Musicians Less Likely to Experience Age-Related Changes in the Auditory Cortex

ScienceDaily 
Nov. 16, 2010 

"During periods of attentive listening, the auditory cortices of older musicians responded the same as those of younger adults, whereas older non-musicians showed typical age-related changes. The researchers note that the musicians spend much of their time paying attention to the details of sound, and this experience may be important for sparing auditory cortex responses."

"Our findings suggest that musical training, which is widely available, may enhance neural connections in the auditory cortex and thus might be useful in preventing age-related changes that contribute to hearing difficulties" Benjamin Zendel

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/11/101116100320.htm

Lethal Sting: How the War on Drugs Killed a College Student

by: Vince Beiser
The Huffington Post


    23 year old Rachel Hoffman was killed in a Sting operation, submitting to a deal that was supposed to keep her from going to jail for marijuana. She was my age, she lived in the same state that I do and spends her time in the same cities. 


 "Like a lot of people her age, Rachel seemed convinced that she was immune to serious trouble. Her nerviness was legendary among her friends. She went skydiving one Easter wearing a pair of bunny ears."

    "She was a friendly, outgoing hippy chick with an easy smile and sleepy eyes, who wore her hair long and loose and favored simple tank tops, T-shirts and jeans. She was fun-loving to a fault. At least once a week she'd have a bunch of friends and friends-of-friends over to her place for a home-cooked, whole-grain dinner. She earned a rep as a wicked pool player at the local student bars. She hit all the local concerts and music festivals, dancing in front of the stage wearing her trademark fuzzy purple top hat. She was always up for a spontaneous road trip, heading out with a carload of girlfriends to wherever their favorite bands were playing, often with no tickets, nowhere to stay, no plans, just winging it."

"...on the first anniversary of Rachel's murder, when Governor Charlie Crist signed a bill named in her honor."

"Rachel's Law" requires police departments statewide to "assign the highest priority in operational decisions and actions to the preservation of the safety of confidential informants", and to train officers who work with them. "The top purpose of law enforcement is to save lives," says Lance Block, Margie and Irv's lawyer. "This law helps them accomplish that." It also allows informants to consult with a lawyer if they choose, and forbids cops from claiming they can promise a reduced sentence in exchange for an informant's help (a power that, in fact, only prosecutors and judges hold). Rachel's parents had sought even more protections, such as barring police from using nonviolent offenders as CI's in cases involving suspects with violent histories. Nonetheless, it's the first law in the nation laying down rules on how cops use confidential informants. "It's our way of honoring Rachel's memory, by helping make sure this doesn't happen to anybody else's child," says Irv."

"And it may be just the beginning. Irv hopes to push Florida's legislature to strengthen the law next year. Margie, meanwhile, aims to establish a foundation to promote similar reforms nationwide. "What keeps me going," she says, "is the thought that my daughter lives on by touching other people's lives."

   

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/vince-beiser/lethal-sting-how-the-war-_b_767197.html

"Mexico's stark reminder of the cost of prohibition"

The Independent

Highlights:  "Even by the barbaric standards of Mexico's drug criminality, the discovery this week in the north-east of the country of a mass grave with 72 bodies – including 14 women – is shocking. It is also a reminder of the root cause of the violence that has killed an estimated 28,000 people since president Felipe Calderón declared domestic war on the drug cartels almost four years ago. The mayhem reflects above all one simple fact: that the United States, which shares Mexico's 2,000-mile long northern border, is the world's largest consumer of illegal drugs."

"The size of this clandestine market obviously cannot be calculated with precision. But the best guesses put it at $60bn or more per year and suggest that 70 per cent of the flow of illegal drugs into the US is controlled by Mexican cartels, which have long since supplanted their Colombian counterparts as the driving force in the region's drug business. Cocaine, heroin, cannabis or methamphetamine – whatever the US user's substance of preference, the overwhelming likelihood is that it will have transited though Mexico."

"If Americans lost their taste for drugs, the Mexican cartels would be out of business. That, however, will not happen; indeed the forbidden nature of drugs may make them more attractive. So why not legalise them? The argument has been powerfully made before and will be so again, but probably to no avail. Sadly the barbaric drug wars will continue."

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/leading-articles/leading-article-mexicos-stark-reminder-of-the-cost-of-prohibition-2061932.html

"Violence breeds violence. The only thing drug gangs fear is legalisation"

by Johann Hari, The Independent

Highlights: "Why? When you criminalise a drug for which there is a large market, it doesn't disappear. The trade is simply transferred from off-licences, pharmacists and doctors to armed criminal gangs..."

"Look carefully at that mound of butchered corpses found yesterday. They are the inevitable and ineluctable product of drug prohibition. This will keep happening for as long as we pursue this policy. If you believe the way to deal with the human appetite for intoxication is to criminalise and militarise, then blood is on your hands.

How many people have to die before we finally make a sober assessment of reality, and take the drugs trade back from murderous criminal gangs?"

