I have been lately quoting Marx’s last “Thesis on Feuerbach” which reads: “Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.” Much as I admire Iain McGilchrist for his breakthrough work on the brain, I wish he would pay more attention (right-brain) to this timely aphorism. His first book, The Master and his Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, established the bi-hemispheric brain as the paradigm for the way we attend to the world and consequently act in it. It also pointed out, in excruciated detail, how… Read More
Continue ReadingThe Myth of the Self (4): Caring Connects to the World
For those who haven’t been following closely, I will repost the table containing the several behaviors associated with the right-hemisphere. I have rearranged the rows in the order in which I discuss them in this series of blog posts. * Russell Ackoff’s ways to deal with messes. Right-hemisphere-dominant behavior types Caring is an especially important category because it has existential implications and is also partly constitutive of flourishing. Caring acts incorporate inputs from the contextual world presented to the right hemisphere. Empathy, sensing what is going on with another person and acting in accordance, guides much caring. But not all… Read More
Continue ReadingThe Only Real Option To Save the Planet
“The world is running out of options to hit climate goals, U.N. report shows” Is this headline from the WaPo (April 4, 2022) correct? I do not believe so. This old “joke” may help understand why. A policeman goes to help a drunk searching for something under a streetlight and asks what he has lost. He says his keys and they both look under the streetlight together. After a few minutes, the policeman asks if he is sure he lost them here, and the drunk replies, “No, I lost them in the park.” The policeman asks why he is searching… Read More
Continue ReadingFraternal Twins Part 5
The Real Me The last few posts have been concerned with the routine ways we behave within and without institutions when our actions are controlled by the left brain. In this post, I shift to the other side as the master, which change also affects the basic nature of our behaviors. Again I include the table of behaviors for comparison purposes. I am using the word, real, in the sense of the existential use of authentic, but as the table and this series of posts have indicated our various modes of behavior suggest that we have multiple personas, each related… Read More
Continue ReadingMore Technology Will Not Bring Us Flourishing
I am generally a fan of David Brooks. That doesn’t mean that I always agree with him, but I think he has a pretty good handle on what needs to be said at the right time. But his column today in the New York Times bothers me a lot. In a nutshell, he paints the possibility of technological breakthroughs as the bright light against all of today’s dark shadows. I think he is wrong, but worse, very wrong. I am not a Luddite, given my doctorate in Chemical Engineering from MIT, standing athwart the road to the artificially intelligent, autonomous,… Read More
Continue ReadingRacism and the Brain: A Long, Complicated Story
This post continues the thread of thought in the previous one. In that post, I brought up the incident of Amy Cooper siccing the police on a nearby black birder. I wrote: The recently reported case of a white woman, Amy Cooper, calling the police when a black man, birding in Central Park, asked her to tether her dog, as she should already done, provides an excellent example of this cognitive process. Cooper had been working for a company with an outstanding reputation for dealing with diversity and had been given extensive training in co-existing with people of color.… Read More
Continue ReadingFinding Something Good in Covid-19
Everyday more bad news. Deaths around the world have reached into the hundreds of thousands. Economies have shut down, leaving millions unemployed. I was born in the middle of the Great Depression, and certainly never expected to see anything like that again. But here it is. One might ask of anything good can come out of this crisis. The best answer to that question that I read about is some return to normalcy. But when and how close to the old status quo is a big unknown. Fewer people are asking a related question, “Why should we return to the… Read More
Continue ReadingFinding McGilchrist in Some of My Favorite Authors
My Harvard Institute for Learning in Retirement class is over. When I planned it and choose the primary readings from Aldo Leopold and Wendell Berry (pictured), I had not tied it to my own work. I thought how wonderful it would be just to expose my colleague to their work. But as the term progressed, I discovered that both writers offer extraordinary examples of the right-brain at work. That we are interconnected to one another and to the Earth is central to both their essays. Berry is more explicit, as the following examples show. I have excerpted a few paragraphs… Read More
Continue ReadingSufficiency, Caring, and the Right-brain
One of my colleagues, after a look at my new book, suggested that I had omitted an important concept, sufficiency. True, the word does not appear anywhere in the text, but the idea lingers in the background. Sufficient must take its meaning from some reference state or quality, as the amount of something just enough to achieve or attain that stage or quality. In particular, the concern raised is triggered by the impending collapse of the Earth’s life support system. The global consumption of energy and goods is destabilizing the Earth’s capacity to maintain human and other living creatures’ habitats.… Read More
Continue ReadingLove and Care
A friend just sent me a link to a blog post discussing the work of Thich Nhat Hanh, described in the post as the “legendary Vietnamese Zen Buddhist monk, teacher, and peace activist.” I also subscribe to this blog, Brain Pickings, by Maria Popova, but I missed this one. Almost a lost opportunity because Nhat Hanh makes a marvelous connection between love and my use of “care.” I have walked quite gingerly in writing about love because its use is likely to be misunderstood by the largely technical/professional audience for my work. But after reading this blog, I’ll not be… Read More
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