Posted inScience Universe

What came before the big bang? A question that shows limit of both science and religion

Usually I put new issues of New Scientist and Scientific American at the bottom of a pile of science magazines that I try to read in order, oldest first. But when the October 2026 issue of Scientific American came with a provocative cover story that pushed my philosophical button, I had to read several of the Impossible Questions right away. I started with "What Is Consciousness, Really?" by Tim Bayne. It was disappointing, though. The main point of the article was that there's no general agreement about what the word consciousness refers to. So the title of the article referred…
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Posted inArtificial intelligence Science

What if an alien civilization, or AI we created, knows the secret of the universe but we can’t understand it?

In my religious-believing days, Eastern religion variety, I loved the term, ultimate reality. I used it in talks I gave to members of the religious organization. I used it in books that I wrote which were based on the spiritual teachings I once embraced. My assumption was that whatever ultimate reality was -- my guess was All-Pervading Conscious Energy -- the problem lay in learning its nature, not in understanding what that nature was, once it had been revealed. Meaning, we humans had the ability to grasp what ultimate reality is all about. While it wasn't an open book, the…
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Posted inFree will Science Universe

Provocative idea: time passes because the universe is continually computing

I've heard of Stephen Wolfram, but don't know much about him. Google AI enlightened me as to his impressive background Early Academic Success: Born in London in 1959, Wolfram was a child prodigy in science. He earned his Ph.D. in theoretical physics from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) at age 20 and later worked as a professor at the University of Illinois. [1, 2] Wolfram Research: He founded Wolfram Research in 1987, where he serves as CEO. The company launched Mathematica, a major computational software program used across technical and academic fields.[1, 2] Wolfram|Alpha: In 2009, he launched Wolfram|Alpha,…
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Posted inScience

Good summary of The Blind Spot book in the Afterword

After I've read a lengthy complex book, struggling to understand the ideas expressed in it, fairly often I'll reach a concluding chapter where the author summarizes their book in a concise readable fashion -- causing me to feel, Geez, maybe I should have saved myself a lot of time and just read that conclusion. I had a similar feeling when I came to the Afterword of  The Blind Spot: Why Science Cannot Ignore Human Experience by Adam Frank, Marcelo Gleiser, and Evan Thompson. Here's how it starts out and ends, providing a good summary of the core notions in the…
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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 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 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 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 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 inRadha Soami Satsang Beas Religions Science

Truth-telling is difficult. Lying is easy. Which explains popularity of religion.

Yesterday on my Salem Political Snark blog I wrote "Chernobyl is a HBO miniseries with a lot to say about truth in these Trumpian times." After noting that authoritarian regimes despise truth-telling, I ended the post with: Soviet authorities were fine with blaming the people in charge of operating the nuclear plant. But they did all they could to hide the fact of a serious design flaw in the Chernobyl nuclear reactor that led to a manageable problem turning into a major disaster. Admitting the existence of the flaw would undermine confidence in the supposedly infallible Soviet system. In the…
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Posted inReality Science

“Do Aliens Speak Physics?” speaks to the nature of science and human assumptions

If you want a synopsis of particle physicist Daniel Whiteson's book, Do Aliens Speak Physics?, an article by Whiteson in the March 14, 2026 issue of New Scientist provides an overview of his provocative question. Here's a PDF of the article. It starts out this way: Would aliens do physics, or is science a human invention? | New Scientist Modern physics offers a remarkable lens on reality. In just over a century, it has decoded the architecture of atoms, traced the early history of the universe and produced laws that seem to hold everywhere, from Earth’s crust to distant galaxies. It is…
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Posted inReality Science Universe

QBism is the most mind-blowing scientific view of reality I’ve ever encountered

What is reality? This is a really important question. Maybe the most important question of all. It's also a really difficult question to answer. Humans have been attempting this throughout recorded history. And probably long before, extending to the first time one of our prehistoric ancestors looked upon the world and thought something like, What's this all about? Most of us, me certainly included, either consciously or unconsciously view reality as being comprised of two main branches: objective and subjective. This was a focus of the first book I wrote, God's Whisper, Creation's Thunder, where I attempted to relate principles…
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Posted inBooks Free will Reality

According to Einstein, past, present, and future are all the same

After reading the Introduction and first three chapters of In Search of Now: The Science of the Present Moment by Jo Marchant, I'm hugely enjoying this book that pushes all of my nonfiction literary buttons: scientific, personal, well-written, provocative. I have a hint of where Marchant is going to end up in her book from reading her New Scientist article that I wrote about in "Intriguing idea: reality is stitched together from interlocking perspectives and experiences." But what I'm looking forward to is how Marchant builds a case for what she admits is a decidedly minority scientific view of the…
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Posted inReality Science

Intriguing idea: reality is stitched together from interlocking perspectives and experiences

Reality. It's everything that exists. Simple enough. Seemingly. But the reality is that reality is fiendishly difficult to define, figure out, get a handle on, tie down. Philosophers have debated the nature of reality for thousands of years. Humans, surely, for much longer. And modern science, even with all of its accomplishments, continues to struggle with what reality is, and isn't. So when the most recent issue of New Scientist arrived today, I took a look at the cover and knew that I'd have to read the Welcome to the Pluriverse article right away, because the subtitle, Forget the multiverse…
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Posted inScience Universe

Evolution could be even more fundamental than physics

Religious dogmatists don't like evolution because it undercuts their fantasy that God brought into being the world and everything in it via a single act of divine creation. Of course, that goes against all the evidence of a big bang setting off a 14 billion year process in which the universe changed from a subatomic speck to the tremendous size it is now, with that size continuing to expand at a speed greater than that of light. I've finished a book by Mark Vellend that views evolution as being at the root of much more than biology, Everything Evolves: Why…
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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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