Livestrong or Not?

I spent a year in Paris, and now have been back in New York for 3 months. It is not clear how quickly humans as a species can adapt to new environments. After all Sherpas do better in the Himalayas than Floridians do,  Aborigines do better in the Australian  bush than Eskimos do, and idiots do better in Alaskan politics than noble-laureates do. Perhaps then it is too much to ask to fully feel at home quickly in another country, or fall back into your own after being away. Paris was not hard for me though. It was like a warm bath with wine, cheese, and free health care. I find my activities in New York mirror my emotional state. In New York I am a boxer, an entrepreneur, a hectic free jazz musician and a fan of sports where a total number of points per game is greater than 2 on average. In Paris people are content in their discontent. They embrace protest because they believe that change can only occur as a society, while at the same time shrugging their shoulders at their inability to be richer than a visiting American. They do this for a number of deeply embedded historical reasons, but also for the more mundane.By individually striving for wealth they may be shortening  the amount of time they can take for lunch. I wrote about this some while I was in Paris, because it was the first time I had a chance to live this kind of life, and also because it is not only opposite of my American cultural background, but different from my manically driven personality. It was refreshing. Suddenly I found myself saying that the biggest problem with my country was the delusion driven Oprahfication of it. I screamed about Americans trying to hold on to Bush era tax cuts, the Republican vilification of Obamacare, and the absurdity of the emerging Tea Party. I remain ideologically united with French society (excluding  the racist Napoleonic Sarcoism of modern French politics). What is harder is to separate that type of romantic identification with a foreign culture from my own American dream, which in practice rests somewhere between my heart and my blackberry. It is difficult to be self analytical enough to see transformation and stagnation of this order in my own activities. Sometimes it takes a non political, but strangely upsetting external event to remind me of who I am.

This week I started reading up on the latest in the Lance Armstrong doping scandal. Since accusations of his use of performance drugs and blood transfusions have been in the news for 8 years or so, this has not been the first time I have discussed this with anyone. There are a few differences now though, and those differences so fully point to the dangers of individualism, of a belief in the ideal American dream , and of the search for legacy, fame and fortune that I am taking note as a warning to myself.

I am not particularly unique, even in the one thing that does differ about me than many people my age. I had cancer when I was thirty. I also thought about Lance Armstrong nearly everyday when I had cancer at 30. This was true for the obvious reasons, which during those painful moments for me were actually deeply profound. This experience may also be more common for Americans than for French people, though I realize that is an unresearched guess. The reason is that Armstrong's survival and successes didn’t just show how you can get your life back after a near death agonizing disease, it also showed that you could come back and achieve more in something than anyone ever had. It is that focus which inspired me, and I am not sure in retrospect if that type of inspiration is not as misdirected as many of the other American Dream gone wrong stories of the last several years.

