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It’s been a year of the Biden administration. And for many around the world, the question is simple: Can America still lead like it used to? President Biden, following his predecessor's “America First” policy, promised to “restore the soul of America.” Many took that to mean Washington was looking to reassert itself as the pre-eminent global leader. But some say that ship has sailed, and question whether the tables are decidedly turning. In light of this emerging divide, we debate this question: Is America retreating from global leadership?   

 Arguing in favor of the motion is Bill Kristol, Founder and Editor-at-Large of The Weekly Standard, and Mary Beth Long, Former U.S. Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs 

 Arguing against the motion is Kori Schake, Director of Foreign and Defense Policy of the American Enterprise Institute, and Vikram Singh, a Senior Advisor for the U.S. Institute of Peace and Former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense.   

Emmy award-winning journalist John Donvan moderates. 

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After nearly 40 years, it's time for teams to approach spreadsheets cloud-first.

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How might coronavirus reshape geopolitics? For some, the answer is clear: China is on the rise. While Washington embraces “America First” and abdicates its global leadership role, they argue, Beijing is stepping up to fill the void. But others see a global future where Beijing’s standing is diminished, not bolstered. Panelists Kurt M. Campbell, Kishore Mahbubani, Minxin Pei, and Susan Thornton. 

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“Our normal waking consciousness… is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different… No account of the universe in its totality can be final which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded.”

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“Queer, in fact maddening, to think that ‘beauty’ in nature is for us alone: for the human eye alone. Without our consciousness it doesn’t exist,” Joyce Carol Oates wrote in her journal. “All of nature, all of the given ‘world,’ is in fact a work of art. Only the human consciousness can register it.” Four decades earlier, Virginia Woolf had recorded the selfsame sentiment in what remains the most stunning passage from her own journal; four decades later, neuroscientist Christof Koch would echo the sentiment in the unsentimental chamber of science: “Without consciousness there is nothing… Consciousness is the central fact of your life.”

Long before Koch and Oates and Woolf, the pioneering psychologist and philosopher William James (January 11, 1842–August 26, 1910) examined the mystery and complexity of consciousness in The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature (public library | free ebook) — the 1902 masterwork based on his Gifford Lectures, in which James explored science, spirituality, and the human search for meaning.

James considers the central function of human consciousness — to make sense of reality through abstract concepts:

The whole universe of concrete objects, as we know them, swims… in a wider and higher universe of abstract ideas, that lend it its significance. As time, space, and the ether soak through all things so (we feel) do abstract and essential goodness, beauty, strength, significance, justice, soak through all things good, strong, significant, and just.

Such ideas, and others equally abstract, form the background for all our facts, the fountain-head of all the possibilities we conceive of. They give its “nature,” as we call it, to every special thing. Everything we know is “what” it is by sharing in the nature of one of these abstractions. We can never look directly at them, for they are bodiless and featureless and footless, but we grasp all other things by their means, and in handling the real world we should be stricken with helplessness in just so far forth as we might lose these mental objects, these adjectives and adverbs and predicates and heads of classification and conception.

Three decades after Nietzsche lamented how our abstractions blind us to the actuality of life, James adds:

This absolute determinability of our mind by abstractions is one of the cardinal facts in our human constitution. Polarizing and magnetizing us as they do, we turn towards them and from them, we seek them, hold them, hate them, bless them, just as if they were so many concrete beings. And beings they are, beings as real in the realm which they inhabit as the changing things of sense are in the realm of space.

And yet our consciousness, James argues, is capable of states that radically disrupt its own neat model-universe of abstractions. He considers how these transcendent states discompose our constructed, concept-constricted experience of reality:

Our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different. We may go through life without suspecting their existence; but apply the requisite stimulus, and at a touch they are there in all their completeness, definite types of mentality which probably somewhere have their field of application and adaptation. No account of the universe in its totality can be final which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded. How to regard them is the question — for they are so discontinuous with ordinary consciousness. Yet they may determine attitudes though they cannot furnish formulas, and open a region though they fail to give a map. At any rate, they forbid a premature closing of our accounts with reality.

