Drew M Dalton - "Reality is Evil" / Philosophers must reckon with the meaning of thermodynamics

https://aeon.co/essays/philosophers-must-reckon-with-the-meaning-of-thermodynamics

 

 

We must start by admitting that the Universe is finite and will eventually end. Moreover, we must accept that the function of the Universe is to hasten this extinction. The laws of thermodynamics reveal, in other words, that what we might view as the generative power of the Universe is instead bringing about the annihilation of everything: the flourishing of life is always contributing to the eventual collapse of the cosmos.

 

 

Life is perhaps the most effective, albeit least obvious, consequence of and agent for thermodynamic decay in our immediate system, as the biophysicist Jeremy England has shown in his lab and the biologist Lynn Margulis has confirmed in field research with her son, Dorion Sagan. Everything in existence, including our species, both arises from and works in service to the destructive order of reality. Decay, it seems, is the ultimate essence of existence, which means that our being must be understood as a mode of unbecoming. It is but one additional way in which the ultimate annihilation of the Universe is accomplished.

 

 

No longer can we conceive of existence as something that is ultimately good. Nor can we conceive of it as something that is morally neutral, as others might have it. Instead, we must acknowledge that reality – which is organised antagonistically against all that it creates, and is the direct cause of the suffering of every entity it endows with consciousness – might be morally evil. If our existence means being forever at war with ourselves and our environs, and actively contributing to the suffering of everything we encounter along the way, then it is decidedly not good to be. Life is a moral catastrophe. To exist is to be unavoidably complicit in an order that is entirely evil.

 

 

Consider, for example, the practice of medicine that, while fully acknowledging the ultimate destiny of life (ie, death), nevertheless strives with tireless passion to delay the arrival of that destiny for as long as possible and to prescribe lifestyles that will enhance the quality of life in the meantime. This is a rather obvious good. What is less intuitive is that such efforts do not work in concert with nature. Medicine is not a way of affirming the intended direction of life and existence, and yet we think of the work that doctors do as ‘good’. What makes it good is precisely that it attempts to forestall, delay, slow down or put off what nature destines. In a similar way, every effort to work against and resist the entropic flow of reality must also count as good.

 

 

To do good is not to work in concert with reality, nor should we ever strive to live in harmony with nature. This would make us complicit in an entirely evil system. To do good is to break with that complicity – to seek ways of dismantling, resisting and reconfiguring the structure of reality to neutralise, alleviate or unsettle its entropic thrust. Only by pursuing goodness negatively, through acts of refusal and resistance, can we hope to animate a new ethics within the metaphysics of decay.

Peter Lukacs - "Can you rewire your brain?"

https://aeon.co/essays/what-the-metaphor-of-rewiring-gets-wrong-about-neuroplasticity

 

 

This thinking can be cruel. It ignores several factors – from the social to the environmental to the genetic – that shape and constrain neuroplasticity, many of which are only partially understood. It turns healing into a moral achievement, and failure into a personal flaw. Some therapy models and self-help programmes lean into this pressure, implying that full transformation is just a matter of effort. But science tells a different story: change is possible, yes. But it’s constrained by biology and shaped by context.

Sam Dresser - "Heidegger v Carnap: how logic took issue with metaphysics"

https://aeon.co/essays/heidegger-v-carnap-how-logic-took-issue-with-metaphysics

Interesting article about metaphysics and Heidegger and Carnap. Heidegger being a nazi-sympathisant was messed up.

Logic will not stand in his way; logic, says Heidegger, is not 'the highest court of appeals'. His point is that humans can understand things in ways that aren't strictly intellectual. In our day-to-day lives, we talk about 'nothing' all the time. ('What did you do in school today?' 'Nothing'.) We can use the concept in this way because we have a pre-theoretical idea of what 'nothing'... is, Heidegger says Getting to this 'pre-theoretical' place is the very heart of the philosophy as a whole. It means going 'beyond' logic, or perhaps 'behind' it, to appeal to the what-it-is-like-ness of being a person. Heidegger wants to show - but not really to argue for - the idea that logic doesn't exhaust what we can meaningfully say about existence.

It is through moods such as boredom, joy or anger that the world 'discloses' itself to us, Heidegger says.

