Posted inScience

Knowing that you know: impossible

It's strange, but the most familiar sensation we have also is the most mysterious: knowing. I know this. And yet, I don't. Just like everything else that I know. Or you know. Or anybody knows. We don't know how we know. Which means we can't trust what we know – not with 100% certainty. So this should squash fundamentalism of every variety. Except…people can't control their knowing. Reason, facts, information, persuasion: our sense of knowing isn't influenced by any of that. Our knowing can't be trusted. Yet it's what we rely upon at every moment. Go figure. (But you can't,…
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Posted inScience

Being absolutely right, you’re wrong

You can't have "right" without "wrong." So if what you say is absolutely 100% certain, no doubt about it – that can't be true. The Taoists figured this out a long time ago. Yin requires yang. Up needs down. Truth depends on falsity. Much more recently, Karl Popper made falsifiability the cornerstone of what distinguishes a scientific theory. I echoed his ideas in "If a religion can't be wrong, it surely is." I keep coming back to this notion, because both intuitively and logically it appeals to me. Sure, something may be real, yet improvable or indescribable. Existence, for example.…
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Posted inScience

Brain damage = enlightenment?

Jill Bolte Taylor had what she calls a "stroke of insight." In her case it was an actual stroke – which produced a blood clot the size of a golf ball that pushed on her language centers in the left side of her brain. Watch the nineteen minute video of her talk about the experience. Or read the transcript. It's fascinating and moving. Neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor had an opportunity few brain scientists would wish for: One morning, she realized she was having a massive stroke. As it happened -- as she felt her brain functions slip away one by…
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Posted inScience Vedanta/Advaita

Quantum and non-dual consciousness

Ah, intellectual and inspirational bliss. A free, downloadable, thoughtful, well-written "Course in Consciousness" that moves smoothly from down to earth quantum theory to soaring spirituality. This is my cup of reading tea. I've only been able to quickly browse through the 242 pages of Stanley Sobottka's writing, but I can tell that there's a lot to like here. Sobottka is an Emeritus Professor of Physics at the University of Virginia, so obviously he knows his scientific stuff. His deep knowledge of, and appreciation for, Buddhist/Advaita teachings is more surprising – though he isn't the only physicist to wade into some…
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Posted inScience

Science unites, religion divides

I've enjoyed the big bang discussion that took off in the comments on my previous post. In the course of defending science and the scientific method against a man, Rhawn Joseph, who believes the big bang, evolution, relativity, and the laws of thermodynamics are all myths, I've had an opportunity to reflect on why science appeals so much to me. Pretty simple: it produces common ground on which we all can stand – reality. Religion divides people, because there's no agreement about the nature of what, if anything, lies beyond the physical universe. So dogmatic arguments over God, soul, life…
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Posted inScience

Starbucks coffee and the big bang

I don't know why drinking a latte at Starbucks makes me feel so cosmically strange. But here's what been happening recently. I sit down at a table, look at my cup, all festooned with the Starbucks logo and a quotation from somebody or other, and it just feels unbelievably weird. So freaking unlikely. That me, Brian, is existing right here and now, in an Oregon Starbucks, about to sip a warm caffeinated drink out of a cardboard container. What are the chances of this happening, given our 13.7 billion year old universe that sprang into existence from a speck of…
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Posted inScience

Physics ventures into the territory of mystics

I find scientific explanations of the universe much more satisfying than religious ones. Science grounds hypotheses in reality that can be observed, tested, and experimented upon. Religion constructs airy-fairy castles in the sky that are divorced from everyday experience. But there's a point, way out there, where observing, testing, and experimenting aren't possible – not even in theory. For example, much of the universe is forever beyond human knowledge because it is receding from us faster than the speed of light, so no signal will ever reach us from this domain. However, we can envision a possibility, remote as it…
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Posted inScience

Skepticism isn’t “blind faith”

Religious believers like to say that agnosticism or atheism also is founded on faith – faith that there's no evidence for God. So skeptics are as filled with faith as the faithful. That's ridiculous. It's the sort of word play that led Donald Rumsfeld, the incompetent Secretary of Defense, to say "absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence" in reference to Iraq's unfound weapons of mass destruction. Well, I see no evidence of a unicorn in our living room right now. There's just my wife and our dog, neither of whom looks like a horse with a horn coming out…
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Posted inScience

Paul Davies’ “Cosmic Jackpot” comes up empty

Where do the laws of nature come from? Great question. Here's an equally good one: Where do the laws of nature reside? I've always wondered about this. Science has found that the universe is remarkably well-ordered. Mathematics describes its fundamental laws (such as gravity and electromagnetism) so perfectly, Paul Dirac said, "If there is a God, he's a great mathematician." But how does every bit of matter know how to obey the law of gravity? Where's the software, the program, that controls the hardware of the universe? Or are these even meaningful questions? I used to think that they were.…
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Posted inScience

Arousal and quiescence in the mystical brain

Browsing through my collection of half-read books, recently I came across The Mystical Mind: Probing the Biology of Religious Experience. Starting in where I left off quite a few years ago (the book was published in 1999), I can tell that I'm going to be reading this baby straight through this time. Because the question marks I left in the margins next to statements that questioned whether any mystical experience occurs outside of the physical brain now would have my personal version of exclamation marks next to them (a round dot made with my highlighter). Back in my religiously devoted…
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Posted inScience

