Archive for category: Science

Though they lack brains, scientists are figuring out new ways to probe whether plants “think”

Research suggests that we spontaneously engage in ritualized behavior when facing stressful and uncertain situations.

By Carlos L. Garrido – Sep 9, 2022

A recent study published in the journal Molecular Psychiatry sent shockwaves across the scientific community and popular outlets as it disproved the predominant “serotonin hypothesis” of depression. In just two weeks since its publication it has been accessed by nearly half a million people and the subject of dozens of subsequent articles. The researchers analyzed a total of seventeen systematic reviews, meta-analyses, and other large studies focused on the following six tenets pertinent to the “serotonin hypothesis” of depression:

“(1) Serotonin and the serotonin metabolite 5-HIAA—whether there are lower levels of serotonin and 5-HIAA in body fluids in depression; (2) Receptors—whether serotonin receptor levels are altered in people with depression; (3) The serotonin transporter (SERT)—whether there are higher levels of the serotonin transporter in people with depression (which would lower synaptic levels of serotonin); (4) Depletion studies—whether tryptophan depletion (which lowers available serotonin) can induce depression; (5) SERT gene—whether there are higher levels of the serotonin transporter gene in people with depression; (6) Whether there is an interaction between the SERT gene and stress in depression.”¹

None of the studies were able to prove any significant link between serotonin levels and depression based on the above tenets, leading the researchers to conclude that “there is no convincing evidence that depression is associated with, or caused by, lower serotonin concentrations or activity.”²

The researchers further argue, “The idea that depression is the result of abnormalities in brain chemicals, particularly serotonin (5-hydroxytryptamine or 5-HT), has been influential for decades,” such that today “80% or more of the general public now believe it is established that depression is caused by a ‘chemical imbalance.”³ In light of this finding, one must ask—how did a hypothesis which failed to substantially prove the connection it is based on achieve such general acceptance?

The serotonin hypothesis wasn’t always the dominant explanation for depression. Shortly after the Second World War, “the first antipsychotic, chlorpromazine, was synthesized when chlorine was added to the promethazine structure.”⁴ This synthesis formed “the basis of the development of the first antidepressants” which emerged following Roland Kuhn’s 1957 presentation in the World Psychiatric Association Meeting, where shortly after the first tricyclic antidepressant was released for clinical use in Switzerland.⁵

A decade later, in the mid-1960s, a series of studies introduced serotonin as the “molecule behind depression.” These studies culminated in the work of Lapin and Oxenkrug, who postulated in 1969 the ”serotonergic theory of depression, which was based on a deficit of serotonin at an inter-synaptic level in certain brain regions.”⁶ In the following years, the pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly created a serotonin-depression study team, which found that fluoxetine hydrochloride was “the most powerful… selective inhibitor of serotonin uptake among all the compounds developed.”⁷ The results led to the 1987 Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval of the clinical usage of Prozac (the brand name given to fluoxetine), the first major selective serotonin receptor inhibitor (SSRI) antidepressant drug.⁸

Prozac became the drug of the age, a commodity which, like Brave New World’s soma, could provide direct, unmediated happiness.

The release of Prozac revolutionized the commodification of medicine, incorporating a new field of mass advertisement which has since become the norm. However, as the documentary, Prozac: A Revolution in a Capsule demonstrates, the drug obtained its prominence not only through advertisement—which, interestingly enough, first occurred through business and finance magazines—but through its incorporation into culture as an iconic symbol of the zeitgeist.⁹ From Woody Allen movies to The Sopranos to late night talks shows, Prozac became the drug of the age, a commodity which, like Brave New World’s soma, could provide direct, unmediated happiness. This quickly resulted in the “Prozac boom,” making it by 1990 the most prescribed drug in the United States, and within ten years of its 1988 release, visits to the doctor for depression doubled and the prescribing of antidepressants tripled.¹⁰

The association of depression with low levels of serotonin was an intentional result of institutionally supported (e.g., American Psychiatric Organization) marketing campaigns from the pharmaceutical industry. This has provided “an important justification for the use of antidepressants” and perpetuated an antidepressant drug market that was valued at almost $16 billion in 2020 (a number expected to rise to $21 billion by the end of the decade);¹¹ in today’s antidepressant epidemic, one in six Americans are on antidepressants.¹² This phenomenon cannot be understood separately from the general commodification and marketization of medicine. As Joanne Moncrieff has argued, “there are some obvious drivers of this trend, such as the pharmaceutical industry, whose marketing activities have been facilitated both by the arrival of the Internet, and political deregulation, including the repeal of the prohibition on advertising to consumers in the US and some other countries in the 1990s.”¹³

Venezuela’s Socialist Healthcare System

This is how and why the serotonin theory gained and sustained its hegemony since the 1990s. However, within the scientific community this hypothesis has been on the chopping block for almost two decades as individual studies have disconfirmed various parts of the hypothesis. The scientific community, in general, is much more skeptical of the “serotonin hypothesis” than the general public. This disconnection between the much more nuanced science on depression and the public perception of the issue has been the subject of various articles and speaks to both the separation of science from everyday life and to the effectiveness of medical marketization.¹⁴ Nonetheless, the explosion the recent study caused is a result of its comprehensive character as an “umbrella review” which examined all parts of the serotonin hypothesis at once—and in doing so, went well beyond the many studies which have focused on separate parts in the last couple of decades.

