Week 5 - Oct 9
Readings and videos
Questions for October 9th class discussion
- The Surprising Science of Happiness, Dan Gilbert TED Talk (21:16)
- Want to be Happy? Be Grateful, David Steindl Rast TED Talk (14:30)
- The Compassionate Brain, How Empathy Creates Intelligence, excerpt, Gerald Hüther
- Consciousness and the Social Brain, by Michael Graziano excerpt (by email)
- Michael Garziano explains his theory Consciousness and the Social Brain, Part 1 (14:52)
- Why God Won't Go Away, by Andrew Newberg, M.D., Eugene D'Aquill, M.D., Ph.D., and Vince Rause, excerpt
- Selected quotations from Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankel
- "A Paradigm for Systems Thinking as a Real-Time Approach to Human Adaptation in the 21st Century," by Melissa J. Mills
- Limits to Growth, MIT Club of Rome (pdf of full book available for download) - Also see videos on Facebook
- The Institute for Economics and Peace
Questions for October 9th class discussion
- The readings and videos above provide some facts and theories about the interplay between the way we experience the world, and the mechanics that underlie our experience. Do you agree with approach suggested in various ways by Dan Gilbert, Michael Graziano, and Andrew Newberg that our conscious representations are all "synthetic," i.e., in the words of Albert Einstein, "free creations of the human mind"?
- The premise of the class is to use the term "axial age" to mark a turning point in human history. In simple terms, the first Axial Age refers to a period when religions and philosophies emerged independently supporting social structures that promulgated the Golden Rule. Do you see conditions in today's world that could give rise to a second turning point to an analogously transformative but different self-awareness of ourselves as humans?
- Do you agree that the daily practice of gratitude is an effective approach? Might it be the doorway to the 2nd Axial Age?
Agenda and Handouts - The Overarching Proposal
Post-class Readings and Video
Below are photos from today's class
- You may want to re-read the Atlantic article by James Kugel "Reading the Bible Through Neuroscience." The article mentions both the unusually definite sense of individuality of American culture, and refers to the idea that this sense of self is actually a mental construct. The idea of a mental construct is the basis of Graziano's attention schema theory of consciousness.
- Here is a link to the book that Ed N. has mentioned more than once, The Fifth Beginning: What Six Millions Years of Human History Can Tell Us About Our Future, by Robert Kelly
- Here is a link to a synopsis of the forth-coming book Beyond Politics: The Private Governance Response to Climate Change by Michael Vandenbergh and Jonathan Gilligan.
- TED Talk on "How to Start a Movement" (4 minutes) - This is the video I mentioned in class.
Below are photos from today's class