El Zapato

ok, I concluded that free will exists and is exemplified by the physical properties of Planck's Constant and Heisenberg's indeterminacy principle, Some things in cosmic creation are open/closed simultaneously...Why not consider that a glimpse into the nature of free will? In my estimation, the works of the likes of Rupert Sheldrake are concrete examples of that concept?

Ahh, an adaptive human being. I congratulate you! But after a moment's thought, I think you nailed it.

Me: It can become a very nebulous and at the same time quite dense question: My feeling is that many people assume way too much when determining the level of freedom they can demand. Some of us are truly misguided even. https://www.fraserinstitute.org/sites/default/files/ch6-conditions-for-freedom.pdf Conditions for Freedom A Few Theses on the Theory of Freedom and on Creating an Index of Freedom Andrei Illarionov* The following text presents an attempt to formulate a theoretical basis for constructing an overall index of freedom in which partial freedoms, such as individual, civil, legal, economic, politic, and national ones, might be included as its composite elements. Introduction Freedom is understood as of two types: positive and negative. Positive freedom is considered primarily to be the physical ability to do something, such as having physical control over ability, strength, resources, information, knowledge, technology, etc. Negative freedom is primarily a legalistic concept dealing with someone’s rights, and involves the absence of subversion of a person’s rights by somebody else. Isaiah Berlin gave a good philosophical definition of freedom (the words “freedom” and “liberty” are being used here mutually interchangeably): * Dr. Andrei Nikolaievich Illarionov is a Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute’s Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity in Washington, DC, and President of the Institute of Economic Analysis, an independent economic think tank in Moscow, Russia, which he founded in 1994. In April 2000, Dr. Illarionov was invited to serve as Chief Economic Advisor to the newly-elected Russian President Vladimir Putin. From May 2000 to January 2005 he was also Putin’s Personal Representative to the G-8. While serving in President Putin’s administration, Dr. Illarionov was the driving force behind the adoption of a 13 percent flat income tax, the Russian government’s creation of a stabilization fund for windfall oil revenues, and the early repayment of Russia’s foreign debt. Dr. Illarionov has co-authored several programs for Russian governments and has written three books and over 300 articles on Russian economic and social policies. He is a regular commentator on current events in Russia. “… non-interference, which is the opposite of coercion, is good as such, although it is not only good. This is the ‘negative’ conception of liberty in its classical form” (Berlin, 1969). (The first definition of freedom.) The rest of this essay is devoted primarily to developing a method for constructing an index built on negative understanding of freedom. Human action The very existence of human action suggests the existence of its several elements: a human actor (the subject of human action), a human act (the action itself), types of human actions, property rights over objects involved in human action, rules about how to use (or not to use) property rights while engaging in those actions. Human actors Actors are by definition human beings. Though the philosophy of classical liberalism insists that all people are born with legally equal rights, in real life different people in different societies, in different times, and under different circumstances do have different legal rights. Those with different legal rights (capabilities) can be classified into a variety of different groups. People can be segregated by age (babies, children, teenagers, or adults). The number of rights they have tends to rise with age until it stabilizes in adulthood. People can also be divided by gender: men and women. Though modern societies recognize the legal equality of the sexes, historically in many societies men had more legal rights than women. People can also be divided by mental health: healthy or unhealthy. Mental illness has been associated with inappropriate or unacceptable behavior that has produced limitations on the affected people’s legal rights; they are often considered to be partially or fully legally incapable. People can be classified by their different social groups, including race, ethnicity, tribe, kin, language, religion, class, caste, profession, conviction, experience, etc. In different societies members of those groups may have different legal rights. Throughout the history of mankind, one of the most important differentiating factors among humans is the level of property rights they possess over themselves (self-ownership)—in other words, the amount of personal freedom they enjoy. Specifically, are they genuinely free people, or servants, or serfs, or slaves, etc.? Even in the freest of modern societies, the amount of freedom that healthy adults do have might differ notably, depending on circumstances. Human action Human actions differ first of all according to the free will of a subject. Actions (as well non-actions) might be free or performed under coercion. Conditions for Freedom For free actions there is an additional important criterion, namely, the existence or reward received in return for the actor’s action. The judgment about whether or not a reward received can be considered as equivalent (more than equivalent, less than equivalent, without even any reward) can be made only by a free person. Free actions can be divided into two kinds: free exchange (that is, actions taken according to free will, for which the actor receives something of equivalent value) or free charity (an action taken by one of one’s own free will, and for which one receives no reward). For actions performed under coercion (under duress), where the actor can exercise no free will, the issue of equivalence of the reward is irrelevant, since the ability to judge the value of resources received in return is something only a free person can do. The very existence of coercion automatically excludes the notion of equivalent or non-equivalent value for any actions performed under coercion. Therefore, any human action made under coercion may be called involuntary charity, even if the resources provided to that actor are comparable to those provided in a similar situation to a free actor. Types of human actions Conscious individuals can engage in three main types of action: thought, speech, and physical acts. There is a vast difference between the physical and legal ability (of an individual, community, society, or state) to coerce human actions. Physical action is the easiest one to control (limit, regulate, or direct). It is possible, but much harder, to control human speech. To control human thought is even harder (though not completely impossible). For example, with the development of education curricula, propaganda, brainwashing, and psychological warfare one can seriously alter the ability of legally free people to think and speak independently. Towards a Worldwide Index of Human Freedom The decision-taking-centre-of-a-human-being (DTCOHB) is different in different circumstances. Though in the end a person’s decision is probably made by their brain, many decisions can be significantly affected by signals sent by different systems in the human body: respiratory, digestive, thermoregulatory, reproductive, etc. Human actions are performed according to a hierarchy of preferences. These actions take place in several main spheres that can be classified according to the importance of particular property rights for an actor. This importance may be measured by the “distance” of each particular sphere from the decision-taking-centre-of-a-human-being (DTCOHB). The crucial distinction between classes of different human actions comes from the amount of property rights an actor has, and an understanding of the borders between the actor’s property rights and those of other actors. There are four main spheres of human activity (security, personal, private, public), each with its own sub-areas. People have property rights (or freedoms) in each of them. In the security sphere, people execute property rights over their own bodies (self-ownership) that are strongly associated with their survival and reasonably good health. As a result, in many modern societies those rights are under no or very limited regulation. The most well-known exception is conscription imposed by governments and some quasistate organizations. In this sphere, property rights may be reflected in the right to life (i.e., freedom from homicide) and the right to use one’s own body (i.e., the freedom from physical intervention without one’s clearly expressed consent, including for medical reasons). In most modern societies, executing property rights in the individual security sphere is recognized as inalienable human right and needs no regulation. In the personal sphere, people execute property rights over their own bodies that are not necessarily intimately related to their survival or health. Such rights include the right to a choice of diet (i.e., freedom from a prescribed diet, such as from the prohibition of alcohol, drugs, kosher food, etc.); right to a choice of clothing; the right to physical movement (i.e., the freedom from illegal incarceration and from constraints or limits on an actor’s movement locally, or within state borders, or internationally); the right to consciousness and independent thinking (i.e., the freedom from imposed views, indoctrination, propaganda, religion, ideology, etc.). In many modern societies, personal rights are relatively recently recognized as inalienable rights, and therefore are subjected to either no or only limited regulation. In the private sphere, an actor’s own property rights can collide with those of others who happen to be related to him or her either by common blood or by living in a shared household, or those with whom he or she has intimate relations. Rights in the private sphere include the right to non-coercive family relations (not intimate ones) (specifically, freedom from terror instigated by family members); rights over one’s intimate relations (i.e., freedom from rape, coercion, arranged marriage, permissions from senior and/or male members of the family, restrictions on gender, etc.). In some societies this sphere of property rights is heavily regulated. In the public sphere, an actor executes his or her property rights in areas where those rights meet (collide with) the property rights of others beyond the private sphere. Rights in the public sphere include rights to economic relations (i.e., economic property rights); rights on civil relations (i.e., non-economic, non-political property rights in a civil society); rights to political relations (i.e., property rights related to territory, including local, regional, national, and international polities). In all societies these property rights face very substantial and detailed regulations. The relative importance (and thus value) for an actor of executing his or her property rights in different areas (and therefore the subjective relative weights he or she gives to different rights in different areas) in the overall group of rights he or she has (i.e., overall freedom) is a subject of individual choice. Relative importance of particular rights tends to diminish in proportion to the increased distance from the DTCOHB, with the most valuable rights being considered in the security sphere, then in the individual and private spheres, then in the public one. Nevertheless, there are many exceptions to this rule....

