TEDx Talks Tom Chi認為「萬物都有相關聯」或「事出必有因」的說法，其實不只是純粹哲學的形上思考，而是有各種科學根據證明這個理論的。而找出這個現象象徵的意義是什麼，或許就能解開人類之所以存在的秘密….？ Tom Chi has worked in a wide range of roles from astrophysical researcher to Fortune 500 consultant to corporate executive developing new hardware/software products and services. He has played a significant role in established projects with global reach (Microsoft Outlook, Yahoo Search), and scaled new projects from conception to significance (Yahoo Answers from 0 to 90 million users). His current focus is delving into human development issues with social entrepreneurs around the globe, rebooting the fundamental frameworks of entrepreneurship itself, and teaching a limited number . . .

Meister Eckhart, from Whom God Hid Nothing: Sermons, Writings, and Sayings

by Meister Eckhart, David O’Neal (Editor) 

This introduction to the writing and preaching of the greatest medieval European mystic contains selections from his sermons, treatises, and sayings, as well as Table Talk, the records of his informal advice to his spiritual children.

(Recommended by Jerry Mayor)

Scott Ostler Jan. 6, 2020 Comments (SFChronicle.com)

Golden State Warriors coach Steve Kerr speaks at a news conference before the team’s NBA basketball game against the San Antonio Spurs in San Francisco, Friday, Nov. 1, 2019. (AP Photo/Jeff Chiu)Photo: Jeff Chiu / Associated Press

These are confusing times.

We’re plunging into the heart of the NFL playoffs, with all kinds of great matchups and compelling stories. Meanwhile, the threat of war looms.

What should we do? Should we wallow in football and ignore the real world? Or put aside the fun and games as long as our globe is as unstable as a lopsided basketball?

Steve Kerr has offered a suggestion. Since the Warriors’ head coach continues to guide his team, we can assume he still sees a value in sports. But Kerr also urges sports fans to not lock out the real world. There is room for both.

Before a game last week, Kerr was asked why he has been so busy tweeting about political matters.

“I’m worried we’re going to end up in another war,” Kerr explained. “I try to use my Twitter platform to remind people to do their homework before we all blindly wave the flag and get ourselves into another mess like we did in Iraq.”

Remember Iraq? The Gulf War? The U.S. and allies began bombing Iraq on Jan. 16, 1991. The Super Bowl was 11 days later in Tampa.

I was there. Fear was in the air. Security was super tight. Military helicopters hovered over the stadium. The halftime show, featuring New Kids on the Block, was not televised by ABC. Instead the network aired a war update with Peter Jennings.

I camped out in the media tent in front of the TVs, one eye on the game and one eye on the war. TV gave us live feeds from Saudi Arabia of American troops watching the Super Bowl. We watched them watching us.

On the grass, Scott Norwood missed a kick, the Giants won. On the sand, the bombing continued, nobody won.

Three decades later, here we are again, heading to Florida for another Super Bowl while heading to the desert for another possible conflict.

Enjoy the games, but consider taking Kerr’s suggestion. No matter which way you lean politically, pay attention, do your homework, be informed, think, listen, express your opinion, vote. American stuff. Go, team.Scott Ostler is a San Francisco Chronicle columnist. Email: sostler@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @scottostler

Scott Ostler

Follow Scott on:https://www.facebook.com/SFChronicle/scottostler

Scott Ostler has been a sports columnist at the San Francisco Chronicle since 1991. He has covered five Olympics for The Chronicle, as well as one soccer World Cup and numerous World Series, Super Bowls and NBA Finals.

Though he started in sports and is there now, Scott took a couple of side trips into the real world for The Chronicle. For three years he wrote a daily around-town column, and for one year, while still in sports, he wrote a weekly humorous commentary column.

He has authored several books and written for many national publications. Scott has been voted California Sportswriter of the Year 13 times, including six times while at The Chronicle. He moved to the Bay Area from Southern California, where he worked for the Los Angeles Times, the National Sports Daily and the Long Beach Press-Telegram.

“Now with respect to analysis, with the Freudian personal unconscious analysis you try to search back to find what the crisis was, what the historical or biographical moment was, and then come to know it and get released from it.

“That’s not the Jungian way at all. What the Jungian tries to find out is what are the energies that have not been allowed to play. Evoke them. You are a flower that is only half opened. Drop a little water on the unopened petals. Let them come. And so it’s a pitch forward instead of backward. Instead of hunting back, back, back, back to disengage back there and then come forward, you just flood forward and this other thing will get washed out.

“And that’s the way myth works. Myth is opening to you the total humanity of yourself and it evokes energies and brings them into play. Some of those energies have been repressed and are consequently frightening for you.”

