Rational Philosophy

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.

Changing the way we think.

Last week I wrote about the implications of what happens to an animal’s brain when you teach it to use a rake. I was fascinated and excited by the idea that the brain’s genetics may be changed by the way it is used. What might this tell us about our capacity to change the way we think and react?

Sandra Aamodt and Sam Wang write today about the brain’s limited capacity for governing self-discipline. Research going back several years has shown that if you exercise restraint or self-discipline in one activity or area of your life, you will deplete your “self-restraint” resources and find it more difficult to remain disciplined in another activity. Complete a cross-word puzzle and you won’t be able to resist dessert.

The studies implicate blood sugar as an important factor in restoring or maintaining self-restraint. Subjects performed better on disciplined tasks if they were allowed to replenish their blood sugar between those tasks. (If only Spitzer had had a glass of lemonade after a hard day in the legislature!)

But most fascinating for me the research has shown that one can increase one’s self-discipline over time by exercising it. This likely (the article says “must”) reflects “some biological change in the brain.” “Even something as simple as using your nondominant hand to brush your teeth for two weeks can increase willpower capacity.”

David Brooks uses insights from sports psychologist H. A. Dorfman’s book The Mental ABC’s of Pitching to argue that the prevailing American emphasis on self-awareness and self-discovery has begun to shift back toward self-discipline and the idea of transcending onesself in one’s work. Brooks, not unusually, doesn’t provide any kind of specific context for his assertion, but his unearthing of Dorfman’s ideas proves a fortuitous coincidence.

Brooks quotes from Dorfman’s book: “Self-discipline is a form of freedom. Freedom from laziness and lethargy, freedom from expectations and demands of others, freedom from weakness and fear — and doubt.”

Combine this idea with the concept that we can, by exercising willpower and self-discipline, increase our capacity for it, and we have an even more powerful idea: we can choose to free ourselves from habits that inhibit our performance and self-satisfaction.

People, particularly young people, tend to rebel against the idea of excessive self-discipline. Too often the concept is fused with the idea of mindlessness or blind adherence to rules. Discipline can seem antithetical to freedom.

But we can distinguish between a reflexive adherence to habits, rules and regulations and the choice of adherence for the sake of improving self-discpline. One is passive and undirected, the other active and end-directed.

According to Dorfman, and supported by scientific research, it makes no difference whether we feel, in the moment, that we want to exercise self-discipline. If we act in a self-disciplined way we will increase our willpower. Just as we go to the gym to workout, whether we feel like it or not, we might be much more inclined to exercise self-discipline if we understand that it will make it easier for us to exercise more self-discipline in the future.

The same philosophy applies to other brain functions. If macaques and rodents in learning to use a rake exhibit changes in brain DNA, then we can postulate that people can experience changes in brain DNA by stretching the use of our minds.

(This theory comports with common sense (sophisticated mental tasks seem to make people more capable of performing sophisticated mental tasks) and studies that show brain exercise is linked with mental health in later life.)

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.

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On cell phones for Cubans and bailouts for homeowners.

As I walked through Manhattan this morning I watched as some buffoon on a cell phone began to cross the street just as the “don’t walk” sign blinked from flashing to solid. He didn’t realize that he was blocking traffic until he was half way across the street. With his phone still glued to his ear he first stopped in his tracks, then loped ahead to the far corner without so much as looking back.

Oh, to live in a world without cell phones! Even Cuba, my last hope of refuge from the cursed devices, has relented to the cell phone tide. Raul Castro — Raul The Reformer, we may as well call him — has declared that ordinary Cubans will be permitted to get cell phone contracts going forward (a privilege previously reserved for key state employees or workers for foreign firms). But since the cell phone contracts will be too expensive for most Cubans, who earn an average of a little less than $20 per month, perhaps it will take a while until cell phones cause traffic accidents in Havana.

