Life - Weiye Loh on Diigo

Mar

31

2012

Balderdash: Jung on Meaning and Self-delusion

If man no longer finds any meaning in his life, it makes no difference whether he wastes away under a communist or a capitalist regime. Only if he can use his freedom to create something meaningful is it relevant that he should be free. That is why finding the inner meaning of life is more important to the individual than anything else, and why the process of individuation must be given priority

gssq.blogspot.com/...meaning-and-self-delusion.html

- Preview

Life Meaning Religion PRagmatism

"The communist world, it may be noted, has one big myth (which we call an illusion, in the vain hope that our superior judgment will make it disappear). It is the time-hallowed archetypal dream of a Golden Age (or Paradise), where everything is provided in abundance for everyone, and a great, just, and wise chief rules over a human kindergarten. This powerful archetype in its infantile form has gripped them, but it will never disappear from the world at the mere sight of our superior point of view. We even support it by our own childishness, for our Western civilization is in the grip of the same mythology. Unconsciously, we cherish the same prejudices, hopes, and expectations. We too believe in the welfare state, in universal peace, in the equality of man, in his eternal human rights, in justice, truth, and (do not say it too loudly) in the Kingdom of God on Earth...
There is, however, a strong empirical reason why we should cultivate thoughts that can never be proved. It is that they are known to be useful. Man positively needs general ideas and convictions that will give a meaning to his life and enable him to find a place for himself in the universe. He can stand the most incredible hardships when he is convinced that they make sense; he is crushed when, on top of all his misfortunes, he has to admit that he is taking part in a "tale told by an idiot."
1 more annotation(s)...
- It is the role of religious symbols to give a meaning to the life of man. The Pueblo Indians believe that they are the sons of Father Sun, and this belief endows their life with a perspective (and a goal) that goes far beyond their limited existence. It gives them ample space for the unfolding of personality and permits them a full life as complete persons. Their plight is infinitely more satisfactory than that of a man in our own civilization who knows that he is (and will remain) nothing more than an underdog with no inner meaning to his life.
  
  A sense of a wider meaning to one's existence is what raises a man beyond mere getting and spending"

Nov

1

2011

A Taste of Honey is still sweet half a century on | marksimpson.com

www.marksimpson.com/...-still-sweet-half-a-century-on

- Preview

Life Death

thinking about life and thinking about death and neither one particularly appealing

Oct

25

2011

Philosophers Speak: A Video Series - NYTimes.com

“My interest in this project is continuous with a lifelong struggle to try to affirm life. From a very early age, in moments of reflection on death, life has always shown up to me as something to be regretted, a cruel joke, something difficult to affirm. Years of reading books by authors who share this view left me unsatisfied, groping toward compelling interpretations of this dissatisfaction and potential responses. I saw these interviews as a unique opportunity to speak with thoughtful people about the broad existential topics that grip my (our) life but are so often avoided in writing and public discourse.
“Perhaps not surprisingly, after 50 interviews from San Francisco to London, I found little consolation and fewer answers to the existential questions that motivated the project. There were however moments of extraordinary solidarity. When an accomplished thinker admits to sharing your suffering and acknowledges the inadequacy of their own thinking to confront this suffering, one feels less alone in the world, a little less inadequate. I’m grateful to the thinkers who agreed to be interviewed and to those who funded the project.”

opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/...losophers-speak-a-video-series

- Preview

Life Philosophy

“My interest in this project is continuous with a lifelong struggle to try to affirm life. From a very early age, in moments of reflection on death, life has always shown up to me as something to be regretted, a cruel joke, something difficult to affirm. Years of reading books by authors who share this view left me unsatisfied, groping toward compelling interpretations of this dissatisfaction and potential responses. I saw these interviews as a unique opportunity to speak with thoughtful people about the broad existential topics that grip my (our) life but are so often avoided in writing and public discourse.
“Perhaps not surprisingly, after 50 interviews from San Francisco to London, I found little consolation and fewer answers to the existential questions that motivated the project. There were however moments of extraordinary solidarity. When an accomplished thinker admits to sharing your suffering and acknowledges the inadequacy of their own thinking to confront this suffering, one feels less alone in the world, a little less inadequate. I’m grateful to the thinkers who agreed to be interviewed and to those who funded the project.”

Sep

12

2011

The Meaningfulness of Lives - NYTimes.com

Philosophy cannot prescribe the particular character of meaning that each of us should embrace. It cannot tell each of us individually how we might trace the trajectory that is allotted to us. But it can, and ought to, reflect upon the framework within which we consider these questions, and in doing so perhaps offer a lucidity we might otherwise lack. This is as it should be. Philosophy can assist us in understanding how we might think about our lives, while remaining modest enough to leave the living of them to us.

opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/...the-meaningfulness-of-lives

