“Nothing real can be threatened.
Nothing unreal exists.
Herein lies the peace of God.”
— A Course in Miracles

The contemplation of miraculous events often leads to fruitless disagreement about big deals like the nature of reality. Another approach is to just assume that they happen and work out the implications.

The Spooky and the Non-spooky

My mother had a collection of audiotapes about something called “A Course in Miracles”. She was an avid, thoughtful spiritual seeker. I became a hardcore scientist, so to my discredit, I barely even asked her about the Course. …

“No need to ask, He’s a Smooth Operator” — Sade Adu

A free man doesn’t worry about vaccines. If there’s an epidemic, somebody will make a vaccine and sell it to him. Won’t take any time at all without government interference. Somebody else will test it, make sure it works. No need to prepare ahead of time. A VC will finance the R&D for a 20:1 return. And it’s been shown time and again that people will pay everything they own to put off dying.

What if you can’t pay? Well, a free man makes his own money. There’s all…

Brenden, I find this approach to myth unhelpful. First of all, “myth” seems to be used for anything that you believe in. So why not just call it “belief”? This confusion leads to statements like this pull quote from Gabriel: “Whereas fire is sacred for the Brahmans, the scientific approach is sacred in secular modernity”. So, a metaphor wherein science is like fire, and all of modern non-religious culture is like a religion’s priestly class. This means something? The word “sacred”, too, is stretched beyond its usual meaning, perhaps (I’m just saying here) to make a meaningless utterance sound profound.

…

“This feels so unreal.” — Nearly all of us, sometime during the pandemic

Each of us has a brain that constructs realities for us, using our senses and memory boxes of dusty debris from the unconscious attic. Our biological survival depends on our discerning base reality from our imaginings and memories. So, the brain operates a reality detector.

But any kind of detector can be fooled. Human experience suggests that consciousness has a dimension that I’ll call phenomenal realness. Reality for us comes in different degrees.

Conscious transparency.

Philosophers have described conscious experience as being transparent. They mean that the perceived world…

The personal genetic information service, 23andMe, just announced that it will merge with a Virgin Group shell corporation to become a public company. The purpose is a “more personalized and proactive approach to healthcare … [via] innovation and disruption.” This might not be a completely good thing.

The merger comes a year after a slump in the consumer genetic testing industry and layoffs at the company. The company has in the past raised considerable private capital but says it now needs the flexibility of going public to reach its goals.

You can browse through 23andMe’s press releases since its 2007…

“I think therefore I am.” Consciousness is the most private of private things. Yet arguably we develop consciousness primarily in interaction with other people, and the intensely human nature of our consciousness evolved in response to a striking rise in complexity of primate social life.

There’s strong support from science and philosophy that social evolution favored three expanding levels of our being: a basic conscious self-model, its extension into a lifelong sense of self, and the self’s anchoring of social commitments into a personal identity.

Conscious Biology

Long ago I studied primate psychobiology because I wanted to know: what is unique about…

There’s been a rise in belief in unfounded conspiracy theories. At the end of 2020 some claim that these elaborate fictions are dangerously increasing our American political schism. Multiple causes have been suggested, including triggers from social stress and the amplifying effect of social media.

We’ll look at some aspects of human nature that leave us susceptible. And there’s a theory that these factors, working together, might even change the nature of consciousness.

The Conspiracy Complex

• What humans take to be reality is actually socially constructed. …

When human endeavors so often go wrongly, we blame people for making bad decisions, whether from a moral, or political, or scientific point of view. This only raises our emotional temperature without fixing problems or heading off future catastrophes. However, there are recent theories that explain that many failures stem from general dynamical patterns. Let’s look at two of these patterns. They might someday be part of a science of how to get things done, a kind of moral philosophy of the practical.

How the Deck Is Stacked

First, let’s consider what we’re up against. As in, what are the given background conditions for any…