But this snippet of communist party friction (Raul’s brother Fidel had held fast to the no cell phone policy for years) got me wondering about whether Raul should be classified as a liberal, allowing for progressive ideas, and Fidel a conservative. And if Fidel is a conservative how does that jive with him being one of the foremost and staunchest communist leaders of all time? Could Fidel Castro and his nemesis George Bush perhaps be sitting on the same side of an ideological fence? And if so, how?

As the current presidential hopefuls put forward their proposals (an odd phenomenon, this, since they’re just running for something, not running something) on fixing or mitigating the mortgage crisis, the stark differences in approach provide a lens through which to examine Democratic ideology versus Republican ideology.

This is a subject that fascinates me. For there to be such a clear division along political lines on so many issues, it seems that the roots of these divisions must live in a fundamental philosophical difference of perspective.

With some differences Obama and Clinton endorse proposals that would provide help to homeowners facing forclosure. McCain (and Bush) oppose any plan for homeowner bailout.

To paraphrase the liberal perspective “let’s help people stand on their own two feet.”

To paraphrase the conservative perspective “let people stand on their own two feet.”

As ideologies, both are rational and consistent. Where and why do they differ?

McCain has made it clear that he believes that homeowners deserve some blame if they’ve bought themselves into an unaffordable mortgage. His perspective is founded on personal responsibility, the freedom to succeed comes with the freedom to screw up. You make your choice and live with it. This same perspective underpins the conservative view on all manner of subjects, such as gun ownership and the death penalty (by all means get a gun, but if you shoot someone you shouldn’t you’ll pay for it with your life).

The conservative philosophy rests on the concept that the individual should have more control over his life and that government should not meddle.

The liberal philosophy rests on the concept that for the good of society, and the good of the individual, government should be ready to step in and provide protection or support.

Obama believes that homeowners need protection from banks eager to foreclose to stem their loses, for instance. While some may get help when they don’t deserve it. Many unwitting victims will be spared. And on gun control, a liberal may say that having the right to bear arms is all well and good unless innocent people are getting hurt by that right.

Is this just a difference of perspective without any deeper significance? I think not.

The roots are evolutionary: As social animals, human beings developed an awareness that while acting for themselves could lead to short term gains, acting for the good of all could lead to long term gains. Sharing your food might make you less well fed in the short term, but when you’re short of food, you’ll be happy for someone to share his food with you.

This is all very rational and common sensical, but even thoughtful people in a well ordered society still feel the pull of self preservation and self-satisfaction. We all experience impulses that lead us to want to act for ourselves, and we all experience impulses that lead us to want to help others. Whether we come out liberal or conservative hinges on the degree to which we believe it’s right and feel the rightness of balancing our own needs with those of others.

(For those who are interested, LIFE! Why We Exist… And What We Must Do To Survive explores a deeper philosophical basis for this line of reasoning by working from the principles of space and time.)

But what about Fidel and Raul?

Fidel Castro exhibited a deep conflict between his personal feelings about individualism — in which he was a conservative (how could a man who led a revolution and took firm control of a country not be convinced of the power and independence of his individual spirit?) — and his intellectual conviction of the benefits of a collaborative, equalized society, communism after all is liberalism on steroids.

This is perhaps why so many of us have a soft spot for the old guy (Fidel) despite his serious flaws and failings, despite his human rights abuses. We empathize with his internal conflict. We see the numbskull stopping traffic while he gabs on his cell phone and we want him to be delivered a comeuppance not a helping hand. But presented with the intellectual idea of helping those who took on too much mortgage debt (numbskulls, most likely, some of them) we easily fall on the side of assistance.

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 John McCain’s ironic disposition and rodents using rakes.

Times Op-Ed contributor Neal Gabler proposes that the media likes John McCain because he has an ironic outlook on the political process. McCain, with his candor and his self-deprecation and his broad wink at the distorted rigamarole of politics agrees with the default, liberal journalistic “notion that our system (in fact, life itself) is faintly imbecilic.” Gabler describes McCain, with his gleeful cynicism, as a postmodernist candidate.

