Posted inConsciousness Science

Consciousness: the hardest problem in science

Consciousness fascinates me. As it does to everyone, because fascination and everything else we experience, without exception, requires consciousness. Without consciousness, nothing exists for us. So when the February 2026 issue of Scientific American arrived in the mail, and I saw that the cover story was "The Hardest Problem in Science: Will brain science deliver answers about consciousness or hit another wall?," I got excited. Soon I began to read that article, even though I had other science magazines in my reading pile. Here's a PDF document of the article, which is in two pieces. What is consciousness? Science faces…
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Posted inConsciousness Neuroscience

If A.I. is thinking, this argues for the materialistic nature of human consciousness

In my last post, "Landscape of Consciousness is an amazing web site that maps 350 theories of consciousness," I said that I strongly believe that materialistic theories where the brain is viewed as the source of consciousness make the most sense and are the most likely to be true. A couple of letters in New Scientist about the above-linked article provide some reasons for materialism. From Andy McGee,  Adelaide, South Australia Further to your exploration of the wide variety of ideas about consciousness, biological consciousness is the only one we know exists. It is most likely to have come from…
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Posted inConsciousness

Landscape of Consciousness is an amazing web site that maps 350 theories of consciousness

If, like me, you're fascinated by the phenomenon of consciousness, have your own favorite notion about what consciousness is and isn't, yet are open to exploring other theories of consciousness, you're going to find the Landscape of Consciousness web site a treasure trove of information and insights. I learned about it from an article by Robert Lawrence Kuhn in the October 25, 2025 issue of New Scientist, "Landscape of consciousness." The online article is titled  "What 350 different theories of consciousness reveal about reality." Here's a PDF file of the article. What 350 different theories of consciousness reveal about reality…
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Posted inConsciousness Neuroscience

The brain produces consciousness, no matter what Rupert Sheldrake says

This has happened to me before, and it just happened with Chris Neibauer's book, No Self, No Problem: How Neuropsychology is Catching Up to Buddhism. I'm enjoying a book. It makes sense to me. The author seems dedicated to facts and reason. Then a passage, or even an entire chapter, appears that is at odds with the rest of the book. Now, I can understand why this happens. As Niebauer argues in his book, each of us isn't a unitary self, but a conglomerate of selves that frequently contradict each other. That's how we can say, "I can't believe I…
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Posted inConsciousness Neuroscience

As an idea, the immaterial soul is dead

As I noted in my previous post about how belief in a human "essence" is almost certainly wrong, Julian Baggini goes on a search for such an entity in his book The Ego Trick: What Does It Mean To Be You? Everywhere he looks, using a blend of neuroscience and philosophy, the search comes up empty. He persuasively argues that an unchanging essence can't be found in the body and it can't be found in the mind -- since both body and mind are changeable with no sign of an essence. Then Baggini expands the search to include the religious…
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Posted inBuddhism Consciousness Taoism/Tai Chi

What is changeless? Important question that I’m not sure about.

I stay in touch with a few people from my high school years, including an old friend that I went to elementary school with. He's as philosophically and spiritually minded as I am, so I enjoy our periodic email exchanges. In our most recent sharing of views, my friend included a quote from a previous message I'd sent him. I was referring to Robert Wright, the author of Why Buddhism is True, a book I've written about on this blog. Wright says that the main illusions Buddhism can help us dissolve are a belief in an enduring unchanging self, and…
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Posted inConsciousness Mindfulness Neuroscience

Often I seem to be conscious, but not aware

I go back and forth, trying to decide whether being conscious and being aware are the same thing, or different things. Sometimes I equate the two. But I recall someone (Ron E.?) expressing a different opinion in a comment on one of my posts.  At the time I discounted that idea. But after what happened to me in my Tai Chi class yesterday -- which wasn't all that different from what has happened to me many times before -- I'm more inclined to believe that being conscious and being aware are indeed distinct mental processes. We were doing a form…
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Posted inAtheism Consciousness Neuroscience

