The "Crazy" Rev. Wright - REDUX (originally posted 3/26/08)

I've been meaning to do a quick and dirty exegesis of Rev. Jeremiah Wright's most "controversial" sermonic utterances, i.e., those suggesting an organized effort to damage Black folks with drugs, disease, and incarceration. Thankfully one of my literary icons, the great Ishmael Reed, has written the response that I would've liked to write - and then some. It's lengthy and well worth reading in its entirety.

Martin Luther King. Jr. had a dream. Here's mine. What would happen if all of the whites holding forth in Op-eds and on cable about race- both in the progressive and corporate media- the middle persons who interpret black America for whites( when they are capable of speaking for themselves), the screenwriters and TV writers who make millions from presenting blacks as scum, and the authors of the fake ghetto books would just shut the fuck up for a few months and listen. Just listen. Listen to blacks, browns, reds and yellows, people whose views are ignored by the segregated media. Listen, not just to their meek colored mind doubles like an Obama critic, Rev. Rivers, who nobody's ever heard of, but people who will level with them.

In 1957, Doubleday released Richard Wright's White Man Listen. In it, he wrote "...the greatest aid that any white Westerner can give Africa is by becoming a missionary right in the heart of the Western world, explaining to his own people what they have done to Africa."

Nobody expects the media to educate the public about Africa. The current coverage is consistent with the images found in the Tarzan movies. It's not going to change. I'll settle for missionary work among the American public. Free them from entrapment by the corporate media, which are causing their brain cells to atrophy. Teach them the other points of views that are smothered by the noise, and trivialized on You Tube. Then maybe they'll understand where the crazy Rev. Wright is coming from.

Of course, this is NOT going to happen. Not even an Obama presidency would suffice to initiate the profound and encompassing evolutionary surge that would be required to adjust the collective American psyche enough to stop its insane self-talk long enough to listen to a different point of view.

when knowledge, love, and work are stunted and frustrated....,

Hermes Press Review of Listen Little Man

wikilivres.ca | Listen, Little Man! Is a human and not a scientific document. It was written in the summer of 1945 for the Archives of the Orgone Institute without the intention of publishing it. It was the result of the inner storms and conflicts of a natural scientist and physician who watched, over decade first naively, then with amazement and finally with horror, what the Little Man in the street does to himself; how he suffers and rebels, how he esteems his enemies and murders his friends; how, wherever he gains power as a ‘representative of the – people’ he misuses this power and makes it into something more cruel than the power which previously he had to suffer at the hands of individual sadists of the upper classes. 

This “Talk” to the Little Man was the quiet answer to gossip and defamation. For decades, the emotional plague has tried again and again to kill orgone research (note well: not to prove it incorrect, but to kill it by defamation). Orgone research carries a very heavy responsibility for human life and health. The fact justifies the publication of this ‘Talk’ or a historical document. It seemed necessary for the ‘man in the street’ to learn what goes on in a scientific workshop and also to learn what he looks like to an experienced psychiatrist. He must learn to know reality, which alone can counteract his disastrous craving for authority. He must be told clearly what responsibility he carries, whether he works, loves, hates or gossips. He must learn how he becomes a Fascist, be it the black or red variety. He who fights for the safeguarding of the living and the protection of our children must needs be against the red as well as the black Fascist. Not because today the red Fascist, like the black Fascist before him, has a murderous ideology, but because he turns lively and healthy children into cripples, robots and moral idiots; because with him, the state comes before right, the lie before truth, war before life; because the child, and the safeguarding of the living in the child, remains our only hope. There is only one loyalty for the educator and physician: that to the living in the child and the patient. If this loyalty is strictly adhered to, the great questions of ‘foreign politics’ also find their simple solution. 

This ‘Talk’ does not imply that one should make it the pattern of one’s existence. It describes storms in the emotional life of a productive, happy individual. It does not want a, convince or win anybody. It pictures experience as a painting pictures a thunderstorm. The reader is not asked to like it. He may read it or not. It does not contain any intentions or programmes. All it wants to do is to win for the researcher and thinker the right to personal reaction, which one has never denied, to the poet or philosopher. It is a protest against the secret and unrecognized intention of the emotional plague to shoot its poison arrows at the hard-working researcher, from a safe ambush. It shows what the emotional plague is, how it functions and retards progress. It also attests to the confidence in the tremendous un-mined treasures, which lie in the depth of human nature: ready to be put in the service of fulfilling human hopes. 

The living, in its social and human interrelationship, is naively kindly and thus, under prevailing conditions, endangered. It assumes that the fellow human also follows the laws of the living and is kindly, helpful and giving. As long a. then is the emotional plague, this natural basic attitude that of the healthy child or the primitive, becomes the greatest danger in the struggle for a rational order of life. For the plague individual also ascribes to his fellow beings the characteristics of his own thinking and acting. The kindly individual believes that all people are kindly and act accordingly. The plague individual believes that all people lie, swindle, steal and crave power. Clearly, then, the living is at a disadvantage and in danger. Where it gives to the plague individual it is sucked dry and then derided or betrayed; and where it trusts it is cheated. 

That’s the way it has always been. It is time for the living a, become hard when hardness is needed in the struggle for its safeguarding and development; in doing so, it will not lose its kindness if it sticks to the truth courageously. There is hope in the fact that, among millions of industrious, decent individuals then an always only just a few pestilential individuals who cause murderous mischief by appealing to the dark nod dangerous impulses in the structure of the armored mass individual and lend them to organized political murder. There is only one antidote to the germs of the emotional plague in the mass individual: his own feeling of living life. The living dots not ask for power but for its proper role in human life. It is based on the three pillars of love, work and knowledge He who has to protect the living against the emotional plague has to lean to use the right to free speech as we enjoy it in America at least as well for the good as the emotional plague misuses it for the bad. Granted equal right in the depression of opinion, the rational finally must win out. This is an important hope.

First Principle - Always Bet on Black - Redux

No race that has anything to contribute to the markets of the world is long in any degree ostracized.

--Booker T. Washington

Having been invited to discuss solutions, I aim to summarize some of the experiences that have given rise to what I call an "open source business model". I should be able to accomplish this in three installments. (originally posted 12/20/07 - reposted 10/13/10 - one'mo gin today)
1. The power of cultural production.

2. The power of open source culture.

3. The power of creative collaboration.

So a few years ago, I'm experimenting with Content Management Systems (CMS) (the database driven backend to interactive websites) in the context of an image sharing technology. I read an article in the Kansas City Star about a comics creator in Kansas City Kansas who was experimenting with CD-Romics, or comics on compact disc. So I call this brother Anthony Jappa

Comics are extremely visual, the cover art is a major selling draw, and all-in-all comics would make perfect grist for the image sharing mill. Furthermore, I used to have a serious love jones for comic books. Long story short, though our initial collaboration did not yield a successful business model we've been friends and collaborators ever since. (digitizing covers for collectors proved excessively labor intensive, we couldn't get folks to do the work themselves, and eBay was already in full effect) And our continuing collaboration has produced a proven and successful methodology for infecting young minds with the urge to create, collaborate, and commercialize. I keep the original development site we constructed as a memento of our original scope and objectives - because where we've gone is so much beyond what this effort set out to achieve.

Back to the matter at hand. Brother Jappa is a true master in the field of creative cultural production. Largely self-taught, he has reached the stage in his career where he writes books and creates animated shorts. He earns his living doing what he loves to do. He is also one of the greatest natural teachers I have ever had the privilege of meeting. He can teach you not only the discipline, but can teach you everything there is to know about comics creation as a cultural production business, as well. It's in the latter domain that he has taught me a helluva lot about its history, its power, and changes in the nature of the thing that have resulted from monopolistic control of comics creation, publication, and distribution. The latter is the business reality against which he's had to contend for over a dozen years.

