#discovery versus evolutionary psychology

[mcm-curiosity]

What can rodents teach us about empathy?

Current Opinion in Psychology

Volume 24, December 2018, Pages 15-20

Ksenia Meyza and Ewelina Knapska

Highlights

• Sharing emotions is evolutionarily conserved and common for many species, including rodents.

• Several rodent behavioral paradigms model simple forms of empathy and prosocial behaviors.

• Animal studies provide an insight into the network of brain structures involved in emotional contagion and prosocial behavior.

While many consider empathy an exclusively human trait, non-human animals are capable of simple forms of empathy, such as emotional contagion, as well as consolation and helping behavior. Rodent models are particularly useful for describing the neuronal background of these phenomena. They offer the possibility of employing single-cell resolution mapping of the neuronal activity as well as novel techniques for manipulation of in vivo activity, which are currently unavailable in human studies. Here, we review recent developments in the field of rodent empathy research with special emphasis on behavioral paradigms and data on neuronal correlates of emotional contagion. We hope that the use of rodent models will enhance our understanding of social deficits in neuropsychiatric disorders characterized with empathy impairments and the evolutionary continuity of the empathic trait.

Current Opinion in Psychology 2018, 24:15–20

This review comes from a themed issue on Social neuroscience

Edited by David Amodio and Christian Keysers

For a complete overview see the Issue and the Editorial

Available online 13th March 2018

https://doi-org.unr.idm.oclc.org/10.1016/j.copsyc.2018.03.002

2352-250X/© 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Defining empathy

We usually think of empathy as an ability to take perspective of another human being, ‘put ourselves in his/her shoes’, which allows for understanding of how others feel. This definition centers our thinking about empathy on cognitive rather than emotional capabilities. But to feel into another's situation we need an emotional connection. Impaired ability to share affect through facial expressions and eye contact is at the core of social deficits observed in autistic patients and can explain their difficulties in taking another person's perspective [1, 2]. The sharing of affect (i.e. moods and emotions) occurs very frequently and is an important aspect of social life. People share these states with others through emotional contagion, which improves intragroup communication and facilitates group bonding [3, 4]. Even though emotional contagion is relatively automatic and unintentional, spread of shared affect can be modulated by many external and internal factors, including our previous experience, contextual cues and/or individual differences (for review see [5]). With that many interacting factors, our understanding of how they influence our empathic behavior depends on our knowledge on how the brain integrates such complex information.

To decipher how our brains are wired for these difficult tasks, we need to break empathy down into more fundamental processes. The most influential theory describing the complexity of empathy has been proposed by Stephanie Preston and Frans de Waal [6]. Their Perception-Action model states that, at the simplest level, empathy is a capacity to be affected by and to share the emotional state of another individual. Perception of such emotional state automatically activates shared representations and evokes a matching emotional state in the observer. This process has been described in many mammals (or more precisely Amniote species [5, 7, 8, 9]), not only in humans. According to Preston and de Waal, with increasing cognition, the emotional core of state-matching evolved into more complex forms, including concern for the other and perspective-taking. This theory, though not thoroughly tested yet, encourages further studies of the evolutionary roots of empathy. In his work with monkeys, apes, and elephants, de Waal has found many cases of emotional responses to the distress of others [10], which suggests a deep-rooted propensity for feeling the emotions of another individual in these species. Empathy-driven prosocial behaviors, such as consolation or helping also were, until recently, considered to be restricted to humans and great apes. Consolation, however, has been recently observed also in dogs [11] and prairie voles, a highly social and monogamous rodent species [12•]. Together with rat helping behavior ([13, 14, 15, 16] but see also [17, 18]), they strongly point toward evolutionary continuity of both empathy and its prosocial outcomes.

Animal models

Emotional contagion

The discoveries which showed that rodents are able to sense what their fellow rodents are experiencing opened the way to study the brain mechanisms underlying social sharing of emotions. To explore the biological mechanisms underlying empathic behavior simple animal models are needed. Such models, in which rats or mice receive emotional information from their conspecifics, allow the role of precisely defined neuronal pathways involved in emotional sharing to be studied. Being in tune with each other can be studied using several behavioral paradigms. Most prominent of these paradigms include: immediate and remote fear transfer, fear learning by proxy and exposure to a conspecific in pain (Figure 1). With the use of these models, it was demonstrated that rodents can experience emotional contagion both during direct observation of an adverse event (e.g. a footshock administered to the paws of a conspecific) [19] and during exposure to a stressed cagemate in the safe environment of the home cage [20, 21]. Such phenomenon was also observed in a ‘Fear-by-Proxy’ paradigm, where information about the stressor is transmitted to a cagemate during exposure of the demonstrator to a stimulus (tone) previously associated with a shock [22]. State-matching was also observed in rats cohabiting a cage with an animal repeatedly exposed to social defeat [23•]. Studies exploring shared pain experiences confirmed that rodents display increased pain sensitivity in the company of an animal in pain [24, 25].

...image removed...

Prosocial behaviors

Rats display prosocial approach, helping and consoling behaviors toward distressed cagemates [13, 16, 26]. They also can act cooperatively, especially if they have benefited from a similar behavior before [14, 15]. The paradigms exploring these behaviors (Figure 2) include: instrumental cooperative task [14, 15], freeing a restrained individual [13] and rescuing a soaked conspecific [16]. Even given choice between highly palatable food and freeing a cagemate, rats choose to act altruistically and often later share the food with the freed animal [13]. The exact motivation for helping another individual is, however, still heavily debated [17, 18].

...image removed...

Social Buffering

The experimental paradigms described above, for the most part, employed emotional transfer from the stressed to the non-stressed animal. However, sharing emotions has also an interesting consequence for the stressed individual. The presence of a conspecific, especially a familiar/friendly one [27], reduces stress levels, attenuates behavioral arousal (e.g. freezing response to a fearful stimulation) and expedites recovery from trauma. The phenomenon, dubbed ‘social buffering’, has been studied in depth by Yasushi Kiyokawa and collaborators (for review see [28]). They found that the behavioral outcome depends on the type and timing of the interaction (i.e. pair-exposure to the stressor versus pair-housing after the shock) and that the main modality responsible for the effect is olfaction.

