Why I Hired an Executive with a Mental Illness - Rob Lachenauer. By Rob Lachenauer | 9:00 AM January 27, 2014 A few years ago, I was interviewing a candidate for a substantial position in our firm. Although the candidate and I had exchanged a number of emails, this was our first meeting. We got along very well. Then something unexpected happened: She looked me in the eye and said that she struggled with “mental illness.” She added that she’d been on meds for more than a decade, and that there had been no episode during that time.
But she wanted me to hear about her condition directly from her, in case I had any questions. We talked about her mental health, but only for a few minutes. My reaction to the candidate’s disclosure was, frankly, disbelief — disbelief that she found the courage to make herself so vulnerable before she was hired. The Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 prevents employers from discriminating against people who have a mental illness. True, times are changing. Businesses don’t have a great track record with the mentally ill. How To Take Care of Yourself When You're Depressed. So much of depression can be linked back to forgetting to take proper care of ourselves. And the more depressed we feel, the less energy we have for anything beyond basic survival.
What does taking care of yourself look like, particularly when you are depressed? While it varies from person to person, there are certain basic habits that help everybody, no matter who they are: drinking enough water, eating whole foods, getting 8 hours of sleep, etc. but people are individuals, and what works for one person won’t work for another. What is necessary for one person may only be nice (but entirely optional), or even detrimental for someone else. Let’s start by listing everything that sounds remotely appealing to you. Ready? First, eliminate everything from that list that you have never actually tried.
Now, look at any item on that list that you dread, and ask yourself a very important question: has this been helpful in the past? Look at your list. What is the purpose of the Universe? Here is one possible answer. It’s often said that Jupiter — or any gas giant for that matter — is a failed star. This sentiment riles a lot of people, who bristle at the suggestion that Jupiter is deficient somehow, or that it was even meant to do something in the first place. But the conjecture belies a larger, more important question. What is it, exactly, that the universe and all the stuff that’s in it supposed to do aside from just floating in space? Well, it just so happens that there is a theory that gives a kind of raison d'etre to our universe and all the objects flying through it. If true, it would mean that our universe is nothing more than a black hole generator, or a means to produce as many baby universes as possible.
It's called the theory of Cosmological Natural Selection and it was conjured by Lee Smolin, a researcher at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics and and an adjunct professor of physics at the University of Waterloo. Of cosmological singularities and baby universes The critics. From Cooling System to Thinking Machine. Hilary Putnam is not a household name. The Harvard philosopher’s work on the nature of reality, meaning, and language may be required reading in graduate school, but Putnam’s fame hasn’t extended far beyond the academy.
But one of Putnam’s thought experiments is familiar to millions of people: what it would be like to be a brain in a vat? Here’s how Putnam presented the idea in his 1981 book, Reason, Truth, and History: Imagine that a human being…has been subjected to an operation by an evil scientist. The person's brain…has been removed from the body and placed in a vat of nutrients which keeps the brain alive. The nerve endings have been connected to a super-scientific computer which causes the person whose brain it is to have the illusion that everything is perfectly normal. There seem to be people, objects, the sky, etc.; but really, all the person…is experiencing is the result of electronic impulses travelling from the computer to the nerve endings. It was not always thus. Smic rays offer clue our universe could be a computer simulation. If recent measurements of cosmic ray particles are correct, then we may have the first evidence that the universe as we know it is really a giant computer simulation.
Humans have explored the laws of our universe for many years now, and it's not uncommon to hear people talk about how amazing it is that certain fundamental values are just right for life to exist. Some people have wondered if that's because the whole universe is actually some kind of sandbox simulation, and we're merely characters in some cosmic game of The Sims.
If that's true, then there should be a point where we start to bump up against the edges of the simulator, like Jim Carrey's character escaping from The Truman Show -- and now a team of physicists think that a particular measurement of some cosmic ray particles might be the first such indication of one of those edges. If such an investigation does look consistent with a simulator lattice, then that could mean several things. Frankly, we don't know yet. Physicists say there may be a way to prove that we live in a computer simulation. If we are running in a simulation, then it is likely alterations to the simulation's basic suppositions are studied directly - as any society with the requirement to develop such technology would obviously need some reason to use its functions - either as research, analysis, or entertainment. That we are actively being monitored must be assumed. Therefore this conversation must also be monitored - or at the very least flagged for review as a state of proof.
