FAITH AND SCIENCE

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kmaherali
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A Guide to Finding Faith

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Scientific advances in recent centuries have made the idea of God only more plausible.

“If appreciating some of the ideas in St. Augustine’s ‘Confessions’ was enough to make you a Christian,” a friend said to me some years ago, “then I’d be a Christian. But a personal God? The miracles? I can’t get there yet.”

Whenever I write about the decline of organized religion in America, I get a lot of emails expressing some version of this sentiment. Sometimes it’s couched in the form of regretful unbelief: I’d happily go back to church, except for one small detail — we all know there is no God. Sometimes it’s a friendly challenge: OK, smart guy, what should I read to convince me that you’re right about the sky fairy?

So this is an essay for those readers — a suggested blueprint for thinking your way into religious belief.

But maybe not the blueprint you expect.

Many highly educated people who hover on the doorway of a church or synagogue are like my Augustine-reading friend. They relate to religion on a communal or philosophical level. They want to pass on a clear ethical inheritance to their children. They find certain God-haunted writers interesting or inspiring, and the biblical cadences of the civil rights era more moving than secular defenses of equality or liberty.

Yet they struggle to make the leap of faith, to reach a state where the supernatural parts become believable and the grace to accept the impossible is bestowed.

For some, this struggle just leads back to unbelief. For others, it can be a spur to act as if they believe, to pray and practice, to sing the hymns or keep kosher and wait for God to grant them faith in full. This is often the advice they get from religious friends: Treat piety as an act of the will undertaken in defiance of the reasoning faculties, and see what happens next.

I’ve given that advice myself. But there’s another way to approach religious belief, harder in some respects but simpler in others. Instead of starting by praying or practicing in defiance of the intellect, you could start by questioning the assumption that it’s really so difficult, so impossible, to credit ideas of God and accounts of supernatural happenings.

The “new atheist” philosopher Daniel Dennett once wrote a book called “Breaking the Spell,” whose title implies that religious faith prevents believers from seeing the world clearly. But what if atheism is actually the prejudice held against the evidence?

In that case, the title of Dennett’s book is actually a good way to describe the materialist defaults in secular culture. They’re like a spell that’s been cast over modern minds, and the fastest way to become religious is to break it.

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https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/14/opin ... 778d3e6de3
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Last edited by kmaherali on Wed Sep 08, 2021 3:45 pm, edited 1 time in total.
kmaherali
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kmaherali
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Did Jesus actually exist?

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Video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=py_Gb5a3w8I

Want to discuss something further from this video? Go to
https://www.kirkdurston.com/conversation

--------------------------------
Connect with me everywhere else!
https://instagram.com/kirkdurston/
https://tiktok.com/@kirkdurston
https://twitter.com/KirkDurston

My name is Kirk Durston and I’m a philosopher, scientist, husband, and a legit Christian. On my channel, I explore assumptions and questions pertaining to God, questions about philosophy, questions about science and questions about the meaning of life, which I think about a lot. I hope you’ll join me on that Quest or perhaps you’re already on your quest about these matters and we can explore together.

#KirkDurston #History #Jesus
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Accelerate your healing on all levels

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The Hard Problem of Consciousness Has an Easy Part We Can Solve

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How does consciousness arise? What might its relationship to matter be? And why are some things conscious while others apparently aren’t? These sorts of questions, taken together, make up what’s called the “hard problem” of consciousness, coined some years ago by the philosopher David Chalmers. There is no widely accepted solution to this. But, fortunately, we can break the problem down: If we can tackle what you might call the easy part of the hard problem, then we might make some progress in solving the remaining hard part.

This is what I’ve been up to in recent years with my partner in crime, Jonathan Schooler, a psychologist at U.C. Santa Barbara. Since I came up in philosophy, rather than neuroscience or psychology, for me the easy part was deciding the philosophical orientation. Schooler and I duked it out over whether we should adopt a materialist, idealist, panpsychist, or some other position on our way to a complete answer. I am, as I’ve written in Nautilus before, a card-carrying panpsychist, inspired by Alfred North Whitehead, David Ray Griffin, David Skrbina, William Seager, and Chalmers. Panpsychism suggests that all matter has some associated mind/consciousness and vice versa. Where there is mind there is matter, where there is matter there is mind. They go together like inside and outside. But for Jonathan, this was far too glib. He felt strongly that this was actually the hard part of the problem. Since he’s the Distinguished Professor and I’m not, we decided to call this philosophical positioning the hard part of the hard problem.

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https://nautil.us/blog/the-hard-problem ... -can-solve
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Existential Comfort Without God

Can natural explanations to life’s big questions be as consoling as religious ones?


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Last month, Harvard University named a new Chief Chaplain: Greg Epstein, an atheist. As reported in The New York Times,1 Epstein, the campus humanist chaplain, was unanimously elected to “coordinate the activities of more than 40 university chaplains, who lead the Christian, Jewish, Hindu, Buddhist, and other religious communities on campus.” Perusing the hundreds of reader comments generated by the Times article revealed broad support. While some questioned whether an atheist could be a “real” chaplain, others suggested that appointing a humanist was a clever move—a way to have a neutral figure in a position of power.

Yet, across a chasm of difference, both reactions share a problematic assumption: that humanist commitments—by virtue of omitting belief in God(s)—involve no basis for religious authority, indeed no commitments at all. In stark contrast, the Harvard students interviewed about Epstein praised his ability to support an authentic quest for meaning without belief in God. “Being able to find values and rituals but not having to believe in magic,” A.J. Kumar, former president of a Harvard humanist group, was quoted as saying, “that’s a powerful thing.” But is it really possible to have meaning (the values and sense of purpose) without magic (the supernatural beings and metaphysics)? Are the commentators right to treat humanism as an absence of meaningful commitments, versus a commitment to humanistic sources of value and meaning?

This is partly a question for philosophers and theologians. (Epstein himself is the author of a book titled Good Without God.) But it’s also a question about the human mind. In the language of psychology: Can people get the benefits of canonically religious beliefs from naturalistic alternatives? (Call this “the humanist’s path” to meaning without magic.) Can people “believe” in God—and get the benefits of doing so—without taking the supernatural elements of their belief to be true? (Call this “the theist’s path” to meaning without magic.)

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https://nautil.us/issue/106/intelligent ... ithout-god
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The Ecstasy of Scientific Discovery, and Its Agonizing Price

Book Review

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A simulation of the Schwarzschild precession, named after the German scientist Karl Schwarzschild, who provided the first precise solution to Einstein’s equations of general relativity.

WHEN WE CEASE TO UNDERSTAND THE WORLD
By Benjamín Labatut
Translated by Adrian Nathan West

In December 1915, while serving on the Russian front, the German astronomer and mathematician Karl Schwarzschild sent a letter to Albert Einstein that contained the first precise solution to the equations of general relativity. Schwarzschild’s approach had been simple. He had plugged Einstein’s equations into a model that posited an ideal, perfectly spherical star, in order to calculate how its mass would warp the surrounding space. Schwarzschild’s solution was elegant, but it revealed something monstrous: If the same process were applied not to an ideal star but to one that had begun to collapse, its density and gravity would increase infinitely, creating an enclosed region of space-time, or a singularity, from which nothing could escape. Schwarzschild had given the world its first glimpse of black holes.

In “When We Cease to Understand the World,” a gripping meditation on knowledge and hubris, Benjamín Labatut describes how Schwarzschild was seized by a sense of foreboding over his own discovery. “The true horror” of the singularity, he told a fellow mathematician, was that it created a “blind spot, fundamentally unknowable,” since even light would be unable to escape it. And what if, he continued, something similar could occur in the human psyche? “Could a sufficient concentration of human will — millions of people exploited for a single end with their minds compressed into the same psychic space — unleash something comparable to the singularity? Schwarzschild was convinced that such a thing was not only possible, but was actually taking place in the Fatherland.”

Schwarzschild, who was Jewish, did not live to see Hitler rise to power and concentrate the collective German will to catastrophic effect. But a different premonition came true within months. The “void without form or dimension,” which he told his wife had invaded his being, took shape as a rare disease that would cover his body in pustulant blisters and kill him mere months after his scientific breakthrough.

Labatut, a Chilean novelist born in 1980 in the Netherlands, casts the flickering light of Gothic fiction on 20th-century science. In five free-floating vignettes, he illuminates the kinship of knowledge and destruction, brilliance and madness. He draws a line from the invention of a synthetic color in the 18th century to chemical warfare in World War I to the Zyklon B agent used in Nazi gas chambers. He relives the vertigo that can grip scientists on the precipice of discoveries, like Schwarzschild’s time-scrambling singularity or the German physicist Werner Heisenberg’s theory of indeterminacy. He retraces the trajectories of two brilliant mathematicians, Shinichi Mochizuki and Alexander Grothendieck, who after solving hitherto intractable problems, obscured or destroyed their own work and withdrew into eremitic silence. And he takes the reader into the heart of the battle to understand the quantum world, pitting Heisenberg’s matrix mechanics against Erwin Schrödinger’s wave equation, efforts that laid the groundwork for both Hiroshima and the internet.

Labatut’s gallery of tormented scientists features no women, though Marie Curie would have fit the profile well as both genius and martyr. Instead, it is the specter of Mary Shelley that seems to guide the author’s hand as he magnifies the nightmarish, repulsive or bizarre moments that affect the course of the history of science.

In any case, the individual characters are merely vehicles for Labatut. His true subject is the ecstasy of scientific discovery and the price it exacts — from the individuals who sacrifice everything in its pursuit, and from the human species, which gains ever more powerful tools to master a world that keeps eluding comprehension.

In the final chapter, we encounter a reclusive gardener who had once been a mathematician but “now speaks of mathematics as former alcoholics speak of booze, with a mixture of fear and longing.” The man, who gardens only at night because he maintains that plants suffer less if they are handled in their sleep, believes that “it was mathematics — not nuclear weapons, computers, biological warfare or our climate Armageddon — which was changing our world to the point where, in a couple of decades at most, we would simply not be able to grasp what being human really meant.”

That night gardener is one of the few invented characters in a book otherwise built on real events. The mix of fact and fiction is in itself common, but Labatut’s formula is unusual. As he explains in an author’s note, the amount of invented material grows over the course of the book. The opening chapter stays close to the facts in its account of Fritz Haber, the chemist who saved countless lives from starvation when he figured out how to harvest nitrogen from the air, creating a plentiful supply of fertilizer, but who also caused the agonizing deaths of countless soldiers in World War I as the guiding force behind Germany’s chemical weapons program. According to Labatut, that chapter contains only a single paragraph of fiction.

