The Evolution of Childhood is chapter one of Foundations of Psychohistory by Lloyd DeMause. I too cannot believe our ignore-ance, and a deep chill sets in with the thought of a fully corporatized puerility.
| "Since Freud, of course, our view of childhood has acquired a new dimension, and in the past half century the study of childhood has become routine for the psychologist, the sociologist, and the anthropologist. It is only beginning for the historian. Such determined avoidance requires an explanation."
|
Psychofraud and Ethical Therapy by John David Garcia was written in 1974, and remains a valuable text. Entire book, well presented, a nice find.
"Ethics, as they will be discussed in this book, are not mystical,
transcendental, existential, or mysterious. Rather, they are scientific,
objectively derivable rules of how best to achieve our basic, innate goals." |
Also available in it's grand entirety online is the above named ethicologist's more recent ('91) weighty tome: Creative Transformation, A Practical Guide for Maximizing Creativity. Frabjous!
| "If the Ethical State cannot establish itself and survive in the United
States, then it may possibly not survive in any other nation, because all
other nations have less freedom than the United States. However, an
Ethical State might start in other, less free nations by an act of ethical
will from visionary leaders, as opposed to rising from the bottom by free
choice as we have proposed. This is an unlikely, but not impossible,
occurrence. That is, after all, how the United States started in the first
place, when an ethical minority used its power at great personal risk to
maximize creativity." | Quining Qualia
| "Which idea of qualia am I trying to extirpate?" |
 With our memetic enema complete we can proceed to masticate fresh memeat without fear of cognitive constipation. Extropian singular beliefs notwithstanding (!), Keith Augustine makes The Case Against Immortality.
| "We know that altering the brain's chemistry can cause drastic personality changes. Schizophrenia and Alzheimer's disease are dramatic examples of mind-brain dependence. If you are thinking of suicide, don't go to a psychiatrist, go to a pharmacologist: A combination of an antidepressant and tryptophan should banish all thoughts of ending your life." | Dimitri Nanopoulos says: The final decision of how we are going to react to an external
signal, we believe, is due to the gravitationally induced spontaneous collapse of the
brain wave function. In this he is in agreement with Sir Penrose and Dr. Hameroff. Then he heads for the stringlands of physics. The Role of Quantum Mechanics in Brain Function.
| "Now, what we found is that even if we do not look at the
system, the system basically erodes because there is always gravitational interaction
that exists. And somehow the interaction of the system with the gravitational force
makes it erode. That means that the wave function is eventually going to localize
even if there is no external observer there." | I wave goodbye to the train of my thought and jump on the reductionist express, where the description is mistaken for the script. The Symphonic Architecture of Mind: The Circulating Wavetrain of Consciousness
| "It is my fundamental hypothesis that consciousness is a circulating multidimensional wavetrain. A brain is a medium in which wavetrains, consciousness being the foremost such wavetrain, cyclically propagate, are transformed, and transform, initiate, and combine with other wavetrains, all of which entrain and are subjected to non-cyclic emotive and tonic influences." | Andy Clark & David J. Chalmers conspire to question Where does the mind stop and the rest of the world begin?, and offer us a vision of The Extended Mind.
| "We advocate a very different sort of externalism: an
active externalism, based on the active role of the environment in driving cognitive processes." | Anxiety and Depression: A Philosophical Investigation has a look at the effect this dichotomy (dynamic tension) twixt joy and nonexistence has, and suggests that these states are a fundamental component of consciousness. How depressing....
| "I believe that philosophy is an essential way of being human and that lived philosophy is prior to any of its methods and theories." |
Anxious to move on, what do I run into but The Horror of Everyday Life: Taxidermy, Aesthetics, and Consumption in
Horror Films. An antithetical exposure of our joyous projections from the weirdly named Journal of Criminal Justice and Popular Culture. (??)
Avoiding the Void, The Lack of Self in Psychotherapy and Buddhism, is a weighty offering that fills the nullity with a transpersonal view.
| "The drugs that people take for non-medicinal reasons do more than
numb pain or enhance pleasure or induce perceptual distortions.
