Philosophy

It’s time to take moral emotion in animals seriously.

To this philosopher, art is the best method for exploring who and what we are.

Don’t worry, even in a simulation, life is still perfectly meaningful.

Published research is less about conclusions than science at play.

If objective ethical values exist, we’ll have to give up tribalism to realize them.

Why science changes everything.

It’s hard to change people’s beliefs about free will. So, it can feel like a relief to realize that even when you can change people’s beliefs, it seems to make no moral difference anyway.Illustration by Triff / Shutterstock Belief is a special kind of human power. Agustin Fuentes, an anthropologist at the University of Notre […]

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 […]

To save the ocean, give property rights to the creatures living there

Not long ago, I heard an echo of Albert Einstein’s religious views in the words of Elon Musk. Asked, at the close of a conversation with Axios, whether he believed in God, the CEO of both SpaceX and Tesla paused, looked away from his interlocutors for a brief second, and then said, in that mild […]

Science and ancient Greeks agree—Stoicism increases well-being.

A proponent of panpsychism argues moral truth is inherent in consciousness.

“We conclude,” the researchers wrote, “that objects have a remarkably persistent dual character: their objective shape ‘out there,’ and their perspectival shape ‘from here.’”Photograph by Ryan DeBerardinis / Shutterstock Imagine you are looking at a manhole cover a few paces away on the street. It looks circular, but this is because of some impressive perceptual […]

How much would you pay to prevent your own child becoming blind?Photograph by 1000Photography / Shutterstock Last fall Fiery Cushman, the director of the Moral Psychology Research Lab at Harvard, and I announced a contest: We would award $1,000 to the author of an argument that effectively convinces research participants to donate a surprise bonus […]

Panpsychists look at the many rungs on the complexity ladder of nature and see no obvious line between mind and no-mind.Illustration by Yurchanka Siarhei / Shutterstock This month, the cover of New Scientist ran the headline, “Is the Universe Conscious?” Mathematician and physicist Johannes Kleiner, at the Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy in Germany, told […]

Philosophy is needed to put the science of COVID-19 in perspective.

If a philosopher starts speaking about elementary particles, run.Pinterest I recently discovered panpsychism. That’s the idea that all matter—animate or inanimate—is conscious, we just happen to be somewhat more conscious than carrots. Panpsychism is the modern elan vital.  When I say I “discovered” panpsychism, I mean I discovered there’s a bunch of philosophers who produce […]

Think of consciousness like spacetime—a fundamental field that’s everywhere.

The ethics of eating insects.

Humans may have one thing that advanced aliens don’t—consciousness.

I design thought experiments to provoke dialogue about who and what we want to become.

Our fate turns on retiring our dualist view of nature.

Opinions differ about what recent measurements of a sound-trapping fluid reveal about light-trapping black holes.

An argument for a new definition of color.

Sacred beliefs likely arose out of prehistoric bonding and rituals.

The former vice president reads the transcendentalist poet—and reminds us of one.

You make choices even if your atoms don’t.

If we, as a society, were serious about our children, then children’s education—especially for those beginning “the age of reason”—would be our highest priority.Photograph by Sharon Mollerus / Flickr During my career as a scientist and a philosopher I have written and edited, thus far, 14 books. Of these, seven are for the general public. […]

I recently heard an echo of Albert Einstein’s religious views in the words of Elon Musk. Asked, at the close of a conversation with Axios, whether he believed in God, the CEO of both SpaceX and Tesla paused, looked away from his interlocutors for a brief second, and then said, in that mild South African […]

Bewilderment is the antidote to scientific reductionism.

My journey into the middle ground of the science-religion culture war.

Composer Philip Glass talks time with painter Fredericka Foster.

The philosophy and science of standing up straight.

“We’re constantly bouncing off other people and looking at other people as a mirror of us. Our very sense of who we are is intertwined with what we see when we see other people look at us.”Photograph by Saly Noémi / Fortepan / Wikicommons An oft-repeated line in A Series of Unfortunate Events, a Netflix TV […]

Philosophy matters. The new challenges of the genomics revolution, the rise of AI, the growth in inequality, societal fragmentation, and our capacity for devastating war all invite philosophical perspective.Painting by Otto Scholderer / Wikicommons Last week, for the first time in recent memory, a news story in this troubling period had me, a bachelor of […]

You have to cleverly build “common knowledge” to solve this lethal riddle.Wikicommons You’ve been caught snooping around a spooky graveyard with your best friend. The caretaker, a bored old man fond of riddles (and not so fond of trespassers), imprisons each of you in a different room inside the storage shed, and, taking your phones, […]

Given 46 million turkeys, the carbon footprint of Thanksgiving turkeys is well over 2 billion pounds of carbon dioxide. In the present deplorable state of the Earth, this is a very great additional grievance.“Still Life with a Turkey Pie,” by Pieter Claesz (1627) / Wikicommons Or, For Preventing the Annual Repast from Being a Burden on […]

There’s a saying, in conservation biology, credited to the plant ecologist Frank Egler: Ecosystems are not just more complex than we think, they’re more complex than we can think. With doomsday narratives swirling about nuclear war, the existential threat of artificial intelligence, and runaway global warming, it’s one we might want to constantly bear in […]

The captivating horror of category violation.

