Category: Personal thoughts
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Over at Facebook I entered into a short dialogue about the question, "What is information?" It led me to do a little Googling and a little noodling. I think there's a lot of understandable confusion about this question. It results from the different meanings assigned to the word information in different contexts. In the context…
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When it comes the question of life after death, sometimes I think it's possible to lose sight of the forest for the trees. It's all too easy to get caught up in the minutiae of particular cases or to become involved in endless speculation about theoretical models. It may be worthwhile to step back and…
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I haven't found a lot to blog on lately, so here's a post from 2005 that I dug out of the trash found in the archives. Happy July 4th! —— A friend of mine recently asked me how I had come to change from being an atheist to a theist, a conversion he found unusual.…
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As regular readers of this blog know, there's a variety of evidence suggestive of the survival of consciousness after death. Some lines of evidence, of course, are more persuasive than others, but when you look at the totality of the research, it's fascinating to see how the various investigations all converge on the same conclusion.…
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F. Scott Fitzgerald famously said, "The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function." Whether or not this is true, lately I've found myself holding two opposing ideas in my mind, and I'm not sure there's any…
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Lately I've been having a series of recurring dreams. Well, not exactly recurring, since the details vary. But the essence of the dreams remains the same. The latest one, which was one of the most vivid, can serve as a good example. In this dream I found myself in a large airliner, like a 747,…
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In a recent post I mentioned that I was getting bored with the paranormal, and that I might shut down this blog fairly soon. Frankly I was surprised by the outpouring of responses. I guess I didn't realize that this blog was important to so many people. I very much appreciate all the support and…
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Among the many memorable contributions to American popular culture made by the late and much lamented TV series Buffy the Vampire Slayer was the immortal phrase: "Bored now." In two words, the show managed to sum up the anomie and ennui of teenagers the world over – or at least teenagers in prosperous developed countries,…
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In an earlier post I mentioned Roger Ebert’s epiphany, during his last days, when he reported to his wife, “This is all an elaborate hoax.” In somewhat similar vein, transpersonal psychologist Stanislov Grof wrote a book called The Cosmic Game (which I admit I’ve never been able to really get into – but I like…
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Some early-morning thoughts on the nature of objective and subjective reality … Some of this material owes a debt to Robert Lanza’s book Biocentrism. First, definitions. By “objective,” I mean existing independent of consciousness. By “subjective,” I mean existing only with regard to consciousness. And by “consciousness,” I mean any perceiving mentality, not necessarily a…