The Dojo Extends Beyond its Walls

If the translation of Do predicates the meaning of one's Truth, what we call home for the purpose of such training is Dojo. Jo (translated as the place, or the Hall) is the center of total focus, where all venerable learning is to take place through myriads of human struggles and energetic interactions. It is therefore stated cogently that the place called "Dojo" must be designated as the place of being enlightened by all things. It is the place where one's purest form of existence must be fo...

 Sexual Selection is a Sheltered Feedback Loop

The worlds of academia, high fashion, religion, and modern art produce sublime wonders, and sometimes monstrous absurdities. They can afford such creative freedom because their systems of self-regulation and self-perpetuation are insulated from the mun- dane pragmatics of the outside world. Their autonomy endows them with liberty and creative power. They are free to evolve under their own momentum, along lines of their own choosing, without having to justify themselves at every step to outsid...

 Cognitive Prostheses

The sense-represent-plan-act picture is a heroic one, but it is biologically implausible. I don't need to memorize the layout of the physical environment around me — this desk, this room, this city, this country. After all, the desk, room, city are there before me and we are built — through evolution — to have ready sensory access to it. Shut your eyes. Can you remember the detailed layout around you? It turns out that beyond the broad outlines — the basic schematic organization of...

 Competition Causes Death

Biologists have persistently overestimated the importance of physical causes of premature death rather than biological ones. In virtually any account of evolution, drought, frost, wind, or starvation looms large as the enemy of life. The great struggle, we are told, is to adapt to these conditions. Marvels of physical adaptation—the camel's hump, the polar bear's fur, the rotifer's boil-resistant tunare held to be among evolution's greatest achievements. The first ecological theories of sex...