Posted inAwareness Reality Science

Prior experiences and assumptions determine how we view reality

As I've noted previously on this blog, one of the spiritual phrases that now irritates me, yet used to make sense to me, is "as it is."  There's a mistaken notion that it's possible to see reality as it is, objectively. That notion gets elevated into various sorts of mumbo-jumbo where this or that meditation technique, or whatever, supposedly gives someone the ability to perceive what is actually there with no trace of illusion. Today I finished reading another chapter in David McRaney's book, How Minds Change. "Socks and Crocs" was super-fascinating. I'll try to do the chapter justice in…
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Posted inScience

Anecdotes no substitute for good arguments and evidence

Here's a cartoon from the Skeptical Science web site, which is skeptical about global warming skepticism. It makes a great point about the limitations of personal experience and isolated examples. Whenever someone claims to have experienced the presence of God or some other supernatural phenomena, a valid response is "So what?" People claim that all sorts of crazy stuff are true. A lot more than a claim is needed before anyone else takes them seriously.
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Posted inRadha Soami Satsang Beas Science

Best way to change someone’s mind is to let them change it on their own

I've read another chapter in How Minds Change, by David McRaney. This one is called "Deep Canvassing," as opposed to the shallow sort of canvassing that I've done occasionally where you knock on the door of a person you want to encourage to vote in a certain way, have a brief chat with them, and hand them a brochure about your favored candidate. Deep Canvassing is the brainchild of a California group, the Leadership LAB (stands for Learn Act Build), which is the political action arm of the Los Angeles LGBT Center, the largest LGBTQ organization on earth. The LAB…
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Posted inScience Universe

In science, intuition arises from facts, not facts from intuition

I found a column by Chandra Prescod-Weinstein in the July 9, 2022 issue of New Scientist interesting for several reasons.  This professor of physics and astronomy at the University of New Hampshire has a take on the expanding universe that I hadn't come across before. As she says in the column, the simplest way to describe this is a familiar one: just as the distance between dots on a balloon that fills with air will increase as the balloon expands, so do galaxies within our universe. But this image is misleading, because a balloon exists in a larger reality, like…
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Posted inScience

Behold the early universe as revealed by the Webb Space Telescope

Science rocks! The Hubble Space Telescope was a scientific marvel. Now it has been surpassed by the James Webb Space Telescope, whose first images were released by NASA a few days ago.  Check out the images on the NASA web site. My favorite is this one. Not because it is the most beautiful or most dramatic. I love it because it reveals how the universe appeared less than a billion years after the big bang set things in motion about 13.8 billion years ago. This is part of how NASA described the image. NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has delivered…
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Posted inBooks Science

Two big ideas about the cosmos and the self

As I frequently say here on the Church of the Churchless, and will undoubtedly be saying again and again, religions are notable for basically being stuck in the Dark Ages, with fresh theologies being very rare, while science and reason continually make strides in casting more light upon the unknown. Recently I've been blogging about a couple of books that I've finished reading, and want to get off my active-reading bookshelf to make room for new titles. So here's what probably are my final observations about Life is Simple: How Occam's Razor Set Science Free and Shapes the Universe and…
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Posted inBooks Science

Science delivers accurate predictions. Religion doesn’t.

Yay, me! I finally finished reading Johnjoe McFadden's book, "Life is Simple: How Occam's Razor Set Science Free and Shapes the Universe."  It took me longer than expected, because I didn't find McFadden's lengthy descriptions of the life and times of historical figures in science, starting with the ancient Greeks, to be all that interesting. I guess he felt he needed to do that in order to buttress his case for how science came to embrace the adage of William of Occam: "Entities should not be multiplied without necessity." This doesn't mean that the world is simple, just that in…
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Posted inReality Science

Space may be created by the interaction of individual quanta of gravity

If you're at a party, talking to someone, and the conversation is lagging, consider saying the title of this blog post: Space may be created by the interaction of individual quanta of gravity.  One of two things could happen, the first being most likely. Either the person will look at you like you're crazy and make an excuse to leave your company, or they'll reply, "That's so interesting. Tell me more." Having read physicist Carlo Rovelli's book, "Reality is Not What It Seems: The Journey to Quantum Gravity," I could talk some more about quantum gravity, but only a little…
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Posted inReligions Science

What grounds religion and mysticism in reality? Nothing

During the 35 years I was a believer in an Eastern religion -- Sant Mat, of the Radha Soami Satsang Beas variety -- I spent a lot of time pondering how it was possible to know whether a description of God, spirit, soul, heaven, or something else supernatural really was true. Meaning, that the description wasn't just a bunch of words strung together in a fashion meant to be convincing, but actually reflected the nature of an aspect of reality that transcended this physical universe. My first book, "God's Whisper, Creation's Thunder," was an examination of how the new physics…
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Posted inScience

Science lacks the blind conviction of the zealot

One of the reasons I absolutely love science and dislike religion is this: scientists the world over see reality in much the same way, while religious believers agree only on the need to believe without evidence, not on what they believe is true about their God fantasies. So I wasn't surprised when, several days after writing "Science has a radical distrust of certainty. Me too," which was based on a book by physicist Carlo Rovelli, an Italian, I came across very similar sentiments about certainty in a book by a British physicist, Jim Al-Khalili, The Joy of Science. Here's passages…
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Posted inReligions Science

Science has a radical distrust of certainty. Me too.

