“Heterophenomenology.” Not a sex act. Way of studying consciousness.

I've learned a new word: heterophenomenology. Was immediately attracted to it, even before I knew what it meant. Had an exotic sensuous ring.  "Hey, hot thing, I'd really like to do some heterophenomenology with you. Are you up for it?" Turns out, though, that what Daniel Dennet is talking about in his new book, Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking, isn't a sex act, but a means of investigating subjective consciousness.  Or at least, what people usually think of as subjective consciousness. Dennett has an interesting take on how it is possible to investigate experiences that are usually regarded…

White’s “The Science Delusion” is deluded about science

I admit it. I haven't read Curtis White's "The Science Delusion." But I've read reviews of the book. I considered buying it to see what a skeptic about science has to say. However, White seems so off-base in his claim that science is determined to supplant the humanities as well as religion, I figured it would be a waste of money. Slate has a fairly favorable review. Some comments on the review make a lot more sense to me, though. No scientist is saying that physics or chemistry or biology can explain a Dylan song or Dickinson poem. But science…

Religion: believing we know more than we really do

My wife and I are enjoying "Brain Games," a National Geographic channel program about how the brain works.  Every episode features exercises that viewers can take part in. An episode we watched a few nights ago was called What You Don't Know. Short answer: a lot.  But most of us mistakenly believe that we know more than we really do. So says a summary of that episode: Bet you could explain something as basic as how a zipper works? Or correctly draw something as simple as a bicycle? If you said yes, you likely bet wrong... but don’t worry it’s…

We will bury you!

Here's another churchless guest post from regular commenter "cc." I titled this post as he named his short essay. Hope he's right... that science and evidence-based rationality will supplant religiosity. It's a slow process, though. The United States is highly developed in many regards. But we have a seemingly never-ending supply of religious nutheads. Under certain conditions, science undermines religion and eventually supplants it. This is demonstrated in the developed world  where the scientific method is held in higher esteem than religious faith. In the most highly developed countries, only a minority of knuckleheads revere and refer to holy scriptures,…

Inner speech: who am I talking to inside my head?

I talk to myself a lot. I'm doing that now. I don't really know what I'm going to say in this blog post until a voice speaks inside my head. It seems to speak simultaneously with both my thinking and my typing -- inner speech, thought, and communication all happening together in some mysterious fashion. This feels normal to me. And according to an article in this week's issue of New Scientist, "LIfe in the Chatter Box," most people do the same thing. Here's how the article starts out: Our inner speech turns out to shape our thoughts and decisions…

Separating numinous from supernatural

Occasionally "cc," a regular commenter on this blog, sends me email messages. They're as cogent, interesting, and well-written as his comments.  Below is a recently-received message that deserves sharing. One of the things I like most about cc's style is the open-endedness of his thoughts. Usually what he says leaves me with more questions, rather than answers. Or questions about answers. Reading the following message, I was struck by the words numinous and numinosity. "Numinous" usually is considered to belong in the realm of religion, referring to some sort of divine experience.  But the Wikipedia article notes that numinous can…

“The hard problem” of consciousness may not exist

This week's issue of New Scientist has a special section on consciousness. Conscious being that I am, I enjoyed reading about whatever the heck my consciousness consists of. The articles contained a lot of interesting information. Much progress is being made on understanding how the brain works, including what causes something to be conscious rather unconscious. For example: One of the most prominent attempts to turn this experimental data into a theory of consciousness is known as the "global neuronal workspace" model. This suggests that input from our eyes, ears and so on, is first processed unconsciously, primarily in sensory…

JOOTSing — Jumping Out Of The System

Sounds good to me, this Jootsing thing. Learned about it in Chapter 8 of Daniel Dennett's new book, "Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking." Joots is a term coined by Douglas Hofstadter. It stands for "Jumping Out Of The System." Jootsing is doing that. This is an important tactic not just in science and philosophy, but also in the arts. Creativity, that ardently sought but only rarely found virtue, often is a heretofore unimagined violation of the rules of the system from which it springs. ...When you are confronting a scientific or philsophical problem, the system you need to…

