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Ezra Weston Loomis Pound (30 October 1885 – 1 November 1972) was an expatriate American poet and critic, a major figure in the early modernist poetry movement, and a fascist collaborator in Italy during World War II. His works include Ripostes (1912), Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1920), and his 800-page epic poem, The Cantos (c. 1917–1962).^[1]

Pound’s contribution to poetry began in the early 20th century with his role in developing Imagism, a movement stressing precision and economy of language. Working in London as foreign editor of several American literary magazines, he helped discover and shape the work of contemporaries such as T. S. Eliot, Ernest Hemingway, and James Joyce. He was responsible for the 1914 serialization of Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, the 1915 publication of Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock“, and the serialization from 1918 of Joyce’s Ulysses. Hemingway wrote in 1932 that, for poets born in the late 19th or early 20th century, not to be influenced by Pound would be like passing through a great blizzard and not feeling its cold.^[a]

Angered by the carnage of World War I, Pound blamed the war on finance capitalism, which he called “usury“.^[3] He moved to Italy in 1924 and through the 1930s and 1940s promoted an economic theory known as social credit, wrote for publications owned by the British fascist Sir Oswald Mosley, embraced Benito Mussolini‘s fascism, and expressed support for Adolf Hitler. During World War II and the Holocaust in Italy, he made hundreds of paid radio broadcasts for the Italian government, including in German-occupied Italy, attacking the United States, Franklin D. Roosevelt and, above all, Jews, as a result of which he was arrested in 1945 by American forces in Italy on charges of treason. He spent months in a U.S. military camp in Pisa, including three weeks in an outdoor steel cage. Deemed unfit to stand trial, he was incarcerated in St. Elizabeths psychiatric hospital in Washington, D.C., for over 12 years.

While in custody in Italy, Pound began work on sections of The Cantos that were published as The Pisan Cantos (1948), for which he was awarded the Bollingen Prize for Poetry in 1949 by the Library of Congress, causing enormous controversy. After a campaign by his fellow writers, he was released from St. Elizabeths in 1958 and lived in Italy until his death in 1972. His political views have ensured that his life and work remain controversial.

Early life and education (1885–1908)

Family background

See also: Homer Pound HouseThaddeus Coleman Pound, Pound’s paternal grandfather, in the late 1880s

Pound was born in 1885 in a two-story clapboard house in Hailey, Idaho Territory, the only child of Homer Loomis Pound (1858–1942) and Isabel Weston (1860–1948),^[4] who married in 1884.^[5] Homer had worked in Hailey since 1883 as registrar of the General Land Office.^[4][6] Pound’s grandfather, Thaddeus Coleman Pound, a Republican Congressman and the 10th Lieutenant Governor of Wisconsin, had secured him the appointment. Homer had previously worked for Thaddeus in the lumber business.^[7]

Both sides of Pound’s family emigrated from England in the 17th century. On his father’s side, the immigrant ancestor was John Pound, a Quaker who arrived from England around 1650.^[5] Ezra’s paternal grandmother, Susan Angevine Loomis,^[8] married Thaddeus Coleman Pound.^[7] On his mother’s side, Pound was descended from William Wadsworth, a Puritan who emigrated to Boston on the Lion in 1632. Captain Joseph Wadsworth helped to write the Connecticut constitution.^[9] The Wadsworths married into the Westons of New York; Harding Weston and Mary Parker were Pound’s maternal grandparents.^[5] After serving in the military, Harding remained unemployed, so his brother Ezra Weston and Ezra’s wife, Frances Amelia Wessells Freer (Aunt Frank), helped to look after Isabel, Pound’s mother.^[10]

Early education

In his Cheltenham Military Academy uniform with his mother, 1898

Isabel Pound was unhappy in Hailey and took Ezra with her to New York in 1887 when he was 18 months old.^[11] Her husband followed and found a job as an assayer at the Philadelphia Mint. After a move to 417 Walnut Street in Jenkintown, Pennsylvania, the family bought a six-bedroom house in 1893 at 166 Fernbrook Avenue, Wyncote.^[5] Pound’s education began in dame schools: Miss Elliott’s school in Jenkintown in 1892 and the Heathcock family’s Chelten Hills School in Wyncote in 1893.^[5] Known as “Ra” (pronounced “Ray”), he attended Wyncote Public School from September 1894.^[12] His first publication was on 7 November 1896 in the Jenkintown Times-Chronicle (“by E. L. Pound, Wyncote, aged 11 years”), a limerick about William Jennings Bryan, who had just lost the 1896 presidential election.^[b]

