Lawyers who filed a class action on behalf of those who purchased the computer game Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas have been surprised and disappointed that the class of those offended by the hidden sex scenes is very small. The scenes themselves, a legacy of pre-release versions of the game, weren’t even completed, and could only be accessed with special hardware or software. Of the many millions who bought the game only a couple of thousand have expressed interest in the settlement. The lawyers, on the other hand, stand to recoup fees of $1.3M if the settlement is approved by the court. Makers of the game should perhaps consider recouping these fees in turn by designing a new game called Grand Theft Lawyer.

This odd situation of the lawyers so misjudging the shrug factor of the game players when it came to the hidden sex scenes seems to highlight a curious matter of our perspectives on sex in general.

A new report on the safe, or unsafe, sex practices of New Yorkers tells us that people in the city have a fair bit of sex and that many of them don’t wear a condom when common sense would say they should. But it’s the comments on this story that quickly become provocative. Alongside people talking frankly and straightforwardly about the difficulties of dealing with desire and pleasure and the practicality of condoms, we have this creepy and passionate post: “burned in their lust for one another, men with men committing what is shameful and receiving their dues… ”

Sex is something we’re set up to do, something that comes naturally, something that non-conscious creatures have no hang-ups about. So how and why did sex become such a tricky topic when humans developed consciousness?

I’ll hypothesize that there may be several reasons:

1. We realized that sex is a high-stakes activity — It can end up with children and long term responsibility, and it decides the future of our group.

So, when people figured these things out it became important to establish social rules and conventions that would prevent problems in the coupling business and ensure the best survival rate for the society.

2. We became aware that the act of sex and the state of desire change our perception of ourselves and the world around us. We became conscious of a diminishing sense of self control when we were aroused, of the strength of the sex impulse, and of the tug of certain stimuli (erotic triggers).

Being conscious of these things tended to bring us into conflict with another gross effect of consciousness — self-control. The tension between the two led inevitably to self-consciousness about sex, and, in the extreme, feelings of shame and embarrassment.

(These ideas are supported by the varying degree of openness about sex in different cultures.)

One woman who purchased the Grand Theft game for her fifteen year old son had this to say when asked whether she would have bought the game if she’d known that it allowed players to kill police officers: “Well, I think he does have games with violence,” adding that she would have “possibly” bought such a game — though not one that contained sex scenes like those in San Andreas.

And the beat goes on…

On the philosophy of The Incredibles, Tiger Woods, and the conceptual founder of the world wide web.

My wife just introduced our four-year-old son to The Incredibles (he’s going through a super-hero phase). As the movie played today I was struck by the question raised by Mr. Incredible about his son Dash. To paraphrase: he asked his wife (Elastigirl) why Dash shouldn’t be allowed to celebrate his incredible speed by going out for sports. (In the movie it’s because they’re in the super-hero protection program.) The question got me in mind of norms and deviations from those norms.

Modern society often gets twisted up in the idea that we’re all equal but we should still revere exceptional ability.

David Brooks writes a drooling piece about Tiger Woods (the golfer). The piece is a great example of the uneasy path we walk when thinking about those with great talent or ability. It’s difficult not to be impressed and somewhat in awe of Tiger Woods’ talent. But would we accept the premise that Tiger Woods has more value as a human being than someone without his talent and determination?

Even when we’re dead and gone people go back to review our contribution to this our that. As is happening with Paul Otlet who dreamed up the Internet before computers had been invented. Otlet imagined a world wide interconnection of nodes that would allow people to share libraries of information and exchange messages.

Does it matter that Otlet’s ideas may have prefigured those that resulted in the actual world wide web? Did Otlet’s ideas actually influence anyone who eventually began the real internet? Or does this just happen to make a plausible and interesting story?

It’s hard to accept that we are neither the true owners of our own successes, nor the architects of our failures. And then at the same time, since no-one and no-thing can lay claim to owning our success or failures, we have no better recourse than to claim them for ourselves.

