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Love, Life, Meaning, Zen, and Science, by Norm Bearrentine

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Review of Daniel Dennett’s, From Bacteria to Bach and Back

May 25, 2017 by Norm Bearrentine Leave a Comment

Dennett has ideas about what human beings are and what they are capable of that he wants desperately to maintain against all science and logic. He wants to believe—and wants to convince us—that we are capable of … [Read more...]

Filed Under: 2017 Tagged With: Bayes, brain, consciousness, Daniel Dennett, free will, Mind

Review of Antonio Damasio’s, The Feeling Of What Happens

May 14, 2017 by Norm Bearrentine Leave a Comment

In his introduction Damasio states: “The . . . fact is that consciousness is not a monolith, at least not in humans: it can be separated into simple and complex kinds, and the neurological evidence makes the separation … [Read more...]

Filed Under: 2017 Tagged With: Antonio Damasio, consciousness, Daniel Dennett, Julian Jaynes, Michael Gazzaniga, The Feeling of What Happens, William Calvin

Review of Sam Harris’s Waking Up

September 12, 2014 by Norm Bearrentine Leave a Comment

Sam did a great job of dealing with the complexities of free will in his book by that name, but in Waking Up he is writing about consciousness and the self, which are altogether more difficult subjects, and he flounders. Like … [Read more...]

Filed Under: 2014 Tagged With: brain, Buddhism, consciousness, Eckhart Tolle, free will, Jean Klein, Sam Harris, self, the present moment

Review of Sam Harris’s “Waking Up,” Chapter 1

August 25, 2014 by Norm Bearrentine Leave a Comment

To put Sam’s intentions in my terms, he wants people to learn to access experiences most people’s brains are capable of, but that aren’t widely promoted in western culture. He thinks this will be good for them, and for anyone … [Read more...]

Filed Under: 2014 Tagged With: consciousness, Dogen, Lao Tsu, LSD, MDMA, meditation, mystical, religion, Sam Harris, spiritual, Zen

Buddha: “Resting in the Peace of Immortality”

March 5, 2008 by Norm Bearrentine Leave a Comment

Originally posted on 08-30-07: The title above is a quote from the Buddha, and I read it this morning in Marvin Minsky's latest book, The Emotion Machine. If you're at all interested in how your brain works, what makes your … [Read more...]

Filed Under: 2008 Tagged With: brain, Buddha, consciousness, evolution, Marvin Minsky, reality, The Emotion Machine, universe

Further Exploration: Shifting Attention Away From the Verbal

March 4, 2008 by Norm Bearrentine Leave a Comment

Originally posted on 05-21-07: Yesterday I talked about one of the ways that meditation can improve understanding of our brains—by giving us another perspective on their operations—but there are many other insights … [Read more...]

Filed Under: 2008 Tagged With: attention, brain, consciousness, meditation, peace, perception, verbal activity, word processing

Be Here Now; The Complexity of the Present Moment

March 4, 2008 by Norm Bearrentine Leave a Comment

Originally posted 05-10-07: One of the first books I ever read on meditation was Be Here Now, in the early 70's. Since then I've seen many references to staying in the present moment, paying attention, mindfulness, etc. but … [Read more...]

Filed Under: 2008 Tagged With: attention, brain, complexity, consciousness, meditation, perception

What This Site Is About

When I realized that the idea of god was a joke, I thought that was the end of the story. Later I found that Christianity had shaped my values, and while some were worth keeping, many had lost their foundation—the meaning of life, for example. Something similar happened when I realized that the idea of free will was a joke, and I’ve spent the decades since both those realizations discovering and editing what Julia Galef calls the “orphan beliefs” they left behind. It’s a tricky business, and this blog has been a chronicle of my efforts to puzzle it all out, including reviews of related books. I hope you find it helpful.

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