In 1897, aged 12, he transferred to Cheltenham Military Academy (CMA), where he wore an American Civil War-style uniform and was taught drilling and how to shoot.^[14] The following year he made his first trip overseas, a three-month tour with his mother and Aunt Frank, who took him to England, Belgium, Germany, Switzerland, Italy, Spain, and Morocco.^[15] He attended CMA until 1900, at times as a boarder, but it seems he did not graduate.^[16][c]

University

Hilda Doolittle, c. 1921

In 1901 Pound was admitted, aged 15, to the University of Pennsylvania‘s College of Liberal Arts.^[18] Years later he said his aim was to avoid drill at the military academy.^[19] His one distinction in first year was in geometry,^[20] but otherwise his grades were mostly poor, including in Latin, his major; he achieved a B in English composition and a pass in English literature.^[21] In his second year he switched from the degree course to “non-degree special student status”, he said “to avoid irrelevant subjects”.^[22][d] He was not elected to a fraternity at Penn, but it seemed not to bother him.^[24]

His parents and Aunt Frank took him on another three-month European tour in 1902, and the following year he transferred to Hamilton College in Clinton, New York, possibly because of his grades.^[25] Again he was not invited to join a fraternity, but this time he had hoped to do so, according to letters home, because he wanted to live in a fraternity house, and by April 1904 he regarded the move as a mistake.^[26] Signed up for the Latin–Scientific course, he appears to have avoided some classes; his transcript is short of credits.^[25] He studied the Provençal dialect and read Dante and Anglo-Saxon poetry, including Beowulf and The Seafarer.^[27]

After graduating from Hamilton in 1905 with a PhB, he returned to Penn, where he fell in love with Hilda Doolittle, then at Bryn Mawr College, and hand-bound 25 of his poems for her, calling it Hilda’s Book. (Doolittle became a poet herself, renamed H.D. by Pound.)^[28] After receiving his MA in Romance languages in 1906, he registered to write a PhD thesis on the jesters in Lope de Vega‘s plays; a two-year Harrison fellowship covered his tuition and a $500 grant, with which he sailed again to Europe.^[29] He spent three weeks in Madrid in various libraries, including in the Royal Library. On 31 May 1906 he was standing outside the palace during the attempted assassination of King Alfonso and left the city for fear of being mistaken for an anarchist.^[30] After Spain he visited Paris and London, returning to the United States in July 1906.^[31] His first essay, “Raphaelite Latin”, was published in the Book News Monthly that September.^[32] He took courses in English in 1907, where he fell out with just about everyone, including the department head, Felix Schelling, with silly remarks during lectures and by winding an enormous tin watch very slowly while Schelling spoke.^[33] In the spring of 1907 he learned that his fellowship would not be renewed.^[34] Schelling told him he was wasting everyone’s time, and he left without finishing his doctorate.^[35]

Teaching

In Durance

I am homesick after mine own kind,
Oh I know that there are folk about me, friendly faces,
But I am homesick after mine own kind.

— Personae of Ezra Pound (1909)^[36]
written in Crawfordsville, Indiana, 1907^[37]

From September 1907 Pound taught French and Spanish at Wabash College,^[38] a Presbyterian college with 345 students in Crawfordsville, Indiana,^[39] which he called “the sixth circle of hell“.^[40] One former student remembered him as a breath of fresh air; another said he was “exhibitionist, egotistic, self-centered and self-indulgent”.^[41]

He was dismissed after a few months. Smoking was forbidden, but he would smoke cigarillos in his room in the same corridor as the president’s office.^[42] He was asked to leave the college in January 1908 when his landladies, Ida and Belle Hall, found a woman in his room.^[43] Shocked at having been fired,^[44] he left for Europe soon after, sailing from New York in March on the RMS Slavonia.^[45]

London (1908–1914)

A Lume Spento

Pound arrived in Gibraltar on 23 March 1908, where he earned $15 a day working as a guide for an American family there and in Spain.^[46] After stops in Seville, Grenada, and Genoa, by the end of April he was in Venice, living over a bakery near the San Vio bridge.^[47] In the summer he decided to self-publish his first collection of 44 poems in the 72-page A Lume Spento (“With Tapers Quenched”), 150 copies of which were printed in July 1908.^[48] The title is from the third canto of Dante‘s Purgatorio, alluding to the death of Manfred, King of Sicily. Pound dedicated the book to the Philadelphia artist William Brooke Smith, a friend from university who had recently died of tuberculosis.^[49]

