Month December 2013

Freud: Interpretation Of Dreams Quotes

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On The Id, The Ego, And The Superego:
According [with the analogy of political censorship], we would assume two psychical forces (currents, systems) to be the originators of dream-formation in the individual; one of these forms the wish uttered by the dream, while the other imposes a censorship on the dream-wish and by this censorship distorts its expression…. nothing from the first system can become conscious which has not previously been passed by the second agency, and the second agency lets nothing pass without exercising its rights and making whatever changes it thinks fit to the applicant for consciousness.  Saying this reveals a quite distinct conception of the ‘nature’ of consciousness: in our view, the entry of something into consciousness constitutes a specific psychical act, different from the process by which ideas are generated or imagined and independent of it; and we regard consciousness as a sensory organ perceiving a content given from elsewhere.  It can be shown that psychopathology simply cannot do without this basic assumption.
In this way my second agency [the superego], which rules over access to consciousness, bestows a distinction on my friend R. by an outpouring of excessive affection, because the wishful endeavors of the first system [the id], in their particular all-absorbing interest, would slander him as a numbskull.  Perhaps at this point we have a presentiment that the interpretation of dreams is capable of providing us with information about the structure of our psychical apparatus which till now we have sought in vain from philosophy…. Taking into account our assumptions about the two psychical agencies, we can now also add that distressing dreams in fact do contain something which is distressing to the second agency but at the same time fulfills a wish of the first agency.
(On The Interpretation Of Dreams, Dream-Distortion, page 113, 114).

It is the censorship between the Unconscious and the Preconscious that we must acknowledge and honor as the guardian of our mental health…. [even while we sleep] his slumber is not deep – he also closes the gateway to movement.
(On The Interpretation Of Dreams, The Psychology of the Dream-Processes, page 371).

[Questionable Inferences]:
According to this dream I was wrong: so it was her wish that I should be wrong, and the dream showed her that her wish was fulfilled.
(On The Interpretation Of Dreams, Dream-Distortion, page 119).
[Note: Convenient…]

‘The butcher’s shop was already shut strikes one as a description of the experience.  But wait: is that not a rather vulgar phrase which refers – or rather its opposite does – to an [unzipped fly] in a man’s dress?  The dreamer, by the way, did not use these words; perhaps she avoided them…
(On The Interpretation Of Dreams, The Material and Sources of Dreams, page 140-141).
[Note: This would be a stretch in most situations in my culture.]

It is in the nature of all censorship that in speaking of forbidden things one is permitted to say things that are not true sooner than the truth.
(On The Interpretation Of Dreams, The Material and Sources of Dreams, page 279).
[Note: Sure, but you failed to make the case that the former was necessary in order to prevent the latter from being expressed.]

Whatever disturbs the continuation of the work of analysis is a resistance……  That is why, when analyzing a dream, I insist that any scale indicating degrees of certainty should be abandoned entirely, and the slightest possibility that something of one sort or another might have occurred in the dream should be treated as absolutely definite.
(On The Interpretation Of Dreams, The Psychology of the Dream-Processes, page 336).
[Note: But if you reject Bayesian methods, what assurances do you have of forming true beliefs?]

The best-interpreted dreams often have a passage that has to be left in the dark…. This is the dream’s navel, and the place beneath which lies the Unknown….  Out of a denser patch in this tissue the dream-wish then arises like a mushroom from its mycelium.
(On The Interpretation Of Dreams, The Psychology of the Dream-Processes, page 341).
[Note: For Freud the root of the unconscious smells like mysticism, looks like mysticism…]

On How To Interpret Dreams:
Suppose I have a picture-puzzle, a rebus, before me: a house with a boat on its roof, then a single letter of the alphabet, then a running figure with his head conjured away, and the like.  Now I could fall into the trap of objecting that this combination and its constituent parts are nonsense.  A boat does not belong on the roof of a house and a person without a head cannot run…. Obviously the correct solution to the rebus can only be reached if I raise no such objections to the whole or to the details, but take the trouble to replace each picture by a syllable or a word which, through some association, can be represented by the picture.  The words connected in this way are no longer nonsense, but can yield the most beautiful and meaningful poetic saying.  The dream is a picture-puzzle of this kind, and our predecessors in the field of dream-interpretation made the mistake of judging the rebus as if it were a pictorial composition.  As such, it seemed to them to have no meaning or value.
(On The Interpretation Of Dreams, The Dream-Work, page 212).

On The Purpose Of Dreams:
Thus the wish to sleep must always be included among the motives for the formation of dreams, and every successful dream is a fulfillment of this wish.
(On The Interpretation Of Dreams,  The Material and Sources of Dreams , page 181).

On Dream-Contents And Dream-Thoughts (Latent vs. Manifest):
Applying our method of dream interpretation has enabled us to uncover the existence of a latent dream-content which is far more significant than the manifest dream-content.
(On The Interpretation Of Dreams,  The Material and Sources of Dreams , page 126).

On The Oedipus Complex:
A man mostly dreams of his father’s death, a woman of her mother’s.  [This rule is] required to be explained by a factor of general significance.  Put crudely, it as though a sexual preference were established very early, as though the boy saw a rival for love in his father, and the girl in her mother, and removing them could only be of benefit to the child.  
(On The Interpretation Of Dreams,  The Material and Sources of Dreams , page 197).

[In this example, the superego] creates the excessive concern for her mother as a hysterical counter-reaction and defensive phenomenon.  In this connection, it is not longer inexplicable why hysterical girls so often cling to their mothers with such extravagant tenderness… Being in love with one parent and hating the other belong to the indispensable stock of psychical impulses being formed at that time which are so important for the later neurosis.  But I do not believe that in this respect psychoneurotics are to be sharply distinguished from other children of Adam…. It is far more likely – and this is supported by occasional observations of normal children – that with these loving and hostile wishes towards their parents too, psychoneurotics are only revealing to us, by magnifying it, what goes on less clearly and less intensely in the inner life of most children.
(On The Interpretation Of Dreams,  The Material and Sources of Dreams , page 200,201).

Like Oedipus we live in ignorance of those wishes, offensive to morality and forced upon us by Nature, and once they have been revealed, there is little doubt we would all rather turn our gaze away from the scenes of our childhood.
(On The Interpretation Of Dreams,  The Material and Sources of Dreams , page 203).

On Ideas Derived From Psychoanalysis And Their Underlying Dream-Thoughts:
The new associations are, as it were, parallel connections, short-circuits made possible by the existence of other and deeper connecting paths.
(On The Interpretation Of Dreams,  The Material and Sources of Dreams , page 213).

On Clarity Of Dream-Content:
[Like the work of the artist Galton], the features [of the dream-objects painted on an over-determined item of dream-content]  have in common emerge more prominently, and those that do not match obliterate each other, and become blurred in the image.
(On The Interpretation Of Dreams,  The Material and Sources of Dreams , page 225).
[Note: Reminiscent of wave interference]

On Anxiety:
Anxiety is an impulse of the libido, proceeding from the unconscious and inhibited by the preconscious.
(On The Interpretation Of Dreams,  The Dream-Work, page 254).

On Autobiography:
My own dreams have in general fewer sensory elements than I have to reckon with in the dreams of others.
(On The Interpretation Of Dreams, The Psychology of the Dream-Processes, page 358).