This is fascinating both in and of itself and more generally. What would an ironically detached president do with his power? How would his sense of irony, of life’s faint imbecility, help or hinder him in running the country?

We get a glimpse perhaps in McCain’s reluctance to support a rigorous bailout of housing lenders and borrowers. McCain lays blame with the lenders for pushing risky loans and with the borrowers for wishful thinking. Bailing them out only rewards their behavior, he says.

His response is aloof, dismissive. He shows a reluctance to engage with the history of the current crisis, the emergence of the shadow banking system to sidestep the kinds of controls that the government put in place as a response to the market crash that precipitated the great depression. Doesn’t the government share a good part of the responsibility for allowing the shadow banking system to emerge without taking steps to regulate it?

Although, this same detachment might be an unusually helpful quality in some situations.

But, more generally, Gabler’s take on McCain points to a philosophical matter of engagement with reality. The ironist perceives the difference between our immediate perception of existence and life, and the larger context of those perceptions. The awareness that ultimately nothing really matters. The central character of Albert Camus’ The Fall (La Chute) comes to realize through a process of self-reflection that everything he’s held dear to him, the whole grand idea of his importance, is nothing but an illusion, an appearance that, ultimately, means nothing. Literature is strewn with such examples of the ironist. Detachment and perspective are essential skills for a novelist, so it is little surprise that this is the case. Hence Gabler’s reference to McCain as a post-modernist candidate.

Gabler surmises that perhaps McCain gained this perspective while a prisoner of war. I would have disagreed with him until I read about the rodents who learned to use a rake.

Dr. Atshushi Iriki, a neuroscientist at the Riken Institute in Tokyo, has trained degus (sociable, Chilean rodents) to use a rake as a tool. By putting the little fellows out of arms reach of their lunch, Iriki coaxed the rodents to take advantage of small rakes so that they could drag the sunflower seeds close enough to eat them. (You can watch a video of the degus at work here.)

Just in itself, this is fascinating. But even more fascinating is the proposal that this kind of learning may lead to molecular and genetic changes in the brain. When Doctor Iriki conducted a similar experiment with Japanese macaques “their brains showed signs of gene activity in a brain region that integrates vision and touch.”

The latent capability for a particular mental aptitude, when prompted and exercized, can lead to a new organization of brain function. This isn’t spelled out in the article, but one presumes that Iriki believes that the animals have not simply learned a new skill, but developed a new capability, one that allows them to process things differently.

And so perhaps Gabler might be right about McCain. It makes sense that being a prisoner of war might lead to the exercising of the functions of the brain that put our existence into perspective. Held captive, treated as insignificant, denied the power of our own self-determination, I can easily see how one would come away with a more ironic perspective on the world.

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How do imagination and logical thinking interelate, and what purpose does thinking serve?

Michio Kaku has spent some time thinking about which inventions of the imagination may be plausible in the forseeable future. He’s written a book on it called “The Physics of The Impossible.” But Kaku’s descriptions of the possible scientific implementations of invisibility mechanisms, force fields and lightsabers seem far less functional and intuitive than their fictional counterparts. This got me thinking about the power of the imagination. Which got me thinking about why we think.

After two years of study the National Mathematics Advisory Panel has issued a report on what to do about the poor state of math skills in late middle school. American students stumble in 25th in math competency out of 30 developed nations. The panel recommends streamlining math education, relying more on specialist math teachers rather than generalists, and ensuring that children memorize core math facts, a tactic that “frees up working memory for more complex aspects of problem solving.” After working with my daughter on her middle school math for the past few years, I’d agree with the panel on these points. There’s a lot to learn in middle school math, and math as a discipline relies a great deal on adding and combining concepts.

As I consider the power of the imagination alongside the power of rational or logical processing I realize that the kind of thinking we do to survive combines these two elements. Thinking entails imagining scenarios or possibilities and calculating or predicting outcomes.

