Posted inConsciousness

Experience is part of physical reality

Sometimes -- well, actually, quite a lot of times -- I find people arguing on this blog, and in other places, that science doesn't know how to deal with personal experience. Further, that because experience seems to be something ineffable, as is consciousness (likely there's no difference between experience and consciousness), this means that the most intimate part of our being is outside the domain of science, which deals with physical reality. Galen Strawson, a philosopher, disagrees. I wrote about his take on consciousness in "The hard problem isn't the nature of consciousness, but of matter."  Many make the same…
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Posted inIndia Religions

India’s 1947 partition shows destructiveness of religion

My previous blog post was about Indian Prime Minister Modi's involvement in the Gujarat massacre of 2002, where about 1,000 people (mostly Muslims, I assume) were killed by Hindu nationalists. But that death toll is nothing compared to what happened after the British partitioned India into a Muslim territory and non-Muslim territory in 1947.  I don't know a lot about the Indian Partition. However, I learned something about it in an article in the January 2 & 9 issue of The New Yorker. The magazine article is called "Blood Lines: Seventy-five years after Indian Partition, have we learned how to…
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Posted inIndia Politics

India’s Modi doesn’t want people to see BBC documentary critical of him

Politicians are much the same the world over. They hate criticism. But in countries with robust freedom of speech and a free press, like the United States, politicians find it difficult to shut down criticism of them. Not so in India, where Prime Minister Modi and his allies are working hard to keep people from seeing a BBC documentary, "India: the Modi Question." TWITTER AND YOUTUBE censored a report critical of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi in coordination with the government of India, according to a top Indian official. Officials called for the Big Tech companies to take action against…
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Posted inRadha Soami Satsang Beas Spiritual practice/meditation

More on why mindfulness is better than mantra meditation

It goes without saying, but I'll say it regardless, that my Church of the Churchless blog posts reflect what I find interesting and what makes sense to me.  If you disagree with a post, naturally that's wonderful. You're you. I'm me. We're different people, so we're going to look at some things differently. Maybe a lot of things differently.  All I can do is explain myself as best I can, while all you can do is explain yourself as best you can in comments on my blog posts -- should you choose to do that. So here's another try at…
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Posted inSpiritual practice/meditation

Mantra versus mindfulness — which is better?

Paying $24.95 for a Learn to Meditate course based on a mantra, that is roughly akin to the Transcendental Meditation approach, had at least one immediate benefit for me. It got me to pondering the pros and cons of using a mantra, versus pursuing mindfulness. This is going to be a fairly short blog post, because after a couple of days where I experimented with repeating the one-word mantra that I chose for the course -- "peace" -- it dawned on me why I gave up on using a mantra and made mindfulness my meditation.  Yes, I still play around…
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Posted inSpiritual practice/meditation

I pay $24.95 for a Learn to Meditate course

As I was reading Galen Strawson's book, "Things That Bother Me: Death, Freedom, The Self, Etc.", I read a mention by Stawson that he'd tried out psychologist Patricia Carrington's approach to meditation, liked it, but didn't stick with it for very long. Curious, I headed to Carrington's web site, which has sort of an old-fashioned internet vibe to it. I poked around the site for a while, focusing on what she has to say about meditation, and liked her emphasis on meditation being as effortless as possible. Since I'm a firm believer in spiritual laziness, I decided to fork over…
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Posted inFree will

Believing in free will isolates us

Before I head off into other directions in my blog posts, I want to share some additional thoughts about free will, and the lack thereof -- a subject that has been a theme of mine recently. (And also non-recently, since I've written a lot about free will over the years.) The main reason I don't believe in free will is that there doesn't seem to be any good reason to believe in it. By and large I prefer truth over falsehood, reality over illusion. Especially when it comes to science. Movies, novels, and TV shows -- I'm fine with falsehoods…
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Posted inFree will

Another good reason to not believe in free will

I'm addicted. To many things. One of them is reading about why free will makes no sense. I ingest books and essays on this subject with delight. Until another one comes along. Then I eagerly imbibe it also. This morning I got my No Free Will fix courtesy of a chapter in Galen Strawson's book, Things That Bother Me: Death, Freedom, The Self, Etc. The chapter, "Luck Swallows Everything," started off in a familiar fashion. Strawson, a philosopher, picked apart the easily pickable argument that free will exists in the form of compatibilism, an incoherent argument that we humans have…
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Posted inMeaning of life

Is it necessary to make our life into a narrative, a story?

