NevDull’s Take On Things

2008 Reading List, Part I

This has been a year of considerable introspection. I’ve been on a journey of learning, renewed by the availability of wonderful content online which I could carry with me. I haven’t read many books, but I’ve listened to a lot of them on my iPod or iPhone. I’ve listened to and watched podcasts. I’ve listened to lectures, to books about religion, philosophy, science, mathematics, politics, and biographical histories.

I’ve had a cherished few conversations which have opened my eyes quite a bit. I’ve been inspired. I’ve cried tears of hope and been overcome by generosity. I’ve been selfish and selfless, gotten my priorities and my budget screwed up, corrected for a while, and let them get back out of hand. But I haven’t stopped learning.

I’m going to dig up some of the names of books and authors and urls.

Last year I saw An Inconvenient Truth, and came to my own conclusion. A conclusion that I needed to look harder both in the mirror and into enough of the science for me to know that there’s an impact of our fossil-fuel burning behavior. And I think that the solutions need to be scalable beyond what people without a purpose can accomplish. This isn’t about the incandescent bulbs I still have in my bathrooms because we like the light better. I’m not exempt from responsibility by any means. But my purpose can’t be limited to my home. My home, in the whole scheme of things, even if it were an adobe hut with no electricity or combustion going on in it wouldn’t change the world.

It may have been the beginning of a search for purpose, something to become comfortable with a sense of purpose independent of a simple regression to nature, with enough political sophistication to consider the absolutes of my ideology negotiable if it’s for the common good. Ah, but there’s the rub… what’s the common good? Who’s defining it? What has his day been like? Can there be a worldwide common good?

We have to consider what we call rights… and reconsider which may be privileges. And make sure we don’t call the privileges rights. If government is going to play a guardian role, and its citizens have rights, then the government will eventually end up providing for those rights because it is cruel not to ensure every man his rights. If they are privileges, then even if the government does pilot a program which subsidizes that privilege because it may be a social experiment, then they can be withdrawn when the test is over. Taking away rights should be hard to do. Let’s take the time to reconsider what our personal goals are, and see if they can be separated from what we want for rights. They can still be goals.

Early in the year, I listened to the Richard Dawkins book The Ancestor’s Tale, which got me thinking about purpose. What’s lurking back in our evolutionary past which can tell me about society’s role which appears to be counter to the “natural way of things”.

Knowing that Dawkins was famously atheist, I then listened to The God Delusion, which I’d been refraining from because I didn’t want to look to be a militant atheist. Or did I? The fact that I could consider the evolutionary process that life has taken, and how I was deriving some sense of the world — and that sense was subject to revision with new evidence, but that new evidence will always be threatening to organized religion, I found my comfortable place.

A desire to seek alternate views from what could be considered similar brought me to the Christopher Hitchens book God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. I chatted a bit with a friend who’d read both authors and found Hitchens tolerable, but Dawkins too in-your-face. My personal interpretation is that Hitchens looks down his nose at the religious, and thinks them ninnies, but Dawkins seems to want to change them.

And then I saw this TED Talk by Dr. Ramachandran which contained a section on his research into relieving phantom limb pain. Understanding my perception of the role the mind plays in pain in a limb that is no longer there — hint: it’s not the nerve damage — it made me understand that what really matters to people most is what impact it has on his mind. Just like the rational explanation that the limb isn’t there not making the phantom pain any less real, it’s not that trivial to convince a religious person that her deity isn’t real.

More to come in another post, soon…

1 comment December 11th, 2008

Don’t Believe Everything You Think: The 6 Basic Mistakes We Make in Thinking

I’m currently reading Don’t Believe Everything You Think: The 6 Basic Mistakes We Make in Thinking. I’m interested in finding out both the flaws in my own thinking as well as some of the “why” behind how others think some of the crazy things they do, in order to better frame my own arguments.

The author, Thomas Kida, points out 6 reasons why people believe things which aren’t true:
· We prefer stories to statistics.
· We seek to confirm, not to question, our ideas.
· We rarely appreciate the role of chance and coincidence in shaping events.
· We sometimes misperceive the world around us.
· We tend to oversimplify our thinking.
· Our memories are often inaccurate.

Updates will come when I get further along.

Add comment August 9th, 2007