Showing titles in Philosophy

The human dilemma is that we have an innate tendency to conflate our current brain state with how reality apart from ourselves really is, forgetting, in the process, that our subjective experiences may be inaccurate or misleading representations of our objective surroundings. There are, of course, good evolutionary reasons for why this is the case, since in our struggle for survival, we have to rely on our mental maps (and take them seriously) in order to find food, ward or fight off enemies, secure housing, find mates, protect offspring, and so on.

Why is the genome of a salamander 40 times larger than that of a human? Why does the avocado tree produce a million flowers and only a hundred fruits? Why, in short, is there so much waste in nature? In this lively and wide-ranging meditation on the curious accidents and unexpected detours on the path of life, Daniel Milo argues that we ask these questions because we’ve embraced a faulty conception of how evolution - and human society - really works.

In 1980, Ronald Reagan created one of the dumbest talking points of all time: "I'm not a scientist, but..." Since then, politicians have repeatedly committed egregious transgressions against scientific knowledge prefaced by this seemingly innocuous phrase. Yet, as science journalist Dave Levitan reveals, that line is just the tip of the melting iceberg when it comes to rhetorical tools wielded to attack scientific findings that don't cooperate with political agendas.

To listen to most pundits and political writers, evolution, stem cells, and climate change are the only scientific issues worth mentioning and the only people who are anti-science are conservatives. Now for the first time, science writers Dr. Alex B. Berezow and Hank Campbell have drawn open the curtain on the left’s fear of science. As Science Left Behind reveals, vague inclinations about the wholesomeness of all things natural, the unhealthiness of the unnatural, and many other seductive fallacies have led to an epidemic of misinformation.

The world of science has been transformed. Where once astronomers sat at the controls of giant telescopes in remote locations, praying for clear skies, now they have no need to budge from their desks, as data arrives in their inbox. And what they receive is overwhelming; projects now being built provide more data in a few nights than in the whole of humanities' history of observing the universe.

Professor Luke O’Neill has become one of the most well-known and trusted voices of Ireland’s COVID-19 pandemic. A world-renowned immunologist, he was thrust into the spotlight as the media and public desperately grappled to make sense of a crisis that saw the country grind to a halt. In these high-octane diaries, Professor Luke reveals what life was like behind the scenes.

¿Es posible que, por separado, la ciencia y la espiritualidad no puedan ofrecernos las claves para comprender el mundo? ¿Podemos plantearnos una perspectiva que integre ambos saberes? A la hora de explicar hechos como la conciencia humana, la conexión entre el cuerpo y la mente, el altruismo y los fenómenos anómalos, el modelo científico convencional presenta limitaciones. Para superarlas, Steve Taylor propone un nuevo camino de investigación y conocimiento: el panespiritismo. Según éste, la esencia fundamental de la realidad son el espíritu o la conciencia, no la materia.

It is not too often that a brilliant scientist is also a wonderfully gifted writer. Sir Arthur Eddington was both. Brought up as a Quaker (he was a pacifist during World War One), Eddington was by all accounts a brilliant mathematician and physicist, who eventually became a professor of astronomy at Cambridge University. Sir Arthur Eddington is perhaps most famous for partially confirming Albert Einstein's theory of relativity back in 1919.

In Life Finds a Way, biologist Andreas Wagner reveals the deep symmetry between innovation in biological evolution and human cultural creativity. Rarely is either a linear climb to perfection - instead, "progress" is typically marked by a sequence of peaks, plateaus, and pitfalls. For instance, in Picasso's 40-some iterations of Guernica, we see the same combination of small steps, incessant reshuffling, and large, almost reckless, leaps that characterize the way evolution transformed a dinosaur's grasping claw into a condor's soaring wing.

En près de cinq heures, cet audio retrace l'histoire de France de 1715 à 1815, incarnée par Olivier Coquard, spécialiste d'histoire moderne.

Can we ever truly comprehend the universe before we fully understand consciousness and the wonders, and limits, of the mind? Ulf Danielsson, an acclaimed theoretical physicist who has dedicated his career to probing the deepest mysteries of nature, thinks not. As he dismantles the arguments of esteemed mathematicians and scientists, who would substitute their mathematical models for reality and equate the mind to a computer, he makes a lucid and passionate case that it is nature, full of beauty and meaning, which must compel us.

En près de cinq heures, cet audio retrace l'histoire de France aux XIVème et XVème siècles.

We need a new philosophy of the earth. Geological time used to refer to slow and gradual processes, but today we are watching land sink into the sea and forests transform into deserts. We can even see the creation of new geological strata made of plastic, chicken bones, and other waste that could remain in the fossil record for millennia or longer. Crafting a philosophy of geology that rewrites natural and human history from the broader perspective of movement, Thomas Nail provides a new materialist, kinetic ethics of the earth that speaks to this moment.

The following essays focus on consciousness, neuroscience, evolutionary biology, artificial intelligence, computer science, virtual and augmented reality, and more. Each chapter stands on its own and doesn’t require prior knowledge about the subject, though having a background in philosophical and scientific thinking is a plus. These essays, with a few exceptions, were originally published in Europe on the Integral World website during the past decade.

Recent scientific discoveries in quantum physics and relativity theory leave no doubt that nonlocality is a basic feature of physical reality. In addition, numerous phenomena such as ESP, out-of-body and near-death experiences, as well as mental states affecting physiological changes indicate that mind is nonlocal and cannot be equated with the brain. Nonlocality in the physical and mental realms negates the materialistic worldview but is entirely consistent with the spiritual worldview. The spiritual worldview is a top-down ontology—it begins and ends with Consciousness and considers ...

This entertaining account, offering a plethora of little known facts and insights from previously classified military projects, shows how the real-world science of the Cold War followed in the footsteps of SF - and how the two together changed our perception of both science and scientists, and paved the way to the world we live in today.

The Nature of Things was written in the 1st century BC by Roman polymath Lucretius. It is written as a didactic poem, and explains Epicurean physics.

We know that eating animals is bad for the planet and bad for our health, and yet we do it anyway. Ask anyone in the plant-based movement and the solution seems obvious: stop eating meat. But, for many people, that stark solution is neither appealing nor practical. In Meat Me Halfway, author and founder of the reducetarian movement Brian Kateman puts forth a realistic and balanced goal: mindfully reduce your meat consumption.

Evolutions brings to life the latest scientific thinking on the birth of the universe and the solar system, the journey from a single cell all the way to our human minds. Reawakening our sense of wonder and terror at the world around us and within us, Oren Harman uses modern science to create new and original mythologies.

Observation apprises us of what is, but not of what must be. It therefore does not apprise us of logical norms or of relations of logical dependence. In addition, the transformation of sensory information (pictorial) information into propositional (conceptual, non-pictorial) information presupposes knowledge of how to convert information of one kind into information of some other kind, and it therefore presupposes knowledge of logical equivalencies.