Posted inNeuroscience

The modular view of mind says there is no “I”, just a contentious “We”

Wouldn't it be wonderful if the being each of us calls "I" didn't really exist, at least not in the way most people think it does, as a coherent unified self?  I think so, though I realize this is a disturbing thought to those who depend on the "I" hypothesis to give their life meaning. Given my Buddhist proclivities, I view the situation much differently.  The way I see it, the "I" I've considered myself to be for most of my life is the cause of many problems. For example, anxiety, because "I" wants things to go the way "I"…
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Posted inBuddhism Mindfulness

We impose meaningfulness on the world through our stories

Yesterday my increasingly buggy blogging service, Typepad, kept generating a "503" error message all day long, so I wasn't able to write a post for one of my other blogs. I just did that, composing "My fall into a creek shows why doing one thing at a time makes sense."  That post includes a mention of my recent post here about human cognition being amazingly slow, so it's worth a read. You also can see photos of an attractive creek that runs through our rural property. Plus our electricity is off at the moment, owing to some downed power lines…
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Posted inConsciousness Neuroscience

Human cognition is amazingly slow, about 10 bits per second

I came across a fascinating article in the March 2025 issue of Scientific American, "Brains produce thoughts surprisingly slowly." (Online title: "The Human Brain Operates at a Stunningly Slow Pace.") You can read the article via this PDF file.Download The Human Brain Operates at a Stunningly Slow Pace | Scientific American Often you hear that the human brain is the most complex entity in the known universe with its 80 billion or so neurons tied together with trillions of interconnections. That may be, but this impressive product of evolution works much slower than the smart phones most of us carry…
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Posted inBuddhism Personal/Stories

Theory of mental modules made me feel better about my many failings

I love it when after reading something in a nonfiction book, it doesn't just make sense to me intellectually, but deeply touches me emotionally.  That's how I felt after reading a chapter in Robert Wright's Why Buddhism is True book, "How Thoughts Think Themselves." Before describing the wonderful feeling I had, I'll share some of the intellectual side of Wright's message -- which is based on a blend of Buddhist teachings, evolutionary psychology, and neuroscience.  He says this about the theory of mental modules in relation to mind wandering: Though the trains of thought that carry you away from direct…
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Posted inBuddhism

For Buddhism, taking the “red pill” means more than just mindfulness

It's been quite a while since I've watched The Matrix. You know, the movie where really real reality is very different from how things appear to those trapped in illusion -- which in this case is being confined in a pod, hallucinating that what you're dreaming is actually true. Robert Wright starts off his Why Buddhism is True book by using the red pill/blue pill choice in The Matrix as a metaphor for what Buddhism seeks: the truth about life. The prison is called the Matrix, but there's no way to explain to Neo what the Matrix ultimately is. The…
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Posted inBuddhism Science

Evolution doesn’t care if feelings are true, just that they are good for us

In a recent post, "No, major religions don't provide a truer picture of reality," I noted that evolution doesn't care about truth, just about whether genes are passed on to the next generation. Of course, this is just a manner of speaking, since evolution isn't about caring or not-caring. This goes against one of the primal facts about evolution: that species prosper not because they possess a greater grasp of reality, but because they are adept at passing on genes, organisms being well suited to the environment in which they find themselves. After writing that, I came across a mention…
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Posted inRadha Soami Satsang Beas

Here’s a thoughtful critique of Radha Soami Satsang Beas — well worth reading

I've received a critique of Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), a religious organization headquartered in India and led by a guru, from someone who wants to be anonymous, preferring to be called "LGG." Here's the PDF file.Download Critique of RSSB The critique is thoughtful and well-researched. Below I've shared the first six pages of the 53-page document. There's plenty of white space in the document, which I've minimized in my copy and paste below, so it doesn't take long to read the document.  Even if you aren't familiar with RSSB, but especially if you are, I'm confident that you'll enjoy…
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Posted inReality Religions Science

No, major religions don’t provide a truer picture of reality

It isn't surprising that, as an atheist, I find a lot not to like in Ross Douthat's book, Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious. However, what does surprise me is how weak Douthat's arguments are.  For while I admire his clear writing style, as befits a New York Times opinion columnist, often he simply tosses off glib statements about the marvelousness of religious belief without backing them up with either solid facts or persuasive reasoning. Here's an example from the book's "Big Faiths and Big Questions" chapter, which argues that the world's major religions are a better bet than minor…
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Posted inMorality Politics

Academy Awards speech about Palestinian suffering shows power of compassion

Having just spent much of my evening watching the Academy Awards (thankfully, I recorded the show, so could skip the commercials and boring parts, as it ran for three hours and forty-five minutes), I had been planning to write something short on a different subject for this blog. That plan changed when I saw the acceptance speech for Best Documentary, which went to "No Other Land," a film about the destruction of a Palestinian village in the West Bank by the Israeli military. The men who gave the acceptance speech were Palestinian co-director Basel Adra and Israeli co-director  Yuval Abraham.…
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Posted inFundamentalism Politics

Zelensky’s meeting with Trump shows danger of cults, political or religious

As I've noted before and surely will again, because it's the truth, the slavish devotion of almost all Republicans to Donald Trump mirrors the slavish devotion of cult members to their own Dear Leader who, in their eyes, can do no wrong. Further proof of this was on plain display today after the president of Ukraine, Zelensky, met with Trump at the White House to sign a deal they'd negotiated regarding the mining of mineral deposits in Ukraine, along with discussing how to end Ukraine's war with Russia. That meeting started off fine (a full video is here), but degenerated…
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Posted inRadha Soami Satsang Beas Science

If humans are the top of creation, what about Neanderthals?

