A poem by my maternal grandmother, Cobie Muyskens deLespinasse

Another  treasure from the closet I am trying to clean out while under "house arrest."  My grandmother wrote three published novels, but also dabbled in poetry.  No wonder she and my mother got along so well!  (The "Frank" mentioned is my father.)

NO TITLE----it was apparently the beginning of a letter to someone.

"Twas the day before Christmas
and all through the house
nobody is moving but Frank and his spouse
as the boys are still sleeping.

It's a good time for dreams
as the rain is descending in rivers and streams.
It's the first rain we've had since clear back in September
and then 'twas darned little---not enough to remember! 

Our gaily wrapped gifts are piled under our tree
where I see there is something from you and to me!
I thought I could write you a poetic letter
but the muse has departed---so prose will be better!

But let me exclaim e'er I run out of rhyme
Merry Christmas to all---have a wonderful time.

Another poem by my mother, Helen Childs deLespinasse

This was published in the "P.E.O. Record" December 1966 issue.  I don't know when she actually wrote it, but by 1966 my brother Hank and I had not been "small boys" for a long time!  

GROWING PAINS

The stockings by the fireplace grow longer every year,
and as I watch those stockings grow my heart is filled with fear.
For soon the time will come,  I know . . .
when boys and stockings cease to grow.

Basketballs, footballs, kites and trains, wagons, and story books
are soon outgrown and in their place are rods and reels and hooks.
When toys no more adorn the tree . . . 
Christmas will rather dreary be.

The day will lose its gaiety when sox and razor blades and ties
replace the guns and horns and drums and things that small boys prize.
It will be very quiet then . . . 
on Christmas when our boys are men.

I'll print a picture in my heart of laden tree and fireplace,
of stockings hung  before the fire and smiles on boyish face.
And in my heart I'll hoard the laughter . . .
for quiet years that follow after.

Two poems by my mother, Helen Childs deLespinasse

Thanks to being under virtual house arrest during the Coronavirus crisis,  this afternoon I started trying to clean out my Fibber McGee's closet in my study.  I have found some surprising things, including a metal file box filled with historical family papers, including a Bible my mother gave my father on December 25, 1934.  (They were married in 1936.)

In the Bible were two poems that my mother wrote, while they lived in Honolulu,  I imagine.  They are worth preserving and sharing.

Blessings For A Granddaughter   (uncertain which one,  perhaps all of them!)

Let her live peaceably each day, oh Lord

A true example of thy living word.

Let her be radiant, by day,  by night

Let her be happiness, let her be light

                 (OR)

Let her be radiant, a beacon bright

Let her, in happiness,  reflect thy light.

No title given

While my free soul explores the universe

seal not my body in an earthy bed,

but give my ashes to the breaking wave

off Diamond Head.

Smile at each passing cloud.
Look up with rapture at the sapphire sky

and be convinced that life goes on and on

We do not die.

Rejoice in sunshine

Revel in the rain that makes the sun more dear,

and never doubt that immortality

is Now and Here.  

Another bit of autobiography: How Willamette U. influenced my life

I wrote this for a New York Times essay contest,  but they didn't use it.

Willamette University, not highly selective in 1957, had an immense impact on my life. Most importantly, through a classmate I met my wife---who attended a different college--- of more than 50 years (and counting). A faculty member's suggestion that I consider graduate school and a college teaching career diverted me from an original intent to join the Foreign Service. National panic over the launching of Sputnik during my freshman year prompted Willamette to add the opportunity to study Russian, which I used extensively during my 36 years teaching political science at Adrian College. The honors program required a major senior research project which was excellent preparation for writing my doctoral dissertation.

The curriculum prepared me well for acceptance by graduate programs at five major universities including Johns Hopkins (which I attended), MIT, and Harvard, and to win NDEA and Woodrow Wilson fellowships. But I also had time to play clarinet in the band, to take four years of pipe organ lessons, and to make some long-lasting friends.

But the biggest impact Willamette U. had on me was my very existence. My parents had met there. The college was therefore my alma mater in more ways than one!

A little bit more autobiography: a book that changed my life

I wrote this for an essay content at the New York Times, but they didn't use it.

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On November 10, 1955 our Vallejo High School honor society made a field trip to San Francisco. After the formal program they turned us loose on Market Street for a few hours.