- Preview

Life Religion Meaning Purpose Transcendence Philosophy

Jean-Paul Sartre thought that, without God, our lives are bereft of meaning. He tells us in his essay “Existentialism,” “if God does not exist, we find no values or commands to turn to which legitimize our conduct. So, in the bright realm of values, we have no excuse behind us, nor justification before us.” On this view, God gives our lives the values upon which meaning rests. And if God does not exist, as Sartre claims, our lives can have only the meaning we confer upon them.
why would the existence of God guarantee the meaningfulness of each of our lives? Is a life of unremitting drudgery or unrequited struggle really redeemed if there’s a larger plan, one to which we have no access, into which it fits? That would be small compensation for a life that would otherwise feel like a waste — a point not lost on thinkers like Karl Marx, who called religion the “opium of the people.”
14 more annotation(s)...
- Moreover, does God actually ground the values by which we live? Do we not, as Plato recognized 2500 years ago, already have to think of those values as good in order to ascribe them to God?
- must the meaningfulness of our lives depend on the existence of God? Must meaning rely upon articles of faith? Basing life’s meaningfulness on the existence of a deity not only leaves all atheists out of the picture; it leaves different believers out of one another’s picture. What seems called for is an approach to thinking about meaning that can draw us together, one that exists alongside or instead of religious views.
- A meaningful life, she claims, is distinct from a happy life or a morally good one. In her view, “meaning arises when subjective attraction meets objective attractiveness.” A meaningful life must, in some sense then, feel worthwhile. The person living the life must be engaged by it. A life of commitment to causes that are generally defined as worthy — like feeding and clothing the poor or ministering to the ill — but that do not move the person participating in them will lack meaningfulness in this sense. However, for a life to be meaningful, it must also be worthwhile. Engagement in a life of tiddlywinks does not rise to the level of a meaningful life, no matter how gripped one might be by the game.
- Often one defends an idea by giving reasons for it. However, sometimes the best defense is not to give reasons at the outset but instead to pursue the idea in order to see where it leads. Does it capture something important if we utilize it to understand ourselves?
- a meaningful life is both valued and valuable — allows us to understand several important aspects of our attitudes toward ourselves and others.
- If a life has a trajectory, then it can be conceived narratively. A human life can be seen as a story, or as a series of stories that are more or less related.
- if one reflected on one’s life, one could reasonably see it in terms of various story lines, whether parallel or intersecting or distinct. This idea can be traced back to Aristotle’s “Ethics,” but has made a reappearance with some recent narrative conceptions of what a self is.
- What makes a trajectory a meaningful one? If Wolf is right, it has to feel worthwhile and, beyond that, has to be engaged in projects that are objectively worthwhile. There is not much difficulty in knowing what feels worthwhile. Most of us are good at sensing when we’re onto something and when we’re not. Objective worthiness is more elusive. We don’t want to reduce it simply to a morally good life, as though a meaningful life were simply an unalienated moral life. Meaningful lives are not so limited and, as we shall see, are sometimes more vexed. So we must ask what lends objective worthiness to a life outside the moral realm.
- When a life embodies one or more of these values (or others), and feels engaging to the one who lives it, it is to that extent meaningful.
- There are narrative values expressed by human lives that are not reducible to moral values. Nor are they reducible to happiness; they are not simply matters of subjective feeling. Narrative values are not felt, they are lived. And they constitute their own arena of value, one that has not been generally recognized by philosophers who reflect on life’s meaningfulness.
- Meaningful lives can be morally compromised, just as morally good lives can feel meaningless to those who live them.
- We should not take this to imply that there is no relationship between meaningfulness and morality. They meet at certain moral limits. An evil life, no matter how intense or steadfast, is not one we would want to call meaningful. But within the parameters of those moral limits, the relationship between a meaningful life and a moral one is complicated. They do not map directly onto each other.
- To be sure, we must buy things, and may even enjoy shopping. And we should not be entirely unconcerned with where we place our limited energies or monies. But are these the themes of a meaningful life? Are we likely to say of someone that he or she was a great networker or shopper, and so really knew how to live?
- Philosophy cannot prescribe the particular character of meaning that each of us should embrace. It cannot tell each of us individually how we might trace the trajectory that is allotted to us. But it can, and ought to, reflect upon the framework within which we consider these questions, and in doing so perhaps offer a lucidity we might otherwise lack. This is as it should be. Philosophy can assist us in understanding how we might think about our lives, while remaining modest enough to leave the living of them to us.

Sep

7

2011

‘Torchwood’ Gives Glimpse of Eternal Life - NYTimes.com

The real question posed by the “Torchwood” scenario is: what would happen to all our death-defying systems if there were no more death? The logical answer is that they would be superfluous. We would have no need for progress or art, faith or fame. Suddenly, we would have nothing to do, yet in the greatest of ironies, we would have endless eons in which to do it. Action would lose its purpose and time its value. This is the true awfulness of immortality.

www.nytimes.com/...s-glimpse-of-eternal-life.html

- Preview

Mortality Life Religion Science Civilization Death

Aug

20

2011

Secularism and Its Discontents : The New Yorker

the Virginia Woolf Question, after a passage in that most metaphysical of novels “To the Lighthouse,” when the painter Lily Briscoe is at her easel, mourning her late friend Mrs. Ramsay. Next to her sits the poet, Augustus Carmichael, and suddenly Lily imagines that she and Mr. Carmichael might stand up and demand “an explanation” of life:

For one moment she felt that if they both got up, here, now on the lawn, and demanded an explanation, why was it so short, why was it so inexplicable, said it with violence, as two fully equipped human beings from whom nothing should be hid might speak, then, beauty would roll itself up; the space would fill; those empty flourishes would form into shape; if they shouted loud enough Mrs. Ramsay would return. “Mrs. Ramsay!” she said aloud, “Mrs. Ramsay!” The tears ran down her face.

Why is life so short, why so inexplicable? These are the questions Lily wants answered. More precisely, these are the questions she needs to ask, ironically aware that an answer cannot be had if there is no one to demand it from. We may hope that “nothing should be hid” from us, but certain explanations can only ever be hidden. Just as Mrs. Ramsay has died, and cannot be shouted back to life, so God is dead, and cannot be reimplored into existence. And, as Terrence Malick’s oddly beautiful film “The Tree of Life” reminds us, the answers are still hidden even if we believe in God. Lily Briscoe’s “Why?” is not very different from Job’s “Why, Lord?”

www.newyorker.com/...110815crat_atlarge_wood

- Preview

Secularism Life

whether or not people did feel full or enchanted in centuries past, religion cannot be identified with the promise of fullness or enchantment. Both Christianity and Islam harshly challenge the self with an insistence on submission, sacrifice, and kenosis—an emptying out of the self, an exchange of the wrong kind of fullness for the right kind of humility—and Buddhism seeks to undermine the very idea of the sovereign, unified self. Revolutionary asceticism, which is what these religions in different ways embody, could be said to be hellbent on disenchantment.
the book valuably works over middle ground, the space vacated by both dogmatic religionists and dogmatic atheists. It is tolerant of, and even interested in, the varieties of religious practice, and maintains an engaged and equitable tone of voice. We might call this the New Secularism. All these qualities are found in the book’s first essay, by the Columbia philosopher Philip Kitcher, who establishes many of the terms of the larger discussion. Kitcher dislikes what he calls “Darwinian atheists” (that is, the New Atheists), who too often “think that once the case against the supernatural has been made, their work is done.” He implies that philosophy must combat and educate common religious prejudice and, by example, suggests that it is more likely to do this effectively than journalism or propaganda.
14 more annotation(s)...
- people tend to think that death “will damage the value we aim to create with our life.” We fear the gradual loss of our abilities as we get older; premature death is a special terror. But, he gently points out, immortality does not help with this:
  
