“Though the world is torn and shakenEven if your heart is breakin’It’s waiting for you to awakenSomeday you willLearn to be still.”—Eagles, Learn to Be Still
An Unsatisfying Present
Throughout life, we are conflicted about the present moment. As children, we long for the freedom of adulthood; as adults, we envy the carefree ease of childhood. Whether romanticising the past or exalting the future, we often wish to be someplace other than here, now.
“And yet I think also that if even we today could acquire the knack of maintaining undistracted consciousness between coffee breaks, we too might find that we possessed angelic talents, powers, and skills.” – Joseph Campbell
“The truth about us is sobering: We have been playing with our smartphones while hurtling toward the abyss…” – Sam Harris, Trump in Exile
The Decline of Attention
Human flourishing depends on many mental and physical attributes: dexterous hands, abstract thought, language, and social bonds. If any of these vanished on a large scale, our quality of life would decline. Most of these foundations of human achievement remain intact—but one mental faculty essential to progress is in alarming decline. Continue reading “The Importance of Awareness”
“The inner man has been created in the image of the outer.” – BF Skinner
“We live our lives, as it were, ‘inside out’, projecting the existence of an ‘I’ as separate from an external world which we try to manipulate to gain satisfaction.” – Namkhai Norbu
Introduction
Until better explanations became available, humans personified nature to explain its workings: gods with human looks and emotions have been invoked across cultures as causes behind natural processes, it was once believed that sperm housed little humans, and the mental faculty of foresight is often attributed to blind evolutionary processes that cannot anticipate future states. Fortunately, the scientific method has usurped much of the personified description of nature. Though we’ve realized personification’s inadequacy at explaining natural processes, the common understanding of our inner mental lives – themselves natural processes – hinges upon personification. We wrongly invoke personae (aka “selves”) as the causes behind human behaviour.[1] This oversimplification neglects the formative role of the environment on actions and mental states.
Continue reading “Who’s in Control?”“What then is time? If no one asks me, I know what it is. If I wish to explain it to him who asks, I do not know.” – Saint Augustine
“In the underlying microscopic world you can run forward and backward in time just as easily one way as the other…If you want to know why notions of cause and effect work in the macroscopic world even though they’re absent in the microscopic world, no one completely understands that.” – Sean Carroll
We tend to become more conservative as we age, resisting new ideas that may be necessary for societies to flourish in a changing world. Numerous techniques and substances exist that can encourage neuroplasticity and creativity. Many of these methods – yoga, meditation, cold exposure etc. – seem to work by moving our attention out of conceptual thought so that our awareness bypasses our frontal lobes to affect deeper brain structures associated with regulating stress, proprioreception, and even our sense of self. Continue reading “Four Paradigms of Time”
Humans’ use of technology fractures our attention spans. And because attention is critical to accessing sustainable sources of happiness, our use of technology has the potential to negatively impact everything that we do. Although I don’t think that there are any methods as reliable as a disciplined meditation practice for improving our faculties of attention (other than Ritalin and smoking), I’ve come up with a few techniques that can be used on the fly. Even though they range from only a few seconds to a few minutes, they invoke large amounts of concentration in small amounts of time. In an arbitrarily numbered list, here they are: Continue reading “Concentration Practices”
[NOTE: this entry has been expanded and updated. See July 2018. This 2015 version has a lovely comment from an internet stranger, so I didn’t want to delete it, but I recommend readers skip this one in favour of the updated version]
“The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well, on the surface of a gas covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away and think this to be normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be.” – Douglas Adams
The Simulation Argument
In 2003 the philosopher Nick Bostrom published a paper called the Simulation Argument, in which he puts forth some sound logic that reaches a pretty wacky conclusion. But as I thought more about it, his conclusion seemed progressively less wacky…
[NOTE: This essay is overdue for a hearty edit, so in the meantime I recommend you check out “Four Arguments for the Nonexistence of Free Will” instead.]
Knowledge can only be gained by first admitting ignorance. The human race has been reluctant to acknowledge uncertainty, opting instead for shallow answers that preclude serious investigation about our lives and the world around us. Such stubborn certitude blinds us to fundamental truths while allowing firm conviction in judgments of how the world is or ought to be. This trend is evident in our historical views toward most natural phenomena – such as diseases, crop death, and weather – which were explained as being caused by a deity as judgment for poor behaviour. Secular society now recognizes the epistemological problems associated with attributing causation to an omnipotent God. We also realize that effective inquiry requires a suspension of bias-inducing judgments. However, because a belief in free will pervades society we fail to apply this rational attitude to our dealings with members of our own species. Assigning causality to God, feeling justified in our judgments, and washing our hands of understanding is no longer fashionable. A belief in free will grants humans God-like powers of causation, allows us to justify (im)moral judgments against individuals, and impacts our understanding of the true causes behind people’s actions. Continue reading “The Problem of Free Will”
Stories From the Ground. 