Medieval times saw the invention of the padded horse collar, a device that enabled the plowman to get more tractive force from the powerful beast attached to the plow. The padding of the collar prevented the noose from cutting off air flowing through the animal’s windpipe as the horse pulled the plow.


That simple invention, or improvement, coupled with a better designed plow than the ancients had used increased food production. Its use is an argument that slight modifications in anything, from machines to artificial intelligence can enhance the human condition. If only we humans could make such small improvements to our emotional restrictions that act like an ancient horse collar!


Emotional Restrictions


The last few decades in America and western Europe have been a period of constricting emotions that polarized populations as much as during anytime in history, maybe even as much as during the conflicts between religious denominations like Catholics and Protestants, and Shia and Sunni. And the reason is that modern media are still using the methods of communication that the early newsmen used. Every story with a social or political side to it is told with constricting single point of view.


But such constrictions are probably the human way. It’s difficult to write a comparison/contrast piece, especially when one is already committed to a particular perspective. Opinion and supposition constrict all our efforts to communicate and make only shallow furrows in which only shallow-rooted thoughts can thrive. In addition, many reporters prefer to plow unproductive soils. There’s a recent example.


The Trump-South African White House Press Conference


I was in my truck on the road when I heard the press conference during the conference between President Cyril Ramaphosa of South Africa and President Trump. As I listened, I heard the American President accost Ramaphosa over deaths of white South Africans and the demise of white South African farming because of a criminal trend to take their land. Over the radio I heard Trump describe burial crosses along a road, presumably those of white farmers who were murdered.


Then came time for questioning. A reporter from NBC ignored the accusations of genocide to ask about the plane Qatar had given to the US Air Force to use as Air Force One. The purpose of the question, if recent history of NBC’s relation with Trump is a guide, was to grow some scandal, to insinuate that the gift was to enrich Trump. Murders meant nothing. Murders weren’t of concern, just as illegal immigration wasn’t a concern until Trump started expelling South and Central American gangs. But the NBC focus shifted when the Trump Administration allowed South African Caucasians to enter the country, a move the Left-leaning Press obviously spun as “another” instance of Trumpian white-nationalist racism.


That South Africans shook off Apartheid decades ago was a notable accomplishment akin to our Civil War and the Emancipation Proclamation. But South Africa, one of the richest countries in natural resources, fell into a rule by corruption, bribery, and crime. The Black population of the country still suffers from a bad economy that has a 33.5% unemployment rate. That the crime has led to the decimation of once productive farming run by Caucasians seems to garner little interest in the Press, especially in a Press devoted to growing scandals in the political soil and in finding something—anything—to blame on Trump. The new Air Force One, was accepted because the new Boeing plane under construction has been delayed. Boeing is contracted to build two new Air Force One jets, designated VC-25B, which are based on the Boeing 747-8. However, the project has been significantly delayed, with the original delivery date of 2024 now pushed back to 2027 or later, and even potentially to 2029. Qatar’s gift plane fills the gap.


But what soil is more productive? A delving into the possible genocide of whites or the Qatari gift? The Trump Derangement Syndrome that has plagued the Press since he announced his candidacy for his first term, has constricted the media for at least 14 years. “They” can’t get over it. “They” can’t stop using the old inefficient plows and constricting collars they wear around their own necks as they plow infertile soil hoping to grow a crop of scandals.

I believe (Who says this without reservations today because of potential condemnations on social media?)—anyway, as I was saying—I believe that psychotherapy can convince someone to change behavior. The problem for counselors is finding the appropriate counseling methodology for clients. Common experiences tell us that repeat criminals won’t change just because we ask them to, won’t change just because we imprison them temporarily, or just because we monitor them with ankle sensors. Some, however, have changed their ways after lengthy periods of psychotherapy and others have undergone behavioral changes associated with flashes of religious discovery both with and without the help of a religious leader. That some have altered their behavior after sessions with counselors gives credence to the potential benefit of psychotherapy as an intervention effecting change. Seems we humans can influence and have in numerous instances affected one another’s behavior. But such influence works both ways, of course, as many young people have become willing participants in gangs because of a negative—reverse?—“psychotherapy.”


Intervention Is Hard because…


All of us have models for belief and behavior, and once attached to any model of thinking and behaving, most of us are reluctant to change or incapable of changing.”I used to be…” and “I used to think…” are not frequent expressions. Thinking and behavior, once locked into a human, are like clogged drains, but those who have used Drano or a similar liquid know that unclogging is possible. And when the clog is especially difficult, the old fashioned and forceful plunger often works.


Not that I’m condoning force as therapy. But a “kick on the butt” does work in some instances. Such is the variable nature of humans. What works for one doesn’t necessarily work for another. What drives one person to do good can drive another to do evil. Thus, there is a delicate balance effective psychotherapists must practice. But there appears to be one approach to counseling another person that underlies effectiveness: Nonattachment.


I did not come by this conclusion on my own. Nonattachment is a principle I learned from my son, Dr Christian Conte, founder of Yield Theory, a methodology for “getting through” the barriers, for unclogging the brain’s drains. A good psychotherapist is NOT attached to a single, one-size-fits-all approach based on his or her own beliefs and behaviors. Good psychotherapy requires personal “letting go.”


If someone asked me the goal of psychotherapy, I would say, “self-discovery.” And since each of us is unique, then I would say the psychotherapist’s role isn’t fostering some favored view of the world garnered from an intolerant ideology. Intolerant? Any ideology whose proponents favor censoring opposing  or even slightly alternate views. But intolerance or narrow-thinking, I fear, is what might be happening in university counseling programs today.


The Death of Professional Intervention


As I look at various universities’ mission statements, I surmise that counselor education programs probably teach attachment directly or indirectly. The curricula have been largely influenced by vocal special interest groups that have pressured faculty and administrations to conform to a norm that rejects the whole premise of “abnormal psychology,” a topic long incorporated in psychology curricula. Nowadays, every behavior by social fiat is not only “normal” but also edifying, and those who question a behavior or belief are ostracized. Anything goes as long as it isn’t questioning the opinions promulgated by mainstream and social media. Questioning breeds outrage and public condemnation.


Let’s begin with an anecdotal tale (Warning, incoming anecdote: dive, dive, dive). As one who spent his career in a university system, I can say by experience that Leftist ideologies have negatively affected the social science communities. And I understand why because I began my career in the humanities before I switched to the sciences. Looking back, I see a younger me infused with all the promise of slightly Left-of-Center ideologies and a disdain for Right-of-Center ideologies, my view probably influenced by those who taught me and by my conversations over coffee with other young professors. As a literature instructor, I taught a course of my own devising on censorship and the First Amendment. In preparing for the course, I naively convinced myself that censoring creativity was a practice advocated by the Right, my belief supported by a pre-Watergate Nixon declaring, “So long as I am in the White House, there will be no relaxation in the national effort to control and eliminate smut from our national life.” Censorship and intolerance? Wasn’t that one mandate of the Right? After all, I thought, no avant-garde playwright or novelist—or professor who taught their works— favored Bowdlerism in a time of Kerouac, Heinlein, Burroughs, Burgess, and other novelists and playwrights who pushed back the boundaries of acceptability, appropriateness, and morality. Within the hallowed halls of academia an anti-Bowdlerism flourished during the twentieth century.


