Compassion and Kindness

I have just returned from a talk entitled “Compassion and Kindness” by His Holiness the Dalai Llama. Around ten thousand were in attendance. He exudes warmth, humility, and humour. He drew on personal experience as well as scientific discovery to emphasise his points. I found that His Holiness spoke with ease, and sometimes flippancy, deep words of truth.

Does an ice cube feel pain when it melts?

An Amazon search for books on consciousness led me to purchase The Physics of Consciousness: The Quantum Mind and the Meaning of Life ISBN 0738204366 by Evan Harris Walker as I am interested in how physicists are using features of quantum mechanics to address the problems of consciousness.

The Illusion of the Soul

I looked through some old bookmarks that I had saved. Here is an article, The Mystery of Consciousness which I found mostly interesting. The essay starts with a good description of the basic problem and goes on to discuss particular aspects of Humphrey’s book, as well as a conference on what the “I” having this thought is. He exercises an evolutionary “just so” story about consciousness – I’m not being overly critical, surely consciousness provides some evolutionary advantage.

Freedom, Human Rights, and Democracy

President George W. Bush delivered the keynote speech to a conference in Prague ahead of the approaching G8 summit in Germany a few hours ago. After listening for a few minutes I started taking notes, here was a snapshot of the Western political dialogue, a defence of liberty against the tyrant.

Happiness

Watching BBC World, I saw a link to a report on happiness. The question of happiness is interesting. It is becoming apparent that happiness (pleasure without desire) is caused by brain states. If these brain states can be achieved through meditation, medication, and other forms of manipulation, then does the experiencing of happiness – the goal of utilitarian theory – have any value as a moral end?

When the person enjoys his or her work, whether it is paid or unpaid work, and feels that it is meaningful and important, this contributes to life satisfaction [1].

This is problematic from the view that life has no intrinsic meaning, which implies that happiness is derivative and artificial:

…another key ingredient is to have important goals that derive from one’s values, and to make progress toward those goals [1].

This is an invitation to join the Red Queen, if making progress becomes an end, then satisfaction can never be obtained.

[1] Test your happiness.

Fashion and Philosophy

After reading Lars Svendsen’s excellent book on boredom, I decided to give his Fashion, A Philosophy ISBN 1861892918 a read. Fashion is about presenting the new to outmode the previous. This book is a critical examination of fashion, but does not do much in the way of original thought. While philosophers have not said much about fashion, some social commentators have, and this is whence the material comes. The author’s main contribution is to suggest that since about 1950 the logic of fashion has changed from one of replacement to one of supplementation.