@OBEler Not sure...Seemed like should I or shouldn't I, so I did. Let's call it a mismap. If you like you can remove it, it won't hurt my feelings, Mr. Big Stuff.

Princess Arab

@Princess Arabia Why not? Perhaps not human-like free will, but much more like an ant's free will.

@Staples By-products are certainly a common phenomenon. I suppose on the other hand, Hawking, along with Kip Thorne (I think) calculated the universe to be as it is by chance at a mathematical zero.

@Staples The anthropic principle suggests that the universe is finely tuned for human existence. It posits that the fundamental constants and conditions necessary for life are incredibly precise. Similar to this:The Copenhagen Interpretation asserts that a system is not in any of its allowable states or alternatively that it is in all of its allowable states simultaneously. Furthermore a particle does not have a trajectory involving a definite location and velocity as a function of time. All true, but still a hollow proposition?

I'm new age by definition...but not by implication. I tend to believe anything is possible. I have had more than my share of 'out of the ordinary experiences'. They have been characterized in a number of ways by science, mysticism, philosophy, psychology, spirituality, et al. The trend to look down on 'new-age' is because once again the right views love and light as by default fake. They be a very strange bunch...

@Fountainbleu All you need are triggers (just an opinion based on what you posted) If you can find them internally, then so be it, I believe you but I love to read and have since early childhood, it isn't for everyone though. There are many other ways to learn,..Many. (e.g. the school of hard knocks, Alien downloads, dreaming, meditation) I'm sure you get the idea.

I hesitate to answer that question, but I will say, it can always get worse. If you feel a level of control over your life, you are doing good.

for sure, do it...

Actually, that strikes me as funny because my ex always used to say that to me. Hardly, am I stronger, more like acclimated to disaster... It's only life. We live or we die and it is not much in-between. Feelings are one area where the term 'relative' is valid.