Now for the twist: the reason we can toss 'Nothing' about so easily - the reason why we have an inkling of 'Nothing' even if we can't directly speak about it - is that there's a particular mood that 'discloses' Nothing. That mood is anxiety. While fear tends to have a singular object, like a vengeful spider or a murderous clown, anxiety lacks a target. It shears away meaning, revealing the pointlessness of it all, the utter, hollowed-out barrenness of existence.

Perhaps it takes a mind as subtle as Ludwig Wittgenstein's to really, truly understand Heidegger. After reading Heidegger's lecture, Wittgenstein remarked:

To be sure, I can imagine what Heidegger means by being [Sein] and anxiety [Angst]. Man feels the urge to run up against the limits of language. Think for example of the astonishment that anything at all exists. This astonishment cannot be expressed in the form of a question, and there is no answer whatsoever. Anything we might say is a priori bound to be mere nonsense. Nevertheless we do run up against the limits of language.

Much of the disagreement between Heidegger and Carnap boils down to the notion of 'limits': the limits of words, the limits of knowledge, the limits of expression. And limits naturally prompt questions about beginnings: where to start when we do philosophy, and how does that starting point influence wherever we might be headed? In logic, Carnap found firm ground from which to launch his own philosophy, and to articulate the kind of thinking that should be classed as truly 'philosophical'. For Heidegger, logic is useful but not sufficient. There is so much more to say, so much more to question, so much more bound up with the business of being alive.

Keri Leigh Merritt - "Capitalism and underdevelopment in the American South" / The Southern Gap

https://aeon.co/essays/capitalism-and-underdevelopment-in-the-american-south

deaths of despair (those from alcohol, drugs or suicide) have skyrocketed, as has substance abuse. Southerners in general are isolated and lonely, and wealth and power are heavily concentrated: there are a few thousand incredibly wealthy families - almost all of them the direct descendants of the Confederacy's wealthiest slaveholders - a smaller-than-average middle class, and masses of poor people, working class or not. The South, with few worker protections, prevents its working-classes from earning a living wage. It's virtually impossible to exist on the meagre income of a single, low-wage, 40-hour-a-week job, especially since the US has not social healthcare benefits.

David Robson - "Words as feelings"

https://aeon.co/essays/in-the-beginning-was-the-word-and-the-word-was-embodied

amazing article.  This seems to indirectly confirm my suspicion about names like "Mordor" and "Nazgul" sounding angry and dangerous!

Try to guess their meaning from the two available options:

1. nurunuru (a) dry or (b) slimy?

2. pikapika (a) bright or (b) dark?

3. wakuwaku (a) excited or (b) bored?

4. iraira (a) happy or (b) angry?

5. guzuguzu (a) moving quickly or (b) moving slowly?

6. kurukuru (a) spinning around or (b) moving up and down?

7. kosokoso (a) walking quietly or (b) walking loudly?

8. gochagocha (a) tidy or (b) messy?

9. garagara (a) crowded or (b) empty?

10. tsurutsuru (a) smooth or (b) rough?

The answers are: 1(b); 2(a); 3(a); 4(b); 5(b); 6(a); 7(a); 8(b); 9(b) 10(a).

If you think this exercise is futile, you’re in tune with traditional linguistic thinking. One of the founding axioms of linguistic theory, articulated by Ferdinand de Saussure in the early 19th century, is that any particular linguistic sign – a sound, a mark on the page, a gesture – is arbitrary, and dictated solely by social convention. Save those rare exceptions such as onomatopoeias, where a word mimics a noise – eg, ‘cuckoo’, ‘achoo’ or ‘cock-a-doodle-doo’ – there should be no inherent link between the way a word sounds and the concept it represents; unless we have been socialised to think so, nurunuru shouldn’t feel more ‘slimy’ any more than it feels ‘dry’.

Yet many world languages contain a separate set of words that defies this principle. Known as ideophones, they are considered to be especially vivid and evocative of sensual experiences. Crucially, you do not need to know the language to grasp a hint of their meaning. Studies show that participants lacking any prior knowledge of Japanese, for example, often guess the meanings of the above words better than chance alone would allow. For many people, nurunuru really does feel ‘slimy’; wakuwaku evokes excitement, and kurukuru conjures visions of circular rather than vertical motion. That should simply not be possible, if the sound-meaning relationship was indeed arbitrary. (The experiment is best performed using real audio clips of native speakers.)

