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The science of the afterlife
If you have a spare 20 minutes during the Christmas break (you are having a Christmas break, aren’t you?) I thoroughly recommend reading the full version of this Times Online article by Bryan Appleyard. I just found it a) was quite insightful about the ways that scientific positions require faith and b) made me feel strangely hopeful.
The world, on the face of it, is made of two ingredients: thoughts and things. A brick, for example, is, on the one hand, a fact in the world and, on the other, a combination of all my feelings about bricks in general and this brick in particular. This is generally regarded as a very odd state of affairs. My thoughts and feelings are as real to me as the brick, but they don’t seem to be made of the same stuff. Indeed, they don’t seem to be made of any stuff. The belief that they aren’t, that the world is made of two different substances — bricks and thoughts of bricks — is called dualism. Dualism is the default human conviction, embraced by religions, philosophies and, in fact, by everybody in their lives — if we didn’t embrace some degree of it, we’d be constantly worried about crashing our cars into other people’s thoughts. Dualism means that the mind and the brain are not made of the same things and therefore in theory, they can be separated, as in NDEs.
How to find things that you have lost
Professor Solomon has the answers. Simple wisdom, clearly stated. Wouldn’t it be nice if everything on the web was this useful?
So why start blogging now?
I’ve had a nagging feeling for some time that I really should have a blog – after all, all the cool kids have been doing it for years*. Trouble is, the fact that everyone else is doing it is pretty much the best guarantee that I won’t do something.
Honestly, I’m terrible; if I’m ordering a meal and more than one person orders the thing I was planning to have, I generally won’t order it, even if I really like it. It’s not single-mindedness; it’s embarrassment.
The obligatory first post
A moment of history. I’ll get better with practice.