From & To Sathish #7 - Page 17

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The gentle, child-led approach to raising children has become popular with millennials – and one two-letter word has fallen sharply out of fashion. Is this progress, or a recipe for future disaster?

There’s no good reason to love each other – and that’s a relief

Loving is an unreasonable decision (we are all extremely unpleasant little beasts) and that’s what allows it to survive

‘Why do you love me?’

After many years, I have come to think this is an ill-formed question. Ill-formed for many reasons, not the least of which might be that it has no good answer. ‘Because you are strong; because you are attractive; because you make me laugh; because you are kind; because you will be a great father; because you are (financially or otherwise) stable; because you are great in bed; because you make me feel complete; because you are confident, tranquil, young, fun, creative, smart, composed…’ Ad nauseam.

I guess I thought – for a very long time – that there was a very good reason to love one another. And this belief also made me think that the point of life was to make oneself lovable. I would go to the gym – to be lovable. I would write great books – to be loveable. And I would hold myself together, as best as humanly possible – to be loveable. Of course, I should have known that this was a largely futile project. At the end of the (very long) day, I felt out of shape, ugly, poor and vulnerable. Probably, at root, because I had the misguided belief that the question ‘Why do you love me?’ could have an adequate answer.

If you do believe that there is a reason to love – trust me, you will spend your life looking for it. And from a man who has been married three times, again believe me, it will destroy any and all chances for true intimacy. If you tacitly think that you have to be a certain way to satisfy love’s conditions, you will dedicate your life to it, and, most likely, waste it in the process. I spent so many hours in the gym, on the treadmill, in the library – thinking that all of this was going to pay off. And I spent so much of my life scrutinising others – most especially my closest intimates – to see whether they measured up. Not realising that love is not a matter of debt and exchange.

You can imagine a couple in love – for five or seven years – arriving at dinner one night, on a night without kids or responsibilities, without much to say, and without much to do. The husband says ‘I love you’ in exactly the way that says ‘Do you love me?’

And the wife, she smiles broadly. ‘Of course!’ she says.

She clears her throat to explain: ‘I love you because you are so kind to me in hard times – and always there for me when I am sad.’

The husband nods and acts satisfied, but he wouldn’t be. Surely there had to be better (or at least more extensive) reasons than this. This is it? And in the back of his head, he would have the more disturbing thought that his wife was really just lying to him: three days ago, she had swung into an inconsolable mood, a true unspeakable funk, and he… he had been nothing like kind or supportive.

In truth, there is probably no good reason his wife could furnish. Because there is no good reason to love him – or me, or you. Because there is no good reason to love. An exhaustive list of love’s conditions cannot be assembled. Just as an exhaustive list of characteristics cannot fully describe yourself, or just as an exhaustive list of possibilities cannot define your future. This is for the best. If you don’t believe me, let’s take a second to consider Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s ode to unreasonable passions:

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.

I love thee to the depth and breadth and height

My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight

For the ends of being and ideal grace.

I love thee to the level of every day’s

Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light.

I love thee freely, as men strive for right.

I love thee purely, as they turn from praise.

I love thee with the passion put to use

In my old griefs, and with my childhood’s faith.

I love thee with a love I seemed to lose

With my lost saints. I love thee with the breath,

Smiles, tears, of all my life; and, if God choose,

I shall but love thee better after death.

The poet never says ‘I love you because –.’ She doesn’t ask ‘how do I love thee’ and then give extensive reasons. That would be rather dissatisfying, wouldn’t it? Love is not to be earned or bartered, because if it were then it would be something of comparable, and not incomparable, worth. And that’s what we want in love and life and marriage, something of incomparable worth. So we should get it through our heads – there is no reason to love one another. In the words of the monk and poet Thomas Merton, ‘love is not a package’ to be measured, bartered and exchanged.

This might be counterintuitive but I promise it will turn out to be more right than not in the end. Because, in the end, we are all extremely unpleasant little beasts. We are unkind and short-tempered and disloyal, and altogether ugly – plus, we grow old, get sick and die – which is about the best reason that one could ever have to avoid loving little creatures like us. We could never, ever, in any number of lifetimes earn something like love. But we do love and are loved, and that unreasonable fact should provide a bit of peace of mind in several different respects, just so long as we take it to be wholly and utterly unreasonable. Loving (and especially getting married) is an unreasonable decision, and it has to be for love to survive.