Neuronal correlates of empathy

Animal studies provided an insight into the network of brain structures involved in emotional contagion and the underlying neural mechanisms. Animal models offer the possibility of blocking selected brain structures, changing the level of neurotransmitters and observing or inducing changes in synaptic plasticity. Very few of these approaches can be employed in human studies [29]. In mice, however, inactivation of neurons within the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) or only of a specific ion channel (the Cav1.2 Ca2+ channel), which contributes to synaptic transmission and neuronal excitability in this structure, led to impairments of observational fear learning [30]. Interestingly, inactivation of this structure did not disrupt fear memory retrieval and classical fear conditioning. On the other hand, inactivation of the lateral amygdala resulted in deficits in both classical and observational fear. Using unilateral inactivation as well as electrical stimulation of the ACC, Kim et al. showed that observational fear learning depends on the activation of the right but not the left ACC [31]. Further, it has been shown that observational fear learning relies on dopamine D2 receptors and the amount of serotonin neurotransmitter in the ACC [32]. Using the model of fear conditioning by proxy, Jones and Monfils [33] confirmed that social fear transmission shares certain neuronal pathways with direct fear learning (such as the activation of the lateral amygdala), but also involves other regions, such as the ACC...removed... Further, bilateral lesions of the prefrontal cortex (but not of the amygdala or the entorhinal cortex) were sufficient for inhibition of pain empathy in rats [36], governed by the noradrenergic input from locus coeruleus to the dorsal root ganglia [37]. The abovementioned inactivation studies point to the involvement of the ACC, dmPFC and the amygdala in fear and pain contagion.

Aside from specific inactivation of selected brain structures or manipulation of neurotransmitter levels, the animal models enable mapping of the activity of the brain with single-cell resolution, which is not possible in human imaging studies (except for very few clinical cases of pre-surgery monitoring of brain activity). For instance, such detailed mapping showed functional heterogeneity of the amygdala ...removed... However, the pattern of activation in the demonstrators and observers was different, pointing to a distinct neural mechanism involved in acquisition of direct and socially transmitted fear. Much less is known about neuronal mechanisms underlying prosocial behaviors. The importance of the amygdala in the shaping of prosocial responses was recently demonstrated. A lesion of the basolateral nucleus of amygdala was shown to impair the expression of mutual reward preferences in the Prosocial Choice Task [42]. Although an emotional response is a central component of empathy, mere contagion of affect is not sufficient to induce prosocial behavior...removed...

Modulators of empathy

Animal models enable and encourage a systematic study of factors influencing emotional contagion. Similar to humans, emotional contagion in rodents is heavily influenced by familiarity. Rodents, just like humans, are more likely to experience shared emotions and exhibit prosocial behaviors such as help or consolation toward familiar individuals (cagemates, siblings, partners in monogamic species [12•, 43]), Reduced anxiety conditions help ‘stranger’ mice develop pain empathy [44], but at the same time, they impair helping behavior toward a restrained rat [45]. Similar previous experience also facilitates the development of shared emotional state. Rats that have previously experienced, for example, footshocks [46] or pain [47] show stronger responses to observed aversive stimulation. In-group membership and previous social experience, rather than resemblance to another member of the same rat strain are also important for the initiation of helping behavior [48]. So are housing conditions during adolescence (single versus group) for the development of empathic skills [49, 50, 51] as well as dominance structure within the given group of animals [33]. Most of the studies discussed here are based on a single exposure to a stressed cagemate. However, some studies show that chronic exposure changes behavioral responding, increasing anxiety, pain nociception, and altering mouse defensive responses to a rat [52].

One of the possible mechanisms of social behaviors modulation is through so-called social hormones, oxytocin and arginine vasopressin, which have been shown to affect a wide range of behaviors, including pair bonding, in-group and out-group relationships, social communication, and social stress response (for review see [53]). Most of the studies till now have been focused on oxytocin, which as a neuropeptide with profound prosocial effects, has a clinical potential. Animal models allow us to study the mechanisms underlying effects of oxytocin supplementation and inhibition. The administration of exogenous oxytocin, however, often produces contradictory results. A recent study by Pisansky and colleagues [54•] showed that intranasal oxytocin (both acute and chronic) increases freezing in response to a stressed unfamiliar mouse. Similar effect was observed upon chemogenetic activation of oxytocinergic neurons. At the same time, systemic administration of an oxytocin receptor antagonist impaired fear acquisition from familiar individuals [54•]. On the other hand, chronic intranasal oxytocin impairs sociability of B6 mice [55], fails to improve sociability of the BTBR mice [56] and results in deficient pair bonding in prairie voles [57]. The discrepancies may stem from different behavioral protocols and oxytocin doses but also from different roles of oxytocin in distinct brain regions involved in specific behaviors, for example, oxytocin in the central nucleus of the amygdala reduces fear [58], whereas in the septum it has an opposite effect [59]. Thus further studies of brain-specific oxytocin effects are well justified and needed. Such structure-specific manipulation has shown that rat pups learned fear responses from their mothers, only if oxytocin neurotransmission in the central nucleus of the amygdala was intact [60•]. On the other hand, infusion of oxytocin receptor inhibitor within the ACC abolished empathic prosocial responses in prairie voles [12•]. In sum, to fully understand the complex, region-specific and behavior-specific mechanisms behind oxytocin modulation of social behaviors further studies are required.

Lastly, there are several reports on distinct strains of rodents (mostly mice) that differ from one another in empathic responsiveness [21, 61, 62•]. This variability makes mouse models of empathy especially suited for studying the genetic background of propensity for empathy. First studies exploring the emotional contagion in mouse models of autism spectrum disorder showed decreased responsiveness in an idiopathic model (the BTBR mouse [21]) and increased stereotypy in the Fragile X syndrome model mice (Fmr1KO/FVB, in prep.) upon exposure to a stressed cagemate. An elevated emotional contagion was also observed in a mouse model of Alzheimer's disease, in which it was linked to increased network synchrony between the anterior insula and basolateral amygdala [63]. Further studies are, however, needed to fully explore this subject.

Summary

Rodent models of empathy have become an indispensable tool of contemporary neuroscience. New techniques of imagining and manipulating neuronal circuits with singe-cell resolution allow for very detailed, mechanistic insight into the brain mechanisms underlying empathy. In contrast, current neuroimaging techniques used in human or primate studies provide data with spatial and temporal resolution too low for studying specific circuits, often residing within the same brain structure. In rodents, such information becomes available through a combined use of chemogenetic or optogenetic tools along with modern in vivo imaging techniques, such as the frame-projected independent fiber-photometry imaging based on genetically encoded calcium indicators [64]. Such methods offer single-cell precision required to disentangle mechanisms underlying emotional contagion and prosocial behaviors and shed some light on their relationship. The genetic diversity of mouse and rat strains also allows for in depth studies of individual differences in empathic abilities, which at both ends of spectrum can be associated with neurodevelopmental disabilities. This opens rodent empathy research field for preclinical testing of drugs aiming at improving social deficits in these conditions. Further, thanks to a fast maturation time, rodents constitute a highly practical model for studying the ontogeny of empathic abilities. Special emphasis should be laid here on early behavioral therapy, its effect on the neuronal circuits involved and the long-lasting effects of such intervention. One should, however, bear in mind that the rapid technological progress in the development of rodent models poses a new challenge for the translatability of the results obtained with these models. This issue is bound to become an interesting research topic in the near future.

Conflict of interest statement

Nothing declared.

