Posted inConsciousness

The hard problem of consciousness may actually be easy

Way back in January 2007, when this blog was just a few years old, I wrote "Digging into the hard problem of consciousness." In that post I quoted Steven Pinker about what the hard problem consists of. It: Is why it feels like something to have a conscious process going on in one’s head—why there is first-person, subjective experience….The Hard Problem is explaining how subjective experience arises from neural computation. The problem is hard because no one knows what a solution might look like or even whether it is a genuine scientific problem in the first place. Ah... or even…
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Posted inAwareness Reality Universe

The cosmos and us are intertwined in a strange loop

I've been a fan of "strange loop" ever since I read Douglas Hofstadter's book, I Am a Strange Loop. Which I've written at least five blog posts about. I've come across another mention of strange loop in The Blind Spot: Why Science Cannot Ignore Human Experience by Adam Frank, Marcelo Gleiser, and Evan Thompson. While Hofstadter's conception is pretty darn complicated, so not amenable to a brief description, The Blind Spot describes it well in a single paragraph. Life-world means "the world we're able to perceive, investigate, and act in." You may want to say that the universe -- the…
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Posted inRadha Soami Satsang Beas

RSSB: Meditation is just inner strength and calm

It's been a couple of months, but they're back! Below is another in a series of guest blog posts from Anon, an ex-RSSB initiate. RSSB stands for Radha Soami Satsang Beas, an India-based religious organization headed up by a guru that I belonged to for 35 years, which explains my interest in sharing criticisms of the faith that I also found lacking. RSSB teachings since 1890 speak about meditation (through books, gurus, sermons, satsangs). RSSB meditation is the way to burn your karmas, the way to escape reincarnation and future rebirths, the path to enlightenment, requirement for salvation, way to…
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Posted inConsciousness

Don’t trust what you think you know about awareness

This is a truism, but frequently we forgot how true it is: We don't know what we don't know. This is much different from the less problematic condition of knowing what we don't know. I know that I don't know Japanese, aside from a few words. I know that I don't know any math beyond calculus, and very little of that. I know that I don't know how to ride a snowboard. I'm confident in stating these sorts of knowledge about my non-knowledge because they're so obvious to me. But there's plenty of things that I don't know that I…
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Posted inBuddhism

Dalai Lama’s brand of Buddhism believes in some really weird stuff

It was an eye-opener for me. Or mind-opener. A story in TIME magazine about what will happen after the Dalai Lama dies, how he became the Dalai Lama, and other details about his brand of Buddhism. I've had the impression that the Dalai Lama was a scientifically oriented person who didn't buy into the supernatural side of Buddhism. But I readily admit that this was based on my fairly cursory knowledge of books and talks by the Dalai Lama aimed at Western audiences. The TIME story by Charlie Campbell seemed like it was written by a devotee of Tibetan Buddhism.…
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Posted inArtificial intelligence Consciousness

AI is acting more like an organism and less like a machine. So what’s special about us humans?

I'm fascinated by AI. It seems increasingly clear that the distinction between artificial intelligence and natural intelligence is becoming increasingly blurry. As the two kinds of intelligence become more similar, the supposedly unique human mind is going to appear much less special. In their book,  The Blind Spot: Why Science Cannot Ignore Human Experience, Adam Frank, Marcelo Gleiser, and Evan Thompson speak about the difference between an organism and a machine. In general terms, a machine is a device consisting of an assembly of components that operate in a coordinated way, according to a prescribed sequence so as to produce…
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Posted inScience

Feeling that we’re part of the natural world makes life go more easily

We humans are animals. More precisely, primate mammals. We're closely related to chimpanzees and bonobos, with whom we share about 99% of our DNA. Yet religions would have us wrongly believe that we are special, made in God's image, the top of creation -- as an Eastern religion I used to belong to would put it. This fantasy that we're somehow separate and distinct from other animals leads to all sorts of problems. For example, we may feel that death doesn't apply to us, because we have an immortal soul, or God will save us if we obey certain commandments.…
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Posted inAtheism Reason