How a Rare Disorder Makes People See Monsters A mysterious neurological condition makes faces look grotesque—and sheds new light on the inner workings of the brain. By Shayla Love In 2007, Jason Werbeloff, a twenty-two-year-old graduate student in Johannesburg, South Africa, spent months in bed with a severe case of mononucleosis. Every part of his body—his joints, his skin, his swollen throat—was in pain, and he passed the time staring at the concrete ceiling of his room. Television gave him a headache; he tried to read but often forgot the names of characters by the end of each page. He saw no one except his mother, who occasionally stopped by with groceries. After he recovered, Werbeloff was eager to be around people again, and he spent a night clubbing. In the shifting red light, he looked at a friend’s face and realized that the right side looked odd. It seemed to stretch outward, like Silly Putty being pulled, and a dark, rough patch was visible around the friend’s right eye. Werbeloff blinked and looked away, and his friend’s features briefly returned to normal. Then the distortions appeared again. “That is when people got ugly,” Werbeloff told me. In the weeks that followed, Werbeloff started to notice similar unsettling changes in everyone he looked at. “If they were smiling with their teeth very visible, then, on the right-hand side, the canine tooth would elongate,” he told me. Even his own face in the mirror looked malformed on the right. He had long known that his ability to recognize faces was so poor that it bordered on prosopagnosia—face blindness—but now he wondered whether he suffered from something else. He worried that he harbored an unconscious dislike for almost everyone he met. For fourteen years, Werbeloff treated the facial distortions as an uncanny and ever-present part of his life. He grew accustomed to looking away from faces periodically, so that they would temporarily return to normal. Then he came across a curious Facebook post in a group for people with prosopagnosia. The author of the post wanted to know whether anyone else had seen faces morph into strange configurations. When Werbeloff said yes, he was told to e-mail Brad Duchaine, a professor of psychological and brain sciences at Dartmouth College, who was studying the phenomenon. In May, 2021, Duchaine interviewed Werbeloff via Zoom. Had Werbeloff suffered any traumatic brain injuries? (No.) Did he ever see faces change before his bout with mono? (No.) Did he see distortions on half of the face, or all of it? (Only the right half.) Duchaine said that Werbeloff seemed to have a rare and largely unexplained condition called prosopometamorphopsia, or PMO. He was trying to meet as many PMO sufferers as he could—not only to identify why the distortions were occurring but to illuminate the intricate way in which the human brain perceives faces. During the Zoom call, Duchaine’s Ph.D. student Sarah Herald asked Werbeloff to stare at portrait photos for longer than he was used to. Werbeloff hadn’t realized how distended a face could become: the right side stretched until it was bulging, and the dark patch became a deep concave pit encircling the eye. After the session, Werbeloff cried. “I don’t believe in demons,” Werbeloff told me. “But I can totally understand that someone who was religious would find it a deeply religiously disturbing experience.” This past April, for the first time, Werbeloff visited Duchaine at Dartmouth, where he had his brain imaged while looking at faces under different conditions. A few days later, on a blustery morning in Manhattan, he met me on the steps of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Werbeloff is now thirty-nine, with short curly hair and brown glasses. He owns a marketing company and hosts Brain in a Vat, a YouTube channel about philosophy. I found his face easy to look at, but I knew that mine might not be, so we sat side by side. (Over the years, he has realized that faces in profile appear less distorted to him.) Werbeloff speaks in a crisp South African accent and seems to choose his words with care. As we watched throngs of museum visitors go by, he told me that he didn’t see distortions if he made sure not to look at any face for more than three seconds. This was possible in a crowd, he went on, but not in intimate relationships. He remembered a time before his condition began, when he dated a man for three and a half years. “From the day I met him until the day I left him, his face didn’t become any less beautiful,” he said. But, since he developed PMO, merely gazing at his loved ones has caused their faces to change. “That was a huge loss,” he told me. “I couldn’t see someone as they were.” In 1947, Joachim Bodamer, a German neurologist, wrote about three patients who struggled with the perception of human faces. Two of the patients had difficulty with recognition, and Bodamer came up with the term “prosopagnosia” to describe them. A third patient, whom Bodamer called Patient B, saw faces as “distorted or displaced.” To this person, the neurologist wrote, “a nurse’s nose was turned sideways by several degrees, one eyebrow was higher than the other, the mouth was squinted, and the hair shifted like an ill-fitting cap.” Scientists ultimately published hundreds of papers on face blindness, and