Introspection is a Dance Teacher, Telling Us : “Try It Yourself And Find Out”

April 11, 2016 Gary ReinerLeave a comment

Introspection is easy to misunderstand. Superficially, the introspectionist seems to say: “Here’s how my mind works; I infer that some other minds (or many others, or all others) work the same way.” But that is not the introspectionist proposition. The introspectionist is a dance teacher, not a dancer. He demonstrates a move and then says, you try it! His goal is not to explain dancing by showing you how he does it. His goal is to explain dancing by showing you how to do it. Then you will reach your own conclusions.

Thus the introspectionist goes in one leap from the weakest possible argument to the strongest — from a weak argument based on his experience alone to an irrefutable one based on yours.

The Tides of Mind: Uncovering the Spectrum of Consciousness
David Gelernter

How Did The Earliest Christians Remember Their Stories About Jesus?

April 5, 2016April 5, 2016 Gary ReinerLeave a comment

When we remember what has happened before now, it is just as much about the present as the past. It is the relevance of the past that makes us remember it in the present. This applies to the early Christian storytellers in the oral stages of the stories about Jesus, stories that weren’t written down until 40 to 65 years after the fact. They told stories that remembered Jesus’s past in light of the community’s present. These may have been “distorted” memories, but nonetheless they were valuable memories, and no less real to the people who held them and shared them than recollections that actually were rooted in the life of the historical Jesus.

Oral cultures have a different conception of tradition from written cultures. In written cultures, such as ours, the idea of preserving a tradition means to keep it intact, verbatim, the same, from one telling to the next. In oral cultures, all one can do is try to remember if a spoken version of a tradition is the “same” as an earlier version. But in fact, being exactly “the same” — in our sense of verbatim repetition — is not a concern in oral traditions. That concern came into existence in written cultures, where such things could be checked.

Studies have shown that those passing along traditions in oral traditions are not interested in preserving exactly the same thing. They are interested in making the same thing relevant for the new context. That necessarily involves changing it. Every time. For that reason, when someone in an oral culture claims that the current version of the tradition — a story, a poem, a saying — is the “same” as an earlier one, they do not mean what we mean. They mean “the same basic thing.” They do not mean “exactly” the same. At all.

Jesus Before the Gospels: How the Earliest Christians Remembered, Changed, and Invented Their Stories of the Savior
Bart Ehrman
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Bart Ehrman
born 1955

. Bart D. Ehrman
. Wikipedia
. Bart Ehrman Blog

Bart Ehrman is an American New Testament scholar. Ehrman is the James A. Gray Distinguished Professor of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He completed his M.Div. and Ph.D. degrees at Princeton Seminary, and began his teaching career at Rutgers University.

Ehrman’s work focuses on textual criticism of the New Testament, the historical Jesus, and the development of early Christianity. He has written and edited 30 books, including three college textbooks. He has also achieved acclaim at the popular level, authoring five New York Times bestsellers.

Books by Bart Ehrman include:

Finding Answers to Our Core Question: ‘What Does It All Mean?’

March 30, 2016March 30, 2016 Gary ReinerLeave a comment

Prompted by our universal curiosity, we ask ourselves ‘What does it all mean?’ And, we routinely trek off in many directions, seeking possible answers.

Here’s a little book, What Does It All Mean?, that helps us plumb the depths of our questioning. Anyone who approaches the book with a ‘beginner’s mind’ will benefit greatly from its wisdom. The book is a lucid introduction to some of the key problems of philosophy, and it sets forth the central problems of philosophical inquiry in an easy to follow, conversational tone, coupled with a dose of humor.

A rich world of possibilities is available to us when we keep a ‘beginner’s mind’. It is when we are beginners that we are eager to learn, receptive, and open to possibilities. Even if we feel as though we’ve crossed the threshold and become advanced, with a ‘beginner’s mind’ we are still open to new insights, and to different, perhaps deeper, ways to appreciate even the basics.