–from Joseph Campbell: Mythos III

More wisdom from Campbell:

“Imperfection is life.”
–Joseph Campbell

“No one has ever performed a good deed.”
–Wolfram von Eschenbach in Parzival

“All deeds have good and evil results, motives and everything else.”
–Joseph Campbell

January 06, 2020 by Common Dreams

“I’m not a very good American because I like to form my own opinions,” said the famous standup comic in 1992 following the first Gulf War. “I don’t just roll over when I’m told to. Sad to say, most Americans just roll over on command—not me.”

by Jon Queally, staff writer

 24 Comments

Comedian George Carlin performing at the Paramount Theater in New York City on April 24th, 1992 during his eighth recorded special for HBO. (Photo: via Scrapsfromtheleft.com)

Amid growing concern that President Donald Trump will further escalate tensions with Iran and start a new war in the Middle East, Rep. Ilhan Omar—an outspoken anti-war Democrat in the U.S. House—shared a historic clip of comedian George Carlin Monday morning that bemoaned the pattern of American militarism in which the United States—often with the help of a conspiring media and pliant public—start or jump into a major war with another country just about every twenty years.

“We like war because we’re good at it! You know why we’re good at it? Cause we get a lot of practice. This country’s only 200 years old and already, we’ve had 10 major wars.” —George Carlin in 1992Carlin recorded the routine—entitled “Rockets and Penises in the Persian Gulf“—as part of an HBO special in 1992 on the heels of the first Gulf War launched by President George H.W. Bush.

Sharing the clip on Twitter, Omar—who on Sunday announced a War Powers Resolution she plans to introduce with Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Calif.) to block Trump from additional attacks on Iran—suggested the topic of Carlin’s routine was once again relevant, but said it remains “no laughing matter.”

“You know my favourite part of that war?” Carlins asks in the routine. “It’s the first war we ever had that was on every channel plus cable… and the war got good ratings too, didn’t it? Got good ratings! Well, we like war! We like war! We’re a war-like people! We like war because we’re good at it! You know why we’re good at it? Cause we get a lot of practice. This country’s only 200 years old and already, we’ve had 10 major wars. We average a major war every 20 years in this country so we’re good at it!”

He goes on to describe that the U.S. government is especially fond of waging war against countries populated by brown people. He explains that bombing people is a good thing to be good at if you don’t have any other national talents.

“Can’t build a decent car, can’t make a TV set or a VCR worth a fuck, got no steel industry left, can’t educate our young people, can’t get health care to our old people, but we can bomb the shit out of your country all right! Huh? Especially if your country is full of brown people—oh we like that don’t we? That’s our hobby! That’s our new job in the world: bombing brown people. Iraq, Panama, Grenada, Libya, you got some brown people in your country, tell them to watch the fuck out or we’ll goddamn bomb them!”

Carlin, who died in 2008 at the age of 71, is widely heralded as one of the great standup comedians of all-time and was known for his sophisticated social critiques  which included irreverent attacks on conventional thinking and cultural norms.

“That’s our hobby! That’s our new job in the world: bombing brown people. Iraq, Panama, Grenada, Libya, you got some brown people in your country, tell them to watch the fuck out or we’ll goddamn bomb them!”

“Now you probably noticed I don’t feel about that war the way we were told we were supposed to feel about that war, the way we were ordered and instructed by the United States government to feel about that war. You see, I tell ya, my mind doesn’t work that way,” Carlin says in the Gulf War routine.

“I got this real moron thing I do; it’s called ‘thinking,'” he continues. “And I’m not a very good American because I like to form my own opinions. I don’t just roll over when I’m told to. Sad to say, most Americans just roll over on command—not me.”

In order to maintain this position, Carlin explains that he has certain rules that he lives by. “My first rule,” he says, “I don’t believe anything the government tells me… nothing, zero, no.”

That is where the clip that Omar shared online ends, but in the full performance, Carlin goes on to say that he has other rules when it comes to U.S. war-making.

“I don’t take very seriously, the media or the press in this country, who in the case of the Persian Gulf war were nothing more than unpaid employees of the Department of Defense,” he continued, “and who most of the time, most of the time functioned as kind of an unofficial public relations agency for the United States government. So I don’t listen to them, I don’t really believe in my country and I gotta tell you folks, I don’t get all choked up about yellow ribbons and American flags. I consider them to be symbols and I leave symbols to the symbol-minded.”

Watch the complete portion of the routine:

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Everybody can contribute — if they so choose.

Zat Rana Dec 20, 2019 · medium.com

One of Albert Einstein’s great legacies is his Gedanken experiments (or thought experiments). He was a competent mathematician, of course, but more than that, his strength was in his ability to ask interesting and novel questions and then use his imagination to crystallize how different components relating to those questions could come together.

In physics, numbers and formulas provide the fixed nails on which theories hang as they find their final form. For Einstein, one of his breakthrough theories came from the realization that the speed of light must always be constant — that it’s the one thing that isn’t relative to anything else. Imagining a railway carriage moving at a particular speed, and contrasting that with the speed of a beam of light, he realized that he couldn’t make the thought experiment work unless the speed of the beam were constant relative to both the railway carriage and the railway station from where the carriage left.