In “Canto LXXVI” (part of The Pisan Cantos), he records that he considered throwing the proofs into the Grand Canal, abandoning the book and poetry altogether: “by the soap-smooth stone posts where San Vio / meets with il Canal Grande / between Salviati and the house that was of Don Carlos / shd/I chuck the lot into the tide-water? / le bozze “A Lume Spento”/ / and by the column of Todero / shd/I shift to the other side / or wait 24 hours”.^[50]

Move to London

48 Langham Street, Fitzrovia, London W1

In August 1908 Pound moved to London, carrying 60 copies of A Lume Spento.^[51] English poets such as Maurice Hewlett, Rudyard Kipling, and Alfred Tennyson had made a particular kind of Victorian verse—stirring, pompous, and propagandistic—popular. According to modernist scholar James Knapp, Pound rejected the idea of poetry as “versified moral essay”; he wanted to focus on the individual experience, the concrete rather than the abstract.^[52]

Pound at first stayed in a boarding house at 8 Duchess Street, near the British Museum Reading Room; he had met the landlady during his travels in Europe in 1906.^[53] He soon moved to Islington (cheaper at 12s 6d a week board and lodging), but his father sent him £4 and he was able to move back into central London, to 48 Langham Street, near Great Titchfield Street.^[54] The house sat across an alley from the Yorkshire Grey pub, which made an appearance in “Canto LXXX” (The Pisan Cantos), “concerning the landlady’s doings / with a lodger unnamed / az waz near Gt Tichfield St. next door to the pub”.^[55]

Pound persuaded the bookseller Elkin Mathews on Vigo Street to display A Lume Spento, and in an unsigned article on 26 November 1908, Pound reviewed it himself in the Evening Standard: “The unseizable magic of poetry is in this queer paper book; and words are no good in describing it.”^[56] The following month he self-published a second collection, A Quinzaine for this Yule.^[57] It was his first book to have commercial success, and Elkin Matthews had another 100 copies printed.^[58] In January and February 1909, after the death of John Churton Collins left a vacancy, Pound lectured for an hour a week in the evenings on “The Development of Literature in Southern Europe” at the Regent Street Polytechnic.^[59][e] Mornings might be spent in the British Museum Reading Room, followed by lunch at the Vienna Café on Oxford Street, where Pound first met Wyndham Lewis in 1910.^[61] “There were mysterious figures / that emerged from recondite recesses / and ate at the WIENER CAFÉ”.^[62] Ford Madox Ford described Pound as “approach[ing] with the step of a dancer, making passes with a cane at an imaginary opponent”:

He would wear trousers made of green billiard cloth, a pink coat, a blue shirt, a tie hand-painted by a Japanese friend, an immense sombrero, a flaming beard cut to a point, and a single, large blue earring.”^[63]

Meeting Dorothy Shakespear, Personae

Pound married Dorothy Shakespear in 1914.

At a literary salon in 1909, Pound met the novelist Olivia Shakespear^[64] and later at the Shakespears’ home at 12 Brunswick Gardens, Kensington, was introduced to her daughter, Dorothy, who became Pound’s wife in 1914.^[65] The critic Iris Barry described her as “carrying herself delicately with the air, always, of a young Victorian lady out skating, and a profile as clear and lovely as that of a porcelain Kuan-yin”.^[66] “Listen to it—Ezra! Ezra!—And a third time—Ezra!”, Dorothy wrote in her diary on 16 February 1909.^[67]

Pound mixed with the cream of London’s literary circle, including Maurice Hewlett, Laurence Binyon, Frederic Manning, Ernest Rhys, May Sinclair, Ellen Terry, George Bernard Shaw, Hilaire Belloc, T. E. Hulme, and F. S. Flint.^[68] Through the Shakespears, he was introduced to the poet W. B. Yeats, Olivia Shakespear’s former lover. He had already sent Yeats a copy of A Lume Spento, and Yeats had apparently found it “charming”.^[69] Pound wrote to William Carlos Williams on 3 February 1909: “Am by way of falling into the crowd that does things here. London, deah old Lundon, is the place for poesy.”^[70] According to Richard Aldington, London found Pound amusing. The newspapers interviewed him,^[71] and he was mentioned in Punch magazine, which on 23 June 1909 described “Mr. Ezekiel Ton” as “the most remarkable thing in poetry since Robert Browning … [blending] the imagery of the unfettered West, the vocabulary of Wardour Street, and the sinister abandon of Borgiac Italy”.^[72]Erat Hora