Arguing that the best way to learn about philosophy is to think about its questions directly, nine core questions are posed: Is there really an external world? Are there other minds? How does the mind relate to the brain? Is there such a thing as free will? What is the nature of morality and justice? How do words manage to refer to things? How should one feel about death? What is the meaning of life? Following each question there is a short, engaging discussion.

True to the spirit of philosophical inquiry, answers to questions are left open-ended, allowing us to consider other solutions and encouraging us to think for ourselves.

What Does It All Mean?: A Very Short Introduction to Philosophy
Thomas Nagel

Thomas Nagel
born 1937

. NYU Department of Philosophy
. Wikipedia

Thomas Nagel is Professor of Philosophy and Law at New York University, where he has taught since 1980. His main areas of philosophical interest are philosophy of mind, political philosophy and ethics.

Nagel is well known for his critique of reductionist accounts of the mind, particularly in his essay “What Is it Like to Be a Bat?“, along with his contributions to deontological and liberal moral and political theory in The Possibility of Altruism (1970) and subsequent writings. Nagel continues his critique of reductionism in Mind and Cosmos (2012), in which he argues against a reductionist view, and specifically the neo-Darwinian view, of the emergence of consciousness.

Books by Thomas Nagel include:

Living in the Present is Hard – The Past & Future Keep Harassing Us

March 25, 2016 Gary ReinerLeave a comment

It is hard to live in the present. The past and the future keep harassing us. The past with guilt, the future with worries.

So many things have happened in our lives about which we feel uneasy, regretful, angry, confused, or, at least, ambivalent. And these feelings are often colored by guilt. Guilt that says: “You ought to have done something other than what you did; you ought to have said something other than what you said.” These “oughts” keep us feeling guilty about the past and prevent us from being fully present to the moment.

Worse, however, than our guilt are our worries. Our worries fill our lives with “What ifs”: “What if I lose my job, what if my father dies, what if there is not enough money, what if the economy goes down, what if a war breaks out?” These many “ifs” can so fill our mind that we become blind to the flowers in the garden and the smiling children on the streets, or deaf to the grateful voice of a friend.

The real enemies of our life are the “oughts” and the “ifs.” They pull us backward into the unalterable past and forward into the unpredictable future. But real life takes place in the here and the now.

Here and Now by Henri Nouwen
Here and Now: Living in the Spirit
Henri Nouwen

Henri Nouwen
1932-1996

Background on Henri Nouwen

If Seeing Is Believing, How Do We Know What We See?

March 21, 2016March 21, 2016 Gary ReinerLeave a comment

The eye is a simple optical instrument. With internal images projected from objects in the outside world, it is Plato’s cave with a lens. The brain is the engine of understanding. There is nothing closer to our intimate experiences, yet the brain is less understood and more mysterious than a distant star.

We have only to open our eyes, and spread before us lies a banquet of colors and shapes, shadows, and textures: a pageant of rewarding and threatening objects, miraculously captured by sight. All this, from two tiny distorted upside-down patterns of light in the eyes. Seeing is so familiar, apparently so easy, it takes a leap of imagination to appreciate that the eyes set extremely difficult problems for the brain to solve for seeing to be possible.

Light does not enter or leave the brain, locked privily in its box of bone. All the brain receives are minute electrochemical pulses of various frequencies, as signals from the senses. The signals must be read by rules and knowledge to make sense. Yet what we see, and what we know, can be very different. As science advances, differences between perceived appearances and accepted realities become even greater.

What is striking is the huge amount of brain contributing to vision, giving immense added value to the images of the eyes. Where does this added value come from? Even in ideal conditions object perception is far richer than any possible images in the eyes. The added value must come from dynamic brain processes, employing knowledge stored from the past, to see the present, and predict the immediate future. Prediction has immense survival value. It makes fast games possible in spite of the physiological delays from eye to brain, and brain to hand. Moreover, anticipating dangers and potential rewards is essential for survival — made possible by buying time from seeing objects distant in space.