MRS. NOAH
It’s still drizzling. Gray religious gloom
seeps in through the small window.
The oil lamp creaks on its hook.
She’s humming to herself, stirring lentil soup.
The ark fills with a homey aroma.
She preserved the testament of spices,
the commandments of barley and beans.
Noah said, “We’ll just catch fish.”
She smiled. And remembered to take
cucumber seeds, to plant,
in a new world, a garden.
In the pantry sat a sack of almonds,
and another with dried figs and dates.
After all she was the one
who’d asked, “Sweetheart,
shouldn’t we be prepared?”
And kept him awake with her dream
of salvation in a houseboat, plied
him with reasons and sulks,
his favorite honey cake.
And got what she wanted:
three stories of gopher wood —
a large ark is easier to keep clean.
The animals they took on board?
Her cow, “Patchy,” and his fancy doves;
two donkeys, two little black goats,
the family’s cats and dogs,
and the grandchildren’s pet turtle.
Legends grow. Legends grow into myths.
Noah said he’d heard the voice of God.
Perhaps. But we know whose voice
nagged him and cheered him on
through the years of hammering and sawing —
and through the dark birth
of those forty nights and forty days.
~Oriana
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SAUL BELLOW AND HIS LAST NOVEL
~ Saul Bellow’s Ravelstein—included in the Library of America’s final volume of Saul Bellow’s complete novels—is a eulogy in novel form for his friend Allan Bloom. But it also contains a kind of eulogy for Bellow himself. A shift in emphasis occurs about halfway through when Ravelstein, close to death, predicts that Chick (more or less Bellow’s alter ego) will soon follow him to the grave. Before long Ravelstein is dead and Chick is hospitalized for a potentially fatal case of food poisoning. Chick spends much of the latter part of the novel contemplating death and summing up his life. “I…lived to see the phenomena,” he concludes. Life may pass by in a continuous series of “pictures,” yet “in the surface of things you saw the heart of things.”
Chick, the author of a biography, has made a career of examining the surface of things to understand the inner lives of his subjects. “Ordinary daily particulars,” he writes, “were my specialty.” The same was true of Bellow in his fiction. He was, in his own term, a world-class noticer.
One of the distinctive thrills of reading Bellow is the exuberant richness of his descriptive prose—in the case of Ravelstein, for instance, we glimpse his “honeydew-melon head,” “legs paler than milk” that emerge from an ill-fitting kimono, and a laugh “like Picasso’s wounded horse in Guernica, rearing back.” But Bellow does not summon these details as many novelists do, merely for the sake of clarity or amusement. They are central to his method. They are the way into the hearts of his characters, and also into his own heart.
Zachary Leader, Bellow’s newest biographer, has taken Bellow’s fictional biographer at his word. No detail of Bellow’s life has escaped Leader’s dragnet, no matter how superficial, and all have turned up in the pages of The Life of Saul Bellow: To Fame and Fortune, 1915–1964. Until now, the most authoritative account has been James Atlas’s Bellow: A Biography (2000), a thorough, engaging account that struck many of Bellow’s acolytes, and the man himself, as excessively critical about his personal life and insufficiently admiring of his genius. John Leonard, in his New York Times review, wrote that “a biographer more scrupulous than Atlas is hard to imagine.” But Leader is that biographer. His book is more than eight hundred closely printed pages, at least a third longer than Atlas’s. And it is just the first of two volumes. ~
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2015/06/04/bellow-defiant-irascible-mind/?*
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“To accept reality is to accept it in its totality, pleasure and pain, day and night, summer and winter. Reality has an alternative character, which results from the interplay of 'I want' and 'It is thus,' of forces and obstacles.” ~ angel ae
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WOULD THE CREATION OF A PALESTINIAN STATE SOLVE THE CHRONIC ARAB-ISRAELI PROBLEM?
The creation of a Palestinian state would not solve anything — it would just make people who already are miserable even more miserable, and also kill lots of people. It doesn’t matter if Palestinians received the lace-state in West Bank plus Gaza or all of Palestine, internally fractured and rife with religious extremism of the highest rank they’re ungovernable as a nation. The existence of Israel and intense hatred of Jews are the two things that basically keep them from exploding on the inside.
The solutions to this are rather unfortunate. The least bad option may be the Assyrian method: forcefully resettle Palestinians across the world in small groups, break their society apart and force them to amalgamate into larger societies. It is culturocide, but any other option is either an outright genocide or a state of war and religious extremism into perpetuity. ~ Tomaž Vargazon, Quora
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Red Square on New Year’s EveMost cleaners, laborers, couriers in large Russian cities are migrants. During Muslim holidays, large cities turn into processions of men (women must stay at home).
It is entirely possible that by the end of this century, Russia will become an Islamic republic.
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RUSSIA IS DYING
Russia is dying.
And it’s not a catch phrase, but a fact.
Countries seem eternal, but they are not. Sure, the land on which they are located will still be there, but that’s all. The peoples inhabiting the land, the borders of the countries, and more importantly — the forms of government change.
Breakaway regions of Kievan Rus, vassal lands of the Golden Horde, the Muscovy principality, the Russian Tsardom, the Russian Empire, the Russian Republic, the USSR and the Russian Federation were all fundamentally different states.
A change in the government system almost always entails a change in elites, rights, laws, property distribution, image of the future, governance structures, political alliances — and at times, the physical destruction of the population, at least partially.
Now, we can take the date of adoption of the state’s constitution as a marker of “the birth of a state”: a state’s constitution is its genetic code, which (more or less) determines everything else.
The world’s oldest state (by the date it’s current Constitution was adopted) is the USA — its Declaration of Independence is 237 years old.
The United States Constitution was written in 1787 and became effective in 1789. It was based on 1780 Constitution of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, drafted by John Adams.
The Russian Empire existed for 196 years.
The USSR lasted 69 years.
The Russian Federation is only 32 years old (like the rest of the post-Soviet states — including Ukraine).
But the Russian Federation is already dying.
What is a state, really?
States are systems.
Any system has several key characteristics that show what stage of the life cycle the system is in.
The first characteristic is structural complexity, which is determined by the number of elements of the system and the connections between them.
The structural complexity of a state is determined by the size of the population and the development of subsystems — science, education, health care, industries, services, the finance sector, non-governmental organizations, political movements, law enforcement, and so on.
In a developing state, new structures are constantly emerging: they interact with each other, create new chains of internal and external connections — and this allows the state to implement a greater number of functions.
Primitive states had simple functions: protect their territory and collect taxes.
Modern states provide citizens’ security and well-being, protect their rights and freedoms, ensure compliance with laws, give citizens social security — and much more.
Degrading states as systems become smaller and simpler: existing substructures disappear, connections between the remaining elements are getting destroyed.
In Russia, both the size of the population and its quality are quickly declining: the gender and age structure are deteriorating; the most economically active part of the population is fleeing the country — and is being partially replaced by migrants from less developed countries.
Many substructures of the state (political parties and citizens’ movements, public associations, NGOs, the judicial system, etc.) in Russia are diminished and replaced by dummies that do not fulfill their functions.
Russia’s economy as a whole is shrinking.
High-tech industries — aerospace, shipbuilding, mechanical engineering, microelectronics — had been hit especially hard.
Health care, science and education (especially professional education) are also shrinking.
Since the year 2000 when Vladimir Putin became the president, almost 50% of existing hospitals, 40% of schools, and 30% of kindergartens had been closed down, for the sake of “efficiency”.
Due to the war with Ukraine unleashed by Russia’s leadership, foreign policy ties and alliances created over centuries had been almost completely destroyed.
Russia’s “allies and partners” of today are mostly the outcasts — the likes of North Korea, Iran, and Afghanistan. (China is Russia’s master, not a partner or ally by any means. China still has the eyes on Vladivostok and other Chinese lands occupied by Russia since mid-1800s).
Russia’s trade, scientific and financial ties with the most developed countries of the world had been severed.
Domestic policy had regressed to the level of feudalism, and the management system is represented either by gerontocrats or appointees selected for obedience rather than talent, which makes it extremely ineffective.
There is no positive image of the future: Western images of the future had been abandoned; communist ones had discredited themselves, and the idea of “staples” such as Orthodoxy and serfdom (in the 21st century) are genuinely embraced by a very few.
In general, by all indications, the structural complexity of Russia as a state is rapidly declining.
Let's have a look at the second characteristic of the system: the efficiency of use of the state’s resources.
A developing system creates more resources, and spends more of the resources on consumption, maintenance and development.
States obtain resources through extraction of minerals, agriculture, industrial production, know-how innovative industries, transportation and tourism.
In Russia, things were satisfactory with the extraction of minerals — but not so good with everything else.
Russia’s GDP (in dollar equivalent) is now at the level of 2008, so we can’t talk about sustainable growth.
Russia’s funds from the sale of mineral resources were: partially frozen in the foreign banks, partially burned in (mostly useless) “national projects”, partially stolen by the officials and “The Boss” (you know who).
The maintenance and development of the resource industry were grossly neglected for years (“why fix what’s not broken?” logic).
Over the past 15 years, the level of depreciation of fixed assets has been steadily increasing. In 2022, Rosstat changed its methodology (I reported on that before) — and suddenly, the rosy picture of pre-2014 levels was supplied to the public. But it was a big lie.
