mostly just amazed

Certainly we find evidence that we think, process (maths for instance) in the unconscious. That when we draw up memories, we recreate them, often changing them.

Intuition and emotion -- the accumulated flash of unconscious instinct and experience -- are essential for our survival. These also can be dangerous to us, stress hormones eating away at us long term, or intuition's self-fulfilling prophecy (end-times, literal belief in scripture, etc.). Inflation is always a danger -- yet can also be beneficial when we step back and learn from what it might tell us about our hidden self.

Living life behind glass much of the time cuts us off from so many clues of understanding one another. Our bodies must be so confused.

Babies die without touch.

It amazes me to realize that the life in me (you, everything) didn't start with me. That it was handed down through things into being, from being to being, to continue burning in my very being. That I pass it on, that the same fire burns in us all.

These are the thoughts my mind keeps circling around. As reason and experience shows me again and again that compassion is the best religion.

Compassion, quiet. Quiet enough to hear animals, trees, maybe even rocks and wind. Not mass minded, yet -- infectious. This is what brought us here. What keeps us.


***

Gail asks:

Hmm...Yes, life handed down( consciousness or undifferentiated energy?) Can you elaborate further on "things into being" ? Are you referring to... from matter into life... ie. elementary particles, atoms,molecules,etc. .... and eventually life? What is the nature of that which is " handed down" ?

I'm referring to the mere amazing fact of our life, this being in body, this drawing of breath. And back beyond being human, atavism evidenced in morphogenesis, life springing from life back beyond all memory. Where consciousness, even sentience, emerges in this -- well, that's our fascination here, isn't it?

And before -- well, who knows?

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/02/130220123332.htm

But we do come from stars. How did we always gnow this?

***

Hi Stephen,

Yes, that's what I was pointing toward --

"One of the strangest features of what is known about cognition in the sense of the per force material cognitive system--the brain--is that our awareness of making a choice often follows the choice having actually been made in the biochemical mechanics of the brain."

Moreover, themes on order of the "world a giant hologram" resonate. (And the mere concept of resonance...)

And the from and to of it, assumptions of time and order: things framed in and from the human perspective. Bee eyes see things differently.

I'm saying simply that empiricism and its extrapolations are built on the way we experience; that even in reaching beyond this, it still limits our grasp. ("The only limit is imagination." Still: drawn from, written in, expressed as, senses.)

With Jung, I think one of the great lessons is an awareness of our interpretive filters. Just the suspicion of them helps us sit down, do that thing that allows that sudden "insight" -- for want of a better word -- to float up and focus us where we might need to look.

We call ourselves a utilitarian age, and we do not know the uses of any single thing. We have forgotten that Water can cleanse, and Fire purify, and that the Earth is mother to us all. . .Still, I am conscious that behind all this Beauty, satisfying though it be, there is some Spirit hidden of which the painted forms and shapes are but modes of manifestation, and it is with this Spirit that I desire to become in harmony
~Oscar Wilde (De Profundis, 509 in Letters vol. I)

-------------
extra credit:
How the subconscious mind shapes creative writing

what we think of as freewill is largely an illusion:

much of the time, we are simply operating on automatic pilot, and the way we think and act – and how well we think and act on the spur of the moment – are a lot more susceptible to outside influences than we realize.~ Malcolm Gladwell in Blink.

Gladwell always asks us to look again. He challenges our thinking, as in the very way we think we actually think. He's disarmingly pleasant, a skilled storyteller with broad appeal who uses hard data to help us see beyond our vaunted assumptions and theories -- the things that are also used to shape policy. Pulling together strings from different sciences, he applies studies, makes us mull with him.

Most of all (and the reason he's attacked): he challenges the main authorizing strategy of the elites: the illusion that we live in some sort of meritocracy.

 Malcolm Gladwell:

Fantastic NYPL The New York Public Library conversation with Malcolm Gladwell on tolerance, criticism, and the importance of changing your mind on a regular basis:
http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2014/06/24/malcolm-gladwell-nypl-interview/

*********

(aside: about the 10,000 hour meme.)

what we think of as freewill is largely an illusion:

much of the time, we are simply operating on automatic pilot, and the way we think and act – and how well we think and act on the spur of the moment – are a lot more susceptible to outside influences than we realize.~ Malcolm Gladwell in Blink.

