Posted inBooks Reality Science

Reality, whatever the truth of it may be, is weird

I've got a fondness for weirdness. I won't try to explain why this is, since any explanation would go against a central tenet of weirdness: not making logical sense. I will though, offer as evidence this photo of a tangible commitment to weirdness: a book by Eric Schwitzgebel, The Weirdness of the World, that is sitting next to my laptop at this moment. The book cost $27.09 from Amazon, a pleasingly weird price. I would have been disappointed if it was $27.00, $27.10, or $27.99.  Here's the Amazon description. How all philosophical explanations of human consciousness and the fundamental structure…
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Posted inReality

Mission (almost) Impossible: embrace the reality of no self and no free will

Two of my favorite subjects on this blog are the unreality of us humans possessing a self, and the unreality of us humans possessing free will.  Those subjects could be collapsed into one, since there's a close connection, if not a sameness, between failing to be an independent self and failing to be an independent willer. Because I enjoy this failure (others find it scary or implausible) I like to tell myself: No self, no free will, no problem It isn't all that difficult to grasp the basis for this pithy summary of the human condition. Buddhism provides that basis…
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Posted inBooks Reality

Beautiful: the world is uncertain, unexplainable, and uncontrollable

This morning I finished reading Brian Klaas's book, Fluke: Chance, Chaos, and Why Everything We Do Matters. My impressions: well-written, highly original, thought-provoking, factually sound. His bio on the book's cover says he "grew up in Minneapolis, earned his DPhil at Oxford, and is now a professor of global politics at University College, London." No wonder his book seems so smart. This is a smart guy.  Below I've shared some passages that I especially liked in his final chapter, "Why Everything We Do Matters."  Our journey together, alas, nears its end. We have now glimpsed a world that is entirely…
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Posted inReality Science

Interesting theory of quantum weirdness (if you’re into this sort of stuff)

I felt a need to add the parentheses in the title of this post, because I realize that I'm more interested in how the quantum realm works than most people are.   So if you read on, be warned that while I find this theory tantalizing, because it deals with the "measurement problem" in quantum mechanics in a creative fashion, you might find this to be the most deadly boring blog post in the history of humankind. (Hey, if so, at least I've accomplished something rare.) In the February 3, 2024 issue of New Scientist, or as folks in Great…
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Posted inReality

Each of us controls almost nothing, but influences almost everything

Having devoted myself to watching the lengthy Oscars show this evening, which sucked up much of my time, I'm going to take a shortcut by revisiting a theme introduced in a previous blog post about Brian Klaas' book, Fluke: Chance, Chaos, and Why Everything We Do Matters. As I recall saying before, what Klaas says is very much in line with Buddhist notions of emptiness and interdependence. In that worldview, entities, including us, are empty of inherent existence because nothing stands alone, a part unaffected by other parts of the cosmos. Yet this isn't how most people view themselves. I…
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Posted inReality

Evolution has led fitness to be valued over truth

Most of us claim to want to know the truth. I sure do. But there's reason to wonder the extent to which this is -- I have to say the word -- true.  A memory comes to mind. As a child, most summers my mother would take me from our home in California to see relatives back in Massachusetts, where I was born and my mother grew up. Once I remember my uncle (mother's brother) greeting her with, "My god, Carolyn, you've gained so much weight!"  That shocked me. Not because it wasn't true, because it was. Because that wasn't…
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Posted inReality Science

Nature uses quantum mechanics. But we humans don’t understand how.

There's been a lot of scientific progress in the 10,000 or so years of human history, most of it in the past few centuries. But the natural world still has a lot of mysteries.  I find this highly appealing. It shows that if someone is attracted to the unknown, there's no need to embrace religiosity or the supernatural. Just look around at the world that surrounds us, and indeed is us. What you'll see are quantum phenomena. Not directly, because the quantum realm typically is well hidden, manifesting only in atomic and subatomic processes that are far beyond the ability…
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Posted inReality Spiritual practice/meditation

The spiritual journey leads nowhere, and that’s absolutely fine

My last post was a digression of sorts, as I explained in the opening paragraphs.  Today I was planning to write a post about a central theme in a book I've been blogging about recently, Joan Tollifson's Nothing to Grasp. I was struck by how Tollifson has come around to viewing reality in simple terms, "as it is." Leaves falling. Birds flying. Pain happening. Dishes being washed. She came to this outlook after a lengthy period of seeking the Truth of It All via meditation, Zen Buddhism, nondual teachings, therapy, and other means. I wanted to write about how weird…
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Posted inBuddhism Reality

Here’s what I wrote about Zen and naive realism when I was 20

Today I was planning to write a post about a central theme in a book I've been blogging about recently, Joan Tollifson's Nothing to Grasp. I was struck by how Tollifson has come around to viewing reality in simple terms, "as it is." Leaves falling. Birds flying. Pain happening. Dishes being washed. She came to this outlook after a lengthy period of seeking the Truth of It All via meditation, Zen Buddhism, nondual teachings, therapy, and other means. I wanted to write about how weird and wonderful it is to have sought reality in esoteric teachings, then realize that, hey,…
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Posted inReality Spiritual practice/meditation

Joan Tollifson’s Pathless Path to Here/Now

For thirty-five years I was a member of an organization, Eastern religion variety, that taught how to pursue a spiritual Path. That word was capitalized, because it was no ordinary path, but a Path from the illusion of the physical world to supernatural realms of existence.  It feels great to be free of that fantasy.  Here's passages from "The Pathless Path to Here/Now" chapter in Joan Tollifson's book, Nothing to Grasp. She beautifully captures the wisdom of giving up the notion of a Path in favor of experiencing the reality of what is what right before us at every moment.…
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Posted inBuddhism Reality Religions