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From there — as if growing out of that single impurity — dialogue, dreams and hallucinations proliferate. (Labatut’s imagination may run lurid, but his prose is masterfully paced and vividly rendered in Adrian Nathan West’s magnetic translation.) Thus the reader witnesses Heisenberg’s matrix epiphany on the remote North Sea island of Heligoland not as a breakthrough in esoteric algebra, but as revelation induced by fever and accompanied by visions.

The historical record confirms that Heisenberg arrived on Heligoland delirious with allergies. It’s known that he had a copy of Goethe’s “West-Eastern Divan” and memorized passages from it. But the hallucination in which the German naturalist and polymath Goethe fellates the lifeless body of Hafez, the 14th-century Sufi poet whose verses had inspired his Divan, is all Labatut’s. Modern science may have replaced mysticism as a path to knowledge, he seems to say, but it’s shattered our holistic understanding of our world.

Labatut has Heisenberg suffer another mental breakdown on the cusp of a scientific breakthrough, this time in Copenhagen, where he arrived at the uncertainty principle now named for him. In a seedy bar, he is accosted by a stranger who works in radio and confronts the German scientist about the “magnificent inferno” created by technologies that can warp distance and time. Stumbling out into the night, Heisenberg is overcome by a prefiguration of the nuclear bomb his research will make possible, a vision of tiny sparks dancing before his eyes, and a mute chorus of shadowy figures who throng around him before a flash of “blind” — not blinding — light obliterates them.

In Labatut’s telling, Heisenberg then comes to recognize that the parameters of any given quantum object can never be identified with certainty. If the position of an electron is determined precisely, “arresting that particle in its orbit like an insect impaled on a pin,” then it becomes impossible to know its momentum, and vice versa. The variables are mathematically complementary, so that the more clearly we bring one into focus, the more it blurs our understanding of the other — as if, Heisenberg explains, “reality allowed us to perceive the world with crystalline clarity with one eye at a time, but never with both.”

With his slippery hybrid of fact and fiction, Labatut slyly applies the uncertainty principle to the human pursuit of knowledge itself. Abstraction and imagination, measurement and story coexist in a multidimensional reality containing infinite destinies and interpretations. At its furthest reaches, reason and scientific inquiry lead into the unknowable. As Labatut puts it, in words he ascribes to Schwarzschild: “Only a vision of the whole, like that of a saint, a madman or a mystic, will permit us to decipher the true organizing principles of the universe.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/24/book ... ks_norm_20
kmaherali
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The Devastating Ways Depression and Anxiety Impact the Body

Mind and body form a two-way street.


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It’s no surprise that when a person gets a diagnosis of heart disease, cancer or some other life-limiting or life-threatening physical ailment, they become anxious or depressed. But the reverse can also be true: Undue anxiety or depression can foster the development of a serious physical disease, and even impede the ability to withstand or recover from one. The potential consequences are particularly timely, as the ongoing stress and disruptions of the pandemic continue to take a toll on mental health.

The human organism does not recognize the medical profession’s artificial separation of mental and physical ills. Rather, mind and body form a two-way street. What happens inside a person’s head can have damaging effects throughout the body, as well as the other way around. An untreated mental illness can significantly increase the risk of becoming physically ill, and physical disorders may result in behaviors that make mental conditions worse.

In studies that tracked how patients with breast cancer fared, for example, Dr. David Spiegel and his colleagues at Stanford University School of Medicine showed decades ago that women whose depression was easing lived longer than those whose depression was getting worse. His research and other studies have clearly shown that “the brain is intimately connected to the body and the body to the brain,” Dr. Spiegel said in an interview. “The body tends to react to mental stress as if it was a physical stress.”

Despite such evidence, he and other experts say, chronic emotional distress is too often overlooked by doctors. Commonly, a physician will prescribe a therapy for physical ailments like heart disease or diabetes, only to wonder why some patients get worse instead of better.

Many people are reluctant to seek treatment for emotional ills. Some people with anxiety or depression may fear being stigmatized, even if they recognize they have a serious psychological problem. Many attempt to self-treat their emotional distress by adopting behaviors like drinking too much or abusing drugs, which only adds insult to their pre-existing injury.

And sometimes, family and friends inadvertently reinforce a person’s denial of mental distress by labeling it as “that’s just the way he is” and do nothing to encourage them to seek professional help.

More...

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/04/well ... 778d3e6de3
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How Covid Raised the Stakes of the War Between Faith and Science

I have never had much interest in faith versus science debates. They simply did not resonate with me. I believe God created the world, but I never felt the need to nail down the details or method of creation. I went to a fairly conservative evangelical seminary (founded by Billy Graham himself), and even there, I was taught that Genesis 1 was more like a hymn or a poem than a science textbook. I have long been influenced by early church theologians like Augustine of Hippo, who understood the biblical creation account as primarily making theological claims instead of offering a precise explanation of cosmological origins.

I was in campus ministry for a decade among scientists who were leaders in their fields. They sought cures for cancer and studied black holes, and were also passionate about their faith. They saw science as a tool, a gift from God that allowed them to help people and explore the glorious wonder of the world.

So I mostly ignored the larger cultural conversations that pit science and faith against each other.

Then along came Covid-19.

It has not been hard for me to trust the medical community and their recommendations during the pandemic because I personally know biomedical researchers whom I trust. I worship each Sunday with physicians. My church prayed for an end to the pandemic and asked God to help scientists in their vaccine research. We never saw a conflict between the work of God and efforts of science.

But others saw the two in opposition. In April 2020, Andrew Cuomo, then the governor of New York, explained declining coronavirus rates by saying, “Our behavior has stopped the spread of the virus. God did not stop the spread of the virus.” Around me, I heard some churchgoers say that Covid precautions were motivated by fear, not faith.

Indeed, these past two years have exposed how the science vs. faith discourse isn’t an abstract ideological debate but a false dichotomy that has disastrous real-world consequences. According to a September Pew study, white evangelicals are the least likely religious group to get vaccinated (about 57 percent have received at least one dose of a Covid vaccine). There are certainly political reasons for this. Many white American evangelicals lean Republican, and Republicans overall are less likely to get vaccinated against Covid. But we also cannot overlook the broader context of distrust between evangelical faith communities and the scientific community.

To better understand this cultural division, I talked to Deborah Haarsma, an astrophysicist, a Christian and the president of BioLogos, an organization that explores the relationship between faith and science. In popular thought, she said, scientists and Christians are often slotted into “two different categories.”

It wasn’t always this way. At the outset of the Scientific Revolution, many scientists were motivated by their beliefs about God. Nicolaus Copernicus, Isaac Newton, Robert Boyle and other giants of modern science were people of faith. But, after high-profile debates over Darwin’s theory of evolution in the late 19th century, a perceived division began to emerge between religion and science. In the spectacle of the Scopes Monkey Trial in 1925, which assessed, among other things, whether a state could prohibit the teaching of evolution in schools (but was also staged as a publicity stunt by town leaders in Dayton, Tenn.), Christian beliefs and science were set up as incompatible ideas.

It “is better to trust in the Rock of Ages,” wrote the prosecutor William Jennings Bryan, “than to know the age of the rocks.”

Haarsma told me that the rise of the creationism movement in the 1960s, led by the engineer Henry Morris, increased the skepticism between some evangelical churches and scientists. The rift continued to grow because of bioethical conflicts around issues like stem cell research and euthanasia, but more so because of a latent cultural assumption that faith and fact oppose each other. When President Barack Obama appointed Francis Collins, an evangelical Christian (and the founder of BioLogos), as head of the National Institutes of Health in 2009, some questioned whether Collins’s religious faith should disqualify him from the position.

A 2018 study by Barna, a Christian research and polling firm, showed that “significantly fewer teens and young adults (28 percent and 25 percent) than Gen X and Boomers (36 percent and 45 percent)” view science and faith as complementary. Young people increasingly see an essential conflict between faith and science.

I asked Haarsma who is to blame. Is it the fault of religious communities for denigrating science or the scientific community for denigrating faith? She laughed and said there’s plenty of blame to go around.

At times, a vocal minority of prominent scientists have marginalized religious communities. Haarsma cited a tweet by Neil deGrasse Tyson, a prominent astrophysicist, from Christmas morning 2014: “On this day long ago, a child was born who, by age 30, would transform the world. Happy Birthday Isaac Newton.” That’s clever, but it appeared to mock Christians on one of our most sacred holidays. These sorts of messages spur needless animosity. If the cultural conversation requires people to choose between their faith and science, most will choose faith, but we don’t have to ask people to choose. This is a false choice.

At the same time, Haarsma said, there are some Christians who present faith as opposed to evidence, instead of “faith as a lived-out commitment in response” to evidence. She also said that heated anti-science rhetoric from a minority of Christians online encourages scientists to dismiss people of faith as a whole.

So, I asked Haarsma, what is the path to reconciliation? If this dichotomy between faith and science is truly a false dichotomy, how do we purge it from our broader cultural discourse and imagination?

I heard her voice rise with passion. This is her life’s work and the work of her organization. She offered practical steps: The message to religious communities needs to be, “Don’t trust science instead of God, trust science as a gift from God.” Church leaders can praise God for creation and the unique ability to be able to study and understand it. Churches can also spotlight scientists, especially people of faith who are leaders in their fields. (BioLogos has a bureau of scientists and other scholars who speak to faith groups.)

In turn, the scientific community could be more honest about the limits of the discipline. “Sometimes people say things like, ‘If everyone would just accept the science, the world would be great,’” Haarsma said. But she notes that science doesn’t solve everything and that scientific communities have to “acknowledge the value of religion as a way of answering life’s biggest questions.”

In the end, Haarsma said, these two communities share a goal: seeking truth. “They can find common ground in their desire to know what is true,” she suggests, “whether about nature or about God.” I asked Haarsma how faith and science entwine in her own work. Her voice sounded ebullient. As a professor of astronomy, she said, she truly sees how, in the words of Psalm 19, “The heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky above proclaims his handiwork.” That’s what scientists study, she told me, “the very handiwork of God.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/07/opin ... 778d3e6de3
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Just Because You Don’t Believe in Conspiracy Theories Doesn’t Mean You’re Always Right

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Every so often, something so awful and senseless happens that it’s hard to fully absorb it. An apartment building collapses as residents sleep within. A movie star’s prop gun fires a real bullet on a film set, killing a young mother. A concert crowd morphs into a melee that leaves people dead and injured.

After each such catastrophe, there looms a question: What’s the real story of what happened here? Amid a stream of facts and rumors via breaking news alerts, the loudest answers often come from two camps: Let’s call them the conspiracists and the reformists.

