From http://www.bobanddavid.com:

"MR. SHOW LIVE!
Bob and David in "Hooray for America!!!" is coming to your town!

So what happened was...
    David and I have been kicking around this idea for a live tour, and we finally said, "Okay". Why now? Because America needs us. And because we've got all these new ideas for scenes, and we want to do them for you. You wanna see 'em? We hope the answer is "bring it, bitch!"
    The show will feature NEW SCENES and some updated CLASSICS,
    There will be live scenes, and video pieces, and some mixed together, just like in the show.
    ACTUAL MR. SHOW CAST MEMBERS will be with us, a small, hi-tech, crew. We don't know their names yet, but that's just because we never bothered to learn them the whole five years we were doing the show.
    The show just might, if you're good, feature a guest appearance by the singing group "Three Times One Minus One", the Mayor of Hollywood, and various other long dead, dear old friends from the show. Our goal is to tell a story that will make you laugh more than you cry, teach then preach, and grab you by the crotch until you believe in apple pie again.
    Here are the dates and cities you must live in or move to so that we can come to "your" town.

SAT 9/14  San Diego California Center for the Perf. Arts @ Escondido 8:00
FRI 9/20  Washington, DC Warner Theatre 7:30
SAT 9/21  Philadelphia, PA Electric Factory 7:30
SUN 9/22  NYC Town Hall 7:30
TUE 9/24  Boston, MA The Orpheum Theatre 7:30
THU 9/26  Ann Arbor, MI The State Theatre 7:30
FRI 9/27  Chicago, IL The Congress Theatre 7:30
SAT 9/28  Madison, WI The Barrymoore Theatre 7:30
SUN 9/29  Minneapolis, MN The State Theatre 7:30
FRI 10/4  Los Angeles, CA Royce Hall 7:30
SAT 10/5  San Francisco, CA The Warfield Theatre 8:00
MON 10/7  Sacramento, CA The Crest Theatre 7:30
WED 10/9  Eugene, OR The McDonald Theatre 7:30
THU 10/10  Portland, OR The Crystal Ballroom 7:30
FRI 10/11  Seattle, WA The Moore Theatre 7:30
SAT 10/12  Vancouver, BC The Vogue Theatre 7:30

From http://www.chocodog.com/chocodog/ween/ween_new/tour_fr.html:

4/19 -Thomas Wolfe Auditorium, Asheville, NC--Usually we try and start a tour in a smallish bar or something, but this was a big ass auditorium, something like 2,000 people came out. I have no idea how we went from playing the "Be Here Now" last year (which holds 350 people), to this place. One way or another it was a pretty great way to kick off this short tour. After the show we got drunk and shot pool
at our hotel bar, which had a cover band playing lots of Skynyrd. later on, some douchebag kid knocked on my hotel room door, and said "yo dean, what was it like playing with those Nashville guys?", like he had waited his whole life to fuckin' ask me that stupid shit and had to knock at 3am just to hear my answer.

4/20 - Guilford College, Greensboro NC--We got to the campus in the early afternoon, it looked like there were maybe 150 people on the whole grounds of the place---I got the impression that rather than stick around for their spring festival, the students all went home instead. The show was completely sold out in advance (1,200 tickets), but this place would've held twice as many. In my opinion this show suffered from what would become a common thing on this tour--- when you play college campuses there is almost always no alcohol allowed, and no smoking cigarettes or anything else---on 4/20 no less. This only applies to the audience obviously, we're up there chain-smoking and drinking the entire time, inadvertently rubbing people's faces in it. I thought we played very well, but after 2 hours and 15 minutes I felt like we had left the crowd behind or something. For this reason we decided not to play any encore---and that was unfortunately all anyone seemed to focus on after the show ended. live and learn i guess.

4/21 - The Plex, North Charleston, SC ----This was a new venue for us, we usually play the Music Farm when we're in Charleston. They hooked us up with a kick-ass meal before we played, which is a rarity on tour and much appreciated. Probably one of the best shows that we've played this year except for the Columbia show. Maybe it was the food, or maybe it just took us a couple days to get the ball rolling, but for whatever reason everything kinda fell into place musically for us on this night. People started throwing 20 dollar bills onstage with requests written on them, we played a whole mess of the requests and bought ecstasy with the cash after the show. From there we went out and spent the night getting lap danced on X in Charleston's seedier clubs. Actually I'm lying---we just got on the bus and drove to Kentucky overnight. All 'n all a great night.

4/23 - Kentucky Theater, Lexington, KY---This was our first time in Lexington and I was impressed by how clean the city was---also, there wasn't a soul on the street after dark. Mick Preston and I generally will walk or drive as far as we have to go to find a Waffle House when we're on tour, but we ended up settling for a Huddle House instead, which to my surprise was every bit as delicious--even though it's an
obvious rip-off of the real thing, right down to the pecan waffles and scattered and smothered hash browns and shit. This was a really cool old theater, and directly adjacent to the concert was the Miss Gay Kentucky drag queen paegant. I don't remember much about this show, except I thought we played pretty solid and we hit some bar afterwards and then some house party, and then a second trip to the Huddle House.

4/24 - Axis, Bloomington, IN--This was our first time ever playing in Indiana, and the crowd was ready to tear the roof off the club by the time we hit the stage. I felt like shit thru most of this show and almost puked all over my amp during "Doctor Rock." This was one of three nights on the tour where I got to watch my team (the Flyers of course) get shutout about 15 minutes before it was time to play, and it put me
in a really bitter, fucked up mindframe all 3 times. I was kind of thankful when Ottawa finally laid a mercy-killing on their sorry asses. Anyway, the gig was great, it was a fuckin sweatbox in this joint, but we gave it up punk-rock style for Indiana.

4/25 - Univ. of Iowa Main Lounge, Iowa City, IA---This room was a big square box with carpeting----again, no smoking and no drinking allowed, but over 2,000 people showed up and we played our asses off. Me, Claude, and Mick had lunch at Hamburg Inn, which is supposed to be famous for it's burgers and shakes or something. After we kicked Iowa City's ass with our rock and roll, we went out to a bar and Mick Preston and I held the pool table for the entire night----I bet we must've won 25 consecutive games. I'm sorry I don't have any better tour stories from this tour, but look at where the fuck we played---Greensboro, Bloomington, Carbondale....I mean what the fuck are we gonna do, fuck sheep and tip cows after the gigs?