“Thank you, whatever comes.” And then she turned
And, as the ray of sun on hanging flowers
Fades when the wind hath lifted them aside,
Went swiftly from me. Nay, whatever comes
One hour was sunlit and the most high gods
May not make boast of any better thing
Than to have watched that hour as it passed.

— Personae: The Collected Poems of Ezra Pound (1926)^[73]

In April 1909 Elkin Mathews published Personae of Ezra Pound (half the poems were from A Lume Spento)^[58][f] and in October a further 27 poems (16 new) as Exultations.^[76] Edward Thomas described Personae in English Review as “full of human passion and natural magic”.^[77] Rupert Brooke complained in the Cambridge Review that Pound had fallen under the influence of Walt Whitman, writing in “unmetrical sprawling lengths that, in his hands, have nothing to commend them”. But he did acknowledge that Pound had “great talents”.^[78]

In or around September, Pound moved into new rooms at Church Walk, off Kensington High Street, where he lived most of the time until 1914.^[79] He visited a friend, Walter Rummel, in Paris in March 1910 and was introduced to the American heiress and pianist Margaret Lanier Cravens. Although they had only just met, she offered to become a patron to the tune of $1,000 a year, and from then until her death in 1912 she apparently sent him money regularly.^[80]

The Spirit of Romance, Canzoni, the New Age

In June 1910 Pound returned for eight months to the United States; his arrival coincided with the publication in London of his first book of literary criticism, The Spirit of Romance, based on his lecture notes from the polytechnic.^[81] Patria Mia, his essays on the United States, were written at this time.^[82] In August he moved to New York, renting rooms on Waverly Place and Park Avenue South, facing Gramercy Square.^[83] Although he loved New York, he felt alienated by the commercialism and newcomers from Eastern and Southern Europe who were displacing the white Anglo-Saxon Protestants.^[84] The recently built New York Public Library Main Branch he found especially offensive.^[85] It was during this period that his antisemitism became apparent; he referred in Patria Mia to the “detestable qualities” of Jews.^[86] After persuading his parents to finance his passage back to Europe, he sailed from New York on the R.M.S. Mauretania on 22 February 1911. It was nearly 30 years—April 1939—before he visited the U.S. again.^[87]First floor of the Vienna Café with its mirrored ceiling, Oxford Street, in 1897. The room became a meeting place for Pound, Wyndham Lewis, and other writers.

After three days in London he went to Paris,^[88] where he worked on a new collection of poetry, Canzoni (1911),^[89] panned by the Westminster Gazette as “affectation combined with pedantry”.^[90] He wrote in Ford Madox Ford’s obituary that Ford had rolled on the floor with laughter at its “stilted language”.^[91] When he returned to London in August, he rented a room in Marylebone at 2A Granville Place, then shared a house at 39 Addison Road North, W11.^[92] By November A. R. Orage, editor of the socialist journal the New Age, had hired him to write a weekly column.^[93] Orage appears in The Cantos (Possum is T. S. Eliot): “but the lot of ’em, Yeats, Possum and Wyndham / had no ground beneath ’em. / Orage had.”^[94]

Pound contributed to the New Age from 30 November 1911 to 13 January 1921,^[95] attending editorial meetings in the basement of a grimy ABC tearoom in Chancery Lane.^[96] There and at other meetings he met Arnold Bennett, Cecil Chesterton, Beatrice Hastings, S. G. Hobson, T. E. Hulme, Katherine Mansfield, and H. G. Wells.^[95] In the New Age office in 1918, he also met C. H. Douglas, a British engineer who was developing his economic theory of social credit, which Pound found attractive.^[97] Douglas reportedly believed that Jews were a problem and needed to abandon a Messianic view of themselves as the “dominating race”.^[98] According to Colin Holmes, the New Age itself published antisemitic material.^[99] It was within this environment, not in Italy, according to Tim Redman, that Pound first encountered antisemitic ideas about “usury”.^[95] “In Douglas’s program,” Christopher Hitchens wrote in 2008, “Pound had found his true muse: a blend of folkloric Celtic twilight with a paranoid hatred of the money economy and a dire suspicion about an ancient faith.”^[100]

