Category Archives: Zen

Questions about Panpsychism

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Like many scientists, I dismissed panpsychism as hugely implausible until recently. Then I read discussions of it in Annaka Harris’s 2019 book “Conscious” and David Chalmers’ 1996 book The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory. They persuaded me that panpsychism should be considered as a potential solution to the hard problem.

There has been a revival of interest in panpsychism and I bought three recent books on it. Before reading them, I decided to think through for myself what a defensible form of panpsychism would look like, and what questions it raises.

The Hard Problem — two options

David Chalmers famously termed this the “hard problem” of consciousness. Most scientists and philosophers simply assume it must be an emergent property of the brain.

The alternative option is some form of panpsychism: consciousness is a fundamental property of matter alongside things such as charge, spin, etc. Chalmers also suggested a hybrid option, that consciousness derives from some other class of more fundamental non-physical properties. Consciousness is emergent from these more fundamental non-physical properties in sufficiently complex arrangements of matter.

Emergence

Emergence refers to properties or behaviors of a complex entity that its parts do not have on their own and emerge only when they interact in a wider whole. Some examples of emergent properties/behaviours include the structure of snowflakes, waves and chaotic fluid flow, chaotic behaviours of simple predator-prey systems, ant colonies, and the blood pumping properties of hearts.

These are all examples of what philosophers call weak emergence. The emergent properties are still descriptions of matter and how it behaves as witnessed from the outside, they are in the same category of things as the underlying basic properties of that matter.

Strong emergence refers to a fundamentally different category of thing emerging from things lacking that category. The proposed emergence of first-person experience from non-sentient matter would be an example of strong emergence. There are no known examples of strong emergence as far as I know.

All discussions of consciousness as an emergent phenomenon simply assume it is emergent. Chalmers argues that strong emergence is uncomfortably like magic, but the emergent phenomena are still regarded as being utterly dependent on the physical.

Panpsychism

Panpsychism is the view that all matter is imbued with consciousness in some sense. The term has been used to describe a wide range of thinking from the animism of primitive religions to a mind-like aspect, or to some much simpler form of basic awareness.

Panpsychism was a common view among philosophers in the 19th century, but fell out of favour in the twentieth century. There has been a recent revival of interest among philosophers such as Thomas Nagel, Galen Strawson, David Skrbina and Philip Goff. Even some neuroscientists such as Giulio Tononi and Christof Koch have proposed that consciousness is widespread and can be found in simple systems.

Most scientists are very reluctant to consider panpsychism, and many dismiss it as obviously ridiculous. The idea that “rocks are conscious” is taken as so obviously ludicrous that panpsychism can be safely dismissed out of hand.

Chalmers has noted that panpsychism avoids the need to have consciousness wink-in or switch-on at some particular level of complexity. Rather it may be a universal property, with very simple systems having very simple phenomenology and very complex systems having very complex phenomenology. Annaka Harris also noted that “In actuality, if a version of panpsychism is correct, everything will still appear to us and behave exactly as it already does.”

What does consciousness refer to?

In a previous article, I discussed the experience of pure conscious awareness when thoughts, feelings, sensations drop away. Zen refers to this as “body and mind dropped away”. This experience is accessible through a range of meditation practices and also occurs spontaneously in some circumstances.

This experience allows the meditator to realize that they are not their thoughts, or their feelings, that these arise and pass away. Contentless consciousness is pure awareness per se. The part of my brain responsible for assigning labels and meaning — to objects, events, interactions — is not currently online.

Is this pure awareness inherently nondual? I’ve have had a taste of nondual consciousness once or twice. Insufficient for me to claim to understand it or draw any conclusions yet. I suspect the pure state is indeed an unchanging non-dual awareness. Duality starts with brain processes classifying what is experienced.

Contents of consciousness

These include thoughts, verbalized or not, feelings and emotions, and sensory perceptions.

