook?

A. I think that work is about finding ways to make public/private partnerships solve problems.

Q. With Craigslist you have stayed connected to your users by handling customer service. In your philanthropic work, how do you field-test your ideas and convictions?

A. The work’s just started, will be decades long in many cases, and I just don’t know how to measure success now.

Related posts from around the web…

Craigslist Founder Looking For New Causes To Support - Craiglist founder Craig Newmark says he’s discovered he’s not much of a manager. That’s why he leaves the managing to others and concentrates on customer service. This gives him the time and freedom to support different causes. …

Craigslist Founder Buys into Citizen Journalism - Craig Newmark pursues politics and citizen journalism Muckety, May 12, 2008 http://news.muckety.com/2008/05/12/craig-newmark- pursues-politics-and-citizen-journalism/2731 Craig Newmark, founder of Craigslist, participates in …

Craigslist founder moving forward with own agenda - While Craigslist expands to smaller cities and tries to sort out a current dispute with minority shareholder eBay…

For-profit philanthropy - how new billionaires want to make money … - In addition to putting $4 million into Grameen’s nonprofit arm, the Grameen Foundation, Omidyar Network has supported nonprofit groups like Unitus, which works to develop microfinance institutions and the International Development Law …

Philanthrocapitalism - “We get stakeholders on the ground visiting communities where they have business and philanthropic interests. Combining business opportunities with NGO project/community visits with cultural immersion and empathetic insight is essential …

On the disjunct between power and wisdom.

I keep coming back to Plato’s words, not because they are perfectly rendered, but because they capture the essence of the idea that power and wisdom seldom coincide:

“There will be no end to the troubles of states, or of humanity itself, till philosophers become kings in this world, or till those we now call kings and rulers really and truly become philosophers, and political power and philosophy thus come into the same hands.” - Plato

And then there’s Thomas Jefferson, not generally recognized as a philosopher, but clearly a man who lived and breathed the search for truth:

“I hope our wisdom will grow with our power, and teach us, that the less we use our power the greater it will be.” - Thomas Jefferson

As we watch the candidates campaign for the presidency I’m most saddened and depressed by how far we remain from Plato’s ideal of power coupled with wisdom. The deeper into the race we get, the more conniving and unwise the rhetoric becomes. (Clinton’s racial politics and her unwise and insincere politics of pandering on the gas tax; McCain’s hard swerve to the right.) The competitive, beauty pageant, micro-focused format of modern politics works against the ideal, of course. Obama seems to be sincere in his desire to break the mold, but he has a long hard road ahead of him and he’s already begun to falter with snipes against Hillary and rash policy promises.

I keep being drawn to stories of good being done by those who’ve quickly made a lot of money and therefore accrued a lot of power while still remembering what it’s like to be one of the have-nots. The Times has a piece on Craig Newmark, of Craigslist, who is one such newly moneyed philanthropist. Newmark, who’s been slow to capitalize on the extraordinary success of his Craigslist idea, even says this about relative wealth: “We know these guys in Google and the eBay guys, and they are not any happier than anyone else. A lot of money is a burden.”

The purist in me reviles against the idea that people who’ve been successful in business should be holding sway with social and philanthropic programs. But why not? Presumably, we’d be able to intervene if one of them turned out to be a nut-job who was out to achieve dubious ends.

Philosophically speaking, if someone has made a lot of money and chooses to spend his or her time and money dedicated to things other than making himself or herself wealthier, it’s more than likely that they’ll be aimed at making positive impact. The concept of philanthropy requires a focus on others over self. A persistent focus on self will tend to have a much less expansive outlook.

Whereas the desire for political power involves a composite desire to achieve sway over others and to be seen to effect change. The desire for political power doesn’t intrinsically have anything to do with effecting positive social change. It should, but it doesn’t.