New book by Dennett looks like an anti-religion winner

Fortunately, our house has a strong foundation. Even though my wife thinks I'm in danger of collapsing our home via the weight of all the books I bring into it, I'm confident that it will survive even after Daniel Dennett's new 512 page tome is delivered. I ordered "Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking" after learning about the book in a NY TImes story, Philosophy That Stirs the Waters. These days, Mr. Dennett, 71, is most famous for his blunt-talking atheist activism. “There’s simply no polite way to tell people they’ve dedicated their lives to an illusion,” he said flatly. But…

There’s no “nothing” to compare with the cosmos’ “something”

Like I said a few days ago, it's absolutely awesome that existence exists. Oh, guess I should add, "awesome, dude... ." Which reflects how marvelously meaningful what I said is. And also how meaningless.  It happened again today. That sudden "bottom falling out from under me" feeling, sort of the mental equivalent of being startled by an elevator going into free fall. I like the feeling. It's the most genuine sensation of spirituality, not really an apt word, but best I can come up with, that comes over me in my churchless way of looking at the world. What it is…

Weirdness: editing a book I wrote that I no longer agree with

This afternoon I decided that I've got to get serious about finishing my re-write of "God's Whisper, Creation's Thunder," a book I wrote in the early 1990's that has been out of print for a long time — since the publisher went out of business.

Years ago I edited the book significantly. My preachiness bothered me. Of course, at the time I wrote it, what I said didn't sound preachy to me. Hey, it was the truth!

So this evening I spent 90 minutes or so on proofreading and editing instead of on writing my usual Church of the Churchless blog post. It was a pleasingly weird experience. Whenever I read what I wrote in this book, even de-preachy'fied, I'm struck by how differently I look upon life now.

Which is a good thing. I feel like I've evolved into a more genuine way of understanding my place in the cosmos. Still…

There are moments when I read what my true-believing self wrote and think, "Ah, back then it was sort of nice to be so sure about God, soul, spirit, life after death, and all that stuff."

Why, you might wonder, would I want to re-publish a book that I don't really believe in any more? Well, several reasons.

Some other people will find my arguments more convincing that I find them myself nowadays. In fact, there's a chance I was on the right track before, and the wrong track now. I put a lot of work into researching and writing this study of how "ageless mysticism" relates to the "new physics." And I wouldn't mind getting some royalties from Amazon to support my senior citizen longboarding passion and caffeine addiction. 

Until I get the revised version of God's Whisper, Creation's Thunder back in print (both paper and electronic forms), I'll probably spend less time writing original posts for this blog. Maybe I'll continue to share excerpts from the rewritten book.

Feel free to laugh at me. I do so myself. Here's how the introduction reads now. Can't recall how different it is from the original. Perhaps not much. I made more changes to other chapters.

Think less, sense more. Stress relief made simple.

Here's some good advice from Daniel Bor, a cognitive neuroscientist, in his book "The Ravenous Brain: How the New Science of Consciousness Explains Our Insatiable Search for Meaning."  After enumerating some oft-heard ways to reduce stress (get enough sleep, exercise regularly, etc.), Bor says: But eclipsing this list in the fight against stress is one simple mental exercise: meditation. This is often written off as being too esoteric and not sufficiently scientific, but it's been shown to profoundly help virtually any mental ailment, whether the person has a psychiatric condition or is merely suffering from the stresses and strains of…

The illusory self loves to make up stories

Who are we? Is there both an "I" and a "me" inside my head? Where do my stories about myself come from? Is it possible to live without a coherent life story? Great questions. So it didn't take me long to reply to this email with a "Sure, Alex, I'll put up a post about the video." Hi Brian,I'm writing from the Institute of Art and Ideas, where we organise a philosophy and ideas festival called HowTheLightGetsIn in May every year. All the debates at the festival are filmed and released over the course of the following year and I thought a…