Are qualia also contents of consciousness? They are not illusory, the one thing direct experience of the suchness of something cannot be is an illusion. And they are not reducible to underlying neural activity as they refer to the first-person suchness of experiencing the particular content. I am inclined to think that suchness remains part of the content of awareness.

Pierz Newton-John makes an argument I find convincing that colours convey information about the environment (dangers, food, etc) and that evolution results in the attachment of emotions to colours to ensure we react appropriately to such colour information. In other words, the experience of a colour develops an emotional richness, ie complex qualia. This can only arise in systems that possess the ability to summarise and respond to complex information in their environment.

He sees this as ruling out panpsychism (because he considers qualia as defining of consciousness). I don’t. If qualia are contents of consciousness, then indeed they will require nervous systems to have any complex suchness. Objects without brains will have nothing but some rudimentary awareness and very rudimentary suchness of that awareness. There is likely not something it is like to be a rock beyond some very tiny awareness per se, no different to our pure contentless awareness.

Philosophers see qualia as being key to what it is like to be human, or a bat, or a dog. And it seems reasonable to me that what it is like to be a bat is very much about the qualitative aspect of bat sensory, bat feeling and bat thoughts, because these will be quite different to, say, human qualia for sensory, feeling and thinking inputs to consciousness. And that would fit with my suspicion that contentless consciousness (pure contentless subjective awareness) might not differ across species, except perhaps in some sort of strength measure (depth?) of awareness.

My experiences of contentless consciousness in meditation seem to confirm that qualia drop away along with other content of consciousness. The hard problem relates to contentless consciousness, pure awareness, The easy problem relates to qualia and other contents of consciousness, and their origins in brains and nervous systems.

Non-ordinary states

There are many of these states other than everyday waking consciousness. We experience several of these each day, including the hypnagogic state, REM (dream) sleep and deep sleep. Let’s consider psychedelic-induced states as an example. In these states, is it only the contents of consciousness that change or does consciousness per se (aka pure awareness) also change?

We know that psychedelics alter neurotransmitter levels and block or activate neurotransmitter receptors. We also know that brain networks are up- or down-regulated, and that brain network connectivity is altered. Qualia and sensory experiences are altered. An example is synesthesia when sensory crossovers occur, such as tasting colours or feeling sounds.

I think it most likely that psychedelic experiences are all about the contents of consciousness. Pure awareness remains unchanged in altered states. But I could be wrong.

Attention

We can focus our attention on specific content of consciousness, such as breath counting, mantras, visual images, flames, or koans, and on awareness itself. Or we can expand attention to be non-specific and broad (mindfulness meditation, shikantaza). How does attention work? What is driving it? The brain? Thoughts? decisions?

While meditative traditions talk a lot about attention in terms of how it can be used, I’ve either ignored or not encountered an analysis of what it is and where it arises. What is attention? How does it work?

Causal connections

The brain and nervous system produce content experienced by consciousness. Is this a causal process from brain to consciousness, or is the “eye of awareness” just aware of content without causal connections, unlike our physical eyes which are causally affected by the light arriving at them.

Are there connections the other direction? We can remember experiencing the suchness of qualia. We can remember (to some extent) experiencing meditative states, even non-dual states of contentless awareness. This must surely imply some causal feedback from the experiences to the memory centres of the brain.

Pure awareness is likely always on (even in deep sleep). The primary evidence for this is from advanced meditators, particularly in the Tibetan tradition. Ken Wilber also reports experiencing this in his book One Taste.

In most of us, the link to memory disappears in states like deep sleep and anaesthetic-induced unconsciousness. This is also the case for most dreams, that do not make it to long-term memory, and traces in short-term memory can rapidly evaporate after waking. Likely most of us do not lay down memories of that residual pure awareness during deep sleep. Maybe neuroscience will find evidence one way or the other?

Once the brain can register memories of conscious awareness, that opens a causal pathway for consciousness to affect other brain processes such as conclusions, choices or reporting of experiences.