4/26 - Missouri Theater, Columbia, MO--As I mentioned before, this was pretty much the most inspired show we've played in a very long
time---I really have no idea what makes one night better than any other, because I felt like ass before this show and was pretty much exhausted. It had been about 7 or 8 years since we were last in Columbia---last time was the night that the 30 minute live version of "Poopship Destroyer" on PTTB was recorded and this gig was probably better than that one. One of the highlights for me was the 15 minute
version of "Never Squeal on the Pusher" that we played to close the show----Glenn took a fucking wicked theremin solo that set this whole show over the top. Other than that, we pulled out some tunes we haven't played in a while and had an awesome time in Columbia.

4/27 - Shryock Auditorium, Southern Illinois U, Carbondale, IL----One more show with no alcohol or smoking for the audience---this was a really cool auditorium, unlike any other that I can remember playing----like a U shaped theater with a balcony that wrapped from the left side of the stage to the right. We had a really strong show and finished with the best version of "Buenas Tardes Amigo" we ever did---we all basically agree that we wouldn't give a shit if we ever played that one or "The Blarney Stone" again in this lifetime---but maybe the time off from playing it helped us get back into the heart of it. After this show we were all feelin pretty good about the tour and decided to go out---well it looked like the world was about to come to an end, the nastiest storm I've ever seen was developing, like gravel was blowing
off the pavement into the air. We drove thru it on the way home---about 1,000 miles. Next day we found out that it was the tornado that killed 11 people in the mid-west----4 died 20 miles south of Carbondale. The wrath of the Boognish strikes down the haters and non-believers.

From The Los Angeles Times:

Dens of the Cyber Addicts
A deadly fire prompts China's latest crackdown on seedy i-cafes filled with game-obsessed players. 'You can't stop us,' one youth says.
By CHING-CHING NI, TIMES STAFF WRITER