When I was 40, I hopped off a treadmill in the gym at the university where I teach. I had just killed myself for nearly an hour, thinking that I was only worth something (in other words, was lovable) by submitting myself to its whirring belt. And then I actually died. The EMTs brought me back to life after a cardiac arrest, and I spent a year going through bypass surgery and convalescing in the most unbecoming of situations. My third (and, I swear, final) wife, Kathleen, had to help me to the bathroom, had to help me use the bathroom, had to help me out of bed, had to put up with my most unbearable mood. And it was the first time that I realised that you don’t love someone for any good reason – because I certainly wasn’t furnishing any. It was the greatest relief of my life.

This is why making up after an argument can be so incredibly life changing. In this way, you (sometimes) prove that things can actually go to hell, and you still love each other, and that little miracle is so revelatory, so freeing, there are few acts that can embody it: laughing, singing, dancing, crying…

These activities in their purest forms are not forced, and they are neither compelled nor described accurately by any logical process. They are also, interestingly, not chosen, at least not in the typical sense of making a choice with a particular justification. In fact, if I present the reasons – extensive or compelling – for why a joke is so very funny, it becomes immediately less so. Tragic situations become less dire (thank God) in their therapeutic description. Dancing, or other acts that involve rhythm and beat, become mechanical and other-than-themselves when we think too carefully about their supposed rhyme and reason. Description has a way of destroying certain experiences. I take this as instructive. Having reasons is sometimes overrated, and maybe one of these sometimes is being in love. As Hannah Arendt once said of love, it ‘is killed, or rather extinguished, the moment it is displayed in public.’

You might say that all of this is so obvious that none of it is worth mentioning. After all, we talk about ‘unconditional love’ like we already know what it means. But I would submit that we often speak with the most confidence about matters we regularly ignore, overlook and know nothing about. To say ‘I love you unconditionally’ frequently means ‘On balance, I will stay with you mostly, no matter what: I have weighed all the reasons that I love you and they will usually outweigh the reasons not to.’ As you can hear, this has everything to do with counting reasons and very little to do with love beyond measure.

To say ‘I love you unconditionally’ is instead simply to say that there is no reason, neither good nor bad, for me to love you at all, that I do it freely without reason, in the same way that I laugh unexpectedly at this situation and not that. In this sense, love is more akin to an act of faith than a rational decision, and continues to be as long as we are ‘in it’. So let’s not forget, and it is easy to forget, the leaping into love or marriage is not a singular act, but rather remains as audacious (and irrational) as the initial fanfare of a wedding. Otherwise, it isn’t love.

One of my favourite poems is Emily Dickinson’s ‘Why Do I Love You, Sir?’ And the answer is just so terse, laconic, unreasonable – and right.

‘Why do I love’ you, Sir?

Because –

The Wind does not require the Grass

To answer – Wherefore when He pass

She cannot keep Her place.

Because He knows – and

Do not You –

And We know not –

Enough for Us

The Wisdom it be so –

The Lightning – never asked an Eye

Wherefore it shut – when He was by –

Because He knows it cannot speak –

And reasons not contained –

– Of Talk –

There be – preferred by Daintier Folk –

The Sunrise – Sire – compelleth Me –

Because He’s Sunrise – and I see –

Therefore – Then –

I love Thee –

So how do you fall out of love? It can never, I think, be by discovering that there is no reason left. Maybe we fall out of love when we confuse the conditions of companionship with love itself, which is, for better and for worse, unreasonable. Maybe we fall out of love just by thinking that we have to have the reasons to stay in.

Of course, there is another possibility, which is terrifying and therefore probably true. Maybe love ends as a song does: in its own time. Or as laughter fades, when the time is over. And maybe that is reason enough to be unspeakably grateful for the time that we have left.

