The Things Going on Inside Our Bodies

It repeatedly occurs to me that I have no idea what is going on inside my own body. Each of us consists of many trillions of cells all of them, more or less, doing what they need to do to keep us alive and cognizant. It's been a good run for me, for which I'm grateful to my trillions of cells. At any given moment, though, there could be numerous microscopic battles underway that are potentially matters of life and death. At any given moment, my immune system could be successfully (or not) beating back a viral incursion. Who knows how many times per day my body's cells divide successfully without allowing cancer to take root. How many close calls are there?  How many times per day do my cells identify a pathogen and wipe it out? Every week there might be countless life and death battles going on inside of me, yet I'm utterly oblivious. I don't deserve such high-level service and loyalty from my minions.

Again, these are the kinds of thoughts that sometimes occur to me, and this is also my introduction to a short excerpt from Episode 247 of the "Waking Up" podcast, where Sam Harris interviews neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett (who is among the top 1% most-cited scientists for her revolutionary research in psychology and neuroscience). Here's the excerpt:

Lisa Feldman Barrett: First of all, you need to understand that decision-making is always about action first. It's not like you decide something and then you act. The decision that your brain is making is the decision to DO this or that based on probabilities, So I think that's the first thing. The second thing is that, we're not just unaware of what's been going on in our own brains, right? We're also unaware of what's going on inside our own bodies, for the most part, thank God, because there's a whole drama going on inside you right now.

Sam Harris: Yeah, exactly. It's a horror show.

Lisa Feldman Barrett: All I can say is, if anybody is really is currently aware of all of the drama going on, inside your own body, I have my deep, deep sympathy, because we're not really wired to be intimately aware of all the details . . . That would be what philosophers call tragic embodiment.

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About Team-Thinking

On this issue, I agree (more or less) with Helen Pluckrose. I consciously strive to gather my information and do my thinking à la carte. No team-thinking for me, because hypocrisy is ubiquitous. For me, it's issue by issue, person by person. This makes gathering and evaluating news stories much harder than permanently signing up for, e.g., e.g., NYT/NPR/CNN or e.g., FOX//Drudge/National Review. I admire Helen's courage, intellect, kind-heartedness and humility. She recently founded Counterweight, which I can generally support (but not always!).

I find this position easy to adapt, given that the first 20 years of my life forced me to develop deeply rooted defenses against my father trying to force/humiliate me into declaring allegiance to the Catholic Church as the "one true holy apostolic church.  Lots more on my journey here, in a five-part series I titled "Mending Fences." I think and hope that I am immune to anyone trying to get me to express belief in anything based on social pressure.  It has been a long, sometimes difficult, journey, given the anger many people express when you don't show loyalty to their "team."  That, however, is a small price to pay for the ability to look in the mirror and not see a sell-out.

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Jeopardy’s Wokeness Contagion

From the NYT, a Jeopardy story of liberal contagion following a contestant gesturing that he won three games with three fingers:

A full 595 former contestants eventually signed on to the final draft of the letter, asking why “Jeopardy!” hadn’t edited out the moment. It went on to proclaim: “We cannot stand up for hate. We cannot stand next to hate. We cannot stand onstage with something that looks like hate.”

.    .    .

So the element of this story that interests me most is how the beating heart of nerdy, liberal fact-mastery can pump blood into wild social media conspiracy, and send all these smart people down the sort of rabbit hole that leads other groups of Americans to believe that children are being transported inside refrigerators. And, I wanted to know, how they could remain committed to that point of view in the absence of any solid evidence.

What caused this insanity? It's a well-written article by Ben Smith, with applications far beyond Jeopardy. One of the reasons: "Social media turns just about everything into a kind of team sport, including analyzing the ills of social media."

This is a clear example of liberal contagion, in a world filled with both liberal and conservative contagion.

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The Many Reasons We Are Now Sex-Negative

At Quillette, Jacob Falkovich has written "The Sex Negative Society" in which he lists the many reasons we are now sex "negative." Here is an excerpt:

Capitalism knows that sex sells, but it’s not selling you on sex. You’re sold sex appeal—the trappings that make your peers (and you) see yourself as worthy of sex. Sex worthiness is sold in many ways: luxury watches, luxury dresses, luxury degrees, luxury beliefs. People can fall into narcissistic obsession with acquiring sex worthiness that entirely precludes actual intimacy. Even if that fate is avoided, the effort spent on acquiring sex worthiness isn’t spent on connecting with intimate partners. Good sex doesn’t contribute to any brand’s sales metrics or any nation’s GDP.

Perhaps it makes no sense to expect sex-positivity of any culture at all. If culture is simply the set of stories people tell themselves to get along collectively and establish order and hierarchy, it has no room for the private and disorderly affair of sex. Camille Paglia takes this further, imagining most of Western art and philosophy as a defense against the chaotic, filthy, and daemonic nature of intercourse. Civilization was always a way to control sex, not to promote it.

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The Most Bigoted Book . . .

From Titania McGrath, dedicated to keeping us all on track: And if you have any friends who are teetering from this vile poison spewed by dictionaries, by all means keep them away from Colin Wright:

Wright is a bad person because Wright lives in a fact-based world and reports on articles like this, which contain facts:

From the Daily Mail:

A student who said women were born with female genitals and the difference in physical strength between men and women 'was a fact' is facing disciplinary action by her university.

Lisa Keogh, 29, who studies law at Abertay University in Dundee was reported to university chiefs by her classmates after she said that women were not as physically strong as men.

The mature student, who is in her final year, is now facing a formal investigation by the university for the alleged 'offensive' and 'discriminatory' comments.

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