Russia’s expenses had increased sharply due to the war in Ukraine going wrong (no “Kyiv in 3 days” parade-ready triumph whatsoever) and the ensuing sanctions. Oil and gas revenues had dropped by at least 30%.
This means that the level of degradation of Russia’s production capacities and infrastructure is now rapidly accelerating. It is already visible in the aviation industry with Russian planes breaking in the air or unable to take off every other day.
All these consequences are not due to uncontrollable circumstances (natural disasters, changes in market conditions, etc.), but rather the result of planned actions of the country’s political leadership, which created a crisis entirely of its own volition.
The behavior of the system in a crisis is its third important characteristic.
Developing systems use the crisis as an opportunity to become stronger: to increase their structural complexity and efficiency of the use of resources.
Developing countries are emerging from crises with an economy freed from the ballast, an updated legislation, new vectors of development and the skill of solving several problems at once.
Degrading states, in an attempt to solve one crisis, generate several new crises. The frequency of crises is increasing, they are are stacked on top of each other; the crises are drawing on the resources faster, threatening the system’s stability.
We are now exactly at this stage, when the decline in Russia’s leader’s ratings is attempted to be rectified up by a war and internal terror; failure at the war is attempted to be rectified by mobilization of civilian reservists and release of violent offenders from prisons, and the loss of markets is attempted to be resolved by becoming a raw resources appendage to China.
But that’s not all.
Having exhausted the reserve of stability, states reduce their complexity, returning to archaic forms of social organization and reducing the size of the population.
A state can be destroyed by a shock, when a large-scale crisis develops faster than the state can adapt to, a systemic collapse, when several crises merge into one continuous chain, and due to absorption by another state.
The absorption of Russia by force with the loss of sovereignty is rather unlikely (due to the possession of a nuclear arsenal), but a major military defeat could provoke a crisis, as has already happened in the case of Prigozhin’s mutiny.
The lack of visible success of the Ukrainian counteroffensive reduced the likelihood of such a development of events — but if the West (accidentally or intentionally) floods Ukraine with weapons, thus could possibly happen again in May 2024.
Wars are unpredictable things.
System collapse caused by critical deterioration of infrastructure, degradation of industry and depletion of reserves, before the start of the war, could happen in Russia by 2036–2040. Or it could happen sooner.
The weakest point of the Russian state at the moment is its management system, which depends on the capacity and health of one elderly man, failing which a large-scale crisis is inevitable.
No one becomes healthier or smarter with age, so a long-awaited obituary (or another brilliant solution) will become the most likely start of a crisis, which can lead to the collapse of the Russian state.
As you can appreciate, in conditions where all scenarios are probabilistic in nature, it is impossible to accurately predict the final date.
But it’s obvious that sooner or later one of these scenarios will inevitably come true.
That’s why Russia is now a kind of Schrödinger’s state: it seems to have been on its last legs for a while, but it still hasn’t died.
But there is no doubt: it will. ~ Elena Gold, Quora
More from Elena Gold:
Russia keeps self-destructing economically and politically — and with the giant scale of the country, this trend is practically impossible to overturn. The newly acquired regions of Ukraine are useless to Russia, as they require giant investments to restore them after the destructive Russian attacks, and are becoming a not-so-secret black hole sucking life out of Russia’s economy — in addition to the black hole of Russian military-industrial complex, which is the only industry developing in the country (and producing false GDP that Putin presents as “economic growth” — but in reality, all this production immediately burns in Ukraine).
also somewhere on Quora:
In Russia, who stands by the window, dies by the window.
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LEONARD BERNSTEIN'S CHILDREN ON MAESTRO (THE MOVIE)
“It was cathartic in a moment when joy and tears, memories and pain were overwhelming,” says Alexander. “We became children again. And of course, we had to fill those seven minutes of applause with something!” Adds Nina: “We just did what used to happen when the ‘Overture of Candide’ was on TV, we watched our father and imitated him in the living room.”
The trio speak in unison, finishing each other’s sentences, and picking up a word or comment to spin off in another direction. Always, incredibly, in tune. A tiny orchestra. Thousands of miles and two oceans divide them, but they sound like the kids shown in Maestro, chattering on the lawns of the Bernstein family estate in Connecticut.
“Do you know, that they actually filmed there?” says Alexander. “It was strange for us, surreal. Nina said it’s like those dreams you have when you’re in your house, but it somehow isn’t your house. My parents were there, but they sort of weren’t my parents. It was like a dream.”
Adds Nina, “We would see Bradley and Carey there, and they would come already in makeup and stage clothes, to get into character. They would walk around the garden, around the rooms, and to us, it seemed both strange and natural.”
Leonard Bernstein and family, Fairfield CT, June 1966
“At a screening the other day, when we were photographed with Bradley and Carey, Jamie and I looked at each other and said, ‘This is a very strange family picture, our parents are younger than us!'” notes Alexander.
It’s hard to get a word in edgewise. The three go back and forth, mixing personal nostalgia with their enthusiasm for a film that evokes memories both sweet and painful. They reflect on the long journey to get their family’s story to the screen.
“They’ve been trying to make this film for 15 years,” says Alexander. “Originally it was with Martin Scorsese. He kept renewing the option, but no decision was made. Fred Berner and Amy Durning were already attached as producers. We agreed with them, we just asked to be able to read the script, to talk to the writer or the director who would do it.”
“At a certain point it had become a joke between us, all this talk of life rights, of options. We had resigned ourselves to the fact that this film would never be made,” says Jamie.
Alexander picks up: “When everything had stopped moving, when it seemed impossible to bring it to the screen, came the twist: Steven Spielberg. Well before he remade West Side Story, he entered the production team, and it looked like he might go behind the camera as well. The idea of Bradley playing the lead came from him. But the more Bradley got involved in the project, the more he talked to us, the more he felt the story was his.”
Jamie was the first among the siblings to see Bradley Cooper’s directorial debut, A Star Is Born.
“She just told us: ‘Go see it.’ We did, and we fell out of our chairs,” says Alexander. “We were really impressed with his work. And when we found him in front of us, he was like we imagined him to be after seeing the film: Focused, attentive, committed and full of generosity.”
“And respectful,” adds Nina. “His approach won us over. When Jamie also met him, and they connected, it was a crescendo. He included us in his work, made sure that we got, without saying anything, all the drafts of the script, and then he screened the work in progress for us at various stages of the project. He asked us a lot of questions, and we tried to not ask for too many corrections. Ultimately, it’s his movie and if he wants to take a certain artistic license, that’s up to him. Only if there was a glaring error would we say: Actually, it happened this way.”
“There was an atmosphere of mutual trust,” Jamie stresses.
The trio quickly brushes over the controversy involving the prosthetic nose Cooper wears to play Bernstein, calling the “scandal” absurd and undeserving of further comment. Much more painful, they say, was watching some of the darkest moments of their parents’ lives revealed onscreen.
“The most difficult part, of course, was when our mother gets sick and then dies,” says Jamie. “We had read the script, we knew it would be in the film, but seeing it was a real punch in the gut, even though Bradley handled everything with wonderful delicacy. In shooting it, in narrating it, even and especially in pitching it to us: If we had seen it all at once, in a preview, it would have destroyed us, we would have fallen apart. ~
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/leonard-bernstein-children-bradley-cooper-maestro-1235768461/
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HOW TO CHANGE
Author and researcher Katy Milkman of the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School is out with a new book, How to Change, that's packed with research-backed paths to personal growth. Science has tried-and-tested methods to help us stop procrastinating, save more money and make healthier choices. She says that if we apply these lessons more widely, they have life-lengthening and even lifesaving potential.
A decade ago, Milkman saw a statistic she calls "completely mind-boggling": 40% of premature deaths are due to behaviors that can be changed. That's one reason she wanted to share her findings widely, she says.
Milkman shared some of the most actionable lessons from her research with Life Kit. This knowledge is for anyone who has a goal and wants to reach it — or the managers and mentors helping employees get there.
"Too much rigidity is the enemy of a good habit”
If you're trying to develop a habit like working out regularly or writing each day, letting yourself have a little leeway is the way to make that habit stick. In one of Milkman's studies, she and her colleagues tried to motivate Google employees to work out regularly at the company gym and build a lasting workout habit.
The conventional wisdom was that those with a consistent routine form the stickiest habits. They tested this out with two groups. Members of both groups told the researchers they had an "ideal" workout time. One group was encouraged to go to the gym at that set time for each visit, while members of the second group got a reminder to go at their "ideal" time but were encouraged to work out whenever they could fit it in.
The results? Members of the group that worked out on a strict schedule simply didn't go to the gym if they missed that window, while the more flexible group formed a more lasting workout habit.
The lesson here? A key component of habit is having some flexibility.
One counterintuitive strategy to beat procrastination
Procrastination is such a beastly barrier to behavior change because of something that economists call "present bias" — we value the rewards we can get in this instant above the rewards we'll achieve in the long run. How do we solve it?
"We're really used to it when other people try to set up boundaries for us — set deadlines, set restrictions on us," Milkman says. She suggests a counterintuitive idea: deploying those restrictions on ourselves.
These restrictions could be deadlines: Research shows that when college students chose deadlines with actual late penalties, it improved their performance in school.
They could also be financial. If you know when you might procrastinate, impose a fine on your future self and commit to paying if you don't follow through with your goals. These are called "cash commitments," and websites like Beeminder and stickK will sell you commitment devices to let you put money on the line.