Yet Westermann’s later research found that there was also something special in ideophones’ phonological features. Comparing the ideophones of half a dozen West African languages, he noted that certain ‘front’ or ‘closed’ vowels – such as the [i] sound in the English word ‘cheese’ – tended to be used to represent concepts that were light, fine or bright, for instance; while ‘back’ or ‘open’ vowels – such as the [ɔ] sound in ‘talk’ or the [ɑ] in past – tended to be associated with a sense of slowness, heaviness and darkness. Meanwhile, voiced consonants such as ‘b’ or ‘g’ – so-called because they require the vocal cords to resonate – were associated with greater weight and softness, while voiceless consonants, such as ‘p’ or ‘k’, tended to be used to represent lighter weights and harsher surfaces. So, for example, in Ewe, someone kputukpluu is thinner than someone who is gbudugbluu.

He found similar relationships with linguistic tones. In many languages, the pitch at which a syllable is spoken can change a word’s meaning. Westermann found that words representing slowness, darkness and heaviness tended to have lower tones than those depicting speed, agility and brightness, which were formed of higher tones. Many also include the repetition of syllables, which can be used to signify number and a continuous action or state. So, for instance, in Ewe, kpata is used to denote one drop falling, but kpata kpata depicts many drops falling.

These patterns have now been observed in the ideophones of many other languages. To take a couple of examples from Basque – a language isolate that also has more than 4,000 ideophones – tiki taka, with its closed, frontal [i] sound, means taking quick, light steps, while taka taka, with a more open [a] sound, denotes taking heavier steps; tilin tilin means ‘small toll’, and tulun tulun ‘big toll’.

Meanwhile, in Japanese you have gorogoro, which, with its voiced ‘g’ sounds, represents a heavy object rolling continuously, while korokoro, with a voiceless ‘k’, represents a lighter rolling object. Similarly, bota means a ‘thick/much liquid hitting a solid surface’, while pota means a ‘thin/little liquid hitting a solid surface’. If you are a Pokémon fan, you might even notice these sound-meaning relationships in your favourite characters. Pikachu, for instance, is named after the Japanese ideophone pikapika, which means sparkle. As Westermann had noted, the voiceless consonants and front [i] vowels are often associated with brightness in a number of languages.

An early version of this experiment can be found in the writing of the German psychologist Wolfgang Köhler in the late 1920s, who tested participants in Tenerife. But the result has now been repeated many times, in many different cultures. In almost all cases, bouba is chosen to represent the shape on the right by the vast majority of participants, while kiki naturally seems to fit a spiky, pointed object.

The evocative power of ideophones might therefore reflect on an inherent sound symbolism understood by all humans. Although we don’t know the exact origin of these universal connections between sounds and meanings, one attractively parsimonious answer comes from human biology and the bodily experience of speech. According to this theory, subtle feedback from our mouth and throat primes us to associate certain phonemes with certain concepts. The mouth tends to form a rounder shape when we form an [o] sound, compared with an [i] sound – which might help to explain the kiki/bouba phenomenon. Voiced consonants such as ‘b’ also last for a marginally longer time than voiceless consonants such as ‘t’ – which might explain why they are associated with slower speed.

As part of the same study, Dingemanse also asked Dutch participants to memorise various lists of word pairs. In one, the ideophones were paired with the correct translation that matched their sound symbolism (kibikibi was paired with its true meaning, ‘energetic’, for instance). In another, the Japanese ideophones were paired with words of the opposite meaning (kibikibi was paired with the Dutch word for ‘tired’).

Over all the experiments, the participants found it far easier to learn the ideophones paired with their correct meaning, remembering about 86 per cent of the ‘congruent’ word pairs, compared with 71 per cent of the word pairs in which they had been given the wrong translation of the ideophone. Once again, this was not true in another experiment that measured how well they learnt Japanese adjectives – supporting the idea that there is something special about ideophones, and the way they are formed, that makes them particularly vivid.