On Reception To His Ideas:
I find it distressing to think that many of the premises at the basis of my psychological solution to the psychoneuroses will produce incredulity and laughter once I have published them.
(On The Interpretation Of Dreams,   The Dream-Work, page 291).

The reader will always be inclined to accuse the author of overloading every rift with ore; but anyone who has gained experience of interpretation himself will have learned better.
(On The Interpretation Of Dreams, The Psychology of the Dream-Processes, page 340).

That the dream [wish] always originates from the Unconscious, as we have admitted, can neither be proved to be universally applicable, though it cannot be disproved either.
(On The Interpretation Of Dreams, The Psychology of the Dream-Processes, page 394).

On Consciousness:
All thinking is only a roundabout way from the memory of a satisfaction, adopted as its purposive idea, to an identical charge of the same memory, which, it is intended, will be regained by way of motor experiences… Thinking, then, must move towards freeing itself more and more from the exclusive regulation of the unpleasure-principle…. 
(On The Interpretation Of Dreams, The Psychology of the Dream-Processes, page 397).

On Why We Forget Our Youth:
As a consequence of this belated entry of the secondary processes, a wide field of memory-material also remains inaccessible to preconscious charging.
(On The Interpretation Of Dreams, The Psychology of the Dream-Processes, page 398).

Feser: Aquinas

kevinbinz 1 Comment

A disappointing text.

Perhaps my expectations were calibrated too highly. I was hoping for an introduction that would sketch both the theoretical manifold of Thomism, and its motivations. I was only satisfied with the former. The proffered justifications of Thomism seemed targeted towards New Atheists, failing to engage more sophisticated philosophical frameworks. Further, Feser motivates his account by way of spurious empirical examples that I will now proceed to debunk.

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Page 21 was particularly disappointing:

> Aquinas would also be baffled by the modern tendency to think of causation as essentially a relation between temporally ordered events.. For Aquinas, it is things that are causes, not events; and the immediate efficient cause of an effect is simultaneous with it, not temporally prior to it.. In the case of the broken window, the key point in the causal series would be something like the pushing of the brick into the glass and the glass’s giving way. These events are simultaneous; indeed, the bricking’s pushing into the glass and the glass’s giving way are really just the same event. Or (to take an example often used to illustrate the Aristotelian conception of efficient causation) we might think of a potter making a pot, where the potter’s positioning his hand in just such-and-such a way and the pot’s taking on such-and-such a shape are simultaneous, and, again, the same event described in two different ways.

Sheets of glass and shards of pottery are physical substances extended in space. Force-carriers do not travel from the point of contact to the rest of the surface instantaneously. Like all other particles, they are constrained by the speed of light. These analogies are empirically bankrupt.

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Causal Series.

Feser introduces the concept of causal series in chapter 2. The idea is embedded within the standard Aristotelian Four Causes that Aquinas adopts: material, formal, efficient, and final. A key distinction here is that, whereas modern philosophy tends to read causality in the language of events, medieval philosophy interprets in the language of things. The two types of causal chains considered are the accidens series and the essential series. Let us now examine what Feser means by this distinction.

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On page 13, Feser explains how substance and matter change:

> Sometimes change concerns some non-essential feature, as when a red ball is painted blue but remains a ball nonetheless. Sometimes it involves something essential, as when the ball is melted into a puddle of goo and thus no longer counts as a ball at all.. For a ball merely to change its color is for its matter to lose one accidental form and take on another, while retaining the substantial form of a ball and thus remaining the same substance, namely a ball. For a ball to be melted into goo is for its matter to lose one substantial form and take on another.

But this account does not treat the problem of ambiguity. Suppose I am microwaving my red ball:

* Eighty seconds into the process, 60% of Thomists would agree that the ball retains its Form.
* Eighty-one seconds into the process, 60% of Thomists would agree that the ball has traded its Form.

Let us suppose that, per Thomism, my red ball really did lose its form at the eighty-one second mark. What is it about the physical phenomena during that second that differed from the previous eighty seconds? If Forms substitution is really as clean and binary as Aquinas suggests, why don’t Thomists remain equally vulnerable to epistemic disagreement as the rest of us?

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On page 15, Feser underscores a Thomistic asymmetry:

> On the hylemorphic analysis, considered apart from the substances that have them, form and matter are mere abstractions; there is no form of the ball apart from the matter that has that form, and no matter of the ball apart from the form that makes it a ball specifically.. While (contra Plato) no form exists apart from some particular individual substance that instantiates it, not every form exists in a material substance. There can be forms without matter, and thus immaterial substances – namely, for Aquinas, angels and postmortem human souls.. This recapitulates an asymmetry noted earlier: just as act can exist without potency even though potency cannot exist without act, so too form can exist without matter even though matter cannot exist without form.

But Feser does not provide an explanation for this curiosity.

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This book could have been improved by a treatment of the following topics:

How can { Forms, final causality } be epistemically accessible?
How can the A-T framework mediate intra-group disagreement?
How does change in matter lead to change in substance, or change in Form?

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On page 48, Feser presents an argument for teleology:

> As philosopher David Oderberg has noted, it is particularly evident in natural cycles like the water cycle and the rock cycle. In the former case, condensation leads to precipitation, which leads to collection, which leads to evaporation, which leads to condensations, and the cycle begins again. In the latter case, igneous rock forms into sedimentary rock, which forms into metamorphic rock, which melts into magma, which hardens into igneous rock, and the cycle begins again. Scientists who study these processes identify each of their stages as playing a certain specific role relative to the others. For example, the role of condensation in the water is to bring about precipitation; the role of pressure in the rock cycle is, in conjunction with heat, to generate magma, and in the absence of heat to contribute to generating sedimentary rock; and so forth. Each stage has the production of some particular outcome or range of outcomes as an “end” or “goal” towards which it points. Nor will it do to suggest that either cycle could be adequately described by speaking of each stage as being the efficient cause of certain others, with no reference to its playing a “role” of generating some effect as an “end” or “goal.” For each stage has many other effects that are not part of the cycle. As Oderberg points out, sedimentation might (for example) happen to block the water flow to a certain region, the formation of magma might cause some local birds to migrate, or condensation in some area might for all we know cause someone to have arthritic pain in his big toe. But [these examples] are no part of the water cycle. Some causal chains are relevant to the cycles and some are not. Nor is it correct to say that the student of the rock or water cycles just happens to be interested in the way some rock generates other kinds and how water in one form brings about water in another form, and is not interested in [these examples]. For the patterns described by scientists studying these cycles are objective patterns in nature, not mere projections of human interests. But the only way to account for this is to recognize that each stage in the process, while it might have various sorts of effects, has only the generation of certain *specific* effects among them as its “end” or “goal” and that this is what determines its role in the cycle. In short, it is to recognize such cycles as teleological.

Interesting.

> As philosophers like G.F. Schueler and Scott Sehon have argued at length, no attempt to analyze human action in non-teleological terms has succeeded.

http://www.amazon.com/Reasons-Purposes-Rationality-Teleological-Explanation/dp/0199278458
http://www.amazon.com/Teleological-Realism-Agency-Explanation-Bradford/dp/0262195356

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On page 52, Feser addresses a counter-argument to the principle of proportionate causality (a cause cannot give to its effect what it does not have itself, whether formally, eminently, or virtually):

> It is nevertheless sometimes suggested that this principle is disproved by evolution, since if simpler life forms give rise to more complex ones then they must surely be producing in their effects something they did not have to give. But this does not follow.. Just as water in conjunction with something else might be sufficient to produce a red puddle even if the water by itself wouldn’t be, so too do the existing genetic material, the mutation, and environmental circumstances together generate a new biological variation even though none of these factors by itself would be sufficient to do so. Thus, evolution [does not] pose a challenge to the principle of proportionate causality. Indeed, as Paul Davies points out in *The Fifth Miracle*, to deny that the information contained in a new life form derives from some combination of preexisting factors – specifically, in part from the organism’s environment if not from its genetic inheritance alone – would contradict the second law of thermodynamics, which tells us that order (and thus information content) tends inevitably to decrease, not increase, within a closed system.