Poetry magazine, Ripostes, Imagism

10 Church Walk, Kensington, London W8. Pound lived on the first floor (far left) in 1909–1910 and 1911–1914.^[g]

Hilda Doolittle arrived in London from Philadelphia in May 1911 with the poet Frances Gregg and Gregg’s mother; when they returned in September, Doolittle stayed on. Pound introduced her to his friends, including Richard Aldington, who became her husband in 1913. Before that, the three of them lived in Church Walk, Kensington—Pound at no. 10, Aldington at no. 8, and Doolittle at no. 6—and worked daily in the British Museum Reading Room.^[79]

At the British Museum, Laurence Binyon introduced Pound to the East Asian artistic and literary concepts Pound used in his later poetry, including Japanese ukiyo-e prints.^[103] The visitors’ book first shows Pound in the Prints and Drawings Students’ Room (known as the Print Room)^[104] on 9 February 1909, and later in 1912 and 1913, with Dorothy Shakespear, examining Chinese and Japanese art.^[105] Pound was working at the time on the poems that became Ripostes (1912), trying to move away from his earlier work.^[106] “I hadn’t in 1910 made a language,” he wrote years later. “I don’t mean a language to use, but even a language to think in.”^[h]

In August 1912 Harriet Monroe hired Pound as foreign correspondent of Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, a new magazine in Chicago.^[108] The first edition, in October, featured two of his own poems, “To Whistler, American” and “Middle Aged”. Also that month Stephen Swift and Co. in London published Ripostes of Ezra Pound, a collection of 25 poems, including a contentious translation of the 8th-century Old English poem The Seafarer,^[109] that demonstrate his shift toward minimalist language.^[79] In addition to Pound’s work, the collection contains five poems by T. E. Hulme.^[110]First edition of Poetry, October 1912

Ripostes includes the first mention of Les Imagistes: “As for the future, Les Imagistes, the descendants of the forgotten school of 1909, have that in their keeping.”^[111] While in the British Museum tearoom one afternoon with Doolittle and Aldington, Pound edited one of Doolittle’s poems and wrote “H.D. Imagiste” underneath;^[112] he described this later as the founding of a movement in poetry, Imagisme.^[113][i] In the spring or early summer of 1912, they agreed, Pound wrote in 1918, on three principles:

1. Direct treatment of the “thing” whether subjective or objective.

2. To use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation.

3. As regarding rhythm: to compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of a metronome.^[115]

Poetry published Pound’s “A Few Don’ts by an Imagist” in March 1913. Superfluous words, particularly adjectives, should be avoided, as well as expressions like “dim lands of peace”. He wrote: “It dulls the image. It mixes an abstraction with the concrete. It comes from the writer’s not realizing that the natural object is always the adequate symbol.” Poets should “go in fear of abstractions”.^[116] He wanted Imagisme “to stand for hard light, clear edges”, he wrote later to Amy Lowell.^[117]In a Station of the Metro

The apparition    of these faces    in the crowd:
Petals    on a wet, black   bough.

— Poetry (April 1913)^[118]

An example of Imagist poetry is Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro“, published in Poetry in April 1913 and inspired by an experience on the Paris Underground. “I got out of a train at, I think, La Concorde,” he wrote in “How I began” in T. P.’s Weekly on 6 June 1913, “and in the jostle I saw a beautiful face, and then, turning suddenly, another and another, and then a beautiful child’s face, and then another beautiful face. All that day I tried to find words for what this made me feel. … I could get nothing but spots of colour.” A year later he reduced it to its essence in the style of a Japanese haiku.^[119]

James Joyce, Pound’s unpopularity

James Joyce, c. 1918

In the summer of 1913 Pound became literary editor of The Egoist, a journal founded by the suffragette Dora Marsden.^[120] At the suggestion of W. B. Yeats, Pound encouraged James Joyce in December that year to submit his work.^[121] The previous month Yeats, whose eyesight was failing, had rented Stone Cottage in Coleman’s Hatch, Sussex, inviting Pound to accompany him as his secretary, and it was during this visit that Yeats introduced Pound to Joyce’s Chamber Music and his “I hear an Army Charging Upon the Land”.^[122] This was the first of three winters Pound and Yeats spent at Stone Cottage, including two with Dorothy after she and Ezra married in 1914.^[123] “Canto LXXXIII” records a visit: “so that I recalled the noise in the chimney / as it were the wind in the chimney / but was in reality Uncle William / downstairs composing / that had made a great Peeeeacock / in the proide ov his oiye.”^[124][j]