Sam Woodward - "The terror of reality was the true horror for H P Lovecraft"

https://aeon.co/essays/the-terror-of-reality-was-the-true-horror-for-h-p-lovecraft

 

[opening paragraph of 'The Call of Chtulhu']

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.

As an absolute determinist, Lovecraft's metaphysics describes an infinite universe in eternal predetermined motion: 'each human act,' he wrote, 'can be no less than the inevitable result of every antecedent and circumambient condition in an eternal cosmos.' This left no room for teleology, the notion that the universe is moving towards some pre-ordained goal, or that humans and other species are evolving for some purpose. His determinism was accompanied by a strict materialism that, in line with the views of many of his contemporaries, made the immaterial - the soul and spirit - inconceivable. These views shaped the nightmarish figures in his tales, which are not apparitions or spectres, the 'supernatural beings of conventional horror writing, but materially real horrors that only appear supernatural because of humanity's inability to comprehend their true nature.

Through a belief in the impossible, Lovecraft thought we might 'acquire a certain flush of triumphant emancipation comparable in its comforting power to the opiate dreams of religion'. But that would happen only if we had, he believed, 'the illusory sensation that some law of the ruthless cosmos has been - or could be - invalidated or defeated'. In that sense, the illusory depictions of nature contravened in weird fiction tales provide some respite, even if only aesthetic, from the rigid and unerring clockwork of the mechanistic and predetermined universe.

Jim Baggott - "Quantum dialectics (How Soviet communist philosophy shaped postwar quantum theory)"

https://aeon.co/essays/how-soviet-communist-philosophy-shaped-postwar-quantum-theory

As the founders of the theory argued about what it meant, the views of the Danish physicist Niels Bohr began to dominate. He concluded that we have no choice but to describe our experiments and their results using seemingly contradictory, but nevertheless complementary, concepts of waves and particles borrowed from classical (pre-quantum) physics. This is Bohr's principle of "complementarity". He argued that there is no contradiction because, in the context of the quantum world, our use of these concepts is purely symbolic. We reach for whicever descsription - waves or particles - best serves the situation at hand, and we should not take the theory too literally. It has no meaning beyond its ability to connect our experiences of the quantum world as they are projected to us by the classical instruments we use to study it.

Bohr emphasised that complementarity did not deny the existence of an objective quantum reality lying beneath the phenomena. But it did deny that we can discover anything meaningful about this. Alas, despite his strenuous efforts to exercise care in his use of language, Bohr could be notoriously vague and more than occassionally incomprehensible. Pronouncements were delivered in tortured "Borish". It is said of his last recorded lecture that it took a team of linguists a week to discover the language he was speaking.

Complementatiry also fell foul of the principal political ideologies that, in different ways, dominated human affairs from the early 1930s, through the Second World War, to the Cold War that followed. Both Bohr and Einstein were of Jewish descent and, to Nazi ideologues, complementarity and relativity theory were poisonous Jewish abstractions, at odds with the nationalistic programme of Deutsche Physik, or 'Aryan physics'. But the proponents of Deutsche Physik failed to secure the backing of the Nazi leadership, and any threat to complementarity from Nazi ideology disappeared with the war's ending. Much more enduring were the objections of Soviet communist philosophers who argued that complementarity was at odds with the official Marxist doctrine of 'dialectical materialism'.

Complementarity looked just like the kind of positivist gibberish that Lenin had sought to annihilate. A reality accessible only in the form of quantum probabilities did not suit the needs of the official philosophy of Soviet communists. It appeared to undermine orthodox materialism. Nevertheless, an influential group of Soviet physicists, including Vladimir Fock, Lev Landau, Igor Tamm and Matvei Bronstein, promoted Bohr's views and for a time represented the 'Russian branch' of Bohr's school. This was not without some risk. Communist Party philosophers sought their dismissal, to no avail, largely because they could not agree on the issues amongst themselves.