How one woman philosopher reinvigorated another.

Einstein, a professed pantheist, wrote that he experienced a “cosmic religious feeling,” a persistent awe at the “sublimity and marvelous order” of the universe. He was not alone.Credit: Internet Archive Aren’t those opposites?” people often ask me, when they discover I study science and religion. As a professor of religious studies, I am particularly drawn […]

When it comes to the ethics of actions, such as the decision to terraform Mars, we should ask: What sort of person would do that—a virtuous or vicious one?Photograph by Kees Veenenbos / Science Photo Library In Kim Stanley Robinson’s science-fiction Mars Trilogy, human colonists “terraform” Mars, turning the rocky red planet into a lush […]

If we, as a society, were serious about our children, then children’s education—especially for those beginning “the age of reason”—would be our highest priority.Photograph by Sharon Mollerus / Flickr During my career as a scientist and a philosopher I have written and edited, thus far, 14 books. Of these, seven are for the general public. […]

A reconstructed conversation with the great writer about science and the absurd.

When writing Ecce Homo in the late 1880s, Nietzsche sought to resurrect the Voltairean spirit in Europe, which he felt by his times had been washed away by pessimistic Romanticism. “Voltaire still comprehended umanità in the Renaissance,” Nietzsche wrote, “the cause of taste, of science, of the arts, of progress itself and civilisation.”Photograph by Gustav […]

  Sure, Donald Trump usually isn’t one for heady or complex matters. His business roles—promoting steaks, golf courses, and casinos—haven’t been particularly rigorous, in an intellectual sense. The closest he came was with Trump University (although, among other problems, its use of the word “university” to describe its operations violated New York State law.) Studying […]

As we get better and better ideas of what is conscious and what is not, they might change the kinds of experiments we will be able to comfortably and ethically perform.“The Scream” (1893) by Edvard Munch Debating whether other beings are conscious can sometimes feel like an unimportant academic exercise. But it’s not. The conclusion […]

Thomas Metzinger on the nature of subjective experience.

  When Robbert Dijkgraaf was a little boy, growing up in the Netherlands, he’d play in his home attic after school, often with a friend. It was dark inside except for the light streaming in from one window. One time, they closed the shades so only a sliver of photons could pass through. Robbert, holding […]

When we work to reduce the risk of global catastrophe, we are doing good at a literally astronomic scale.Illustration by CSA Images / Printstock Collection Ten years ago, I dropped out of my graduate program in electrical engineering. I was in computational electromagnetics, modeling how radio waves propagate through the ground. I liked it, but […]

Sharing what meaning you take from illness can enhance your treatment and sense of well-being.Illustration by Len Small A little over a decade ago, Farr Curlin, a physician and professor of medical humanities at Duke Divinity School, became curious about the spiritual lives of his colleagues. He already knew that patients’ religious beliefs and communities […]

Why the central problem in neuroscience is mirrored in physics.

How scientific cosmology puts a new twist on the problem of evil.

Big data meets history to forecast the rise and fall of religion.

It’s a subtle point, but the British comedian Ricky Gervais was not quite right when he told Stephen Colbert on The Late Show yesterday, “Science is constantly being proved all the time.” Perhaps he misspoke. He was put on the defensive. Colbert, an idiosyncratic but sincere Catholic, was not really playing devil’s advocate when he […]

Bad ideas die hard, and then sometimes they come back to life. One such bad idea is the so-called design argument that goes something like this: “Behold the human eye: It is perfectly adapted to seeing the things we need to see, like predators or potential mates. It looks almost like the eye was designed […]

Some think fine-tuning is evidence for God, but in fact the opposite is true.

Why scientific cosmology can’t give us the God of religion.

Some of this cosmologist’s most exuberant students are Tibetan monks in Dharamsala.

Modern cosmology may rule out a personal God, but leaves open a broader conception of divinity.

We have ethical and aesthetic reasons to leave Mars alone.

Why this rabbi’s religious beliefs can bend with science.

In the debate between religion and science, wonder is what the doctor ordered.

Almost in spite of themselves, scientists are driven to a teleological view of the cosmos.

When we find ET, which faiths will bend, and which will snap?