When I read Chalmers, he semi-convinced me that pure consciousness was an epiphenomenon that did not causally affect its contents or the neurons producing them. But memories of meditative states do get made. Is there a causal pathway from conscious awareness per se to laying down memories of that awareness? How does that work?

What should a panpsychism hypothesis look like?

  • Consciousness is pure unchanging awareness, not mind or self or thoughts or qualia or other contents of consciousness
  • Some degree of consciousness is a basic property of matter.
  • Without the involvement of a brain (or perhaps nervous system), there are no thoughts, no thinking, no feelings etc just some degree of contentless awareness.

Some speculations about panpsychism

Without a brain to provide content, and to store memories, pure consciousness at lower levels can be no more than some microscopic “pure awareness” with possibly some direct connection to very primitive “physical inputs” that do not require sensory organs or nervous system. That might be nothing more than some sort of very limited awareness of temperature or quantum fields.

But does pure awareness have a “strength”. Is awareness at the atomic level very weak or is awareness just awareness, and it is the connection to content that changes with scale and complexity?

If there is some scaling of awareness with size, whether linear or not, how do we get an apparent unified “field” of awareness at human-level?

I think it likely that some very primitive consciousness increased probability of survival and reproduction. Evolutionary selection pressures have selected organisms that developed nervous systems with structures that favoured some alignment/coupling of atomic-level consciousness. Maybe those same selection pressures selected arrangements that fostered two-way causal communications between the growing first-person awareness and the increasingly complex brain.

The human brain weights around 1.3 kg. Assuming a weight of 1 kg and an average atomic weight of 6 for brain atoms, there are approximately 10²⁶ atoms in a human brain. One atom might thus have about one hundred million-billion-billionth of the pure contentless awareness of a human. That could at most have only an extremely faint direct experience of quantum interactions with force transmitters (virtual particles, real particles etc).

How might these atomic quanta of consciousness align to form a “macroscopic” consciousness. Perhaps the alignment process is somewhat analogous to what occurs in ferromagnetic materials.

The atomic level magnetic fields of atoms (arising from the spin of the electrically charged electrons) can align in magnetic materials to produce a macroscopic and continuous magnetic field. Perhaps elementary quanta of consciousness can similarly align to produce a larger field of consciousness. This is of course only an analogy, the interactions of “quanta” of consciousness may be completely different to any interactions in the physical domain.

Without a brain to produce thoughts and other inputs to that awareness it cannot act in any way. Perhaps the evolution of brains involved an emergent process producing a more aware consciousness able to experience inputs from the brain. The hard problem is avoided. In the same way a bar magnet avoids the hard problem of magnetism by organizing the already existing magnetic fields of atoms so that their spins are aligned.

Is there any way to test the emergence or panpsychism hypotheses?

No. To a certain extent we can infer that simpler brained animals have “less consciousness” although their consciousness (pure contentless awareness) is likely to be exactly the same as ours apart from possibly its “strength”. The big difference is the contents of consciousness, the thoughts and perceptions are simpler, and almost definitely non-verbal and less complex. Sensory inputs may be wildly different to ours.

There are likely some predictions that can fall out of this proto-theory of panpsychism. One example would be a prediction that computing machines that have programs to emulate thoughts and process sensory and language inputs will not align their atomic level awarenesses into an analogue of human consciousness. Why? Because we have no idea what aspects of brain structure enable this coordination and linking of atomic level consciousnesses, and we certainly have not designed computer circuits to incorporate such factors, as yet unknown to us.

Of course, we have no idea whether particles have consciousness or not. We cannot even tell whether anyone other than ourselves is truly conscious. We assume so because they are a human like us, and we have consciousness, and they act as though they do and tell us they do.

Annaka Harris makes an analogy to the Higgs field. Physicists realized it needed to exist to give mass to electrons and quarks. Eventually, after 48 years, its carrier, the Higgs boson, was detected experimentally. If consciousness is another property of matter that we have yet to discover, it is not at all clear whether it is possible to discover it, given that we have no way of detecting consciousness outside first-person experience of it. But it may need to exist, if emergence continues to remain only a magical explanation.