Oliver Sacks wrote about it for this magazine. (“On several occasions I have apologized for almost bumping into a large bearded man, only to realize that the large bearded man was myself in a mirror,” he wrote, in 2010.) Patient B’s condition, however, went largely unexplored. Macdonald Critchley, a British neurologist, was one of only a few scholars who studied visual aberrations that specifically affect the face; in the nineteen-fifties, he introduced the term “prosopometamorphopsia,” from the Greek for face (prosopon); to distort (metamorphoun); and sight (opsis). In 2011, a Dutch woman named Ellen Novara-da Lima sent Sacks an e-mail. “I am a woman of 52 years old and I suffer from an illness,” she wrote. “I think there’s no name for it. I see monsters, ugly faces all day.” Because Sacks couldn’t evaluate her from New York, he referred her to a neurologist in the Netherlands, Jan Dirk Blom, who published a paper about her, with Sacks as a co-author. “She could perceive and recognise actual faces, but after several minutes they turned black, grew long, pointy ears and a protruding snout, and displayed a reptiloid skin,” they wrote. Sacks and Blom diagnosed her as having PMO. Blom works at a nondescript psychiatric facility that is tucked into a medical and business complex in The Hague. When I visited him there, in 2023, I presented my I.D. at the front desk and followed him to a sterile exam room. He wore an authoritative gray suit and polished dress shoes. When he started to research PMO, he told me, there was very little published work on the subject. By reading old case studies, however, he was able to identify seventy-three historical patients who seemed to have experienced the condition. An early account, published in Berlin in 1904, said that, after a seizure, a thirty-seven-year-old woman saw a change in her reflection which gave her “large, contorted eyes.” Five years later, a paper described a seventy-three-year-old stroke patient who began to see familiar faces as “large, strange, and grimacing.” In 1916, a German doctor wrote that a thirty-five-year-old woman, who had an unusual form of migraines, often saw “grotesquely disfigured faces.” One of the first visual depictions of PMO dates to 1965, when an artist, who had had a tumor removed from the left side of his brain, saw distortions on the right half of people’s faces. TNP, as the patient was called in the case report, drew a smiling nurse in a white cap; a pink vortex swirled where the nurse’s right eye should have been. When TNP looked at a doctor’s face, he reported that “the eye became a ghastly staring hole, cheekbone a cavity; he had teeth on the upper lip, often had two ears” on the right side. In 2019 and 2020, eight people with PMO came to Blom’s clinic. A middle-aged man saw skin where people’s right eyes should have been. A young woman told them that, for three weeks, she had perceived the left side of people’s faces as melting, and had seen their left eyes appear to fall toward their cheeks. Another woman painted the distortions she saw in her own reflection: her head getting larger, furrows on her forehead, and then a shrinking of her body and a brightening of colors. (She didn’t like to look at the painting, so she gave it to Blom.) Distorted perceptions are not the same as hallucinations, Blom told me. If you saw an elephant appear in your home office, you would be hallucinating. But, if you looked up and perceived an elephant in an elephantine cloud, that’s more like a distortion. “There’s a cloud—it’s actually there,” he said. He views his PMO patients as very different from psychiatric patients with schizophrenia, who hear voices or see things that don’t exist. People with PMO aren’t helped by antipsychotics; they know that what they’re seeing isn’t right. Blom suggested that PMO could fall under the umbrella of Alice in Wonderland syndrome, a collection of neurological symptoms that can be provoked by migraines, epilepsy, viral infections, or tumors, and which distort a person’s perception of their own body and the world around them. As a clinician, Blom is most concerned with alleviating symptoms, if he can. Although there is no known cure, he has found that some distortions go away with medications for epilepsy. Others simply fade on their own, in the way that migraines come and go. But for those who continue to experience distortions, Blom said, the condition undermines a central part of the human experience. “We’re constantly observing each other, and looking at all these micro-expressions,” he told me. His patients with PMO had lost access to the stories we tell with our faces: that we are curious, or bored, or annoyed; that we are lost in thought, or in love, or need to hear that last sentence again. I suddenly became aware of Blom’s eyes on me, and of all that my face was telling him. The human brain seems drawn to faces from birth. One study found that newborns, in their first minutes of life, tended to follow printouts of faces with their eyes; they were much less interested in scrambled images of facial features, or in blank pages. We even see faces where there aren’t any—for example, in electrical outlets and emoticons. In the nineties, neural imaging revealed that parts of the fusiform gyrus—a brain region near the base of the