E=mc2. That’s what the thought experiment yielded — the idea that energy and mass are interchangeable. The spacetime that makes up our entire conception of the Universe is composed of both matter and energy, yes, but they are tangled with one another, interconnected to a point where anything with a mass, anything that moves or vibrates, can be broken down to energy. In this sense, the Universe is a thermodynamic system, where everything possesses energy capable of doing work. This simple idea is what makes the laws of thermodynamics fundamental to our understanding of reality.

The first law of thermodynamics states that energy can neither be created nor destroyed; it can only be transformed from one form to another. The second law of thermodynamics states that, as energy is transformed from one state to another, more and more of it is wasted — meaning that as time goes on, we get more and more entropy, or disorder, in the Universe, until at some point in the far future the Universe will destroy itself because it has reached maximum entropy in what is referred to as the heat death of the Universe.

If this is where the story ended, nobody will blame a person for slowly decaying into a state of depression. Except, something strange started to happen some 4 billion years ago. On a tiny speck of dust, in a relatively tiny galaxy, in a tiny, tiny part of the Universe, a process called abiogenesis occurred for the very first time. This tiny speck of dust is the floating rock we call Earth, and this process is otherwise known as the origin of life.

We don’t know how life came to be, we don’t know why it came to be, but we know that out of non-living matter living entities eventually arose and began the evolutionary process of increasing their complexity relative to their environmental habitats. As the evolutionary tree grew out with time, so did the variety in species. This went on for billions and billions of years until some two hundred thousand years ago when a great ape by the name of Homo Sapiens — or, modern humans — began to roam the planet.

This brings us to a very crucial point. With the arrival of humans, the Universe suddenly became self-aware in a way that it hadn’t previously been before. Not only that, but this self-awareness also pointed us in a singular direction that continues to be the driving force of both culture and civilization: The collective generation of order in the fight against entropy.

Biological organisms are strange because they generally maintain their internal states and their external form, in a kind of homeostasis, in the face of a constantly changing environment. They fight entropy by virtue of existing, by virtue of how efficiently they use their energy. As a human being, you don’t break down with every change that happens around you — either you know how to manage it through prior experience or you simply adapt, and you do this very efficiently. In the words of neuroscientist Karl Friston: “Biological systems somehow manage to violate the fluctuation theorem, which generalizes the second law of thermodynamics.” In other words, our very existence is a fight against the heat death of the Universe.

This knowledge, of course, does nothing to account for the fact that as individual beings we are likely to die even far before this heat death has anything to say about it. And that is true. Using the first law of thermodynamics (the idea that energy cannot be created nor destroyed, only transformed into something else), we might bring ourselves some solace in knowing that we are a part of the Universe and that our energy turns into something else, just like it was something before we were human, but it doesn’t actually stop our physical body from withering away. But that’s a limited way to understand the power of our collective efforts.

Not only are biological organisms great at creating order with their bodies, but humans, in particular, have learned to harness energy outside of their bodies to create order in the external world. First, we discovered fire, which likely gave us our big brains. Then we built simple tools that allowed us to domesticate animals and plants. Then we settled down in agricultural communities. With time, we developed meaningful technologies that gave us the leverage to use energy in such a way as to run a collective civilization where we have things like corporations and art and the rules of morality. The world of abundance we know today is the resulting phenomenon.

We are a species dominant due to our ability to cooperate flexibly in exceptionally large groups, and this cooperation has allowed us to create the knowledge to understand how the Universe works. We think. Our self-awareness allows us to understand our surroundings, and that understanding allows us to create culture, along with civilization. And while our individual bodies may wither away and die long before the heat death of the Universe, as long as we continue to have culture and civilization, our contributions, whether they be through raising decent children or inspiring innovations, will live on, in big ways and in small ways.

In nature, we have consumer species and producer species. Producer species are plants and bacteria that convert the energy of the sun. Consumer species are organisms that eat to fuel their bodies. In this sense, all large animals, including humans, are consumers. In the ecological food chain, we take more value than we add, whereas producers add more value than they consume. Except, abstracted away, humans produce value in a different way, a lasting kind of value when we build civilization.

Each individual person is a bundle of energy. This bundle of energy consumes not just food, but also information and knowledge from the existing cultural thought soup. Our mental models, our education, our values — all of these things we consume from our surroundings. But when we use this complex mixture of consumption to produce, we add something back to the environment. The act of creativity, which is what humans innately do best, is the act of producing more than the sum of our consumption with the energy contained within the human body.

When someone takes action to raise awareness in our fight against climate change, or better yet, builds a technology that helps us take it on, they are producing something that creates more value than the sources of their consumption. When someone creates a work of art that changes our cultural perception for the better, or when a sage or a saint guides our moral compass in a more meaningful direction, they are producing something that creates more value than the sources of their consumption.

Even the simple act of working on yourself, your character, your inner world, ordering it so that it sets a better example for people on the outside produces more value than your sources of consumption. It’s an action with indirect consequences. Little things add up to big things, and big things eventually break down barriers that were previously considered unbreakable.

