Called one of the most influential psychologists of our time, Daniel Kahneman has been appearing in articles from Freakonomics – yes because of a recently released book, Thinking Fast and Slow - and here’s an example:

http://www.freakonomics.com/2011/11/28/daniel-kahneman-answers-your-questions/

Q. You recommend the use of checklists in business decision-making to counteract a number of the [...]]]>

Called one of the most influential psychologists of our time, Daniel Kahneman has been appearing in articles from Freakonomics – yes because of a recently released book, Thinking Fast and Slow - and here’s an example:

http://www.freakonomics.com/2011/11/28/daniel-kahneman-answers-your-questions/

Q. You recommend the use of checklists in business decision-making to counteract a number of the most common biases – confirmation bias, anchoring, etc. I would like to know what you think of the argument that framing bias (and the associated narrow targets) has an even greater impact – for example, framing strategy as being about beating competitors (with potentially misleading analogies from chess, football, judo etc. used as a guide) or framing the focus of marketing as being on branding (thereby encouraging an inside-out perspective) rather than customers (which would encourage a more outside-in approach), even the focus on shareholder value (rather than broader stakeholder value) which has been linked to short-termism that ultimately isn’t in shareholders best interests? -Jack Springman

A. You are absolutely right – or at least I agree with you! Appropriate framing of the problem that is to be solved is essential to everything that follows. And it is certainly the case that a bad frame of the problem will lead to bad decisions. We may not have emphasized this point sufficiently in the checklist we proposed in the Harvard Business Review earlier this year.

In my own work with self-development and the enlightenment culture technologies I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about and observing the behavior of “selves” – the organizing structures in the brain mind that make us behave in the ways we recognize as human and ‘conscious’. I think Kanhemans model of the experiencing vs the remembering selves was both useful, and that it is very instructive when applied to the enlightenment tradition’s models.

He talks about this a bit in this excellent TED video – so, take the time to watch it if you have an interest in the nature of the self, the “ego” as it’s commonly (and typically pejorativly) called in moden ET (enlightenment traditions) ulture, then the minutes you spend watching this video should seem worthwhile – that is, your remembering self will store a story about them being worthwhile which you will occassionaly recall.

Here is a transcript of a relevant part for those who read faster than they watch:

Now, the experiencing self lives its life continuously. It has moments of experience, one after the other. And you can ask: What happens to these moments? And the answer is really straightforward: They are lost forever. I mean, most of the moments of our life — and I calculated, you know, the psychological present is said to be about three seconds long; that means that, you know, in a life there are about 600 million of them; in a month, there are about 600,000 — most of them don’t leave a trace. Most of them are completely ignored by the remembering self. And yet, somehow you get the sense that they should count, that what happens during these moments of experience is our life. It’s the finite resource that we’re spending while we’re on this earth. And how to spend it would seem to be relevant, but that is not the story that the remembering self keeps for us.

So we have the remembering self and the experiencing self, and they’re really quite distinct. The biggest difference between them is in the handling of time. From the point of view of the experiencing self, if you have a vacation, and the second week is just as good as the first, then the two-week vacation is twice as good as the one-week vacation. That’s not the way it works at all for the remembering self. For the remembering self, a two-week vacation is barely better than the one-week vacation because there are no new memories added. You have not changed the story. And in this way, time is actually the critical variable that distinguishes a remembering self from an experiencing self; time has very little impact on the story.

Now, the remembering self does more than remember and tell stories. It is actually the one that makes decisions because, if you have a patient who has had, say, two colonoscopies with two different surgeons and is deciding which of them to choose, then the one that chooses is the one that has the memory that is less bad, and that’s the surgeon that will be chosen. The experiencing self has no voice in this choice. We actually don’t choose between experiences, we choose between memories of experiences. And even when we think about the future, we don’t think of our future normally as experiences. We think of our future as anticipated memories. And basically you can look at this, you know, as a tyranny of the remembering self, and you can think of the remembering self sort of dragging the experiencing self through experiences that the experiencing self doesn’t need.

(This article on Daniel Kahneman will be continued…)

Inherently unsatisfying or supremely satisfying, depending on your favorite imprinted storylines.

