Category: Mind

  • Against Empathy

    Paul Bloom

    As far as the title goes, he was preaching to the choir. My thoughts on empathy have been shaped over the last few years based on some excellent books like The Selfish Gene, The Moral Animal, Thinking Fast and Slow, Who’s in Charge? and even How Adam Smith Can Change Your Life, which is quoted by the author quite a bit. These thoughts are not kind to empathy being the best guide for decision making of the moral or even sometimes the day to day kind. They also favour rational compassion. So, theoretically, this book should have worked for me, especially because it has been recommended by some of my favourite thinkers.

    But it didn’t to the extent that I had hoped it would. This, I think, is largely because the premise of “against empathy” required little validation for me, it was the case for rational compassion that I was more interested in. After all, disproving one thing is not always automatic proof for another, even if the “another” is part of the title of the book! Unfortunately, the book spends just spends the last 10 pages (of 241) on rational compassion. Or at best 25, if one extends a benefit of doubt to occasions where the author argues for it in related contexts.

    I did come across a few interesting things though. Some framing for example – how both folks for and against gun control/immigration are possibly driven by empathy. The only difference is who they are empathetic to. And quotes – this one being my favourite – “Scratch an altruist, and watch a hypocrite bleed” ~ Michael Ghiselin. (I really believe in this one, and the selfish interests that drives erm, selflessness) I realised that I was in the august company of Thomas Hobbes and Abraham Lincoln in this. There are also interesting concepts like the moralization gap – how we discriminate between the immorality of acts done to us and done by us (exaggerate the first, downplay the other).
    The arguments are a mixed bag, but the writing style is witty and accessible and I would recommend it to folks who are intrigued by the thought of being against empathy. If you’ve already arrived at it via thinking/reading, this could help you in validation, but only on the first part of the title.

  • Who’s in charge?

    Michael S. Gazzaniga

    Our notion of the mind is a single “me” that consciously acts and reacts on/to stimuli. But a more accurate description would be several modules that work in tandem to define and dictate what we could call the mind/consciousness. A lot of this mind’s activities is dictated by factors that have been built into us by evolution and environment. I had just about been converted to biological determinism and started disbelieving the notion of free will! I think I’ll have to change my mind again!

    While the blurb might seem like a case for determinism, (and thus against ‘free will’) I thought the actual content of the book, especially towards the last third, swing more towards a “we don’t know yet”. The idea of it, though, starts earlier in the book – “Just as traffic emerges from cars, traffic does ultimately constrain cars, so doesn’t the mind constrain the brain that generated it?” (more…)

  • The Gene : An Intimate History

    Siddhartha Mukherjee

    “As our island of knowledge grows, so does the shore of our ignorance.” probably best describes this book for me. My understanding of the subject grew manifold after reading this book, but I also realised how little we know!

    Perhaps the one question we all seek an answer to is “Why are we here?”. There probably is no universal answer to that question, as science and religion like to approach it in different ways. Personally, I think that purpose is either just a narrative in hindsight, or a story we build to create meaning in our lives.

    Meanwhile, science has raced ahead of religion in explaining “how are we here?” In terms of the two building blocks that have existed before us – atoms and genes – as well as the influence of the one we created – byte. This book is the story of what the author describes as “one of the most powerful and dangerous ideas in the history of science: the gene, the fundamental unit of heredity, and the basic unit of all biological information.” Indeed, it is the history of this unit – from its presence in a human’s mind as an abstract idea to the human attempts to write and rewrite it – that makes up this book. (more…)

  • The Monk and The Philosopher

    Jean-François Revel, Matthieu Ricard

    A biologist turned Buddhist in conversation with a philosopher about the meaning of life. If that isn’t interesting by itself, they happen to be son and father. (respectively) World views separated by time and distance. What really works is that Matthieu Ricard and Jean-François Revel have absolute clarity on the points of view they represent, and yet, are not in the discussion to force their perspectives on the other.

    The scope of the discussion includes scientific research, metaphysics, politics, psychoanalysis, and obviously religion as both share their perspectives on these topics. In many cases, they seem to arrive at the same destination, but via different paths.  (more…)

  • The Moral Animal

    Robert Wright

    The last book I read in 2016 was “This Explains Everything: Deep, Beautiful, and Elegant Theories of How the World Works” where leading thinkers share their favourite deep and elegant theory. An overwhelming number of them cited Darwin’s theory of natural selection, and though I have not been asked, I’d say rightly so. As someone rightly pointed out, the beauty and elegance is when one theory explains a lot of diverse phenomena, and is almost a gift that keeps on giving.
    In The Moral Animal, Robert Wright uses Darwin’s theory to explain exactly what the book’s title says – why we are the way we are, using Darwin’s own life to illustrate several facets of classic human behaviour. I have thus far viewed the brain as a product of evolution, and feelings and emotions as a vague result of biochemistry triggered by the environment and the brain. My views have been shaped by some excellent and diverse books – Sapiens, Scarcity, Finite and Infinite Games – to name a significant few. This book, in many ways, is an amalgamation of the best insights that those have to offer. But the brilliance of the book is in how it goes beyond, and draws the connection between mental organs and behaviour in the modern world.
    The book throws light on the various behaviours we exhibit in our day to day life, many of which have their origins in the hunter-gatherer stage of our species and before. In fact, we even share some traits with our nearest relatives- chimpanzees and bonobos. Almost all facets of our life are addressed – relationship with parents, siblings, spouse, and society in general, politics, sex, friendship, religion etc.

    (more…)