We don’t know where we came from. We don’t know where the collective culture and civilization are going. We don’t even know that they can overcome this fight against entropy. As it currently stands, according to the current laws, it doesn’t look like it. But we also don’t know for sure that they can’t. We don’t know what kind of discoveries lie ahead. What we do know is that, collectively, as a species, we are moving forward. We are adding more order to the world, and that order is largely good, no matter what metric we use to define it. In 10,000 years of civilization, we’ve come far. There’s no telling how far we could go if we widen our horizons to another 10,000 years. Even if we deny the value of the moral arc of civilization, the creativity, the interestingness, that it has enabled in our quest for self-awareness means something even if only because of things like hope and curiosity.

We are all tied in this interconnected web of actions and meanings that create ripples as a whole that could reach all kinds of corners of the Universe. We have bodies of mass that move and vibrate to give us energy. From a first principle view, the purpose of life is to use that energy to produce more than you consume, to act creatively in the world, to add order to culture and civilization in the grand fight against entropy, on whatever scale you are capable of doing so at. We might win, we might lose, we might perish, but the attempt itself is what helps us transcend our temporary condition.

Humans aren’t perfect. We are beautifully flawed in various complex ways. But one thing that differentiates us from any other organism that we know of is our potential. We are the Universe observing itself to make sense of itself. And the knowledge we create in that quest, the outcomes we produce, have the possibility to take us to places we have yet to even imagine.Personal Growth

WRITTEN BY

Zat Rana

Playing at the intersection of science, art, and philosophy. Trying to be less wrong. I share my more intimate thoughts at www.designluck.com/community.

“There are more things … likely to frighten us than there are to crush us; we suffer more often in imagination than in reality.”

Brain Pickings|getpocket.com

• Maria Popova

Seneca.

“The truth is, we know so little about life, we don’t really know what the good news is and what the bad news is,” Kurt Vonnegut observed in discussing Hamlet during his influential lecture on the shapes of stories. “The whole process of nature is an integrated process of immense complexity, and it’s really impossible to tell whether anything that happens in it is good or bad,” Alan Watts wrote a generation earlier in his sobering case for learning not to think in terms of gain or loss. And yet most of us spend swaths of our days worrying about the prospect of events we judge to be negative, potential losses driven by what we perceive to be “bad news.” In the 1930s, one pastor itemized anxiety into five categories of worries, four of which imaginary and the fifth, “worries that have a real foundation,” occupying “possibly 8% of the total.”

A twenty-four-hour news cycle that preys on this human propensity has undeniably aggravated the problem and swelled the 8% to appear as 98%, but at the heart of this warping of reality is an ancient tendency of mind so hard-wired into our psyche that it exists independently of external events. The great first-century Roman philosopher Seneca examined it, and its only real antidote, with uncommon insight in his correspondence with his friend Lucilius Junior, later published as Letters from a Stoic (public library) — the timeless trove of wisdom that gave us Seneca on true and false friendship and the mental discipline of overcoming fear.

In his thirteenth letter, titled “On groundless fears,” Seneca writes:

There are more things … likely to frighten us than there are to crush us; we suffer more often in imagination than in reality.

With an eye to the self-defeating and wearying human habit of bracing ourselves for imaginary disaster, Seneca counsels his young friend:

What I advise you to do is, not to be unhappy before the crisis comes; since it may be that the dangers before which you paled as if they were threatening you, will never come upon you; they certainly have not yet come.

Accordingly, some things torment us more than they ought; some torment us before they ought; and some torment us when they ought not to torment us at all. We are in the habit of exaggerating, or imagining, or anticipating, sorrow.

Illustration by María Sanoja from ‘100 Days of Overthinking’.

Seneca then offers a critical assessment of reasonable and unreasonable worries, using elegant rhetoric to illuminate the foolishness of squandering our mental and emotional energies on the latter class, which comprises the vast majority of our anxieties:

It is likely that some troubles will befall us; but it is not a present fact. How often has the unexpected happened! How often has the expected never come to pass! And even though it is ordained to be, what does it avail to run out to meet your suffering? You will suffer soon enough, when it arrives; so look forward meanwhile to better things. What shall you gain by doing this? Time. There will be many happenings meanwhile which will serve to postpone, or end, or pass on to another person, the trials which are near or even in your very presence. A fire has opened the way to flight. Men have been let down softly by a catastrophe. Sometimes the sword has been checked even at the victim’s throat. Men have survived their own executioners. Even bad fortune is fickle. Perhaps it will come, perhaps not; in the meantime it is not. So look forward to better things.

Art by Catherine Lepange from ‘Thin Slices of Anxiety: Observations and Advice to Ease a Worried Mind.’