  If your life is directed toward nurturing others who need your protection and guidance, and if, unluckily, you die before they are ready to cope without you, the fact that you will be restored—and maybe restored to them in some entirely different state—is immaterial. Your project, on which you have centered your existence, has still been compromised by premature death.
- Many religious people look forward to meeting loved ones in Heaven, Kitcher notes, and yet the reunion can’t be simply a continuation of life together on earth. If, say, a father lost his young son, as the Victorian agnostic Thomas Huxley lost his son Noel, Heaven would not restore what he most wanted, which was to see his son continue his life on earth. “Moreover, any reunion would apparently confront two strangers with one another, a parent whose life had extended in different directions after Noel’s death and a child who would no longer occupy the emotional space vacated by his earthly death,” Kitcher writes.
- many modern religious believers do not cleave to the kind of literal belief in God imputed to them by militant atheism. In order for secularism to have a wide appeal, he writes, it will need to become a secular humanism that is more than “blunt denial” but is as attuned to human need as religion has been, and as responsive to social injustice as the teachings of Jesus or Muhammad.
- Kitcher suggests that religionists and secularists actually agree about how to create meaning in a life. Many believers think of their submission to God not as compelled, he points out, but instead as “issuing from the choice of the person who submits.” Life develops meaning because someone identifies with God’s purpose. This identification must spring from an act of evaluation, a decision that there is value in serving a deity whose purpose is deemed good. Believers, then, make an autonomous choice “to abdicate autonomy in order to serve what the autonomous assessment has already recognized as good.” Both atheists and believers are involved in making independent evaluations of what constitutes life-meaning. They draw different conclusions about what that meaning is, but they go about finding it in similar ways.
- literary theorist and scholar Bruce Robbins attacks, in a different way, the idea that secularism implies meaninglessness or, at best, second-rate meaning. Robbins has little time for the idea of “enchantment”; the word seems to flatter certain emotions or activities (such as religious epiphanies or their secular substitutes), while excluding others. Secularism must find and create its own values, and these might be quite varied—for instance, “helping children with their homework or cooking good meals,” or “men campaigning to protect doctors from murderous antiabortion activists or Jews campaigning against Israeli settlements on the West Bank.” He faults Charles Taylor for assuming that modern secular life “is beset with the malaise of meaninglessness.” Weber’s word for disenchantment, Entzauberung, actually means “the elimination of magic,” but it is a mistake to infer the loss of meaning from the loss of magic.
- If a malaise besets contemporary life, Robbins writes, it may have been produced not by the march of progress but by the faltering of progress—“by the present’s failure to achieve a level of social justice that the premodern world did not even strive to achieve.”
- In the old theistic world, meaning and value were believed to inhere in the world itself, outside the human mind: in God, in the cosmos, and in God’s natural world, whether charged objects (such as religious relics) or the structure of the universe itself. Meaning came to you from out there. In a secular world, our meanings and values are thought to be generated by our minds and projected onto the world.
- When our neighbor doesn’t agree with us that murdering scores of people at an island camp in Norway is wrong, we do not shrug and say, “Chacun ses goûts.” When Tolstoy calls Shakespeare a poor writer, it is a judgment that judges Tolstoy, and marks his eccentricity.
- Secular explanations of the world (modern physics, astronomy, evolution) have not made the world less wondrous, and have not undermined the validity or the authority of our wonderment. Taking pleasure in the flight of a bird is not undermined by knowing a lot more than our ancestors did about how that bird evolved, and about how it works: on the contrary.
- The contemporary discourses that trouble Taylor seek to explain not the world but our minds. What happens when, say, neuroscience “explains” that our wonderment is merely an evolutionarily determined product of certain processes in our brain? Isn’t the strong evaluation that may sponsor such wonderment undermined by a mechanistic surrogate? Altruism, for instance, may involve strong evaluation: we admire it as something larger than ourselves, and those who don’t share our admiration of it seem inadequate, or worse. But where are we left when evolutionary biology tries to reduce the strong evaluation we make about altruism by claiming that, like all animal behavior, it is just a contrivance that benefits our selfish genes? In Taylor’s terms, the question is whether an “upper language,” in which we describe altruism as noble and admirable, can be fully captured by a “lower language,” of instrumental and biological explanation, a language that scrupulously avoids the vocabulary of purpose, intentionality, design, teleology.
- Taylor is skeptical that it can; he worries about the undermining allure of such reduction, and not without cause. These days, one is continually running up against a crass evolutionary neuroscientific pragmatism that is loved by popular evolutionary psychologists and newspaper columnists (of the kind who argue that we are happiest living in suburbs and voting Republican because neuroscience has “proved” that a certain bit of our brain lights up upon seeing Chevy Chase or Greenwich; or that we all like novels because stories must have taught us, millennia ago, how to negotiate our confusing hunter-gatherer society—I exaggerate only a little). Taylor is right to claim that the popularity of this type of reduction is “one of the most burning intellectual issues in modern life.”
- But he is perhaps too defeatist. There is good reduction and bad reduction. Taylor does not attack the bad reduction case by case, but proceeds as if it were generally already winning—as if it were already vitiating the prospects of a moral and meaningful existence. This is a little like decrying a conspiracy theory because it has damaged a sacred truth, instead of attacking the conspiracy theory as simply untrue. In this sense, Taylor’s essay seems a narrative of loss and lament, even as he protests that it is not. It would be better to lay the problem of reductionism at the doors of specific forms of reduction (many of those doors little more than temporary storefronts), rather than at the very large door of “post-Galilean science.” The former is secular argumentativeness; the latter is closer to religious elegy.
- Darwin foresaw as the goal of the evolutionary process . . . namely, the natural creation of man as a moral creature.”
- , Thomas Nagel wrote a shrewd essay entitled “The Absurd,” in which he argued that, just as we can “step back from the purposes of individual life and doubt their point, we can step back also from the progress of human history, or of science, or the success of a society, or the kingdom, power, and glory of God, and put all these things into question in the same way.” Secularism can seem as meaningless as religion when such doubt strikes. Nagel went on to conclude, calmly, that we shouldn’t worry too much, because if, under the eye of eternity, nothing matters “then that doesn’t matter either, and we can approach our absurd lives with irony instead of heroism or despair.” This is impeccably logical, and impishly offers a kind of secular deconstruction of secularism, but it is fairly cold comfort in the middle of the night.

