Fwd: powerpoint for class today

David T.

Presentation 5.pptx

Framing matters

It's the first day of fall! Or is it just another Monday in September?

Behavioral scientist @katymilkman's research reveals something fascinating: how we *frame* today can completely change our motivation to change.

In one of her studies, she invited people to sign up for goal reminders to achieve their goals on the exact same day — but described it differently to two groups. One group heard "first day of spring," the other heard "third Thursday in March."

Laurie Santos
https://www.threads.com/@lauriesantosofficial/post/DO6sswhiDmd?xmt=AQF0YNzskMxFwR5SXxcqEW8EhPLc7vtSvhWyX-cHJkD4AA&slof=1

A happy morning routine

(Mine's better…)

"How you start your morning sets the tone for your whole day.

This is the science and habits behind my "Mad Scientist" morning routine, a six-step protocol I use to lower negative affect, boost positive mood, and make mornings a time of focus and flow.

I put the six science-backed practices into a simple guide you can follow.

Click the link in my bio to make your mornings calmer, and more focused."

Arthur Brooks
https://www.threads.com/@arthurcbrooks/post/DO69ax1kuk5?xmt=AQF0LeBMox1-rcbTeL8wYXsqokdz4V4pvRaKOmjRN8-5Ng&slof=1

World Gratitude Day

Gratitude isn't just fluffy stuff.

🔹 Studies link it to better sleep, lower stress & even longer life.
🔹 It builds resilience—mindset is everything.
🔹 And it grows when you share it.

On #WorldGratitudeDay, name one thing you're thankful for. It might just change your brain AND someone else's.

#gratitude #mindset #resilience

The Gratitude Mind  

John Kaag: “James says, no, reality always outstrips the descriptions of it — and that’s for the best.”

NYTimes: Psychedelics Blew His Mind. He Wants Other Philosophers to Open Theirs.

"The findings of psychedelics wouldn't have surprised Heraclitus, Plato, Plotinus, Spinoza, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Emerson, Nietzsche and, most certainly, William James," John Kaag, a philosopher at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell and an expert on James, told me. Only over the past 100 years has the discipline, through an "analytic turn," been "trying to reduce all of human experience to the understandable, to the explicable," he said. "And James says, no, reality always outstrips the descriptions of it — and that's for the best."

nyt

“Your brain doesn’t care if you’re happy”

—To which Darwin replies: "the vigorous, the healthy, and the happy survive…"
==

Your brain was built for survival, not happiness.

That's why gratitude feels like magic—it convinces your mind that you're safe, right now.

#mindsetshift #gratitude #GratitudePractice #MindsetShift #NeuroScience #AnxietyHack #MentalStrength

https://www.threads.com/@the_gratitude_mind/post/DO1q2c5EgQh?xmt=AQF0fhsKWpbcTB0_yiSllCSOFsOlp_7657up1SoQ52aIAA&slof=1

How NOT to be an Epicurean

https://www.instagram.com/p/DOYyTDEjtnE/?igsh=MXJ4NGU0c3NtYzl3aw==

Pursuing joy

 (Thanks for sharing this, Gary.)

---

Message of the Week  Clay Stauffer  Guest columnist  The Tennessean Sept. 14, 2025

---

I have been teaching moral leadership at Vanderbilt University since 2019. My courses tend to focus on topics like happiness, fulfillment, values, emotional intelligence, and the quest for a meaningful life. I want my students to reflect upon what it means to live a moral life that seeks to make a positive difference in the world. How will they make big decisions? Which values matter most? How will they approach the world regardless of their chosen career path? What will sustain them when they face disappointment, tragedy and hard times?

In his classic book 'The Happiness Hypothesis,' Jonathan Haidt identifies three different theories of human happiness. The first theory is called the 'Progress principle:' Happiness comes from success and acquisition. This principle clearly dominates our consumer culture. We feel that we will be happier if we make more money, buy a nicer car, a bigger house, or more toys. But remember the timeless words of Ecclesiastes: 'I considered all that my hands had done and the toil I had spent in doing it, and again, all was vanity and a chasing after the wind.' (Ecc 2:11) So many of the material things we chase provide temporary satisfaction...  (continues at Nashville Tennessean)

Are you an otrovert?

 Otroversion seems to be the condition Groucho Marx declared: unwillingness to join any club that would have someone like him for a member...

Feel like you don’t belong? Crave emotional independence? Constantly come up with original ideas? Like Frida Kahlo, Franz Kafka and Albert Einstein, you could have a distinct case of otroversion ...

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2025/aug/20/are-you-an-otrovert-why-this-personality-type-could-be-your-greatest-gift

Sacred matter

Responding to those who accuse Epicurean materialists of desacralizing nature and the universe by reducing all to atoms swirling in the void ("matter in motion")--

"To anyone who has ever looked on the face of a dead child or parent the mere fact that matter COULD have taken for a time that precious form, ought to make matter sacred ever after. It makes no difference what the PRINCIPLE of life may be, material or immaterial, matter at any rate co-operates, lends itself to all life's purposes. That beloved incarnation was among matter's possibilities." Pragmatism, Lecture III

Mentioned in Richardson's James bio:

  

