Letters to the Editor
Mike Sulzer
Published Letters: 525 Editor's Choice: 2
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fight_back//same_tactics
[Read the article: Is it "contradictory" to decry the right's tactics while insisting on their equal application?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Remember MoveOn/BetrayUs. The press does not respond in the same way when the left uses the tactics dear to the right. Obama is smart enough to understand this. Are the rest of us?
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Glenn
[Read the article: Is it "contradictory" to decry the right's tactics while insisting on their equal application?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]What you describe as Obama's understanding -- and I think it's questionable whether you're right -- is not new.
I failed to get my point across. I agree that the Democrats need to fight back. But the method used must take advantage of the asymmetrical response to left vs. right. It would seem that Obama did this with his speech on race.
Democrats need to take control of their own messaging and stop fretting so much about how David Broder and Fred Hiatt might react.
When was the last time a Democrat made an uplifting speech that pulled his (or her) ass out of the fire? Maybe sometime in the 60s?
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Glenn
[Read the article: Is it "contradictory" to decry the right's tactics while insisting on their equal application?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]So I agree that Obama's approach to these types of smears has been sometimes effective. But I just believe it's not enough -
Agreed. And I think that some discussion of the best tactics is in order.
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But what does it mean?
[Read the article: You are the river: An interview with Ken Wilber]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]No one should doubt that a person can be aware very differently from the usual. But no one should think that it is possible to say what this means. That would be misusing analytical thinking.
It is good to see at least a partial recognition that the difficulties in describing the small scales that quantum mechanics analyzes has nothing to do with human consciousness. The idea that it does is no more or less silly than the turtle.
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thought this was worth repeating....
[Read the article: You are the river: An interview with Ken Wilber]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]...between altered states of consciousness being "real" versus "just a brain state". A brain state, any brain state, is just as real as a house, it is just that one experiences a brain state directly while a house indirectly, via a brain state, i.e. the image of the house.
But this has nothing to do with Al Gore.
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Something less than a fact
[Read the article: You are the river: An interview with Ken Wilber]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]The fact is that civilization (state level societies, written language, division of labor etc.) although a great cultural advance has probably set us back significantly in our spiritual development.
Evidence, please. For example, how does one define advances or set backs in spiritual development?
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@dv
[Read the article: John McCain's bid for American Jewish votes]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]It would be good to have a foreign policy which put this nation's interests first, rather than Israel's. Actually, it would be good to have a government which put the people's interests first, rather than corporate profits.
Actually, I think it is necessary to understand the needs of people world wide, and adopt an appropriate foreign policy. But you correctly point out how far we are from even considering the needs of the people of the US.
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@aveutter
[Read the article: You are the river: An interview with Ken Wilber]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]But most of the people in the world are struggling.
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@jazztao
[Read the article: You are the river: An interview with Ken Wilber]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Materially speaking, where does this understanding lie? Show me on the brain scan where this moral understanding exists. This is exactly Wilber's point: at some point we have to acknowledge that a material explanation of everything breaks down.
It certainly does not break down there. There is every reason to expect that moral understanding has a physical imprint on the brain. You are just continuing a long tradition of identifying what is not currently understood or observable and grouping it in with the spiritual.
The activity of your brain is your personal model of the world around you. But even a perfect understanding of that model would not explain anything significant about awareness itself. That is where the mystery is.
The difficulty of explaining the very small has nothing to do with this either. It is just a problem of constructing a model that is very different from the very practical one we are programmed with to handle ordinary things.
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@jazztao
[Read the article: You are the river: An interview with Ken Wilber]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]We could do a brain scan and see that the language center is active while we read it and type it, but the brain scan cannot tell whether what we are discussing is right or wrong anymore than it could show that we were discussing baseball or tapioca pudding rather than philosophy.
Language works as a form of communication, and therefore the information is in the brain. You cannot tell tapioca from baseball in a brain state now, but the information has to be stored in a consistent manner. If you can remember which one you discussed yesterday, it is in principle possible to read that from your brain. What is missing from any such analysis is this: why are you aware?
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@jazztao
[Read the article: You are the river: An interview with Ken Wilber]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Are you admitting a type of awareness that can't be materially verified--awareness, or just refining the question? If refining, can you suggest a material rationale for awareness?
What I mean is this: Assume that all awareness correlates with brain activity. This still us nothing about awareness. It has nothing to do with thinking; in certain kinds of dreams, or other states, rational thought is impossible but you are fully aware. One can even be aware of the lack of ability to think. But I see no evidence that any awareness occurs without neural activity, just that awareness is more fundamental and not tied to the "higher" types of mental activity that humans think they are good at.
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@jazztao
[Read the article: You are the river: An interview with Ken Wilber]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I would argue, however, that you're still driving for a fully materialistic explanation of 'awareness'. And this might be possible if we each, as individuals, lived in a vacuum. But, each and every one of us lives in some sort of community where there exist collective awareness and understanding. It is this fact that leads me to believe that awareness is not something so simple as a firing of neurons.
No, I am arguing that there is no explanation for awareness, that even at our primitive level of rational development, the limitations of what we can understand are visible. Nor do I think that there is any collective awareness that is independent of the brains of the individuals in the community.
Further, your statement, "But I see no evidence that any awareness occurs without neural activity, just that awareness is more fundamental and not tied to the "higher" types of mental activity that humans think they are good at." seems to me a wish that some more fundamental type of mental function will be discovered. Perhaps the whole thing is a chicken and egg proposition, and just as likely there could be no neural activity without awareness?
Not really, I do not think that there is any such thing to discover. I do not see how you can assign a direction of causality to a relationship that cannot be understood.
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@jazztao
[Read the article: You are the river: An interview with Ken Wilber]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Thank you, as well, especially for your patience. I am not so good at writing about these things.