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/johann-hari/johann-hari-violence-breeds-violence-the-only-thing-drug-gangs-fear-is-legalisation-2062252.html

"...latest uk newspaper to back legislation"

Transform Drug Policy Foundation Blog

Highlights: "Does the media follow public opinion or lead it? Probably a bit of both, but it is clear that the climate around drugs policy is changing in the public political and media spheres, and the momentum for change is building."

http://transform-drugs.blogspot.com/2010/08/independent-becomes-latest-national-uk.html

"Monkeys love Metallica"

by Rob Bryanton, Imagining the Tenth Dimension

Highlights: "music, like the the other patterns we've just looked at, connects in ways that go beyond the limits of our 4D spacetime"
"In the study, 14 cotton-top tamarins were played clips of music while the researchers noted any changes in behavior. Pieces included Samuel Barber's Adagio for Strings, a soft piano piece from The Fragile by Nine Inch Nails, Metallica's Of Wolf and Man and Tool's The Grudge... According to the Guardian article, the monkeys didn't exhibit any clear response to these piece of music one way or another, except for the Metallica song,which had the unexpected effect of calming them down... the New York Times article claims the scientists saw a similar soothing effect on the monkeys with the Tool song."
 

http://imaginingthetenthdimension.blogspot.com/2010/01/monkeys-love-metallica.html

"Vets Get Ecstasy to Treat Their PTSD"

By Katie Drummond, Wired

September 2, 2010

Highlights: "Dr. Michael Mithoefer and Anne Mithoefer, a psychiatric nurse, are the South Carolina pair who’ve been spearheading research into ecstasy, known clinically as MDMA, since 2000. After one successful study on 21 PTSD patients between 2004 and 2008, they’ve now received the final okay from FDA and DEA officials to start a study entirely devoted to former military service members."

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010/09/new-trial-gives-vets-ecstasy-to-treat-their-ptsd

"Magic mushrooms ingredient beneficial to cancer patients"

By Thomas H. Maugh II, Los Angeles Times

September 7, 2010


Highlights: "The research was a pilot study involving only 12 patients, but it is viewed as a first step in restoring the drug to respectability."

"This is a landmark study in many ways," said Dr. Stephen Ross, clinical director of the Center of Excellence on Addiction at New York University's Langone Medical Center, who was not involved in the research. "This is the first time a paper like this has come out in a prestigious psychiatric journal in 40 years.

"Subjects were given the drugs in a hospital research unit and were then closely monitored for six hours. They were encouraged to lie in bed, wear eyeshades and listen to music during the sessions."
"The patients were given a relatively low dose of psilocybin, 0.2 milligram per kilogram of body weight. Nonetheless, the team reported in the Archives of General Psychiatry, all patients reported a significant improvement in mood for at least two weeks after the psilocybin treatment and up to a six-month improvement on a scale that measures depression and anxiety. Most also reported a decreased need for narcotic pain relievers. No adverse reactions were observed."

"These types of patients normally do not respond well to psychological therapy, Grob said, but his study showed that the drug has "great promise for alleviating anxiety and other psychiatric symptoms."

"http://www.latimes.com/news/science/la-sci-magic-mushrooms-20100907,0,4230087.story?track=rss

"God particle signal is simulated as sound"

By Pallab Ghosh
Science correspondent, BBC News


Highlights: "The process of converting scientific data into sounds is called sonification."

"The aim is to give physicists at the LHC another way to analyse their data. The sonification team believes that ears are better suited than eyes to pick out the subtle changes that might indicate the detection of a new particle."

"We can hear clear structures in the sound, almost as if they had been composed. They seem to tell a little story all to themselves. They're so dynamic and shifting all the time, it does sound like a lot of the music that you hear in contemporary composition"

hoped the particle collisions at Cern would "reveal something new and something important about the nature of the Universe".

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/10385675

"What happened to dynamic range?"

by Bob Speer 

"The question needs to be asked because we're the ones responsible for what's happened to our music."
http://www.cdmasteringservices.com/dynamicrange.htm


Highlights: "Much of the music we listen to today is nothing more than distortion with a beat.  Great music is suffering because it lacks dynamic range.  When music lacks dynamic range, it lacks punch, emotion, and clarity.  The record labels blame digital downloads, MP3s, CD burners, and others for the lack of CD sales.  While there is some truth to their constant whining, they only have themselves to blame for the steady decline in CD sales.  The record labels need to reevaluate what they consider to be good music."


   This article states that music lacks dynamic range and that is why no one is listening. "Great music is suffering because it lacks dynamic range." Well... if it lacks dynamic range, how is it great music? In my opinion, there is plenty of dynamic music out there, and not enough dynamic listeners. If people actually weren't buying simple pop music, no one would be getting paid to record it. 

   It is every individuals responsibility, as with the responsibility of freedom, to open themselves to the grand world of sounds. 

   Support local artists and underground music, buy tickets, go to concerts and do what you can to spread the word.

Yes We Can

"There is no reason to be scared by tradition anymore..."

