SAL RESTIVO'S BLOG: THE SOCIOLOGICAL COGITO

   https://www.amazon.com/Sociological-Cogito-Hard-Problems-Science/dp/1041303467/ref=sr_1_3 ? $233.99 to discover what the solution is to the hard problem of consciousness?  Do not buy this book. If I'm still alive when it comes out in a few months, I will send you a copy.  I'm not in any imminent danger of leaving this so-called fine-tuned universe but approaching 86 next month and with my family history I could pop off at any moment.  I am now convinced that  André Breton was right: dream and reality blend into a kind of absolute reality, a surreality.. We are living in a world whose essence is best captured by surrealists not critical realists like I was until a few moments ago.  Here are a few tidbits from my recent excursions for your amusement.  We are not living in a simulation.  That is just another way for physicists and philosophers to sneak god back into the picture.  And multiple univers...

I have fallen into the trap of discovering meaning  where no meaning exists.  All such efforts are designed to deaden the pain of existence.  Civilization has corrupted the meaningless search for meaning in a meaningless universe by enhancing meaninglessness.  Look around at the world you live in.  Civilization has progressed by covering up the life giving greenery of Earth with concrete, steel, asphalt, and other matter.  It has sent great clouds of pollution into the air we need to breathe, and drowned our life giving oceans, rivers, lakes, and streams in pollutants, it has directed some of our most creative energies and precious life giving resources into monuments, arts, music and literature dedicated to and celebrating non-existent gods, spirits, and deities of all forms.  It has drawn on nature's lawlessness and violence to season our artistic environments with violence far in excess of what is found in the real world. Our movies celebrate v...

   I’ve heard these two truisms all my life:   No one knows what happens when you die; and no one knows if there is a god or not.   If you know that in our every day world gathering two apples once and gathering two apples again will leave you with four apples – that is, if you know that 2+2=4 then you know that when you die you enter an ending time of nothingness, and you know that there is no god.   This is the unerring conclusion of a couple of hundred thousand years of accumulated human experience.                                                          From the crystal ball of Google: ON DEATH The Scientific View: Scientifically, death marks the end of an individual's conscious experience, with consciousness completely fading as the brain shuts down. SR; ESSENTIALLY, ...

Presents a powerful narrative that situates the individual within the inescapable framework of social forces In a world increasingly defined by inequality and existential threats, Sociological Realism: Society as the Walls of Our Imprisonment offers a bold reinterpretation of society’s role in shaping the individual. Beginning with the premise that society is a reality sui generis ―a unique and formative system―Sal Restivo carefully constructs an argument about how institutions, cultural traditions, and historical processes shape our identities, behaviours, and beliefs. Tracing the development of the sociological imagination from antiquity to the present day, the author introduces foundational thinkers whilst anchoring abstract theory in personal narrative and lived experience. This distinctive volume―part introductory sociology, part sociobiography―confronts dominant ideas about free will, agency, and the autonomous self. Engaging with contemporary issues including class,...

  REFLECTIONS ON THELONIUS MONK: "All musicians are subconsciously mathematicians" Physicist and saxophonist Stephon Alexander has argued in his many public lectures and his book The Jazz of Physics that Albert Einstein and John Coltrane had quite a lot in common. Alexander in particular draws our attention to the so-called “Coltrane circle,” which resembles what any musician will recognize as the “Circle of Fifths,” but incorporates Coltrane’s own innovations. Coltrane gave the drawing to saxophonist and professor Yusef Lateef in 1967, who included it in his seminal text, Repository of Scales and Melodic Patterns. Where Lateef, as he writes in his autobiography, sees Coltrane’s music as a “spiritual journey” that “embraced the concerns of a rich tradition of autophysiopsychic music,” Alexander sees “the same geometric principle that motivated Einstein’s” quantum theory. Neither description seems out of place. Musician and bl...

  “I wrote,” the ninety year old professor told me, “in my Memories of My Melancholy Whores (Marquez), that among the charms of old age are the provocations our young themselves because they think we are out of commission.”      Sì, risposi. Ricordo di aver baciato M sulle rive del fiume Red Cedar; mi baciò appassionatamente e poi disse: "Perché succede sempre a me?" Più tardi, la sorprese di nuovo quando mi staccai dalla sua bocca e venni sulla sua spalla. Allo stesso modo, ho sorpreso una Tigre,scopandola da dietro per ore finché finalmente si voltò verso di me e disse "Basta". Poi si sdraiò a pancia in giù e si finì mentre io ero sopra di lei. Then he told me about the madam and the young girl she presented him with.   “Nothing happened, in fact it showed me I’m in no condition for this kind of chasing around....I can’t anymore.”   That’s what he told the madam over the phone.   Then he hung up the phone, “filled with a sense of liberation I hadn’t ...