Questions SEP 23

1. What do you think of Epic's definition of a world? 159 Do you think he had a notion that each world could have its own laws of nature (rather than the natural universe being governed by a single set of natural laws, which seems to be the modern "correct" view)?
2. When Epic applies the criterion of "running counter to our experience" to cosmology, how does he or the cosmologists of his time know anything of what worlds do? --unless he is indeed generalizing universally from earthly experience. And how can he claim to know that the planets, moon, etc. were not separately created? 160
3. Can we be sure our reliance on the "clear evidence" of the senses is not an alternate form of "mythologizing"? 166
4. Astrology is "worthless," but is that because of the "one-cause" method? 171
5. Do you share Epic's contempt for those who imagine "some divine being" who sits and watches animals in hibernation etc.? 172
6. Is it the same mistake to say one shouldn't study philosophy or seek happiness prior to some designated age? 178
7. Do you agree with Epic's definition of "the irreligious man"? 179
8. If you're not afraid to die, should you automatically expect there to be "nothing fearful in living"? 180
9. Do you "prefer the most savory dish to the largest portion..."?
10. What's Epic saying, when he declares the future "neither ours nor altogether not ours"? 181
11. Will a good Epicurean really "never experience anxiety" and live like a god," with no emotional peaks or valleys? 185, 192 Would you miss your peaks?
12. Do you believe death is really "no different than if we had never been born at all," even if we rule out a punitive afterlife? 188
13. Having imbibed the Epicurean message, do we "no longer need unlimited time"? 199 [Let's remember to revisit this question when we read 4,000 Weeks...]
14. Is life "ruined by procrastination"? 204 How well do you resist procrastination? Any tips?
15. Must we "laugh and philosophize..."? 205 And "remain cheerful"? 206 Do you?
16. Is friendship the heart of "the gospel of the happy life"? Why call it a gospel?
17. Is Vatican quote #68 the wisest statement in this book? 207

Before we say goodbye to Epicurus, in case you've not seen Alain de Botton's take on him and his school yet...

 

 

Happiness Begins with Café con Leche, in “Encarnación”

…the question of professional aspirations could be different from the question of happiness. "I needed to find a way to understand how to enjoy the ride," he told me. "And I think she explained it perfectly." For Encarnación, life is about having a sense of play. You are the one who gets to decide whether you're happy or not. That decision may look like taking time for small pleasures—say, savoring a good cup of coffee instead of merely getting caffeinated. Café con leche, y azúcar en el café.

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-new-yorker-documentary/happiness-begins-with-cafe-con-leche-in-encarnacion

The gift of little things in the present

"...The occasion and the experience, then, are nothing. It all depends on the capacity of the soul to be grasped, to have its life-currents absorbed by what is given. "Crossing a bare common," says Emerson, "in snow puddles, at twilight, under a clouded sky, without having in my thoughts any occurrence of special good fortune, I have enjoyed a perfect exhilaration. I am glad to the brink of fear." 

Life is always worth living, if one have such responsive sensibilities. But we of the highly educated classes (so called) have most of us got far, far away from Nature. We are trained to seek the choice, the rare, the exquisite exclusively, and to overlook the common. We are stuffed with abstract conceptions, and glib with verbalities and verbosities; and in the culture of these higher functions the peculiar sources of joy connected with our simpler functions often dry up, and we grow stone-blind and insensible to life's more elementary and general goods and joys. 

The remedy under such conditions is to descend to a more profound and primitive level. To be imprisoned or shipwrecked or forced into the army would permanently show the good of life to many an over-educated pessimist. Living in the open air and on the ground, the lop-sided beam of the balance slowly rises to the level line; and the over-sensibilities and insensibilities even themselves out. The good of all the artificial schemes and fevers fades and pales; and that of seeing, smelling, tasting, sleeping, and daring and doing with one's body, grows and grows. The savages and children of nature, to whom we deem ourselves so much superior, certainly are alive where we are often dead, along these lines; and, could they write as glibly as we do, they would read us impressive lectures on our impatience for improvement and on our blindness to the fundamental static goods of life. "Ah! my brother," said a chieftain to his white guest, "thou wilt never know the happiness of both thinking of nothing and doing nothing. This, next to sleep, is the most enchanting of all things. Thus we were before our birth, and thus we shall be after death. Thy people,... when they have finished reaping one field, they begin to plough another; and, if the day were not enough, I have seen them plough by moonlight. What is their life to ours,--the life that is as naught to them? Blind that they are, they lose it all! But we live in the present."

--ON A CERTAIN BLINDNESS IN HUMAN BEINGS

==

Panda happiness

“Yesterday is history, tomorrow is a mystery, today is a gift , which is why we call it the present.”― Bill Keane

The Beauty of a Silent Walk

It's not just for peripatetic philosophers...

No talking. No podcasts. No music. Just some time alone with your thoughts.
Walking in silence is an ancient tradition rooted in mindfulness, a form of meditation that helps people focus on the physical sensations, thoughts and emotions of the present moment, without any judgment.

The fact that the silent walk is nothing new has attracted a chorus of critics; "Gen Z thinks it just invented walking," they say.

To that, Arielle Lorre, 38, a content creator in Los Angeles, had to laugh.

"Fifteen or 20 years ago, this would not have even been a conversation," said Ms. Lorre, who has often discussed the benefits of silent walks, most recently on her podcast and on TikTok. But silent walking feels relevant right now because many of us have become tethered to our devices, she added.

The question then becomes: "How do we counteract that?" Ms. Lorre said.

Walking is a well-established balm for the mind and body. Research has shown that walking for as little as 10 extra minutes a day may lead to a longer life. And a 2020 study in The Journal of Environmental Psychology found that a 30-minute walk in an urban park reduced the amount of time that people dwelled on negative thoughts. Walking has also been shown to improve creativity and help fend off depression... nyt

==

Silent walks are great, but so are walking-and-talking walks. This guy just needs to learn how to shift walking-gears:

No, I don't want to go for a walk with you

Walking is a solo activity, and no one is going to convince me otherwise.

