Green Oasis

I read Yoshikawa’s Musashi when I was younger. The tale of the brash young samurai seeking to perfect his skill and himself influenced a lot of my thought. Am I a human or an animal? The movie Musashi Miyamoto reminded me of the book. I liked it.

Even though the idea of an ethnic homeland has caused untold suffering, I connect with Matisyahu’s song Jerusalem. Jerusalem represents for me the promised land of human destiny, the ideal human community for which I hope. May I never forget that goal, or may my right hand forget what it’s supposed to do.

Here’s more proof that being rich ≠ happiness. It seems like human beings are not being human unless they’ve found some reason to be miserable at least some of the time. We’re not cut out to be perpetually happy.

(via kottke.org)

Atul Gawande wrote a fascinating article for the New Yorker. It’s premise is that most of our perceptions come not from direct experience of the world but from memory. In other words, very little information is coming to us from the world outside our skull. Our minds are fudging the rest based on past experience. Using case studies of amputees who still perceive sensations in their missing limb and a woman who itched so persistently that she scratched… well I won’t spoil the story.

(via kottke.org)

Update: Dr. Ramachandran explains some of these same phenomena.

I find it fascinating that we aren’t simply a human being or even a colony of coöperative human cells but a symbiotic superorganism.