Laura J Martin - "Disturbance How atomic doomsday experiments, fuelled by Cold War fears, shaped then shook ecologists’ faith in self-healing nature"

https://aeon.co/essays/how-atomic-doomsday-experiments-shaped-disturbance-ecology

The AEC hoped the Luquillo irradiation experiment would help the mainland prepare for nuclear war. It also intended the irradiation of Luquillo to inform another imperial project, the proposed Project Plowshare Pan-Atomic Canal, a plan to ‘improve’ the Panama Canal (so that it would not require locks to move ships) by detonating a series of H-bombs through Panama. The US Department of Defense also tested Agent Orange and other ‘tactical herbicides’ for use in the Vietnam War at Luquillo. Puerto Rican forests were destroyed in an attempt to plan for the protection of mainland Americans.

Felipe de Brigard - "Nostalgia doesn't need real memories - an imagined past works just as well"

https://aeon.co/essays/nostalgia-doesnt-need-real-memories-an-imagined-past-works-as-well

A more tractable version of this second reading was championed by Charles Zwingman's medical analysis of nostalgia in 1960, according to which what the subject wants is for gratifying features from past experiences to be reinstated in the present, presumably because the current situation lacks them. Although a person might feel nostalgia about a childhood friendship, her longing would actually be satisfied not by travelling back in time but by improving her current relationships. There are two advantages to this approach. First, it helps to understand nostalgia's particular instantation of Gorgias' paradox: the nostalgic individual wrongly attributes the desirable features of the object to an unrecoverable event, when in reality those features can be dissociated from it and reattached to a current condition. Second, this approach can help to understand recent findings suggesting that nostalgia can be motivational, and can increase optimism, creativity and pro-social behaviours.

Neuroscience tells us that, when we imagine, we redeploy much of the same neural mechanisms that we would have employed had we actually engaged in the simulated action. When we imagine biking, we engage much of the same brain regions we'd have engaged had we actually been biking.

Coined by the Swiss physician Johannes Hofer in 1688, 'nostalgia' referred to a medical condition - homesickness - characterised by an incapacitating longing for one's motherland. Hover favoured the term because it combined two essential features of the illness: the desire to return home (nostos) and the pain (algos) of being unable to do so. Nostalgia's symptomatology was imprecise - it included rumination, melancholia, insomnia, anxiety and lack of appetite - and was thought to affect primarily soldiers and sailors. Physicians also disagreed about its cause. Hofer thought that nostalgia was caused by nerve vibrations where traces of ideas of the motherland 'still cling', whereas others, noticing that is was found predominantly among Swiss soldiers fighting at lower altitudes, proposed instead that nostalgia was caused by changes in atmospheric pressure, or eardrum damage from the clanging of Swiss cowbells. Once nostalgia was identified among soldiers from various nationalities, the idea that it was geographically specific was abandoned.

Indeed, feeling nostalgic for a time one didn't actually live through appears to be a common phenomenon if all the chatrooms, Facebook pages and websites dedicated to it are anything to go by. In fact, a new word has been coined to capture this precise variant of nostalgia – anemoia, defined by the Urban Dictionary and the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows as 'nostalgia for a time you've never known'.

Although memory and imagination are usually thought of as different, a number of critical findings in the past three decades have challenged this view. In 1985, the psychologist Endel Tulving in Toronto observed that his amnesiac patient 'N N' not only had difficulty remembering his past: he also had trouble imagining possible future events. This led Tulving to suggest that remembering the past and imagining the future were two processes of a single system for mental time-travel. Further support for this hypothesis came in the early 2000s, as a number of scientific studies confirmed that both remembering the past and imagining the future engage the brain's so-called 'default network'. But in the past decade, it has become clear that the brain's default network supports mental simulations of other hypothetical events too, such as episodes that could have occured in one's past but didn't, atemporal routine activities (eg, brushing teeth), mind-wandering, spatial navigation, imagining other people's thoughts (mentalising) and narrative comprehension, among others. As a result, researchers now think that what unifies this common neural network isn't just mental time-travel, but rather a more general kind of psychological process characterised by being self-relevant, socially significant and episodically, dynamically imaginative.

Arwen E Nicholson - "There is no planet B"

https://aeon.co/essays/we-will-never-be-able-to-live-on-another-planet-heres-why

In fact, we would have been unable to survive on Earth for around 90 per cent of its history; the oxygen-rich atmosphere that we depend on is a recent feature of our planet.