From Biochemical Determinism to Dialectical Materialism

There is a prevalent myth which holds that those who function in society as professional “intellectuals” are somehow “autonomous and independent” from the dominant social order and the interests of the ruling class.¹⁵ This myth predominates in the community of the “hard” sciences perhaps more than in any level of traditional intellectuals. Here it is taken as sensum communem that science is objective and disconnected from ideology and social factors. For these folks, as Marxist scientists Richard Levins and Richard Lewontin said, “nothing evokes as much hostility… as the suggestion that social forces influence or even dictate either the scientific method or the facts and theories of science.”¹⁶ But it is in this illusion of non-ideological objectivity where ideology can be seen to be the most entrenched, functioning as unknown knowns, that is, as unrecognized assumptions or inherent biases which mediate how scientists approach the world.

This does not mean, as the postmodernist disease¹⁷ which influences some of the philosophy of science holds, that we should maintain a “deep epistemological skepticism” which often, as Ellen Meiksins Wood notes, conflates “the forms of knowledge with its objects… as if they are saying not only that, for instance, the science of physics is a historical construct, which has varied over time and in different social contexts, but that the laws of nature are themselves ‘socially constructed’ and historically variable.”¹⁸

On the contrary, in Marxism, as Helena Sheehan argues, there is “no conflict between [stressing] the historical and contextual nature of science and [affirming] the rationality of science and the overall progressive character of its development.”¹⁹ In essence, the Marxist tradition’s understanding of the socially determined character of scientific production does not mean that scientific objectivity is rejected and that the object of scientific study itself is conceived of as relative. The form of abstract and unmediated objectivism which prevails in the sciences is rejected and what is affirmed is a necessarily socially mediated understanding of scientific objectivity. This overcomes, as Sheehan notes, the stale “objectivist/constructivist” binary which today structures the discourse about science and affirms instead a dialectical both/and attitude.²⁰ This is important to clarify so that the forthcoming analysis of capitalism’s influence on science is not confused as an embracement of relativism and a rejection of science’s ability to produce objective knowledge of the world.

The serotonin hypothesis emerges from what Levins and Lewontin called “Cartesian reductionism” (the objectivist extreme), which they held to be the “dominant mode of analysis” in all spheres of today’s sciences. In psychiatry this shows up as genetic and biochemical determinism, an attempt to reduce the complexity of mental health issues to genetics or to biochemical mechanisms which, with respect to the latter, somehow the major pharmaceutical companies always have a pill for. But, as Moncrieff has argued, “mental health problems are not equivalent to physical, medical conditions and are more fruitfully viewed as problems of communities or societies.”²¹

Reductionism, in essence, is a methodological reflection in the sciences of bourgeois individualism and Robinsonade forms of thinking, which artificially divorce individuals from society and hold the latter to be simply the sum of the former.

For instance, studies have shown that “within a given location, those with the lowest incomes are typically 1.5 to 3 times more likely than the rich to experience depression or anxiety.”²² The plethora of factors that stem from and contribute to poverty has allowed researchers to establish “a bidirectional causal relationship between poverty and mental illness,” such that poverty both increases the likelihood of mental illness and is proliferated further by it.²³ The fact that the poorest in any context are up to three times more likely to experience depression than the rich shows that any analysis of depression must necessarily take into account the socioeconomic context of the individual. This inequality induced dissatisfaction allows one to understand both poverty and depression relationally. As Marx had already noted in 1847,

Our desires and pleasures spring from society; we measure them, therefore, by society and not by the objects which serve for their satisfaction. Because they are of a social nature, they are of a relative nature… A house may be large or small; as long as the surrounding houses are equally small it satisfies all social demands for a dwelling. But let a palace arise beside the little house, and it shrinks from a little house to a hut… if the neighboring palace grows to an equal or even greater extent, the occupant of the relatively small house will feel more and more uncomfortable, dissatisfied and cramped within its four walls.²⁴

The Cartesian reductive framework contains various methodological flaws which prevent the concrete understanding of the world. It treats, for instance, the interactions of parts and whole one-sidedly—as if parts are homogenous entities ontologically prior to the whole, and hence, as if the whole was simply the sum of its parts. In so doing, this outlook draws artificial hard and fast lines between causes and effects and fails to see how parts and wholes are reciprocally conditioning, i.e., how “their very interaction structures the way they are interrelated and interpenetrated, resulting in what is called a whole.”²⁵ In short, how wholes are not simply the sum of their parts, but the totalities through which the parts themselves attain the functions which form the whole. It is, in essence, a methodological reflection in the sciences of bourgeois individualism and Robinsonade²⁶ forms of thinking, which artificially divorce individuals from society and hold the latter to be simply the sum of the former.