More reasons why I’m liking the modular mind theory

As I continue reading Robert Kurzban's book Why Everyone (Else) is a Hypocrite: Evolution and the Modular Mind, I keep coming across ideas that make me pleased I forked out $16.97 to Amazon. The book is well worth the money. Here's some additional points from Kurzban that appealed to me. Press Secretary versus President. Most of us like to think that basically we're in charge of our thoughts and actions. Maybe our emotions also, though they seem more out of our control. In other words, we're the President of the entity we call "myself." Kurzban has a different view. He…
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Posted inConsciousness Neuroscience

The conscious “you” isn’t your self any more than unconscious parts are

The good news keeps on coming from my reading of Robert Kurzban's book Why Everyone (Else) is a Hypocrite: Evolution and the Modular Mind.  In my previous post I talked about how Kurzban persuasively argues that the modular view of mind shows that there isn't a singular "I" inside our cranium, just a multitude of "We's." This makes our human nature hugely more interesting than if each of us were a single entity.  As the poet Walt Whitman said: Do I contradict myself?Very well then I contradict myself,(I am large, I contain multitudes.) Most of us try so hard to…
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Posted inConsciousness Neuroscience

Human cognition is amazingly slow, about 10 bits per second

I came across a fascinating article in the March 2025 issue of Scientific American, "Brains produce thoughts surprisingly slowly." (Online title: "The Human Brain Operates at a Stunningly Slow Pace.") You can read the article via this PDF file.Download The Human Brain Operates at a Stunningly Slow Pace | Scientific American Often you hear that the human brain is the most complex entity in the known universe with its 80 billion or so neurons tied together with trillions of interconnections. That may be, but this impressive product of evolution works much slower than the smart phones most of us carry…
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Posted inConsciousness Neuroscience

No, neuroscience doesn’t support religiosity

A trend is evident. With every fresh blog post I set out to write about Ross Douthat's book, Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious, I have an urge to start off the title with "No." Obviously that's because I don't believe everyone should be religious, and Douthat's arguments in favor of that aren't very convincing. Still, I enjoy being exposed to ideas that I disagree with. Not as a steady diet, but as tasty morsels occasionally. Douthat does about as well as could be expected with his ambitious goal: not to found religiosity on faith, but to a large extent upon…
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Posted inAwareness Consciousness Mindfulness

Meditators need to avoid mistaking subtle dullness for meditative joy

As noted in a previous post, I've been re-reading the first part of a book by Culadasa (John Yates), The Mind Illuminated: A Complete Meditation Guide Integrating Buddhist Wisdom and Brain Science for Greater Mindfulness.  I'm almost back to where I stopped my reading about six years ago for a reason I can no longer recall. The book is an amazingly detailed and comprehensive approach to Buddhist meditation. I find it refreshing, because there's hardly any mention of Buddhist scriptures, Buddhist terms, or Buddhist stories.  The whole focus is on guiding the reader through ten stages of meditative practice. So…
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Posted inConsciousness Spiritual practice/meditation

If consciousness is immaterial, why does ultrasound boost mindfulness?

I realize that those who believe that consciousness is immaterial are pretty much immune to the evidence that it is a physical phenomenon.  That evidence is ubiquitous, as I've pointed out many times in blog posts. Anesthesia makes us unconscious. So does being hit on the head with a baseball bat. Caffeine makes consciousness more alert. MDMA ("Ecstasy") makes consciousness feel more loving.  The October 2024 issue of Scientific American has a short article that presents more evidence for the physical nature of consciousness. Being a daily meditator for most of my life -- I started meditating in 1969 --…
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Posted inConsciousness Neuroscience Reality