This points to an intriguing development in the tensions between power and wisdom. Perhaps we will see a period in which politicians are shamed into behaving more responsibly and sincerely by the wealthy philanthropists. Why shouldn’t social improvement occur outside the mainstream political spectrum? And if they do, why shouldn’t this result in more pressure on politicians to focus on doing a job that serves the people rather than serving themselves?

Power rests where it lands. Wisdom, too.

For a rational, science-based explanation of life’s meaning and purpose, please refer to my book: LIFE! Why We Exist… And What We Must Do To Survive.

On the genetic ancestry of the duck-billed platypus, the beating of suspects by police in Philadelphia, and the race tensions in the Democratic primary contest.

The duck-billed platypus has a bill, webbed feet, lays eggs, but has fur and nurses its young. And now that an international team of scientists has decoded the duck-bills genome its uniquely ambivalent classification — part reptile, part mammal — has become a little less mysterious. The team found that the duck-bill’s genetic line split off from the other primary line over 166 million years ago. It has many genes in common with other mammals, but has retained many reptilian genes.

In Philadelphia, police and city officials have hurried to stress that the beating of restrained suspects caught on tape by television news reporters wasn’t racially motivated. The police officers were mostly white, the suspects black. (One presumes that this means they would have beaten white suspects, too.)

And in the contest for the Democratic nomination Hillary Clinton has again hinted that her success with white voters makes her a better matched against the Republicans.

We live in the confines of our prejudices. Prejudice rests on the fear that our identity of self isn’t supreme.

Philadelphia city officials probably believe they act out of a different fear when claiming that race wasn’t a factor in the beatings. One presumes that they fear the incident will fuel racial tensions. Asserting that race wasn’t a factor allows them to feel that they’re acting to diffuse the tension. But asserting that race is not a factor before that aspect of the beatings has been thoroughly investigated seems to work counter to that aim.

Hillary Clinton fears losing more than she fears anything else, even betraying her bigotry. However latent and denied it is, bigotry does seem to underpin Clinton’s use of the difference of her race from Obama’s as a tool to further her campaign.

The duck-billed platypus, amalgam of reptile and mammal, can stand as an emblem of the possibility of living without prejudice. Rather than spending so much time parsing our differences, how much better would the world be if we could acknowledge that the world is just as diverse and bizarre as we can accept it to be.

On lying, fibbing, tricking and kidding.

My four year-old son is learning the nuances of deceit. When he’s caught claiming that he didn’t eat that piece of candy you said he couldn’t have he says he was “just joking.” His deceptions have a straightforward purpose — to get something that he wants which would otherwise be denied him, or to avoid responsibility for something that would incur his parents’ displeasure. Transparent and predictable, his lies seem to come with the territory of being human. He’s learning about the commodity of untruth, and its cost.

One would think that by the time a person has grown to adulthood he or she has learned that obvious, easily uncovered untruths have little value and come at a high cost, especially when you live in the public eye.

Hillary Clinton, one can presume, must understand, abstractly at least, the high cost of silly lies. And yet she trots them out as if she were a four year-old. (I’m not exculpating Barack Obama, but his lies at least seem to be in keeping with his general philosophy and purpose, whereas Clinton’s sometimes confound us with their preposterous posturing.) Claiming to George Stephanopolous, for instance, that her support for summer gas tax relief was something other than just political pandering insults the intelligence of those who would vote for her.

Recent research into the psychology of lying suggests that people lie to deceive others or to deceive themselves. This research also suggests that lying to deceive oneself has an aspirational quality — the student who inflates his grade point average aspires to that grade point average, and, more often than not, will get closer to it over time.

Very often politicians lie because they aspire to be right. They lie to defend a position because they believe in their ability to hold correct positions. Hillary Clinton desperately wants to believe that her aspiration to the presidency is legitimate. Beyond anything else, a victory would validate her sense of her right to be center stage — politically and personally. When someone fights so desperately to win, it gives us a window into what they feel they have to lose.

Philosophically, deceit is a simple concept — the presentation of untruth in place of truth. We can quibble about what we mean by truth, about whether anything can be completely objective, but this is hairsplitting. When a student says his grade point average is 3.7 when it is really 3.1 this is deceit.