The earliest part of our planet's history, known as the Hadean aeon, begins with the formation of the Earth. Named after the Greek underworld due to our planet's fiery beginnings, the early Hadean would have been a terrible place with molten lava oceans and an atmosphere of vaporised rock. Next came the Archean aeon, beginning 4 billion years ago, when the first life on Earth flourished. But, as we just saw, the Archean would be no home for a human. The world where our earliest ancestors thrived would kill us in an instant. After the Archean came the Proterozoic, 2.5 billion years ago. In this aeon, there was land, and a more familiar blue ocean and sky. What's more, oxygen finally began to accumulate in the atmosphere. But let's not get too excited: the level of oxygen was less than 10 per cent of what we have today. The air would still have been impossible for us to breathe. This time also experienced global glaciation events known as snowball Earths, where ice covered the globe from poles to equator for millions of years at a time. Earth has spent more of its time fully frozen than the length of time that we humans existed.

Kathleen Lubey - "What Andrea Dworkin missed about Pornography"

https://aeon.co/essays/what-andrea-dworkin-missed-about-pornography

But the women soon qualify the potency of the penis. Miss Forward finds it to be, in crucial ways, unlike the dildo: whereas the dildo remains constantly erect, the penis ‘contracts himself like a Snail’, becomes ‘mean and pitiful, sneaking and supple’ in the absence of feminine beauty. Men, the young women realise, do not in their essence possess strength and power. Rather, they require an object of desire to beckon them to action. Men’s claim to uncontested social dominance, therefore, is premised on a faulty anatomical analogy.

Michael J Warren - "British place names resonate with the song of missing birds"

https://aeon.co/essays/british-place-names-resonate-with-the-song-of-missing-birds 

Cuckoos, like so many British birds that are threatened or extinct, would have been much more abundant in the Middle Ages. Yaxley, on the edge of surviving cuckoo strongholds in the former Fens, would have thronged to their calls. Now these places, and many like them where the birds of their names are absent, are solemnly displaced, the names creaking in the wind like dilapidated pub signs whose buildings have long since closed or fallen into ruin. We can sense that displacement in the sprawl of modern suburban environments too, which, with considerable irony, fashionably assign bird nomenclatures to roads and residential spaces (Sandpiper Drive, Nightingale Way, Lark Rise, Goldcrest Mews…) where the species named are nowhere to be seen, and perhaps never have been.

Mara van der Lugt on hopeful pessimism

https://aeon.co/essays/in-these-dark-times-the-virtue-we-need-is-hopeful-pessimism

In the early Enlightenment, of course, there were no such concerns for the future of the planet. But there were evils in existence – plenty of them. Crimes, misfortunes, death, disease, earthquakes and the sheer vicissitudes of life. Considering such evils, these philosophers asked, can existence still be justified?

This longstanding philosophical debate is where we get the terms ‘optimism’ and ‘pessimism’, which are so much used, and perhaps overused, in our modern culture. ‘Optimism’ was the phrase coined by the Jesuits for philosophers such as Leibniz, with his notion that we live in ‘the best of all possible worlds’ (for surely, if God could have created a better one, he would have done so). ‘Pessimism’ followed not long afterwards to denote philosophers such as Voltaire, whose novel Candide (1759) ridiculed Leibnizian optimism by contrasting it with the many evils in the world. ‘If this is the best of all possible worlds,’ Voltaire’s hero asks, ‘what on earth are the others like?’

But really, Voltaire wasn’t much of a pessimist: other philosophers such as Bayle and Hume went much further in their demonstrations of the badness of existence. For Bayle, and for Hume after him, the point is not just that the evils of life outnumber the goods (though they believe this is also the case), but that they outweigh them

Harold James - "Geopolitics is a loser's buzzword"

https://aeon.co/essays/geopolitics-is-a-losers-buzzword-with-a-contagious-idea

I'm not sure I follow this completely.  The phrase was coined in Sweden around 1900, then people like Haushofer - who some think was basically the mastermind/writer behind Mein Kampf - took it and made it an excuse for "lebensraum", as later Putin would blame geopolitics on the breaking up of the Sovjet Union...?

