All posts tagged: Free Will

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 […]

A Piece of Cosmic Literature

April 1, 2017
by Michael
comments 31
Course Ideas / Science

An aspect of nature I love is its elegant ambiguity. Despite our best efforts and the amazing discoveries we’ve made in the past few centuries there are fundamental questions about the nature of the universe that may not ultimately be knowable through objective inquiry. It’s always too early to tell, of course, since we don’t know what we may learn next, but the pattern of ambiguity is fairly clear. The ambiguity goes all the way […]

A Discussion on Karma

May 1, 2016
by Michael
comments 48
Dialogues

During the month of April, Hariod and I had a back-and-forth discussion on the idea of karma– what it is and isn’t and how its effects may play out in our lives.  It turned into a somewhat lengthy discussion by blogging standards, but we didn’t think it made sense to serialize it, so are offering it here as a PDF file.  It should read easily in a web browser, an e-book reader, and/or be easily […]

Temptation

March 17, 2014
by Michael
comments 17
Course Ideas / Poetry

Some would say that faith is like a padded suit you put on because you’re too scared to face the obvious reality that your life is a swift, knee-scuffing blood-curdling tumble down a steep and rock-strewn escarpment towards the waiting gaping dark, ugly and hungry empty irreversible vacuum-powered inescapable abyss of non-existence. You’re afraid to die, they say. Some of those same ones would say there’s a real sweetness to the glimpses of wild flowers […]