BEIJING -- At first, Song Yozhu thought that his 14-year-old grandson was on drugs. The boy rarely came home. When he did show up, he was lethargic. Then, a few weeks ago, he and a 13-year-old friend bleached their hair blond and started living together in an empty apartment.
    "He told me, no, he was not on drugs," Song said. "He had been hanging out at the wang ba. He said he went there almost every night."
    Wang bas are China's 200,000 Internet cafes, the vast majority of them illegal. To the West, they may appear to raise the prospect of free expression in a country with an authoritarian regime, but to Chinese parents, they are smoke-filled rooms with substandard safety conditions, nothing more than modern-day versions of opium dens ruining their children's lives. And, in some cases, taking their children's lives.
    This month, 25 people, many of them teenagers, were killed in a blaze at a Beijing wang ba. Chillingly, it was no accident. Song's grandson and his friend have confessed to setting the fire, allegedly as revenge against the owners, who had refused to let them in.
    The government immediately shut down every wang ba in the capital, and Chinese parents cheered. Large cities across China took similar action.
    "I am very happy the government closed all the Internet cafes at the moment," said Lu Mei, who said his 16-year-old son was forced to repeat a year of high school because he spent too much time at the cafes. "He used to lie to me about where he was going. I thought he was studying at school, yet he was playing games at the Internet cafe. I was so angry, I didn't know what to do. I couldn't follow him everywhere."
    Wang ba translates as "Net bar." But the majority of them qualify neither as cafes nor bars. You won't find espresso machines or beer on tap. You will, however, see plenty of ashtrays and breathe in lots of smoke. Some facilities are so primitive, the only bathroom is a bucket against a wall.
    Like those at the wang ba that burned, most owners skirt the law, operating without a license and serving minors. China permits people younger than 18 to patronize licensed wang bas on weekends and holidays. Those younger than 14 can enter only with an adult.
    Some say Beijing is responsible for promoting illicit wang bas. The Communist government is so afraid of the Internet's power to spread antisocial activities, it has tried to control Internet cafes by making it nearly impossible to get a license. Instead, the move has had the opposite effect.
    The illegal market has flourished, with fewer safety precautions. Periodic crackdowns such as the one underway have only made the cafes more popular.
    As much as the government is wary of the Internet, it also understands the Web's economic and social benefits. For example, Beijing wants to be known as a digital city for the 2008 Olympics. That won't be possible if the authorities unplug all the Internet cafes.
    The state-owned telecommunications sector also has tremendous financial interest in promoting the use of the Internet. The question Beijing is wrestling with is how best to control the phenomenon without killing it.
    "It's hard to imagine they would want to crack down on a permanent basis," said Dali Yang, a China specialist at the University of Chicago. "No sane Chinese leader would want to say that. This is not an absolute issue of Internet freedom but how to best regulate the industry."
    Even if the government wanted a total ban, physically it wouldn't be possible. The wang bas pop up easily: All you need is a few computers and a room and you're in business.
    Still, this month's fire has become a rallying point for worried parents long eager to stamp out the illegal cafes and rein in the country's out-of-control cyber kids.
    Blame what is happening on two decades of dramatic social change. China went from being a nearly computer-illiterate nation a few years ago to one with 33 million Internet users.
    That might seem puny compared with the 143 million signing on in the United States. But China's numbers are growing exponentially and are expected to reach 100 million by mid-decade. The country soon could boast the biggest online population on Earth.
    The more open society of modern China has brought not only unprecedented personal freedom but also an explosion in juvenile crime.
    In a country that not long ago was filled with young Communists so morally upright that they would turn a penny found on the street over to police, juvenile delinquents now regularly make the news, mirroring their naughty counterparts in the West.
    Contrary to what some Westerners--and members of the Chinese Communist Party--might expect, many young Chinese Web surfers show only minimal interest in the Internet as a tool for information gathering or political subversion. Like youngsters around the globe, what they really crave is computer games. Lots of computer games.
    To them, wang bas function as a giant video arcade. At the cafe that burned, for example, players paid less than $2 a night for all the games they wanted. Even those who have their own terminals find the cafes cheaper, faster and infinitely more fun than signing on from home or school, where parents and teachers may be around to supervise.
    This is a generation of spoiled only children--"little emperors," as they're often called. They grew up in a society without devotion to God, Mao or sometimes even their parents. The online world of violent games serves as a kind of surrogate faith for many.
    Some seem to delight in their addiction.
    At Beijing Science and Technology University, which reportedly lost nine students in the blaze, it was standing room only last week in one undergraduate computer room, which is still open because it is part of the school's academic facility, not a wang ba.
    The vast majority of the 100 or so students there were male, and virtually all the on-screen activities were games.
    The atmosphere was so charged, it felt like an actual combat zone, with players linking up in online squads and firing away as if their lives depended on it.
    "If I don't play for one day, I can't concentrate on anything," said Liang Sai, a 19-year-old chemistry major waiting for a terminal. "If you ban all the Internet cafes, we'll find somewhere else to play. You can't stop us, because we're hooked."
    For the two boys accused of setting the deadly fire, the wang ba was practically their second home.
    Both Song's grandson, who because of his age has been identified only by his last name, Song, and his accomplice, identified as Zhang, have drug-addicted fathers now in jail, said the grandfather.
    These aren't spoiled children. Song's parents divorced before he was a year old. He hasn't seen his mother since he was 7. He grew up with his father, who had a string of girlfriends. Some of them used to beat the boy, his grandfather said.
    The grandparents once found the boy, then 2, waiting for his father on a trash pile, chewing on rotten fruit. Early this year, when his father went to jail, the boy went to live with his grandfather, a 67-year-old widower who uses a wheelchair.
    Zhang basically lived on his own in his mother's bare apartment. She was never around. A few weeks ago, young Song moved in with him, hauling over the TV, refrigerator and washer from his father's house. They smoked cigarettes and literally played with fire, twice almost burning down the apartment, the grandfather said.
    The grandson pretended to go to school, but classmates said they rarely saw him. When he did show up, he behaved like a bully, borrowing money he never returned so he could head back to the Internet cafe.
    "He has suffered too much pain. He's not afraid of anything," the older Song said.
    What the boy needed, it seemed, was hope. Sometime last year, his mother called his grandfather to say that if he did well in school, she would find a way to take him to the United States. The thought that his mother still cared seemed enough to transform the delinquent into an angel.
    "His teachers were so shocked at his progress they cried during the PTA meeting," the grandfather said. "But then his father got into trouble, and the boy gave up again."
    The wang ba became his refuge.
    Today, the boys remain under police detention, pending further investigation and possibly a trial.
    Entrepreneurs say that if Beijing seizes on the wang ba fire to toughen regulations overall, it could deal a serious blow to legitimate cyber cafes--which already are weak competitors of the illegal operators, partly because they tend to be nicer, safer and more expensive.
    "Without good and simple regulations that distinguish between good and bad Internet cafes, it's very hard for entrepreneurs to invest in the business," said Edward Zeng, the self-proclaimed founder of China's first upscale Internet cafe in 1996.
    His cafes actually serve coffee and turn away minors, but he said he's paying a price for following the law. In the last two years, poor business has forced him to cut his chain of about 20 shops by half, he said.
    Only about 10% of Beijing's estimated 2,200 Internet cafes are legitimate, because the state makes obtaining licenses very difficult. Illegal operators thrive--they give young Web users what they want: 24-hour service for as little as 25 cents an hour, cigarettes, even cots to crash on. This makes for cheap entertainment, even in China. Youngsters in school uniforms are the illicit cafes' main clientele.
    The Chinese press is splattered with horror stories about the tragic consequences.
    A high school sophomore came home late from a wang ba and confronted his angry father, according to one account. Then the teenager leaped from the family's seventh-floor window.
    One middle school student had been playing for so long that he insisted he was being abducted by aliens. His parents sent him to a mental hospital.
    Parents have tried begging and grounding. Some have cut their children's allowance. No matter--the kids borrowed, stole, sold their bicycles. Anything to keep playing.
    Some desperate parents have hired private detectives to hunt down children who go missing for days. Others have formed neighborhood brigades to patrol local haunts.
    But the games go on.
    "It's a great way to kill time and fill emptiness," said Liang, the chemistry major. "Most of us can't afford to travel or do other things for fun. I don't know about the girls, but for the guys, it's our No. 1 recreational activity."
    When the girls turn up, they tend to stay in a separate part of the room reading e-mail and chatting online. Many drown out the noise from the game-crazed boys by downloading pop songs and listening to them on headphones.
    Liang said he likes to play as many as seven hours a day straight, and Saturdays are usually all-nighters. On the night of the fire, he was playing at a nearby wang ba when the blaze illuminated the sky.
    The two alleged arsonists apparently bickered with the owners because they had no money to play. So the boys torched the place with gasoline, according to their confession.
    Those who died were trapped on the second floor of the building. The only exit was engulfed in flames--or perhaps locked from the outside. The windows were bolted with steel bars, a common practice for owners afraid of inspectors and computer theft.
    Bouquets of yellow chrysanthemums appeared last week on the curb next to the gutted building. Reading the messages of grief left most parents shaken and determined.
    Zo Jianjune, the mother of a 21-year-old son who lives next door to the burned cafe, said her husband had run to the wang ba, unbolted the steel bars and saved seven people.
    "A crackdown is absolutely necessary," she said. "Otherwise, there's no telling what else could happen."

The Grand Illusion:
Why consciousness only exists when you look for it.
by Susan Blackmore
From New Scientist, 22 June 2002, p 26-29

“The last great mystery of science”; “the most baffling problem in the science of the mind”; this is how scientists talk about consciousness, but what if our conscious experience is all a grand illusion?

Like most people, I used to think of my conscious life as like a stream of experiences, passing through my mind, one after another. But now I’m starting to wonder, is consciousness really like this? Could this apparently innocent assumption be the reason we find consciousness so baffling?

Different strands of research on the senses over the past decade suggest that the brave cognitive scientists, psychologists and neuroscientists who dare to tackle the problem of consciousness are chasing after the wrong thing. If consciousness seems to be a continuous stream of rich and detailed sights, sounds, feelings and thoughts, then I suggest this is the illusion.

