Humans Think Like Quantum Particles. An American election season seems like a bad time to sing the praises of human rationality.
Candidates make promises that will never be kept yet voters somehow accept; thoughtful arguments hold no sway, while sound bites carry the day. What a comedown from the Enlightenment ideals, the faith in rationality, that inspired the founding of the republic. And it is even worse than you might think. Some things you think should be possible to figure out rationally if only you exerted yourself aren't. If you actually succeeded in living a life of reason—never voting without weighing each candidate's record carefully, never buying an appliance without consulting Consumer Reports, never begging the question, never erecting straw men, never falling into any of the other traps that flesh is heir to—you still would find yourself doing things that made no sense, not because you had failed but because reason itself is a saw blade missing a few teeth.
Yoga & Meditation. Mindfulness with Jon Kabat-Zinn. Consciousness and Complexity. Recently my wife Ramona and I watched a PBS program entitled "Ape Genius.
" The program sought to uncover the cognitive abilities and limits of the great apes: Chimpanzees, Bonobos, Orangutans, and Gorillas. Their mental capabilities were contrasted with those of humans. The deep question posed was: Given the many similarities between humans and great apes, why are we so different? Only humans have art, music, global organization and so on? Why?