Nondual awareness could be closest to the scientific worldview

In my previous post, We're all having an "out of brain experience," I said there was more to say about a lengthy chapter in Thomas Metzinger's book about pure awareness, The Elephant and the Blind.  Here's that saying. More accurately, here's what Metzinger says, because his ideas are so subtle and often expressed in philosophical language, I figure that it's best if I use his own words here, rather than trying to restate them in my own language. Don't be surprised if some, or much, of what Metzinger says in these excerpts isn't crystal clear. It isn't always clear to…
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Posted inConsciousness Neuroscience

We’re all having an “out of brain experience”

At long last, I'm reaching the home stretch of reading Thomas Metzinger's meaty/tofuy book, all 500 pages of it, The Elephant and the Blind, about the experience of pure consciousness that's based on more than five hundred experiential reports from meditators. There are 35 chapters. I've just got two left to read. I thought about skipping some, but after finishing the "Transparency, Translucency, and Virtuality" chapter this morning, I'm glad that my rather obsessive reading style -- usually I read every page in a book, unless I'm really not enjoying it -- paid off in this instance.  Because Metzinger makes…
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Posted inConsciousness God

Douglas Harding sees God where most people see consciousness

It's a familiar feeling. I'm enjoying a book about spirituality, because the author makes sense to me and doesn't go overboard on religious mumbo-jumbo.  Then... I reach a chapter where I fill the margins with question marks, because what's being said doesn't make sense to me and sounds like religious mumbo-jumbo. That doesn't stop me from enjoying the previous part, but it makes me wonder how the author could shift so suddenly into religiosity.  That's what happened to me today with Douglas Harding's Face to No Face: Rediscovering Our Original Nature. I wrote about my initial reading of it in…
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Posted inBuddhism Consciousness

I rediscover Douglas Harding’s “headless” rediscovery of the obvious

Douglas Harding's classic book, On Having No Head, has the subtitle of Zen and the Rediscovery of the Obvious. Well, as I said in a 2018 post, "'On Having No Head' has a few simple truths," I'd bought the book quite a few years prior, given it away because I wasn't overly impressed with it back then, then bought a revised edition after I heard Sam Harris talk about it on his Waking Up app. The past few days I've been re-re-reading the book that I re-bought and re-read six years ago. That's a lot of "re's" for a book…
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Posted inConsciousness Spiritual practice/meditation

“Theory contamination” is a big problem in spirituality

What is real? This is one of the toughest questions to answer, because to a large degree, reality, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder.  I'm mainly speaking about subjective realities here, the province of spirituality, religion, and mysticism. But to a lesser degree, objective realities, the province of science, also appear different to people with varying theoretical assumptions. A classic example is observations of the motions of the planets in the middle ages. For quite a while it was assumed that Earth was at the center of what we now call the solar system, with the Sun…
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Posted inConsciousness Neuroscience

Pure consciousness isn’t an experience. It’s the capacity to experience.

I've gotten back to reading Thomas Metzinger's new book, The Elephant and the Blind: The Experience of Pure Consciousness. The title isn't entirely accurate, nor is it entirely inaccurate. I say this because one of Metzinger's chapters is called "It is Not an Experience." He writes: Here, what we are trying to approximate is that for some meditators, the phenomenal character of pure awareness also includes the self-evident fact that somehow, in a way that is very hard to express in words, what is occurring is not merely what philosophers call a "phenomenal experience" -- something that subjectively appears to…
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Posted inConsciousness Neuroscience Spiritual practice/meditation

If you’re trying to control your mind, who is the “you” doing the trying?

English has some confusing ways of putting things when it comes to the mind, consciousness, attention, and all that.  For example, we may say, "I couldn't stop myself from eating a second piece of cake." Okay. But what's the difference between "I" and "myself"? Don't each of these words refer to the same entity? So isn't that sentence just a matter of grammar, not of reality?  In other words, maybe what the sentence really means is "I ate two pieces of cake, but now I wish I'd only eaten one." Now we just have "I" without the extraneous "myself."  This…
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