This appeal to the Second Law seems empirically dubious.  In no sense is the Earth’s biosphere a “closed system”.

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On page 57, Feser defends Aquinas against Anthony Kenny’s arguments are inadequate from a Fregean perspective.

> As Gyula Klima has said, “it is ludicrous to claim victory by yelling ‘Checkmate!’ in a game of poker. But this is precisely what Kenny seems to be doing whenever he is yelling ‘You are not a good enough Fregean!’ at Aquinas.’ Certainly other conceptions of existence are possible..

Tasteless, and misses the point. In order to sustain their school, Thomists must do more than simply regurgitate theories of a medieval Scholastic. They must engage with the current theoretical climate. If you want to deny Fregean essences wholesale, you must interact with their argumentative traditions.

Feser does later partially address Fregean thought, which to my mind partially redeems the above rhetorical device.

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On page 28, Feser explains how Aquinas defends angelic differentiation:

> With what Aquinas calls “separated substances” – immaterial realities like the soul, angels, and God – things are not so straightforward. The soul.. must on Aquinas’s view be conjoined to matter at some point in its existence.. God is necessarily unique, so that the question of individuation cannot arise. But what about angels, which are supposed to be both distinct from one another and yet completely immaterial? An angel, says Aquinas, is a form without matter, and thus its essence corresponds to its form alone. But precisely because there is no matter to distinguish one angel in a species from another, “among these substances there cannot be many individuals of the same species. Rather, there are as many species as there are individuals”.

After this concession, Feser promptly moves on to a separate topic. But consider what this means: besides Triangle and Redness forms, Aquinas affirms that there is also JoeTheAngel form and a RobertTheAngel form. This seems an astonishingly ugly band-aid, and its ontological awkwardness is not acknowledged nor ameliorated.

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On page 63, Feser sets the stage for the Quinquae Viae:

> The Summa, it must be remembered, was meant as a textbook for beginners in theology who were already Christian believers, not an advanced work in apologetics intended to convince skeptics. The Five Ways themselves are merely short statements of arguments that would already have been well known to the readers of Aquinas’s day, and presented at greater length and with greater precision elsewhere.

Historically accurate. But, if the Five Ways are not Aquinas’ best case for theism, I would rather attention be devoted to other, more incisive, arguments.

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On page 65, Feser insulates Aristotelian metaphysics from Aristotelian physics:

> It has also sometimes been claimed that Aquinas’s proofs rest on outdated Aristotelian scientific theory, and thus are irrelevant in the present day. But as noted in chapter 2, Aristotle’s metaphysics stands or falls independently of his physics and, as we shall see, there is never a point in any of the arguments where appeal need be made to now falsified theories in physics or any of the other sciences.

Perhaps such sharp bifurcations between physics and metaphysics are irredeemably anachronistic. Aristotelian metaphysics were originally motivated by his physics. To insulate the former from the latter is to remove its original motivators.

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On page 68, Feser addresses empirical counterexamples:

> As Rudy te Velde has suggested, some critics place too much significance on the physical details of the examples Aquinas gives in the course of the proof, failing to see that their point is merely to illustrate certain basic metaphysical principles rather than to support broad empirical or quasi-scientific generalizations.

If you can’t defend Thomas’ examples, fix them! Immersed in the context of the section, this passage seems to evidence a pathological reluctance to improve upon Aquinas at any point.

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I stopped here. Since medieval philosophy poses an interesting challenge to more modern approaches, I hope to locate a more rigorous replacement soon.

Ramachandran: The Tell-Tale Brain

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This book contained more idiosyncrasies than I expected. Time was spent on the Victorian sentiments of R’s research paradigm, with his preference for simple experiments with everyday tools.

R was also uncomfortably rigid in his treatment of the ape-human divide. While postulating a continuous evolutionary link between different species within our clade, R claimed that the evolutionary progress between homo sapiens and our near-neighbors are about as significant abiogenesis itself.

I wouldn’t characterize the above as an extreme position, perhaps, but R does not hesitate to remind the reader every few pages, how this behavior is unique to humans. Some of these claims were well-founded, but many lacked evidence, and some were plainly false (“apes don’t have theory of mind”, “apes don’t appreciate humor”, etc).

For a researcher seeking to democratize scientific progress, Ramachandran displayed a disappointing poverty of integrative thinking. In particular, R’s tone towards psychology is sometimes measured, sometimes awkwardly uninformed (dismissing out of hand the psychometric concept of the general intelligence factor, g, as “absurd”), but never collaborative. A more promising way to progress in the sciences: higher-level fields structure lower-level fields, and fields closer to implementation details constrain those engaged with more general abstractions.

I was unhappy with the degree to which Ramachandran leaned on mirror neuron systems. Mirror neurons are neurons discovered in apes that fire for some arbitrary action, regardless of whether it is performed by the observer, or by some other agent. To me, it felt like Ramachandran abstracted this idea to be the neurological basis of two distinct things: theory of mind, and conceptual representation. And, because these two things are such important conceptual building blocks,
mirror neurons appear practically everywhere Ramachandran looks…

All of that said, this book does have a lot to offer to those uninitiated in neuroscience. Its introduction to the nervous system felt especially competent. The section on body map failures, e.g., people whose body map for an arm is corrupted and they seek amputation, was particularly interesting. Some connections were made from these neurological structures, to sexual orientation and transgender behavior, which I bookmarked for further research. Finally, I appreciated the book’s breadth, particularly enjoying its explorations in theories of humor (Benign Violation Theory), the tri-stream visual systems, autistic savants, and neuroaesthetics.

Siegel: The Neurobiology of “We”

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I enjoyed the ambiance of this audiobook. Siegel’s pace was measured and calm, his tone disarmingly personal. It turns out that he literally founded the field of interpersonal neurobiology, which purports to synthesize vast swathes of scientific disciplines into a coherent whole. Large claims by an influential man.

The author was careful to precede his discussion by asserting that the mind and the brain are distinct, that he would like to move away from the aphorism that “the brain is the seat of the mind”. Instead, Siegel advocates a philosophical stance of emergentism, that the brain-mind connection is causally bidirectional. In my view, this point was rather underdeveloped & the book as a whole does not hinge on the point.

One interesting chapter relates to attachment theory. Children-caregiver relationships tend to group into four distinctive categories. These can be divined from the Strange Situation test, which places the child in a foreign environment, and then removes the caregiver for a few minutes. Attachment style is linked to child response: secure-attachment children reach out to the parent, and then resume play; avoidant-attachment children ignore the parent; anxious-attachment cling to the parent and are slow to be comforted; disorganized-attachment exhibit confused, contradictory responses.