References and recommended reading

Papers of particular interest, published within the period of review, have been highlighted as:

• of special interest

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the European Research Council Starting Grant (H715148) to E.K. and the Polish National Science Center [grant number 2015/18/E/NZ4/00600] to K.M.

[penurnbra]

here’s the fuckton of articles from the Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts that I obsessively gathered + organized during last night’s sleep deprived, caffeine driven, depressive episode

Vol. 1

No. 1 (1988)

ARTICLES

JOURNAL OF THE FANTASTIC IN THE ARTS (JFA): Purpose

EDITORIAL COMMENTS

Was Zilla Right?: Fantasy and Truth

Children of a Darker God: A Taxonomy of Deep Horror Fiction and Film and Their Mass Popularity

The Artifact as Icon in Science Fiction

The Birth of a Fantastic World: C. S. Lewis's "The Magician's Nephew"

Fantasy's Reconstruction of Narrative Conventions

Postmodern Narrative and the Limits of Fantasy

No. 2 (1988)

ARTICLES

CRITICS IN THE GULAG

Decadence and Anguish: Edgar Allan Poe's Influence On Réjean Ducharme

Mervyn Peake: The Relativity of Perception

Nature's Nightmare: The Inner World Of Hauptmann's "Flagman Thiel"

"Tel art plus divin que humain": The Reality of Fantasy In Ronsard's Poetic Practice

Transvestites and Transformations, Or Take It Off and Get Real: Queneau's "Zazie dans le métro"

Structural and Psychological Aspects Of the Spider Woman Symbol In "Kiss of the Spider Woman"

REVIEWS

Snobbery, Seasoned with Bile, Clute Is (Strokes: Essays and Reviews 1966-1986, John Clute, Thomas M. Disch)

No. 3 (1988)

ARTICLES

Introduction: Beagle and Ellison: A Special Issue

The Wind Took Your Answer Away

The Fractured Whole: The Fictional World Of Harlan Ellison

The Ellison Personae: Author, Storyteller, Narrator

Symbolic Settings In Science Fiction: H. G. Wells, Ray Bradbury, and Harlan Ellison

Humankind and Reality: Illusion and Self-Deception In Peter S. Beagle's Fiction

Two Forms of Metafantasy

The Alchemy of Love In "A Fine and Private Place"

Fantastic Tropes In "The Folk of the Air"

No. 4 (1988)

ARTICLES

Overture: What Was Postmodernism?

The Decentered Absolute: Significance in the Postmodern Fantastic

Putting a Red Nose on the Text: Play and Performance In the Postmodern Fantastic

Theater for the Fin-du-Millennium: Playing (at) the End

De/Reconstructing the "I": PostFANTASTICmodernist Poetry

There's No Place Like Home: Simulating Postmodern America in "The Wizard of Oz" and "Blue Velvet"

Fictional Cultures in Postmodern Art

Deconstructing Deconstruction: Chimeras of Form and Content in Samuel R. Delany

Millhauser, Süskind, and the Postmodern Promise

Coda: Criticism in the Age of Borges

Vol. 2

No. 1 (1989)

ARTICLES

Phoenix Rising: Like Dracula from the Grave

The Vampire

Rising Like Old Corpses: Stephen King and the Horrors of Time-Past

Tanith Lee's Werewolves Within: Reversals of Gothic Traditions

Loving Death: The Meaning of Male Sexual Impotence in Vampire Literature

From Pathos To Tragedy: The Two Versions of The Fly

An Appreciation: Virgil Finlay

Courteous, Humble and Helpful: Sam as Squire in Lord of the Rings

Genetic Experimentation: Mad Scientists and The Beast

Native Sons: Regionalism in the Work of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Stephen King

The Femivore: An Unnamed Archetype

No. 2 (1989)

ARTICLES

From Trickery to Discovery: Old, New, and Nonexistent Trajectories of Science Fiction Film

The JFA Forum on SF Film

The Cybernetic (City) State: Terminal Space Becomes Phenomenal

Murray Tinkleman: An Appreciation

Video, Science Fiction, and the Cinema of Surveillance

Science-Fiction and Fantasy Film Criticism: The Case of Lucas and Spielberg

But Not the Blackness of Space: "The Brother From Another Planet" as Icon from the Underground

REVIEWS

'Weirdies' Point the Way (Teenagers and Teenpics: The Juvenilization of American Movies in the 1950s, Thomas Doherty)

Nirvana for Sleaze-lovers (Revenge of the Creature Features Movie Guide, revised by John Stanley)

Vol. 4

No. 2 (1992)

ARTICLES

"Poof! Now You See Me, Now You Don't"

Interpolation and Invisibility: From Herodotus to Cervantes's Don Quixote

Rings, Belts, and a Bird's Nest: Invisibility in German Literature

"Spells of Darkness": Invisibility in The White Witch of Rosehall

"Seeing" Invisibility: Or Invisibility as Metaphor in Thomas Berger's Being Invisible

Vol. 5

No. 1 (1992)

ARTICLES

The Craving for Meaning: Explicit Allegory in the Non-Implicit Age

Recent Trends in the Contemporary American Fairy Tale

The New Age Mage: Merlin as Contemporary Occult Icon

Dualism and Mirror Imagery in Anglo-Saxon Riddles

Vol. 6

No. 1 (1993; Special Issue: Richard Adams' "Watership Down")

ARTICLES

Introduction

The Significance of Myth in "Watership Down"

Shaping Self Through Spontaneous Oral Narration in Richard Adams' "Watership Down"

Shamanistic Mythmaking: From Civilization to Wilderness in "Watership Down"

Saturnalia and Sanctuary: The Role of the Tale in "Watership Down"

"Watership Down": A Genre Study

The Efrafan Hunt for Immortality in Richard Adam's "Watership Down"

No. 4 (1995)

ARTICLES

The Artisan in Modern Fantasy

The Symbolic versus the Fantastic: The Example of an Hungarian Painter

1920's Yellow Peril Science Fiction: Political Appropriations of the Asian Racial "Alien"

Religious Satire in Rushdie's "Satanic Verses"

Magic or Make-believe? Acquiring The COnventions of Witches and Witchcraft

REVIEWS

Encyclopedia Worth Waiting For (The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, John Clute, Peter Nicholls)

Fresh Approach to Nineteenth Century Science Fiction (Science Fiction Before 1900: Imagination Discovers Technology, Paul K. Alkon)

The Play of the Critic (Staging the Impossible: The Fantastic Mode in Modern Drama, Patrick D. Murphy)

Vol. 10

No. 1 (1998)

ARTICLES

Editor's Introduction

Stasis and Chaos: Some Dynamics of Popular Genres

Lois McMaster Bujold: Feminism and "The Gernsback Continuum" In Recent Woman's SF

"Who Am I, Really?" Myths of Maturation in Lois McMaster Bujold's Vorkosigan Series

Asimov's Crusade Against Bigotry: The Persistence of Prejudice as a Fractal Motif in the Robot/Empire/Foundation Metaseries