As in the interwar era, geopolitics has become a buzzword that brings with it a contagious idea. Geopolitics should be recognised as what it is: an attempt to understand the world by people and countries that believe they are losing out. As in post-1919 Germany, it looks like an appealing way of explaining a newly chaotic world to the confused. The real danger is that this mode of thinking appears so attractive that it poisons everyone else’s politics too. The haunted world of Haushofer, and of the Hartschimmelhof, is a monument to a confusing response to confusion: and a grim warning.

Rob Boddice - "Pain is not the purview of medics. What can historians tell us?"

https://aeon.co/essays/pain-is-not-the-purview-of-medics-what-can-historians-tell-us

Interesting read on how pain is not (just) nociception (?), as experienced physically, "through tissue", but has many shapes and forms, is personal.

Take, for example, the concept of grief in ancient Greece: ἄχεος (ákheos). It is one of the key terms for grief or distress at the heart in the Iliad, but it is also one of many words in Greek for pain/suffering. Despite the association of Achilles with other passions, it is grief-pain that he embodies in his very name, and it is in the name of this pain that most of Achilles’ violent actions are carried out in the final books of the epic. You might object that Achilles is a fictional character, a demi-god; that this pain is merely literary, not literal, and not human. Yet the Iliad framed ideas and practices of virtue, belief, warfare and ritual for centuries. It was key to Greek self-fashioning in the classical period. It was the central intertext of Plato’s Republic. If Greeks learnt how to do pain, they learnt it, in part, through Achilles.

the Norwegian artist Edvard Munch understood the potentiality of wordlessness and of the blank face. The blankness of his own pain(ted) visage demonstrates another sign of ineffable, emotional pain, that is nonetheless expressive and learnable. Fuelled by the Danish philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard’s angst and mired in grief, poverty and suicidal thoughts, Munch was plunged into fortvilelse, a mixture of despair and violent grief.

Munch transfigures, in these words, the experience of a physical, humoral pain – his melancholy, his pain under the heart – into the pain of the world, where the sky bleeds and nature screams, not audibly, but sensibly. The inadequacy of Munch’s description of his own pain is marked by his erasure of the lines that attempt to express it. And while all the words would be eliminated entirely in the final painting, the erasure of the personal and physical embodiment of pain is mapped on to the painting. The face of the figure, leaning against the fence, is featureless – not an absence of expression, but simply nothing in the place of a face: not a mask, but deletion. The pain is mapped instead on to the sky. If, for the man, pain was ineffable, one needed only to look up to access it. This profundity of suffering put the pain everywhere. Munch’s language of pain, ultimately, was paint. The concepts required to express it are in evidence. They are situated – melancholy and angst, mixed with the bruised city and the bloody sky – and distinct. To access this pain requires cultural knowledge.

The greater the stimulus, the greater the pain. The more serious the wound, the more serious the pain. It is one of those apparently obvious correlations that have no foundation. The experiences of the war-wounded on a grand scale provided doctors with a wealth of empirical information that inconveniently disconnected damage from pain. Large wounds did not always hurt.

These mysteries pointed researchers to the dynamics of nervous signalling: the traffic was not just in one direction, from the periphery to the centre, but also from the centre to the periphery. How a sensory stimulus feels is mediated by appraisal, and that appraisal is situated in terms of the personal experience of the individual, the degree of attention applied to the wound, to the immediate occasion of the injury (danger, fear, reassurance, safety) and to the cultural repertoire of pain concepts that provide the framework for expression. 

How the body and mind talk to one another to understand the world

 https://aeon.co/ideas/how-the-body-and-mind-talk-to-one-another-to-understand-the-world

Contemporary experiments demonstrate the neural and mental representation of internal bodily sensations as integral for the experience of emotions; those individuals with heightened interoception tend to experience emotions with greater intensity. The anterior insula is a key brain area, processing both emotions and internal visceral signals, supporting the idea that this area is key in processing internal bodily sensations as a means to inform emotional experience. Individuals with enhanced interoception also have greater activation of the insula during interoceptive processing and enhanced grey-matter density of this area.