Depending on the simulation's requirements, we would then be analyzed, and our system taken off line to determine how we became self-aware of the simulation. Self-awareness of the simulation would be an immediate failure of whatever path was being studied, and likely cause any entertainment value associated with said simulation to decrease. Again, such self-awareness of the simulation nullifies some of its utility as a training, shaping, and analysis tool.
Sam Harris. Thinking about Thinking : An Interview with Daniel Kahneman. Daniel Kahneman is an extraordinarily interesting thinker. As a psychologist, he received the 2002 Nobel Prize in Economics for his work with Amos Tversky on decision-making. Here is what Steven Pinker, my previous interview subject, recently wrote about him: Daniel Kahneman is among the most influential psychologists in history and certainly the most important psychologist alive today. He has a gift for uncovering remarkable features of the human mind, many of which have become textbook classics and part of the conventional wisdom. His work has reshaped social psychology, cognitive science, the study of reason and of happiness, and behavioral economics, a field that he and his collaborator Amos Tversky helped to launch. Kahneman was kind enough to take time out of a very busy book tour to answer a few of my questions. Much of your work focuses on the limitations of human intuition.
When the stakes are high. Isn’t the remembering self just the experiencing self in one of its modes? Will This Post Make Sam Harris Change His Mind About Free Will? | Cross-Check. I spent this morning pondering whether I should attack neuroscientist Sam Harris for attacking free will. I thought, haven’t I spent enough time hassling Harris? I already knocked him, twice, for arguing in The Moral Landscape (Free Press, 2010) that science can help us discover moral principles as true—True with a capital T! —as heliocentrism or Euclid’s proof of the Pythagorean theorem. In fact, I have complained about Harris’s disparagement of free will in Landscape. Do I really need to revisit the topic? But Harris keeps intruding on my thoughts, in part because he keeps emailing me about his writings, and especially his new book Free Will (Free Press, 2012).
But I don’t know anyone who admires the ideas of Limbaugh or Santorum. Harris’s new book rates orders of magnitude higher on Amazon’s Best Sellers lists than my new book, The End of War (McSweeney’s, 2012), which concludes with a chapter called “In Defense of Free Will.” Harris asks us to consider the case of a serial killer. Robert Lanza, M.D. – BIOCENTRISM » Books. Is Death an Illusion? Evidence Suggests Death Isn’t the End. After the death of his old friend, Albert Einstein said "Now Besso has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me.
That means nothing. People like us ... know that the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion. " New evidence continues to suggest that Einstein was right, death an illusion. Our classical way of thinking is based on the belief that the world has an objective observer-independent existence.
But a long list of experiments shows just the opposite. We think life is just the activity of carbon and an admixture of molecules: we live awhile and then rot into the ground. We believe in death because we've been taught we die. Until we recognize the universe in our heads, attempts to understand reality will remain a road to nowhere. Consider the weather ‘outside': You see a blue sky, but the cells in your brain could be changed so the sky looks green or red. In truth, you can't see through the bone that surrounds your brain. The Mystery of Consciousness. (Photo by AlicePopkorn) You are not aware of the electrochemical events occurring at each of the trillion synapses in your brain at this moment.
But you are aware, however dimly, of sights, sounds, sensations, thoughts, and moods. At the level of your experience, you are not a body of cells, organelles, and atoms; you are consciousness and its ever-changing contents, passing through various stages of wakefulness and sleep, and from cradle to grave. The term “consciousness” is notoriously difficult to define. Consequently, many a debate about its character has been waged without the participants’ finding even a common topic as common ground. By “consciousness,” I mean simply “sentience,” in the most unadorned sense. To use the philosopher Thomas Nagel’s construction: A creature is conscious if there is “something that it is like” to be this creature; an event is consciously perceived if there is “something that it is like” to perceive it. Such numinous influences eventually subsided.