What Siegel demonstrates is how later in life, a particular interview called the Adult Attachment Interview can predict, with 85% accuracy, the attachment style learned by the adult, earlier in life. When asked to explore feelings about early childhood relationships: the secure adult will be able to fluently conjure feelings; the anxious adult will be derailed by more present anxieties (“just last week, my mom did something nice for my brother, but not for me”; the avoidant adult will not be able to fully access emotional data (“my mom was organized, beautiful”); the disorganized adult will answer relatively normally until faced with questions of loss or abuse.

The demographic ratios between these styles in US society tends to be 55% secure, 20% anxious, 20% avoidant, 5% disorganized.

Another interesting point of the book relates to trauma, or PTSD. Siegel summarizes an impressive swath of research that suggests that PTSD is the result of memory-encoding inconsistency. Memory is not a monolithic system, but rather divides into myriad subsystems. Siegel argues that trauma occurs when the threatening event is encoded into implicit memory, but stress hormone prevents the hippocampus from encoding it into episodic memory. Without access to the conscious “metadata” for the event in episodic memory, flashbacks trigger confusion between the memory, and the event itself.

Finally, Siegel presented a way of thinking about the brain that I found more helpful than Latin names. If one curls up the thumb into the palm, and curls the fingers around the thumb, it is a half-decent model of the brain. The palm represents the brain stem, the wrist the spinal column, the thumb the limbic system, the fingers the cortex. Within the “fingers”, the back section between second and third knuckles represent perceptual systems, the tips, the prefrontal cortex.

I’ll now list two criticisms I have, one specific and one general. The first is a matter of definition; Siegel likes to define the mind as a “process that organizes matter and energy flowing through the brain”. This is largely fine, and reflects the consilience between thermodynamics and information theory. But, he tends to conflate the use of “energy” between thermodynamics and emotional/psychic energy, which is unfortunate. My second criticism is one that I have so far felt against the fields of positive psychology as a whole: I just didn’t learn very much from this book. The brain sciences don’t seem to be sophisticated enough yet to give Siegel the mileage he needs to establish his conclusions. With so little attention given to mechanism, books such as this one will always feel empirically inadequate.

That said, this book does represent a fairly compelling “beginner’s guide” to interpersonal neurobiology, and I look forward to learning more (especially how interpersonal neurobiology relates to mindfulness meditation).

Csikszentmihalyi: Flow

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Themes:

Hedonism Is Inadequate.
Human beings do not need pleasure above all else. People report enjoying watching TV, but often feel listless afterwards. “The future will belong not only to the educated man, but to the man who is educated to use his leisure wisely.” (pg 163, citing C.K. Brightbill).

Psychic Entropy Threatens Our Health.
Attention can be thought of as psychic energy reserves, and is a finite resource. Data bombards our senses continuously, the mind must try to organize and derive meaning from this flood of information. Failure to impose adequate structure leads to feelings of listlessness, boredom, and apathy.

Flow Introduces Structure To The Mind.
Another expression for flow is being “in the zone”.

On page 49, C enumerates distinctive phenomenological characteristics of enjoyment (flow):
1. Challenge: An achievable activity that engages skill sets.
2. Immersive: Awareness becomes fused to the activity (“in the moment”).
3. Clear Goals: Success is well-defined.
4. Clear Feedback: Participant can evaluate their performance reliably.
5. Focused attention: Everyday concerns are removed from attention.
6. Control: A sense of autonomous responsibility for action.
6. Muted self-awareness: Ego is suspended only to return, energized.
7. Time Distortions: Time moves quickly, or slowly, or seems irrelevant.

Flow only occurs when skills are well-matched with challenge intensity. If the flow activity continues to be experienced without change, personal skill can outpace challenge, leading to boredom. If the activity requires skills which outpace personal skill, this only introduces stress. The trick is to keep skills & challenges matched in an ascending cycle as the participant learns. As this two elements grow, so does the ability of the ego to bring order to psychic chaos.

Autotelic Personalities Find Internal Motivations Via Flow.

A distinction is made between exotelic and autotelic motives. Exotelic refers to commitments induced by external forces, autotelic desires directly emerge from the self. C uses this distinction to get at what he believes to be wrong about modern education.

On page 97, C describes a “formula” for how autotelic personalities typically transform simple physical actions into flow-producers:
1. Set an overall goal, and as many sub goals as are realistically feasible.
2. Find ways to measure progress in terms of the goals chosen.
3. Maintain concentration of task at hand, and make finer and finer distinctions in the challenges involved in the activity.
4. Develop the skills necessary to better engage with available opportunities.
5. Keep raising the stakes when the activity becomes boring.

Flow Informs The Human Condition.

The remainder of the book goes on to apply this framework. Conditions that induce flow are explored, physical and mental flow activities are compared, social and philosophical implications are explored.

Evaluation:

C gave me the impression that he was politically conservative at times, which is unusual for this kind of book. I found myself sympathetic to C’s argument against certain strains of multiculturalism: perhaps cultures can, in principle, be comparatively evaluated based on how well they fit to universally-human psychological structures.

I generally liked what C had to say. I largely agreed with his critiques of utilitarianism (that pleasure is the universal unit of value).

But the above points of agreements are little more than bookmarks. The book suffers from a fairly ubiquitous lack of empiricism. General principles are woven together, but precision and rigorous empirical research are undervalued. An example: C claims that the ability of flow to escalate skills & challenges improves the “complexity of the soul”, but nowhere is this loose concept truly nailed down.

Thus, I do not feel like I have emerged with a deeper knowledge of the human mind. For me, this book only served to refine my intuitions about which aspects of cognitive psychology deserve empirical attention.

Quotes: 

“Dr Hamilton found that the students who reported less intrinsic motivation in daily life needed on the average to fix their eyes on more points before they could reverse the ambiguous figure, whereas students who on the whole found their lives more intrinsically rewarding required fewer points.” (pg 87)

“Bertrand Russell described bow he achieved personal happiness: ‘Gradually I learned to be indifferent to myself and my deficiencies; I came to center my attention increasingly upon external objects: the state of the world, various branches of knowledge, individuals for whom I felt affection.’ There could be no better short description of how to build for oneself an autotelic personality.” (pg 93)

“Whosoever is delighted in solitude is either a wild beast or a god.” (Francis Bacon, cited pg 173)

Metzinger: The Ego Tunnel

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With this book, Metzinger furthers an encouraging trend in academia: superstar theoreticians are writing accounts of their work for the layman.

His book is carved into three parts. The first summarizes his theory of consciousness, as rigorously developed in Being No One. The second introduces his theory of self-hood in the context of clinical neuroscience. The third discusses the imminent social conflict that will erupt as the public acquaints itself with the increasingly-surprising results of cognitive science.

Criticisms:

M fails to adequately consider evolutionary mechanisms other than natural selection. Some textual evidence from pg 43: “in principle, consciousness could be a by-product of other traits that paid for themselves, but [its stability] over time suggests that it was adaptive.”

While M excels at presenting cutting-edge research, he often neglects to leave his readers with tools for further research. I kept hoping that he would cite the concepts of “umwelt” and “semiosphere” but he never did. Also, pages 111-113 were stunningly eloquent, but if I had not read the physiological journals beforehand, I would have completely missed the fact that M was describing the theory of pain known as the neuromatrix.

The text is laced with insinuations of consensus. While this is often applicable in surprising ways (scholars agree that thoughts can be inferred from lab equipment), M can cast this authoritative weight inappropriately (his self-less Ego theory is itself immersed in controversy).