skull which is associated with vision—are more active when people see faces. A team led by Nancy Kanwisher, a neuroscientist at Harvard, named these regions the fusiform face area, or FFA. Neurologists often learn by studying brains that aren’t working as expected. Damage to the FFA, whether through stroke or injury, can erode one’s sensitivity to faces, and to human faces in particular. In a case study from 1993, a man developed face blindness after a stroke and then became a farmer. He struggled to tell people’s faces apart, but could consistently distinguish between his sheep. PMO could offer another opportunity to deepen our understanding of facial recognition—something to which Duchaine has dedicated his scientific career. In his lab, in Hanover, New Hampshire, faces are everywhere: portraits of Duchaine and his students hang on the wall; cartoonish pictures of eyes, eyebrows, a nose, and a mouth dangle from a nearby “facial-expression mobile.” “Face Book,” a collection of paintings by Chuck Close, sits on the coffee table. During my visit, this past October, Duchaine led me into his office and talked me through the regions of the brain, holding up his large hands to represent each hemisphere. (Duchaine’s own facial-recognition abilities are “below average,” he told me; his wife teases him for thinking that people with similar hair look alike.) Duchaine first heard about PMO while studying face blindness. He was surprised when studies and surveys suggested that around two per cent of the population develops prosopagnosia. In 2021, he created a Web site that asked people who see facial distortions to get in touch, in the hope that a similar hidden population might surface. Around a hundred and fifty people have reported facial distortions to his team—a number suggesting that, around the world, thousands of people may experience them. Given that many PMO patients don’t have trouble seeing other body parts, or objects, the condition reinforces the idea that there are face-specific networks in the brain. But people with PMO can recognize faces, and this suggests that facial perception and recognition might be separate processes. (Some people with PMO see more intense distortions on strangers, whereas others see them more on loved ones; one patient said in 2012 that she saw the most extreme changes in her grandchildren.) Duchaine’s findings have led him to a novel theory of how we see faces. Roughly a quarter of his patients, including Werbeloff, have hemi-PMO—distortions that affect only half of the face. “The two halves of the face seem to be represented separately from one another, which is a surprise,” Duchaine said. We may consider our lips to be one thing, but our brains seem to see them as the left side of the lip and the right side. PMO may clarify the role of each side of our brains when it sees faces. The right hemisphere seems especially important for facial perception: injury-induced face blindness tends to result from damage to the right. But PMO can apparently be caused by lesions on either side. Lesions on the left can cause distortions on the right side of people’s faces; lesions on the right can cause distortions on both sides. For this reason, Duchaine believes that the left hemisphere processes the right side of faces, and vice versa—and then, he suspects, the right side puts the pieces of the image together. “They’re fused, and they go forward together for later processing,” Duchaine said. “That’s something we didn’t know.” Researchers are able to induce PMO-like symptoms by stimulating specific parts of the brain, especially on the right side. And some hemi-PMO cases involve damage to the splenium, a part of the brain that carries information between the hemispheres. Duchaine is curious about whether anyone develops PMO in the absence of brain damage. He’s in contact with a fifteen-year-old boy who has been seeing distortions for as long as the boy’s family can remember; he calls faces cartoonish, like characters from “The Simpsons.” In one test, the boy looked at a fixed point, and Duchaine’s team showed him faces in his peripheral vision. He said that all the faces stretched toward the point; he was reminded of scenes in the “Harry Potter” movies, when Dementors try to suck out people’s souls. “You could imagine that there are some people out there who have had it their entire lives,” Duchaine told me. “They have no idea what faces look like.” In 2007, Victor Sharrah, who sports a white ponytail and a handlebar mustache, was working as a long-haul truck driver based in Clarkesville, Tennessee. One day that spring, he yanked open the jammed door of his truck. It clocked him in the chin, and he fell backward, hitting his head on the pavement. The blow knocked him unconscious and gave him a concussion. Such injuries can sometimes trigger PMO—but, strangely, Sharrah didn’t develop the condition until one morning twelve years later. The elongated face and enlarged eyes of his roommate alarmed him so much that he left the house. During his commute to work, however, he saw the same distortions on other drivers. “I was freaking out,” he told me. “I thought I woke up in a demon hell.” (It’s possible that Sharrah’s head injury did not cause his PMO; years after his concussion, he was also exposed to carbon monoxide.) When