Human Rights and National Minorities in the United States

Three human rights myths serve to limit the debate over human rights in the United States and bias our perspective in dealing with the human rights claims of citizens from other countries. The first myth is that human rights belong solely to individuals and protect them largely from negative actions by the state. The second myth declares that civil and political rights are primary while economic, cultural, and social rights are secondary. The third myth asserts that the only rights that count are legal in nature and that moral or personal claims are invalid or irrelevant. Even a brief historical analysis reveals that all three myths are just that -- myths. The group rights of corporations are protected under the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, economic rights have been upheld over political claims as witness the Supreme Court\u27s Dred Scott decision, and legal debates over rights have often obscured the political, personal, and identity questions that many rights arguments revolve around. Only a conception of human rights that views them as the gradual empowerment of people or groups or the deconcentration of power removes them from the realm of an elite debate among experts and allows for cross-cultural comparison and action

Values and the Quantum Conception of Man

Classical mechanics is based upon a mechanical picture of nature that is fundamentally incorrect. It has been replaced at the basic level by a radically different theory: quantum mechanics. This change entails an enormous shift in our basic conception of nature, one that can profoundly alter the scientific image of man himself. Self-image is the foundation of values, and the replacement of the mechanistic self-image derived from classical mechanics by one concordant with quantum mechanics may provide the foundation of a moral order better suited to our times, a self-image that endows human life with meaning, responsibility, and a deeper linkage to nature as a whole.Comment: 10 pages, latexed, math_macros.tex, full postscript available from http://theor1.lbl.gov/www/theorygroup/papers/37315.p

The 18-fold way

I shall consider each of the 18 claims made by Mohrhoff, and explain, in each case, why I take the path opposite to the one by which he seeks to remove the effects of our thoughts on the activities of our quantum mechanically described brains.Comment: To be published in Foundations of Physics. This is a reply to an article (quant-ph/0105097) by Ulrich Mohrhof