Why We Dream & Thoughts on DMT

People continue to investigate this age-old mystery. Why do we dream? Deirdre Barrett's new theory suggests that dreams are not merely a side effect of REM sleep, or a Freudian gratification, rather a way of problem solving, critically thinking while we sleep. I believe this also has long been a colloquial answer to the mystery of dreaming... however, I believe that scientific credit to Barrett's ten years of research will do much good for the acceptance of shamanistic practices, which, like dreams, make us "ripe for the type of 'out-of-the-box' thinking that some problem-solving requires". 


My hope is that one day, instead of reminding children to wash behind their ears, mothers and fathers will be shouting behind their children "don't forget to clean your brain!!" Our society already notices the importance of "clearing the mind". Perhaps one day LSD and DMT will be seen as evolutionary tools as simple as soap and hot water. 


Even so, mystery will remain. When we dream are we problem-solving, or are We problem-solving? Perhaps the tiny pulse of dmt into our sleeping brains is enough to drop-us into the fabric, into the collective... maybe only half way. Even more, dreams might reveal something about our soul or show us that we are not alone. 

As the universe seems to continually synchronize, I woke up this morning from the most terrible nightmare. More tremendous than all of my monster and dragon dreams combined, there were people killing people. It was a sight that I will not write down in my dream journal. The images are still burning my minds eye. After crying for some time, I got online to read and write about dreams. As I signed on to facebook, the top of my feed lent me this article on Barrett's research. Thank you Luke, Fredrik and David for participating in the synchronicity.

http://www.livescience.com/health/dream-problem-solving-100627.html

Stretching Molecules Yields New Understanding of Electricity

National Science Foundation



Highlights: "The main advance in our work is that we show single-molecule devices can be very useful as scientific tools to study an interesting phenomenon that has never before been experimentally accessible," said Dan Ralph, the Cornell physics professor who led the study."

"The research shows mechanical control can be a realistic strategy for manipulating molecular spin states, to supplement or replace the use of magnetic fields in proposed applications such as quantum computing or information storage" 

http://www.nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=117109&WT.mc_id=USNSF_51&WT.mc_ev=click

Tripping in a Pet Scanner

Mind Hacks

Highlights:

a report from a participant who describes his or her experience being PET brain scanned while tripping on psilocybin:

At the beginning of the trip I suddenly felt an urge to lie down in the lab. At that point, the optical ‘distortion’ began. First, I saw that some structures were moving and took up different colors and forms. From the gurney, I looked at the sink and the soap dispenser on the wall. All of a sudden, they looked as if they had been painted – as if you apply a filter to an image, which makes it look like an oil painting.

Before the scan, I went to the toilet, but I didn’t find my bearings there. All proportions were wrong: the toilet seemed to be huge, my hands were too big, the arms too long. The first minutes of the scan were also strange. When I realized the scientist in the corner of my eye, he looked like a rat, and the assistant’s face was a zombie-like grimace. As soon as I closed my eyes, my perception changed abruptly and totally.

I was gliding through bizarre geometric spaces, mostly cubic and intensively red. My field of vision was enormously wide, up to 270º, at the corners of which I perceived whispering human figures. Only with great effort, could I afterwards fill in the questionnaires. The answers did not seem suitable or too undifferentiated. Sometimes I did not understand the questions. But it was fascinating that I could read at least half of the questions on a page at the same time.

http://www.mindhacks.com/blog/2010/06/tripping_in_a_pet_sc.html

Brain Sand ( corpora arenacea)

Mind Hacks

Highlights:

Taken from the Wikipedia entry on 'brain sand':

Corpora arenacea (or brain sand) are calcified structures in the pineal gland and other areas of the brain such as the choroid plexus. Older organisms have numerous corpora arenacea, whose function, if any, is unknown. Concentrations of "brain sand" increase with age, so the pineal gland becomes increasingly visible on X-rays over time, usually by the third or fourth decade. They are sometimes used as anatomical landmarks in radiological examinations.

Chemical analysis shows that they are composed of calcium phosphate, calcium carbonate, magnesium phosphate, and ammonium phosphate. Recently, calcite deposits have been described as well.

French philosopher René Descartes famously concluded that the mind and the brain existed as entirely separate entities (a position now known as Cartesian dualism) and believed that pineal gland was the point at which the two interacted.

This was due to the fact that that, unlike most other structures in the brain, there is only one pineal gland and it is located exactly along the midline.

As Descartes largely thought of the mind and soul as the same thing, I'd like to think he would have called these calcified particles 'soul sand' had he known about them.

If you want some more details on 'brain sand', of which we know very little, this large abstract of a scientific study has a wealth of information.

http://www.mindhacks.com/blog/2010/06/brain_sand.html

U.S. drug war has met none of its goals

 by Martha Mendoza
msnbc

Highlights:

After 40 years, the United States' war on drugs has cost $1 trillion and hundreds of thousands of lives, and for what? Drug use is rampant and violence even more brutal and widespread.