In his reply to Pound, Joyce gave permission to use “I hear an Army” and enclosed Dubliners and the first chapter of his novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.^[122] Pound wrote to Joyce that the novel was “damn fine stuff”.^[125] Harriet Shaw Weaver accepted it for The Egoist, which serialized it from 2 February 1914, despite the printers objecting to words like “fart” and “ballocks”, and fearing prosecution over Stephen Dedalus‘s thoughts about prostitutes. On the basis of the serialization, the publisher that had rejected Dubliners reconsidered. Joyce wrote to Yeats: “I can never thank you enough for having brought me into relation with your friend Ezra Pound who is indeed a miracle worker.”^[126]

Around this time, Pound’s articles in the New Age began to make him unpopular, to the alarm of Orage.^[127] Samuel Putnam knew Pound in Paris in the 1920s and described him as stubborn, contrary, cantankerous, bossy, touchy, and “devoid of humor”; he was “an American small-towner”, in Putnam’s view. His attitude caused him trouble in both London and Paris.^[128] English women, with their “preponderantly derivative” minds, were inferior to American women who had minds of their own, he wrote in the New Age. The English sense of what was right was based on respect for property, not morality. “[P]erched on the rotten shell of a crumbling empire”, London had lost its energy. England’s best authors—Conrad, Hudson, James, and Yeats—were not English. English writers and critics were ignorant, he wrote in 1913.^[129]

Continue reading Bio: Ezra Pound →

Nathalie Cabrol|TED2015 (ted.com)

While we like to imagine little green men, it’s far more likely that life on other planets will be microbial. Planetary scientist Nathalie Cabrol takes us inside the search for microbes on Mars, a hunt which counterintuitively leads us to the remote lakes of the Andes mountains. This extreme environment — with its thin atmosphere and scorched land — approximates the surface of Mars about 3.5 billion years ago. How microbes adapt to survive here may just show us where to look on Mars — and could help us understand why some microbial pathways lead to civilization while others are a dead end.

This talk was presented at an official TED conference, and was featured by our editors on the home page.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Nathalie Cabrol · Planetary explorerTo determine how life might persist on Mars, Nathalie Cabrol explores one of Earth’s most extreme environments: high-elevation Andean lakes and deserts.

Caroline Delbert · Thu, June 10, 2021 · (finance.yahoo.com)

• Is the universe a conscious being, like a gigantic widely dispersed human brain?
• Scientists have long questioned how consciousness and science mix.
• Two mathematicians have turned one theory into a crunchable math model.

In upcoming research, scientists will attempt to show the universe has consciousness. Yes, really. No matter the outcome, we’ll soon learn more about what it means to be conscious—and which objects around us might have a mind of their own.

➡ You think science is badass. So do we. Let’s nerd out over it together.

What will that mean for how we treat objects and the world around us? Buckle in, because things are about to get weird.

What Is Consciousness?

The basic definition of consciousness intentionally leaves a lot of questions unanswered. It’s “the normal mental condition of the waking state of humans, characterized by the experience of perceptions, thoughts, feelings, awareness of the external world, and often in humans (but not necessarily in other animals) self-awareness,” according to the Oxford Dictionary of Psychology.

Scientists simply don’t have one unified theory of what consciousness is. We also don’t know where it comes from, or what it’s made of.

However, one loophole of this knowledge gap is that we can’t exhaustively say other organisms, and even inanimate objects, don’t have consciousness. Humans relate to animals and can imagine, say, dogs and cats have some amount of consciousness because we see their facial expressions and how they appear to make decisions. But just because we don’t “relate to” rocks, the ocean, or the night sky, that isn’t the same as proving those things don’t have consciousness.

This is where a philosophical stance called panpsychism comes into play, writes All About Space’s David Crookes:

“This claims consciousness is inherent in even the tiniest pieces of matter — an idea that suggests the fundamental building blocks of reality have conscious experience. Crucially, it implies consciousness could be found throughout the universe.”