His innovative flirtation with CD-Romics was a preliminary effort to use technology to get around some of those distribution control barriers. When I met him, I was vaguely aware that the comics game had changed substantially since I was a kid, but I had no idea concerning the specific nature of the changes that had taken place. See, I was a hardcore comic book collector when I was boy. Back in the day, a dollar would get you 4 comics and an afternoon of mind expanding escape. Moreover, you could buy comics in any convenience store, many grocery stores, almost all pharmacies, they were everywhere newstands were to be found. Comics were not only the cheapest and best entertainment available to me - they became the core of my very first business, as well. By the age of 12, I had become a collector/dealer of comics. By the time I was 20, my collection was extensive enough that I was able to pay for my first two years of college tuition and expenses through the sale of much of that collection.

As anybody who has shared this addiction knows, comics are no longer ubiquitous and a dollar won't come anywhere near buying you even a single comic book. Jappa explained to me how the Marvel/DC/Diamond publication distribution monopolies had fundamentally altered the landscape of comic book availability and further, how the dominant business practices in the industry have made it exceedingly difficult for independant comics creators to break-in in any meaningful way into this field of cultural production and entertainment. For his business to succeed - and there's no question that his work is worldclass - Jappa's had to hustle and grind like a madman. Getting breaks here and there with dealers, working the convention circuit, and doing everything he can to figure out alternative pathways by which he can achieve mass distribution and proliferation of his work product.

Because my active interest in comics had fallen off after I sold the bulk of my collection, it had been years since I had paid comics any heed at all. However, I had noticed that comics were by no means as available as they once had been. Everything that Jappa taught me about the comic publication and distribution industry was a smaller scale instantiation of what Norman Kelley had written a few years earlier about the music industry.

Today, a great deal of public attention is misdirected toward issues of content in popular cultural production. Content is merely a symptom, it is not the root cause of the present malaise in popular cultural production. Control of production and distribution is the cause of the current malaise. There are worlds upon worlds of original, wholesome, uplifting, enlightening, and entertaining cultural production that never get published or put into widespread distribution. Folks lose their minds debating high/low distinctions of culture and anybody with an opinion is qualified to enter the fray. However, real practitioners and specialists in the business know that most of the actual barriers to the market reduce to business and interpersonal nuts and bolts. These include issues like;

• how artists are recruited,
• how contracts are structured for maximums profits for record firms,
• how much firms spend on the production of an artist's work,
• whether artists make their living solely by selling units or doing performances (a situation similar to that of blues musicians),
• how musicians lose the copyright to their music,
• the lack of royalty payments, and
• the Big Six publication and distribution monopoly

On a smaller scale, the comics industry is identical.

Very likely, there never will be a substitute for the paper comic that is the equivalent of the CD-ROM substitute for vinyl record albums, and the rapid and destabilizing emergence of mp3's as a substitute for CD-ROMS. But you never know. Brother Jappa has twelve years invested in the game and he's still hustling, grinding, and inovating in order to make that breakthrough. I'm going to support him with technology any and every way I know how to do.

Back to the matter at hand, the power of cultural production - one of the other fundamentals I learned from Jappa is the universality of the basic storyboard as the basis for all complex narrative storytelling. If you look into the basement of any movie that has ever been made, what you'll find that comics is the creative and preproduction grist for that creative mill. i.e., storyboards that lay out the visual as well as narrative flow that will be converted to the screen. Same goes for complex games and video games. The comics creation discipline is a fundamental prerequisite to any complex narrative cultural production that takes place in our society. It is a lynchpin of complex cultural production.

Readers of the assault know full well the power of images to manipulate and control the subliminal consciousness. As a singular historian and master of this game, Jappa has taught me a great deal about the intent and use of images across the history of comics - on both conscious and subconscious levels - to convey specific messages to the audience these comics are created to address.

Comics creation is an immensely powerful and fundamental narrative discipline that is imperative for us to master and control. There are no barriers to entry on the creation side, and we're Working overtime to figure out methods for short-circuiting and overcoming the market barriers posed by the dominant distribution monopoly. Technology is key to overcoming those barriers. The last really powerful aspect of this game is that both boys and girls enjoy and gravitate toward various aspects of the creative work involved with it. Children love to create, they love to do cultural production work, and they love to learn all the ins-and-outs of the technique involved with doing it well. It's a carrot with which draw children into an oasis of creation, collaboration, disciplined development of technique and invite him to meet and discuss ways in which we might collaborate.and last but not least the potential commercial rewards of harnessing their imaginations and plying their creative workproducts in the marketplace.

Matter of fact, it's the initial sugarcoating I've found effective for drawing children into routine use and increasing familiarity with open source technologies. We make a concerted effort to use only open source software in our digital production efforts. I'll explain this more fully in the next installment. It's important because not only do we want our kids to be creative producers and ply the workproduct of their imaginations in the market, we also want them to be creative technologists capable of directly controlling and modifying the tools used to do the fun stuff.

Work with open source tools and technologies conduces to exposure to the wide world of open source culture, as well - and that's a culture that is fundamentally all about surmounting control and distribution barriers. Our solutions will emerge from those small, dedicated crews that learn how to surmount current control and distribution barriers and collaborate with likeminded others to proliferate that knowhow far and wide...,

is the book an indispensable cognitive object or a cognitive bottleneck?

npr | What counts as a book these days, in a world of Kindles, Nooks and iPads — and eager talk about new platforms and distribution methods?

Traditional publishers are traveling a long and confusing road into the digital future. To begin with, here's the conventional wisdom about publishing: E-books are destroying the business model.

People expect them to be cheaper than physical books, and that drives down prices. But the story's not that simple. For one thing, digital publishers have the same problem that record labels do: piracy. And there's just not the same stigma attached to pirating an e-book as there is to holding up a Barnes & Noble.

It turns out, though, that some publishers are doing pretty well despite the piracy problem. "We've had an incredible year," says Sourcebooks President Dominique Raccah. "Last year was the best year in the company's history. This year we beat that, which I didn't think was even possible." Raccah adds that her company is doing well because of digital publishing, not in spite of it. "It's been an amazing ride," she says.

It turns out there are some huge advantages — at least for publishers. A big one: The price of an e-book isn't fixed the way it is with physical books. Ten years ago, a publisher would have sent out its books to the bookstore with the price stamped on the cover. After that, it was done — the publisher couldn't put it on sale to sell more books.

Alien Abductions and the End of White People - REDUX

Another oldy but goody. This time from subrealist commentator Annalee Newitz;

Let us consider another, even more widely discredited, theory about UFOs and extraterrestrial intelligence. A few members of the scientific community and certain elements in the UFOlogy community claim that the US Government has been in contact with extraterrestrials since the late 40s. It has been suggested that the government actually possesses alien space craft and has captured aliens who crash-landed. The government is covering up its secret knowledge by ridiculing and threatening those who attempt to make public the existence of these alien 'visitors'. This theory can hardly be proven true or false without further evidence. However, it certainly seems like the kind of thing the US Government would do if confronted with something uncontrollable and highly organized. In other words, just because the aliens may be a hoax doesn't mean the government hasn't lied to us in similar situations. During the civil rights protests of the 50s and 60s, one of the ways the government attempted to quell social unrest was by pretending nothing was going on or claiming that the protesters were just a bunch of crazy children. This strategy backfired when people across the country began receiving images on television of African-Americans being beaten and menaced with firehoses during peaceful protests in the South. People formerly unaware of the civil rights violations endured by African-Americans were galvanized by these images and a national movement was born. What I am trying to point out here is that whenever the social status quo is threatened by a united group, the US Government's position has always been one of official denial. For the government, the civil rights movement was just a 'fantasy' in the minds of a socially isolated group of people until widespread publicity made it 'real'.