The February 2025 issue of National Geographic features a fascinating story by Brook Larmer, "The Hunt for the  Other Humans." This got me to thinking about the common religious teaching that humans are the top of creation. For example, the Bible says in Genesis: 26 Then God said, “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals,[a] and over all the creatures that move along the ground.” 27 So God created mankind in his own image,    in…
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Posted inMiracles Mystics Religions

Ross Douthat’s five varieties of mystical experience

I'm finding Ross Douthat's book, Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious, less interesting now that I've gotten past the reasons Douthat offers for being religious, and have started to read how one goes about choosing a religion to believe in. However, in his "The Myth of Disenchantment" chapter, which is within the why believe section, his description of five varieties of mystical experience struck me as both fairly unique and mostly valid. I'll use Douthat's own words to describe those varieties rather than attempting a paraphrase. (1) Generic mystical experience.  The first is what you might call the generic mystical experience…
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Posted inRadha Soami Satsang Beas

Photos of Gurinder Singh Dhillon, the RSSB guru, with rich and political people

Below I've shared twenty photos of the guru of Radha Soami Satsang Beas, Gurinder Singh Dhillon, that were sent to me by someone who said: Hello Brian, I want to put your attention on one matter that effects on the heart of common satsangi, the matter is Why do Baba Gurinder Singh Dhillon and his intern Baba Gill like to visit only the houses of rich and political people and get photographed with them? Whereas none of them is a follower of Radhaswami cult and most of them are corrupt, jail inmates, non vegetarian, heavy drinker. Many of them are…
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Posted inNeuroscience Science

AI, artificial intelligence, points to the mystery of how the mind works

Religiously-minded people like to invoke mystery as a reason for believing in God and the supernatural. They adore how holy books teach that the workings of divinity are beyond human comprehension, you know, the whole man proposes and God disposes thing.  But it isn't necessary to go anywhere outside of the closest entity any of us has to ourselves to come face-to-face with a gigantic mystery, because that entity is the mind that experiences both mystery and everything else from our birth until our death. In my previous post, "No, neuroscience doesn't support religiosity,"  I included a passage from Ross…
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Posted inConsciousness Neuroscience

No, neuroscience doesn’t support religiosity

A trend is evident. With every fresh blog post I set out to write about Ross Douthat's book, Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious, I have an urge to start off the title with "No." Obviously that's because I don't believe everyone should be religious, and Douthat's arguments in favor of that aren't very convincing. Still, I enjoy being exposed to ideas that I disagree with. Not as a steady diet, but as tasty morsels occasionally. Douthat does about as well as could be expected with his ambitious goal: not to found religiosity on faith, but to a large extent upon…
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Posted inPersonal/Stories

Pieces of churchless string too short to save

Many years ago, in that far-off time when local newspapers were much more vibrant and successful than they are now, our town's paper, the Salem Statesman Journal, had a column written by someone who occasionally started his piece with "pieces of string too short to save." Meaning, he was going to mention a bunch of unrelated things in his column that day, each of which was interesting, but didn't merit taking up the entire column. Today I figured I'd dust that saying off and do my blog post imitation of it, otherwise known as three-dot writing. ...Yesterday I heard from…
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Posted inReligions Science Universe

No, the big bang doesn’t point to a divine creator

In my first post a few days ago about Ross Douthat's book, Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious, I said that I bought the book because "I was curious about how Douthat would make his arguments, figuring that it would be easy for atheists like me to undermine them." Here I'll finish my critique of his first substantive chapter, "The Fashioned Universe," which I started making in that initial post about the book.  It's easy for me to do this, because I'm already seeing a theme emerge in how Douthat tries to make his case for religious belief. Though he's…
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Posted inAtheism Religions

“Believe” is a book that claims religions are true. I doubt it can do that.

I bought Ross Douthat's book, Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious, not because I agree with that thesis. Rather, I was curious about how Douthat would make his arguments, figuring that it would be easy for atheists like me to undermine them. After reading 25 pages, I'm impressed with Douthat's lofty goal, but not with his reasoning so far. Being a New York Times opinion columnist and a former senior editor at The Atlantic, it isn't surprising that Douthat is a talented writer. He makes his points clearly. So kudos to him for that. And I admire how in his…
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Posted inBuddhism Spiritual practice/meditation

Here’s the best description of Zen koans I’ve ever seen

Koans are an aspect of Zen Buddhism that I've always looked upon as wonderfully mysterious, yet unappealing. For in traditional Zen writings I'd read about a student being given a koan like "Does a dog have buddha nature?" Then they struggled to figure out what the answer is, periodically having a get-together with their Zen master for him to see how they're doing, where usually he rejects their lame attempt at a response by hitting them on the head with his staff or screaming at them. Not exactly something that sounds either pleasant or productive to me.  But near the…
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Posted inMorality Politics

Empathy is a sign of maturity, which is why Trump is so childlike

It's difficult to define morality, or for that matter, to define any other characteristic that most people would agree is part of being a decent human being. But that shouldn't stop us from speaking about morality, since common sense and intuition are a pretty good guide here. In the February 2025 issue of Scientific American, there's an article about how the adolescent mind develops, "Growing the Adolescent Mind."  The geeky details are interesting. However, what caught my eye was the mention of transcendence, which I usually think of as referring to something in the religious or spiritual sphere. After all,…
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