Meditations

Over the last 30 years, philosophers of science, pundits and New Age devotees have blurred and muddied the differences between humans and nature. The gambit has been to eliminate the…

Bright orange poppies, California’s state flower, are plentiful this year, and surround me in the in the high grass at creekside. Vultures soar by at nearly treetop level, exhibiting effortless…

“The biggest concern is that we might one day create conscious machines: sentient beings with beliefs, desires and, most morally pressing, the capacity to suffer,” write psychologist Paul Bloom and…

Given that the universe, and life on earth, unfolds in seamless wholeness, how did nature make such a mistake as man? And has evolution provided us a way out of…

The winter rains came late this year in California. A series of storms this spring have made the land verdant beyond belief. Sitting on the lip of the narrow gorge…

There’s a new installation on roof of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, “a spare and unsettling sculpture” according to the New York Times of two huge creatures—a…

The search for life on other planets is intensifying. A field that was dismissed as fringe science two decades ago is now closing in from different angles on the question…

In the early 1980’s, after 15 years of intensive philosophical inquiry into the question of how human disorder could evolve out of the natural order, I had a shattering experience…