The more powerful our imagination, the more options we will have. The more adept of processing of facts and likelihoods the more likely we will be to make good choices.

This brings us closer to answering the question of why we think. Working backwards, since thinking gives us the power to manufacture and select options, thinking evolved as a good way of gaining advantage through anticipation.

All of which seems rather obvious now that I’ve set it out. But I don’t think I’d ever before considered that imagination had such a powerful and important role in rational thinking.

In an individual, a healthy dose of both capabilities seems advantageous. But if we think about society as a whole, we can all benefit from the imagination of others, as well as from the logical processing power of others. In society we have a collection of minds, some more disposed to imagination, some more disposed to logical processing. If we respect the value of both, society as a whole will benefit.

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.

What response to public wrongdoing?

In his chronical of Eliot Spitzer’s predecessors in doing wrong, N. R. Kleinfield makes a compeling case for a connection between power and irrational risk-taking. The piece focuses on sex scandals, but could just as easily have included bribery and corruption. Kleinfield draws on the opinions of experts in psychology to underscore the logic behind the link — people who seek power typically have an appetite for high stakes and pushing the envelope.

We gasp in surprise when we learn of each new scandal, but perhaps we should not really be surprised. Abuse of power, sexual extravagance, and a sense of being above the law have been with us all through history. The difference is that these days there’s generally more accountability, and more publicity.

In his initial announcement, Spitzer apologized to his family and said that his connection to the prostitution ring was a private matter (although he did apologize to the public, too). This echoes previous scandaleers who have either explicitly or implicitly sought to separate their private actions from their public role.

Unless we’re to compound the abuse of power, any illegal actions should be appropriately prosecuted. But what about immoral or inappropriate acts, things that are not illegal or wouldn’t typically be subject to prosecution.

As members of society we can ask ourselves two questions:

1. How much do we care to let the private actions of public figures reflect upon their public roles?

2. How do we action upon that answer?

In America in recent years it has begun to seem that the intense scrutiny of the private lives of candidates for public office has gone beyond the point of appropriateness and good sense. After all, if we accept that those who seek public office must be prepared to tolerate risk, and to gain or lose a great deal, shouldn’t we tolerate the idea that this personality type won’t be happy with slippers and a pipe in the evening (at least not a tobacco pipe)? I’m not saying we should excuse or overlook illegal activity, nor turn a blind eye to serious character flaws, but the important thing is that the person can do the job he or she is elected to do.

If the politician can maintain a rational and exemplary record of public service, why should we care, or even need to be aware, that he or she has a personal pecadillo or two?

Which brings me to the definition of flaws. On moral matters we define a sin as something that, from our perspective, we would judge immoral. As I outline in my book (LIFE! Why We Exist… And What We Must Do to Survive), it’s possible to point to a rational origin for our sense of morality, thereby lending it an objectivity, but as morality reveals itself in the world, it tends not to be rational.

Let’s cut the politicians a break and allow them their private lives, flaws or no flaws, moral or immoral. Let’s not dig if we’re only digging for private dirt. When society expects its leaders be not just effective and law-abiding, but also irreproachable in mind and body, society loses.

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 truth and lies: and their effect on society and how we live.

My wife and I are selling our house. One man made a good offer, insinuated his keenness to move quickly, and then promptly became impossible to pin down. After a roller-coaster of promised inspections and contract signings, reneged upon for reasons of his workload or ill health, we have been forced to conclude that he’s either completely full of it, or extremely busy and unfortunate. We don’t know which. Nor does it seem likely that we will ever know. While I’m curious for curiosity’s sake to know the real story, my overriding concern has a practical base — is he a legitimate buyer?

