Arbitrary Marks

It isn’t often that I write about anything related to the city of Chicago, but this has been on my mind over the past week and I thought I’d bring your attention to it.
I’m on Flickr quite a bit, putting up my own photos and watching those belonging to my contacts. Some of those [...]

A recent study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences tries to isolate innate characteristics of the brains of homosexual men and women. Earlier studies have focused on parts of the brain which are more or less plastic–that is, they have to do with perception or reproduction, behaviors that may reinforce structural [...]

I’ve been reading Patricia Churchland’s classic intro text, Neurophilosophy, in the evening (alternating between that and the Thomas Covenant series). While I wouldn’t recommend it to everyone–she gets really thick into details which obscure some of the take-away for the generalist–the most recent chapter I read on neuropsychology was tremendously useful.
Take the current media craze [...]

As I write this, an article on Buddhism, atheism and neuroscience is the top emailed article on the NY Times website.
In it, he makes a couple of interesting claims about the so-called “New Atheism” debates and where they’re probably headed. First, he thinks that “The cognitive revolution is not going to end up undermining faith [...]

The Arbitrary Marks household has a new member, Lucy.  She’s a 3 month old terrier-chihuahua mix and a bright, friendly little girl who is getting housebroken in the midst of a Chicago snow.  She’s also a great object lesson in philosophy.  (Kids and animals both, I think, provide fertile ground for exploring philosophical questions–which is why [...]

I nearly called this a "linkfest", but the occasion isn’t festive. This post will contain links as I find them to the ongoing situation in Myanmar, particularly the religious-political links. It seems I’m not the only one dissatisfied with the coverage, see Diane Winston at HuffPo. Below for links.

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The title of this post is from an article published in 1996 in Pacific Affairs, Vol. 69, No. 2.  In a little under twenty pages, Josef Silverstein surveys the history of Myanmar (then Burma) and the development of concepts of political freedom.  Aung San Suu Kyi, the central figure in the democratic movement, has been explicit [...]

So why are the Theravadan Buddhist monks in Myanmar leading protests for democracy? That was my immediate question when I saw the news. In looking over the coverage of the protests, the stories I read mostly said things like the monks are the "highly revered moral core of Burmese society" and then moved [...]

This story is why I don’t typically correct people who mistake my gender, unless there’s a compelling reason and it is safe.  There is a certain discomfort in people which can turn into violence.  I don’t know anything about the bar where the woman was, or how gay-friendly Jackson is, so I can’t comment on [...]

Two articles, one in the Chicago Tribune, and another on CNN-IBN, highlight the reasons for my personal ambivalence about Buddhism. Academically, I’m very interested in its philosophy–but that doesn’t necessarily translate into personal adherence to the eightfold path.