And deceit isn’t confined to humans. The natural world abounds with deceit. Animals camouflage, impersonate, dissemble, trick… all with the aim of staying alive or furthering their genes.

Early philosophers such as Socrates and Plato focused a great deal of attention on the mechanics of deception and the antidote of reason. They did this because they felt that too often people were deceived by illogic. Clear, unfettered truth was the primary battleground of their philosophy.

Amazingly, many hundreds of years later, despite great advances in so many fields, we still don’t teach our children the fundamentals of logic and reason as a matter of course. Until today, until right now, I’ve thought that this was simply an oversight. But I wonder now whether the battle that Socrates started isn’t still underway. Perhaps it’s a battle of humanity for humanity.

Here we have highly educated people fibbing like four year-olds. In Socrates’ day, the sophists were aware of their deceptions, and they succeeded because people wanted to believe them. Just so today, the Clintons of the world know that they’re dissembling, but people want to believe them. We like rhetoric. We like to think that the world might be something other than what it is. Reality is hard. The truth is unsavory. Let’s go for a drive…

For a rational, science-based explanation of life’s meaning and purpose, please refer to my book: LIFE! Why We Exist… And What We Must Do To Survive.

On why we learn, and why it’s not always a good thing.

The NY Times Science section features an article today on remarkable research scientists have been doing into the positive benefits and surprisingly negative side-effects of learning — “Lots of Animals Learn, but Smarter Isn’t Always Better.” The research arrives at a somewhat banal conclusion: When it comes to the evolving characteristics of living things, the benefits of learning will always be balanced against the benefits of other adaptations, so that species reach the best balance for them not necessarily the highest level of learning capability possible.

To paint a less arid picture of this finding, bees that capture just one type of pollen have adapted to recognize that type of pollen — it’s of no use to them to be able to learn about other pollens. Whereas bees that need to gather nectar from many different kinds of pollens have evolved to be better learners because the ability to learn from their experiences with different species of plant benefits them.

The research struck me as remarkable in part because of the ingenious mechanisms the scientists had used to better understand learning processes in all kinds of unlikely organisms from the microscopic vinegar worm, Caenorhadits elegans, which can learn using its meagre brain capacity of 302 neurons, to more familiar research subjects like the fruit fly. The scientists selectively bred fruit flies that were better learners (this took fifteen generations) by hand selecting those with naturally better learning capabilities (the description of this process is worth a read all in itself). When they pitted larvae of these smarter fruit flies against larvae of regular fruit flies in a primitive survival challenge, the smarter fruit fly larvae fared poorly.

Then we have the two questions that the research teased up but didn’t answer — why have human beings evolved to be such good learners? And in what situations might it be disadvantageous for humans to be better learners?

Before diving into these murky pools of inquiry, I’m inclined to explore the concept and origination of learning itself.

In the process of learning, an entity (let’s not confine ourselves to living things) develops a new response to a stimulus. Simple as that. Better learners develop improved or refined responses more quickly.

It might help to consider a non-organic example: The most recent versions of Microsoft Office have had a built-in learning function. After you’ve executed the same keystrokes a few times under similar circumstances, the program can prompt you to ask whether you’d like to do that same thing every time those circumstances arise.

In a living organism, instead of keystrokes the stimulus could be something like tasting a new food. After tasting the food a few times and finding it good to eat the organism can learn to seek out the food. (The research scientists trained the fruit flies in the lab to unlearn the attraction of orange jelly by spiking it with quinine.)

I would argue that the concept of and possibility for learning follows inevitably from the fundamental principles of space and time. Every change in state in space over time results in a set of stimuli with corresponding responses. It is an intrinsic possibility of space and time that a feedback loop will accompany some set of stimuli and responses so that a certain response is reinforced over others. This is learning.

