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 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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Posted inConsciousness Science

Quantum theory doesn’t say consciousness creates reality

I'm no quantum physicist. That option closed down for me early on, when I was kicked out of my high school physics class because I was paying more attention to my girlfriend sitting behind me than to whatever the teacher was saying.  But I've made up for that by reading lots of books about quantum theory, many of them in the course of researching my first book about the connection between ancient mysticism and the new physics, "God's Whisper, Creation's Thunder" -- which I got back in print via a rewrite that took out the preachy parts.  I no longer…
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Posted inConsciousness

Brain and conscious mind are linked like two sides of a coin

Here's some excerpts from a story in the June 2021 issue of Scientific American, "The Brain Electric," by Christof Koch.  Koch makes some great points about the current state of science's understanding of the brain/mind. There's no doubt that the mind is the brain in action. Meaning, no brain, no mind.  But even though the physicality of mind is clear, there's plenty of mystery left to be explored in the highly complex three pound hunk of meat that resides between our ears. -- You're headed toward a storm that's a couple of miles away, and you've got to get across…
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Posted inBooks Consciousness Science

Mind and consciousness through the eye of quantum physics

Here's additional excerpts from physicist Carlo Rovelli's wonderful new book, "Helgoland: Making Sense of the Quantum Revolution." (See here for my first post about the book.) The passages below are from final chapters where Rovelli focuses on the nature of mind and consciousness in light of quantum physics.  Rovelli's take on this subject is very much in line with a post I wrote in 2018, "Awareness is a process, not a thing."  Consciousness isn't a thing. It is a process. Thinking of it as a thing makes us wonder what kind of a thing it is, whereas we should be…
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Posted inBuddhism Consciousness

Motive of a mass murderer wrongly assumes conscious will

One of the things that comes through loud and clear in the many modern neuroscience and psychology books I've read is that we humans are lousy at knowing why we act a certain way. Experiments on split-brain patients, for example, where the connection between the two brain hemispheres has been severed, shows that even when the left side of the brain (which controls language) is unaware of the reason the right side did something, the patient will make up a "why" story that has no basis in fact. We don't like to admit that we don't know. So the brain…
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Posted inBooks Buddhism Consciousness

My #1 problem with Steve Hagen’s “The Grand Delusion”

I'm a big fan of Steve Hagen's books about non-religious Buddhism. "Buddhism Plain and Simple" and "Buddhism is Not What You Think" really resonated with me.  But his new book, "The Grand Delusion: What We Know But Don't Believe" elicited a lot of question marks in the margins.  One problem I had with the book is that while Hagen's other books were marked by humility, this one has a heavy dose of grandiosity. Hagen sets out to solve every issue perplexing humanity, or more accurately, scientists.  Consciousness. Quantum theory. Free will. Existence of God. All these topics, and more, supposedly…
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Posted inConsciousness

“Consciousness” might be a meaningless word

Below you can read a letter in New Scientist that raises a question I've pondered. Is there really such a thing as consciousness?  It's clear that, along with other living beings, we humans are aware of both our external surroundings and internal states like hunger, thirst, fear, sexual attraction, thoughts, and such. However, since that awareness is the brain in action when neurons reach a certain level of complexity, is it necessary to call that brain activity by a special name? Perhaps. Perhaps not.  As the letter writer notes, at one point people thought that there must be some medium…
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Posted inConsciousness

Trump’s new crazy idea to kill the coronavirus

Since quite a few people from countries around the world visit this blog, I decided to put this post here rather than on one of my other blogs, Salem Political Snark and HinesSight. I'm doing this out of a cry for help. Not a prayer, because I don't believe in God. Just a request that wherever you are in the world, send some kind thoughts in the direction of the United States. I ask for this because today it became clearer than ever -- and believe me, it was exceedingly clear before -- that our president, Donald Trump, is the…
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Posted inConsciousness Science

How the brain fools us into believing consciousness is immaterial

I love it! Because I loved The Matrix movie. There's something wildly appealing about our consciousness being deceived about the nature of reality in such a fashion that it is very difficult to escape the bounds of that deception. The "it" that I'm loving is a book by Michael Graziano, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Princeton University. Rethinking Consciousness: A Scientific Theory of Subjective Experience is one of the best books I've read about the nature of consciousness, and I've read a lot of them. Here's a 13-minute video where Graziano describes the key aspects of his Attention Schema…
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Posted inBooks Consciousness

Our essence is more iike a spider web than a diamond

Take a look at these images. Which do you feel best describes your essence? Is the real you more like a complex spider web with lots of gossamer interconnections, or a simple unitary, unchanging diamond? Most people have the feeling that they possess, or are, a core consciousness that often is termed the Self or Soul. This is the dominant religious philosophy, whether Western or Eastern (Buddhism and Taoism excepted). So the goal of a "diamond" perspective is to get in touch with an unchanging essence that remains the same in the midst of an ever-changing world. That perspective almost…
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Posted inConsciousness Science

Quantum theory isn’t needed to explain consciousness

If I wasn't an atheist I would have called out Thank God! when i read the following passages in Christof Koch's book, "The Feeling of Life Itself: Why Consciousness Is Widespread but Can't Be Computed." Koch, who is President and Chief Scientist of the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle, doesn't see any need to invoke mysterious quantum phenomena when attempts to understand consciousness are being undertaken. As I noted recently, it irritates me when someone -- who almost always isn't a scientist -- tries to inject quantum theory into a discussion of meditation, consciousness, or such. As Koch…
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Posted inBooks Consciousness

What is it like to be you? Impossible to know.

