What is so hard about the ‘hard problem’ of consciousness?

I am a materialist in the sense that I think that all phenomena arise due to material entities interacting according to laws of nature. I have seen no reason to think that anything supernatural or mystical is needed to be invoked to explain anything. I have sometimes been asked by people, usually the religious seeking to challenge my atheistic viewpoint that the material world is all there is and does not allow for any gods, as to how I can explain love. They seem to think that love is an immaterial quantity and that believing in its existence requires the same leap of faith as believing in a god. I reply that love is an emotion that is created by the workings of my brain that releases certain substances that cause me to have that feeling I point out that when I die, any love that I feel for anyone or anything will die with me. It does not survive the death of my brain.
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Paul Farmer has died

I read the tragic news of his death at the young age of 62 in Rwanda. Farmer was one of the truly inspiring people. A highly trained doctor who came from humble beginnings, his mission in life was to bring high quality health care to some of the poorest nations in the world, starting with Haiti. A strong believer in the need for global justice and equity, along with Ophelia Dahl (who happens to be the daughter of children’s author Roald Dahl and Academy Award winning actress Patricia Neal), he co-founded the organization Partners in Health which I have supported for many years. They sent me an email announcing the sad news and saying that his death was due to an ‘acute cardiac event’, which I understand to be a heart attack. The Miami Herald has a report.

Dr. Paul Farmer, the renowned infectious disease specialist who devoted his life to fighting deadly epidemics and spent the last several years working on four continents delivering health care to millions, has died in Rwanda, his organization Partners in Health confirmed. He was 62.

A Florida native who lived in Miami with his wife and children when he wasn’t traveling or teaching at Harvard University, Farmer was co-founder of Partners In Health, a nonprofit health care organization based in Boston with a sister organization, Zanmi Lasante, in Haiti.

The recipient of many awards, one of his most recent being the 2020 Berggruen Prize for Philosophy and Culture, and its $1 million cash award, Farmer told the Miami Herald that his personal mission was to change the way humans think of infectious disease and address social inequalities in health care delivery.
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NFTs are a playground for crooks and grifters

NFT’s (Non-Fungible Tokens) are the new rage, riding the wave of the fascination with blockchain and cryptocurrency, two other things that do not seem to deter people from getting on the bandwagon even though they may have just the haziest idea of what they are. Naturally this leads to crooks moving in, selling NFTs of items that do not even belong to them.

When Lois van Baarle, a Dutch artist, scoured the biggest NFT marketplace for her name late last year, she found more than 100 pieces of her art for sale. None of them had been put up by her.

Van Baarle is a popular digital artist, with millions of followers on social media. She’s one of a growing number of artists who have had online images of their art stolen, minted as unique digital assets on a blockchain, and offered up to trade in cryptocurrency on the NFT platform OpenSea.
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US anti-vax virus spreads to Canada

I am somewhat baffled by the protests that have been talking place in the city center in Ottawa and the bridge to Detroit in Windsor Ontario where truckers and people in RVs and have been blocking streets for weeks now. The police finally moved in to clear the Windsor-Detroit bridge which opened today and it looks like they are beginning to clear the Ottawa streets too. Meanwhile prime minister Justin Trudeau has invoked emergency powers to be used of necessary.

So who are these protestors? Some of them are protesting the covid-19 restrictions that are still in place but others seem to be anti-vaxxers whom one would think would be a fairly insignificant presence since Canada has one of the highest covid-19 vaccination rates in the world, around 90%. But it seems like these people are similar to the anti-vaxxers in the US, very loud and angry though small in numbers and consist of the usual suspects that we find here.
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Guinea worm disease almost eradicated

We need to celebrate the successes on the infectious diseases front and there has been a huge one that has been overshadowed by the focus on covid-19.There are many diseases that are water borne and create immense suffering to people who do not have access to clean water. One of those diseases is caused by the guinea worm. The good news is that tremendous strides have been made in combating it.

While the COVID-19 pandemic continues to rage around the world, another disease could be on its way out. Only 14 cases of infection with Guinea worm – a parasite that causes painful skin lesions – were reported in humans in 2021.

This is the lowest tally ever for an infection that, as recently as the 1980s, was found in more than 20 countries and infected 3.5 million people a year (see ‘On the way out’) – however, a remaining reservoir for the parasite in animals means eradication could be a while off, if indeed it is possible, say some scientists.

“It’s pretty amazing,” says Adam Weiss, director of the Guinea Worm Eradication Program of the Carter Center, which is headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia. The centre announced the numbers in late January. “Fourteen people on a planet of almost eight billion. It’s mind-bending to think about.”

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Spirit photography

There is a very strong desire among some segments of the population to make contact with dead people. This desire has been exploited by charlatans, people who claim that (for a fee, of course) they can channel your loved ones. The methods used have varied over time. In the US, the rise in interest in communicating with the dead coincided with the Civil War that saw massive numbers of dead people that left their families devastated and seeking some form of comfort.

In the mid-19th century, in the early days of photography, the husband and wife team of William and Hannah Mumler created a sensation by taking photographs of people that showed the ghosts of their dead loved ones hovering around them, such as this one of the ghost of Abraham Lincoln standing behind his wife Mary Todd Lincoln.
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Columbus and the Flat Earth Myth by Mano Singham

One of the things that surprised me after coming to the US is how many students (and even adults) believed that it was Christopher Columbus who established the fact that the Earth was round and that prior to his 1492 voyage across the Atlantic, people believed the Earth was flat. (Some people still believe the Earth is flat but that is another story.)

I wrote an article about this myth that appeared in Phi Delta KAPPAN, vol. 88, no. 8, p. 590-592, April 2007 that you can read by following the link below.

Columbus and the Flat Earth Myth