Copernicus, Galileo, and Free Speech -- There Are Lessons Here

At the Galileo Museum in Florence.

What do you do if you're an outlier, ahead of the curve on a matter of historical or social significance? Or someone who has made a discovery that goes against public opinion?

When Copernicus observed and then proved that the earth went around the sun, and not vice versa, he only published this revelation at the end of his life. Had there been freedom of speech, accompanied by free thought and free inquiry, the "Copernican revolution" may have begun much earlier.

Galileo paid a price for his inquiries into how the universe works. His 1633 imprisonment was primarily due to his support for the heliocentric model of the solar system--that the sun was the center of our solar system--which contradicted the geocentric model endorsed by the Church at the time. Galileo's advocacy for the ideas proposed by Copernicus, challenged the prevailing religious and scientific beliefs of the era. He was found guilty of heresy by the Roman Catholic Church and was placed under house arrest for the remainder of his life.

Today this power to elevate or destroy careers is no longer wielded by the Church. It belongs to the State and the mob. Free speech without repercussions appears to remain an unattainable ideal, like Quixote's impossible dream. 

These "Throwback Thursday" thoughts came to mind as I reflected again on Ibsen's Enemy of the People.

Thursday Mashup: Ideas Worth Chewing On

"His story is an odd one. It’ll be worth telling one day."--Winesburg, Ohio

Stories of Note for 7 March 2019

On March 5 in 1616, the book De Revolutoinibus Orbium Coelestium (On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres) was banned by the Catholic Church.

Written by Nicolaus Copernicus in 1543, the book revealed a theory that we now know to be true: that the Earth revolves around the Sun.

Copernicus postulated that the Sun was the center of the universe — a theory that directly challenged the religious philosophy that man was the center of all creation.

(Today, we know that both of these claims are false. Neither the Earth nor the Sun is the center of the universe… but the Earth does revolve around the Sun.)
--The above originally opened a story on The Mission eNewsletter Tuesday

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Arts Sector Contributed $763.6 Billion to U.S. Economy—More Than Agriculture or Transportation, New Data Shows
Most people are unaware of the economic impact of the arts. Isaac Kaplan's article offers up stats that will surprise you.

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The Ad Contrarian Bob Hoffman zeroes in on the deceptive way online advertisers gain support for violating our privacy. The piece is title More Elephant Advertising. He can be pretty scathing at times, but his straightforwardness is refreshing. He does not pull punches.

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This AEON article about Maslow's Hierarchy is interesting. 
It's titled Do you have a self-actualised personality? Maslow revisited

The first paragraph reminds readers of Maslow's "needs hierarchy" and then digs into what contemporary psychology has to say on the matter of self-actualization. Despite being short on actual data for his theories, Maslow was amazingly perceptive.

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My story about clickbait got published in The Writing Cooperative. Read it here:

Personally I Find Clickbait Headlines More Than Just A Little Annoying

Here are 7 examples (And I especially hate #3)

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Probably the scariest story here today:
Nebraska county owes $28M for wrongful convictions

No DNA tests, covered up testimony, and forced confessions. 

The taxpayers will pay the damages.

Here's the story: Six people were arrested and wrongly convicted for the rape and murder of a Nebraska woman. After serving a combined 75 year behind bars it was learned through DNA evidence that they were innocent and had been railroaded in an effort to get the case resolved. Once proven innocent they sued Gage County and won a settlement of $28 million. The Supreme Court refused to overturn the decision and now the county must pay up.

The lawsuit alleged that law enforcement officials recklessly strove to close the case despite contradictory evidence and coerced false confessions. The three people who gave false confessions all had histories of psychological problems. One of the six, Joseph White, died in a workplace accident in Alabama in 2011.

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Meantime, life goes on... all around you.

Mark Gober Shares Ideas About Consciousness from His New Book, An End to Upside Down Thinking

One evening this past month my mind went down a path that began like this: What If We’re Wrong?

I then began scribbling down notes, which I set aside to ponder later.
What if we’re wrong about what it means to be good citizens?
What if we’re wrong about voting being something that really, really matters?
What if we’re wrong about democracy being good? Is Democracy sacred? Why? Our American experiment is a little over two centuries old.
What if political action is a massive distraction from more important things in our families and communities?

When I began reading Mark Gober's book An End To Upside Down Thinking a whole new set of questions emerged, pertaining to the nature of reality and consciousness. At one time Copernicus must have asked, "What if the earth was not the center of the universe?" Gober believes that in time many of the commonly held beliefs of science, as regard consciousness, will be upended. His book is a contribution to this revolution.

The book, which I wrote about here on Friday, explores a lot of areas where commonly accepted views are being challenged, where more "what if" questions need to be revisited. What follows here is an interview with the author.

EN: You have invested a lot of time into investigating your instincts or presuppositions about consciousness. What were the catalysts or trigger events that nudged you in this direction?