A quarter century before quantum mechanics founding father Niels Bohr formulated the principle of complementarity and its corollary that, in the words of the Nobel-winning physicist Frank Wilczek, “you can recognize a deep truth by the feature that its opposite is also a deep truth,” James offers the defining feature of these transcendent forms of consciousness:

It is as if the opposites of the world, whose contradictoriness and conflict make all our difficulties and troubles, were melted into unity. Not only do they, as contrasted species, belong to one and the same genus, but one of the species, the nobler and better one, is itself the genus, and so soaks up and absorbs its opposite into itself.

James had arrived at this conclusion not merely as a philosopher, but as an empiricist, using his own body-mind as a laboratory for experiments with nitrous oxide — a favorite of the visionary chemist and inventor Humphry Davy’s, who christened the substance “laughing gas” for its pleasurable euphoric effects. The mild hallucinogenic properties of nitrous oxide gave James a glimpse of a whole other side of his own consciousness, which he used as a springboard into understanding so-called mystical, or transcendent, experiences — “a group of states of consciousness peculiar enough to deserve a special name and to call for careful study.”

Governed by the conviction that “phenomena are best understood when placed within their series,” he morphologizes the four defining features of these experiences — the first two necessary and sufficient to qualify the transcendent state of consciousness as such, the remaining two subtler and not required, but often accompanying the experience:

1. Ineffability. — The handiest of the marks by which I classify a state of mind as mystical is negative. The subject of it immediately says that it defies expression, that no adequate report of its contents can be given in words. It follows from this that its quality must be directly experienced; it cannot be imparted or transferred to others. In this peculiarity mystical states are more like states of feeling than like states of intellect. No one can make clear to another who has never had a certain feeling, in what the quality or worth of it consists. One must have musical ears to know the value of a symphony; one must have been in love one’s self to understand a lover’s state of mind. Lacking the heart or ear, we cannot interpret the musician or the lover justly, and are even likely to consider him weak-minded or absurd. The mystic finds that most of us accord to his experiences an equally incompetent treatment.
2. Noetic quality. — Although so similar to states of feeling, mystical states seem to those who experience them to be also states of knowledge. They are states of insight into depths of truth unplumbed by the discursive intellect. They are illuminations, revelations, full of significance and importance, all inarticulate though they remain; and as a rule they carry with them a curious sense of authority for after-time.
3. Transiency. — Mystical states cannot be sustained for long. Except in rare instances, half an hour, or at most an hour or two, seems to be the limit beyond which they fade into the light of common day. Often, when faded, their quality can but imperfectly be reproduced in memory; but when they recur it is recognized; and from one recurrence to another it is susceptible of continuous development in what is felt as inner richness and importance.
4. Passivity. — Although the oncoming of mystical states may be facilitated by preliminary voluntary operations, as by fixing the attention, or going through certain bodily performances, or in other ways which manuals of mysticism prescribe; yet when the characteristic sort of consciousness once has set in, the mystic feels as if his own will were in abeyance, and indeed sometimes as if he were grasped and held by a superior power. This latter peculiarity connects mystical states with certain definite phenomena of secondary or alternative personality, such as prophetic speech, automatic writing, or the mediumistic trance. When these latter conditions are well pronounced, however, there may be no recollection whatever of the phenomenon, and it may have no significance for the subject’s usual inner life, to which, as it were, it makes a mere interruption. Mystical states, strictly so-called, are never merely interruptive. Some memory of their content always remains, and a profound sense of their importance. They modify the inner life of the subject between the times of their recurrence. Sharp divisions in this region are, however, difficult to make, and we find all sorts of gradations and mixtures.

More than a century after its groundbreaking publication, The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature remains a fascinating read. Complement this particular portion with physicist Alan Lightman’s stirring account of one such secular, non-hallucinogenic transcendent experience in his encounter with a baby osprey and mathematician-turned-physician Israel Rosenfield’s pioneering anatomy of consciousness, then revisit Albert Camus on consciousness and the lacuna between truth and meaning.

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An anti-aging strategy that works in mice is about to be tested in humans

-- Read more on ScientificAmerican.com

“It is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.”

