Posted inReality Science

Mathematics is both invented and discovered

I'm fascinated by the question of whether the laws of nature are "out there" in an objective external world, or "in here" within the subjective confines of the human brain. A recent post on my other blog about male/female conversation styles mentions how I'd talk about this topic with another philosophically-minded man. When men talk, most of the time they aren't trying to either reveal, or gain access to, inner feelings. My wife and I used to get another with another couple. The other guy and I would converse in one corner of our living room, while the wives huddled…
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Posted inScience

Believing comes first, reasons and evidence follow

Most of us like to believe that our beliefs are well-founded. It's the other guy who isn't looking at the evidence, is drawing false conclusions, has his or her head in the sand while we're staring straight at reality. Well, that's an unfounded belief. Each of us, everyone on Earth, is prone to making wrong conclusions. Michael Shermer explains why in his new book, "The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and God to Politics and Conspiracies -- How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths." The brain is a belief engine. From sensory data flowing in through the senses the…
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Posted inScience Spiritual practice/meditation

How to be happy without a soul

I'm pretty much convinced that I don't have a soul. If it shows up one day like a lost puppy that managed to find its way home, I'll be pleasantly surprised. (At least, if it wags its tail and licks my face.) Quite a while ago I gave up the search for my self, impelled in part by a source of great spiritual wisdom, The Onion, which told the tale of another guy who did the same thing. As neuroscience learns more and more about how the brain functions, my decision appears increasingly wise to me. Of course, what else…
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Posted inBooks Science

“The Ego Trick” — selves exist, but not as we believe

Who are we? Is there an essential "me"? Am I an unchanging self? I'm fascinated by these sorts of questions. Ever since I started practicing yoga and meditation more than forty years ago, I've been trying to understand who or what I am. For much of that time I believed in the adage, "self-realization before God-realization." Yet as I said in a blog post, Religions are wrong about self-realization: But the fact remains that whatever our "self" may be, it isn't something simple, obvious, supernatural, or transparently evident to awareness. So this makes traditional religious/spiritual notions of self-realization laughably out…
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Posted inReligions Science

Religion, like fast food, makes you unnaturally large

Since I've given up religion, I've become a lot more content with my smallness. As noted before, I'm no longer obsessed with expanding my consciousness, enlarging my connection with God, or growing my spiritual understanding. Small things please me now much more than they did before. I guess you could say I've lost a lot of ego-weight after discarding a religious belief system that had grandiose goals and taught that human beings could attain perfection. This morning I forgot to put the canned dog food back in the refrigerator. There goes my claim to perfection. To which I say, good…
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Posted inReligions Science

Religious believers are acting in accord with evolution

Having arrived at a churchless view of reality, I'm amused when true believers accuse me of taking the easy way out by being a skeptic about God and other things divine'ish. They see religious belief as a courageous stand against rampant secularism -- a bold independent search for ultimate reality that transcends materialistic boundaries. Actually, the truth is far different. Religious belief is the default human condition. What takes courage, effort, and determination is going against the religious current that sweeps the vast majority of people into a faith-based ocean. Interestingly, the evidence for this is scientific. Evolutionary psychology has…
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Posted inScience

“I Am” movie: emotionally satisfying, scientifically annoying

Everything is interconnected. Modern society puts too much emphasis on money. Yogurt is conscious. Random number generators around the world respond to major events like 9/11. These are some of the things that the "I Am" movie taught me. (Click on that link to watch the trailer, which captures the essence of "I Am" nicely.) OK, I have no problem with the first two messages. Interconnectedness is indeed how reality operates. And film creator Tom Shadyac uses his own life experience to persuasively argue that buying lots of stuff doesn't buy meaning or satisfaction (Shadyac made Jim Carrey a star…
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Posted inReality Science

We are to the brain as the cosmos is to us

What's our biggest problem in life? Us. Ourselves. If there wasn't any me, I wouldn't be dissatisfied, unhappy, or feeling that a situation should be different from how it is. Of course, I also wouldn't exist. For most people, not being anything isn't an attractive solution to the irritating somethings that are part and parcel of our daily existence. But perhaps there is an in between, a middle ground which comfortably avoids the extremes of too little me (personal non-existence) and too much me (ego-encapsulated anxiety). This is the promise of many forms of spirituality, philosophy, psychotherapy, mysticism, meditation, religion,…
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Posted inMorality Science

92% of Americans believe in God. Are they normal?

Yesterday I was reading TIME magazine and came across a factoid that 92% of Americans believe in God. My first reaction? Wow, I'm part of a distinct minority. Checking on the Gallup web site, I learned that this percentage is down only slightly from the 1940's, when the polling firm started asking this question. In 1967, when I was a godless existentialist drug-crazed college student, 98% of my fellow citizens believed in God, making me even more of an exception. But am I abnormal? Another survey found that only 1% of people in the United States said they've never believed…
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Posted inScience Universe

Embrace uncertainty, shun dogma — be a possibilian!