Sharrah posted about what he was seeing in a support group on Facebook, Catherine Morris, a volunteer for the group and a former teacher at schools for the visually impaired, reached out. She suggested he could be experiencing visual distortions—not a psychotic episode, as he feared. “She saved my life,” Sharrah told me. Morris also introduced him to Duchaine, who realized that Sharrah’s PMO had a unique feature: he saw facial distortions only in person, and not on screens. On Halloween, I met Sharrah in a small room in Dartmouth’s psychology building, Moore Hall, where Duchaine’s team was evaluating his symptoms. A Ph.D. student, Antônio Mello, was repeatedly showing him a Ken doll and asking him to rate the severity of facial distortions he saw, from zero to six. “That’s about a four,” Sharrah said. Next, Mello asked Sharrah to look at a student’s face through lenses of various colors—something that Morris had recommended to reduce the intensity of distortions. Through red lenses, Sharrah rated the distortions a four. Then he closed his eyes, put on green lenses, and opened his eyes again. “Two,” he said. It’s not clear why colors make a difference, but a few other patients have reported the same thing. After Sharrah’s exam, we walked together to a park in the center of town. He lit a cigarette as we walked; we passed a few pedestrians in costumes. “Those girls over there are distorted,” he told me, pointing at a group of young women who were not in costume. “It’s always Halloween.” He asked me if I had ever seen “They Live,” a science-fiction film from 1988 in which a man finds a special pair of sunglasses. They reveal everyone around him to have deformed, zombie-like faces. “My whole scenario reminds me of the reverse,” he said. He held up a pair of green glasses that Morris made for him, which he sometimes wears to alleviate distortions. If Sharrah hadn’t mentioned his condition, I never would have guessed that he suffers from it. I could sense how profoundly it distorts his life, however. In his most recent job, he worked in a restaurant kitchen, cooking comfort food like fried catfish and meatloaf; he told me that he liked being away from the customers, where he didn’t have to see facial distortions. For several years, he had a girlfriend whom he met online, but they never met in person. “She was worried about us meeting face to face,” he said. During our conversation, I started to feel self-conscious that my presence might burden him with an unpleasant sight. Before we parted, we took a selfie together. He looked at us on the screen of my phone and nodded in affirmation. “You look normal there,” he said. Recently, Werbeloff got the results of his brain imaging. The protective sheath around neurons in his splenium appeared to have deteriorated. Duchaine told him that he was confident the damage “is the cause of your hemi-PMO (or at least part of the story).” Werbeloff was unsettled to learn the news, but he also found it comforting. “I was quite relieved to have a reason,” he told me. At the Met, Werbeloff and I went to see “Hidden Faces,” an exhibition of Renaissance-era portraits. We stopped at a pair of fifteenth-century portraits by Jacometto Veneziano. One was said to show a nun, whose face was mostly visible under a white headdress; the other, a man in a black hat, in profile. In a hushed voice, Werbeloff told me that the woman’s face was starting to change, but the man’s was not. Next, we looked at an oil painting by Ridolfo Ghirlandaio which showed a beige mask with blushed cheeks framed by mystical creatures. It had the realistic features of a face, but with empty black holes for eyes. A Latin inscription read, “To each his own mask.” “Will this one distort?” I asked. “I have no idea,” Werbeloff said, and paused. “It is distorting.” Then we saw a portrait of a woman who stared straight out at the viewer, by Lavinia Fontana. “Oh, she’s a bad one,” he said. English is replete with expressions such as “to lose face,” “say it to my face,” and “two-faced,” which emphasize that faces are a way to access our most authentic selves. To “deface” something is to destroy it. But PMO is a painful reminder that when we look at someone else, their appearance is partly constructed in our minds. I asked Werbeloff whether he was still able to enjoy art museums. “It’s like looking at a train crash,” he said. “You can’t look away. It’s bad, but it’s fascinating.” One of Werbeloff’s former partners wore glasses, which lessened the facial distortions. “Of course, the glasses have to come off eventually,” he told me, wryly. His current partner wears a gold nose stud, which helps to disrupt the distortions. “That nose ring is the most amazing thing,” he said. “I find him to be the most beautiful creature.” I was moved by the reverence in his voice. At the end of our time together, Werbeloff and I looked at each other face to face. He was staying behind at the museum to explore the contemporary-art wings, where there happen to be fewer portraits. We spent a few minutes bantering about philosophy and his plans for the evening, and I felt like I was hanging out with a friend. Then his eyes darted away from me, and back again. I sensed that he was trying to reset the distortions on my face—to see me, just for a moment, as I was. ♦