However, biochemical determinism/reductionism does not necessarily have to reduce explanations to only one factor. For instance, the inconsistent success of SSRIs²⁷ in treating depression has led some scientists to sustain ex juvantibus²⁸ (from reasoning backwards) that serotonin’s role in depression is interactive and dependent on its relations with adrenaline, dopamine, and other chemical processes. Although this represents a more complex view of the serotonin hypothesis in particular, and of the often wrongly conflated “chemical imbalance” view of depression, it is nonetheless a form of biochemical determinism.²⁹ This is because it fails to see how the “chemical imbalances” don’t arise out of a void but are produced by the concrete environment the individual is in. The point, again, is not to diminish the biochemical in order to elevate the role of the environment, but to see both the biochemical and the environment as dialectically interconnected, acting “upon each other through the medium of the [individual].”³⁰ As Levins and Lewontin argue, the individual “cannot be regarded as simply the passive object of autonomous internal (biochemical composition/genes) and external (environment) forces;” instead, the individual functions as a subject-object which is both conditioned by these factors (as object) and reciprocally conditions them (as subject).³¹

The limitations of the prevalent serotonin hypothesis also helps to demonstrate what Friedrich Engels noted in his unfinished Dialectics of Nature: although “natural scientists believe that they free themselves from philosophy by ignoring it or abusing it… they are no less in bondage to philosophy but unfortunately in most cases to the worst philosophy.”³² This reductive, bio-determinist outlook straitjackets science within abstract thought, preventing it from seeing things in their movements and interconnections. It forces the reduction of larger problems to simple components—since these are seen as the ontological basis of wholes—and limits the possibility of observing issues like depression dynamically and comprehensively.

It is much easier to reduce depression to a biochemical phenomenon in the brain than to analyze how the social relations prevalent in the capitalist mode of life create the conditions for the emergence of depression. Similarly, once this reduction is established, it is much easier to treat the “solution” through individualized drug consumption than through socially organized revolutionary activity. As Moncrieff has argued, “by obscuring [the] political nature” of mental illness, certain “contentious social activities” are enabled, and attention is diverted “from the failings of the underlying economic system.”³³

Tracing depression to the exploitative and alienating relations sustained between people and their work, their peers, and nature, is not only a much more laborious task, but one which would necessarily end in the realization of the systemic root of the problem. Given capitalism’s universal commodification, and the form this takes in what Levins and Lewontin call the “commoditization of science,” such a result is directly against the interests of the institutions that control scientific knowledge production.³⁴ As one of many other fields in which the universalizing logic of commodity production has penetrated, the aim is, of course, profitability; the quest for truth and scientific discovery is subsumed under the quest for profit. This is especially true after four decades of neoliberalism, where, as Moncrieff notes, “more and more aspects of human feelings and behaviour” have been commodified and turned “into a source of profit for the pharmaceutical and healthcare industries.”³⁵ “Investing in research,” as Levins and Lewontin argue, is but “one of several ways of investing in capital.”³⁶

In the West, this reality was clear to the rich tradition of British Marxists scientists like J.B.S. Haldane, J.D. Bernal, Hyman Levy, and others which emerged following the 1931 Second International Congress of the History of Science and Technology. As J.D. Bernal stated in 1937, “production for profit can never develop the full potentialities of science except for destructive purposes,” only “the Marxist understanding of science puts it in practice at the service of the community and at the same time makes science itself part of the cultural heritage of the whole people and not of an artificially selected minority.”³⁷

Healthcare for Human Rights, Not Profits: what the US Can Learn from Cuba’s Coronavirus Response

Towards Socialist Science and Medicine

The serotonin theory gained prominence because: 1) it fits within the one-factor, causally linear framework of the Cartesian reductionist outlook prevalent in mainstream science; 2) it was a diagnosis which facilitated the greatly profitable solution embodied in the tens of billions of dollars’ worth antidepressant drug industry; 3) it plays a hegemonic role in steering the diagnosis of the depression epidemic away from its real source—capitalist social relations which sustain the mass of people alienated from what they produce, from other people, and from nature—and, specifically with respect to the United States, in drowning debt for getting sick, pursuing an education, or attempting to own a home.

Socialism removes these material difficulties upon which many mental health issues are grounded and places the working class in control of the economy, state, and civil institutions, making them function in the service of human and planetary needs, not profit. By abolishing poverty and war; guaranteeing healthcare, housing, and education as a right for all; providing everyone with meaningful well-paying jobs; amongst other things, a socialist society creates the economic and social security which radically transforms the environment in which most cases of depression are rooted. If one seriously seeks to overcome the depression epidemic capitalism is hurling the mass of people into, socialism is the only real solution.

In Cuba, mental health treatment emphasizes “individual and group psychotherapies” of various kinds and incorporates psychopharmacology in an integrated fashion with the former.

Likewise, only socialism can de-commodify science and provide the general social atmosphere for a move away from a hegemonic outlook dominated by static, reductive, abstract, individualist, irrationalist, deterministic, and binary thought, and towards a dialectical materialist one which emphasizes change, interconnection, reciprocity, sociality, emergence, and concrete investigation of the concrete.³⁸ The extraordinary successes of Cuban science and medicine testify to what can be done when the profit motive is removed and comprehensive, preventative, and community-based care becomes the norm.

