__._,_.___
Change settings via the Web (Yahoo! ID required)
Change settings via email: Switch delivery to Daily Digest | Switch to Fully Featured
Visit Your Group | Yahoo! Groups Terms of Use | Unsubscribe
__,_._,___
__._,_.___
Foreign Policy Innovation - Identifying the natural allies
Not East Not West, Look at How do you become Best!
Looking at the foreign policy of last 35+ years, it does not seem that there has been much thought given in our foreign policy. The way the foreign policies have been executed, we could have done without the expensive the foreign ministry, it seems. After all, you do not need a shiny plate to ask for alms in it! Don't you think so?
So who are the natural allies?
Who have scarce land and other natural resources?
Who have a very high population density?
Who have successfully acted as the center country or hub economies?
Who have the green technologies ?
Who are good at the foreign policy similar to
We intend to focus on the specific topics in coming days. Here are some of the summaries:
Bangladesh should say YES to Singapore, UAE,
UAE, as we speak, is building herself into the newest hub economy of the world. There is a lot of exchange of human resources between the countries, too.
The next country of interest should be Netherlands. This is a country which has driven innovation in land management and ecological resource management. Given our already acute problems with scarce resource and the perceived deterioration of the same in near future, we should become the playing ground of all the great innovation that has been done in the past and is being currently done.
We hope that our foreign policy makers, think-tanks on foreign policy and strategic issues would give enough thought on the suggestions forwarded here. These are not flawless - we recognize that. But these have been generated through the practice of hobby - on a part-time basis. A full-time rigor would be able to more succinctly identify our natural allies among the countries with whom
If you thought some of the ideas are worth of your reading time, please forward it to others. If you have an ear to the members of the CTG, economists, policy makers and strategists, please forward it to them. If you have an ear to the journalists and news editors of the electronic media, discuss it with them. Hope they would look at the suggestions and give due diligence.
Thanks for your time,
Innovation Line
==================================================================================================
Note: This is a freelance column, published mainly in different internet based forums. This column is open for contribution by the members of new generation, sometimes referred to as Gen 71. If you identify yourself as someone from that age-group and want to contribute to this column, please feel free to contact. Thanks to the group moderator for publishing the article.
We have not seen the Liberation War, but we know if we can free the country from corruption first, we will eventually get to other dreams soon. Because of corruption, we could not even get into information highway for years, let alone other dreams!
This is the kind of article for which we started this column. Because of ongoing mess, a gift from our older generation, we often get diverted. Now that it seems some sanity is returning in
==================================================================================================
| Understanding Ourselves and Our Universe: How Psychology Can Turn the "Mysteries of Human Nature" into Useful Tools for Self Improvement and Success in Life |
Part 5: The "Psychology-as-Biochemistry" (PaB) Theorem (Also known as the Greatest Part of PSH100, the "Mind Blower," "the Big Kahuna," and "Looking Over the Horizon to a Brighter Tomorrow!") |
|
It is highly questionable that basing human philosophy, civilization, science, and daily conduct on the assumptions that there is such a supernatural dimension to the universe, and that it influences or even controls the natural dimension
. ! The magnificent and irresistible march of real human progress throughout the ages has been marked by discoveries, inventions, and breakthroughs that essentially and specifically transfer major issues and phenomena from the supernatural to the natural dimension
. ? Throughout the study, we've been dropping small, medium, and large hints that this study -- and, in fact, the whole serie approach to the psychological aspects of humanism -- is taking a sharp departure from the traditional field of psychology that most participants have studied in high school, college, and even graduate school for the past few hundred years. Up to this point, we've introduced the key components of SciPsy gradually, but now we think it best that we articulate this new hypothesis and theory about the true nature of psychology in one succinct part of the discussion: the shortest, but quite possibly the most profound and most challenging, lstudy of the entire course. You may have to review this section several times to absorb the magnitude of its impact and the pervasiveness of its implications. That's fine; do what you have to do to fully appreciate what we're saying here. It should be well worth it.
