Posted inBooks Science

My (only) big problem with Sam Harris’ “Waking Up” book

I'm re-reading Sam Harris' Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion. Having read it first in 2014, I wanted to see if I looked upon the book any differently now -- having altered my views about meditation, consciousness, and such during the past few years. Well, I'm still having a problem with how Harris looks upon consciousness. It's pretty much the same problem I talked about in "Questions I had in Sam Harris' 'Waking Up' meditation chapter." It sure seems in the "In fact..." passage that Harris is touting the good that comes from feeling that he is a…
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Posted inScience Universe

The “self” is like a web without a spider

Self... who am I? Will... who controls what I do? Being... do I continue on after death? These are big questions. Humans have struggled to find answers to them from the beginning of recorded history, and surely long before that.  Most people accept a view that is common to most religions: I am something other than my physical body; call it soul or spirit. I have free will; so I am responsible for my actions. I possess, or am, a non-material essence that is unaffected by physical death. Well, maybe.  But these answers go against the grain of modern science.…
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Posted inReality Science

“Free will isn’t. Existence is.” My hoped-for TEDx talk.

Well, it's time for my third annual TEDxSalem speaker application. I was rejected in 2014 and 2015, having pitched Grand Talks About The Cosmos that, obviously, didn't strike the speaker selection committee as being such marvelously interesting topics as I considered them to be. Noting that the deadline for prospective speakers to apply for the 2016-17 event was coming up on April 18, I decided to pitch another talk idea. This time, Free will isn't. Existence is. If nothing else, another TEDxSalem rejection will add to my Tortured Artist (or Misunderstood Genius) resume. In my old age, well, more accurately,…
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Posted inReligions Science

If words sound like spiritual drivel, they probably are

We've all heard lofty sounding spiritual phrases that initially seem like they mean something, but on further reflection are recognized as empty words. In one of his Scientific American Skeptic pieces,  "The True Meaning of BS," Michael Shermer uses Deepak Chopra as an example. Example: “Attention and intention are the mechanics of manifestation.” This is an actual tweet composed by Deepak Chopra, as quoted by University of Waterloo psychologist Gordon Pennycook and his colleagues in a paper published in the November 2015 issue ofJudgment and Decision Making. The scientists set out to determine “the factors that predispose one to become or to…
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Posted inReligions Science

Science’s “faith” is very different from religious faith

Great timing, Steve. Your comment today on my "Why 'man of faith' is an insult" post came soon after I'd come across a perfect reply. But first, the comment: Brian, thank you for taking a moment to respond to my post. I understand and agree with both of your references (although I have a special affinity for chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream). Still, I'd like to understand your perspective on faith just a bit more. You indicate that neither of your examples require religious faith, and I agree with that premise. My question is this (and expanding upon your…
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Posted inReality Science

Understanding reality (including religion) is a matter of “likely”

After almost a dozen years of writing Church of the Churchless posts, and reading comments on them, I'm familiar with the arguments religious people use to justify their beliefs.  When I point out that there is no demonstrable evidence supporting a belief in God, heaven, soul, spirit, angels, the afterlife, or any other form of supernaturalism, frequently I'll hear something like this: Hey, Brian, you can't prove God doesn't exist, so there's no proof for your skeptical view either.  Thus, it's a tie! There's no proof God exists, and there's no proof God doesn't exist, so it's up to each…
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Posted inScience Spiritual practice/meditation

“Higher” states of consciousness actually are lower

I was turned on to an intriguing TEDx talk by neuroscientist Arne Dietrich about Surfing the Stream of Consciousness by a reader of this blog. His description of the core theme of the 17 minute video starts at about the 13 minute mark, if you want to get the gist in only four minutes.   A blog post on The Peaceful Self site, "Flying With the Pixies," includes a transcript of part of Dietrich's talk.  "Your mind, your soul, your hopes, your dreams, your emotions is about a cantaloupe size of meat crackling with electricity inside your skull. There's nothing sacrosanct…
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Posted inReality Science

“The Atheist’s Guide to Reality” — a mind blowing book

I like books that take some of my cherished assumptions about how the world works and chew them up into tiny pieces before putting them in a Truth Blender where they're dissolved into unrecognizable thought-mush. "The Atheist's Guide to Reality" by Alex Rosenberg is such a book. After reading it four years ago (I blogged about it here, here, and here) I've finished re-reading the second half of the book.  And, yes, once again it has blown my mind. But in a different way from the first time, because I'm a different person now.  Being a habitual highlighter and back-of-book…
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Posted inReality Science

Neuroscientist David Eagleman: the brain creates our reality

Somehow my wife and I missed most of the original showing of the 6-part PBS series, "The Brain - With David Eagleman." We saw the final episode, and wanted to catch up on the rest. So last night we streamed What is Reality?, the first episode. It's available on iTunes and Amazon Prime, with clips on the PBS web site. Here's one of the clips: Really interesting. The basic neuroscientific message of this episode is that reality doesn't directly stream into consciousness through our senses, or by any other means. Instead, the brain does all sorts of processing of raw…
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Posted inScience

Max Tegmark: “Consciousness is the way information feels”

I felt unsatisfied after reading Margaret Wertheim's "I feel therefore I am: How exactly did consciousness become a problem?"  Wertheim, a talented science writer, ably reviewed philosophical and scientific conceptions of consciousness. But she ended up favoring a mysterian view where subjectivity supposedly is just too different from physical matter to have consciousness explained by particles. This is all thrilling science, yet a question remains: will any of it explain subjective experience?  Chalmers, the philosopher, claims that the problem of experience is not mechanistically reducible and he argues that it will ‘persist even when the performance of all the relevant functions is explained’.…
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Posted inDeath/Rebirth Science