How to Build a Computer Model of God

Can Souls [...]]]> So – if we are software, then all kinds of interesting things become possible, is I suppose the takeaway from this piece. It does still posit something outside, tinkering with what’s inside.

Inherently unsatisfying or supremely satisfying, depending on your favorite imprinted storylines.

How to Build a Computer Model of God

Can Souls Exist Without a Physical Component?

I normally hate it when people use Physics principles or Mathematical theorems to justify something unrelated and not intended. That said, my thought process started with the wonders of Gödel’s incompleteness theorem. It says, in a nutshell:

Any sufficiently complex mathematical system will contain truths which cannot be proved using that same system.

It is much more complex than that of course, but it basically means that, at least in Math, some truths will always be out of grasp in the current system. What if the system we live in – Earth – has similar properties? Of course, moving from a Math system to life is a bit of a stretch. Instead, I thought, could I build a real life computer system which has these properties??

…

To achieve this, I introduce a new function to the Hypervisor. This new function allows the system to look at any process running in a virtual machine by accessing (reading) a given memory location. In this way, the Hypervisor can view any processes state that it wishes. It may also store a copy of that state to disk without notifying or having the virtual machine environment have any evidence that it is happening. When a process dies, the Hypervisor can save the state of the process to disk, and still 100% of virtual machine resources are given back to the system. No evidence of this saving is left behind for the virtual machine to notice, since all of it happened outside the virtual machines scope and view.

It is now a simple matter for the Hypervisor to do some interesting things with the saved process states. It could, for instance, reincarnate the saved process into a new process in the same virtual machine by copying the saved contents into a new process, or perhaps only certain segments of the saved process state. It could also take the saved process state and insert it into a new process in other virtual machines, which could be completely different operating environments than the one the process originated in. In this way, the Hypervisor could approximate a process flowing through states of reincarnation or travel from Earth to Heaven or Hell, all without leaving a trace in the original environment.

I attended a lecture given by Richard M Doyle - ”Stairway to Eleusis – the EXEGESIS exegesis and the dharma of Philip K Dick” – as I understood it, he was part of a team of researchers who had the opportunity to go over the infamous and near mythical 9000 page book written by PKD [...]]]>  

I attended a lecture given by Richard M Doyle - ”Stairway to Eleusis – the EXEGESIS exegesis and the dharma of Philip K Dick” – as I understood it, he was part of a team of researchers who had the opportunity to go over the infamous and near mythical 9000 page book written by PKD as a consequence of his also infamous schizophrenic break/enlightenment/religious experience.

For those unfamiliar with teh story, R Crumb’s also infamous comic is about the best way I know of to fill in the backstory.

Robert Crumb – The Religious Experience of Philip K Dick

The result of this team study of the file boxes containing the folders of the huge largely handwritten Exegesis document is a book about to be released, The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick - making about a tenth of the original document available for study.

A lot of people who have, either thru luck, or practices, or trauma, or other methods, entered one of the many types of “enlightenment” experience will recognize Philip K Dick’s description of one of the characteristic effects of such experiences – the sense of a vast, unending flow of information, suddenly accessible, and often overwhelming. Whatever this experience is, whatever it means, it is common, and has been described thousands of times in the large body of esoteric literature and stories.

I’ve had the experience myself, quite a few times, at many levels of intensity. I’ve had it often enough to know, for instance, that the experience “contains” information and stories that are probably garbage, or at least not true in any human sens eo fthe word true, even tho they are sometimes strikingly “pretty”, ornate, and beautiful and evocative as stories.

I’ve had the experiences often enough that I have had to create a keyphrase for one of the special problems that these experiences raise for we explorers. I call it “the First Content Problem”.

The First Content Problem is this – what is the source of the vast, seemingly endless streams of content that seem to erupt from somewhere and flood the mind during certain types of consciousness and ‘special experience’? If it is coming from somewhere – Where? What? How? If it is being created by the brain and imagination ‘on the fly’, what the hell is doing it? How is such a massive amount  of mental stuff  made (or drawn, constructed, written – whatever verb applies)?

It’s hard to model out how one could actually study the ‘first content problem’ – how do you measure an inner experience. As I mentioned, I’ve tried a few experiments – a bit like trying to put a bucket in the wild rushing river of information, then look to see if what I caught in the bucket made sense. The results were not satisfying to me – I felt unsure if I was looking at gobbledegook or something real seen from an unfamiliar angle.