After writing a post on mindfulness recently (Mind Power in Physical and Mental Therapies), I had some correspondence with my former life coach Serge Prengel. Serge shared with me something he’d written about mindfulness in response to the same news report, which I thought I would share here, republished with gratitude to Serge.

Mindfulness Coaching & Therapy

By Serge Prengel“>Serge Prengel

What is mindfulness, and what does it have to do with therapy or coaching?

1. Is it mystical?
First, I’d like to dispel some of the esoteric, mystical associations that many people have with the word “mindfulness’. For many people, “mindfulness” still has the connotation of something magical, endowed with mysterious powers. In fact, mindfulness is very much a part of the human experience. While some people do develop their ability to reach “higher” states of consciousness, everybody has the ability to be mindful and to increase that ability.

Helping clients practice mindfulness has long been a part of many traditional, talk-based psychotherapies, even though it has not necessarily been conceptualized as “mindfulness” within the theories underlying these therapies. For instance, many therapists help clients grow from self-consciousness into self awareness, without necessarily thinking of this as mindfulness training. Another example is how therapists help clients develop the “observing self”: In addition to noticing your mood, you become aware that there also is an “observing self” that notices how you feel, but doesn’t drown in this feeling.

2. The practitioner’s mindfulness

Having a personal experience of mindfulness has profoundly influenced the way many therapists and coaches experience what they do, and changed the way we do our work.
By this, I do not mean that we “prescribe” meditation to our clients. In fact, many of us do not specifically refer to either “mindfulness” or “meditation” during the work we do with our clients. But the profound change is that it influences how we are, and what we do, during our sessions. The practice of mindfulness helps us look for a different quality of listening - - a deeper way of paying attention to what clients say and mean.

By the way, the experience of mindfulness doesn’t just come from the practice of traditional meditation techniques. Standard “lotus” meditation is not the only way to mindfulness. Many Buddhist traditions include such practices as “walking meditation”. Some traditions go further, considering that any activity can be an opportunity to practice a mindful attitude (e.g. the injunction to “chop wood, carry water” as a way to spiritual development). Other gateways include “Focusing”, which was developed by Gene Gendlin as he analyzed the process of therapy to understand what happened in successful therapies.

3. Transmitting an experience

As a therapist/coach, you have the possibility of shaping the experience of what happens in sessions in order to help your clients “get it”. You are not teaching a whole class to try to impart them some general knowledge of what mindfulness might be. You see one client at a time, and this gives you the opportunity to tailor each session to help each client get a direct, personal experience of mindfulness.

This experience starts with what I was describing in the previous paragraph: How a mindful therapist can give a client the experience of being listened to and heard in a profound way. This continues into a creative process that is based on the very specific circumstances of this very specific client, and the nature of the interaction between this very specific client and this very specific therapist.

Over time, clients come to internalize this mixture of mindfulness, receptivity and creativity. Neural pathways adapt so that the client knows how to get back to that state of mindfulness/receptivity/creativity without thinking about it, without having to remember a procedure (much the way “procedural memory” helps us remember how to use a bike).

4. Self-regulation

As the findings of neuroscience make more inroads into the psychotherapy world, there is a growing interest in “bottom up” processes as opposed to “top down” processes. In a nutshell, “top-down” approaches focus on how our “higher” functions, such as the intellect or the will, influence what we do. “Bottom up” approaches focus on how what happens at a sensorimotor level affects what we do and who we are. Far from seeing the brain as just the organ of cognition, we tend to see it more as the place that receives input both from the outside world and from inside ourselves, and that regulates our functioning “from the bottom up”.

So there is a growing interest in how mindfulness can help us enhance the natural processes of self-regulation. This is not done in a mechanical way – i.e. saying “meditate 15 minutes a day” the way you would say “take two aspirins”. Regulating a complex mechanism is a complex thing, as everybody knows from the experience of how difficult it is to relax by just thinking “I should relax”.

