my mind on books

Metapsychology, a great site for book reviews, has published a review of Self-Consciousness, the recent book by Sebastian Rödl.

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I’m just squeaking in under the wire for my July selection in the Non-Fiction Five Challenge – The Cincinnati Arch: Learning from Nature in the City. [For this reading challenge I picked non-fiction titles that are outside the usual scope of my reading and of this website.]

This book turned out to be not so much a natural history of Cincinnati, but more of a meditation on overcoming the apparent dichotomy between wilderness and city. The author had identified himself as a wilderness lover, so at first he sees his move to the city as a kind of exile. (The first chapter is titled “The Road of Exile.”) Eventually he comes to see the natural world as a continuum that includes the city, and he arrives at a ‘practice of the wild’ (Gary Snyder’s term) that can embrace all aspects of experience.

Here is a ‘mind-related’ excerpt:

…the house feels like a spacesuit, a diver’s mask, or a suit of armor, a fabricated refuge that keeps my body comfortable so that my mind can work on matters of its choosing. Without the house, the body’s needs would always be clamoring for attention: “Feed me!” “Keep me warm!” But with those needs taken care of by the house, the mind can go its own way, attentive to ideas and dreams. So the house represents a kind of refuge or escape from nature, which is construed as whatever exists outside the organism and, ipso facto, forces it to pay attention. The house allows the mind to pay attention to itself. (p. 56, emphasis mine)

On the practice of the wild:

Wild practice is first and foremost a local practice. You always have to do it right here. Wild practice has an aspect of attentiveness: learning the other creatures and their ways, keeping watch, waiting for things to emerge, learning to see the unseen. There is also an aspect of mindfulness, of repeated acts deliberately composed, of discipline projected over the long term. There is an aspect of relation: dancing with the wildness of others, participating in local flows of energy, nourishment, and information, all of which comprise what I call husbandry. There is an aspect of homage to one’s origins in landscapes of learning or transformation – call it pilgrimage – and an aspect of reflection and witness that preserves the land’s gifts by sharing them through stories. Five disciplines, in sum, are necessary: attentiveness, mindfulness, husbandry, pilgrimage, and witness. (p. 123)

He then goes on to talk about applying this practice at different levels of relationship – personal, community, and ecological.

Immortality Defended by John Leslie is discussed in the article “Eternity for Atheists” in the New York Times 7/29/07:

Each of us, Leslie submits, is immortal because our life patterns are but an aspect of an “existentially unified” cosmos that will persist after our death. Both Tipler and Leslie are, in different ways, heirs to the view of William James. The mind or “soul,” as they see it, consists of information, not matter. And one of the deepest principles of quantum theory, called “unitarity,” forbids the disappearance of information.

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Not the Wind, Not the Flag

Two monks were arguing about a flag. One said: “The flag is moving.”
The other said: “The wind is moving.”
The sixth patriarch happened to be passing by. He told them: “Not the wind, not the flag; mind is moving.”

[from Mumonkan, in Zen Flesh, Zen Bones p. 114]

The Library Thing page for the tag “consciousness”

Top ten “most often tagged Consciousness” as of 7/27/07 (with links to Amazon info):

1. Consciousness Explained by Daniel C. Dennett

2. The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes

3. The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory by David J. Chalmers

4. The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness by Antonio R. Damasio

5. The Mind’s I: Fantasies and Reflections on Self & Soul by Daniel C. Dennett and Douglas Hofstadter

6. Kinds of Minds: Toward an Understanding of Consciousness by Daniel C. Dennett

7. The User Illusion: Cutting Consciousness Down to Size by Tor Norretranders

8. Consciousness: An Introduction by Susan Blackmore

9. Wider than the Sky: The Phenomenal Gift of Consciousness by Gerald M. Edelman

10. The Mystery of Consciousness by John R. Searle

I’ve read #1, 2, 4, 7; have in my library #3, 5, 6.

[Note: I've set up links to open in a new window because I thought that would work better with a list -- but it might conflict with pop-up blocking, so I apologize if that's at all annoying.]

Love, Life, Goethe: Lessons of the Imagination from the Great German Poet by John Armstrong

I don’t often read biographies, so this is not a book I would ordinarily pick up, but since it was there on my local library’s new book shelf, with the subtitle’s promise of “lessons of the imagination,” I took it home and found it to be very readable. (Nice short chapters for one thing.)

Goethe is seen as an example of the reconciliation of life and art; he is able to say that life is good, while still striving to develop himself. (‘I am not here simply to have a good time, but to devote myself to noble objects.’ p. 178)

Goethe is determined to bridge the gaps between creative art and what is called ‘the real world.’ For much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries artists have withdrawn their sympathy from the normal conditions of comfortable existence. The artist is at odds with – and critical of ‘bourgeois life.’ …

Goethe’s immense hope was that there need not be – should not be – a spiritual loathing or artistic contempt for that life. Which, after all, is normal life, broadly speaking. If depth of thought, maturity of passion and grace of feeling are to be central to a society, these spiritual qualities have to coexist with the normal demands of life. And Goethe suggests more than coexistence; he is looking at the ways in which the discipline of ‘the real world’ – the demands of power and responsibility – might actually offer special opportunities for personal growth and development. (p. 101)

Another edition has the subtitle “how to be happy in an imperfect world.” Google Book Search page for this title has links to several reviews.

Creative Explorations: New Approaches to Identities and Audiences by David Gauntlett is based on a project in which people used Lego pieces to create metaphorical models of their identity (sounds something like “sand tray therapy“).

The author has posted an extract from the conclusion; here is part:

“I was struck by ‘the will to coherence’ – the desire to assemble a solid and unified view of self-identity. It was also possible to see participants asserting their own distinctiveness within the context of an increasingly globalised and mainstream fashion-led culture. The role of the media emerged as the provider of stories – ethical resources which people use to orient themselves towards aspirations. We saw that the sense of a journey was common, with each person as the hero of their own story, often moving away from historical ties towards greater stability, fulfilment, and engagement with the world. … these goals were not about possessions gained, but about social connections, inner happiness, and a life well lived.”

More on the project at the ArtLab website… and the author’s website….

This week’s Science Weekly podcast from the Guardian includes interviews by Susan Blackmore with Daniel Dennett, V.S. Ramachandran, and Francis Crick, from her book Conversations on Consciousness: What the Best Minds Think about the Brain, Free Will, and What It Means to Be Human.

To achieve holism we must try to connect up all the fragments of our different thoughts and draw them into a living whole, and in so doing we enrich the meaning of each individual element. ‘We are aware of a huge crowd of things; the soul can grasp extraordinarily diverse links between these things. Souls that have the inner strength to open up the world begin to organize these links, so as to think more easily; and they begin to take pleasure in putting two and two together and establishing connections between diverse elements of their world.’ (p. 307)

The above passage from Love, Life, Goethe: Lessons of the Imagination from the Great German Poet resonated unexpectedly with ‘Everything Is Miscellaneous.’