One rants about shadowy schemes, nefarious figures, unseen hands and global cabals. The other preaches the gospel of rationality, a doctrine holding that even if all is not yet known, all is eventually knowable, and that if sensible rules are followed, chaos can be prevented.

Take as an example Travis Scott’s Astroworld Festival, where a crowd surge earlier this month left at least 10 people dead and injured hundreds. “It was like hell,” one attendee said. Some conspiracists were quick to assert another view: The concert wasn’t just “like” hell. It was, rather, an elaborate satanic ritual, perhaps designed to summon a portal to hell.

The signs were all there, they tweeted. There was the stage that looked like an inverted cross. There was the fact that the Church of Satan was founded on April 30, 1966 — 666 months and six days before the night of the concert, Nov. 5, 2021. And that date was also the 66th birthday of Kris Jenner, the mother of Kylie Jenner, Mr. Scott’s girlfriend. These outlandish ideas are not relegated to the fringes of the internet; some videos making such claims have millions of views. A single comment on one of these posts (“The music industry is demonic and collects souls”) garnered tens of thousands of likes on its own.

A conspiracist’s natural habitats are TikTok, Reddit, Facebook and YouTube, fertile ground for planting seeds of paranoia and fear through seconds-long clips and doctored photos. After the Astroworld tragedy, a prominent QAnon figure reportedly articulated the mantra of a conspiracist: “There is NO such thing as ‘coincidence.’ Ever.”

Enter the reformist, for whom a catastrophe comes down to predictable human error. According to the reformist, the cause of the crowd surge at Astroworld was a series of egregious mistakes: inadequate planning, a set of safety measures not properly put in place or a performer who should have stopped the show sooner.

Crisis could have been averted if only the proper procedures had been followed, the reformist argues on CNN or MSNBC, in an op-ed or Twitter thread. With sober policy prescriptions and technocratic resolve, the reformist suggests, we can bring to heel the chaos that is human existence. We need only follow the rules — and his or her smart advice.

The dichotomy between figures embodying either chaos or order goes back millenniums, and exists in cultures around the world. It is exemplified by the pairing of the ancient Greek gods Dionysus, the god of wine, revelry and mayhem, and Apollo, the god of the sun, temperance and rational thinking. Philosophers, Nietzsche most notably, have long commented on the relationship between the Apollonian and the Dionysian.

We humans need narratives to process what happens around us or in the world at large. As the popular historian and philosopher Yuval Noah Harari has said: “The truly unique trait of Sapiens is our ability to create and believe fiction. All other animals use their communication system to describe reality. We use our communication system to create new realities.”

Both the conspiracists and the reformists are engaged in this utterly human process. By connecting events and facts, and tying red strings between them on their metaphorical pin boards, the conspiracist and the reformist each develop a thesis about what happened. Stories help us live with each other and with ourselves, and in the wake of great and sudden suffering, we need something to keep us going.

It might be difficult to see how a story about a satanic blood sacrifice helps people live with themselves. But the conspiracist’s story offers a kind of clemency for the people involved, and perhaps for humankind at large. The image of concertgoers booing a woman who climbed a platform to try to stop the show at Astroworld is difficult to stomach. It can be easier to believe that the events that transpired were a satanic plot than to see them as a result of mundane human indifference.

The soothing quality of the reformist’s story is even easier to identify. His or her program of measured improvement offers hope for progress and the promise of control. For that, the reformist attitude is to be admired. If it’s true that “the story in which you believe shapes the society that you create,” as Mr. Harari recently said in an interview, then reformists, with their efforts to eliminate systemic malfunctions, are working toward a better world, or at the very least, a more safe and just one.

The conspiracist and the reformist tend to double down on the narratives valued by their respective communities. The reformist lives in a world where expertise and problem-solving have cultural cachet. The conspiracist lives in world where spirituality and belief in higher powers can answer a lot of the big questions.

Of course the distinctions between the reformist and the conspiracist, between the Apollonian and the Dionysian, are not absolute. Within any one person, the lines blur: Many of us can be reformists and conspiracists, prone to mysticism in some areas and beholden to reason in others. A tree may fall and nearly kill you, leading you to believe that this was a sign from the universe that you must live life to the fullest and appreciate each day — even as you email the city council about hiring more arborists.

There are problems with the stories that both conspiracists and reformists peddle. The conspiracist’s story, taken to its extreme, would have us believe that there is nothing we can do about accidents or problems because they are spawned by devils and cabals, malevolent forces beyond our control. The extreme version of the reformist’s story, by contrast, would have us believe that there’s nothing we can’t do about accidents or problems, that reason can secure us total control over our environment, and even over ourselves.

The truth is that catastrophes occupy the gray space between the darkness of the conspiracist’s narrative and the light of the reformist’s narrative. We are more in control than the conspiracists think; we are less in control than the reformists think.

American history offers many examples of conspiracists and reformists differing in their interpretation of events, from the Salem witch trials to the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Or, take two other horrors of recent months: the fatal shooting on the set of the film “Rust,” and the Surfside condo building collapse. Both inspired conspiracy theories, and both inspired lectures and expert analyses of societal failures. Surely, more could have been done to prevent these tragedies — there were procedural and administrative failures in both instances — but we can only ever reduce the possibility of disaster, not eliminate it completely.

There’s a risk here, of course, of false equivalence. Though the conspiracist and the reformist have much in common, the consequences of their stories are obviously quite different. Conspiracy theories such as those advanced by QAnon adherents can breed apathy or extremism or undermine civil society, and they have led to violence and threats of violence.

Reformist narratives might be sanctimonious, but they tend to come from a desire to protect people and improve the world. Still, they can lead to excess caution, such as an unwillingness to discuss an eventual end to masking mandates at schools in some blue states, even when it’s not yet clear what effects two years of masking will have on children.

The true problem with the conspiracist and the reformist, however, is that by telling stories about a catastrophe’s meaning, they assent to the premise of the question, to the hubristic notion that the world should bend itself to human reasoning, that its nature and events and accidents will align with our storytelling. Each camp acts as if its stories are natural discoveries, rather than constructed narratives.

And what’s often lacking in both these camps is humility and empathy. Living in the gray area requires a healthy dose of both.

Empathy is what’s required, for example, to narrow the gulf on Covid: the conspiracist deniers and anti-vaxxers on one side, and the double-masked-and-triple-vaxxed reformists on the other, each railing against anyone whose choices they disagree with.

What would Covid messaging have looked like if humility had been built into the stories we told about masks and vaccines? If we had understood them to be highly effective preventive measures, rather than either silver bullets or ruses, would they have mutated into symbols, into sharp ideological lines dividing the nation?

Humility is a useful quality, too, when regarding the disaster of human-wrought climate change: It’s required to accept that a great deal of damage has already been done, and that our ability to mitigate future damage is already limited. Admitting so doesn’t mean abandoning the fight altogether.

What’s the harm, you might ask, of stories that make some sense of the senseless? Perhaps none. But they can rob us of the opportunity to sit with our feelings, to grieve our losses, to rage at the chaos of the universe, at our animal helplessness, at the random unfairness of life. Both conspiracists and reformists tell stories that explain the “why” before we’ve even processed the “what.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/21/opin ... 778d3e6de3
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Post by kmaherali »

Revelation, Sciences and Symbolism. Al-Ghazali's Jawahir al-Qur an.


Islam and Rationality

The Impact of al-Ghazali

Papers Collected on His 900th Anniversary

VOLUME 1

Edited by

Georges Tamer

pdf of the book can be accessed at:

https://www.academia.edu/20156226/Revel ... view-paper
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Post by kmaherali »

Christmas Reflections: Miracles (Part 1 of 2)

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Video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pNyEDKBLlPQ
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Post by kmaherali »

Book

How God Works: The Science Behind the Benefits of Religion


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Drawing on a wealth of new evidence, pioneering research psychologist David DeSteno shows why religious practices and rituals are so beneficial to those who follow them—and to anyone, regardless of their faith (or lack thereof).

Scientists are beginning to discover what believers have known for a long time: the rewards that a religious life can provide. For millennia, people have turned to priests, rabbis, imams, shamans, and others to help them deal with issues of grief and loss, birth and death, morality and meaning. In this absorbing work, DeSteno reveals how numerous religious practices from around the world improve emotional and physical well-being.

With empathy and rigor, DeSteno chronicles religious rites and traditions from cradle to grave. He explains how the Japanese rituals surrounding childbirth help strengthen parental bonds with children. He describes how the Apache Sunrise Ceremony makes teenage girls better able to face the rigors of womanhood. He shows how Buddhist meditation reduces hostility and increases compassion. He demonstrates how the Jewish practice of sitting shiva comforts the bereaved. And much more.

DeSteno details how belief itself enhances physical and mental health. But you don’t need to be religious to benefit from the trove of wisdom that religion has to offer. Many items in religion’s “toolbox” can help the body and mind whether or not one believes. How God Works offers advice on how to incorporate many of these practices to help all of us live more meaningful, successful, and satisfying lives.

https://www.amazon.ca/How-God-Works-Ben ... 1982142316
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Post by kmaherali »

Christmas Reflections: Miracles (Part 2 of 2)

Image

Video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPHvJJ4_HA0
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Post by swamidada »

NASA looks to religious scholars for answers

NASA has enlisted the help of theologians to examine how the world would react if sentient life was found on other planets and what impacts such a discovery would have on deeply-held beliefs about divinity and creation.

The US space agency has recruited some 24 scholars so far to participate in a program at Princeton University’s Center of Theological Inquiry (CTI) in New Jersey. The center – which received a $1.1 million NASA grant in 2014 – looks to build “bridges of understanding” between academics of various disciplines, scientists, and policymakers on “global concerns.”

According to the Daily Mail, the program is apparently aimed at answering such big picture questions as “what is life? What does it mean to be alive? Where do we draw the line between the human and the alien? What are the possibilities for sentient life in other places?”

Last week, CTI Director Will Storrar told The Times that NASA’s goal for the program was “serious scholarship being published in books and journals” to address the “profound wonder and mystery and implication of finding microbial life on another planet.”

“We may not discover life for 100 years. Or we may discover it next week,” a NASA expert told the paper, which added that the agency’s growing “astrobiology” department has been looking for new answers to age-old questions for some 25 years.

Among those who have participated in the CTI program is Andrew Davison, a priest and theologian at Cambridge University who holds a PhD in biochemistry. Davison, who was part of the program’s 2016-2017 cohort, noted in a blog post that “religious traditions” were an “important feature in how humanity would work through any such confirmation of life elsewhere.”