In the Bonanza Inn Book Shop I paid 10 cents for a used copy of Norman Cousins' Modern Man Is Obsolete. A charming handwritten letter taped inside indicated it had been a Stanford professor's wedding present to a former student 10 years earlier. I always wonder what happened to that marriage to put this book in that store that very day.

The book expanded an editorial Cousins wrote for the Saturday Review Of Literature immediately after the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It argued powerfully that continued world anarchy would produce atomic catastrophe and that we urgently needed a world government.

Overwhelmed, I changed my intended college major from physics to political science so I could work for peace in a diplomatic career. I didn't want to contribute to potentially dangerous technological progress when world political systems couldn't cope with the "progress" we had already made.

Thanks to another change in plans, I ended up teaching political science at Adrian College for 36 years.

Could Our Brains Be An Interface Between Body and Mind?

It seem to me that it would be useful for some researchers to examine the possibility that the conventional assumptions are incorrect, and see what can be accomplished by postulating that the brain (a physical/material system operating in space and time) is an interface device connecting the physical/material body with a non-material, non-physical mind that is not located in space and is "outside of" time----"eternal" in the sense of beyond time rather than in the sense of infinite duration in time.

The left-brain, right-brain differences, seen from this point of view, might suggest that the left brain is the side of the interface device that connects to the time-bound body, and the right brain is the side of the device that connects to the "eternal" mind. I doubt if it is actually this simple, partly because the available evidence from imaging seems to show a lot more complexity in the distribution of functions, and partly because some functions such as vision and hearing draw on both hemispheres of the brain. But it might be possible to devise some experiments based on this general hypothesis that might not occur to scientists who take the current assumptions as proved facts.

A simple analogy that I have thought about that is suggestive of the problems of proving the correctness of current basic assumptions uses a "black box" model: Imagine a black box whose exterior we can see, with two push buttons on it. We push button one and speak to it, then push button two and hear the same words coming back out. Certainly one possibility is that there is some kind of tape recorder or memory chip inside which records sounds when button one is pressed, then plays them back when button two is pressed. But another possibility is that there is a transceiver in the black box, which transmits the sounds it picks up to a transceiver located somewhere else and which in turn is connected to a recorder. When you push button two on the known black box, it sends a signal to the second transceiver to play back the "tape" and send it back over to the black box which then duly emits it. (This is where the analogy, like all analogies, is inexact, since the second mechanism here, the transceiver-recorder, is itself a physical system, but it is being used to stand for the non-material mind in the hypothesis.)

Assume we are talking about memory, and are assuming that memories are stored in some fashion in the black box. Then assume that after speaking into the black box but before pushing button two we take a baseball bat and beat the heck out of the black box. Then we push button two, and nothing happens. Aha! we say. This proves that memories are stored in this box, and that we have damaged those memories.

Of course in the case of the black box it is obvious that we have proved no such thing.

Why should it prove anything in the case of a brain that has been damaged by disease or trauma?

It is well known that by poking an electrode into specific areas of someone's brain, certain memories can be evoked. According to my analogy, however, this is not proof that the evoked memory was "stored" in that area of the brain, or indeed stored in the brain at all. Given the unconventional hypothesis that the mind is "eternal" in the sense of not located in time or space, and that memory is the ability to recall some experience that happened at some other point in time, it would be quite possible that memory would a function of the mind and not of the brain. In this event, what would need explaining would not be why we remember things, but why we ever forget things, and also (wildly) why we don't remember what happened the day after tomorrow. ("It's a poor sort of memory that only works backwards"-----Alice in Wonderland.)

It s

Does happiness require us to lie to ourselves about our nature?

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari is a best-selling, well-written, but fundamentally flawed work. Like most serious analysis, it is a mixture of sense and nonsense and has a good deal of both. Fortunately, it is “a multitude of different parts and pieces that do not fit together very well” (as Richard Feynman described modern physics) so for the most part its fundamental nonsense about human nature does not contaminate its many good points.

The author's thesis can be summarized in one sentence: For you shall know the truth, and the truth will make you upset. Ashish Singal, reviewing the book on Amazon.com, makes the same point somewhat differently: "Our search for happiness and meaning inevitably involves lying to ourselves."