They are a weapon against the void." | Rather than looking for the causes of joy, perhaps we could re-cognize that the greatest happiness is that experiential isness of transtemporal acausality. Nevertheless, the 3rd Annual Consciousness and Experiential Psychology Conference approached Consciousness and Well-being with a diversity of opinion; and don't be thrown off by the quote below, as after we finish laughing there is much of interest to sculpt our delight.
| "This paper surveys the main causes of joy." |
a finding:
| "Zero-order correlations showed that the Existential Well-Being subscale of
the SWBS was significantly and inversely related to the Bodily Symptoms subscale
of the MPHQ (r(79) = -.303, p < .01), and positively related to the Perceived
Health subscale of the MPHQ (r(79) = .405, p < .01)." | William Glasser, M.D is certainly blunt in the analysis of his own profession (I am painfully aware that we have made no measurable progress in reducing the number of people currently diagnosed and treated as if they are mentally ill.) which adds credibility to this look at Reality Therapy in the Year 2000.
| "What Choice Theory makes crystal clear is that when 99% of the people in the world have difficulty getting along with someone else, they use an ancient, common-sense belief, I call external control psychology. This controlling, punishing, I-know-what's-right-for-you psychology is the source of the unsatisfying relationships present in so many people's lives. The more it is used in any relationship, the more the relationship is harmed and, eventually, destroyed. This psychology is a plague on humanity." | Tap, tap, tap; taap, taap, taap; tap, tap, tap. Are treatments such as Thought Field Therapy the distress calls of a social ship that has struck the iceburg of glacial genetic evolution? Our souls cry out for the flow of cognitive revolution to stop, if only long enough to grok our location; but there is no time.
Now, if there is any doubt we can refer to William Seager's The Reality of Now.
Pt = t < _
and by extension:
Nt = St_ or (~(t < _) & ~(_ < t))
Ft = _ < t.
No vicious regress or logical incompatibilities emerge. | Herbert FJ Muller makes a start on spanning quality and quantity with tensile threads of ideational silk; and then we find ourselves beautifully clothed. How Do Physicists Build Reality?
| "The contributions of Raman and Abraham suggest, if I understand them correctly, that consciousness can be defined as a very complex system, including a 'chaos' factor. But
will descriptions of hypercomplex objective systems be able to access consciousness in
its full meaning ? I think the answer has to be no: because such an account would need
to include the aspect of subjective experience, and this cannot be done objectively." | Physics and Cognition: A Remnant from the Cat? takes a highly charged subject and reveals the object to be us. Replete with linked references and sagacious commentary, Dimiter G. Chaka brings (us) layfolk through a smooth transition to reflective amazement.
| "Suppose, just for the sake of the argument, that all unsolved mysteries are
linked into one coherent structure, such that all pieces fit perfectly and
none of them is unneeded nor redundant. Perhaps the physics of the brain
could tell us more about other, seemingly unrelated, blank spots in
present-day science. Perhaps we may need to know how the brain works in
order to develop a complete theory of quantum gravity, and vice versa." | We are expecting snow(!) tonight, so the thought of Stuart Hameroff and Alwyn Scott enjoying
A Sonoran Afternoon is a good one; though what dazzles is the clarity of thought in this unedited transcript of their discussion.
| "We both feel uncomfortable with the notion that the mind is nothing more than the switchings off and on of the brain's neurons, and we are both looking for something more. But we're looking in different places." |
Gaze into the screen, but watch what you think. A useful tool or the ultimate control mechanism?
New Technological Windows into Mind raises many questions.
| "At this new phase in the evolution of computer technologies it will be
possible to take into account not just some statistical characteristics of human beings, but create technical systems sensitive to a broad spectrum of actual states and intentions of a person. We are going to discuss -- and to demonstrate -- some of these perspectives concentrating on the following domains: brain imaging methods and, particularly, eye movement research." | Before being able to call into question the tenets, one must have a feel for the field. For what has become a fundamental cognitive constant, The Evolutionary Psychology FAQ provides meat to put over the fire of investigation.
| "Evolutionary psychologists are betting
that cognitive structure, like physiological structure, has also been designed by natural selection to
serve survival and reproduction." | Cognitive Tools, Techniques, Training, & Technology shines a light on many facets, including The Fundamental Reality of Text and Participatory and Interactive Cywebs.
| "Crews of highly developed cognitive beings, augmented in their collaboration by well designed technological systems are, by far, the most powerful force for change in the known universe." | Back to the relative macrosphere with a definitive disquisition On Cognitive Liberty, by Richard Glen Boire, Esq.
| "If freedom is to mean anything, it must mean that each
person has an inviolable right to think for him or herself. It must
mean, at a minimum, that each person is free to direct one's own
consciousness; one's own underlying mental processes, and one's
beliefs, opinions, and worldview. This is self-evident and axiomatic." | One can be no more free of the actual than by embodying the virtual, and this actual virtuality could be our transpersonal future. Max More provides a foundation in A Transhumanist Declaration, version 3.0, The Extropian Principles.