Bowdlerism? The process of expurgating passages in books in favor of “propriety,” began in 1807 with Dr. Thomas Bowdler and his sister Henrietta’s revision of the Bard’s plays titled Family Shakespeare. The Bowdlers effectively erased words and expressions in Shakespeare’s plays to censor what they they believed were passages unsuitable to be read aloud in a family. In the late 1940s and throughout the next few decades, including those years of my early university career that began in 1968, Bowdlerism was anathema wherever professors taught literature.


But you know how pendulums swing. So, also, censorship which today appears to angle leftward.


How in the world does this relate to psychotherapy and professional secular counseling? Well, in running the gambit toward ever-freer speech, many professors began to accept anything avant-garde as superior in value to the “old works,” the “old thinking,” and the “old propriety.” Instead, they favored in art, literature and performance, the equivalent of a laissez-faire, hands-off, everything-has-equal-value perspective. The thinking that I might call the Equivalence Factor influenced other academic fields, also. Teaching kids about tribal cultures crowded out the Greeks and Romans, two of the most influential civilizations in occidental history. Eventually, this kind of thinking influenced some to believe that all opinions, even of those apparently disconnected from commonsense reality, held equal value. In my own university the faculty acquiesced to a policy that proclaimed all knowledge was equivalent, that no set of topics held a special place. Learning about batik and the-dyeing was just as valuable as learning how to write effective prose. The product of this largely 1970s movement was that “Well, it’s my opinion” rose to the level of fact. Thus, many faculty members in universities were trained under more Left-leaning ideologies. I call it reverse Bowdlerism. Everything “old,” all those therapies accepted as sound in previous decades have been expurgated to meet the “new propriety,” you know, the one that is acceptable on the “standards” of social media and Leftist culture. The process has effected a censorship from the Left and affected the training of therapists.


Leftist politics, often manifest in emotional condemnations of anything conservative, seem to have insinuated themselves into counseling programs. Some counselors are now being trained to attach. Yes, attach, to be attached to a way of thinking and counseling as long as it conforms to current culture as defined by pundits, podcasters, social media influencers, and mainstream media. And as an aside, I’ll mention that the same societal phenomenon has migrated into the sciences, where questioning string theory and climate change can get one ostracized or prevent one from acquiring a position or a promotion.    


Yes, whereas nonattachment was a principle once integral to counseling programs to teach trainees that counseling sessions were about clients and not about the counselors themselves, now political leanings bear weight, and sessions can be periods of censorship, condemnation, and propaganda. In fact, in universities many social science programs are like that: More about the professors than about the subject, more about opinion framed by popular thinking and censorship of free thought. The only acceptable thinking is Left-leaning.


It will probably take a generation for the pendulum to swing back to that principle my son writes about in his books: NONATTACHMENT is key to good and effective psychotherapy and to positive interactions among people. Good? Effective? I suppose one could say that both are relative. I suppose that one could argue that propaganda can also engender good.


Certainly, propaganda from any direction can be an effective control to foster a “good” behavior or belief as perceived by the propagandist, but propaganda enhances the needs of the propagandist, not the propagandized. In the context of psychotherapy, good and effective apply to a positive turnaround of someone in need of turning around from thinking or behavior that is in the client self-inimical or other-inimical.


Thus, by excluding the principle of nonattachment from counseling programs in favor of attachment to populist culture driven by various widespread media and anonymous sources, modern counseling education is focused more on therapist than on client, more on censoring than on freeing, more on dictating than on discovering.


I’ll reiterate: The goal of psychotherapy not associated with the psychotherapist is self-discovery in the client.






  

The recent post by James Comey, former head of FBI who allowed fabricated information to pass through a FISA court, convinces me that the man has no integrity, no loyalty to the country and the rule of law, and that he thinks everyone else is stupid. His recent controversial post that he tried to defend by claiming ignorance about its meaning reveals him imprudent. He said he knew the meaning of “8647” was political, but he didn’t know it was a call for violence. Yo! Comey. The mob knows the meaning of “86.” Didn’t you spend years in the FBI, an agency attuned to the language of hitmen?


The depth of corruption that generated two impeachments, numerous politically driven trials, and persecutions of conservatives and Pro-lifers has not dissipated. If the former head of the FBI still seethes with hatred for all things Trumpian, one can be very sure that there are others infused with similar hatred, harboring ill will.


But one doesn’t have to ferret out the TDS. Just go to a Bruce Springsteen concert in a foreign land, where the Boss stirs up anti-Americanism, specifically by saying Trump is a Nazi dictator totally incompetent and inimical to the good of the people. His logic? Well it’s there same logic expressed by those expats who moved after the last election: Trump is a rich bad guy.


There’s no specificity beyond the generalizations that Trump is destroying the Constitution, destroying Democracy, and destroying the American economy.


Apparently, most of the TDS crowd slept through the previous administration, cared little for the wasted hundreds of billions of tax dollars, and were happy with an imbalance in trade.


But you know all this—that is, you know all this if you are not infected with TDS, the insidious ailment that makes otherwise average and slightly above average IQs into dithering self-important academics and politicians, and many government employees into big spenders of others’ money with no accountability. You know all this if you can see the hypocrisy in the use of private jets for the Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez anti-oligarchy tour during which two socialists, one of them with extensive barmaid experience, have flown about the country to make Bruce Springsteen’s claims about Trump while failing to note their own support for waste, fraud, and abuse that occurred under their watch. (And, oh yes, spend more money on climate change)   


Take the outrage against DOGE, Tesla, and Trump’s cabinet because they have a mission to tame the monster of Big Government gone wild through Biden’s prolonged nap. What’s the logic of disdaining efficiency? What’s the logic of scratching an EV that you formerly praised for “saving the planet”?


Do conservatives have faults? Certainly. They did not stop or even slow the decades-long growth of government. When they controlled both House and Senate, they made no reforms to stop the waste. Wimpy governing, if you ask me. Afraid to ruffle feathers.


And some conservatives take unmeasured generalities for granted. Obviously, illegal aliens are “illegal,” but of the ten to twenty million whom Biden let into the country in just four years, most were just heeding the invitation on the Statue of Liberty, albeit with the incentive of free stuff the Biden Administration granted.


And now with the release of the audio of the Biden-Hur interview, some TDSers are forced to admit they allowed a feeble mind to sit as a figurehead of America while others—we can only guess—ran the country, or allowed the country to run like the proverbial headless chicken.


So, in this week’s news, Trump has announced some progress on trade, met with Muslim leaders, signed some deals to enhance America’s economy, and forced the Houthis into a ceasefire (that they will no doubt break, bringing more destruction on their tribal heads). None of these accomplishments, however, mean anything to TDSers. Springsteen will continue to rake in money from his young and aging fans who will approve of his unfounded diatribes and scratchy old voice. Comey will probably appear on The View to say he knew the message was political but did not know it meant “kill the president,” and will receive the accolades of the TDS-filled audience who, if asked, will have no specific remedies for waste, abuse, and fraud they unknowingly support with their taxes.