It’s also where physics enters the picture. Some scientists have posited that the thing we think of as consciousness is made of micro-scale quantum physics events and other “spooky actions at a distance,” somehow fluttering inside our brains and generating conscious thoughts.

The Free Will Conundrum

One of the leading minds in physics, 2020 Nobel laureate and black hole pioneer Roger Penrose, has written extensively about quantum mechanics as a suspected vehicle of consciousness. In 1989, he wrote a book called The Emperor’s New Mind, in which he claimed “that human consciousness is non-algorithmic and a product of quantum effects.”

Let’s quickly break down that statement. What does it mean for human consciousness to be “algorithmic”? Well, an algorithm is simply a series of predictable steps to reach an outcome, and in the study of philosophy, this idea plays a big part in questions about free will versus determinism.

Are our brains simply cranking out math-like processes that can be telescoped in advance? Or is something wild happening that allows us true free will, meaning the ability to make meaningfully different decisions that affect our lives?

Within philosophy itself, the study of free will dates back at least centuries. But the overlap with physics is much newer. And what Penrose claimed in The Emperor’s New Mind is that consciousness isn’t strictly causal because, on the tiniest level, it’s a product of unpredictable quantum phenomena that don’t conform to classical physics.

So, where does all that background information leave us? If you’re scratching your head or having some uncomfortable thoughts, you’re not alone. But these questions are essential to people who study philosophy and science, because the answers could change how we understand the entire universe around us. Whether or not humans do or don’t have free will has huge moral implications, for example. How do you punish criminals who could never have done differently?

Consciousness Is Everywhere

In physics, scientists could learn key things from a study of consciousness as a quantum effect. This is where we rejoin today’s researchers: Johannes Kleiner, mathematician and theoretical physicist at the Munich Center For Mathematical Philosophy, and Sean Tull, mathematician at the University of Oxford.

Kleiner and Tull are following Penrose’s example, in both his 1989 book and a 2014 paper where he detailed his belief that our brains’ microprocesses can be used to model things about the whole universe. The resulting theory is called integrated information theory (IIT), and it’s an abstract, “highly mathematical” form of the philosophy we’ve been reviewing.

In IIT, consciousness is everywhere, but it accumulates in places where it’s needed to help glue together different related systems. This mans the human body is jam-packed with a ton of systems that must interrelate, so there’s a lot of consciousness (or phi, as the quantity is known in IIT) that can be calculated. Think about all the parts of the brain that work together to, for example, form a picture and sense memory of an apple in your mind’s eye.

The revolutionary thing in IIT isn’t related to the human brain—it’s that consciousness isn’t biological at all, but rather is simply this value, phi, that can be calculated if you know a lot about the complexity of what you’re studying.

If your brain has almost countless interrelated systems, then the entire universe must have virtually infinite ones. And if that’s where consciousness accumulates, then the universe must have a lot of phi.

Hey, we told you this was going to get weird.

“The theory consists of a very complicated algorithm that, when applied to a detailed mathematical description of a physical system, provides information about whether the system is conscious or not, and what it is conscious of,” Kleiner told All About Space. “If there is an isolated pair of particles floating around somewhere in space, they will have some rudimentary form of consciousness if they interact in the correct way.”

Kleiner and Tull are working on turning IIT into this complex mathematical algorithm—setting down the standard that can then be used to examine how conscious things operate.

Think about the classic philosophical comment, “I think, therefore I am,” then imagine two geniuses turning that into a workable formula where you substitute in a hundred different number values and end up with your specific “I am” answer.

The next step is to actually crunch the numbers, and then to grapple with the moral implications of a hypothetically conscious universe. It’s an exciting time to be a philosopher—or a philosopher’s calculator.

(Contributed by Jsanet Cornwell, H.W., m.)

Boyhood

(Childhood, Boyhood, Youth #2)

by Leo Tolstoy, Leo Tolstoy 

Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910) was born at Yasnya Polyana, in Tula Province, fourth of five children. Tolstoy is widely regarded as one of the greatest of all novelists, particularly noted for his masterpieces War and Peace and Anna Karenina; in their scope, breadth and realistic depiction of Russian life, the two books stand at the peak of realistic fiction. As a moral philosopher he was notable for his ideas on nonviolent resistance through his work The Kingdom of God is Within You, which in turn influenced such twentieth-century figures as Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. In the 1850s Tolstoy also began his literary career with an autobiographical trilogy: Childhood (1852), Boyhood (1854), and Youth (1857). His first publications tell of a rich landowner’s son and his slow realization of the differences between him and his peasant playmates. Although in later life Tolstoy rejected these books as sentimental, a great deal of his own life is revealed, and the books still have relevance for their telling of the universal story of growing up.

