Confessions of a Conservative Atheist
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To the young, all is new. They’re on the ride for the first time, making it near impossible to understand what it will feel like for the fiftieth. To the old, the belief that we’ve seen it all before settles in along with the feeling that nothing can surprise us anymore. It’s a bizarre irony… Continue reading The more the holidays change, the more they stay the same even in a world where change is the only constant
In a world where computers are creating content, from text to images, video, even writing songs, can they rightly be considered artists, or is there still something that makes humans unique? Today’s Artificial Intelligence software can create new things, generating content that has never been produced before, from the written word to pictures, videos, even… Continue reading Artificial Intelligence, the nature of creativity, and the difference between humans and machines
Whether you have heard of Caenorhabditis elegans, your own body and mind work much the same way. Essentially, your brain is C elegans’ times 331,125,828 or so, having neurons that look both inward and outward, reflecting even upon themselves over and over and over again. I am one of those neurons. I am a neuron… Continue reading I am a neuron in the human brain, almost the same as that found in a lowly roundworm
Diversity, if we take that to mean the richness of experience and ways of life, requires people to stick with their own to some extent and exclude others from some things. I was born and bred in majority white towns, a proud member of Generation X who grew up in the 1980s. Throughout my grade… Continue reading Personal lessons in the wonders and limits of diversity
It’s difficult to overstate the radical rewiring of humanity and our role in the world that occurred in Shakespeare’s era, fundamentally altering the nature of our relationship with ourselves, others, and reality itself. A rewriting that might be breaking down today... The late, great literary critic and legendary scholar Harold Bloom once claimed that William… Continue reading Shakespeare and the end of humanity as we know it
There might have been a time when existence was so bleak and life so cheap, humanity had little choice except to hope for more, but that period has long passed and developed countries, at least, are world’s of plenty. As an atheist, I’ve been occasionally asked how one copes with the idea that this life… Continue reading An atheist’s case for optimism in the face of oblivion
In many ways a dog navigates the same world as we do with shared systems and processes across our senses, but in others their reality is dramatically different with a sense of smell so powerful they can count molecules in the air and see ghosts. I can’t be the only dog lover who frequently looks… Continue reading How a dog sees and navigates the world
Hamlet’s lessons for a happy holiday season and a successful life in general. Who knew Shakespeare’s tragic Danish Prince could offer such good advice on positive mental health while careening towards a bloody end for him and his entire family? “There is nothing either good or bad, thinking makes it so.” Hamlet speaks these few… Continue reading This Christmas let thinking make it so and be merry from the inside out
An engineering professor believes consciousness is not computable, as in it works fundamentally different from our current mathematics, but is that really the case? Computers, in fact, have a lot to teach us about our own minds, just not in the way most people think. Read on for a few musings on what makes us… Continue reading Decoding consciousness: What computers can and cannot tell us about our own minds
What is consciousness? Can consciousness have evolved, naturally, like the rest of our bodies? Why are we conscious? Would we be better off as unconscious zombies? One thing I know for sure: If we’d be better off as zombies, we’d be zombies. It’s much, much cheaper to make us that way, and in the game… Continue reading The evolution of consciousness, reimagined
Confessions of a Conservative Atheist 