Praise:

M’s exceptionally lucid writing style, combined with a compelling bird’s eye view of genuinely pivotal cogsci research, makes this a compelling read. The wealth of illuminating graphics didn’t hurt either.

Three sections stood out as independently valuable. Chapter 2 explores six themes: the One-World Problem, the Now Problem, the Reality Problem, the Ineffability Problem, and the Who Problem. I found this journey to be compelling, and it left me itching to buy M’s magnum opus (Being No One). In addition to this, Chapter 3’s discussion of Out-Of-Body experiences stitched together a fascinating collection of research. Finally, chapter 7 included a well-overdue discussion of the effects of, and viable policy strategies towards, nootropics.

Conclusion:

I warmly recommend this book. A tasty quote to conclude (pg 20):

“The evening sky is colorless. The world is not inhabited by colored objects at all. It is just as your physics teacher in high school told you: Out there, in front of your eyes, there is just an ocean of electromagnetic radiation, a wild and raging mixture of different wavelengths. Most of them are invisible to you and can never become part of your conscious model of reality. What is really happening is that your brain is drilling a tunnel through this inconceivably rich physical environment and in the process painting the tunnel walls in various shades of color. Phenomenal color. Appearance.”

Kahneman: Thinking, Fast and Slow

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The best popular science book I have encountered to date.

Extremely well-organized with short, self-contained chapters. Kahneman is an intellectual giant, and it shows in his writing. The book surveys an impressive amount of material. His seminal paper on prospect theory – the most widely cited article in the social sciences – is explained in detail. Every chapter ends with “water cooler quotes”, which I found to be a surprisingly-useful way to recap new material.

Kahneman’s book is organized into three distinctions:

1. Cognitive Systems. “System1” is the first system discussed, and is summarized as “fast thinking”. It is associative, subconscious, heuristic-oriented. “System2” is a more recent biological phenomenon; it is more analytical, abstract, purposive, effortful, and also more lazy. This distinction is not merely a theoretical construct of a researcher, it is the basis of dual-process theories of psychology, which is one of the most active areas of psychological research today.

2. Behavioral Agents. “Econs” are the decision making agents found in classical economic textbooks. Their preferences are constant, consistent, and geared towards maximizing utility. “Humans” are the decision making agents in the real world, cognitively driven by System1 and System2. Their preferences change, are manipulable, and are deeply inconsistent. This distinction is rooted in the modern field of behavioral economics (which Kahneman helped found).

3. Phenomenological Selves. The “experiencing self” is the self that experiences the moment, the self that perceives the world as it flies by. The “remembering self” is the self that constructs a narrative of personhood; it derives on memory to reconstruct the experiencing self, but its restorative work is – as with everything else in the book – subject to error. Here is a TED talk Kahneman gave on the subject: http://www.ted.com/talks/daniel_kahne…

I highly recommended this book.

Descartes: Discourse On Method Quotes

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On The External Control Of Our Environments:
I considered how one and the same man with the very same mind, were he brought up from infancy among the French or the Germans, would become different from what he would be had he always lived among the Chinese or the cannibals, and how, even down to the styles of our clothing, the same thing that pleased us ten years ago, and that perhaps will again please us ten years hence, now seems to us extravagant and ridiculous.  … Hence I [chose to be] constrained to try to guide myself on my own.
(Discourse On Method, Part II, page 9-10)

The Method:
[Just as law is best kept dramatically parsimonous and rigidly enforced, so these principles]:
1) The first [principle] was to never accept anything as true that I did not plainly know to be such; that is to say, carefully to avoid hasty judgment than what presented itself to my mind so clearly and so distinctly that I had no occasion to call it in doubt.
2) The second [principle], to divide each of the difficulties I would examine into as many parts as possible, and as was required, in order better to resolve them.
3) The third [principle], to conduct my thoughts in an orderly fashion, by commencing with those objects that are simplest and easiest to know, in order to ascend little by little, as by degrees, to the knowledge of the most composite things…
4) And the last [principle], everywhere to make enumerations so complete and reviews so general that I was assured of having omitted nothing.
(Discourse On Method, Part II, page 11)

On Deriving Context From Graphical Models:
I thought it would be more worthwhile for me to examine only these [mathematical concepts] in general, and to suppose them only in subject that would help me make the knowledge of them easier…. Then, having noted that, in order to know these [concepts], I would sometimes need to consider each of them individually, and sometimes only to keep them in mind, or to grasp many of them together, I thought that, in order better to consider them in particular, I ought to suppose them to be relations between lines, since I found nothing more simple, or nothing that I could represent more distinctly to my imagination and to my senses; but that, in order to keep them in mind or to grasp many of them together, I would have to explicate them by means of certain symbols, the briefest ones possible; and that by this means I would be borrowing all that is best in geometrical analysis and algebra, and correcting all the defects of the one by the other.
(Discourse On Method, Part III, page 12)

On The Distinction Between Reason And Empiricism:
Everything unimaginable [to the senses] seems to [many people] unintelligible.  Even philosophers take it as a maxim in the schools that there is nothing in the understanding that has not first been in the senses, where it is nevertheless certain that the ideas of God and the soul have never been.  And it seems to me that those who want to use their imagination to grasp these ideas are doing the very same thing as if, in order to hear sounds or to smell odors, they wanted to use their eyes.
(Discourse On Method, Part IV, page 21)

On The Certainty Of Metaphysics Over The Sciences:
Finally, if there still are men who have not been sufficiently persuaded of the existence of God and of their soul by means of the reasons I have brought forward, I very much want them to know that all the other things of which they think themselves perhaps more assured, such as having a body, that there are stars and an earth, and the like, are less certain.
(Discourse On Method, Part IV, page 21)

On Truth Originating From Divine Clarity:
It follows from [divine perfection] that our ideas or notions, being real things and coming from God, cannot, in all that is clear and distinct in them, be anything but true.  Thus, if we quite often have ideas that contain some falsity, this can only be the case with respect to things that have something confused or obscure about them, because in this respect they participate in nothing; that is, they are thus confused in us only because we are not perfect…. But if we did not know that all that is real and true in us comes from a perfect and infinite being – however clear and distinct our ideas were, we would have no reason that assured us that they had the perfection of being true.  
(Discourse On Method, Part IV, page 22)

On Philosophical Zombies:
I contented myself with supposing that God formed the body of a man exactly like one of ours, as much in the outward shape of its members as in the internal arrangement of its organs… without putting into it, at the start, any rational soul, or anything else to serve there as a vegetative or sensitive soul, but merely kindled in the man’s heart one of those fires without light….  For on examining the functions that could, as a consequence, be in this body, I found there precisely all those things that can be in us without our thinking about them, and hence, without our soul’s contributing to them….  And these are all the same features in which one can say that animals lacking reason resemble us.
(Discourse On Method, Part V, page 26)

[While this is not the case for animals], if there were any such machines that bore a resemblance to our bodies and imitated our actions as far as this is practically feasible, we would always have two very certain means of recognizing that they were not at all true men.  The first is that they could never use words or other signs, or put them together as we do in order to declare our thoughts to others.  For one can well conceive of a machine that utters words, and even that utters words appropriate to the bodily actions that will cause some change in its organs….  But it could not arrange its words differently so as to respond to the sense of all that will be said in its presence, as even the dullest man can do.  The second means is that, although they might perform many tasks very well or perhaps better than any of us, such machines would invitably fail in other tasks; by this means one would discover that they were acting not through knowledge but only through the disposition of their organs.  For while reason is universal… these organs require some particular disposition for each particular action; consequently, it is for all practical purposes impossible for there to be enough different organs in a machine to make it act in all the contingencies of life in the same way as our reason makes us act.  
(Discourse On Method, Part VI, page 32)

