Posted inScience

Seeing red. Much more to this than meets the eye.

I love pondering Big Questions About the Cosmos. The stark existence of, well, existence is one of them, though I'm not sure if this is really a question. Maybe just a brute fact about which nothing more can be said.  (Along this line, recently I read a letter to the editor in New Scientist magazine arguing that circular reasoning, sort of like "existence exists," has to be the nature of a final truth. Otherwise there's always another truth along another link in a chain of causes/effects or reasoned explanations, and we never get to the end.) Sometimes, though, little questions…
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Posted inFree will Science

Sitting in the jury box, I deny free will

Ah, it was my first time to sit in the jury box as a prospective juror. I didn't want to waste my opportunity. Which, because I hate jury duty, was the opportunity to not be a real juror.  Yet I'd held my right hand up along with the other eleven people in the jury box (six were needed for the trial) as the judge swore us to tell the truth during the voir dire process of the defense and prosecuting attorneys questioning us prospective jurors about whether we could fairly decide the case (it involved menacing without physical contact). So…
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Posted inScience

Brain has no outside authority

Free will, or rather the lack thereof, fascinates me. I've blogged about this subject a lot. (Couldn't help myself, for deterministic reasons.) In the December 2012 issue of Scientific American there's a letter about a recent Skeptic column by Michael Shermer. In the column it was argued that what humans really have is "free won't." Shermer says: But if we define free will as the power to do otherwise, the choice to veto one impulse over another is free won’t. Free won’t is veto power over innumerable neural impulses tempting us to act in one way, such that our decision to act…
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Posted inScience Universe

Scale of the universe makes belief in God look very small

I'm not religious. But if I were ever to embrace a religion, I'd want it to be a modern one. A scientific one. Meaning, a religion that seeks to explain whatever might lie beyond the physical universe without denying the reality of what does indisputably exist. The dogmas of every major world religion, though, date from prescientific times. Back then, most people believed that the Earth was the center of the cosmos. The Sun and stars orbited around our planet. We humans were special. Both in terms of our relation to the rest of the universe, and of our relation…
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Posted inReality Science Spiritual practice/meditation

How true are your religious predictions?

Today Nate Silver was called a "data god" in the Doonesbury comic strip. So I figure it's appropriate to honor his sacredness with another post about his fascinating book, "The Signal and the Noise." Silver is a hero of the reality-respecting community, of which I'm a proud member. He successfully predicted the outcome of the 2012 presidential election, getting the Obama vs. Romney winner correctly in all 50 states. Early on in his book, Silver talks about how we have a lot more information now, but this doesn't mean we have more knowledge. Meanwhile, if the quantity of information is…
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Posted inRadha Soami Satsang Beas Science

Science loves being wrong. Religion hates it.

Are you sure you're right about something? Whether it is going to rain tomorrow; whether space aliens have visited Earth; whether God exists. Whatever. If so, you've got a religious attitude, even if you don't consider yourself to be religious. That's because science is never completely certain. Scientists always are open to having their ideas about reality disproved.  In short, they love being wrong. Indeed, says Steven Ross Pomeroy in his Scientific American blog post, "The Key to Science (and Life) is Being Wrong." A good scientist must be willing to be wrong. Such an inclination is liberating, for it…
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Posted inPersonal/Stories Science

Salem (Oregon) skeptics meet under Center for Inquiry banner

Last night my wife and I entered a den of secular, scientific skeptics. Not surprisingly, we enjoyed our first CFI Salem Humanists meeting. There was some sort of merging between the local Center for Inquiry and Humanist groups, but CFI seems to be the main banner under which they meet now. Laurel and I had read about the meeting, an honoring of Carl Sagan, in our local newspaper. We figured we'd meet some like-minded people. We figured right. There were quite a few other newbies in an upstairs room at the IKE Box coffeehouse. So it took a while for…
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Posted inReality Science

Reality belongs to those who know, not believers

Reality is real. This is, for some, an unreal statement. They believe that reality is whatever someone considers it to be, that it's possible to create our own reality, that reason, logic, facts, and demonstrable evidence are useless in revealing whatever lies behind obvious appearances, that intuition and a gut feeling are better guides to truth. Well, as I said in a post a few days ago, Tuesday's national election in the United States was a victory for reality. And a concomitant defeat for those who value subjectivity over objectivity, passionate belief over reasonable facts, "I feel..." over "I know...…
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Posted inFree will Science Universe

Free will is a wonderful thing to lose

Most of us are afraid of losing our freedom. We like being able to say what we want, go where we want, do what we want. Within limits, of course. Absolute freedom is impossible. Constraints are part of the human condition. This helps explain the almost universal belief in free will, and the desire to exercise free will to the fullest. Even if we're constrained by outer circumstances, such as not being able to drive 200 miles an hour because our car won't go that fast, most people have the feeling that what they are capable of choosing to do…
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Posted inScience Spiritual practice/meditation

In spiritual science, discussing and debating beats blind faith

I'm amused at the advice I frequently get in comments on blog posts and emails: "Stop thinking so much, Brian. Believe in God. Have faith in your guru. Meditate and experience the truth that has eluded you." These people don't understand that I view spirituality and mysticism as a science. Always have. Likely always will. If I wanted a religion, I had one in my brief career as a Catholic. I was attracted to the Sant Mat teachings, Radha Soami Satsang Beas version, because they were billed as a "science of the soul." Cool. Spirituality and science wrapped up in…
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Posted inScience