I’d been wanting to write about fake memoirs (the latest being Peggy Seltzer’s Love and Consequence, her (fictitious) account of her young life in the LA drug wars) and Daniel Mendelsohn helped me find a way in. Mendelsohn has been gathering life histories of family members who survived the holocaust for a book he’s working on. Mendelsohn has a very personal take on those who lie about their experiences in order to tell an amazing story. He thinks it is repellent. He goes further and questions whether it is a good thing to go through the process of trying to imagine the pain of others, to put ourselves in their shoes. Our presumption to be able to imagine what others go through “debases the anguish” that they suffer, he claims.

Mendelsohn spares no one in his assault on induced empathy. A holocaust museum that recreates the experience of riding in a cattle car “encourage[s] not true sympathy or understanding, but a slick “identification” that devalues the real suffering of the real people who had to endure that particular horror.” (Mendelsohn goes on to implicate the Internet, “which has already made problematic the line between truth and falsehood, expert and amateur opinion, authentic and inauthentic.”)

Apart from his skepticism about manufactured, the real crime, according to Mendelsohn, is that when people lie about their experiences, they make us less trustful of such accounts generally. “How tragic if, because of the false ones, those amazing tales are never read — or believed.”

All of which made me wonder — is he right?

I concluded that Mendelsohn takes an essentially irrational position. That his response is mostly emotion wrapped in rationale.

Rationally, Mendelsohn’s empathy hypothesis would lead us to suspect any form of empathy. But if we read, watch or listen to a true story of oppression or suffering, the story has impact and affects us only if we can feel some sort of empathy. If we were to be able to tell ourselves that we had no place imagining ourselves in a similar set of circumstances, the story would be emotionally meaningless to us.

Mendelsohn’s actions also don’t concur with his rhetoric. He is compiling a list of true stories because he believes they should be heard. Does he want them heard but not to affect people?

Sure, some empathy ploys are cheap, ineffective, devaluing and insulting. But to damn empathy generally is short-sighted.

Mendelsohn’s other target is trickier to unravel. I share his desire for less fabrication, for greater honesty and candor. But wanting won’t make it happen. And I don’t immediately come to the same conclusion that modern society has become a catchall for lies and misstatements, with the Internet as its most effective web.

I wrote recently that we each have an obligation of skepticism. That we can’t simply accept everything we read or see at face value. Mendelsohn seems to hanker for a world where everything is believed because it is all truth. But truth is an elusive quality. Even in the true stories that Mendelsohn gathers for his book there will be elements that become highlighted, brought to greater intensity by the use of a particular word or phrase or literary technique, as well as aspects that get excluded or diminished in the telling. That’s the whole point of the telling — to get it told, to bring out the essence.

For as long as there has been language there have been lies and liars. As human beings we process the stories we hear, some we know to be truth, some we know to be lies, and some we either must take at face value or not. Ultimately, we each reach our own level of skepticism. Without a certain level of honesty and truthfulness, society begins to crumble, because society relies on contracts of reliability in human relationships. Society rightly places a great value on honesty. I therefore feel less pessimistic than Mendelsohn seems to feel about the future of truth.

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.

Exploring faith’s role in everyday life.

On Saturday, NPR’s “Speaking of Faith” repeated an interview with poet and philosopher John O’Donohue, who passed away earlier this year. I was struck by O’Donohue’s very pragmatic views on faith and belief. He shared his view of god as beauty, which struck me as a very profound perspective on the concept of god. As an atheist, I am interested in the concept of god as one way that we make sense of existence. The idea of beauty conveys a sense of intrinsic wonder and appreciation that fits with the concept of god. And, as O’Donohue pointed out, beauty needn’t be confined to that which is not difficult or painful to confront.

If we start from this idea of god as beauty we can draw a conclusion about the concept of faith: Faith corresponds to a commitment to beauty. Having determined our points of reference for god or beauty, commiting to that conception becomes an act of faith.