Aug

9

2011

Trying to Live Forever - NYTimes.com

opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/...trying-to-live-forever

- Preview

Correlation Causation Life Information Overload Health Medicine Science

An article in the May Consumer Reports Health shed some light on this question. It discussed the widely publicized medical study that showed, contrary to expectations, that “raising HDL (good) cholesterol with drugs did nothing to protect against heart attacks.” This, the article said, was surprising because observational studies had shown that people with lower levels of HDL had more heart attacks than those with higher levels of HDL. An observational study, however, shows only a correlation between two variables (e.g., level of HDL and number of heart attacks). The new result came from a randomized clinical study, using one group of patients who receive a given treatment and a “control group” of patients who do not. Unlike an observational study, such a study can show whether or not, for example, higher HDL actually prevents heart attacks. The article went on to emphasize that “we should almost never rely on the results of observational studies, which can only suggest associations with disease but not prove them.”
implicit in most media reports, is that acting on the results of the unreliable observational studies “couldn’t hurt and might help.” This makes sense if I have a medical problem for which there is no reliable remedy. If nothing else has helped my arthritis, insomnia or back pain, it would make perfect sense to try a remedy that will not do serious harm and has some probability of working.
3 more annotation(s)...
- But most observational studies concern not remedies for present ills but protection against future ones, and for these cases it is hard to tell if even relatively small costs or risks of harm outweigh the probability of partial protection
- More important, there is a reasonable chance that further observational studies will call into question the one I’m acting on or even
- it would seem preferable to keep healthy by a method that is simple, reliable and doesn’t require constant revision and fine-tuning. We do, after all, have such a method available: simply follow the humdrum standard advice we’ve heard all our lives about eating sensibly, exercising regularly, and having recommended medical tests and exams. Doing this and foregoing the endless calibration of our behavior to the latest research results will be far less stressful, make it more likely that we’ll stick to the method, and allow more time for fulfilling pursuits. From this point of view, the media’s constant updates on the latest observational studies are counterproductive.

Jul

15

2011

You should probably quit your job

occasionally someone remembers that our lives are so short, the time is so precious, and they push aside the pile to look again on the "Promised Land." And then they do something important. They quit their job.

This happened to Kai Nagata this week. Kai was a Canadian TV reporter who suddenly resigned because he realized he could be doing more if he was doing something else. In his words:

"I quit my job because the idea burrowed into my mind that, on the long list of things I could be doing, television news is not the best use of my short life."

www.ottawacitizen.com/...story.html

- Preview

Life Job

Jun

28

2011

What Darwin's Doubters Get Wrong - The Chronicle Review - The Chronicle of Higher Education

chronicle.com/...64457

- Preview

Darwinism Evolution God Religion Life Philosophy

Darwinism implies that there is and can be no direction in life's history. All change is a function of randomly appearing new variations (mutations) that are then sifted by the opportunistic mechanism of natural selection. Although new variations are not uncaused, they do not appear according to need. As Darwin himself argued, to think otherwise is to illicitly bring in a directing God. The late Harvard paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould used to pun that the arrival of the human species was entirely an accident brought on by our lucky stars—a comet that hit the earth 65 million years ago, wiping out the dinosaurs and allowing for the rise of mammals
philosophy today tends to be very secular, and there is a lot of sympathy for the claims of the so-called New Atheists—Richard Dawkins, Daniel C. Dennett, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens—that if you are a Darwinian, then you ought to be at least an agnostic, if not an outright atheist.
3 more annotation(s)...
- To Fodor the notion of natural selection is flawed. He has long been on record arguing that metaphors in science are misleading, and that they must be eliminated as science matures. In the case of Darwinism, we have an analogy or metaphor at work, between the artificial selection that breeders use when they improve livestock—shaggier sheep, beefier cows—and the process of differential reproduction that Darwinians think leads to evolutionary change (in the direction of adaptive advantage). Fodor believes that differential reproduction illicitly brings mind into the natural process:
  
  The present worry is that the explication of natural selection by appeal to selective breeding is seriously misleading, and that it thoroughly misled Darwin. Because breeders have minds, there's a fact of the matter about what traits they breed for; if you want to know, just ask them. Natural selection, by contrast, is mindless; it acts without malice aforethought. That strains the analogy between natural selection and breeding, perhaps to the breaking point. What, then, is the intended interpretation when one speaks of natural selection? The question is wide open as of this writing.
- One could certainly pick apart individual things, for instance Fodor's claims about selective breeding versus natural selection. The very last thing that Darwin and his followers are trying to do is put mind into nature. In both artifice and nature, some organisms are going to reproduce and others are not, and the reasons for that are (on average) going to be connected to the different features of the winners and losers. To say that a speckled moth is less likely to be eaten by a robin than a dark moth, because the robin can less easily see the speckled moth against the lichen-covered tree, is to say nothing about God or any other conscious being.
- One could also pick up on the fact that neither Plantinga nor Nagel seems to have the slightest awareness of the scientific criticisms that have been launched against intelligent design. Every example that supporters of intelligent design produce to suggest that natural causes are not adequate—the bacterial flagellum, the blood-clotting cascade—has been shown to be the exquisite end result of evolution. And one could certainly groan at the tired suggestion that Darwinians are unaware of or threatened by developments in evolutionary development. No evolutionary biologist, least of all Sean Carroll, suggests that one day the eye just appeared. However the new sources of variation play out, selection is going to be there right along with them.