For a second let’s forget the doping thing. Even if Lance honestly achieved something so incredible, it is possible that I misinterpreted what the real value of that achievement was. I could say that the achievement allowed him to become an inspiration, but that is circular logic, as it comes back to the point of not being able to answer my question at all. I could say that his 7 Tour De France victories allowed him to achieve the fame and fortune by which he raised unprecedented awareness and funding for cancer research. That argument seems honorable enough as a group, but as an individual who was going through cancer, it set expectations that may have made me want to beat the cancer, but at the same time left me no model for how to archive similar goals as the ones achieved by Lance, even if I did recover. The only thing to do was to hope that there is some special will to live that comes from hardship like cancer that makes you push harder towards previously unthinkable goals. It doesn't increase the probability of achieving them, or provide a road-map on how to to even begin. If anyone had pointed this out to me before this week I would have been strangely and naively surprised. I actually never thought of it, because in this case I chose to do something I rarely do consciously, which was to take a leap of faith. I had faith that with recovery, with hard work anything was possible. The truth of this is no more real than my annoyance with “The Secret” and Oprah's power of will approach to success. The likely hood of becoming Oprah no matter how hard you think , pray or work is near 0. The likely hood of being as much of a success in any field as Lance was in biking after having cancer is even less. I held so deeply to that delusion, which is very American, even in Paris, that I would never have noticed this one in myself. Then I started reading the new doping reports. Not only are friends, colleagues, coaches and journalists saying that he doped, and even supplied performance enhancing drugs to fellow teammates, but the tests have come back in many place to say that he was using. So conjecture and science are against my hero. There has been a Franco-American battle over this issue since the beginning. French screeners and reporters have said since 1998 that Lance was doping. The backlash from America and Lance was enormous. His second book was nearly an anti french tirade. I firmly stood by Armstrong for all of these years, saying such compassionate things to my French wife as “you are a country of cry baby sore losers who haven't produced a world class athlete in my lifetime. Jealous bastards!” Instead of hitting me, as was deserved, she simply rolled her eyes. I thought at the time it was because she didn't have a decent argument to this perfectly reasonable point I was making. (I still hold to the sore loser accusation.) It turns out that my ranting was so simplistic that she probably didn't want to bother with it. Also, my wife Marine is very psychologically sharp. She must have known about my cancer identification, and my American dreams, and knew that a fight on this would likely do more harm than good. I think she was right. Now as evidence points very much against Lance, and I am a few years removed from my own cancer I am reevaluating my take on this. The thought eats at me, because it is a revelation of two opposing things. There is the revelation that he is a cheat, and that even with this outlier of human achievement, the dream did not exist. There is also something more personal to me, acknowledgement of this shatters some of the remaining American Dream in me. Intellectually this should be a good thing. I am a rational person, and delusion is an opposite of rationality. Where it is hard is to see rather such delusion actually did help me for a long time. Is this why people still pray to dead saints? I understand this for the first time in a long time, as I recognize my own irrational religiosity of human potential. In the end the Lance Armstrong episode may put this in perspective for me. If it doesn’t maybe I will have to rely on the french sports magazine L’Equipe.

The Jellyfish, The Frog and The Man

Normally when I think of why it is better to be a human than a jellyfish, I think of the uniquely human ability of abstraction, and how that abstraction can lead to creativity. When I think of what would be better about being a jellyfish than human, I think about the naivety of jellyfish. It is likely that he doesn’t experience the same existential crisis of acknowledging his own mortality. For a person it is very hard to live in the present, as the past and future always intrude, with the future ending with us in ashes. There were two science stories last week that put into question the whole idea of mortality. The first was actually about a type of jellyfish. The jellyfish discovery was provocative, even though it is indisputable.  This certain type of jellyfish is biologically immortal. Like all living beings, he goes through cell aging, and cell death, but unlike us he repeats the lifecycle. So the jellyfish becomes old, then young, then old an infinite number of times. Of course he could die by other means, like getting eaten, or environmental destruction, but this particular jellyfish will not die of old age. http://www.allvoices.com/contributed-news/5448422-a-jellyfish-is-the-only-animal-immortal

The other story this week was the release of a TED Talk about suspended animation. http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/mark_roth_suspended_animation.html This is worth watching.  Like the jellyfish finding, this story finds that our notion that all living things die, is not strictly accurate. We know that seeds can be in a state that is like death, but can come to life when planted.  Certain frogs can stop all metabolic function during the winter. They actually freeze, then in the spring thaw out and hop away. The TED Talk speaks about how this type of suspended animation and reanimation is possible in humans through adjusting oxygen levels and temperature. So it is possible to suspend life, and start it up again.

These two cases (eternal jellyfish and reanimation) are not the same for an obvious reason. In the case of the jellyfish, life is continuous, where the reanimated frog (or person) has a period of time which more closely resembles death. They both do make us reconsider how we view the present and the future. While many of us live neither as the jellyfish or the frog, this is not the case for a large part of the population who (I imagine) can relate very closely to one of these templates of existence. The jellyfish school is perhaps best exemplified by the gerontologist Aubrey De Grey. De Grey is the long bearded, Oxford educated scientist, who is spending his life and intellect on immortality. He is widely criticized for this, not because his science is questionable, but for more ethical reasons. In fact his science may be too new to yet know if it is valid, but it is not pseudoscience. He has real theory, and performs real experiments in labs around the world. Many of us like hearing him speak, because this is a voice of reason talking about something so unreasonable. What a mess the world would be if we all lived forever? Still the prospect is exciting, as the unknown of death is a haunting one. His ideas are in essence to make people like the eternal jellyfish. And, he would probably argue, the jellyfish is immortal but doesn’t seem to overwhelm the planet with its presence.