Anecdote alert: Dive, dive, dive


In Lancaster, Pennsylvania, this past week, I went to a “hometown” restaurant for breakfast. Although I don’t eavesdrop, I could not help overhearing an “old guy” (probably younger than I) say he was “so thankful for what Biden did for Social Security.” Hmnnn. You tell me. I’m unaware, but I thought Social Security was written into law, inviolable, and solvent for a few more years. Was it possible—I have enough sense not to have intruded on his table’s conversation—that he watches only those liberal networks who further the notion that Trump wants to take away their Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Obamacare, and subsidies of all kinds, including payments for transgender operations in Guatemala? Has he not heard that Trump wants to eliminate tax on Social Security? That he wants the price of energy reduced? That he wants to…


TDS has spread like COVID, but unlike the disease, it’s flourishing in the minds of many today.

Let’s write some rhymes from Left and Right
A verse is better than a fight.
We’ll lay out what the difference is
And at the end you’ll find a quiz.


Right:
“I’ll argue that the Right depends
“On subtle reason when it defends
“Positions that it holds most dear
“Right's reason whispers in your ear,
“Whereas the Left will shout and curse
While taking taxes from your purse
“And then the Right they will condemn
"As always in ad hominem.”


“The thoughts we carry do collate
“The ways we actuate our fate.
“What lies within our minds foretells,
“Does guide, and then compels
“It drives us to a common ground
“Where you and I can compromise;
“Trust me, now, I think it’s wise.
“But you might argue otherwise,
“That thinking’s not how we agnize.
“That feelings are the way we know.”


Left:
“They are inbred from long ago.
“Our thoughts are not a driving force
“Sensations are the real workhorse.
“We simply act on how we feel.
“Emotions are what acts reveal.
“And thus, we know just whom to hate
“Like Trump and others quick and late,
“Those racists of the past, you know.
“Columbus voyaged to and fro
“He started all the slavery trade
“From Africa and slaves conveyed.”


Right:
“That kind of talk is fraught with lies
“That through the media arborize,
“And show how feeling twists the facts
“Rewrites some history; misguides the lax;
“And trains the liberal young to hate
“Descendants whom they do equate
“With settlers in a different time
“Who lived a different paradigm.
“Emotion’s just one person’s truth
“Something you Libs don’t teach your youth.
“But if you say that what is real
“Is little more than how we feel,
“I’ll tell you, no, it isn’t true.
“Real for me is real for you.
“Paper cuts lie not in thought
“Irons that burn are truly hot.
“I’d be remiss denying truths
“What we know now we learned as youths.
“Kick a stone; you’ll hurt your toe
“Pain is pain; it brings us woe.
“Certain sure we can be wrong
“But feelings sing the Sirens’ song.
“And misconceptions that occur
“Make all we see into a blur.
“Sure, our thoughts can be quite wrong.
“You and I on that concur.
“Yet, our thinking plays its role
“Giving meaning to the whole.
“Sans pure thought the Self is less;
“It’s thinking makes the Self fluoresce.
“Thinking drives a prudent life;
“Prudence then reduces strife.
“If all we have is what we feel,
“Sensation will define what’s real.
“When I feel cold and you feel hot
“Truth becomes a Gordian’s knot.
“Thermometers will measure true
“The truth’s not me; the truth’s not you.
“It’s reason that interprets truth
“It’s what we now should teach our youth.”


Left:
“Your thinking’s heartless, emoting’s not.
“Compassion’s never born in thought.
“We need to feel if we’re to see
“The world as one for you and me.”


Right:
“That’s how we differ; it’s not one;
“A father differs from his son.
“Our difference is how we know
“Jack from Jill and Jill from Joe
“The frontal cortex is what welds
“Our differences in unity;
“Emotions break community
“By breaking up by race and class,
“If you’re not favored, you’re an ass.”
“I have a different view of man
“Extolling difference is my plan.
“Each to his own, what’s mine’s not yours.
“I see a world of open doors
“You want doors closed on how you feel
“For you it’s race that does appeal.
“Emotions see just black or white
“And they dictate what’s wrong or right.
“That’s how you voted to elect
“Joe Biden who did all affect
“With spending sprees still in effect
“And industry he then did wreck,
“And border crossings in the millions;
“Illegals helped to spend his trillions.
“All based on feelings of old Joe
“Who said that Trump was our foe.
“What was his plan save to expend
“Our wealth in causes with no end?”


Left:
“But, I say, we must emote
“To know for whom to cast a vote
“Supporting those who need it most
“In Guatemala to the Gold Coast.
“And all the UN wants to back
“Like climate that is now attacked.”


Right:
“Listen now as you declare,
“We spend our money on the air,
“We spend it on our enemies.
“We give them dollars; ourselves, pennies.
“Remember Bagram left behind
“For Taliban an easy find?
“Joe left them billions to equip
“Each warlord with a chieftainship.”
“And now your party pickets ICE
“Emotions give such bad advice.
“You Lefties side with Venezuelans
“With vicious organizations
“With those who hate the Jews
“And with Hamas and Hezbollah
“I see it in the daily news
“Your coeds dressed in a burqa
“Their feelings born in ignorance
“Of women’s lives in Middle East
“Where they’re considered as the least.
“How the coeds seem to feel
“Does not relate to what is real.”


Left:
“You have no heart or empathy
“That is the human destiny.
“And now you send illegals back
“To their own countries and to jails
“And that is where your thinking fails.
“Aren’t they people like you and me?”


Right:
“But those sent back were on a spree
“Of murder, rape, and thievery.
“Selective outrage hides the fact
“Of how their victims now react
“Or try to sleep quite unperturbed
“Their nightmares have their nights disturbed.
“Compassion’s good and has its place
“But you must look into a face
“Of a mom who lost her child
“Because Old Joe let gangs run wild.
“You let emotion drag you down
“You’re out there singing like a clown.
“For what and whom and just because?
“Are foreign gangs your only cause?
“See that is where your feelings fail
“A thinker thinks to use a jail
“To put away MS-13
“Before they kill another teen.
“Emoting’s fine with common sense
“Your screaming ‘Nazi’ is no defense
“No matter how your pundits try
“They lose debate with each bold lie
“As in those silly statements made
“To claim old Joe just should have stayed,
“To claim Kamala was so smart
“When everyone could plainly see
“And in their brains thought differently.
“And one more thought to end debate:
“Emotion is not good for fate.”


The Quiz
I’ll make this simple and real short
Just “Yes” or “No” in your retort.

1. Are you a liberal with a plan?
2. Do Democrats all think alike?
3. Do you support Tren de Aragua?
4. Did you favor spending sprees without accountability?
5. If you believe climates are changing, do you agree spending trillions will halt the change?   
6. Do you favor DEI?
7. If “yes” to #5, do you have a favorite sports team?
8. If “yes” to #5 and #6, do they keep score?
9. Are you a conservative without a plan?
10. Do you object to some conservative policies?
11. Do you want all illegals deported?
12. Do you have evidence that spending trillions will prevent climates from changing?

We’ve fallen. Humanity’s rise to the pinnacle of life has ended as we’ve slipped on emotion and ignorance. We’ve climbed part way to the pinnacle of evolution only to find uneasy footing on fissile shale. And we’re sliding down the slope toward the Valley of Fools, where we’ll likely be little more than organic detritus on a talus of broken lithic debris.


