There are already a few essays here about Buddhism and/or Zen . My life circumstances conspire to make me take these ideas seriously as a guide for life. So this post is "home" for a few thoughts about using Zen ideas to cope with life. Here is a link to the "Buddhism" category in Perplexity . I'm sorry, but you can't see the dialogue if you don't have a Perpexity.ai subscription. For me, it is packed with information, questions and answers. For quick reference, here is a summary of the 8-fold path of Buddhism. I have difficulty remembering it all: Wisdom (Prajna)Right View (Samma Ditthi) - Understanding the Four Noble Truths and the nature of reality as it is. Right Intention (Samma Sankappo) - Cultivating intentions of renunciation, good will, and harmlessness. Ethical Conduct (Sila)Right Speech (Samma Vaca) - Abstaining from false, harsh, slanderous, and idle speech. Right Action (Samma Kammanto) - Refraining from killing, stealing, and sexual...

Picture by Tengr.ai based on the idea that we are a story we tell ourselves (summary by Google Gemini)   In "Why We Remember," neuroscientist and psychologist Charan Ranganath challenges our conventional understanding of memory. He reveals that memory isn't simply a passive recording of the past, but an active and transformative force that shapes our present and future. Ranganath combines accessible language with cutting-edge research to illuminate how our brains record experiences and how we utilize this information to understand our identity, make decisions, and envision the future. The book delves into the surprising ways memory influences our perception of the world, often unconsciously and sometimes detrimentally.   Key takeaways from "Why We Remember" include:Memory is not a static repository but a dynamic process that continuously evolves.   Our memories are not always accurate representations of the past, as they can be influenced by various factors.   M...

Notes on a conversation with a friend ... The subject of time has fascinated me since I was a little kid. Time is a real thing - an aspect of the platform that reality is built on. But physics fails to put a finger on the moment we call "now". In one direction, the one we call "future', what will happen is fundamentally unknowable before it happens. That comes out of Chaos theory and Quantum Mechanics. On a more subtle level, we are also unable to know the past in detail. In my experience, philosophers and theology shine no light on these issues, but often claim ersatz credibility by dropping references, especially to Quantum Mechanics, hoping that most of their audience will not understand the reference. On a psychological level, it is not clear why the "present" has any special status when it comes to "knowability". Neurologically speaking, there is no "now", only an experience of what I consider to be a dynamic change in the state of ...

Pop fears about the AI apocalypse often feature the machine suddenly and inexplicably "coming to life." The "lights go on," and all of a sudden, the machine supposedly feels like us, has a consciousness like us and (therefore) starts to exhibit all of our worst attributes. In particular, it "wants" to live and suddenly "sees" us as a threat. All of this plays on thousands of years of confusion about what it is to be human in the first place. What is it to "feel alive"? What is consciousness? What is "self"? I think that thousands of years of superstition and religious "theology" shed no light at all on this question. If you are one of those who are looking for a detailed treatment of the "soul" as distinct from the body, I wish you good luck. As for me, I see no reason to invent a separate realm of reality to house my mind - even as I admit that it is difficult to say just exactly how a slab of meat be...

I have a lot of time on my hands - perhaps too much. I read a lot, usually 2 serious books per week or maybe more if you count the books I check into and decide not to read or put on the back burner for later. In the "later" category is the emerging genre of books explaining all the details of Donald Trump's horrible personality and personal history. I get it. No further information required. There is a danger of being pulled into a rabbit hole, following "click bait" until starvation sets in. Sometimes I wonder if I'm doing something similar on a larger scale, taking advantage of the cheap and easy access to books (Kindle) and general information (Google/YouTube). So here are, in theory, the "topics" I'm following. THE SELF & COLLECTIVE INTELLIGENCE This is a hold-over from the main thread in my "Christian Skeptic" blog. At the moment, it concerns questions about the nature of the self (aka, "soul"). I'm convinced ...

If we're lucky, the first person we encounter in our lives is our mother. We naturally generalize to recognize other moving shapes as like our mother but not our mother. We have all experienced the difficulty of calming a baby who refuses to accept the attentions of anybody but his mother. This leads me to a claim that may seem odd: We discover our mothers before we discover ourselves! But we are "hard wired" to assemble the meme of "self" pretty early. These fingers and toes are "my" fingers and toes. When you watch a baby, you can see this is a discovery , not a "brute fact". But the "hard wiring" of the motor cortex establishes a predictable link between the perception of the body and the ability to move around body parts. Thus is born "me" (the object in the world) and "I", the one who seems to "be me". One of our main jobs in the first two years of life is establishing an iron-clad link between ...

