Just because we're superstitious doesn't make it rational, or does it?

It's been a wet week here in New York. On days when it might rain, I like to take along an umbrella to reduce, I hope, the chance that it will rain on me. This week I took an umbrella and still it rained. It hasn't shaken my faith in my superstition.

John Tierney's "Why Superstition Is Logical" makes a muddled and perhaps incomplete attempt at explaining the rationality of superstition. He begins with the example of a rational person irrationally resisting the temptation to set her watch to the correct time zone until the plane lands. He then discusses some circumstances in which superstition induces a positive psychological boost to "do the right thing." To wit:

1. Students think that not doing their reading makes them more likely to be called on in class… so they do the reading.

2. People think that trading away a lottery ticket makes that ticket more likely to win… so they hold onto the ticket… obviously with much more of an upside potential than a trade.

3. An applicant to Stanford graduate school is less likely to get in if he goes around wearing a Stanford T-shirt… he may or may not get in, but he's less likely to look like a jerk.

I couldn't quite figure out how not having set one's watch before an airplane disaster fell into the same category as these examples.

Interspersing these sets of seemingly divergent examples, Tierney inserted yet another intriguing piece of data related to superstition. He mentioned that negative outcomes have a subliminal tug. We recall the day we got caught in the rain much more readily and with much more emotion than we recall the days when we didn't get caught in the rain. This leads us to believe that getting caught in the rain is the more likely outcome.

To all of which I have a couple of thoughts to add.

Let's say that there's a 50/50 chance that we'll get rained on when we think we might get rained on. And let's say that if we're neither overly optimistic nor pessimistic we'll sometimes take precautions against the chance of getting rained on and sometimes not. Naturally, if it looks like rain our precautions might include avoiding going outside, or taking the car instead of walking. On the remaining days, when we stick to our plan of going out and walking not driving, we've therefore, without superstition, increased the likelihood that we will get caught in the rain.

Here's how that works:

Start with ten days. Five will be rainy, five won't. Five days we'll be optimistic and risk the rain. Five days we'll be pessimistic and won't risk the rain. Of the five pessimistic days, we'll stay in one day, drive another day, leaving three days that we'll carry an umbrella. This means that out of ten days, we avoid the risk of rain entirely on two days, (on average one of these will be rainy). This leaves eight days, four of them rainy four of them not rainy. But we'll have our umbrella with us on just three of those days…

Even to get to an even chance, we need a little superstition.

Now to the other thought.

We recall negative outcomes for an evolutionary reason. They are learning experiences, cautions. All animals have evolved with this feedback mechanism. Or, perhaps more precisely, those that didn't have died.

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 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 biobigotry, regular bigotry, and the apparent contradiction of free-will.

Natalie Angier writes about our tendency to project human characteristics onto, and make human judgments of, animals. We take a dislike to certain species and favor others. And we justify our preferences on the basis of an animal's behavior, its choice of habitats, its degree of invasiveness, its plumage… in short, on anything that inspires our appreciation or dislike. Angier calls this biobigotry.

Angier rightly implies that an animal is what it is and does what is in its nature to do; any judgment we put on it has relevance only as an artifact of our mind. By using the word biobigotry Angier connects the concept to the human-human bigotry of judgments based on race, gender, age, weight, etc.

Here we come to the paradox: If we say that animals do what it is their nature to do and shouldn't be judged for it, then carry this idea forward and apply it to people, who likewise do what it is their nature to do, we end up concluding that people, too, can't be judged as inherently despicable or adorable.

Is this a supportable premise?

It is wrong for Angier to condemn cowbirds for leaving their eggs in other birds' nests; that's what cowbirds do. But is it likewise wrong to condemn a person who steals, for instance? Isn't the act of theft a result of a certain set of circumstances — genetic, environmental, and circumstantial.

If we follow this approach to its rigorous conclusion we can end up deciding that no one can be blamed for anything. For most of us this doesn't sit well. So how can we resolve this paradox.

The resolution lies in the concept of free-will. The cowbird does not reflect on a set of choices available to it and decide it would prefer to leave its eggs in another bird's nest. But the person who steals has a range of options from which to choose. Stealing is a choice.

Immediately, though, we see a problem with this approach. One could argue that for someone who is going to steal the range of possible options is illusory. The options exist in theory, but in practice he or she is preconditioned to reject the other options.

In this new paradox we have reached the limits of the applicability of human judgment. When we judge someone we judge them against a range of possible responses and actions, regardless of whether the person could have actually chosen differently given his or her psychological makeup and the situation at hand. We judge and condemn, in effect, not the person, but the person's inability to make a better choice.

On the separate worlds of science and religion.