On The Purpose Of The Lungs:
The true function of respiration is to bring enough fresh air into the lungs to cause the blood which comes there from the right cavity of the heart, where it has been rarified and, as it were, changed into vapors, immediately to be condensed and to be converted once again into blood before returning to the left cavity; without this process the blood could not properly aid in feeding the fire that is in the heart.
(Discourse On Method, Part V, page 30)
[Note: this was, of course, ultimately proved incorrect]

On Immortality Of The Soul:
When one knows how different [soul and body] are, one understands much better the arguments which prove that our soul is of a nature entirely independent of the body, and consequently that it is not subject to die with it.  Then, since we do not see any other causes at all for its destruction, we are naturally led to judge from this that it is immortal.  
(Discourse On Method, Part VI, page 33)

On The Inferiority Of A-T Philosophy Against Science:
It is possible to arrive at knowledge that would be very useful in life and that, in place of that speculative philosophy taught in the schools , it is possible to find a practical philosophy, by means of which, knowing the force and the actions of fire, water, air, the stars, the heavens, and all the other bodies that surround us, just as distinctly as we know the various skills of our craftsmen, we might be able, in the same way, to use them for all the purposes for which they are appropriate, and thus render ourselves, as it were, masters and possessors of nature… perhaps even [rid oneself] of the frailty of old age…
(Discourse On Method, Part VI, page 35)
[Note: “philosophy taught in the schools” is likely directed at A-T scholasticism]

I am sure that that the most impassioned of those who now follow Aristotle would believe themselves fortunate, if they had as much knowledge of nature as he had, even if it were on the condition that they would never have any more.  They are like ivy, which never stretches any higher than the trees supporting it, and which often even descends again after if has reached their tops, for it seems to me that they are re-descending, that is, they are making themselves somehow less knowledgeable than if they abstained from studying; not content with knowing all that is intelligibly explained in their author, they want in addition to find the solutions there to many difficulties about which he says nothing and about which he has perhaps never thought.  Still, their manner of philosophizing is very convenient for those who have only very mediocre minds, for the obscurity of the distinctions and the principles they make use of is the reason why they can speak about all things as boldly as if they knew them, and why they can uphold everything they say against the most subtle and the most adroit, without anyone’s having the means of convincing them they are mistaken.  In this they seem to me like a blind man who, in order to fight without a disadvantage against someone who is sighted, had made his opponent go into the depths of some very dark cellar.  
(Discourse On Method, Part VI, page 40)

On His Aspirations For Inspiring Post-Mortem Audiences:
I [published] as much to have all the more occasion to examine [my judgments] well (since without doubt one always looks more carefully at what one believes must be seen by many, than at what one does only for oneself; and often the things that have seemed to me to be true when I began to conceive them have appeared false to me when I wanted to put them on paper), as in order not to lose any occasion to benefit the public, if I am able, and in order that, if my writings are worth anything, those who will have them after my death can thus use them as will be most fitting.
(Discourse On Method, Part VI, page 37)

On Reasons For Self-Censorship After Galileo:
I would have many opportunities to lose time, had I published the foundations of my physics.  For although they are nearly all so evident that it is necessary only to understand them in order to believe them, and although there has not been a single one for which I did not believe I could give demonstrations, nevertheless, because it is impossible for them to be in agreement with all the diverse opinions of other men, I foresee that I would often be distracted by the disputes they would engender.
(Discourse On Method, Part VI, page 38)

On The Disadvantages Of Social Learning:
In this way, if there were someone in the world whom one assuredly knows to be capable of finding the greatest things and the things as beneficial to the public as possible and whom, for this cause, other men were to exert themselves to help in every way to succeed in his plans, I do not see that they could do a thing for him except to make a donation toward the expenses of the experiments he would need and, for the rest, to prevent his leisure from being wasted by the importunity of anyone.
(Discourse On Method, Part VI, page 41)

On Experience Being The Groundwork Of Semantic Webs:
The reasonings [in my essay presenting a considerable number of scientific results] follow each other in such a way, just as the last are demonstrated by means of the first, which are their causes, so these first are reciprocally demonstrated by means of the last, which are their effects.  And one must not imagine that I am here committing the fallacy that logicians call a circle, for, experience rendering the majority of these effects very certain, the causes from which I deduce these effects serve not so much to prove them as to explain them; on the contrary, it is rather the case that the causes are what are proved by the effects.
(Discourse On Method, Part VI, page 43)

Descartes: Meditations On First Philosophy Quotes

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On Why He Couldn’t Assert Immortality Of The Soul Immediately:
But because some people will perhaps expect to see proofs for the immortality of the soul in this [second] Meditation, I think they should put on notice here that I have attempted to write only what I have carefully demonstrated…….
(Meditations On First Philosophy, Synopsis, page 54)
[Note: Descartes has to spend a lot of time placating the crazies]

On The Relation Between Philosophy And Theology:
I have always thought that two issues – namely, God and the soul – are chief among those that ought to be demonstrated with the aid of philosophy rather than theology.
(Meditations On First Philosophy, Dedication, page 47)

On Atheism:
Granted, it is altogether true that we must believe in God’s existence because it is taught in the Holy scriptures, and, conversely, that we must believe the Holy Scriptures because they have come from God. This is because, of course, since faith is a gift from God, the very same one who gives the grace that is necessary for believing the rest can also give the grace to believe that he exists. Nonetheless, this reasoning cannot be proposed to unbelievers because they would judge it to be circular.
(Meditations On First Philosophy, Dedication, page 47)

Moreover, I know that there are many irreligious people who refuse to believe that God exists and that the human mind is distinct from the body – for no other reason than their claim that up until now no one has been able to demonstrate these two things.
(Meditations On First Philosophy, Dedication, page 48)

I have seen two rather lengthy treatises [that respond to Discourse On Method], but these works, utilizing as they do arguments drawn from atheist commonplaces, focused their attack not so much on my arguments regarding these issues, as on my conclusions. Moreover, arguments of this type exercise no influence over those who understand my arguments, and the judgments of many people are so preposterous and feeble that they are more likely to be persuaded by the first opinions to come along, however false and contrary to reason they may be, than by a true and firm refutation of them which they hear subsequently. Accordingly, I have no desire to respond here to these objections, lest I first have to state what they are. I will only say in general that all the objections typically bandied about by the atheists to assail the existence of God always depend either on ascribing human emotions to God, or on arrogantly claiming for our minds such power and wisdom that we attempt to determine and grasp fully what God can and ought to do. Hence these objections will cause us no difficulty, provided we but remember that our minds are to be regarded as finite, while God is to be regarded as incomprehensible and infinite.
(Meditations On First Philosophy, Preface, page 52)

On The Certainty Of His Meditations And Their Potential For Misinterpretations:
Although the arguments I use here do, in my opinion, equal or even surpass those of geometry in certitude and obviousness, nevertheless I am fearful that many people will not be capable of adequately perceiving them, both because they are a bit lengthy, with some of them depending on still others, and also because… they demand a mind quite free from prejudices and that can easily withdraw itself from association of the senses. Certainly there are not to be found in the world more people with an aptitude for metaphysical studies than those with an aptitude for geometry.
(Meditations On First Philosophy, Dedication, page 49)