...all of which, for at least some people, fundamentally changed the way they looked at themselves and others, and at their universe and life. Such paradigm shifts have been called many things, such as "insights," "breakthroughs," "epiphanies," and "cognitive restructurings," among others. Since the term "paradigm shift" is controversial, and since this is a psychology discussion, we'll use cognitive restructuring as the generic term for these dramatic changes in perceptions and understandings. What they all have in common is that once one understands the new hypothesis or theory or premise, one never thinks about the problem or issue the same way again. Even if you don't fully accept the new approach right away, it poses an intellectual challenge that nags at your brain incessantly until you resolve your position, and it spurs you on to further reflection, study, and practical research until you "reach your peace" with it; i.e., usually accept or reject it. Such are the hypothesis, premise, implications, and practical applications of what we're calling the "Psychology-as-Biochemistry (PaB) Theorem," here in this study. You don't have to believe it, but you will have to study it, reflect on it, and explore its possibilities to understand the course. If you do "give it all you've got," it could very well change your entire life! (NOTE: You should know that many psychologists have not made the PaB paradigm shift as yet, but I'm saying that I have. By that I mean that I think there is sufficient evidence to assume the new paradigm as fact, and proceed from there. I am NOT saying that all the hypotheses I'll espouse are scientifically "proven" or widely accepted at this time, but just that I am confident enough. The PaB Theorem also clearly implies that all human assumptions about thinking, feeling, and behavior up to recent times (and the basic assumptions and ways virtually all people think about their own psychological phenomena even today) has been essentially wrong. The primary reason that even the greatest thinkers of our species before now have been so wrong is because they relied on poor methodology to form and test their hypotheses about psychology; i.e., they've relied primarily on introspection, which has led them to take a giant mis-step right at the critical beginning of their investigations. Because a thought or feeling seems not to be physical (like a stimulus or a response), it has been hard to fairly entertain the hypothesis that a thought or feeling is just physical. Thus, psychology has always pulled up well short of where all the best scientific evidence would inevitably lead if it were understood and given a fair, empirical chance. Of course, if the great thinkers of the past had had all the evidence we have today, they'd be leading the way for the rest of us! And that's what we're asking you to do. Review the brief but remarkable items of solid, credible scientific evidence to follow here, and then do what all good humanists, critical thinkers, and scientific theorists should do; i.e., reflect on the reason and logic of it, read up on it, test it theoretically and practically, and try to come up with a better theory that fits all the best evidence. And - at least eventually - if you can't beat it, join it! We're just this side -- or more excitingly, just beyond -- a huge metacognitive restructuring (changing the way we "think about thinking"), based on the following premises: 1. 2. The far simpler, more reasonable, better supported, yet less traveled concept of the universe is called monism ("one-ism"). Monism states that the universe and everything in it is made up of "one kind of stuff," and materialistic monism -- which is what we're using in this course -- states that that one kind of stuff is real, and physical, and follows all the natural laws. (There are, believe it or not, nonmaterialistic monists, such as some Australian aborigines -- people who think that reality is a dream, and only dreams are real -- but they are few and far between.) 3. It is highly questionable that basing human philosophy, civilization, science, and daily conduct on the assumptions that there is such a supernatural dimension to the universe, and that it influences or even controls the natural dimension, and especially that there are a special class of people who can sense, communicate with, understand, or even influence the supernatural dimension (e.g., seers, priests, prophets, psychics, etc.), has ever produced one single benefit for humans or humanity, or led to one single discovery that has advanced human progress or civilization in the history of the world ... ever. (Obviously, I don't see sacred texts as good, even if some parts of these were tolerable, they are just matter.) 