The Plausibility of Santa Claus and Scorpios

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If You Believe in Astrology, You're Behaving Like a Child.

Christmas has come and gone, and with it another orgy of shredded wrapping paper and gravy-fueled gluttony.  I count myself as a big fan of winter's big show, and did my part to outfit my kids with an embarrassing smorgasbord of plastic playthings.  From AT-ATs to goalie pads, those boys made out like bandits.

Of course, my wife and I didn't take most of the credit for the presents — those kudos went to a fictional break-and-enter specialist from the north pole, aka Mr. Kristopher Kringle.  As in millions of other homes around the globe, we helped sell the myth to our boys by leaving cookies as an offering to Santa.  Once they were in bed, all that was needed was for Ma in her kerchief, and I in my cap, to settle right in for a short winter's snack.  (Tip: don't eat the whole cookie - you have to leave a piece with a bite mark clearly visible)
 

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Tagged Adults Astrology Children Christmas Gifts Holidays Likliehood Physical Reality Plausibility Pseudoscience Reality Santa Santa Claus Science Skepticism Zodiac

How I Remember to Feel

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Can Knowledge of the Material Mind Spell an End to the Magic of Living?

Last night my family and I had dinner with some good friends at a local restaurant, but by the end of the evening, we had converted the place into a nightclub.  That’s because our kids, all of them 4 or under, decided to spontaneously section off an unused plot of the dining room as their own personal dance floor.  The show lasted half an hour, with my boys pulling off some sick break-dance moves, while my friends’ daughter rocked the joint by using the area for a mosh-pit.

It was the peak of hilarity, and I assure you that there’s not one bit of artistic license at play in the telling of it.  I’m quite sure that the throngs of patrons and waiters who were obviously charmed by the impromptu performance would tell you the very same thing.  The spectacle was so joyously sweet that at one point my friend and I turned to each other and noted that in our entire lives, we’d never forget this moment.

But how are we so blessed with the power of mind, and specifically of memory?  Without it we’d have no context for anything, no ability to inter-compare experiences.  Without memories we’d lack more than an ability to recollect fond moments in restaurants, but also the very sensation of sentience.  If who we are is at least partly defined by the sum or our experiences, then our memories must make up a large part of what many would call our souls.

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Tagged Brain Dualism Materialism Memories Memory Mind Mortality Neurons Philosophy Physical Reality Reality Science Sentience Soul Spirit Thought

Reality Can Bite

How to Protect Yourself From the Bomb by Remembering that it's There

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In a recent post I took exception with the moon-hoax folks and did my humble best to shake some sense into them.  Their assertion is so contrary to all available evidence, yet also so adamantly argued, that I felt it important to shine some light on it.

In actuality I never dared to hope for even a single conversion amongst the conspiracy theorists themselves.  The mechanism of being a true believer in something so incredible is often a closed loop.  Those who cherish such fantasies are not easily swayed, especially by arguments made by half-witted bloggers.

I suppose the most I wished for was some consciousness-raising amongst the previously unconcerned.  An optimistic theory of mine is that most people are intelligent, rational souls who tend to go down the correct path if only given directions to the trail-head.  But issues such as whether or not man landed on the moon are trivial in the day-to-day process of living on this planet, and general indifference is to be expected.

 

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Tagged Apollo 11 Carl Sagan Cosmos Education Holocaust Moon Landing Nuclear Missiles Nuclear War Reality Warning World War 2

Bottoms Up!

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The world can big pile of confusing sometimes.

It's such a complicated place, and there's so much we don't know about it.  As a species we have a passion to learn what we can, but the things that we don't know vastly outnumber the things that we do.  A bit of high-school biology is enough to floor the average person by virtue of the complexity it exposes.  There's so many many ins, so many outs; it seems as if a complete understanding of the Universe would require an infinite amount of knowledge.

Often I hear people become so bewildered by this problem that they leap from the 'how' questions directly to the 'why' questions.  It's a natural coping mechanism.  Since the nuts and bolts of how complex systems work is generally so far beyond us, we turn instead to wondering why they matter.  Science is said to have none of these answers, being a slave to data and devoid of any proclamations of meaning.  Just ask Oprah Winfrey.  She helps the confused populace interpret the world by offering every form of pseudoscientific and nonsensical explanation possible.

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Tagged Anthropic Principle Big Bang Complexity Creation Genesis Pseudoscience Reality Science Universe
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