PCAPPC

This panel from the Sistine Chapel was never given a name by Michelangelo, though it is commonly referred to as "The Creation of Adam." I don't think I'm the only one puzzled by this description. Adam has obviously already been created, so what's God doing now? And why does God appear to be struggling to reach out and touch an Adam who couldn't care less? God seems to be gathering his loyal legions around him while reaching out for one more who appears to be casually telling God to go ahead without him. Could this be a representation, not of God in the act of creation, or even in the act of endowing man with self-knowledge, but of humanity in the act of rejecting God -- the birth, that is, of humanism? That God and his angels together form a remarkably precise outline of the human brain is, I think, no coincidence; it might very well be a symbol of God as a creation of the mind rather than the reverse. Click on the image above to go to site where you can view...

I don't need further convincing. Check out the BBC article .

Lee Smolin, in his book The Trouble with Physics , complains that his generation of theoretical physicists dropped the ball. In the early 1970’s graduate students like himself were sure they were close to a major revolution in humanity’s understanding of the universe. But just when a “theory of everything” seemed to be within reach, theoretical physics divided into ideological camps and began arguing philosophy and metaphysics rather than investigating the meaning of experimental results and the testability of their hypotheses. In the last 50 years, industry, government and individual entrepreneurs have been busy applying the knowledge gained in the previous 500. Up until 1960, even Newton’s laws were fundamentally untested. It wasn’t until the first earth-orbiting satellites that even those most basic laws of physics could be demonstrated unambiguously. Technology has been rapidly advancing since, and today its routine to use the equations of quantum electrodynamics in the design of c...

Why isn't this Nobel-Prize-winning economist ever interviewed on American television? Check out this interview from Italy.

In objecting to Saul’s description of the current Western technocracy as a “dictatorship of reason,” a couple of us made the point last night that reason has really never been given a chance, that reason has always been pushed aside by irrational forces -- apocalyptic Christianity, racism and other skewed ideologies. That the rational method was revived in the late Middle Ages to support and legitimize those very same “irrational” institutions could be dismissed as a simple disagreement over definitions. But at the same time, I think we all agree that the process of defining terms is much more than an intellectual exercise, or a nuanced strategy for scholastic debate. At the heart of the matter, I think, is the important difference between prescriptive and descriptive dictionaries. Pre scriptive dictionaries use definitions to produce the desired result, like when scholars in the Middle Ages carefully parsed Biblical passages to remove contradictions in scripture, or when modern-day pu...

John Ralston Saul uses language deliberately, and many common words are given such weight that we're forced to rethink their definitions. Does the meaning of the word, "free", for example, shift when we talk about "free" trade vs. "free" speech? Our claim to language as citizens is essential to the health of civilization, and its constant exercise is essential to democracy. Perhaps in January, at our next meeting of the PCA, we can take up a few of the following words (in no particular order) which Saul uses very precisely, and whose meanings, I think, stretch our mental muscles: Management; Morality; Imagination; Intuition; Leadership; Reason; Humanism; Ideology; Legitimacy; Democracy; Knowledge; Common Sense; Ethics; Facts; Language; Science; Culture; Methods; Civilization; Citizen; Courtier; Lobbyist; Memory; Expertise; Government; God; Power; Pundit; Groups; Elite; Globalization; Specialization; Contractual Obligations; Disinterest; The Social ...

Fear isn't the object from which we recoil, nor is it the discomfort to which an encounter with the object might lead, nor a motivation to achieve the tranquility of its erasure. These are all rationalizations to an essentially irrational response. Fear, fundamentally, is a reaction which focuses our attention, briefly, on an object or some characteristic of a situation which might do us harm: a snake on the path; the edge of a cliff; a blackening sky and a flash of lightening. But with imagination came the possibility of chronic fear, the manifestation of its triggers in the mind and the pathological holding of them there. These became the seeds of ideology; the containment of a chronic fear became, in time, essential to tribal cohesion; the common fear, popularly nourished, reinforced tribal identity by defining what was inclusive to and what would be excluded from society. Our understanding of “other” began in empathy. The first step to comprehending individuality, self and othe...