In the early 90s, one might say civil rights movements of the late 50s and 60s have had a substantial effect on mainstream politics, culture and the law. A majority of people in the United States would probably agree that slavery and segregation were indeed 'real' abuses of power. While the plight of African-Americans was once accurately called 'invisible' by Ralph Ellison, it is now quite visible and deemed a force to be reckoned with. What I want to suggest at this point is that minority power and multiculturalism, like the old world order, are predicated upon keeping a particular 'invisible' group of people hidden from sight. The group I mean is white people. This is an incredibly unpopular position to take in a time when white people are often blamed for global injustice. Asking a multicultural society to recognize white people as a marginalized group is perhaps as absurd as claiming aliens are abducting Earth people.

Proponents of minority discourse and multiculturalism claim white people spent most of history recognizing themselves and therefore don't need any more recognition; after all, isn't history written by 'dead white men'? I think the problem with the multiculturalist idea that white people must be stopped like this is that it perpetuates the same old problem of center vs. margin, with the margin coming out a bit whiter this time around. We still live in a divided society, but every race gets to be the people in the center. That is, racial minorities get to occupy the same position white people had in the old world order. As long as we tell ourselves that imperialism was the white people's problem, we make the mistake of thinking that somehow non-white people aren't capable of being just as fearful, ignorant and oppressive as those white people on the ships were centuries ago. Therefore when I say we must recognize white people, what I'm really saying is that we need to recognize the 'white people' in all of us. We are all — white and non-white — capable of taking advantage of each other for power or profit; a non-white ruler can be just as cruel and terrifying as a white one. But as long as the white person bears the burden of guilt for the horrors of imperialism, it will be too easy to forget that imperialist oppression can and does exist without white people at all. The invisible white person in the margin reminds us that oppressive power can exist even when non-whites rule the world.

Here ends the subrealist exposition for this morning. While I intended to take on the subject of dopamine hegemony as monster of the id, I got sidetracked a little bit. Ah well, the weekend's still young and we seem to be on a roll, what with cognitive dissonance and imperial dissolution at alltime historical highs. If we are to speak of action directives, it makes sense to look at the situation from the perspective of centuries, rather than decades, from the long view of possible psychological evolution, and from the new physics, rather than the Cartesian-Newtonian blind alley.

If the situation is going to cusp, and I believe that it will, I think that it is in the cusp and only in cusp that the long-term controlling variables reach critical instability. It is those momentarily unstable states within which small nudges can have big effects.

How can the controlling variables be identified? What is distraction and what is real? Originally posted March 29, 2008.

UFO Abductions and Race Fear? - REDUX

Steven Mizrach is an interesting subrealist.

Though UFO abductions do appear to be an international phenomenon, the lion's share of cases seem to come from Anglo-Saxon-rooted countries like the United States, England, South Africa, and Australia. Interestingly, all of these countries face race problems - whether it be with Aborigines, African-Americans, Zulu and Xhosa, or Caribbean blacks from the commonwealth. In the Third World, many people from these First World countries commonly encounter "organ removal" panics. Rumors have spread like wildfire that Americans in Guatemala are kidnapping small children and "harvesting" their organs for transplants. The similarity between these panics and UFO abductions should also be fairly obvious....

The connection between the UFO phenomenon itself (long before the current wave of abductions) and race is curious and bizarre. Many of the first group of UFO "contactees" - who went aboard the flying saucers willingly, to make love to gorgeous Venusians (but never producing offspring) - were loosely affiliated with the "Silver Shirt" movement of the 30s and 40s, a sort of homegrown American fascism which, among other things, opposed Roosevelt and WW II. The 50s contactees seemed to report that the majority of the saucer pilots were "Aryans" - long-haired, blonde, tall beings from Venus or other planets in the solar system. The "Aryans," when not warning humanity about atomic war, often gave messages promoting race harmony, but softly warning against racial intermixture and the "population explosion" of the Third World masses...

What ever became of the New World Order eruptions of the early 90's? Do you remember the vast conspiracy imaginings associated with pre-Katrina FEMA? Oklahoma City, Waco, Black Helicopters, etc.., etc.., etc..? Whatever became of all those folks now that they've had eight years of rule by the other side of the governance duopoly? Originally posted March 29, 2008.

Chapter 13 - REDUX

The Fire Officer's Guide To Disaster Control by William M. Kramer, Ph.D. and Charles W. Bahme, J.D. is a totally serious book which is found in all fire and police department libraries across the United States. In June 1993, a new chapter (pp.458-473) was added to this book. Bahme himself saw "UFOs" fly over Los Angeles on Aug. 26, 1942, and they were subsequently fired upon by ground defenses which killed nine people. During the Korean War, Bahme was Security Coordinator for the Chief of Naval Operations. The Guide is published by the Delaware State Fire School and made available through the Fire Engineering Book Service at 800-752-9768.

The Fire Officer's Guide To Disaster Control can be found in US local libraries. The Dewey Decimal number is 363.378. The ISBN # is 0-912212-26-8. Fire Officer's Guide to Disaster Control includes information on:


* training
* planning and procedures
* communication
* handling casualties
* infrastructure assessment
* recovery operations
* stress debriefing

Contents

1. Disaster Planning
2. Historical Lessons
3. Organizational Structure and Incident Command
4. Resource Management and Augmentation
5. Training and Preparation
6. Communications and Information Management
7. Catastrophic Fires
8. Civil Disorders and Riots
9. Weather-Related Natural Disasters
10. Terrain-Based Natural Disasters
11. Transportation Disasters
12. Hazardous Materials Incidents
13. Enemy Attack and UFO Potential
14. Mass Casualties and Mass Evacuation
15. Aftermath and Recovery

On March 30th, Chapter 13 was published on the Cleveland Tremonter. Interestingly, it's not there anymore. Originally posted April 5, 2008.

empathy and the science of evil

Time | Cambridge psychology professor and leading autism expert Simon Baron-Cohen is best known for studying the theory that a key problem in autistic disorders is "mind blindness," difficulty understanding the thoughts, feelings and intentions of others. He's also known for positing the "extreme male brain" concept of autism, which suggests that exposure to high levels of testosterone in the womb can cause the brain to focus on systematic knowledge and patterns more than on emotions and connection with others. (Oh, and yes, he's also the cousin of British comedian Sacha "Borat" Baron Cohen.)

Baron-Cohen's new book, The Science of Evil: On Empathy and the Origins of Cruelty, examines the role of empathy, the ability to understand and care about the emotions of others, not only in autism but in conditions like psychopathy in which lack of care for others leads to antisocial and destructive behavior.

What do you mean when you write about "zero negative" empathy?

Zero empathy refers to people at the extremely low end of the scale. They tend to be people with personality disorders, particularly antisocial personality disorder (ASPD). I focus quite a lot on psychopathy [the extreme form of ASPD] and also on two other personality disorders, borderline personality disorder and narcissistic personality disorder.

The 'negative' is meant to be shorthand for this being negative for the individual but also for the people around them. It's meant to contrast with what I call 'zero positive' empathy, which effectively describes the autistic spectrum.

[Autistic people] struggle with empathy just like zero negatives but it seems to be for very different reasons. I'm arguing that their low empathy is a result of a particular cognitive style, which is attentive to details and patterns or rules, which in shorthand, I call systemizing.

If we think about the autism spectrum as involving a very strong drive to systemize, that can have very positive consequences for the individual and for society. The downside is that when you try to systemize certain parts of the world like people and emotions, those sorts of phenomena are less lawful and harder to systemize. That can lead to having low empathy, almost like a byproduct of strong systemizing.