First we must be clear what is meant by the term “illusion”. To say that consciousness is an illusion is not to say that it doesn’t exist, but that it is not what it seems to be?more like a mirage or a visual illusion. And if consciousness is not what it seems, no wonder it’s proving such a mystery.

For the proposal “It’s all an illusion” even to be worth considering, the problem has to be serious. And it is. We can’t even begin to explain consciousness. Take this magazine in front of your eyes. Right now, you are presumably having a conscious experience of seeing the paper, the words, and the pictures. The way you see the page is unique to you, and no one else can know exactly what it is like for you. This is how consciousness is defined: it is your own subjective experience.

But how do you get from a magazine composed of atoms and molecules, to your experience of seeing it? Real, physical objects and private experiences are such completely different kinds of thing. How can one be related to the other? David Chalmers, of the University of Tucson, Arizona, calls it the “Hard Problem”. How can the firing of brain cells produce subjective experience? It seems like magic; water into wine.

If you are not yet feeling perplexed (in which case I am not doing my job properly), consider another problem. It seems that most of what goes on in the brain is not conscious. For example, we can consciously hear a song on the car radio, while we are not necessarily conscious of all the things we do as we’re driving. This leads us to make a fundamental distinction: contrasting conscious brain processes with unconscious ones. But no one can explain what the difference really is. Is there a special place in the brain where unconscious things are made conscious? Are some brain cells endowed with an extra magic something that makes what goes on in them subjective? This doesn’t make sense. Yet most theories of consciousness assume that there must be such a difference, and then get stuck trying to explain or investigate it.

For example, in the currently popular “Global Workspace” theory, Bernard Baars, of the Wright Institute in Berkeley, California, equates the contents of consciousness with the contents of working memory. But how does being “in” memory turn electrical impulses into personal experiences?

Another popular line of research is to search for the “neural correlates” of consciousness. Nobel Laureate, Francis Crick, wants to pin down the brain activity that corresponds to “the vivid picture of the world we see in front of our eyes”. And Oxford pharmacologist, Susan Greenfield, is looking for “the particular physical state of the brain that always accompanies a subjective feeling” (New Scientist, 2 Feb, p 30). These researchers are not alone in their search. But their attempts all founder on exactly the same mystery?how can some kinds of brain activity be “in” the conscious stream, while others are not? I can’t see what this difference could possibly be.

Could the problem be so serious that we need to start again at the very beginning? Could it be that, after all, there is no stream of consciousness; no movie in the brain; no picture of the world we see in front of our eyes? Could all this be just a grand illusion?

You might want to protest. You may be absolutely sure that you do have such a stream of conscious experiences. But perhaps you have noticed this intriguing little oddity. Imagine you are reading this magazine when suddenly you realise that the clock is striking. You hadn't noticed it before, but now that you have, you know that the clock has struck four times already, and you can go on counting. What is happening here? Were the first three “dongs” really unconscious and have now been pulled out of memory and put in the stream of consciousness? If so were the contents of the stream changed retrospectively to seem as though you heard them at the time? Or what? You might think up some other elaborations to make sense of it but they are unlikely to be either simple or convincing.

A similar problem is apparent with listening to speech. You need to hear several syllables before the meaning of a sentence becomes unambiguous. So what was in the stream of consciousness after one syllable? Did it switch from gobbledegook to words half way through? It doesn't feel like that. It feels as though you heard a meaningful sentence as it went along. But that is impossible.

The running tap of time
Consciousness also does funny things with time. A good example is the “cutaneous rabbit”. If a person’s arm is tapped rapidly, say five times at the wrist, then twice near the elbow and finally three times on the upper arm, they report not a series of separate taps coming in groups, but a continuous series moving upwards?as though a little creature were running up their arm. We might ask how taps two to four came to be experienced some way up the forearm when the next tap in the series had not happened yet. How did the brain know where the next tap was going to fall?

You might try to explain it by saying that the stream of consciousness lags a little behind, just in case more taps are coming. Or perhaps, when the elbow tap comes, the brain runs back in time and changes the contents of consciousness. If so, what was really in consciousness when the third tap happened? The problem arises only if we think that things must always be either "in" or "out" of consciousness. Perhaps, if this apparently natural distinction is causing so much trouble, we should abandon it.

Even deeper troubles threaten our sense of conscious vision. You might be utterly convinced that right now you're seeing a vivid and detailed picture of the world in front of your eyes, and no one can tell you otherwise. Consider, then, a few experiments.

The most challenging are studies of “change blindness” (New Scientist, 18 Nov 2000, p 28). Imagine you are asked to look at the left hand picture in the illustration below. Then at the exact moment you move your eyes (which you do several times a second) the picture is swapped for the one on the right. Would you notice the difference? Most people assume that they would. But they'd be wrong. When our eyes are still we detect changes easily, but when a change happens during an eye movement or a blink we are change blind.

 Another way to reveal change blindness is to present the two pictures one after the other repeatedly on a computer screen with flashes of grey in between (for an example see http://nivea.psycho.univ-paris5.fr/ASSChtml/kayakflick.gif). It can take people many minutes to detect even a large object that changes colour, or one that disappears altogether, even if it’s right in the middle of the picture.

What do these odd findings mean? At the very least they challenge the textbook description that vision is a process of building up representations in our heads of the world around us. The idea is that as we move our eyes about, we build up an even better picture, and this picture is what we consciously see. But these experiments show that this way of thinking about vision has to be false. If we had such a picture in our heads we would surely notice that something had changed, yet we don't. We jump to the conclusion that we’re seeing a continuous, detailed and rich picture. But this is an illusion.

Researchers differ in how far they think the illusion goes. Psychologists Daniel Simons of Harvard University and Daniel Levin of Kent State University, Ohio, suggest that during each visual fixation our brain builds a fleeting representation of the scene. It then extracts the gist and throws away all the details. This gives us the feeling of continuity and richness without too much overload.

Ronald Rensink of the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, goes a little further and claims that we never form representations of the whole scene at all, not even during fixations. Instead we construct what he calls “virtual representations” of just the object we are paying attention to. Nothing else is represented in our heads, but we get the impression that everything is there because a new object can always be made “just in time” whenever we look.