Because of that, [religion] features as part of NASA’s ongoing aim to support work on ‘the societal implications of astrobiology,’ working with various partner organizations.

Other religious figures, including the Bishop of Buckingham Alan Wilson, Rabbi Jonathan Romain of Maidenhead Synagogue, and Imam Qari Asim of the Makkah Mosque in Leeds, told The Times that Christian, Jewish, and Islamic teaching would not be affected by the discovery of alien life.

Meanwhile, Carl Pilcher, a former head of NASA’s Astrobiology Institute, said that the agency was “giving an increased emphasis to questions which before the 20th century had largely been the preserve of philosophy and theology and religion.”

https://www.rt.com/news/544401-nasa-loo ... rs-aliens/
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Post by kmaherali »

The James Webb Space Telescope and a Quest Every Human Shares

Building, launching and deploying the giant observatory required the best of what our species has to offer the cosmos.


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“This is unbelievable. We’re about 600,000 miles from Earth, and we actually have a telescope,” said Bill Ochs, the James Webb Space Telescope’s project manager, earlier this month.Credit...Adriana Manrique Gutierrez/NASA

On Monday, NASA announced that the James Webb Space Telescope had reached the perch from which it could spend as much as 20 years in surveillance of the cosmos. It traveled about a million miles since launching on Dec. 25, and what a journey that has been.

The telescope was launched from French Guiana as a tightly wrapped package of wires, plastic and slabs of gold-plated beryllium. As it journeyed toward its destination, it had to unfold like a robot from the “Transformers” movies and shape-shift into, well, a telescope with a golden 21-foot-wide mirror gliding atop a silver sunshield.

There were 344 things that could have gone wrong during that month — what NASA calls “single point failures” — that would have doomed the mission.

The astronomers were on the edge of their seats.

And so were I and my colleagues. We knew that at any moment a call or a tweet saying something on the telescope had snagged or ripped or frozen, gone offline or just started sending gibberish would plunge us into a heartbroken crisis investigation: Interviewing disappointed and baffled astrophysicists, begging engineers for better explanations about tiny bits of metal or computer algorithms we’d never heard of, covering rounds of commissions, tiger team reports, congressional hearings and outside critics.

Everything about the Webb would be up for grabs: What shortcuts were taken during the decades of effort, by whom? Who had an idea or a suspicion that was ignored? What was the road not taken?


At the risk of jinxing the whole thing, not to mention my journalistic objectivity, I have to say I’m glad it didn’t happen that way. NASA did what it had to do.

And we as humans, temporary inhabitants of a dust mote, as Carl Sagan said, did what we had to do. The Webb telescope is designed to ferret out the very first stars and galaxies that lit up the foggy aftermath of the Big Bang and initiated the grand crescendo of evolution that produced us, among other things, as well as to search for clues to whether the conditions might be right for other creatures’ emergence, on nearby exoplanets.

There was no military or economic advantage in devoting 25 years and $10 billion of national treasure to build a telescope, of all things, devoted not to looking down at our enemies, but out across time and space, trying to decipher the nature and condition of our origins. We all share the quest even if we all don’t get the time and chance to obsess about it.

It’s not just Einstein’s universe, it’s ours too. Our crib and our crypt.

The Webb telescope is now parked in an orbit of L2, a region balanced between the gravity of the sun and Earth, and it will be months before astronomers share the spacecraft’s first images. And it could all still go bad. A tiny uncharted space rock could crash through its sunshield; a solar storm could fritz it; sensitive machinery could break. My very words could jinx it.

In case of failure, everything could still be up for grabs, I believe, except the decision to build such a telescope in the first case. Building it required the best of humans: cooperation and devotion to knowledge, daring and humility, respect for nature and our own ignorance, and the grit to keep picking up the pieces from failure and start again. And again.

“This is unbelievable. We’re about 600,000 miles from Earth, and we actually have a telescope,” Bill Ochs, Webb’s project manager at the Goddard Space Flight Center, said when the telescope finally unfolded its golden wings earlier this month.

We stagger upward under the weight of our knowledge of our own mortality. In the face of the ultimate abyss that is destiny, we can find honor and dignity in the fact that we played the cosmic game to win, trying to know and feel as much as we can in the brief centuries allotted to us.

Once, long ago in another lifetime, I happened to sit next to Riccardo Giacconi, one of the great captains of Big Science and later to receive the Nobel Prize in Physics, on a flight to a conference we were both attending in San Diego. At the time he was with the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and looking forward to the launch of his dream project, a satellite — later named the Einstein Observatory — that would record images of X-rays from violent objects like black holes.

Dr. Giacconi, however, had proposed naming his satellite Pequod, after the doomed ship Ahab had commanded in pursuit of Moby Dick, much to the amusement and bafflement of his colleagues.

So I asked him why he wanted to name his dream creation after a doomed whaler.

Dr. Giacconi replied that he liked the connection of the whaling story to New England. Then he began a disquisition about Dante, of all people. During the poet’s tour of hell in the Inferno section of the “Divine Comedy,” he finds Odysseus being consumed by flames, as punishment for his sins, schemes and scams during the Trojan War and subsequent wandering trip back home.

Odysseus tells the story of his life and voyages, how he got back to Ithaca but was then bored and set off with his men on a voyage through the Pillars of Hercules into the great unknown western sea. When his crew got nervous and wanted to turn back, he told them to buck up.

“Consider the seed from which you sprang,” Dr. Giacconi intoned. “You were not made to live like brutes, but to pursue virtue and knowledge.”

Then a great storm rises up and sinks them.

“The search for knowledge does not always end happily,” Dr. Giacconi laughed.

Onward anyway.
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Post by kmaherali »

What’s So Hard About Understanding Consciousness?

We brought Antonio Damasio and Anil Seth together to share their insights into neuroscience’s big question.

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Because you are reading these words, it’s safe to say you possess consciousness—that magic of awareness that you are alive and awake, and that you are you, not somebody else. Consciousness is the scent of pine in winter, the sense of the color blue, the memory of a first kiss, the thrill of an exceptional performance—all of the rich and ineffable qualitative experiences that make a life worth living and that slide through time, knitting one moment to the next.

But while we may all be intimately familiar with what consciousness feels like, explaining why it exists or how it arises from physical and biological processes is another matter. These questions are as old as Aristotle, and yet millennia on, we still don’t have any definitive answers. For much of history, the nature of consciousness was the purview almost exclusively of philosophers and poets. It was not taken seriously as a legitimate subject for scientific inquiry because it was difficult, if not impossible, to do experiments. But over the past three decades, that has changed, as neuroscientists began to make some real headway in understanding the neural bases of consciousness-related phenomena.
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COMMON GROUND: Neuroscientists Antonio Damasio (left) and Anil Seth believe the “hard problem” of consciousness—how qualitative experience arises from physical material—is not so hard after all. Photo of Damasio by Luiz Carvalho; Photo of Seth by Lovis Osternick

Two neuroscientists who’ve made major contributions to elucidating consciousness, of different generations, are Antonio Damasio and Anil Seth. In books that include Descartes’ Error and The Strange Order of Things, Damasio, 77, has plumbed the neural basis for feelings, emotions, and decision-making. Seth, 49, has left his mark on the field by illuminating the brain mechanisms behind perceptual experience, particularly vision, and the experience of selfhood. Both scientists published books late last year that deepen and expand their explorations of the brain and consciousness. In Being You: A New Science of Consciousness, Seth lays out his theory of “controlled hallucination”—that our perceptual experiences of the world are inventions of the brain governed by a system of predictions—and makes the case that consciousness is intimately tied to the interior of the living body. In Feeling & Knowing: Making Minds Conscious, Damasio sets out to demystify consciousness, which he argues evolved from primordial feelings such as pain and hunger, interactive processes that pair the physical with the mental and arise from a chemical orchestra deep in the viscera.

We arranged a Zoom conversation between the two scientists. We asked them to share their respective views of consciousness, ask questions of one another, and offer their wagers on whether we can ultimately solve this hardest of problems.

Full conversation at:

https://nautil.us/whats-so-hard-about-u ... ess-13877/
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Re: FAITH AND SCIENCE

Post by kmaherali »

Book

Islam & Science

Muslim Responses to Science’s Big Questions


Table of Contents

The Task Force on Islam and Science 4
Foreword: The Relationship between Islam & Science in Recent Centuries 8by: Ekmeleddin İhsanoğlu, Chair of the Task ForcePreface: An Important Question of our Time 19by: Tuncay Zorlu, Co-Convenor of the Task ForceMuslim Responses to Science’s Big Questions: Summary Report 21by: Usama Hasan & Athar Osama, Convenor and Project Director

The Istanbul Declaration on Islam and Science 89
Contributed Essays:
The relationship between science and Islam: Islamic perspectives and 93frameworks
by: Mohd. Hazim Shah

Islam’ and ‘Science’: Freedom, Justice and Meaning 107
by: Farid Panjwani

Modern Science and Challenges to Some Islamic Theological 115
Doctrines
by: Mehdi Golshani

Has Science Killed the Belief in God? by: Basil Altaie 129

Evolution and Islam: Is there a contradiction?by: Rana Dajani 142

Islam, Science, Methodological Naturalism, Divine Action, and 152
Miracles
by: Nidhal Guessoum

The (Im)Possible Medicalization of “Breathing the Soul” (Nafkh 162Al-Rūḥ)
Contemporary Islamic Debates on the Beginning ofHuman Life
by: Mohammed Ghaly

Al-Ghazali’s Methodical Engagement with the Scientific Tradition 175
by: Afifi Al-Akiti

Meeting Muslims Meeting Science by:Willem B. Drees 186

Reflections on Task Force Constributions by: Philip Clayton 193

APPENDIX A:
Translation of a standard mediaeval text of Ash’ari 203
theology regarding naturalism and causality
APPENDIX B:
A mediaeval text on the soul and spirit 206
APPENDIX C:
Primary Theological Objections to Evolution and 208
Scientific Responses
APPENDIX D:
Extract from Basil Altaie, God, Nature and the Cause 213

The entire book can be read at:

https://www.academia.edu/39876520/Islam ... card=title
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Re: FAITH AND SCIENCE

Post by kmaherali »

Does spirituality belong at the doctor's office?

(CNN)Life's big questions drew Dr. Victoria Sweet to a career in medicine. "Your job is to deal with birth, suffering and death. It just captivated my imagination," said Sweet, now a bestselling author and associate clinical professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco.

"Medicine attracted me because I felt it was about the realest thing you could do," she said. As a physician, Sweet cared for people through the most difficult -- or most joyous -- moments of their lives.

Across her career in medicine though, Sweet said she watched the field eroded by a growing emphasis on efficiency and profit.