While enduring an internationally denounced blockade from the most formidable of empires, the Cuban revolution’s commitment to a science for the people has allowed it to construct what is internationally recognized as one of the best health care systems in the world.³⁹ Cuba’s comprehensive social care emphasizes the impact of biological, social, cultural, economic and environmental factors on patients. Far from the United States’ drug-first approach of dealing with mental health issues, Cuba’s comprehensive social care allows all medical issues to be better understood at their source, treated, and prevented from occurring.⁴⁰ In Cuba, mental health treatment emphasizes “individual and group psychotherapies” of various kinds,⁴¹ and when not hampered by the blockade, incorporates psychopharmacology in an integrated fashion with the former.⁴²

Cuban scientists see mental health issues and treatment “within the context of the community,” not isolated individuals.⁴³ As Alexis Lorenzo Ruiz, president of the Cuban Society of Psychology, said: “At all times, the community—like the family—are participants and necessary contributors in each action taken to move toward an improvement in the wellbeing of people with mental illness.”⁴⁴ Additionally, unlike the disease-centered model of care which predominates in most capitalist countries, this human-centered approach promotes multidisciplinary and integrative relations between mental and medical care within the different fields of medicine—various forms of medical doctors, psychologists, nurses, and other health care professionals train side by side each other within the communities they serve in.⁴⁵ This socialist model has afforded the Cuban people the conditions where, despite the enormous material difficulties created by the US blockade, depression in Cuba affects only 3.8 percent of the population, whereas in the United States 4.8 percent.⁴⁶

In their 1985 book, The Dialectical Biologist, Levins and Lewontin reformulate Marx’s Eleventh Thesis and state that “dialectical philosophers have thus far only explained science. The problem, however, is to change it.”⁴⁷ In the West, the seeds of such a change are emerging once again. As Nafis Hasan wrote in Science for the People, “recent developments in the fields of immunology, cancer, theoretical and evolutionary biology lend credence” to the view that “any non-reductionist approach (e.g., systems biology) to studying biology will advertently end up using a dialectical approach.”⁴⁸ The fall of the reductive serotonin hypothesis in depression research is but one instance in many pointing to the fact that the dominant outlook presents a fetter for the development of the sciences. Just like a socialist revolution is needed to free humanity and the forces of production from the fetters of the capitalist system of waste, a revolution in outlook is needed to free the sciences from its archaic Cartesian reductionism and furnish it with “the most scientifically apt method for understanding the world”—dialectical materialism.⁴⁹

Notes:

Joanna Moncrieff et al., “The Serotonin Theory of Depression: A Systematic Umbrella Review of the Evidence,” Molecular Psychiatry (2022), https://doi.org/10.1038/s41380-022-01661-0.
Moncrieff et al., “The Serotonin Theory of Depression.”
Moncrieff et al., “The Serotonin Theory of Depression.”
Victor Silva Pereira and Vinícius Antonio Hiroaki-Sato, “A Brief History of Antidepressant Drug Development: From Tricyclics to Beyond Ketamine,” Acta Neuropsychiatrica 30, no. 6 (February 2018): 307–322, https://doi.org/10.1017/neu.2017.39.
Pereira and Hiroai-Sato, ”A Brief History.”
Pereira and Hiroai-Sato, ”A Brief History.”
Pereira and Hiroai-Sato, ”A Brief History.”
Pereira and Hiroai-Sato, ”A Brief History.”
“Prozac: Revolution in a Capsule,” New York Times, September 21, 2014, https://www.nytimes.com/video/us/100000003127845/revolution-in-a-capsule.html?playlistId=100000002148738.
Pereira and Hiroai-Sato, ”A Brief History.”
Linu Dash, Vidhya Wable, and Onkar Suman, Antidepressant Drugs Market: Global Opportunity Analysis and Industry Forecast, 2021–2030 (Allied Market Research, 2022), https://www.alliedmarketresearch.com/antidepressants-drugs-market; Moncrieff et al., “The Serotonin Theory of Depression.”
Megan Pagaduan, “America’s Epidemic of Antidepressants,” Berkeley Political Review, November 7, 2021, https://bpr.berkeley.edu/2021/11/07/americas-epidemic-of-antidepressants/.
Joanna Moncrieff, “The Political Economy of the Mental Health System: A Marxist Analysis,” Frontiers in Sociology 6 (2022): 771875, https://doi.org/10.3389/fsoc.2021.771875.
Jeffrey R. Lacasse and Jonathan Leo, “Serotonin and Depression: A Disconnect Between the Advertisements and the Scientific Literature,” PLOS Medicine 2, no. 12: e392, https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pmed.0020392. Note: This article also shows how the disconnection between the science and the advertisement violates the laws of the FDA, but that the FDA has been deliberately inactive in cracking down on marketized misinformation because these advertisements are given “to the fraction of the public that functions at no higher than a 6th grade reading level.” Basically, the FDA allows this misinformation to disseminate because the viewers are too unintelligent to understand the truth.
Antonio Gramsci, The Prison Notebooks (New York: International Publishers, 2014), 7.
Richard Levins and Richard Lewontin, The Dialectical Biologist (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985), 4.
“Postmodern Disease” is a concept introduced by Ellen Meiksins Wood in the Monthly Review collection In Defense of History: Marxism and the Postmodern Agenda, which deals with themes relating to the hegemonization of postmodernism in academia and how it serves, in various and often indirect ways, the capitalist “end of history”’ narrative. Its rejection of history, comprehensive outlooks, socially informed scientific objectivity, class struggle, etc., establishes it as an enemy of Marxism while passing itself as “more radical.” The paradox, however, is that it not only fails to oppose the existing order, but actively serves as one of its key hegemonic tools. As Ellen Meiksins Wood states, “Postmodernism is no longer the diagnosis… it has become the disease.”
Ellen Meiksins Wood, “What is the ‘Postmodern’ Agenda,” in In Defense of History: Marxism and the Postmodern Agenda, ed. Ellen Meiksins Wood and John Bellamy Foster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1997), 5, 7, 10.
Helena Sheehan, Marxism and the Philosophy of Science (New York: Verso Books, 2017), 46.
Helena Sheehan, “Marxism, Science, and Science Studies: From Marx and Engels to COVID-19 and COP26,” Monthly Review 74, no. 1 (May 2022), https://monthlyreview.org/2022/05/01/marxism-science-and-science-studies/.
Moncrieff, “The Political Economy of the Mental Health System.”
Matthew Ridley et. al., “Poverty, Depression, and Anxiety: Causal Evidence and Mechanisms,” Science 370, no. 6522 (December 2020): eaay0214, https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aay0214.
Ridley et. al., “Poverty, depression, and A nxiety.”
Karl Marx, Wage Labour and Capital (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1975), 33.
Kaan Kangal, “Engels’s Emergentist Dialectics,” Monthly Review 72, no. 6 (November 2020), https://monthlyreview.org/2020/11/01/engelss-emergentist-dialectics/.
“The individual and isolated hunter and fisherman, with whom Smith and Ricardo begin, belongs among the unimaginative conceits of the eighteenth-century Robinsonades.” Karl Marx, Grundrisse (London: Penguin Books, 1993), 83.
For instance, studies have shown that “approximately 80% of the response to medication was duplicated in placebo control groups.” See Iving Kirsch et al., “The Emperor’s New Drugs: An Analysis of Antidepressant Medication Data Submitted to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration,” Prevention & Treatment 5, no. 1 (July 2002), https://psycnet.apa.org/buy/2002-14079-003. A similar conclusion was arrived at in a recent study which pooled 73,000 patients and showed that only around 15 percent of the time do the drugs work better than the placebos. As the researchers concluded: “Patients with depression are likely to improve substantially from acute treatment of their depression with drug or placebo. Although the mean effect of antidepressants is only a small improvement over placebo, the effect of active drug seems to increase the probability that any patient will benefit substantially from treatment by about 15%.” Marc B. Stone et. al., “Response to Acute Monotherapy for Major Depressive Disorder in Randomized, Placebo Controlled Trials Submitted to the US Food and Drug Administration: Individual Participant Data Analysis ,” BMJ 378 (2022): e067606, https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj-2021-067606.
As was noted by the study referenced above, this “line of reasoning is logically problematic—the fact that aspirin cures headaches does not prove that headaches are due to low levels of aspirin in the brain.” Jeffrey R Lacasse and Jonathan Leo, “Serotonin and Depression.”
The conflation is distinctly present in marketing.
Levins and Lewontin, The Dialectical Biologist, 89.
It is also important to note that “every part or activity of an organism acts as environment for other parts,” such that this dialectical integration does not just occur mechanically between the whole organism (individual X) and their environment, but within various sub-levels which themselves function as part and environment. Levins and Lewontin, The Dialectical Biologist, 58.
Friedrich Engels, Dialectics of Nature (London: Wellred Books, 2012), 213.
Moncrieff, “The Political Economy of the Mental Health System.”
Levins and Lewontin, The Dialectical Biologist, 199.
Moncrieff, “The Political Economy of the Mental Health System.”
Levins and Lewontin, The Dialectical Biologist, 200.
J.D. Bernal, “Dialectical Materialism and Modern Science,” Science and Society 2, no. 1 (Winter 1937): 63.
This refers to the method of ascending from the abstract (less determinations, more superficial, less complex) to the concrete (more determinations, more complex, more comprehensive) which is at the core of both idealist and materialist dialectics. For instance, Marx’s Capital (as a whole) is at its core a categorial ascension from the less concrete categories in volume one (commodity, money, capital, absolute and relative surplus value) to the more concrete categories in volumes two and three (various capital circuits, turnover of various forms of capital, etc. for volume two and price, rate of profit, various types of capital, etc. for volume three). This categorial ascension allows for the most concrete—capitalist production as a whole (the title of volume three)—to be reproduced concretely in thought. The same movement can be seen in Hegel’s Logic’s ascension from being (most abstract category) to absolute spirit (the most concrete category).
For more on the United States’ hybrid warfare on Cuba, see my article for Covert Action Magazine or my seminar on the 26^th of July movement for the People’s School for Marxist Leninist Studies.
Helen Yaffe, We Are Cuba: How a Revolutionary People Have Survived in a Post-Soviet World (Great Britain: Yale University Press, 2020), 127.
This includes activities like psycho-ballet and other exercises and arts, yoga, martial arts, etc.
Sheila J. Linz and Alexis Lorenzo Ruiz, “Learning About Mental Healthcare in Today’s Cuba: An Interview with the President of the Cuban Society of Psychology,” Perspectives In Psychiatric Care 57, no. 1 (January 2021), https://doi.org/10.1111/ppc.12548.
Linz and Ruiz, “Learning About Mental Healthcare in Today’s Cuba.”
Linz and Ruiz, “Learning About Mental Healthcare in Today’s Cuba.”
Linz and Ruiz, “Learning About Mental Healthcare in Today’s Cuba.”
Linz and Ruiz, “Learning About Mental Healthcare in Today’s Cuba.”
Levins and Lewontin, The Dialectical Biologist, 288.
Nafis Hasan, “Biology at Another Crossroads,” Science for the People, July 18, 2022, https://magazine.scienceforthepeople.org/lewontin-special-issue/biology-at-another-crossroads/.
Carlos L. Garrido, “The Dialectical Ascension from the Abstract to the Concrete,” Midwestern Marx, July 28, 2022, https://www.midwesternmarx.com/articles/the-dialectical-ascension-from-the-abstract-to-the-concrete-by-carlos-l-garrido.