| "We see humanity as a transitory stage in the evolutionary development of intelligence." | This excerpt from When The Dream Becomes Real: The Inner Apocalypse in Mythology, Madness, and the Future by Michael O'Callaghan contains an interview with John Weir Perry M.D., who examines Mental Breakdowns as a Healing Process.
| "The results were amazing: full-blown "schizophrenics" were able to go through what turned out to be only a temporary non-ordinary state of consciousness, and emerge on the far side of madness, as Perry put it, "weller than well."" |
The Voice of the Earth by Theodore Roszak, Reviewed by Ralph Metzner
| "Roszak and I agree that "eco-psychology" should not become a
sub-discipline within psychology, like "developmental
psychology". Rather, eco-psychology is a newly vitalized context
for psychological thinking (as it can be for other disciplines as
well, for example philosophy, economics, sociology, etc),
that will be absolutely essential if we are to survive the next
century with a halfway decent biosphere left, as well as some
capabilities for sane human life-styles." | The Anatomy of a Trauma gives the eight steps to understand and track old feelings that erupt into the present. This paradigm takes the mystery out of the result of a serious blow to the psyche. Such as growing up believing that you are special, talented, unique; and then finding out that in fact "dogsbody" more accurately describes the scene.
Perhaps Burying Freud would be a better idea.
| "Freud does 'not so much sexualize the realm of the intellect as intellectualize the realm of the sexual'- by reducing it to abstract categories, and so separating clean mind from dirty body, lifting Man out of Nature by favoring abstraction over incarnation." | Kenneth Eisold reviews Unfree Associations: Inside Psychoanalytic Institutes, or Life Among the Analysts. Physician, steal my self.
| "This extraordinary book is a labour of love and of rage." | The quantum leap from qualia to quality is thoroughly elucidated in Consciousness:
network-dynamical, informational and phenomenal aspects.
| "Thus, the aim of the article is to
present a broad overview of multi-level aspects of consciousness." |
Generality, Modularity and then Fluidity:
A Review of Stephen Mithen, The Prehistory of the Mind is a masterful summation by Thomas E. Dickins of this important work.
| "I am inclined to treat the detail of this structure with caution but it deserves serious attention and will generate much future research." |
The rediscovery of the human mind is a paper by Rom HarrŽ that explores the revolutions in psychological sciences and their underlying assumptions.
| "There are no 'facts of the matter' in some domain of enquiry that are independent of the method and instruments of enquiry and of the concepts that are used in that enquiry. This is as true of physics as it is of psychology." |
The Mind of the Swarm brings life to science in a general and gentle observation of a buzz of bees in need of new digs.
| "Like a chemical reaction, a photograph developing, there emerged a unifying pattern: neat columns, a phalanx, an army, awakened and marching steadily, relentlessly forward." |
This singular bombinating event can be seen as part of a much greater Interspecies Global Mind. Howard Bloom writes an amazing essay that encapsulates this view, as well as freeing the mind to explore genuine wholeness.
"If you want to stride into the Infinite, move but within the Finite in all directions."
Goethe |
Charles S. Grob, M.D. examines Psychiatric Research with Hallucinogens and asks "What have we learned?"
| "Jaffe, in the 7th and 8th editions of
Goodman and Gilman, defined psychedelics as agents that produce changes in thought and
perception normally experienced only during dreaming or at times of religious exultation. All of us
should take a few minutes to think about the implications of that definition." |
Biopsychiatry does have a contribution to make, at least of a quantitative nature, and Psychobiological Criminality, Hormones; Neurotransmitters; Vitamins & Drugs gives the best brief overview I have come across; complete with great tables that clarify things considerably.
Modeling the influence of a serial killer's residential location on choice of body disposal
locations is not a representative sample of the abstracts offered in this summary of the Psychology and Law International Conference, held last summer in Dublin.
In a passionate offence toward biomedical models of psychopathology, Linda Sisson, R.N. explores The Politics of "Normality".
| "Behind every diagnosis is a clinical judgment that the person's distress is caused
by a disorder and not some other factor such as abuse, poverty, or oppression." |
Okay, here's the one crank lead that I'm allowed periodically by the credibility police. I can imagine Russian Psychotronics to be possible, and certainly hear the warning that technology makes our psychic privacy ever more vulnerable.
| "The difference [between the
older subliminal technique of briefly inserting an unencrypted
picture into a commercial and Dr. Smirnov's new technique] is that
the [subliminally] encrypted technique demonstrated here is almost
impossible to prove." |
On the Orthomolecular Environment of the Mind: Orthomolecular Theory is far more benign in intent, if not in contentiousness.
