23 November 2024
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Jun 4, 2018 —
Robert Wright & Brian Greene
- Why a particle isn’t what you think it is
- Reasons to doubt the many worlds interpretation
- The theory Einstein developed that he didn’t believe
- Would going back in time violate the laws of physics?
- Black holes and the natural selection of universes
- What are the strings in string theory made of?
- Audience Q and A
May 27, 2018 —
Aryeh Cohen-Wade & Michael Benson
- Michael’s new book Space Odyssey, about the film 2001
- The quest to make the “first good science fiction film”
- The remarkable development of the Dawn of Man sequence
- The fiction and fact of HAL 9000
- The trippy “Stargate” sequence
- Why the movie’s premiere was an utter disaster
- Is the film supposed to be boring?
- 2001‘s legacy
May 25, 2018 —
Robert Wright & Massimo Pigliucci
- What is the Logos?
- The practicality of metaphysics
- Philo of Alexandria’s vision of global harmony
- Plotinus and the connection between human and divine
- The Logos and Christianity
- The Logos as an algorithm
- Why do the laws of physics infallibly work?
- Carl Jung and the Logos (and Jordan Peterson’s Jungianism)
May 23, 2018 —
Daniel Kaufman & Richard Thompson
- Richard, a.k.a. miceelf88, joins Dan to talk gender politics
- The difference between sex and gender identity
- The ontological (and legal) issues with fluid gender identity
- Dan: Social identities like gender aren’t “self-made”
- What trans identity means for the civil rights coalition
- Jordan Peterson and gender as the essence of self
- Empathy vs. sympathy in coalition building
May 17, 2018 —
William Black & ContraPoints
- What is “autogynephilia”?
- Are there identifiable “subtypes” of trans women?
- Are trans individuals’ souls “trapped in the wrong body”?
- Why ContraPoints ruffles feathers in the Twittersphere
- New Atheism as an entry point to the alt-right
- Assessing Sam Harris and Ezra Klein’s recent debate on race and IQ
May 15, 2018 —
Stephen Asma & Rami Gabriel
- Are emotions cultural or physiological?
- Neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett’s argument for emotion-via-culture
- Why social construct theory is all the rage today
- Rami’s thoughts on self-help psychology
- Rami: Pets teach us that emotional connection predates language
- What makes emotions adaptive to environment?
- Stephen and Rami review the Jaak Panksepp Memorial Symposium
- What neuroscientists say about the brain’s unpredictability
May 4, 2018 —
Robert Wright & Steven Pinker
- Steve’s new book, Enlightenment Now, and Bob’s critique
- Cognitive biases that undergird tribalism
- Bob wants to crowdfund a meditation retreat for Steve, who is uncooperative
- How Al Gore’s climate change activism may have hurt his own cause
- Is it crazy to suspect that there’s a larger purpose unfolding through the workings of nature?
- Has our growing grasp of computation and cognition made consciousness less mysterious or more so?
Apr 27, 2018 —
Robert Wright & Chris Stedman
- Chris’s experience as a humanist chaplain at Harvard and Yale
- Secular community with a moral tone
- Atheism, anti-theism, and humanism
- What Richard Spencer doesn’t like about the Abrahamic faiths
- Atheism and tribalism
- Atheistic fervor as a response to religious trauma
- An inspirational atheism
- Does some New Atheist rhetoric encourage bigotry?
Apr 25, 2018 —
Daniel Kaufman & Crispin Sartwell
- Is masculinity treated as a pathology?
- Why girls are outperforming boys in class
- Disentangling gender and sex, culture and biology
- “Girl power” was a success, but at what social cost?
- Crispin’s years as a teen revolutionary
- The modern school as a totalitarian institution
- What really explains high-security schools?
- How safe can we reasonably expect to be in society?
- Is the media distorting our narratives of crime and danger?