Case in point (as “they” say): After years of hearing about road rage incidents, we now have stories about parking rage. You read me right: parking rage. We don’t even have to be moving and colliding.


In Miami, Porsche driver Anthony Russian shot a person in the foot—after allegedly trying to kill him—over the victim’s taking too much time to park his car. * In Honolulu, Nathaniel Radimak assaulted a teenage girl learning to lateral park. **Certainly, these two incidents exemplify our slide into that valley of fools.


But There’s More


We might tend to dismiss these two parking-rage incidents as isolated, as the work of aberrant individuals. Radimak and Russian aren’t, we might argue, representative of our species. But if they are not representative of our species, then they are certainly representative of our times.


Our times? Maybe all times. We’ve been sliding, if we go by the ancient tale of Cain and Abel, over all our murderous and war-filled existence. And to what end? Makes me want to get in the face of Nathaniel Radimak and Anthony Russian to say Dr. Phil like, “What the H were you thinking?” And speaking of Russian, I’ll mention the more than a million Russian casualties in the Ukraine invasion. Makes me want to get in the face of Vladimir Putin to say, “What the H were you thinking?” Why all the anger, hate, and wasted life?


Thinking might have little to do with the slide. Emotions were the driver—parker?—in the Miami and Honolulu incidents. Emotion is certainly tied to Putin’s continued support for a failed invasion. Make that one secondary emotion in particular, Pride. And like Putin, many members of our species would rather throw away more lives than admit a mistake. Think of Radimak and Russian, the former throwing his future into the prison system by his rash acts of needless violence; the latter apparently willing to kill another over parking too slowly.


Is There Any Hope We Will Reach the Top?


I wouldn’t bet on success in the upward climb for the species as a whole. Sure, some exceptional people will stand on the top for their brief lifetimes, but regardless of their exemplary lives, there will still be Radimaks, Russians, and, well, Russians.


The climb over fissile rocks is difficult. The problem we all face is that the mountain we endeavor to climb is composed of eroded and fissile shales. We don’t make much progress as we slide on rock that cleaves as we step, causing us to expend our energy just to maintain our position on the mountain side.


But hope lies in the same folly that causes so many to fail. Bereft of a resigning wisdom that says most of us will, in fact, fail to find firm footing, some of us will still deign to climb higher, find more energy to be better, lend helping hands to those below, and keep looking upward.


I hope you are one of them. Not getting angry over parking is ironically, “a start.”


*https://nypost.com/2025/05/11/us-news/miami-porsche-driver-anthony-russian-shoots-motorist-in-foot-over-parking-spot-at-miami-airbnb/
Miami Porsche driver shoots motorist in foot for ‘taking too long’ backing into tight spot: cops. By Shane Galvin Published May 11, 2025, 2:46 a.m. ET


**https://nypost.com/2025/05/11/us-news/tesla-road-rage-driver-nathaniel-radimak-arrested-in-hawaii-for-assault-on-teen-driver-less-than-a-year-after-prison-release/
Serial Tesla road rage driver Nathaniel Radimak attacks mom, daughter in Hawaii — less than year after being released in California: police. By Nicholas McEntyrePublished May 11, 2025, 2:37 a.m. ET

Two old astrobiologists talk in an abandoned observatory. Gladys, an optimist, talks to Mark.


Gladys: Well, Mark, it’s time to acknowledge that in spite of our experiments and observations, we haven’t found that alien life we’ve spent our careers looking for.


Mark: I was sure we would find it on Mars. But I’m not done looking. Can’t wait to explore Europa, especially with the AI driven drones we’re sure to launch. But, Gladys, I’m surprised at you, an optimist, saying something negative. Surely, you don’t want to give up the search. With two trillion galaxies out there, we’ve just started to explore.


Gladys: Giving up the search hasn’t made me a pessimist. It has made me more optimistic about my own life. I have gained a new respect for what I… what we are. It’s been centuries since Copernicus said we don’t have a special position in the universe, Galileo and Kepler proved it, and Bruno said there are other worlds. In all those centuries we have looked and looked, waited and waited for some intelligent life beyond Earth. And you know what, Mark?


Mark: No. What?


Gladys: We’ve come back to a pre-Copernican Cosmos, where we are, in fact, special, because we have no evidence that another kind of conscious being exists, and I don’t care how many galaxies there are, how many nebulae have organic molecules, or how many carbonaceous chondrites land on Earth, demonstrating the presence of carbon in space. Yeah, there might be the stuff of life out there, but not, as far as we know…and we’ve searched pretty far…


Mark: But the presence of water is one key substance we’ve looked for, and we know that Europa has some. Mars has some, also.


Gladys: Mark, Mark, Mark. Let’s say you find a microbe. Then what? Conscious microbe?Intelligent microbe? Communicative microbe? We would still be alone as the only conscious form the universe possesses. So, isolated still? Yes, but that only enhances our special status as the universe aware of itself. We are, to go back to those pre-Renaissance times, the center. Not the physical center, of course because we think that in a pre-Big Bang singularity, everything was “the center.” Think, Mark, sure it’s possible that another part of that singularity acquired consciousness, self-consciousness, but we have little chance of finding it. We’re the center because we’re unique. I might still look for a distant microbe, but intelligent life? If it’s out there, as Fermi asked, where is it? Why haven’t we run into it? If it shows up, fine, but I’m not holding my breath. Instead, I’m relishing my role as the pinnacle of the universe, the unmatched pinnacle. And to go back to “Where is it?” I know that in a universe at least 13.8 billion years old, intelligent life could have arisen and gone out of existence before human ancestors looked up. So, the time element added to the distance element makes me think that all our recent looking has gone for naught.


Mark: So, your optimism derives from your isolation?


Gladys: Pretty much. I understand the reason for SETI enthusiasm, for the giant dish at the Green Bank Observatory in West Virginia and for other radio astronomy sites. We’ve learned much about the universe from all the expensive terrestrial and space telescopes, but not once have we said, with the exception of that brief “Wow!” signal, that there’s evidence of intelligence beyond Earth. And even that signal might have been just a natural phenomenon. Face it, Mark, you’re special because you are alone. This search for extraterrestrial life is essentially an endeavor of the idle affluent, of a civilization in which astronomers can look up because they don’t have to look down, that is, to look at the soil to see if the vegetables and grains have grown. Civilization includes people who see to the necessities. You and I build observatories because we don’t have to grow corn. Searching for extraterrestrials is the occupation of the coddled.


Mark: But finding that life will be a great discovery.


Gladys: Actually, I would say that discovering the methods for discovering life is greater. We use radio waves, X-rays, gamma rays, infrared rays, cosmic rays, and experiments with organic molecules, all unknown to our ancestors. We have new ways of expanding our awareness, new ways to observe and measure. The observations don’t justify the deductions, however.


Mark: What do you mean?


Gladys: I’ve relied on this joke before, but I’ll say it again because it once chosen as the “best” joke. Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson went camping in a remote place, say the to the moors.
They set up their little camp, lighted the fire, then tired from the hiking, decided to go to sleep. In the middle of the night Holmes woke Watson, saying, “Watson, Watson, wake up. Look up and tell me what you observe and deduce.” Watson, knowing he was in the presence of the world’s greatest detective, a man known for his deductive abilities, said, “Holmes, I see stars, thousands of stars. I surmise that around some of those stars there are planets, and on some of those there is life. And further…” he said as he cleared his throat, “I surmise that some of that life possesses complex brains and that some of those brains have achieved consciousness. From this, I deduce that there is intelligent life elsewhere in the universe,” he finished pleased with his logic. To which Holmes, the great deducer said, “No, Watson, you idiot, someone stole our tent.”