The brain and mind does seem to extract or build stories or narrative fragments sp0ntaneously “out of” the sensation of the flood of information – but the stories are also pretty clearly fictions when examined closely. Look at PKD’s narratives as described in the R Crumb comic as an example – some of his story constructions are pretty clearly paranoiac, whereas if you are doing your practices right, you hope at least lol, your story constructions will be metanoiac – but they are still story constructions, fictions and metaphors and allusions , and as you look closely at them the gaps, the places where the story breaks down and it’s fictionality is revealed, will become glaringly obvious.

So, what is this process of creating these “holy stories’, these metanoias? Why does it happen? What is it about that experience of vast and endless streams of information flooding thru the mind that causes us to spontaneously write the “holy stories”, to create mythology?

If anybody else comes along and reads this who is also curious about this, I invite you to suggest ideas for studying this “first content problem”.

http://www.truth-out.org/timothy-leary-wall-street-occupation-movement/1319050501

After the tribal (familial) and feudal (childlike) stages of human evolution came the industrial [...]]]> Good old uncle Tim gets reprinted by truthout – nice to see him again. His ideas will reappear in time to be studied anew. This snippet starts with some mention of his idea of neurogenetic castes and stages.

http://www.truth-out.org/timothy-leary-wall-street-occupation-movement/1319050501

After the tribal (familial) and feudal (childlike) stages of human evolution came the industrial (insectoid) society, where the individual is a worker or manager; in later stages, a worker-consumer.

In all these static, primitive societies, the thinking is done by the organizations that control the guns. The power of open-minded individuals to make and remake decisions about their own lives, to fabricate, concoct, invent and reinvent is severely limited.

Youth had no power, no voice, no choice.

The post-political information society does not operate on the basis of obedience and conformity to dogma. It is based on individual thinking; scientific know-how; quick exchange of facts around feedback networks; high-tech ingenuity; and practical, frontline creativity. The society of the future no longer grudgingly tolerates a few open-minded innovators. The cybernetic society is totally dependent on a large pool of such people, communicating at light speed within and without geographical boundaries. Electrified thoughts invite fast feedback, creating new global societies that require a higher level of electronic know-how, psychological sophistication and open-minded intelligence.

This cyber-communication process is accelerating so rapidly that to compete in the world information marketplace of the 21st century requires the navigational skills of change-oriented, innovative individuals who are adept in communicating via the new cyber-electronic technologies.

Life magazine has been posting photos from it’s older collections, and a recent one featured Aleister Crowley. Yeah yeah, spooky right? No. Crowley was a jerk, a freeloader, and a drug addict, and a bit of a religious crank, but some of his work is brilliant, and like a lot of the creative people [...]]]>

Life magazine has been posting photos from it’s older collections, and a recent one featured Aleister Crowley. Yeah yeah, spooky right? No. Crowley was a jerk, a freeloader, and a drug addict, and a bit of a religious crank, but some of his work is brilliant, and like a lot of the creative people of his time (the early 1900s) studying religion, philosophy, and psychology, his books are still worth reading.

I think all these photos have been seen before, but they are still interesting. I think the hipster vibe of the pic I screengrabbed and linked is kinda funny. The slide show (yuck) is worth a click and a look.

Gotta love the autumnal equinox – a mysterious time of the year, the day’s length changing so fast.

http://religion.blogs.cnn.com/2010/09/22/gop-candidates-witchcraft-dabbling-worries-wiccan/

Selena Fox on Beliefnet

There’s an irony to the timing of this hubbub, says Selena Fox, [...]]]> It was sweet to see Selena Fox in the news. And on the autumnal equinox as well.

Gotta love the autumnal equinox – a mysterious time of the year, the day’s length changing so fast.

http://religion.blogs.cnn.com/2010/09/22/gop-candidates-witchcraft-dabbling-worries-wiccan/

Selena Fox on Beliefnet

There’s an irony to the timing of this hubbub, says Selena Fox, 60, who led her first Pagan ritual in 1971.

