A Zen "koan" is a riddle posed by a master to a student. Koans famously make no sense, but the idea is that they kick the student out of his conventional way of thinking to experience reality in a new way. To "solve" the koan, the student must get past  "mere words". Words that often prevent him from seeing the world as it really is. The most famous koan is "What is the sound of one hand clapping? "The "answer" to a koan comes as a flash of enlightenment, often with a laugh. How simple! How could I not have seen that! In this spirit, I offer my own koan: What is the point of a tree? This question occurred to me while I was relaxing in my back yard and regarding the huge poplar, which had soldiered through many hardships over the decades but still maintained a slightly ragged majesty.  It crossed my mind to ask, "But what is the point?" This turned out to be a very good question. It has sent me tumbling off the "beaten pat...

Zen Temple, Gateway Park Revised December, 2015 What all the great faiths of the world have in common is faith itself. And faith is a mistake. Faith is ... " strong belief in God or in the doctrines of a religion, based on spiritual apprehension rather than proof." Well, doesn't Science itself have its "strong beliefs". Doesn't that make Science a religion? Actually, no. Scientific theories are only those that are capable of disproof. Scientists always hang on to the most reliable of theories, while thinking up ways to experimentally disprove others. If it is impossible to imagine a way to devise an experiment that would, at least in principal, disprove a theory, then the theory has little interest and little practical use. Scientific theories do not survive because they are proven, they survive because (so far) they have resisted disproof . This outlook leaves plenty of room for compassion and positively encourages a sense of awe and wonder. It is an outlo...

Many roads lead us to the same conclusion. The proper understanding of human life must de-emphasize the natural tendency to focus on "me" and "mine" and "I" and identify with the community. This is a very natural conclusion, but it tends to be lost as we lose our grip on traditional communities and face the world alone or in nuclear families. Evolution has left us equipped with a natural feeling of comfort and identity with community -- the first one being with our mother, then our "nuclear" family, then the extended family, then the village and beyond. Once we reach beyond the village, an element of distrust creeps in. The natural feeling of trust we have with the folks we encounter every day doesn't extend to people in the next village or the town over the mountain. Then, we start to see things in "economic" terms. We rely on trade and, eventually, money. Stripped to its bare essentials, money is simply a token of trust. We no lon...

I’d like to explain how I visualize the workings of my own brain. At first glance, it’s just a big bag of neurons. People don’t seem to differ all that much in the actual weight of the brain. I take this to mean that there is not a lot of difference in the number of neurons, or that  such a number doesn’t tell us very much about the very great differences we see in the efficiency of people’s brains. The other real and quantifiable thing about the brain is its enormous number of synapses, which communicate between one “up stream” neuron and a number of “down stream” neurons. I picture the differences in “efficiency” or “power” of the brain to be a matter of how the neurons are wired together: the number of connections, the usefulness of the connections, the mysterious ability to make and break connections, which, from the perspective of the brain’s owner, emerge as ideas and associations between ideas. So, some people’s brains work better than others because of the way the are wired...

This conversation with TBocce got me thinking for weeks about entropy ... [06:36] TBocce Player (tbocce): Rome wasn't built in a day I suppose... [06:37] CF: no but it can be destroyed in a day -- [06:38] TBocce Player (tbocce): yes...Man had developed weapons of mass destruction, and if you agree with GBS that is what Man does [06:39] CF: creativity is swimming up the strong current of entropy [06:39] CF: 10's of millions of years to figure out a spear tip ... [06:40] TBocce Player (tbocce): apparently we offer more incentives  to make war than we do to keep peace [06:43] CF: no i think destruction is just inherently easier [06:44] TBocce Player (tbocce): because of the resources spent on finding the technology to do it quicker and more effectively are greater [06:49] CF: i think u would rather discuss politics than physics [06:50] TBocce Player (tbocce): I try to talk about what I know; and I know  little about science. I am open to learning [06:51] CF: ok [06:51] CF: "e...

This is a huge subject and I have a lot to say about it. For the moment, I’d like to give you a thumbnail sketch of an idea that seems to have “legs”. “Entropy” is one of the deepest and most powerful ideas in Science. Unfortunately, along with Quantum Mechanics, it is a total mystery to most educated laymen. At the risk of insulting your intelligence, I will give you a quick introduction to the idea, with the promise that I will connect it to something very relevant and practical by the end of the essay. For those new to the subject, there are many exhaustive treatments on-line, such as: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy_(information_theory) Unfortunately, if you don’t already “get” the idea of entropy, such essays will only deepen the mystery. For the moment, lets just say that entropy is a measure of randomness.It’s easier to understand the opposite of entropy, which you might think of as “information”. There is another, closely connected idea of entropy that comes from thermodyn...

What creates culture is a commonly-held view of the world and widely-accepted rules of behaviour. The world-view is passed from generation to generation by living myth -- stories that are constantly expanded and reinterpreted. Members of the society are dipped in the myth. The myth allows them to see themselves as part of the continuing story of their society. The priests are the "experts" on the way things "really" are. The rules range from customary ways of greeting all the way to formal criminal law. Again, expertise is required. The priesthood plays a special role here. They are not just story tellers. They enforce the rules. They have an impact on the daily lives of the citizen. We tend to regard the world view of other cultures as quaint and "interesting", primitive, unscientific ... We regard the laws and they way they are informed in other cultures as equally quaint and arbitrary. But our own culture has it's priesthood, which, when viewed obj...