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...

 Misuse of language Law Belief Signaling that I am a member of the group Do Biologists "believe" in evolution like Fundamentalists don't? Ordinary "belief" depends on a structure of related inferences - "evidence" as opposed to motivated reasoning - totally linguistic. Scientific "evidence" refers to real experience. Religious "evidence" is based on philosophical reasoning (at best). "Survival of the fittest" is a circular concept. "Variation" is the mechanism of evolution. Hard to refute that variation exists... What does it mean to "believe" in God? At its base, it's a system of appeasing spirits through traditional ceremonies. If you don't believe in prayer, what kind of "God" remains? If you don't think God is active in history, are you misusing the "God" concept? Do you mean God=physics? The ground of all Being - Tillich . Video here . Is "ground of all being...

Warning: This post contains more speculative bullshit than (most) of the others. The reader is encouraged not to take it too seriously. It's a meditation on an idea I've long regarded as fundamentally important: the Tao and how the idea lines up with what we think "science" is telling us. The Tao that can be named is not the eternal Tao "Tao" is an elusive concept in the Tao Te Ching . Our physical laws borrow their appearance of solid reality from the reality they describe. The famous saying above (which lead me to become a part-time Taoist) points out the profound difference between a description and the thing itself *.  I had earlier learned the same hard lesson in Physics 101, when the instructor firmly insisted that all science does is describe , not " explain ". A "description" is a system of statements "about" the "real world" out there. One particular kind of description I discuss here is a "program" ...

In this blog, I introduce two categories of "life" that may be regarded as controversial or "merely" a matter of definition. "Supermind" is at the "high" end. At the low, primitive, "old" end is "proto-life" - life before (or simply without) DNA ("before" being evolutionary speculation I avoid). Here is a good presentation on work on "proto-life". I'll try to add more examples as I come across them. Current work in this field can be regarded as an "existence proof": if there is any way we can make "life" out of non-living molecules, there may be others, one of which presumably actually happened. For my purposes, it's sufficient to see how such systems are possible, at least in theory. I leave the discovery of actual evolutionary processes to others. I avoid using "evolutionary fairy dust" to support the ideas put forward here. This blog does not put forward or support...