When Coyote Leaves the Res: Incarnations of the Trickster from Wile E. to Le Guin

Kurt Vonnegut's Fantastic Faces

Celtic Myth and English-Language Fantasy Literature: Possible New Directions

No. 2 (1999; A Century of Draculas)  

ARTICLES

Introduction

A Century of Draculas

High Duty and Savage Delight: The Ambiguous Nature of Violence in "Dracula"

Bram Stoker and the London Stage

"If I had to write with a pen": Readership and Bram Stoker's Diary Narrative

Closure and Power in "Salem's Lot"

The Image of the Vampire in the Struggle for Societal Power: Dan Simmons' "Children of the Night"

Not All Fangs Are Phallic: Female Film Vampires

Madame Dracula: The Life of Emily Gerard

Back to the Basics: Re-Examining Stoker's Sources for "Dracula"

No. 4 (2000)

ARTICLES

Muggling On

Grail, Groundhog, Godgame: Or, Doing Fantasy

Something Hungry This Way Comes: Terrestrial and Ex-Terrestrial Feline Feeding Patterns and Behavior

Technology, Technophobia and Gynophobia in Gonzalo Torrente Ballesteas "Quizá nos lleve el viento al infinito"

Ready or Not, Here We Come: Metaphors of the Martian Megatext from Wells to Robinson

Bringing Chaos to Order. Vonnegut Criticism at Century's End

Resources for the Study of American Fantasy Literature Through 1998

REVIEWS

Strange Constellations: A History of Australian Science Fiction, Russell Blackford, Russell Van Ikin, Sean McMullen

Edgar Allan Poe: Comprehensive Research and Study Guide, Harold Bloom

Warlocks and Warpdrive: Contemporary Fantasy Entertainments with Interactive and Virtual Environments, Kurt Lancaster

Nursery Realms: Children in the Worlds of Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror, Gary Westfahl, George Slusser

Science Fiction Writers: Critical Studies of the Major Authors from the Early Nineteenth Century to the Present Day, Richard Bleiler

Vol. 11

No. 4 (2001)

ARTICLES

When the Hungarian Literary Theorist, Györgyi Lukács Met The American Science Fiction Writer, Wayne Mark Chapman

Cultural Negotiation in Science Fiction Literature and Film

Episteme-ology of Science Fiction

Orchids in A Cage: Political Myths and Social Reality in East German Science Fiction (1949-1989)

Virtual Poltergeists and Memory: The Question of Ahistorcism in William Gibson's Neuromoncer(1984)

The Search for a Quantum Ethics: Michael Frayn's "Copenhagen" and Other Recent British Science Plays

Leakings: Reappropriating Science Fiction--The Case of Kurt Vonnegut

REVIEWS

Darwin's Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot, and Nineteenth-Century Fiction, Gillian Beer

Space and Beyond: The Frontier Theme in Science Fiction, Gary Westfahl

The Rise of Supernatural Fiction: 1762-1800. Cambridge Studies in Romanticism, E.J. Clery

Thrillers. "Genres in American Cinema" series, Martin Rubin

Othermindedness: The Emergence of Network Culture, Michael Joyce

A Century of Welsh Myth in Children's Literature, Donna White

That Other World. (The Princess Grace Irish Library), Bruce Stewart

Edgar Rice Burroughs: The Exhaustive Scholar's and Collector's Descriptive Bibliography of American Periodical, Hardcover, Paperback, and Reprint Editions, Robert B. Zeuschner, Philip José Farmer; The Burroughs Cyclopaedia: Characters, Places, Fauna, Flora, Technologies, Languages, Ideas and Terminologies Found in the Works of Edgar Rice Burroughs, Clark A. Brady

Italian Horror Films of the 1960s: A Critical Catalog of 62 Chillers, Lawrence McCallum

Vol. 14

No. 4 (2004)

ARTICLES

On Editing a Journal

"Hiro" of the Platonic: Neal Stephenson's "Snow Crash"

Suicide and the Absurd: The Influence of Jean-Paul Sartre's and Albert Camus's Existentiafism on Stephen R. Donaldson's "The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever"

The Monomyth in Daniel Keyes's "Flowers for Algernon": Keyes, Campbell and Plato

Writing the Possessed Child in British Culture: James Herbert's "Shrine"

Disney World: A Plastic Monument to Death: From Rabelais to Disney

REVIEWS

Uncharted Territory: An Unofficial and Unauthorized Guide to Farscape, Scott Andrews

The Artist as Monster: The Cinema of David Cronenberg, William Beard; The Modern Fantastic: The Films of David Cronenberg, Michael Grant

Tomorrow Now: Envisioning the Next Fifty Years, Bruce Sterling

Monsters, Mushroom Clouds, and the Cold War: American Science Fiction and the Roots of Postmodernism, 1946-1964, M. Keith Booker

Harlan Ellison: The Edge of Forever, Gary K. Wolfe, Ellen Weil

One Ring to Bind them All: Tolkien's Mythology, Anne C. Petty; Tolkien's Ordinary Virtues: Exploring the Spitirtual Virtues of Lord of the Rings, Mark Eddy Smith; Frodo's Quest: Living the Myth in The Lord of the Rings, Robert Ellwood

Chaos Theory, Asimov's Foundations and Robots, and Herbert's Dune: The Fractal Aesthetic of Epic Science Fiction, Donald E. Palumbo

The Classic Era of American Pulp Magazines, Peter Haining

Vol. 25

No. 1 (2014)

ARTICLES

Introduction: Reinhabiting Fantasy

Reading Tolkien in Chinese

Convention Un-done: Un Lun Dun's Unchosen Heroine and Narrative (Re)Vision

"But what does it all mean?" Religious Reality as a Political Call in the Chronicles of Narnia

Telepathy and Cosmic Horror in Olaf Stapledon's "The Flames"

"I was a Ghetto Nerd Supreme": Science Fiction, Fantasy and Latina/o Futurity in Junot Díaz's "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao"

REVIEWS

St. Lovecraft (The Classic Horror Stories, Roger Luckhurst, H. P. Lovecraft; Weird Realism: Lovecraft and Philosophy, Graham Harman; Slime Dynamics: Generation, Mutation, and the Creep of Life, Ben Woodard; New Critical Essays on H.P. Lovecraft, David Simmons; H. P. Lovecraft's Dark Arcadia: The Satire, Symbology and Contradiction, Gavin Callaghan)

The Hobbit and Philosophy: For When You've Lost Your Dwarves, Your Wizard, And Your Way, Gregory Basham, Eric Bronson

Collision of Realities. Establishing Research on the Fantastic in Europe, Lars Schmeink, Astrid Böger (X)(X)

Hermione Granger Saves the World: Essays on the Feminist Heroine of Hogwarts, Christopher E. Bell

