This is a 10-part series from The Open University, featuring Professor Russell Stannard exploring the BIG questions – What is consciousness? What is free will? What caused the Big Bang? What is time? Each “episode” is relatively short, between 7 and 14 minutes, so these are bite size examinations of the big questions. The Boundaries … Read more
From Scientific American, this is a short but cool discussion between Joseph LeDoux and Michael Gazzaniga on the topic of free will – Gazzaniga wrote an excellent book on the topic, Who’s in Charge?: Free Will and the Science of the Brain (2011). Free Will: Is Your Brain the Boss of You? [Video] By Mark … Read more
Thomas Roberts is the author of The Psychedelic Future of the Mind: How Entheogens Are Enhancing Cognition, Boosting Intelligence, and Raising Values (2013) and Psychedelic Horizons (2006), among other works. The paper below is posted at Academia.edu – it looks at re-visioning our understanding of consciousness from a singlestate model to a multistate model. As … Read more
From Bookforum‘s Omnivore blog, a collection of links on political philosophy with topics ranging from inequality to Thomas Piketty to Jean-Jacques Rousseau (on his continued relevance and his views on equality). Hot topics in political philosophy Jun 24 20143:00PM Fabienne Peter (Warwick): The Epistemic Circumstances of Democracy. Xavier Landes (Copenhagen): The Normative Foundations of (Social) … Read more
This is last week’s episode of The Philosopher’s Zone podcast, with guest Daivd Papineau, professor at King’s College in London. Papineau has worked in metaphysics, epistemology, and the philosophies of science, mind, and mathematics. His overall stance is naturalist and realist. He is one of the originators of the teleosemantic theory of mental representation, a … Read more
This is a very cool article in which philosopher Alva Noë looks at one of my favorite films through a perspective I have never taken or even considered – the film is about the act of coming to realize that something is wrong. It’s clear something is wrong long before Rosemary is able to … Read more
From Bookforum‘s Omnivore blog comes this interesting assortment of links on all things atheism and faith. One of the highlights is a Julian Baggini review (in The Guardian) of Atheists: The Origin of the Species by Nick Spencer. Another interesting link is from Steven Douglas Smith (University of San Diego School of Law), Is God … Read more
This is a cool article from Aeon Magazine about how modern mathematics is influencing Western philosophy in the direction of accepting contradictions – an influence of Buddhist thought that is finally getting traction in the West. Graham Priest is a distinguished professor of philosophy at CUNY and professor emeritus at the University of Melbourne. He … Read more
From Bookforum‘s Omnivore blog, another collection of philosophy links to drag us down the rabbit hole. Included is a review of Mary Midgley’s Are You an Illusion? and an article on Midgley’s efforts to defend human consciousness against the likes of Richard Dawkins. There is also a good interview with John Searle, one of … Read more
Nice talk from Cassandra Vieten, CEO and President of the Institute for Noetic Sciences, on the need for fearlessness in scientists at the “frontier of science,” the “investigation of consciousness.” This talk was given at the Science and Nonduality Conference. Fearless Science – Cassandra Vieten Published on Feb 6, 2014 The frontier of science is … Read more