Physicist Sean Carroll debunks unscientific religious myth-making

My wife is a member of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, so we get the organization's excellent newsletter. On paper, even! I just got around to reading the August 2015 issue. It had an excellent piece by physicist Sean Carroll -- the address he gave after winning FFRF's "Emperor Has No Clothes Award."  You can read "Physicist Carroll: Atoms and Eve incompatible" on the FFRF web site. Or via this PDF file: Download Physicist Carroll: Atoms and Eve incompatible - Freedom From Religion Foundation Only the paper version had two interesting graphics. So I took photos of them to share…
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Posted inScience

Beauty is enhanced by science, not diminished

Here's a great video of physicist Richard Feynman speaking about science and beauty, combined with some gorgeous images.  Feynman makes some excellent points.  I've never understood why some wrongly believe that scientists, and the scientifically-minded (I include myself in this group), don't appreciate the beauty in life as much as other people do.  Feynman points out that scientists look upon the world in the same way as everybody else. But they also have a deeper factual understanding of certain aspects of reality. This enhances, rather than diminishes, the scientific appreciation of beauty.
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Posted inScience

Consciousness could be the mind’s way to explain unconscious actions

One of my favorite parts of New Scientist issues are the letters. Not surprisingly, given the readership, the letters typically are intelligent, insightful, and creative.  Below is one from the October 10 issue that grabbed my attention. It just seems like it could be so right, though I'm not sure how anyone could test this hypothesis.  The letter writer suggests that just as the human mind/brain has an inherent tendency to attribute conscious purpose to other people (basically, "theory of mind"), perhaps that same ability to construct a purposeful agent also is applied inwardly -- to one's own mind.So when we…
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Posted inReality Science

The weird interwoven world of general relativity

Let's get this straight right away: I don't really understand general relativity.  I've read a lot of explanations about it. Briefly I'll feel like I grasp what general relativity is all about in a non-mathematical sense.  A few days later, or even sooner, that understanding has slipped away and I'm basically as clueless as I was before. Which is strange, because usually I can conceptually grasp scientific truths much more fully.  So there's something weird for me about general relativity. Which probably is best explained by the fact that almost everybody feels the same way.  Spend two minutes watching this…
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Posted inScience

“I don’t believe in conscious decisions”

Here's a brilliant letter to the editor in a recent issue of New Scientist. I've read Castaldo's letter several times. Don't claim to understand it fully. But I love this sentence, particularly:  I believe that what we call a conscious decision is just an awareness that our myriad subconscious systems have collectively resolved a course of action or state of belief.This makes a lot of sense.  Like... yesterday I noticed that my wife had left a page in our local newspaper open to a Best Buy ad. A Labor Day sale was on for televisions. We'd talked a bit about…
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Posted inReligions Science

Belief in design of the natural world runs deep in human brain

Here's another bit of scientific evidence showing that false religious belief comes easy, while true secular rationalism requires effort to attain. The title of the piece, "Even atheists intuitively believe in a creator, study finds" is a bit overblown. It's more, as you can read below, that humans have an innate bias toward finding design in the natural world, even when something like a tree obviously wasn't intentionally designed. This helps explain why the vast majority of people on Earth subscribe to religious beliefs. Psychologically, it's the easy way to go. What's difficult is to carefully assess the evidence of…
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Posted inScience

Misanthropic Principle: Universe is fine-tuned against life

I like this guy's way of thinking. He has a letter in the most recent issue of New Scientist where he points out how ill-suited the universe is for life.  This is, he says, the Misanthropic Principle -- as contrasted with the Anthropic Principle. It doesn't appear to be his original idea. Googling this term, I found a post by a Jewish astrophysicist, Howard Smith, who says that he coined the term.  Here's the New Scientist letter: From Nathaniel Hellerstein Michael Slezak says that the universe is fine-tuned for life (2 May, p. 32). Balderdash.  Inspection of the night sky…
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Posted inBooks Religions Science

Knowledge must be based on facts

Recently I wrote about "Five criteria for a 'God Theory' that religions fail." One of philosopher L.R. Hamelin's criteria related to private knowledge. If her theory can be tested only by private revelation, not by observations available to everyone, she unjustifiably claims private knowledge. Someone left a comment on this post, wondering why private knowledge wasn't justifiable. This was my reply: Here's how I see the issue of "private revelation" and "private knowledge." Can knowledge be private? Only if we define knowledge in a way that makes it virtually (or completely) synonymous with subjective experience. But then it isn't really knowledge…
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Posted inReligions Science Universe

Given size of the universe, is creation really all about us?

Religious belief involves lots of absurdities. For me, one of the biggest ones is the assumption that humans are the Big Deal of the universe.  Whether it be Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, or some other major religion, theologies differ about how people are special in the eye of God, Brahman, or whatever, but they agree that members of a recently evolved species on Earth, Homo sapiens, occupy a central place in the cosmic scheme of things. This is really difficult for me to accept for various reasons. One is our modern understanding of the size of the universe. Consider... (1) Light…
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Posted inGod Religions Science

A question about “God’s creation” for religious believers

I have a question for religious people: most religions believe that God or some other divine being created the universe. Which, naturally, includes Earth. I read a lot of science books. I'm not expert in the details of cosmology and evolution, but I'm familiar with the broad outlines of these fields. I know how much solid evidence supports certain basic facts. Such as... The universe started off in a big bang some 13.8 billion years ago. Stars and galaxies eventually came into being, along with our sun and the solar system.  Chance, in the form of countless unpredictable chaotic deterministic…
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