Horror Noir: Where Cinema's Dark Sisters Meet, Paul Meehan

The Mummy's Curse: The True History of a Dark Fantasy, Roger Luckhurst

Scottish Women's Gothic and Fantastic Writing: Fiction since 1978, Monica Germaná

The Irresistible Fairy Tale: The Cultural and Social History of a Genre, Jack Zipes

Mutants and Mystics: Science Fiction, Superhero Comics, and the Paranormal, Jeffrey J. Kripal

Philip K. Dick and Philosophy: Do Androids Have Kindred Spirits?, D. E. Wittkower

Animal Alterity: Science Fiction and the Question of the Animal, Sherryl Vint

Anime's Media Mix: Franchising Toys and Characters in Japan, Marc Steinberg

The Ghost Story 1840-1920: A Cultural History, Andrew Smith

Fairy Tales Framed: Early Forewords, Afterwords, and Critical Words, Ruth B. Bottigheimer

The Time Ship: A Chrononautical Journey, Enrique Gaspar, Yolanda Molina-Gavilán, Andrea L. Bell

Future Wars: The Anticipations and the Fears, David Seed

The Horror Sensorium: Media and the Senses, Angela Ndalianis

Inception and Philosophy: Ideas to Die For, Thorsten Botz-Bornstein

Antarctica in Fiction: Imaginative Narratives of the Far South, Elizabeth Leane

Green Suns and Faërie: Essays on Tolkien, Verlyn Flieger

No. 2 & 3 (2014)

ARTICLES

Elegy

Introduction: AfterLives: What's Next for Humanity

"Only We Have Perished": Karel Čapek's R.U.R. and the Catastrophe of Humankind

"From Zoo. to Bot.": (De)Composition in Jim Crace's "Being Dead"

Terminal Films

Living as a Zombie in Media is the Only Way to Survive

Zombie Republic: Property and the Propertyless Multitude in Romero's Dead Films and Kirkman's "The Walking Dead"

Thinking Blind

The Loveliness of Decay: Rotting Flesh, Literary Matter, and Dead Media

Post-Vampire: The Politics of Drinking Humans and Animals in "Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Twilight", and "True Blood"

REVIEWS

Cyberpunk Women, Feminism and Science Fiction: A Critical Study, Carlen Lavigne

Under the Shadow: The Atomic Bomb and Cold War Narratives, David Seed

Undead in the West: Vampires, Zombies, Mummies, and Ghosts on the Cinematic Frontier, Cynthia J. Miller, A. Bowdoin Van Riper

Spanish Horror Film, Antonio Lázaro-Reboll

John Brunner, Jad Smith

The Irish Fairy Tale: A Narrative Tradition from the Middle Ages to Yeats and Stephens, Vito Carrassi

Fanged Fan Fiction: Variations on Twilight, True Blood, and The Vampire Diaries, Maria Lindgren Leavenworth, Malin Isaksson

Welsh Gothic, Jane Aaron

Puppet. An Essay on Uncanny Life, Kenneth Gross

The Ashgate Research Companion to Nineteenth-Century Spiritualism and the Occult, Tatiana Kontou, Sarah Willburn

Mechademia 7: Lines of Sight, Frenchy Lunning

Approaching The Hunger Games Trilogy: A Literary and Cultural Analysis, Tom Henthorne; Of Bread, Blood, and The Hunger Games: Critical Essays on the Suzanne Collins Trilogy, Mary F. Pharr, Leisa A. Clark

Dawn of an Evil Millennium: Horror/Kultur im neuen Jahrtausend, Jörg van Bebber

Solar Flares: Science Fiction in the 1970s, Andrew M. Butler

Becoming Ray Bradbury, Jonathan R. Eller

Beyond His Dark Materials: Innocence and Experience in the Fiction of Philip Pullman, Susan Redington Bobby

Postapocalyptic Fiction and the Social Contract: "We'll Not Go Home Again.", Claire P. Curtis

English Catholics and the Supernatural, 1553-1829, Francis Young

The Late Victorian Gothic: Mental Science, the Uncanny, and Scenes of Writing, Hilary Grimes

Bewitched Again: Supernaturally Powerful Women on Television, 1996-2011, Julie D. O'Reilly

A Hobbit Journey: Discovering the Enchantment of J.R.R. Tolkien's Middle-Earth, Matthew Dickerson

Fear and Learning: Essays on the Pedagogy of Horror, Aalya Ahmad, Sean Moreland

Maps of Utopia: H. G. Wells, Modernity, and the End of Culture, Simon J. James

Dancing the Tao: Le Guin and Moral Development, Sandra J. Lindow

The Subversive Harry Potter: Adolescent Rebellion and Containment in the J.K. Rowling Novels, Vandana Saxena

As If: Modern Enchantment and the Literary Prehistory of Virtual Reality, Michael Saler

Enchanting: Beyond Disenchantment, Stephen David Ross

Ces français qui ont écrit demain. Utopie, anticipation et science-fiction au XXe siècle [Those Frenchmen Who Wrote Tomorrow: Utopia, Anticipation and Science Fiction in the Twentieth Century], Natacha Vas-Deyres

The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, James Rose; The Descent, James Marriott

Teaching with Harry Potter, Valerie Estelle Frankel

William Gibson, Gary Westfahl

The Wizard of Oz as American Myth: A Critical Study of Six Versions of the Story, 1900-2007, Alissa Burger

Saw, Benjamin Poole

Scotland as Science Fiction, Caroline McCracken-Flesher

Gothic Music: The Sounds of the Uncanny, Isabella van Elferen

New Directions in the European Fantastic, Sabine Coelsch-Foisner, Sarah Herbe

Fantasy, Art and Life: Essays on George MacDonald, Robert Louis Stevenson and Other Fantasy Writers, William Gray

Extraterrestrials and the American Zeitgeist: Alien Contact Tales Since the 1950s, Aaron John Gulyas

To See the Saw Movies: Essays on Torture Porn and Post-9/11 Horror,  James Aston, John Walliss

Science Fiction, Mark Bould

[hopefulfestivaltastemaker]

July 4, 2021

My roundup of things I have been up to this week. Topics include presidential ratings, Fast Grants, the Internet as a threat multiplier, and birth rates and urban density.

Presidential Rankings

C-Span has a new edition of their polling on presidential rankings.

These rankings are always fun to look at, but I wouldn’t take them too seriously. How does one determine, for instance, if James Monroe or Lyndon Johnson was the better president? Their eras and the challenges they faced were totally different.

Generally the list is not too far from how I would rank them. Lincoln, Washington, and FDR round out the top three, as they should. I would probably put TR and Eisenhower a bit lower, and Harding and Nixon a bit higher, but in no cases by a whole lot.

