Philosophy – Stories From the Ground.

What’s the Point of Consciousness?

“If a general theory of reality has no place for consciousness, then that theory cannot be true.” – Philip Goff, Galileo’s Error

“Consciousness is also nature.” – Guy Armstrong, Emptiness

Two Views of Mind

Science has shown, time and again, that the workings of our world are rarely intuitive. We inhabit a universe with no centre, where time passes relative to motion, nothing can travel faster than the speed of light, and half the cells in our bodies aren’t even human. At the frontiers of knowledge, common sense holds no sway.

The Logic of Rebirth and Karma

“Offered to us as the irreplaceable means of deliverance, the Dhamma does not seek mere intellectual assent, but commands a response that is bound to be fully religious.” – Bhikkhu Bodhi, Two Faces of the Dhamma

“Why, if experience continues anyway, is it so terribly important that it continue within this set of personal characteristics, memories, and body?” – Tom Clark, Death, Nothingness, and Subjectivity

Strange Relics

When I started meditating, ten-odd years ago, I didn’t think much of Buddhism. Whenever neuroscientists wrote about the absence of a solid self, I was intrigued. When Alan Watts waxed lyrical about the ideological assumptions underpinning materialism, I was enthralled. But when Buddhists spoke of the Four Noble Truths, the Noble Eightfold Path, or the Three Characteristics, I glazed over. Even though Buddhism was the primary source of my newfound interest in spirituality, it often read like a painfully detailed way of stating the obvious in dry, arcane terminology.

How to Have a Good Meditation Retreat: In Theory and Practice

“If you practice for a result, then it becomes a hindrance.” – Dipa Ma (common advice to students)

“What is important is not the experiences we have but how we get transformed by them.” – Sayadaw U Jagara (recounted by Joseph Goldstein in Reflections on Nibbana)

Thwarted Desires

In Buddhism, there’s a saying that the path is “good in the beginning, good in the middle, good in the end.” Upon starting a meditation practice, many of us notice surprising benefits. Encouraged by these benefits, we may then seek to take the practice further, setting aside days, weeks, or months to retreat from the world, dedicate ourselves to meditation, and reap the fruits of deep stillness.

Reason’s Emotional Roots

“Do we not perhaps feel thought, and do we not feel ourselves in the act of knowing and willing?” – Bruce Lee, Striking Thoughts

“Nature appears to have built the apparatus of rationality not just on top of the apparatus of biological regulation, but also from it and with it.” – Antonio Damasio, Descartes’ Error

Critical of Critical Thinking

Rationality has always faced an uphill battle. It stirs few passions and obeys no creed, meaning that when it challenges ethnic, religious, or political loyalties, it can typically be subdued with a simple appeal to the human heart. Some people ignore reason more eagerly than others but we are all, to some extent, averse to rationality.

Why Things Don’t Exist (or A Very Western Interpretation of Emptiness)

“It is not clear that the universe is a thing, and if it is defined as a set of things it runs the risk of paradox.” – Paul Davies, God and the New Physics

“The thought of your mother is not your mother.” – Joseph Goldstein (restating words spoken by his teacher, Anagarika Munindra)

Holding Reality In Mind

Until Pythagoras and Parmenides, we believed the Earth was flat. Until Copernicus and Kepler, we believed we were at the centre of the universe. Until Darwin and Wallace, we believed that humans were perfectly crafted divine creations. Throughout human existence, we’ve consistently believed in models of reality that have been proven wrong. How is this possible?

Four Arguments for the Nonexistence of Free Will

[A tip for those in a rush: If you want to cut straight to the point, skip the intro paragraphs and start at “What Do You Mean, Free?”]

“The only reason, for example, that you are not a rattlesnake is that your mother and father weren’t rattlesnakes. You deserve very little credit for being what you are—and remember, the people who come to you irritated, bigoted, unreasoning, deserve very little discredit for being what they are.” — Dale Carnegie, How to Win Friends and Influence People

Steeped in Intuition

Knowledge comes through many channels. It can be gained through deliberate study, absorbed through exposure to contexts and cultures, or emerge unbidden in flashes of insight from the subconscious. It can even develop over aeons of natural selection, shaping dispositions suited for survival in an unforgiving world. Yet despite these diverse ways of knowing, all knowledge shares a common root: a dependence on intuition.

Is There Any Evidence that we Live in a Simulation?

“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

In 2003 the philosopher Nick Bostrom published a paper called “Are We Living in a Computer Simulation?”, in which he uses solid logic to reach a wacky conclusion. Bostrom argues that a highly sophisticated civilization might choose to run simulations of its evolutionary history, so detailed as to capture conscious experience. If this happens, the number of simulated worlds could vastly outnumber the single, original reality. Therefore, unless such simulations are impossible, there’s a reasonable chance that we live in one. Continue reading “Is There Any Evidence that we Live in a Simulation?”

Four Arguments for the Nonexistence of Free Will

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[NOTE TO READER: This essay has been updated. Please read the more recent version (scroll up).]

“The only reason, for example, that you are not a rattlesnake is that your mother and father weren’t rattlesnakes. You deserve very little credit for being what you are – and remember, the people who come to you irritated, bigoted, unreasoning, deserve very little discredit for being what they are.” — Dale Carnegie, How to Win Friends and Influence People

Bending Intuition

Knowledge comes through many channels. It can be acquired by conscious effort, per academic ways of learning. It can accumulate unconsciously, seeping in through exposure to various cultures and contexts. It can arise suddenly, via flashes of insight produced by the veiled churnings of the subconscious mind. Or it can develop over aeons of natural trial and error, resulting in dispositions suited for survival in an oft-unforgiving world. But for all its different modes and forms, every bit of knowledge shares one crucial requisite: a dependence on intuition. Continue reading “Four Arguments for the Nonexistence of Free Will”

Are We Ruled by Thought or Emotion?

“… no sharp line divides thinking from feeling, nor does thinking inevitably precede feeling or vice versa (notwithstanding the century of debate within psychology over which comes first).”—Steven Pinker, How the Mind Works

“I’m hooked on a feeling; I’m high on believing.”—Mark James, popularised by Blue Swede

Deceptive Dichotomies

We interpret the world through perception, but our perceptions are limited and often exclude basic relations. For instance, we might think that inside and outside, up and down, or left and right are mutually exclusive, but they are also interdependent: the existence of an outside entails an inside, up only exists relative to down, and left delineates right. Our mental landscapes are peppered with such dichotomies, tricking us into thinking interrelated phenomena are separate. Continue reading “Are We Ruled by Thought or Emotion?”

Rethinking Death

dikaseva-34881-unsplash “Why should I be frightened of dying? There’s no reason for it—you’ve got to go sometime.” — Pink Floyd, The Great Gig in the Sky

Morbid Metaphors

Life is often compared to a burning candle whose luminosity is bookended, past and future, by eternal darkness. At first blush, this metaphor seems apt: consciousness comes into existence, illuminates a lifetime of experience, then dissolves, replaced by the abyss whence it came. But such a comparison is wrongheaded, emblematic of prevailing attitudes towards death which are unimaginative and unduly negative. Continue reading “Rethinking Death”