Posted in from the dark room, photography on May 15, 2011| Leave a Comment »
John O’Donohue, in the excellent documentary, Anam Cara, talks about the impact on life of living in the presence of mountain, and in a beautiful passage talks of how the clouds come down and hide the mountain but the knowledge of presence, even though it’s now invisible, continues to make an impact on life. In fact, the visible becoming invisible takes the impact to a whole new level
Posted in books, from the reading room, philosophy on May 14, 2011| Leave a Comment »
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (The “Black Swan” guy) has a new book out which is a collection of aphorisms. It’s called The Bed of Procrustes (ISBN 1846144582).
I like books of aphorisms. You can dip and dive into them and just stop where something provokes or captures you. Here are a few of his which have made me stop and think so far.
Don’t talk about ‘progress’ in terms of longevity, safety or comfort before comparing zoo animals to those in the wilderness.
Who doesn’t want longevity, safety and comfort? But he’s right, there’s a difference between being a zoo animal and living free in the wild. Can we have the longevity, safety and comfort AND the freedom and excitement of the wild??
If you know, in the morning, what your day looks like with any precision, you are a little bit dead – the more precision, the more dead you are.
This is pretty close to my heroes not zombies theme. If your every day is scheduled to death, is that satisfying? Is there some room for spontaneity, for freedom to respond to events and circumstances? If life can’t be fully controlled, it certainly can’t be fully planned. Globally, we’re caught up in command and control methods based on a delusion of the certainties revealed by science – whether it’s economic science, earthquake science, or medical science. The events of the last few years in particular are really showing the extent to which these theories and approaches are delusional and only further power and control over the individual.
It is a very recent disease to mistake the unobserved for the nonexistent; but some are plagued with the worse disease of mistaking the unobserved for the unobservable.
This is a bit like Rumsfeld’s famous knowns and unknowns, isn’t it? But there’s also the issue of is reality only that which can be seen and measured?
Asking science to explain life and vital matters is equivalent to asking a grammarian to explain poetry.
This reminded me of Mary Midgely‘s superb “Science and Poetry” – one of my favourite philosophy books. Science isn’t everything and it can’t explain everything either….
Posted in from the dark room, photography on May 13, 2011| Leave a Comment »
We walk along numerous paths, streets, lanes every day. When we walk along them every day we can stop seeing them. Here are some paths I’d never walked along before which really grabbed my attention and reminded me to notice the paths I’m taking.
In the case of these garden paths in Kyoto, the paths themselves are beautiful. What about the regular paths you follow every day? What about the paths you follow through life? Where’s your present path leading, and what kind of path is it? Beautiful? Interesting? Enriching? (by the way, no paths go nowhere!)
Posted in from the dark room, photography on May 12, 2011| Leave a Comment »
When I looked at this stone, I thought I was looking at water…..then, I remembered some other stones I’d seen that seemed like that.
All stones which appear to flow….and I wondered about all those ways we have of subdividing Nature – solid, liquid, gas for example – and how appealing it is when we find in one form the echoes of another.
In the Higashi Honganji Temple in Kyoto, I saw this path – ok, not as natural as the rocks above, but beautiful and flowing all the same…..
Posted in from the dark room, photography on May 10, 2011| Leave a Comment »
Look carefully at this cloth. What do you see?
I took this photograph in the Ginza branch of my favourite French tea room chain – Mariage Freres.
I love the subtlety of this design. It’s like a watermark. Distinct and clear, but only in a certain light. It would have been easy to overlook it. Yet it is also hard to miss.
I wonder what my watermark looks like?
I wonder what subtle but clear patterns distinguish me and what kind of light would reveal them?
Posted in books, from the living room, from the reading room, perception, philosophy on May 10, 2011| 1 Comment »
When you listen to a favourite piece of music, do you have the same experience every time you listen? Have you ever had a wonderful meal in a restaurant, returned at a later date and had, maybe another wonderful meal……but were the two meals the same? Was the experience the same? If you look at a great painting, do you see exactly the same painting every time? I don’t mean is it the same object. I mean do you have the same perceptive, affective experience…….do you actually notice, regard, attend to the painting in an identical way, and does that produce an identical pattern of thoughts and feelings in you?
