Entitled Opinions update

"Because to recognize oneself as a material being.. a number of human beings find that too disenchanting a view.. and if that's what it means to recognize myself, I'd rather continue to decieve myself" --Robert Harrison

Despite somewhat unfortunate statements such as this, Robert Harrison's Stanford radio program/podcast 'Entitled Opinions' is still going strong. Recent highlights include a program on Karl Marx, and a another, with Harrison's brother Thomas, on Pink Floyd.

Silence must be heard!

A slice of shark brain with lemon

Politics fatigue. The US election is over and all the politics podcasts and news have lost their bite. Hillary as foreign minister, so what? The economy tanking, who cares? Keith Olberman's attempts to sound as excited about the political news now as he did before the election are off key and Democracy Now won't stop heaping shit on not-even-president-yet Obama. But even Obama is boring now. Another 'stimulus package', wake me up in a month or two, seriously, who gives a shit? (And all the while Israel is starving Gaza.. that still lights a spark somewhere, but is it being discussed? nooo, course not. Because, to paraphrase Obama; 'that shit is sacrosanct'.. yea he actually used that word.. right before bringing Rham Emanuel on board.. but I digress....)

So that's half my podcasts rendered impotent, half my daily entertainment gone. And to top it all Entitled Opinions go on hiatus. Shit. Post-election, post-SfN blues. Even Twit has lost it's umpf.

So, back to basics. Back to work. Think of the absence of distractions as an opportunity to take a closer look at what I'm working on. An intelligent circuit. A biologically inspired circuit. Biologically inspired circuit design.

Sooner or later we all come up against network theory. We all need large data-sets for strong patterns to emerge, but then the variables are too many and the maths are too hard. For this we need intelligent circuits.

NASA knows this. NASA even uses an artificial neural network to handle the plants they're bringing to Mars. But it's unlikely that it's a network modeled on a biological circuit. We don't have programs like that, not yet.

Podoholic

When you're in the middle of a full-blown podcast addiction you don't listen primarily because you're interested, but in order to drown out the deafening silence. The emptiness of your own thoughts hurts and terrifies you, gives you the shakes. Sometimes the continuing flow of spoken words barely cover the neurotic, nihilistic whirlpool, but ultimately the podcasts are slightly more dopaminergic - or "motivating" as we used to say back in the day - than the solitary confinement of your own thoughts. So you keep on listening, religiously. You're an information-junkie, and your drug of choice is the spoken word. The iTunes Store is your pusher and the BBC is a meth lab.

Every now and then, however, you stumble across something of extraordinary value. You're struck by delightful surprise as the words pouring into your ears suddenly speak to you in more ways than you thought possible. For 30 minutes, or an hour, or two if you're as lucky as I was todya, you're engulfed; your poor addicted brain, so accutely sensitized to extracting value from those streaming headphones, is showered in relevance, meaning, expectation, monoamines, creative memory formation and retrieval. For that short duration of time, your personality grows and you're completely attentive.

Nowhere are such experiences more likely than in Professor Robert Harrison's Entitled Opinions (about Life and Literature), live from the Stanford campus. Seventy four hours of material, and counting. For the longest time I avoided the two-part program entitled The Rescurrection, despite an interesting earlier program with the same guest (Prof Thomas Sheehan) entitled The Historical Jesus (that show preceeds the monumental '1910', with Harrison's brother Thomas). I guess I thought The Rescurrection would be a dry mulling over the relation between culture, scripture and historical data (don't get me wrong: some episodes of Entitled Opinions, like the most recent one on the heart, are pretty lousy). It was anything but dull.

In the first hour, Sheehan, a professor of religion and a catholic, subjects the fundamentalist conception of Christ's resurrection to intense critizism, scrutinizing historical and biblical sources and presenting a strikingly unorthordox account of what really happened after Joshua's death on the cross, almost two milennia ago. In the second hour, Sheehan's scrutiny turns to Harrison's own latent catholisism. I won't try to recount this second hour, let's just say that topics include the profound absurdity of human existence and of Christian faith, and how the two connect and mirror eachother, as well as the limits of human understanding and the exceptionality of life. It's a great exchange, and I'll end with a quote from it:

"If there is not an agency of mystification, then somehow the sacrality even of these everyday things with which we live or eat - bread and wine - cannot assume, let's say the proper dignity, or absolute value associated with life, that they deserve." -Robert Harrison