Jun

21

2011

Rationally Speaking: The five top regrets of dying people

rationallyspeaking.blogspot.com/...p-regrets-of-dying-people.html

- Preview

Happiness Relationship Death Life

The result is this list of “top five” things people wished they had done differently:
1. I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.
2. I wish I didn’t work so hard.
3. I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings.
4. I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.
5. I wish that I had let myself be happier.
I’m not sure what it means for someone to be true to oneself, but I take it that the notion attempts to get at the fact that too many of us cave to societal forces early on and do not actually follow our aspirations. The practicalities of life have a way of imposing themselves on us, beginning with parental pressure to enter a remunerative career path and continuing with the fact that no matter what your vocation is you still have to somehow pay the bills and put dinner on the table every evening. And yet, you wouldn’t believe the number of people I’ve met in recent years who — about midway through their expected lifespan — suddenly decided that what they had been doing with their lives during the previous couple of decades was somewhat empty and needed to change. Almost without exception, these friends in their late ‘30s or early ‘40s contemplated — and many actually followed through — going back to (graduate) school and preparing for a new career in areas that they felt augmented the meaningfulness of their lives (often, but not always, that meant teaching). One could argue that such self-examination should have occurred much earlier, but we are often badly equipped, in terms of both education and life experience, to ask ourselves that sort of question when we are entering college. Better midway than at the end, though...
4 more annotation(s)...
- American workers are significantly more stressed than other people, and as a result they enjoy their lives much less. To add insult to injury, they are steeped in a society that actually makes fun of, say, France's short work week, or more in general, disdain the European “socialist” approach that allows people (God forbid!) to take sick leave without losing their pay, or to take care of their infant children while retaining their jobs.
- My European and South American friends seem to have little trouble expressing their feelings, and that goes for both men and women. But the US is, of course, the country where the quintessential icons are the tough silent guys with a gun (midwest and south) or the Woody Allen-type neurotic individual who spends a lifetime in therapy — neither of which seems a particularly appealing model to me. I suspect one’s ability to express feelings is greatly facilitated by the presence of the fourth ingredient of a happy life: friends.
- the fourth entry — about friendship — follows the same pattern as the ones above. For Epicurus, friendship is a major way to ataraxia, or tranquillity in life: “Of all the things which wisdom provides to make life entirely happy, much the greatest is the possession of friendship.” Aristotle developed a sophisticated theory of friendship, recognizing three types: of pleasure, of utility, and of virtue. The first kind applies to situations in which one is a person’s friend because of the direct pleasure that friendship brings — for instance because you like people who are good conversationalists, or with whom you can go to concerts, and so on. Friendships of utility are those in which one gains a tangible benefit, either economic or political, from the relationship. The implication is not that one has utility friendships for the purpose of exploiting the other person, first because of course the advantage can be reciprocal, and second because a business or political relationship doesn’t preclude you having genuine feelings of affection for your partner or colleague. For Aristotle, though, the highest kind of friendship was one of virtue, where you are friends with someone because of the kind of person he is, because of her virtues. I suspect it is largely the latter — most precious and difficult to achieve — that Ware’s patients had in mind during the last few weeks of their lives.
- Happiness in the sense of flourishing — Aristotle’s lifelong project — is the compound outcome of doing what one finds meaningful, of achieving a balance between work and other aspects of one’s life, of being able to engage our fellow human beings at both a rational and an emotional level, and of cultivating true friendships and other important relationships. It is therefore a bit misleading to think of “letting” oneself be happy. Eudaimonic happiness is actually hard and constant work, but it is the kind of work that allows you to get to your final few weeks of existence, look back, and think: wow, it really was a good life that I lived. And a bit more examination here and there will likely help you to arrive at that happy conclusion.

Jun

14

2011

All Religious Affiliations Are Pro-Choice, Except for White Evangelicals

"with the exception of white evangelical Protestants, majorities of all major religious groups say abortion should be legal in all or most cases." This flies in the face of the widely held notion that religious people are pro-life.

www.care2.com/...all-religious-affiliations

- Preview

Feminism Choice Abortion Life Religion Gender Equality

people also tend to identify with both "pro-choice" and "pro-life" labels, indicating that the binary may be rather useless. This is visible in almost every demographic group. PRRI's research director, Daniel Cox, points out in the news release that many Americans believe that abortion is morally wrong, but that it should also be legal. This view is not compatible with the "pro-choice"/"pro-life" divide.
"more than 7 in 10 religious Americans believe it is possible to disagree with the teachings of their religion on the issue of abortion and still be considered a person of good standing in their faith."

Jun

6

2011

Harvard dropouts from the class of 1969 | Harvard Magazine Jul-Aug 2010

Several celebrated Harvard dropouts have done quite nicely sans diploma. These include R. Buckminster Fuller ’17, Robert Lowell ’37, Bonnie Raitt ’72, Bill Gates ’77, and Matt Damon ’92 in the last century alone. But what of those who do not become famous? What becomes of those who leave Harvard voluntarily and, despite multiple invitations, never return? (The College routinely contacts those who have left to ask if they wish to complete their degrees.)

We chose an era known for its radical sensibility and tracked down three members of a College class (1969) that might represent its high-water mark, to catch up with them and see if they had any regrets about the path not taken. Here are their stories.

harvardmagazine.com/...dropouts

- Preview

Education University Life

Jun

1

2011

Roger Pielke Jr.'s Blog: Donald Boudreaux: I'll Take That Bet

The fact of the matter is that our vulnerability to extreme weather is increasing, due to a combination of a growing population and especially urbanization in locations prone to extreme weather events. This means that even with the hard work by many professionals in a range of fields that has contributed to the dramatic decrease in the number of deaths over recent decades low death totals are unlikely to continue into the future, as this year's tragic tornado season tells us. Of course, given expected societal trends a reversal in statistics would not necessarily mean that our disaster policies are failing. What it means is that our responses to extreme weather require constant vigilance, investment and continued hard work.

rogerpielkejr.blogspot.com/...udreaux-ill-take-that-bet.html

- Preview

Disaster Life Death Climate Science

May

31

2011

Feeling happy? Don't be too smug as chances are you will die young - Telegraph

Researchers found that children who are rated "highly cheerful" at school went onto die younger than their more reserved class mates.
This is because they are likely to lead more carefree lives full of danger and unhealthy lifestyle choices, it is believed.
They may also be more likely to suffer from mental problems such as bipolar depression which sees moods swing from extreme happiness to debilitating sadness.
Being too cheerful – especially at inappropriate times – can also rouse anger in others, increasing the risk of a person coming to harm.

www.telegraph.co.uk/...es-are-you-will-die-young.html

- Preview

Happiness Life Longevity

trying too hard to be happy often ended up leaving people feeling more depressed than before, as putting an effort into improving their mood often left people feeling cheated.
"The strongest predictor of happiness is not money, or external recognition through success or fame. It's having meaningful social relationships.

"That means the best way to increase your happiness is to stop worrying about being happy and instead divert your energy to nurturing the social bonds you have with other people.

May

25

2011

Best Countries to Live In? According to New Rankings: Canada and Australia | The Utopianist - Think Bigger

The GDP has come under scrutiny lately. Not that it isn’t a useful economic indicator; it’s just that it doesn’t always give a complete picture of how a country’s economy affects the average citizen. If income inequality is high, a rocketing GDP can mean very little to the large part of the population left behind.
That’s why the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) developed the Your Better Life Index, an attempt to shed light on what average citizens really care about. The study examined 34 countries in 11 different categories: housing, income, jobs, community, education, environment, governance, health, life satisfaction, safety and work-life balance. A little hippy-ish? It might seem so at first, but who can honestly say that all of those categories aren’t, at least in some way, important to them.

utopianist.com/...-rankings-canada-and-australia

- Preview

Life GDP Countries

May

17

2011

3quarksdaily: “Is there an answer?” Searching for the meaning of life in The Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

with all due respect to Wittgenstein, my favorite example of the “dissolving questions” strategy comes from Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, which contains a cheeky and unforgettable dissolution of which I’m sure Wittgenstein himself would have been proud: A race of hyper-intelligent, pan-dimensional beings builds a supercomputer named Deep Thought, so that they can ask it the question that has preoccupied philosophers for millions of years: “What is the answer to life, the universe, and everything?”

