Wednesday, August 28, 2002,
02:08 p.m.
talk therapy and brain changes
A very interesting article from the N.Y. Times about a study showing that psychotherapy can produce the same changes in brain chemistry as medication. The author, Richard A. Friedman, ends on this note: "If psychotherapy produces nearly the same brain changes as pharmacotherapy, then the boundary between mind and brain is purely artificial — even unnatural." I really like this article because I am tired of the argument that because mental states can be changed, and mental illnesses treated, that these states and diseases are only the expressions of chemical problems. Why can't chemical imbalances be the reflection of mental states? If I am simultaneously scared and trembling, You wouldn't assume that the physical symptom was the cause of the emotional system, would you?
Elio Frattaroli eloquently refutes the idea that the mind can be reduced to the physiology of the brain in his book Healing the Soul in the Age of the Brain: Becoming Conscious in an Unconscious World. I was reading this book simultaneously with books on Buddhism and was struck by how similar Frattaroli's insights were to things I was readng in the Buddhist books. But unlike so many psychiatrists writing books, he shows no sign of being a Buddhist, or even knowing much about it. (Many of the people writing on Buddhism, like Sylvia Boorstein and Mark Epstein, are also psychotherapists.)
Saturday, August 24, 2002,
01:36 p.m.
dumb library questions
Thursday, August 22, 2002,
03:18 p.m.
TV Filter
I love it when people come up with a clever solution to a problem rather than an oppressive one. I was looking something up for a patron on a Christian web site and found an ad for a TV language filter. I wondered how they could mute out objectionable words from "streaming" TV, but the gadget reads the closed captions and mutes out the audio when it hits a phrase with objectionable language. If you watch it with the captions on, it even subsitutes in something mild in place of the "cursing" -- their definition of cursing is fairly flexible, and they have different levels of censoring. I don't know if charity really begins in the home, but I'm happy for censorship to begin -- and end -- there.
Wednesday, August 21, 2002,
10:08 p.m.
I just heard that Thomas Jefferson was 30 or 31 when he was tapped to write the Declaration of Independence.
Just when I was feeling good about where I am at age 30.
Wednesday, August 21, 2002,
03:10 p.m.
Christianity and Slavery
About the most offensive thing I have seen in a long time is the idea expressed by some Christians that slavery was okay in the long run because it brought Christianity to Africans. Somewhat comfortingly, the article linked above does not agree. One sentence in the article is intriguing to me: "It is always problematic for us to rank one culture's sin above another's."
Saturday, August 17, 2002,
01:28 p.m.
Freaky Linkages: Last night, Tiffany and I were talking about the Red Hot Chili Peppers for some reason, and I said that I remembered seeing them back in junior high on a music video show called "Rockin' America" that my friends and I loved because of the goofy skits between videos and the fact that they played weird, fairly non-mainstream stuff -- this was 1985, and The Chili Peppers wouldn't be everywhere for a few years.
So today, I'm looking at a list of movies about librarians, and it mentions an X-rated musical version of Alice in Wonderland from the '70s -- and this page actually has something nice to say about it. "Curiouser and curiouser," as Alice would say; I cannot help but look this up in IMDB to see if it's real. Which it apparently is. Some reviews said that it was too bad that the star, Kristine DeBell did an adult movie, because it ruined what would have been a promising career. So I browsed around to see what else she did. One movie, Tag: The Assassination Game sounded familiar, like I caught it on late-night TV in high school, so I check it out. And who is in the cast but Frazer Smith, host of Rockin' America?
Of course, in a holographic universe this kind of thing happens all the time, but I've just started reading up on that and am not ready to comment, though I surely will in the future.
Saturday, August 17, 2002,
11:49 a.m.
"Though the president's harshest critics think he's stupid, I've always maintained that the real problem is that he thinks we are stupid"
-- Frank Rich, New York Times
Friday, August 16, 2002,
07:23 p.m.
Imaginary murder
Who needs to go see Minority Report when people are pleading guilty to the murder of a nonexistent baby?
Friday, August 16, 2002,
12:28 a.m.
We just finished watching Princess and the Warrior and all I can say is that it's one of the most ______ movies I've ever seen.
Thursday, August 15, 2002,
09:06 a.m.
Yesterday, after I finished my entry about non-dualistic thinking, I strolled over to my friend Rich's blog, and saw his posting from that morning about how "The Catholic Church has it completely wrong with the concept of original sin." I basically agree with everything he says, but I am not ready to entirely give up on the concept of original sin. Not that I believe in it, just that I think thatit is a skewed version of something that seems valid to me.
Seeing his post right after what I was writing, I couldn't help but think of dualistic boundary-making consciousness as the real original sin. "Sin" is not the right word, though — too judgemental. Perhaps the original thorn in our side.
When humanity — or another animal, for all I know — started making boundaries, or distinctions, that was the moment of original sin, the mark we all bear with us. This "moment" may have taken thousands of years to pass, the way some creationists (I won't say "creation scientists") say that God's "days" of creation are much longer than our "days." The tree was not just the tre of good and evil, but of the knowledge of good and evil — and though this is certainly not traditional Christian doctrine, I will say that this "knowledge" is socially constructed. The key is not the good an evil, but the differentiation between the two.
