Sadness

What is sadness? It arises from the natural mind. In this case, I would say the natural mind includes the heart, because I also suspect that computation happens in the heart. So sadness.... I think it arises from the process of deconstructing computational structures. The brain develops an infrastructure to support computation about something/someone that we need or want to pay attention to. When that person dies or we lose the thing, the computational infrastructure becomes useless and has to be deconstructed. I think that process gives rise to what we call sadness.

Theodicy

I think it is worthwhile to make an early note on why I think Christianity doesn't make any sense. This is important to me, because I grew up a Christian although I lost that faith in high school. I think that a Christian is going to be forced to have a different notion about the nature of mind because of confusion about the existence of the soul and about the persistence of mind after death. Either of these notions are going to prevent any critical thought.

Long before I realized the argument had a name, one clear idea in my own mind was that the notion of a good, all-powerful god doesn't make any sense. The statement off the problem goes by the name of theodicy. This refers in general to the attempt to reconcile the notion of a loving, all-powerful god with existence of evil.

An argument that I often use is as follows: Suppose I were sitting by the edge of swimming pool, and my toddler was playing at the edge of the pool. If I saw that my child was about to fall in, I would certainly stop him/her, but god wouldn't. Hence, I am a better father than god.

In my personal view. There isn't any way around this problem.

Methodological Naturalism

Methodological naturalism is the viewpoint that all experience is part of the natural world and that all knowledge is gained in essentially the same way; that is, through observation and experience. In particular this means from the very beginning that there can be no supernatural phenomena and no divine inspiration. Everything that we are and know comes from the world around us.

My first introduction to this was when my Buddhist teacher told me that my viewpoint was "scientific materialism". I thought about it, and I had to agree with him. In searching to better understand that terminology, I came across a more neutral and descriptive term, methodological naturalism. My teacher meant to convey that this was a limitation in my viewpoint and a barrier to further spiritual progress. But as I reflected more on it, I came to see this as an essential element of my outlook on life.