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Dr. Victoria Sweet says creating space for a real, person-to-person connection is essential in medicine.

Physicians now spend more than half their time on tasks that aren't face-to-face with patients, a 2017 study found. Even during in-person consultations, a 2020 study said, a large proportion of physician time is devoted to using electronic health records.

Sweet saw a shift from more holistic medicine rooted in caring to an industry treating health care as a commodity. "It's a commodification that, I think, completely leaves out the essentials," she said.

What's essential, Sweet said, is creating space for a real, person-to-person connection in medicine. "The essence of what goes on between doctor and patient is very profound," she said. "That space, to me, seems sacred."

At the 10th annual Conference on Religion and Medicine http://www.medicineandreligion.com/ this month, Sweet will give a plenary talk titled "Space for the Sacred in the Care of the Sick." The conference highlights scholarship focused on the intersection of health care and religion, including some organizations that argue we must make room for both the sacred -- and for spirituality -- in the doctor's office.

When medical care was spiritual care

"Modern medicine is secular," said Gary Ferngren, a professor emeritus of history at Oregon State University who studies the history of medicine and religion. "Since the late 19th century, it has developed very rapidly in cutting itself off from any religious or spiritual values."

For much of human history, societies used religious frameworks to understand the meaning of disease and pain, Ferngren has written. Illness could be attributed to causes such as a magical curse or divine punishment.

A more up-to-date understanding of disease gradually replaced those views. Today's doctors are -- thankfully -- unlikely to prescribe an exorcism or suggest patients make sacrifices to Asclepius, the Greco-Roman god of medicine.

Five stages of grief, and how to get through them
Five stages of grief, and how to get through them

But Ferngren has written that the historic presence of religion in the sick room also offered patients tools for grappling with questions still relevant in the 21st century. At a time when health care and religion were more closely aligned, a patient might receive not only medication when consulting a doctor but also religious consolation, comfort and meaning.

"What happens at death's door?" Ferngren said. "To a person lying in bed and wondering what kind of future there is, it's tremendously important."

Inviting spiritual care into the consultation room

In fact, many patients would like to discuss spiritual matters with their health care providers: One study found that 83% of patients want physicians to ask about their spiritual beliefs, especially when they're facing life-threatening illness, serious medical conditions and bereavement.

"A high percentage of people, if they're in the hospital for a physical illness, would like to talk to their physician about spiritual matters and have a conversation," said Dr. John Graham, president and CEO of the Institute for Spirituality and Health at the Texas Medical Center, a cosponsor of this month's conference.

Graham has defined spirituality as "our innate ability to connect -- to connect to others, to our environment, to the transcendent mystery and to our true, deepest self." Like Sweet, he said modern medicine's focus on efficiency leaves out that broader view of patients' well-being and their spiritual and religious needs during illness.

Addressing such needs is known as spiritual care, which Graham said most physicians don't have adequate training to do.

When working with medical students today, Graham shares lists of questions that might open the door to a deeper conversation with patients. "They could ask: 'In the past, when you go through a difficult problem, where have you found the strength to get through?' " Graham said.

For some patients, the answer is religion. Some patients are glad to share their own faith practices, Graham said. Or they might mention a connection to nature. Others talk about meditation or a trusted family member they've looked to for guidance.

Each patient brings different beliefs to the conversation. And advocates believe that all individuals -- including atheists -- can benefit from access to spiritual care.

Even an atheist can face 'spiritual distress'

"Atheists, religious, humanists -- everyone has that spirituality or inner life, the need for a sense of meaning and purpose," said Christina Puchalski, a physician and the founder of the George Washington Institute for Spirituality and Health. "If they're feeling a lack of that, it could be a source of spiritual distress."

Spiritual distress has been shown to be especially high in patients coping with serious and chronic illness, Puchalski said, and addressing it is critical in the case of palliative care.

"People who have high spiritual distress -- that's often linked to higher depression and anxiety," she said. "People who have high spiritual well-being also tend to have better health overall."

Spiritual interventions for cancer patients -- who are especially vulnerable to spiritual distress -- are associated with lower depression, anxiety and hopelessness, according to one 2018 meta-analysis. Another study of older adults found that spiritual well-being is linked to health-related quality of life, a measure of physical and mental health over time.

What does spiritual care look like in practice? It starts with the kinds of questions Graham discusses with medical students. Along with several colleagues, Puchalski developed the FICA Spiritual History Tool to help practitioners better understand their patients' spiritual beliefs. It contains questions that invite patients to ask for the kind of care they want, such as "How would you like me, as your health care provider, to address spiritual issues in your health care?"

When it comes to measuring impacts, however, Puchalski said clinical research into spiritual care is an area with lots of room for growth.
"It's a relatively new, up-and-coming field," she said. "When it comes to looking at spiritual distress as a clinical marker -- we are involved right now in trying to build that field of research."

Sign up for CNN's Stress, But Less newsletter. Our six-part guide will inform and inspire you to reduce stress while learning how to harness it.

Is the world facing a crisis of spiritual distress?

And for the last two years, Puchalski said, the Covid-19 pandemic has driven a surge of interest in the field of spiritual care. "All of a sudden people were dealing with really intense existential and spiritual distress," she said, pointing to the loneliness and grief the pandemic has brought.

Millions lost loved ones. Health care providers watched patients slip away in hospital intensive care unit settings without family members present. And people around the world grappled with questions about death and dying.

"People have dealt with those questions for centuries, right?" Puchalski said. "It's just that in the course of the pandemic, all of us have been affected whether we're facing serious illness or not."

Mindfulness matters: 5 ways to get started with mindfulness
Mindfulness matters: 5 ways to get started with mindfulness

While research into the fallout of Covid-19 is still young, one study in Croatia found that spiritual quality of life was linked to better mental health outcomes and emotional stability amid the pandemic.

For health care providers, taking time to look inward can make a difference, too, said Puchalski, who has introduced a professional development program called Reflection Rounds designed to help them do just that.

"Many of us have been called to serve others," she said, pointing to the wave of burnouts amid health care workers around the globe. "Serving people -- it impacts us."

But the effect of Covid-19 on spiritual well-being isn't just about distress and languishing. Puchalski said she also sees room for positive change as people around the world look for solutions to problems the pandemic brought to the fore. She said she hopes it will spur growth as the world looks ahead.

"I see people searching for meaning and purpose," Puchalski said. "And I'm seeing a sort of desire towards kindness, which is a beautiful thing."
Jen Rose Smith is a writer in Vermont. Read more of her work at www.jenrosesmith.com

https://www.cnn.com/2022/03/13/health/s ... index.html
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Re: FAITH AND SCIENCE

Post by kmaherali »

I Just Want to Know What I’m Made Of

It’s time to admit quantum theory has reached a dead end. Can we please go back to the math?


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I have been in love with quantum theory since before I started my Ph.D. in the subject over 30 years ago. Suddenly, however, I feel like we should maybe take a break.

The trigger for this quantum of doubt was a new paper. There’s nothing particularly special about it; it’s just a proposal for an experiment that might tell us something more about how the universe works. But, to me, it felt like the final straw. It has opened my eyes to the possibility that, without radical change, quantum physics may forever let me down.

Essentially, I just want to know what I am made of. One hundred years ago this year, the Danish physicist Niels Bohr received the Nobel prize “for his services in the investigation of the structure of atoms.” But I’m still waiting for a straight answer as to what the structure of the atoms that make up my body is. Quantum theory seems to promise an answer that it can’t deliver, at least not in any way that I can comprehend. As Bohr once put it, “When it comes to atoms, language can be used only as in poetry.”

Bohr is often fêted as the founding father of quantum theory and was one of the champions of its oddness. It’s true that quantum is both mysterious and attractive—as enigmatic as the Mona Lisa’s smile. However, there seems to be something troubling about the quantum grin. Whether probing it through theory or through experiment, we quickly arrive at an impasse: We can’t use any of the results to tell us what stuff actually is.

The trouble starts with the workhorse of quantum theory: Erwin Schrödinger’s famous wave equation. It assumes that all quantum stuff can be mathematically modeled as if it were a wave. Schrödinger’s equation is a huge success: It allows us to predict, for instance, exactly what colors of light an atom will emit when stimulated with electromagnetic energy.

However, the beautiful utility of this equation, which is put to work by physicists every day around the world, masks its enigmatic silence about the actual nature of the atoms whose behavior it so successfully describes. While Einstein won a Nobel Prize for proving that light is composed of particles that we call photons, Schrödinger’s equation characterizes light and indeed everything else as wave-like radiation. Can light and matter be both particle and wave? Or neither? We don’t know.

More...

https://nautil.us/i-just-want-to-know-w ... -of-14367/
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How science is like mythology when it pushes the boundaries of the known.

Post by kmaherali »

As Creation Stories Go, the Big Bang Is a Good One

How science is like mythology when it pushes the boundaries of the known.


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Deep in the depths of time, there was the Ocean of Milk. The gods and demons both desired amrita, the nectar of immortal life, which could only be obtained from the great ocean. The supreme god Vishnu told them to use Mount Mandara as a churning stick, and to rotate the mountain with the giant serpent, Vasuki, as a rope. For a thousand years, they churned until amrita emerged. The gods and demons fought and quarreled over amrita until the gods prevailed. The churning produced other wonders: the physician of the gods Dhanvantari, the goddess of riches Lakshmi, the goddess of misfortune Jyestha, the white elephant, the seven-headed horse Uchchaisrava, and a wish-granting tree. And finally came the moon, Chandra.

More recently, modern scientists are churning the universe for another treasure. They are searching for the ripples in spacetime, known as gravitational waves, leftover from the primordial big bang. Scientists believe that when our universe was less than a second old, it underwent a radical phase transition, dramatically inflating in size. That event shaped the future evolution of the cosmos, planting the seeds that would one day grow to become galaxies and clusters. That cataclysmic event, perhaps the most powerful episode the universe has ever experienced, left nothing else behind but the most subtle churning of gravitational waves. Scientists hope to find these gravitational waves because the earliest moments of the Big Bang are shrouded in mystery, and perhaps the only relics of that era are those faint whispers of gravity.

“Why is there something rather than nothing?”

The first story comes to us from the Hindu mythological tradition, and the second from modern cosmology. Both are creation stories, the story that defines how everything—literally, everything—came into being. Creation stories are perhaps the most important stories of all. As the great German philosopher Martin Heidegger pointedly asked, “Why is there something rather than nothing?” The creation story explains why there is this rather than not-this. It separates us from the unknown, from the dark. Without creation, without cosmology, we are lost.