William James considers it this way in his Stream of Consciousness essay…
…and yet a close attention to the matter shows that there is no proof that an incoming current ever gives us just the same bodily sensation twice. What is got twice is the same OBJECT. We feel things differently accordingly as we are sleepy or awake, hungry or full, fresh or tired; differently at night and in the morning, differently in summer and winter; and above all, differently in childhood, manhood, and old age. For an identical sensation to recur it would have to occur the second time in an unmodified brain. But as this, strictly speaking, is a physiological impossibility, so is an unmodified feeling an impossibility….
The reality is, we never have the exact same experience twice. So maybe you should slow down a little, become more aware, more mindful of this present moment. You’ll never have another chance to have this particular experience again.
Posted in from the reading room, philosophy on May 9, 2011| Leave a Comment »
In “The Stream of Consciousness”, William James dismisses the ‘synthetic’ method of attempting to understand consciousness by considering small parts of it and trying to create the whole picture by assembling the various parts.
On every ground then the method of advancing from the simple to the compound exposes us to illusion. All pedants and abstractionists will naturally hate to abandon it. But a student who loves the fulness of human nature will prefer to follow the ‘analytic’ method, and to begin with the most concrete facts, those with which he has a daily acquaintance in his own inner life.
This strikes me as very sensible. The phenomenon of emergence was described much later, as were the findings of complexity science, but in fact, the more we have discovered about complex systems, such as living organisms, the more it becomes clear the that whole cannot be understood from a simple cobbling together of knowledge of the parts.
Posted in from the consulting room, health on May 8, 2011| 3 Comments »
Simon Baron-Cohen wrote a fascinating piece in the Guardian considering the reality of cruelty in human affairs. He proposes the notion that there is a scale of empathy – a scale which reflects the amount of empathy a person feels towards others.
People said to be “evil” or cruel are simply at one extreme of the empathy spectrum. We can all be lined up along this spectrum of individual differences, based on how much empathy we have. At one end of this spectrum we find “zero degrees of empathy”.
Zero degrees of empathy means you have no awareness of how you come across to others, how to interact with others, or how to anticipate their feelings or reactions. It leaves you feeling mystified by why relationships don’t work out, and it creates a deep-seated self-centredness. Other people’s thoughts and feelings are just off your radar. It leaves you doomed to do your own thing, in your own little bubble, not just oblivious of other people’s feelings and thoughts but oblivious to the idea that there might even be other points of view. The consequence is that you believe 100% in the rightness of your own ideas and beliefs, and judge anyone who does not hold your beliefs as wrong, or stupid.
I think this is a useful concept – Ian McEwan, the writer, wrote after 9/11 that the terrorists were guilty of a “failure of imagination”. It’s true that imagination is the faculty we use to put ourselves into the shoes of others. If someone really does get into the mental state of “zero degrees of empathy”, then I can see that it is likely they would be capable of far greater acts of cruelty.
I like how he goes on to consider the value of empathy –
Empathy is like a universal solvent. Any problem immersed in empathy becomes soluble. It is effective as a way of anticipating and resolving interpersonal problems, whether this is a marital conflict, an international conflict, a problem at work, difficulties in a friendship, political deadlocks, a family dispute, or a problem with the neighbour. Unlike the arms industry that costs trillions of dollars to maintain, or the prison service and legal system that cost millions of dollars to keep oiled, empathy is free. And, unlike religion, empathy cannot, by definition, oppress anyone.
Empathy, is, I believe, crucially important in health care. Yes, I need good clinical diagnostic and therapeutic skills and knowledge, but empathy is what drives me to find the best for every patient. It also seems to make a lot of sense to me that empathy, as it involves, active, non-judgemental listening and a desire to understand and know another person, makes it more likely I will actually arrive at a “correct” diagnosis. Aren’t doctors more likely to miss a diagnosis if they have zero degrees of empathy? (By the way, I suspect empathy isn’t a constant. We probably all move up and down along the empathy scale, day by day, week by week. Makes it a good idea to reflect on where you are at the moment though, doesn’t it?)
Posted in Uncategorized on May 7, 2011| Leave a Comment »
Posted in from the dark room, photography on May 7, 2011| 1 Comment »
Heroes Not Zombies 