Don't be a sucker. Be an altruist.

Is altruistic behaviour among humans advantageous just for the group or for the individual as well? Are altruists in fact the unlucky martyrs of evolution that boost the success of their groups by sacrificing their own selective fitness? This is what my friend G. suggested to me recently. As I find this point of view a very pessimistic one I decided to try and argue against it (even though arguing against G. is never an easy task :-) ). Thankfully modern evolutionary theory came to my rescue!
From a biological point of view altruism is defined as “behaviour that benefits an individual(s) while being detrimental (cost > benefit) to the actor in the short term”. A key element in the above definition is the “short term” qualifier. Let me explain this in more detail.
Any type of altruistic behaviour has behind it some form of incentive. This incentive can take many forms; expected -even if uncertain- reciprocity by the benefited or a third party, social accolades, psychological and physiological reward in the form of stimulation of pleasure centers in the brain or even the hope for restitution in an after-life,. Therefore two things should be evident. First, as opposed to biological altruism, no such thing as “true altruism” exists since there is always some selfish incentive behind any altruistic action, even if that incentive is not immediately obvious. Second it is not clear that altruistic behaviour is detrimental to the fit of an individual. Early theories that tried to reconcile the apparent oxymoron of altruism and Darwinism considered the evolutionary advantages of “altruistic genes” for a group or the kinship of carriers of such genes. However these theories have since been complemented by ideas such as those of reciprocal altruism and inclusive fitness which argue that altruistic behaviour can evolve without the need for group selection. In other words altruism could be only prima facie detrimental to an individual but in fact advantageous when possible future and indirect compensations are taken into consideration. If that line of argument is true it is only reasonable to suggest that the positive psychological and physiological responses to altruistic behaviour are there to promote selfless actions that might seem irrational in the short term but are advantageous for the group as well as the individual in the long term.
An excellent review of altruism from an evolutionary/biological point of view.

Well I'll be damn...

Tom Cruise can be hilarious even in comedies:
Les Grossman
And for you viewing pleasure only, ladies and gentlemen...Alpa Chino :-) :
Booty, Sweat and Tears

The Great Wall of China

I really don't want to spoil the celebratory spirit that surrounds the Olympics in Beijing and the accomplishments of the Chinese athletes but...what the heck I'll go right ahead and do it.
Here are the facts: China is not a democracy. China is not a socialist or even a communist country. China is an Orwellian dystopia. Censorship and propaganda are as widespread as ever and if something their government is only getting better at implementing them. Actually they have become so good at it that the people of China seem to be completely spell bound. In web-forums or everyday discussions Chinese people try to convince you that things are not as they seem. You mention Tienanmen and the reply you get is that the students were actually attacking the army. The famous photo of the Tank man is just one "emotionally loaded artefact". "He was not harmed, the tank actually stopped". No matter that there is a bunch of reports of him being taken away by the secret police and sent to the firing squad days later. NO. They will have you believe that he was taken away, given a wag of the finger or a relaxing massage and then released. Even if you had his body shown to them they would probably tell you that the government actually offered him a helping hand by executing him (I mean the guy was obviously suicidal, WHY ELSE would he throw himself in front of a Tank?). It is the same with every topic you bring up. Falun Gong? "They are one evil, perverted cult". Blunt censorship of the media? "It's only there to uphold the morals and values of the country". How about those reports from foreign media for violations of human rights and persecutions of those that raise their voices against the political bureau? "All part of a well orchestrated Western propaganda". And don't get me started on the insane answers you get when you mention Tibet. No matter what you throw at them you find in front of you the Great Wall of Chinese doublethink. And all these coming not from illiterate imbeciles, but from smart, well educated people. It is just scary.
The Chinese however have the valid excuse of being brainwashed to the point where the support for the Party and the love for the country have become one and the same thing. Or at the very least you can say that the recent economic growth and complete turn to capitalism raised the quality of lives of hundreds of millions of people and at the same time the appreciation for the government. Sure, they bargained away their freedoms but at least they did so for a good price.

Olympic Spirit

Untranslatable

Όρτσα, διάλε την πίστη του κι όπου το βγάλει η βράση,
για που θα σάσει μια δουλειά για που θα σοχαλάσει!
Σαν τη λογιάσεις μια δουλειά, όρτσα και μη φοβάσαι,
αμόλα τη τη νιότη σου και μην τηνέ λυπάσαι.

Viktor and Milan talk it out...

"We can never know what to want, because, living only one life, we can neither compare it with our previous lives nor perfect it in our lives to come.
There is no means of testing which decision is better, because there is no basis for comparison. We live everything as it comes, without warning, like an actor going on cold. And what can life be worth if the first rehearsal for life is life itself? That is why life is always like a sketch. No, "sketch" is not quite the word, because a sketch is an outline of something, the groundwork for a picture, whereas the sketch that is our life is a sketch for nothing, an outline with no picture.
Einmal ist keinmal... What happens but once, says the German adage, might as well not have happened at all. If we have only one life to live, we might as well not have lived at all."
Milan Kundera