Only by hooking up pure awareness to a brain that can produce inputs to awareness and record and report memories of what its like to experience those contents can we have the full experience of what its like to be conscious. Neuroscientists might be wrong that consciousness is an emergent property of the brain. But it can still be true, that without a brain, consciousness is not all that big a deal for the atoms, or the toaster or the computer running an AI program.

Where does this leave us?

It’s hard for me to see how scientists could ever explain the emergence of first-person awareness from unconscious matter, no matter how well organized, but it remains a possibility. No-one to date has made any plausible proposal for how it would happen. Rather like the creationists, who have no ideas, no hypotheses, just “god did it”.

I think a defensible version of panpsychism is starting to emerge from the thoughts and questions I have documented here. Its also possible that the solution to the hard problem may be forever beyond our reach,

I will now start reading some of the recent writings on panpsychism. Are others thinking along the same lines? Do they have plausible hypotheses to address questions I have raised here?

This article was originally published online at Medium.com on 27 April 2025.

Meditation and the nature of consciousness

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What is the role of meditation and other first-person evidence  in understanding the nature of consciousness and addressing the hard problem of consciousness?

I have been directly exploring the nature of consciousness for over 30 years, primarily through meditation, but also through self-hypnosis, breath work, and psychedelics. About three years ago, I decided to explore in more depth what neuroscientists and philosophers had to say about consciousness, to complement and possibly revise what I had learnt through direct experience.  From mid-2022 to present, I have published nine posts on consciousness here summarizing my readings in neuroscience and philosophy, and their impact on my own understanding of consciousness. Links to these are given at the end of this post.

Neuroscientists and first-person evidence

Consciousness is a first-person experience and can only be examined directly by each person individually. My conscious experience cannot be directly observed by anyone else. In contrast, neuroscience and science in general work with third-person objective observations and measures, which can in principle be made by anyone. It can thus only deal with the correlates of conscious experience.

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What is consciousness

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Over the last couple of years, I’ve been thinking more and more about the nature of consciousness. My Zen meditation practice basically involves letting go of thoughts, letting go of the self, and simply experiencing consciousness without content. I have direct experiences from my meditation practice, as well as a reasonably wide reading of Zen and Buddhist masters and their experiences and understanding of consciousness, self and reality.  At times, I feel like I have had openings to experiences which have “enlightened” me about the nature of self, consciousness etc, but I have not really integrated these tastes of non-self into any sort of stable or mature understanding of reality.

I had read a few articles by philosophers who have explored the nature of consciousness, particularly the so-called hard problem of consciousness and last year read a review of a new book by Anil Seth which led me to think he had made advances from the neuroscience perspective.

Apart from my direct explorations through Zen meditation, breathwork and psychedelics, I also have worked with several Zen teachers and read extensively on consciousness in Buddhist literature and in the works of Ken Wilber, who has explored and mapped states and stages of consciousness in his writings. More recently, I read and reviewed Sam Harris’s book Waking Up, which also discusses the nature of consciousness and self.

So I decided I would read some of the key books and articles on consciousness from the philosophers and neuroscientists, to complement my experience and understanding gained from meditation and psychedelic explorations.

I bought the following books:

Anil Seth is a neurologist, Peter Godfrey-Smith a biologist and philosopher of science. Annaka Harris is a science writer (fun fact: also the wife of Sam Harris). Lewis-Williams and Pearce are both archaeologists. The final three are all philosophers. I guess the other relevant discipline I am missing is artificial intelligence research. I’ve read a little in this area and have found it mostly irrelevant to the issues relating to consciousness that I am interested in, and tedious reading to boot.

I browsed Chalmers book on consciousness and discovered the entire book ignores the entire knowledge base on states of consciousness, meditation, nondual states, etc. As if it’s irrelevant. So I quickly browsed the books by the other two philosophers, and the book by Anil Seth the neurologist. Not a single mention of meditation, altered states, psychedelics. I had bigger problems with Seth’s ideas, but will leave that to a separate review.