You might think the two stories don’t merit comparison. One is a legend handed down through time, and one is based on the observational study of our cosmos. But the stories have more in common than we may want to let on. In particular, both propose some entity or act or form that already exists, and through some process the world as we know it emerges. In other words, all creation stories make some assumption about the (primordial) cosmos, and the story goes from there. This is as true for the Hindu tradition as it is for Big Bang cosmology, and all the stories struggle to move to a point before the beginning.

Viewed through the lens of this commonality—this struggle to explain the most primordial of primordials—the ideas in physical cosmology, which are technical and mathematical, take on a new character: They can be viewed as rehashes of the old mythological stories. Scientists are human, and they are all drawing from the same well of inspiration as everybody else. Mythological creation stories and the scientific Big Bang theory aren’t in competition; in their shared attempts to explain the before-the-beginning, they are intertwined at a fundamental, human level, and it’s here where science can gain its greatest inspiration.

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CREATION: In a Hindu creation story, gods and demons churn the Ocean of Milk to bring forth amrita, the nectar of immortal life. The churning also gives life to the gods and goddesses of healing, riches, and misfortune. Photo by V&A Museum / Wikimedia.

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https://nautil.us/as-creation-stories-g ... one-16149/
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Searching for What Connects Us, Carlo Rovelli Explores Beyond Physics

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The physicist ranges widely — from black holes to Buddhism to climate change — in his new book, “There Are Places in the World Where Rules Are Less Important Than Kindness.”

The nature of time. Black holes. Ancient philosophers. The struggle for democracy. Climate change. Buddhist philosophy. In his new collection of essays and articles, Carlo Rovelli, one of the world’s most renowned physicists, broadens his writing to include questions of politics, justice and how we live now.

“I look at myself as much more than a physicist,” he said in an interview at his home in London, Ontario, on a cold, calm day in February. The new book, “There Are Places in the World Where Rules Are Less Important Than Kindness,” published by Riverhead on May 10, is the result of all his “wandering around and being curious in this space of culture at large,” he added.

There is a thread, however, through the myriad topics he covers: the interdependence of all things — and what makes that interdependence profound.

A theoretical physicist and professor at the Centre de Physique Théorique at Aix-Marseille University in France and an adjunct professor of philosophy at Western University in Canada, Rovelli has spent much of his career on the theory of loop quantum gravity, an area of theoretical physics that seeks to unite Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity with quantum mechanics.

Under the theory, the universe would not be continuous, like, say, the sea looks from the shore. Rather, it would be composed of what Rovelli calls “elementary grains” or “quanta of space.” After thinking about his books and discussing their ideas with him, I started to think of the universe as if it were a vast sea of beads, where everything that happens, each “grain,” is a bead directly affecting the next.

Rovelli’s thinking on the nature of time began much earlier — and the story, which he described in “A Stupefying Story,” a piece included in his new book, reveals much about his approach to life and writing. He first meaningfully considered the nature of time during his psychedelic experiences as a teen. The “magical nights” he experienced, he wrote, left him “with a calm awareness of the prejudices of our rigid mental categories.”

Part of what is so appealing about Rovelli’s writing, said Abhay Ashtekar, who is the Evan Pugh professor of physics and the founding director of the Penn State Institute for Gravitation and the Cosmos, is that he “has a knack for communicating to the public very deep ideas in reasonably simple terms.”

Ashtekar read and enjoyed “Seven Brief Lessons on Physics,” a previous book of Rovelli’s, and the one he is best known for. But he’d also seen that “knack” work with his family, he said.

“There was a time in which my 91-year-old mother-in-law and my 19-year-old son were reading the book,” Ashtekar said, adding that they’d picked up the book independently.

Rovelli greeted me at the door as I took off my snow-covered shoes. Looking out from under an unruly mop of gray hair, he seemed playfully affable behind his cloth mask. We made our way to a table next to tall windows. Bright, soft snow blanketed the outside.

Our conversation was as broad as the reach of ideas in his book. We started out talking about how Dante Alighieri and Einstein shared similar conceptions of the universe. (There’s a piece on this in the new book, too.) Soon after, he mentioned Che Guevara and Allen Ginsberg — heroes of his, he said.

Rovelli only started writing for the public in his 50s, after decades as a researcher. He began with articles about major topics in physics for the Italian newspaper Il Sole 24 Ore. Readers liked the pieces, which led to “Seven Brief Lessons on Physics,” a book first published in Italy in 2014, and in the U.S. in 2016. Since then, he’s written more books, including “The Order of Time,” “Reality Is Not What It Seems” and “Helgoland.”

He writes for two very different types of readers, he said: experts who want a fresh perspective and people who know little to nothing of physics but are curious about its big ideas. But he wants to go beyond just reframing those ideas, he added.

“I want to present science the way I understand it after working 40 years in it, so it’s obviously not the same because I’ve been thinking and rethinking and rethinking,” he said. “There is always a little — sometimes a strong — personal take into things.”

Perhaps it’s Rovelli’s writing style, along with his facility with ideas, that sets him apart from other popular science writers. “For some readers,” he said, “the writing in my books is what matters to them. And the truth is I use analogies, some poetical, but it’s not coloring or embellishment. It’s actually where I’m trying to go, trying to transmit some emotion, some sense of marvel, some sense of the core.”

Simon Carnell, along with his late wife, Erica Segre, translated five of Rovelli’s books, including his new one. He said in an email that he sees Rovelli’s style as “highly compressed without ever becoming dry or airless.” He added that Rovelli “has the scientific instinct to avoid and pare away every superfluous word (including of the translations of his work), but more importantly, a writerly ability to do so in the service of a style that is elegant, lively and above all engaging.”

Beyond offering Rovelli’s heady but lean synthesis of science and the humanities, his new book also features pieces dealing with politics, climate change and justice. Dean Rickles, a professor of history and philosophy of modern physics at the University of Sydney, said in an interview over Zoom that this larger project of Rovelli’s, with its theme of interdependence, is particularly compelling.

“He’s concerned now with justice and with peace and with climate. He has become a sort of very political scientist,” he said. “I think you can boil it all down, actually, to sort of a quality, like a democracy in all things … We’re all interdependent.”

Maybe the best way to think of Rovelli’s worldview is through the work of Nāgārjuna, a second-century Indian Buddhist philosopher he admires. Author of “The Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way,” Nāgārjuna taught that there is no unchanging, underlying, stable reality — that nothing is self-contained, that all is variable, interdependent. Reality, in short, is always something other than what it just was, or seemed to be, he argues. To define it is to misunderstand it.

In “Emptiness is Empty: Nāgārjuna,” another piece from his new book, Rovelli writes about how the philosopher’s conception of reality provokes a sense of awe, a sense of serenity, but without consolation: “To understand that we do not exist is something that may free us from attachments and from suffering; it is precisely on account of life’s impermanence, the absence from it of every absolute, that life has meaning.”

Before leaving Rovelli’s home that day, I took another look at the concealing snow outside. Reality seemed at once more compelling and more mysterious. Hesitating, I asked him if he thought there was any grand, capital “T” truth. He indulged me, then paused for a moment.

“Capital ‘T,’ ‘the Truth’ … I don’t think it’s interesting,” he said. “The interesting thing is the small ‘t.’ That’s my take on it.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/05/book ... iversified
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STUDY: ACCOUNTABILITY TO GOD MEANS A GREATER SENSE OF WELL-BEING

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Researchers found that the association between accountability to the divine and sense of psychological well-being was stronger in those who prayed more

A recently published study sought to measure the difference that a sense of accountability to God made in terms of psychological well-being, as distinct from church attendance, prayer and meditation:

Religious believers who embrace accountability to God (or another transcendent guide for life) experience higher levels of three of the four variables of psychological well-being – mattering to others, dignity and meaning in their lives, though not happiness – according to a study from researchers with Baylor University, Westmont College and Hope College.

The study also found that this relationship is stronger among those who pray more often, suggesting that accountability coupled with communication may be a powerful combination for well-being.

LORIE FOGLEMAN, BAYLOR UNIVERSITY, “STUDY EXAMINES LINK BETWEEN ACCOUNTABILITY TO GOD AND PSYCHOLOGICAL WELL-BEING” AT NEUROSCIENCE NEWS (MARCH 2, 2022)

The data for the study, “Perceptions of Accountability to God and Psychological Well-Being Among US Adults” in Journal of Religion and Health relies on data from the 2017 Baylor Religion Survey, a national survey of American religious beliefs, values and behaviors.

Woman pray with bible, Asian woman believe in the prayer to God, Christian student pray for study to pass the exam in the library at the college .Bible and christian study concept
One of the study authors commented,

“People who embrace theistic accountability see themselves as answerable to God,” said co-author Blake Victor Kent, Ph.D., assistant professor of sociology at Westmont College. “They welcome responsibilities that are associated with their faith and view accountability to God as a gift that helps them lead happy and successful lives. Accountability has been examined philosophically as a virtue relevant to the spiritual life, but until now no one had quantified it.”

LORIE FOGLEMAN, BAYLOR UNIVERSITY, “STUDY EXAMINES LINK BETWEEN ACCOUNTABILITY TO GOD AND PSYCHOLOGICAL WELL-BEING” AT NEUROSCIENCE NEWS (MARCH 2, 2022) THE
That’s an interesting omission in the literature considering that religious scriptures stress the need for accountability.

Why don’t the people who feel more accountable experience greater happiness?

… the researchers noted that the results for happiness were significant when they excluded other religious items from the analysis. This suggests that accountability matters but that it is also related to other facets of religious life such as the social aspects of attendance, which could matter more for happiness as part of a person’s psychological well-being.

“Further, it may be that happiness varies more on a daily basis compared with the other outcomes and may therefore be more strongly correlated with social and psychological factors that change quickly from day to day compared with relatively stable characteristics like accountability to God,” the researchers wrote.

LORIE FOGLEMAN, BAYLOR UNIVERSITY, “STUDY EXAMINES LINK BETWEEN ACCOUNTABILITY TO GOD AND PSYCHOLOGICAL WELL-BEING” AT NEUROSCIENCE NEWS (MARCH 2, 2022)
In short, a sense of accountability to God was not, in itself, a source of happiness; the happiness came from other aspects of the respondents’ faith such as the sense that one matters to others and of dignity and meaning. In any event, in a world where much is going wrong, a person who experiences a sense of accountability may find much to be unhappy about.

https://mindmatters.ai/2022/03/study-ac ... ell-being/
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What Is Time?

Post by kmaherali »

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The more closely we observe the present moment, the more amorphous it becomes.