(Science for the People)

Scientists are trying to better understand the origins of agriculture, and how we coevolved with our favored crops

Time-out for critical gaze, transnational mutual aid and radical hope.Photo credit: Vural Özdemir

Art and literature that ignite progressive social movements have a secret active ingredient: an enduring hope for change. Hope prevents public lethargy, and keeps . . .

Back story

For nearly a century, the mathematical formalism of quantum mechanics has been clear and conclusive, yet its meaning has been opaque. In trying to work out what quantum mechanics says about the world, some interpretations suggest that quantum theory does not describe the world outright but is simply a tool for making predictions about it. Those are “epistemological” interpretations.

Other interpretations of quantum mechanics, however, are “ontological”. They consider what happens once we uncover more about the quantum world (when we find variables that are still “hidden”) or once we accept that some of its structures (such as the wave function) aren’t the ones we’re familiar with. When that occurs, we’ll see that its fundament, or “ontology”, is more or less like ours.

QBism is different. It is agnostic about whether there is a world that is structured independently of human thinking. It doesn’t assume we are measuring pre-existing structures, but nor does it pretend that quantum formalism is just a tool. Each measurement is a new event that guides us in formulating more accurate rules for what we will experience in future events. These rules are not subjective, for they are openly discussed, compared and evaluated by other physicists.

QBism therefore sees physicists as permanently connected with the world they are investigating rather than somehow getting “behind” it. Physics, to them, is an open-ended exploration that proceeds by generating ever new laboratory experiences that lead to ever more successful, but revisable, expectations of what will be encountered in the future.

Phenomenologists like myself find this obvious. We see QBism as simply stating that physicists form their ideas about the world the way the rest of us do: through experience. Humans are pre-connected with the world, and experience comes first. As Laura de la Tremblaye – a philosopher from the University of Geneva – said at the Linköping meeting: “QBism is a phenomenological reading of QM.”

Overlapping thoughts

These remarkable overlaps between QBism and phenomenology made physicists at the conference feel they needed to study phenomenology – and the phenomenologists to study physics. Fuchs himself explained how he’d once driven 75 miles through Boston traffic to pay $1600 for a complete set of the works of William James, the 19th-century American philosopher and proto-phenomenologist. Meanwhile, Delicia Kamins – a philosophy student at Stony Brook University who also spoke at Linköping – last year used her Fulbright fellowship to bone up on quantum mechanics at the University of Bonn.

For phenomenologists, experience is always “intentional” – i.e. directed towards something – and these intentionalities can be fulfilled or unfulfilled. Phenomenologists ask questions such as: what kind of experience is laboratory experience? How does laboratory experience – in which physicists are trained to see instruments and measurements in a certain way – differ from, say, emotional or social or physical experiences? And how do lab experiences allow us to formulate rules that anticipate future lab experiences?

Another overlap between QBism and phenomenology concerns the nature of experiments.

Another overlap between QBism and phenomenology concerns the nature of experiments. They don’t magically beam physicists into a special, more fundamental world. Instead, as I have long argued, experiments are performances. They’re events that we conceive, arrange, produce, set in motion and witness, yet we can’t make them show us anything we wish. That doesn’t mean there is a deeper reality “out there” – just as, with Shakespeare, there is no “deep Hamlet” of which all other Hamlets we produce are imitations. In physics as in drama, the truth is in performance.