The other common school of thought is one that I relate to the reanimated frog. Many of the world’s major religions think of life as being in a state similar to the frozen frog. This is of course not how they would describe it, but how I think of religious belief in an afterlife. These people feel that a more full existence happens after the one where our bodies are alive. Therefore, for the moment, our bodies are essentially waiting for the spring to come so that our souls can be awakened in heaven.  The obvious difference between the religious person and the frozen frog is that while both views seem magical, the frog’s condition is strictly material. There is no extra implied force, location, or spirit involved. What is the same is the cycle of life, death and new life.

These two views leave out much of the world, even while being analogous to the cases I mention. Buddhists for instance embrace emptiness, which is basically uncertainty about death, as does the Jewish faith. Both of these admit a certain amount of ignorance, but don’t go all the way, since both have resurrection or reincarnation stories built into them. Stories of course or not wrong, or even unscientific, as they can be viewed metaphorically. Still they can lead to a hope that is not completely unlike the hope to either be like the jellyfish or like the frozen frog. Maybe there is nothing that can be done about this. Perhaps we are stuck by our own neural structure to think about the future in one of these ways. We try to look to nature, and to our intuition to connect the dots from the past through the future. For me as I naturalist, I tend to think that everything is causal. Our present is on a course that was determined by our past, and if we knew all of the variables, we could extend that to the future. We can’t know all of the variables, so this lack of counter causal free-will , for the most part, doesn’t change the way we make decisions. What it does do is change the way we think about the ultimate future, or death. It is metaconscious. If we think of our past as our birth, our present as just a point on a line, and our death as being the place that the line ends, it is very different than considering either the line continuing forever (like the jellyfish), or having a break in it (like the frozen frog). So just by hearing these stories I am in that unique state of being human; abstracting to understand the future rather than living in the present.

Genetically Modifying you and your Salad

A very frustrating part of having friends, who have such a wide range of metaphysical beliefs, is that a dinner conversation can become very long, and often end with misunderstandings or even anger. Though I am happy to have dinner party debates with friends of all types of religious and secular belief systems, I have tried to make my life a little easier, less stressful and more productive by not mixing in traditional religious fundamentalist. Certainly the combination of them and I make for fuel fired debates, but ultimately it becomes so personal that the evening ends with one of two outcomes. It is sometimes sadness, where the fundamentalist says something like “I feel so, so sad that we will not be spending the afterlife in paradise together. I really sympathize with the agony of the inferno where you will be occupying eternity”. The other side would be me causing rage, and maybe a full fist fight, when I say “go ahead and console yourself with those mindless, bigoted, pedophiles. That is a bunch I would want not to spend eternity with.”

As you can see, this is an example, one among many, of how a conversation like this can go wrong. Due to the severity of this, I avoid the party all together. Those people in general I spend only 5% of my time with. The other 95% of the time, I have two general groups of friends, who have a wide range of opinions, but whom we can make some generalizations about. The first group is the people I like in a deeply emotional way. They are often the people I cry with when I need to cry. They are passionate and dynamic. They cook well. They hike, and Kayak, and garden. They also see you as something greater than your material self. They are therefore classical Cartesian dualists, with some modern flair. That is they do believe that the mind is not the brain. It is a soul. Something which is either more important or responsive to our body, but exists separately or at least supplementary to it. The modern way of dealing with the soul is to erase some of the more dogmatic ideas of religion and search for truth outside of a religion. Many of these are great thinkers, poets or philosophers themselves. They intellectually and emotionally put together a treatise for existence based on multiple texts, from Eastern Religions and a general empathy with nature. This includes the avoidance of the suffering of animals, the elimination of pesticides, and the creation of natural temples of rocks, even in public parks, as a shrine to simplicity and nature. Thomas Jefferson was actually one of these types of people. There is another side of these friends that goes a step beyond what would appear to all of us non Osama Bin Laden, non Pat Robertson reasonable people. This other side is what is discussed in Michael Specter’s book “Denialism”. In this book, Specter looks at many claims of this group of my friends (well, he didn’t actually do this as a study of my friends, but I could have supplied him with some case studies) that when the scientific method is applied to them, the belief becomes just that, another faith based claim, similar to a fundamentalist claim. Examples of these types of claims are the use of vitamins, which science shows that 98% are completely useless. More importantly for my argument though is a dedicated belief in the wisdom of buying organically grown crops. The argument for this has its merits on some specifics. The use of pesticides is dangerous, and for me, the organic foods taste better most of the time. The argument though destroys a key desire of my friends, which involves connectivity and charity though a spiritual empathy with all other forms of life.

