Rousseau and the Tiger

 

This is the Tiger and this is Rousseau.

This is the picture I painted to show
That this is the Tiger, so supple and eager.
And this is the customs man, suited and meagre,
And what do we wonder and what do we know?
This is the Tiger and this is Rousseau.

I am Rousseau and I painted the Tiger,
The Tiger so fierce and the Tiger so free.
This is the jungle, the terrible tangle,
And these are the teeth that will torture and mangle,
And all of it up on the wall as you see.
This is the Tiger and this? This is me.

This is the man and he works in an office,
And this is the beast so unhuman and fine.
This is the picture. I painted the picture.
With cunning and craft I effected the capture,
I conjured the colour, I dreamed the design,
And I painted the Tiger. The Tiger is mine.

--John Whitworth

The Evolution of Happiness

In the WSJ (7/26/13), Alison Gopnik writes "Does Evolution Want Us to Be Happy?"

"Samuel Johnson called it the vanity of human wishes, and Buddhists talk about the endless cycle of desire. Social psychologists say we get trapped on a hedonic treadmill. What they all mean is that we wish, plan and work for things that we think will make us happy, but when we finally get them, we aren't nearly as happy as we thought we'd be."

The process of evolution works to make us more fit, and thus more likely to survive and reproduce.  It's shaped our motivational system, which pushes us always toward greener pastures.  But once we've reached that greener pasture, "feeling happy now is, from evolution's perspective, just a superfluous luxury."

"It is as if every time we make a decision that actually makes us better off, evolution resets our happiness meter to zero. That prods us to decide to take the next action, which will make us even better off—but no happier."

Makes you wonder if the Buddhists have a point.

Consciousness, Art, and the Awakening Cosmos

In the latest issue of The New Yorker, Richard Brody reviews the philosopher Thomas Nagel's new book, "Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False." Brody writes that "Nagel offers mental activity as a special realm of being and life as a special condition--in the same way that biology is a special realm of science, distinct from physics."

"Since neither physics nor Darwinian biology--the concept of evolution--can account for the emergence of a mental world from a physical one, Nagel contends that the mental side of existence must somehow have been present in creation from the very start. [...] He suggests that any theory of the universe, any comprehensive mesh of physics and biology, will need to succeed in 'showing how the natural order is disposed to generate beings capable of comprehending it.'

"And this, he argues, would be a theory of teleology--a preprogrammed or built-in tendency in the universe toward the particular goal of fulfilling the possibilities of mentality.  In a splendid image, Nagel writes, 'Each of our lives is a part of the lengthy process of the universe gradually waking up and becoming aware of itself." 

Brody asserts that "the book's widest implications involve art and how it helps us to understand the world." He brings up a parallel with his own view regarding "realistic" movies, "that the realities that matter in movies are mental constructs, whether emotional or political, and that, therefore, a movie that rigorously represents solely the physical aspects and actions of its characters doesn't necessarily come any closer to anything like reality, and may even get further from it."

"If Nagel is right, art itself would no longer be merely the scientist's leisure-time fulfillment but would be (I think correctly) recognized as a primary mode of coming to grips with the mental and moral essence of the universe.  It would be a key source of the very definition of life."

Explosions Rock Buddhist Temple in India

Buddhist-Muslim tensions are spreading beyond the borders of Burma.

A Buddhist monk received treatment at a hospital after blasts rattled the Mahabodhi Temple in Bodh Gaya, India, on Sunday.

From NY TIMES, 7/7/13:  

NEW DELHI — A series of explosions rocked one of Buddhism’s holiest sites in eastern India on Sunday morning, an attack that officials called an act of terrorism.  

Mahabodhi Temple Complex at Bodh Gaya

Two people were wounded in the explosions at the Mahabodhi Temple in Bodh Gaya, officials said. Initial reports suggested that the 12-acre temple complex had suffered minimal damage. The soaring main temple, constructed in the fifth or sixth century, is near the Bodhi Tree, where Buddha is said to have attained enlightenment. The temple complex attracts Buddhists and other visitors from around the world and has been designated as a World Heritage site by Unesco.

A Dying Culture?

David P. Goldman:  "Sometime in 2011 the total number of film plots with the keyword “zombie” passed the number of film plots with the keyword “cowboy,” according to the Internet Movie Database. One might argue that the zombie has become the great American archetype of the postmodern era, as the cowboy was the American archetype a century ago. With the release of Brad Pitt’s $200 million zombie epic World War Z, what used to be the stuff of low-budget shockers has entered the American cultural mainstream. Therein lies a lesson."