I think the flow of time is not part of the fundamental structure of reality,” theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli tells me. He is currently working on a theory of quantum gravity in which the variable of time plays no part. And throughout our conversation, I’m trying to get my mind around the idea that even though the universe is made up of “events,” as Carlo explains, a single interval between two events can have different values. There is no central clock, its hands ticking a steady beat for the universe to march along to, moving in one direction from the past into the future.

The prospect that our experience of time may not correspond to an underlying reality has fascinated me for as long as I can remember, as the idea connects two of the most intriguing topics—time and consciousness. Inspired by my recent conversations with Carlo and others in the production of my podcast documentary series, I’ve been thinking more about where the two phenomena overlap.

The more closely we observe the present moment, the more amorphous it becomes. It vanishes as we reach out to touch it, transforming into the next moment, and the next … When we look out at the ocean, we naturally perceive the waves while understanding (both intellectually and intuitively) that there is no real “thing” that is a wave. The concept is useful shorthand for a dynamic phenomenon that occurs in nature. So too with the human brain, which is an ever-changing symphony of electrical firing among billions of neurons.

Contrary to our everyday intuition, there isn’t an entity persisting through time in the form of a static “self.” All our conscious experiences are being generated anew by dynamic neuronal activity. Like an ocean wave, your “self” is an endlessly fluctuating process. Memories trail along from the past, and those memories impact your experience in this moment, but each moment of your experience still depends on the exact state of your brain at that particular point in time.

We’re always residing in the here and now, yet each moment is instantaneously swept away by a ghostly breeze. There it goes. How long did it last? The more focused our attention is on our experience through time, the faster the moments rush by. A raging river. Yet, a vast, peaceful stillness rides along the never-ending stream. We are eternally racing toward the future—yet not moving at all. There’s no traveling forward when you are the river.

I often wonder if time is our small keyhole into a deeper reality—just a glimpse of the vast structure of the universe. Could time be an illusion of sorts? Through the various attempts to understand the implications of quantum mechanics, many physicists have become convinced that spacetime is emergent—that both space and time are manifestations of a more fundamental reality. In a 2014 lecture at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, the prominent theorist Nima Arkani-Hamed declared it plainly: “Almost all of us very strongly believe that spacetime really doesn’t exist.”

Whatever is true about the fundamental reality, the space we seem to be moving through clearly represents something about the world. However, as we’ve come to understand, the way our brains process incoming information often creates a distorted impression of what’s actually “out there.”

In a 2016 Nautilus essay, “Let’s Rethink Space,” science journalist George Musser uses a musical analogy to show how what appears to us to be spatial distance might in fact be a difference in energy:

Sounds of long and short wavelengths are oblivious to each other; if you sound a deep bass note and a high treble pitch simultaneously, each ripples through the room as though it were the only sound in the world … These waves overlap in the three dimensions of space through which they propagate, yet they’re independent of each other, as if they were located in different places. In a sense, you can think of the sound waves as residing 14 centimeters apart within a fourth spatial dimension.

But harder still is the project of constructing an analogy that helps us wrap our minds around the possible misrepresentation of time in our experience. In my efforts to understand what it would mean for the flow of time to be an illusion, the closest visualization I’ve been able to create is that of a web of nodes in which we experience only one node at a time. At each locus, all the other nodes become inaccessible to us, as if a spotlight were continually traveling across this “web of time,” inch by inch, painting our reality. If you were to experience a structure on this web —such as node a, node a, node f; node a, node a, node f—you might interpret the experience as “two node a’s cause a node f” when, in fact, the whole web of nodes already exists in its entirety. The implicit causality would not apply at a deeper level. Causality through time would still illuminate “connections,” it’s just that the underlying reality of these connections would reveal a structure vastly different from the one we intuit—that is, a universe with a flow of time, where the past is set in stone, the future is undetermined, and the present is the only true “reality.”

In his most recent book, Einstein’s Unfinished Revolution, physicist Lee Smolin describes the conclusions that his colleague Julian Barbour has reached about the nature of time:

Barbour insists that the passage of time is an illusion and that reality consists of nothing but a vast pile of moments, each a configuration of the whole universe. You now are experiencing a moment. Now you are experiencing a different moment. According to Barbour, both moments exist eternally and timelessly, in the pile of moments. Reality is nothing but this frozen collection of moments outside time … The moments all coexist, and each is a configuration of the whole universe.

Smolin himself holds a different belief, concluding that whereas space is not fundamental, time is still part of the fundamental story. But Smolin’s work, too, reflects the degree to which the true nature of reality is at odds with our day-to-day intuitions. In his book, he depicts the universe this way:

Your view of the world is like a film projected on a two-dimensional sphere, which we call the sky … Hypothesize that all that the universe consists of is these skies—each one the view of some event. Rather than construct the views from the causal relations, reverse things and derive the causal relations and everything else from the views.

In these musings I’m often left wondering to what degree our conscious experience of the flow of time is responsible for our confusion about it. Is it possible that experiencing a deeper structure of the universe is what we’re calling time? Are time and consciousness perhaps two sides of the same coin?

Whatever turns out to be true about the nature of reality, in every moment of our lives we have firsthand knowledge of a simple truth: Circumstances have come together to create an experience of witnessing the universe unfold from within, however limited our perspective. How and why may always remain mysteries—perhaps by definition, as Smolin’s skies suggest—but in the meantime, we can revel in the wondrous view.

Annaka Harris is the New York Times bestselling author of Conscious: A Brief Guide to the Fundamental Mystery of the Mind. She is an editor and consultant for science writers, specializing in neuroscience and physics, and her work has appeared in The New York Times. Annaka is the author of the children’s book I Wonder, a collaborator on the Mindful Games Activity Cards, by Susan Kaiser Greenland, and a volunteer meditation teacher for the Inner Kids organization.

https://nautil.us/what-is-time-17483/
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The Lonely Planet

Post by kmaherali »

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The Lonely Planet
The famous physicist Max Planck said
“You cannot get behind consciousness” …

Planet Earth sits in the Milky Way Galaxy. There are over 400 billion suns in our galaxy. Our next-door neighbor Andromeda, has a similar number of stars…

And that is just two Galaxies out of two trillion Galaxies in the KNOWN Universe.There are uncountable trillions of planets, with an estimated 60 billion habitable planets in our own galaxy…

…and that is only point zero one percent of the Universe

The other 99.9% is invisible interstellar dust…unknown and probably unknowable…And yet, that so-called invisible vast emptiness is the ground of all creation, the ground of our very EXISTENCE!

That emptiness, the so-called Vacuum, is Full!
It’s a Plenum!
The source of everything in the known Universe,
Consciousness itself!
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If you ask physicists what the Universe is made from, the answer you get is NO-THING!

So then, why does our so-called physical reality of space time look like it does? Why is it that the atoms and molecules in our brains create an experience of 3-dimensional space time, the experience of your own body, the experience of your mind, the experience of everything around us that we encounter daily…experiences that create the illusion of manifest reality?

That is what science calls
The Hard Problem of Consciousness
The so-called Mind Matter Problem

Most scientists take the view that this is unsolvable! But unsolvable only if your world view is to take Matter as primary, foundational! If one takes the reverse view, and is prepared to make the big shift, that Matter is secondary, and make Consciousness primary, then Consciousness becomes fundamental, and the so-called Hard Problem becomes solvable…

Why?

Because we then perceive matter as emerging from consciousness. So, consciousness becomes primary, matter is secondary and all in the physical world, including our minds, bodies, nature, the entire cosmos is inferred from Consciousness. Essentially, we see Consciousness as permeating everything in the known Universe. Consciousness as prior to space and time. We come to realize that Matter is a human construct, a construct that has come about through our experience of the material world as mis-perceived through our faulty sensory perception. And that misperception comes about because we view Matter through a narrow band of perceptual activity which includes space time, gravity, atoms, quarks, and everything else, which are mere human names, constructs given to modes of knowing in consciousness. Science is a gift in consciousness, all theories are in consciousness, all experiments are in consciousness, all observations are in consciousness, we must not deny the primacy of consciousness…


Science can create models of reality…but it does not access that hidden reality.

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When we focus on Consciousness as the fundamental reality, then there is no misperception.
Even the human brain is an experience in Consciousness.

Out of NO-THING, we become SOME-THING. We are in a continual state of BECOMING…Creatures of process and TRANSFORMATION…Creators of POSSIBILITIES…Creators of a possible FUTURE!

But we must ask, what Future?
Imagine for a moment that we are the only civilization in the milky way galaxy. A lonely plant, apparently living in a very narrow band of ideal conditions….

Imagine that we are responsible for the only civilization in a Galaxy of 400 billion suns.

Surely, that’s a wakeup call if ever there needs to be one! A wake-up call to all who have it within their power to make a difference in this world.

And that includes you, me and just about every able person on the planet.

We could begin by starting to respect nature, respecting each other, respecting this beautiful planet of ours…

There may be other life out there, perhaps other habitable planets, but right now we don’t know this for sure.

Again, lets realize that everything is inferred from consciousness. This should enable us to transcend the veil of form and separation and realize our oneness, our interconnectedness, and that surely will give us the impetus to take care of the one habitable planet we know –

Mother Earth!

"We do not inherit the earth from our ancestors, we borrow it from our children."
Native American Proverb
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This Optical Illusion Has a Revelation About Your Brain and Eyes

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Your pupils may be dilating when you see images like this one as your brain tries to anticipate the near future.

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Akiyoshi Kitaoka

By Richard Sima
June 6, 2022
Do not be alarmed.

The hole you see is not really moving, growing or expanding. The darkness will not swallow you.

The image is actually static, and has much to teach us about how our brains and eyes see the world. In a study published last week in the journal Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, psychologists tested this illusion on 50 men and women with normal vision, and, using an infrared eye tracker, found that the greater a participant’s response to the illusion, the stronger the pupil dilation response.

They also discovered some people — perhaps even you — can’t see it.

In your eyes, the pupils unconsciously adjust to the light in your surroundings, dilating when it is dark to try to capture more light, and constricting when it is bright to prevent overexposure. When you look at this illusion, the hole is not darkening. But the perception that it darkened was enough to make your pupils respond.

“There is no reason per se that the pupil should change in this situation, because nothing is changing in the world,” said Bruno Laeng, a psychology professor at the University of Oslo and an author of the study. “But something clearly has changed inside the mind.”

The researchers hypothesize that the illusion works because the gradient on the central hole makes it look as if the viewer is entering a dark hole or tunnel, prompting the participants’ pupils to dilate. They also found the illusion’s effect varied against different colors and was strongest when the black hole was atop a magenta background.