Jumping forward to living things, the learning process, to a certain point, gets reinforced because it produces better adapted organisms. (Just as the scientists bred better learning fruit flies, so nature breeds better learning organisms, so long as other survival mechanisms aren’t disproportionately compromised.)

So, now we’re back to the key questions: Why do people learn so well? And what are some of the limiting factors for us as learners?

Giving an accurate but unhelpful answer to the first question we could say that people evolved into such good learners because it served them well as a survival mechanism. But I’d like to present a more helpful hypothesis — human beings evolved to be better learners because for us getting smarter became its own feedback loop. The smarter people got, the less able we were to survive without being smarter still. Early humans developed tools and built shelter. This had the effect, over time, of reducing our ability to live without tools and shelter. We ventured into new lands, forcing ourselves to learn to live in those places. We gathered together into societies, forcing ourselves to learn how to live together.

This theory also goes toward providing an answer the question about what limits our learning. We can be pushing up against our limits in many ways — rely too much on your use of tools and what happens when you’re without your tools? Rely too much on the protocols of human society and what happens when those protocols break down.

But again, there’s perhaps a more subtle and direct answer to the question. What we really want to know is why we wouldn’t want to be as smart as we possibly could be…

My wife’s uncle is an incredibly successful man who disdains high intelligence. He opines that being too smart makes someone unhappy. It’s difficult to argue with this as a general hypothesis; very smart people do tend to be unhappier than less brilliant people. Bertrand Russell, himself an exceptionally brilliant man, expressed this well when he said: “I’ve made an odd discovery. Every time I talk to a savant I feel quite sure that happiness is no longer a possibility. Yet when I talk with my gardener, I’m convinced of the opposite.”

For a rational, science-based explanation of life’s meaning and purpose, please refer to my book: LIFE! Why We Exist… And What We Must Do To Survive.

New findings of brain research, exoneration through DNA analysis, and relationship twists.

My four year-old son gloms on to new interests with great intensity and with a level of focus that seems infinitely unflagging. Depending on the interest, his mother and I either rejoice (relatively speaking) at his fascinations, or despair. But neither state lasts long. Just when we think he’ll be a Thomas The Tank Engine junky all his life (despair!), he moves on to Lightning McQueen (better). And as we begin to worry that he’s reciting all the words to the Cars movie, he drops that and moves on superheroes. Now we’re anxiously awaiting the next new thing while we try to figure out how to dissuade him from wearing his superhero costumes — complete with capes and masks — everywhere he goes.

For children, new habits are old hat. But as we grow to adulthood, we tend to narrow our focus and stick to things we feel comfortable with. But according to research findings (and this one passes the ‘duh!’ test) when we stretch ourselves and try new things, form new habits, we create new pathways in the brain, and even new brain cells, that can lead to innovative thinking.

The NY Times article is light on references, but points to a couple of interesting concepts:

1. That research in the 1960s indicated that we’re born with the capacity to tackle challenges in four primary ways: analytically, procedurally, relationally (or collaboratively) and innovatively.

2. That when we reach puberty our brains tend to close off half of that capacity, maintaining the approaches that have worked best for us so far.

These seem like very dubious claims. I’ve always felt that true analysis has to begin with innovation. Sure, spoon fed bookwork can be achieved with almost no innovation — if we’re told to tackle a problem in a certain way — but if we’re faced with a true challenge, one that comes without a prescription, don’t we have to think innovatively in order to get the analytical ball rolling?

So, I take these strict categorizations with a large grain of salt. But I do like the idea of challenging ourselves to forge new pathways in the brain. And the more that I read about the studies in this area, the more excited I become about the prospect that people can change the way they think. (See Irony And The Plastic Mind and The Promise of The Plastic Mind.) We can respect the idea that we approach challenges with some mix of analysis, procedure, collaboration and innovation, even if we don’t consider them mutually independent strategies. And this gives a new dimension to our habit experimentation — if we tend to do a lot of things heavy on analysis, try something that’s heavy on innovation…

NPR reports on James Lee Woodward, the 17th Dallas man to be exonerated by DNA evidence. Woodward had spent 27 years behind bars, even forgoing chances of parole because he wouldn’t apologize for a crime he didn’t commit. The new Dallas DA — Craig Watkins — is determined to reexamine as many dubious convictions as possible in order to get the innocent out from behind bars. At an institutional level Watkins has begun to institute new habits of fairness and due process in the DAs office. And this seems to be a very important connection between these two articles. Just as we can stretch ourselves on a personal level to get ourselves out of a rut, to challenge ourselves to think more innovatively, so, too, the same thing can and does happen with society.