How do you account for people who are both highly empathetic and highly systematic, such as some of those with Asperger's who are actually oversensitive to the emotions of others?

I've certainly come across subgroups like that. There are people with Asperger's whom I've met who certainly would be very upset to learn they'd hurt another person's feelings. They often have very strong moral consciences and moral codes. They care about not hurting people. They may not always be aware [that they've said something rude or hurtful], but if it's pointed out, they would want to do something about it.

The other side of their moral sense is that they often have a strong sense of justice or fairness. They may have arrived at it through looking for logical patterns rather than necessarily because they can easily identify with someone, however.

People often think that autistic people are dangerous, like psychopaths, when they hear this idea that they have "no empathy."

In a way, that was one of my motivations for writing the book. Low empathy is a characteristic of many different conditions or disorders. Often books are written where they either focus on psychopathy or autism but [not both].

We have to look at them side by side, and when we do that, we see that they are very different and it's important to bring that out.

Is it the case, then, that autistic people are not good at the "mind reading" part of empathy, in terms of predicting people's behavior and feelings, while psychopaths are able to do that but are not able to care?

I think the contrast between these two conditions provides some evidence for that dissociation within empathy. People with psychopathy are very good at reading the minds of their victims. That's probably most clearly seen in deception. You have to be good at mind reading before it would even occur to you want [to deceive someone]. So you can see the cognitive part of empathy as functioning very well, but the fact that they don't have the appropriate emotional response to someone else's state of mind, the feeling of wanting to alleviate distress if someone's in pain, [that suggests that] the affective part of empathy is not functioning normally.

GOP position on the deficit is not about the money

Video - Uncle Jay presents the not funny truth about our useless Congress

TPM | If congress does nothing, the deficit will disappear. On Wednesday, the Congressional Budget Office released its updated long-term budget forecast, which looked surprisingly like the previous version of its long-term budget forecast.

It showed, as one might expect, that if the Bush tax-cuts remain in effect and Medicare and Medicaid spending isn't constrained in some way, the country will topple into a genuine fiscal crisis -- not the fake one the Congress is pretending the country's in right now.

Republicans, of course, seized on that particular projection, and claimed (a bit ridiculously) that it proved the government must adopt their precise policy views: major spending cuts, particularly to entitlement programs.

While all this -- from the findings to the politicization of them -- is perfectly expected, the forecast also presents another opportunity to remind people that the medium-term budget outlook is perfectly fine if Congress adheres to the law as it's currently written. That means no repealing the health care law, for one, but more significantly it means allowing the Bush tax cuts to expire, and (unfathomably) allowing Medicare reimbursement rates for doctors to fall to the levels prescribed by the formula Congress wrote almost 15 years ago. In other words, no more "doc fixes."

WaPo | Reporting on the same CBO report, you'd think it was an entirely different document. The national debt will exceed the size of the entire U.S. economy by 2021 — and balloon to nearly 200 percent of GDP within 25 years — without dramatic cuts to federal health and retirement programs or steep tax increases, congressional budget analysts said Wednesday.

The dire outlook from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office comes as the White House and congressional leaders are locked in negotiations aimed at cutting spending and stabilizing future borrowing. The CBO report highlights the enormity of that task and the immense difficulty of paying off the debt, given an aging population and soaring health-care costs.

WaPo Blog | The Congressional Budget Office just released the latest edition of its long-term budget outlook (pdf), and it shows the same thing as always: If Congress lets the Bush tax cuts expire or offsets their extension, implements the Affordable Care Act as scheduled and makes or offset the Medicare cuts prescribed by the 1997 Balanced Budget Act — which CBO calls the “extended baseline scenario” — the national debt will be totally manageable. If Congress passes laws extending the Bush tax cuts without offsetting the cost, repealing the Affordable Care Act and its cost controls and protecting doctors from Medicare cuts without making up the savings elsewhere — the “alternative fiscal scenario” — the national debt will be totally out of control:This is a good time to remind everyone that when you hear politicians telling you that their plan cuts taxes or balances the budget, you always need to ask what baseline they’re using. Almost all the plans on the table, for instance, do less to balance the budget than simply doing nothing. But since they use a version of the “alternative fiscal scenario” as their baseline, they don’t have to admit that before they make the deficit somewhat better, they’re first planning to make it much, much worse. Fist tap Rembom.

operating limits

Video - Prism Defense Ship-Helicopter Operating Limits Fist tap Arnach.

the man-child born of a virgin

 

Video - John Marco Allegro in an interview with Van Kooten & De Bie. 

 