John Kaag is the Donohue Professor of Ethics and the Arts and Chair of Philosophy at the University of Massachusetts Lowell and Miller Scholar at the Santa Fe Institute.

If You Meet ET in Space, Kill Him

Should an alien species resist, we will have discovered life.

By George Musser

If we ever contact extraterrestrials, we’ll have to find a way to understand them. Who are they? What are their intentions? What have they discovered that we haven’t? Olaf Witkowski thinks the only way to begin that dialogue is to try and kill them.

Clearly, there are going to be major differences between us and them. Biological, technological, and cultural gaps are likely to be as wide as interstellar space itself. “The only way to communicate with a creature that is very different from you, and you can make no assumptions at all about how they encode language or meaning, is just killing them,” Witkowski says.

He argues that the only universal basis of communication, the sole feature that all life shares, whatever its form—because it is built into the very definition of life—is that life wants to live. It strives to maintain itself, because if it didn’t, it wouldn’t survive the depredations of the world.

Living entities have to be “replicating or maintaining themselves in a homeostatic loop,” Witkowski says. “Otherwise, they wouldn’t be there.” They will be experts at detecting threats to survival. “So, you try to hurt them. Then they will understand.”

Witkowski hasn’t worked out how threatening ET would open a door to communication rather than shut it rather firmly. In Stanislaw Lem’s final novel, Fiasco, humans (spoiler alert) send a ship to contact aliens on a distant planet and, when they don’t respond to radio messages, attack. That does get the aliens to answer, but the consequences are evident from the book title.

The only universal basis of communication, the sole feature that all life shares, is that life wants to live.

Still, in Witkowski’s scenario, ET’s instinct to survive tells us it’s a form of life, something we share. Perhaps, then, we could turn around and help it survive. “Now we can start from something they value,” Witkowski says. “So they will hear us.” And that could be the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

A soft-spoken researcher on artificial life and intelligence, Witkowski is an unlikely advocate for a warmongering view of interstellar interchange. He is monk-like in his serenity and once considered taking his vows. “I even joined some religious communities as a teenager and have sometimes considered a monastic life,” he says.

Born to a Vietnamese mother and Polish father, growing up in Belgium, studying in Spain, now living in Japan, Witkowski speaks six languages fluently and can get by in another six. For his dissertation, he analyzed how communication enables cooperation among AIs or other cognitive systems. Yet despite his linguistic superpowers, Witkowski feels that communication is such a fraught act, presupposing a background of shared knowledge and motivations, that we might scarcely even recognize a message from beyond Earth, let alone decipher it. Humans can often barely communicate among themselves.

Pioneers of the search for extraterrestrial intelligence recognized the challenge, but many assumed that mathematics and physics could serve as a cosmic lingua franca. Our radio signals or laser pulses might tap out a sequence of prime numbers, for example—a prime on Earth is a prime on Alpha Centauri Ca—and build up from there.

In 1966, Carl Sagan wrote about the tests of this principle which he and Frank Drake had conducted. Once he gave a sample message to eminent scientists at a party in Cambridge, Mass., and asked them to figure it out. They couldn’t. (He does not mention whether those scientists ever came back to one of his parties.)

Last year, a trio of mathematicians showed how to recognize such messages as artificial in origin and to reconstruct their basic format. Whether we could make any sense of them is still questionable. Although mathematical truths may be universal, their expression is culturally specific, and even if we manage to translate them, the resulting phrasebook may not help us communicate other ideas.

In a 2014 paper, anthropologist Ben Finney—who has collaborated with SETI scientists to study historical precedents of intercultural contact—wrote that European scholars used to think they could translate ancient Mayan hieroglyphs based on math and astronomy. They didn’t get far. Ultimately, they had to relate the glyphs to modern spoken Maya—in effect, relying on an oral Rosetta Stone. We won’t have that option with extraterrestrials.

Some wonder whether the inherent difficulties of communication explain the Great Silence—the failure, apart from a few tantalizing but equivocal hints, to detect alien signals or Galactic empire-building. Maybe we are in fact surrounded by aliens or their artifacts and don’t recognize them. They might elude us because they think a billion times faster or slower, are tucked into nanometer-level structures, or do not have bodies but exist as diffuse patterns. Commenting on this possibility in this same volume as Finney’s paper, archaeologist Paul Wason noted that we routinely misinterpret human creations as natural phenomena. An untrained eye takes a Paleolithic tool for an ordinary rock.