"...Like most humans, I am a terrible multitasker. Invite me on a walk and I will struggle to keep up my end of the conversation because my brain cannot unlearn that walking time is thinking time, my mind wandering as widely and aimlessly as my feet..." nyt

"…Get into the habit of examining your own mind and the world around you while walking in deep philosophical contemplation, Epictetus says, so that you may come to know who you really are, rather than losing yourself in society, among the chatter of other people's voices."

https://open.substack.com/pub/donaldrobertson/p/how-to-walk-like-a-stoic-e1a41c8d5af0?r=35ogp&utm_medium=ios&utm_campaign=post

Being There

The principal duty of friendship is merely presence.

"...According to an American Perspectives Survey, between 1990 and 2021, the percentage of Americans reporting that they had no close friends at all quadrupled. For men, the number had risen to 15 percent. Almost half of all Americans surveyed reported having three close friends or fewer... Ever since I’ve started thinking and writing about America’s loss of belonging, I’ve been asking people what virtue they value most in a friend. I’ve asked people who are religious and secular, white-collar and blue-collar, men and women, Black and white. And it’s remarkable how often the answer boils down to the single virtue I mentioned above, of presence, of being there..."

David French
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/24/opinion/friendship-loneliness.html?smid=em-share

Epicurus in "The Spinoza Problem"

 Irvin Yalom's novel suggests that Epicurus's view of the gods as real but distant was "bold, but not foolhardy"... and that it presaged Spinoza's pantheism. 

MTSU Constitution Day Keynote Speaker featuring David Brooks

So disturbing to hear that only 30% of our fellow Americans trust their neighbors, let alone their public institutions. No wonder our society is lately so splintered and (in David's word) "rotted" with mutual suspicion and hostility. But, so good to hear him encouraging more questions, more listening, and a greater sense of community.

And so great to see my former students on the panel. Nice job, Sneh and Victoria!

(Starts at around 20 minutes)

https://www.youtube.com/live/fQnMDJ7uFm8?si=_MU8BA9gxZZ8uK3h

The Era of Dark Passions

Interesting how much of David Brooks's latest column made it into his Constitution Day panel discussion here on Wednesday (or vice versa)… offering insight into how newspaper columnist sausage gets made.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/18/opinion/trump-kirk-rage.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

It matters where you hang your hat

What if your ZIP code mattered more for your happiness than almost anything else?

According to longevity expert Dan Buettner, changing your environment can sometimes *double* your happiness. That's because where you live shapes the air you breathe, how much you walk, and how easy it is to connect with other people.

🎧 Learn more about how the your environment — from where you choose to live to what you put on your plate — impacts your happiness on The Happiness Lab.

https://www.threads.com/@lauriesantosofficial/post/DOv3rk7lYX5?xmt=AQF0x-lG3AjTjgbPeeOVQGei62xe0SKVe79J0xuMrugY7g&slof=1

Brazenness

...That Jimmy Kimmel and Stephen Colbert are salient targets of the right wing's free-speech hypocrisy tells you a lot about the right wingers themselves: their thin-skinned insecurity and sense of inadequacy. Stung by being exposed by these sharp-witted and eloquent individuals, their response is to lash out: the bully's way. I think it is a safe bet that Kimmel and Colbert will be far more fondly remembered by history than those currently trying to repress them. Or, indeed, than any whom the right wingers fete for purposes of weaponisation.

A.C. Grayling

https://open.substack.com/pub/acgrayling/p/brazenness?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=post%20viewer

"Show of Force"

...Ukrainians are being invaded by Russia.

No one from the outside will invade us. We can only invade ourselves.

And whether that happens is up to us: whether we choose to see the overall logic, whether we choose to name things as we are, whether we choose to talk to one another, and whether we choose to go on with the work of citizenship, decency, and humanity.

Timothy Snyder

https://open.substack.com/pub/snyder/p/show-of-force?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email

Midterm report presentations '25

 Select a topic related to the day's scheduled assigned reading OR to one of the RECOMMENDED texts on reserve in the library (focus on the first chapter or two, if you wish you can return to it for your final report presentation later)

• The Word of Dog: What Our Canine Companions Can Teach Us About Living a Good Life (Rowlands) 978-1324095682 - because dogs, who can teach us much about attention and the present, make me happy.
• Wanderlust: A History of Walking (Solnit) 978-0140286014 - because the peripatetic life makes me happy.
• Moral Ambition (Bregman) 978-0316580359 - because there's more to life than happiness, and more to happiness than pleasure and complacency.

Plan to speak for about ten minutes, then give us a discussion question and direct the discussion. We'll plan to do two presentations (three if/when necessary) per class. Coordinate with your classmates who report on the same day to avoid redundancy. If you can find a suitable way to incorporate a podcast and/or video into your report presentation (using the James Walker Library production facilities on the 2d floor), you're welcome to do so.

Indicate your date and topic preference in the comments space below. First come, first served. 

UPDATE, Sep 15: To the handful of you who've expressed no preference: please do so ASAP, or I will have to assign you one.

