Issue_69

Zombies are supposed to be capable of asking any question about the nature of experience. It’s worth wondering, though, how a person or machine devoid of experience could reflect on experience it doesn’t have.Photograph by Ars Electronica / Flickr The Australian philosopher David Chalmers famously asked whether “philosophical zombies” are conceivable—people who behave like you […]

How a math professor learned to stop worrying and love algebraic geometry.

Reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine’s Abstractions blog.The fabric of space and time is widely believed by physicists to be emergent, stitched out of quantum threads according to an unknown pattern. And for 22 years, they’ve had a toy model of how emergent space-time can work: a theoretical “universe in a bottle,” as its discoverer, Juan Maldacena, has described it. Nautilus Members […]

A “memory matrix” might solve Stephen Hawking’s black-hole paradox.

If, as the research shows, our moral outrage is highly sensitive to actions but not consequences, we might want to treat feelings of moral outrage—whether others’ or our own—skeptically. Photograph by Vjacheslav_Kozyrev / Flickr The episode last month at the Lincoln Memorial, involving the boys from Covington Catholic High School, and a Native American man, […]

The brain may represent concepts in the same way that it represents space and your location, by using the same neural circuitry for the brain’s “inner GPS.”

What is neuroscience doing to art?

Astronomers turned a fantastic concept into reality.