Posted inScience

Brian Greene shows why science surpasses religion

Physicist Brian Greene has ably taken on Carl Sagan's role as TV's best popularizer of science. My wife and I thoroughly enjoyed his recent "Fabric of the Cosmos" series on PBS. I've read his book by the same name, as well as his recent "The Hidden Reality."  This afternoon, while exercising at an athletic club, I listened to an interview with Greene on a Point of Inquiry podcast. (I've discovered a bunch of interesting new podcasts to supplement my Philosophy Talk listening after spending $1.99 on the terrific Instacast iPhone app; highly recommended.) Listening to Greene talk with Chris Mooney,…
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Posted inBooks Science

God didn’t design the world. Neither do humans.

Scientifically-inclined people like me dismiss the idea of "intelligent design" when it is applied to the universe as a whole, or Earth in particular. It just is extremely unlikely that our world was designed by an intelligent being, rather than coming to be as it is through evolution's process of natural selection. Strangely, though, even most scientists assume that history is the record of how we humans have designed cultures, civilizations, and such. So intelligent design isn't accepted as an explanation for how the natural world came to be, but it is accepted as an explanation for how the "built"…
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Posted inScience

Shocker! Thoughts really aren’t about anything at all

Thoughts. Desires. Intentions. Plans. Interpretations. Meanings. These seem to be so important, so vital, so much a part of being human.  We think about stuff. We have feelings about stuff. We argue, debate, laugh, cry, discuss, cogitate, agonize over, dream about stuff. Yet there are good neuroscientific reasons to say, "We're totally mistaken. It's impossible for our minds to be about anything." So argues Alex Rosenberg in his book, "The Atheist's Guide to Reality." A few days ago I blogged about it here, ending with a quotation that stimulated this post: Ultimately, science and scientism are going to give up…
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Posted inReality Science

“Atheist’s Guide to Reality” answers life’s biggest questions

Here's a gift idea for the atheists and agnostics on your Christmas shopping list: Alex Rosenberg's The Atheist's Guide to Reality: Enjoying Life Without Illusions. I'm enjoying it a lot, having bought it at Powell's Books in Portland (best bookstore in the world!) a few weeks ago. Rosenberg, chair of the Philosophy Department at Duke University, is a powerful writer. He is utterly fearless in proclaiming his atheistic thesis. Here it is in a nutshell, on pages 2-3 of his new book where he confidently answers life's biggest questions in a few words: Is there a God? No. What is…
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Posted inScience Wu Project

Nothing is the heart of reality

There's something fascinating about nothing. Yes, that's a paradox. Necessarily so, because "nothing" is an abstraction, an impossibility. If nothing actually existed, it wouldn't be nothing. And even if somehow there could be nothing, no one would know about it. A recent issue of New Scientist largely was devoted to exploring the nature of nothingness. In one page, physicist Brian Greene summarized the main themes in "Nothingness: why nothing matters."  SHAKESPEARE had it right, even in ways he couldn't have imagined. For centuries, scientists have indeed been making much ado about nothing - and with good reason. Nothing, or rather…
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Posted inScience

“Boy with no brain” isn’t spiritually significant

Can human consciousness exist without a brain? There's no solid evidence in support of this hypothesis, which lies at the core of most religious dogma and mystical practices. Sure, the notion of an immaterial conscious soul is appealing, as this would survive bodily death.  Almost everyone would agree that immortality is more desirable than the alternative: dying and not existing, forever. So I understand why people cling to the possibility that brains aren't the real us. After I wrote a blog post, "Unmediated experience doesn't exist," where I said that experience isn't possible without a brain, I got an email…
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Posted inScience Spiritual practice/meditation

Why ask “why” if the question is unanswerable?