As I noted a few days ago in "Are you endurant or transient? Me, I feel like I'm a bit of both", there was more to say about this distinction between people who feel a sense of continuity about themselves during their lifetime (endurants) and people who feel that they're being constituted anew as their life unfolds (transients). Part of that additional saying relates to what Galen Strawson, whose book ("Things That Bother Me") is where I'm getting these ideas, calls a narrative approach to one's life. Meaning, we not only recall events in our life, but make a story out…
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Posted inBooks

Are you endurant or transient? Me, I feel like I’m a bit of both.

In Galen Strawson's book, "Things That Bother Me," he makes an interesting distinction between people who feel a sense of continuity about themselves during their lifetime (endurants) and people who feel that they're being constituted anew as their life unfolds (transients). There's a lot to say about this. For now, the hour is late, I've been working on getting new iPhone 14's up and running for my wife and I today/tonight, so I'm simply going to share how Strawson defines "endurants" and "transients." He says he's a strong transient, while most people are endurants. Me, I kind of split the…
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Posted inGod

God should be able to find us, so give up the God search

After spending 35 years searching for God, some time ago I came to the belated conclusion that this is a really stupid thing to do. For if God is too ignorant, or too uncaring, or too weak, or too busy with other stuff to find us, why should we exert any effort to search for a God who is much more limited than a human being? Consider: experts say that if you're lost outdoors here on Earth, the best thing to do is stay put if you're unsure where to go and get unlost. (See here, here, and here.) One…
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Posted inFundamentalism Religions

Image of Muhammad causes uproar. I’m pleased to share it.

It's bizarre how fundamentalist Muslims get so upset over images of their Prophet Muhammad, whether these be paintings or cartoons. Just another example of the utter irrationality of religious believers. Today the New York Times had a story, "A Lecturer Showed a Painting of the Prophet Muhammad. She Lost Her Job." This happened even after the instructor told her students in advance what she was going to do and on the day of the showing gave the students another chance to say if they had a problem with this. Erika López Prater, an adjunct professor at Hamline University, said she…
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Posted inAtheism Meaning of life

“It had to be” — a great four-word secular philosophy

At my age, 74, it gets more common to have worries pop up in my life that are different from younger person concerns. Health problems, for example. They occur at any age, but when you're young, things that are wrong with you tend to get better. However, the older we get, the more likely we have to deal with chronic problems, things that aren't going to go away.  Best we can do is manage them so they're annoyances, not major obstacles to living an enjoyable life. I find that when I have a doctor appointment scheduled where I'm not sure…
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Posted inConsciousness

The hard problem isn’t the nature of consciousness, but of matter

The Portland Oregonian sometimes has the New York Times Book Review section in its Sunday online edition. Looking it over last weekend, I noted an ad for a book containing 133 essays from the Times' award-winning philosophy series. I gave "Question Everything" to myself as a belated Christmas present. It arrived recently, and I read one of the essays by Galen Strawson this morning: Consciousness Isn't a Mystery. It's Matter. Wow. Really interesting and thought-provoking. Strawson presented a fresh view of consciousness that I'd never come across before. This is the power of philosophy, which to me simply means clear thinking…
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Posted inBooks Neuroscience

Mind-blowing idea to start 2023: thoughts aren’t about anything

Might as well make my first churchless blog post in 2023 about a subject that first caught my attention back in 2011, which was the first time I read Alex Rosenberg's book, The Atheist's Guide to Reality: Enjoying Life Without Illusions.  It's the notion that our thoughts aren't about anything at all. That link leads to a blog post where I did my best to describe why Rosenberg says this. I won't repeat most of what was said in that post, so I invite you to read it if you want to have your mind blown so early in the…
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