* Archived Book Suggestions *

Chris OConnor · Posted: Thu Jan 09, 2003 12:10 am Post subject: * Archived Book Suggestions *

Archived Book Suggestions for Quarterly Readings

This thread is our old book suggestion thread. In October of 2005 we changed our book selection process. We now create a new book suggestion thread each quarter. Please feel free to look through this thread for book ideas. ::44

Read about our new Book Selection Process.

Chris

Edited by: Chris OConnor at: 10/10/05 12:55 pm

rielmajr

The recommendations made thus far would all be excellent choices. I would offer the following for consideration:

1. Steven Pinker: a)How the Mind Works;b) The Blank Slate

2. Daniel Dennett: a) Consciousness Explained; b) Darwin's Dangerous Idea

3. Victor Johnston: Why We Feel: The Science of Human Emotions

4. Gene Edelman: A Universe of Consciousness

5. Karen Armstrong: The Battle for God; A History of God; A Brief History of Islam

6. John Noonan: The Lustre of Our Country --The American Experience of Religious Freedom

7. Steven Mithen: The Prehistory of the Mind -- The Cognitive Origins of Art, Religion and Science

8. Stephen Jay Gould: Full House -- The Spread of Excellence from Plato to Darwin

Edited by: Chris OConnor at: 7/29/05 12:06 am

Jeremy1952

Here is a summary of books suggested so far, in alphabetical order. Books suggested more than once are indicated by the digit to the left.

--Karen Armstrong: The Battle for God
--Karen Armstrong: A History of God
--Karen Armstrong: A Brief History of Islam
--Axelrod, The Complexity of Cooperation
--Damasio, Descartes' Error
--Damasio, The Feeling of What Happens
--Dawkins: ANY
3 Dawkins, The Extended Phenotype
--Dawkins' The Selfish Gene
2 Dawkins, Unweaving the Rainbow
--Daniel Dennett: Consciousness Explained
--Daniel Dennett: Darwin's Dangerous Idea
--Gene Edelman: A Universe of Consciousness
--Stephen Jay Gould: Full House -- The Spread of Excellence from Plato to Darwin
--Victor Johnston: Why We Feel: The Science of Human Emotions
--Kaufmann, At Home in the Universe
--Dan Kindlon and Michael Thompson: Raising Cain: Protecting the Emotional Life of Boys
--Donald MacKensie: Mechanising Proof: Computing, Risk and Trust
--Lynn Margulis, Dorion Sagan, Ernst Mayr: Acquiring Genomes: A Theory of the Origins of Species
--Steven Mithen: The Prehistory of the Mind -- The Cognitive Origins of Art, Religion and Science
--John Noonan: The Lustre of Our Country --The American Experience of Religious Freedom
3 Steven Pinker: The Blank Slate
--Steven Pinker: How the Mind Works

Edited by: Jeremy1952 at: 1/9/03 7:56:28 pm

JPRT464

The Illusion of Conscious Will by Daniel M. Wegner (MIT Press, 2002). This is one of the most fascinating books I have read. It embodies the ultimate skepticism – skepticism of one’s self! (Cogito, ergo non sum?) Wegner, a psychologist at Harvard, brings together a number of threads: psychological observation, from long-noted phenomena to cleverly devised experiments showing how we wrongly infer that we are conscious agents, planning and causing our own actions and being aware of why we are doing what we do. There are the famous readiness potential studies from the 1980s showing that actions, such as our willing a finger to move are preceded, by some 200 milliseconds, by potential changes in the brain, indicating that our "decision" to move had already been made. There are clever psychological experiments that tease apart our perceptions of what we are doing from what we actually do. People can be lead to believe that they have caused actions that are actually caused by someone else. Tests performed on people with split brains (from operations done to relieve certain kinds of severe epilepsy) show that we have an explainer that will dream up reasonable but incorrect explanations for actions when we are unaware of what prompted them. Automatisms and ideomotor action, exhibited in such phenomena as dowsing, ouija board use, automatic writing, etc, are actions that escape our conscious intentions. We perform them but experience the illusion that we do not, that they arise from outside of us, thereby throwing light on the disconnect between conscious intentions and action. Similar phenomena that Wegner examines include action projection, where our own actions are projected onto other people or animals (as with Clever Hans, the calculating horse, and facilitated communication, whereby therapists think that they are eliciting communication from severely autistic children). We may experience virtual agency in the phenomena of mediums, channeling, spirit possession, and multiple personalities. One of the most interesting chapters is devoted to hypnosis and how it may work to cause people to "stop noticing the causal role of their own thoughts." What are we to make of our conscious will being an illusion? Is it a cause for despair, an epiphenomenon with no significance? Wegner essays an answer in his last chapter, "The Mind’s Compass," where he argues that conscious will is "a person’s guide to his or her own moral responsibility for action," and even if illusory, is not trivial. All in all, this is a great book and should provoke a good discussion. It is well illustrated and written with a nice touch of humor throughout.