With temperatures dipping sharply recently in many parts of the world, resulting in such phenomena as snow in Baghdad and ice reforming with a vengeance in the Antarctic, global warming skeptics have stepped up their cry against the science of human impact on climate change. Pointing to the recent cold snaps, the skeptics argue that the science of global warming is bunk. Even some who accept the underlying global warming trend say that the cold snap teaches us that we can’t base our deductions and predictions on a few years of data. The global warming trend only reveals itself after averaging out more dramatic and temporary climate swings.

To some degree perhaps this question is one of faith, too. I realize that rationally I believe and many believe that the data supporting global warming is strong enough to take on logic, but it’s not strong enough for everyone. I have cast my commitment behind the idea that burning fossil fuels in vast quantities must eventually have a negative effect on the planets eco-systems. Global warming and the evidence for it fits with that commitment. The skeptics, not stupid people, have committed to the idea that the planet’s eco-systems are unaffected or negligibly affected by burning fossil fuels. This is their faith and they interpret the evidence accordingly.

In another article we read about educators who have come to believe in the superior educational methodology of teaching in single-sex classrooms. Those who subscribe to the concept have committed to the idea and have faith in it. Those who don’t have faith in mixed-sex classrooms. Who is right? Reading the article, it’s not clear. I’m not even sure whether either side is necessarily right. If one accepts that boys and girls learn differently and respond differently to different environments and different stimuli, this still doesn’t tell you that single-sex classrooms will be superior to mixed-sex classrooms that acknowledge and respond to these differences.

Just one anecdote about an adherent to single-sex teaching styles was enough to make me very skeptical: “Sax credits Bender with helping focus a boy who was given a wrong diagnosis of attention-deficit disorder by telling him that his father, who had left the family, would be even less likely to return if all his mother had to report was the boy misbehaving in school.”

Yes, I imagine that would focus a child, but at what cost?

This brings us back to the core challenge of O’Donohue’s beautiful idea — that god is beauty. We can be deceived into thinking that we apprehend beauty when we simply apprehend our attraction to an idea. Without reflecting on the reason for our attraction, we can’t be sure that we’re committing to beauty or to folly.

It was Aristotle who said: “One swallow does not make a summer, neither does one fine day; similarly one day or brief time of happiness does not make a person entirely happy.”

Likewise, one appealing facet of an idea — be it single-sex classrooms, global warming or god — does not make it worthy of our full commitment.

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 function and power of creativity, and the particular value of music as an artistic medium.

Art Schop is a name I’ve been recording under for material that’s more spontaneous, philosophical and odd. This is the second year I’ve entered the RPM Challenge to record an album in the month of February. With a whole bunch going on this year and my wife pregnant (and therefore needing sleep when I wanted to record) I thought I wasn’t going to make it. But today, with her encouragement, I knuckled down and hid myself away and finished up. (This entailed writing or editing lyrics for several songs, recording vocals for nine of ten songs, and mixing all ten.)

Creativity is a funny thing. When you least expect it, something lovely happens. I wasn’t thrilled by much of what I had to work with this morning when I started, fragments of lyrics isolated from the music, and with the pressure of time thought that I’d perhaps get my album done, not much more. But in the course of a few short hours some beautiful moments (or so I hope) found their way out of my subconscious.

Heath Ledger and Michelle Williams had a house a couple of miles from where I live in Brooklyn. I saw Heath around a few times and our kids circled one another once at a local coffee shop. Apart from his talent and charisma, he seemed like a wonderful, warm, nice guy. I was very sad when he died. One of the songs I recorded today is in memory of Heath…

from here to there (song for Heath Ledger)

(A few of the other tunes are posted on my RPM profile.)

Where does the creative impulse originate? Why do people so love music, playing music and singing, listening to music, creating music?

When we create we translate a feeling or impression into some communicable form. Rationally then, the urge to create would seem to originate in the urge to communicate things that we feel otherwise unable to communicate fully. I could tell people I’m sorry that Heath Ledger died. But this wouldn’t quite capture the essence of my sorry, a whole mix of emotion and ideas. When I listen to the song, on the other hand, it expresses my feelings much more coherently, much more warmly, without the same archness or analysis that I’d wrap around them in conversation.