"Only under the threat and pressure of death does it make sense to do what we can and should, right now. That is, to make proper use of the moment’s offer of a meaning to fulfill—be it a deed to do, or work to create, anything to enjoy, or a period of inescapable suffering to go through with courage and dignity…Live as if you were living for the second time—and as if you had acted the first time as wrongly as you are about to act now. Once an individual really puts himself into this imagined situation, he will instantaneously become conscious of the full gravity of the responsibility that every person bears throughout every moment of his life—the responsibility for what he will make of the next hour, for how he will shape the next day…facing the transitoriness of human existence—how is it possible to say yes to life in spite of death"
Viktor Frankl

On Human Connection (1)

The discussion with J. started as always very inconspicuously. We were trifling with the notion that in modern societies the Internet has become an extension of our mental existence. We resort more and more to the vast amounts of data that reside in the web and the powerful search engines to complement the limited ability of our brains to register and retrieve facts. Whether it's about finding the appropriate word for our sentences or that term we have on the tip of our tongue we find much preferable the physical effort of typing one or multiple queries to the mental effort of memory retrieval. And why strain one's hippocampus over storing non-essential data when the unfathomable pool of knowledge is just one mouse click away? What is more a large portion of the everyday stimuli that eventually end up in our brains, from music and videos to news articles are channelled through the web.
But isn't it true that factual memory is intimately connected to conscience both as a causal antecedent and in terms of anatomical occupancy? Surely, one might think, this common, accessible source of knowledge and culture brings us closer to a universal conscience, to a global brotherhood. This is however just an illusion. Our ability to connect with fellow human beings does not depend on the data in hand or even our efficiency in processing and assimilating them. Human connection goes many levels deeper. Is that true even in cases where the medium is controlled and composted to uniformity by oppressive rulers (see China) or cultural and ideological quasi-Monopolies (see most Western societies)? I would argue that by infusing their message the censors can go only as far as to align the otherwise haphazard soulless bodies of their societies. People with the ability for true human connection cannot be manufactured or discouraged by the quality of the message. And this is exactly why these people are as rare in the most oppressive societies as in the most open ones. Common stimuli do not warrant connection of souls just like lack thereof does not prevent it.

On Memory (1)

Yesterday I heard a most beautiful and sad story. It is a story I've heard before and you might have as well. But this time it didn't strike me as horrific as the last time I came across it. It is the story of Clive Wearing who, after a viral infection, lost in the age of 50 all of his past memories as well as the ability to create new ones in what the neurologists call a combination of retrograde and anterograde amnesia. Clive has a new conscience every few minutes. No experience from the distant or recent past makes sense to him. He has no association between his self and this world apart from that minuscule time interval that his short term memory is able to maintain. So, he strives to define his existence anew every few minutes by keeping entries to a diary. But the entry is always the same and repeated again and again with only the slightest of alterations: 8:40 am "Now I am truly awake for the first time". 9:05am "NOW I am perfectly overwhelmingly awake". 9:17am "Now, yes now I am actually awake". An infinite loop of awakenings in this world. A cycle of rebirths, lives and deaths, each obsolete entry in his diary being an inscription on a graveyard devoted exclusively to him.
Yet Clive does remember one thing. He remembers his love for his wife. This is the memory he chose to hide in the deepest refuge of his cortex when the virus started sweeping across his brain. Every time he encounters her he greets her in the most passionate and joyous of ways. Even though he may have seen her only a few minutes earlier, he welcomes her every time with the sweetest words and kisses, like a lover reuniting with his partner after having being separated for years. Clive's memory of his wife has transcended his tragedy to become the most powerful incarnation of Paul's Hymn to Love.
Proust has this nice metaphor for memory. He says "[memory] Comes like a rope let down from heaven to draw me up out of the abyss of non-being". If you had just one memory to salvage, one memory to rescue you from your non-existence, a single engram tying your soul to this world what would that be?
Documentary on Clive Wearing

On Memory (2)

Yesterday I heard a most beautiful and sad story. It is the story of painter Joe Andoe. Andoe reached fame first by his paintings of pasture landscapes from his home town of Tulsa. The theme was repeated hundreds of times and his pasture canvasses could be found in the most prestigious exhibitions from the Phillip Morris collection to the Metropolitan museum and MOMA. Soon his empty pasture landscapes started getting filled with idealized depictions of horses. And it was not much later that Andoe started compulsively creating body and face portraits of girls using a monochromatic palette. The girls, sometimes half or fully naked, looked astoundingly similar as if the same person had posed and had been drawn under different angles. Andoe was following his artistic impulse unquestionably until one day while sitting in his studio a memory from his early youth stroke him like a lightning. He was sixteen in Tulsa and he was in the back seat of his car with a naked young girl. His first love. The car was parked in the middle of a huge pasture not far from where route 66 makes its passing. Suddenly the two young lovers are astounded by the the face of a horse sticking its head at the rear window of the car. A shocked Andoe in his studio suddenly realizes that in his entire career he has been painting fragments of one afternoon that took place 30 years earlier. This single instantane of nonchalance and adolescent love permeated his entire work and defined him as an artist.
Saul Bellow had said: "Everybody needs his memories. They keep the wolf of insignificance from the door". If you had to choose one single memory to occupy your dreams and haunt your existence, a single engram encapsulating your passing through life what would that be?
Joe Andoe's paintings