Gladwell always asks us to look again. He challenges our thinking, as in the very way we think we actually think. He's disarmingly pleasant, a skilled storyteller with broad appeal who uses hard data to help us see beyond our vaunted assumptions and theories -- the things that are also used to shape policy. Pulling together strings from different sciences, he applies studies, makes us mull with him.

Most of all (and the reason he's attacked): he challenges the main authorizing strategy of the elites: the illusion that we live in some sort of meritocracy.

 Malcolm Gladwell:

Fantastic NYPL The New York Public Library conversation with Malcolm Gladwell on tolerance, criticism, and the importance of changing your mind on a regular basis:
http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2014/06/24/malcolm-gladwell-nypl-interview/

*********

(aside: about the 10,000 hour meme.)

ya think?

It is almost morning,
And yet I am sure you are not satisfied
Of these events at full. Let us go in;
And charge us there upon inter'gatories,
And we will answer all things faithfully.

George Lakoff gives us a synopsis of his recent work, which also happens to be a brilliant in-a-nutshell of the rational, the principles, of our reasons that so lead us away from ourselves: our basic misunderstanding of how we think.

And I don't think I've ever seen a better thumbnail of all that Carl Jung was trying to clue us into. Understand this and it all comes clear.

Just read, please:

[...] There is a received view of mind, absorbed into popular culture and similar to that of the philosopher René Descartes, that I refer to as "Enlightenment reason". It goes like this: reason is conscious, disembodied, dispassionate, literal (it fits the world directly), logical (it leads from facts to correct conclusions), universal and serves self-interest.
This is widely taken as defining "rationality". I surveyed results from neuroscience and the cognitive sciences that contradict all these supposed properties.
Reason is mostly unconscious and physical - it uses the brain. It requires emotion and uses frames, metaphors and melodramatic narratives. It also varies depending on world view and is used at least as much in the service of empathy as self-interest.
This is real reason, how people really think, and it requires a new account of rationality that calls for a New Enlightenment.
Each of these results is crucial for understanding politics. Conservatives, using marketing techniques taken from psychology, have marketed their big ideas effectively: the nature of national security, government, the market, taxes, responsibility, family values, religion, and so on.
Progressives have failed to build institutions (such as think tanks) to get their big ideas out in public honestly. An awareness of brain mechanisms could help map effective communication.
The Political Mind [The Political Mind: Why You Can't Understand 21st-Century American Politics with an 18th-Century Brain] is an exercise in the democratisation of knowledge. It opens up the cognitive science of politics for all to see. Journalists, policy-makers, most economists, and even many academics are stuck on the old view of reason, which leads them to fall prey to effective political marketing, mostly from the conservative side.
Cognitive Science and Linguistics, University of California, Berkeley
From issue 2663 of New Scientist magazine, 02 July 2008, page 20

Now. Marry that to below. And trust, Gnow, grok, take heart, mateys: WE CAN FIX THIS.

Fantastic misgovernment is not an accident, nor is it the work of a few bad individuals. It is the consequence of triumph by a particular philosophy of government, by a movement that understands the liberal state as a perversion and considers the market the ideal nexus of human society. This movement is friendly to industry not just by force of campaign contributions but by conviction; it believes in entrepreneurship not merely in commerce but in politics; and the inevitable results of its ascendance are, first, the capture of the state by business and, second, what follows from that: incompetence, graft, and all the other wretched flotsam that we've come to expect from Washington.
The correct diagnosis is the "bad apple" thesis turned upside down. There are plenty of good conservative individuals, honorable folks who would never participate in the sort of corruption we have watched unfold over the past few years. Hang around with grassroots conservative voters in Kansas, and in the main you will find them to be honest, hardworking people.
But put conservatism in charge of the state, and it behaves very differently. Now the "values" that rightist politicians eulogize on the stump disappear, and in their place we can discern an entirely different set of priorities-priorities that reveal more about the unchanging historical essence of American conservatism than do its fleeting campaigns against gay marriage or secular humanism.
The conservatism that speaks to us through its actions in Washington is institutionally opposed to those baseline good intentions we learned about in elementary school: Its leaders laugh off the idea of the public interest as airy-fairy nonsense; they caution against bringing topnotch talent into government service; they declare war on public workers. They have made a cult of outsourcing and privatizing, they have wrecked established federal operations because they disagree with them, and they have deliberately piled up an Everest of debt in order to force the government into crisis. The ruination they have wrought has been thorough; it has been a professional job. Repairing it will require years of political action. ~Thomas Frank, in the August 2008 edition of Harper's, excerpted from The WRECKING CREW, How a gang of right-wing can men destroyed Washington and made a killing