The failure is then laid out in stark economic terms:

Using Freedom of Information Act requests, archival records, federal budgets and dozens of interviews with leaders and analysts, the AP tracked where that money went, and found that the United States repeatedly increased budgets for programs that did little to stop the flow of drugs. In 40 years, taxpayers spent more than:

• $20 billion to fight the drug gangs in their home countries. In Colombia, for example, the United States spent more than $6 billion, while coca cultivation increased and trafficking moved to Mexico — and the violence along with it.

• $33 billion in marketing "Just Say No"-style messages to America's youth and other prevention programs. High school students report the same rates of illegal drug use as they did in 1970, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says drug overdoses have "risen steadily" since the early 1970s to more than 20,000 last year.

• $49 billion for law enforcement along America's borders to cut off the flow of illegal drugs. This year, 25 million Americans will snort, swallow, inject and smoke illicit drugs, about 10 million more than in 1970, with the bulk of those drugs imported from Mexico.

• $121 billion to arrest more than 37 million nonviolent drug offenders, about 10 million of them for possession of marijuana. Studies show that jail time tends to increase drug abuse.

• $450 billion to lock those people up in federal prisons alone. Last year, half of all federal prisoners in the U.S. were serving sentences for drug offenses.

At the same time, drug abuse is costing the nation in other ways. The Justice Department estimates the consequences of drug abuse — "an overburdened justice system, a strained health care system, lost productivity, and environmental destruction" — cost the United States $215 billion a year. Harvard University economist Jeffrey Miron says the only sure thing taxpayers get for more spending on police and soldiers is more homicides. "Current policy is not having an effect of reducing drug use," Miron said, "but it's costing the public a fortune."

not just a high

by Nathan Seppa
Science News Daily

Highlights: "Though the psychoactive effect of THC has slowed approval for cannabis-based drugs, the high might also have brought on a serendipitous discovery, says neurologist Ethan Russo, senior medical adviser for GW Pharmaceuticals, which is based in Porton Down, England. “How much longer would it have taken us to figure out the endocannabinoid system if cannabis didn’t happen to have these unusual effects on human physiology?”



http://www.sciencenews.org/view/feature/id/59872/title/Not_just_a_high

Being and Doing: FREEDOM

Notes/Quotes from Sartre's Being and Nothingness: 

I. Freedom: The First Condition of Act

“The concept of an act contains, in fact, numerous subordinate notions which we shall have to organize and arrange in a hierarchy: to act is to modify the shape of the world; it is to arrange means in view of an end it is to produce an organized instrumental complex such that by a series of concatenations and connections the modification effected on one of the links causes modifications throughout the whole series and finally produces an anticipated result” (559).

“an action is on principle intentional… This does not mean, of course, that one must foresee all the consequences of his act” (559). 

“This means that from the moment of the first conception of the act, consciousness has been able to withdraw itself from the full world of which it is consciousness and to leave the level of being in order frankly to approach that of non-being” (560).

“No factual state whatever it may be is capable by itself of motivating any act whatsoever. For an act is a projection of the for-itself toward what is not, and what is can in no way determine by itself what is not” (562).

“Under no circumstances can the past in any way by itself produce an act” (563). 

“all action is the freedom of the acting being” (563). 

“there is no act without a cause, this is not in the sense that we can say that there is no phenomenon without a cause. In order to be a cause, the cause must be experienced as such” (564). 

“fear is understood in turn only in relation to the value which I implicitly give to this life” (564).

“It is only because I escape the in-itself by nihilating myself toward my possibilities that this in-itself can take on value as cause or motive. Causes and motives have meaning only inside a projected ensemble which is precisely an ensemble of non-existents. And this ensemble is ultimately myself as transcendence; it is Me in so far as I have to be myself outside of myself” (564). 

“it is in fact impossible to find an act without a motive but that does not mean that we must conclude that the motive causes the act; the motive is an integral part of the act” (565).

“It is the act which decides its ends and its motives, and the act is the expression of freedom” (565).

“The fundamental condition of the act is freedom” (565).

“Now freedom has no essence” (565).

“It [freedom] is not subject to any logical necessity” (565).

“I could not describe a freedom which would be common to both the Other and myself; I could not therefore contemplate an essence of freedom. On the contrary, it is freedom which is the foundation of all essences” (566).

“Freedom is beyond essence” (566).

“The question is of my freedom” (566).

“to be is to have been” (566).

“I am indeed an existent who learns his freedom through his acts, but I am also an existent whose individual and unique existence temporalizes itself as freedom. As such I am necessarily a consciousness (of) freedom since nothing exists in consciousness except as the non-thetic consciousness of existing. Thus my freedom is perpetually in question in my being; it is not a quality added on or a property of my nature. It is very exactly the stuff of my being; and as in my being, my being is in question, I must necessarily possess a certain comprehension of freedom” (566). 

“…if negation comes into the world through human-reality, the latter must be a being who can realize a nihilating rupture with the world and with himself… the permanent possibility of rupture is the same as freedom… this permanent possibility of nihilating what I am in the form of “having-been” implies for man a particular type of existence” (567). 

“For the for-itself, to be is to nihilate the in-itself which it is… the for-itself escapes its being as its essence” (567). 