SEP

18 Epicurus -p.156 -

1. Basil Lozano Epicurus
2. 
   

23 Epicurus -p. 207

1. David Testerman Sept. 23. Epicurus
2. 
   

25 Waldinger 1-2 -p.53

1. Jonathan Haycraft - Waldinger 1 and 2, September 25th: Conjuring Happiness
2. Rhys Stephens - Moral Ambition

30 Waldinger 3-4 -p.116

1. Amanda Burbage - Waldinger 3-4
2. Adeline Lennon - Sep 30 Ch. 3 Relationships

OCT

2 Waldinger 5-6 -p.164

1. Jacob Rampey - Oct 2nd - Wanderlust (Solnit) Chapters 1-2
2. Avery Eaton - same (please coordinate with Jacob to avoid redundancy... maybe do two other chapters)

7 Waldinger 7-8 -p.222

1. Kendal Johnson- October 7th Waldinger chapter 8 Family Matters
2. Carol Edwards- Oct 7th Waldinger Chapter 7. The Person Beside you: How intimate relationships shape our lives

9  EXAM 1

FALL BREAK

16 Flanagan -p.42. 

1. October 16, Jayden Smith; The Happiness Agenda
2. Landon, Word of Dog
3. Airmark, Word of Dog (please coordinate to avoid redundancy, select different chapters to focus on)

21 Flanagan 2-3 -p.95

1. Oct. 21: Tyler Murray - Ch. 4 Social Fitness; Flanagan - The Good Life
2. Sophie Duffy - Word of Dog
3. (Name, Wanderlust)

23 Flanagan 4-7 -p.145

1. May Gaines - Oct 23, Chap 5. Subjective vs. Objective Happiness, Flanagan
2. Michael Woolery October 23rd - "Meditations" by Marcus Aurelius
3. (Name, Moral Ambition)

Chatting some more about the Experience Machine

(Previously...)

My prompt: We continued this discussion in class yesterday. The student who said he’d plug in contented that role-playing video games are more immersive and immediate than reading literature. I still contend that being swept into the world of a well crafted novel is at least as imaginatively immersive. Of course, as I have written, (* below) I would love someday to experience something like the Star Trek Holodeck. But I also hope never to lose that robust sense of reality that enables me to distinguish the virtual from the real. Can you suggest some sources that emphasize and prioritize the qualitatively-different feel of experiences that are real?

---Here are several books and videos—and some related arguments—that emphasize and prioritize real experience over simulation or virtuality. These picks tend to affirm that there is a qualitative difference, often morally or existentially significant, between the real and merely simulated or imagined—even when the simulation is compelling.

---

Books & Essays

1. The Case Against Reality: How Evolution Hid the Truth from Our Eyes by Donald D. Hoffman
   Hoffman argues that perception evolved not to show us “reality as it is,” but to give us a user-interface tailored for survival. While this sounds like it pushes toward relativism, Hoffman’s claims are often interpreted as showing why real experience matters: because it is grounded in interactions and consequences outside our heads. The illusions we enjoy are only illusions precisely because they mask a deeper reality. Quantum Zeitgeist+4The Inquisitive Biologist+4Quanta Magazine+4

2. Reality+: Virtual Worlds and the Problems of Philosophy by David J. Chalmers
   Chalmers is more sympathetic to the idea that virtual worlds are “genuine reality” in some respects. But his discussion makes it possible to see clearly the ways in which we nonetheless tend to treat reality as having more weight—because of authenticity, of unmediated causal chains, of moral responsibility, etc. This helps sharpen the distinction. Amazon

3. At the Threshold of the Image: From Narcissus to Virtual Reality by Andrea Pinotti
   A historical/philosophical exploration of image, illusion, representation, and what happens at the border between image and reality. This helps show that the difference between “seeing” (or experiencing) an image and being part of a real, embodied, causally efficacious world has long been a philosophical concern. ZoneBooks

4. The Dream of Reality: Heinz von Foerster’s Constructivism by Lynn Segal
   This is more about how we construct “what we call reality” through perception, language, and cognition, but Segal helps ground those analyses in what is at stake—why we care about reality. You’ll get good material here for arguing that even if our access is mediated, we still have reasons to prize the “real” fabric with which our experiences interact. Wikipedia

5. Transformative Experience by L. A. Paul
   Less about simulation per se, more about how some real experiences change your very framework of judgment. Becoming a parent, for example, isn’t just another experience; it transforms your preferences and what “counts” as real and meaningful. This helps show that some real experiences can’t be equaled by imagined ones because they revise you as a subject. Wikipedia

6. Simulacra and Simulation by Jean Baudrillard
   This is perhaps more challenging, because Baudrillard tends to erode distinctions between simulation and reality. But precisely because it challenges them so aggressively, it gives you tools to defend the distinction—by throwing into relief what is lost when you collapse real into simulated or “hyperreal.” Wikipedia

---

Videos & Lectures

Here are some talks that can help your students feel viscerally why many of us sense a difference between experiencing reality and simulation—even when the latter is immersive.

• “Virtual Reality Is GENUINE Reality” – David Chalmers (YouTube)
  In this video Chalmers argues that virtual worlds can be real in certain respects. But watching him qualify his claims is instructive: he doesn’t say virtual equals physical in every dimension (causality, moral responsibility, risk, authenticity). The contrasts he draws help show why people still resist simulations as a full substitute. YouTube

• Ted / Other Talks by Donald Hoffman – “Do we see reality as it is?”
  Hoffman’s public talks, interviews, etc., often emphasize how perception distorts, hides, or filters reality. If you show students those, they tend to respond with “that’s interesting—but then what counts as real?” which is exactly the tension you want to explore. Social Sciences UCI+1

---

Arguments & Themes to Highlight in Discussion

To help your students see why many thinkers believe there is a strong preference for reality (or at least see why that preference makes sense), you might draw out these themes:

• Causality and Risk: Real experiences can lead to real (including unpredictable) consequences; simulations are typically risk-free or predictable. Having a child involves vulnerabilities and responsibilities that can’t be fully simulated.

• Independence and Surprise: Reality is partly “other” than us; it resists our will, sometimes surprises us. Fiction or simulation often is scripted or inside someone’s control. That resistance is valuable.