Several contemporary therapies have developed ways to help people achieve more self-regulation in dealing with difficult or overwhelming circumstances. The process of doing that involves moment-by-moment attention to fleeting experiences, including body senses. This is facilitated by of the ability of the therapist to be attuned to the client, and to have the ability to be mindful during this process. This creates a learning experience where the client experiences mindfulness and develops skills to increase the ability to be mindful. While this has a lot of similarity with the skills fostered by meditation, it is not meditation per se - - and it goes further than most people can hope to achieve individually through meditation.

Serge Prengel

Clinton (Hillary), Polanski (Roman), Young Earth (In Texas), and red wine.

The Times reports that ‘Hillary Rosen, one of Mrs. Clinton’s most prominent women supporters, wrote on the Huffington Post Web site. “I am sure I was not alone in privately urging the campaign over the last two weeks to use the moment to take her due, pass the torch and cement her grace.”’

Ah, yes, the cementing of one’s grace; the trowel’s slap against the wet lime. For Clinton, one can imagine, this is the sound of the bricks being laid for her mausoleum. To let go of this campaign, once an inevitable victory, and to accept its loss, her oblivion. How long must it have been since Clinton defined herself in anything but political terms?

Roman Polanski has suffered tragedy (the murder of his family) and inflicted harm and misery (by having sex with a thirteen year-old girl). He’s also imbued the world with grace through his artistic endeavors. His victim, 30 years on, expresses her desire to let go of his crime. That crime has defined him these past thirty years, but has also defined her, to some extent, as its victim. If she can let go, she will be free of that definition. Whereas oddly, and rightly one feels, he will remain attached to his.

Dr. Don McLeroy, a dentist in Central Texas, chairs the state’s education board. As the Times reports, Dr. McLeroy believes that ‘Earth’s appearance is a recent geologic event — thousands of years old, not 4.5 billion. “I believe a lot of incredible things,” he said, “The most incredible thing I believe is the Christmas story. That little baby born in the manger was the god that created the universe.”’

‘“I just don’t think [evolution is] true or it’s ever happened” … when he considers the case for evolution, Dr. McLeroy said, “it’s just not there.”’

I feel the same way about dentists. After all, before a dentist looks in your mouth, your teeth are fine, they’ve been getting along quite well. But as soon as a dentist pokes around in there all of a sudden you’ve got all of these problems that have been lurking for years.

And, come to think of it, I feel that way about Texas, too. The idea that such a state exists is just so preposterous. Sure, you can make a compelling case for Austin, but what about the rest? Naah. It’s just some left wing conspiracy to scare the rest of us into voting Democrat.

But if the Texas state education board succeeds in having schools teach the weaknesses of evolutionary theory, as it is dangerously close to doing, I may have to let go of the conviction that Texas and its dentists don’t exist.

Which brings me to today’s philosophic conundrum:

Should I drown my days of sorrow in red wine if it will only serve to extend them?

While we live in the moment we must accept the uncertainty of the future… and the past.

“Prophesy is a good line of business, but it is full of risks,”
– Mark Twain (who may lose his house twice over…)

Back in the dark ages of last November I wrote about a stockbroker who, in anger, jostled the stationary bike of a fellow spin-class member. Frustrated by the man’s grunting and shouting, he grabbed the handlebars of the offender’s bike, lifted it off the ground (while he was still on it) and dropped it. My blog post on the subject sports a photograph of the purportedly injured party, Stuart Sugarman, a partner at an investment firm, wearing a neck brace. Here we are in sunny June and I read that a jury has acquitted the stockbroker of assault, having found Mr. Sugarman to be an unreliable witness, and deciding that the incident didn’t, beyond reasonable doubt, result in Sugarman’s injuries.

When I wrote my original post I was convinced that the stockbroker, Christopher Carter, was guilty of something — perhaps not a crime, but certainly of unreasonably losing his cool. The current news story casts a somewhat heroic glow on Carter’s vigilante act, blaming Sugarman for being a boar in the class, and a liar to boot.