Mark: Ha! Perfect joke, false premise followed by misdirection followed by an unexpected twist. Reminds me of the guy who became interested in astronomy, so he put in a skylight in his ceiling and bought a telescope. His neighbors upstairs weren’t pleased.


Gladys: But I had a point in telling the joke though I do like yours. We’ve been surmising on the basis of possibility. We astrobiologists, science fiction writers, film makers have all been Watsons. We have wanted to find meaning elsewhere. We wanted the universe to be like the world we know. But so far, evidence points to it’s being a universe of stuff, just unthinking stuff with the one exception. If we find microbes floating in the depths of Europa, or methanogens on Titan, it will only prove that primitive life exists elsewhere, but none of our deducing—saying, for example, that if Earth’s early unicellular life led to us, then it could lead to beings like us with time—none of that deducing is proof of life, and certainly not proof of intelligent life.
    And you know, Mark, if our first communications, those radio waves sent out 105 years ago when KDKA Pittsburgh started broadcasting, would be 105 light years away. Assuming that intelligent life intercepts them anywhere along their path, derives meaning from them, say understanding a commercial for Mother’s Oats, then it would take any of those civilizations the equivalent number of years to respond. Would we be listening to the right frequency? Could we even know we heard any organized message if their return broadcast was at 1020 on our AM dials? Remember, also, that Earth and the Solar System have moved since those signals were broadcast. So, how do the aliens target Earth to ask, “What are Mother’s Oats?”


Mark: Nevertheless, your statements still make me wonder about your optimism. Sounds to me that you’re like Voltaire’s Pangloss in Candide. No matter what happened he said or implied, “This is the best of all possible worlds.” It was a parody of eighteenth century optimism because of all the tragedies Pangloss and Candide observe.


Gladys: No, I’m an optimist because I know that until proven incorrect by an alien encounter, that I’m special in having observable intelligence, in being self aware. The moon isn’t self aware. I’m retiring from astrobiology. It was fun while it lasted, but my optimism is rooted in realism. I ask with Fermi, “Where is it?” I can’t deduce there is intelligent life elsewhere and know I can prove my deduction. Yes, I’ll acknowledge that in so many years—a hundred, a thousand, ten thousand—someone will surprise everyone with a discovery of alien life, but I find meaning in the world around me. Unlike Watson, I know the tent is missing. That’s the commonsense deduction Watson should have made when he saw the night sky above him. My deduction is that we have reason to be optimistic because we have little choice in the matter. Life is here. Life here is significant because it its unique. That uniqueness is the root of my optimism and my self esteem. Want to study life in the Cosmos? Look in a mirror, Mark.

I’ve asked this before: Are you happy?


Tough question. Sometime and somewhere in my youth I heard the line attributed to Tolstoy in the context of his novel Anna Karenina: "The surest way to make someone unhappy is to ask if they [sic.] are happy.”


See, right there I’ve probably made some people unhappy.


“What?” you ask. “How?”


As some would see it, the nitpicking. Someone, the antecedent, is singular; they is plural. “For gosh’s sake, Donald, those years of correcting papers are long behind you. Let them go. Get on with your life. What’s next, correcting the text I sent you?”


Sorry, I had to insert that “[sic.]” to avoid being accused of faulty grammatical number agreement. I realize this is a time when people are “identifying” as plural entities (i.e., “they”), but the logic of the language, if not the practice, is ingrained, has been ingrained since elementary school. Heck, my mother, an avid crossword, puzzle solver, and newspaper reader with only a ninth grade education (dropped out to help support the large family of siblings during the Depression), as I was saying, my mother constantly corrected my teenage grammar. Habit, then, to add “sic.” (“thus”) in deference to a career of correcting thousands of student papers and proofreading numerous graduate theses, dissertations, and reports. And, yes, I have corrected text messages, but I fear I’m losing the fight to emoji language. LOL. But I’ll admit that before my recent cataract surgery, I made numerous typographical errors in blogs and, by pressing "send" let Siri send off words I never chose—She’s more exasperating  than I believe I am.


Have I just made you unhappy by the distraction? You were just thinking about happiness when I seemed to have changed the subject, but there’s s method here.


Distraction


With all our electronic media, we live in the Era of Ultimate Distraction. The obsession we have with news 24/7, podcasts, YouTube videos, and, well, everything else that intrudes our lives, all add to billions of people living either consciously or unconsciously by comparison and in distraction. Keeping up with the neighborhood Jones family, once a bit more compressed by localism, has been expanded to the world of Jones families. You might not care about the fashion that Kim Kardashian sports on some red carpet or the fashion that Bianca Censori did NOT wear, but it’s in your head, forced there as a distraction on your daily life. “And why don’t you care?” some gossip columnist or blogger might ask. “What else is worth knowing, save the goings on of the rich and famous, the stupid and reckless, the evil and political? Do any of these distractions and comparisons add to your happiness? Are you happy, for example, that Taylor Swift is happy, or rich, or dating? But even if you are indifferent, doesn’t the knowledge forced upon you by various media affect you? Just a little? Come on, now, be honest. It’s non-natural concupiscence to do a double take.


There you are, ready to watch a football game when abruptly the camera swings to the box where Taylor Swift sits or stands or claps  and high fives her new friends. Geez. It is a game you want to see, not a display of a player’s girlfriend. Distraction.


But that’s just one small distraction in a life of distractions. How can any of us be truly happy in such a life? *

You Don’t Need Research for the Obvious, as Stanislav Said


Did you know that there are people out there whose energies have gone into discovering what makes people happy? Yep. Guess what they found out. Yep. Stuff you already know. Stuff like being generous and helping others, paying compliments in a pay-it-forward interaction, giving solace, and all that other “stuff.”


A gregarious species finds happiness in its gregariousness. The COVID period taught many that lesson. Isolation is the most devastating psychological condition for most people regardless of what they might say, such as, “I hate people.” Withdrawing is a symptom of depression, the antithesis of happiness. Well, then, if we are gregarious, can the social scientists tell us about happiness?


In his 1972 Social Sciences as Sorcery, * Stanislav Andreski challenged his colleagues by noting how they failed in their attempts to turn common knowledge into “science.” He noted that after wading through pages of formulae and esoteric language, we find that people are gregarious, a fact Stanislav says he can believe because his grandmother told him so. In Andreski’s words, “Pretentious and nebulous verbosity, interminable repetition of platitudes and disguised propaganda are the order of the day, while at least 95 per cent of research is indeed re-search for things that have been found long ago and many times since” (p. 11).


If the answer to the happiness question doesn’t come from the social scientists, does it lie in the work of psychologists? They’ve given it considerable attention. And again, the answer to that happiness question seems to lie in our obvious gregariousness, in charity, aid, and gratitude.


Nothing Profound Here


Sufficient numbers of wealthy people have committed suicide to indicate that riches are not a guarantee of happiness. Neither are fame and drugs. Certainly, we know that admiration for others can simply lead to our asking, “But what about me?”