My initial reaction was to dismiss the philosophers as inhabiting a limited sterile corner of academia ignoring large parts of human experience. But then realized if I did that, I would be no better than them.

Ken Wilber has gone down this same path of integrating Western psychology and philosophy with Eastern first-person methods and understanding and has been largely ignored by academia and philosophers.  In part, because he does somewhat go over the top, and despite his focus on empirical methods, does seem to uncritically accept aspects of Tibetan Buddhism at more or less face value. Such as rebirth.

Sam Harris seems to get it more right. And his conclusions are very much aligned with mine. And even he gets dismissed by Western commentators as being arrogant. By telling them they cannot just critique from the outside, without trying the methods for themselves. So much for open-mindedness to all the relevant evidence.

For consciousness per se, which is a subjective experience, its clear that the objective methods of science are going to be at best marginally relevant. What is most relevant is the actual massive domain of experiences of consciousness. Particularly those focused not on the contents of consciousness (as the psychologists and neuroscientists like to do) but those focused on the exploration of consciousness per se when the contents are out of the way. The recent book by Anneka Harris is the only other one on my list above which examines what meditation tells us about consciousness.  And when I started reading it, I found it a superb discussion of the various issues and theories about consciousness.  So my next post will be a closer look at Harris’ book, and then I will dive into the philosophers.

Links to my later posts on consciousness are given below:

Anneka Harris on the fundamental mystery of consciousness Oct 6 2022

Consciousness Explained…..or Consciousness Ignored? Oct 16 2022

Christian beliefs in heaven and hell are not what Jesus taught

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In two previous posts (here and here), I examined the prevalence of belief in heaven and hell across the world and in the major religions. Less than half of Christians in developed countries say they believe in hell, and only a slight majority in heaven. The USA is the major exception, with over 80% of Christians saying that they believe in heaven and in hell. Here I examine the extent to which the Christian belief in heaven and hell as places of reward and punishment after death are supported by either Biblical texts or the teachings of Jesus.

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The Wide Sky

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Let me not spend my life
lamenting the world’s sorrows
for above
in the wide sky
the moon shines pure

ukiyo to mo
omoi-tōsaji
oshikaeshi
tsuki no sumikeru
hisakata no sora

— Saigyo

I came across this poem quite by accident.  But it really struck home, as I’ve been spending too much time thinking about the state of the world right now. The human race appears to be quite incapable of working together to address the existential crises of the pandemic, global heating and species extinctions, and overpopulation, as well as the rejection of reason and science dramatically exacerbating these potentially soluble crises.  Humans have not reacted to these crises in general by pulling together, given that collective action can indeed address and ameliorate, if not completely address, them. But ratherhave retreated back into tribes who blame the “other” for all their problems. It is indeed difficult sometimes to remember the moon shining pure in the wide sky.

Saigyō was the Buddhist name of Fujiwara no Norikiyo (1118–1190), a Japanese Buddhist monk-poet. He is regarded as one of the greatest masters of the tanka (a traditional Japanese poetic form). He influenced many later Japanese poets, particularly the haiku master Basho.

Saigyo was born into a branch of the Fujiwara clan, the most powerful family in Japan in the early 12th century. As a young man he joined the Hokumen Guards who served at the retired Emperor’s palace. Despite a seemingly assured future, he decided at the age of 23 to “turn from the world” and become a reclusive wandering Buddhist monk. He spent the rest of his life in alternating periods of travel and seclusion with occasional periodic returns to the capital at Kyoto to participate in imperial ceremonies. During this period, the second half of the 12th century, Japan was wracked by civil war

The translation of the poem above is by Meredith McKinney, who has published a selection of over 100 poems by Saigyo in the collection Gazing at the Moon: Buddhist Poems of Solitude (September 2021). The poems selected focus on Saigyo’s story of Buddhist awakening, reclusion, seeking, enlightenment and death. I can highly recommend this collection, which embodies the Japanese aesthetic of mono no aware — to be moved by sorrow in witnessing the ephemeral world.