Dichotomies are limiting. Also, unrealistic. Theist/atheist. Believer/skeptic. Conservative/liberal. Follower/leader. Human/animal. Matter/energy. The world comes in a lot more flavors than just vanilla and chocolate. There's all sorts of shades of gray between black and white. Reality doesn't completely conform to how we Homo sapiens' conceptualize it. This is one reason I like David Eagleman's "possibilian" philosophy so much. (I've blogged about it before here and here.) Eagleman is a scientist. He recognizes that the scientific method is more than passively open-minded; science also actively seeks out new possibilities, creatively wondering "what if... ." Yet this doesn't mean giving credence to…
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Posted inScience

Conscious awareness is a small part of who we are

Mystery is a big part of why people are attracted to religions. True believers in God, or some other supernatural entity, thrill to the notion that they're diving into a vast unknown spiritual ocean whose depths can't be fathomed. Lots of devotees also embrace the idea of surrender -- turning one's life over to a higher power who knows better than we do what is good for us. Well, modern neuroscience has some news for these religious folks: if you want mystery, unfathomability, and surrender of your conscious will, look no farther than right here and right now. Because the…
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Posted inGod Religions Science

Religion is like a placebo with no active ingredient

So you don't believe in God, but you want the benefits that come with being religious: feeling special, not being afraid of dying, embraced by a loving divine power, and such. No problem. You can keep your atheism or agnosticism and have your Godly presence also. This is the message that I draw from a fascinating study about placebos, which found they can be medically effective even when people know they're getting a fake drug. Patients can benefit from being treated with sham drugs even if they are told they contain no active ingredient, scientists have found. The finding suggests…
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Posted inBuddhism Radha Soami Satsang Beas Science

The reasons we give for what we do: are they reasonable?

About a week ago Marina, a visitor to this blog, asked me to explain why I left the spiritual organization that I'd belonged to for about thirty-five years. She then reminded me that I hadn't answered her question, asking again: What made you leave RS [Radha Soami Satsang Beas] – a major thing or a nagging feeling over the years? I pointed her to a partial compendium of posts that I've written for this blog, quite a few of which addressed this question. But something kept nagging at me as I thought about her first three words. What made you...…
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Posted inScience

Scientific reasons for why people don’t believe science

We all wear mental blinders. That's the nature of how the mind/brain works: we perceive reality through cultural, neurological, genetic, emotional, and other filters. Science is one of the best ways to see things more clearly. Individually we're prone to significant biases. Collectively, though, it's possible to systematically correct for blind spots and home in on a truthful perspective. I came across an interesting article by Chris Mooney in Mother Jones, "The Science of Why We Don't Believe Science." It starts off by describing a cult, the Seekers, who thought they were communicating with aliens, including an astral incarnation of…
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Posted inPersonal/Stories Science

Simple truth: our brains are us

Last night I had an all-too-familiar experience: Sitting back and listening to a discussion, pondering the deeper meaning of what was being said, jumping in with some comments that were So Absolutely Correct they deserve to be capitalized -- and then seeing looks of what the #$%! is Brian talking about?, after which the conversation went on its merry way, barely missing a step notwithstanding that my brilliant remarks should have made people pause to digest their awesomeness. Oh, well, often a prophet is recognized only inside his own head. But if he has a blog, this allows him to…
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Posted inFree will Science

Free will may be an illusion, but it feels real

Over the years, and decades, I've had lots of intense discussions with other people about free will. Partly this is because my first book about physics and mysticism had a chapter called "Laws of cause and effect govern lower levels of creation." Then my second book, "Life is Fair," argued in a different fashion that karma rules the universe, and karma is basically a spiritualized form of cause and effect. My view of reality is much different now. I don't agree with myself about a lot of stuff that used to make sense to me, but doesn't from my current…
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Posted inReality Science

If we’re an alien computer simulation, could we ever know this?

Religions turn me off. Science turns me on. And in the science books I read, the notion that we could be living as artificial intelligences within a computer simulation keeps popping up. I'm fascinated by this possibility (see previous blog posts here and here). I've finished physicist Brian Greene's new book, "The Hidden Reality." He talks about simulated universes in a Universes, Computers, and Mathematical Reality chapter. My interest here is in those who would be drawn by the purity of electrical impulses to program simulated environments populated by simulated beings that would exist within a computer's hardware; instead of…
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Posted inScience

Life lessons from a neuroscience discussion

As noted in my previous post about two of my favorite books on neuroscience, a few nights ago my wife and I had four other people over for an interesting discussion about what modern brain research has to say about the human condition. Each of us took a turn summarizing what we'd read (book or article) about a neuroscientific topic. Then questions were asked and topics debated. Here's some recollections and impressions from the evening. The brain is a bunch of meat. That's obvious, but we humans often fail to grasp that our feelings, perceptions, memories, thoughts, dreams, intuitions, and…
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Posted inBooks Buddhism Science

What we are: a strange loop in an ego tunnel

If there's one thing I know after 62 years of living, it's I don't know who or what I am. (Of course, I could be wrong about that also -- but I'd still be right about not knowing whether I was or wasn't.) Now, this isn't so different from what I used to believe in my religious days. When I embraced a mystical meditation system known as Sant Mat, I assumed that some sort of maya/illusion stood between me and reality. So I couldn't know myself or the cosmos as it really is until the veils were removed. However, the…
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