As a scientist and an artist, I feel the argument of my friends, but rationalize a completely other view. First I must say that being rational is essential for me. I just read from the Spinoza “Ethics”, and see that he has intellectual development as a progression, involving each step, from experience, to rational to instinctual. I get this very much. The goal would therefore be to have a great deal of experience with something, then work out why that thing happens, resulting in such knowledge that it then becomes instinctual. This is a wonderful design for an interpretive musician or for a scientist, and it is one that could be applied easily to the dualist viewpoints reaction to certain beliefs.

I would like to take just one belief of this generic stereotypical group, and one from myself, and my science friends. The first group might listen to the Deepak Chopra PodCast, while the second to “The Skeptics Guide to The Universe”. I want to look at how we perceive nature, because it is nature where both of the groups come together, in order to protect it. Both groups also claim to understand humans as a part of nature. When talking to the spiritual, organic food devotees, I ask if they are just uncomfortable with pesticides. If they say yes, I then say, “me too, they are dangerous in water supplies, and for the food chain”. If they say a more common thing though which is that they are against genetically engineered food, I become deflated, as my nature loving Chopraesque friends have lost track of truth. There have been literally billions of genetically engineered crops sold, without one instance of an illness ascribed to them. This is not even to mention that nature itself has been genetically modifying plants for thousands of years, especially if you consider humans a part of nature.

This is now an old argument. I want to introduce a new debate between these two groups, by first posting it here, and letting ideas form before we meet over wine and hydroponic winter melons. The concept is this; consider that we are all material parts of nature, and are either connected through a spiritual force as one group may claim, or through common elements as the other would claim. I think that no matter which philosophical leaning we are talking about, all seem to take some comfort, and understanding in the famous Carl Sagan quote that we are all “star stuff”. This is not just us, but all matter, and all life. So accepting this is not a stretch. Then consider biological sciences as it applies to human medicine. Most of us, all liberal politically, took the decoding of the human genome in 2000 to be a positive advancement, as it would help us not only understand existence better, but potentially cure diseases. We were also shocked and angered by the Bush Administration’s ban on government labs using embryonic stem cells, as the potential for those cells are so great. Just last month, now that Obama has ended this ban, an important study proved that embryonic stem cells injected into specific regions of the brain will create axons which reach a designated target. For example if the cells are placed in the visual cortex, an axon will grow to reach the optic nerve, potentially making the blind able to see again. This has been demonstrated in mice. Since axons can be so long that they can reach to the base of the spinal cord, this could one day be used for spinal cord injury. Paraplegics could walk again. Though this may be a while, it is on a testing regime that leaves many doctors and scientists hopeful. I would doubt that any of my friends would not be thrilled by this. Actually, the Chopra crowd also tends to fall into the old conservative jab of being “bleeding hearts”. This is likely the reason they are my friends. I want friends with empathy and compassion. So, stem cell research is a genetic engineering that we can all agree on. Which then gets me to what I would consider a double standard. If all life is connected, why is genetic engineering good enough for people, but not for plants? This seems surprising for two reasons. It is Genetic Engineered foods that will feed starving parts of the world. This should appeal to us bleeding hearts. It also makes for stronger crops, the way we are trying to make for stronger humans.