Why does Harari think we need to lie to ourselves? I think it is because he depicts an extremely unattractive picture of our nature as human beings, a nature which he claims has been proved by modern biological science.

The Greek philosopher Socrates maintained that human happiness required us to understand our own nature correctly. Taking the Socratic maxim, "Know thyself" (page 392) Harari gives us this analysis:

If happiness is based on feeling pleasant sensations, then in order to be happier we need to re-engineer our biochemical system. If happiness is based on feeling that life is meaningful, then in order to be happier we need to delude ourselves more effectively."

Earlier he had claimed that "from a purely scientific viewpoint, human life has absolutely no purpose." (Page 391).

Someone once joked that a behaviorist was someone "who had made up his windpipe that he had no mind." I'm afraid that Harari sounds like he has done exactly that:

"Scientists studying the inner makeup of the human organism have found no soul there. They increasingly argue that human behavior is determined by hormones, genes and synopses, rather

than by free will----the same forces that determine the behavior of chimpanzes, wolves, and ants. Our judicial and political systems largely try to sweep such inconvenient findings under the carpet. But in all frankness, how long can we maintain the wall separating the department of biology from the departments of law and political science?"

Notice in this quotation that on the basis of the fact that some scientists "argue" a certain thing, the author then refers to what they argue as "findings," which is a far more serious claim. This kind of "reasoning" permeates his discussion of human nature.

Harari tells us that "According to the science of biology, people were not created. They have evolved." He doesn't seem inclined to consider the possibility this is a false dichotomy, that creation need not be assumed to occur at one point in time but might take place over a considerable period of time--which sounds suspiciously like evolution.

Perhaps his disinclination to consider this possibility rests on his belief that "Just as people were never created, neither, according to the science of biology, is there a Creator. . . ."

The disturbing thing in all this is not the author's belief that there is no God (a point that he makes repeatedly in this book) and no soul, but that he claims that this has been proved by "the science of biology." The ideas themselves are not uncommon, but to claim they are based on science misunderstands the essential nature of science.

Put most simply, science is a "guess and test" procedure in which, after careful observation of something, we make a guess about how to explain it, and then test that guess by looking to see if predictions made on that basis hold up and to see if there is any evidence which is incompatible with that explanation. To speculate that there is no God, no soul. and no creation can be legitimate guesses, but biological science (and the other physical sciences) have never carried out the mandatory second part of science, testing the guesses, which they actually have no way to do. Harari is grossly abusing science by claiming it as authority for conclusions which are beyond the scope of its competence.

Rounding out his unappealing view of human nature, Harari happily accepts without critical scrutiny currently fashionable ideas about the human brain. He tells us (pages 120-121) that we store information in our brains. But then (page 127) he admits that "Exactly how the brain does it remains a mystery." He tells us (p. 252) that "biologists admit that they still don't have any good explanation for how brains produce consciousness." He simply assumes that consciousness and memory are functions of the brain, which I suppose makes sense if he has made up his windpipe that he has no mind.

Towards the end of the book (page 401) , however, Harari lets the cat out of his "scientific" bag, fundamentally contradicting his assumptions about the brain expressed earlier. This paragraph has such fascinating implications that I must quote it extensively:

"Yet of all the projects currently under development, the most revolutionary is the attempt to devise a direct two-way brain-computer interface that will allow computers to read the electrical signals of a human brain, simultaneously transmitting signals that the brain can read in turn. What if such interfaces are used to directly link a brain to the Internet, or to directly link several brains to each other, thereby creating a sort of Inter-brain-net? What might happen to human memory, human consciousness and human identity if the brain has direct access to a collective memory bank? In such a situation, one cyborg could, for example, retrieve the memories of another---not hear about them, not read about them in an autobiography, not imagine them, but directly remember them as if they were his own?"

In this paragraph Harari is admitting that it is not impossible to imagine that we can remember things that are not "stored" in our own brain, but are located someplace else. But if this is possible it totally undermines his blind assumption earlier that memories have got to be stored in our brains.

Harari also introduces the idea of an "interface" or connection, with a brain on one end and a computer on the other end, or with one person's brain on one end and another person's brain on the other end. But once we accept the idea of interfaces, another possibility would seem to follow: that the brain itself is an interface between a physical, material body located in space and time and a non-physical, non-material mind that has no location either in space or in time.