• Authenticity and Moral Integrity: Being a certain kind of person—not just feeling like one—is tied up with real actions and their effects: relationships, obligations, commitments.

• Transformative Effects: Some real experiences transform you in ways that imagined ones don’t; they change your capacities, your outlook, your values. Simulation can mimic strains, emotions, even learning—but often lacks the residual change that real living brings.

• Epistemic Value: Knowing that something is real carries weight. There is trust, testimony, evidence, verification. The difference between “this happened” vs “I imagined this” isn’t just semantics; it affects identity, social trust, planning, responsibility.

---

If you like, I can gather a curated list of accessible readings/videos (for undergrad level) that explicitly argue that reading literature can be as immersive or more so than video games, yet still preserve the reality-boundary. Would that be helpful?

---Cool, I dug up a number of undergrad-friendly readings and videos that explicitly compare literature to games/virtual environments, or explore what reading does that simulation often can’t. These should help you press the distinction in class in a way that’s grounded, philosophical, and persuasive (without being dismissive of games).

---

Readings (Books, Essays, Papers)

1. Albert Borgmann – Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life
   Borgmann introduces the “device paradigm” and the idea of focal things and practices. One of his themes: certain real practices (reading, attending to nature, communal crafts, etc.) are focal, and they have a character that an equivalent “device-use” lacks. He gives tools for thinking about why real experience has a kind of value not fully reproducible in mediated, technological simulation. Wikipedia

2. “Comparing storytelling in games & literature” by Simon K. Jones (essay)
   This looks explicitly at what literature can do that games often don’t—and vice versa. Jones argues that although games have interactivity, literature has a different kind of imaginative participation: you supply more of the world, you live in the mind of characters, you engage with ambiguity. For many readers, that makes literature qualitatively immersive in its own way. Medium

3. “Exploring Narratives in Video Games as Literary Texts” by A. C. Turley (2018)
   Useful especially for students: this compares how video games tell stories vs. how literary texts do, and observes that literature requires sustained imaginative effort and leaves more underdetermined, thereby engaging the reader’s agency of interpretation in deeper ways. The paper doesn’t always say literature is better, but it shows what is (often) different. IU Indianapolis ScholarWorks

4. “Books vs Video Games – A Detailed Comparison” (CrewFiction, 2024)
   A more popular piece, but well-done. It outlines emotional impact, cognitive engagement, imaginative visualization, narrative depth, and so on. It gives you a list of where literature tends to win (for example, in fostering imagination, interpretive depth, introspection) vs. what games do well (interactivity, sensory immersion). Good for student readers. Crewfiction

5. Michael Heim – The Metaphysics of Virtual Reality
   Though somewhat older, Heim is one of the thinkers who tries to map what virtual reality could do, but also what it might lose. He reflects on the difference between mediated vs “focal” or “intuitive” experience. (This is helpful because it takes the simulation-enthusiast seriously, while still pointing out what realness contributes.) WIRED

---

Videos & Lectures

• “Reality+ Virtual Worlds and the Problems of Philosophy” (talk/book by David Chalmers)
  There are YouTube summaries/reviews of Reality+ that pull out Chalmers’ discussion of virtual worlds: how they might count as real in some respects, but also where people tend to resist them as full substitutes (because of authenticity, unmediated causality, how experiences affect identity etc.). This is directly helpful for your purpose. YouTube

• “The Reality of the Virtual” – Slavoj Žižek (documentary/lecture)
  Žižek explores what makes something “real,” even when mediated or virtual; the ways that the symbolic, the imagined, and the virtual shape us, but also how the “real” has an irreducible core. It’s not an easy pro-reality polemic; but it gives students a lot of philosophical texture to think about how “virtuality” and “real effects” differ. Wikipedia

---

Possible Lines of Argument to Use in Class

To help your students see why literature is (in many cases) just as immersive and real (in important senses), you might structure comparison around:

• Agency of Imagination: When reading, the reader supplies a lot—images, voices, internal interpretations. That constructive work makes the experience more personal, more individuated, and harder to replicate in a pre-programmed simulation.

• Ambiguity & Underdetermination: Literature often leaves gaps; it doesn’t show everything. We imagine, infer, interpret. That openness allows existential or ethical reflection—not just emotional response, but judgment, nuance.

• Transformative Effects: Real reading can change you—judgments, beliefs, emotional sensitivities. Because reading is slower, less predictable, it gives space for internal change that isn’t just “wow, that felt real” but “I see things differently now.”

• Authentic Causality & Consequences: The stakes of real life—relationships, moral responsibility, risk, loss—these are the sorts of things simulation can mimic in effect, but not always in force or permanence. Even very affecting fiction doesn’t usually impose real duties in the world (though it can inspire them).

• Reality as Constraint: Reality pushes back. The physical, causal, social constraints of the world (other people, mortality, chance) are part of what makes real life rich. Simulations tend to limit or bypass many of those constraints, which can make them safer, more pleasant—but less “real” in the sense of existential weight.

---The key, I think, is to keep circling back to the qualitative feel and the existential weight of reality. Games and novels can both immerse, but reality leaves scars, obligations, and transformations that no simulation quite matches. That’s the line worth pressing with your students.

JPO: Right. I’ll share some passages in my book ”William James’s Springs of Delight: the return to life” that emphasize the distinctive qualitative feel and existential weight of reality. One in particular is from Ralph Barton Perry’s book about James, noting that the experience of a sunrise, for example, can be exemplary of this. The experience per se cannot be easily translated into language or fully represented at secondhand. “You had to be there,” as the saying goes.

