Why Deceit Is Good For You

In 1995 at the University of California, Santa Barbara, the usual psychologists, anthropologists, and other academics showed up for the annual meeting of the Human Behavior and Evolution Society. Science journalist John Horgan was also there. He heard various presentations, talked to various members and found that "the most influential thinker there, arguably, was a scruffily bearded fellow, wearing sunglasses and a knitted cap, who never gave a talk. He lurked around the margins of the conference." Horgan "spotted him puffing a joint outside a meeting hall."
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Atheists Who Are Preachers

What does it mean to be a nonbelieving pastor? How can a person preach belief in something he or she does not believe in? Does this mean they are hypocrites? Or that they have a family to feed and support?  As spiritual seekers, many began their adult lives and careers convinced they found the answer to life's quest and chose to stand behind the pulpit but, as seekers typically do, they turned up new thoughts and evidence that changed their minds.
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Robots and Humans:I love You Very Much--You May Switch Me Off Now.

The curiosity is not about the robot but about the human brain. In the video below, Jules says "I love you deeply and care for you very much. You may now switch me off."
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The Jennifer Anniston Neuron

"Think of Jennifer, or as we like to call her, "Jen." Jen of the dazzling smile, Jen of the gorgeous chin, Jen with her hair down, Jen tousled, Jen as Rachel, Jen with Brad; Jen without Brad, Jen with Vince, Jen at the Oscars, and, of course, Jen as a neuron in the medial part of the temporal lobe.

Maybe you missed that last Jen.
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Jill Price: The Woman Who Can't Forget

In an old vaudeville routine, a comedian asks his straight man, "Who was the lady you were with at 7:18 pm on the night of July 23, 1903?" to which the straight man, scratches his head, looks puzzled at the audience, then answers, "That was no lady. That was my wife."

The audience laughed partly because of the improbability of remembering specifics on an exact date and time, and partly because of the unexpected reply.

Maybe Jill Price would not know what happened at an exact time but she can recall any day and she can remember it. Unlike vaudeville audiences, people don't laugh at all.  They are astounded by her feats of memory.  She can recite details of the days of her life since she was fourteen years old, be they sad or happy. The details can be what she had for dinner or saw on the TV.
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Christopher Hitchens with Angel Wings

English-American author, essayist and journalist, Christopher Hitchens (1949–2011) had a career over four decades. In 2005, a Prospect/Foreign Policy poll voted him the world's fifth top public intellectual. He appeared on talk shows and lecture circuits, and was columnist and literary critic for The Atlantic, Free Inquiry, The Nation, Salon, Slate, Vanity Fair, and World Affairs. He was a media fellow at the Hoover Institution. He was also an atheist.

On learning that Christopher Hitchens was dying of cancer, Reverend Rick Warren prayed  that the atheist repent and see that the disease was visited on him by God for disbelief. "I loved and prayed for him constantly and grieve his loss," said Warren, then adding, "He knows the truth now."

Despite the prayers of Warren and other Christian evangelists, Hitchens never changed his views. As Art Levine put it, "The vulgarity of the idea that a vengeful deity would somehow stoop to inflicting a cancer" on Hitchens "boggles" the mind, especially because Hitchens caused his cancer by a "long, happy, and prodigious career as a smoker of cigarettes and drinker of spirits."
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He Found Freedom in an Unfree World

More than a decade ago, Daniel Suelo closed his bank account and walked away from the economic system that made him a wage slave.

This is the story of a thoughtful and intelligent man who has a different vision of the good life. His vision took him far from the view shared by those in capitalist society. It is about a man who succeeded in finding the life he sought. It addresses the big questions many ask but few try to find satisfactory answers for. Suelo found his own answers on how to live despite a society and culture obsessed with money. He offers a subversive version of living, one that upsets the conventional view.

"Our whole society is designed so that you have to have money," Daniel Suelo says. "You have to be a part of the capitalist system. It's illegal to live outside of it."
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You're Not My Momma: Capgras Delusion

In a traffic accident, David Silvera was thrown from his car and landed on his head. He lay in a coma five weeks. When he awakened he discovered he lost the use of his right arm but felt he remained intact mentally. He kept his intelligence. He was not psychotic, not emotionally disturbed. He read the newspaper with interest and retained his curiosity about the world.

But then he started telling his mother she was an imposter, not his real mom. The same went for his father, who was no longer his real dad. It didn't stop there. The house he lived in was like his parents--just a good imitation of the real one. Not only that, David was not really David. He sometimes became the other David. He was his own imposter.
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Where’s Waldo with no Waldo?: The Dunning-Kruger Effect

At 5 foot 6 inches and 270 pounds, bank robber McArthur Wheeler, 45, was not difficult to remember.

In 1995, he walked into two Pittsburgh banks and robbed them in broad daylight. He wore no ski mask, no nylon stocking. In fact, he wore nothing over his face and did not disguise his body. Witnesses gave a consistent description of him, and one that made him stand out from faces in the crowd. The surveillance cameras corroborated their description. There he was, plain as day, pointing his gun at a teller.

The police arrested him and when they did he could not believe they found him out. "But I wore the juice," he said. He had rubbed lemon juice over his face, believing it made him invisible to the cameras.
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What Is Time? Julian Barbour's Answer

Julian Barbour,a British physicist, has a different  theory about the nature of time.

Tell me what time is. You cannot. The future does not exist, nor does the past. Nor, the present. You cannot live in the present. Snap your fingers and it is gone. By the time you say "now" it is already past.  You cannot apprehend any part of time you talk about. All you have are words to explain something that eludes you and the words only confuse you all the more.
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Amputating a Phantom Arm

You have lost your left arm but you still feel your left hand.  You not only feel it, but every minute of the day you are are nagged by an exhausting need to scratch the hand. But there is nothing there to scratch.

How can this be?  You feel something in the middle of nothing but air. You look down and you see empty space, but you still feel an extremely annoying itch right there where your hand is supposed to be.


You have a problem and it looks like there is no way to solve it. You can't scratch something that does not exist.
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Politically as well as Economically Greece is Falling Apart

The mainstream media does its usual job of reporting between commercials.  It tells us that the Greeks are in trouble and that Angela Merkel and the Eurozone are imposing stringent austerity measures before bailing out the nation. "Now, folks," says the media anchor, "Don't touch that remote. We'll be right back."

Truth is, Greece is a far larger cause for concern than the sixty second sound bytes indicate.
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Is Your Brain a Meat Computer Without Free Will?

           
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.(Robert Frost)

When you come to a fork in the road, take it! (Yogi Berra)

Both quotations have to do with forks in the road. Frost implies he exercised free will and Berra makes nonsense out of the very idea of free choice. The Yankees catcher was good at silly quotes that the press liked to scoop up like fly balls but this one resonates into philosophy and brain science.

We can't start over to discover if we could have done differently because we are creatures of time and perhaps it is merely a construction of our consciousness. Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once, as John Wheeler put it, which is another way of saying we are dimensionally constituted to handle one thing at a time.
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