For what reads like a fluff piece, Cornelia Dean's portrait of evolutionary biologist and author Francisco J. Ayala manages to press some pertinent buttons. Specifically:

1. The title "Roving Defender of Evolution, And Room for God" might mislead. It seems to imply that Ayala speaks not just as a scientist but as a believer. But the piece closes as follows: "Dr. Ayala will not say whether he remains a religious believer. 'I don’t want to be tagged,' he said. 'By one side or the other.'"

2. Ayala makes some curious statements about evolution and evil. As Dean reports "If God or some other intelligent agent made things this way on purpose, [Ayala] said, 'then he is a sadist…'" And quoted Ayala from his book: "Evolution 'provided the ‘missing link’ in the explanation of evil in the world.'"

3. And, in passing, Dean inserts this dramatic and non-trivial opinion: "'Science and religion concern nonoverlapping realms of knowledge,' [Ayala] writes in the new book. 'It is only when assertions are made beyond their legitimate boundaries that evolutionary theory and religious belief appear to be antithetical.'"

The NY Times exhibits poor editorial judgment in publishing the piece under the chosen title. I don't know whether the Times is diluting its editorial expertise in the move to become an up-to-date on-line news resource. And I don't have an assiduous record of the editorial quality of the paper. But it's my passing impression that the mismatch between titles and content is happening somewhat frequently on-line. I don't ever recall it happening in the printed paper. The piece itself is less focused and on-point than one would expect from a top notch news source. In an Internet world overflowing with dubious content, these things matter enormously.

I'm fascinated by Ayala's equating of evolution with an explanation for evil. Given the sketchy coverage of Ayala's views and opinions, I'm guessing that he has much more to say on the subject. But from the little we have to work with Ayala seems to be saying that evolution lets God off the hook for being the source of evil.

This brings us to the third point. If science and religion concern nonoverlapping realms of knowledge then on what basis can we cross-reference evolution and evil?

Here are my specific responses:

a. Religion is not a realm of knowledge, it is a realm of belief. In furthering human understanding and combating intolerance, we must resist the confusion of scientific and rational knowledge (which is grounded in a common and reproducible perception of the world we live in) from religious belief (which is not).

b. Evil is a human construct related to belief and doesn't "exist" other than as a concept. To casually conjoin the concept of evolution with the concept of evil overlaps science and religion in exactly the way that Ayala seems to decry.

c. I agree that denouncing religion in the name of science isn't particularly helpful. But neither is it helpful for a renowned scientist to use his scientific credentials to explicitly "make room" for religion while being coy about his own beliefs.

As a side note, moral concepts arise out of our experience of the world around us. Morality is our way of making sense of the way that life seems to operate. If we explore the origin of the concept of morality we find that it has its fundamental grounds in the principles of space and time. Working rationally we can define a moral framework that relies only on logic and promotes ideas about goodness that reflect life as it is not life as we've been told it should be. — I describe this approach in detail in my book - LIFE!

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.

On abstraction and the real world.

It's been nearly 150 years since Charles Darwin published The Origin of Species. The NY Times reports on a new exhibition that provides insight into Darwin's scientific life and work. We learn that Darwin, inspired by musings on the natural world around him, tested out his ideas on the plants in his garden. He cross-pollinated plants with complementary anatomical parts, for instance, and found that the hybrids were more robust than their parents.

Through his inspiration from life, experimentation with life, and abstraction from life, Darwin derived the theory of evolution, forever changing our understanding of the world we live in, and bringing scientific understanding forward in one huge leap.

My teenage daughter has the most difficulty with science and math when she's required to apply newly learned abstract concepts to "real world" problems. I expect she's not alone. A new study indicates that people learn abstract concepts more successfully if taught the abstract theory first rather than expecting them to learn by deduction from "real world" examples. The conclusion: "Real world" examples aren't as effective as a thorough briefing on the equations and theories concerned.

What surprised me about this article was not the conclusion (since it seems to make common sense — Darwin spent many painstaking years deriving his theories from real world examples, and the results are only obvious because he abstracted them!) but the realization that anyone ever thought that real world examples could effectively impart complex abstract knowledge. It's useful to tie abstract concepts back to real world examples, of course, but this step is tough and challenging because it requires the additional skills of distilling the pertinent information and understanding how to apply the appropriate theory.

Studies of language and reasoning underscore this lesson: Children who have no language for numbers can count up to three instinctively. Primates have the same skill. But with larger numbers our ability to count without language diminishes rapidly. As the article points out, language can help enormously in processing problems.