“Have you considered philosophy, Donald?”


Great suggestion. I had a philosopher colleague who was Heideggerian existentialist. He focused on play as a fundamental human need. Or maybe it was play as a fundamental characteristic. Definitely, play plays a role in happiness. We’ve seen colts and calves frolicking, puppies and kitties tumbling, and full-grown dogs fetching sticks and balls (just part of their hunting instinct?). We played as children. We have grown into adults whose play can be as frivolous as a weekend softball game to serious gambling in Vegas. Is investing a form of play?


Then, of course, there’s that nasty withdrawal that results from bad knees that prevent one from running the bases, bad shoulders and elbows that prevent us from the courts of tennis and basketball, and insufficient funds that prevent us from sitting at a card table in Vegas. Such withdrawals are inevitable. So, as my late Heidegger expert might argue, there appears to be a type of positive play that contrasts with a type of negative play. The positive one uplifts. But as with all philosophies, the problem lies in practicality. If all we do is temporary, can the happiness derived from the sundry forms of play ever last a lifetime? And how, I might ask, does happiness square with the existential world of dread and anxiety. Is it a distraction from a lifetime of trauma, tragedy, losses, and failures. Is it a distraction from death? WAIT! Wait. Yes, I just had a thought. Is happiness the ultimate distraction?  


Which, my dear reader, brings us back to our gregarious nature. People people are generally happier than Bah-Humbug Dickensian grouches. And that’s not a profound discovery. No one needs to tell you that. Fulfill your destiny to be a people person. Apparently, making others happy is the best way to become happy.
  

*https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/01/magazine/happiness-research-studies-relationships.html


**Get the book in the library because it’s outrageously expensive to buy ($95 on eBay to $695 elsewhere) Oh! Library? That’s a building that stores thousands of books you can borrow for the price of a library card. 

In the coffee cafe, an old guy (OG) and young guy (YG) talk.


OG: I see the Press is all over the first 100 days of the Trump Administration, some favoring and some criticizing the period.


YG: Sure, he said he would end the war in Ukraine, bring down prices, et cetera.


OG: Well, ending the war in Ukraine was probably a bridge too far, given the nature of Putin, the involvement of NATO, and Zelensky’s reluctance to concede by losing Crimea and eastern Ukraine. With regard to prices, I’d say that they will come down or wages will go up to the same effect, but that the crying about prices that were coming from the Democrats was plain hypocrisy because they had no problem with 9% inflation and high prices for four years under Biden. Now inflation is back down almost to Trumpian years, those of his previous term. Nevertheless, I suspect GDP will suffer at least until new trade deals are finalized.


YG: Yeah, about those tariffs.


OG: Let me guess. You’re concerned that the stuff China sells you at Walmart will be more expensive.


YG: No doubt.


OG: Could you give me change? I want to leave Josh the waiter a tip, but I have only a hundred.


YG: Sure, Twenties and fives okay? I don’t have any ones.


OG: Yep. I’ll take five twenties and eight fives.


YG: A hundred equals five twenties. What’s with the extra $40 in fives? Hundred forty doesn’t equal a hundred.


OG: Yet, you have no problem with the trade imbalance.


YG: I don’t understand.


OG: So, you object to giving me $140 for my hundred, but you don’t object to giving China more money than China gives the US. You see the unevenness when it’s your money, your very personal up-close money, but you can’t understand that you have been giving away the country’s, and therefore your, money to China in the trade imbalance.


YG: I hadn’t thought of it that way.


OG: I understand the dissociation of personal finances and national finances, but you should understand why a little bit of economic pain in the short term can undo decades of economic pain you accepted without thinking. America can always generate more wealth, but it’s folly to continue massive trade imbalances with countries that see the US as little more than a big fat cash cow.
    Now, about that change for the hundred…


En la cafetería, un señor mayor (SM) y un joven (J) conversan.
SM: Veo que la prensa está encima de los primeros 100 días del gobierno de Trump, algunos lo apoyan y otros lo critican.
J: Claro, él prometió terminar la guerra en Ucrania, bajar los precios, y todo eso.
SM: Bueno, acabar con la guerra en Ucrania era pedirle peras al olmo, considerando cómo es Putin, el involucramiento de la OTAN, y que Zelensky no quiere ceder Crimea ni el este de Ucrania. En cuanto a los precios, yo diría que o bajan solos o suben los sueldos y da lo mismo. Pero que los demócratas se quejaran tanto de los precios fue pura hipocresía, porque no dijeron nada cuando hubo 9% de inflación y precios por las nubes durante cuatro años con Biden. Ahora la inflación casi está de vuelta a los niveles de la era Trump, de su mandato anterior. Aun así, sospecho que el PIB va a resentirse hasta que se cierren nuevos acuerdos comerciales.
J: Sí, sobre esos aranceles...
SM: A ver, déjame adivinar. Te preocupa que lo que compras en Walmart hecho en China te salga más caro.
J: Sin duda.
SM: ¿Me podés dar cambio? Quiero dejarle propina a Josh, el mesero, pero solo tengo un billete de cien.
J: Claro, ¿te sirven billetes de veinte y de cinco? No tengo de uno.
SM: Sí, está bien. Dame cinco de veinte y ocho de cinco.
J: Pero cien son cinco veintes. ¿Qué onda con los $40 extra en fives? Ciento cuarenta no es cien.
SM: Y sin embargo, no te molesta el desequilibrio comercial.
J: No te sigo.
SM: O sea, te molesta darme $140 por mi billete de cien, pero no te molesta que China reciba más dinero de EE.UU. del que nos da. Ves lo desigual cuando se trata de TU plata, de la que tenés en el bolsillo, pero no te das cuenta que llevás años regalándole al país asiático la plata de tu país, y por lo tanto, la tuya.
J: Nunca lo había pensado así.
SM: Entiendo que uno separe la economía personal de la nacional, pero hay que entender que un poco de dolor económico ahora puede corregir décadas de pérdida que aceptaste sin cuestionar. Estados Unidos puede generar más riqueza, claro, pero seguir manteniendo un déficit comercial enorme con países que nos ven como una vaca lechera gigante es un disparate.
Ahora sí… ¿me das el cambio del billete de cien?

If you skim through YouTube, you’ll find videos on the nature of reality. Some are very good. Among the good, I count those like the discussion at Dartmouth between physicist Sean Carroll and Buddhist authority Alan Wallace. Good? Because it recalls a topic that underlies most previous human discussions on reality and hints at the concept Descartes held, i.e., the mind-body duality.
    Is the world “real,” or do we just “think” it’s real? Framed another way, the question centers on whether or not either mind or body exists independently. If neither does, then which one is dependent.