Finally, our ordinary notions of seeing are more or less demolished by psychologists Kevin O'Regan of the CNRS, the French national research agency in Paris, and Alva Noë of the University of California, Santa Cruz, who first described vision as a grand illusion. They argue that we don't need internal representations at all because the world is always there to be referred to. According to their “sensorimotor theory of vision” seeing is not about building pictures of the world in our heads, it’s about what you are doing. Seeing is a way of interacting with the world, a kind of action. What remains between eye movements is not a picture of the world but the information needed for further exploration. The theory is dramatically different from existing theories of perception.

It’s not clear who’s right. Perhaps all these theories are off the mark, but there is no doubt about the basic phenomenon and its main implication. Searching for the neural correlates of the detailed, picture in our heads is doomed because there is no such picture.

This leaves another problem. If we have no picture, how can we act on the things we see? This question may seem reasonable but it hides another false assumption?that we have to see consciously in order to act. We need only think of the tennis player who returns a serve before consciously seeing it, to realise that this is false, but the situation is odder than this. We probably have several separate visual systems that do their jobs somewhat independently, rather than one single one that produces a unified visual world.

David Milner of the University of St Andrews, and Melvyn Goodale of the University of Western Ontario, argue that there is one system for fast visuomotor control and a slower system for perceiving objects. Much of their evidence comes from patients with brain damage, such as D.F. who has a condition known as visual form agnosia. She cannot recognise objects by sight, name simple line drawings, or recognise or copy letters, even though she produces letters correctly from dictation and can recognise objects by touch. She can also reach out and grasp everyday objects (objects that she cannot recognise) with remarkable accuracy. D.F. seems to have a visual system that guides her actions but her perception system is damaged.

In a revealing experiment D.F. was shown a slot set randomly at different angles. (Trends in Neurosciences, vol 15 p 20, 1992). She could not consciously see the orientation of the slot, and could not draw it or adjust a line to the same angle. But when given a piece of card she could quickly and accurately line it up and post it straight through. Experiments with normal volunteers have shown similar kinds of dissociation, suggesting that we all have at least two separate vision systems.

Perhaps the most obvious conclusion is that the slow perceptual system is conscious and the fast action system is unconscious. But then the old mystery is back. We would have to explain the difference between conscious and unconscious systems. Is there a magic ingredient in one? Does neural information turn into subjective experiences just because it is processed more slowly?

Perhaps the answer here is to admit that there is no stream of conscious experiences on which we act. Instead, at any time a whole lot of different things are going on in our brain at once. None of these things is either “in” or “out” of consciousness but every so often, something happens to create what seems to have been a unified conscious stream; an illusion of richness and continuity.

It sounds bizarre, but try to catch yourself not being conscious. More than a hundred years ago the psychologist William James likened introspective analysis to “trying to turn up the gas quickly enough to see how the darkness looks." The modern equivalent is looking in the fridge to see whether the light is always on. However quickly you open the door, you can never catch it out. The same is true of consciousness. Whenever you ask yourself, “Am I conscious now?” you always are.

But perhaps there is only something there when you ask. Maybe each time you probe, a retrospective story is concocted about what was in the stream of consciousness a moment before, together with a “self” who was apparently experiencing it. Of course there was neither a conscious self nor a stream, but it now seems as though there was.

Perhaps a new story is concocted whenever you bother to look. When we ask ourselves about it, it would seem as though there’s a stream of consciousness going on. When we don't bother to ask, or to look, it doesn't, but then we don't notice so it doesn't matter.

 Admitting that it’s all an illusion does not solve the problem of consciousness but changes it completely. Instead of asking how neural impulses turn into conscious experiences, we must ask how the grand illusion gets constructed. This will prove no easy task, but unlike solving the Hard Problem it may at least be possible.
 

Susan Blackmore is a psychologist, writer and lecturer based in Bristol.

Further Reading
Consciousness Explained by Daniel Dennett, Penguin (1993)
O’Regan and Noë’s ideas will soon be debated in a special issue of Behavioral and Brain Sciences.
N.B. The current issue of Journal of Consciousness Studies is devoted to the Grand Illusion.  See http://www.imprint.co.uk/jcs/
This will also be published as a book Is the Visual World a Grand Illusion? Ed. Alva Noë, Imprint Academic, 2002.
 

Ocean Sunfish

It has many names in many languages, but the ocean sunfish vies for the title of strangest fish in the sea. Its Latin name, Mola mola , means millstone. Recorded up to two tons, this gentle giant inhabits all tropical and temperate seas.

The ocean sunfish (Mola mola) is the world's largest known bony fish (sharks and rays are cartilaginous, not bony).  At least one estimate over 3000 lb. has been recorded and individuals reaching 11 ft. (3 m.) from fin tip to fin tip have been seen. It is found in all oceans in tropical and temperate climes, and is known to eat gelatinous zooplankton (jellyfish) and probably small fishes and algae.  In the eastern Pacific, Mola mola is normally found from British Columbia to South America, although in El Nino events it has been recorded as far north as Alaska.

Long dorsal and anal fins are the mola's principal source of locomotion -- they are flapped from side to side. The caudal fin of the ocean sunfish is quite short and acts like a rudder.

Molas are often covered with small parasites, and will approach drift kelp and other flotsam to recruit small fish (which hide in and below the kelp) to remove these parasites.

From TIME Magazine:

The Bible and the Apocalypse
The biggest book of the summer is about the end of the world. It's also a sign of our troubled times
BY NANCY GIBBS

What do you watch for, when you are watching the news? Signs that interest rates might be climbing, maybe it's time to refinance. Signs of global warming, maybe forget that new SUV. Signs of new terrorist activity, maybe think twice about that flight to Chicago.

Or signs that the world may be coming to an end, and the last battle between good and evil is about to unfold?