Apr 23, 2018 —
Philip Menchaca & Kelly Baker
- The Ku Klux Klan’s appeal to Protestant America
- How the KKK rationalized a Jewish Jesus
- The Birth of a Nation and the symbology of the burning cross
- How to “love thy neighbor” as a Klansman (answer: very selectively)
- Kelly: The Klan declined, but its politics went mainstream
- Kelly’s search for apocalyptic rhetoric in Klan literature
Apr 9, 2018 —
Stephen Asma & Rami Gabriel
- Puppet Show: Are emotions in the brain?
- Luiz Pessoa’s argument for the feedback between lower and higher brain function
- How the regions of the brain evolved to interact
- “The content problem” in the neuroscience of emotion and cognition
- Are the common fears of snakes and spiders “hard-wired,” and how?
- What brain mapping fails to tell us about cognition
- Rami’s research on prosopagnosia (face blindness) and emotional cognition
Mar 23, 2018 —
Robert Wright & Massimo Pigliucci
- Massimo’s new edited volume, Science Unlimited?: The Challenges of Scientism
- What is scientism?
- Science and the challenge of studying subjective experience
- And about those pesky fundamental questions of existence…
- How philosophical thought underpins all research methodology
- Massimo: Core concepts across science have competing interpretations
- The importance of distinguishing “is” from “ought”
- What neuroscience can never explain about human consciousness
Mar 13, 2018 —
Josh Summers & David Lesondak
- What is fascia and why does it matter?
- When fascia malfunctions
- What David does as a “body worker”
- How body posture could influence mental health
- Unanswered questions in fascia research
- Can mindfulness meditation reduce the perception of pain?
- The concept of “tensegrity,” or tensional integrity, in the human body
Mar 9, 2018 —
Robert Wright & Josh Summers
- Bob and Josh recount their first meeting after a silent meditation retreat
- Does yoga always have a spiritual component?
- How Josh’s yoga practice prepares the body for meditation
- How yoga’s focus on breath can lead to the body
- Solutions to modern distraction
- Bob: Mindfulness practice can erode essentialist thinking
- What’s the point of Bob’s Mindful Resistance Project?
- The present and future of the Mindful Resistance Newsletter
Mar 8, 2018 —
Aryeh Cohen-Wade & Pater Edmund Waldstein
- Why the Mortara case is still provoking argument 150 years later
- Pater Edmund offers a defense of Pope Pius IX
- Integralism and different conceptions of liberty
- What would an integralist Catholic state look like?
- How Pater Edmund became a monk (with a blog)
- The day-to-day life of a modern meditating monk
Mar 7, 2018 —
Stephen Asma & Rami Gabriel
- Puppet show: Why are human emotions unique?
- Does self-restraint make us human?
- Considering emotions as social constructs
- Stephen: If you have emotions, you have consciousness
- Artificial intelligence doesn’t necessarily defer to it its creator
- How insects are like robots
- Does culture change how the brain reads emotion in faces?
Mar 2, 2018 —
Robert Wright & Richard Prum
- Darwin’s approach to explaining the peacock’s cumbersome plumage
- Could beauty have evolved, in part, for beauty’s sake?
- The sense in which traits favored via mate selection may not be ‘adaptive’
- Mate preference and aesthetics
- What can we learn from ducks’ miserable sex lives?
- How paternal investment in offspring became part of human life
- When sex isn’t for reproduction
- Richard’s misgivings about evolutionary psychology
Mar 1, 2018 —
Daniel Kaufman & Crispin Sartwell
- Crispin’s “Why They Suck” essay series
- Why in particular does Michelangelo suck?
- The contrasts in humanism represented in Italian and Northern Renaissance art
- The “ennobling quality” of human emotion in early Renaissance art
- Why Dan is a humanist and Crispin is not
- Identifying the internal incoherence of Michelangelo’s work
- Dan: Judaism’s approach to moral agency begins in the Garden of Eden
- Crispin questions emphasizing human endeavors over all others
Feb 23, 2018 —
Robert Wright & Galen Strawson
- Why scientific materialism is harder to define than you think
- Galen explains panpsychism
- What does “mind is all there is to reality” mean?