"I have reached the conclusion that
another general method of treatment, which may be called orthomolecular therapy, may be found to
be of great value, and may turn out to be the best method of treatment for many patients."
Linus Pauling | While it is true that the 'digital divide' needs to be addressed, an attitude that says Let Them Eat Pixels seems to inform those who could solve the actual problems of poverty.
| "Operating a computer is simple compared to designing a scientific experiment,
solving a challenging math problem, or writing a forceful and coherent paragraph." |
Complexity rising: From human beings to human civilization, a complexity profile is an astounding essay by Yaneer Bar-Yam. This dense work allows a clear vista of the psychosocial terrain, and illuminates paths of understanding that may lead us to the fields of ease.
| "The merging of disciplines in the field of complex systems runs counter to the
increasing specialization in science and engineering. It provides many opportunities for synergies and the recognition of general principles that can form a basis for education and understanding in all fields." |
Precis of The creative mind: Myths and mechanisms brings us 'back to one'; the origin and nature of creativity within the individual.
"I am not forgetting beauty. It is because
the worth of beauty is transcendent that the subtle ways of the power that achieves it are
transcendently worth searching out."
Livingston Lowes |
 Now wait a minute, Sir Ben Goertzel, are you trying to tell me in World Wide Brain that the collective mediocrity is of higher order intelligence than the individual's potential for genuine novelty? How could it be possible for the intellinexus to account for individual value(s) any more than, in the biological sense, Gaia does?
| "My belief, as crudely suggested in this post to the Global Brain Study Group, is that the sanity of the global Web brain is an engineering problem. By designing Web software intelligently, we can encourage the various parts of the global Web brain to interact with each other in an harmonious way -- the hallmark of true sanity. The various neuroses of human mind and culture will be in there -- but they will be subordinate to an higher level of sanely and smoothly self-organizing structure." | In our haste to find a neurochemical solution to schizophrenia we may be missing a key link.
| "Recent developments in Nonlinear Dynamical Systems theory enable us to address a number of
unresolved issues in connection with Gregory Bateson's double bind theory." | The trinity of Ben Goertzel, Mark Germine, and Allan Combs offer unifying ideas from diverse perspectives in The Dynamics of Thought, Reality, and Consciousness.
| "This volume is a collection of articles which all share a common concern with time, process, and
consciousness. The chapters represent a variety of different perspectives and the authors span the
disciplines of psychology, mathematics, physics, and psychiatry. As a whole the collection presents a
coherent view of mind as a complex, evolving, self-organizing system." | Neurospace The very word brings to mind interior infinity, which is not the only point of this essay. Rather, this is largely a look into the role of psychedelic plants in our development as humans; as well as an appeal to insight.
| "We need a politique here - not an ideology but an active cognizance of actually
persisting situations, as clearly as we can grasp them in our jacked-in or stoned condition. We need
a strategic sense of where to apply the nudges of our material art, the little martial Zen moves,
whereby even a weak person can win a battle." |
A lecture that I wish i had attended makes the connection between consciousness and quantum physics. Alternately, coming from a Newtonian perspective gives a more prosaic conception. Here is K. K. Glendenning's Thalamic Inhibition in the Evolution of Human
Intelligence: Evolutionary Pressure for Cortical Inhibition.
| "Perhaps this is the basis for the saying that the mark of intelligence
lies as much in what one does not say or do as it does in one's words or actions!" | John Perry deconstructs our understanding of consciousness in Knowledge, Possibility and Consciousness. "The
world is a very odd place, at least for the philosopher, and this is one of the leading oddities."
Adolf Grunbaum has a look at our need for meaning and the implication of that need on real understanding. As Creation As a Pseudo-Explanation in Current Physical Cosmology concludes: After all is said and done, the notion of temporal creation ex nihilo dies
hard.
Begin the new year with a new concept of your brain - eight circuits, described by Tim Leary and Robert Anton Wilson.
John Hopkins Psychiatry offers A Structure For Psychiatry At The Century's Turn, and comes to the conclusion that We are all challenged to find ways to assimilate the amorphous body of psychiatric fact and opinion.
The Institute for Psychohistory is "putting the world on the couch". Lloyd deMause, a leader in psychohistorical research, discusses in Chapter 4 of his book Childhood and History, The Psychogenic Theory of History.
"Like Aztec human sacrifices, recessions and depressions are accompanied by national sermons, "cautionary tales", about how sacrifices are necessary to purge the world of human sinfulness. The choice between these different solutions to growth panic follows cyclical patterns, wars and depressions alternating in group-fantasy cycles of varying lengths." |