---That’s perfect material for your class. Perry’s remark, and your use of it in Springs of Delight, goes straight to the heart of what’s missing in simulations: presence. A sunrise isn’t just photons and atmospheric scattering, nor just the subjective glow of feeling. It’s the fact that you were there when the world disclosed itself in that way. The smell of dew, the temperature on your skin, the irreducible thisness of the moment. That’s why secondhand reports, photographs, or digital renderings don’t quite substitute.

James himself leaned on this insight—his insistence that experience is “thick,” that reality comes to us as more than data or representation. His phrase “the blooming, buzzing confusion” is meant in part to capture that unmediated density, which gets flattened when abstracted or simulated.

Sharing Perry’s sunrise passage alongside your student’s claim about video games would make for a sharp contrast: a reminder that the “had-to-be-there” quality is not a defect of reality but its defining strength. Games and novels, no matter how immersive, are still mediated. They can evoke or simulate, but they lack the existential weight of being embedded in the world where things happen to us, and where consequences ripple beyond the screen or the page.

...That’ll give your students plenty to chew on about what makes being there irreducible. Reality itself will do the rest.

==

*  

...There is no denying the computer's practical utility and ever growing potential as a mind-expanding tool, a spur to creativity, and a bridge between people, connecting one another's ideas. But as we accustom ourselves to the idea of computer-facilitated "networking," we risk reducing the whole digital phenomenon to one more consumer-oriented data stream that may supplant or, at the least, compete with, a more direct relationship with nature and the information of the senses, which alone can secure us to the palpable soil of Mother Earth. As we develop a dependent relation to uninterrupted streams of electronically mediated information, passively ingested, we risk losing our native capacity to think and feel for ourselves. If all experience is second-hand, we ourselves will become second-hand beings, information processors, virtual persons at best.

This is not a uniquely electronic problem. Emerson, for instance, was at war with mediation and derivative experience in the nineteenth century. But in our time the vehicles of mediation are so much more pervasive and invasive of personal consciousness. A trivial example often noted: young people working in retail jobs nowadays are increasingly challenged by the relatively simple task of exchanging currency accurately; rarely do they know how to "count back" one's change. They have been taught to rely on calculators for even the most basic transactions of daily life, and for the most part the reliability of calculating technology supports this reliance. But we have to wonder whether the next generation, or subsequent generations, will develop so strong a reliance on computers that people will experience steady erosion of their ability to think an original thought, to feel an honest emotion. Are we witnessing the ascendancy of a new form of perception, one that limits possibility to the confined bounds of what is renderable in virtual representations of thought and feeling? If so, human reality itself is being squashed and neutered.

The question of James's naturalism must address not only the issue of its relation to supernaturalism but also to a largely uncritical popular eagerness to embrace every new form of virtual experience. When bodily immediacy no longer secures our grip on reality, we are too far from home. James would recoil from the insular subjectivism of our brave new Information Age, which has been aptly described as an age of missing information.20 What is missing is the information of the senses, synthesized by the actual central processing unit of the brain and central nervous system but made user friendly in each instance by the uniquely personal contributions of the users themselves. Without this information, we cannot generate for ourselves the sympathetic appreciation of others' experience, which is a prerequisite of pan-historical human solidarity. That, in turn, is necessary for the personal identification with remote futurity that may fuel forms of transcendence unknown to egoists, sensualists, and (their new cousins) virtualists.

George Lakoff and Mark Johnson have suggested that we can retrieve our missing information by attending more carefully to how biological embodiment structures every aspect of our metaphorical hold on the world and on all our relationships. Like James and Dewey, they discern powerfully spiritual implications in the universally carnal human condition. Our organic form is inherently socializing.

A major function of the embodied mind is empathic. From birth we have the capacity to imitate others, to vividly imagine being another person, doing what that person does, experiencing what that person experiences. The capacity for imaginative projection is a vital cognitive faculty. Experientially it is a form of "transcendence."21

Such transcendence is as natural as the body, and as intimately personal as our imaginations are rich. Yet, it relates us vitally to others, surmounting the confines of narrow selfhood. Transcendence defies reduction to computational models of mind which suppose that the neural hardware of our bodies can host any compatible program, indifferently. "Real people have embodied minds whose conceptual systems arise from, are shaped by, and are given meaning through living human bodies."22 This means specific bodies, and persons.

The Jamesian view, again, is that happiness and unhappiness as personal phenomena are vital mysteries, opening onto ranges and depths of experience not wholly available to unpoetic or unspiritual natures, not even minimally so to those who actively or voluntarily withdraw from the vitalizing immediacies of firsthand natural and social relations. Subjectivity is at the core of this mystery, at once the most familiar and the strangest of phenomena. Life in its endless variety is wondrously beyond discursive capture, as (honest) conscious intelligence is intimately aware. Yet the hubris persists among many sensitive and subtle thinkers that belief in human progress must in principle mean the eventual elimination of mystery (Dennett, again, exemplifies this attitude). James believed in progress but in permanent mystery as well, and this is a clue to what is potentially transcendent in a melioristic metaphysic.

In hitching our own personal sense of well-being to the millennial prospects of the race, we expand the region of wonder surrounding our private destiny so that it can embrace, as well, the ideals of the vast human fraternity, past, present, and future. We engage the permanent possibility of meaningful exertion in behalf of common hopes, but not at the expense of individual dreams. And personal imagination retains the prerogative of defining those hopes and dreams, plotting our advance on them, and ranking alternatives. In short, this is a kind of transcendence through which individuals realize a vitalizing attachment to something immeasurably larger and more enduring than themselves, yet are required to renounce none of those personal, individual, "romantic" elements of selfhood which, though transient and unstable, are the animating centers of our lives, our respective founts of happiness. This is transcendence via expanded selfhood, that is, truly expansive, not self-annihilating. It does not exchange the familiar self for a vague abstraction; rather, it convenes all the idiosyncratic selves in a marriage of hope. But with respect to personal enthusiasm, identity, and aspiration, it is an "open" marriage. It defines faithfulness in terms not of renunciation but of mutual consent, forbearance, and tolerance.