If this were the case then it would be plausible to think that consciousness might be a function of the mind rather than of the brain. If this guess were correct, it would explain the facts, reported by Harari, that scientists are unable to explain how the brain produces consciousness and how it stores memories. If the brain does neither of these things, it would explain why nobody can figure out how it does them. (For a further discussion of this idea, which I wrote several years ago before ever hearing of Harari, see part my short appendix to this review, below.)

Perhaps a concept of human nature in which our actions are controlled by our non-material minds rather than by the blind operation of physical causation ("hormones, genes, and synopses") and in which human life is not meaningless would make it unnecessary to use drugs applied to our brains to make us happy as the author recommends (page 389). Perhaps our present unhappiness results from failure to understand our true natures. Know thyself, indeed!

As I indicated, Harari's book is loose-jointed enough that his portrait of human nature does not undermine the validity of most of the other things he talks about in the book. I found these other things interesting, often insightful, and agreed with many of them, but do not have anything unique to say about them.

Let me conclude by pointing out that from the Biblical point of view Mr. Harari, though he is obviously very intelligent and well-educated, is a fool. "The fool says in his heart, 'There is no God.'" (Psalms 14: 1) The foolishness, however, lies not in his theological conclusions, but in his belief that they are grounded in science.

Appendix (Written at least five years ago, before I had ever heard of Mr. Harari)

417 words

It seem to me that it would be useful for some researchers to examine the possibility that the conventional assumptions are incorrect, and see what can be accomplished by postulating that the brain (a physical/material system operating in space and time) is an interface device connecting the physical/material body with a non-material, non-physical mind that is not located in space and is "outside of" time----"eternal" in the sense of beyond time rather than in the sense of infinite duration in time.

The left-brain, right-brain differences, seen from this point of view, might suggest that the left brain is the side of the interface device that connects to the time-bound body, and the right brain is the side of the device that connects to the "eternal" mind. I doubt if it is actually this simple, partly because the available evidence from imaging seems to show a lot more complexity in the distribution of functions, and partly because some functions such as vision and hearing draw on both hemispheres of the brain. But it might be possible to devise some experiments based on this general hypothesis that might not occur to scientists who take the current assumptions as proved facts.

A simple analogy that I have thought about that is suggestive of the problems of proving the correctness of current basic assumptions uses a "black box" model: Imagine a black box whose exterior we can see, with two push buttons on it. We push button one and speak to it, then push button two and hear the same words coming back out. Certainly one possibility is that there is some kind of tape recorder or memory chip inside which records sounds when button one is pressed, then plays them back when button two is pressed. But another possibility is that there is a transceiver in the black box, which transmits the sounds it picks up to a transceiver located somewhere else and which in turn is connected to a recorder. When you push button two on the known black box, it sends a signal to the second transceiver to play back the "tape" and send it back over to the black box which then duly emits it. (This is where the analogy, like all analogies, is inexact, since the second mechanism here, the transceiver-recorder, is itself a physical system, but it is being used to stand for the non-material mind in the hypothesis.)

Assume we are talking about memory, and are assuming that memories are stored in some fashion in the black box. Then assume that after speaking into the black box but before pushing button two we take a baseball bat and beat the heck out of the black box. Then we push button two, and nothing happens. Aha! we say. This proves that memories are stored in this box, and that we have damaged those memories.

Of course in the case of the black box it is obvious that we have proved no such thing.

Why should it prove anything in the case of a brain that has been damaged by disease or trauma?

It is well known that by poking an electrode into specific areas of someone's brain, certain memories can be evoked. According to my analogy, however, this is not proof that the evoked memory was "stored" in that area of the brain, or indeed stored in the brain at all. Given the unconventional hypothesis that the mind is "eternal" in the sense of not located in time or space, and that memory is the ability to recall some experience that happened at some other point in time, it would be quite possible that memory would a function of the mind and not of the brain. In this event, what would need explaining would not be why we remember things, but why we ever forget things, and also (wildly) why we don't remember what happened the day after tomorrow. ("It's a poor sort of memory that only works backwards"-----Alice in Wonderland.)