For evangelical Christians with an interest in prophecy, the headlines always come with asterisks pointing to scriptural footnotes. That is how Todd Strandberg reads his paper. By day, he is fixing planes at Offutt Air Force Base in Bellevue, Neb. But in his off-hours, he's the webmaster at raptureready.com and the inventor of the Rapture Index, which he calls a "Dow Jones Industrial Average of End Time activity." Instead of stocks, it tracks prophecies: earthquakes, floods, plagues, crime, false prophets and economic measurements like unemployment that add to instability and civil unrest, thereby easing the way for the Antichrist. In other words, how close are we to the end of the world? The index hit an all-time high of 182 on Sept. 24, as the bandwidth nearly melted under the weight of 8 million visitors: any reading over 145, Strandberg says, means "Fasten your seat belt."

It's not the end of the world, our mothers always told us. This was helpful for putting spilled milk in perspective, but it was also our introduction to a basic human reference point. We seem to be born with an instinct that the end is out there somewhere. We have a cultural impulse to imagine it—and keep it at bay. Just as all cultures have their creation stories, so too they have their visions of the end, from the Bible to the Mayan millennial stories. Usually the fables dwell in the back of the mind, or not at all, since we go about our lives conditioned to think that however bad things get, it's not you know what. But there are times in human history when instinct, faith, myth and current events work together to create a perfect storm of preoccupation. Visions of an end point lodge in people's minds in many forms, ranging from entertainment to superstitious fascination to earnest belief. Now seems to be one of those times.

The experience of last fall—the terrorist attacks, the anthrax deaths—not only deepened the interest among Christians fluent in the language of Armageddon and Apocalypse. It broadened it as well, to an audience that had never paid much attention to the predictions of the doomsday prophet Nostradamus, or been worried about an epic battle that marks the end of time, or for that matter, read the Book of Revelation. Since Sept. 11, people from cooler corners of Christianity have begun asking questions about what the Bible has to say about how the world ends, and preachers have answered their questions with sermons they could not have imagined giving a year ago. And even among more secular Americans, there were some who were primed to see an omen in the smoke of the flaming towers—though it had more to do with their beach reading than with their Bible studies.

That is because among the best-selling fiction books of our times—right up there with Tom Clancy and Stephen King—is a series about the End Times, written by Tim F. LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins, based on the Book of Revelation. That part of the Bible has always held its mysteries, but for millions of people the code was broken in 1995, when LaHaye and Jenkins published Left Behind: A Novel of the Earth's Last Days. People who haven't read the book and its sequels often haven't even heard of them, yet their success provides new evidence that interest in the End Times is no fringe phenomenon. Only about half of Left Behind readers are Evangelicals, which suggests there is a broader audience of people who are having this conversation.

A TIME/CNN poll finds that more than one-third of Americans say they are paying more attention now to how the news might relate to the end of the world, and have talked about what the Bible has to say on the subject. Fully 59% say they believe the events in Revelation are going to come true, and nearly one-quarter think the Bible predicted the Sept. 11 attack.

Some of that interest is fueled by faith, some by fear, some by imagination, but all three are fed by the Left Behind series. The books offer readers a vivid, violent and utterly detailed description of just what happens to those who are left behind on earth to fight the Antichrist after Jesus raptures, or lifts, the faithful up to heaven. At the start of Book 1, on a 747 bound for Heathrow from Chicago, the flight attendants suddenly find about half the seats empty, except for the clothes and wedding rings and dental fillings of the believers who have suddenly been swept up to heaven. Down on the ground, cars are crashing, husbands are waking up to find only a nightgown in bed next to them, and all children under 12 have disappeared as well. The next nine books chronicle the tribulations suffered by those left behind and their struggle to be saved.

The series has sold some 32 million copies—50 million if you count the graphic novels and children's versions—and sales jumped 60% after Sept. 11. Book 9, published in October, was the best-selling novel of 2001. Evangelical pastors promote the books as devotional reading; mainline pastors read them to find out what their congregations are thinking, as do politicians and scholars and people whose job it is to know what fears and hopes are settling in the back of people's minds in a time of deep uncertainty.

Now the 10th book, The Remnant, is arriving in stores, a breathtaking 2.75 million hard-cover copies, and its impact may be felt far beyond the book clubs and Bible classes. To some evangelical readers, the Left Behind books provide more than a spiritual guide: they are a political agenda. When they read in the papers about the growing threats to Israel, they are not only concerned for a fellow democratic ally in the war against terror; they are also worried about God's chosen people and the fate of the land where events must unfold in a specific way for Jesus to return. That combination helps explain why some Christian leaders have not only bonded with Jews this winter as rarely before but have also pressed their case in the Bush White House as if their salvation depended on it.

Walter Russell mead is sitting in his office at the Council on Foreign Relations in midtown Manhattan on a soft June afternoon, at work on a book that was born last September. He published an acclaimed history of U.S. foreign policy last year and was working on a study about building a global middle class. But he has put that aside. Piled around him now are the Koran, a Bible, books on technology and a stack of Left Behind books. When Mead predicts that our century will be remembered as the Age of Apocalypse, he does not mean to suggest that the world will soon end in a fiery holocaust. "The word apocalypse," he observes, "comes from a Greek word that literally means 'lifting of the veil.' In an apocalyptic age, people feel that the veil of normal, secular reality is lifting, and we can see behind the scenes, see where God and the devil, good and evil are fighting to control the future." To the extent that more people in the U.S. and around the world believe history is accelerating, that ancient prophecies are being fulfilled in real time, "it changes the way people feel about their circumstances, and the way they act. The grays are beginning to leak out of the way people view the world, and they're seeing things in more black-and-white terms."

At the religious extremes within Islam, that means we see more suicide bombers: if God's judgment is just around the corner, martyrdom has a special appeal. The more they cast their cause as a fight against the Great Satan, the more they reinforce the belief in some U.S. quarters that the war on terror is not one that can ever end with a treaty or communique, only total victory or defeat. Extremists on each side look to contemporary events as validation of their sacred texts; each uses the others to define its view of the divine scheme.

In such a time of uncertainty, it's a natural human instinct to look for some good purpose in the shadows of even the scariest events—and for some readers the theology of the Left Behind books provides it. Some stumbled on the series by accident, and were hooked. Deborah Vargas, 46, of San Francisco bought her first Left Behind book in January at a Target, looking for a good read. She got much more than she had bargained for, especially after Sept. 11. "It was almost a message right out of the Bible," she says. "Something within me started to change, and I started to question myself. What was I waiting for? A sign?" Since then, she says, her life has been transformed, and she is now a regular in the Left Behind chat rooms. "I want to talk about it all the time."

