Up Your Music Game

One thing I’ve learned from a lifetime of music appreciation is that everyone listens his or her own way. Think of the last time you listened to music. What was it? How did you listen to it? Were you paying attention to individual instruments, lyrics, or do you remember how it felt?

In my experience, musicians tend to hear individual instruments; they can tell you what instruments are being played, and they can hear what each is doing and explain it to you. Listening in his mode makes it easy to hear each type of sound as an extension of the person playing the instrument, and appreciate the creativity and skill, or lack thereof. Musicians can break apart a song and explain it rationally.

But it seems to me the average listener hears the song as a whole; they have a connection to how a song feels, but couldn’t tell you what went into making it, and they tend to remember the vocal melody and lyrics before the instrumentation.

Here’s an experiment: if you’re the type who hears individual instruments, try to turn that off for a while and listen to the song as a whole. Pay attention to how it feels. If you’re the type who listens to songs “as a whole,” try to delineate what instruments are making what noises, and pay attention to what each is doing (this might take a few listens). Switching back and forth and listening to songs different ways can lead to surprising changes in opinion.

You can listen any number of ways. Listen to the rhythm section. Listen to the amount of reverb on the vocals or the distance of the mike from the drums. Listen to the lyrics and pay attention to their meaning. Manipulating your own consciousness around the music can be an interesting experience.

You might realize that you disliked a song your entire life because there is one small aspect of it that rubs you the wrong way. For instance, once you muscle through the totally bizarre opening two minutes of “Aja” by Steely Dan, the song is unstoppable, and the last minute is mind-blowing.

You might also find out one of your favorite songs is actually terrible. That’s not a fun discovery, but do you really want to listen to garbage your whole life just because you lost your virginity to Def Leopard?

Deepak Chopra’s Cosmic Confusion

In all of history, no topic has been the subject of more bullshit writing than the spiritual side of life. We all live through the lens of our own experience, and it’s commendable to try to explain internal experiences, but because consciousness is such a mysterious and strange aspect of life, an unfortunate majority of opinions about it are sadly misguided.

Deepak Chopra, for example, says that matter is an illusion and consciousness is all there is. This is wrong. I’ve voiced my disagreement with his opinions before, but I assure you I’m not holding a grudge; I’m simply voicing my reaction to the ongoing dissemination of his ideas, which I find pernicious. We should all strive to understand our selves, so I don’t hold his efforts against him, but I would love to share a coffee with the man and let him in on the following:

Matter is real. It is one of the fundamental facts of the universe, as all sane people know. Even most insane people know this. Under some very special conditions, matter gives rise to organisms. As those organisms evolve, some gain tremendous complexity and computational powers to employ for survival, and very few attain what we would call consciousness. Referring to a persistent fact as an “illusion” isn’t helpful.


Some of the functions of consciousness remain a mystery, but we have no evidence to assume that consciousness is all there is. What we know as consciousness today has only been around for the tiniest sliver of the history of the universe, and there is plenty of evidence to support that claim. How can Chopra’s theories explain prehistory? If consciousness is all there is, does he believe that there was absolutely nothing in the universe until the first conscious being was born? What gave birth to that being?

Chopra’s philosophy seems like redressed Hinduism, where matter is maya (illusion) and we are all facets of Brahman (God). He redresses it with the ill-fitting jargon of quantum physics, a perplexing topic that arose from the exploration of matter. Chopra is certainly no authority on this dense and confusing field of study, and most quantum physicists disagree with his interpretations.

Chopra and his ilk love to refer to materialism as “reductionism” as if materialism reduces our significance in the universe. But this is bush league word play. Pay attention to how often they use that word and you’ll realize this is a cheap tactic in a mind game and has no relation to how the world is described by materialism.

And besides, not one facet of our internal experienced is “reduced” by materialism. Whatever explanation we throw at it, we all have an internal experience. Belief in God or spirits or a soul—even the belief that we are all biological puppets—doesn’t change the fact that consciousness as we know it arises from the brain. Beliefs don’t change our qualia and don’t change our perceptual apparatus. It only changes our explanation of these phenomena to ourselves. But those explanations are just words.

