Category: philosophy

How to open someone’s mind

COVID19 has resurfaced more than a discussion about pandemics and vaccines. As many admit, fear of the vaccines may be the greatest barrier to stopping COVID19. It stretches far beyond the so-called anti-vaxxer community: about 50% of Americans harbour questions about the safety of the COVID19 vaccines; 40% say they definitely or probably won’t get one.

COVID19 opened a discussion of open/close minds and stereotypes.

How can we open people’s minds (to using vaccines and in general) and get them to see what science, facts and reality are?

When we try to change a person’s mind, our first impulse is to preach about why we’re right and prosecute them for being wrong. Yet experiments show that preaching and prosecuting typically  backfire — and what doesn’t sway people may strengthen their beliefs. Much as a vaccine inoculates the physical immune system against a virus, the act of resistance fortifies the psychological immune system. Refuting a point of view produces antibodies against future attempts at influence, making people more certain of their own opinions and more ready to rebut alternatives.

In 1980s, when treating substance abuse problems, psychologists (William Miller and Stephen Rollnick) developed a technique called motivational interviewing. The central premise: instead of trying to force other people to change, you’re better off helping them find their own intrinsic motivation to change. You do that by interviewing them — asking open-ended questions and listening carefully — and holding up a mirror so they can see their own thoughts more clearly. If they express a desire to change, you guide them toward a plan. This technique works well only when there is a genuine desire to understand people’s motivations and help them reach their goals.

Why is motivational interviewing effective in opening and changing minds? Studies showed that when we listen carefully and call attention to the nuances in people’s own thinking, they become less extreme and more open in their views. For example, when asking people how their preferred political policies might work in practice, rather than asking why they favour those policies, was more effective in opening their minds. As people struggle to explain their ideal tax legislation or healthcare plan, they grasp the complexity of the problem and recognise gaps in their own knowledge. In motivational interviewing, there’s a distinction between sustain talk and change talk. Sustain talk is about maintaining the status quo. Change talk is about a desire, ability or commitment to making a change. A skilled motivational interviewer listens for change talk and asks people to elaborate on it: the how questions that lead to thinking things through, introspection and opening of their minds. 

In controlled trials, motivational interviewing has helped people to stop smoking, abusing drugs and alcohol, and gambling; to improve their diets and exercise; to overcome eating disorders; and to lose weight. The approach has also motivated students to get a good night’s sleep; voters to reconsider their prejudices; and divorcing parents to reach settlements.

So how can we conduct a motivational interview with intention of getting someone to become more open-minded or open to change? Below is one framework:

  1. Start by assessing the importance of change to a relevant matter.
  2. Reflect on answer (s) provided to the question above.
  3. Elicit change talk about values, hopes, goals, or relevant matters.
  4. Elicit discrepancy by placing the current behaviour in the context of current values or desired future.
  5. Assess the person’s lack of self-efficacy. A person who has a high level of self-efficacy generally believes he/she can carry out what is necessary to realise his or her goals. Motivational Interviewing is particularly useful with people that lack self-efficacy and believe they may be unable to change.
  6. Use Motivational Interviewing to build/improve self-efficacy.

Consciousness, quantum physics and Buddhism

What is consciousness?

And how do I really know you are conscious? This is the problem of solipsism. I know your brain is very similar to mine as you look like a human, sound like one and give an expression of someone with brain like other humans. By mathematical induction then, there is a perfectly reasonable inference that you too are conscious.

Some 10,000 laboratories worldwide are pursuing distinct questions about the brain and consciousness across a myriad of scales and in a dizzying variety of animals and behaviours. According to most computer scientists, consciousness is a characteristic that emerges from of technological developments. Some believe that consciousness involves accepting new information, storing and retrieving old information and cognitive processing of it all into perceptions and actions. If that’s right, then one day machines will indeed be the ultimate consciousness. They’ll be able to gather more information than a human, store more than many libraries, access vast databases in milliseconds and compute all of it into decisions more complex, and yet more logical, than any person ever could.

Consciousness could be explained by “integrated information theory,” which asserts that consciousness is a product of structures, such as a brain, that can store a large amounts of information, have a critical density of interconnections and thus enable many informational feedback loops. This theory provides a means to assess degrees of consciousness in people, animals (lesser degree than humans) and even machines/programs (for example, IBM Watson and Google’s self-taught visual system). It proposes a way to measure it in a single value called Φ (phi) and helps explain why certain relatively complicated neural structures don’t seem critical for consciousness. For example, the cerebellum, which encodes information about motor movements, contains a huge number of neurons, but doesn’t appear to integrate the diverse range of internal states that the prefrontal cortex does.

The more distinctive the information (of the system), and the more specialised and integrated the system is, the higher its Φ (and anything with a Φ>0 possesses at least a shred of consciousness). Over the past few years, this theory has become increasingly influential and is championed by the eminent neuroscientist Christof Koch. The problem is that even though Φ promises to be precise, it’s so far impossible to use it for practical calculations related to human or animal brains, because an unthinkably large number of possibilities would have to be evaluated.

Accordingly, consciousness is a property of complex systems that have a particular “cause-effect” connections. If you were to build a computer that has the same circuitry as the brain, this computer would also have consciousness associated with it. It would feel like something to be this computer, like each human does. Hofstadter’s Mind’s I has a collection of essays about mind (an emerging property of brain function) and how feedback loops are essential for this emergence.

