The always colorful Susan Blackmore has a long list of her publications on her website, many of them available online. Among then is “Zen into Science,” orginally Dr. Blackmore’s contribution to a volume called Neurotheology. Blackmore begins by offering a sort of a definition of that vastly overused term, “spirituality”:
What is this yearning that so many of us have for something else; something beyond, something finer than the messiness of striving for the ultimately pointless gains of our ordinary life? It is this yearning, whatever it is, that drives us towards religion and spirituality.
. . .
If one avoids the traps of religion and the yearning stays alive, what then? To me the yearning is a massive swirl of questions. Who am I? Why am I here? What is the point of it all? What is this stuff I seem to see all around me? What is consciousness and how can it possibly arise from a physical brain? How can I go on?
She then says, in words that could be an epigram for this blog:
I have found two ways to seek answers and, oddly enough, they seem to converge.
The first is the practice of Zen.
. . .
The second is the practice of science.
I think of Blackmore as very much a fellow inquirer on the path I’m on. This does not mean that I accept many or most of her conclusions.
A full treatment of her views would require a much longer post, but here are a few observations:
– Blackmore very much adheres to the Stephen Batchelor school of “agnostic Buddhism,” which a lot of people would say isn’t really Buddhism at all. I pretty much share Batchelor’s views on a lot of issues, but I think that he, Blackmore, et. al., are far too sanguine about identifying themselves as Buddhists while rejecting 95% of the content of that tradition. (In Blackmore’s case, I can’t see that she’s very interested in or knowledgeable about that tradition.)
– In philosophy of mind, Blackmore is far to uncritical an acolyte of Dan Dennett. But that’s a subject for a whole series of posts, at the least.
Speaking of Dan Dennett, who’m I’ve briefly mentioned in this blog before, in this section of the online essay “Moving Forward on the Problem of Consciousness” David Chalmers explains what he thinks is wrong with Dennett’s views.
At The American Prospect, Neil Sinhababu writes about abortion. (Sinhababu is, as I once was, a doctoral candidate in philosophy at UT-Austin, although I don’t know the guy.) For academic philosophers, there’s nothing very new here. Sinhababu’s position is:
I think that killing [a] kitten would be worse than killing [a human] embryo. . . . I hold that moral status depends on the nature of a creature’s mind. This means that the lives of creatures that can think and feel — regardless of their species — are of greater value than the lives of creatures that cannot.
This could almost be called the mainstream view among academic philosophers; at any rate, arguments like Sinhababu’s are the stock-in-trade of the courses on “contemporary moral issues” that provide the sole exposure to philosophy for many American undergraduates these days. Still, given the controversy that surrounds, say, Peter Singer’s views, it’ll be interesting to see what kind of shock and outrage it produces in the blogosphere.
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