But not everyone is taken in by the illusion, so if you have no idea what’s going on in these images, you are not alone: 14 percent of participants in the study also did not report seeing it. Dr. Laeng proposes that a minority may, perhaps based on past experience, see the image in only two dimensions.

These latest results comport with a 2012 study in which Dr. Laeng and his colleagues found that the Asahi illusion, which resembles the growing glare of sunlight partly obstructed by trees or clouds, also caused people’s pupils to constrict.

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The “Asahi” illusion also was found to cause people’s pupils to constrict.Credit...Akiyoshi Kitaoka

The new study was “clever” for showing “a physiological indication of the response to the perceived expansion of the dark,” said Dr. Dale Purves, a neurobiologist and professor emeritus who studies visual perception at Duke University. However, “there are much more striking effects” that could have been used to demonstrate the pupillary response.

But this study gets at a fundamental problem all animals, including humans, deal with, Dr. Purves said. While a camera can directly measure the amount of light it is picking up, he said, “we don’t have that physical apparatus, we have no measurement of the world.”

Instead we have “an eye with a brain attached,” Dr. Laeng said. When the eye is confronted with a scene, your brain “is analyzing what it’s seeing and building up, constructing a possible scenario and adapting to it.”

Another famous example is The Dress, a viral photograph that inspired spirited debates in 2015 as to whether an item of clothing was white and gold or blue and black. Dr. Laeng thinks it “is probably the greatest experiment ever in human history, so far at least.”

With the dress, as with the expanding hole illusion, our brains are making assumptions about what is seen based on past experience. Evolutionary history plays a role, too.

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The researchers found the illusion’s effect varied against different colors and was strongest when the black hole was atop a magenta background,Credit...Akiyoshi Kitaoka

“The information we get from the world is quite indeterminate,” Dr. Laeng said. “The brain goes into a constant guessing mode, we have to sort of come up with the best solution, but there are several possibilities for the same type of input.”

Illusions like the expanding hole feed into the debate over whether all perception is, fundamentally, an illusion.

“Everything we perceive is inconsistent with the physical reality of the world,” Dr. Purves said. “Everything we see, whether it’s line length, color, brightness, you name it.”

So, you are not really being tricked; instead, visual illusions help reveal what our mind’s eye is up to by showcasing mismatches between what we see and what is really out there.

One hypothesis, Dr. Laeng said, is that the brain is trying to predict and show us the future.

It takes time for a stimulus, like light, to reach our sensory organs, which need to send it to the brain, which in turn needs to process, make sense of, and do something with that information. And by the time our brain catches up with the present, time has already moved forward, and the world has changed.

To get around this, the brain may be constantly trying to predict a little bit into the future in order to perceive the present.

Seeing the expanding hole illusion is not a flaw, but a feature: It’s the result of your brain’s strategy to navigate an uncertain, ever-changing world, most likely built up from evolutionary history to ultimately help humanity survive. It is adaptive to predict the future by, say, dilating your pupils in anticipation of going somewhere dark.

“It’s a very philosophical question,” Dr. Laeng said. “We do live in a virtual reality, but it’s a pragmatically useful virtual reality.”

So, the world you are seeing is an illusion, but don’t be alarmed.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/06/scie ... 778d3e6de3
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In a Parallel Universe, Another You

Post by kmaherali »

As they probe the secrets of the cosmos, scientists question whether our reality is but one in a multiverse.

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The orbits of stars near a black hole in the Milky Way galaxy.Credit...-/Agence France-Presse, via European Southern Observatory/Afp Via Getty Images

By Michio Kaku
Dr. Kaku is a physicist.

June 20, 2022, 3:00 p.m. ET
This essay is part of a series called The Big Ideas, in which writers respond to a single question: What is reality? You can read more by visiting The Big Ideas series page https://www.nytimes.com/column/the-big- ... is-reality .

When I was 8 years old, a revelation forever changed my life.

The year was 1955, and newspaper headlines announced the death of a renowned scientist. A photo accompanied one article, showing his office desk strewn with papers and books. As I recall, the photo caption noted that among the stacks of material was an unfinished manuscript.

I was captivated by this discovery. What could be so challenging that this man, often hailed as one of the greatest scientists of all time, could not complete this work? I had to find out, and over the years I visited libraries to learn more about him.

His name was Albert Einstein. His unfinished work explored what would be known as the theory of everything, an equation, perhaps no more than an inch long, that would allow us to unify all the laws of physics. It would, as Einstein had hoped, give us a glimpse into the mind of God. “I want to know his thoughts,” he famously said. I was hooked.

Today, many of the world’s top physicists are embarking on this cosmic quest, whose far-reaching reverberations span our understanding of reality and the meaning of existence. It would be the crowning achievement of thousands of years of scientific investigation, since ancient civilizations also wondered how the universe was created and what it is made of. The ultimate goal of the theory of everything is to combine Einstein’s theory of relativity with the bizarre world of quantum theory.

In essence, the theory of relativity delves into the cosmos’s most massive phenomena: things like black holes and the birth of the universe. The domain of relativity is nothing less than the entire cosmos. Quantum theory, on the other hand, explores the behavior of matter on the most minuscule level. Its domain encompasses the tiniest particles of nature, those hidden deep inside the atom.

Unifying these two spheres of thought into a single and coherent theory is an ambitious undertaking, one that builds on and adds to the work that Einstein began. But to do this, scientists must first determine a crucial truth: where the universe came from.

This is where our two spheres of thought pointedly diverge.

If we subscribe to Einstein’s relativity theory, the universe is a bubble of some sort that is expanding. We live on the skin of this bubble, and it exploded 13.8 billion years ago, giving us the Big Bang. This birthed the singular cosmos as we know it.


Quantum theory is based on a radically different picture — one of multiplicity. Subatomic particles, you see, can exist simultaneously in multiple states. Take the electron, a subatomic particle that carries a negative charge. Wondrous devices in our lives, such as transistors, computers and lasers, are all possible because the electron, in some sense, can be in several places at the same time. Its behavior defies our conventional understanding of reality.

Here is the key: In the same way that quantum theory forces us to introduce multiple electrons simultaneously, applying that theory to the entire universe makes us have to introduce multiple universes — a multiverse of universes. By that logic, the solitary bubble introduced by Einstein now becomes a bubble bath of parallel universes, constantly splitting in two or bumping into other bubbles. In this scenario, a Big Bang could perpetually happen in distant regions, representing the collision or merging of these bubble universes.

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Albert Einstein with J. Robert Oppenheimer, known as the father of the atomic bomb, in 1950.Credit...Gertrude Samuels/The New York Times

In physics, the concept of a multiverse is a key element of a leading area of study based on the theory of everything. It’s called string theory, which is the focus of my research. In this picture, subatomic particles are just different notes on a tiny, vibrating string, which explains why we have so many of them. Each string vibration, or resonance, corresponds to a distinct particle. The harmonies of the string correspond to the laws of physics. The melodies of the string explain chemistry.

By this thinking, the universe is a symphony of strings. String theory, in turn, posits an infinite number of parallel universes, of which our universe is just one.

A conversation I once had with the theoretical physicist and Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg illustrates this. Imagine sitting in your living room, he told me, listening to the radio. In the room are the waves from hundreds of different radio stations, but your radio is tuned to just one frequency. You can hear only the station that is coherent to your radio; in other words, it vibrates in unison with your transistors.

Now, imagine your living room is filled with the waves of all the electrons and atoms vibrating in that space. These waves might hint at alternate realities — ones with, say, dinosaurs or aliens — right there in your living room. But it’s difficult to interact with them, because you don’t vibrate coherently with them. We have unfastened ourselves from these alternate realities.

There’s an exercise my colleagues and I sometimes present to our Ph.D. students in theoretical physics. We ask them to solve a problem by calculating the probability that one will wake up on Mars tomorrow. Quantum theory is based on what is known as Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, allowing for a small probability that we can exist even on distant places like Mars. So there’s a tiny but calculable likelihood that our quantum wave will tunnel its way through space-time and wind up there.

But when you do the calculation, you find that for this to happen you’d have to wait longer than the lifetime of the universe. That is, most likely you’ll wake up in your bed tomorrow, not on Mars. To paraphrase the great British geneticist J.B.S. Haldane, reality is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.

It’s been more than six decades since Einstein’s death, yet I keep going back to that photo of his desk that I saw as an 8-year-old, the work he left unfinished and its profound implications. In the quest to meld two opposing perspectives of the universe, we’re left with a host of deeply unsettling questions. Might we also exist in multiple states? What might we be doing if we had chosen a different career? Married someone else? What if we could somehow change important episodes in our past? As Einstein once wrote, “The distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.”

Maybe there are copies of us living entirely different lives. If this theory of everything is correct, then perhaps there is a parallel universe where we are billionaires plotting our next escapade, or where we subsist as vagrants desperately searching for our next meal. Who knows? A simple quantum fork in the road might have made all the difference.

Michio Kaku is a professor of physics at the City University of New York and the author of “The God Equation.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/20/spec ... iversified
kmaherali
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The Biology of Belief: Unleashing the Power of Consciousness, Matter, & Miracles

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Book

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With more than 100,000 copies sold of his self-published book, The Biology of Belief, Bruce Lipton teams up with Hay House to bring his message to an even wider audience. This book is a groundbreaking work in the field of new biology, and it will forever change how you think about thinking. Through the research of Dr. Lipton and other leading-edge scientists, stunning new discoveries have been made about the interaction between your mind and body and the processes by which cells receive information. It shows that genes and DNA do not control our biology, that instead DNA is controlled by signals from outside the cell, including the energetic messages emanating from our thoughts. Using simple language, illustrations, humor, and everyday examples, he demonstrates how the new science of Epigenetics is revolutionizing our understanding of the link between mind and matter and the profound effects it has on our personal lives and the collective life of our species.

https://www.amazon.com/Biology-Belief-U ... 1401923127
kmaherali
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Joined: Thu Mar 27, 2003 3:01 pm

Healing Illness with the Biology of Belief - Dr. Bruce Lipton

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In this empowering interview with Dr. Bruce Lipton you will discover:

- Debunking genetic determinism and how you can change the expression of your genes
- The science of epigenetics and how you change the expression and genetics of the cells
- Why there is NO gene that causes cancer
- Quantum physics principles that are relative for our health and healing
- Anita Moorjani’s story of healing from cancer through her consciousness
- How Adverse Childhood Events and Trauma lead to cancer
- The difference between the conscious and the subconscious mind
- The 3 ways to change the programming in your subconscious mind to create healing in your life
- How to help children who are struggling with their beliefs and their health

-->> Available to watch here for a limited time

https://healthandhealingclub.com/zen/he ... ief-7fd758
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