4. Throughout human history, there have been people who -- for one reason or circumstance or another -- have dared to think that unthinkable thought; i.e., that the supernatural dimension of the universe does not exist, and never has. An enormously disproportionate number of great, brilliant, civilization-shaping ideas and hypotheses and discoveries and inventions and paradigm shifts have come from those people, whether they articulated their "a-supernaturalism" explicitly or not, right down to the present day. And the vast majority of great progress that has been contributed by supernaturalistic thinkers has been based on their a-supernatural, monistic ideas, not their supernatural ones. (The names of Newton, Galileo, Copernicus, and Jefferson come to mind here.) 5. 6. Today we should have sufficient evidence to transfer all aspects of human psychology to the natural dimension, too. While science can no more "disprove the negative" premise that there is nothing supernatural about human psychology than it can disprove the existence of spirits or gods, there are five incontrovertible lines of reasoning and evidence available to us right now that strongly support, lead inevitably toward, and thus all but prove the PaB Theorem: o No psychological construct, hypothesis, theory, or treatment based on supernaturalistic (psychodynamic, psychoanalytic, analytic) thinking has ever produced reasonable evidence or efficacy to support its validity -- never, ever. o Only naturally based constructs, hypotheses, theories, and treatments have ever produced valid supportive evidence, efficacious treatments, and fertile avenues of new research and knowledge. Real progress in psychology has been entirely due to scientific methods and asupernatural constructs and theories. o Today, we can scientifically produce the very aspects of human psychology previously (and still, by some) attributed to non-empirical hypothetical constructs and supernatural origins and causes; i.e., by manipulating nothing but natural brain biochemistry, a lab psychologist or neuroscientist can produce or block or systematically modify the very types of human cognitive, emotional, and behavioral phenomena (including everything from common thoughts, memories, and feelings, to so called "altered states," "mystical experiences," or any other supposedly "mental," "psychic," or paranormal phenomena) on which the entire concept of supernaturalism rests or fails. (Similarly, by changing the psyychological enviornment of a person, a community or even a nation, through propaganda ; loudspeakers, TV channels, Internet sites, radio stations, newspapers, magazines, manipulation of textbooks and teachings in mosques, schools and madrassas, through the public speeches by mullahs and po,liticians, through religious rhetoric and songs, through social and poltical institutions etc. it is possible to create a specific type of thinking, manipulating emotions, thoughts, memories and feelings as well as behaviours and thinking or creating mystical experience or other mental, psychic or paranormal experiences; such experience have been carried out at personal levels changing the micro-milieu or ar community and national levels by affecting ther mico as well as macro-milieu of the individuals, the community and the whole nation). o The seemingly deeply troublesome issue of "not being able to prove that all psychology is only biochemistry" can be effectively offset and practically neutralized by invoking the well established scientific principle called the Law of Parsimony (Occam's Razor), which states that when two or more hypotheses or theories explain phenomena equally well, the one requiring the fewest assumptions and constructs is always best. This simple and seemingly common sense principle is actually quite profound when it is applied to comparing natural versus supernatural explanations of psychological phenomena (or anything else). It effectively "breaks supernaturalism's last straw" of defense, because if natural, scientific psychology (SciPsy) can explain and predict everything that supernaturalistic theories can (and we know that it can, and much, much better) without invoking any supernatural assumptions or constructs whatsoever, then all those supernatural assumptions and constructs (such as minds, souls, spirits, gods, etc.) are rendered completely superfluous to real knowledge. (While explaining any phenomenon by saying "a God/Allah did it" is certainly apparently simpler, since it adds the additional NEC causal agent of "a god" and totally fails all tests of explanation and prediction, it fails the Law of Parsimony even worse.) In other words, although we can't prove there is no supernatural dimension, we can prove to any fair and objective evaluation that supernatural constructs, hypotheses, theories, and treatments are totally needless and useless to understand all human psychological phenomena and to treat of all forms of human psychopathology. Since we don't need it for that, what do we need it for? There will be opportunity in the remainder of serie to explore a fraction of the basic issues and evidence explicating this totally natural, humanistic, SciPsy ("biobehavioral information processing") model of human psychology. If you just can't accept this theorem as yet, well, join the stupid majority! Meanwhile, enjoy your own exploration of this promising and exciting