The critical point

In the final session of the June conference, the question arose as to whether QBism is an “interpretation” of quantum mechanics – i.e. a new perspective on it – or simply a “reconstruction”, a reassembly with new pieces. That led to a heated, insightful, productive (if occasionally technical) discussion among the philosophers and physicists present as to what these terms mean. I had always dreamed that this sort of debate would occur. I just didn’t think it would happen in my lifetime.

The post When physicists and philosophers realize they share a noble truth appeared first on Physics World.

“Potentially toxic by-products of neural activity accumulate in the prefrontal cortex,” one researcher says

There’s more to this thing called life than we can possibly understand, but there are clues. And there is hope.

By Clara Vondrich

As the world gasped in wonder at the first images of our infant universe from the James Webb Space Telescope last month, we were reminded that human beings are still capable of acts that elevate us all and advance our collective potential.

“[When] my grandchildren … look up at a star, point to it and say ‘there’s life!’ — that’s going to be a moment more profound than the Copernican moment that took Earth out of the center of the universe. It’s going to put an end to cosmic loneliness,” said project team member Natalie Batalha, a planet hunter and astronomer at UC Santa Cruz.

But back on Earth, anti-science rhetoric and special interests have pushed us to the edge of climate chaos. Unless we act fast, Batalha’s grandkids may actually point to the star, exclaim “there’s life!”, pack their bags, and hop in the nearest space-Uber.

The biggest threat to climate action today is not the industry-funded deniers and skeptics left over from the 1990s. It’s the elite business and political leaders who advance incremental solutions to the most radical issue of our time. They say we can’t move too quickly lest we disrupt the economic order and throw society into a tailspin. Only a gradual phaseout of fossil fuels is realistic. And anyone who says otherwise is idealistic or naive.

Yet, it must be said now and moving forward: These power brokers are advancing solutions that will assure our mutual destruction. Gradual, incremental action may have worked decades ago, but now it guarantees our passage into a hell realm of runaway climate change. Countries must phase out fossil fuels fast or pay the price. Instead, they are using Russia’s invasion of Ukraine to justify a huge new build-out of fossil plants, pipelines, and export terminals that could operate for 50 years or more.

After decades of limited progress on climate legislation, the U.S. Congress is poised to pass the first meaningful climate bill in a generation. True to the incrementalist mindset, however, the bill contains giveaways to the fossil fuel industry and even trades clean energy incentives for expedited regulatory approval for pipelines. Things are not looking good.

But what if our linear march towards doom is not baked in? What if we can leapfrog time and space? What if “reality” is anything but?

Radical Change Requires Radical Thinking

Cue quantum social change. This [r]evolutionary new academic discipline pioneered by former Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change social scientist Karen O’Brien, PhD, panpsychologist Zhiwa Woodbury, science journalist Lynn McTaggart, and others, suggests that the mind-bending principles that describe the subatomic world are also relevant to our daily lives. Just as quantum physics disrupted our view of matter and energy, smashing the Newtonian paradigm of a fixed physical reality with predictable patterns of cause and effect, quantum social change disrupts our beliefs about what’s possible, how fast, and by whom.

To be sure, some might say that resorting to concepts from quantum physics is at best pseudoscience, at worst a form of magical thinking — albeit an understandable temptation in such desperate times. But this criticism misses the point. Quantum social activism invites us to think differently about familiar dilemmas, and see what new possibilities may open as a result. To paraphrase a truism attributed to Albert Einstein: We cannot solve our problems with the same level of thinking that created them. Quantum principles help us escape our mental ruts.

Entanglement. Complementarity. Non-locality. Potentiality. Indeterminacy. If harnessed by the climate movement, such concepts could open a portal to a clean energy transformation fast enough to stop us from crossing tipping points of no return. Even the merest mention of these mysterious-sounding terms is enough to send a thrill of possibility down the spine. But what do they mean and how can we apply them in three-dimensional reality?

“The biggest threat to climate action today is not the industry-funded deniers and skeptics left over from the 1990s. It’s the elite business and political leaders who advance incremental solutions to the most radical issue of our time.”

Entanglement in the quantum world means that particles are interconnected and never act alone. Even at great distances, a shift in one particle is instantaneously mirrored by the other. Einstein called these non-local effects “spooky action at a distance” because he could not explain them through classical cause and effect.

Every mass shooting reminds us how destructive and deadly social disconnection can be. Meanwhile, unhinged individualism and ego are behind the evisceration of human rights, rise of autocracy, and destruction of Indigenous cultures and the natural world. In contrast, community and connection are proven to insulate us from stress, give our lives meaning and allow us to be part of something “bigger.” The more entangled we are, the better we seem to do.

As a climate activist and former head of fossil fuel divestment non-profit Divest Invest, I have seen the power of entanglement firsthand. The movement to push investors to pull their money out of coal, oil, and gas started on a handful of American college campuses in 2012. Ten years later, 1,500 institutions with assets exceeding $40 trillion have divested, reinvesting in clean energy in many cases.