Remember the power of fresh starts.
We humans tend to organize time around events or exiting one chapter in life and entering another. "You have ... this extra motivation to pursue change because you feel like, 'That was the old me. This is the new me, and the new me has a clean slate and can do it.' So it's really freeing," Milkman says. Recognizing and highlighting opportunities to create fresh starts, even if they're small, like the start of a new week, can change behavior. Research from Milkman and her colleagues shows that just flagging an upcoming birthday can encourage people to start saving more for retirement.
Fresh starts occur at a high frequency. Mondays are a strong fresh start in our minds. "When we just look at when people choose to pursue healthy activities or start new goals, Mondays are a big motive," Milkman says.
Making accountability public can be a powerful motivator — for good!
We know the negative emotions associated with feeling like you're being watched by other people. But Milkman writes about ways that public accountability can be used to help us behave more generously. Just as with procrastination, you can use accountability partners as a way to enforce a "penalty" on yourself.
"If you tell someone whose opinion you care about that you intend to do thing X — you know, 'I'm going to pass my CPA exam by this date' or 'I'm going to run a marathon on this date'... and then you don't do it? Well, that's basically a penalty, right? Because now you have shame and embarrassment," Milkman explains.
Change isn't one and done.
Despite all the helpful takeaways from her research, Milkman compares the process of making change or achieving tough goals to treating a chronic disease rather than curing a rash. It's an insight she credits to her colleague Kevin Volpp.
There's no quick fix if you want change to last, Milkman says. Quitting smoking or eating right for a month won't magically make you healthy — lasting change requires lasting attention. "The barriers to change — it's not like those things just go away after you work on them for a month," Milkman says. "They're not curable. They're part of the human condition.”
https://www.npr.org/2021/05/14/996939779/a-behavioral-scientists-advice-for-changing-your-life
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PERSONALITY CONSISTENCY: WHY SOME PEOPLE CAN CHANGE FASTER THAN OTHERS
~ Have you ever felt as though someone important to you, such as your best friend, was starting to become a completely different person? At the same time, perhaps you have the opposite problem – no matter what you do or how hard you try, you can never seem to break old habits and you find yourself struggling to change for the better. How can these two realities — some people appearing to completely change who they are, while others find themselves unable to make any changes — coexist?
When you think about how much you or others can change deep down, what you are really considering is personality – a person’s typical thoughts, feelings and behaviors as they go through their daily life. Your best friend’s personality seems to have changed profoundly, yet your personality seems entirely fixed. This striking contrast echoes a long-running debate in psychology. For a long time, psychologists saw personality as fixed throughout our lives. This has since been disproven – although personality is relatively stable, it’s far from set in stone.
Typically, most personality changes occur in young and older adulthood, with middle age appearing to be the period of the greatest stability. Changes in personality can be driven by the natural aging process or the influence of external factors, such as major life events and daily interactions with other people.
While there are average trends of change in each of the so-called Big Five personality traits – such as agreeableness typically increasing with age, whereas neuroticism decreases – people also vary as individuals in the ways that they change. For instance, although the average trend is for most people to increase in agreeableness, others can remain quite stable, and yet others might show decreases. This mixed picture of average trends and individual variability is true for all Big Five traits (alongside agreeableness and neuroticism, that includes extraversion, conscientiousness, and openness).
Another way to think about this is to consider how people tend to change in their entire personality across time – ie, their personality profile as reflected across all the Big Five traits. If there are individual differences in how stable single traits are, are there also individual differences in how stable entire personality profiles are?
Indeed, in our recent research, my colleague Joshua Jackson and I found that some individuals are simply more stable in their personality profiles than others – suggesting this quality of stability can itself be a dispositional characteristic. That is, whereas you might be relatively steadfast in how you respond to questionnaire items assessing all of the Big Five traits (ie, your Big Five personality profile), thus showing heightened levels of personality stability, your best friend could reliably change more frequently in their scores, thus showing general levels of instability.
We made this finding by examining repeated personality test scores for more than 20,000 individuals and seeing how much each individual’s test scores tended to correlate (ie, remain consistent) over time. We found that people varied in their initial levels of profile stability: some had profile correlations such as .30 (indicating low levels of stability, with greater changes occurring across two time points) while others had profile correlations such as .80 (indicating high levels of stability, with fewer changes occurring across two time points).
What’s more, as our study progressed, these individual differences in profile stability persisted. We found that, over a duration of more than a decade, people maintained their own typical levels of profile consistency – overall, those with stable personalities tended to remain stable, and those people with unstable personalities tended to remain unstable. The quality of being stable in your personality traits appears to be a trait in and of itself! This could explain the hypothetical story of your friend’s changing personality in contrast to your own apparent rigidity.
Why are some people more stable than others in their personalities? Past research has shown three processes that underlie personality stability: developmental constants, such as genetic or biological factors and/or early life experiences, which can establish and maintain one’s level of personality stability; environmental factors such as a long-term career, partner and dwelling, which can increase one’s personality stability by making them more ‘who they are’ and solidifying their qualities across time; and, lastly, stochastic or random factors, such as unexpected life changes or things that lead someone to deviate from the typical status quo of their life, which can reduce their levels of stability.
As shown by our research, people usually maintain their person-typical levels of stability across time – we think this is due to the developmental constants, which are a strong presence in most individuals’ lives and set their personal level of stability. In the rare cases where an individual’s personality consistency changes, this likely reflects the influence of the environment (which usually increases stability) or stochastic factors (which reduce it).
Thus, how stable you are is a byproduct of your own disposition (a quality you carry within yourself), your environment and the life experiences you’ve accumulated thus far. It is likely that all three processes co-exist within each individual’s life – but it is the certain combination of them and their influence on an individual that results in their own unique level of personality stability and the changes in it across time.
The quality of personality stability has implications for your life and how you think about yourself. If you are someone who has the tendency to remain consistent in your personality, it might suggest that you are less capable of changing who you are. Although this does not preclude the chance that change is possible, your personality is robust against external influences. It is likely you have gone through certain maturational milestones – such as graduating from school, starting a career, and finding a long-term partner – and other life experiences that research shows can often change personality, yet they have not changed you.
The positive side of this is that people around you have likely come to expect you to act a certain way, and rely on that feeling of familiarity with who you are. However, it could also suggest that you will have difficulty trying to change or reinvent yourself because your typical pattern of thoughts, feelings and behaviors are enduring and resistant to change.
The reverse is true if you have relatively low personality stability – your friends and family might find your apparent fickleness a little disorientating, and it might have implications for your sense of a coherent self, yet optimistically it also suggests that you are capable of change, including for the better.
The quality of personality stability also has implications for how you think about and interact with people you know. You can doubtless describe various aspects of their personality pretty well – if a friend is often early or late to something; if they have mood swings or are of a more calm, steady temperament; or if they prefer to be the center of attention or more of an outside observer in social settings. Some of these characteristics you may view as their cardinal, or primary, qualities: the things that define who they are.
This ability to describe those close to you in life may come in handy at times. For instance, if you view a close friend as someone who is just habitually late to things, it may make it easier to overlook as it becomes habitual and something you come to expect from them. An implication of our research is that you could take a similar perspective about how stable they are in their personality.
Although being highly stable or unstable may not seem the most adaptive, I should add the good news that, like many other psychological characteristics, most people have an average level of consistency that falls somewhere in the middle. Having this relatively stable yet still somewhat open-to-change personality system means that, not only are you able to naturally experience personality change, but you and the people close to you can maintain some stable sense of ‘who you are’. Additionally, you also have some level of malleability to work with if there is some quality about yourself you wish to reinvent.
Overall, many ideas and constructs in psychology have found their way into the general population. Personality traits are an exceptional example of this – who isn’t interested in learning more about why they are the way they are and how best to label and describe these qualities? I’m proposing that a sensible addition to the repertoire of public knowledge about personality, beyond the main traits, is the notion of personality consistency. With implications spanning from practical applications to navigating everyday social interactions, personality consistency is one individual difference that may forever change what we know about ourselves and others. ~
https://psyche.co/ideas/theres-a-reason-some-of-us-find-it-easier-to-change-than-others?utm_source=Psyche+Magazine&utm_campaign=87a808fea1-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2025_01_05&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_-a9a3bdf830-%5BLIST_EMAIL_ID%5D
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WHY KURT GÖDEL BELIEVED IN THE AFTERLIFE
As the foremost logician of the 20th century, Kurt Gödel is well known for his incompleteness theorems and contributions to set theory, the publications of which changed the course of mathematics, logic and computer science. When he was awarded the Albert Einstein Prize to recognize these achievements in 1951, the mathematician John von Neumann gave a speech in which he described Gödel’s achievements in logic and mathematics as so momentous that they will ‘remain visible far in space and time’.
By contrast, his philosophical and religious views remain all but hidden from view. Gödel was private about these, publishing nothing on this subject during his lifetime. And while scholars have grappled with his ontological proof of God’s existence, which he circulated among friends towards the end of his life, other tenets of his belief system have received no significant discussion. One of these is Gödel’s belief that we survive death.
Why did he believe in an afterlife? What argument did he find persuasive? It turns out that a relatively full answer to these questions is buried in four lengthy letters written to his mother, Marianne Gödel, in 1961, to whom he makes the case that they are destined to meet again in the hereafter.