In the 1960s, the American philosopher Edmund Gettier devised a thought experiment that has become known as a “Gettier case.” It shows that something’s “off” about the way we understand knowledge. This ordeal is called the “Gettier problem,” and 50 years later, philosophers are still arguing about it. Jennifer Nagel, a philosopher of mind at […]

In the 1960s, the moral philosopher Philippa Foot devised a thought experiment that would revolutionize her field. This ethical puzzle, today known as the “trolley problem,” has become so influential—not just in philosophy but also in neuroscience, behavioral economics, evolutionary psychology, and meme culture—that it’s garnered its own tongue-in-cheek sub-discipline, called “trolleyology.” That body of […]

While a doctoral student at Princeton University in 1957, studying under a founder of theoretical computer science, Raymond Smullyan would occasionally visit New York City. On one of these visits, he met a “very charming lady musician” and, on their first date, Smullyan, an incorrigible flirt, proceeded very logically—and sneakily. “Would you please do me […]

In his 2003 book, Being No One, Thomas Metzinger contends there is no such thing as a “self.” Rather, the self is a kind of transparent information-processing system. “You don’t see it,” he writes. “But you see with it.” Metzinger has given a good amount of thought to the nature of our subjective experience—and how […]

We hold this mathematics to be self evident.

If you think everyone around you is terrible, the joke may be on you.

In his first lecture on physics to freshmen and sophomores at the California Institute of Technology, in 1961-62, Richard Feynman said: If, in some cataclysm, all of scientific knowledge were to be destroyed, and only one sentence passed on to the next generations of creatures, what statement would contain the most information in the fewest […]

Meet the philosopher who revived anti-realism.

Two philosophers debate the ethics of performance enhancement.

Vulcan shows us science beyond the scientific method.

What the existence of zombies would do to our philosophy of mind.

What the existence of zombies would do to our philosophy of mind.

David Chalmers, co-director of the Center for Mind, Brain and Consciousness at New York University, once undertook something odd for a philosopher: He conducted an international poll. In November 2009, he and his then-PhD advisee, David Bourget, asked over 2,500 of their colleagues—professors and graduate students alike—among other things, with which dead thinker they most […]

Henri Bergson’s debate with Albert Einstein reached and swayed the 1921 Nobel committee.

Georg Cantor died in 1918 in a sanatorium in Halle, Germany. A pre-eminent mathematician, he had laid the foundation for the theory of infinite numbers in the 1870s. At the time, his ideas received hostile opposition from prominent mathematicians in Europe, chief among them Leopold Kronecker, once Cantor’s teacher. In his first known bout of […]

A step-by-step guide to True, False, and Random.

Science can’t tell us whether science explains everything.

Why ethical objections to interfering with nature are too late.

An argument for a new definition of color.

This classic Facts So Romantic post originally ran in July, 2013. On July 4, 1776, representatives of 13 colonies on the eastern shores of North America signed a Declaration of Independence from England. Winning independence was still a bloody war ahead, an unlikely outcome. Declaring independence was rashness, potentially carrying a death sentence for treason. Not, perhaps, what you […]

In the 1960s, the English psychologist Peter Wason devised an experiment that would revolutionize his field. This clever puzzle, known as the “Wason selection task,” is often claimedto be “the single most investigated experimental paradigm in the psychology of reasoning,” in the words of one textbook author. Wason was a funny and clever man and […]

How Julian Jaynes’ famous 1970s theory is faring in the neuroscience age.

Thinking of nucleobases as a long sequence of letters may contribute to the illusion that DNA is a language.Neil Palmer / CIAT via Flickr When we talk about genes, we often use expressions inherited from a few influential geneticists and evolutionary biologists, including Francis Crick, James Watson, and Richard Dawkins. These expressions depict DNA as […]

We can experience nothingness, but does it actually exist?

A child asks, and war answers.

“I did not have to believe anything irrational about the universe.”

The physicist on writing, the writer on physics.

From a childhood hallucination to the halls of theoretical physics.

Shining a light on the spark that separates man from beast.

Layers of history beckon with imperfect memories.

We humans take a lot for granted. Pizza delivery, email, smartphones, dishwashers. All of this occurs in the background, making our lives simpler. None of it requires any explicit effort. Our minds also do a lot of subconscious work that we take for granted. Have you ever seriously thought about how you know that the […]

Are some things too good to be true?

In his essay for “Uncertainty,” the second issue of Nautilus, David Deutsch explains why you can never be entirely sure that a thought is undoubtedly correct. Despite that, he says we can still learn true things about the world, and that information be used in important pursuits like medicine. In the clip below, Deutsch identifies […]

Nothing obstructs access to the truth like a belief in absolute truthfulness.

Nothing obstructs access to the truth like a belief in absolute truthfulness.

One man’s path to knowing less about God.

Human uniqueness is all relative.