Posted inScience

Glimpses of observer-dependent reality on “Einstein’s Lawn”

"Excellent book buy, Brian." I enjoy praising myself. I rarely fail to make sense when I'm speaking to someone who understands me: Me. The book I'm talking about to myself is Amanda Gefter's "Trespassing on Einstein's Lawn: A Father, a Daughter, the Meaning of Nothing, and the Beginning of Everything." I was worried it'd be too sentimental, with too much father-daughter stuff. I was mainly interested in the physics, the meaning of a cosmos that, as the subtitle says, is mainly (or completely?) comprised of nothing. No worries. Three chapters in, I'm hooked. Both on Gefter's compelling prose and the search…
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Posted inFree will Science

Society would do fine without a belief in free will

I'm fascinated by free will. Especially the lack thereof. Do a "free will" Google search of my blogs (via the box in the right sidebar) and you'll find lots of posts I've written on this fascinating subject.  (Some are here, here, here, and here.) It doesn't bother me at all that modern neuroscience is steadily demolishing philosophical and religious reasons for believing in free will. If this is the way the world works, where's the problem? To me, worrying about the consequences if people stop believing in free will is almost exactly the same as previous worries about what would…
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Posted inGod Reality

Once God is gone, the world shines more brightly

I've flown both ways. For many years I Iooked upon the world through a conceptual prism where my belief in God, a being unseen and unknown, altered the perspective from which I saw things. Now, I do my best to cast off the filter of spiritual imaginings, desiring to view reality as clearly as possible as it is rather than how I'd like it to be. I've discovered something interesting: when I don't try to fashion the world into a place that it isn't, full of illusory ideas about salvation, divinity, soul, eternal existence, and such, what is turns out…
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Posted inPersonal/Stories

A brief conversation with a newly churchless friend

Sometimes a lot can be said in a short time. It all depends on how honest and direct the conversing is. With Russell, a Tai Chi friend who I hadn't seen for quite a while after he stopped coming to classes, we covered a lot of philosophical ground in a few minutes after we ran into each other in a downtown Salem coffeehouse. He was chatting with the barista when I walked up to the counter to order. Russell greeted me in his usual wonderfully friendly manner. I told the barista, "I know Russell from Tai Chi. He's the only…
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Posted inDeath/Rebirth Science

Inference to the best explanation. Fancy words, simple way of living.

Idly glancing at a bookshelf in our house a few days ago, I noticed a book that I bought back in 2010, Paul Thagard's "The Brain and The Meaning of Life." Since, I've been re-reading some of it each morning. Great book, with some great ideas. I blogged about these before in "Reality is real, but brains construct knowledge" and "Divinity isn't necessary to make life meaningful." Here's an excerpt from the first post. When we go on our evening walk, my dog has a very different experience of reality than I do, given her vastly superior sense of smell.…
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Posted inBuddhism Spiritual practice/meditation

Reduce the chatter of your inner anchorperson

The 24 hour cable news channels are a fairly recent invention. But the voice inside our head that chatters away almost non-stop likely is as old as modern human consciousness. There's a lot of similarity between so-called news anchors and our own inner commentator. (Who is it? Me? But it's giving me advice, berating me, encouraging me, talking to me. So how could it be me? Assuming there even is a "me" for the voice to be or not to be.) They both spend a lot more time recollecting the past and musing about the future than reporting on what…
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Posted inReality Science

Try to have your philosophy disturbed every day

Driving home this evening, on my car radio I heard the end of an interview with Neil deGrasse Tyson, the astrophysicist who hosts the new Cosmos series. Tyson said: I try to have my philosophy disturbed every day.  Beautiful. That's obviously an open-minded scientist speaking, not a fundamentalist religious believer. People of faith don't want to have their philosophy disturbed, because its foundation is so shaky. They don't know. They aren't sure of the facts. They don't possess demonstrable evidence. No, they just have faith that maybe, perhaps, possibly, what they want to be true really is: salvation, eternal life,…
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Posted inPersonal/Stories Religions

Telling a story from my dark side felt like church. Without the religion.

Last night I was one of eight speakers who took part in the second Stories From the Dark Side event here in Salem, Oregon. I enjoyed myself. The organizers kindly provided a bottle of Jack Daniels and a couple of shot glasses in the Grand Theatre's "green room." Plus, Santiam Brewing Company had some dark stout on tap in the lobby. I managed to get myself in a great story-telling frame of mind via a balanced blend of coffee, beer, and whiskey. I talked about my one hour with my father. That is one of my favorite blog posts, mostly because I wrote…
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Posted inDeath/Rebirth

We’ll die the way we have lived

I don't like to think about death. Especially my own. When my wife and I went to get our wills made, I asked the attorney to say "gerbiled" rather "died" whenever she needed to refer to my death. Yeah, it sounded sort of ridiculous when the attorney told us, "So upon Brian's gerbiling, his estate will pass to..." But I was fine with ridiculousness so long as I could lessen the probability that I'd have to seriously envision my, um, eventual gerbiling. No, I can say it now: eventual death. I still don't enjoy pondering my demise. However, for some…
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Posted inTaoism/Tai Chi

True cliche: live every moment as if it were your last

One of the benefits of growing older -- I'm 65 -- is that you acquire some Zennish enlightenment without having to meditate on hard cushions, figure out koans, or do any other of the Official Zen stuff. Just seeing people you know about your age or younger die naturally leads to a realization that, as I said in another blog post on this subject three and a half years ago, This is it. We live. And eventually we die. What I knew on the dog walk, and still know, is that this moment, whatever it consists of, never will come again.…
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Posted inBooks Buddhism

Halfway through “10% Happier.” I feel 5% better now.