Before exploring Gödel’s views on the afterlife, I want to recognize his mother as the silent heroine of the story. Although most of Gödel’s letters are publicly accessible via the digital archives of the Wienbibliothek im Rathaus (Vienna City Library), none of his mother’s letters are known to have survived. We possess only his side of their conversation, left to infer what she said from his replies. This creates a mystique when reading his letters, as if one were provided a Platonic dialogue with all the lines removed, except for those uttered by Socrates. Although we lack her own words, we owe a debt of gratitude to Marianne Gödel. For, without her curiosity and independence of thought, we would have one less resource in understanding her famous son’s philosophy.
Thanks to Marianne’s direct question about Gödel’s belief in an afterlife, we get his mature views on the matter. She asked him for this in 1961, a time when he was in top intellectual form and thinking extensively about philosophical topics at the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) in Princeton, New Jersey, where he had been a full professor since 1953 and a permanent member since 1946. The nature of the exchange compelled Gödel to detail his views in a thorough and accessible manner.
In a letter dated 23 July 1961, Gödel writes: ‘In your previous letter you pose the challenging question of whether I believe in a Wiedersehen.’ Wiedersehen means ‘to see again’. Rather than the more philosophically formal terms of ‘immortality’ or ‘afterlife’, this term lends the exchange an intimate quality.
After emigrating from Austria to the United States in 1940, Gödel never returned to Europe, forcing his mother and brother to take the initiative to visit him, which they first did in 1958. As a result, one can intuit here what must have been a deep longing for lasting reunification on his mother’s behalf, wondering if she would ever have a meaningful amount of time with her son again. Gödel’s answer to her question is unwaveringly affirmative. His rationale for belief in an afterlife is this:
He deepens the rhetorical question at the end with the metaphor of someone who lays the foundation for a house only to walk away from the project and let it waste away. Gödel thinks such waste is impossible since the world, he insists, gives us good reason to consider it to be shot through with order and meaning. Hence, a human being who can achieve only partial fulfillment in a lifetime must seek rational validation for this deficiency in a future world, one in which our potential manifests.
Before moving on, it is good to pause and capture Gödel’s argument in a nutshell. Assuming that the world is rationally organized, human life – as embedded in the world – ought to possess the same rational structure. We have grounds for assuming that the world is rationally organized. Yet human life is irrationally structured. It is constituted by a great potential but it never fully expresses this potential in a lifetime. Hence, each of us must realize our full potential in a future world. Reason demands it.
Let’s linger first with a key premise of the argument, namely, the claim that the world and human life, as part of it, display a rational order. While not an uncommon position to hold in the history of philosophy, it can often seem difficult to square with what we observe. Even if we are a rational species, human history often belies this fact.
The first half of 1961 – permeating the background of Gödel’s awareness – was filled with rising Cold War tensions, violence aimed at nonviolent protestors during the civil rights movement, and random suffering such as the loss of the entire US figure-skating team in a plane crash. Folly and unreason in human events seem the historical rule rather than the exception. As Shakespeare’s King Lear tells Gloucester when expounding on ‘how this world goes’, the conclusion seems to be: ‘When we are born, we cry that we are come to this great stage of fools.’
It would be a mistake, however, to think that Gödel was naive in his insistence that the world is rational. At the end of a letter dated 16 January 1956, he asserts that ‘This is a strange world.’ And his discussions in his correspondence with his mother show that he was up to speed on political topics and world events. Throughout his letters, his opinions are informed and critical, albeit imbued with optimism.
What is tantalizing, and perhaps unique, about his argument for an afterlife is the fact that it actually depends on the inevitable irrationality of human life in an otherwise reason-imbued world. It is precisely the ubiquity of human suffering and our inevitable failures that gave Gödel his certainty that this world cannot be the end of us. As he neatly summarizes in the fourth letter to his mother:
~ What I name a theological Weltanschauung is the view that the world and everything in it has meaning and reason, and indeed a good and indubitable meaning. From this it follows immediately that our earthly existence – since it as such has at most a very doubtful meaning – can be a means to an end for another existence. ~
Precisely in virtue of the fact that our lives consist in unfulfilled or spoiled potential makes him confident that this lifetime is but a staging ground for things to come. But, again, that is only if the world is rationally structured.
If humanity and its history do not display rational order, why believe the world is rational? The reasons that he gives to his mother in the letters display his rationalist proclivities and belief that natural science presupposes that intelligibility is fundamental to reality. As he writes in his letter dated 23 July 1961:
~ Does one have a reason to assume that the world is rationally organized? I think so. For it is absolutely not chaotic and arbitrary, rather – as natural science demonstrates – there reigns in everything the greatest regularity and order. Order is, indeed, a form of rationality. ~
Gödel thinks that rationality is evident in the world through the deep structure of reality.
Science as a method demonstrates this through its validated assumption that intelligible order is discoverable in the world, facts are verifiable through repeatable experiments, and theories obtain in their respective domains regardless of where and when one tests them.
In the letter from 6 October 1961, Gödel expounds his position: ‘The idea that everything in the world has meaning is, by the way, the exact analogue of the principle that everything has a cause on which the whole of science is based.’ Gödel – just like Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, whom he idolized – believed that everything in the world has a reason for its being so and not otherwise (in philosophical jargon: it accords with the principle of sufficient reason).
As Leibniz puts it poetically in his Principles of Nature and Grace, Based on Reason (1714): ‘[T]he present is pregnant with the future; the future can be read in the past; the distant is expressed in the proximate.’ When seeking meaning, we find that the world is legible to us. And when paying attention, we find patterns of regularity that allow us to predict the future. For Gödel, reason was evident in the world because this order is discoverable.
Although unmentioned, his belief in an afterlife is also imbricated with the results from his incompleteness theorems and related thoughts on the foundation of mathematics. Gödel believed the world’s deep, rational structure and the soul’s postmortem existence depend on the falsity of materialism, the philosophical view that all truth is necessarily determined by physical facts.
In an unpublished paper from around 1961, Gödel asserts that ‘materialism is inclined to regard the world as an unordered and therefore meaningless heap of atoms.’ It follows too from materialism that anything without grounding in physical facts must be without meaning and reality. Hence, an immaterial soul could not count as possessing any real meaning.
Gödel continues: ‘In addition, death appears to [materialism] to be final and complete annihilation.’ So materialism contradicts both that reality is constituted by an overarching system of meaning, as well as the existence of a soul irreducible to physical matter. Despite living in a materialist age, Gödel was convinced that materialism was false, and thought further that his incompleteness theorems showed it to be highly unlikely.
The incompleteness theorems proved (in broad strokes) that, for any consistent formal system (for example, mathematical and logical), there will be truths that cannot be demonstrated within the system by its own axioms and rules of inference. Hence any consistent system will inevitably be incomplete. There will always be certain truths in the system that require, as Gödel put it, ‘some methods of proof that transcend the system.’
Through his proof, he established by mathematically unquestionable standards that mathematics itself is infinite and new discoveries will always be possible.
It is this result that shook the mathematical community to its core.
In one fell swoop, it terminated a central goal of many 20th-century mathematicians inspired by David Hilbert, who sought to establish the consistency of every mathematical truth through a finite system of proof. Gödel showed that no formal mathematical system could ever do so or prove definitively by its own standards that it was free of contradiction. And insights discovered about these systems – for instance, that certain problems are truly non-demonstrable within them – are evident to us through reasoning. From this, Gödel concluded that the human mind transcends any finite formal system of axioms and rules of inference.
Regarding the incompleteness theorems’s philosophical implications, Gödel thought the results presented an either/or dilemma (articulated in the Gibbs Lecture of 1951). Either one accepts that the ‘human mind (even within the realm of pure mathematics) infinitely surpasses the powers of any finite machine’, from which it follows that the human mind is irreducible to the brain, which ‘to all appearances is a finite machine with a finite number of parts, namely, the neurons and their connections.’
Or one assumes that there are certain mathematical problems of the sort employed in his theorems, which are ‘absolutely unsolvable’. If this were the case, it would arguably ‘disprove the view that mathematics is only our own creation.’ Consequently, mathematical objects would possess an objective reality all its own, independent of the world of physical facts ‘which we cannot create or change, but only perceive and describe.’
This is referred to as Platonism about the reality of mathematical truths. Much to the materialist’s chagrin, therefore, both implications of the dilemma are ‘very decidedly opposed to materialistic philosophy’. Worse yet for the materialist, Gödel notes that the disjuncts are not exclusive. It could be that both implications are true simultaneously.
How does this connect with Gödel’s view that the world is rational and the soul survives death? The incompleteness theorems and their philosophical implications do not in any way prove or show that the soul survives death directly. However, Gödel thought the theorem’s results dealt a heavy blow to the materialistic worldview. If the mind is irreducible to the physical parts of the brain, and mathematics reveals a rationally accessible structure beyond physical phenomena, then an alternative worldview should be sought that is more rationalistic and open to truths that cannot be tested by the senses. Such a perspective could endorse a rationally organized world and be open to the possibility of life after death.