“Indeed by the sole fact that I am conscious of the causes which inspire my action, these causes are already transcendent objects for my consciousness; they are outside. In vain shall I seek to catch hold of them; I escape them by my very existence. I am condemned to exist forever beyond my essence, beyond the causes and motives of my act. I am condemned to be free. This means that no limits to my freedom can be found except freedom itself or, if you prefer, that we are not free to cease being free” (567). 

“the refusal of freedom can be conceived only as an attempt to apprehend oneself as being-in-itself” (567-568).

“human reality perpetually tries to refuse to recognize its freedom” (568).

“Human reality is free because it is not enough. It is free because it is perpetually wrenched away from itself and because it has been separated by a nothingness from what it is and from what it will be. It is free, finally, because it’s present being is itself a nothingness in the form of “reflection-reflecting.” Man is free because he is not himself but presence to himself. The being which is what it is can not be free. Freedom is precisely the nothingness which is made-to-be at the heart of man and which forces human-reality to make itself instead of to be. As we have seen, for human reality, to be is to choose oneself; nothing comes to it either from the outside or from within which it can receive or accept” (568).
“Thus freedom is not a being; it is the being of man” (569). 

“…he is wholly and forever free or he is not free at all” (569). 

“If the hand can clasp, it is because it can be clasped” (569).

“Spontaneity, since by definition is beyond reach, can not in turn reach; it can produce only itself… it is impossible for a determined process to act upon a spontaneity, exactly as it is impossible for objects to act upon consciousness” (569).

“The only bond which a nihilating spontaneity could maintain with mechanical processes would be the fact that it produces itself by an internal negation directed toward these existents” (569).

“either man is wholly determined… or else wholly free” (570).

“If the will is to be freedom, then it is of necessity negativity and the power of nihilation. But then we no longer can see why autonomy should be preserved for the will” (570).


“But if we wish to avoid the error which we denounced earlier and not consider these transcendent ends as pre-human and as an a priori limit to our transcendence, then we are indeed compelled to recognize that they are the temporalizing projection of our freedom. Human reality can not receive its ends… either from outside or from a so-called inner “nature.” It chooses them and by this very choice confers upon them a transcendent existence as the external limit of its projects. From this point of view and it is understood that the existence of the Dasein precedes and commands its essence – human reality in and through its very upsurge decides to define its own being by its ends. It is therefore the positing of my ultimate ends which characterizes my being and which is identical with the sudden thrust of the freedom which is mine. And this thrust is an existence; it has nothing to do with an essence or with a property of a being which would be engendered conjointly with an idea. Thus since freedom is identical with my existence, it is the foundation of ends which I shall attempt to attain either by the will or by the passionate efforts. Therefore it can not be limited to voluntary acts” (572). 

“Freedom is nothing but the existence of our will or of our passions in so far as this existence is the nihilation of facticity; that is, the existence of a being which is its being in the mode of having to be it” (573).

“My fear is free and manifests my freedom; I have put all my freedom into my fear, and I have chosen myself as fearful in this or that circumstance. Under other circumstances I shall exist as deliberate and courageous, and I shall have put all my freedom into my courage. In relation to freedom there is no privileged psychic phenomenon. All my “modes of being” manifest freedom equally since they are all ways of being my own nothingness” (574).

“The motive… is generally considered as a subjective fact. It is the ensemble of the desires, emotions, and passions which urge me to accomplish a certain act” (576).

“the cause is objective; it is the state of contemporary things as it is revealed to a consciousness” (567).

“Nevertheless this state of affairs can be revealed only to a for-itself since in general the for-itself is the being by which “there is” a world. Better yet, it can be revealed only to a for-itself which chooses itself in this or that particular way – that is, to a for-itself which has made its own individuality. The for-itself must of necessity have projected itself in this or that way in order to discover the instrumental implications of instrumental-things” (577). 

“The internal organization which consciousness has given to itself in the form of non-positional self-consciousness is strictly correlative with the carving out of causes in the world” (578).

“cause and motive are correlative” (579).

“Just as the consciousness of something is self-consciousness, so the motive is nothing other than the apprehension of the cause in so far as this apprehension is self-consciousness” (579).

“…the past is in-itself. The motive becomes then that of which there is consciousness. It can appear to me in the form of “empirical knowledge”; as we saw earlier, the dead past haunts the present in the aspect of a practical knowing. It can also happen that I turn back toward it so as to make it explicit and formulate it while guiding myself by the knowledge which it is for me in the present. In this case it is an object of consciousness; it is this very consciousness of which I am conscious. It appears therefore – like my memories in general – simultaneously as mine and as transcendent” (579-580).

“In a general way consciousness at whatever moment it is grasped is apprehended as engaged and this very apprehension implies a practical knowing of the motives of the engagement or even a thematic and positional explanation of thesse causes. It is obvious that the apprehension of the motive refers at once to the cause, its correlate, since the motive, even when made-past and fixed in-itself, at least maintains as its meaning the fact that it has been consciousness of a cause; the discovery of an objective structure of the world” (580). 