On Teleology:
…the entire class of causes which people customarily derive from a thing’s “end,” I judge to be utterly useless in physics. It is not without rashness that I think myself capable of inquiring into the ends of God.
(Meditations On First Philosophy, Meditation 4, page 82)

On Truth And Clarity And Certainty:
I am certain that I am a thinking thing. But do I not therefore also know what is required for me to be certain of anything? Surely in this first instance of knowledge, there is nothing but a certain clear and distinct perception of what I affirm. Yet this would hardly be enough to render me certain of the truth of a thing, if it could ever happen that something that I perceived so clearly and distinctly were false. And thus I now seem able to posit as a general rule that everything I very clearly and distinctly perceive is true.
(Meditations On First Philosophy, Meditation 3, page 70)

[The idea of God discloses to me something real… it is] an idea that is utterly clear and distinct… for whatever I clearly and distinctly perceive to be real and true and to involve some perfection is wholly contained in that idea.
(Meditations On First Philosophy, Meditation 3, page 77)

But once I perceived that there is a God, and also understood at the same time that everything else depends on him, and that he is not a deceiver, I then concluded that everything that I clearly and distinctly perceive to be true. Hence even if I no longer attend to the reasoning leading me to judge this to be true, so long as I merely recall that I did clearly and distinctly observe it, no counter-argument can be brought forward that might force me to doubt it. On the contrary, I have a true and certain knowledge of it. … For what objections can now be raised against me? That I have been made such that I am often mistaken? But I now know that I cannot be mistaken in matters I plainly understand. That I have taken many things to be true and certain which subsequently I recognized to be false? But none of these were things I clearly and distinctly perceived. But I was ignorant of this rule for determining the truth, and I believed these things perhaps for other reasons which I later discovered were less firm.
(Meditations On First Philosophy, Meditation 5, page 92)
[Note: Notice how God’s existence ties in (precedes?) this understanding of truth as clarity.]

On God’s Existence:
In fact the idea I clearly have of the human mind – insofar as it is a thinking thing, not extended in length, breadth or depth, and having nothing else from the body – is far more distinct than the idea of any corporeal thing. And when I take note of the fact that I doubt, or that I am a thing that is incomplete and dependent, there comes to mind a clear and distinct idea of a being that is independent and complete, that is, an idea of God. And from the mere fact that such an idea is in me, or that I who have this idea exist, I draw the obvious conclusion that God also exists, and that my existence depends entirely upon him at each and every moment. This conclusion is so obvious that I am confident that the human mind can know nothing more evident or more certain.
(Meditations On First Philosophy, Meditation 4, page 81)

However, as far as God is concerned, if I were not overwhelmed by prejudices and if the images of sensible things were not besieging my thought from all directions, I would certainly acknowledge nothing sooner or more easily than [God].
(Meditations On First Philosophy, Meditation 5, page 91).

For just as the objective mode of being belongs to ideas by their very nature, so the normal mode of being belongs to the causes of ideas, at least to the first and preeminent ones, by their very nature. And although one idea can perhaps issue from another, nevertheless no infinite regress is permitted here; eventually some first idea must be reached whose cause is a sort of archetype that contains formally all the reality that is in the idea merely objectively.
(Meditations On First Philosophy, Meditation 3, page 74)

On Why One Can Invent Corporeal Ideas, But Not Divine Ideas:
As to the ideas of corporeal things, there is nothing in them that is so great that it seems incapable of having originated from me… There is another kind of falsity (called “material” falsity) which is found in ideas whenever they represent a non-thing as if it were a thing… Assuredly I need not assign to these ideas an author distinct from myself. For if they were false, that is, if they were to represent non-things, I know by the light of nature that they proceed from nothing; that is, they are in me for no other reason that something is lacking in my nature. If, on the other hand, these ideas are true, then because they exhibit so little reality to me that I cannot distinguish it from a non-thing, I see no reason why they cannot get their being from me.
(Meditations On First Philosophy, Meditation 3, page 75

On “The Unicorn Defense”:
From the fact that I think of God as existing, it does not seem to follow that God exists, for my thought imposes no necessity on things. And just as one may image a winged horse, without there being a horse that has wings, in the same way perhaps I can attach existence to God, even though no God exists. But there is a sophism lurking here. From the fact that I am unable to think of a mountain without a valley, it does not follow that a mountain or a valley exists anywhere, but only that, whether they exist or not, a mountain and a valley are inseparable from one another. But from the fact that I cannot think of God except as existing, it follows that existence is inseparable from God, and that for this reason he really exists.
(Meditations On First Philosophy, Meditation 5, page 89)

On The Unreliability Of The Senses:
Many experiences gradually weakened any faith that I had in the senses… [examples include phantom limb pain and flaws in visual recognition]… To these causes for doubt I recently added two quite general ones. The first was that everything I ever thought I sensed while awake I could believe I also sometimes sensed while asleep, and since I do not believe that what I seem to sense in my dreams comes to me from things external to me, I saw no reason why I should hold this belief about those things I seem to be sensing while awake. The second was that, since I was ignorant of the author of my origin (or at least pretended to be ignorant of it), I saw nothing to prevent my having been so constituted by nature that I should be mistaken even about what seemed to me most true.
(Meditations On First Philosophy, Meditation 6, page 95)

Thus what I thought I had seen with my eyes, I actually grasped solely with the faculty of judgment, which is in my mind.
(Meditations On First Philosophy, Meditation 2, page 68)

On Why “Everything That Begins To Exist Has A Cause” Includes The Non-Corporeal:
Now it is indeed evident by the light of nature that there must be at least as much [reality] in the efficient and total cause as there is in the effect of that same cause. For whence, I ask, could an effect get its reality, if not from a cause? And how could the cause give that reality to the effect, unless it also possessed that reality? Hence it follows that something cannot come into being out of nothing, and also that what is more perfect (that is, what contains in itself more reality) cannot come into being from what is less perfect. But this is manifestly true not merely for those effects whose reality is actual or formal, but also for ideas in which only objective reality is considered… As imperfect a mode of being as this is by which a thing exists in the intellect objectively through an idea, nevertheless it is plainly not nothing, hence it cannot get its being from nothing.
(Meditations On First Philosophy, Meditation 3, page 73-74)

On Thought And Forms:
Rather, the very nature of an idea is such that of itself it needs no formal reality other than what it borrows from my thought, of which it is a mode.
(Meditations On First Philosophy, Meditation 3, page 76)

I am a substance.
(Meditations On First Philosophy, Meditation 3, page 76)

On Self-Knowledge Never Being Wrong:
Now as far as ideas are concerned, if they are considered alone and in their own right, without being referred to something else, they cannot, properly speaking, be false. For whether it is a she-goat or a chimera that I am imagining, it is no less true that I imagine the one than the other. Moreover, we need not fear that there is falsity in the will itself or in the affects, for although I can choose evil things or even things that are utterly non-existent, I cannot conclude that it is untrue that I do choose these things. Thus there remain only judgments in which I must take care not to be mistaken.
(Meditations On First Philosophy, Meditation 3, page 71)
[Note: Above passage seems to hint at an is-ought distinction.]