If you're absolutely certain that you know what is true, this is a very good sign that you're wrong. Also, that you are religious rather than scientific. This is one of the compelling insights theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli talks about in the concluding chapter of his book, "Reality is Not What It Seems: The Journey to Quantum Gravity." In another post I'll describe why Rovelli views the as-yet-unproven theory of quantum gravity as the best approach to resolving the divide between relativity theory and quantum mechanics. For now, I liked what Rovelli had to say about the approach of science…
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Posted inBooks Reality Science

“Reality is Not What It Seems,” a book by Carlo Rovelli

My new favorite book, until a fresh one arrives from Amazon, is Carlo Rovelli's Reality is Not What It Seems: The Journey to Quantum Gravity. Rovelli is an Italian theoretical physicist who, not surprisingly given the title of his book, is focused on resolving the mismatch between relativity theory and quantum mechanics. The key to doing this is to find a theory of gravity that is more fundamental than Einstein's general relativity, which describes gravity as the warping of space-time and isn't compatible with quantum mechanics. That's a fascinating subject, made more fascinating by Rovelli's impressive writing ability, albeit in…
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Posted inBooks Reality Science

Life is Simple, a fascinating book about Occam’s razor

I've been making my way through Johnjoe McFadden's book Life is Simple:How Occam's Razor Set Science Free and Shapes the Universe. It traces the history of science through the lens of Occam's razor. William of Occam, who was born in the late 13th century, is famous for favoring the simplest solutions in theology, science, and other areas of life. The book says, "Three centuries after his death, the French theologian Libert Froidmont coined the term "Occam's razor" to refer to William's preference for shaving away excess complexity." But contrary to how many people look upon Occam's razor, this doesn't mean…
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Posted inBooks Science

“Nature versus nurture” is just wrong

This morning I noticed a book in my office languishing under a pile of papers. I'd read most of it quite a while ago, except for a few pages at the end.  Having finally finished "Unique: The New Science of Human Individuality" by neuroscientist David J. Linden, I wanted to mark the occasion by sharing some excerpts on subjects that I found particularly interesting. First up is the familiar "nature versus nurture" phrase that I remember from my schooling. The idea is that who we are is a function of just two things, heredity and upbringing. Linden makes clear that…
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Posted inBooks Consciousness Science

What hitting a fastball tells us about the brain

I'm not sure what to make of this seemingly correct fact, but I find it so interesting, I feel that it must have some deep significance to those of us who aren't professional baseball players. In the course of rereading a chapter in Robert Burton's book, On Being Certain: Believing You Are Right Even When You're Not, I came across his analysis of baseball pitchers and hitters in the "When Does a Thought Begin?" chapter. Here's the crux of the issue: Professional baseball pitchers throw with velocities in the range of 80 to 100 miles per hour. Elapsed time from…
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Posted inBooks Consciousness Science

How neural networks operate in the hidden layer of our brain

ln my previous post, I referred to the hidden depths of the brain without including much of a description of what goes on in those depths. Neuroscience is still working on that problem. But even though Robert Burton, a neurologist and neuroscientist, wrote the book I spoke about in the blog post (On Being Certain: Believing You Are Right Even When You're Not) in 2008, the basic points he makes are still valid. (Neuroscience doesn't evolve that fast.) Here's passages from his chapter on Neural Networks that will give you a good feel for how the hidden layer of the…
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Posted inBooks Science

Our sense of knowing flows from hidden depths of the brain

The human brain remains largely mysterious, even though modern neuroscience has learned a lot about it. It's unclear to what extent computer artificial intelligence will come to mimic our brains. But at the moment this much seems clear. Just as "deep learning" takes place in artificial intelligence in a manner that even AI programmers can't figure out, our own sense of knowing arises from hidden depths of the brain that we can't figure out. Meaning, when you've been trying to figure out what to do about some problem -- like whether you should take a new job that's been offered…
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Posted inScience

Science is the best lens we have to view the world

Here's a typically thoughtful comment from Appreciative Reader on a recent post. I made it into a blog post of its own for a couple of reasons. Most importantly, the comment explains in a clear, persuasive fashion why science is just a great way of learning about the world and our place in it. Secondly, Appreciative Reader's comment went into the spam filter of Typepad, my blogging service, and it took me several days to notice that this had happened, because I've been so obsessed with keeping track of what's going on with Russia's invasion of Ukraine. So it's Putin's…
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Posted inScience

A scientific theory never becomes a fact

New Scientist has a feature near the end of the magazine where reader questions shared in one issue are answered by other readers who send in submissions that are selected to appear in a later issue. Below is a question and six answers related to when a theory becomes a fact. The answers make a lot of sense. Even though I've been aware that when something is called a theory, this doesn't mean that it isn't a well-proven means of describing reality. But this is how many people view a theory -- as something speculative, as when we say "I've got…
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Posted inScience

Say yes to drugs. The war on drugs is crazy.

Over on my HinesSight blog, tonight I wrote "MDMA research shows war on drugs is absurd." Check it out. I shared part of a story Sam Harris tells in his Waking Up book about taking MDMA (Ecstasy) with a friend in 1987, which produced a marvelous feeling of love in them.
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