All posts tagged: Consciousness

Choice and Consequence Part 5: Free Will, Learning and Determinism

February 13, 2022
by Michael
comments 30
Course Ideas / Reflections

Part 4 of the series is here. I listened to a YouTube video this week in which physicist Sean Carroll gave a talk entitled “God Is Not a Good Theory.” In his presentation, Dr. Carroll used Bayesian probabilities to compare the likelihood of God’s existence to the likelihood that we live in a multiverse—(multiverses being one naturalistic way of explaining the appearance of a statistically unlikely universe such as our own). The Bayesian procedure involves […]

Choice and Consequence Part 1: An Introduction

January 9, 2022
by Michael
comments 15
Course Ideas / Reflections

Each of us occupies a construct of memory, belief, identity and meaning that not only generates the sense of self we require to meaningfully function as individuals, but generates our picture of the external world as well. I often call this construct a worldview. It is an active perceptual process within each of us that works continuously to sustain, protect and strengthen the idea at its root. And while it may seem there are a […]

The Blind Watchmaker, Cont’d

January 25, 2020
by Michael
comments 11
Book Reviews / Reflections / Science

This week I finished the audio version of The Blind Watchmaker by Richard Dawkins, which I discussed in my previous post, and I’d like to give a few responses to the book as a whole now that I’ve completed it. Dawkins’ overall objective with this work is to describe how the dizzying mélange of organized complexity we find in the biological world can be explained by the properties of non-living matter, the blind mutations of […]

A Dialogue on the Continuum of Life

October 18, 2015
by Michael
comments 26
Dialogues

This post is based on dialogue rather than monologue, which brings a different approach to things.  Because it is already fairly lengthy, I’ll not offer much by way of introduction.  Hariod and I have had a brief discussion on the topic of reincarnation and whether or not we consider life to be a conscious continuum.  I hope you enjoy.  For those not inclined to read through all of this, at least a haiku: Crispy autumn leaves scurrying […]

Jabberwocky Detonation

July 21, 2014
by Michael
comments 6
Poetry

The Only Principle is this: Nothing happens that doesn’t unfold within a field of awareness, and every awareness is held by a greater one because no awareness is great enough to hold itself. This is precisely true, even though awareness is always, only and ever… One. (That last bit’s the Other Principle.) Using language as we are here is like trying to make a hole in the Emptiness by using teaspoons to scoop out little […]