Where does the truth lie?

Some scientists have apparently decided that wherever the truth about dark energy lies they are not going to find it. Current calculations indicate that the universe is 4% regular matter (stars, planets, pencils), 22% dark matter, and 74% dark energy (not related to dark matter as far as we know). Despite a lot of attention and investigation, dark energy isn’t yielding its mysteries, and some scientists are worried that it won’t.

Such pessimism seems unwarranted at this point in time. After all, the future could last a long time. Why give up now?

I’m reasonably sure that Ray Kurzweil, noted futurist, would concur. Kurzweil has been making predictions about the future for over thirty years, with impressive results. In the ’80s he predicted that a computer would defeat the world chess champion by 1998 (it happened in 1997). Some of Kurzweil’s current predictions:

• Within 10 years, a drug that lets you eat whatever you want without gaining weight.
• Within 20 years, all energy will come from clean sources.
• In 15 years… your life expectancy will rise faster than you age.
• And then, by 2050, the Singularity, when humans and/or machines begin to evolve into immortal beings with ever-improving software.

Still doubtful? “Two decades ago he predicted that “early in the 21st century” blind people would be able to read anything anywhere using a handheld device. In 2002 he narrowed the arrival date to 2008. On Thursday night at the festival, he pulled out a new gadget the size of a cellphone, and when he pointed it at the brochure for the science festival, it had no trouble reading the text aloud.”

From a philosophical perspective, an interesting aspect of all of this is that time, as we perceive it, is all in our minds. The past and the future, as we commonly conceive of them, don’t exist. All of existence rests on the current moment. Reality is transitional. Causality creates our perception of time. The predictable changing of things, the nudge of being from one moment to the next. Without this, time would be meaningless.

(This, as a digression, is the clue to understanding our existence. Once we have accepted that the rules of causality shape the universe we live in, we can begin to understand why we live, think and feel the way we do.)

This morning when I woke up I was the proud owner of an idea for a sure-fire business opportunity. By 9:30am, that sunny feeling of certainty had been toppled as I found out that someone already held the copyright to my idea. All was lost. By 3pm, after a brief nap, I’d regained my optimism after dreaming up a revision to my idea… Time, you faithless lover, revise me again.

On avoiding work and making false distinctions.

After I swam this morning, I got into a locker room discussion about the supreme wastefulness and poor management of the NY City Transit system. (Coincidentally, the subject of a recent post.) There we were, a former Transit employee (me), a current Transit employee, and a contractor to the Transit Authority, quickly finding common ground on the subjects of inefficiency and ineptness. The discussion began when the current transit employee joked that his job required him just to show up.

Barack Obama showed up when Ted Kennedy couldn’t (because of his brain tumor) to make the commencement address at Wesleyan University. Obama took the opportunity to urge the graduating class to consider the call of public service. William Kristol chastises Obama for omitting from his list of worthy public services that the Weslyan grads might consider a career in the armed forces .

Um, William, who in his right mind would encourage young people to join the armed forces right now? And particularly Obama, who opposed the war, and who wants out of the war, and who probably believes that drawing down on military spending is a good long term goal.

The report of another commencement address underscores the weakness of Kristol’s unconvincing piece. We read that President Bush gave the commencement address at Furman University in South Carolina. Bush also called for students to consider public service… and also left out the military from his list.

At the pinnacle of his rhetorical powers, Bush exhorted the Furman graduating class to adopt a “culture of responsibility” avoiding the inevitably un-fulfilling temptations of “alcohol, drugs and promiscuity.” (A bit late for that advice probably, Mr. President.)

And, speaking of alcohol, whenever I read Stanley Fish’s column it makes me want to tackle a shaker of Martinis. There’s something so depressingly negative about Fish’s way of thinking. He’s the worst kind of academic, it seems, seeking out reasons to accept the inevitability of problems rather than find ways to see past them.