Jeremy1952

I have heard of Wegner, but never read anything by him; I'm certainly "up" for this one. BTW Pinker is touching on some of these issues in Blank Slate, although certainly not to the same depth. Or, if we do select Blank Slate (it is currently tied for most mentioned), perhaps JPRT464 could point out areas of agreement or disagreement.

Chris OConnor

Michael Shermer's - "How We Believe" is my suggestion...

Quote:
One hundred years ago social scientists predicted that belief in God would decrease by the year 2000. "In fact ... the opposite is has occurred," Shermer writes in his introduction. "Never in history have so many, and such a high percentage of the population, believed in God. Not only is God not dead as Nietzche proclaimed, but he has never been more alive.

Why do so many believe in the existence of something so inexplicable? That's exactly what Shermer answers in this comprehensive, intelligent, and highly readable discussion about the nature of faith. "People believe in God because the evidence of their senses tell them so," claims Shermer, who is the publisher of Skeptics magazine. Having been a believer and a student of the history of science, Shermer (now an agnostic) is more interested in knowing why and how people believe in God rather than trying to prove who's right or wrong. As a result, this book is not only even-handed and thorough, it is also destined to become a timeless contribution to spirituality as well as science.

Chris

Edited by: Chris OConnor at: 7/29/05 12:08 am

Jeremy1952

Elaine Morgan, The Descent of Woman

Established irrefutably the equal role of women in human evolution. It created a worldwide furor and became a rallying point for women everywhere. Its influence has been profound and lasting-on the terminology used by students of prehistoric anthropology, on the theory of evolution, and on the biblically fostered attitudes toward women. [in the new edition] The author discusses changes since the book was first published and tells what needs to be done in the future. It remains the key book in any discussion of women and their place in society.

Elaine Morgan has worked as a freelance writer for television, and is the author of The Aquatic Ape, The Scars of Evolution, and The Descent of the Child.

She lives in Wales.

Jeremy1952

Christopher Wanjek's book, Bad Medicine, is published by John Wiley & Sons, priced £11.50

Bad medicine

Homeopathy is based on a 300-year-old mistake and magnetic therapy is simply fraudulent. As for oxygen-fortified drinks ... Christopher Wanjek debunks some popular medical myths

Christopher Wanjek
Tuesday November 26, 2002
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2002

Ancient Egyptians believed the heart was the centre of thought and the brain cooled the body. The Romans reckoned a bad uterus caused hysteria. And you know about London's blood-letting days. Yet myths about the body and health linger on today, some astoundingly ludicrous but pervasive none the less.

Often it is said, for example, that we use just 10% of our brains. Magician Uri Geller readily spreads this myth as an explanation for why he can bend spoons; he claims to use more of his brain than the rest of us. Truth be told, we use 100% of our brains - even while watching a silly Uri Geller magic show. That 10% figure was invented in the 30s by ad men in America selling self-help pamphlets. "Scientists say you only use one-tenth of your brain," the ads said. "Wake up to your true potential."

In the 19th century, scientists did indeed determine that certain parts of the brain didn't seem to have any obvious function (such as moving a limb) when stimulated by an electrode. They called these regions "the silent cortex" and later learned that these regions were responsible for the very traits that make us human: language and abstract thought.

How can we be sure that Geller is not even 10% right about the brain? For one, commonsense: never has a doctor said, "You'll be fine.The bullet is lodged in the 90% part of the brain you don't use." Biologically, any part of the body will deteriorate without use. Legs shrivel in a cast, and neurons in the brain die as a result of diseases such as Alzheimer's and dementia. And if you want proof in pictures, modern scans all show that the entire brain is active.

Some body myths still show up in biology textbooks. The tongue is not mapped out to taste sweet, salty, bitter and sour in select locations. The tip of the tongue is said to be reserved for the sweet taste. Yet place salt on the tip of your tongue - or anywhere, for that matter - and you will taste it.

The tongue map developed around 1900 merely suggesting that certain regions might be more sensitive than others for certain types of tastes, which itself isn't so true either. A misinterpretation of the data over the years led people to think that taste buds only existed in delineated regions. French wine glass makers are still hooked on the idea.

Slightly lower in the body we come to the liver, which detoxifies poisons from food and medicine. A million-dollar industry has grown from the notion that the liver itself becomes toxic and must be cleaned, or banged out like a lint screen, with a vitamin and herb regimen. Not true. Aside from vitamin A, nothing ever accumulates in the liver. What the liver cannot detoxify, it allows to pass.

