Posted inReligions Science

Supernatural beliefs lack both causes and mechanisms

When I press on certain keys on my MacBook Pro keyboard, magic happens! Which you can see. Because I can touch type, words form on my laptop's screen. After I publish this post, the words appear on my Church of the Churchless blog. Of course, all this isn't really magic. There's a chain of causes that leads to the words appearing in a blog post. Underlying those causes are hidden mechanisms -- software, hardware, internet functions, and such -- that most of us don't understand very well. But what we're certain of is the overall way someone typing out thoughts…
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Posted inChristianity/Jesus

Businesses shouldn’t assume their customers are Christian

Before Thanksgiving my wife and I got a mailing from Kaufman Homes, a business here in Salem, Oregon.  We use Kaufman's Home Maintenance, a quarterly service where a Kaufman handyman guy checks a bunch of things in your house and does minor repairs as needed. I like that I no longer have to maneuver through the crawl space under our house to change the filters on our two heat pump air handlers. That was never fun, and it got less fun the older I became. What surprised us was the decidedly Christian message Kaufman Homes sent to their customers. This…
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Posted inBooks Reality Religions

Why people with religious delusions do fine in everyday life

I've finished Steven Pinker's book, Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters. I enjoyed it, though some chapters were a bit tedious. The final chapters, though, held my interest. Here's what I liked most in the next to last chapter, "What's Wrong With People?" Meaning, why do so many people believe such crazy irrational stuff? It starts off with a great George Carlin quote. Tell people there's an invisible man in the sky who created the universe, and the vast majority will believe you. Tell them the paint is wet, and they have to touch it…
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Posted inAwareness

Be thankful for nothing. Which means, everything.

I'm not a grinch about Thanksgiving. I enjoy this holiday.  My wife just finished making an apple pie. Soon I'll prepare our main dish, a vegetarian Trader Joe's Turkey-Less Stuffed Roast, which requires all of my cooking skills: heating the oven to 375, basting the roast, and cooking it for 45 minutes.  Whew! I feel exhausted already. I'm also totally fine with feeling thankful. I just have a different view about what thankfulness means. Last night I saw people interviewed on the evening news about what they're thankful for. Family. Friends. Having a job. That sort of thing. OK. Totally…
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Posted inConsciousness

Everybody’s brain is producing a kind of hallucination

Today I finished reading the final pages of Anil Seth's book, "Being You: A New Science of Consciousness." Here's a provocative passage from the Epilogue. Everything in conscious experience is a perception of sorts, and every perception is a kind of controlled -- or controlling -- hallucination. What excites me most about this way of thinking is how far it may take us.  Experiences of free will are perceptions. The flow of time is a perception. Perhaps even the three-dimensional structure of our experienced world and the sense that the contents of perceptual experience are objectively real -- these may…
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Posted inBooks Consciousness

“Beast machine theory” explains consciousness well

Hate to break this to you, if you're a firm believer in immaterial consciousness, but we humans are animals. Specifically, mammals of the primate variety, close relatives of chimpanzees, gorillas, and such. In his book, "Being You: A New Science of Consciousness," Anil Seth lays out his well-informed view of consciousness. (He's a professor of cognitive and computational neuroscience at the University of Sussex.) Seth gave a TEDx talk about his beast machine theory.  Here's some of what Seth has to say in his book about the beast machine theory. The beast machine theory grounds experiences of world and self…
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Posted inFree will Meaning of life

Free will is part of the human mind, not the universe

Free will as people almost always understand it is an illusion. There's little or no doubt about that, as I noted in a recent post.  Here's an idea that is well worth pondering. I've enjoyed doing just that as I go to sleep, letting my mind wrap itself around an intriguing notion. So far as we know, we humans are the only entity in the universe that doesn't exist in full accord with determinism -- causes and effects operating in a lawful, orderly manner. Oh, but what about randomness? Sure, randomness is real. Every programmer knows about random number generators.…
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Posted inFree will

Spooky free will is an illusion

Everybody believes they have unfettered free will, yet almost certainly nobody does. This is just one of the illusions that Anil Seth debunks in his captivating book, "Being You: A New Science of Consciousness." I'm fascinated by free will. Of course, I don't have a choice in this. Seth makes a strong case for being skeptical about our ability to choose actions, thoughts, emotions, and such by somehow stepping outside of all influences other than...  That's what's so difficult to come up with. What could possibly reside in human consciousness that produces the "free" part of free will?  If something…
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Posted inPersonal/Stories

Health problems are a window into how our minds work

Yesterday I got a probable diagnosis of glaucoma, an eye disease. I wrote about this in a post on my HinesSight blog, "Not so fun day: I probably have glaucoma." One bit of good news is that this was detected in an early stage, since I get an annual eye exam because I wear contact lenses and am severely nearsighted. Another aspect of getting the likely diagnosis is that it's given me an opportunity to observe how my mind has been dealing with the news. Which really is just another way of saying, How I have been dealing with the…
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Posted inAtheism God Religions

What if God hates religions?

I'm an atheist who likes to imagine how God thinks. What allows me to do this is the same reason anyone is able to make a claim about God. Since there's no convincing evidence that God exists, every person has an equal opportunity to imagine what this non-existent entity is like -- in much the same way that anyone can come up with a fictional story about characters they conjure up in their mind. So I enjoy visualizing how irritated God is at religious people. God is fine with people who use drugs, drink too much, watch porn all the…
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Posted inBooks Consciousness

The teletransportation paradox gives us clues about the “self”

Here's an excerpt from Anil Seth's book, "Being You: A New Science of Consciousness." I found it fascinating, even though it echoes ideas Derek Parfit wrote about in one of his books. But Seth describes this thought experiment in an intriguing way. After the excerpt, I'll share some observations about it. Let's begin our exploration of the self with a quick trip into the future. A century or so from now, teletransportation devices have been invented which can create exact replicas of any human being.  Just like the machines in Star Trek, they work by scanning a person in exquisite detail…
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Posted inPersonal/Stories

Risk-taking is largely a personal decision

Writing a few days ago about how walking on the edge of a roof is great mindfulness training got me thinking in a couple of related directions. One is that how risky something is usually is a combination of objective fact and subjective interpretation. The other is that the first thing I did after coming up with the name for this blog back in 2004, was decide on a subtitle. Preaching the gospel of spiritual independence The two ideas are related, in my own mind at least. I want people to make an informed decision about what sort of spirituality,…
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Posted inPersonal/Stories

Walking on the edge of a roof is great mindfulness training

Even though lots of people believe otherwise, we are physical beings living in a physical world. (If you disagree, share your factual evidence in a comment on this post. Hey, maybe a Nobel prize awaits you if you're able to prove that we're non-physical beings living in a physical world, or maybe two Nobel prizes if you can prove we're non-physical beings living in a non-physical world.) One reason I enjoy Zen Buddhism so much is that Zen is deeply rooted in physicality. Chop wood, carry water. Focus on the breath while keeping the spine straight in meditation. Students getting…
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Posted inBooks Consciousness

We’re conscious because we are beast machines

I'm enjoying Anil Seth's book, "Being You: A New Science of Consciousness." Consciousness is fascinating. Without it, we are nothing. Without it, we know nothing. Without it, we experience nothing. So, yeah, consciousness is pretty damn important. Here's passages from the Prologue. They offer a good feel for the approach Seth takes in his book, which is based on a solid grasp of modern neuroscience.  The book jacket says: "Anil Seth is a professor of cognitive and computational neuroscience at the University of Sussex, and codirector of the Sackler Centre for Consciousness Science." This book is about the neuroscience of…
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