SETI researchers talk about communicating information, starting with prime numbers, but hopefully leading to a cure for cancer, a unified theory of physics, and all the other wisdom an advanced civilization could offer. But communication is not only, or even primarily, about information. It is about emotion, about establishing our presence and developing or reinforcing a connection. When you ask someone “How are you?” do you honestly care?

The growing literature on science denial counsels us that we can’t change anyone’s mind with facts. We have to establish a bond first. One sad realization I’ve come to in my career as a science writer is that most readers—present company excepted, of course—seek not information, but validation. Even before social media, they judged an article on, say, climate change not by its data or arguments, but on whether they agreed with it. If they did, we were duly scientific; if they didn’t, we were hopelessly politicized.

In 2014, philosopher Tomislav Janović argued that extraterrestrial communication, too, will be affective. “The intention is to simply reveal our presence as intentional beings,” he wrote. “For it is much more likely that they will be able to empathically recognize such an intention than to interpret a signal embodying an explicit representational content.”

To be sure, even the presence and structure of a message, whether or not it is ever decoded, will provide some information. It would certainly quiet the biologists who think intelligent life is such an evolutionary fluke on Earth that it will be vanishingly rare in the galaxy. It would indicate that intelligent life is not self-sabotaging, dispelling the fatalism that is all too easy to feel these days. And over time it might well blossom into an information-bearing channel.

It will behoove us to create an emotional bond with the first super-intelligent alien species we encounter.

Some even suggest that conscious experience is a form of affective self-communication, grounded in how we process our bodily states, which we experience as emotional states. Neuroscientists Antonio Damasio, Mark Solms, and Anil Seth have described consciousness as a bodily self-assessment as opposed to a cognitive function. We evolved it to survive in a fickle environment.

“The germ of consciousness and feeling comes from giving a damn about yourself in this world,” neuroscientist Kingson Man told me. “That is ultimately the dividing line between living and nonliving.”

Damasio and Man suggest that physical vulnerability is also the missing ingredient for artificial general intelligence. In 2023, they and Hartmut Neven at Google created a neural network that can recognize handwritten digits—a standard machine-learning test case—while adding the novelty that in performing the task, the network also affected its own ability to perform the task. It was like computational beer pong: If you lose a point, you drink and make it more likely you’ll lose the next point. The network rose to the occasion. It learned not only to perform the task, but to adapt more quickly than a regular network when the researchers changed the rules.

Damasio, Man, and other authors have also suggested that vulnerability would help with the AI alignment problem. If the machine is vulnerable—so that it needs to devote resources to maintaining its own functioning—it may recognize that humans are vulnerable, too, which is the basis for empathy and an impetus to achieve mutually desirable outcomes. Such a machine will be less likely to launch a first strike against us, they argue. It is a fair bet that advanced AIs will be the first super intelligent alien species we encounter, so it behooves us to create an emotional bond with them.

SETI researchers commonly assume that extraterrestrials will be as advanced morally as they are technologically, if only because they would have wiped themselves out if they weren’t. So we have no need to fear them. Besides, Earth doesn’t have a lot to offer that couldn’t be obtained more easily and plentifully elsewhere in the solar system or galaxy; expending vast quantities of energy to cross interstellar space in search of energy sources seems perverse. And if rapacious civilizations were out there, we should have already been invaded.

Others think we shouldn’t be so sanguine. If the old Darwinian logic holds, aggressors shall inherit the galaxy. Even the most enlightened alien civilization will have aggressive factions. Earth might well have some resources they want, such as the products of life itself. As in the Predator film series, they may seek out conflict for its own sake.

But Witkowski sees a third possibility. Maybe the extraterrestrials are trying to understand us. By invading Earth and trying to kill people, the invaders may be saying, “We just want to talk.”

https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/7-underrated-foods-anchovies-cabbage-090044273.html

7 underrated foods, from anchovies to cabbage, that are worth eating

There’s more to these foods than meets the eye.