Talk to the people who were already inclined to read omens in the headlines, and you hear their excitement, even eagerness to see what happens next. "We sense we are very close to something apocalyptic, but that something positive will come out of it," says Doron Schneider, an Evangelical based in Jerusalem. "It's like a woman having labor pains. A woman can feel this pain reaching its height when the child is born—and then doesn't feel the pain anymore, only the joy of the happy event." Even the horror of Sept. 11 was experienced differently by people primed to see God's hand in all things. Strandberg admits that he was "joyful" that the attacks could be a sign that the End Times were at hand. "A lot of prophetic commentators have what I consider a phony sadness over certain events," he says. "In their hearts they know it means them getting closer to their ultimate desire."

People who were strangers to prophecy don't always find as much comfort there. When Dave Cheadle, a Denver lay pastor at an inner-city ministry, sent out an Internet letter after 9/11 suggesting that Revelation was the relevant text for understanding what was happening, he got a huge—and frightened—response: "People were asking themselves whether they were ready to die. Very sane, well-educated people have gone back to the storm-cellar thing to make sure they have water and freeze-dried stuff in their basements." Some had trouble reconciling their warm image of a merciful God with the chilling warnings they were reading. "They're asking people to believe that we have a God who simply can't wait to zap the Christian flight crew out of jets so they crash?" asks Paul Maier, a professor of ancient history at Western Michigan University and an author of Christian fiction, who finds in the Left Behind books a deity he does not recognize. "You can't believe in a God who would do this kind of thing."

Others, already believers, have come away from this past winter feeling a need to change tactics, change jobs, find a new way to get the urgent message across. Rick Scarborough, pastor of the First Baptist Church of Pearland, Texas, a Houston suburb, resigned his pulpit this month to put all his energy into recruiting Christians to become politically involved. "I am mobilizing Christians and getting more Christians to vote. I am preparing a beachhead of righteousness," he says. Meanwhile Wyoming state senator Carroll Miller, a popular legislator from Big Horn County, announced his retirement from politics in part so that he could spend more time speaking at churches and men's clubs, helping people come to grips with the prospect of the Second Coming. "It's very important that we as a Christian nation know what the Scriptures have said about these days," he says. "I'm putting forth my personal effort for my own sake as well as for my family and friends."

Miller knows people who have prepared Bibles with the relevant passages indexed about what will occur during the Tribulation, so that their left-behind friends and relatives will know to prepare for the earthquakes and locusts and scorpions: when "the sun became as black as sackcloth and the moon became as blood." After a while, sightings of the Antichrist come naturally: when U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan tells the World Economic Forum that globalization is the best hope to solve the world's problems, when the forum floats the idea of a "united nations of major religions," when privacy is sacrificed to security, the headlines are listed on the prophecy websites as signs that the Antichrist is busy about his business. "He's probably a good-looking man," says Kelly Sellers, who runs a decorative-stone business in Minneapolis, Minn. "I'm sure he's in politics right now and probably in the public eye a little bit." Sellers has read every Left Behind book and is waiting for the next one—"anxiously." "It helped me to look at the news that's going on about Israel and Palestine," which, he believes, "is just ushering in the End Times, and it's exciting for me."

His sister-in-law Jodie thinks technology is a key to hastening the End Times. "'When Christ returns, every eye shall see Him,'" she quotes from Revelation. Thanks to CNN and the Internet, "we're getting to a place where every eye could actually behold such an event." The books were enough to persuade Sandra Keathley, a Boeing employee in Wichita, Kans., not to buy Microsoft's Windows XP, because she has heard rumors that it carries a method of tracking e-mail. (In fact, the software had an instant-messaging bug that was later fixed.) If the Antichrist were to come, she fears, "and you want to contact another Christian, they could see that, trace it."

The growing audience for apocalyterature extends even into mainline Protestantism, a tradition that has spent little time on fire and brimstone. "I would go for years without anyone asking about the End Times," says Thomas Tewell, senior minister of the Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church in midtown Manhattan—hardly a hothouse of apocalyptic fervor. "But since Sept. 11, hard-core, crusty, cynical New York lawyers and stockbrokers who are not moved by anything are saying, 'Is the world going to end?', 'Are all the events of the Bible coming true?' They want to get right with God. I've never seen anything like it in my 30 years in ministry."

There has never really been a common religious experience in America, and that is as true as ever now: some ministers report that these days when they announce they will be preaching on the Apocalypse, attendance jumps at least 20%. But elsewhere church attendance is back down to where it was before Sept. 11, and those pastors see little sign of existential dread. Pastor Ted Haggard, who started a church in his Colorado Springs, Colo., basement that now has 9,000 members, attributes the surge in End Times interest to the Christian media empire as much as anything else: "Because of the theology of our church, I don't think we're close to a Second Coming," he says. "But many of the major Christian media outlets believe that there is fulfillment, and people respond to that. People love gloom and doom. People love pending judgment. No. 1, they long to see Jesus, and No. 2, they look for the justice that Jesus will bring to the earth in his Second Coming."

Go into a seminary library, and it's hard to find scholarly books on apocalyptic theology; academics tend to treat this tradition as sociology. They see End Times interest rising and falling on waves of cataclysm and calm. Masses of people became convinced the end was nigh when Rome was sacked in 410, when the Black Death wiped out one-third of the population of 14th century Europe, when the tectonic shudders of the Lisbon earthquake in 1755 caused church bells to ring as far away as England, and certainly after 1945, when for the first time human beings harnessed the power to bring about their total destruction, not an act of God, but an act of mankind.