Incoming Old Man’s Anecdote Alert: Dive, dive, dive


I didn’t have the typical high school life. I chose to enter a Catholic boarding school that encouraged meditation before the crush of daily study, lectures, and recreational activities clouded students’ minds. Up and meditating at 5:30 AM for about a half hour daily in my teen years was a process that convinced me that we are not, as Sean Carroll seems to argue in the video, merely physical entities composed of interworking subatomic particles and quantum fields driven to act under the influence of the four fundamental forces in Nature—and maybe some forces or fields we have yet to discover. Although I do agree that those physical entities are at work, I have long suspected that mind is more than brain and more than the gut bacteria that seem to exert some control over who we are.
    Mind exists separately in my view and in spite of experiments on “readiness potential” that show our awareness of acting proceeds only after the brain works to initiate an action. And, “No,” before you ask, I do not think my mind preceded my having a brain or those gut bacteria. Additionally, “No,” I do not believe in a Star Wars Force that in a tradition similar to Buddhist thought permeates the physical universe and allows telekinesis. Finally, “No,” I also don’t think the ancient Greeks’ nous (νοῦς) warrants a belief in anamnesis (ἀνάμνησις). Whatever I share with others is neither a matter of deja vu nor a matter of a priori. But I will admit to humans having inner and reptilian brain segments that drive some behavior like the instinctual reflex to ducking one’s head after a sudden unexpected loud sound. However, I do think that minds can intertwine themselves even when brains are separated though I have no proof other than…


The Experiment


    With classmates similarly trained (practiced) in meditation, I sometimes found myself practicing mind games, such as staring at the back of someone’s head in an assembly and suggesting merely by thinking that he should turn around. To our collective and to my individual surprise, the process seemed to work as efficiently as getting others to yawn by yawning but unlike the latter, accomplished without direct observation. In running the experiment we had to ask whether we were giving away our intention by some physical activity like breathing heavily or twitching in our seats as we stared or that one of us was caught ij the subject’s peripheral vision. Possibly we were giving some physical sign, but we made an effort not to do anything physically save staring and thinking. And at times, I performed the experiment alone with equal success. With no way save repeated attempts to verify the effect of one mind on another outside sensory experience, I have to admit my conclusion is possibly faulty, very faulty. Yet, the experience seems virtually universal as script writers have revealed when they give a character the line, “I think someone is watching us.”


Telepathy or Experience?
  
    And then there’s that reading someone’s intention or even completing someone’s sentence that you might have done. I acquired that latter ability through those hours of quiet contemplation to the annoyance of numerous speakers whom I rudely interrupted mid-sentence. How could I know the exact words they were about to say? Was it, as I believe anyone could reasonably argue, simply a matter of knowing the language and the common-speak? Anyone familiar with idiomatic expressions knows standard combinations of words, phrases, and clauses. Everyone shares a basic 20-40,000 word vocabulary. Let me illustrate: “She’s the apple of….” You completed that, of course, with “my eye.” That one goes all the way back to the biblical story of Eve and loose interpretations of the famous Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil in the Garden of Eden as an apple tree. (Leave it to parochial westerners to think “apple” and not “fig” or “date”)
    All well and good for idioms and common English similes and metaphors, but I found myself capable of completing even those expressions less frequently used, those I might call unique to the circumstance of the moment, before—I’ll emphasize BEFORE—a person expressed a thought in words. Sometimes, I said the sentence as a person began to speak. Strange, but again, explicable as a simple response to the context of a conversation in the limited idiom of a single, familiar language.
    Experience is a great teacher as we know, and as the author of Ecclesiastes writes, “That which hath been is that which shall be; and that which hath been done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun” (New American version). How do we learn language, idiom, and culture? Immersion in the sea of repetitive examples is one answer. The brain records the thousands of leagues we spent under that sea and makes the seamounts, reefs, and life we passed available on Nemo’s demand or on the surprise blurting of a lowly seaman named Broca, “Cap’n, sir, we saw this last year. Remember?”
    So, maybe I had no ability to read a mind in a non-physical sense. Maybe I had no ability to link my mind to another’s. Instead, I was simply recalling how I had heard words used to describe or explain something analogous, something very familiar. That is a legitimate thought given that we compose songs, write lyrics and poems, pen lengthy stories all on the bases of patterns like the six or seven basic literary plots, the frequencies on the standard music scale and 12 notes in an octave, common chords, and the rhythms like iambic pentameter and rhymes like “fish” and “wish” we have learned. If you need some anecdotal evidence on this, then I suggest you watch the YouTube video entitled “Axis of Awesome - 4 Four Chord Song (with song titles).” Is there an alternate interpretation of my completing another’s thought? Maybe I was improvising with words as musicians do with notes in a Bourbon Street bar.
    Certainly, I don’t use all English words. Definitely, a search of my last 2,000 blogs reveals I’m not the Bard whose plays contain 25,000 unique words. Willy would be the ultimate challenger in the game Scrabble, definitely one I could not beat unless I had by chance picked the “Q,” “U,” “X,” “J,” “C,” “H,” and “V” while he had only letters valued 1, like the vowels.
    I know at least the average number of words, so anticipating what another average speaker might say could be attributed to mere guesswork and not telepathy.
    
    Separating all we have experienced from all we might do is quite possibly impossible. A statement like “This reminds me…” is the most superficial of examples revealing the connections our brains make effortlessly. Nevertheless, I tend to believe I’m onto something legitimate in saying minds are nonlocal. I believe I have communicated with others in the sense of influencing their behavior as in the staring experiment.


What, then, Are We to Make of Empathy?


    Was it Clinton who said, “I feel your pain”? Could he have been lying? He did, after all say, “I did not have sex with that woman, opening the linguistic door to all sorts of meanings for the word sex. Sorry, got distracted. “Feel the pain of another”? Is the validity of that statement as questionable as “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”
    And since I mentioned Shakespeare above, I should also bring up acting, the ultimate joining of one mind with another, even an imaginary other. Actors do this on two levels, one in their portrayal within a fictional world and the other in their connection to the audience’s world. Hey, I’ll admit, I got teary eyed when Spock died in Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan and during the scene in Interstellar when Coop visited an elderly Murphy who said her dad promised he’d return. I “felt” for other characters who experienced tragic moments. How was I connected? I especially ask, “How was I connected to fictional characters?” They weren’t “real” like a brick except in the minds of the writers, actors, and audience. Is the empathy simply an expression of an overwrought narcissism? “The world is nothing if not about me. That death could be mine as Gerard Manley Hopkins writes in “Spring and Fall: To a Young Child.”
        
Márgarét, áre you gríeving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leáves like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Ah! ás the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you wíll weep and know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sórrow’s spríngs áre the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It ís the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.


So, no connection to others save in their modeling what might happen to me? Spock’s death is my eventual death; Coop’s separation is mine. The empathy isn’t outward. It’s intensely inward. The inner brain simply reacts to a personal danger. And nothing is more personal than death, especially the first death we encounter, as Dylan Thomas writes, “After the first death there is no other.” And as the early existentialists obsessed, the dread or anxiety we experience lies in knowing that we, our friends, and family are all destined to die, our mortality binding our emotions to our reasoning, our minds linked in a common knowledge.


Mind Control


Those who argue the world is meaningless because it acts without mind rely on those fundamental forces, fields, and particles acting randomly. And then to confuse us, they throw in a puzzling fact. The fate of “particles” and wave phenomena seem somehow dependent on observation as though mind is interlocked with “body.” The analog is Schrödinger's cat whose life and death are in superposition and unknown until someone or some recording instrument opens the box. Just because phenomena occur doesn’t mean we conscious beings cause them to occur. What if we’re merely late to the party? The DJ had already announced the next song before we took off our coats and threw them on the bed.