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How Much Stretching It Takes to Make You More Flexible, According to Science

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10 Misconceptions About Evolution

An evolutionary biologist clears up common myths

Forgive people in your life, even those who are not sorry for their actions. Holding on to anger only hurts you, not them.

Maturity is learning to walk away from people and situations that threaten your peace of mind, self-respect, values, morals, or self-worth.

Know your limits, know when to give, know when to demand,

know when to say no and, most importantly, when enough is enough.

The journey of life is exciting when we challenge our own weaknesses. Sometimes our enemy teaches us better than our friend.

Be thankful for what you have. You have no idea how many people would love to have what you've got.

If you can't do anything about it just let it go. Don't be a prisoner to the things you cannot change.

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The Deadly Story of a Life-Giving Element

Do you have a deep, dark secret? By Arthur C. Brooks

Edgar Allan Poe is popularly known for writing early-American horror stories. But for me, he is a social scientist who used fiction instead of theory and statistics to make his arguments about human behavior. My favorite example of this is his 1843 short story “The Tell-Tale Heart,” which describes a man slowly going mad because of a dark secret. The narrator recounts a murder he has committed, of an old man with a filmy blue “vulture eye,” whose regard the murderer simply could not endure.

The narrator’s objective in telling this story is to demonstrate his own sanity; Poe’s objective is to study the effects of this terrible act on the murderer. The narrator-killer hides the old man’s body under the floorboards of his house, but then he begins to hear the beating of the dead man’s heart beneath his feet. The sound—clearly a metaphor for the murderer’s tormenting shame and guilt—grows louder and louder. In the end, the narrator can stand the thumping no longer; seeking relief, he confesses his crime to the police.

You, of course, are unlikely to have committed a crime like the narrator’s and suffer insanity as a result, yet the genius of Poe’s psychodrama is that it gives you a glimpse of how your mind works. Most, if not all, of us have guilty secrets, secrets we have never told anyone. For many people, including perhaps you, these secrets are an emotional burden, harming your quality of life. Fortunately, you can find easier ways to get relief than confessing to the cops.

Psychologists call the secrets we keep about ourselves self-concealment. Although what you self-conceal might feel uniquely shameful, the experience of carrying a guilty secret really doesn’t vary that much across the population. Michael Slepian, a professor of leadership and ethics at Columbia University, maintains a website called KeepingSecrets, which organizes into various categories the things that people are hiding from others. Murder is not one of the categories on the site; the most common secrets anonymously cataloged involve what moralists might call infidelity or indiscretion, but what in more social-scientific language we’d label “extra-relational attraction thoughts” (attraction to someone who isn’t your partner) and undisclosed sexual behavior. In short: Your own tell-tale heart probably involves love and sex.

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These themes are fairly consistent among men and women, and at all different ages. If you assume that these kinds of secrets would be less frequent among older adults, think again: According to Slepian’s data, more than half of men aged 60 and older have engaged in sexual behavior that they’ve never disclosed to a soul. Among women of that age, extra-relational thoughts that they keep to themselves are just as common as such secrets are for women in their 30s.

Some secrets go unshared for eminently practical reasons, such as not telling your colleagues that you’re on the job market. For the most part, though, a secret stays hidden for self-protection against the disapproval of people whom we care about. For example, confessing to your family that you have a crush on a co-worker who isn’t your spouse would be costly for you in multiple ways. For this reason, scholars have noted that secrets are an effective way to avoid unnecessary conflict in relationships.

Secret-keeping can also be motivated by your own negative emotions of guilt and shame. Psychologists define guilt as an adverse evaluation of an act, accompanied by remorse or regret; shame involves feeling bad about yourself as a person. To express this distinction in more concrete terms: You feel guilty for telling a lie to your friend; you are ashamed of being a liar. Or put another way: Guilt is more about harming others; shame more about a threat to one’s self-conception. So keeping certain behavior secret means not having to reveal a source of guilt or shame—or perhaps even deal with it yourself. In that sense, self-concealment can include not only hiding an awkward fact about yourself from others, but also hiding the knowledge of it from yourself.