When I came upon Rich's entry, I first thought that the "sin," shuch as it is, must be passed on memetically rather than however the church thinks it is passed on — which makes me realize — how does the church think that the stain of sin is passed frmo generation to generation? Do souls have genes? Do genes have souls?
But thinking about it later, I wondered if the boundary-making capacity might be genetic and inborn. I had thought earlier that boundary-making is passed down memetically, first by parents and then in school, mostly by language. But how would the infant pick up the memes of language without a natural ability to categorize, to decide (slowly at first) what is signal and what is noise?
But then, Daniel Dennett says that even the simplest microbes have some sense of boundaries, of inside and outside, and this fits with Wilber's holons.
So is it linguistic distinction-making that forms "original sin?" Is that what has gotten us into all this trouble? Perhaps so. Is it really a coincidence that the man who ate from the tree was the same man who was charged with naming everything in the world, and thus, as Wilber points out, making distinctions and abstractions? Sure, he was the only guy around for a while, but a creation myth could just as easily have had a few generations live in Eden before Nimrod, or Shem, or someone, eat from the tree. (But then, if anyone else besides Adam and Eve ate from the tree, there could have been multiple threads of humanity, some laboring under original sin and others not.
Perhaps Adam was the "first man" not becasue he was created ab nihilo, but because he was the first man in whom we recognize our own heavily linguistic consciousness. (I do not think consciousness is only linguistic, and agree with Nabokov that Joyce "gives too much verbal body to thought" [I am quoting from memory, the original line is in Strong Opinions.] but language powerfully influences our consciousness at many levels and in many ways.)
Adam would thus be the "first man" in the same way that, say, Don Quixote is often considered the "first novel." There were previous book-length narratives, but DQ has qualities that set it apart from earlier tales, and together with modern novels.
But that is just more distinction-making, and thus illusory.
When I was thinking about typing up these musings this morning, I opened up the New York Times Web site and found this article on the "language gene" that arose around 100,000 years ago and changed primitive man from the humans we know today. So maybe I was onto something with that Adam business.
Wednesday, August 14, 2002,
10:32 p.m.
Yesterday I finished A Year in Van Nuys by Sandra Tsing Loh. It's the funniest thing I have read in a long time. Read it.
Wednesday, August 14, 2002,
07:32 a.m.
I successfully completed my first day as a librarian, which I will get into more later.
I started reading No Boundary: Eastern and Western Approaches to Personal Growth by Ken Wilber, which I was very happy to see on the shelf at a library in a mall in suburban Vancouver — those last two words are almost redundant.
The main idea so far is that no boundaries (between earth and sky, good and evil, inside and outside etc.) exist in nature, that they are the creations of human thinking and culture — what Richard Brodie would call "distinction memes." (See my entry of July 28-29).
Wilber discusses the similarity (though not the equivalence) of post-classical physics with Eastern mysticism and writes: "The reason the East knew this long before western science stumbled onto it is that the East never took boundaries seriously. Boundaries didn't so go to their heads that their heads and nature parted ways." (p. 40) When I read this, I thought of the Japanese prints that became trendy in Europe and America in the late 19th century and influenced painters like Van Gogh, Gauguin, and Toulouse-Lautrec. What is striking about these prints is their flatness — though they are wonderfully rendered, there is often no foreground and no background, at least not to the degree of separation implied in Western paintings of the same time. Compare this or this with this or this.
Though the lines in the Japanese prints are more firmly drawn, and one could say these are boundaries, I feel that these lines show where wave and sky meet, while the fuzzier lines in the Western paintings say "this is HERE and that is way back THERE." My point is open to debate, but I think it has merit, and fits with the East/West distinctions that Wilber draws — though of course, these are just more illusory mental boundaries.
Tuesday, August 13, 2002,
07:37 a.m.
My first day at the new job, new career really, and I'm scared. Good scared, but scared.
Friday, August 9, 2002,
04:50 p.m.
blogs
My mom forwarded me this article from the Sacramento Bee on blogs. So I sent her back
the piece I wrote on blogs for one of my last classes for my MLIS, back in December. The Bee article was written by someone I knew when we both wrote for the Sacramento News & Review, and I felt a smug satisfaction that I was months ahead of the game with my (unpublished) blog piece.
Friday, August 2, 2002,
05:51 p.m.
Dr. Yo
This is a mighty cool internet radio stream. Just so you know.
Thursday, August 1, 2002,
02:32 p.m.
New Month, New News!
For those of you who have followed my job woes in the Portland market, weep no more!
I just said yes to the offer to be Assistant Community Librarian of the Vancouver Mall branch of the Ft. Vancouver Regional Library in Vancouver, WA. The pay's pretty good, I can drive there in 15 minutes, and I don't have to move -- contrary to what all the wet blankets in Portland tried to tell me.
Thanks to anyone who gave me advice or consolation over these months!
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