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“The confidence people have in their beliefs is not a measure of the quality of evidence but of the coherence of the story that the mind has managed to construct,” Nobel-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman observed in summarizing his pioneering behavioral psychology studies of how and why our minds mislead us. And yet our beliefs are the compass by which we navigate the landscape of reality, steering our actions and thus shaping our impact on that very reality. The great physicist David Bohm captured this inescapable dependency memorably: “Reality is what we take to be true. What we take to be true is what we believe… What we believe determines what we take to be true.”

How, then, do we align our beliefs with truth rather than illusion, so that we may perceive the most accurate representation of reality of which the human mind is capable, in turn guiding our actions toward noble and constructive ends?

That’s what the English mathematician and philosopher William Kingdon Clifford (May 4, 1845–March 3, 1879) explored with uncommon insight and rhetorical elegance nearly a century and a half before the golden age of “alternative facts.”

By the time tuberculosis claimed his life at the unjust age of thirty-three, Clifford had revolutionized mathematics by developing geometric algebra, had written a book of fairy tales for children, and had become the first person to suggest that gravity might be a function of an underlying cosmic geometry, developing what he called a “space-theory of matter” decades before Einstein transformed our understanding of the universe by bridging space and time into a geometry of spacetime.

But one of Clifford’s most lasting contributions is an essay titled “The Ethics of Belief,” originally published in an 1877 issue of the journal Contemporary Review and later included in Reason and Responsibility: Readings in Some Basic Problems of Philosophy (public library). In it, Clifford probes the nature of right and wrong, the infernal abyss between belief and truth, and our responsibility to the truth despite our habitual human deviations into unreason, delusion, and rationalization.

Clifford, at only thirty-two, begins with a parable containing an ethical thought experiment:

A shipowner was about to send to sea an emigrant-ship. He knew that she was old, and not overwell built at the first; that she had seen many seas and climes, and often had needed repairs. Doubts had been suggested to him that possibly she was not seaworthy. These doubts preyed upon his mind, and made him unhappy; he thought that perhaps he ought to have her thoroughly overhauled and refitted, even though this should put him at great expense. Before the ship sailed, however, he succeeded in overcoming these melancholy reflections. He said to himself that she had gone safely through so many voyages and weathered so many storms that it was idle to suppose she would not come safely home from this trip also. He would put his trust in Providence, which could hardly fail to protect all these unhappy families that were leaving their fatherland to seek for better times elsewhere. He would dismiss from his mind all ungenerous suspicions about the honesty of builders and contractors. In such ways he acquired a sincere and comfortable conviction that his vessel was thoroughly safe and seaworthy; he watched her departure with a light heart, and benevolent wishes for the success of the exiles in their strange new home that was to be; and he got his insurance-money when she went down in mid-ocean and told no tales.

What shall we say of him? Surely this, that he was verily guilty of the death of those men. It is admitted that he did sincerely believe in the soundness of his ship; but the sincerity of his conviction can in no wise help him, because he had no right to believe on such evidence as was before him. He had acquired his belief not by honestly earning it in patient investigation, but by stifling his doubts. And although in the end he may have felt so sure about it that he could not think otherwise, yet inasmuch as he had knowingly and willingly worked himself into that frame of mind, he must be held responsible for it.

Clifford adds a layer of ethical complexity by arguing that even if the ship hadn’t sunk, the shipowner would be guilty of the same error of judgment, for he “would not have been innocent, he would only have been not found out.” He writes:

The question of right or wrong has to do with the origin of his belief, not the matter of it; not what it was, but how he got it; not whether it turned out to be true or false, but whether he had a right to believe on such evidence as was before him.

[…]

For it is not possible so to sever the belief from the action it suggests as to condemn the one without condemning the other. No man holding a strong belief on one side of a question, or even wishing to hold a belief on one side, can investigate it with such fairness and completeness as if he were really in doubt and unbiased; so that the existence of a belief not founded on fair inquiry unfits a man for the performance of this necessary duty.