Some of the movements over time are interesting. Wilson and Jackson have both come under a lot of criticism lately for their records on civil rights and racial issues, and their rankings have dropped a few points, though Wilson at 13th place remains in good shape. Polk and Cleveland have gone down too, but I’m not sure why. Grant looks like the biggest winner over the life of the poll, perhaps as historians focus less on the scandals (which are real but can only be blamed on the president to a limited extent) and more on the accomplishments, such as enforcing Reconstruction and settling the Alabama claim. These shifts say as much about the values of contemporary historians as they do about the presidents they discuss.

I’ve heard as a rule of thumb that it takes at least 25 years before there is enough historical perspective of events for these rankings to make sense. George W. Bush, for instance, has moved from near the bottom (36th place) to near the middle (29th) as the charged partisan atmosphere of the time starts to recede. But even he is still too recent. Donald Trump makes his first appearance on this list, tied with Pierce as the third worst, and I expect that his ranking will also improve as historians have the chance to consider the accomplishments alongside the failures.

The poll also looks at several particular leadership characteristics, such as public persuasion and crisis management, and ranks the presidents by these metrics. It’s interesting how well these rankings correlate with each other, and I confess there are quite a few of them I would have trouble assigning values to (James Monroe is 14th in crisis leadership? What crises were there in his term of office?).

Fast Grants

A few weeks old but I missed it until now, Patrick Collison, Tyler Cowen, and Patrick Hsu wrote up their review of the Fast Grants program. In April 2020, concerned that the traditional granting structure for medical research, for which the NIH is the biggest player in the US, would be too sluggish in light of the COVID emergency, these three set up Fast Grants with the goal of short applications and a 48 hour turnaround for funding.

There are many interesting discoveries here, but what I found particularly interesting were survey results that 32% of Fast Grants recipients said the grant accelerated their work by a few months, and 64% said the research wouldn’t have happened at all.

There is considerable anxiety these days about productivity in science. Trends in productivity, or the amount of progress per researcher, have been moving downward for decades, leading to a Red Queen type of situation where we have to invest more and more into science to maintain the same rate of progress. Why exactly this is happening is unclear; Nintel has some good coverage of the issue. But I think it is very hard to make the case that more science funding is the answer, and the way that we fund science certainly deserves some scrutiny.

Internet as Threat Multiplier

Claire Berlinski wrote a piece recently asserting just that: the way that information and misinformation is disseminated causes damage to the point where misinformation, whose spread is facilitated by recent information technology, should be regarded as an existential risk to humanity alongside nuclear war and bioengineered viruses.

I have to say that this piece bears a number of faults, particularly the overly polemical tone. A few weeks ago, I mentioned a paper finding evidence of more extensive large-scale cooperation in Paleolithic groups than is often given credit for. Claire however asserts that the evolutionary milieu for humans is cooperation in groups not beyond the low hundreds and that modern civilization, with its tendency to create far larger agglomerations, poses an evolutionary mismatch. This is an example of sloppy ideas in pop evolutionary psychology having political implications.

The two weakest links in this argument, though, are the question of whether the problem of misinformation is in fact worse in the last couple decades, and to the extent that it is, whether information technology is to be blamed for the decline. I have doubts about both of these. It doesn’t seem like either of these points are addressed explicitly, let alone well-argued, in the piece.

Despite the criticisms, the most interesting point is the challenge that Claire posed, and intends to take on, to systemically make the pro-vaccine case. Too often the case is a condescending “experts say that ...” or “the established science is ...” without an explanation that a layperson can actually understand.

It reminds me of the point Scott Alexander has made a few times, that in the heady days of the 2000s, debates were ubiquitous across the Internet. Practically every message board had a section dedicated to the tedious “religion versus atheism” debate, as though atheism and fundamentalist Christianity were the only options. Perhaps due to the intractability of this and other debates, persuasion has fallen by the wayside.

Real Climate, founded in 2004, falls into this tradition. The site is run by several climate scientists, with the goal of educating people about the science. There is plenty of room for criticism of site, but it remains a valuable resource for any intelligent layperson who wants to understand climate science. Yet the mission, to persuade and educate, feels as outdated as the styling.

Fertility and Urban Density

There is a new paper out (new to me at least) that goes into some detail about birth rates and urban density.

The paper confirms the generally accepted hypothesis that birth rates fall in settings of high density. The authors consider it very strong evidence that a statistically significant association was found in 111 of 174 countries in the data set. I’ll have to recalibrate what I consider to be strong evidence in the realm of social science. At any rate, this phenomenon has been found in all sorts of creatures, not just humans.

However, this effect is moderated by a number of other variables associated with stress. Fertility tends to be higher in settings with higher homicide rates, more pathogens, more income inequality, and other stressors.

These results are placed into the content of life history theory. The explanation is that in stressful situations, to maximize ones long-term genetic fitness, it is rational to have more children and hope at least some of them prosper. In situations that are more stable, it is rational to have fewer children and invest more effort into insuring each child does well.

I like the explanation in that it is a fairly coherent explanation (not just a description) of decisions about birth rates, but I fail to see how the central point--the fertility/density relationship--fits into this story. Does greater density imply less stress? Or (as seems more likely) are there other factors at work here? For fertility to slow under high density seems like as rational a response as to slow under stability, but rational more for a population than an individual.

I’m not too sure how the results are actionable for policy. But they are interesting.

[incessantlystudying]

Wider Reading ||

The following books are a mixture of texts focusing on science, psychology, and English. I am personally going to be reading some of the books from each of the sections for my own wider reading outside of the classroom. Once I have read any of the books I will do a detailed review of it and whether I recommend it or not. 

Science // focusing on Pharmacy and Medicine: 

• The Selfish Gene - Richard Dawkins || The reader will come away with a clear understanding of kin selection, evolutionary stable strategies, and evolutionary theories of animal behavior. https://www.amazon.co.uk/Selfish-Gene-Anniversary-Landmark-Science/dp/0198788606/ref=pd_lpo_sbs_14_img_0?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=KQNSGNESYN68HTENJ8HX

• Bad Science - Ben Goldacre ||  In this eye-opening book he takes on the MMR hoax and misleading cosmetics ads, acupuncture and homeopathy, vitamins and mankind’s vexed relationship with all manner of ‘toxins’. https://www.amazon.co.uk/d/Books/Bad-Science-Ben-Goldacre/000728487X/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1497205432&sr=1-1&keywords=bad+science

• Advice to a Young Scientist - P.B. Medawar || To those interested in a life in science, Sir Peter Medawar, Nobel laureate, deflates the myths of invincibility, superiority, and genius instead, he demonstrates it is common sense and an inquiring mind that are essential to the scientist's calling. https://www.amazon.co.uk/Advice-Young-Scientist-Foundation-Science/dp/0465000924/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1497205613&sr=1-1&keywords=advice+to+a+young+scientist

• The Checklist Manifesto - Atul Gawande || In this book Gawande explains how checklists can improve care and save lives, as well as benefit many other areas of society, including investing and restaurants. It includes examples of how he’s seen it work and it’s also reader-friendly if you aren’t prepared for lots of medical jargon. https://www.amazon.co.uk/d/Books/Checklist-Manifesto-How-Things-Right-Atul-Gawande/1846683149/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1497205812&sr=1-1&keywords=the+checklist+manifesto