Sixteen centuries before Descartes examined the vital relationship between fear and hope, Seneca considers its role in mitigating our anxiety:

The mind at times fashions for itself false shapes of evil when there are no signs that point to any evil; it twists into the worst construction some word of doubtful meaning; or it fancies some personal grudge to be more serious than it really is, considering not how angry the enemy is, but to what lengths he may go if he is angry. But life is not worth living, and there is no limit to our sorrows, if we indulge our fears to the greatest possible extent; in this matter, let prudence help you, and contemn with a resolute spirit even when it is in plain sight. If you cannot do this, counter one weakness with another, and temper your fear with hope. There is nothing so certain among these objects of fear that it is not more certain still that things we dread sink into nothing and that things we hope for mock us. Accordingly, weigh carefully your hopes as well as your fears, and whenever all the elements are in doubt, decide in your own favour; believe what you prefer. And if fear wins a majority of the votes, incline in the other direction anyhow, and cease to harass your soul, reflecting continually that most mortals, even when no troubles are actually at hand or are certainly to be expected in the future, become excited and disquieted.

But the greatest peril of misplaced worry, Seneca cautions, is that in keeping us constantly tensed against an imagined catastrophe, it prevents us from fully living. He ends the letter with a quote from Epicurus illustrating this sobering point:

The fool, with all his other faults, has this also, he is always getting ready to live.

Complement this particular portion of Seneca’s wholly indispensable Letters from a Stoic with Alan Watts on the antidote to the age of anxiety, Italo Calvino on how to lower your “worryability,” and Claudia Hammond on what the psychology of suicide prevention teaches us about controlling our everyday worries, then revisit Seneca on making the most of life’s shortness and the key to resilience when loss does strike.

This article was originally published on August 27, 2017, by Brain Pickings, and is republished here with permission.

After watching how my family treated my lesbian mom, I assumed it would all repeat when I came out. But as my grandma’s memory faded, her disapproval of gay people vanished too.

Narratively|getpocket.com

• Brandon Sargent

Illustrations by Erick M. Ramos

I sat on the shag carpeting in my grandma’s basement near her vintage Pac-Man arcade game, watching my cousins whip the joystick around, trying to beat the record so they could leave the initials A-S-S on the system’s high-score board. When a ghost caught up with Pac-Man, my cousins screamed, but I was more invested in the yelling echoing from the floor above us. I quietly crept over to the basement staircase, trying my best to hear what was happening in the kitchen. My mom was up there with Uncle Jay and Grandma, and they didn’t sound happy.

“I didn’t raise you to be this way,” I heard Grandma say. “What are you going to tell your kids?”

“My kids love me,” my mom said, her voice strained like it used to get when she fought with my dad.

“Listen, Denise,” Uncle Jay said, ruffling through some papers. “Take a look at these. It’s a conference that many women who think they’re lesbians have attended. It’s helped them change their lifestyle, and it’s here in Michigan.”

When my mom started crying, I found myself wondering why I always found myself watching relationships crumble from the vantage point of a staircase. At 5 years old, I had sat at the top of the stairs, watching my parents devise their divorce in a language I couldn’t understand yet. At 8 years old, I had watched through the bars of the upstairs railing as my mom begged her partner, Janet, not to break up with her; until then, I’d thought they were just best friends. And now at 12, I sat at the top of another staircase, listening to my grandma estranging her only daughter.

My mom says that the first time she realized she was gay was in high school when she developed a crush on a girl who later ended up being one of her bridesmaids when she married my dad. She thinks her dad and brothers knew way before she did. Her brothers nagged and teased her, calling her butch and a lesbian, and while her mother ignored all of it, her dad tried to overcompensate by giving her extra attention.

In 2001, right before my parents divorced, my grandpa suffered a heart attack and died. I was only 5, so I don’t remember him much, but I wish I did. Before he passed away, he was alone with my mother in his hospital room and said to her, “You need to do what you need to do to be happy, and don’t let anyone hold you back from doing that.” He told her that he knew she was unhappy in her marriage, and he wanted her to follow her gut.

Because I was only 6 when they split up, the memories I have of my parents together are mostly sensory. The sight of their headlights when they pulled into the driveway at the end of their weekly bowling night. The scent of cigarettes and beer on their smooth, leather jackets when I hugged them both before they could even set down their bags, and how they never reprimanded me for being awake even though the babysitter had told me to go to bed hours earlier. The warm comfort of crawling into their bed after a nightmare I’d pretended to have just so that I could spend more time with them.

I’ve immortalized these stories and memories of them together and happy in my mind because rewinding and replaying them like a VHS tape was my way of coping as I watched them drift apart. As my mom’s new partner, Janet, came around more and more, my mom and dad transitioned from amicable co-parents to archnemeses who used their kids as pawns in the chess match that is raising children post-divorce. When my brother, my sister and I got old enough to understand my mom’s relationship, my dad would openly condemn it. In 2008, he even banned Katy Perry’s “I Kissed a Girl” from being played in his household.

A car ride with Dad was like Sunday mass. Whether the drive was five or 45 minutes, a homily from Dad was inevitable. The second he reached to turn down the Christian rock station, I knew it was coming.