Meredith McKinney is an award-winning translator of classical and modern Japanese literature, who lived and taught for around 20 years in Japan. She returned to Australia in 1998 and now lives near the small town of Braidwood, not far from Canberra where I lived until early 2000. I was interested to learn a little more about her, and was surprised to find out that she is the daughter of Judith Wright (1915-2000), one of Australia’s greatest poets and an activist for the environment and indigenous rights. For the last three decades of her life, Wright lived near Braidwood. She became completely deaf in 1992 after progressively losing her hearing since early adulthood.

The Order of Time – Carlo Rovelli

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When I studied physics at university in the 1970s, I became interested in the nature of time, particularly in light (pun intended) of its role in both special and general relativity.  I also read The Direction of Time by Hans Reichenbach (1891-1953) regarded as the leading empiricist philosopher of the 20th century, as well as other philosophers and writers.  Later, in the 1990s I became a student of Zen Buddhism with Hogen Yamahata, who emphasised that the only reality is what is experienced here-now. This certainly describes my experience of time but is also fundamentally at odds with the usual understanding of the implications of modern physics. 

So I read Carlo Rovelli’s fourth book The Order of Time (2018) with great interest.  Unusually for a physicist he gives an accessible and very readable overview of the main findings of physics but also discusses the human experience of time and tries to integrate our common experience with the insights of modern physics. See here for my previous review of his first book Anaximander.

It’s a short book and is written for a lay audience, written in a very readable and accessible way. Its been criticized by some for not having enough hard science exposition and too much speculative stuff, particularly in the third section. However, I thoroughly enjoyed the mix and wholeheartedly recommend it if you are at all interested in the nature of time.

Rovelli opens with the claim that the nature of time is perhaps the greatest remaining mystery.  I’m inclined to think that consciousness and the fundamental constituents of reality are equally great mysteries, and indeed these may all be interrelated. The introductory chapter identifies a number of key questions about time:

  • Does the universe unfold into the future, as time flows?  Does in fact time “flow”?
  • Does the past, present and future all exist in the block universe of relativity, with our consciousness or perhaps the “present moment” moving through the blocks?
  • Why do we remember the past and not the future? Put another way, why does time flow only in one direction, when the fundamental equations of physics have no preferred time direction?
  • Is time a fundamental property of the universe in which events play out, or is time an emergent property, perhaps emerging only at a certain scale or degree of complexity?

The rest of the book is divided into three parts. In the first part, Rovelli summarizes the understanding of time in modern physics, and how this is radically at odds with our normal perceptions of time. Special and general relativity have conclusively shown that there is not a single universal time. Time passes at different rates at different places (faster where gravity is lower) and at for observers travelling at different speeds (slower when velocity is greater).  Additionally, there is no longer a single universal “now”. Between the past and the present there is an expanded “now” in which different observers will see events occurring with different time differences and possibly in a different order. The direction of time, the difference between past and future, does not exist in the elementary equations of the world and appears only in the second law of thermodynamics (entropy of a closed system can only increase or stay the same).

The second part, The World Without Time, delves into the fundamental nature of reality, drawing on Rovelli’s own field of research, loop quantum gravity in a shorter section. He argues that the fundamental constituents of reality are events (interactions) not things, and that space and time are emergent properties from these interactions. This is controversial, quantum loop gravity is but one of a number of contenders for the ’Theory of Everything’. There are physicists such as Lee Smolin (The Singular Universe and the Reality of Time) who have argued the opposite: that time is indeed a fundamental property of the universe. And more, like Sean Carrol, who conclude that neither he nor anyone else has a clue whether time is fundamental or emergent.

