Several Random Things

Speaking of the Hard Problem of Consciousness, there’s going to be a new Tom Stoppard play about the “Hard Problem”.   I’m so excited!

Hilary, a young psychology researcher at a brainscience institute, is nursing a private sorrow and a troubling question at work, where psychology and biology meet. If there is nothing but matter, what is consciousness? This is ‘the hard problem’ which puts Hilary at odds with her colleagues who include her first mentor Spike, her boss Leo and the billionaire founder of the institute, Jerry. Is the day coming when the computer and the fMRI scanner will answer all the questions psychology can ask? Meanwhile Hilary needs a miracle, and she is prepared to pray for one.

Tom Stoppard is the master of geeky, postmodern-in-the-best-sense intellectual theatre.   For purposes of the preceeding sentence please ignore (but only for the duration of this paragraph) the existence of Stephen Sondheim, who also fits the above description…

This interview with a convert from Hinduism to Eastern Orthodoxy (and the accompanying article) is by far the most useful and informative thing I’ve ever read about the vexed question of the extent to which Yoga is compatible with the Chirstian faith.

From the same program, a discussion of whether ancient Christians distinguished between insanity and demon possession.

On a similar note, the testimony of a Catholic Christian with a schizophrenia-like condition and how it relates to his faith.

Heartwrenching: The Spy who Loved Me.  It’s difficult to know what is real and what is not in a relationship, when the person in question has been trained in dissociation to the point where he may not even know who he is himself.

A video about a man with cerebral palsy who makes paintings using a typewriter.  (The 2014 article is in the present tense, but actually Paul Smith died in 2007.)

Be My Eyes, an iPhone app that allows sighted people to help blind people from afar.

Science Falsely So Called: Fundamentalism and Science.  The evolution of the characteristically modern movement in Christianity called Fundamentalism, named after a publication called “The Fundamentals“.  (While I do not share the Fundamentalist approach to interpreting Scripture or Nature, it seems unnecessarily insulting to them to use the same term to describe fanatics in other religions, that like to blow people up.)

Wonder and the Ends of Inquiry.  The surprisingly ambivalent relationship between wonder and scientific inquiry.