Some evidence backs up the idea that guilt can be alleviated with this sort of occlusion. With shame, however, dark secrets create torment. As Professor Slepian and his colleagues showed in a 2020 article in the journal Emotion, shame tends to provoke the unwelcome intrusion of the secret into your thoughts throughout the day. Other research has shown that concealment itself tends to elicit shame. In other words, shame and secrecy can feed on each other in a vicious cycle to bother you.

This vortex of shame is very bad for happiness. Neuroscientists have demonstrated that shame activates both the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex, which is responsible for mental pain, and the ventrolateral prefrontal cortex, which processes rumination. Psychologists observe that concealing secrets predicts negative affect (sour mood), physical malaise, and general distress.

Another unhappy effect of secrets is that they undermine intimacy. By creating a barrier between loved ones, secrets can make close relationships dysfunctional. If a friend or family member is cold toward you, don’t assume that it’s because of anything you did; a secret shame could be the cause.

Keeping a shameful secret is like carrying around a heavy object. It weighs on your ability to think about other things; it makes you enjoy life less; it is uncomfortable, even painful. The research is clear that if you can find a way to put that object down, you will feel much better. One 2019 study of adults practicing self-concealment showed that, as expected, the correlation between guarding a secret and quality of life was negative—whereas revealing that secret to someone had a neutral effect on the sharer’s quality of life and being free from the preoccupation enhanced their quality of life, to the point where the secret no longer had a negative impact. In other words, to feel happier, tell your secret to someone and then let it go.

Not so simple, I know. To begin with, if the troublesome secret involves an ongoing behavior that you’re ashamed of, you may need to address that issue before anything else. We are typically encouraged to think that shame itself is the problem, but this paints with too broad a brush. Some behaviors are rightly regarded as antisocial and stimulate shame for good reason. In that respect, your shame might be perfectly appropriate and betoken a healthy conscience, which confers benefits. Psychologists have pointed out that shame can dissuade you from engaging in harmful conduct. If your secret revolves around an illicit activity such as drug abuse or an extramarital affair that might hurt your family, or is damaging to your body and soul, abstaining from the action may be the most important step.

Second, when unburdening yourself to someone else, who that person is matters a lot. Coming clean to a person who reacts negatively will tend to justify your self-concealment in the first place, and create bigger problems. Psychologists researching this topic have recommended selecting people whom you can expect to react positively, those you regard as trustworthy and not liable to be harmed by the information.

That last point matters because unburdening yourself in a way that hurts someone affected by the behavior you were hiding can be a selfish act. When making disclosure to a loved one is not appropriate, more formal and safer ways to resolve self-concealment are available. Seeing a therapist is an option, and will assure confidentiality. In many religions, this is also the role of a confessor.

The third step, after ceasing the underlying behavior (if necessary) and unburdening yourself, is to stop ruminating on the secret. That might no longer be an issue, because steps one and two can by themselves interrupt the cycle of secrecy and shame. But if uninvited thoughts about a past shame are still intruding, psychologists have developed a number of cognitive behavioral therapy techniques to help you move on. These include rumination-focused CBT, which works to break perseverative negative thoughts; mindfulness-based CBT, which teaches you to focus on the present; and cognitive-bias modification, which reinforces attention toward positive memories and experiences.

All of this can help you if you have a troubling secret. But I have one other perspective to bring to this problem, one that I doubt would have occurred to Poe, who, according to his 1849 obituary, “had very few friends” and “was the friend of very few—if any.”

Say you have a friend whom you know to be haunted by their past. You can invite this friend to do the unburdening thing. Obviously, you must be completely trustworthy in this invitation: You must never mention the secret to a soul. Performing such a service, according to a 2018 study, tends to deepen the intimacy of a friendship, which can take it to a higher level.

But bear in mind that doing so also imposes a burden upon you, as this secret becomes yours. To lighten your friend’s load, you accept some of it. That is an act of pure kindness.

By Arthur C. Brooks

Arthur C. Brooks is a contributing writer at The Atlantic and the host of the How to Build a Happy Life podcast.