Conception for a quicky website...

What's the opposite of gravity?

Everything seems to stay together.

Blogging from a pearl is problematic

Sad but true. Although " blogging from a pearl while walking down the street and lacking patience is problematic" might be more apt.

Scan the Outliers

if we scanned paul farmer's brain when he looked at and thought about a sick person dying needlessly from preventable disease, and compared the scan to that of the average middle class person given the same stimulus, what differences might we expect to find?

One guess might be heightened activity in the motivational and motor sensors, as Dr. Farmer imagines taking the necessary actions to solve the problem. We might also expect to see higher activation in those regions associated with outrage.

Farmer credits his family upbringing with his instinctive imperative to help those less fortunate. Might his activation pattern to this stimulus have remained relatively constant since maturity over time? If so, then perhaps activation patterns on a given stimuli could predict life long dedication to philanthropy.

The application for this research might tend towards a behavioral treatment, for there is no doubt that behavioral conditioning influences brain patterns [to suggest as much is nearly a tautology], focused on particular goals of economic equity or distribution. Of course, related pharmaceutical testment hovers ominously nearby. However, the behavioral treatment is no different from moral education or advertising, and a drug treatment no different than valium or adderal.

Let the proposed applications not distract from the question: what is different about the brains of those who dedicate their lives to helping the less fortunate?

fMRI and ethics: drivers of the new econ

The relative nature of human preferences can now be conclusively illuminated using fMRI. A new economics based on preference must acknowledge the address the illogical inconsistency of individual behavior by looking at the motivations of the true stakeholders: the genetic inheritance.

Enough biased articles on genetic altruism have been written by western romantics and the time has come for an open eyed view of the motivations underlying micro-economics and their corruption of the macro economic field that leads to the hellish descent our planet and species now faces.

Where will the new economics be created and, more importantly, how will it be applied?

DNA wants is to believe false things.

Why do we want to believe erroneously that we exist? Because our genes have evolved to cultivate that desire. Where Buddhism is the solution, are the genes inevitably the cause?

Nicotine Brings Enlightenment

When you are a smoker. You crave nicotine.

When you are a human, you crave.

When you are a buddhist, you fight craving with meditation.

When a smoker is smoking, she is (relatively) relaxed, sociable and in good humour.

When a buddhist has meditated, they are in a similar state.

The goal is the same: the cessation of craving and, thus, the cessation of suffering.

Drug use automatically leads to enlightenment as users become obsessed with craving, just like buddhists, and enter into regular states of being explicitly aware that their craving has ceased, just like buddhists. These states occur when the user uses.

The meditator hopes to extend this state beyond moments of practice into all moments of their conscious life. The committed drug user similarly hopes to extend this state into all moments by using amounts which bring the explicit high (explicit awareness of the absence of craving) at all times.