I’ve experienced the feeling of being in the true presence of divinity. It was a fully conscious experience and it came stamped with an undeniable feeling of authority. I came out of the experience thinking, “Oh, that’s what they mean when they say ‘God’.” In no way does this experience prove that there is some sort of external divine intelligence; it only proves that such a conscious experience is possible. Such a feeling is possible. It’s a beautiful feeling, but it says nothing about the fundaments of the universe, and the experience would have been totally impossible without matter (my brain, for example). I spend time every day cultivating that experience, and I need no belief of any kind to justify it. These are purely pragmatic concerns, denuded of metaphysics.

I’m sure these facts have been laid out for Mr. Chopra over and over again, yet he keeps on with his message, adjusting his pseudo-scientific jargon ever so slightly but failing to learn or change or grow. It makes me question his motives. The fact is that his name has become a brand, and to admit his prior confusion hurts the brand. After all, what does an enlightened spiritual guru need with a net worth of $80 million? He doesn’t need any of your money, and you don’t need any of his nonsense.

Free Will: A Devil’s Advocacy

Here are some thoughts on Sam Harris’ Free Will that weren’t in my review. I hope you get a kick out of them.

Much of the strength of Harris’ argument rests on the weak shoulders of the concept of free will, which is vague, flimsy, and usually inadequate. The popular concept of free will, in this sense, is similar to the popular concept of God, which is often argued over but rarely defined. His point, briefly, is that we all inherit accidental conditions when we’re born and throughout our lives that define the range of our experience and reactions. We have no control over these conditions and therefore our will can never be truly “free”.

What Harris does best is to present an argument to the popular, “common sense” assumptions about free will (much like he does with God in this “debate” with a confused Deepak Chopra). Harris’ argument constantly pleads for a causal look at physical phenomena and evidence-based conclusions. He shows over and over again that there is no real evidence to support free will.

Some of the semantic elements of his presentation did not sit right with me, however, so I’ll outline a few of these issues as I see them. I welcome comments and opinions, as I am nothing like an authority on any of these issues. If it’s a bit fragmented, that’s because I agreed with most of what he said, and only took issue here and there.

“Free will is an illusion.”

Rather than open with a working definition of free will—which would put people on the same page immediately, even if it were a weak definition—Harris says that free will IS an illusion. This is his thesis statement. But the “Is”, in this case, as in all subject-predicate propositions, over-extends its authority. When we say what something is, what exactly do we mean?

I can predicate all I want, but my statements will never cover all the facts of reality. I can talk about some fundamental, permanent property in an object, and I can make a definitive judgment about objects—say, “the grass is green”—but my judgment doesn’t close the issue altogether and won’t necessarily be true under all conditions (green grass viewed under a red light appears black).

How do I know what something is? I look, or in the case of a priori phenomena, I intuit and reason. I can sense features of the object of inquiry, but I can never know everything about it. Better I should declare my judgment in terms of my frame of reference. The subject-predicate “is” misleads because it unconsciously assumes ultimate, objective authority and falls prey to misguided is/is-not dual logic.

If I translate his “is” claim with this in mind, it becomes “free will appears as an illusion to me.” This simple and honest change of wording strips his argument of its tone of authority. The “to me” implies his epistemology (i.e. free will appears as an illusion according to principles 1, 2, 3, etc.). We shouldn’t speak authoritatively about facts as though they exist alone in a vacuum. I prefer arguments that avoid claiming what something “is” and instead describe the world as it actually works, through verbs expressing process-transactions with an observer.

“There are no self-sustained facts, floating in nonentity.” – Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality

The other issue I have with his claim is this: labeling a persistent fact “an illusion” doesn’t make the illusion go away. Even if we wholeheartedly buy Harris’ argument, we still feel free to make the choices presented to us. Calling free will an illusion doesn’t diminish the fact that I make conscious decisions that affect my future. The term “illusion” is not so firm a concept that Average Joe can’t easily misapply it. People will continue to live just as they did before, even if they adjust their assumptions about how much freedom is actually involved.

Hindus believe that the phenomenological world is an illusion, that our senses obscure true divine reality. But Hindus still live with the phenomenological world of sense every day. We can reason away sensations as merely neurological events, but this does little to take us out of the experience of that illusion. I find this thought echoing in my head when Harris writes, “[e]ither our wills are determined by prior causes and we are not responsible for them, or they are the product of chance and we are not responsible for them” because a similar line of reasoning likely led the Hindus to develop their metaphysics of karma.