I bought a book written by Sam Harris' wife, Annaka Harris, because the title appealed to me  (Conscious: A Brief Guide to the Fundamental Mystery of Mind), and I wanted to see if she'd disagree with her husband -- a noted atheist neuroscientist whose Waking Up guided meditations I listen to every morning via an iPhone app. As I suspected, this little (110 pages) book didn't contain much that I didn't already know. But Harris did discuss consciousness in an appealing fashion, and had an interesting take on the possibility of panpsychism.  Here's how she distinguishes between prescientific notions of…
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Posted inConsciousness Reality Science

Science is our best guide to a possible supernatural reality

Here's another comment from David C. Lane on a recent post of mine that makes so much sense, I'm sharing it even before I've even lunch. Sometimes my hunger for transmitting truth is greater than my stomach's yearning for food.  Didn't someone  once say, man does not live by bread alone? (or Trader Joe's meatless chick'n tenders). Lane talks about his Remainder Conjecture in which supernatural claims should only be accepted after a rigorous examination of them through the lens of science. This fits with David Hume's observation, which I wrote about yesterday, that we have a tremendous amount of…
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Posted inBuddhism Consciousness Spiritual practice/meditation

Sam Harris shows my meditation is on the right spiritual track

There's many forms of meditation. They all have strengths and weaknesses, pluses and minuses. But only a few forms of meditation lead to an increased knowledge of reality, since most are based on unfounded religious dogma. I'm confident that the meditation I've been practicing for about fifteen years -- after I wisely gave up a religiously-based form of meditation -- has me on the right spiritual track. I explained why in "Real spirituality is realizing you aren't a soul, or self." Here's how that 2014 post starts out. Just as predicted, I'm really enjoying reading Sam Harris' new book, "Waking…
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Posted inConsciousness

We humans have selfhood without a self

Here's a big question, one of the biggest when it comes to understanding reality and how religions typically view what it means to be human: Do we have a self? Or adding an (important) capital letter, Do we have a Self? To kick off my discussion of these questions, here's some recent right-on comment observations from "JB." Brian: "there is nobody having an experience. There is just experience, which usually includes an experience of being, or having, a self." Rather than no-body having an experience, I would argue that there is a body having an experience. More precisely, I would…
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Posted inAwareness Books Consciousness

“On Having No Head” has a few simple truths

On Having No Head is a book by D.E. Harding. I'd bought and read it quite a few years ago. Then, when I needed to weed out unwanted books to make room for more, On Having No Head was given away.  Recently, though, I heard Sam Harris speak about the book in his Waking Up iPhone app, so I decided to re-buy and re-read it. Here's my review, which is of a second edition of the book that contains a "Bringing the story up to date" section that was written over forty years after Harding wrote the first edition. My…
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Posted inBooks Consciousness Free will

Modern science is more mystical than ancient mysticism

For many years, about 37, I was deeply attracted to mysticism. One of the reasons was that I loved how mystic teachings taught the self was an illusion and our sense of free will masked God's overarching control over all things, including human actions. But gradually I realized the downsides of mysticism. There was no demonstrable evidence that God or anything supernatural existed. And my love of science eventually led me to embrace reality, rather than religion -- of which mysticism is an offshoot. Now, though, I've come to a pleasing conclusion: modern science actually is more mystical than ancient…
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Posted inConsciousness

“I’ is consciousness itself, not a conscious being

I'm pleased to share another email message from JB, a frequent commenter on this blog who has an outstanding ability to write cogently about profound topics.  I was tempted to say "philosophical topics," but as you will read below, JB's thoughts about consciousness really have little to do with philosophy -- at least, as most people regard this field. The ancient Greeks considered philosophy (literally, love of wisdom) to be a way of life, not an academic exercise. So in that sense, what JB writes about is indeed philosophical, since there is nothing more intimately connected with life than our…
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Posted inConsciousness

Can there be consciousness without conscious content?

In regard to the question I asked in the title of this post, I'd say "No." For one thing, how could someone know that they are conscious without an extra something-or-other besides supposedly pure consciousness?  I talked about this in "My (only) big problem with Sam Harris' 'Waking Up' book." Let's be clear: Sam Harris considers that the brain produces consciousness. He doesn't show any sign of believing in a transcendent non-physical consciousness (like soul or spirit) which exists apart from the brain. So I have no problem with this aspect of Harris' view of consciousness. But as I said…
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