Art gets us closer to a raw form of communication, where the symbols of the art represent feelings that cannot otherwise be measured and processed for someone else to apprehend. It’s akin to a hug or a kiss or a touch.

Arthur Schopenhauer wrote about existence as having two aspects — our perception of it through our senses, which is an indirect representation, and the thing itself, which he called the “will.” Schopenhauer quite rightly stated that we can never directly apprehend the will. It will always and only be revealed to us through our immediate experience. For Schopenhauer, music came closer than anything else to revealing the nature of the will. Intuitively, Schopenhauer’s perspective on music has great weight. Just as music flows and never “is” so existence can’t ever be apprehended and stopped. Just as music follows forms and ideas, repeats patterns, so does existence.

(And we must remember that music originates from human perception via the subconscious. So any mirroring of the will in music is a mirroring of our perception of the will.)

People so enjoy art because it communicates to us on a non-verbal, emotional level; it is release and relief from our insularity of experience. And music has a particularly powerful aspect — it is immediate and transient, it flows. It cannot be frozen and held up to the eye. It forces us to submit to immediate, unstudied perception.

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 letting go.

Hillary Clinton seems to have been finding it difficult to pick her campaign strategy, vacillating between a softer, less strident tone and what has come across as a somewhat nasty tactic of questioning the qualifications and sincerity of Barack Obama. People differ on whether she should have been more ruthless from the start, or less ruthless all the way through; but all seem to agree that picking one would have been better than flipping back and forth.

After conducting extensive research through carefully constructed experiments, Dr. Dan Ariely, professor of behavioral economics at MIT, has concluded, not surprisingly, that people like to keep their options open. But, more surprisingly, Dr. Ariely thinks that we like to keep them open not necessarily because we feel we need them, but because we don’t like to let go of them. Dr. Ariely found that his test subjects worked hard to keep their virtual doors from disappearing, even when they knew there was no cost to making them reappear.

No matter how carefully arrived at, the results of research can be misinterpreted. The test subjects can’t tell us why, on a fundamental level, they wanted to keep the doors from disappearing, so this becomes a matter of inference. But an incredibly valuable aspect of Dr. Ariely’s research seems to be that it gives us a tool we can use when making choices.

Once we are aware that we will be tempted to keep our options open, even when logic tells us that this is detrimental, we will be more likely to trust our logic and let go of unproductive options.

No one would accuse Hillary Clinton of being stupid. I am sure she understands objectively that it would be better, or would have been better, to pick one style of campaign and stick to it. But she was tempted to hold on to all her cards. Whereas, if she’d had the benefit of the insights from Dr. Ariely’s experiments, she may have been able to make the tough call and pick one strategy or the other. (Interestingly, this inability to let a door close seems to be the Achilles Heel of much political decision making. I wonder whether it played a role in Clinton’s initial support for and later distancing from the Iraq war?)

Another example from today’s news: The NY Times reports that after a review of treatments for prostate cancer, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality could not determine which of those treatments to recommend. The article and those interviewed describe this circumstance as “scary,” “troubling,” and “disappointing.” But, as the article points out, in the absence of a prefered treatment, practitioners tend to select the treatment that they most ascribe to or feel most comfortable with. The Agency doesn’t say that any of the treatments being employed don’t have merit. And, in the absence of better data, it seems appropriate that doctors employ techniques they’re happy with. One can’t argue that it would be better to have better treatment data, but in the absence of better data, selecting the most appealing option and letting go of the others, seems a rational choice.

As a more mundane case in point I am put in mind of grocery shopping. A trip to the supermarket for a few items can take me several times as long as a visit to the bodega around the corner, just because in the supermarket I feel obliged to weigh my options. Modern life presents us with so many choices that letting go becomes a more and more valuable technique in time management.

I would present more examples, but I have to stop somewhere…

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.

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