Sunday, September 15, 2013

 

posted by Sastry Rama 8:27 AM

Thursday, November 01, 2012

 

willpower - rediscovering the greatest human strength 2011 book
[Intro Chapter in Google Docs and http://dotheknowledge.com/downloads/willpower.pdf]
http://www2.lse.ac.uk/publicEvents/events/2012/01/20120124t1830vSZT.aspx
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/04/books/review/willpower-by-roy-f-baumeister-and-john-tierney-book-review.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

From pg. 17 "Why Will Yourself to Read This?" section of Introduction
"The result, after dozens of experiments in Baumeister’s lab and hundreds elsewhere, is a new understanding of willpower and of the self. We want to tell you what’s been learned about human behavior, and how you can use it to change yourself for the better. Acquiring  self-control isn’t as magically simple as the techniques in modern self-help books, but neither does it have to be as grim as the Victorians made it out to be. Ultimately, self-control lets you relax because it removes stress and enables you to conserve willpower for the important challenges. We’re confident that this book’s lessons can make your life not just more productive and fullling but also easier and happier. And we can guarantee that you will not have to endure any sermons against bare ankles."

posted by Sastry Rama 3:25 PM

 

Self-Control Relies on Glucose as a Limited Energy Source: Willpower Is More Than a Metaphor
[Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2007, Vol. 92, No. 2, 325–336]
Abstract:

The present work suggests that self-control relies on glucose as a limited energy source. Laboratory tests
of self-control (i.e., the Stroop task, thought suppression, emotion regulation, attention control) and of
social behaviors (i.e., helping behavior, coping with thoughts of death, stifling prejudice during an
interracial interaction) showed that (a) acts of self-control reduced blood glucose levels, (b) low levels
of blood glucose after an initial self-control task predicted poor performance on a subsequent self-control
task, and (c) initial acts of self-control impaired performance on subsequent self-control tasks, but
consuming a glucose drink eliminated these impairments. Self-control requires a certain amount of
glucose to operate unimpaired. A single act of self-control causes glucose to drop below optimal levels,
thereby impairing subsequent attempts at self-control.

[also saved in Google Docs]

posted by Sastry Rama 3:15 PM

 

The pursuit of meaningfulness in life.

Baumeister, Roy F.; Vohs, Kathleen D.

Snyder, C. R. (Ed); Lopez, Shane J. (Ed), (2002). Handbook of positive psychology., (pp. 608-618). New York, NY, US: Oxford University Press, xviii, 829 pp.

Abstract

1. Human beings begin life as animals and remain tied throughout life to natural cycles of birth and death, eating and sleeping, reproduction, danger and safety, and more. Yet to this natural dimension of human life must be added a cultural one. Humans use their thinking capacity to transcend their immediate environment and their natural urges and responses. Thinking usually involves meaning, as in the use of language, symbols, and connections between concepts. The authors discuss the pursuit of the meaningfulness in life. The aim of positive psychology is to catalyze change in psychology from a preoccupation only with repairing the worst things in life to also building the best qualities in life. The field of positive psychology at the subjective level is about positive subjective experience: well-being and satisfaction (past); flow, joy, the sensual pleasures, and happiness (present); and constructive cognitions about the future--optimism, hope, and faith. 

[copy in Google Docs - Chap. 44 of Handbook]

posted by Sastry Rama 3:10 PM

 

Notes from "Understanding the Search for Meaning in Life: Personality, Cognitive Style, and the Dynamic Between Seeking and Experiencing Meaning"

Journal of Personality 76:2, April 2008
DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-6494.2007.00484.x

Michael F. Steger,1 Todd B. Kashdan,2
Brandon A. Sullivan,3 and Danielle Lorentz3
1University of Louisville
2George Mason University
3University of Minnesota

[Source: http://itari.in/categories/higherpurpose/understanding_the%20_search.pdf  ; also a copy in Google Docs]

posted by Sastry Rama 3:07 PM

Wednesday, March 10, 2010

 
भक्त्या मामभिजानाति यावान्यश्चास्मि तत्त्वतः।

ततो मां तत्त्वतो ज्ञात्वा विशते तदनन्तरम्।।18.55

[Source: Gita Supersite http://202.3.77.102/acquia/?q=node/20]
posted by Sastry Rama 8:27 PM

Thursday, February 18, 2010

 

Prof Jonardon Ganeri has published a work on conceptions of self in Indian ethics and epistemology, The Concealed Art of the Soul (Oxford University Press 2007) [here]. The book argues for a performativist conception of self.

"The startling idea of the Hindu Vedantins, again, is that the way out of colossal error is to embed within the illusion the catalyst of its own destruction. The Upanisad is a ‘Trojan text’, a false gift that will blow up in the mind of its recipient, destroying the error of which it too is a part. It is a false vehicle with a true content.
posted by Sastry Rama 1:37 PM

Thursday, January 14, 2010

 
"Happiness for Aristotle is not an inward disposition that might then issue in certain actions, but a way of acting which creates certain dispositions."
[Source: Pg. 84, "The Meaning of Life: A Very Short Introduction" by Terry Eagleton]

posted by Sastry Rama 7:10 PM

Wednesday, January 06, 2010

 

Apologetics is the whole of the consensus of the views of those who defend a position in an argument of long standing. The term comes from the Greek word apologia (απολογία), meaning a speaking in defense.

Early Christian writers (c 120-220) who defended their faith against critics and recommended their faith to outsiders were called apologists



posted by Sastry Rama 6:44 PM

Tuesday, January 05, 2010

 
"the great seventeenth-century philosopher-scientist René Descartes is often said to have banished teleology from science. He envisaged a unified style of explanation based ultimately on the universal laws of mathematical physics that governed the behaviour of all natural phenomena, celestial and terrestrial alike. There was no room for any irreducible purposiveness or goal-seeking deep down in nature.The job of the scientist was to subsume all observable events under the relevant mathematical covering laws; and in respect of these ultimate laws there was no attainable answer to the question ‘why?’ One could say – and Descartes did say – that God had decreed that it should be so; but he immediately added that the rationale for God’s decrees was not for human scientists to discover: it was ‘forever locked up in the inscrutable abyss of His wisdom’. David Hume, writing a century after Descartes, took an essentially parallel line, though couched in entirely secular language: the job of science was to map the observable natural world, but any supposed ‘ultimate springs and principles’ of nature were beyond human power to fathom."

"Belief in God, according to Freud’s view in Civilisation and its Discontents, is based on an infantile response: the terrifying ‘feeling of helplessness’ in childhood aroused the ‘need for protection’ – for protection through love – which was provided by the father; and the recognition that this helplessness lasts throughout life made it necessary to cling to the existence of a Father, but this time a more powerful one. This Freudian diagnosis has been highly influential, and can often be seen as informing the idea, voiced by many contemporary atheists, that God is merely a projection formed in response to our human insecurities. But there are at least two problems with this way of dismissing the religious impulse. ..."

[Source: "On the Meaning of Life" by John Cottingham]

living grudgingly vs. living gratefully
posted by Sastry Rama 5:21 PM