On this issue I am confused, and I would be happy if someone would clear things up for me. If I accept that physics can explain everything that exists, then material facts must be responsible for false beliefs. If I believe trolls control reality through magic, this belief is explained as an outcome of weird biology or neurochemical activity (psychosis, bad drugs, etc.). So the physical facts of my brain are responsible for my subjective misreading of the world around me. This underlines the importance of communicating my judgments in terms of my own frames of reference (i.e. “I am going under the Great Bridge when I die, according to my beliefs, because I paid the toll and the trolls have chosen me.”).

Science is a semantic activity first and foremost; although it aims at objectivity, empirical testing should always refer to the observer applying tests to the facts at hand (i.e. “Under these conditions, I noticed X.”). The more observers corroborate a fact, the higher the probability that the next observer will see the same thing and further corroborate the observation. By this, the scientific method, we approach facts and laws. But the point here is that experience is the only measure of reality. We can say nothing meaningful about an unobserved world, and if we do we are confusing inference for fact. Free Will takes advantage of this tactic, frequently using absolute, objective language when it is not possible to have absolute, objective knowledge. His use of absolute language is obviously a linguistic dilemma. It doesn’t mean that I disagree with the spirit of his argument.

I will quote him as an example: “Consider what it would take to actually have free will. You would need to be aware of all the factors that determine your thoughts and actions, and you would need to have complete control over those factors.” Remove superlatives from this sentence. “Consider what it would take to actually have free will. You would need to be aware of some of the factors that determine your thoughts and actions, and you would need some control over those factors.” Well, we are aware of some of the factors, and we do have some control, so the statement simply begs the definition of “free”. In this case, “free” doesn’t mean “completely free”, but there is wiggle room for free will if we admit that we have some freedom in our conscious actions.

I’d like to return to my question: are thoughts and semantics purely material? Can the various levels of abstraction, the nuance and individuality of human brains and nervous systems be completely accounted for with only empirical evidence? I don’t think so. If you take strict material determinism as your view, you do not have the empirical evidence to claim that all of human experience can be explained by physics, even if it really, really seems that way.

There seems to be some missing explanation, some mystery that translates these so-called simple neuronal firings into complex visible, audible, tactile experiences that we can actually think about in infinite (indefinite) degrees of abstraction. It’s easy to say, “Thought A is caused by the firing of neuron X,” but a thought has a subjective, omni-valent presentation to it and a neuronal firing does not. How consciousness translates neuronal firings into experience seems mostly mysterious to me.

We can measure the brain activity of someone who is meditating or sleeping or doing a puzzle or looking at a red Chevy Nova. We can get reams of data, collated and colour-coded, and that makes us think we have the facts. But try going the other way here. Try looking at brain activity on the page and tell me exactly what it is like to live in that brain, complete with all itinerant facts, all the memories of each element of the event, the fantasies the person calls up consciously and unconsciously because of personal, historical correspondences, etc. It’s impossible. Numbers and data are not experience itself. Math and science are only models of experience. They are usually more correct models than primitive superstitions, sure, but still only models.

If beliefs have a material basis, the materialist says his nervous system and brain is more correct than a faith-based person’s nervous system. But both generate models for consideration. New and different models help guide us toward understanding reality as long as we eventually eliminate the false models. There will always be new models of reality because models reflect our collective subjectivity, which evolves and reacts to environmental conditions. To ossify any one model into dogma is to insist on an end to our development in understanding reality.

The Neuroscience of Consciousness

Harris refers several times to the fact that brain scans reveal activity significantly sooner than a person feels he has made a decision. “These findings are difficult to reconcile with the sense that we are the conscious authors of our actions.” But is it possible that the complexity of the brain and nervous system, with our conscious and unconscious abstractions on multiple levels, simply takes longer to register cogently in consciousness than it does to register on an EEG? We don’t know of a more complex machine than the brain/CNS. Since all signals travel at finite speeds, might the time delay be explained by the abstract processing and reprocessing, the neuronal and physiological feedback loops we perform unconsciously to fit events into our worldviews?