Why fascinates me. I don't know why. It just does.  Is there a problem with that? I respond "no." But asking that question belies the answer. Better to say, "sometimes there's no why, just is." Reasons lie on a sliding scale, though. In some areas of science causes and effects can be determined in amazing detail. If such wasn't the case, I wouldn't be able to type this blog post on a computer and publish it on the Internet where you can read it. Nor would space probes be able to reach the most distant planets in our solar system…
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Posted inGod Science

Don’t mistake God for your intuitive brain speaking

Over on my other blog, yesterday I made fun of a bunch of Republican presidential candidates (Cain, Bachmann, Perry, Santorum) for believing that God had told them to pursue their political dreams.  But it would have been just as easy for me to make fun of myself -- or anyone -- because we all are prone to mistaking messages from the hidden part of our own brains for guidance of cosmic import. If you've ever said, "I think the universe is sending me a message" (I sure have), this is an indication that the difference between you and someone who believes that…
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Posted inScience Universe

“Empty” space really isn’t — but don’t jump to spiritual conclusions

Wow! That's my one-word review of the first episode, "What is Space?," in NOVA's The Fabric of the Cosmos series. (You can watch it online.) I already knew many of the facts presented by physicist Brian Greene. Such as: -- Matter is mostly empty space. Take out the space, and Greene said that the mass of the Empire State Building would condense to the size of a super-heavy grain of rice.  -- Space isn't really empty. It is seething with activity at the quantum level. Particles are continually flashing in and out of existence. -- TIme and space are intimately…
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Posted inBooks Reality Science

“War of the Worldviews” ends with clear win for science

Just like I thought after reading only four of the nineteen debates between spiritually-minded new age sage Deepak Chopra and scientifically-minded physicist Leonard Mlodinow in their book, "War of the Worldviews," I finished the final chapter feeling that science emerged the decisive victor. Understand: I've got a lot of sympathy for mysticism, meditation, and unconventional ways of viewing the cosmos. I don't believe that science has all the answers, because I don't believe that anybody does.  But I've always liked my "spirituality" (a term that doesn't mean to me what it used to, yet which I continue to use out…
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Posted inBooks Science

Deepak Chopra’s inanity makes my head explode

Like I said before, I'm enjoying the series of mini-debates between Deepak Chopra and Leonard Mlodinow in "War of the Worldviews: Science vs. Spirituality." Now that I'm more than halfway through the book, it's more obvious than ever that Mlodinow is kicking Chopra's intellectual/philosophical butt. Here's a non-verbal depiction of my reaction to Deepak Chopra's New Age'y, mostly fact-free arguments on some Big Questions of Life. This photo is of the second page in Chopra's eight page answer to "Does the Brain Dictate Behavior?" Those are nine -- count them, nine -- marginal question marks that I highlighted in on…
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Posted inScience Spiritual practice/meditation

My meditation: learning how unfree I am

Even though I no longer follow an organized system of meditation (for over thirty years I was a member of an India-based group, Radha Soami Satsang Beas), I still enjoy meditating every day. Sometimes I follow my breath. Sometimes I repeat a simple mantra of one or two syllables. Since I practice Tai Chi and resonate with Taoism, the words "wu chi" appeal to me. It's the readiness posture in Tai Chi, an embrace of empty fullness. And it's the core of the Wu Project that I've been blogging about. I also like to listen to a mantra in my…
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Posted inReligions Science

Mlodinow beat Chopra in “War of the Worldviews”

I've only read four of the nineteen debates between New Age "guru" Deepak Chopra and top-notch physicist Leonard Mlodinow in their fascinating book, War of the Worldviews: Science vs. Spirituality.  But I'm ready to declare a clear winner: Mlodinow. Highlighter in hand, I'm filling the pages Chopra authored with marginal question marks. By contrast, so far I haven't found anything obviously questionable in what Mlodinow wrote. That's because science sticks with facts, by and large, while spirituality is prone to fluttering all over the place with ethereal unproven pronouncements. You should make up your own mind, though. That's the best thing…
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Posted inReality Science

