Don’t trust your eyes; they can deceive you. - Obi Wan Kanobi Many aspects of reality cannot be grasped directly through the senses. One can search high and low and never come to “see” love or justice or meaning, for instance. One approach to this problem is to say that whatever cannot be measured through the senses or by instruments More »

I recently had the pleasure of watching “Won’t You Be My Neighbor,” an excellent documentary about a show that I loved as a kid called “Mr. Rogers Neighborhood.” The show had an amazing run from 1968-2001 and, with a totally counterintuitive style, captured the hearts and minds of millions of children. Its host, Fred Rogers, was a couldn’t-be-more-regular guy from More »

This week the world continued its undying fascination with outer space. As the first images came in from the James Webb telescope (named after the man who ran NASA from 1961-1968) many were moved by the beautiful and remarkably sharp and colorful images of our visible universe. Many more marveled at the fact that these images are, counterintuitively, very ancient More »

Amazingly, 80’s British pop star Kate Bush scored a #1 hit on the British charts last week - off a song that came out 37 years ago! She now holds the records both for taking the longest time getting to #1 and for being the oldest woman (63) to have a #1 hit. The springboard for this unlikely occurrence was More »

Here is some standard materialist thinking about emotionality. In a nutshell: Physical existence is the only kind of existence People experience emotions, therefore Emotions have a physical cause For many years we have been hearing about the causal link between the experience of love and a chemical called Oxytocin. The story went something like this: People have genes Genes have More »