- Is human consciousness epiphenomenal?
- Do physical laws come from somewhere?
- Is it like something to be a rock? (And is Galen saying it is?)
- Galen: Discussion of the mind-body problem was better 100 years ago
Feb 22, 2018 —
Daniel Kaufman & Daniel Tippens
- What does Dan K. mean by Philistinism?
- How philistines reduce the irreducible in all walks of life
- Philistinism’s creeping control in philosophy and the academy
- When we invest in arts and letters, what do we get in return?
- What good are refined senses, anyway?
- Dan T. explains how refinement can prevent us from being duped
Feb 21, 2018 —
Aryeh Cohen-Wade & Catherine Nichols
- Why is pop culture obsessed with good guy vs. bad guy stories?
- Catherine: Modern stories don’t let the villain be fully human
- World War II and the trope of the ragtag band of misfits
- Shakespeare vs. comic book movies
- Storytelling about why we go to war
- What pop culture best represents moral complexity?
Feb 16, 2018 —
Robert Wright & Ann Hulbert
- Ann’s new book on child prodigies, Off the Charts
- Will a child prodigy become an adult non-prodigy?
- The cautionary tale of Bobby Fischer
- The prodigy’s “adolescent crisis”
- How people misunderstood Amy Chua, the “Tiger Mom”
- The insanity of the college admissions gauntlet
- Child prodigies inspire sympathy. Their parents? Not so much.
Feb 9, 2018 —
Robert Wright & Jeff Warren
- How Jeff went from science journalist to meditation teacher
- Jeff’s new book, co-authored with Dan Harris: Meditation for Fidgety Skeptics
- How ADD and bipolar tendencies shaped Jeff’s practice
- The life-changing experience of falling out of a tree while on mushrooms
- The interaction between mindfulness, not-self, and suffering
- Jeff takes a stab at defining enlightenment
- The varieties of consciousness
- How meditation can shift your priorities
Feb 9, 2018 —
Stephen Asma & Rami Gabriel
- This week’s puppet show: How do emotions help us survive?
- Darwin’s attempts to understand the inner lives of animals
- Can we really hide our feelings? Rami doubts it
- The “seeking” drive that keeps us going
- Angst: Fear without an object
- How culture complicates finding a mate
- Is there an adaptive function to recognizing beauty?
Feb 5, 2018 —
William Black & Benjamin Park
- The Mormon Church’s new president, 93 year-old Russell M. Nelson
- The decades-long campaign to incorporate the Church into the American mainstream
- Does the Church clash with academic historical study?
- Untangling the fates of remarried Mormons’ souls
- The LDS Church as a contained society within the US
- Why did the first Mormon women choose polygamy?
Jan 29, 2018 —
Robert Wright & Michael Shermer
- The time Michael thought he was being abducted by aliens
- Michael’s new book, Heavens on Earth
- Deepak Chopra’s afterlife
- Why uploading your brain to achieve immortality makes no sense
- Is radical life extension just bunk?
- The Second Coming, presented by Ray Kurzweil
- What consolation can the atheist offer to the dying?
- The spookiest thing that’s ever happened to Michael
Jan 22, 2018 —
Robert Wright & Stephen Batchelor
- Striking parallels between Buddhism’s Mara and Christianity’s Satan
- How Stephen’s opera Mara came to fruition
- Bob and Stephen argue about the true meaning(s) of “enlightenment”
- How much authority should a secular Buddhist ascribe to the Buddha?
- The perils of clinging to the dharma
- Stephen’s unusual place in the Buddhist world
Jan 19, 2018 —
Aryeh Cohen-Wade & Liz Wolfe
- Why the Aziz Ansari story blew up
- Are women like “Grace” damned if they do, damned if they don’t?
- Libertarianism and consent
- Katie Roiphe vs. the creator of the Shitty Media Men list
- Is giving the benefit of the doubt possible in the age of the Twitter mob?
- Having good politics vs. being a good person
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