Another viewpoint on consciousness comes from quantum theory, the most profound and thorough theory about nature of things. According to the orthodox Copenhagen Interpretation, consciousness and the physical world are complementary aspects of the same reality. When a person observes, or experiments on, some aspect of the physical world, that person’s conscious interaction causes discernible change. Since it takes consciousness as a given and no attempt is made to derive it from physics, the Copenhagen theory postulates that consciousness exists by itself but requires brains to become real. This view was popular with the pioneers of quantum theory such as Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg and Erwin Schrödinger.

The interaction between consciousness and matter leads to paradoxes that remain unresolved after 80 years of debate. A well-known example of this is the paradox of Schrödinger’s cat, in which a cat is placed in a situation that results in it being equally likely to survive or die – and the act of observation itself is what makes the outcome certain.

The opposing view is that consciousness emerges from biology, just as biology itself emerges from chemistry which, in turn, emerges from dissipative systems, according to physicist Jeremy England. It agrees with the neuroscientists’ view that the processes of the mind are identical to states/processes of the brain. It also agrees with a more recent interpretation of quantum theory motivated by an attempt to rid it of paradoxes, the Many Worlds Interpretation.

Modern quantum physics views of consciousness have parallels in ancient philosophy. For example, Copenhagen theory is similar to the theory of mind in Vedanta – in which consciousness is the fundamental basis of reality, on par with the physical universe. On the other hand, England’s theory resembles Buddhism as Buddhist hold that mind and consciousness arise out of emptiness or nothingness.

A strong evidence in favour of Copenhagen theory is the life of Indian mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan, who died in 1920 at the age of 32. His notebook, which was lost and forgotten for about 50 years and published only in 1988, contains several thousand formulas, without proof in different areas of mathematics, that were well ahead of their time. Furthermore, the methods by which he found formulas remain elusive. He claimed they were revealed to him by a goddess while he was asleep.

Thinking deeper about consciousness leads to the question of how matter and mind influence each other. Consciousness alone cannot make physical changes to the world, but perhaps it can change probabilities in the evolution of life and thus quantum processes? The act of observation can freeze and even influence atoms’ movements, as shown in 2015. This may very well be an explanation of how matter and mind interact.

 

awake or asleep

Heraclitus wrote:

Men are as forgetful and heedless
in their waking moments
of what is going on around them
as they are during their sleep.
Fools, although they hear,
are like deaf;
to them the adage applies
that whenever they are present
they are absent.
One should not act or speak
as if he were asleep.
The waking have one world in common;
sleepers have each a private world of his own.
Whatever we see when awake is death,
when asleep, dreams.
 

awake and alive

Wakefulness is the way to life.
The fool sleeps as if he were already dead,
but the master is awake and he lives forever.
He watches. He is clear.
How happy he is! For he sees that wakefulness is life.
How happy he is, following the path of the awakened.
With great perseverance he meditates, seeking freedom and happiness.
  
– from the Dhammapada of Gautama Siddhartha (Buddha)

10 reasons why socrates is still relevant today

Leaders in Europe and America have to take out dusty books of philosophy and check why Socrates and his ideas are still valid today:

  1. They’ve Never Been Rendered Obsolete
  2. He Taught Us to Question Everything
  3. He Taught Us That Life is Worthless Without Happiness
  4. He Taught Us to Ask if There’s Such a Thing as a Just War
  5. He Advocated True Freedom of Speech
  6. He Invented Philosophical Ethics
  7. He Was a Champion of Human Virtue
  8. He Warned Us of the Follies of Materialism
  9. He Taught Us the Value of Civil Disobedience
  10. He Taught Us to Stand Up For What We Believe

are you a hero?

Brave bystanders lift a burning car and save a man trapped beneath.

Flight passenger leaps onto a burning man to prevent him from detonating explosives.

As the train arrives, a 50-year-old man jumps on subway tracks to save a youth.

These men/women were ordinary people who decided in an instant to do something heroic.

Dr. Zimbardo thinks everyone can be a hero.

Hero:

  • chooses not to watch-and-wait in face of crisis.
  • puts compassion into action by helping someone in need.
  • decides to speak against injustice, instead of assuming someone else will.
  • supports the causes that matter to him/her, without expecting rewards.

freedom according to camus, adler, gandhi, buddhism and modernity

Since Protagoras’ famous “man is the measure of all things,” declaring human freedom as an unlimited absolute, philosophers have been fascinated with the idea of freedom.

Philosopher/scholar Adler categorized freedom as:

  1. self-realization
  2. acquired state of mind
  3. self-determination: to determine — not necessarily carry-out — wishes/actions in life

Gandhi thought, “freedom isn’t worth having if it doesn’t connote freedom to err.”

Hindu/Buddhist freedom is embedded in moksha; to Chuang Tzu freedom meant “free yourself from the world.”

In modern China/world, freedom is “fusion of personal, national, social, civic, and moral freedoms” or “liberation, self-development, independent personality/responsibility, democracy/human-rights, spiritual-cultural necessity, privacy, autonomy/self-mastery.

is dalai lama a dictator?

What you might not know is that Dalai Lama is considered a “religious dictator” (against his “competitor” Dorje Shugden‘s worshippers) by some.

In the West, he is mostly beloved/admired for his intense charism and Hollywood connections, projecting an image of an avuncular “Santa Claus.” Western fans see in him a “secular saint” or a “politically correct god for a godless world”.

Furthermore, admiration for Dalai Lama taps into older Western ideas about Tibet (forbidden to Westerners during 1792-1903 period) as a remote and mystical Shangri-La.

Sleep is the best way to meditate according to Dalai Lama.