TSMATC | Describing the growth of the mushroom ( boletos), Pliny says: “the earth produces first a ‘womb’ (vulva) . . . and afterwards (the mushroom) itself inside the womb, like a yolk inside the egg; and the baby mushroom is just as fond of eating its coat as is the chicken. The coat cracks when (the mushroom) first forms; presently, as it gets bigger, the coat is absorbed into the body of the footstalk (pediculi) . . . at first it is flimsier than froth, then it grows substantial like parchment, and then the mushroom. • is born. 1 More prosaically, perhaps, the process is thus described by a modern mycologist: “In the genus Amanita a membrane surrounds the young fungus. In addition to this wrapper or volva there is another membrane, stretching from the margin of the cap and joined to the stem, as in the mushroom. Thus it is as if the “button stage” were surrounded by an outer skin. As the fungus develops this is torn apart. If its texture is sufficiently tenacious to hold it together, it is left as a cup at the base of the stem . . . With growth the membrane covering the gills tears and is left as a ring on the stem.” Of the Amanita phalloides, the writer adds: “Before the volva breaks the fungus looks somewhat like a pigeon’s egg half-buried, or like a small phallus ‘egg’. It is common in glades in woods and adjoining pastures after the first summer rains, and continues through early autumn.”2 It was the fertilization of the “womb” that most puzzled the ancients, and remained a mystery until the end of the last century. To Pliny the fungus had to be reckoned as one of the “greatest of the marvels of nature”, since it “belonged to a class of things that spring up spontaneously and cannot be grown from seed”.3 It was surely “among the most wonderful of all things” in that it could “spring up and live without a root”.4 Until the invention of the microscope the function of the spore, produced by each fungus in its millions, could not be appreciated. The mushroom has, indeed, no seed in the accepted sense, germinating and giving out a root and later a stem apex with or without seed leaves. The walls of each minute spore extrude to form thread-like tubes which branch further until all mass together to form the spongy flesh of the fungus. The result is neither animal nor vegetable, and the mystery of its proper classification persisted until relatively modern times. Thus a sixteenth-century naturalist wrote: “They are a sort of intermediate existence between plants and inanimate nature. In this respect fungi resemble zoophytes, which are intermediate between plants and animals.”5 One explanation for the creation of the mushroom without apparent seed was that the “womb” had been fertilized by thunder, since it was commonly observed that the fungi appeared after thunderstorms. Thus one name given them was Ceraunion, from the Greek keraunios, “thunderbolt”. Another was the Greek hudnon, probably derived from Sumerian *UD_NUN, “storm—seeded”.6 It was thus uniquely-begotten. The normal process of fructification had been by-passed. The seed had not fallen from some previous plant, to be nurtured by the earth until in turn it produced a root and stalk. The god had “spoken” and his creative “word” had been carried to earth by the storm-wind, angelic messenger of heaven, and been implanted directly into the volva. The baby that resulted from this divine union was thus the “Son of God”, more truly representative of its heavenly father than any other form of plant or animal life. Here, in the tiny mushroom, was God manifest, the “Jesus” born of the Virgin “the image of the invisible God, the first-born of all creation • . in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell . . .“ (Col I:15ff.). The phallic form of the mushroom matched precisely that of his father, whom the Sumerians called ISKUR, “Mighty Penis”, the Semites Adad, or Hadad, “Big—father”, the Greeks Patër-Zeus, and the Romans Jupiter, “Father-god”.7 To see the mushroom was to see the Father, as in Jesus the uncomprehending Philip was urged to look for God: “He who has seen me has seen the Father. . . Do you not believe that I am in the Father and the Father in me?” (John 14:9ff.). Even the detutns recognized him as “the Holy One of God” (Mark 1:24), and it was as “the Holy Plant” that the sacred fungus came to be known throughout the ancient world. The slimy juice of the mushroom which, in some phalloidic species, spills over the “glans” and clown the stem, seemed to the ancients like the viscous exudation of the genital organs prior to coitus and the seminal discharge at orgasm. The Hebrew word for “smooth, slimy” derives from a Sumerian phrase meaning “semen running to waste”,8 and figures in a number of biblical allusions to the mushroom.9 It was otherwise known as “spittle”, and Job asks if there is any taste in the “spittle of the mushroom” (as we should now read the name of that plant) (Job 6:6).10 To have “spittle in the mouth” was a euphemism in the Jewish Talmud for “semen in the vagina”, ll and the close relationship between the two fluids resulted in the very widespread belief that spittle had strong curative and prophylactic properties. Thus, as human semen was a cure for scorpion stings, according to Pliny,12 spittle was a repellent to snakes and an antidote to snake venom.13 Jesus is pictured making a clay poultice to lay over the eyes of the man born blind (John 9:6), mixing his spittle with dust, as Pliny reports that saliva used each morning as an eye ointment cured ophthalmia.14 Rain, the semen of the god, was spurted forth from the divine penis at his thunderous orgasm in the heavens, and was borne as “spittle” from the lips of the glans to earth on the storm wind.15 It was a unique concentration of this powerful spermatozoa in the juice of the “Holy Plant” that the Magi believed would give anyone anointed with it amazing power. They could “obtain every wish, banish fevers, and cure all diseases without exception”.16 So the Christian, the “smeared or anointed one”, received "knowledge of all things” by his “anointing from the Holy One” (I John 2:20). Thereafter he had need of no other teacher and remained for evermore endowed with all knowledge (v. 27). Whatever the full ingredients of the Christian unction may have been, they would certainly have included the aromatic gums and spices of the traditional Israelite anointing oil: myrrh, aromatic cane, cinnamon, and cassia, all representing the powerful semen of the god. Under certain enclosed conditions, a mixture of these substances rubbed on the skin could produce the kind of intoxicating belief in self-omniscience referred to in the New Testament. Furthermore, the atmosphere of the oracular chamber would be charged with reek of sacred incense consisting of “sweet spices, stacte, and onycha, and galbanum, sweet spices with pure frankincense . . .“ (Exod 30:34), giving the kind of overpowering hypnotic effect referred to by an early Christian writer when he speaks of “the frenzy of a lying soothsayer” as a “mere intoxication produced by the reeking fumes of sacrifice”.17 That these ingredients formed only part of the sacred incense formula is well known. Josephus says there were thirteen elements,18 and the Talmud names eleven, plus salt, and a secret “herb” which was added to make the smoke rise in a vertical column before spreading outwards at the top.19 With the characteristic shape of the mushroom in mind, we can hazard a fair guess now at this secret ingredient. Knowledge and healing were two aspects of the same life-force. If to be rubbed with the “Holy Plant” was to receive divine knowledge, it was also to be cured of every sickness. James suggests that anyone of the Christian community who was sick should call the elders to anoint him with oil in the name of Jesus (Jas 5:14). The Twelve are sent out among their fellow-men casting out demons and anointing the sick with oil (Mark 6:13). Healing by unction persisted in the Church until the twelfth century,20 and the anointing of the dying, the so-called “extreme unction” has persisted in the Roman Catholic Church to this day.21 The principle behind this practice remains the same: the god’s “seed—of— life”, semen, found in spring or rain water, in the sap or resins of plants and trees, and above all in the slimy mucus of the mushroom imparts life to the ailing or the dead.

your "ism" is not my heredity

Video - Pokemon Black or White Black Nerd Rant.

Scientific American | Nothing about the field of IQ studies is free of political influence. It's naive to believe that any kind of research on a purported measure of individual merit could be politics-free in a self-proclaimed meritocracy with wide inequalities. Binet's original work was meant to determine which children should have access to additional educational resources. IQ scores are used occasionally to sort out "inappropriate" candidates for various jobs, including those whose IQs are too high for a role. IQ as a proxy for merit is used to argue that a group does or does not face discrimination in educational or career opportunities. This is all terribly political.

The question isn't whether there are politics surrounding this issue or where. They're everywhere. The question is where does the politics get in the way of the science? Again, the answers don't favor Pinker's view of a fatwa against genetic explanations of individual differences.

No one is pretending BGI Hong Kong doesn't exist or that it isn't looking for genes associated with variability in IQ scores. No one is issuing fatwas to stop them or even protesting their work. Some people are questioning IQ as a proxy for intelligence, but no one is saying the work shouldn't go forward until a better proxy is found. Similarly, no one is pretending that Paul Thompson isn't doing some fascinating work in brain imaging and variability in brain structure.

What is in dispute is the likelihood that genes will be found that account for any significant fraction of the variability found in human intelligence and whether the current literature on the topic is sufficient to predict that. Here is where disagreement with Thompson comes into play. He has published a number of papers with "genetics" in the title ("Genetic influences on brain structure," "Genetics of brain structure and intelligence," "Genetics of brain fiber architecture and intellectual performance") that involve no genetic testing whatsoever.

Instead, these studies rely on degree of relatedness (usually between identical and fraternal twins) as a measure of shared genes. This sounds reasonable, and to a degree it is. However, unless researchers can measure or control for the way genes unrelated to intelligence interact with the environment, these studies can't tell us how much variation in brain structure is due to shared genes that code for intelligence and shared genes that code for something else, such as illness that limits time in school. Until these studies are designed to look for genetic influences in addition to environmental influences, these studies are useless for their intended purpose. Fist tap Arnach.

no numbers above four and no concept of time...,

Time | While you're rushing to meet deadlines and trying to make it to places on time, there's one tribe in the Amazon that doesn't have that problem.

Researchers from the University of Portsmouth and the Federal University of Rondonia in Brazil have found that the Amazonian tribe Amondawa, has no abstract concept of time. “In English we say things like, her birthday is coming up, or he worked through the night,” researcher Chris Sinha told NewsFeed. “But they (the Amondawa) don't use such expressions of movement in space to metaphorically talk about time."

The study was carried out via interviews, observations, questionnaires and experiments, and the results came as a surprise to the researchers, because it's the first language in which it's been established that space to time mappings don't occur.

But although the Amondawa, who were first contacted by the outside world in 1986, don't have anything like a clock, they do talk in time periods. “They're just not as strict,” says Sinha. That means that if two members of a tribe were to meet up, they'd say something like "We'll meet in the afternoon," or "we'll meet tomorrow morning." This is also explained by the fact that they have a small number system which only goes up to four.

The Amondawa doesn't have a calendar either; They don't have a word for year, month or week. Rather, they refer to the “dry” or “rainy” season.

So what does this say of their lifestyle? “They're more laid back in the sense that they're not ruled by time,” says Sinha. “There's excitement in their lives, but it's of a different kind.”

The Amondawa have no trouble in picking up notions of time in Portuguese, their second language. “This tells us that we have become so embedded in a world that is governed by the measurement of time, that we find it difficult to understand what it might be like to live in a world that is not governed that way,” says Sinha. Fist tap Nana.

the location of consciousness

OCBBM | The final fallacy which I wish to discuss is both important and interesting, and I have left it for the last because I think it deals the coup de grace to the everyman theory of consciousness. Where does consciousness take place?