Transcendence is a depth experience, and of course there are as many possible approaches to depth as there are ways of being mindfully attentive. Depth resides in traces of historical experience pointing to rich funds of remembered subjectivity, also preserved in the external memory of books, still the only "storage medium" we can rely on not to become obsolete in a generation or less. Depth is present in the hot current of concentrated perception. And it inheres as well in purposive contemplation of a future which, from our vantage, contains many more possibilities than will actually transpire, many opportunities for rich and rewarding relations of all kinds to be affected, and as many risks of the reverse.

We live in a time when depth experiences are increasingly difficult to come by, when experience itself is treated as a "virtual" commodity, and mysterious subjectivity is recycled as prosaic "information" to be skimmed from the theoretically unlimited network database the world is rushing to wire itself into. "Bits are steadily supplanting atoms," writes Sven Birkerts. "Our living has gradually less to do with things, places, and human presence, and more to do with messages, mediated exchanges, ersatz environments, and virtual engagements of all descriptions."23 There is a bit of the apocalyptic curmudgeon in Birkerts, but his elegant and sober challenge to the unexamined assumption that printed text on paper is inconsequentially interchangeable with phosphorescent text on computer monitors is important and timely. Has our infatuation with the web's promise of infinite information clouded our judgment? Are we releasing our grip on the distinction between the real and the virtual, between what is immediate and what is filtered or fabricated? And are we, in consequence, experiencing an unprecedented "crisis of subjectivity"?

There does seem to be a deliberateness to the pace of reading a book and meditating one's response to it, and to the pace of writing and rewriting until words and thoughts form a unity of intention and meaning, which seems oddly inappropriate online. So, it becomes a cause for some concern when an influential scholar announces that "I find myself increasingly unlikely to consult material that is not online" and replies to reading-list suggestions that "if they put their books online I might read them."24

One way of disarming such concern might be to suggest that the virtual/real distinction is not so distinct after all, that "all reality is virtual [and] the only reason for calling a simulation a virtual reality is that its virtuality is more obvious."25 But this is not persuasive. If we take our own experience at all seriously, we must agree with C. S. Peirce that daily encounters with "limitation, conflict, constraint," in general the "teaching of experience" that he calls "Secondness," furnishes the "main lesson of life."26 But is this only a "virtual" kind of lesson, and what can that mean? This sounds like a professional philosopher's puzzle, maybe even a pleasantly diverting one, but it does not seem much engaged with most people's actual experience of life.

What is "virtual reality?" It has always been with us in one form or another. Literary fiction and poetry often succeed by implanting illusory experiences of virtual reality in a reader's consciousness. Great art and music may do the same, in less straightforward ways. The sophistication of those "virtual" experiences available to us in lieu of inaccessible actual ones is, in some respects, a measure of our progress as a civilization. There is nothing intrinsically or uniformly desiccating about them. But, to spend an inordinate portion of one's conscious existence reading even the best literature, or patronizing the finest museums--never mind sporting a VR suit and headset--surely would be. Serious intellectual or aesthetic activity is, of course, very different from the passive form of virtual entertainment to be ingested from television or computers, if only because it is active and engaged with our intelligence and our more humane sympathies. At the opposite extreme, too many of our contemporaries are already plugged in--to television mainly but with the Internet beginning now to capture a growing share of their leisure time--far beyond acceptable hygienic limits. Between the extremes of hyper-aestheticism and immersion in an increasingly debased pop culture--daytime TV has become a misanthropic abomination, from Geraldo to Beavis and Butthead, Jerry Springer, and worse; "primetime" is a nightmare of "reality programming" often as contrived as professional wrestling, itself inexplicably resurgent in popularity--is increasingly difficult to imagine sane virtual environments for the masses.

There are many reasons to be disturbed by present trends, none more compelling than the question of the legacy we are preparing for our children: what sort of natural environment will be there for them to enjoy, and what habitual relations to it will we teach them to prefer? Birkerts has confessed a "swarm of angst" about this, imagining (like E. M. Forster in "The Machine Stops") "a future gone virtual in the extreme" in which people "devote themselves almost exclusively to the exchange of information and ideas by means of a peculiar apparatus..."27 We are not there yet, but this vision is no longer safely consigned to the science fiction racks.

A good way of confronting one's pessimism is by the hopeful act of uncovering its causes and conditions, so far as these are not strictly of one's own peculiar and personal constitution. Not "The sky is falling!" but "Look, the sky seems unstable; what shall we do, now, to steady it?" The sudden emphasis on modes of experience with the world that shut out sensory contact with fresh air and open landscapes seems to some of us one source of instability. Others think that the "limitations and even perversions of communication and learning that are inherent in practices based on the paper-embodied word"28 can be ameliorated by computer networking. Let us all hope they are right. And let us hope that everyone's focus will eventually regain enough of the combined spirit of Jamesian pluralism and Peircean fallibilism to converge on repairs to salvage what is valuable in every medium of expressive human communication.

Meanwhile, many proclaim a world just around the corner in which we will all be "connected," superficially. And in a world so homogeneously unified, we might be right to worry about the persistence of anything but surfaces. Unless we choose to revive and to revere the mystery of our own and others' subjectivity, the depth of the richest forms of experience could be lost to us. Can we follow the current trend of digitizing most aspects of our lives, plug in to extensive computer networks, indulge the fantasies of virtual reality, and still feed and shelter the flame of subjective mystery which, for James and others, contributes so much of the richness and dimensionality of personal experience?

