The direction of last things

The direction of last things

I’m writing this piece on the first day after Easter Sunday. Most will know this is the most important and oldest festival of the Christian Church, celebrating the resurrection of Christ. For me, it also marks the passing of a close family friend after a long illness. It’s times like today that urge us to reflect about life, the meaning of life, and the role religion plays when facing death.

Aldous Huxley once wrote most human beings behave as though death were no more than an unfounded rumor. But what happens when you realize the rumor is true. Many see death as a new beginning. We say a person passed away. In Judaism for example the word 'death' is avoided altogether since the person's soul does not ever die. Instead, it passes away or passes on to a different plane of reality, a spiritual realm.

Not all of us have a strong religious predilection and yet the idea of saints and sinners, heaven and hell still shape our thinking. What will lead and inspire us in a world free of all gods. How can an atheist find meaning in life.  How can we face death without the comfort of the afterlife.

More and more people today believe there is no God. Religious values, however, have dominated our lives for hundreds of years and still have a hold over us. What can reason and science offer us in the place of religion.  To bring comfort in the face of death, help us tell right from wrong. Or provide meaning in an indifferent and uncaring world. If there is no God, what is the meaning of life. What’s the point.

One of the oddest reactions to facing up to life without God was that of the Great Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy. He was bought up Christian and as a young man lost his faith. He had wealth, a family and a celebrity status thanks to his novels War and Peace and Anna Karenina. But in his late forties he began to question everything. Tolstoy was in despair and staring down into an abyss of suicidal depression – he could find no answer to what tormented him. Why do I live? Is there any meaning in my life that will not be annihilated by the inevitability of death?

Perhaps this is part of the explanation why religion evolved in the first place. It satisfied our desperate desire to find meaning and order in the chaos.  Is it possible that evolutionary science tells us a lot about ageing and death.  If we look at death from a genes point of view our bodies become nothing more than a kind of a survival machine for genes. Once our genes get us to a reproductive age and copy themselves into a new generation, our bodies began to have less purpose. Time bombs inside us go off. We age – we die. So rather than looking upon ageing as the wearing out of our body perhaps we should see it as a side effect of how our genes work.

And whilst talking about evaluation - evolutionary psychology suggests that we have evolved a sense of a separate mind or soul because it’s useful to us. A soul that’s in control of us.  An executive function makes it difficult for us to shake off the religious way of death. We are programmed to believe in something such as a soul.

Nebraska - demonstration of humility

I recently watched the Oscar-nominated film Nebraska, starring Bruce Dern and Will Forte. The film, as you know was shot in black and white, daring stylistic choice. This I think is a good demonstration of humility in the face those dominating features; no splashes of color to distract our attention from what are most real. The film's stark images of small towns, highways and relationships in the Great Plains are keenly explored.

This is a sensitive and whimsical look at the challenges faced by ordinary people as they play out the dramas of what they see as their little lives, long forgotten events, misinformation and face saving pride when reputation is often all that remains.

Nebraska is also a film about the commandment to honor your father and mother. David is a big-hearted son who has empathy for his father; he knows he's latched on to winning the lottery so he can pass something of value to his two sons. David's return gifts are well worth waiting to see. Here is a caregiver who does the best he can for his father.

A visit to the optometrist today

Had to visit the optometrist today – a far far more amiable experience than the trip to the dentist the other day. As well as the shiny new spectates, a script and timely down time in a dimly lit room there was an additional bonus – getting to see a part of my brain. A high resolution picture of my retina (retinas.)

As we know, the retina is a part of the brain pushed out into the eye during development. It retains many characteristics of other brain regions and hence has yielded significant insights on brain mechanisms. Visual processing begins there as a result of neuronal interactions in two synaptic layers that initiate an analysis of space, color, and movement. In humans, visual signals from 126 million photoreceptors funnel down to one million ganglion cells that convey at least a dozen representations of a visual scene to higher brain regions.

Interesting to read local electrical stimulation of the retinal surface in patients blind from outer retinal disease has resulted in focal light perception that seems to arise from the stimulated area. Such findings in an acute experiment warrant further research into the possibility of prolonged retinal stimulation, improved resolution, and ultimately, an intraocular visual prosthesis.

Freud on Coca

So now we have it - Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis, inventor of free association, transference and the Oedipus complex has quite a bit to say about that great evil. I’m taking about Cocaine. The Cocaine Papers is a collection of papers featuring Freud’s writing and thoughts on the subject, personal and professional. His conclusions;

Cocaine can increase alertness and libido, improve reaction time, depress hunger and serve as an anesthetic, but it is also, for some people at least, habit-forming, and that’s of course not all. We understand these days the impact of illicit drug use in the community including premature death, crime, mental health disorders, and other blood borne viruses, etc.

The publication of 'Cocaine Papers' presents the complete and authoritative versions of Freud's important texts, widely referred to as 'the cocaine papers.' Written between 1884 & 1887, they are a significant contribution to the fields of psychology, pharmacology, and social history.