Sapolsky: Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers Quotes

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On Heart Disease Markers:
CRP [C-reactive protein] is turning out to be a much better predictor of cardiovascular disease risk than cholesterol, even years in advance of disease onset.  As a result, CRP has suddenly become quite trendy in medicine, and is fast becoming a standard endpoint to measure in general blood work on patients. 
(Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers, Chapter 3, Page 44)

On The First Gulf War:
During the 1991 Persian Gulf War fewer deaths in Israel were due to SCUD missile damage than to sudden cardiac death among frightened elderly people.  
(Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers, Chapter 3, Page 50)

On The Origins Of Peter Pan:
A son, age thirteen, the beloved favorite of the mother, is killed in an accident.  The mother, despairing and bereaved, takes to her bed in grief for years afterward, utterly ignoring her other, six-year-old son.  Horrible scenes ensue.  For example, the boy, on one occasion, enters her darkened room; the mother, in her delusional state, briefly believe it is the dead son – “David, is that you?  Could that be you?” – before realizing: “Oh, it is only you.”  Growing up, being “only you”.  On the rare instances when the mother interacts with the younger son, she repeatedly expresses the same obsessive thought: the only solace she feels is that David died when he was still perfect, still a boy, never to be ruined by growing up and growing away from his mother.
The younger boy, ignored (the stern, distant father seemed to have been irrelevant to the family dynamics), seizes upon this idea; by remaining a boy forever, by not growing up, he will at least have some chance of pleasing his mother, winner her love.  Although there is no evidence of disease or malnutrition in his well-to-do family, he ceases growing. As an adult, he is just barely five feet in height, and his marriage is unconsummated.  
And then the chapter informs us that the boy became the author of the much-beloved children’s class – Peter Pan.  J.M. Barrie’s writings are filled with children who didn’t grow up, who were fortunate enough to die in childhood, who came back as ghosts to visit their mothers.
(Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers, Chapter 6, Page 106)

On The Strangeness Of Sleep:
All things considered, sleeping is pretty creepy.  For a third of your life, you’re just not there, floating in this suspended state, everything slowing down.  Except, at points, your brain is more active than when you’re awake, making your eyelids all twitchy, and it’s consolidating memories from the day and solving problems for you.  Except when it’s dreaming, when it’s making no sense.  And then you sometimes walk or talk in your sleep.  Or drool.  And then there’s those mysterious penile or clitoral erections that occur intermittently during the night.  (And this isn’t even going into the subject of species that sleep with only half of their brain at a time, in order to keep one eye and half the brain open to look out for predators.   Mallards, for example, that are stuck on the edge of their group at night keep their outward facing eye, and the half of the brain that responds to it, preferentially awake.  As more oddities, dolphins can swim while sleeping and some birds can fly.)
(Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers, Chapter 11, Page 227)

On Teddy Roosevelt The Scientist:
A biography of Teddy Roosevelt, however, recently helped me to appreciate that the world lost one of its great potential zoologists when he lapsed into politics.  At age eighteen, he had already published professionally in ornithology; when he was half that age, he reacted to the news that his mother had thrown out his collection of field mice, stored in the family icebox, by moping around the house, proclaiming, “The loss to science!  The loss to science!”
(Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers, Chapter 13, Page 252)

On Personal Autonomy And Depression:
Humans can be provoked into at least transient cases of learned helplessness, and with surprising ease.  Naturally, there is tremendous individual variation in how readily this happens – some of us are  more vulnerable than others….  In the experiment involving inescapable noise, Hiroto had given the students a personality inventory beforehand.  Based on that, he was able to identify the students who came into the experiment with a strongly “internalized locus of control” – a belief that they were the masters of their own destiny and had a great deal of control in their lives – and, in contrast, the markedly “externalized” volunteers, who tended to attribute outcomes to chance and luck.  In the aftermath of an uncontrolled stressor, the externalized students were far more vulnerable to learned helplessness.  Transferring that to the real world, with the same external stressors, the more that someone has an internal locus of control, the less the likelihood of a depression.  
(Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers, Chapter 14, Page 303)

Having an illusory sense of control in a bad setting can be so pathogenic that one version of it gets a special name in the health psychology literature… As described by Sherman James of Duke University, it is called John Henryism.  The name refers to the American folk hero who, hammering a six-foot-long steel drill, tried to outrace a steam drill tunneling through a mountain.  John Henry beat the machine, only to fall dead from the superhuman effort.  As James defines it, John Henryism involves the belief that any and all demands can be vanquished, so long as you work hard enough.  On questionnaires, John Henry individuals strongly agree with statements such as “When things don’t go the way I want them, it just makes me work even harder,” or “Once I make up my mind to do something, I stay with it until the job is completely done.”  This is the epitome of individuals with an internal locus of control – they believe that, with enough effort and determination, they can regulate all outcomes.  
(Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers, Chapter 18, Page 404-5)

On Race And Anxiety:
Some recent studies that I find truly unsettling show that if you flash a picture of someone from a different race, the amygdala tends to light up.  Endless studies need to be done looking at what sort of face is flashed and what sort of person is observing it.  But in the meantime, just think about the implications of that finding.
(Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers, Chapter 15, Page 323)

On Dopamine Motivating Behavior:
The next key thing to learn is that the dopamine and its associated sense of pleasurable anticipation fuels the work needed to get that reward.  Peter Phillips from the University of North Carolina has used some immensely fancy techniques to measure millisecond bursts of dopamine in rats and has showed with the best time resolution to date that the burst comes just before the behavior.  Then, in the clincher, he artificially stimulated the dopamine release and, suddenly, the rat would start lever pressing.  The dopamine does indeed fuel the behavior.  
(Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers, Chapter 16, Page 339)

On Drug Addiction Rerouting Pleasure Pathways:
Brain-imaging studies of drug users at that stage [of needing the drug on account of low resting dopamine levels] show that viewing a film of actors pretending to use drugs activates dopamine pathways in the brain more than does watching porn films.  
(Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers, Chapter 16, Page 345)

On Oscar Awards & Life Expectancy:
The issue of respect [and its relationship with life expectancy] may help explain the highly publicized finding that winning the Oscar at any point in your life extends your life expectancy about four years, relative to doctors who were nominated but didn’t win.
(Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers, Chapter 18, Page 390)

On Religion & Health:
Finally and most important in this area of science, you can’t randomly assign people to different study groups (“You folks become atheists, and you guys start deeply believing in God, and we’ll meet back here in ten years to check everyone’s blood pressure”). 
(Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers, Chapter 18, Page 408)

Consider two leading thinkers in this field, Richard Sloan and Carl Thoresen… 
[they] agree that there’s not a shred of evidence that praying for someone improves her health…. 
[they] agree that when you do see a legitimate link between religiosity and good health, you don’t know which came first.  Being religious may make you healthy, and being healthy may make you religious….
[they] also agree that when you do see a link, you still don’t know if it has anything to do with religiosity [there are many variable that] need to be controlled for…
[they] are also mostly in agreement that religiosity does predict good health to some extent in a few areas of medicine…
[they are both] made very nervous by the idea that findings in this field will lead to physicians advising their patients to become religious…
[they] both note that religiosity can make health, mental or otherwise, a lot worse.  
(Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers, Chapter 18, Page 409-11)

On Dysrationalia:
Standing fast on this issue requires a heartbreaking rejection of a tenet of liberal education that so many of us treasure.  It is the notion that being exposed to the Great Books and the Great Thoughts must lead to Great Morals.
(The Trouble With Testosterone, Beelzebub’s SAT Scores, Page 110)