Mark Gober

Mark Gober: In August 2016, I randomly stumbled across podcasts that challenged everything I thought I knew. The more I investigated, the more I realized I needed to re-think existence and who and what we are. To be clear: before this, I had no explicit instincts or suppositions about the ideas discussed in my book. If anything, my views were opposite what they now are. After my initial exposure to thought-provoking podcasts, I then researched extensively for a year while continuing in my day job in finance/consulting. Over a few weekends in July 2017, I wrote what is now my book An End to Upside Down Thinking. Why write a book? I realized the ideas represented a revolution bigger than any we've ever seen. For example, we used to think the earth is flat. Then we thought (incorrectly) that the earth was at the center of the solar system. The next one is: we used to think the brain produces consciousness.

EN: In my philosophy of mind class in college, our first assignment was to write a paper addressing this issue: what would you experience if you woke one morning and your brain had been exchanged with someone in England? This seems like a central theme, as you ask readers to reconsider the brain’s relationship to consciousness. How would answer the question posed by my professor in 1971?

MG: In my book, I first address the fact that we have no idea how a brain could produce consciousness. This is known as "the hard problem" of consciousness. All we know is that the brain is related to consciousness. But we don't know if the brain produces it. I then provide evidence suggesting that consciousness doesn't come from the brain at all, that the brain acts more like an antenna/receiver or filter of consciousness, and that consciousness is more fundamental than matter. Matter doesn't create consciousness; rather, consciousness creates matter. Furthermore, the evidence points toward the idea that we are all fundamentally connected as part of a singular, underlying consciousness. So even though we seem to have individual experiences, our minds are actually connected.

One of the phenomena I discuss in my book is called a "near-death experience." These are instances in which a person has a severely impaired brain or sometimes is even clinically dead, and yet the person reports lucid memories. In An End to Upside Down Thinking I explain why the near-death experience can't be explained as a mere hallucination but rather it may teach us something about the broader reality that our brain normally filters or obfuscates from our perception. In the near-death experience people often report a "life review" in which they experience their life in a flash, judging themselves for how they treated others. Now here's the kicker (and finally getting to your question): in many cases, the person experiences the life review from the perspective of the person he/she affected. So let's say Bob is having a life review and is reviewing a time in which he harmed Jane. In the life review he feels the pain he caused to Jane, as if he were Jane. This example points to the notion that we are actually part of the same consciousness but in our everyday experience we are viewing life through the lens of our limited, individual brain. In the life review people seem to have the ability to view life through the lens of another.

The brain and body allow consciousness to have specific experiences. So (returning to your original question) experiencing life through the brain of another would be like viewing life through a different lens.

EN: What are the implications for how we might live life and treat one another?

Carl Jung likewise asked many questions
about the nature of consciousness.

MG: If consciousness isn't produced by the brain as I argue in An End to Upside Down Thinking, then the death of the brain/body would not imply the death of consciousness. I provide evidence suggesting that consciousness exists independently of the physical body. In other words, our consciousness lives on when our body dies. This has massive implications for how we live. If we lost the fear of the death, how might we live differently? For some, this changes everything.

If we are all truly interconnected as part of the same underlying consciousness, then all separation we see is an illusion. "You" vs. "me" and "us" vs. "them" are illusions. So if at the core level we are all the same, it becomes irrational to do harm to another. Altruism takes on a new meaning: helping others feels good because we are ultimately helping our "self" as part of the same consciousness. Altruism is then the highest form of selfishness. This changes everything. Imagine how many of the world's problems would shift if we appreciated this notion. The solution to world peace and the survival of the species, in my mind, are dependent upon the realization that we are not separate.

EN: I think here of Jesus in his parable of the sheep and goats, where he says, "As you did it unto the least of these... you did it unto me."

The book has much to ponder. You can find it here on Amazon.com.

A Recycled Blog Post On Rambling

"I have no special gift. I am only passionately curious." ~ Albert Einstein

What was it that made men like Einstein and Newton and Copernicus and Aristotle stand out from the herd? Einstein puts his finger on the nub of it right there. They were inordinately curious. They asked questions. They wanted to understand how the world worked. They didn't just accept things as they were.

For some reason, when we're kids we're taught that "curiosity killed the cat." This is repeated ad nauseaum in our childhood so as to make curiosity something bad, like lying. In reality, curiosity is part of the fabric of who we are. And it is essential to learning.

Making art is a thrill for creative personalities because it employs curiosity in the process of creation. What will happen if I do this? What happens if I do that? There is a sense of being an audience to one's own creations.

By way of contrast, many artists I know hate the way our culture wants "products" which can be reproduced. There's nothing more boring for an artist than mass production. It stunts this natural desire to see what will happen if I color it this way or that. Business people may like mass production for its efficiencies and the revenues generated. But I don't know many artists who want to make 1,000 identical baskets of flowers, teddy bears and ribbons.

According to our friend Merriam-Webster, the word ramble is an intransitive verb of 15th century Middle English origin which means to move aimlessly from place to place or to explore idly. I like the second part of that first definition: "To explore idly."

When we allow our minds to ramble and roam, amazing things happen. We discover gems. We find connections between new ideas and past experiences. There's a therapeutic aspect to it as well.