---------------

Harpers, SEE ALSO: Angola; Apartheid; Career as Angolan guerrilla leader; Career as superspy; Career as U.S. president; Career in conservative politics; Career in politics; Conservatism; Williamson, Craig; Entrepreneurship; Norquist, Grover Glenn; Guerrilla warfare; Iran-Contra Affair, 1985-1990; Iran Hostage Crisis, 1979-1981; Abramoff, Jack; Kemp, Jack; Savimbi, Jonas Malheiro; 1981-1989; North, Oliver; Pictorial works; Political corruption; Reed, Ralph; Republican Party (U.S. : 1854- ); Reagan, Ronald; South Africa


more George Lakoff related articles in New Scientist

1.
Visceral politics
The World's No.1 Science & Technology News Service Visceral politics George Lakoff, Berkeley, California, US Owen Flanagan's description of my book The Political Mind: Why you can't understand 21st...
George Lakoff, 02 July 2008 From magazine issue 2663 Labeled: Letters
2.
Review: The Political Mind by George Lakoff
...Review: The Political Mind by George Lakoff Owen Flanagan Book Details...an 18th-century brain by George Lakoff Viking Penguin $25.95...9780670019274 IN The Political Mind, George Lakoff, an eminent cognitive linguist...
Owen Flanagan, 28 May 2008 From magazine issue 2658 Labeled: Review opinion
3.
Perspectives: Meaning and the body
...it? For nearly three decades, George Lakoff, a linguist from the University... In Philosophy in the Flesh, Lakoff and I explained embodied cognition...different meaning-making patterns. Lakoff and I have called these bodily patterns...
Mark Johnson, 12 January 2008 From magazine issue 2638 Labeled: Perspectives opinion
4.
Grasp the meaning
...experiences, as by the support this gives to an established paradigm in cognitive linguistics: that concepts are embodied. George Lakoff, a pioneer in cognitive linguistics, has long claimed that concepts are generally based on our bodily experience...
Bo Jin, 16 June 2007 From magazine issue 2608 Labeled: Letters
5.
Metaphors sell
...Milton Keynes, UK It's good to see George Lakoff's work on metaphor receiving the attention...military occupation of the Middle East? George Orwell warned us about all this half a century ago. Lakoff's work raises the issue again. It...
Russell Johnston, 18 October 2003 From magazine issue 2417 Labeled: Letters
6.
How does the brain 'think big'?
...Metaphorically speaking, that is. George Lakoff, a cognitive linguist at the University...and breathing, for example. Lakoff's research has led him to believe...using these kinds of metaphors, and Lakoff says he has found thousands of similar...
Anil Ananthaswamy, 27 September 2003 From magazine issue 2414 Labeled: Features

7.
Bestsellers
...Newberg, Ballantine 4 Euclid's Window by Leonard Mlodinow, Free Press 5 Where Mathematics Comes From by George Lakoff, Basic Books 6 Rivers in Time by Peter Ward, Columbia University Press 7 The Quantum Brain by Jeffrey...
16 June 2001 From magazine issue 2295 Labeled: Opinion
8.
Bestsellers
...Himanen, Random House 2 Where Mathematics Comes From by George Lakoff, Basic Books 3 Crypto by Steven Levy, Viking/Penguin...Cole, Harcourt 9 The Universal History of Computing by Georges Ifrah, Wiley 10 Quantum Evolution by Johnjoe McFadden...
31 March 2001 From magazine issue 2284 Labeled: Opinion
9.
Bestsellers from San Francisco
...Mathematics Comes From by George Lakoff, Basic Books 2 Robo...Universal History of Computing by Georges Ifrah, John Wiley 8 Telecosm by George Gilder, Free Press 9...Oxford University Press George Gilder is known for his maverick...
03 February 2001 From magazine issue 2276 Labeled: Opinion

---

ya think?

George Lakoff gives us a synopsis of his recent work, which also happens to be a brilliant in-a-nutshell of the rational, the principles, of our reasons that so lead us away from ourselves: our basic misunderstanding of how we think.

And I don't think I've ever seen a better thumbnail of all that Carl Jung was trying to clue us into. Understand this and it all comes clear.