He notes that seemingly random neuronal firing originating in the brain has been observed. But how do we know something is random? We call a signal random if it doesn’t follow our idea of patterned stimulus (in this case, it doesn’t fit our ideas of material determinism). Of course, what appears random may in fact be purposeful and not random at all. Pi, for instance, looks like a completely random string of numbers (3.141592654…), but we know it isn’t random. It signifies a concrete relation.

If I were to argue for the existence of a soul, I might argue this so-called random firing is not random at all, but direct material evidence of the soul’s activity. The neural action rises from unknown causes in a manner that material determinism can’t explain. Of course if I were to make this argument, I would be stepping outside of the materialist paradigm. Naturally, using a complete unknown as “proof” for anything is totally backwards…but weirder arguments have been made (by Deepak Chopra).

Since it would be impossible to trace all the contributing factors in any decision, many human activities must seem on paper to be randomly generated (from a window of possibilities, tendencies, etc.). If there was an immaterial soul and free will, it would be immeasurable and we could only detect its impulses after the impulse worked through the nervous system and was processed on different levels of abstraction, so the conscious mind might be the last to know of the soul’s impetus.


While Harris can safely kill the concept of “freedom” in any argument for free will, he concedes that we do have will and we do make conscious decisions that affect our futures. Our apparent “freedom” falls within a bracket of possibilities. But with intellectual and/or spiritual growth, we continually understand more of our unconscious tendencies and open the window of possible outcomes, thereby increasing our freedom.


Even arguing against free will, Harris believes willpower exists and is effective. Rather than thinking about humanity as a purely clockwork organism, he grants that our wills are unique to us and we do have a measure of control over our own lives.

     “A creative change of inputs to the system—learning new skills, forming new relationships, adopting new habits of attention—may radically form one’s life.               Becoming sensitive to the background causes of one’s thoughts and feelings can—paradoxically—allow for greater creative control over one’s life. It is one thing to bicker with your wife because you are in a bad mood; it is another to realize that your mood and behavior have been caused by low blood sugar. This understanding reveals you to be a biochemical puppet, of course, but it also allows you to grab hold of one of your strings: A bit of food may be all that your personality requires. Getting behind our conscious thoughts and feelings can allow us to steer a more intelligent course through our lives (while knowing, of course, that we are ultimately being steered).”

So Harris’ argument hasn’t damaged our humanity, it has just given us an honest look at what we mean when we say we are free. We definitely are not completely free, and there is no conceivable behavior we can adopt to prove we are free from background causes.

He is a neuroscientist, and his arguments imply material determinism, as when he says, “if I were to trade places with one of these men, atom for atom, I would be him: There is no extra part of me that could decide to see the world differently…” So although he seems to write as though agnostic about the existence of a soul, Free Will is in fact an argument against the soul. This hidden message shouldn’t surprise anyone, as he is the founder of Project Reason, and their modus operandi is to spread science and secular values to the world.

Free Will is a fine piece of work and I recommend it. It does away with a shabby, ill-defined concept in favor of evidence-based conclusions. It might seem a colder way to look at the world, but feeling cold or feeling warm and fuzzy doesn’t change the facts of reality. Nor does his work strip us of spirituality. I am eager to read Harris’ upcoming book, Waking Up: Science, Skepticism, Spirituality, due in 2014.

Free Will by Sam Harris

A little while ago I wrote a review of Free Will by Sam Harris. The review, in which I speak very highly of the book, was aimed at the casual reader, someone who might pick it up out of sheer curiosity, so I avoided some of the semantic and epistemic issues that rubbed me the wrong way. Here is the review, as written. Next week I will post some of the problems I had with the book. These problems didn’t make it into the review because I doubt they will bother the average reader and reflect my own distinct brand of nitpicking.

Article first published as Book Review: Free Will by Sam Harris on Blogcritics.

Free Will by Sam Harris








Far from abstract verbalism, Free Will discusses the practical issues of morality, politics, and justice without yanking the rug out from under them. From Harris’ position justice must still be served, but our inclinations to hate criminals must be reassessed as we realize these criminals aren’t in complete control, but are the unlucky outcomes of bad genes, bad environments, or other maladaptive conditions. The elimination of free will in no way leads to the decay of morality.


Change Your Brain – Pt. 1






These three books challenged my beliefs and enriched my mind.