Mathematics and scientific concepts provide a rich, inclusive language that abstracts the concepts of space, time and causality: This language helps us process the abstracted workings of the real world. Without it we would be fumbling around anew with each new problem. As with anything in the real world, though, discerning and holding on to sound ideas and methods provides its own challenge. At each turn there are those who want to forge on on new paths, or turn back down old ones.

Footnote: When I wrote the back cover blurb for my book a couple of years ago I made the apparently extravagant claim that in its contribution to human understanding it was the most important book since Darwin's The Origin of Species. This offended some people. For a while I was embarrassed to have ever claimed such a thing. But today as I read about Darwin's methods and saw how he'd sketched out his evolutionary ideas, I felt a renewed sense of conviction that when we can understand how evolution relates to the fundamental principles of space and time we will have taken another big step forward. And I am still convinced that Life! achieves this feat.

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 work and self: Wesley Snipes, Tom Daley, Anna Quindlen, Rene Descartes

I've spent the past eleven years and ten months — more than half my working life — at the same firm. Today was my last day. I'm going to be writing more, and making more music, and probably a whole lot of things that I have no clue about just yet.

As I said goodbye to my colleagues this afternoon I was aware of how much the experience of working with them and doing what I'd been doing had changed me, how much I'd learned, how much I'd unlearned, and how much I'd grown and shifted. I was moving on, but not without taking the experience with me.

Actor Wesley Snipes, convicted on tax charges, has been sentenced to the maximum of three years in jail. As I read the story I was fascinated by the extent to which a movie star's life must be affected by his or her sense of self as reflected by public opinion. Denzel Washington had written a letter of character reference to the court. I found myself sad for Snipes; excerpts from the letter seemed to describe the image of a man rather than the man himself.

Thirteen year old Tom Daley, a British diver who will compete in the Beijing Olympics, explained his approach to maintaining a balanced perspective like this: "I try and keep it all separate because when I'm not diving and doing media stuff I'm just a normal kid."

And as I rode on the elevator in the office today, I saw this quote from Anna Quindlen:

"Don't ever confuse the two, your life and your work. That's what I have to say. The second is only a part of the first."

It read like a personal message.

The philosophy of self is as old as the phenomenon of consciousness. It took several million years for this idea to be neatly framed and attributed to Descartes who coined the famous phrase: "Cogito ergo sum" trans. "I think therefore I am."

To twist this idea into a framing of the concept of self we can say: "I am what I think."

Some would immediately argue that we do many things without reflection, without thinking them through. Which is true. But the concept of "self" requires reflection. Once I have acted, my acts affect my sense of self according to the way that I process them.

I could have walked away from my job thinking that I was unchanged by it. Had I done so, my sense of self would have been quite different.

Actor Wesley Snipes (and others in the public eye) must process his immediate thoughts about himself as well as processing the opinions expressed by the world at large. Public opinion must place a tremendous strain on one's ability to maintain a consistent and accurate sense of self.

Young diver Tom Daley demonstrates an admirable compartmentalization of private and public space. (It seems perhaps that children often have a greater aptitude for this than adults.) Daley prefigures Quindlen's advice in years if not in time.

We can achieve great things. We can inspire great respect or admiration. We can, likewise, achieve little, or inspire no one. But we captain our sense of self over these waters as if it were the QE2, or a tug boat, or a kayak. We might never know or care that the QE2 is really a kayak, or vice versa.

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

On the rise in America's prison population, execution, and administrative wrongdoing.

The United States has a prison population far higher than anywhere else in the world. This is a recent phenomenon. About thirty years ago the US prison population started to climb and now other countries regard the US's penal system as shocking.

The Supreme Court just upheld the use of a lethal cocktail injection for the administration of the death penalty, citing case law supporting the idea that the mere possibility of cruel and painful death isn't a reason to put a stop to lethal injection. The constitutionality of capital punishment distracts us from whether it is a punishment worthy of an enlightened society.

And slowly but surely details of the Bush administration's disregard for human rights and US law continue to emerge. Bush and his senior team spent a good deal of time and energy devising mechanisms that would allow them to torture detainees. (Of course, the administration's blatant disregard for appropriate justification wasn't limited to the abuse of prisoners. It has been a consistent pattern.)

These three examples seem to indicate a disturbing trend. Most disturbing, the Bush administration's conviction that it is above the law, simply because it believes it is right. While Europe (much scoffed at by the likes of Bush) has moved inexorably and bumpily toward cooperation and enlightenment, the US has veered off on its own, deluded by the idea of itself as a nation that can remain fixed, or fixate, on the idea of itself as infallible.

As we've seen with the Catholic church in recent years, the infallible have a lot to learn. Errors of national ego punctuate the history of civilization like buckshot. The only thing that can save us from even worse transgressions and further isolation is a healthy dose of humility.