Suppose we – cynics and all – accept that the world, in this deep sense, is rational. Why presume that human beings deserve anything beyond what they receive in this lifetime? We can guess that something similar troubled his mother. Gödel says in his next letter’s theological portion: ‘When you write that you pray to creation, you probably mean that the world is beautiful all over where human beings cannot reach, etc.’ Here, Marianne might have agreed that much in creation appears ordered, but challenged the assumption that all of reality is so ordered, in particular when it comes to human beings. Must the whole world be rational? Or might it be that human beings are irrational aberrations of an otherwise rational order?
Gödel’s response reveals extra degrees of nuance to his position. In the first letter, Gödel had only loosely referenced a ‘wide field of possibilities’ that go underdeveloped but which demand completion. In his subsequent letters, he details what it is about humanity that requires existence to continue – that is, what is essential to humanity.
It is first important to explain what Gödel meant by an ‘essential’ property. We have, of course, many properties. I have the property, for example, of standing in a relationship of self-identity (I am not you), of being a US citizen, and of enjoying the horror genre. Although there is no unanimity on exactly how to understand Gödel’s use of ‘essential’, his ontological proof for the existence of God includes a definition of what he means by an essential property. According to that definition, a property is essential of something if it stands in necessary connection with the rest of its properties such that, if one possesses said property, then one necessarily possesses all its other properties. It follows that every individual has an individuated essence, or as Gödel notes in the handwritten draft of the proof: ‘any two essences of x are nec. [sic] equivalent.’ Gödel, like Leibniz, believed that each individual possessed a uniquely determinable essence.
At the same time, even if essence is defined as individual-specific in the proof, there is evidence that Gödel thought that essences could also be kind-specific. He thought all human beings are destined for an afterlife because they all share a property in virtue of their being human. There are sets of necessary properties that hang together and that are interrelated across individuals such that the possession of this set would entail something being the kind of thing it is. In his ontological proof, for example, he defines a ‘God-like’ being as one that must possess every positive property. As for human beings, I am a human being in virtue of possessing a kind-specific set of properties that all human beings possess necessarily and that at least some of which are completely unique to us (just as only a God-like being can have the property of possessing every positive property).
In Gödel’s letter of 12 August 1961, he points out the crucial question, which is too often overlooked: ‘We not only don’t even know whence and why we are here, but also don’t know what we are (namely, in essence and seen from within).’ Gödel then notes that if we were capable of discerning with ‘scientific methods of self-observation’, we would discover that every one of us has ‘completely determined properties’.
Gödel playfully in the same letter remarks that most individuals believe the opposite: ‘According to the common conception, the question “what am I” would be answered such that I am something that has absolutely no properties in its own right, something along the lines of a coat rack on which one can hang anything one pleases.’ That is, most people assume that there is nothing essential about the human being and that one can ascribe to humanity any trait arbitrarily. For Gödel, however, such a conception presents a distorted picture of reality – for if we have no kind-specific essential properties, on what grounds can categorization and determination of something as something begin?
So what essentially human property points towards a destiny beyond this world? Gödel’s answer: the human ability to learn, and specifically the ability to learn from our mistakes in a way that gives life more meaning. For Gödel, this property hangs necessarily together with the property of being rational. While he admits that animals and plants can learn through trial and error to discover better means for achieving an end, there is a qualitative difference between animals and human beings for whom learning can elevate one into a higher plane of meaning. This is the heart of Gödel’s rationale for ascribing immortality to human beings. In the 14 August 1961 letter, Gödel writes:
~ Only the human being can come into a better existence through learning, that is, give his life more meaning. One, and often the only, method to learn arises from doing something false the first time. And that occurs of course in this world truly in abundant quantity. ~
The folly of human beings mentioned above is perfectly consistent with the belief in the world’s rationality. In fact, the world’s ostensible senselessness provides an ideal set-up to learn and develop our reason through the contemplation of our shortcomings, our moments of suffering, and our all-too-human proclivities to succumb to baser inclinations. To learn in Gödel’s sense is not about our ability to improve the technical means for achieving certain ends. Rather, this distinctive notion of learning is humanity’s capacity to become wiser. I might, for example, learn to be a better friend after losing one because of selfish behavior, and I might learn techniques for thinking creatively about a theoretical approach after multiple experimental setbacks.
An essential property of being human is, in other words, being prone to develop our reason through learning of the relevant sort. We are not just learning new ways of doing things, but rather acquiring more meaning in our lives at the same time through reflection on deeper lessons discovered through making mistakes.
All this might lead one to infer that Gödel believed in reincarnation. But that would be overhasty, at least according to certain standard conceptions of it. An intriguing feature of Gödel’s theological worldview is his belief that our growth into fully rational beings occurs not as new incarnations in this world, but rather in a distinct future world:
~ In particular, one must imagine that the ‘learning’ occurs in great part first in the next world, namely, in that we remember our experiences from this world and come to understand them really for the first time, so that our this-worldly experiences are – so to speak – only the raw material for learning. ~
And he elaborates further:
Moreover one must of course assume that our understanding there will be substantially better than here, so that we can recognize everything of importance with the same infallible certainty as 2 x 2 = 4, where deception is objectively impossible.
The next world, therefore, must be one that liberates us from our current, earthly limitations. Rather than recycling back into another earthly body, we must become beings with the capacity to learn from memories that are latently brought along into our future, higher state of being.
The belief that it is our essence to become something more than we are here explains why Gödel was drawn to a particular passage in St Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians, which I discovered when perusing his personal library at the archives of the IAS. In a Latin, pocket-sized edition of the New Testament, Gödel jotted at the top of the title page in faint pencil: ‘p. 374’. Following this reference, one is led to Chapter 15 of St Paul’s letter where Gödel marked verses 33 through 49 with square brackets and drew an arrow to one verse in particular.
In the bracketed verses, St Paul describes our bodily resurrection. Employing the metaphor of crops, St Paul notes that sown seeds must be destroyed in order to grow into plants that it is their nature to become. So too, he notes, will it be with us. Our lives and bodies in this lifetime are only seeds, awaiting their destruction, after which we will grow into our ultimate state of being. Gödel drew an arrow pointing at verse 44 to highlight it: ‘It is sown in weakness, it is raised in power. It is sown a physical body, it is raised a spiritual body.’
For Gödel, St Paul had apparently arrived at the correct conclusion, albeit by prophetic vision as opposed to rational argument.
We are left largely to wonder about Marianne’s reaction to her son’s views on the hereafter, though it is certain that she was puzzled. In the letter dated 12 September 1961, Gödel assures his mother that her confusion about his position has nothing to do with her age and much more to do with his compact explanations. And in the last letter, from 6 October 1961, Gödel objects against the claim that his views resemble ‘occultism’. He insists, on the contrary, that his views have nothing in common with those who would merely cite St Paul or discern messages directly from angels.
He admits of course that his views might appear ‘unlikely’ at first glance, but insists that they are quite ‘possible and rational’. Indeed, he arrived at his position through reasoning alone, and thinks that his convictions will eventually be shown to be ‘thoroughly compatible with all known facts’. It is in this context that he further presents a defense of religion, recognizing a rational core to it, which he claims is often maligned by philosophers and undermined by bad religious institutions:
~ N.B. the current philosophy curriculum doesn’t help much in understanding such questions since 90 per cent of contemporary philosophers see their primary objective as knocking religion out of people’s heads, and thereby work the same as bad churches. ~
Whether this convinced Marianne or not, we can only guess.
For us who remain with both feet still in this world, Gödel’s argument presents us with a fascinating take on why we might continue to exist after shuffling off this mortal coil. Indeed, his argument glows with an optimism that our future lives, if reason is to be satisfied, must be ones in which we maximize certain essential human traits that remain in a paltry state here. Our future selves will be more rational, and somehow capable of making sense of the raw material of suffering experienced in this life. Can we assume that Kurt and Marianne are now reunited? Let us hope so.
https://aeon.co/essays/kurt-godel-his-mother-and-the-argument-for-life-after-death?utm_source=Aeon+Newsletter&utm_campaign=edc7551007-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2024_01_05&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_-b43a9ed933-%5BLIST_EMAIL_ID%5D
Kurt Gôdel and his mother, Marianne
Alexander T Englert, author of the article:
I agree that the prospect of an eternity is not very appealing, at least if it is just more of what we experience here with added gradual perfection. One of my favorite short stories is “The Dream” by Julian Barnes in which the protagonist soon learns how terrifying an eternity of self-perfection can be. The individual ends up “opting-out” of eternity, by which is meant choosing complete annihilation. For my money, Barnes does a terrific job of thinking through what an eternity of living by our current standards amounts to.
That said, would Gödel’s suggestion that we enter a completely new world (as well as a different form of being to boot) be subject to the same issues? I’m not so sure. At least prima facie it seems to ward off the objection. We simply cannot know in any detail apart from some coarse-grained inferences. We could then be left in an agnostic position from which we could hope that a future life does not turn out to be the sort of dull eternity described by Barnes.
Tom Horton:
Sadly, these arguments of Gödel’s can be dismissed in one word: entropy. I invoke sadness because a great mathematician poured out a large and personal effort without much apparent knowledge of allied scientific fields. He would not be the first great thinker to make such fundamental errors.
It is also ironic that in proposing properties of reason, order and meaningfulness for humanity, he leans on emotional arguments. Implied in this series of letters is his mother’s anticipation of death, and his anticipation of his own. Like so many other humans, he invokes myth and ego to escape materialism and construct a bargain with extinction.