Alternative medicine thrives on these types of myths. Magnet therapy, with its claim that it manipulates blood flow, is just plain fraudulent. The therapy is based on the notion that the iron in our blood is magnetic. Makes sense, but it's wrong, because iron is bound to haemoglobin. If the blood were magnetic, then we would blow up when placed under the powerful magnets of an MRI machine. If you do notice redness under that magnetic bracelet you are wearing, that's not magnetism. You merely have a chunk of metal irritating your skin.

Homeopathy is based on a 300-year-old mistake.

Homeopathy's foundation lies on the premises of "like cures like" and "the law of infinitesimals." Nappy rash, for example, is cured with a diluted solution of poison ivy. Homeopathy founders when it comes to dilution. A typical dilution level is times 30, which in homeopathy-speak means one-part medicine and 1030 part water. Such dilution is implausible, developed before the concept of Avogadro's number, which determines the number of molecules in a given solution. You would need to drink 8,000 gallons of water to get one molecule of medicine.

Other homeopathic cures are set at 100 to the power of 30. You would need an entire solar system worth of matter to mix with one molecule of medicine. At least homeopathy is safe because it is, indeed, just water.

On the topic of thirst, a new trend is oxygen-fortified drinks to replenish your body with oxygen. It shouldn't surprise you that breathing works better. Oxygen best enters the bloodstream through the lungs, not the stomach. You would need to drink about a litre of oxygenated water every 30 seconds to get a deep breath's worth of extra oxygen, and this assumes you don't pee.

Even breathing in pure oxygen won't help you catch your breath because haemoglobin (which carries oxygen in the blood) is nearly saturated with oxygen with every normal breath we take at sea level, where the air is about 18% oxygen.

Alternative medicine proponents have also latched on to the antioxidant fable, this notion that heroic antioxidant supplements fight sinister free radicals out to wreck havoc on the body. This is an oversimplification. Free radicals are molecules with an unpaired electron, making them highly reactive. Yes, they destroy cell walls and lead to disease. And yes, antioxidants neutralise free radicals. Yet free radicals are crucial for the body to make energy, a process that occurs in the cell's mitochondria. Also, free radicals, such as hydrogen peroxide, are a key component to the body's immune system. Too many antioxidants - that is, megadoses of supplements - disturb this natural process.

Indeed, antioxidants such has vitamin C and beta carotene have been shown to fuel cancer growth, and selenium can be toxic. Conversely, there is no evidence that high doses of antioxidants help the body in any way - except (a big maybe here) vitamin E.

The myth of brain cancer from mobile phones is steeped in society's irrational fear of radiation. For radiation to cause cancer, it must break chemical bonds in the body. Only certain types of radiation, called ionising radiation, can do this. Ultraviolet radiation, X-rays and gamma rays are the culprits. Visible light and radio waves are always safe.

Radiation travels as photons. Imagine a chemical bond as a window across the street. A high-energy X-ray photon is like a golf ball that smashes the window. Radio photons from mobiles, millions of times less energetic than X-rays, are like puffballs. You can throw as many radio puffballs as you want, you will never break that window. This is the essence of quantum mechanics.

If your ear feels warm after a cellphone conversation, remember that you are holding a machine with a battery pack against your head. If you get a headache, remember that talking on a mobile is much more annoying than talking on a traditional phone.

Vaccination also worries people today, particularly the MMR vaccine thought to be related to autism. Several major studies in America and England have found no association between the two. Autism merely appears at the same time in life that a child gets the MMR jab. The myth lives on, though, fuelled by a back-to-nature crowd who simply don't understand the importance of vaccines. We have a false sense of security: because our children are immunised, they do not contract measles, whooping cough, and other potentially deadly diseases. Those children not immunised are relatively safe because everyone around them is immunised. Drop immunisation, and we're right back to the 19th century.
The anti-vaccine crowd doesn't understand that 25,000 people will have died of measles alone in Afghanistan this year, according to World Health Organisation. That's a world without vaccines. Likewise, Britain, feeling confident, dropped the whooping cough vaccine in 1974, and by 1978 there was an epidemic of 100,000 cases, with 36 deaths.

The vaccine worry highlights the core myths associated with alternative medicine. First, the ancient "natural" world was somehow a better place, less polluted and with less stress. Second, ancient peoples knew how to care for themselves with natural remedies that "restore balance" by channelling unseen energy forces in the universe. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Life was much harder as little as 100 years ago. Children died. Disease wiped out entire cities. For most of humanity, indoor air was filled with soot and faeces. Families constantly stressed over where the next meal would come from. No herbal medicine or incantation routinely worked to cure disease. Few lived past the age of 50, no matter if they practiced yoga and thought happy thoughts, as Deepak Chopra and Andrew Weil teach us.

Surprisingly, many in this modern world subscribe to the idea that disease is not caused by pathogens but rather an "unbalance" or "negative energy". They take untested herbs, much like medieval Europeans, to restore this balance. Or they practice qigong to move so-called qi (chi) energy through the body to initiate some mystic healing practice.