  My blog this morning is a reflection on this article in National Catholic Reporter, July 3 rd , 2025.   The Catholic Church believes in science. That good Christians must be anti-science is a myth. "Science is sometimes portrayed as elitist or biased, despite its self-correcting nature, that is, science moving forward often corrects established wisdom and always must be open to new insights." — Pontifical Academy of Sciences  https://www.ncronline.org/opinion/catholic-church-believes-science-good-christians-must-be-anti-science-myth?utm_source=flipboard&utm_content=other Does the Catholic Church believe in social science, does it believe in the Durkheimian sociology of God? This is the key to believing in science.  Beginning in the 1840s, a Copernican revolution unfolded challenging millennia ideas about God and religion.  These ideas were as radical in departing from the views of the Church as were the ideas of Copernicus and Gal...

  BIG BRAINS GO BUST: HOW EXISTENCE MAKES SMART PEOPLE DUMB   The ultimate question, philosophers tell us, can be posed in two ways: Why is there anything at all? Why is there “something” rather than “nothing?”   Apparently some people think that if you string a bunch of words together and put a question mark at the end you have constructed a question. Not so fast. Here is a good example of why thinking should have stop signs. Already deluded by Mormonism, Jim Holt drives his delusion further by tackling a non-question. Something can come out of nothing in a specific quantum mechanical sense, but sometimes - notably in human discourse - nothing can come out of nothing. I don't mean to be rude, but surely you're joking Mr. Holt, and Mr. TED!!   https://lnkd.in/gpyn2Hb8 Don’t let it be said that those know-it-all physicists could ever turn their backs on the Big Questions of life, the universe, and everything.   So of course they have answers...

  Over the course of my career I've come up with a number of innovative concepts.  For example, I identified two phobias: subanimaphobia is the fear that there is a life after death.  Subsubanimaphobia is the fear that there is a life after death and it's just like the life you're living now forever.   The Recurrence Theorem helps explain the ease or difficulty we experience when traveling from one place to another locally, regionally, or internationally.  Each arena of behavior has a recurrence index which tells how similar or different it is from other arenas.  Basically, we are able to go from room to room, home to street, school, or work, and travel locally, regionally, and internationally because the structures we encounter tend to be roughly at least identifiable, accessible, and not obstructions to our actions.   Buildings, entrances and exits (doors), windows, stairs, escalators, elevators, stores, hospitals, public transportation, st...

       New York Times opinion columnist David Brooks and University of Chicago graduate (BA) has written a great deal in the public arena and now has revealed his spiritual evolution from agnostic to man of faith.   Faith came to him, he writes, through “numinous experience...moments of awe and wonder...”   He writes about moments of transcendence at the foot of a New England mountain and at Chartres Cathedredal in France.   I have stood at the foot of a mountain in New England, and in fact lived on a mountain in Vermont; and I’ve visited and written about the cathedral at Chartres.   I can imagine what Brooks must have felt at these times, but being as I am anchored to the earth I cannot be driven to awe and wonder as numinous experiences.   They did not open up vast mysteries for me as they did for Brooks.   He explains this in terms of “the emotions we feel when we are in the presence of a vast something j...

  I have called many times for an index of GDDP (Gross Domestic Disproduct) to measure the human and natural wastes that accompany the production of goods and services measured by Gross Domestic Product.   This could help offset the fact that we go stumbling along producing goods and services with no thought to the limits of natural resources. Remembering Jimmy Carter, we remember how he urged Americans to limit individual power consumption: “TURN OFF LIGHTS,” he said.   This is an example of what I call the law of marginal futulity.   Suppose we do turn off ights in our individual homes; who is going to turn off the lights in Las Vegas?   Who is even going to imagine that the lights of Las Vegas are the tip of the ice berg of our problem with assigning values and costs to using resources? Jimmy Carter’s Complicated Environmental Legacy, By Nitish Pahwa https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2024/12/jimmy-carter-death-environmental-legacy-cli...

  My friend Jo Boaler at Stanford posted this on LinkedIn:I have always appreciated the reporting of the Guardian newspaper in the UK. This is their analysis of recent events.I am writing to you on an ominous day for America, and for the world.Last night, in his victory speech, Donald Trump called the free press "the enemy camp". Intimidating words. But we believe that, as journalists, we can't afford to be intimidated. We have a duty to tell the truth about the man the United States has just elected as president - a man who tried to overturn a democratic election the last time he was in office, whose supreme court appointees gutted women's reproductive rights, who calls climate change a hoax, who falsely claims mass deportations will solve our economic problems, who threatens jail for his political opponents, who lies reflexively and shamelessly, and whose second administration imperils our democracy, freedoms and planet.I replied:I experienced the ...

I write this just weeks away from my 84th birthday. I don’t know that I’m more aware of my coming departure from this so-called life than I was when I was ten. I was surely aware of my ultimate fate before that. My grandmother had died when I was 8, and I have a vague recollection of learning that one of my schoolmates at about that time had been struck by lightning and killed. But I was ten when my mother found me curled up in a fetal position in the bed she shared with my father crying. She asked me what was wrong and I said “I don’t want to die.” My mother’s response was curious on reflection. She was essentiallly uneducated, an immigrant from southern Italy, and an untutored Roman Catholic who had populated our Brooklyn apartment with pictures and statues of saints and had hung crosses on the walls. Thinking back, I would have thought that she would have comforted me by pointing out that when I died I would go to heaven where I would live forever with all of my family and ...