Carlo Rovelli

The third and final part attempts identify the sources of time and to understand how the non-universal time of relativity and the non-time of fundamental physics are consistent with our experience of time: “Somehow our time must emerge around us, at least for us and at our scale.” This to me was the most interesting and inspiring part of the book, though there are many reviewers on Amazon and Goodreads who really did not like it. Rovelli is up-front about the speculative nature of his “possible” answer. He is not sure it is the right answer, but it’s the one that he finds the most compelling and he doesn’t think there any better ones.

As have many before him, Rovelli locates the arrow of time in the second law of thermodynamics, that entropy can never decrease. Entropy is a macroscopic property of systems and essentially associated with the number of microscopic configurations that are consistent with the “blurred” macroscopic view. Rovelli repeatedly uses the idea of “blurring” to explain the emergence of time at the macroscopic level. You have to read him to (possibly) understand it. He also identifies another potential source of temporal ordering in the quantum uncertainty principle; that the values of variables such as speed and position depend on the ordering of their measurement. He then states that Alain Connes has shown that the emergent thermal time and quantum time are aspects of the same phenomenon. Time emerges from our ignorance of the microscopic details of the world.

Although I studied statistical mechanics, I never understood until reading Rovelli that entropy was a relative quantity, determined not only by the state of a system but also by the set of macroscopic variable with which it is observed. Rovelli addresses the issue of why the universe started in a low entropy state (allowing the emergence of time) by suggesting that the universe has pockets of high and low entropy by chance, and necessarily it is only in the regions with low entropy that time can emerge so that life is possible, together with evolution, thought and memories of past times. He is arguing an astonishing variant of the weak anthropic principle, namely, that the flow of time is not a characteristic of the universe as a whole but necessarily associated with local region(s) in which entropy is initially low. This suggested to me that perhaps there might be sentient life forms evolve in local regions of the universe which are not in initial low entropy state according to the macro-variables by which we and other earthly life interact with reality, but may be low entropy for life forms which interact via a different set of macro-variables.

Rovelli goes on to speculate that the emergence of time may have more to do with us than with the cosmos per se. Is this dangerously close to putting humans back at the centre of the universe? He then discusses how causality also is a result of the fact that entropy increases. This is what allows past events to leave traces in the present, and that we remember the past but not the future. Evolution has designed our brains to use the traces to predict the future. Causality, memory, history all emerge from the fact that our universe was in a particular state of low entropy in the past. That particularity is relative, dependent on the set of macroscopic variables with which we interact with the world.

And in the final chapters of the book, Rovelli turns to us, and the role we play with respect to time. This for me was the most fascinating and inspiring part of the book. Rovelli argues that humans (and the rest of the biosphere) have been hard-wired by evolution to accept and use the concept of time. The changing interactions are real, but the time in which all this seems to occur is a manifestation of the human (and probably animal) mind, which has evolved to make use of the memory traces of the past to predict the future. The movement is real, the changing is real, but the time in which all of this seems to occur is nothing more than a manifestation of human (possibly animal) mind and the illusion, in turn, is supported by the entropy generated in the functioning of our brains.

From his discussion of the three sources of time, he draws a number of conclusions about the implications for us:

  • The self is not an enduring entity, but an emergent construct of the brain and memory, time is the source of our sense of identity.
  • Reality is made up of processes or interactions not things. Things are impermanent.
  • Being is suffering because we are in time, impermanent. “What causes us to suffer is not in the past or the future: it is here, now, in our memory, in our expectations. We long for timelessness, we endure the passing of time: we suffer time. Time is suffering.”

Rovelli explicitly notes how these are also some of the key insights of Buddhism: suffering, no-self, emptiness and impermanence. Rovelli here is NOT doing what people like Fritjof Capra and many new age gurus do: to use the strangeness of reality at quantum level as a justification for believing in macroscopic-level things like telepathy or clairvoyance.  Rather, he is arguing that his understanding of time is consistent with what I consider some of the most important insights of Buddhism. I have also realized that the lack of a universal present moment is not inconsistent with the Zen insight that only the present exists. My teacher Hogen-san has always used the phrase “here- now” to describe our only reality, not just “now”. So there is no conflict with the time of relativity.