“It is therefore by the very thrust of the engaged consciousness that a value and a weight will be conferred on motives and on prior causes. What they have been does not depend on consciousness, but consciousness has the duty of maintaining them in their existence in the past… but the meaning held for me by this desire, this fear, these objective considerations of the world when presently I project myself toward my futures – this must be decided by me alone. I determine them precisely and only by the very act by which I project myself toward my ends. The recovery of former motives – or the rejection or new appreciation of them – is not distinct from the project by which I assign new ends to myself and by which in the light of these ends I apprehend myself as discovering a supporting cause in the world. Past motives, past causes, present motives and causes, future ends, all are organized in an indissoluble unity by the very upsurge of a freedom which is beyond causes, motives, and ends. The result is that a voluntary deliberation is always a deception” (580-581).

“Actually causes and motives have only the weight which my project… confers upon them” (581).

“There is therefore a choice of deliberation as a procedure which will make known to me what I project and consequently what I am. And the choice of deliberation is organized with the ensemble motives-causes and ends by free spontaneity. When the will intervenes, the decision is taken, and it has no other value than that of making the announcement” (581).

“…the will is not a privileged manifestation of freedom but that it is a psychic event of a peculiar structure which is constituted on the same plane as other psychic events and which is supported, neither more nor less than the others, by an original, ontological freedom” (583). 

“One could even state that determinism – if one were careful not to confuse it with fatalism – is “more human” than the theory of free will. In fact while determinism throws into relief the strict conditioning of our acts, it does at least give the reason for each of them. And if it is strictly limited to the psychic, if it gives up looking for a conditioning in the ensemble of the universe, it shows that the reason for our acts is in ourselves: we act as we are, and our acts contribute to making us” (583).

“…freedom is actually one with being of the For-itself; human reality is free to the exact extent that it has to be its own nothingness… it has to be this nothingness… in multiple dimensions: first, by temporalizing itself…second, by rising up as consciousness of something and (of) itself… and finally, by being transcendence…” (583-584).

“An existent which as consciousness is necessarily separated from all others because they are in connection with it only to the extent that they are for it, an existent which decides its past in the form of a tradition in the light of its future instead of allowing it purely and simply to determine its present, an existent which makes known to itself what it is by means of something other than it… this is what we call a free existent” (584).

“There are as many ways of existing one’s body as there are For-itselfs although naturally certain original structures are invariable and in each For-itself constitute human-reality. We shall be concerned with what is incorrectly called the relation of the individual to space and to the conditions of a universal truth” (587).

“…each attitude of failure is itself transcendence since each time I surpass the real toward my possibilities” (592). 

“This form which we call our ultimate possibility is not just one possible among others – not even though it be… the possibility of dying or of “no longer realizing any presence in the world.” Every particular possibility, in fact, is articulated in an ensemble. It is necessary to conceive of this ultimate possibility as the unitary synthesis of all our actual possibles; each of these possibles resides in an undifferentiated state in the ultimate possibility until a particular circumstance comes to throw it into relief without, however, thereby suppressing its quality of belonging to the totality” (593).

“I cannot perceive any instrumental thing whatsoever unless it is in terms of the absolute existence of all existents, for my first being is being-in-the-world” (593). 

“Thus the first phenomenon of being in the world is the original relation between the totality of the in-itself or world and my own totality detotalized; I choose myself as a whole in the world which is a whole. Just as I come from the world to a particular “this,” so I come from myself as a detotalized totality to the outline of one of my particular possibilities since I can apprehend a particular “this” on the ground of the world only on the occasion of a particular project of myself” (593-594). 

“…profound choice… is simply one with the consciousness which we have of ourselves. This consciouness… can be only non-positional… it is not distinct from our being. And as our being is precisely our original choice, the consciousncess (of) the choice is identical with the self-consciousness which we have. One must be conscious in order to choose, and one must choose in order to be conscious. Choice and consciouness are one and the same thing” (595). 

“What difference is there… between a willed feeling and an experienced feeling? Actually there is no difference. “To will to love” and to love are one since to love is to choose oneself as loving by assuming consciousness of loving” (595). 

“… to assume self-consciousness never means to assume a consciousness of the instant; for the instant is only one view of the mind and even if it existed, a consciousness which would apprehend itself in the instant would no longer apprehend anything. I can assume consciousness of myself only as a particular man engaged in this or that enterprise, anticipating this or that success, fearing this or that result, and by means of the ensemble of these anticipations, outlining his whole figure” (595).

“My ultimate and initial project… always the outline of a solution of the problem of being. But this solution is not first conceived and then realized; we are this solution. We make it exist by means of our very engagement, and therefore we shall be able to apprehend it only by living it. Thus we are always wholly present to ourselves; but precisely because we are wholly present, we can not hope to have an analytical and detailed consciousness of what we are” (596). 

“…the world by means of its very articulation regers to us exactly the image of what we are” (596). 