Reasonist may be a better term for us unbelievers than atheist

My wife, Laurel, belongs to the Freedom From Religion Foundation (FFRF), so she receives their publication, Freethought Today. She correctly thought that I'd be interested in an essay by Robert Pierce in the June-July 2026 issue, "'Reasonist' is a better identifying term." I put the term to use last night in a post on my Salem Political Snark blog about a proposed data center here in Salem. I noted in "Data center proposed for Salem has both potential benefits and problems" that: Like most things in life of this sort, a data center proposed to be built on 75 acres…
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Posted inAtheism Reality Science

Austere physicalism may sound unappealing, but actually it is a great philosophy of life

In line with the adage, great things come to those who wait, after plowing through some pretty scientifically dense chapters in Liam Graham's book, Physics Fixes All the Facts, I've reached concluding chapters that have a more philosophical tone to them. Which makes them more interesting to me, even though I realize that Graham had to build a foundation for his arguments before he could put some icing on the cake -- to mix a few metaphors. One of those chapters is called "Austere physicalism." This basically means that the only genuinely real entities are those described by fundamental physics,…
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Posted inPersonal/Stories Universe

In praise of the strangeness of everyday life

Strange: unusual or surprising in a way that is unsettling or hard to understand That's the dictionary definition. Which I agree with. So how can it be that I find the strangest thing of all to be everyday life? The life that you and I are living right now. Me sitting at my laptop in a house in rural south Salem, Oregon, seemingly nothing unusual or surprising anywhere to be seen, and you reading these words wherever you are, which likely also seemingly doesn't contain anything particularly unusual or surprising. Because -- at least for me, and I'm suggesting that…
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Posted inReality Science

Here’s an argument for why everything is physics. Can you refute it?

Before I started reading Liam Graham's book, Physics Fixes All the Facts, from the title alone I thought I'd have problems with that provocative statement. But after reading 11 of the 16 chapters, I'm having difficulty finding holes in Graham's arguments. According to Graham, the main reason people think there's more to causal reality than physics is that novel phenomena (like consciousness) seem to emerge  from basic phenomena like the particles and forces known to physics. He doesn't deny that more is different, the key adage of those who worship at the scientific altar of emergence. But he doesn't believe…
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Posted inMeaning of life Personal/Stories

Is it the small things or the big things in our life that matter most to us?

I've changed a lot in the past twenty years or so, after I set aside the beliefs I'd embraced during thirty-five years of religiosity, Eastern religion variety. One major change is that my previous grandiose life goals have been replaced by much smaller ones. Before, I held out hope that I'd learn the truth about ultimate reality. Today, I was happy that I could install license plates on the Tesla Model Y Juniper that I'd leased a bit over a month ago. (This isn't a matter of simply screwing them on. I had to consult a couple of You Tube…
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Posted inScience

Genes, selfish or altruistic, make us who we are

Know yourself is an adage with a long history, going back at least to the early Greeks. It's still fashionable in some spiritual circles to say "self-realization precedes god-realization." Leaving aside the basic question of whether any sort of enduring self even exists, or whether a god does. (I deeply doubt this.) But if we're being scientifically correct, there's no doubt that any search for one's self should include the genes that go a long way toward making us who we are. Maybe all the way. I was reminded of this by an article in the May 23, 2026 issue…
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Posted inReality Science Universe

The universe knows much more about itself than we humans know about the universe

Notwithstanding the title of this blog post, I don't really believe that the universe knows itself in the same way we do. That is, the universe isn't self-aware. I simply mean that the universe does its universe'ing thing with an ease and completeness that is far from the limited knowledge we humans have of the universe, laboriously arrived at over thousands of years. I've been listening to an interesting  conversation Sam Harris had with Alex O'Connor called "What is Experience?" that is on his Waking Up app. O'Connor is more open than Harris to the possibility that consciousness is inherent…
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Posted inReality Religions Science

What’s the scientific source of everything in the world?

Creation is a perennial hot topic in both science and religion. In the Bible, God created the heavens and the earth. Other holy books have different explanations for how the world came to be. But they all suffer from a fatal flaw: they're unbelievable. Or so lacking in evidence they are the closest thing to unbelievable. Science does a lot better. Big bang cosmology provides a satisfying, albeit incomplete, answer to the creation question. Some 14 billion years ago our universe burst into existence in a unimaginable explosion of sorts, expanding from the size of a subatomic particle to the…
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