Institutions, after all, comprise people, people doing what they’re accustomed to doing, and what they are told to do, or implicitly or explicitly encouraged to do. It is the Craig Watkins of the world who act as catalysts for change within our institutions. (Sadly Watkins success at overturning old convictions with DNA evidence can’t be replicated in other parts of Texas — everywhere else the DNA evidence of these old cases has been discarded.)
(Of course, not all change is positive. The Bush administration has provided a striking example fo change for the worse, creating an institutional mindset in government that has set the country back several decades in terms of enlightened national and global policies.)

Coincidental to the main theme of this post, I came across an article on CNN.com that dips into the things that can happen in relationships when one partner makes a big change. The report gives several examples — the man who encourages his wife to become a nudist, the woman who ditches her fiance when he quits his high power job, and the man who loses his wife when he tells her he’s a cross-dresser.

What’s interesting about the CNN article vis a vis this post is that it points to a subtle way that we can forge new pathways in relationships just by being ourselves, by accepting our desire for something and being honest about it. Interestingly, the relationship experts don’t seem to unreservedly endorse honesty and self-expression. There’s a bit of finger-wagging going on. But in each of the three examples I found it hard to see that the relationship would be worth salvaging if it couldn’t survive the new challenge at hand.

I’ll end with the words of James Lee Woodward: “Time is what you make of it. You’re living no matter where you are.”

For a rational, science-based explanation of life’s meaning and purpose, please refer to my book: LIFE! Why We Exist… And What We Must Do To Survive.

On the remarkable ability of humans to innovate… and to repeat our mistakes.

Hewlett Packard today reports that it has created a new kind of memory chip component — a memristor, part memory, part resistor — that could dramatically reduce the size and heat consumption of computer memory. The memristor hold a record of its state, even when no power is applied, promising to solve a number of thorny problems (like losing RAM memory when a computer is turned off). H.P. has constructed memristors from “tiny, extremely thin spots of titanium dioxide” but the memristor concept goes back to the theoretical work of Berkeley electrical engineer Leon Chua who predicted the usefulness of such a device back in 1971.

Computer technology provides a seemingly endless series of examples of human innovation. Each time a boundary approaches that threatens to limit the increases in computing power, speed and storage capacity, someone finds a new way to shift the boundary.

Many other scientific disciplines provide similar remarkable examples of innovation on a frequent basis. Having just gone through the birth of my third child, along with a brief stay in the ICU, the field of medicine comes to mind.

In fields like technology and medicine the momentum for the innovation seems to derive from two main sources — money and focus: Money helps fund the research. And focus helps keep it targeted on particular goals.

The two are interrelated. Since there’s more money available to pay for certain kinds of research, these kinds of research get more focus.

In some instances, we shake our heads over lack of money and lack of focus in important fields of research. In these days of grave concern in many quarters over global warming, for instance, we despair that the government is so wishy washy or worse in its response. Two of the candidates running for president, one a Democrat, even recommend that gas taxes are eliminated during the summer holiday season!

But such discrepancies, we expect, should right themselves over time as people get their priorities straight. Another class of problem puzzles and worries me more. These are problems that don’t get recognized as opportunities for innovation, areas in which we keep making the same mistakes over and over.

If a computer manufacturer today set about building a valve computer — the kind that used to fill a room and could do less than a child’s calculator can today — we would dismiss it as being eccentric or deluded. In technology and science, innovation tends to be progressive. People accept useful innovations and employ them.