Everyone, or almost everyone, immediately replies, in my head. This is because when we introspect, we seem to look inward on an inner space somewhere behind our eyes. But what on earth do we mean by ‘look’? We even close our eyes sometimes to introspect even more clearly. Upon what? Its spatial character seems unquestionable. Moreover we seem to move or at least ‘look’ in different directions. And if we press ourselves too strongly to further characterize this space (apart from its imagined contents), we feel a vague irritation, as if there were something that did not want to be known, some quality which to question was somehow ungrateful, like rudeness in a friendly place.

We not only locate this space of consciousness inside our own heads. We also assume it is there in others’. In talking with a friend, maintaining periodic eye-to-eye contact (that remnant of our primate past when eye-to-eye contact was concerned in establishing tribal hierarchies), we are always assuming a space behind our companion’s eyes into which we are talking, similar to the space we imagine inside our own heads where we are talking from.

And this is the very heartbeat of the matter. For we know perfectly well that there is no such space in anyone’s head at all! There is nothing inside my head or yours except physiological tissue of one sort or another. And the fact that it is predominantly neurological tissue is irrelevant.

Now this thought takes a little thinking to get used to. It means that we are continually inventing these spaces in our own and other people’s heads, knowing perfectly well that they don’t exist anatomically; and the location of these ‘spaces’ is indeed quite arbitrary. The Aristotelian writings, 23 for example, located consciousness or the abode of thought in and just above the heart, believing the brain to be a mere cooling organ since it was insensitive to touch or injury. And some readers will not have found this discussion valid since they locate their thinking selves somewhere in the upper chest. For most of us, however, the habit of locating consciousness in the head is so ingrained that it is difficult to think otherwise. But, actually, you could, as you remain where you are, just as well locate your consciousness around the corner in the next room against the wall near the floor, and do your thinking there as well as in your head. Not really just as well. For there are very good reasons why it is better to imagine your mind-space inside of you, reasons to do with volition and internal sensations, with the relationship of your body and your ‘I’ which will become apparent as we go on.

That there is no phenomenal necessity in locating consciousness in the brain is further reinforced by various abnormal instances in which consciousness seems to be outside the body. A friend who received a left frontal brain injury in the war regained consciousness in the corner of the ceiling of a hospital ward looking down euphorically at himself on the cot swathed in bandages. Those who have taken lysergic acid diethylamide commonly report similar out-of-the-body or exosomatic experiences, as they are called. Such occurrences do not demonstrate anything metaphysical whatever; simply that locating consciousness can be an arbitrary matter.

Let us not make a mistake. When I am conscious, I am always and definitely using certain parts of my brain inside my head. But so am I when riding a bicycle, and the bicycle riding does not go on inside my head. The cases are different of course, since bicycle riding has a definite geographical location, while consciousness does not. In reality, consciousness has no location whatever except as we imagine it has.

23. It is so obvious that the writing ascribed to Aristotle were not written by the same hand that I prefer this designation.

consciousness not necessary for reason

OCBBM | The long tradition of man as the rational animal, the tradition that enthroned him as Homo sapiens, rests in all its pontifical generality on the gracile assumption that consciousness is the seat of reason. Any discussion of such an assumption is embarrassed by the vagueness of the term reason itself. This vagueness is the legacy we have from an older ‘faculty’ psychology that spoke of a ‘faculty’ of reason, which was of course situated ‘in’ consciousness. And this forced deposition of reason and consciousness was further confused with ideas of truth, of how we ought to reason, or logic - all quite different things. And hence logic was supposed to be the structure of conscious reason confounding generations of poor scholars who knew perfectly well that syllogisms were not what was on their side of introspection.

Reasoning and logic are to each other as health is to medicine, or - better - as conduct is to morality. Reasoning refers to a gamut of natural thought processes in the everyday world. Logic is how we ought to think if objective truth is our goal - and the everyday world is very little concerned with objective truth. Logic is the science of the justification of conclusions we have reached by natural reasoning. My point here is that, for such natural reasoning to occur, consciousness is not necessary. The very reason we need logic at all is because most reasoning is not conscious at all.

Consider to begin with the many phenomena we have already established as going on without consciousness which can be called elementary kinds of reasoning. Choosing paths, words, notes, motions, the perceptual corrections in size and color constancies - all are primitive kinds of reasoning that go on without any prod, nudge, or even glance of consciousness.

Even the more standard types of reasoning can occur without consciousness. A boy, having observed on one or more past occasions that a particular piece of wood floats on a particular pond, will conclude directly in a new instance that another piece of wood will float on another pond. There is no collecting together of past instances in consciousness, and no necessary conscious process whatever when the new piece of wood is seen directly as floating on the new pond. This is sometimes called reasoning from particulars, and is simply expectation based on generalization. Nothing particularly extraordinary. It is an ability common to all the higher vertebrates. Such reasoning is the structure of the nervous system, not the structure of consciousness.

But more complex reasoning without consciousness is continually going on. Our minds work much faster than consciousness can keep up with. We commonly make genera assertions based on past experience in an automatic way, and only as an afterthought are we sometimes able to retrieve any of the past experiences on which an assertion is based. How often we reach sound conclusions and are quite unable to justify them! Because reasoning is not conscious. And consider the kind of reasoning that we do about others’ feelings and character, or in reasoning out the motives of others from their actions. These are clearly the result of automatic inferences by our nervous systems in which consciousness is not only unnecessary, but, as we have seen in the performance of motor skills, would probably hinder the process. [19]

Surely, we exclaim, this cannot be true of the highest processes of intellectual, thought! Surely there at last we will come to the very empire of consciousness, where all is spread out in a golden clarity and all the orderly processes of reason go on in a full publicity of awareness. But the truth has no such grandeur. The picture of a scientist sitting down with his problems and using conscious induction and deduction is as mythical as a unicorn. The greatest insights of mankind have come more mysteriously. Helmholtz had his happy thoughts which “often enough crept quietly into my thinking without my suspecting their importance . . . in other cases they arrived suddenly, without any effort on my part . . . they liked especially to make their appearance while I was taking an easy walk over wooded hills in sunny weather!” 20

And Gauss, referring to an arithmetical theorem which he had unsuccessfully tried to prove for years, wrote how “like a sudden flash of lightning, the riddle happened to be solved. I myself cannot say what was the conducting thread which connected what I previously knew with what made my success possible.” 21

And the brilliant mathematician Poincaré was particularly interested in the manner in which he came upon his own discoveries. In a celebrated lecture at the Société de Psychologie in Paris, he described how he set out on a geologic excursion: “The incidents of the journey made me forget my mathematical work. Having reached Coutances, we entered an omnibus to go some place or other. At the moment when I put my foot on the step, the idea came to me, without anything in my former thoughts seeming to have paved the way for it, the transformation I had used to define the Fuchsian functions were identical with those of non-Euclidian geometry!” 22

It does seem that it is in the more abstract sciences, where the materials of scrutiny are less and less interfered with by everyday experience, that this business of sudden flooding insights is most obvious. A close friend of Einstein’s has told me that many of the physicist’s greatest ideas came to him so suddenly while he was shaving that he had to move the blade of the straight razor very carefully each morning, lest he cut himself with surprise. And a well-known physicist in Britain once told Wolfgang Köhler, “We often talk about the three B’s, the Bus, the Bath, and the Bed. That is where the great discoveries are made in our science.”