Every once in a while it's OK for our minds to drift, our thoughts to ramble. I don't know if it's healthy to keep our thoughts tightly coiled all the time. This might be a facet of music's wonder in that as we lose ourselves in the rhythms and harmonies and contours of sounds, whether sweet or discordant, we find a measure of freedom from our inward tyrannies.

Rambling as a lifestyle is also energizing for some. I know a few writers who travel the world, writing articles about what they see here, there and everywhere. I'm sure it's fascinating to meet so many interesting people, become engaged in so many cultures, to see so many scenic wonders.

But books can do a lot for us, too. And you can add surfing the net, idly rambling across an uncharted sea of URLs... There really are marvels out there.

Relax. Enjoy the view. Ramble on.

NOTE: THIS IS A RECYCLED BLOG POST FROM JANUARY 7, 2009

ALL ART AND IMAGES ON THIS BLOG ARE MY OWN CREATIONS UNLESS OTHERWISE NOTED. FEEL FREE TO BORROW WHAT YOU SEE HERE SO LONG AS ATTRIBUTION IS GIVEN. COPYRIGHT ED NEWMAN

Are We Really Running Out Of Oil?

I remember back in the Seventies when The Population Bomb was popular and the prophets of doom seemed to have taken over all the media soapboxes so that we were running out of food and running out of oil and running out of everything because there were too many people. Paul McCartney himself wrote about it on his Ram album: "Too Many People." At that time things were compounded by economic collapse and Cold War mania.

In the Eighties, even though things seemed to boom there was this constant reminder that we were going to run out of oil. I always remember statements like, "We will run out of oil in the next ten years." In the Nineties, ten years later, I would occasionally hear this same lament on talk radio, and in 2003 our local talk show Leftie Duke Skorich was rambling on with the same tired warning: "And we will be out of oil in ten years. As you know we are completely dependent on oil today."

The whole oil lament reminds me of the Flatworlders who had a difficult time getting their heads around the Copernican notion that the earth was round. Copernicus, who so feared telling the truth about his observations that he waited till he was on his deathbed lest the Church burn him as a heretic, understood how the Cosmos worked when it came to the movement of heavenly bodies.

And in our own time, it was an astrophysicist who accidentally discovered the possibility that oil had nothing to do with dead vegetation and dinosaurs, but was part part of the core content of our earth.

His name was Thomas Gold, of Cornell University. He studied asteroids. And one day he began asking the right question about what he was observing. Why are there hydrocarbon chains on asteroids coming in from outer space if hydrocarbon molecules are from dead plants and animals? Good question, Mr. Gold.

In 1999 I wrote an article about Professor Gold's work, which I myself had encountered in 1986 in a cover story that appeared in The Atlantic magazine. My piece, which appeared in the National Oil & Lube News, was called "Are Fossil Fuels An Old Fashioned Idea Whose Time Has Gone?"

It begins by my recounting a trip to the 1964 New York World's Fair and the large dinosaur that was an emblem for Sinclair, for fossil fuels and the oil industry. I wrote:

There's no question Sinclair's dinosaur was a powerful symbol. Dinosaurs had great power in the imaginations of young people. Whatever became of the dinosaurs? That big green brontosaurus graphically planted the answer in our minds. Yesterday's dinosaurs are today's fuel. It is all part of the circle of life, you might say. Yesterday's dead critters and ancient vegetation are producing today's energy, hence our familiarity with the term "Fossil Fuels" when speaking of gas and petroleum.

The only problem with the dino image is this: What if it's not true?

Well, here we are ten years later and people still don't realize how abundant our world's oil supply is. For better or for worse, here is a very recent account from Discovery News. Check it out: Earth's Mantle: Untapped Oil Source?

The July 27, 2009 piece by Michael Reilly begins, "Oil, one of the most important, valuable substances on the planet may form in an unexpected place, according to a new study -- the crushing hot furnace of Earth's mantle."

Sound familiar? Here's a little more.

The petroleum we rely on to fuel our cars and heat our homes were formed over millions of years as ancient, dead algae and plankton were compressed in layers of sediment and heated. Because of this, oil companies know to look for new reserves in places that are, or once were shallow marine environments.

For decades, though, scientists have toyed with a tantalizing alternative theory of petroleum formation: What if chemical reactions between water and minerals deep in Earth's mantle could send black gold bubbling up into the crust?

Alexander Goncharov of the Carnegie Institution of Washington in Washington, D.C and a team of researchers have shown that just such a thing is possible. They heated methane (CH4) up to 1,500 degrees Kelvin (2,240 degrees Fahrenheit) and mimicked the squeezing effect of being buried under over 100 kilometers (62 miles) of solid rock.

The results were astonishing -- methane readily transformed into butane (C4H10) and propane (C3H8), two common components of crude oil.

Now, what it some of our other common unquestioned convictions are inaccurate. Global warming seems plausible but is it man-produced?

What are the implications of this discovery, that oil is abundant and will never be exhausted?

Just sowing a few seeds here. In the meantime, breathe deep and make the most of your day.