(Goodreads.com)

The Gift: 12 Lessons to Save Your Life

by Edith Eger (Goodreads Author) 

This practical and inspirational guide to healing from the award-winning, New York Times bestselling author of The Choice shows us how to stop destructive patterns and imprisoning thoughts to find freedom and enjoy life.

Edith Eger’s powerful first book The Choice told the story of her survival in the concentration camps, her escape, healing, and journey to freedom. Oprah Winfrey says, “I will be forever changed by Dr. Eger’s story.” Thousands of people around the world have written to Eger to tell her how The Choice moved them and inspired them to confront their own past and try to heal their pain; and to ask her to write another, more “how-to” book. Now, in The Gift, Eger expands on her message of healing and provides a hands-on guide that gently encourages us to change the thoughts and behaviors that may be keeping us imprisoned in the past.

Eger explains that the worst prison she experienced is not the prison that Nazis put her in but the one she created for herself, the prison within her own mind. She describes the twelve most pervasive imprisoning beliefs she has known—including fear, grief, anger, secrets, stress, guilt, shame, and avoidance—and the tools she has discovered to deal with these universal challenges. Accompanied by stories from Eger’s own life and the lives of her patients each chapter includes thought-provoking questions and takeaways, such as:

-Would you like to be married to you?
-Are you evolving or revolving?
-You can’t heal what you can’t feel.

Filled with empathy, insight, and humor, The Gift captures the vulnerability and common challenges we all face and provides encouragement and advice for breaking out of our personal prisons to find healing and enjoy life.

(Goodreads.com)

“Love is not what you feel. Love is what you do.”

–Dr. Edith Eva Eger

Institute for Management Development IMD Dr Edith Eva Eger – holocaust survivor, author, and leadership mentor – addressed the IMD community (Wednesday 8 May) with lessons drawn from her journey from one of the most traumatic events in modern history to an extraordinary life and work spreading a message of positivity. Full article: https://www.imd.org/news/updates/from…

https://newatlas.com/physics/charm-meson-particle-matter-antimatter/?fbclid=IwAR3nsN31ONG120f-CjWwkqmI7_RKIoA2yHBf5fI58a3lkwz56eEQq10Mxko

A subatomic particle has been found to switch between matter and antimatter, according to Oxford physicists analyzing data from the Large Hadron Collider. It turns out that an unfathomably tiny weight difference between two particles could have saved the universe from annihilation soon after it began.

The Choice: Embrace the Possible

by Edith Eger (Goodreads Author), Esmé Schwall Weigand (with), Philip G. Zimbardo (Foreword), Edith Eva Eger 

It’s 1944 and sixteen-year-old ballerina and gymnast Edith Eger is sent to Auschwitz. Separated from her parents on arrival, she endures unimaginable experiences, including being made to dance for the infamous Josef Mengele. When the camp is finally liberated, she is pulled from a pile of bodies, barely alive.

The horrors of the Holocaust didn’t break Edith. In fact, they helped her learn to live again with a life-affirming strength and a truly remarkable resilience. The Choice is her unforgettable story.

(Goodreads.com)

Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life

by Marshall B. Rosenberg, Arun Gandhi (Foreword by) 

Do you hunger for skills to improve the quality of your relationships, to deepen your sense of personal empowerment or to simply communicate more effectively? Unfortunately, for centuries our culture has taught us to think and speak in ways that can actually perpetuate conflict, internal pain and even violence. Nonviolent Communication partners practical skills with a powerful consciousness and vocabulary to help you get what you want peacefully.

In this internationally acclaimed text, Marshall Rosenberg offers insightful stories, anecdotes, practical exercises and role-plays that will dramatically change your approach to communication for the better. Discover how the language you use can strengthen your relationships, build trust, prevent conflicts and heal pain. Revolutionary, yet simple, NVC offers you the most effective tools to reduce violence and create peace in your life—one interaction at a time.

Over 150,000 copies sold and now available in 20 languages around the world. More than 250,000 people each year from all walks of life are learning these life-changing skills.

(Goodreads.com)