I'm glad my Amazon guilt led me to buy Dan Harris' "10% Happier" in the charming Paulina Springs Bookstore in Sisters, Oregon.  Whenever I visit the bookstore, usually once a month in spring and summer, I do my best to buy something. This assuages the guilt I feel from buying books via Amazon the rest of the time. So when I saw a copy of "10% Happier" last Sunday, I ended up purchasing it after thumbing through the book. Previously I'd read reviews of Harris' book that made me wary of adding one more meditation/ mindfulness title to my extensive…
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Posted inReligions

No, Ben Sasse, religious beliefs don’t allow someone to ignore laws

Some defenders of religion argue that religious belief is a harmless personal exercise. "What's the problem with people believing whatever they want? How does this hurt anyone?" Well, read Nebraska Senate Nominee Says Religious Beliefs Can Justify Breaking Any Law. This article presents excellent reasons why elevating unsubstantiated, nonfactual religious beliefs over other sorts of unsubstantiated, nonfactual personal beliefs is dangerous. Sasse, however, apparently believes that this law does not go far enough, even if the Court gives Hobby Lobby everything it is asking for. His proposed rule — that government cannot require someone to act counter to their religious…
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Posted inSpiritual practice/meditation

Embrace the dark. You need it as much as light.

I first heard about Barbara Brown Taylor's "Learning to Walk in the Dark" in a TIME magazine piece. Part of it is here. She used to be a minister, but gave that up -- partly because the church put too much emphasis on being all bright and light rather than dim and dark. Like Taylor, I've become much more appreciative of darkness. Physical. Mental. Spiritual. (Though I really don't know what spiritual means; it's an empty word to me; however, since so many people use it, I sort of feel like I have to also.) I'm fine with not-knowing. Like,…
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Posted inSpiritual practice/meditation

“Yes, yes, yes” is an appealing philosophy of life

I have a regular column in my town's bi-weekly alternative newspaper, the peculiarly named Salem Weekly, whose web site is called WillametteLive for some peculiar reason.  (Hey, it's an alternative paper; my column is called Strange Up Salem; peculiar is good.) In the issue that hit the streets today I wrote about yes, yes, yes. The column is philosophical enough to merit sharing in this here Church of the Churchless.  Plus, a bit of Googling of my own websites (you can do it yourself via the search box in the right sidebar) turned up a 2007 post on a similar…
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Posted inReligions

Sunday summary of last week’s news about God, soul, and spirit

Here's my report concerning news of all things godly during the past week. Based on my reading of two daily newspapers, TIME, New Scientist, The New Yorker, online New York Times, and many perusals of blogs, web sites, and other Internet offerings... Nothing.  A lot has been happening in material reality. Nothing seems to be going on in supernatural reality. No miracles. No appearances by God. No divine revelations. No anything. Zilch. It's been this way every week for as long as I can remember. Which is the vast majority of my 65 years of living. Same old, same old. …
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Posted inReality Science

Churchless challenge: What supernatural fact are you sure about?

Today, here at the Church of the Churchless, we've got a short and simple question for believers in some extra-physical reality: What supernatural fact are you sure about? I was tempted to say 100% sure, or absolutely sure. But I'm an admirer of science, and science isn't 100% sure about anything (every seeming fact about physical reality might be falsified one day, though the chances are miniscule for extensively verified facts). So let's just leave it at "sure." Meaning, the supernatural fact you're sure about isn't just a matter of belief, hope, faith, or tentative conclusion that it is true.…
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Posted inReligions

Welcome to the age of apatheism — not caring about God

That's a great word, apatheism. I hadn't come across it until I read a recent New Scientist article, "Losing Our Religion." (On the magazine's web site it is called "God not-botherers: Religious apathy reigns.") Of course, New Scientist is a British publication. The article says, "The UK is one of the least religious countries in the world, with around half of the population saying they don't belong to any religion."  However, there is good news for my country, which is a lot more religious. Even in the US -- a deeply Christian country -- the number of people expressing "no…
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Posted inReligions

Supreme Court says prayer is OK at town meetings. Ugh!

Today the United States Supreme Court said it was just fine to have prayers from a "chaplain of the month" open a town's public meetings.  Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, writing for the majority in a 5-to-4 decision that divided the court’s more conservative members from its liberal ones, said the prayers were merely ceremonial. They were neither unduly sectarian nor likely to make members of other faiths feel unwelcome. “Ceremonial prayer,” he wrote, “is but a recognition that, since this nation was founded and until the present day, many Americans deem that their own existence must be understood by precepts…
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Posted inScience Universe

No need for “making” in a mathematical universe. It just “is.”

I've finished Max Tegmark's fascinating "Our Mathematical Universe," a book I blogged about before here. The final chapter was a bit of a letdown. Tegmark ambled off into extraneous subjects, like how Earth might come to its demise and whether other conscious entities exist in the universe. Surprisingly, Tegmark thinks we humans probably are the most intelligent life-form in the universe. If true, and I doubt that it is, that's depressing. Geez, 14 billion years have passed since the Big Bang, and Homo sapiens are the most sapient entities the cosmos could come up with? But I still enjoyed the…
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Posted inReality Science

Is the cosmos, including us, made of mathematics?

For several weeks I've been reading some of Max Tegmark's "Our Mathematical Universe" each morning. It's been a mind-bending journey, one which I'm about to complete -- just 26 pages left. Tegmark argues that rather than mathematics just being able to describe the universe, mathematics actually is the universe. Along with everything else in existence, which includes four levels of the multiverse. I'm enjoying the book. To me, Tegmark makes a lot of sense. I've always wondered, Where are the laws of nature? Meaning, physicists can precisely model many of these laws via mathematical equations. But why should the universe…
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