Just read, please:

[...] There is a received view of mind, absorbed into popular culture and similar to that of the philosopher René Descartes, that I refer to as "Enlightenment reason". It goes like this: reason is conscious, disembodied, dispassionate, literal (it fits the world directly), logical (it leads from facts to correct conclusions), universal and serves self-interest.
This is widely taken as defining "rationality". I surveyed results from neuroscience and the cognitive sciences that contradict all these supposed properties.
Reason is mostly unconscious and physical - it uses the brain. It requires emotion and uses frames, metaphors and melodramatic narratives. It also varies depending on world view and is used at least as much in the service of empathy as self-interest.
This is real reason, how people really think, and it requires a new account of rationality that calls for a New Enlightenment.
Each of these results is crucial for understanding politics. Conservatives, using marketing techniques taken from psychology, have marketed their big ideas effectively: the nature of national security, government, the market, taxes, responsibility, family values, religion, and so on.
Progressives have failed to build institutions (such as think tanks) to get their big ideas out in public honestly. An awareness of brain mechanisms could help map effective communication.
The Political Mind [The Political Mind: Why You Can't Understand 21st-Century American Politics with an 18th-Century Brain] is an exercise in the democratisation of knowledge. It opens up the cognitive science of politics for all to see. Journalists, policy-makers, most economists, and even many academics are stuck on the old view of reason, which leads them to fall prey to effective political marketing, mostly from the conservative side.
Cognitive Science and Linguistics, University of California, Berkeley
From issue 2663 of New Scientist magazine, 02 July 2008, page 20

Now. Marry that to below. And trust, Gnow, grok, take heart, mateys: WE CAN FIX THIS.

Fantastic misgovernment is not an accident, nor is it the work of a few bad individuals. It is the consequence of triumph by a particular philosophy of government, by a movement that understands the liberal state as a perversion and considers the market the ideal nexus of human society. This movement is friendly to industry not just by force of campaign contributions but by conviction; it believes in entrepreneurship not merely in commerce but in politics; and the inevitable results of its ascendance are, first, the capture of the state by business and, second, what follows from that: incompetence, graft, and all the other wretched flotsam that we've come to expect from Washington.
The correct diagnosis is the "bad apple" thesis turned upside down. There are plenty of good conservative individuals, honorable folks who would never participate in the sort of corruption we have watched unfold over the past few years. Hang around with grassroots conservative voters in Kansas, and in the main you will find them to be honest, hardworking people.
But put conservatism in charge of the state, and it behaves very differently. Now the "values" that rightist politicians eulogize on the stump disappear, and in their place we can discern an entirely different set of priorities-priorities that reveal more about the unchanging historical essence of American conservatism than do its fleeting campaigns against gay marriage or secular humanism.
The conservatism that speaks to us through its actions in Washington is institutionally opposed to those baseline good intentions we learned about in elementary school: Its leaders laugh off the idea of the public interest as airy-fairy nonsense; they caution against bringing topnotch talent into government service; they declare war on public workers. They have made a cult of outsourcing and privatizing, they have wrecked established federal operations because they disagree with them, and they have deliberately piled up an Everest of debt in order to force the government into crisis. The ruination they have wrought has been thorough; it has been a professional job. Repairing it will require years of political action. ~Thomas Frank, in the August 2008 edition of Harper's, excerpted from The WRECKING CREW, How a gang of right-wing can men destroyed Washington and made a killing

---------------

Harpers, SEE ALSO: Angola; Apartheid; Career as Angolan guerrilla leader; Career as superspy; Career as U.S. president; Career in conservative politics; Career in politics; Conservatism; Williamson, Craig; Entrepreneurship; Norquist, Grover Glenn; Guerrilla warfare; Iran-Contra Affair, 1985-1990; Iran Hostage Crisis, 1979-1981; Abramoff, Jack; Kemp, Jack; Savimbi, Jonas Malheiro; 1981-1989; North, Oliver; Pictorial works; Political corruption; Reed, Ralph; Republican Party (U.S. : 1854- ); Reagan, Ronald; South Africa