The first time we were alone in the car after my mom came out, I sat in the passenger seat of his moss-green minivan, and we had only just left our subdivision when he said, “So, how do you feel about gay people?”

“I don’t know,” I answered. “I like Mom and Janet being together.”

“You know that’s not right, right?” he said.

“Why not?”

“Because in the Bible, God says boys are supposed to be with girls, and girls are supposed to be with boys,” he said. “I’m not saying your mom is a bad person. I love your mom. I married her. I’m just saying that you can’t get sucked into the idea that it’s OK, and you can’t encourage it. Don’t you want your mom to be in Heaven with you?”

I did want my mom to be in Heaven with me. I wanted it desperately. Conversations like that sprouted incessant nightmares in which I would die and float up to Heaven and God would tell me that Mom was in Hell for being gay, and I’d never get to see her again.

“But they seem happy together, Dad,” I said.

“Life isn’t always about being happy.”

I wanted to disagree with everything he was saying. I wanted to tell him he was mean, and that he was an idiot. I wanted to tell him, and Grandma, and everyone else, to stop talking about my mom that way. I wanted to get out of the car. There was a powerful force inside me that knew she was an amazing person no matter who she loved. I wish I could’ve told him that, but looking back, I realize I couldn’t have defended her because I was nervous he might have become suspicious about me.

As I got older, the conversations about my mom felt more and more like they were also about me. I was aware of my attraction to men, which began with Zac Efron in the High School Musical movies and was confirmed when I simultaneously discovered gay porn and how to delete my browsing history. I still believed I would end up with a woman because I was no good at interacting with other boys, and the girls I surrounded myself with were intelligent, captivating, and superior to any man I’d ever met. I didn’t realize then that I was attempting to pull off what my mom had tried — and failed at — with my dad.

By the time high school began, I had dropped out of all of the sports my dad had signed me up for all my life, the majority of my friends were girls, and I’d even begun experimenting with concealer on the acne that had sometimes driven me to tears. I was severely lacking in the traditional masculinity department, and when my dad spoke of “the gay lifestyle” I could feel his eyes boring into me, and I felt like an addict realizing he’s at his own intervention.

One night during my junior year, I found myself alone at the dinner table with my dad, and he brought up my mom’s “lifestyle” again for what felt like the millionth time. With newfound confidence that came with knowing I’d be free from his lectures in less than two years when I graduated high school, I told him I was done discussing my mother. In that moment, I could imagine us estranged, exactly like my mom and her mother, and that seemed better than this Hell. I was overloaded with AP classes, maintaining a 4.0 GPA, and on track to becoming valedictorian. I didn’t have time for his religion anymore.

“Why do you think you know if Mom will go to Heaven or not? Why do you think you know everything?” I yelled, louder than I’d meant to. I took the napkin from my lap and tossed it onto the full plate of food. “I hate to leave you alone at the dinner table, but you’ve got God, right? You two can talk all about your stupid Bible all you want!”

My dad looked like he’d just seen a ghost, and he yelled my name as my body carried me out the front door.

I stomped through our neighborhood. My head was pounding with rage and shame, and as I passed each perfect home and its pristine green lawn, I felt like I was slowly being suffocated by a performance I’d never auditioned for.

***

About a year later, I got a scholarship to a summer acting program in New York City. It was a summer full of firsts: My first time living on my own, my first time smoking a cigarette, my first time sneaking into a bar, and most importantly, my first time falling in love with another boy. This sun-kissed boy from L.A. helped me toss the closeted and curated version of myself into a New York City dumpster — and yanked out the free spirit that was hiding underneath.

When he first grabbed my hand in public, I flinched, but when I gave into love, it was mesmerizing. Hand in hand, we walked through crowds of people of all races, ages and occupations, and I realized that no one gave a shit, so I decided I didn’t either. I came out to everyone except my dad before that summer ended. If I had to go back to Michigan, I was taking my newfound freedom with me.

My dad and I never talked about it directly, but I knew he had heard through the grapevine that he’d lost another loved one to Satan. He ignored it for as long as he could. He knew that I was dating, but he never asked about it. He stopped asking about everything. The conversations about my mom finally ceased too, along with the Sunday morning texts asking if I was coming to church.

My dad was stuck in his ways, but as I got older my mom’s brothers came around. After the day that my uncle and grandma had presented my mom with conversion therapy papers, my mom didn’t hear from Grandma for months, and their relationship was nearly nonexistent for years afterward. My mom says that her brother John would call Grandma and tell her, “You’re gonna lose your daughter, Ma. You need to accept who she is.” I wondered if my grandma and dad didn’t care about losing us because the Catholic Church had convinced them that they already had.