What reality is really made of

Oh, man, did my philosophical heart flutter when I looked at the cover of the most recent New Scientist magazine and read: WHAT THE UNIVERSE IS REALLY MADE OF: strip away human notions of reality and one thing remains I feverishly turned to page 38. Finally, I'd know What It is All About. I had a suspicion. Which was confirmed when I saw the heading, "Reality by numbers." Yes, it isn't wildly surprising that a science magazine would contain an article by a physicist, Max Tegmark, who believes that the essence of the universe is mathematical. Surprising or not, the…
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Posted inScience

Boltzmann brains can blow your mind

Who needs far-out religious myths – walked on water! resurrected from the dead!— when science is able to come up with equally mind-blowing hypotheses that have the advantage of being plausible? Take the case of Boltzmann brains. These aren't actual brains, but most likely are free-floating conscious entities that pop out of random quantum fluctuations in the vacuum that pervades the universe. None have been observed. In fact, a New Scientist article on the subject (August 18 issue) says: A Boltzmann brain is so improbable, in fact, that there is essentially no chance that even a single one has appeared…
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Posted inScience

Science keeps painting religion into a corner

Believers in the supernatural, do you feel a bit more cramped today? Like there's less room for your beliefs to roam unquestioned? You should, if you've been following the out-of-body news. Scientists have been able to induce out-of-body experiences in healthy people. They didn't need to nearly die on an operating table and look down at their bodies from an external vantage point. All it took was some virtual reality goggles, a camera, and a stick. Now, this is just a first step toward understanding out-of-body experiences. It doesn't rule out the possibility that human consciousness is able to exist…
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Posted inScience

Science takes the honest path

For me, science is energizing while religion sucks the life out of my soul. Or whatever the heck it is that makes my life lively. As I said in a comment to my "Quantum Christian gobbledygook" post, deflating the ridiculous proposition that electromagnetism casts any light on the Trinity was deeply satisfying. I felt so good after writing that post. Doing my best to look upon reality with eyes wide open unleashes something that could easily be called "mystical" if it wasn't so natural. Speaking truth to bullshit – that brings us closer to the angels. More accurately: it would,…
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Posted inScience

Christian quantum gobbledygook

I didn't get a free book. But I was able to write a blog post with gobbledygook in the title, which is a fine second prize. My investigation into how Christians are mangling quantum theory began with an email that arrived yesterday. The header read: 'God the Final Frontier' - New Book Explains How Discoveries In Science Reveal the Nature of God Even A Child Can Understand. That sounded promising. I can be childlike. And I want to know the nature of God. Tell me more. The author's approach is unique because it reveals scientific discoveries such as how quantum…
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Posted inScience

Science is more spiritual than religion

On this July 4, Independence Day in the United States, let's remember that the founders of this country wanted its citizens to be free of religious tyranny. So you can bet they wouldn't be happy with the fundamentalist excesses in the United States today. Most of our founding fathers were deists who believed that religious beliefs have to be founded on reason, not holy books. To them, God is revealed in the laws of nature, not religious superstition. Science thus becomes more godly than religion, because the nature of the creator is revealed through (no big surprise) nature. Ann Druyan,…
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Posted inScience

Global warming and God’s will

The science is settled. Global warming is happening. Humans are very likely the cause. “Very likely” means with 90 percent certainty, according to the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. That’s up from “likely” in the panel’s 2001 report. You can bet that the next report will say “extremely likely.” Unfortunately, scientific near-certainties get muddied up when theological guesses are thrown in. I like to listen to conservative talk radio. Hearing gibberish makes me appreciate truth more, just as a string of cloudy Oregon days produces an Ah! when the sun finally comes out. This week I’ve heard both Michael…
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Posted inGod Radha Soami Satsang Beas Science

Does God exist? Science says no.

Proving (sort of) that no-god has a plan for my life, on Friday the mailman delivered two ungodly packages that I’d been anticipating for quite a while: Victor Stenger’s new book, “God: The Failed Hypothesis,” and the free DVD, “The God Who Wasn’t There,” I got for sending myself to hell via the blasphemy challenge. Back in August I wrote about an advance description of Stenger’s book that led me to pre-order it. Good decision. I’m several chapters into “God: The Failed Hypothesis” and am enjoying a physicist’s scientific demolishing of the God hypothesis. Stenger’s central thesis is that if…
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Posted inScience Spiritual practice/meditation

Digging into the hard problem of consciousness

Want to tackle one of the most intractable mysteries in science? You’ve got a hold on it right now: consciousness. Nobody knows what it is, though everybody uses it to think, “What is it?” Steven Pinker has a terrific article in this week’s TIME magazine, a special issue devoted to the mind and brain. In “The Mystery of Consciousness” he talks about the Easy Problem of consciousness, which basically concerns how mental processes function and are correlated with neural goings-on in the brain. Tough enough, certainly, but researchers are making good progress delving into this area. However, barely a scratch…
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Posted inScience Universe

Consider a cosmos with no consciousness

I’ve always thought that the “we create our own reality” folks didn’t have much of an argument to stand on. It just seems so darn obvious that the universe stands apart from any conception of it. How we perceive the cosmos certainly depends on our sensory and cognitive capabilities. However, that there is a cosmos—however it may appear—prior and separate to any perception struck me as self-evident common sense. In other words, I considered that the universe stands on its own (anthropomorphically envisioned) feet. While we humans are able to create subjective realities within our minds, the grander cosmos outside…
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