mindfulness

Meditation may influence  your career: A group of people working in a call center was given the chance to practise mindfulness to stand the stress at work. What happened was that 80 percent of the people in  the group quit the work. So it can be really helpful to quit something.... I guess the 80% saw the meaningless in disturbing people and wanting them to buy things they don't need. As you know, new things make us happy for a while, than we have to buy something new things, or travel somewhere, or find a new loved one or, or boast with your knowledge about something... Is it really craving that causes suffering? Even craving a permanent self? According, for instance, the German philosopher Thomas Metzinger, we have no self.  We are more interacting processes. Metzinger likes to illustrate this with the "Rubber hand experiment". He wants to combine philosophy with science and experiments that can relate to his thesis. The search for one's own soul...

Is quantum physics the last chance for mystery n our lives? The fact is that no one knows how it works, the only thing we know is that it works. But is it really important for living beings? Is it not only important in the very small world. It seems not so. According to research, birds can navigate, tadpoles can turn to frogs and we can use smell because of quantum physics. Why is that so special? Well that may mean that chance  may play a role in our lives, and that time may be more complicated than we think. It may be that we can influence our brain because of meditation. And by changing our brain, we can even change our past! How? We all know it; there may be different stories about our past. There may be other perspectives. I have written about my memories about my childhood, and after that and after that my siblings have read it, it changed my view about my childhood a bit. A learned to see from my fathers and my mothers point of view of the time I was born,...

Hardcore scientists, as Richard Dawkins, thinks that we don't need them. But it may depend on what we mean with a myth. If we mean a  story, like the ones about Zeus or Indra, it may seem like fantasy. Even the stories in the Bible may look like fiction. But Christian people don't seesv it that way. Why? Because it gives them meaning. I can guess that science gives meaning to Dawkins. Yuval Harari looks at humanism and capitalism as myths and stories. We have to believe in them to make them true. The idea that all people  has the same value, is also an idea, although a good one. The value of a dollar is also fiction that becomes real because we all have the same idea. Myth helps us to distinguish between god and bad. Science can't do that. So it may be good to believe in some myth. Some say that science and the idea of its progress is a kind of religion, that nowadays seem to promise longer life or even eternal life as Ray Kurzweil seems to wish for. H...

Christian de Duve, a Nobel prize winner, speaks about evolution and inevitability. It may be that it's not pure chance that guides evolution. Why did  life and we humans occur here? De Duve opens up for that it was inevitable that we would occur after some billion years of life on earth. In that case, it may be that creatures similar to us lives on other planets far away. But it may also mean that they have destroyed their own civilization. Anyway de Duve tells us that evolution will go on, and disasters as the hurricane Katrina, may push us to go forward. Perhaps will our brains be bigger. Or maybe we will use biotechnology to make us smarter. As de Duve means, evolution has made us smarter in the past, but not more wise.  Maybe we didn't need that in the past. But nowadays phronesis, practical wisdom, is really needed. We are still a quite young race. And we may change a lot. If the brain changes we may see "reality" in very different way. And we for su...

Adam Frank in an interesting figure. Professor of physics and astrobiology at the University of Washington. He  has set up a blog 13.7: Cosmos and Culture   where he and others write about science and culture phenomena as spirituality. He emphasises that we need things like values, sacredness and mythology to guide us and science. He has practised Buddhist meditation for many years, and maybe because of that he is open for questions a bit outside of mainstream scie He says he is an atheist but interested in spirituality. He has even been an adviser for the film "Doctor Strange".  "You wonder what I see in your future?", asks the woman in Nepal to Dr Strange and she answers; "possibility". of course, that is inspired of the wave function in quantum physics. An electron seems to be real until it is measured.  Before that it's a wave of possibilities. In a way that can is like when you in daily life becomes like the people around you look...

What is that? We better ask Jeremy Lent. He has written a book called "The pattern instinct" which has had good reviews. The Western thought, which started with Platon, is the web of meaning that we in west live in now. Plato wrote about the word of ideas. The material world is just a pale copy of the ideal world. Christianity continued on that path: God is above everything, but the immaterial soul connects us with heaven. Descartes described animals as machines. Richard Dawkins does it too, anyway regarding bats. The mind, or our  thought and intellect is the key to humanism and that's what differs us from  nature and animals. We humans with souls are one thing and the nature another, so why not exploit it? Lent want us to understand the age that we are living  in; Anthropocene. An age that search solutions for everything within technology and science: If the bees starts to disappear, why not make robot bies? But of course Lent prefer living bees. (even if they ...

I read in Wikipedia: "Currently, the Earth is in an icehouse climate state. About 34 million years ago, ice sheets began to form in  Antarctica ; the ice sheets in the  Arctic  did not start forming until 2 million years ago. [5]  Some processes that may have led to our current icehouse may be connected to the development of the Himalayan Mountains and the opening of the  Drake Passage  between  South America  and Antarctica. Scientists have been attempting to compare the past transitions between icehouse and greenhouse, and vice versa to understand where our planet is now heading. Without the human influence on the greenhouse gas concentration, the Earth would be heading toward a  glacial  period. Predicted changes in  orbital forcing  suggest that in absence of human-made  global warming  the next glacial period would begin at least 50,000 years from now [  (see  Milankovitch cycles ). But due ...