The stories and accounts are often repeated, albeit sometimes, not always, from different perspectives. Freud was looking to make a name for himself and achieve fame and fortune so as to be able to marry his “beloved treasure,” Martha Bernays, and thought he had come upon the means for that with the then legal drug cocaine.

On April 21, 1884, a 28-year-old researcher in the field now called neuroscience sat down at the cluttered desk of his cramped room in Vienna General Hospital and composed a letter to his fiancée, Martha Bernays, telling her of his recent studies: “I have been reading about cocaine, the effective ingredient of coca leaves,” Sigmund Freud wrote, “which some Indian tribes chew in order to make themselves resistant to privation and fatigue.” And not too much later, less than a month later, Freud was writing to Bernays about the many self-experiments in which he had swallowed various quantities of the drug, finding it useful in relieving brief episodes of depression and anxiety. Later, he described how “a small dose lifted me to the heights in a wonderful fashion. I am just now busy collecting the literature” — in German, French and English — “for a song of praise to this magical substance.”

Included in this work are Freud’s ‘Cocaine Dreams,’ which show just how brilliant was his analytical mind. As with his early position on the causes of “Hysteria” (sexual abuse as cause) and was mostly right with regards to cocaine, but abandoned his position because of peer pressure.

inferiority complex and the overview effect

I woke up this morning with a thought. A thought that I’d never had before; this is despite the fact that I’ve often read about, talked about and written about. The thought?

Well, the realization that the universe is as small in scale as it is large. That is, there are objects in the universe that are unimaginably small as there are objects that are unimaginably large.

Space programs since the 1960’s reaffirmed the reality of the Earth in space, which is immediately understood to be a tiny, fragile ball of life, "hanging in the void", shielded and nourished by a paper-thin atmosphere. And we’ve read about the overview effect, which is a cognitive shift in awareness reported by some astronauts and cosmonauts during spaceflight, often while viewing the Earth from orbit or from the lunar surface.

At the same time, some of us have an inferiority complex about being smaller than average. Most people don’t like being just average, but being less than average is even worse. Astronomers like to take advantage, by pointing out that the universe is really, really big — much bigger than these below-average-sized persons.

But we’re not so small if we compare ourselves to small things. For instance, we are much, much bigger than a bacterium, which is so small you need to look through a microscope to find it; and by the time you do find it, it has probably split in half and turned into two even smaller bacteria.

Now we often say the universe is a large, large place. But we don’t seem to ever say the universe is a really small place. If we take the height of an average person to be 1.7 x 10⁰ meters, or roughly 1.7 meters, Gomez’s Hamburger is 10¹⁶ meters away; the Milky Way galaxy 10²¹ meters and the observable universe 10²⁶ meters.

Equally, a white blood cell is 10^-5 big (.0001) big, the Hepatitis B Virus is 10^-8 meters and the smallest object we know of include the Neutrino at 10^-24 meters and more esoteric objects such as strings, and the quantum foam coming in at 10^-36 meters.

On my birthday

Birthdays – even better than Christmas when we’re young, wet behind the ears and knee high to creepy crawlers. We get to celebrate our existence, noting annually the exact day we were born into this world and the glorious journey called Life.

But birthdays mark the passage of time and as we grow older they seem to keep coming at an alarmingly rapid rate. Growing older certainly beats the alternative. I’m very happy that I’m alive when so many of my dear ones no longer are. None of us expected they would die so young and I never imagined being this old back in more naïve, crisp days of yesteryear. How can we possibly know? But I think each of us has an imagined age we would reach when we would be “old” and a vision of some time, many many years away, when we would die…if we can imagine such an event.

For years, a close friend insists that we don’t age. That is, our personality doesn’t age. I think I know what she is saying. She recalls traits and patterns of thought that have formed her very being.

Contemporary psychology argues that personality is defined as a set of traits that follow the individual throughout the life course. Personality is made of five traits that dispose an individual to particular thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. These traits are: (a) neuroticism, (b) extroversion, (c) openness to experience, (d) agreeableness, and (e) conscientiousness.

The Baltimore Longitudinal Study on Aging is regarded as the most definitive study of personality traits. Paul Costa and Robert McCrae tested the personalities of individuals between 19 to 80 years old for over twelve years and specifically measured their levels of neuroticism, extroversion, openness to experience, agreeableness, and conscientiousness. Costa and McCrae concluded that these five personality traits remained relatively stable with age.  Furthermore, trait stability especially characterized individuals after the age of 30.

Given the general conclusion that personality traits remain stable after age 30, Costa and McCrae would argue that if a 30 year old woman worried excessively about whether or not her husband's salary was enough to make mortgage payments, then she also is likely to be worried about having saved enough for her children's college tuition when she is 45 and is likely to be worried about the adequacy of her husband's pension income at age 70. Since Costa and McCrae suggest that personality traits remain stable through adulthood a high degree of neuroticism, as reflected by a consistent and excessive level of anxiety and worry, is likely to persist and find new focal points over time.