Physicists may have discovered extra dimensions

Note the word "may" in this blog post title. That's the most important thought in the potentially super-exciting story of how CERN researchers may have discovered that neutrinos travel slightly faster than the speed of light. If this is true, the implications would be astronomical. Literally. Because a leading explanation for the Einstein-defying neutrinos (his theory of relativity makes the speed of light an absolute speed limit) is that the nearly massless particles are taking a short cut through extra dimensions of reality on their way from CERN, near Geneva, Switzerland, to a particle detector near L'Aquila, Italy. An article…
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Posted inBuddhism Science

Unmediated experience doesn’t exist

A comment conversation between me and "cc" on a recent blog post got me to thinking about whether any human experience can be unmediated. Meaning: not communicated or transformed by an intervening agency In a comment I said: But sometimes people do need to be talked out of an erroneous belief system. That was the job of my wife, when she worked at a state mental hospital, and then also (to a different degree) as a private psychotherapist. Just because someone feels like they are one with the cosmos doesn't mean this feeling has any basis in reality. People also…
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Posted inReality Science

A mind-blowing fact about infinity

What can you say about infinity? Well, the word has a pretty lengthy Wikipedia page, so clearly the answer is "a lot." Which makes sense, since if there's one thing we know about infinity, it's this: infinity is freaking big. Or at least, limitless. I suppose something could be infinitely small -- getting smaller and smaller without limit. But this would mean that it's a freaking big bit of small. God supposedly is infinite. Infinitely loving, infinitely knowing, infinitely powerful. Heck, God probably has an infinite number of positive qualities, being so infinite. This is assuming that God exists. We…
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Posted inMystics Science

“The Beginning of Infinity” — inspiring science

I don't know whether physicist David Deutsch's optimism expressed in his new book, "The 'Beginning of Infinity," is justified. I'm only about a quarter of the way through it, so maybe his later chapters imply more of a downer that what I've read so far. His basic thesis, though, is both inspiring and believable. There are no limits to knowledge. Human life -- individual or collective -- is a never-ending journey on the path to more. Whenever there has been progress, there have been influential thinkers who denied that it was genuine, that it was desirable, or even that the…
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Posted inScience

We are natural born dualists

There's something strange about people who say "All is One" while believing in an immaterial soul or some other supernatural entity. This is a dualiistic idea that's at odds with oneness. Materialists actually are the true monists, because they hold that everything in existence is formed of the same substance. Michael Shermer makes this point nicely in his book, "The Believing Brain." This process of explaining the mind through the neural activity of the brain makes me a monist. Monists believe that there is just one substance in our head -- brain. Dualists, by contrast, believe that there are two…
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Posted inReligions Science

Null hypothesis makes God a nothing

It's been a while since "null hypothesis" passed through my brain. Probably a college statistics class was the last time those words were thought about. So I felt like I was saying hello to an old acquaintance when I came across references to the null hypothesis in the final chapter of Michael Shermer's latest book, The Believing Brain. Science begins with something called a null hypothesis, Although statisticians mean something very specific about this (having to do with comparing different sets of data), I am using this term null hypothesis in its more general sense: the hypothesis under investigation is…
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Posted inScience Spiritual practice/meditation

Religious Naturalism: sound science with a topping of awe

Thanks to a comment by Alex on a recent post about the wonders of the universe, I learned about Religious Naturalism -- which I wasn't very familiar with before. (Alex is with the Unitarian Universalists Hong Kong, UUHK.) May I introduce the philosophical/religious position which explores the religious depth (feelings of wonder, awe, inspiration, reverence, and humility; and contemplation of life and death) of the Universe as understood by science: Religious Naturalism More information: http://faculty.uml.edu/rinnis/2000_stone_2_1.pdf http://www.religiousnaturalism.org http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religious_naturalism In my opinion, your article is a wonderful exposition of Religious Naturalism (if you don't mind being so described). No, Alex, I don't…
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