Twenty-five years ago, almost to the date, Sen. Jesse Helms (R-North Carolina) – who Fox says called Wiccans Satanists – led the charge to try to pass legislation that would have taken away tax-exemption status for Wiccan churches. This attempted infringement on her church’s constitutional rights led Fox and others to form the Lady Liberty League, to educate lawmakers and others, dispel misconceptions and promote Pagan civil rights.

“It was the first time in American history that Wiccans, other Pagans and those of other religions and belief systems came together to defeat an unconstitutional piece of federal legislation directed against the Wiccan community,” she says.

Pagan, she explains, is the “umbrella term for nature religion practices with roots in Old Europe.” Wiccans represent one branch of Paganism, as do Druids and Heathens, for example, she says.

Nailing down the exact number of Wiccans and practitioners of related Pagan paths in America is next to impossible, Fox says, in part because of people’s fears of discrimination. But her church, which sits on a 200-acre nature preserve, has been in contact with more than 250,000 practitioners in the U.S. since it started in 1974. She’s also heard estimates that the U.S. numbers are anywhere between 500,000 and 1 million.

Numbers measured by the American Religious Identification Survey, most recently completed in 2008, suggest that practitioners may be getting more comfortable owning up to their beliefs. Those identifying as Pagans jumped from 140,000 to 340,000 between 2001 and 2008, according to the survey.The number of Wiccans skyrocketed as well in that time frame, climbing from 134,000 to 342,000.

I especially enjoyed the [...]]]> Erik Davis is often interesting, tho arguably forced by his circumstances to focus on creating popular content – and he’s an excellent writer and considerably-better-than-average thinker – so even tho it’s an old and much discussed topic, his latest article on tarot and it’s most well known deck is worth reading.

I especially enjoyed the mention of Pamela Coleman Smith, and her photo. The illustrations that accompany the article are worth taking a look, even if Erik’s writing is too textured for the net attention span, lol.

POP ARCANA – catchy clever title, eh?

An example of Erik’s intelligence and rigor:

“This point is important to emphasize, given the curious fog that cloaks our appreciation of the occult streams that animate the West. On the one hand, secular historians (and most of the better-informed adepts) recognize that the forms and even the content of much of today’s ancient or traditional lore are modern reconstructions rather than unbroken currents. We recognize, in other words, that Court De Gébelin was hallucinating his hieroglyphs, that Lévi was constructing the links between Tarot and Kabbalah. But this insight is often deployed for no other purpose than to expose the fantasies that, more often that not, “authenticate” occult claims through appeals to hidden tradition. It does not bloom into the more interesting (if more disturbing) conclusion: that the occult is now. The modern imagination — our imagination — is the theatre that stages these uncanny synchronicities, these resonances across time, these spectral encounters. This is the sort of serious play that Johann Valentin Andreae suggested when he used the phrase ludibrium to characterize the Rosicrucian mysteries he helped invent out of whole cloth in the 17th century, and that subsequently became an actual and deeply significant stream of Western esoteric thought and practice — including the Golden Dawn. The modern occult is at root an enchanted game, a round of hide-and-seek in a half-manufactured forêt des symboles. No wonder that one of the most popular vectors of the modern occult would be a deck of cards.”

Erik tells us what most people who are fascinated by the new age and occult material would rather not hear – this is mostly modern material, invented, mixed with rehashed ideas from much older texts, but still very modern.

We probably won’t awaken from that dream, even tho we should.

(I mispelled his name – my apologies, spelling is a personal weakness. His name was Isaac Bonewits. I leave my original mispelling as evidence [...]]]> If you don’t know who Issac Bonewitz is, that’s not necessarily a surprise, for he represents an earlier more idyllic time in the study of the art form of intentional religion.

(I mispelled his name – my apologies, spelling is a personal weakness. His name was Isaac Bonewits. I leave my original mispelling as evidence of my error.)

http://neopagan.net/blog/?p=259

I would say that much of the work that he ended up doing was “silly, but necessary”. Someone had to act out those intentional religion and recreated religion ideas, and he got the job.

He was a religion geek of the first order. And there are worse things to be, on this planet and in this life.

I regard his books more as curiosities and cultural artifacts than as anything that it’s important to read, but it wouldn’t hurt you to read them if you come across them, and you have any interest in the whole pagan neopagan conscious religion thing.