theorem in the remaining lessons, and also search the Internet, watch PBS Science programs and the Discovery Science channel on TV, and read everything you can find about cutting edge brain biochemistry phenomena to better understand the awesome implications of the PaB Theorem. Some fun topics to research on your own are human genetics, artificial intelligence, neural networking, prosthetic human senses and limbs, lab replications of "altered states of consciousness" and "religious" experiences, comparative research on non-human cognition and language, BeMod and behavior therapies, and -- of course -- the newest discoveries in evolutionary and biological psychology. Armed with the information in this course thus far, you should be able to understand such research much better, so ENJOY! |
| Understanding Ourselves and Our Universe: How Psychology Can Turn the "Mysteries of Human Nature" into Useful Tools for Self Improvement and Success in Life |
Part 6: A Quick Overview of Human Information Processing |
|
Information processing (IP) is "psychology talk" for the way humans take in, interpret, understand, think about, and make and implement decisions in response to stimuli from our environments
.. The natural laws and principles of learning and BeMod just completed in the previous discussion (which derived directly from the excellent behaviorism research, theories, and practical applications of the great psychologists John B. Watson and B. F. Skinner). Now we conclude with the "bio" and "information processing" parts of the model, in reverse. Before we start this ldiscussion, we're quickly going into human neuropsychology (or psychoneurology. We will be constantly referring to neurons and neural functions (and neural dysfunctions). At this point in our Cornerstone study, one only needs to know three simple things in order to keep up with the discussion: 1. A neuron is a nerve cell. 2. What a neuron does is to "fire";(or suddenly release a current) i.e., when stimulated on its receiving end (the dendrites), a nerve cell will conduct an electrical charge down its length and pass it on from its transmitting end (the axon), usually to another neuron, or to a muscle, organ, or gland. Humans have one or two hundred billion neurons in their brains, performing a myriad of different tasks, but in every case, all that's required for any neuron to function properly is for it to "fire" properly. 3. Although structurally the neuron is the basic structural unit from which all human nervous systems are constructed, functionally; the unit is neural circuit, which is a group of two or three to tens of thousands of neurons acting together to produce some psychological or neural phenomenon. For now, our basic theorem is that neurons don't think (or feel, or behave), but neural circuits do think, feel, behave, remember, see, plan, and more. Thus, a neural circuit is the basic unit of information processing; one circuit = one information bit. (This is actually result of human adaptation, because we have nearly one or two hundred billion neurons in our brains, but those neurons can organize into several quadrillion neural circuits. Thus, we can be much more adaptive and intelligent using the larger capacity provided by neural circuits than we could with neurons acting alone.) By learning such aspects of our brain physiology and biochemistry, one can gain a better understanding of psychology. Information processing (IP) is "psychology talk" for the way humans take in, interpret, understand, think about, and make and implement decisions in response to stimuli from our environments (including stimuli from the external world, from the parts of our bodies other than the CNS, and even when one part of the CNS communicates with another part of the CNS), and how we think, feel, and act about it. In non-human animals, we generally talk about them "reacting to stimuli." In humans we call the same basic phenomena information processing because humans and the higher mammals translate stimuli into more meaningful cognitive symbols (information bits) and modify, manipulate, and mediate those symbols in so many different complex ways (processing) that it just intuitively seems to deserve a more impressive term. Of course, there's probably some "speciesism" (favoring our type of animal above others for its own sake) going on there, too! But it's also a good descriptive term, so let's see what it's all about. Step 1: Stimulus -> Sensory Reception = Energy Transduction. Sensory stimuli (energy sources, such as light for vision, sound waves for hearing, mechanical energy for touch, chemical molecules in the air for smell, etc.) impinge on sensory receptors in human sensory organs (such as the retina in the eye, cochlea in the ear, olfactory epithelium in the nose, etc.), setting off electrochemical sensory codes for transmission to higher neural centers, primarily in the brain. Remember how the almost infinitely complex DNA code is made up of only 4 "letters" (A, G, C, T)? Well, neural codes from the sensory receptors are similarly made up of