Divest-invest wasn’t a top-down movement. Once the idea was planted, campaigns popped up simultaneously all over the world. Diverse campaigners shared learnings and tactics online and at summits, far-flung groups adopted common talking points and financial arguments, and, ultimately, a distributed, self-organized collective moved a mountain.

The lesson is clear: As more and more like-minded change agents become entangled, momentum builds and the door opens to non-linear change. Systems theorist Mark Skelding explains this phenomenon by positing that we inhabit a “psychosphere” through which all sentience is entangled.

Non-locality is related to the idea of entanglement: What we do can have far-flung unseen and unexpected consequences. Technology is the great enabler of non-locality today, with the internet and countless apps allowing campaigners to organize global shows of solidarity at warp speed.

Complementarity is another quantum concept of great relevance to the climate movement. It holds that subatomic objects embody different forms, shape-shifting in a sense, depending on who is observing them, how, and when. The classic example is the famed double-slit experiment, which proved that light and matter each behave as both a particle and a wave.

“In a chaotic world, the right catalyst can create unpredictable impacts. Quantum leaps, non-linear change, true transformation — these are possible when people and movements embrace potentiality and the hope it can bring.”

On the human plane, it’s clear that we each exist as individual “particles,” or as Woodbury posits, “cells in the meta-organism that is Gaia.” But while Western thinking is still limited by a dualistic worldview (us v. them, hers v. mine), Indigenous cultures, the cycles of the natural world (moon phases, ocean tides), and fractals all attest to the wave-like dimension of reality — an uninterrupted flow of untold power. In truth, therefore, all of reality has a particle dimension and a wave dimension.

What are the implications if you, too, are both a particle and a wave? It means that we all have agency to join in and help power social movements. Just consider the wave of millions of youth globally who marched for climate justice in September 2019. They came together not because of some orchestration from on high, but because of their unified consciousness and concern around an issue with existential implications for their own generation. Where complementarity is nurtured — believed in — “I” becomes “we” and our limited capacity for change grows exponentially.

In these times, a radical evolution of our thinking about climate change and its desperate trajectory is required. Words like “radical” and “transformative” make energy incrementalists squirm but they need to wake up and smell our forests burning. It’s no secret that the world is neither on a path to rein in global temperature rise to 2 degree Celsius, much less the 1.5 degrees pledged in the Paris Climate Agreement. Indeed, the Paris targets themselves are beginning to look tragically inadequate, as new analysis catalogs the global human toll of climate-related extreme weather events at even current levels of warming. Nevertheless, complementarity reminds us that some aspects of the climate crisis are not “either, or” but rather “both, and.” For example, the invasion of Ukraine has prompted Europe and the United States to expand fossil fuel infrastructure to meet current energy needs. On the other hand, Europe also plans to radically cut gas consumption in a way that would have been unthinkable a year ago.

As applied to social change, however, quantum potentiality is the crown jewel. It is very different from classical probability, which tells us that the chance of preserving a safe future is virtually nil. As the grandfather of climate science, James Hansen, has said: The dice are loaded against us. Yet potentiality allows us to transcend probability to a boundless realm where quantum leaps are possible.

A vendor in Tunisia sets himself ablaze, and the Arab Spring rises up. A lonely young girl sits down outside the Swedish Parliament with a “Fridays for Future” placard, and the whole world responds. In a chaotic world, the right catalyst can create unpredictable impacts. Quantum leaps, non-linear change, true transformation — these are possible when people and movements embrace potentiality and the hope it can bring.

And all of this is supported by the final quantum concept at hand, indeterminacy. It is just what it sounds like: Nothing is fixed, nothing is predictable. A higher order can quite suddenly emerge from apparent chaos. A radical shift from our current trajectory is still possible. Amen.

Infinite Potential

Taking these concepts to heart can help all of us who fight for a better world. The news on almost all fronts is bleak, and resignation can seem like a reasonable option. O’Brien stresses that “beliefs matter.” If we believe that we can help speed transformative social change in time, we will act with much more energy, agency, and urgency. Staying in dulled paralysis will get us nowhere.

Quantum social change gives us a mental frame for re-activating our potential to solve the climate crisis. These concepts give each of us agency to transcend limiting beliefs, swap out isolation with community, lack with abundance, fear with love. Quantum social change is the ultimate rebuttal to energy realists and their incremental path to climate breakdown. This is not naive. It’s urgently necessary.

Perhaps getting to this crisis point was essential for us to wake up to the infinite possibilities of a quantum paradigm, to our unstoppable power as individuals and as the collective. While the James Webb Space Telescope promises to “end cosmic loneliness,” it might be wise to start with ending earthly loneliness.

Remember you are enmeshed in something larger, something vital — you are both a particle and a wave. Start rising.

Clara Vondrich is an attorney with a background in neuroscience. She was the inaugural director of the fossil fuel divestment and renewable energy investment start-up, Divest Invest, and is a current Public Voices fellow with the OpEd Project, in partnership with the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication.

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