more George Lakoff related articles in New Scientist

1.
Visceral politics
The World's No.1 Science & Technology News Service Visceral politics George Lakoff, Berkeley, California, US Owen Flanagan's description of my book The Political Mind: Why you can't understand 21st...
George Lakoff, 02 July 2008 From magazine issue 2663 Labeled: Letters
2.
Review: The Political Mind by George Lakoff
...Review: The Political Mind by George Lakoff Owen Flanagan Book Details...an 18th-century brain by George Lakoff Viking Penguin $25.95...9780670019274 IN The Political Mind, George Lakoff, an eminent cognitive linguist...
Owen Flanagan, 28 May 2008 From magazine issue 2658 Labeled: Review opinion
3.
Perspectives: Meaning and the body
...it? For nearly three decades, George Lakoff, a linguist from the University... In Philosophy in the Flesh, Lakoff and I explained embodied cognition...different meaning-making patterns. Lakoff and I have called these bodily patterns...
Mark Johnson, 12 January 2008 From magazine issue 2638 Labeled: Perspectives opinion
4.
Grasp the meaning
...experiences, as by the support this gives to an established paradigm in cognitive linguistics: that concepts are embodied. George Lakoff, a pioneer in cognitive linguistics, has long claimed that concepts are generally based on our bodily experience...
Bo Jin, 16 June 2007 From magazine issue 2608 Labeled: Letters
5.
Metaphors sell
...Milton Keynes, UK It's good to see George Lakoff's work on metaphor receiving the attention...military occupation of the Middle East? George Orwell warned us about all this half a century ago. Lakoff's work raises the issue again. It...
Russell Johnston, 18 October 2003 From magazine issue 2417 Labeled: Letters
6.
How does the brain 'think big'?
...Metaphorically speaking, that is. George Lakoff, a cognitive linguist at the University...and breathing, for example. Lakoff's research has led him to believe...using these kinds of metaphors, and Lakoff says he has found thousands of similar...
Anil Ananthaswamy, 27 September 2003 From magazine issue 2414 Labeled: Features

7.
Bestsellers
...Newberg, Ballantine 4 Euclid's Window by Leonard Mlodinow, Free Press 5 Where Mathematics Comes From by George Lakoff, Basic Books 6 Rivers in Time by Peter Ward, Columbia University Press 7 The Quantum Brain by Jeffrey...
16 June 2001 From magazine issue 2295 Labeled: Opinion
8.
Bestsellers
...Himanen, Random House 2 Where Mathematics Comes From by George Lakoff, Basic Books 3 Crypto by Steven Levy, Viking/Penguin...Cole, Harcourt 9 The Universal History of Computing by Georges Ifrah, Wiley 10 Quantum Evolution by Johnjoe McFadden...
31 March 2001 From magazine issue 2284 Labeled: Opinion
9.
Bestsellers from San Francisco
...Mathematics Comes From by George Lakoff, Basic Books 2 Robo...Universal History of Computing by Georges Ifrah, John Wiley 8 Telecosm by George Gilder, Free Press 9...Oxford University Press George Gilder is known for his maverick...
03 February 2001 From magazine issue 2276 Labeled: Opinion

---

Please watch Sapolsky

So. First arm, now hand impaired. They're trying to tell me something.Think I've found it.

Time to watch, retool. Been immersed in Robert Sapolsky's work -- his Stanford class on Human Behavior Biology is online, whole. If only everyone would watch it. Try the first lecture and let him convince you why.

Stephen -- you need to interview him.

My perspective: lotsa of  changes coming and in the works regarding the way we heal and live. Medicine, especially. With all the emphasis and money shaping the APPLICATION (that was a mistake, caps locked, but let's leave it) of what we're learning about the genome, my mind spins. No end of scenarios for spec fic / fiction, which is my bag. But think: People already paying gobs of money to have a tiny fraction of their genetic material analysed for markers and tendencies. Big business, and how will this affect / effect research, what gets entrenched, what to grasp and let go of (ala what happened with hydrocarbons /oil vs. developing alt.energy), how it's applied?  People, we need to get educated on how to think about this, and not leave it to pharma and the free-market god and its handmaid Fundamentalists.

Not hard to understand that this is not a good time to be filtered by Facebook and web-bots, sorted into bubbles by Murdocian empires, etc.

Please watch Sapolsky.  (Also at http://www.virtualprofessors.com/stanford-bio-250-human-behavioral-biology )

extra credit peruse n extrapolate (and as we said...): http://ghr.nlm.nih.gov/


_________________________________________

Can't type anymore -- so a redux:

an interstitial aside.

elvis costello says you have to learn to write in the dark so you won't
forget what comes to you there. my legal pad this a.m. said:

1. growth is the holy
2. we are our ideas
3. the past is initiation
4. community fosters the growth of the individual

given: we live our lives as individuals yet ^

in a balloon off to side:

why the fascination w/ mysticism (e.g., say, late antiquity's
neoplatonic revival): what is in the time that...? ---> (circles back)

community is to ideas
as
body is to mind

propaganda a manipulation of conscious thought through unconscious thought.
uc: space of thinking
Jung: uc space of Self

---> religion ---> rules that shape thought, know the rules, shape the
action. war of ideas: ideas of war.

