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.

Random Acts of Kindness Day

Aaron Mathes has no heat in his apartment

It's true. I encouraged him to go outside even though the realfeel is 14 degrees. I thought it'd be good for him to make it to the gym. He has no hot water either.

Trading is Fun

Trading is fun. Giving money for goods is fun. Money isn't valuable unless its spent. Money in the bank can provide a peace of mind. But religion is much more effective at that.

Why music?

My latest intellectual hero Geoff Miller makes a good case that music and the arts have evolved as part of the interplay between mate choice and competition. I wonder why everybody isn't as consumed with the biological underpinnings of their passions as I am. Lucky for them.

Here's an example of Miller's thoughts on music in evolution to whet your appetite:

"Music, considered as a concrete behavior rather than an abstract facet of culture, shows many features that may function as indicators. Dancing reveals aerobic fitness, coordination, strength, and health. Because nervousness interferes with fine motor control, including voice control, singing in key may reveal self-confidence, status, and extroversion. Rhythm may reveal the brain’s capacity for sequencing complex movements reliably, and the efficiency and flexibility of the brain’s “central pattern generators”. Likewise, virtuosic performance of instrumental music may reveal motor coordination, capacity for automating complex learned behaviors, and having the time to practice (which in turn indicates not having heavy parental responsibilities already, and hence sexual availability). Melodic creativity may reveal learning ability to master existing musical styles and social intelligence to go beyond them in producing optimally exciting novelty. " (Miller 2000)
He mentions areas for future research at the end of the article and some of them I might be able to help with:

• the mate preferences people have concerning musical displays, and the inferences they make from manifest musical ability to underlying traits
• the sexual payoffs for different degrees of musicalitcy in tribal and modern populations.
  
• the perceptual and cognitive preferences people (and other apes) have with respect to many dimensions of musical stimuli
• the frequency distribution of actual musical productions with respect to those dimensions,
• whether there is strong assortative mating for musical traits
• whether there are genetic correlations between musical tastes and music-production tendencies in modern populations, which might indicate a runaway effect in progress
  

Its a bit of a bummer that creating aesthetically superlative musical performances satisfies a runaway evolutionary accident. Then again it all comes back to the bizarre accident of genetic reproduction and the links of genes as both reflections and manipulators of the environment.

Its all almost too much to grasp and leaves me breathless. Along the lines of the primacy of the gene, music can be seen as the penultimate demonstration of the complexities of life that are captured by genetic progress. I can live with this.