Not long after I came out, Grandma’s body began turning against her. Her doctor discovered a tumor in her brain, and after it was successfully removed, she dealt with minor memory loss and stints of narcolepsy. After falling asleep at the wheel of a golf cart and running over Aunt Paula’s leg, they took away her driver’s license. The doctors gave her a walker that she refused to use, which resulted in many falls and phone calls from the floor of her kitchen. She convinced herself that she was strong and agile, until her kids had to hire her home assistance for a while — and for the last two years, she’s been in a hospice home, battling dementia.

Despite their history, my mom became my grandma’s most frequent visitor. When someone is dying, we tend to forget their wrongdoings and focus on the good. By the time my grandma had begun her stay in her new home, my mom had finally found “the one.” She’d fallen in love with a woman named Erika, and when I saw my mom smile at her, it was like seeing her smile for the first time — and somehow, after all those years, my grandma could see it too.

My grandma had lost a lot of her memory, and she’d apparently forgotten her disapproval of same-sex relationships too. She loved Erika from the day they met. If Erika was at work and my mom showed up without her, Grandma would ask about where she was. Once she even said to my mom, “You better not have messed things up with her!”

While Grandma’s brain let go of many of her memories, her heart held on to some of the dearest ones. She could recite all 20 of her grandchildren’s birthdays, she could tell you about every date she’d gone on with my grandpa before he became her husband, and during one of my mom’s solo visits, Grandma even seemed to remember what she’d done to my mother.

“I never would’ve expected you to be here like this,” she said to my mom, who sat in a chair next to her bed after tucking her in.

“Why?” my mom asked.

“Because I never treated you the right way. I never accepted you for who you are.”

Mom laid her head on her mother’s chest and cried like a baby until Grandma fell asleep.

As I grew up, I watched her grow up too. She started her life over, and I watched the world turn their fear and hatred into obstacles and place them in my mom’s path—but I also watched her overcome them all. All she ever wanted was to be accepted and loved, and she finally got it.

My dad has since grown at a glacial pace. It could be better, but it could be worse. He calls once in a while to talk about trivial things, but he never asks about my love life, and he never reads my writing. I constantly think about demanding more from him, and I often draft letters that end up sounding like contracts, stating my terms if he wants to continue our pseudo-relationship, but I never finish them.

In this political climate, it sometimes feels like arguments and debates and outcries and protests are changing nothing, but watching my mom and grandma has reminded me of another important element of change, and that is time. Time may be a limited resource, but hope isn’t, and I have that now. Hope starts small like a seed we plant in our hearts, and it’s watered with each moment of progress. Moments like holding hands with a boy for the first time, coming out, making my mother proud, and watching her finally get the love she deserves. I believe my dad and I will find our way to the same kind of reconciliation, and now I have proof that it’s possible. The hope I have has blossomed, and its roots are deep.

Brandon Sargent is a nonbinary writer living in New York City. He’s a graduate of Marymount Manhattan College, and his work has appeared in The Marymount Manhattan Review and The Odyssey. His most recent project was a queer-based web series, Hard Feelings Web Series, which he wrote, directed, and starred in, and he is currently working on a memoir about queer identity and family.

This article was originally published on April 1, 2019, by Narratively, and is republished here with permission.

Philip Pullman’s work preempted the cutting-edge ideas of panpsychism, writes Philip Goff.

20th December 2019 (iai.tv)

Philip Goff

 | Assistant Professor of Philosophy, Durham University. Author of Galileo’s Error: Foundations for a New Science of Consciousness and Consciousness and Fundamental Reality1,122 words

The BBC/HBO dramatization of Philip Pullman’s magnum opus His Dark Materials has been one of the televisual highlights of the year, if not the decade. The alternative reality of Lyra Belacqua’s Oxford, with its airships and daemons and gateways to other worlds, is so strange and yet somehow so familiar. The violent dogmatism of the Magisterium mirrors the rising tide of nationalism; the Gyptian children severed from their daemons might serve as a metaphor for the scars of a decade of austerity.

What is perhaps most captivating is how Pullman draws on cutting-edge developments in science to tell his story. At the centre of the His Dark Materials trilogy is the mysterious substance known as ‘Dust’. In developing his theory of Dust – he likes to talk of it as a process of discovery rather than creation – Pullman drew inspiration from dark matter, the equally mysterious substance that is predicted by our best scientific theories but which we have thus far not been able to observe directly. Another source of inspiration was the Higgs Boson – also known as the ‘the God particle’ – the fundamental particle discovered in the Large Hadron Collider in 2012. The Higgs Boson is in fact an excitation, an all-pervasive field known as the Higgs field. And the Higgs field plays a very special role in physics; it gives mass to the particles that make us up. Without the Higgs field, electrons and quarks would be weightless and travel at the speed of light. It is the interaction of these particles with the Higgs field that slows them down and gives them weight.

Pullman draws inspiration from cutting-edge developments in science; in this case, he may have foreshadowed one.