Anthony Weir:
Forgive me for joining the crowd of unbelievers. Gödel relies on belief, not on argument. The idea of the human soul is just an idea which has become belief. The further belief that humans are the only beings to have souls is unprovable and could be seen as mere religious (anthropocentric) arrogance.
If we don’t have souls, what could constitute an afterlife?
Even if we do have souls, more questions are raised: how long would an afterlife last ? Might it simply be the persistence of a quantum of energy…or would it be an expansion like a galaxy?
Could there be a half-afterlife ? Might there be more than one?
If so, might they be a series of Russian dolls, or discrete existences ? What constitutes an existence in this context ?
Too many questions!
Megan Fritts:
Another question I have is why Gödel moves from the existence of an afterlife to the assumption that he would see his mother again? After all, an afterlife may be private, temporary, or simply full of too many people to locate particular loved ones!
Byron Bufort:
Gödel may have simply been terrified by nonexistence. Unfortunately, there’s often not more to it than than but hopeful thinking.
Andrew P:
The very notion of an “immaterial soul” makes no sense whatsoever. If a soul exists, it must be made of something, and that something, whatever it is, must have some kind of interaction with normal atomic matter. It could be made of unknown dark matter particles, neutrino condensates, knotted constructs of massless fields, or something else that we can’t conceive of, but it must be some kind of physical structure that has energy, and stores and processes information.
There is another, less flattering term for Gödel’s views: Anthropocentrism, including the staggeringly arrogant belief that somehow the human brain was singled out to discover The Real Truth about life, the universe, and everything.
Finally, while I doubt that it would have cured him, Gödel would have benefited from a strong dose of Nietzsche. In the meantime it is interesting to see the double standard at work: When philosophers or other non-STEM types enter the fray of scientific debate, the gatekeepers of science scream bloody murder. But when equally unqualified scientists stumble into philosophy, no one seems to mind, however blundering their efforts may be. To Gödel’s credit, at least he evidently did not intend to make his views public.
Keertan Patel:
“What is tantalizing, and perhaps unique, about his argument for an afterlife is the fact that it actually depends on the inevitable irrationality of human life in an otherwise reason-imbued world. It is precisely the ubiquity of human suffering and our inevitable failures that gave Gödel his certainty that this world cannot be the end of us.”
This very point that Kurt quoted in his letter is somewhat aligned to the philosophy of KARMA, which also states the same wherein, it's due to our past doings or any past unfulfillment of goals or any other things, the death of our physical existence is not the death of us. We continue to live on with another body but with the same soul and thoughts.
G E:
I gather that he thought it reasonable one is reborn in a second world with the latent memory of the first and with improved reasoning so as to learn and develop a deeper insight into the last life and oneself. Furthermore he mentions it reasonable to assume that there are or will be beings in the future without the need to learn anything, presumably because they already know everything. The interpretation that he believed in an immortal soul is in my view not supported by his writings. He was a conceptual realist and therefore the reality of thoughts is important in the interpretation of his writings.
As Leibniz remarked before, humans can reflect on their existence and evaluate their existence through thinking. Any such life form, be it fungus, plant or bacteria would therefore benefit from latent memory in a next life. Ironically, this is what happens from one generation to the next.
Apart from the structural, experiences of the parents are formative also for the offspring, there is therefore in my view no need to invoke persistence of an individual. I did not have to discover the incompleteness theorem; Gödel did it for me and I could learn it and reflect on it. Though I see his perspective, his argument that the human mind seems like a waste of energy unless it can better itself in a future world does not seem to require the persistence of the specific individual, but the evolution of the concepts that individuals discover and the knowledge they acquire.
Concepts are not dependent on specific individuals as long as they are shared among those that evolve them and gain better insight in my view. If humans fail to do so, may be another form will be able to in this evolving universe.
Lauren Dove:
Gödels intuitions were correct. We do ‘see again.’
“The mystics of past ages have told of the divided and the undivided universes. The Book of Genesis has told the world that God divided day from night, light from dark, male from female, and the earth from the firmament of heaven, but never has it occurred to layman, churchman or man of science that such a division into pairs of opposites meant electric polarization.”
D.L.:
The only certainty is death. Allen Wheelis, The Seeker himself, summed up what life had taught him: “Life is not to be managed—or shaped, or directed, it is not even to be understood. Life is to be lost. And the only question is whether with grievance or with generosity and grace.”
Afterthought:
“Hence, each of us must realize our full potential in a future world. Reason demands it” —heh… I refuse to believe that Gödel would have written this.
Oriana:
This article and the discussion reminded me of the movie “Groundhog Day” — where the same “day” keeps happening over and over until the protagonist learns to correct his mistakes and becomes kind to others. It’s a charming and morally appealing idea, and indeed we often say that So-and-so “learned his lesson.” We also speak of "life lessons." Humanity as a whole is learning various lessons — but that has no bearing on individual afterlife.
I also remember my father, a mathematician, saying, "Certain things exist only in mathematics." This may well include Gödel's afterlife.
On a different tangent:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HsM_VmN6ytk
"We'll Meet Again" is a lovely song, but it has a dark side as well. When a friend's husband was dying but still lucid, he said, "But don't worry: soon we'll meet again." The marriage happened to be an unhappy one, and to my friend this was a vision of hell, not heaven, something she hoped would never happen.
The gospel of Mathew tries to assure his readers that in heaven there is no marriage. "For in the resurrection they neither marry, nor are given in marriage, but are as the angels of God in heaven."~ Matt 22:30
Mary:
I don't find Gödel's arguments for an afterlife very convincing, mainly because he seems to insist that persistence of the individual is basic to the argument. We die unfinished, without fulfilling our potential, therefore there must be another world after death, allowing for that fulfillment. Why should the universe be concerned about our unfulfilled potential? Certainly nothing depends on our individual fulfillment. The whole frame of his argument takes for granted that human life, our ability to learn, reason and understand the world as legible, discoverable, knowable, is the aim and project of all things...that the human mind, or individual essence, is the pinnacle, the goal, the reason, for everything (and anything) to exist at all.
He finds order to be the definition of rationality, but the basis of order is not abstract, it is in the physicality of matter itself. Consider the Periodic table, consider chemistry and biochemistry. Things exist in combinations dictated by the shapes of their essential particles...subatomic particles and electrons...they can connect and form new structures only as the architecture of their atoms allows. The order in nature is a physical order...all its varieties dependent on the possible connections and combinations of material particles.
I don't however feel entropy undermines his ideas of progressive development. It seems to me entropy is not the final state, but a stage in a larger process. Living things die and are digested by all the forces of decay...but their substance is neither lost nor destroyed. They are transformed and absorbed into something new.
This process happens everywhere around us, visible in, for instance, what goes on between trees and fungi and insects in forests, death and life interlayered and interdependent. But no individual...tree, fungus, beetle, is preserved to continue to its fulfillment as an individual. Its substance is preserved but not as an essential identity.
As for meaning, the meaning of things may also be part of a process not only concerned with humanity, but with the evolution of the universe itself, learning through all its possible permutations to become something we can hardly imagine....something we are a part of without being the center. I see Gödel's ideas as basically anthropomorphic, biased to see humanity as central and essential to Everything.
I think he mistakes our importance in the universe — which is obviously not all about us.
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Oriana:
Religion — or at least monotheistic religions — seem to assume that the universe is about us. One time I asked, “If the universe was created for us, why all the billions of galaxies?” And got the answer: “For the greater glory.” That didn’t satisfy me at all. Is god amusing himself, just creating galaxies and planets at a whim? Is he an artist, enlarging and revising the night sky as a painter might?
In the absence of a convincing answer, it’s easier for me to go along with a self-creating and self-transforming universe.
Likewise, it’s very hard to believe that the universe and/or deity would be concerned with the fullest development of our potential. In the past centuries, only a tiny fraction of humanity had
access to the kind of education that would develop their talents, whether literary or musical, mathematical, linguistic, or anything else. On the other hand, it’s incredibly important that we master the lessons of our ancestors (one of them being not to be so anthropocentric). The ability to pass on accumulated knowledge is one of the defining characteristics of humanity.
And the knowledge keeps on accumulating. Galileo leads to Newton, Newton and Copernicus become the foundation for Kepler, eventually we get to Einstein and so on. Yes, there is a personal evolution, and we’re certainly a different individual at 13 than at 33 or 73, but in terms of humanity what is important is the giant currents of collective evolution — from execution by torture being public entertainment in the Middle Ages to a prohibition of “cruel and unusual punishment” starting during the Enlightenment.
Gödel, alas, seems to have thought in terms of an individual rather than humanity, at least in his wishful meditations on the afterlife. Note, however, that on a certain level he must have realized the weakness of his reasoning, and thus never published the arguments that he stated in his letters to his mother. Those were his private cogitations, based on wishful thinking rather than sound evidence — or, let’s face it, any kind of evidence.
In summary, his main mistake is thinking in terms of an individual rather than the collective evolution of humanity.
It would be very nice to carry on in order to fulfill one’s potential, but for me it’s like saying, “It would be very nice to continue just because I’m very curious about what happens next. Will the Israeli-Arab conflict ever be resolved? I have such a high need to know that surely I must continue after physical death — such intense curiosity can’t simply end.” Yes it can — and I know better than to try to publish an essay arguing that the universe came into being in order to satisfy my curiosity.