America, a country born with a sense that divine providence was paying close attention from the start, has always had a weakness for prophecy. With its deep religious history but no established church, this country welcomes religious free-lancers and entrepreneurs. Both the visionaries and the con artists have access to the altar. It took the shocking events of the last mid-century to draw apocalyptic thinking off the Fundamentalist margins and into the mainstream. The rise of Hitler, a wicked man who wanted to murder the Jews, read like a Bible story; his utter destruction, and the subsequent return of the Jews to Israel after 2,000 years and the capture of Jerusalem's Old City by the Israelis in 1967, were taken by devout Christians and Jews alike as evidence of God's handiwork. Israel once again controlled the Temple Mount, a site so holy to Islam and Christianity as well as Judaism that Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's simple act of visiting the mount was sufficient to ignite the current Palestinian uprising. The Temple Mount is the location of al-Aqsa Mosque, one of the holiest sites in Islam, and is also the very place where Christians and Jews believe a new temple must one day be rebuilt before the Messiah can come. An Australian Evangelical once set fire to the mosque to clear the way, and to this day security remains exceptionally tight for fear that those who take Scripture literally might not just believe in what the prophets promised, but might also try to help it along.

But it took something more, a pre-eminent theological entrepreneur, to bring a wider American audience to the apocalyptic tradition. Hal Lindsey's The Late Great Planet Earth, published in 1970, became the best-selling nonfiction book of its decade; Time called Lindsey "the Jeremiah of our generation" for his detailed argument that the end was approaching. "That's the first book I ever read about last days, and it changed my life," says George Morrison, pastor of Faith Bible Chapel in Arvada, Colo., where average Sunday-morning attendance is 4,000. "All of a sudden, I was made aware that wow, there's an order to this thing." Lindsey's explanation of the Bible's warnings came just as a backlash was stirring against '60s liberalism, an echo of the 18th century reaction to the Enlightenment. Lindsey caught the moment that launched a decade of evangelical resurgence, when for the first time in generations believers organized to put their stamp on this world, rather than the next.

The election of Ronald Reagan brought "Christian Zionism" deeper into the White House: Lindsey served as a consultant on Middle East affairs to the Pentagon and the Israeli government. Interior Secretary James Watt, a Pentecostalist, in discussing environmental concerns, observed, "I don't know how many future generations we can count on until the Lord returns." Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger affirmed, "I have read the Book of Revelation, and, yes, I believe the world is going to end—by an act of God, I hope—but every day I think time is running out." It was no accident that Reagan made his "evil empire" speech at a meeting of the National Association of Evangelicals.

It never seemed to hurt that Lindsey's predictions passed their "sell by" date: during the Gulf War, sales of his book jumped 83%, as people feared Saddam Hussein was rebuilding Babylon and dragging the world to its last battle. Nowadays Lindsey sees his early warnings being vindicated almost daily. "The Muslim terrorists are going to strike the U.S. again and strike us hard so that we cease to be one of the world's great powers," he says. "It's not far off." When he wrote his best seller, he says, not many people took prophecy seriously. "I was called a false prophet for saying there'd be a United States of Europe back in 1970, but there is one now. People have watched this scenario continue to come together, and that's why so many people today are believing we are in the midst of last days."

Actually, the more Evangelicals became involved in politics, the more they engaged with the world here and now, the more interest in End Times theology drifted back into the realm of entertainment. And many argued that was a healthy sign. Not all Evangelicals embrace End Times theology, and some see in it a dangerous distraction. Jesus said that when it comes to the time of judgment, "no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, but My Father only." In that light, if Christians are called to put their faith in Christ, whatever trials they face, then it undermines that trust to try to read the signs, unlock the code, focus on what can't be known rather than on what must be done: heal the sick, tend the poor, spread the Gospel.

It is one thing to become politically active to deploy that Gospel to improve people's lives, another to try to promote a specific religious scenario. Intercessors for America, a 30-year-old prayer ministry, helps keep people politically connected through e-mail alerts and telephone-prayer chains. The June 11 Prayer Alert implored, "Lord, raise up government leaders in Israel, the United States (and worldwide) who will not seek to 'divide the land,' and who would recognize the unique significance of Jerusalem in God's end-time purposes." A refusal to consider Israel's withdrawal from any occupied territory would tend to complicate the peace process: virtually every proposal has involved a land-for-peace swap. Yet at the same time, "if this wave of terrorism continues without a meaningful peace treaty soon," predicts John Hagee, pastor of the 17,000-member Cornerstone Church in San Antonio, Texas, "the sparks of war will produce a third world war. And that will be the coming of the End Times. That will be the end of the world as we know it."

To the true believers, that seems less a threat than the fulfillment of a promise. "If we keep our eyes on Israel, we will know about the return of Christ," says Oleeta Herrmann, 77, of Xenia, Ohio. "Everything that is happening—wars, rumors of war—in the Middle East is happening according to Scripture." Herrmann is a member of the End-Time Handmaidens and Servants, a group of global missionaries who preach the Gospel with an emphasis on End Times teachings. Sept. 11 is proof of her belief that the Second Coming of Christ is "closer than it ever has been," Herrmann says.

And therein lies the central paradox in this wave of End Times interest. If you believe the end is near, is the reaction hope, or dread? "Even though the Left Behind series has been popular, many people still think of the End Times as negative," wrote Kyle Watson on his prophecy news website, AtlantaChristianWeekly.com. He thinks believers should be excited about the end of the world. "Try viewing prophecy and current events [as] how much closer we are to being with Christ in heaven."

That impulse to hope for a good ending is one Cal Thomas, the conservative columnist, sees even in the disciples' questions for Jesus. He cites Bible passages in which the Apostles press Jesus for clues about how the future unfolds. "This is intellectual comfort food, the whole Left Behind phenomenon, because it says to people, in a popularized way, it's all going to pan out in the end," he says. "It assures them, in the midst of a general cultural breakdown and a time of growing danger, that God is going to redeem the time." Evangelicals who had felt somehow left behind in secular terms, by a coarse culture and a fear of general moral decay, welcome arguments that even the most tragic events may be evidence of God's larger plan. In fact, you don't have to be religious to be hoping for that as well.

—With reporting by Amanda Bower/New York, Rita Healy/ Denver, Marc Hequet/St. Paul, Tom Morton/ Casper, Adam Pitluk/San Antonio, Matt Rees/ Jerusalem, Jeffrey Ressner/Los Angeles, Melissa Sattley/Austin and Daniel Terdiman/San Francisco

jaybabcock.com home