Reality

I'm still making my way through a thick, serious, thoughtful, well-written science/philosophy book, "The Singular Universe and the Reality of Time."  (Previous posts about the book are here and here.) The authors, Roberto Mangabeira Unger and Lee Smolin, wrote different parts of the book. I've just started reading Smolin's chapters. He's a philosophically minded physicist, while Unger is a scientifically minded philosopher. A couple of topics particularly interested me in Smolin's opening Cosmology in Crisis chapter.  First, the notion of naturalism -- which he says comes in two flavors, timeless and temporal. Smolin defines naturalism this way: Naturalism is the…

Imagination. We tend to think of this as something special, an activity we engage in when, say, we're trying to do something creative like paint a picture, write a novel, or compose a song. Or as what the brain does when it dreams -- which seemingly is markedly different from the clear perception of reality in our waking state. But Evan Thompson's book, "Waking, Dreaming, Being," has given me a different perspective on imagination. From both a Buddhist and neuroscientific perspective, he sees imagination as permeating every form of consciousness. Here's a passage from his Imagining: Are we real? chapter.…

Having written a well-received book called "Return to the One," I've obviously thought a lot about oneness. My views have changed considerably since I wrote the book. I used to believe that the goal of a spiritual or self-realized life was to merge the soul's immaterial consciousness with universal consciousness, which often is termed God or The One.  Now, I've got another view of oneness. A simpler one. A more easily achieved one. A considerably more scientific one. What I am, what we all are, what everything in the universe is -- its the stuff of physics. Julian Baggini puts…

For about a week I've been reading two books during my morning pre-meditation time. To most people they'd seem incompatible. Or at least, pointers in divergent directions of reality.  But I happily read some of each, using a highlighter and pen (thanks for blank back pages, publishers) to note what I like, and sometimes don't like, about "The Way of Wonder" and "The Systems View of LIfe."  Here's a blog post that includes links to other posts I've written about Haas' books; I haven't finished The Systems View of Life, which is a fascinating, but quite technical, undergraduate textbook that…

Whenever I read a book about Buddhism or mindfulness, I've got my highlighter poised to make a skeptical marginal question mark when (usually not if) I come across mention of perceiving reality "as it is." This is an absurd pre-scientific notion, as I've discussed here and here. With so many interesting ideas to choose from, I'll take the easy way out in this post and share some of what I read this morning about how humans attribute what actually is within to without -- the world outside our craniums.  Frequently I take issue with those who claim it is possible to know reality "as…

I've heard the term, "God's eye view," before. But I haven't given it much thought. Maybe it was because I believed in God for so many years. I never questioned the notion that there could be a way of looking upon reality that was godlike. After all, even scientists -- not just religious believers -- assume the cosmos can be viewed from some sort of detached objective transcendent perspective. This is the way things are.  OK. But says who? And where is that entity? If inside the cosmos (which I define as everything that exists), then this being with a…

Driving home this evening, on my car radio I heard the end of an interview with Neil deGrasse Tyson, the astrophysicist who hosts the new Cosmos series. Tyson said: I try to have my philosophy disturbed every day.  Beautiful. That's obviously an open-minded scientist speaking, not a fundamentalist religious believer. People of faith don't want to have their philosophy disturbed, because its foundation is so shaky. They don't know. They aren't sure of the facts. They don't possess demonstrable evidence. No, they just have faith that maybe, perhaps, possibly, what they want to be true really is: salvation, eternal life,…

Today, here at the Church of the Churchless, we've got a short and simple question for believers in some extra-physical reality: What supernatural fact are you sure about? I was tempted to say 100% sure, or absolutely sure. But I'm an admirer of science, and science isn't 100% sure about anything (every seeming fact about physical reality might be falsified one day, though the chances are miniscule for extensively verified facts). So let's just leave it at "sure." Meaning, the supernatural fact you're sure about isn't just a matter of belief, hope, faith, or tentative conclusion that it is true.…

For several weeks I've been reading some of Max Tegmark's "Our Mathematical Universe" each morning. It's been a mind-bending journey, one which I'm about to complete -- just 26 pages left. Tegmark argues that rather than mathematics just being able to describe the universe, mathematics actually is the universe. Along with everything else in existence, which includes four levels of the multiverse. I'm enjoying the book. To me, Tegmark makes a lot of sense. I've always wondered, Where are the laws of nature? Meaning, physicists can precisely model many of these laws via mathematical equations. But why should the universe…