After seven and a half million years of computation, Deep Thought finally announces the answer: Forty-two. In response to the programmers’ howls of disappointment and confusion, Deep Thought rather patiently points out that the reason his answer doesn’t make any sense is because their original question didn’t make any sense either.

www.3quarksdaily.com/...ikers-guide-to-the-galaxy.html

- Preview

Life PHilosophy

The Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein gets credit for pointing out that many classic philosophical conundrums are unsolvable not because they are so profound, but because they are incoherent. Instead of trying to solve such questions, he argued, we should try to dissolve them, by demonstrating how they misuse words and investigating the confusion that motivated the question in the first place.
#1: What’s the point of anything if we’re all going to be dead someday?
9 more annotation(s)...
- if you feel that life lacks meaning if it’s all going to end someday and you feel that life would lack meaning if it’s going to last forever, then that says more about the incoherence of your own conception of meaning than it does about the nature of the universe.
- #2: What’s the purpose of our existence?
- It’s true that scientists have a pretty solid explanation of the series of events that led to the existence of humanity. We’re still uncertain about how the very first life actually formed, but we have some good hypotheses, and we’re clear on the subsequent process of evolution which produced homo sapiens. But to many people, that isn’t an answer to the question of “why” we are here. When they ask “why” we exist, they don’t mean the question in a causal sense (i.e., “What was the series of events that caused our existence?”). They mean the question teleologically -- they’re seeking some externally-bestowed purpose for our existence.
- But what if our lives did have a predetermined purpose? And what if we could learn what it was? There’s no guarantee that it would yield the sense of meaning we crave.
- #3: How can any of our lives matter in the grand scheme of things?
- My suspicion is that the enormity of the universe plays a key role in the sensation that life lacks meaning. Psychological research suggests that when we evaluate an act of charity, we don’t judge it based on the amount of good it would accomplish -- we judge it based on the amount of good it would accomplish relative to the size of the problem.
- So you can see why contemplating the vast size of the universe might seem to rob life of meaning: however consequential our lives and our actions typically seem to us, they’re going to look pretty insignificant when we start comparing them to the universe as a whole. Who cares about humanity’s joys, agonies, and achievements? Divide them by an infinite universe and they dwindle to nothing.
- #4: Things seem to happen without rhyme or reason.
- where did we get our futile expectations of an orderly world? One plausible hypothesis is that the ability to pick up on patterns and causal relationships evolved to help our ancestors notice predators hiding in the bushes, learn to avoid poisonous fruits, figure out where the best fishing spots were, and so on. And if pattern-seeking is a survival skill, it’s also not surprising that it goes into overdrive when we feel threatened or helpless. Recent experimental evidence shows that when people are feeling vulnerable, they’re more likely to see correlations in financial data; to perceive objects in randomly-generated visual noise; to believe conspiracy theories; and to see cause-and-effect relationships between events with no logical connection, like a man stamping his foot three times before a business meeting and then succeeding in his business pitch.

May

3

2011

Get your politics off my grief: After my abortion, neither pro-life nor pro-choice forces helped

As a 26-year-old New Yorker who has no problem telling a stranger about the abortion I had at 19, I have found that people make two assumptions: that I am pro-choice and that simply being pro-choice would resolve any difficult emotions I have encountered.

Identifying with political ideology does not jibe with my more complicated experience. Grief might be normal, but dogmatic agendas have hijacked outlets for healing.

www.nydailynews.com/...r_prolife_nor_prochoice_f.html

- Preview

Abortion Choice Life Politics Gender Equality

After my procedure, relief washed over me - just as I had read it would, in a report from the Guttmacher Institute, an offshoot of Planned Parenthood. Yet it was the kind of relief I have felt after losing someone to a prolonged battle with cancer: grateful the suffering had ended, but sorry my loved one had to go.

At first, I sought refuge in the pro-choice movement. In finding a community, I was coping. Our communication, however, sounded a little more like war rhetoric than sharing in a common bond. I heard myself sounding like a bumper sticker. "Fight for choice!" I hollered, as if war has ever been the answer.

Emotions, I learned, could be regarded as a chink in the pro-choice armor. Pro-lifers have long hyped "post-abortion syndrome," a condition the American Psychological Association continues to refute. As recently as January, a Danish research team reconfirmed that there is no evidence of an increased rate of mental illness after the procedure.

But three years after my abortion, I started having nightmares about babies. Awake, I missed my potential child. It was bewildering that I could feel so mournful about a decision that was supposed to buttress the architecture of my identity.
It felt traitorous to admit that, far from thinking I had expelled a "blob of cells," I now wondered who that person I aborted would have been. Mental illness or not, having the blues seemed to insult my foremothers, who fought not just for my right to end a pregnancy, but for my right to vote, to attend college, to wear a godforsaken pair of pants. I shut up about my feelings because I valued my community, but my community was unsupportive - suspicious, even - of my gloom.
3 more annotation(s)...
- I then attended, of all things, a Catholic retreat called Rachel's Vineyard, one of the few services for people who need to address their terminations. An alumna "leery of religious concepts" had reassured me with her fulsome brochure blurb, but at the retreat, politics again prevailed, this time from the other side.
  
  Facilitators encouraged us to approach Congress with our stories of how the "abortion mills hurt us." We then gathered around a grainy video about post-abortion syndrome. I knew that studies "proving" the ailment had methodological flaws, but to my surprise, I exhibited some of the symptoms: depression, longing for the lost and, yes, bitterness. An online search revealed that signs of the discredited "syndrome" overlapped with a medically recognized state called complicated grief. By distributing false information and making us their political instruments, the facilitators sure had a funny way of helping.
- Apparently, to feel troubled after ending a pregnancy was either reason to challenge public policy or an indignity so atypical that it should be ignored or even denied.
- Shortly after Rachel's Vineyard, I happened upon a third, more inclusive, movement. In 2005, Oakland-based Aspen Baker founded a movement called "pro-voice," guided by the simple notion that the women who actually have had an abortion should lead the public discussion. Pro-voice does not give abortion rights thumbs up or down, relying instead on the implicit power of unique narratives to change the culture around this issue.
  
  I'm a believer.
  
  Contorting rich experiences and complex emotions into partisan slogans shames women who do not "feel" within their political lines, separating us into distinct, sometimes-opposing groups that struggle to relate to one another. Pro-voice is an antidote to the alienating ills of America's abortion culture.
  