The essential point here is that there are several stages of creative thought: first, a stage of preparation in which the problem is consciously worked over; then a period of incubation without any conscious concentration upon the problem; and then the illumination which is later justified by logic. The parallel between these important and complex problems and the simple problems of judging weights or the circle-triangle series is obvious. The period of preparation is essentially the setting up of a complex struction together with conscious attention to the materials on which the struction is to work. But then the actual process of reasoning, the dark leap into huge discovery, just as in the simple trivial judgment of weights, has no representation in consciousness. Indeed, it is sometimes almost as if the problem had to be forgotten to be solved.

19. Such instances were early recognized as not conscious and were called “automatic inference” or “common sense.” Discussions can be found in Sully, Mill, and other nineteenth-century psychologists.

20. As quoted by Robert S. Woodworth, Experimental Psychology (New York: Holt, 1938), p. 818.

21. As quoted by Jacques Hadamard, The Psychology of Invention in the Mathematical Field (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1945), p. 15.

22. Henri Poincaré, “Mathematical creation,” in his The Foundations of Science, G. Bruce Halsted, trans. (New York: The Science Press, 1913), p. 387.

consciousness not necessary for concepts

OCBBM | A further major confusion about consciousness is the belief that it is specifically and uniquely the place where concepts are formed. This is a very ancient idea: that we have various concrete conscious experiences and then put the similar ones together into a concept. This idea has even been the paradigm of a slew of experiments by psychologists who thought they were thus studying concept formation.

Max Muller, in one of his fascinating discussions in the last century, brought the problem to a point by asking, whoever saw a tree? “No one ever saw a tree, but only this or that fir tree, or oak tree, or apple tree . . . Tree, therefore, is a concept, and as such can never be seen or perceived by the senses.” [7] Particular trees alone were outside in the environment, and only in consciousness did the general concept of tree exist.

Now the relation between concepts and consciousness could have an extensive discussion. But let it suffice here simply to show that there is no necessary connection between them. When Muller says no one has ever seen a tree, he is mistaking what he knows about an object for the object itself. Every weary wayfarer after miles under the hot sun has seen a tree. So has every cat, squirrel, and chipmunk when chased by a dog. The bee has a concept of. a flower, the eagle a concept of a sheer-faced rocky ledge, as a nesting thrush has a concept of a crotch of upper branch awninged with green leaves. Concepts are simply classes of behaviorally equivalent things. Root concepts are prior to experience. They are fundamental to the aptic structures that allow behavior to occur at all.8 Indeed what Muller should have said was, no one has ever been conscious of a tree. For consciousness, indeed, not only is not the repository of concepts; it does not usually work with them at all! When we consciously think of a tree, we are indeed conscious of a particular tree, of the fir or the oak or the elm that grew beside our house, and let it stand for the concept, just as we can let a concept word stand for it as well. In fact, one of the great functions of language is to let the word stand for a concept, which is exactly what we do in writing or speaking about conceptual material. And we must do this because concepts are usually not in consciousness at all.

7. Max Muller, The Science of Though: (London: Longmans Green, 1887), 78-79. Eugenio Rignano in his The Psychology of Reasoning (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1923), p. 108f., makes a similar criticism to mine.

consciousness not a copy of experience

OCBBM | Although the metaphor of the blank mind had been used in the writings ascribed to Aristotle, it is really only since John Locke thought of the mind as a tabula rasa in the seventeenth century that we have emphasized this recording aspect of consciousness, and thus see it crowded with memories that can be read over again in introspection. If Locke had lived in our time, he would have used the metaphor of a camera rather than a slate. But the idea is the same. And most people would protest emphatically that the chief function of consciousness is to store up experience, to copy it as a camera does, so that it can be reflected upon at some future time.

So it seems. But consider the following problems: Does the door of your room open from the right or the left? Which is your second longest finger? At a stoplight, is it the red or the green that is on top? How many teeth do you see when brushing your teeth? What letters are associated with what numbers on a telephone dial? If you are in a familiar room, without turning around, write down all the items on the wall just behind you, and then look.

I think you will be surprised how little you can retrospect in consciousness on the supposed images you have stored from so much previous attentive experience. If the familiar door suddenly opened the other way, if another finger suddenly grew longer, if the red light were differently placed, or you had an extra tooth, or the telephone were made differently, or a new window latch had been put on the window behind you, you would know it immediately, showing that you all along ‘knew’, but not consciously so. Familiar to psychologists, this is the distinction between recognition and recall. What you can consciously recall is a thimbleful to the huge oceans of your actual knowledge.

Experiments of this sort demonstrate that conscious memory is not a storing up of sensory images, as is sometimes thought. Only if you have at some time consciously noticed your finger lengths or your door, have at some time counted your teeth, though you have observed these things countless times, can you remember. Unless you have particularly noted what is on the wall or recently cleaned or painted it, you will be surprised at what you have left out. And introspect upon the matter. Did you not in each of these instances ask what must be there? Starting with ideas and reasoning, rather than with any image? Conscious retrospection is not the retrieval of images, but the retrieval of what you have been conscious of before, [5] and the reworking of these elements into rational or plausible patterns.

Let us demonstrate this in another way. Think, if you will, of when you entered the room you are now in and when you picked up this book. Introspect upon it and then ask the question: are the images of which you have copies the actual sensory fields as you came in and sat down and began reading? Don’t you have an image of yourself coming through one of the doors, perhaps even a bird’s-eye view of one of the entrances, and then perhaps vaguely see yourself sitting down and picking up the book? Things which you have never experienced except in this introspection! And can you retrieve the sound fields around the event? Or the cutaneous sensations as you sat, took the pressure off your feet, and opened this book? Of course, if you go on with your thinking you can also rearrange your imaginal retrospection such that you do indeed ‘see’ entering the room just as it might have been; and ‘hear’ the sound of the chair and the book opening, and ‘feel’ the skin sensations. But I suggest that this has a large element of created imagery - what we shall call narratizing a little later - of what the experience should be like, rather than what it actually was like.

Or introspect on when you last went swimming: I suspect you have an image of a seashore, lake, or pool which is largely a retrospection, but when it comes to yourself swimming, lo! like Nijinsky in his dance, you are seeing yourself swim, something that you have never observed at all! There is precious little of the actual sensations of swimming, the particular waterline across your face, the feel of the water against your skin, or to what extent your eyes were underwater as you turned your head to breathe. [6] Similarly, if you think of the last time you slept out of doors, went skating, or - if all else fails - did something that you regretted in public, you tend not to see, hear, or feel things as you actually experienced them, but rather to re-create them in objective terms, seeing yourself in the setting as if you were somebody else. Looking back into memory, then, is a great deal invention, seeing yourself as others see you. Memory is the medium of the must-have-been. Though I have no doubt that in any of these instances you could by inference invent a subjective view of the experience, even with the conviction that it was the actual memory.

5. See in this connection the discussion of Robert S. Woodworth in his Psychological Issues (New York: Columbia University Press, 1939 Ch. 7

6. An example taken from Donald Hobb’s provocative discussion, “The mind’s eye”, Psychology Today, 1961, 2.

consciousness not necessary for learning

OCBBM | A third important misconception of consciousness is that it is the basis for learning. Particularly for the long and illustrious series of Associationist psychologists through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, learning was a matter of ideas in consciousness being grouped by similarity, contiguity, or occasionally some other relationship. Nor did it matter whether we were speaking of a man or an animal; all learning was “profiting from experience” or ideas coming together in consciousness - as I said in the Introduction. And so contemporary common knowledge, without realizing quite why, has culturally inherited the notion that consciousness is necessary for learning.

The matter is somewhat complex. It is also unfortunately disfigured in psychology by a sometimes forbidding jargon, which is really an overgeneralization of the spinal-reflex terminology of the nineteenth century. But, for our purposes, we may consider the laboratory study of learning to have been of three central kinds, the learning of signals, skills, and solutions. Let us take up each in turn, asking the question, is consciousness necessary?