What has this got to do with Dust? As the story develops, we discover that Dust is in fact a kind of fundamental particle: the ‘Rusakov particle’. And, like the Higgs boson, this particle is an excitation in an all-pervasive field: the Rusakov field. Whilst the function of the Higgs field is to give mass to particles, the function of the Rusakov field is to give consciousness to humans. It was when, 30,000 years ago, human beings began to interact with the Rusakov field that the lights of self-awareness switched on and we began to reflect on our own existence.

I’m a huge fan of Pullman’s work, but it was only recently that I discovered connections to my own work on the science of consciousness. Sir Philip and I hooked up on twitter, when he interjected into a philosophical discussion I was having on the nature of consciousness. We subsequently emailed, he read and kindly endorsed my book Galileo’s Error: Foundations for a New Science of Consciousness, and we ended up having a public discussion in Oxford on the philosophy of consciousness (which you can view here or read the transcript here). In preparation for this discussion, I looked back at the His Dark Materials trilogy, and was blown away to discover a line from The Subtle Knife (the middle volume) that perfectly captures a view that has recently been causing waves in consciousness research: panpsychism. We have been discussing how Pullman draws inspiration from cutting-edge developments in science; in this case, he may have foreshadowed one.

Panpsychists are trying to address one of the deepest challenges in contemporary science: the problem of consciousness. Despite great progress in our scientific understanding of the brain, we still don’t have even the beginnings of an explanation of how complex, electro-chemical signaling is somehow able to give rise to the inner subjective world of colours, sounds, smells and tastes that each of us knows in our own case. There is a deep mystery in understanding how what we know about ourselves from the inside fits together with what science tells us about matter from the outside.

So it turns out that there is a huge hole in our scientific story. The proposal of the panpsychist is to put consciousness in that hole.

How does the panpsychist solve this problem? Their starting point is that physical science doesn’t actually tell us what matter is. That sounds like a bizarre claim at first; when you read a physics textbook, you seem to learn all kinds of incredible things about the nature of space, time and matter. But what philosophers of science have realized is that physical science, for all its richness, is confined to telling us about the behavior of matter: what it does. Physics tells us, for example, that matter has mass and charge. These properties are completely defined in terms of behavior, things like attraction, repulsion, resistance to acceleration. Physics tells us absolutely nothing about what philosophers like to call the intrinsic nature of matter: what matter is in and of itself.

So it turns out that there is a huge hole in our scientific story. The proposal of the panpsychist is to put consciousness in that hole. Consciousness, for the panpsychist, is the intrinsic nature of matter. There’s just matter, on this view, nothing supernatural or spiritual. But matter can be described from two perspectives. Physical science describes matter “from the outside,” in terms of its behavior, but matter “from the inside,” i.e. in terms of its intrinsic nature, is constituted of forms of consciousness. Panpsychism offers a wonderfully simple, elegant way of integrating consciousness into our scientific story, a way of bringing together the inner reality of consciousness with the external description of physics.

I said earlier that this panpsychist view is foreshadowed in the middle volume of His Dark Materials. The scene in question is one in which the scientist Mary is talking to Dust particles, or “shadows” as she calls them. I won’t go into the strange method they’re using to communicate – you’ll have to read the book – but Mary asks the Dust particles:

“Are you what we would call ‘spirit’?”

…to which the particles reply:

“From what we are, spirit. From what we do, matter. Matter and spirit are one.”

If we replace ‘spirit’ with ‘consciousness’, this is pretty much the panpsychist position outlined above.

Pullman has gone on to describe panpsychism as a ‘new Copernican revolution’:

“This idea has the glorious simplicity of our first realisation that the earth goes around the sun, and not vice versa. Suddenly the universe appears in a new and much more revealing perspective.”

He’s clearly enthusiastic about the idea. But does he actually believe it might true? I put this to him in our discussion. He answered:

“Yeah. But I should add that I’m prepared to believe anything that will help me tell a story.”

Scientists, philosophers and novelists all have their story to tell. Sometimes those stories connect together and enrich each other. Long may it continue!

More from Philip Goff
Twitter: @philip_goff
Website: www.philipgoffphilosophy.com
Blog: www.conscienceandconsciousness.com 
Galileo’s Error: Foundations for a New Science of Consciousness

Philip Goff
20th December 2019

Willa Cather

Dear love, what thing of all the things that be  Is ever worth one thought from you or me,               Save only Love,               Save only Love? The days so short, the nights so quick to flee,  The world so wide, so deep and dark the sea,                So dark the sea;  So far the suns and every listless star,  Beyond their light—Ah! dear, who knows how far,               Who knows how far?  One thing of all dim things I know is true,  The heart within me knows, and tells it you,               And tells it you.  So blind is life, so long at last is sleep,  And none but Love to bid us laugh or weep,               And none but Love,               And none but Love.        This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on January 5, 2020, by the Academy of American Poets. About this Poem “Evening Song” was originally published in April Twilights (The Gorham Press, 1903).  Willa Cather was born in Virginia on December 7, 1873. She is the author of several books of prose and poetry including April Twilights, and Other Poems (Alfred A. Knopf, 1923). She died in New York City on April 24, 1947.