There’s more, and less, to reality than we believe

We humans are mavelously anthropocentric creatures. Of course, our two dogs are marvelously caninecentric creatures. All they know about the world is what their dog brains are able to perceive.  I don't get the feeling, though, that Serena and Zu Zu feel that their way of looking upon reality is the only way, or the best way. Whereas lots of people do. One exception: when they're engaged in an intense sniffing project while we're on a walk and I tell them, "Come on, let's go!"; their bemused look at me speaks What an idiot -- why isn't he as interested…

The secret truth gurus don’t know (but scientists do)

In my life I've flown in both directions: toward mysticism as taught by gurus, and toward scientific understanding as taught by scientists. For a long time I felt like it was possible to meld the best of both worlds in an even-better combination. Now, though, I feel like whatever mysticism claims to offer needs to be assessed from within the world of reality known to science. Understand: I'm not saying that scientists are anywhere close to knowing what life, the universe, consciousness, and All That is all about. Mysteries abound. Maybe they always will, since it seems that most of…

In living, focus on “differences that make a difference”

I've come across this phrase quite frequently in philosphical and scientific writings: a difference that makes a difference. It's appealing.  What good is a difference that doesn't make a difference? In fact, is it even really a difference, if nothing about it makes a difference? These are deep epistemological waters. I'm not competent to dive into them. I just enjoy pondering Gregory Bateson's definition of information, which seems to apply more generally to other areas (of course, it could be reasonably argued that information is the essence of everything). Consider the mind-body problem. Or in some religious circles, the mind/soul-body…

Spiritual sages were clueless about how the brain works

Almost every religious prophet, mystic guru, spiritual sage, revered master, elevated yogi, or other supposed knower of what lies beyond everyday appearances shares a common denominator:  They were essentially clueless about the human brain with which they made their pronouncements about divine reality.  So they had no idea about how the knower of their purported knowledge works. I'd realized this before, but the factiness of this fact hadn't really hit me until I started reading Patricia Smith Churchland's "Brain-Wise: Studies in Neurophilosophy."  In the Introduction, Churchland reminds us how neuroscience has only come into its own very recently. By contrast,…

The self: a trick your mind plays on not-you

Here's some good news, and some even better news, from the current special issue of New Scientist: "The Great Illusion of the Self." You're being tricked by an expert! And who doesn't like amazing tricks? Even better, the trickster is your own mind! You're your own magician.  Well, you would be if you existed. But almost certainly you don't. At least, not in any way close to how you feel that you do. In 10 pages, several New Scientist stories -- "Who Are You?," What Are You?," "When Are You?," "Where Are You?," "Why Are You?" -- persuasively present evidence that an…

Don’t understand the brain? You can’t understand spirituality.

Here's a follow-up to my "Spirituality without neuroscience is bullshit" post. Since I wrote it I've been pondering ways to convert religious believers to what seems to me to be an obvious truth: if you don't understand the brain with which you do your understanding, your understandings are going to be shallow. I'm not saying that everybody has to be expert in the anatomy and functioning of the brain. But without basic knowledge of what lies within the cranium of each of us, how we look upon the world is going to be skewed by our ignorance. Let's consider an…

Spirituality without neuroscience is bullshit

For most of my life I've been an avid reader of philosophical, spiritual, mystical, religious, and otherwise what's it all about? books.  I've mentally devoured ideas that were way out there. Well, usually they also were way in here. Meaning, those notions concerned our innermost core being: soul, pure consciousness, Buddha-nature, atman... that thingless thing goes by lots of names. My evolution into churchlessness has changed my appetite for books that I once found delicously tasty. I'm much more attracted now to readings which accept reality as known to modern science, while delving further into the many mysteries lying beyond the…