1+ week, 15+ hour 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…...

1+ week, 2+ 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+ week, 13+ hour 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,…...

3+ mon, 1+ day 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,…...

4+ mon, 2+ 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…...

5+ mon, 2+ day 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…...

9+ mon, 1+ week ago   (509+ words) According to epiphenomenalism, we are like children pretending to drive a car " it can be great fun, but we are really not in charge. - Epiphenomenalism is the idea that our conscious minds serve no role in affecting the physical world....

10+ mon, 2+ day ago   (817+ words) A fresh view of intelligence " spanning living systems from bacteria to human civilization " challenges the idea that it's merely problem-solving. - Traditional definitions of intelligence emphasize problem-solving ability, but a broader view suggests that intelligence is about how well a system…...

11+ mon, 3+ week ago   (1553+ words) If humanity really is alone in the Universe, it presents us with a philosophical problem " and opportunity. - From the discovery of exoplanets to the sheer vastness of the cosmos, we have good reasons to suspect that humanity is not alone…...