Yes, if we remember how and when and why to pull the plug. There can be no virtual substitute for the real experiences of depth and transcendence, of triumph and joy, of disappointment and sorrow. We will not find reality in bits and simulacra, useful and even transforming though they may be. We must continue to seek it within ourselves and in our reflective relations to others and to nature. And we must continue to express it in our art and in our free actions and dispositions. Then the world will be safe for network mediation.

There is room in the world for a multiplicity of delights and enjoyments; that is part of the meaning of pluralism. So a Jamesian must welcome the "virtual" deliverance of meaningful or pleasant (even if derivative and secondhand) perceptions. But our Jamesian will still hesitate to concede depth, in the honorific sense, to an experience that elides the distinction between what is immediate and real and what is mediated, contrived, and artificial. Recalling James's disdain for subjectivism that treats consciousness as the mise-en-scene of our private amusement, we can be sure that whatever transcendence anyone may be fortunate enough to glean under the auspices of virtual experience, it is not all that it might be: actual, connected fruitfully with nature and the social world.

When I speak of the virtual as shallow, I am thinking not only of the donning of multimedia headsets or the strapping on of body suits with millions of little stimulators to trick the senses. I mean the day-to-day tissue of experience in a culture that views such promised entertainments not only as not inferior but in some cases as clearly superior to the pedestrian pleasures that have always, heretofore, gratified human beings: breathing and moving in fresh air, conversing with real people in real time, delighting in the sensual aesthetic of our own solitary senses. The holographic presentation of a walk in a gentle spring rain, which I hope someday to enjoy for myself on some dreary winter's day, can never replace the real thing. Such an experience may be stunningly satisfying, and taken on its own terms there is no reason to deny that it may have its own kind of depth and resonance. But if we ever find ourselves not bothering to notice whether we are indoors or out, in the holo-suite or in the rain, we will have lost an important hold on who and what we are.

Is this an implausible science fiction horror story or a real danger? Perhaps I and others are being needlessly alarmist, but I would rather risk overreacting than allow the virtualists to lure us onto the unreflectively digitized "road ahead," paved though it may be with honorable intentions. I remain steadfastly unwilling to risk the future of experience to those who often describe themselves as "geeks" and "tech-nerds" and who have spent the better part of their waking lifetimes glued to screens, never registering a flicker of concern or even recognition that there might be an issue of the social and personal impact of these new media of experience.

This is one motive for insisting on a sense of mystery at the heart of subjective experience. The rush to translate all into data and information may leave us without the will or the wish to prefer what is original and authentic, or even to recognize that category at all. If we acknowledge the untranslatable mystery of our selfhood, we will not be fooled by so much superficially seductive and mesmerizing information. But if transcendence is to be naturalized, so must this mystery. If we find the coupling of mystery and naturalism somehow counterintuitive and untenable, if we believe that naturalized understanding must be prosaic, de-mystifying, and dull, we have misread the mystery. We need to turn back before we can move ahead.

Our biology lies behind that mystery but does not solve it. We reengineer our world both physically and imaginatively, we interpolate ourselves amidst the countless causal forces having made up the world heretofore, and now we believe it in our power to reconstruct the world to some degree, as causal forces in our own right. How shall we use that power? What kind of world are we in the process of making? What "sub-worlds" will it contain? Can it ever not be boundless in containing more points of view or dimensions of reality than can fit into any conceivable database?

But this last question serves as a reminder that virtual forms of experience may also be meaningful and illuminating, may open partially on those elusive dimensions of reality, if we learn from them even just a little of how others may perceive the world. One clear way in which "the virtual also has its depth and meaning"29 is in its vestigial capacity to provide experiences we would otherwise miss altogether--"vestigial" because we have always had virtual reality and virtual experiences; the computer- generated version is only the latest and possibly the most atypical example. Anything that stands surrogate for something else and invites us to experience that other thing vicariously, through its mediation, is virtual. Some of those surrogates are contrived and artificial, but that should not automatically discredit them.

The printed word, like all human communication, is a deliberate contrivance. One of its "killer apps" is literary fiction, a virtual universe owing its existence and whatever salutary properties it possesses to that contrivance. Through the medium of fiction we can enter for a time into the subjective space, may gain interior access to the sensibilities, of another. We can virtually experience what it might have been like to be a peasant farmer in medieval England, to be a Hindu mystic, to walk on the moon, or to see the world as our grandparents saw it in their youth--virtually, not actually. That is limiting, of course, but far less than the condition of near-total ignorance, which is our aboriginal state. So, virtual reality can--in principle--deepen our sense of mystery. The important assumption here is that by learning more of another's subjectivity from the inside, virtually, we come to know that person, that self, better and also better appreciate the mystery of selfhood. The mystery does not vanish; it grows in richness and complexity.

But the narrowly scientistic paradigm cannot compass the idea of mystery as a virtue. A popular definition of information, in the computer world, is the reduction of uncertainty. This understanding places a premium on the exponential growth of data, but has no use for the kind of foggy uncertainty embodied in mysterious selfhood. This is not the way to naturalize mystery. If the purpose of naturalizing mystery is not to "solve" or eliminate it but to strengthen our appreciation of how it animates human souls--and in the process to grasp something basic about our condition--then it is fundamentally mistaken to define mystery as the absence of data. The digital rendering of experience is a boon for many purposes, but not for this one...

-- Phil Oliver, William James's "Springs of Delight": The Return to Life (Vanderbilt University Press, 2001), p.166-173