I have often wondered how my background academic educational career in International Relations connects to the part of me that writes books on the body, mindfulness and philosophy. We are used to compartmentalizing different fields and pursuits instead of seeing them as part of a whole. It has only been in light of the recent […]
Tag: free will
Alan Watts: short and sweet
This is a wonderful little clip that describes precisely what I write about in my books and on this blog. I hope you will have a listen! Book Information
Stuck Where We Are
Anything we don’t understand about our life we can consider a mystery of nature. We are 100% natural organisms that follow physical laws as is everything else in the universe, just a variation on the theme, a different arrangement of molecules, as biologist Jerry Coyne once put it. So, our behavior abides by laws of […]
Naturalism and Buddhism: An Excerpt from Naturalist Writer Tom Clark on Desire
Tom Clark is director of the non-profit Center for Naturalism and author of Encountering Naturalism: A Worldview and Its Uses. He writes on science, free will, consciousness, addiction and other topics, and maintains Naturalism.org, an extensive resource on worldview naturalism. I highly encourage you to check out his webiste. Below is a passage of his I […]
Decision-Making Guaranteed
If we are alive, then we are in activity for the continual stream of time that is our life. This means our brain makes ongoing decisions for us about how we spend our time, barring not even a millisecond. This is relevant because we struggle over the concept of how to make decisions, and, moreover, […]
Sam Harris on Free Will
As my work puts forth the pronouncement that all human behavior is involuntary, i.e., automatic and choiceless, it overlaps with the age-old issue of free will discussed by philosophers, cognitive scientists, and neuroscientists. I reference many of these in my second book, “The Myth of Doing.” Sam Harris, both a philosopher and a neuroscientist, wrote […]
Jill Eng 