Phi, integrated information, the fountain of phenomena

I've read a lot of neuroscience/neurophilosophy books. But none like "Phi: A Voyage from the Brain to the Soul," by psychiatrist Giulio Tononi. It's amazingly creative, filled with literary, historical, artistic, philosophical, and scientific allusions that made me feel like a Neanderthal. How the heck does Tononi know all this stuff? Guess I spend way more time watching The Daily Show and Survivor than he does. In the lavishly illustrated book, a blend of theory, fact and fiction, Galileo meets Francis Crick, Alan Turing, Charles Darwin, and other great thinkers. It's pleasingly entertaining, yet left me feeling like I'd eaten…
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Posted inScience

Oxytocin and the soul

This probably is my one and only chance for a blog post with the title above. Can't pass up the opportunity. As I was going through my pile of undone/unread stuff, I came across this letter in the October 6, 2012 issue of New Scientist that struck me as interesting. From Felix DuxNo doubt some will feel uncomfortable, as your reviewer Kayt Sukel suggests, at Larry Young and Brian Alexander's idea that the release of oxytocin during sex "tricks" women into nurturing their partners (22 September, p 46). Unless you believe in a non-physical soul - which I'm sure Young and…
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Posted inChristianity/Jesus Death/Rebirth Science

Heaven is NOT real, no matter what Eben Alexander says

I'm impressed with myself. (And not for the first time, nor the last.) Noted religious skeptic and neuroscientist Sam Harris has much the same reaction as I did, albeit more fully and cogently stated, to Eben Alexander's ridiculous claim that while in a coma, when his cortex supposedly was "completely shut down," he had an experience of heaven that must have been separate from brain activity. Hence, a soul travel of some sort to God's realm. Here's what I said about the guy's story three days ago, in response to a comment on this post. Rain, I'm not much impressed with…
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Posted inBuddhism Reality Science

Happy birthday to me. But is there really a “me”?

Geez, I'm so philosophically minded, I can't even enjoy a birthday without questioning whether "I" am having one. Over on my other blog I mused yesterday about the Beatles' When I'm 64 and the positive side of craziness. Hopefully this will shut up the folks who, after reading my thoughtful ponderings about religion/spirituality, accuse me of being a left-brained rationalist who only lives in my big fat intellectual cranium.  Fire up your skateboard, accustory dudes, and join me on a four mile longboarding jaunt up and down (mild) hills here in Salem's Minto Brown Island Park. Then you'll see another…
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Posted inBuddhism Reality Science

Reality is a circle: nothing is fundamental

Ooh, ooh! It came, it came! I felt like a kid who'd just gotten a long-awaited toy in the mail when I opened our mailbox and saw the New Scientist cover: What is Reality? A User's Guide to the Ultimate Question of Existence. Finally. I'd know. What reality is all about. I stretched out the suspense by waiting until evening to read the cover story. In the bathtub, immersed in relaxingly hot water, a glass of red wine and highlighter in hand (not at the same time). I wasn't disappointed. Right away I liked the concise focus of the "Defining Reality"…
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Posted inScience

Without evolution, a world view is crazy

Thank you Bill Nye, the American science guy. You've made a You Tube video that tells it like it is. Creationism is not appropriate for children. Also for adults.   I took the title of this post from Nye's searching for words when he tries to explain what denying the reality of evolution is like. "Crazy" came to mind, but he then went for milder terms, like inappropriate. Me, I like "crazy." Like Nye says, once you deny evolution, your world view becomes really complex and hard to justify. You've got to explain dinosaur bones, radioactivity, a 14 billion year…
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Posted inReality Science

Thinking about life isn’t the same as experiencing life

About half an hour ago I was walking around a nearby lake with our two dogs. Then I was directly experiencing what it was like to be outdoors in late afternoon on a pleasingly sunny and warm Oregon day. I can share a photo I took, but what you see isn't what I experienced. In fact, even if you had been standing right beside me when I got my iPhone out, how you looked upon the lake wouldn't have been the same as my experience of it. That's the thing about experience: it's subjective, personal, ineffable, ever-changing, impossible to pin…
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Posted inBooks Science

Certainty is how the brain’s left hemisphere deludes itself

Are you certain? For sure? No doubts at all? 100%? Your faith in what you know is absolute? Congratulations. The left hemisphere of your brain is firmly in control of you -- recognizing that almost certainly (notice that almost? my brain's right hemisphere is working) there's no difference between "you" and "your brain." This is my second post about Iain McGilchrist's fascinating book, "The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World." See here for the first. I'm hugely enjoying learning about how the left and right hemispheres function.  After all, how the world appears…
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Posted inReality Science

Divided brain is root of our divided self

I'm fascinated by the human brain. It's a mini-universe. A mini-universe that is me. So what I'm fascinated by is the same entity that is doing the fascinating, which is to say...me. Go figure. I can't. There's no way I can get outside of my brain and look upon it objectively. Nobody can, not even supposedly elevated mystics and meditators. Show me someone without a working brain and you're showing me someone dead. However, neuroscientists, psychologists, psychiatrists, and other scientifically-minded students of the human brain know a lot about its structure and functions. I've read quite a few books about…
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Posted inScience Spiritual practice/meditation

The human brain is a mini-universe. Trust it. Explore it.

I had a thought today... Which came out of my brain... The thought was about my brain... My brain was thinking about itself, which is... So cool! The outer world entrances us. We spend most of our time and energy focused on what lies beyond the contents of our cranium. Yet the brain is indeed the most complex object in the universe.  Aside from the universe itself. The human brain is truly awesome. A typical, healthy one houses some 200 billion nerve cells, which are connected to one another via hundreds of trillions of synapses. Each synapse functions like a…
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