While Rovelli addresses my key questions about the nature of time, I am not convinced of all his arguments and explanations, or even that I fully understand them. But it is an immensely thought-provoking read, and I will read it again and hopefully my brain will hold off hurting long enough for me to clarify my own thoughts and speculations on the nature of time.  In the meantime, I have been paying attention to the present moment as much as I can during my daily zazen, trying to simply experience here-now without thoughts about the past or speculations about the future.

Definitions of God and the Motte-and-Bailey fallacy

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Recently, I got involved in an online discussion about whether spirituality was compatible with atheism (see previous post Atheism and Spirituality) and foolishly did not clarify what the term “god” referred to. But it was clear from the general context that those arguing atheism was incompatible with spirituality were assuming spirituality required belief in God and were using a concept of God (singular) largely consistent with the standard Christian God who is conceived of as an eternal being who created the universe and life, and who is both transcendent (wholly independent of the material universe) and involved in the world.

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Atheism and Spirituality

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Late last year I volunteered to participate in a research study on psilocybin-occasioned mystical experiences.  I completed an online survey and later was interviewed by the principal researcher in a more than hour long semi-structured zoom interview. In the survey, I had answered a question on religious affiliation with “Atheist”. During the interview, the interviewer expressed surprise that I practiced Zen meditation as she equated atheism with a materialist philosophy.  I in turn was surprised at her assuming that a spiritual practice implied a belief in God or gods, particularly as my practice was to a large extent within a Zen Buddhist context, which does not treat the historical Buddha as a god or invoke concepts of gods.

I refined my thoughts on this topic in several online discussions, where I found both religious believers and some other atheists were very hostile to the idea that an atheist could have a spiritual practice. And I noticed that some of the atheists who did say they were spiritual, defined “spiritual” in terms of experiences like the enjoyment of a sunset or a moving piece of music, or the feeling of being part of nature.  

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Zazen, left brain, right brain, self

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During the last COVID wave, while activities were restricted and I was largely staying at home, I intensified my zazen (sitting meditation) practice. With more attention to my  practice, I was surprised to find I was easily sitting for 45 minutes and spending less of that time lost in thoughts and more time simply being present here-now aware of the arising and passing on random thoughts, sensations and sensory inputs.

There are four main categories of things that distract my attention from being here-now:

  • Largely verbalised thought sequences. These can be somewhat spontaneous, jumping across subjects and concerns, or more focused on solving a problem, thinking through a situation or piece of work to be done, planning, strategizing, worrying, pondering the past or future.
  • Distracting sensory stimuli with associated thoughts and emotions, eg. An intrusive noise, an insect flying around or crawling on my skin, an itch, or an ache or pain.
  • Images that appear in the minds eye. These can be random or connected.
  • Full-blown dream-like visions or daydreams, sometimes short, sometimes long.

I also occasionally experience auditory or olfactory hallucinations. For example, a voice saying something, or a distinct smell.  But these are rare.

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Looking back on 34 years in the martial arts

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As a student at the University of Sydney in the early 1970s, I became interested in Zen Buddhism through the writings of Alan Watts and others, but the concept of actual “practice” was completely foreign to me. Then I picked up a second-hand copy of Zen Combat by Jay Gluck (Ballantine 1962) and was absolutely fascinated by its survey of Japanese martial arts and the role of Zen in them. Bruce Lee also sparked a huge surge of Western interest in the Asian martial arts with his 1973 film Enter the Dragon.  The idea of practicing a martial art was something I could relate to, and in 1974 I enrolled in a lunch-time karate class at the University during my 4th year Physics Honors Year. I was so enthusiastic about karate that I remember being puzzled why others were not joining once they knew about the availability of classes. Over the next two or three years I trained in several karate styles including Goju Ryu, Dioshin Lyanbukan and Kei Shin Kan.

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