THE HUMAN TRAGEDY There has been a lot going on since my last "status report". A few little insights have added up to quite a change in outlook - not so much from a logical point of view, but from the subtle emotional impact of it all. This post builds on some previous fragments and may seem to ramble a bit, but here goes ... The Sam Harris podcast on consciousness made a few interesting points that take awhile to sink in. Sam points out that it is hard to imagine what an "explanation" of consciousness would look like. There is something about it that puts it in a different category from even the most notoriously difficult to explain things such as quantum mechanics and the Schrodinger wave equation. Thomas Metzinger plugs a powerful meme into my head when he suggests that final acceptance of our mortality leads to a "tragic" view of human existence. That word, "tragic" seems to chew around the edges of everything I have intellectual...

"Plenty of ... Islamic State recruits, like plenty of normal people, are dullards and goofballs, incapable of articulating the beliefs that rule their lives. At best they are proficient at parroting them, with the same brain shrinking effects apparent in Hare Kristna ... They know these things because they have been taught them, and not because they have crafted their ideologies or studied classical Arabic... [they] are easily lead" Graeme Wood is no friend of Islam. But he went to amazing lengths to find any kind of logic in the world view of ISIS. More specifically, is there any light at all between what ISIS believes and those who claim Islam is a "religion of peace"? "The Way" is a long series of interviews with "true believers, ISIS "scholars" and the learned lights of Islam who claim that ISIS has somehow got it wrong in their interpretation of the supposedly infallible Koran and sayings of the Prophet. It is a case study of ho...

This post builds on my view of the human condition presented here . Is it possible to find yet another reason to turn away from religion, organized or not? I think my initial, basic reason was the attraction of skepticism , which always seemed to me a necessary frame of mind for a scientist. I don't suppose I have ever been a "real" scientist, but they seemed to me to be the ones on the track of genuine insights about reality. This frame of mind goes all the way back to my earliest memories at about age 5. More recently, I have despaired about the role of authority in religion. Surrender of one's own common sense and will to an authority seemed to be the core of religion and a special case of many of the problems that beset humanity in general. After spending a year or so studying psychology, neuroscience and especially neuroanatomy, I have gained some confidence in my understanding of how the brain (and, by extension, humans) work. This lead me to yet another source ...

What is a CPU chip "for"? What does it "do"? If we held one in our hands, or examine the circuitry, we could learn a lot about the instruction set, but perhaps the thing we'd notice first was all those little legs that are obviously intended to plug the CPU into something else. The CPU doesn't make a lot of sense on its own. We can say the same of a biological cell - a skin cell or brain cell. They have all the machinery of stand-alone eukaryotic (nucleated) cells but they quite obviously are built to participate with their neighbors in some kind of "tissue", which, in turn, is part of an organ which plays its part in the life of an organism, such as you and me. Suppose we look at the human brain the same way. 1/3 of cortex devoted to vision - massive tie-in to the universe, especially the electromagnetic spectrum Massive parts of the cortex are devoted to a wide range of special functions relating to our ability to function in groups of humans: Sp...