But in other spheres people hold on to old ways of thinking, even if they’re unproductive, wasteful or dangerous. Why is this?

Hillary Clinton managed to give Iran the moral high ground by threatening to “obliterate” it if it were to attack Israel. Condoleezza Rice complained that Jimmy Carter had talked to Hamas and Assad, insisting that not talking to them was the only viable diplomatic option. We cut down rain forests. We allow politics to be overtaken by special interests.

You may disagree with my examples, but my point is that there are whole spheres of human understanding or misunderstanding that relent much less willingly to innovation and progress than technology, medicine, etc.

A couple of thoughts:

1. There’s no money in advancing the fields of government, diplomacy and policy. Or, to be more precise, as George Bush and his cronies have amply demonstrated, there’s money in doing the opposite.
2. There’s no way to bring consistent focus, because there are too many differences of opinion and conflicting motives.

But I can almost hear you saying that there’s another reason, that it’s so hard to define innovation in matters of government, diplomacy and policy, and therefore it’s impossible to recognize a step in the right direction. It may be true to some extent that these fields yield less readily to objective analysis. But that’s hardly a reason not to try.

For a rational, science-based explanation of life’s meaning and purpose, please refer to my book: LIFE! Why We Exist… And What We Must Do To Survive.

On the Supreme Court’s upholding of ID needs for voters, Barack Obama’s tussle with Wright’s preaching, and a couple of proposed field trips.

Upholding the Indiana state requirement for voters to show a picture ID, the Supreme Court majority concluded that this requirement wasn’t unduly burdensome on any class of voters. Indiana provides picture IDs at no cost for the poor and allows someone to vote without an ID if they subsequently show one within 10 days. (Souter, in his dissent, said the requirement could pose a non-trivial burden on many.)

After reading today that Obama attended Jeremiah Wright’s church for twenty years, I felt prompted to give some more thought to the controversy stirred up by Wright’s divisive and outspoken views. His critics would have Obama explain why he cannot be associated with Wright’s views when he sat through his sermons for twenty years.

Condoleezza Rice and the Bush administration have criticized President Jimmy Carter for meeting with Hamas and the Syrian leadership. Carter writes an elegant response to these criticisms in an op-ed today. What he says, effectively, is that avoiding discourse works far less well than engaging in discourse.

I don’t know whether Obama ever engaged Wright directly on his views. But just sitting through those sermons must have forced Obama into having to engage with the ideas being expressed, not to agree with them necessarily, but to acknowledge their presence in the world. If he’d got up and walked out and never come back he might have made a statement, but he would have missed out on years of study of Wright’s perspective — and Wright’s perspective is not unique. If the country’s leaders don’t engage with it, we won’t made progress against racism.

But while the furore continues the burden remains with Obama to define his identity. Much better for him to do this by being what he is (as he did in his eloquent speech on racism) rather than defend what he’s not.

(Ironically, sitting through endless speeches one disagrees with figures prominently in the job description for a law maker. Obama seems to have that qualification in spades.)

How does a Supreme Court judge begin to determine whether the acquisition of a picture ID constitutes a reasonable burden for a poor would-be voter in Indiana?

The ID may be free, but where are the administrative offices from where the IDs would be attained? How far from where people live? How convenient for public transportation? How long is the wait once they get there? What fears may large numbers of poor people have about applying for a picture ID?

I don’t know the answers to these questions, but they seem to be the kinds of questions one would need to answer before deciding whether the burden would be reasonable.

I suggest a field trip: Take the Supreme Court justices to Indiana. Let them go along with a couple of poor people to get their IDs, then decide.

I’d suggest the same for Obama’s critics. Have them attend a sermon at his church. Then ask them when they come out whether they’ve been swayed by Wright’s opinions.

For a rational, science-based explanation of life’s meaning and purpose, please refer to my book: LIFE! Why We Exist… And What We Must Do To Survive.