Getting poopoo'ed on the head by birds is something that happens to me way too often. And it ain't me doing it, it is the damn birds. Though it is supposed to be a sign of good luck...well, I'm still waiting.

@Ishanga In traditional Buddhism there has always been two main threads of reaching enlightenment. One is study and the other is just do it. I've always been a just do it kind of person in the realm of religiosity. I like it and I agree with you quite a bit on your perspective.

@Rishabh R yes basically, I suspect when anyone has a feeling of rejection (hurt), nothing can be any more real. I'll give you a concrete example. My ex-wife accused me of abuse, I concluded that despite me not being an abusive personality by nature, quite the opposite, she fully believed it. So, I had no choice but to accept her feelings. But, on the other hand, she had a history of leaving disaster in her wake, broken relationships, attempted suicide, narcissism, and a host of other weirdness (I should emphasize her tendency toward paranoia). I never fully integrated my acceptance of her viewpoint UNTIL my daughter came to me with feelings of the same experiences with her mother. What I then realized was that 'it' wasn't me, it was her. Of course, I played my part in it, but she has an enraging personality and I fell into her game due to my own very real weaknesses. So, it is in a way walking a tightrope (A psychologist would call it 'walking on eggshells, which is part of the ploy that women love to use to justify their inability to accept what is really real). But we as individuals/people have to navigate the landmines of human emotions to eventually 'actualize' our experiences. Life is not easy for us humans, sometimes painful, sometimes blissful, Though far from easy for me, we have to make it work and most essential is moving forward in a way that makes us happy. I haven't done it yet and will likely go to my grave without that as an accomplishment.