The "I" Meme is perhaps the most powerful meme of all: the inescapable impression that the world is experienced in the "first person singular". This seems to be "hard wired' in the brain and this meme finds expression in virtually all human languages, although to varying degrees (It is avoided in Japanese for example). Attempts to discuss "I" from the "outside" result in a surprisingly varied collection of apparently related memes, such as the "soul", the "mind", the "spirit" and the "self". These are not identical memes and are each somewhat "weaker" than the I meme. We can, after all, experience the world in the first person without accepting the idea of the soul - in fact some schools of Buddhism explicitly deny the existence of the "self" as an illusion. On the other hand, it is common to regard "I" as separable from the body: the "soul". Much philosophi...

What, if anything, is "consciousness"? This is a central question of Zen . I have recently taken a look at the more "Scientific" view on the question. I just read Daniel Dennett 's discussion of consciousness. There are lots of Dennett lectures online. He's articulate and entertaining.  Dennett is a philosopher so tends to dig himself into obscure debates about language, terminology and disputes with other philosophers. He borrows a lot of experimental results, but he's not really part of the Scientific culture. Sorry, philosophers, philosophy is not Science. As Robert Laughlin reminds us, scholars of the humanities talk about words; physicists talk about facts. Dennett is still well worth reading though. Let me sketch out what I think he's talking about. He seems to be arguing against the intuitive view of consciousness, best represented by what's called the Cartesian Theater . This pictures the mind as something sitting in a theater watching t...

It has been pretty obvious for centuries that all we know about the world comes to us by means of our senses. Even the vast new body of knowledge about the universe that Science has provided lately comes indirectly through indirect "evidence" and human reasoning, which turn out to be the most powerful of our senses in the long run. But if anyone suggests to me that this means that the "real world" is entirely a matter of our imagination and there is really nothing "out there", I will suggest that he (it's always a "he") take another drag of on his funny cigarette and go lie down somewhere. Let the rest of us talk seriously. What is an endless subject of fascination is the surprising difference between what we perceive and what we can subsequently learn is "really" happening. We learn that we do, indeed, see the world through very foggy lenses and that the more we learn about the world, the more we find out how little of it is perc...

In a previous post  I sketched out the importance of being a bit more imaginative when we ask the difficult question, What is the mind like . It's time to abandon the ancient assumptions that I have a little person inside my head  that's the "real me" and somehow, perhaps this little person (the soul) will survive death. It's obviously not like that. There is "nobody home" in the brain, nothing "controlling" it. The "self" is what it feels like to be a brain. That is still a big mystery, but progress nonetheless. Here, I'd like to discuss another aspect of the ancient view. Is there only one "self" running around in my brain? And, while we are at it, is there more to the "self" than this entity that seems to be looking out my eyes? Is there more to "me" than the "me" I feel writing these lines? Mountains of experimental evidence says there is. Lots more. I have always been very interested i...

What is the "self"? Among proponents of mindfulness and Zen, it is common to say that the "self" is an illusion - that the "self" does not really exist. Such talk leads us immediately into paradox, but Zen loves paradox. Vast amounts of ink are spilled in discussions about how, if the self doesn't exist, who or what it is that knows it doesn't exist. The self seems to be a matter of daily experience. Saying it's an illusion is little more than an attention-getting opinion or a device to sell books. To me, the problem seems to be a shortcoming of language. I just read a treatment of this issue that purported to solve it all by claiming that the self is a verb not a noun . This poor individual was trying to tackle one of the hardest problems in the world using his tenuous grip on the grammar he learned in school. He dimly perceives that the "self" is not an ordinary "thing", so he concludes it must be the only other kind of g...

The Truman Show , 1999, is a rich and thought-provoking source of metaphor (imagine here that I pause to watch the whole movie again ...) The Truman Show Delusion  is a variety of paranoia where the sufferer imagines himself to be "on stage" all the time - the centre of a grand performance. I have tasted this one myself in the early days of what came to be called "bipolar illness" - a rather useless term that has come to refer just about any dislocation in the "normal" way we feel about ourselves and our relationship to "reality". I'm all better now, thank you, but my earlier struggles have taught me that there are many alternatives to what is called a "normal" frame of mind. Almost everyone has a version of the Truman Show Delusion. We all feel ourselves to be the centre of the universe. That's an illusion created by our brains.  If that function is not working, we can have "out of body" experiences. But the "nor...