A century before psychologists came to identify such cognitive flaws as confirmation bias and the backfire effect, Clifford adds:

Nor is it that truly a belief at all which has not some influence upon the actions of him who holds it. He who truly believes that which prompts him to an action has looked upon the action to lust after it, he has committed it already in his heart. If a belief is not realized immediately in open deeds, it is stored up for the guidance of the future. It goes to make a part of that aggregate of beliefs which is the link between sensation and action at every moment of all our lives, and which is so organized and compacted together that no part of it can be isolated from the rest, but every new addition modifies the structure of the whole. No real belief, however trifling and fragmentary it may seem, is ever truly insignificant; it prepares us to receive more of its like, confirms those which resembled it before, and weakens others; and so gradually it lays a stealthy train in our inmost thoughts, which may someday explode into overt action, and leave its stamp upon our character for ever.

In a sentiment evocative of the Indian poet and philosopher Tagore’s reflections on the interdependence of existence, Clifford takes care to highlight the sociological tapestry out of which each strand of our private beliefs is frayed:

No one man’s belief is in any case a private matter which concerns himself alone. Our lives our guided by that general conception of the course of things which has been created by society for social purposes. Our words, our phrases, our forms and processes and modes of thought, are common property, fashioned and perfected from age to age; an heirloom which every succeeding generation inherits as a precious deposit and a sacred trust to be handled on to the next one, not unchanged but enlarged and purified, with some clear marks of its proper handiwork. Into this, for good or ill, is woven every belief of every man who has speech of his fellows. A awful privilege, and an awful responsibility, that we should help to create the world in which posterity will live.

In a passage of astounding pertinence today, as dangerous ideologies divorced from truth offer false comfort in “alternative facts” to the detriment of our common good, Clifford cautions:

Belief, that sacred faculty which prompts the decisions of our will, and knits into harmonious working all the compacted energies of our being, is ours not for ourselves but for humanity. It is rightly used on truths which have been established by long experience and waiting toil, and which have stood in the fierce light of free and fearless questioning. Then it helps to bind men together, and to strengthen and direct their common action. It is desecrated when given to unproved and unquestioned statements, for the solace and private pleasure of the believer; to add a tinsel splendour to the plain straight road of our life and display a bright mirage beyond it; or even to drown the common sorrows of our kind by a self-deception which allows them not only to cast down, but also to degrade us. Whoso would deserve well of his fellows in this matter will guard the purity of his beliefs with a very fanaticism of jealous care, lest at any time it should rest on an unworthy object, and catch a stain which can never be wiped away.

Three centuries after Western philosophy founding father and reason crusader René Descartes asserted that “it is not enough to have a good mind; the main thing is to apply it well,” Clifford adds:

In regard, then, to the sacred tradition of humanity, we learn that it consists, not in propositions or statements which are to be accepted and believed on the authority of the tradition, but in questions rightly asked, in conceptions which enable us to ask further questions, and in methods of answering questions. The value of all these things depends on their being tested day by day. The very sacredness of the precious deposit imposes upon us the duty and the responsibility of testing it, of purifying and enlarging it to the utmost of our power. He who makes use of its results to stifle his own doubts, or to hamper the inquiry of others, is guilty of sacrilege which centuries shall never be able to blot out.

How to purify and enlarge our access to truth is what Carl Sagan outlined a century later in his timeless Baloney Detection Kit, but Clifford himself crystallizes the most effective approach in a wonderfully succinct dictum:

It is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.

Complement with Lewis Thomas, one of the most enchanting writers of the past century, on the transmutation of ignorance into truth, Karl Popper on the crucial difference between truth and certainty, and Laura (Riding) Jackson’s unusual and profound 1967 manifesto for the telling of truth.

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donating = loving

Bringing you (ad-free) Brain Pickings takes me hundreds of hours each month. If you find any joy and stimulation here, please consider becoming a Supporting Member with a recurring monthly donation of your choosing, between a cup of tea and a good dinner.

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newsletter

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Fifty million years ago, the Cowboy State was crawling with crocodiles. Fossil records show that crocs lounged in the shade of palm trees from southwestern Wyoming to southern Canada during the Cretaceous and Eocene.  Exactly how the middle of the North American continent -- far from the warming effects of the ocean -- stayed so temperate even in winter months has long eluded scientists.

