Category: philosophy
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The Story of Big Numbers
Physicist Albert Bartlett is quoted as saying that “the greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function”. Starting with a thought experiment in which two competitors are challenged to come up with the bigger finite number, Scott Aaronson has written an accessible and fact-filled essay about large numbers, touching on topics…
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Option Paralysis: The Quarterlife Crisis
Kate Carraway sums up that modern existential angst experienced by countless twentysomethings: The Quarterlife Crisis, a somewhat disabling mix of akrasia, apathy and ennui brought on by a number of realisations. This phenomenon, known as the “Quarterlife Crisis,” is as ubiquitous as it is intangible. Unrelenting indecision, isolation, confusion and anxiety about working, relationships and…
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Superstition and Irrationality
I’d like to class myself as a fairly rational being, but we all have our transgressions, right? So are we all maybe a bit superstitious? To answer this, Richard Wiseman offers this common thought experiment from Bruce Hood’s new book, Supersense: Imagine that you only have two objects in your house: 1) A £10 watch that was given to you by…
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Suicide: The One Truly Serious Philosophical Problem
A strangely inspiring article comes out of this philosophical look at suicide—that problem with which our species has been ‘gifted’. It feels like a call-to-action for your life. We must recognize that there are multiple forms of suicide. You can release your claim to life by means of a rope, a gun, a tall building,…
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Love and the Existential Vacuum
I have recently finished reading Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl; an excellent book that is at once an account of Frankl’s time in Nazi concentration camps during WWII and an introduction to his psychotherapeutic theories of logotherapy. According to Frankl’s logotherapy, the way to find meaning in life is to dedicate oneself to…
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What Will Change Everything?
The Edge annual question, 2009: What will change everything? Nobody ever voted for printing. Nobody ever voted for electricity. Nobody ever voted for radio, the telephone, the automobile, the airplane, television. Nobody ever voted for penicillin, antibiotics, the pill. Nobody ever voted for space travel, massively parallel computing, nuclear power, the personal computer, the Internet,…
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Debating Cryonics
Cryonics: the low-temperature preservation of humans and animals that can no longer be sustained by contemporary medicine until resuscitation may be possible in the future. When one discusses cryonics, topics as diverse as futurology, medicine, technology and philosophy are debated. A few weeks ago a number of high–profile bloggers, headed by the excellent Overcoming Bias, have been…
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On Wealth
When the Wall Street Journal columnist Jason Zweig was accused of being “a coddled member of the silver-spoon generation” he decided to confront the accusation by retelling tales from his less-than-privileged upbringing. In doing so, however, he made some poignant remarks about wealth: The most important lesson that I learned, I believe, is that money…
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The Age of High Culture
The cover story for this quarter’s Intelligent Life is an article arguing that, contrary to most recent opinions, the population isn’t, in fact, becoming dumber and we are at the dawn of an ‘age of mass intelligence’. This quote from Ira Glass, the creator of This American Life, gets to the core of the argument…
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The Anthropological Divide
Times Higher Education discusses the divide between evolutionary and social anthropologists. On one side are the evolutionary anthropologists. “(They believe) our behaviour is based on things that we did to find mates in our years of evolution,” says Alex Bentley, a lecturer in anthropology at Durham University. “Then we have the social anthropologists. Some of…