1. Gladiator 2. Troy 3. Saving Private Ryan 4. Apocalypse Now 4. many others ... I didn't realize that I liked 'war' movies ... no, not really, I did. Honorable Mentions: The Grudge, 3 Body Problem The most disgusting movie I've ever seen: Eraserhead: David Lynch

I suggest having a full body MRI to see if you have any implants? Manifestations: weird electrical and magnetic effects, blinking lights, ability to feel electrical current, other anomalous experiences, etc. would be a starting point, methinks.

One thing that I've learned is valid, is that what we feel can be as real as anything. Our feelings can deceive us though but that requires a deeper look to discern. But if you feel it, you might as well own it, even if it is a projection of someone else's. Agonizing reappraisal is always in order.

True as manifestations, but one should be concerned and careful about what is manifested.

Here's an interesting story. An individual had his testosterone level reduced to zero but I don't remember the reason for it, but I think it was sex crimes or some such thing. In any case, he remarked on his personal experience while beginning his journey in that state. He described that one day he was just walking down the street and a feeling came over him that everything he saw was doing exactly what God intended. Rocks, a wheel hubcap, everything was perfect just as God intended. It was a fascinating thing.

I always hated that feeling of my body floating to the ceiling and even worse was hearing people's thoughts. It was too much!

I hope you are right but it is somewhat distressing to me. And then there is the Electoral College to deal with...

ahhhaha, lol. Such a funny-looking sandwich.