Religious believers are in love with concepts, not reality

I find it amusing when religiously-minded people accuse atheist skeptics like me of thinking too much, of not being in touch with direct experience, of being in love with abstract concepts. This is a classic case of, as the saying goes, the pot calling the kettle black. Meaning, as that Wikipedia article points out, psychological projection has taken over, and the accuser claims that someone else has the attribute that actually they have.  For there's nothing more tied to thinking, indirect experience, and abstract concepts than religious belief. The reason is obvious: since there's no demonstrable evidence that the entities…
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Posted inBooks Reality

Kant is difficult to understand, but pleasingly irreligious

I haven't read much of Immanuel Kant directly. Basically, all I've known about this great philosopher is his distinction between noumenon, which can't be known, and phenomenon, which can be known. But since the book I'm reading now, The Rigor of Angels: Borges, Heisenberg, Kant, and the Ultimate Nature of Reality, contains a heavy dose of Kant, I'm gradually learning more about his worldview. Which is pleasingly irreligious. I had no idea that Kant was so down on religion and the supernatural. Here's some passages about his philosophy from what I read today. Like Kant's writing itself, they aren't the…
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Posted inBooks Reality Science

We can’t grasp reality as it is, only as we know it

My new favorite book, The Rigor of Angels: Borges, Heisenberg, Kant, and the Ultimate Nature of Reality, had such a provocative title, as soon as I saw it recommended in The New Yorker I knew that I'd have to buy it. Wow. It's a work of literary genius, based on my reading of the first part of it. The author, William Egginton, is a humanities professor, but he clearly has an excellent grasp of modern science also. The front cover has a one-sentence summary of what the book is about. A poet, a physicist, and a philosopher explored the greatest…
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Posted inMeaning of life Reality

Sam Harris praises reason as the only game in town for strangers to play

Near the end of Sam Harris' conversation with André Duqum, which I've written about here and here, Harris praised reason in a way that deeply resonated with me. One reason I liked the praise of reason is that it's a vitally important human capacity that too often is taken for granted. It's the foundation of every well-functioning society and organization, from the smallest to the largest. Yet too often we only notice the importance of reason when it's missing. As in religious dogma. As in political posturing. As in pronouncements of authoritarians. As in attempts to ban books and decry…
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Posted inReality Universe

Likely we don’t even know the questions to ask of the cosmos

We all have questions. About all kinds of stuff. What's wrong with my computer? Who will win the next presidential election? Is that lump on my chest anything to be concerned about? Almost always, our questions are presumed to have answers. Maybe not right now, but eventually. The winner of the 2024 presidential election will be known after the votes are counted, not before. Until then all we can do is wait. And hope. That's when I turn a bit religious, even though I'm an atheist: Dear God, please don't let Donald Trump win a second term! But the questions…
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Posted inBooks Reality

I enjoy reading Sartre’s Being and Nothingness. (Yeah, I’m weird.)

OK, I lied. Or more accurately, I changed my mind. After saying in my previous post about Sartre's Being and Nothingness that I didn't feel like re-reading (or re-re-reading) the 798 pages of dense philosophical prose, choosing to only read the 44 pages of the translator's introduction again, I've found myself plowing further into the book. Because I'm enjoying it.  I sort of figure that rather than attempting the New York Times crossword puzzle, I'd rather exercise my aging brain by reading passages that often simultaneously stretch my ability to comprehend them, while presenting me with fresh ways of looking…
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Posted inReality Science

I’ve finished “The One.” It ended up kind of ho-hum.

Well, some books end with a rousing crescendo. Others end with a deflating sense of ho-hum. I can't say that Heinrich Pas' The One: How an Ancient Idea Holds the Future of Physics was totally in the latter category for me, but it was close to it. I've been writing about the book because I'm fascinated by quantum mechanics and have read quite a few books that explore the possible meaning of this field, apart from the undeniable success of the mathematics of it -- which makes possible so much of our modern technology. Pas deserves a lot of praise…
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Posted inReality Science Universe

Religion hates mystery. Science loves mystery.

Recently there's been a comment conversation on this blog about the religious philosophy of Thomas Aquinas, a medieval Christian. I've never been interested in his theology, since like most avid religious believers, Aquinas wants to use philosophy to defend his faith, not to engage in a search for truth. Wikipedia has a cogent criticism of Aquinas by Bertrand Russell. He does not, like the Platonic Socrates, set out to follow wherever the argument may lead. He is not engaged in an inquiry, the result of which it is impossible to know in advance. Before he begins to philosophize, he already…
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Posted inReality Science Universe

New Scientist story by Heinrich Päs about quantum oneness

I got excited when I saw the cover of the most recent issue of New Scientist that appeared in our mailbox a few days ago. Ooh! "A bold new way to think about how the universe fits together" Bring it on! When I turned to the cover story, which is called Reality Reconstructed in the print edition, I saw that the author was Heinrich Päs, the theoretical physicist who wrote The One: How An Ancient Idea Holds the Future of Physics, which I've written previous blog posts about here, here, and here.  As noted in the third post, Päs devotes…
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Posted inReality Religions Science

Einstein: “It is the theory which decides what can be observed”

Here's my third post about Heinrich Pas' book The One: How An Ancient Idea Holds the Future of Physics, the previous posts being here and here. In my reading I've reached a sort of interlude in-between the first and last parts of the book, each of which deal fairly directly with a monistic interpretation of quantum mechanics, which explains The One title. But two intervening chapters, "The Struggle for One" and "From One to Science and Beauty," focus on the historic struggle between monism and dualism in Western thought (there's very little mention of Eastern thought, which also has monistic and dualistic…
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