* *
Oriana:
Perhaps we should not meditate on the afterlife, but instead enjoy being alive in the present. Here is Robert Bly from the seminal Silence in the Snowy Fields, 1953 (translation of Issa?) 
*
“JUSTICE FOR NEANDERTHALS!”
~ Our conjectures about the Neanderthals began in 1856, when workers in a limestone quarry near Düsseldorf discovered a cave full of bones, some of abnormal bulk. A local naturalist, with uncanny intuition, thought the bones had to be from a primitive kind of human. He sent them in a chaperoned wooden box to an anatomist in Bonn, who inspected them and came to the same conclusion. In 1863, Prof William King, delivering a short paper to the British Association for the Advancement of Science, argued forcefully that the bones belonged to a creature for whom we didn’t yet have a name. He went on to propose one: Homo neanderthalensis.
Why that name? The valley where the bones were discovered had been a favorite spot for the wanderings of a 17th-century polymath and nature-lover whose family name had originally been Neumann, before his ancestors rechristened themselves, faux-classically, Neander. “Neander” was Greek for “new man”, “Thal” was German for valley. The Valley of the New Man: “Could there be any more fitting moniker for the place where we first discovered another kind of human?” asks Rebecca Wragg Sykes, the author of Kindred: Neanderthal Life, Love, Death and Art.
The discovery of those bones, and their naming in 1863, came at a time when Europe was coming to terms with the implications of the theories of Charles Darwin. On the Origin of Species had been published only four years earlier, and it was becoming harder to deny that the world was older – dramatically older – than we had supposed.
That name, Homo neanderthalensis, did two things at once. It proposed that we, proud members of Homo sapiens, had not always been the only members of our genus. But the kinship it acknowledged in one breath, it took away from the Neanderthal in the other. Even if they were human, Neanderthals were humans of a distinct type. They were like us; indeed, they were rather more like us than the chimpanzees that we were beginning to acknowledge as our kindred. But they were still other. Perhaps that was the beginning of the denial of the Neanderthals’ dignity against which their 21st-century champions so bridle.
The fossil record was already beginning to show us how different a place the world of the mid-19th century was from the one that the Neanderthals inhabited. There were animals then that are no longer with us: enormous grazing cattle named aurochs, straight-tusked elephants, woolly rhinoceros, and the great auk, a giant penguin-like bird that died out around the time of the discoveries in the Neander valley.
That world, barely a blink of an eye in geological time, was, as Wragg Sykes puts it with sincere excitement, “sparkling with hominins”: Homo antecessor, Homo bodoensis, Homo heidelbergensis, many of which inhabited the Earth during the very same periods. There are at least a half dozen now that are widely recognized, and more seem to be discovered all the time.
The Neanderthals have been joined, much more recently, for instance, by such species as Homo floresiensis, irritatingly referred to as “hobbits” after the discovery of a diminutive skeleton in Indonesia in 2003.
In 2010, we got decisive proof of the Denisovans, another hominin, in Siberia. In the years since, the hominin ranks have swelled yet further to include Homo naledi (South Africa) and Homo luzonensis (the Philippines). No one doubts that further archaeological work, particularly in Africa, will yield yet more hominins. But the parade of archaic humans all began with the most popular of our fellow hominins: the Neanderthals.
The most recent defense of Neanderthal dignity to appear in English is The Naked Neanderthal by the French paleoanthropologist Ludovic Slimak. He reports encountering an anthropologist at Stanford who joked, while projecting a slide of a Neanderthal skull, that “if I got on a plane and saw that the pilot had a head like that, I’d get off again”. Blunter still was the Russian academic who kept insisting that the Neanderthals were, simply “different”. Different how? “Ludovic,” he said, “they have no soul.”
What exactly is that supposed to mean? Dragged out of the realm of idle metaphor, the Russian scientist must have been saying that there were psychological capacities that we, Homo sapiens, have – capacities distinctive of our humanity – that Homo neanderthalensis lacked. But what were they? That is a scientific question, to be answered by research, not simply a matter for philosophical speculation.
The reconstructed “Flint” and “Nana”, standing proudly erect, looked as he expected: uncannily (as we are tempted to say) human. “The exaggerated features of skull anatomy,” Finlayson writes, “really fade away once you put skin and flesh to the bone.” The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein once wrote that the best image of the human soul was the human body.
Acknowledging the soul – the dignity – of the Neanderthal might well have to start with acknowledging how alike their bodies were to ours.
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A hypothesis from the 1960s offers a vivid example of the kind of evidence that can be adduced for Neanderthal intelligence. A team led by the Cambridge archaeologist Charles McBurney was excavating at a seaside cliff on the Channel Island of Jersey. An early 20th-century dig had already turned up remnants – in the form of surviving teeth – of Neanderthal occupation. But at the base of the cliff, they found an uncommonly large number of bones belonging to mammoth and rhinoceros. Why were they there?
McBurney’s field assistant, Katharine Scott, advanced an intriguing hypothesis. Could the bones be there because the mammoths had tumbled to their deaths from the high cliff that overlooked the graveyard? Scott pointed to evidence, from surviving hunter-gatherer societies, of “drive lanes” used to kill large numbers of bison. The Native American hunters who had been known to practice this kind of hunting used controlled grass fires to send the animals towards the cliff, and carefully positioned hunters to keep the animals moving. Had the Neanderthals used similar hunting techniques?
Excavation sites are full of pieces of flint that show evidence of fire-making. Charcoal remains at these sites indicate that they were keenest on using resin-rich pine wood as fuel, suggesting they had decided tastes based on a long history of experimentation. They may even have learned to use bones to prolong the life of a fire, keeping them warm while they slept.
The Neanderthals, in other words, walked erect, hunted big game and knew how to control fire: hardly the knuckle-draggers of stereotype.
In 2022, the Nobel prize in physiology or medicine was given to the scientist whose work has put a number to just how human the Neanderthals were. Svante Pääbo, a Swedish geneticist, was a pioneer in the study of “paleogenetics”, which began with the discovery of how DNA might be extracted from a range of sources: old bones and teeth, naturally, but also from cave sediments. The techniques he and his colleagues refined have enabled us to know vastly more about the Neanderthals, their bodies, their habits and their habitats, than their 19th-century discoverers could ever have imagined possible.
Perhaps the most entertaining thing about Pääbo’s 2014 book, Neanderthal Man: In Search of Lost Genomes, is how much of it is dedicated to an account of the palaeogeneticist’s greatest enemy: contamination. Pääbo takes us through the punctilious quest for absolute cleanliness in the laboratory and for methods that will help distinguish real Neanderthal DNA from samples contaminated with, say, the investigator’s own.
Having cut his teeth on trying to extract DNA from Egyptian mummies in the late 1970s, Pääbo began to apply his methods to even older bodies. His methods culminated in a series of triumphs. First, he managed to extract mitochondrial DNA from a piece of ancient bone allowing him to publish, in 1997, the first Neanderthal DNA sequences. Thirteen years later came the publication of a full Neanderthal genome, based on DNA extracted from only three individuals.
The genome offered strong support to what had previously been only a hypothesis: that Homo sapiens and the Neanderthals had had a common ancestor who lived about 600,000 years ago. More significantly, it showed that when early Homo sapiens had walked from their original home in Africa into Eurasia, they had encountered Neanderthals there and interbred with them. The Neanderthals were among the genetic ancestors of modern Europeans and Asians (but not of modern Africans). Eurasians today have between 1.5 and 2.1% of Neanderthal DNA.
Some readers of this research have found Pääbo’s conclusions a source of comfort. Those wondering what had happened to the Neanderthals 40,000 years ago had long been tempted by a dark speculation: perhaps we, Homo sapiens, with our superior weapons and new microbes, had killed them off. But Pääbo’s conclusions give an otherwise tragic story something of a silver lining: the Neanderthals are still alive, as alive as the archaic Homo sapiens they interbred with.
They live on, to use an apt cliche, in us, their (very) hybrid heirs. The one vital trace they have left behind lies in our genes, in the frustrating susceptibility that modern Eurasians with Neanderthal DNA have to burn in the sun and develop Crohn’s disease. Perhaps that is a surer way to restore them to dignity than any other: to see them not as falling prey to our ancestors but as our ancestors.
Not all Neanderthal researchers draw such comfort from the DNA studies. Ludovic Slimak thinks the Neanderthals no more live on “in us” than an extinct wolf lives on in the poodle who shares sections of the archaic wolf genome. In Slimak’s way of thinking about the question, the comforting idea that there was no extinction, only a sort of “dilution”, is tantamount to a failure to see that Neanderthals were a genuinely “other” kind of humanity, neither better nor worse, and certainly not “soulless”. “That humanity”, he writes with a brutal brevity, “is extinct, totally extinct.”
Svante Paabo
Is it really odder to want justice for extinct Neanderthals than it is to want a wrongly convicted friend to be posthumously exonerated? Thinkers dismissed in their lifetimes as kooks or cranks have been vindicated several centuries after their martyrdom, by those who rejoiced that justice had finally been done. It is, if anything, a part of human nature to resist the idea that our interests die with us: a part of our nature, and a beautiful one at that. And it makes one wonder: when the civilizations of Homo sapiens have been reduced to bones and rubble, will our successors on this planet, digging up our mounds of plastic waste, be as anxious to give us our due?
