I accompanied my 98-year-old mother in law to the Sunday Service at St. Stephen's, a "high end" middle-class urban church in Qualicum Beach on Vancouver Island. Dianne, the newly-minted graduate of a Baptist Theology College, expertly designed and conducted the service. She is is an excellent speaker with an intelligent, engaging, sincere manner. In many ways, she's the best that this denomination has to offer. I urge you to listen to her sermon here. If you don't have time for it, please skip this entire blog post since it is a meditation on that sermon. My remarks are irrelevant to anyone who lacks a soft spot in their heart for "old-time religion."  Dianne can take the credit for getting me to think about the sermon for days. Definitely a good omen for her career in the pulpit. Romans 7:15-25Amplified Bible (AMP) 15 For I do not understand my own actions [I am baffled and bewildered by them]. I do not practice what I want to do, but I am doing the ver...

Stripped of philosophical rhetoric, the Hard Problem of Consciousness is: Why does it feel this way to be me? It's about the inner experience of being. I won't digress into the history and controversy of the issue except to say that I do indeed regard the problem as "hard". It seems to me that no amount of understanding of the "mind" as an epiphenomenon of physics can explain the feeling of being in the world. In fact, it is hard to imagine what such an "explanation" would look like. For me, the first step in tackling a hard problem is to recognize that it is, indeed, hard. The most critical step in my Master's thesis research was to recognized that the problem I was trying to solve was provably impossible . The key was to ask the right question and to know that the question you'd really like to ask is unanswerable . For the purposes of this discussion, I will use the term "soul" to refer to a (possibly hypothetical) entity that ...

The "soul" is perhaps the poster child example of a " meme ". What is essentially "us" survives death. Stripped to its fundamentals, this is the idea that the "mind" exists in some kind of parallel universe, independent of the physical world we all inhabit on a daily basis. Modern versions of this idea set aside the parallel universe and assume that we can somehow "upload" ourselves into computers. This preposterous idea flies in the face of anything we know about the brain, but it has roots in the ancient lore of the soul. We just can't let go of the idea that we are ghosts that can be somehow set free. "Idealism" takes the view that we can know only the world of the mind - indeed reality itself is the illusion. This is simply another variant of the concept that mind and world are fundamentally disconnected. Where did this idea come from? I think there is a simple answer. Imagine yourself to be a hunter-gatherer way back ...