“In fact it is by surpassing the world toward ourselves that we make it appear such as it is. We choose the world, not in its contexture as in-itself but in its meaning, by choosing ourselves. Through the internal negation by denying that we are the world, we make the world appear as world, and this internal negation can exist only if it is at the same time a projection toward the possible. It is the very way in which I entrust myself to the inanimate, in which I abandon myself to my body (or, on the other hand, the way in which I resist either one of these) which causes the appearance of both my body and the inanimate world with their respective value” (596).
“we are perpetually engaged in our choice and perpetually conscious of the fact that we ourselves can abruptly invert this choice and “reverse steam”l for we project the future by our very being, but our existential freedom perpetually eats it away as we make known to ourselves what we are by means of the future but without getting a grip on this future which remains always possible without ever passing to the rank of the real” (598). 

“To choose ourselves is to nihilate ourselves; that is, to cause a future to come to make known to us what we are by conferring a meaning on our past” (599). 

“Thus freedom, choice, nihilation, temporalization are all one and the same thing” (599). 

“By the free choice of this modification, in fact, we temporalize a project which we are, and we make known to ourselves by a future the being which we have chosen; thus the pure present belongs to the new temporalization as a beginning, and it receives from the future which has just arisen its own nature as a beginning” (600).

“another Adam would have been possible… this real Adam is surrounded by an infinity of possible Adams… But because of the necessary connection of possibles, another gesture of Adam would have been possible only for and by another Adam, and the existence of another Adam implies that of another world” (602).

“…the contingency… which makes freedom possible is found wholly contained within the essence of Adam. And this essence is not chosen by Adam himself but by God… Adam has not chosen it; he could not choose to be Adam. Consequently he does not support the responsibility for his being. Hence once he himself has been given, it is of little importance that one can attribute to him the relative responsibility of his act” (602-603). 

“The view of the total project enables one to “understand” the particular structure considered” (604). 

“the act of understanding is the interpretation of a factual connection and not the apprehension of a necessity” (605).

“the for-itself can make voluntary decisions which are opposed to the fundamental ends which it has chosen. These decisions can be only voluntary – that is, reflective. In fact they can derive only from an error committed either in good faith or in bad faith against the ends which I pursue” (606). 

“It should be observed first of all that the choice of total ends although totally free is not necessarily nor even frequently made in joy” (606).

“We can even choose not to choose ourselves” (607).

“Whatever our being may be, it is a great choice; and it depends on us to choose ourselves…” (607)

“by means of the will, we can construct ourselves entirely, but that the will which presides over this construction finds its meaning in the original project which it can appear to deny, that consequently this construction has a function wholly different from that which it advertises, and that finally it can reach only details of structures and will never modify the original project from which it has issued any more than the consequences of a theorem can turn back against it and change it” (612). 

“Thus human reality does not exist first in order to act later; but for human reality, to be is to act, and to cease to act is to cease to be” (613). 

“The existence of the act implies its autonomy. Furthermore, if the act is not pure motion, it must be defined by an intention” (613). 

“The intention, which is the fundamental structure of human-reality, can in no case be explained by a given. But if one wishes to interpret the intention by its end, care must be taken not to confer on this end an existence as a given” (614).

“The intention makes itself be by choosing the end which makes it known” (614). 

“Since the intention is a choice of the end and since the world reveals itself across our conduct, it is the intentional choice of the end which reveals the world, and the world is revealed as this or that (in this or that order) according to the end chosen. The end, illuminating the world, is a state of the world to be obtained and not yet existing. The intention is a thetic consciousness of the end. But it can be so only by making itself a non-thetic consciousness of its own possibility” (614). 

“My end is a certain objective state of the world, my possible is a certain structure of my subjectivity; the one is revealed to the thetic consciousness the other flows back over the non-thetic consciousness in order to characterize it” (614). 

“Since human reality is act, it can be conceived only as being at its core a rupture with the given. It is the being which causes there to be a given by breaking with it and illuminating it in the light of the not-yet-existing” (615). 

“It would be in vain to imagine that consciousness can exist without a given; in that case it would be consciousness (of) itself as consciousness of nothing – that is, absolute nothingness” (615). 

“…the for-itself is free and can cause there to be a world because the for-itself is the being which has to be what it was in the light of what it will be. Therefore the freedom of the for-itself appears as its being. But since this freedom is neither a given nor a property, it can be only by choosing itself. The freedom of the for-itself is always engaged; there is no question here of a freedom which could be undetermined and which would pre-exist its choice. We shall never apprehend ourselves except as a choice in the making. But freedom is simply the fact that this choice is always unconditioned” (616). 

“freedom is a choice of its being but not the foundation of its being” (616). 

“… human-reality can choose itself as it intends but is not able to not choose itself. It can not even refuse to be; suicide, in fact, is a choice and affirmation – of being” (616). 

“… choice is that by which all foundations and all reasons come into being” (616). 

“Freedom… is the perpetual escape from contingency: it is the interiorization, the nihilation, and the subjectivizing of contingency, which thus modified passes wholly into the gratuity of the choice” (617). 

“… because here we are dealing with a choice, this choice as it is made indicates in general other choices as possibles” (617). 

