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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Posted inReality Science

Eleatic Doctrine: what’s real either acts on something else or is acted upon

About a week ago I wrote "Is consciousness more fundamental to reality than quantum physics?" The title of that blog post came from the title of an article in New Scientist that focused on the central messages of two books,  The Blind Spot by Adam Frank, Marcelo Gleiser, and Evan Thompson, and Physics Fixes All the Facts by Liam Graham. I've started reading each book. So far, I'm not finding a direct contradiction between them. The Blind Spot argues that science has gone awry by failing to recognize that everything we humans know and experience, naturally including scientific activities, rests…
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Posted inAtheism

Five reasons why I’m happy being an atheist

For 35 years I believed in God, an Eastern religion variety. Or maybe I just believed in believing in God. Can't be sure. Probably the truth is that I bounced back and forth between a belief in God, and a belief that it was good to believe in God, even if I didn't truly believe in God. Okay, that probably is clear as mud. So let's move on to a simpler topic -- the 20 or so subsequent years when I didn't believe in God. At least the sort of God that occupied my mind during those 35 believing years.…
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Posted inReality Religions Science

Reality isn’t an abstraction. Religion is. Which is why religion isn’t real.

If something can't be perceived either directly (like rocks) or indirectly (like the subatomic particles that make up rocks), then there's no reason to believe that it is real -- where "real" means being part of the natural world. Many things exist without being real in that sense. Fairies. Unicorns. God. Heaven. These are mental concepts, abstractions. They exist in human minds, but not in the world at large. Yes, a concept can become real if there is evidence for it in the natural world. Einstein's theory of relativity moved from mathematical abstraction to reality when observations and experiments confirmed…
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Posted inReality Science

Is consciousness more fundamental to reality than quantum physics?

The title of this blog post was the subtitle to an article by Karmela Padavic-Callaghan in the May 2, 2026 print edition of New Scientist, "The essence of reality." It became the title of the online article, which I've shared below. Is consciousness more fundamental to reality than quantum physics? | New Scientist Here's how the article starts out: Imagine you could take a cosmic mixing bowl and cook up reality from scratch. It would be a strange kind of baking, with the end results including everything from space-time and satellites to cats and the cosmic web. But here’s the…
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Posted inTaoism/Tai Chi

“The Tao is Silent” is my favorite Taoist book, because it makes no sense

In my bookcase I have an entire shelf devoted to Taoism. Or Daoism. Take your pick. There's quite a few translations of the Tao Te Ching. There's many books about Taoist philosophy. Modern takes on Taoism. And my favorite book of all, Raymond Smullyan's The Tao is Silent. The back cover says "Raymond M. Smullyan is an internationally known mathematical logician." Indeed, there's a lot of books by him on Amazon. Most are heavily mathematical. The Tao is Silent is the only one I'd have a chance of understanding. But I can't understand it either. Which is why I like…
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Posted inReality Universe

Searching for a deep meaning to the universe assumes there is one — which is dubious

My previous blog post, "What if there's no deep answers to cosmic questions because there's no deep truth," made me aware how dubious the assumption is that there's a deep meaning to the universe in addition to facts about the universe. Facts, after all, are much closer to being an objective quality of the universe than meaning is. Meaning is manufactured by human minds. Facts arise naturally from investigations into the nature of reality. As noted in the previous blog post, it seems entirely possible to know how the laws of nature operate without adding on a layer of deep…
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Posted inReality Universe

What if there’s no deep answers to cosmic questions because there’s no deep truth?

When I used to give talks at meetings of my religious group, Eastern religion variety, almost always I'd use one of my favorite terms: ultimate reality. I loved those two words. They meant a lot to me, something to aim for, something to devote myself to, something to search for as a lifelong pursuit. Reality, I thought, was interesting. But ultimate reality -- that was the pot of gold at the end of the spiritual rainbow. While I didn't know what it was, I had some ideas in line, not surprisingly, with what the Eastern religion I belonged to for…
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Posted inReality Religions

The world is what makes a difference between mere words and reality

"Water" can't quench our thirst because it is just a word, not H2O. So it is with language in general. "Hawaii" conjures up a pleasant sensation in me, but it is nothing like lying on a warm sunny beach listening to the waves. But when it comes to the supernatural side of religiosity, believers have to be content with words. For where is the reality that corresponds to "God," "heaven," "soul," and other terms that fill holy books and holy sermons, delighting readers and listeners with promises of supernatural experiences that are always something to look forward to, not a…
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Posted inBuddhism

More Zen pseudo-wisdom from Dainin Katagiri

Carrying on from my previous post where I criticized what Dainin Katagiri said in some concluding chapters of his book Each Moment Is the Universe: Zen and the Way of Being Time, here I'll share some additional criticisms now that I've finished reading the book. While naturally I'll focus on what Katagiri said, his confusing, non-sensical statements are reflections of general problems I have with similar books about spirituality and religion. I'm open to persuasive evidence and arguments for things that I used to believe in, but no longer do. Like, the existence of God, life after death. immaterial consciousness,…
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Posted inBuddhism

Bodhisattva B.S. is an annoying part of Buddhism

I'm finding more not to like in the concluding chapters of  Each Moment Is the Universe: Zen and the Way of Being Time, by Dainin Katagiri. In my previous post I criticized Katagiri for buying into the Buddhist notion of past lives, which reeks of unproven supernaturalism. In some reading I did in the book today, I came across another subject that, thankfully, I've rarely encountered in other books about Zen Buddhism: bodhisattvas. Katagiri said: There are two ways of manifesting your life every day: there is an ordinary life and a bodhisattva life. The ordinary type of life is…
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