Psychology // do have some scientific background: 

• The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat - Oliver Sacks || Oliver Sacks recounts the stories of patients lost in the bizarre, apparently inescapable world of neurological disorders. These are case studies of people who have lost their memories and with them the greater part of their pasts; who are no longer able to recognize people or common objects; whose limbs have become alien; who are afflicted and yet are gifted with uncanny artistic or mathematical talents. https://www.amazon.co.uk/d/Books/Man-Who-Mistook-His-Wife/0330523627/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1497207099&sr=1-1&keywords=the+man+who+mistook+his+wife+for+a+hat 

• Nature via Nurture - Matt Ridley || Armed with the extraordinary new discoveries about our genes, Ridley turns his attention to the nature versus nurture debate to bring the first popular account of the roots of human behaviour. https://www.amazon.co.uk/d/Books/Nature-Nurture-Genes-experience-makes-Ridley-Paperback/B011T7GLQO/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1497207393&sr=1-3&keywords=nature+via+nurture

• The Language Instict - Steven Pinker || The world's expert on language and mind lucidly explains everything you always wanted to know about language: how it works, how children learn it, how it changes, how the brain computes it, and how it evolved. With deft use of examples of humor and wordplay. https://www.amazon.co.uk/Language-Instinct-How-Mind-Creates/dp/014198077X/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1497207494&sr=1-1&keywords=the+language+instinct

English // some of these books just seem interesting to me: 

• Jane Eyre - Charlotte Brontë || Jane's journey from a troubled childhood to independence - and her turbulent love affair with the enigmatic Mr Rochester - electrified Victorian readers with its narrative power. https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/1847493734/ref=ox_sc_act_title_6?smid=A3P5ROKL5A1OLE&psc=1

• Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen || The pride of high-ranking Mr Darcy and the prejudice of middle-class Elizabeth Bennet conduct an absorbing dance through the rigid social hierarchies of early-nineteenth-century England, with the passion of the two unlikely lovers growing as their union seems ever more improbable. https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/1847493696/ref=ox_sc_act_title_5?smid=A3P5ROKL5A1OLE&psc=1

• Wuthering Heights - Emily Brontë || The tale of Heathcliff and Cathy's ungovernable love and suffering, and the havoc that their passion wreaks on the families of the Earnshaws and the Lintons. https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/1847493211/ref=ox_sc_act_title_3?smid=A3P5ROKL5A1OLE&psc=1

• Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen ||  The story of two Dashwood sisters who embody the conflict between the oppressive nature of 'civilised' society and the human desire for romantic passion. However, there is far more to this story of two daughters made homeless by the death of their father. https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/1847494846/ref=ox_sc_act_title_2?smid=A3P5ROKL5A1OLE&psc=1 

(in class we are also reading The Lovely Bones, A Streetcar Named Desire and The Great Gatsby)

If you have bought any of these books and have posted about them on tumblr, please don’t hesitate to tag me in them, it would be highly appreciated. And if you have any more recommendations that I can add to this list, do leave them in the comments section. Like I have said before, if you do want reviews of the books that I will buy, do let me know!! 

- mariah x

[darkbeacon]

Megapolisomancy Revealed

Megapolisomancy Revealed

In 1978 Fritz Leiber published “Our Lady of Darkness” which was received as a horror fantasy novel. The story unfolds around Leiber’s fictional hero, Franz Westen, who encounters the mysterious occult technology called Megapolisomancy – the ‘new science’, magic, and prophecy of super-cities created by Thibaut de Castries.   Westen has found an old journal of (the real author) Clark Ashton Smith attached to a ‘gracelessly printed’ tome entitled ‘Megapolisomancy’.   

The story oft references M. R. James’ ghost stories with quotes and symbolism, and Leiber himself noted that the story started out as a ‘short Jamesian horror story and just grew’.   As the story unfolds, HP Lovecraft, Ambrose Bierce, Dashiell Hammett, Jack London, and the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn – all real entities – are also invoked in the swirling tale about the strange occult science.

In Leiber’s story, the history of de Castries is revealed as such: de Castries arrived in San Francisco in 1900, when electricity, skyscrapers, radio, radioactivity, Egyptian discoveries, psychologies of Freud and Jung, and occult theosophies and Orders were being promulgated around the world.  De Castries gathered various acolytes to him and founded his own Hermetic Order of the Onyx Dusk, whose mission was violent revolution against super cities, and his perceived enemies.  

Our new super cities, de Castries felt, had grown out of control and caused paranormal and paramental entities to come into being – entities that inevitably drained and harmed us: their clueless creators.  Megapolisomantic operations were set to bring our large buildings down to rubble, to inflict paramentals on the enslaved humans to drive them further mad, and ultimately drive all human presence from such cities.  De Castries died in 1929, prior to the stock market crash which ‘would have been a comfort to him because it would have confirmed his theories that because of the self-abuse of megacities, the world was going to hell in a handbasket’.

In the time of de Castries, urbanization was just tipping over the 50% mark in the U.S, and megacities were just an idea but a fast looming threat on the horizon.   A century later, urbanization is the norm, at over 80% in the US, and the rise of the megacity has proven to be relentless, unstoppable.  For this reason, it’s worth a closer look at the city magic fantastically described by Leiber.  

Let us first contrast our world versus de Castries’ world of new urbanization.  The reams of paper, coal, electrical wiring & smog, once feared by de Castries, has been mitigated demonstrably as our communication networks have become wireless and environmental actions put in place.  Yet the steel and concrete behemoths remain and have multiplied, and the electric, gas, and oil lines that fuel our cities have been knit under the earth, out of sight. ��We are still fighting to realize and solve of the deathly impact we are having on our earth’s ability to sustain human life, resistant as we seem to be to that fact.   

We have discovered new mathematics and physics to explain our universe, build and code the machines that serve us, even begin our first steps toward creating artificial intelligence.  We even seek immortality through merging ourselves with machines or possibly moving off the earth to survive in space, if our cities become too congested or our earth too diseased by our cities.   Everything we take in – from our food to the very ideas that populate our thoughts based on our media – has been edited for our pleasure – food is manufactured to be bigger and tastier than natural, media reports deliver messages that have built-in conclusions to ease us from the pain of thinking.   At the same time, we have begun to more widely acknowledge consciousness in other beings – a benefit of our networking: comparing notes and making better observations of the world around us.  But if we think critically, we can see the limitations of fast food, fast media, and fast connections and perhaps alter our interaction with them to utilize their benefits without being overcome.

The magician can focus on maneuvering more adeptly within their environment safely and productively, or exert their will on the multitude of issues that inhibit their Life and Initiation.  One’s Work might fall in to creating a safer more sustainable environment for Life to thrive; or for education and critical thinking to cut through to allow the Black Flame to spark potential others.