Ann-Sophie Barwich - "Why might it be easier to fool your eyes than your nose?"

https://aeon.co/essays/why-might-it-be-easier-to-fool-your-eyes-than-your-nose

Why do we generally trust our eyes? Visual object recognition seems intuitively more objective than odour perception since it builds on perspective invariance. Regardless of the angle from which you approach an object, you can recognise it as being the same thing and of the same category. A ball doesn't usually transform suddenly into a square or triangle when you approach it from the left rather than the right side. It will likewise continue to look like a ball if you paint it in another colour or spritz an odour at it. The same cannot necessarily be said about olfactory images in their ephemeral and fluctuating appearance. Contextual cues (such as a word or an image) can profoundly alter the conceptual content of an odour image in an instant - for example, from Parmesan to vomit, and back again. With visual imagery, it is usually only in the case of optical illusions of puzzle pictures such as the duck-rabbit that such radical shifts of perception occur.

By comparison, it is much harder to trick your nose. Certainly, olfaction is much more variable in its perceptual expression than vision. But this variation doesn't mean that the nose has been misled. Olfaction simply does not work analogously to the visual system. Crucially, feature coding in smell is not viewpoint-invariant. On the contrary, the causal principles of the olfactory system facilitate a cue-dependent interpretation in the computational integration of its neural signals. This inherent variability is of greater advantage when it comes to judging a contextually highly promiscuous and often unpredictable distal stimulus. The same odorant in different chemical environments can change its meaning also because you never smell chemicals on their own.

Phil Jaekl - "Can humans navigate by sensing the Earth's magnetic field?"

https://aeon.co/essays/can-humans-navigate-by-sensing-the-earths-magnetic-field

They examined the mineral content of pulverised bees and pigeon heads using specially adapted geological testing equipment. In each, they discovered about 100 million particles of magnetite. This opened the possibility that Earth's magnetic force could somehow affect the nervous system by the raw movement of these millions of tiny compasses, perhaps facilitating neural communication to signal North and South.

The idea is that, when someone isn't doing anything but resting, the brain's activity level peaks and troughs rhythmically in waves at a specific frequency rate - in this case, within what is known as the 'alpha frequency' band. Then, if they hear, see or sense something, these cycles become less regular, marking a decrease in alpha activity.

Dreams are a precious resource. Don't let advertisers hack them

 

In his book 50 secrets of Magic Craftmanship (1948), Salvador Dali documented a technique that he called 'slumber with a key'. Sitting in a chair with one arm on the armrest, holding a heavy key over an upside-down plate, he would bring to mind a problem he was working on and allow himself to drift off to sleep. With the onset of sleep, his hand muscles would relax, the key would fall and hit the plate, waking him up, often with a solution to his problem.

How to pray to a dead God

 https://aeon.co/essays/how-to-fulfil-the-need-for-transcendence-after-the-death-of-god

Even Darwin would write that the 'view now held by most physicists, namely, that the Sun with all the planets will in time grow too cold for life ... is an intolerable thought.' Such an impasse was a difficulty for those convinced by science but unable to find meaning in its theories. For many, purpose wasn't an attribute of the physical world, but rather something that humanity could construct.

In Germany, the Reformed theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher rejected both Enlightenment rationalism and orthodox Christianity, positing that an aesthetic sense defined faith, while still concluding in a 1799 address that 'belief in God, and in personal immortality, are not necessarily a part of religion.' Like Arnold, Schleiermacher saw 'God' as an allegorical device for introspection, understanding worship as being 'pure contemplation of the Universe'. Such a position was influential throughout the 19th century, particularly among American Transcendentalists such as Henry Ward Beecher and Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Those who practise apophatic theology - 2nd-century Clement of Alexandria, 4th-century Gregory of Nyssa, and 6th-century Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite - promulgated a method that has come to be known as the via negativa. According to this approach, nothing positive can be said about God that is true, not even that He exists. 'We do not know what God is,' the 9th-century Irish theologian John Scotus Eriugena wrote. 'God Himself does not know what He is because He is not anything. Literally God is not.'
    How these apophatic theologians approached the transcendent in the centuries before Nietzsche's infamous theocide was to understand that God is found not in descriptions, dogmas, creeds, theologies or anything else. Even belief in God tells us nothing about God, this abyss, this void, this being beyond all comprehension. Far from being simple atheists, the apophatic theologians had God at the forefront of their thoughts, in a place closer than their hearts even if unutterable. This is the answer of how to pray to a 'dead God': by understanding that neither the word 'dead' nor 'God' means anything at all.