Book review: Sam Keen, In the Absence of God

This book seems to be an ecumenical attempt to take adherents of Abrahamic religions beyond the literal dogma of their scriptures toward a shared underlying spirituality and value system.  For people with a lingering sense that the "should" be religious, but doubts about the canonical beliefs of their native religion, I think this will be a rewarding, and possibly life-changing read.

However, in my opinion Keen succeeds, probably unintentionally, in taking his ecumenicism beyond that.  It comes as close as anything I've read to explaining an underlying primal human spirituality.  He does this by explaining our nebulous spiritual sense as being grounded in primal emotions.

Mandelbrot insight

In honour of the life of Benoit Mandelbrot, I’d like to discuss the philosophical implications of he famous set.

The Ineffability of Qualia

When we communicate with each other to convey experiences and ideas, how does the information actually transfer from one mind to another? For that matter, how does a word hold meaning for us?

The Delusion of Perfectionism

I remember a time when I was a small boy, when my father praised one of my creative projects, and I proudly stated "I'm a perfectionist". He quickly replied that there are a lot of problems with being a perfectionist. This puzzled me at the time. What could be wrong with always wanting everything to be perfect? It was as if my father didn't understand the value of perfection! How could he be so dense?

Universal Harmony

I'd like to share with you a realization I came to recently. It is an observation which is at the same time obvious and profound, logical and mystical. There is a benign force underlying the entire universe. In fact this force is a fundamental and necessary property of existence. This force is the source of a fundamental harmony which unifies everything.

Second law of thermodynamics fallacy

The original form of the Second Law of Thermodynamics states simply that heat within a system will tend to become  evenly distributed over time.  This is intuitive enough that most reasonable people would be willing to accept it as axiomatic, and therefore worthy of the name "law".

Unfortunately, over time it has been extrapolated and misconstrued to an almost unrecognizable conjecture which states roughly:  The level of entropy in a closed system increases over time.  In this context entropy is defined roughly to mean disorder, or chaos.  Essentially this means that things tend to become less organized and more "random" over time.

In this modified form, on its surface, this may still appear intuitive.  After all, we're all familiar with things breaking down over time.  A broken glass is hard to fix.  A dead hamster cannot be brought back to life.  Indeed, this new form of the law is taught widely in universities and accepted by most engineers and physicists unquestioningly.

There's only one problem with this version of the 2nd law:  it's unequivocally not true!