Back to the story.  Once de Castries decided cities could not be destroyed, he sought to utilize Megapolisomancy to control and protect from the paramentals and paranatural entities birthed by our cities.  They are the byproducts of the raw materials and the sludged, drained thoughts and neuroses of the madness that descended upon the inhabitants of such mega cities.   Today’s cities paranatural entities might be described as memetic forces, the drain of health from physically unhealthy surroundings, the unhealthy foods and habitual activities.  The paramentals might be the impulses to retract from the world completely and stay in our silos, the doubt and fear causing constant adverts, the crushing ‘everyone else’ mentality that is our struggle to shrug off.

We have observed a ‘command to look’ in nature, stemming from our evolutionary wisdom built into our reptilian brains, but we need to utilize a learned ‘unnatural command to look’ to stoke the Black Flame of consciousness and evolution of self.    By doing so we can promote critical thinking in ourselves and others, and make our surroundings and our network useful forces rather than debilitating ones.  Control your environment and input, lest it control you.

For these reasons, study of Megapolisomancy is in order – to be met not with trepidation and terror over ‘paranaturals’ and ‘paramentals’ but to establish a useful understanding to learn about them, use them for us and against our own stasis and the unrelenting World of Horrors that consumes and grows without thinking.   These ‘para-things’ and ‘citystuff’ exist because of the global ‘us’, and we can regain control of them to further our personal and societal evolution rather than let them bleed us dry.

Leiber alluded to Megapolisomancy in snippets and suggestion, but I have drawn the following operations/methods from the novel.  Excerpts from the novel are below for finer review.

1)      Usage of ‘weighted’ structures  - weighted in scale and importance

2)      Identifying and marking sites of future interest (for potential structures, activities)

3)      Protections against the paranatural/paramental entities: the Star (pentagram), abstract designs, and silver.

4)      Vector geometry in targeting a person/area

5)      Usage of elements (earth, fluid, gas, and fire)

6)      Usage of Balance to achieve the execution of an operation; or banishment of the paranatural/paramental entities (The latter comes from a blend of the mathematical and musical/artistic.

7)      Usage of one physical and mental Focal point in an operation

Other Links on Our Lady of Darkness & Megapolisomancy

Talking about Ritual Magic: Our Lady of Darkness & Megapolisomancy

Our Lady of Darkness: A Jamesian Classic

by Dark Beacon

[raglanphd]

Herbert Spencer's First Principles

First Principles is Herbert Spencer’s huge prospectus to the rest of his work, the synthetic philosophy. Spencer divides truth into the Unknowable and Knowable. Whether god(s) exists or not, whether the universe is eternal or was created is unknowable. We can’t conceive of self-creation, eternity, or nothingness. This makes the positions of theism/deism, atheism and pantheism up to dispute. The ultimate nature of physical reality, or materialism versus idealism, is also unknowable, as we can’t conceive of space and time or matter in themselves even though we depend on them. So Spencer’s basically an agnostic. We should be open minded and not conflate our beliefs with the truth. What we can know, and this is philosophy, is systematic or general knowledge of phenomena. All we can know are the effects of the ultimate force behind the universe.

Force is the starting point as whatever we know is what impinges on our perception. We give primacy to our ideas of space time matter and energy to this force, though these are meaningful as mental relations and not things in themselves. The truths of philosophy are to be found in the most general scientific truths. The rest of the work focuses on the processes of evolution and dissolution which govern matter. Evolution is a concentration of matter and decrease in motion, dissolution is a decomposition of matter and increase in motion (death). Spencer sees evolution in the formation of planets from stardust and the development from a single cell to the diversity of life, macrocosm and microcosm. Through both evolution and dissolution, Spencer derives the Law of Progress of the universe from a state of homogeneity to a state of heterogeneity, simplicity to complexity. The same cause has multiple effects as forces do not act equally on a body. This is a continuing process of equilibrium in which the universe becomes both integrated and diverse, just as society does with the division of labor and hierarchy from family to clan to tribe to nation. Quite an ambitious work.

The most contentious argument which is the culmination of First Principles is that evolution tends towards greater complexity. The use of progress isn’t normative but as states of matter. This seems to be countered by the second law of thermodynamics entropy: in a closed system of transfer of energy but not matter, the amount of entropy or disorder stays the same or increases over time. This is the reverse of homogeneity to heterogeneity, but that applies to closed systems and not the universe as such necessarily, that is as the ultimate unknowable. Nevertheless even with the second law of thermodynamics order can increase locally. Since the 19th century it has been proposed that universal equilibrium is heat death, the death of the universe where no more physical processes will occur, but there is also the Big Crunch where the universe after expansion will fall in on itself in a black hole by force of gravity and will begin anew; a cyclical universe. Spencer’s case is more metaphysical than physical though so it isn’t clear that the law of progress can be falsified. It is widely held that the universe we know began in a state of high order, of homogeneity, and has grown more disordered so that we have an arrow of time with entropy so we have a meaningful past present and future, though the universe didn’t have to begin this way. The recent discovery of dark matter/energy suggests that the universe is continuing to expand at a faster rate instead of slowing down. This could mean the universe is headed toward the Big Rip. So I take Spencer’s law of progress to be a local phenomena and not the ultimate fate of the universe which is unknowable as Spencer defines it.

Henri Bergson who was influenced by Spencer in his own evolutionary philosophy nevertheless criticized Spencer for “cutting up present reality already evolved into little bits no less evolved and then recomposing it with these fragments, thus positing everything that is to be explained” (Creative Evolution 1907). Spencer by declaring the internal nature of the world to be unknowable proceeds to take the datum of worldly processes available to consciousness, the effects, to be the basis of evolution. But evolution, which means to unfold, is a process rather than mechanical step by step process. Multiplying the observed steps of this process in space and time doesn’t give us its true nature. Spencer’s reasoning is purely causal, by external relations where the relation of datum in space and time is what defines something’s nature. This kind of thinking Bergson opposed to intuition which gives us a unity of duration in which every moment is linked together and we can’t conceive of things in isolation as causal datum.

In Spencer’s defense, what he is providing here is a philosophy for scientific investigation. What he calls unknowable are the most fundamental questions of philosophy, for which I do think we can hold reasonable positions on based on our own fundamental beliefs which while not verifiable are meaningful, perhaps the most meaningful. Despite the perhaps unsatisfying and superficial nature of Spencer’s reasonings, they are a useful way to think about the world for those who want a unified naturalistic philosophy to unite the special sciences, which is what the rest of Spencer’s synthetic philosophy is on biology, psychology, sociology and ethics. So I think Spencer isn’t wrong as much as he limits his thinking yet extrapolates greatly on a few principles. I think this is a classic of philosophy and the first great work of evolutionary philosophy, which came out only a year after Darwin’s The Origin of Species and doesn’t even discuss natural selection.