------------

and so dark was saying what?

Meanwhile... the word Triumph traces back to mean Dionysos / Bacchus. Really. Little joke on Constantine and friends, ye wily romantics.

merikan heritage dictionary:

INTRANSITIVE VERB: Inflected forms: tri·umphed, tri·umph·ing, tri·umphs
1. To be victorious or successful; win. 2. To rejoice over a success or victory; exult. 3. To receive honors upon return from a victory in ancient Rome. Used of a general. NOUN:1. The fact of being victorious; victory or conquest. See synonyms at victory. 2. A noteworthy or spectacular success. 3. Exultation or rejoicing over victory or success. 4. A public celebration in ancient Rome to welcome a returning victorious commander and his army. 5. Obsolete A public celebration or spectacular pageant. ETYMOLOGY:Middle English triomfen, from Old French triumpher, from Latin triumphre, from triumphus, triumph, from earlier triumpus, ultimately (probably via Etruscan) from Greek thriambos, hymn to Dionysus.


NOw, go google thriambos
(as in: they're doing it again.)

+++++++++

speaking of which -- more jots from the dark:

what is the space btwn inner and outer? where is it? that space the two share is the stage where the Greeks met their gods, (great perspective in the intro by David Kovaks to the most recent Loeb Bacchae) to a physical statement, a place where all can meet. fixed in time, moved by eros, theatre the meeting of mortals and immortals.

film is this too, but film is not married to time. which both limits and expands what it can do.

the temple is the eye of the polis. and so is the stage.

analogs:

the physical timespace manifestation of that personified messenger, the daemon Hermes / Dionysos... birth star... all of these.

novel is an inner / outer meeting space, a "stage" for the daemon.
unfixed in time and space.

-----------------

and once again, I'm thinking of what happened as I came out of the fog after my cancer surgery fiver years ago. A dream, Dionysos turning to me, saying, "You owe me." I do. 

PS

Heading to the woods today. Mine in english, my daughter's in her beautiful greek, a supplication: Thank you.

TO DIONYSUS
I begin to sing of ivy-crowned Dionysus, the loud- crying god, splendid son of Zeus
and glorious Semele. The rich- haired Nymphs received him in their bosoms from the lord his
father and fostered and nurtured him carefully in the dells of Nysa, where by the will of
his father he grew up in a sweet- smelling cave, being reckoned among the immortals.
But when the goddesses had brought him up, a god oft hymned, then began he to wander
continually through the woody coombes, thickly wreathed with ivy and laurel.
And the Nymphs followed in his train with him for their leader; and the boundless
forest was filled with their outcry.

And so hail to you, Dionysus, god of abundant clusters! Grant that we may
come again rejoicing to this season, and from that season onwards for many a year.

+++++++++

blessings.

Please watch Sapolsky

So. First arm, now hand impaired. They're trying to tell me something.Think I've found it.

Time to watch, retool. Been immersed in Robert Sapolsky's work -- his Stanford class on Human Behavior Biology is online, whole. If only everyone would watch it. Try the first lecture and let him convince you why.

Stephen -- you need to interview him.

My perspective: lotsa of  changes coming and in the works regarding the way we heal and live. Medicine, especially. With all the emphasis and money shaping the APPLICATION (that was a mistake, caps locked, but let's leave it) of what we're learning about the genome, my mind spins. No end of scenarios for spec fic / fiction, which is my bag. But think: People already paying gobs of money to have a tiny fraction of their genetic material analysed for markers and tendencies. Big business, and how will this affect / effect research, what gets entrenched, what to grasp and let go of (ala what happened with hydrocarbons /oil vs. developing alt.energy), how it's applied?  People, we need to get educated on how to think about this, and not leave it to pharma and the free-market god and its handmaid Fundamentalists.

Not hard to understand that this is not a good time to be filtered by Facebook and web-bots, sorted into bubbles by Murdocian empires, etc.

Please watch Sapolsky.  (Also at http://www.virtualprofessors.com/stanford-bio-250-human-behavioral-biology )

extra credit peruse n extrapolate (and as we said...): http://ghr.nlm.nih.gov/