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/justice-for-neanderthals-what-the-debate-about-our-long-dead-cousins-reveals-about-us?utm_source=pocket-newtab-en-us
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ONE APPROACH TO THE PROBLEM OF EVIL
~ While I don't believe in a comprehensible or caring or loving or personal God, and don't see a creator God as necessary (though such a God would be sufficient), I do like this answer to the Epicurean paradox:
This is one of the most common philosophical attacks on theism, and could be considered to be the original problem of evil. There are many different ways theistic philosophers have attempted to address this issue throughout history, but I wanted to focus on the “Could God have created a universe with free will but without evil?” part.
This ultimately comes down to how we define omnipotence. Normally when we hear that term, we think “The ability to do anything.” The term literally means all powerful or holding unlimited power. But what about things that are logically impossible? Could God create a square circle? If he couldn’t, what would that say about him being omnipotent?
Most philosophers agree that while omnipotence entails power over everything else in existence, it doesn’t entail the ability to do the logically impossible. Thus God could not create a universe with free will and without evil, because evil is a natural result of free will. Free will without evil wouldn’t be free will at all and would be logically incoherent. This doesn’t mean God isn’t omnipotent, it means he can’t do what’s logically impossible.
This paradox only works for those who define omnipotence as the ability to do anything, even the logically impossible. For those who define omnipotence the way it has been traditionally understood by philosophers there is nothing incoherent about this issue. ~ Sandy McReynolds, Facebook 
Tintoretto: Creation
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VACCINES MAY PROTECT THE BRAIN AGAINST DEMENTIA
There are many good reasons to get a flu shot this fall, but here’s one that might surprise you: It could protect your brain.
Recent research suggests that regular vaccinations against influenza and other infectious diseases such as shingles, pneumococcal pneumonia, and tetanus, diphtheria and pertussis (whooping cough) may reduce the risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias.
“Vaccines are the great public health success story of our generation,” said Paul E. Schulz, professor of neurology and director of the Neurocognitive Disorders Center at the McGovern Medical School at UTHealth Houston, who led several of the studies. “They keep you safe from any number of infections, many of which can be life-threatening. And now it appears there is another tremendous benefit, this one against a disease that is among the most feared.”
A number of studies have found that people receiving vaccinations for flu and several other infectious diseases appear less likely than the unvaccinated to develop dementia, although scientists aren’t sure why. Some believe that infectious agents play a role in the development of Alzheimer’s disease and that vaccinations help by preventing or reducing the likelihood of getting these infections.
Alternatively, Schulz speculates that vaccines may curb an immune system reaction to amyloid plaque, a naturally occurring protein found in abnormally high levels in Alzheimer’s. The immune system sees plaque as a foreign invader and attacks it, causing chronic brain inflammation and the death of nearby neurons, which contribute to dementia.
In quelling the immune response to amyloid, vaccines may save brain cells that the body’s immune system might otherwise kill, he said.
It’s also possible that vaccines strengthen the immune system’s ability to get rid of plaque.
“Less plaque lead to less inflammation and less brain cell loss,” Schulz said, adding: “We aren’t sure yet exactly what the mechanism is, but something is going on with the brain and the immune system that seems to make a big difference.”
Schulz led a recent study that found a statistically significant difference in the incidence of Alzheimer’s after following two groups — one vaccinated against flu, the other unvaccinated — for up to eight years.
In the flu study, the researchers took participants from a national patient database, two groups of 935,887 each, one group vaccinated, the other not. To avoid the potential influence of various factors that could affect the results, the scientists ensured that each group shared many of the same characteristics, such as age, gender, how frequently they went to the doctor, and certain medical conditions, such as high blood pressure and elevated cholesterol.
Schulz and his colleagues found that an annual flu vaccination for three consecutive years reduced the dementia risk 20 percent over the next four to eight years, while six shots doubled it to a 40-percent reduction.
There were 47,889 cases of dementia in the vaccinated group, compared with 79,630 in the unvaccinated participants — a difference of more than 30,000 cases, Schulz said.
SIMILAR RESULTS FROM OTHER VACCINES
In another study, his team found similar results with vaccines for other infectious diseases, including shingles, pneumococcal pneumonia and the combination of tetanus, diphtheria and pertussis (whooping cough), known as Tdap, or with tetanus and diphtheria without the pertussis component.
With the shingles vaccines, for example, (Zostavax, the early shingles vaccine, and Shingrix, the most recent one), the researchers compared 198,847 patients who were vaccinated to an equal number who were not, Schulz said. Among the vaccinated, 16,106 patients developed Alzheimer’s during the eight-year follow-up, compared with 21,417 of the unvaccinated — or 5,311 fewer patients in the vaccinated group got dementia.
With Tdap and Td vaccines, the researchers compared two groups of 116,400 patients each, one vaccinated, one not. In the vaccinated, 8,370 individuals developed dementia over the eight years, compared with 11,857 in the unvaccinated — 3,487 fewer patients among the vaccinated.
With the pneumococcal vaccine, they compared two groups of 260,037 each, one group vaccinated, the other unvaccinated, and recorded 20,583 dementia cases among the vaccinated after eight years, compared with 28,558 unvaccinated people — 7,975 fewer patients in the vaccinated group, Schulz said.
In two studies conducted in the United Kingdom — still unpublished and under peer review — researchers at Stanford University found similar results. The first, among an older population in Wales, suggests that vaccination with Zostavax prevented an estimated 1 in 5 new dementia cases during a seven-year period, said Pascal Geldsetzer, assistant professor of medicine in the division of primary care and population health at Stanford University, who led the research.
The second analyzed mortality data for England and Wales and found a 5 percent difference in the probability of dying from dementia — or 1 in 20 deaths averted — during a nine-year follow-up.
For both studies, the scientists established two groups for comparison purposes based on the country’s birth date eligibility requirements. Those who turned 80 just before the vaccine program started were not eligible for the vaccine, and remained ineligible, while those who turned 80 just after the program began received the vaccine free over the course of the following year.
“It is likely that the only difference between the two comparison groups was a tiny difference in age, but a large difference in the probability of getting the shingles vaccine,” Geldsetzer said. “That makes our study fundamentally different in its approach to studies that simply compare people who get vaccinated with those who don’t. We think that our findings from this unique natural randomization strongly suggest a causal relationship.”
Experts said more studies were needed to determine the effects of the vaccine on the brain.
There may be undetectable factors that distinguish the vaccinated from the unvaccinated, despite researchers’ efforts to control for them, such as prior head injuries, genetics or environmental exposures, said William Schaffner, professor of preventive medicine and infectious diseases at Vanderbilt University.
Regardless, experts agree that people should get their shots. “All this requires further studies, but vaccination, along with good diet, exercise, intellectual and emotional stimulation are key factors for healthy aging,” Hotez said.
No one should suffer from preventable diseases, Schaffner said: “Vaccinations are a critical means of staying well and living a healthy life.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/wellness/2023/10/25/flu-shots-alzheimers-dementias-vaccinations-infectious-diseases/
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BEST DIETS
It's the season for resolutions — and the annual "Best Diets" rankings from U.S. News & World Report.
For 2024, the Mediterranean diet once again took the spot for best overall diet.
With its emphasis on intake of fruits, vegetables, olive oil, and fish as well as on diet quality rather than a single nutrient or food group, the Mediterranean diet has now held that title for seven consecutive years.
It also placed first in six of 10 other categories: best diet for diabetes, best heart-healthy diet, easiest diet to follow, best diet for bone and joint health, best family-friendly diet, and best diet for healthy eating.
The Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension (DASH) diet, which is known for fighting high blood pressure and preventing or controlling diabetes, again came in a runner-up for best overall diet. It tied for second place last year with the Flexitarian diet, a semi-vegetarian diet that emphasizes fruits, vegetables, whole grains, and plant-based protein; this year the Flexitarian diet took first place among the plant-based diets.
However, rounding out 2024's top three was a contender that didn't make it onto last year's podium: the Mediterranean-DASH Intervention for Neurodegenerative Delay (MIND) diet. The diet combines elements of the DASH and Mediterranean diets, with a focus on foods that improve brain health to potentially lower risk of mental decline, U.S. News explained.
Best Overall Diets
Mediterranean (overall score: 85.1%)
DASH (75.4%)
MIND (60.7%)
Best Weight-Loss Diets
WeightWatchers
Mediterranean
Volumetrics
Best Fast Weight-Loss Diets
Keto
Atkins
HMR program (meal-replacement shakes)
Best Diets for Diabetes
Mediterranean
DASH
Flexitarian
Best Heart-Healthy Diets
Mediterranean
DASH
Ornish
Easiest Diets to Follow
Mediterranean
Flexitarian
DASH
Best Diets for Bone and Joint Health
Mediterranean
DASH
Flexitarian
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Ending on beauty:
After trying many years, and then
near death, the able man may know
an image living in the alpine stone.
If at all, the high and new come slowly,
and, for us, they do not last so long.
Oh my beloved! nature's like that too,
who tried for beauty times untold
until she triumphed, and made you.
Yet by that token she is old
and almost at the end of her career.
So terror, which is always near
to beauty, feeds desire strange food.
My mind falls silent and no longer says
if joy or pain be more: the sight
of you calls forth the End of Days,
yet gives me great delight.
~ Michelangelo
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