Only people in the wealthiest of nations are subscribing to ancient practices, often banned in developing countries. We seem to be so content, so caught up with myths, that we have forgotten how the advances of real science through the 20th century - the germ theory of disease, for one - have made life that much more pleasant.

Jeremy1952 · Posted: Wed Jan 22, 2003 3:56 pm Post subject: Pinker, "The Blank Slate"

Little bitty excerpt:

People who hope that a ban on biological explanations might restore personal responsibility are in for the bitterest disappointment of all. The most risible pretexts for bad behavior in recent decades have come not form biological determinism but from environmental determinism: the abuse excuse, the Twinkie defense, black rage, pornography poisoning, societal sickness, media violence, rock lyrics, and different cultural mores…

Something has gone terribly wrong. It is a confusion of explanation with exculpation. Contrary to what is implied by critics of biological and environmental theories of the causes of behavior, to explain behavior is not to exonerate the behaver….If behavior is not utterly random, it will have some explanation; if behavior were utterly random, we couldn’t hold the person responsible in any case. So if we ever hold people responsible for their behavior, it will have to be in spite of any causal explanation we feel is warranted, whether it invokes genes, brains, evolution, media images, self –doubt, bringing up-ke, or being raised by bickering women.

Chris OConnor

The Philosophy of Humanism - by Corliss Lamont

This book is a must read for anyone interested in secular humanism! The entire text is available for free online at www.corliss-lamont.org/philos8.htm. I think we could easily get Corloss Lamont's widow as a guest in our chat room, which would probably make for a very interesting and educational session. She is a nongovernmental ambassador to the United Nations, and is internationally known in the humanist world. Anyone wishing to find something to fill the "void" left in their lives when the domga and irrationality of religion is removed MUST read this book.

Anyone not fully aware of what secualr humanism is all about should read this summary www.mind.net/rvuuf/pages/humanis1.htm.

To read more about this text visit the Amazon.com listing at www.amazon.com/exec/obido...vi=glance.

More information about Humanism www.freeinquiry.com/humanism-uu.html.

This is the edition of this book that I first read years and years ago www.skeptic.de/index.php3...leno=0447.

www.evolvefish.com/fish/product5 08.html

www.geocities.com/cadfile...anism.html

www.americanhumanist.org/ humanism/

www.humanists.org/hum_lamont.htm

www.slsoftware.com/study/...a nism.html

www.infidels.org/infidels...anism.html

Chris

Edited by: Chris OConnor at: 7/29/05 12:08 am

Chris OConnor

Carl Sagan - Pale Blue Dot! This is an awesome read!

Quote:
We succeeded in taking that picture [from deep space], and, if you look at it, you see a dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam.

The earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and in triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of the dot on scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner of the dot. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light.

Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity -- in all this vastness -- there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. It is up to us. It's been said that astronomy is a humbling, and I might add, a character-building experience. To my mind, there is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.

-- Carl Sagan

Chris

Edited by: Chris OConnor at: 7/29/05 12:08 am

Timothy Schoonover

Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals' Abuse of Science - by Alan D. Sokal, Jean Bricmont

Quote:
In 1996, an article entitled "Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity" was published in the cultural studies journal Social Text. Packed with recherché quotations from "postmodern" literary theorists and sociologists of science, and bristling with imposing theorems of mathematical physics, the article addressed the cultural and political implications of the theory of quantum gravity. Later, to the embarrassment of the editors, the author revealed that the essay was a hoax, interweaving absurd pronouncements from eminent intellectuals about mathematics and physics with laudatory--but fatuous--prose.

In Fashionable Nonsense, Alan Sokal, the author of the hoax, and Jean Bricmont contend that abuse of science is rampant in postmodernist circles, both in the form of inaccurate and pretentious invocation of scientific and mathematical terminology and in the more insidious form of epistemic relativism. When Sokal and Bricmont expose Jacques Lacan's ignorant misuse of topology, or Julia Kristeva's of set theory, or Luce Irigaray's of fluid mechanics, or Jean Baudrillard's of non-Euclidean geometry, they are on safe ground; it is all too clear that these virtuosi are babbling.

Their discussion of epistemic relativism--roughly, the idea that scientific and mathematical theories are mere "narrations" or social constructions--is less convincing, however, in part because epistemic relativism is not as intrinsically silly as, say, Regis Debray's maunderings about Gödel, and in part because the authors' own grasp of the philosophy of science frequently verges on the naive. Nevertheless, Sokal and Bricmont are to be commended for their spirited resistance to postmodernity's failure to appreciate science for what it is.

Obviously, I don't agree with Sokal and Bricmont. But, as it seems, most of you all are happy postmodern haters, so I say lets hash it out. Maybe we'll all learn something.

Chris OConnor

My suggestion =


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