15+ hour ago  (74+ words) Jim Al-Khalili explains how the past and future are more fluid than we may think. This content is locked. Please login or become a member. We would hope that the moment that we eternally live in, the "now," would have…...

1+ week, 11+ hour ago  (871+ words) From a scientific perspective, studying consciousness is a bit like trying to describe the singularity inside a black hole from the window of a spacecraft in its gravitational orbit. We can see how the black hole warps and contorts the…...

1+ week, 6+ day ago  (367+ words) A philosophy column for personal reflection. But what if most people don't actually want the truth, or if they just want to be right? In such cases, the truth might be a liability. When what philosophers, scientists, or experts present…...

1+ mon, 1+ week ago  (561+ words) A philosophy column for personal reflection. We are all philosophers. I don't mean this in the "What do you make of Quine's "Two Dogmas'?" sense. No, we are all philosophers in that we all do philosophy. Philosophy is a practice…...

2+ mon, 4+ day ago  (539+ words) Our intuitions about consciousness may be deeply wrong'Big Think We tend to trust our intuitions about consciousness because they feel immediate and personal, but feeling convinced is not the same as being right. Annaka Harris explores what happens when science…...

2+ mon, 2+ day ago  (267+ words) Consciousness feels like the most familiar thing in the world, and yet science still can't say what it is, where it begins, or why it exists at all. Annaka Harris examines the assumptions shaping consciousness research, from the belief that…...

2+ mon, 1+ week ago  (75+ words) Stoicism has been flattened into slogans about toughness, detachment, and emotional silence, a version that's easy to sell, but mostly wrong." Massimo Pigliucci returns Stoicism to its original purpose: a practical philosophy built to help ordinary people make better judgments,…...

4+ mon, 3+ week ago  (575+ words) A sharp border separating the physical and the mental is intuitively obvious. It is the reason why most cultures believe in a soul of some kind " an entity distinct from the body that experiences its sensations and beliefs. For example,…...

6+ mon, 1+ week ago  (427+ words) Could all of this be solved by coming up with a "Theory of Everything?" Although the idea continues to fascinate many, there are some strong arguments to be made against it. Here's why, perhaps, there isn't a Theory of Everything…...

6+ mon, 4+ week ago  (129+ words) He didn't have much patience for parapsychological things like out-of-body experiences or telepathy, but neither did he have much time for the notion of first-personhood. Much of Dennett's career was spent defanging what David Chalmers would call "the hard problem…...