In anticipating and then saying the sentence another person was about to speak was I in control or being controlled? It is possible that the other’s mind influenced me to utter words that after uttering, I attributed the process to my telepathy. Was I merely taking visual or audible clues to their logical end? Maybe I merely anticipated that the road was either a cul-de-sac or an Interstate.


The Big Nous


Not a Force as in Star Wars, but an omnipresent Deity? I think of statements like Christ’s “Before Abraham was, I am.” Or of Yahweh’s “I Am Who Am.” Both statements hint at an overriding and suffusing Mind, timeless. Existence Itself aware of Itself. This is, of course, a root western thought that personalizes Nous and sits at the heart of Creation. The Cosmos is the product of Omniscient Mind, not of the quantum vacuum and unconscious Nothingness. The delicately balanced forces that enable life and consciousness could not have been random unless an untold number of universes exist, most unfavorable to life; most unfavorable to Mind, but one—this One—uniquely primed to foster its potential.This one imbued with mind by Mind.


The physicists reject this. But isn’t rejecting an act of mind? The mind can’t, as Augustine of Hippo pointed out in De Trinitate, deny its existence. What would do the denying? Any denial is itself a confirmation.


Out of Body Experience
 
In the YouTube video of Carroll and Wallace’s discussion, Wallace calls for a science of mind, postulating that a number of people devoted to meditation and examining mind gathered over an uncertain number of years could arrive at a science of mind. But “science” entails quantification though there are many who now argue the validity of qualitative research, especially those in the social “sciences.” The problem for those who would establish a science of mind as distinguished from, say, the “science”of psychologists and neuroscientists, is that both of those document behavior and electro-biochemical reactions clearly observable in some manner (e.g., direct observation or fMRI) whereas there is no current indisputable way to measure, for example, out-of-body episodes (OBE) other than through reports on psychedelic drug use or chance fMRI imaging during an unpredictable OBE driven by some Shirley McClain trip to the Andes.


Where Does This Leave Us?


It’s a personal matter, this mind business. I know by experience that I seemed at times to have connected to other minds, and one of those connections was far more dramatic than any of the others. My spouse and I experienced an intertwining that seems impossible and inexplicable. In the college dining room in the midst of clinking silverware, dishes, and glasses punctuating others’ loud conversations, we had for a moment a joint OBE, an experience that we both describe as being somehow above our physical nature, somehow sparkling and twinkling above us at the apex of a triangle formed with our two heads at the base angles, a kind of pyramid of joining, not some dollar bill eye at the top, but our minds and those proverbial “bells” people mention. It didn’t last long, but while it did, the “outside world”—that “objective one” through which we move the way matter becomes matter by interaction with the Higgs boson—faded away. We were minds interlocked.


Was it chance hormonal activity driven by the proximity of pheromones? It didn’t seem so. It seemed both at the time and in retrospect a real “joining” of minds that we still speak of occasionally.


But nothing in my personal experience with mind can be quantified like matter under the influence of fundamental forces, particles, or fields. Not vector definitely, but scalar possibly? I’ll grant that latter designation because the experience we had in the dining room was certainly “intense.” So, if Wallace’s volunteers of mind-students can develop a science of mind, the measurements will probably be scalar, the measuring devices like thermometers not speedometers.


The acknowledgement that mind exists separately from body, the door is open for mind to exist beyond body, even beyond death. Could its continued existence account for ghost stories, communication with the dead, the efficacy of prayer? The Afterlife?


Personal experience has opened me to accepting a universe of possibilities I cannot quantify. It opens me to accepting a level of or type of existence best described as spiritual. Unlike the physicist, I cannot relegate myself to a dull atheism with regard to the origin of mind, dull because it cannot admit its own contradictory tenets that allow a mind to deny its existence as different from brain activity.


I know I have not resolved all you might have hoped for. I have not reached a definitive answer. I might even have infuriated you. I’ll say it once more: If I have given you a point of departure for your own thoughts, I’ve done my job. We might never have a meeting of the minds. That’s all right—except just saying that hints that we have minds.

“I should have listened.” “I should have known.” “I acted rashly.” “I’m sorry.”


Aria (Advanced Research and Invention Agency) is about to risk your well being just to run an experiment on a hypothesis, on a process in progress, on the popularized notion that climate change is a natural phenomenon within human control. Aria, in an attempt to reduce incoming solar radiation, will fund cloud seeding with reflective aerosols. * If they are successful in their effort to geoengineer the planet and, by happenstance, some Icelandic or Indonesian volcano erupts as Laki did in 1783 and Krakatoa did in 1883, you’ll be wearing a double layer of your winter clothes—or maybe wearing your winter coat in summer as people did during the “Year without a Summer” (1816) that followed the successive eruptions of first Mayon in the Philippines and then Tambora in Indonesia. Volcanoes do their own geoengineering from time to time.


I’ve written about this before. I’ve warned against doing it. But who am I? Don’t the “scientists” know better? Don’t the politicians? Sorry, Am I picking on people like Bernie Sanders, Alexeandria Ocasio-Cortez, and a host of other Democrats who, with former Presidents Joe Biden and Barack Obama, have declared climate change an “existential threat” and the cause of wildfires that spread through poorly managed forests encompassing residential areas that didn’t exist a century ago? Actually, yes, because I believe Aria’s attempt would most likely hav their approval, as a similar proposal had the Biden Administration’s approval.


That a single volcanic eruption can alter global temperatures by ejecting aerosols into the stratosphere is a lesson learned as far back as the eighteenth century. Benjamin Franklin’s suspected that Laki’s 1783 eruption affected temperatures. A century later with better world-wide interconnectedness through telegraph and newspaper reports, naturalists realized that Krakatoa altered Northern Hemisphere temperatures. If you were alive in 1992, you experienced a smaller, but similar effect, after the 1991 eruption of Pinatubo lowered average temperatures by 0.5–0.6 °C (0.9–1.1 °F) in the Northern Hemisphere and decreased global temperatures by about 0.4 °C (0.7 °F). Were the people of Aria not paying attention?


But unding has erupted into Aria’s pockets, and with no real oversight by skeptics, the “science” of blocking sunlight will probably proceed. As Dr. Sebastian Eastman puts it, “It’s theoretically possible (to cool the planet) with current day technology but there are many practical questions that would need to be answered before they could be done at scale.”


Just because something can be done doesn’t mean it should be done.


You have no say in the matter, of course. In Europe and the USA voters have put in office people who have probably never studied atmospheric physics, the history of glaciation, historical geology, the several climate classification systems, the effects of continentality, land-water distribution, elevation, latitude, cloud dynamics, ocean currents, orography, semi-permanent High and Low pressure systems, atmospheric cycles and prevailing mechanisms for moving heat around the planet, precession, axis tilt, orbit shape, Sun cycles, atmosphere stratification and chemistry, outgassing from forests, natural methane seeps including methane hydrate volatility, volcanic eruptions, and… Well, who am I to say anything that contradicts the wisdom of Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and the people at Aria ready to spend UK taxpayers’ funds on seeding the sky with aerosols?


*https://www.msn.com/en-gb/science/environmental-science/britain-to-approve-50m-sun-dimming-experiments-in-bid-to-prevent-runaway-climate-change/ar-AA1DrKBz