  Here's a right I'd march for: the right to wail myself to sleep, to yearn for my long gone baby, yet to know that I needed to delay parenthood. Transcending heartache is possible as long as I keep my story unabridged - and out of the political sphere.

Apr

14

2011

Epiphenom: A general-purpose "need to belong" drives belief in God

epiphenom.fieldofscience.com/...ose-need-to-belong-drives.html

- Preview

Religion Life

Half the students got a version of the research article which concluded that “there is a consciousness that asserts His will in the universe,” whereas the other half got a version which concluded that the Theory of Everything “cannot help to test the existence of God.”

Before that, they had already asked the students about their views of God. They were all asked to say whether they thought God is accepting or rejecting, and controlling or not controlling - regardless of whether or not they actually believed in God.

After the study, they asked the students about the strengths of their actual belief (or lack of) in God.

What happened was that those students who read the 'no evidence for God' article reported similar levels of belief regardless of their image of God. So these students are a kind of reference point.

Among those students who read the "Evidence for God" version of the article, belief in God increased - but only among those who had a mental image of God as being 'accepting'. Among those who had a more 'rejecting' image of God, belief actually went down after learning that there was evidence that God exists!
this could suggest that belief in god is stimulated by a need to be accepted, and that an image of God as rejecting actively drives some people away from belief. But there could be all sorts of other things going on here. More evidence is needed.

And that extra evidence comes in the second study.
6 more annotation(s)...
- The second study was basically the same as the first, but this time they asked half the students to first spend a couple of minutes thinking about someone who “lives in your neighbourhood, but you do not know well”. The other half were asked to think about someone who “accepts and loves you and helps you in times of need”. The idea was that the second group would be reminded that they were already loved and accepted, and so their need to belong would be reduced.
- For the first group, who thought about a person they didn't know too well, the results were the same as the first study.
  
  In the second group, the results were dramatically different. This time, reading the article had no effect on their level of belief in God.
- what happened was that, by satisfying their need to belong, the students with an image of God as 'accepting' were not motivated to believe in God in order to feel loved. And students with an image of God as 'rejecting' were not motivated to shun belief in God for fear of being rejected.
- They did a couple of other studies, one showing that people who were subtly made to think that God is rejecting subsequently went on to report lower levels of belief, and also were less inclined to go to Church. And their final study showed that believers are quite aware of this motivation - the need to belong - as a part of their rationale for their beliefs.
  
  What makes this study so interesting is that it shows not only that belief in God can make you feel loved and accepted, but that it is a direct substitute for human love and acceptance.
- belief isn't driven by some specific need to 'belong' to and be accepted by a god-figure. It's a general purpose need, which can be filled (if otherwise vacant) by God. [The researchers are careful to point out that there are a lot of other factors involved in motivating religious belief and non-belief, of course.]
- This new research helps to explain why countries with the highest social capital also have the lowest levels of belief.
  
  Strong, integrated communities don't need gods.

Mar

16

2011

FT.com / FT Magazine - What can we do when life loses meaning?

there are three main ways to infuse life with meaning. The first is getting involved with a project by “creating a work or doing a deed”. The second is “experiencing something or encountering someone” – be it nature, art, or loving another human being. And the third is “the attitude we take toward unavoidable suffering”. Even when we cannot change a situation for the better,

www.ft.com/...6d-11e0-931d-00144feab49a.html

- Preview

Life Existential Well-Being

Meaninglessness is a frequent visitor to the therapist’s consulting room. Many people who seek therapy are not suffering from any “pathology” but simply find that meaning has drained from their world, a feeling that can creep up on us or be precipitated by big life changes. Some may think that this kind of problem would be better addressed in a church, synagogue or meditation centre. “Meaning” is a fuzzy concept, and there are those who like to tie it to spirituality and the hope of somehow transcending human horizons.
A sense of meaninglessness is by no means always bundled with searching for God or losing religious belief. It could manifest itself simply as a certain inner emptiness, a feeling that some vital ingredient has gone missing from our life. If finding meaning always required spiritual transcendence, those of a more naturalistic bent would be condemned to a meaningless life. Instead, meaning can and does arise from the world around us.
8 more annotation(s)...
- Someone who knew this well was Viktor Frankl – concentration camp survivor, psychiatrist and author of Man’s Search for Meaning – who wrote about the “existential vacuum” that can sometimes overpower us
- Frankl believed that a narrow concern for our own state of mind is not conducive to a meaningful life, and that we can more readily find meaning when we engage with things outside ourselves.
- Frankl thought there are three main ways to infuse life with meaning. The first is getting involved with a project by “creating a work or doing a deed”. The second is “experiencing something or encountering someone” – be it nature, art, or loving another human being. And the third is “the attitude we take toward unavoidable suffering”. Even when we cannot change a situation for the better, Frankl advises that we can still look for more skilful ways of dealing with the reality facing us. Adopting one or any combination of these paths can be enough to breathe meaning back into life.
- For philosophers, loss of meaning in life is a regular occurrence. It happened in Germany in the late 19th century, when Friedrich Nietzsche wrote of the nihilism that confronts us once the claims of religion and objective truth have been shown to be false. It happened in Britain in 1936, when A.J. Ayer’s Language, Truth and Logic heralded the arrival of logical positivism, with its belief that statements about life’s meaning are literally meaningless. And it happened in France in the 1940s, when the existentialists Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre announced that life has no pre-existing purpose.
- But these philosophers did not so much deny meaning as redefine it. The meaning of life does not exist as a fact in the world, waiting to be discovered. We are not born with a purpose, but that does not mean we have to live without purpose. There is no meaning of life, but there can be meaning in life, if we put it there ourselves.
- Ayer, for instance, wrote that “there are many ways in which a person’s life may come to have meaning for him in itself”. Anything that we find worthwhile can be a source of meaning, from child rearing to stamp collecting. Similarly, Nietzsche claimed that the “meaning and morality of one’s life come from within oneself”, a sentiment broadly shared by Sartre and Camus.
- Some people recognise nothing in their lives that fills it with such value, while others find that this kind of meaning just isn’t enough. They feel what contemporary philosopher John Cottingham calls a “need for transcendence”, a connection with something beyond the “immanent” material world that only religion can provide.
- The harsh message of existentialism is that you can yearn as much as you like, but what you’re yearning for ain’t there. Life can have meaning solely in the here and now, but no one can guarantee that you’ll succeed in creating it. Meaninglessness is a constant threat for everyone, philosopher or not.