This week Fish writes about “norms and deviations.” In a nutshell he argues that any group can be defined as a deviation from a norm, and that that group can legitimately claim that the norm is artificially determined. Deaf people, once defined as disabled, now seeks recognition as a community that rejects the term disabled. Fish rattles through the spectrum of differences from sex distinctions to the distinction between serial killers and non-serial killers. He concludes, rather smugly, that there’s no better way of looking at the endless recursive meaninglessness of these situations than to accept its endlessness and meaninglessness.

Fortunately, I didn’t have to do any work in rebutting Mr. Fish — someone else had already done it for me. A poster called malnicore added this comment, which cannot be improved upon (or, maybe it can, but I’m not going to try):

Oddly, I now notice that malnicore’s last sentence echoes Bush’s call to release ourselves from any attachment to “alcohol, drugs and promiscuity.” To which list he might usefully have added “abuse of power.”

On a stroke victim’s experience of nirvana, Supreme Court justices’ rendering surprising decisions, and a father’s $45K investment in his son’s self-motivation.

I watched The Simpsons movie over the weekend, which uses the twin drays of pollution and global warming to help drive its plot. I thought it must have been during the Simpsons movie that I heard a witticism about an endangered species being one simply less able to survive, but my daughter corrected me; David Letterman cracked the joke about the great blue heron when he hosted the Piedmont bird impersonators on a recent show.

Which is a long way around (what do you expect?) to introducing the subject of my curiosity today — exceptions. An endangered species might be considered an exception in that it is one of a minority of the species on the planet doomed to imminent extinction, but maybe another way of looking at this is that every species is endangered, we’re just each on our own time-lines.

Other exceptions:

A stroke victim experienced an informed nirvana after her stroke disabled the egotism and analytical dominance of her left brain. Doctor Jill Bolte Taylor, now recovered but having learned a new skill, can still tap into the peaceful, euphoric oneness that her stroke foisted upon her. Unusual in her pragmatic perspective on the sensation, Dr. Taylor describes her experience as a sudden understanding the relative and all-connected reality of her existence. But since we’d need a stroke, and a lucky stroke, to get to the same euphoric sensation, what use is Dr. Taylor’s unique affliction?

The Supreme Court rendered two surprisingly non-conservative decisions today in favor of workers versus employers. The particular details are less pertinent to this post than their out-of-wackness.

And lastly, I’ve written variously before on the value of education as an end in itself. I was just talking about this yesterday to my wife’s aunt’s mother (such are family gatherings) who made the pertinent point that the value of an education is to teach one how to learn. But today I read the compelling story of a man who bribed his son to apply himself in school by promising him a Shelby 427 Cobra. (Those kids who’ve been duped into performing for $50, read no further…)

Alright, so what gives? We like evolution, survival of the fittest, but we love the endangered species. We pride ourselves on our mastery of language, on our analytical heft, but our jaws drop as we think about freedom from ego and stress. We hate the conservatism of the court with such vehemence that we try to read conservative subplots into its more liberal decisions. And we don’t believe in the value of financial incentives in encouraging our children to learn, but we wonder how we’re going to pay for the Shelby Cobra…

Exceptions.

Does an exception tell us that the rule is wrong?

Not necessarily. I think they perhaps give us a new overarching rule that we should be careful of absolutism. We love to categorize. Categorizing has been such useful skill for the conscious mind that it has become a ready defense against uncertainty. In some cases perhaps too ready.

Dr. Taylor’s experience tells us that we may have a very different perception of reality if we could find ways to counter the less helpful strategies of the left brain.

The Supreme Court justices remind us that we can’t necessarily judge people by their past actions and ideas.

And the father who bought his son a Shelby Cobra for making the honor role thumbs his nose at those of us who hove to the higher ground of learning for the sake of learning…

On the importance and unimportance of naming things.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Again, I feel I should quote him in full:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.