Signal learning (or classical or Pavlovian conditioning) is the simplest example. If a light signal immediately followed by a puff of air through a rubber tube is directed at a person’s eye about ten times, the eyelid, which previously blinked only to the puff of air, will begin to blink to the light signal alone, and this becomes more and more frequent as trials proceed.[9] Subjects who have undergone this well-known procedure of signal learning report that it has no conscious component whatever. Indeed, consciousness, in this example the intrusion of voluntary eye blinks to try to assist the signal learning, blocks it from occurring.

In more everyday situations, the same simple associative learning can be shown to go on without any consciousness that it has occurred. If a distinct kind of music is played while you are eating a particularly delicious lunch, the next time you hear the music you will like its sounds slightly more and even have a little more saliva in your mouth. The music has become a signal for pleasure which mixes with your judgment. And the same is true for paintings.[10] Subjects who have gone through this kind of test in the laboratory, when asked why they liked the music or paintings better after lunch, could not say. They were not conscious they had learned anything. But the really interesting thing here is that if you know about the phenomenon beforehand and are conscious of the contingency between food and the music or painting, the learning does not occur. Again, consciousness actually reduces our earning abilities of this type, let alone not being necessary for them.

As we saw earlier in the performance of skills, so in the learning of skills, consciousness is indeed like a helpless spectator, having little to do. A simple experiment will demonstrate this fact. Take a coin in each hand and toss them both, crossing them in the air in such a way that each coin is caught by the opposite hand. This you can learn in a dozen trials. As you do, ask, are you conscious of everything you do? Is consciousness necessary at all? I think you will find that learning is much better described as being ‘organic’ rather than conscious. Consciousness takes you into the task, giving you the goal to be reached. But from then on, apart perhaps from fleeting neurotic concerns about your abilities at such tasks, it is as if the learning is done for you. Yet the nineteenth century, taking consciousness to be the whole architect of behavior, would have tried to explain such a task as consciously recognizing the good and bad motions, and by free choice repeating the former and dropping out the latter!

The learning of complex skills is no different in this respect. Typewriting has been extensively studied, it generally being agreed in the words of one experimenter “that all adaptations and short cuts in methods were unconsciously made, that is, fallen into by the learners quite unintentionally. The learners suddenly noticed that they were doing certain parts of the work in a new and better way.” [11]

In the coin-tossing experiment, you may have even discovered that consciousness if present impeded your learning. This is a very common finding in the learning of skills, just as we saw it was in their performance. Let the learning go on without your being too conscious of it, and it is all done more smoothly and efficiently. Sometimes too much so, for, in complex skills like typing, one may learn to consistently type ‘hte’ for ‘the’. The remedy is to reverse the process by consciously practicing the mistake ‘hte’, whereupon contrary to the usual idea of ‘practice makes perfect’, the mistake drops away - a phenomenon called negative practice.

In the common motor skills studied in the laboratory as well, such as complex pursuit-rotor systems or mirror-tracing, the subjects who are asked to be very conscious of their movements do worse. [12] And athletic trainers whom I have interviewed are unwittingly following such laboratory-proven principles when they urge their trainees not to think so much about what they are doing. The Zen exercise of learning archery is extremely explicit on this, advising the archer not to think of himself as drawing the bow and releasing the arrow, but releasing himself from the consciousness of what he is doing by letting the bow stretch itself and the arrow release itself from the fingers at the proper time.

Solution learning (or instrumental learning or operant conditioning) is a more complex case. Usually when one is acquiring some solution to a problem or some path to a goal, consciousness plays a very considerable role in setting up the problem in a certain way. But consciousness is not necessary. Instances can be shown in which a person has no consciousness whatever of either the goal he is seeking or the solution he is finding to achieve that goal.

Another simple experiment can demonstrate this. Ask someone to sit opposite you and to say words, as many words as he can think of, pausing two or three seconds after each of them for you to write them down. If after every plural noun (or adjective, or abstract word, or whatever you choose) you say “good” or “right” as you write it down, or simply “mmm-hmm” or smile, or repeat the plural word pleasantly, the frequency of plural nouns (or whatever) will increase significantly as he goes on saying words. The important thing here is that the subject is not aware that he is learning anything at all. [13] He is not conscious that he is trying to find a way to make you increase your encouraging remarks, or even of his solution to that problem. Every day, in all our conversations, we are constantly training and being trained by each other in this manner, and yet we are never conscious of it.

Such unconscious learning is not confined to verbal behavior. Members of a psychology class were asked to compliment any girl at the college wearing red. Within a week the cafeteria was a blaze of red (and friendliness), and none of the girls was aware of being influenced. Another class, a week after being told about unconscious learning and training, tried it on the professor. Every time he moved toward the right side of the lecture hall, they paid rapt attention and roared at his jokes. It is reported that they were almost able to train him right out the door, he remaining unaware of anything unusual. [14]

The critical problem with most of these studies is that if the subject decided beforehand to look for such contingencies, he would of course be conscious of what he was learning to do. One way to get around this is to use a behavioral response which is imperceptible to the subject. And this has been done, using a very small muscle in the thumb whose movements are imperceptible to us and can only be detected by an electrical recording apparatus. The subjects were told that the experiments were concerned with the effect of intermittent unpleasant noise combined with music upon muscle tension. Four electrodes were placed on their bodies, the only real one being the one over the small thumb muscle, the other three being dummy electrodes. The apparatus was so arranged that whenever the imperceptible thumb-muscle twitch was electrically detected, the unpleasant noise was stopped for 15 seconds if it was already sounding, or delayed for 15 seconds if was not turned on at the time of the twitch. In all subjects, the imperceptible thumb twitch that turned off the distressing noise increased in rate without the subjects’ being the slightest bit conscious that they were learning to turn off the unpleasant noise.

Thus, consciousness is not a necessary part of the learning process, and this is true whether it be the learning of signals, skills, or solutions. There is, of course, much more to say on this fascinating subject, for the whole thrust of contemporary research in behavior modification is along these lines. But, for the present, we have simply established that the older doctrine that conscious experience is the substrate of all learning is clearly and absolutely false. At this point, we can at least conclude that it is possible - possible I say - to conceive of human beings who are not conscious and yet can learn and solve problems

9. G. A. Kimble, “Conditioning as a function of the time between conditioned and unconditioned stimuli,” Journal of Experimental Psychology, 1947, 37: 1-15.

10. These studies are those of Gregory Razran and are discussed on page 232 of his Mind in Evolution (Boston: Houghton Muffin, 1971). They are discussed critically in relation to the whole problem of unintentional learning by T. A. Ryan, Intentional Behavior (New York: Ronald Press, 1970), pp. 235-236.

11. W.F. Book, The Psychology of Skill, (New York: Gregg, 1925).

12. H.L. Waskom, “An experimental analysis of incentive and forced application and their effect upon learning,” Journal of Psychology, 1936, 2: 393-408.

13. J. Greenspoon, “The reinforcing effect of two spoken sounds on the frequency of two responses,” American Journal of Psychology, 1955, 68: 409-416. But there is considerable controversy here, particularly in the order and wording of postexperimental questions. There may even be a kind of tacit contract between subject and experimenter. See Robert Rosenthal, Experimenter Effects in Behavioral Research (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1966). In this controversy, I presently agree with Postman that the learning occurs before the subject becomes conscious of the reinforcement contingency, and indeed that consciousness would not occur unless this had been so. L. Postman and L. Sassenrath, “The automatic action of verbal rewards and punishment,” Journal of General Psychology, 1961, 65: 109-136.

14. W. Lamnbert Gardiner, Psychology: A Story of a Search (Belmont, California:Brooks/Cole, 5970), p. 76.