Feb

17

2011

Cancer resembles life 1 billion years ago, say astrobiologists - microbiology, genomics, genetics, evolution, cell biology, cancer, astrobiology - Australian Life Scientist

Feature: Inside DNA vaccines
bioMD makes a bid for Andrew Forest's Allied Medical and Coridon
Alexion acquires technology for MoCD therapy
More >

Most Popular
Media Releases
Cancer resembles life 1 billion years ago, say astrobiologists
Feature: The challenge of a herpes simplex vaccine
Feature: Proteomics power of pawpaw
bioMD makes a bid for Andrew Forest's Allied Medical and Coridon
Immune system boosting hormone might lead to HIV cure
Biotechnology Directory Company Profile
Check out this company's profile and more in the Biotechnology Directory!
Biotechnology Directory

Find company by name
Find company by category
Latest Jobs
Senior Software Developer / Java Analyst Programm
App Support Developer – Java / J2ee
Solutions Consultant - VIC
Technical Writer
Product Manager (Fisheye/Crucible)

BUYING GUIDES
Portable Multimedia Players
Digital Cameras
Digital Video Cameras
LATEST PRODUCTS
HTC Wildfire S Android phone (preview)
Panasonic LUMIX DMC-GH2 digital camera
HTC Desire S Android phone (preview)
Qld ICT minister Robert Schwarten retires
Movie piracy costs Aus economy $1.37 billion in 12 months: AFACT
Wireless smartphones essential to e-health: CSIRO
Aussie outsourcing CRM budgets to soar in 2011: Ovum
Federal government to evaluate education revolution targets
Business continuity planning - more than just disaster recovery
Proving the value of IT - Part one
5 open source security projects to watch
In-memory computing
Information security in 2011
EFA shoots down 'unproductive' AFACT movie piracy study
In Pictures: IBM hosts Galactic dinner
Emerson Network Power launches new infrastructure solutions
Consumers not smart enough for smartphones?
Google one-ups Apple online media subscription service
M2M offerings expand as more machines go online
India cancels satellite spectrum deal after controversy
Lenovo profit rises in Q3 on strong PC sales in China
Taiwan firm to supply touch sensors to Samsung
HP regains top position in India's PC market

Copyright 2011 IDG Communications. ABN 14 001 592 650. All righ

www.lifescientist.com.au/..._years_ago_say_astrobiologists

- Preview

Cancer Evolution Life

astrobiologists, working with oncologists in the US, have suggested that cancer resembles ancient forms of life that flourished between 600 million and 1 billion years ago.
Read more about what this discovery means for cancer research.
12 more annotation(s)...
- The genes that controlled the behaviour of these early multicellular organisms still reside within our own cells, managed by more recent genes that keep them in check.
  It's when these newer controlling genes fail that the older mechanisms take over, and the cell reverts to its earlier behaviours and grows out of control.
- The new theory, published in the journal Physical Biology, has been put forward by two leading figures in the world of cosmology and astrobiology: Paul Davies, director of the Beyond Center for Fundamental Concepts in Science, Arizona State University; and Charles Lineweaver, from the Australian National University.
- In the paper, they suggest that a close look at cancer shows similarities with early forms of multicellular life.
- According to Lineweaver, this suggests that cancer is an atavism, or an evolutionary throwback.
- “Unlike bacteria and viruses, cancer has not developed the capacity to evolve into new forms. In fact, cancer is better understood as the reversion of cells to the way they behaved a little over one billion years ago, when humans were nothing more than loose-knit colonies of only partially differentiated cells.
  “We think that the tumours that develop in cancer patients today take the same form as these simple cellular structures did more than a billion years ago,” he said.
- the genes that controlled this early multi-cellular form of life are like a computer operating system's 'safe mode', and when there are failures or mutations in the more recent genes that manage the way cells specialise and interact to form the complex life of today, then the earlier level of programming takes over.
- One piece of evidence to support this theory is that cancers appear in virtually all metazoans, with the notable exception of the bizarre naked mole rat.
  "This quasi-ubiquity suggests that the mechanisms of cancer are deep-rooted in evolutionary history, a conjecture that receives support from both paleontology and genetics," they write.
- Their notion is in contrast to a prevailing theory that cancer cells are 'rogue' cells that evolve rapidly within the body, overcoming the normal slew of cellular defences.
- However, Davies and Lineweaver point out that cancer cells are highly cooperative with each other, if competing with the host's cells. This suggests a pre-existing complexity that is reminiscent of early multicellular life.
- cancers' manifold survival mechanisms are predictable, and unlikely to emerge spontaneously through evolution within each individual in such a consistent way.
- The good news is that this means combating cancer is not necessarily as complex as if the cancers were rogue cells evolving new and novel defence mechanisms within the body.
  Instead, because cancers fall back on the same evolved mechanisms that were used by early life, we can expect them to remain predictable, thus if they're susceptible to treatment, it's unlikely they'll evolve new ways to get around it.
- If the atavism hypothesis is correct, there are new reasons for optimism," they write.

Weiye Loh's Library tagged Life → View Popular, Search in Google

Balderdash: Jung on Meaning and Self-delusion

A Taste of Honey is still sweet half a century on | marksimpson.com

Philosophers Speak: A Video Series - NYTimes.com

The Meaningfulness of Lives - NYTimes.com

‘Torchwood’ Gives Glimpse of Eternal Life - NYTimes.com

Secularism and Its Discontents : The New Yorker

Trying to Live Forever - NYTimes.com

You should probably quit your job

What Darwin's Doubters Get Wrong - The Chronicle Review - The Chronicle of Higher Education

Rationally Speaking: The five top regrets of dying people

All Religious Affiliations Are Pro-Choice, Except for White Evangelicals

Harvard dropouts from the class of 1969 | Harvard Magazine Jul-Aug 2010

Roger Pielke Jr.'s Blog: Donald Boudreaux: I'll Take That Bet

Feeling happy? Don't be too smug as chances are you will die young - Telegraph

Best Countries to Live In? According to New Rankings: Canada and Australia | The Utopianist - Think Bigger

3quarksdaily: “Is there an answer?” Searching for the meaning of life in The Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

Get your politics off my grief: After my abortion, neither pro-life nor pro-choice forces helped

Epiphenom: A general-purpose "need to belong" drives belief in God

FT.com / FT Magazine - What can we do when life loses meaning?

Cancer resembles life 1 billion years ago, say astrobiologists - microbiology, genomics, genetics, evolution, cell biology, cancer, astrobiology - Australian Life Scientist

Selected Tags

Related Tags

Top Contributors

Groups interested in Life

Education in Second Life

Commercial Insurance

OpenSim