“my freedom eats away my freedom. Since I am free, I project my total possible, but I thereby posit that I am free and that I can always nihilate this first project and make it past” (618). 

“No law of being can assign an a priori number to the different projects which I am. The existence of the for-itself in fact conditions its essence” (618). 

“Our particular projects, aimed at the realization in the world of a particular end, are united in the global project which we are” (618). 

“In addition freedom is the freedom of choosing but not the freedom of not choosing. Not to choose is, in fact, to choose not to choose. The result is that the choice is the foundation of being-chosen but not the foundation of choosing” (619).

“Hence the absurdity of freedom” (619).


II. Freedom and Facticity: The Situation

“In particular the coefficient of adversity in things can not be an argument against our freedom, for it is by us – by the preliminary positing of an end – that this coefficient of adversity arises” (620). 

“…that the being who is said to be free is the one who can realize his projects. But in order for the act to be able to allow a realization, the simple projection of a possible end must be distinguished a priori from the realization of this end. If conceiving is enough for realizing, then I am plunged in a world like that of a dream in which the possible is no longer in any way distinguished from the real. I am condemned henceforth to see the world modified at the whim of the changes of my consciousness” (620-621). 
“… the formula “to be free” does not mean “to obtain what one has wished” but rather “by oneself to determine oneself to wish”… success is not important to freedom” (621). 

“…misunderstanding: the empirical and popular concept of “freedom” which has been produced by historical, political and moral circumstances is equivalent to “the ability to obtain the ends chosen” (622). 

“Our description of freedom, since it does not distinguish between choosing and doing, compels us to abandon at once the distinction between the intention and the at. The intention can no more be separated from the act than thought can be separated from the language which expresses it; and as it happens that our speech informs us of our thought, so our acts will inform us of our intentions – that is, it will enable us to disengage our intentions, to schematize them, and to make objects of them instead of limiting us to living them” (622). 


“… the for-itself is free. But this does not mean that it is its own foundation. If to be free is necessary that freedom should decide the existence of its being… First it would be necessary that freedom should decide its being-free; that is, not only that it should be a choice of an end, but that it should be a choice of itself as freedom. This would suppose therefore that the possibility of being-free and the possibility of not-being-free exist equally before the free choice of either one othem… before the free choice of freedom. But since then a previous freedom would be necessary which would choose to be free… basically, which would choose to be what it is already – we should be referred to infinity; for there would be need of another prior freedom in order to choose this and so on (623). 

“… we are a freedom which chooses, but we do not choose to be free. We are condemned to freedom” (623). 

“If, therefore, freedom is defined as the escape from the given, from fact, then there is a fact of escape from fact. This is the facticity of freedom” (623). 
The facticity of freedom is that it escapes fact.

“Actually if freedom decided the existence of its being, it would be necessary not only that my being not-free should be possible, but necessary as well that my absolute non-existence be possible” (623). 

“A freedom which would produce its own existence would lose its very meaning as freedom. Actually freedom is not a simple undetermined power. If it were, it would be nothingness or in-itself” (624). 

“… to do supposes the nihilation of a given. One does something with or to something. Thus freedom is a lack of being in relation to a given being” (624).

“… it could not therefore determine its existence from the standpoint of nothingness, for all production from the standpoint of nothingness can be only being-in-itself” (624). 

“empirically we can be free only in relation to a state of things and in spite of this state of things” (624). 

“freedom is a lesser being which supposes being in order to elude it. It is not free not to exist or not to be free” (625). 

“Contingency and facticity are really one; there is a being which freedom has to be in the form of non-being. To exist as the fact of freedom or to have to be a being in the midst of the world are one and the same thing, and this means that freedom is originally a relation to the given” (625). 

My Place

“the facticity of my place is revealed to me only in and through the free choice which I make of my end. Freedom is indispensable to the discovery of my facticity. I learn of this facticity from all the points of the future which I project” (634). 

“My place appears in terms of the changes which I project. But to change implies something to be changed, which is precisely my place. Thus freedom is the apprehension of my facticity” (635). 

“It is only in the act by which freedom has revealed facticity and apprehended it as place that this place thus defined is manifested as an impediment to my desires, an obstacle… Thus our freedom itself creates the obstacles from which we suffer. It is freedom itself which, by positing itse end and by choosing this end as inaccessible or accessible with difficulty, causes our placing to appear to our projects as an insurmountable resistance or a resistance to be surmounted with difficulty. It is freedom again which establishes the spatial connections between objects as the first type of a relation of instrumentality, which decides on techniques permitting distances to be measured and cleared, and thus constitutes its own restriction. But to be precise, freedom can exist only as restricted since freedom is choice. Every choice… supposes elimination and selection; every choice is a choice of finitude. Thus freedom can be truly free only by constituting facticity as its own restriction” (635-636). 

“A being which is neither the foundation of its own being nor of the Other’s being nor of 
the in-itselfs which form the world, but a being which is compelled to decide the meaning of being – within it and everywhere outside of it” (711).