variations in the quantity, frequency, and pattern of neurons activated by the stimulus. Once the sensory receptor neurons "fire" in response to sensory stimuli reception, energy transduction has occurred (by the sensory neurons changing the external energy form into electrochemical energy in the nervous system), but there's no "sensory experience" yet; i.e., you haven't seen or heard or smelled anything. That's still two steps and a few milliseconds away, even for our fastest senses (and compared to many non-human animals, most of our sensory transmissions mechanisms just aren't very fast). Step 2: Sensory Transmission. Once the sensory receptor neuron transduces the stimulus energy into neurochemical energy and fires, the resulting neural code is sent up the sensory fibers (a series of ascending/afferent neurons bundled into nerve fibers) to the specialized reception areas for each sense in the brain. Sensory transmission's sole function is to transport the neural code from the sensory receptor neurons to the brain, without changing the code in any way (transmission). (Some senses have intermediate, sub-cortical areas that begin processing the codes before reaching the brain.) Step 3: Cognition. Also called "higher processing," this step covers three kinds of functioning: sensation and perception, cognitive and emotional mediation, and decision-making. Cognition is the most complex and "human" IP (Information processing) step of all. This is where all the perceiving, thinking, remembering, feeling, analyzing, evaluating, deciding, and planning occur. A. Sensation/Perception: Once the sensory transmission code reaches specialized sensory reception areas of the brain, specialized neural circuits fire, constituting sensation (only "meaningless sensory experience"; i.e., one may "sense" vaguely that a sound or smell has occurred, but with no idea of what it is yet). Sensory reception area neurons in turn fire circuits of neurons in nearby sensory association areas and memory circuits, which become biochemically associated with the sensory code and give that sensation meaning (perception). For the first time, you can "image" a sight or sound in your brain, and recognize what it is or what it means. B. Cognition and Emotion: Once that sensory information has been translated into associative circuits outside the specialized reception areas of the brain, they can simultaneously fire (associate) thousands of other circuits holding other memories and even instincts. Now, for the first time, you can think about what has been sensed and perceived, hold an idea of what that sensory information means to you (a simple form of cognition). You can also conceptualize about the relationships among that sensory stimulus and other similar stimuli and thoughts and behaviors, and "remember" what response options you have and how you feel about those options (higher forms of cognition called mediation -- connecting stimulus phenomena to associated stimulus, cognitive, emotional, and/or response phenomena), and start formulating a range of possible response options. C. Decision-Making: Once your memory circuits have provided you with the necessary information to determine which, of all the responses you've made before, have been the most reinforced, and are thus the most adaptive for this particular stimulus situation, you can decide (choose from those options) how to respond and form intentions and plans for what behaviors will make up your actual response, which are again formed into neural codes by the specialized motor (movement) areas of the brain. Step 4: Motor Transmission. From the specialized motor areas of the brain, motor neurons send response codes down motor transmission neurons (descending/efferent nerve fibers), once again transporting the response codes unchanged, to the only parts of the human body that can actually "behave" (muscles, organs, and glands). Step 5: Response/Behavior. Neurons between the motor transmission fibers and our muscles, organs, and/or glands transduce the electrochemical energy in our nervous system back into mechanical energy, and stimulate whatever pattern of responses our motor codes command (muscles contract to create movement, and/or organs activate and do whatever those particular organs are preprogrammed to do, and/or glands secrete their fluids). Thus every single "bit" of information (where a bit = the basic unit of information; the lowest reducible unit of sensation, perception, cognition, emotion, behavior, etc.) is processed through the human nervous system as is summarized above. (By the way, the same five-step sequence also holds for the simplest stimulus-response processing sequence, such as when you stub your toe and yell and jump back, but that is just instinctive reflex without any cognition involved. That simplest sequence is called the "reflex arc," and is mediated by the spinal chord, not the brain.) We'll concentrate on human information processing from here on in this serie, and share more details of just how human CNS biochemistry affects psychological phenomena. |