Chrome has a built-in translation feature, so why would you install an extension for Google Translate? You can select text from a page, click the small Google Translate icon and get the translation almost instantly.


You can also click the extension's button and type some text you want to translate or click "translate this page".


The nice thing about the extension is that you can change your primary language in the extension's settings without changing your browser's interface language or your operating system's language. For example, Chrome for Mac "determines the browser interface language by the Language & Text setting in System Preferences."


"The Translate team is working hard to connect people by breaking language barriers across computers, mobile devices and Internet browsers. Our users make more than 1 billion translations a day," informs the Google Translate blog.

Freelance and professional writer Roger Vlitos examines the theories and myths about Avebury.

Solving the "faint young sun paradox" -- explaining how early Earth was warm and habitable for life beginning more than three billion years ago even though the sun was 20 percent dimmer than today -- may not be as difficult as believed, says a new study.

Today’s post is from Tyler Jewell, CEO at Codenvy. In this post, Tyler looks at how you can leverage cloud based development tools to build applications for Google Cloud Platform.

Codenvy is a cloud development environment for coding, building, and testing applications for Google Cloud Platform. In a recent LinkedIn survey, 1200 engineers indicated that they spend nearly ⅓ of their week administering their desktop. This includes configuring the IDE, build system, runtime, and plug-ins. By providing a cloud IDE that is pre-integrated with Google App Engine, we can change the developer workflow dramatically by automatically provisioning a cloud workbench that allows a developer to be immediately productive with fewer errors, and have a higher confidence that their application will deploy correctly to App Engine when pushed.

Each Codenvy workspace is comprised of an IDE, a code assistant service, a build system and a debugging runtime. These four components are integrated and decoupled to scale independently based on usage. This allows us to eliminate configuration needs while reducing compilation time and deployment time. Projects in Codenvy can start through a project creation wizard, or can be imported from a git repository. After coding operations are complete, code can be deployed directly to App Engine through using continuous integration post-commit hooks on git, or through a jClouds-based direct deployment connection to App Engine.



The main challenge is setting up the development environment to match the production environment. Each language, framework and PaaS has its nuances that must be addressed. To reproduce the App Engine environment in Codenvy, we embed the Google App Engine SDK into the IDE (enabling compilation and auto-completion), and in the debugging runtime so that applications can be functionally tested in a cloud-local environment before being pushed to App Engine directly.


The App Engine SDK is provided automatically by Codenvy whenever a App Engine application is configured in the project space. By providing this SDK in a cloud local environment, you save time by being able to do a high number of iterative changes to test functionality before pushing artifacts onto a App Engine instance. Since the deployment process of your artifacts onto App Engine has an uptake time, developers who need to make many changes would wait longer than making use of the cloud local environment that is low latency.

Other Google Services Used by Codenvy

Google technology has been instrumental in building our product and growing our user base:

• First, we enable multi-cursor collaborative editing which is incredibly useful for pair programming, code reviews, or classroom teaching. This is powered by Google Web Toolkit, a framework to write optimized Ajax applications, and Collide, an open source collaboration system published by Google.
• Second, oAuth makes it possible to register with a Google account and start coding in seconds.
• Third, we support Chromebook development and have certified on Pixel tablets.
• Finally, we are preparing Android support in Codenvy. Check out this sample demo of an Android app built in Codenvy and deployed to Manymo’s web-based Android emulator: http://vimeo.com/66157251.

Later this year, we will release production Android development support. In addition to editing, building and packaging Android applications, it will be possible to run them in the browser with a tenanted emulator. We’ll also be shipping an SDK that will allow the community to create programming language, deployment target, and framework extensions so that we can work to extend Codenvy to support PHP and Go in App Engine.

Please visit Codenvy today and get started building your App Engine application. Full documentation and tutorials are at docs.codenvy.com. And you can vote for the features that you want here. And finally, do not hesitate to contact support with any questions at support@codenvy.com.

- Contributed by Tyler Jewell, CEO, Codenvy