For the moment, let me talk about the world of human experience as "E". The world that Science investigates is assumed to exist a part from human experience , although we can only know it through human experience. Without really thinking about it, we imagine the "real world" to be about the shared experience: verifiable, consistent and augmented by what we call "reason". But we have long admitted that Universe, which I will call U, is not the same as "E". In fact, we assume that we can never know "U" entirely, directly or completely. We all know that "E" is not the same for each of us. In fact, it is quite remarkably different between different cultures and different times or even for a single individual throughout his or her lifetime. The question at hand is, is there anything "out there" apart from E and U? In most religious traditions the answer is "yes".  Most religions postulate a universe in ...

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 ...

If you are not familiar with this phenomenon, I refer you to that the breathless and uncritical treatment of the subject in  near death experiences on CBC Ideas . It seems fairly common for people who are "near death" in the sense of having their heart stop to have a vivid memory of leaving their body, seeing themselves from the outside, perhaps hearing and/or seeing what's going on around them, seeing a wonderful light and feeling a great sense of peace and well-being. The classic treatment of the subject, " Life after Life " is cited with approval by the "expert" for the CBC audience. "People have reported "near death experiences", or NDE's, over centuries and across cultures. The nature of them has historically been the territory of religion and philosophy. But now science has staked its claim in the discussion. And the questions are profound: where is consciousness produced, in the brain, or somewhere else? Can consciousness cont...

What am I? In many religious traditions, the answer would be given in terms of the "soul" -- something that is fundamentally "me". Believers in this tradition imagine something inhabiting the body but separable from he body, especially at death. After death, the soul goes on to further adventures in Heaven, Hell, the Happy Hunting Ground or perhaps another body, human or not. In any case, the soul seems to inhabit an entirely different universe, immune from the laws of physics or, dare we say it, logic. Outside of religious thinking, we generally use the term " mind " in place of "soul", but the common image is still something inhabiting the body, different from the body and somehow "looking out" on the real world. This way of thinking saddles us with the "mind-body" problem, in which we attempt deal with one of life's central mysteries: How is it that I can look out from "inside" my mind on to a material world? ...