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MeaningofLife.tv videos — November 2018
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Nov 30, 2018 —
Robert Wright & Sabine Hossenfelder
- Sabine’s new book, Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray
- Sabine: There’s no reason to think the four fundamental forces can be unified
- What “beauty” means to a physicist
- The weirdness of the Higgs Boson
- Must there be an explanation for the fundamental forces?
- Sabine: Multiverse theory isn’t science
- What Sabine wants physicists to be doing instead of chasing beauty
Nov 23, 2018 —
Robert Wright & John Haught
- The prescience of theologian Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
- Teilhard’s synthesizing of the “above” and the “ahead”
- John: The creation of humans is not the universe’s climax
- John: God is “not yet”
- Science and faith as different layers of explanation
- Searching for God in a scientific age
- Why John rejects perennialism
- Questions from the live audience
Nov 16, 2018 —
Robert Wright & Eddy Nahmias
- Explaining “compatibilism,” the view that there’s no conflict between free will and determinism
- Without free will, what happens to moral responsibility?
- Eddy tells Bob he errs in saying determinism means events are “inevitable”
- Free will is hard to imagine, but not nonsensical
- Why most philosophers today are compatibilists
- Bob: Compatibilists are just playing word games
- Were prisoners destined from birth to wind up in prison?
- Waiting for the “Einstein of consciousness”
Nov 14, 2018 —
Aryeh Cohen-Wade & Rebecca Lohnes
- Rebecca’s path from the Ivy League to an animal shelter
- The science of animal training
- The many reasons why you shouldn’t try to be your dog’s “alpha”
- What we know about animal personality
- What goes on inside an animal shelter?
- Is there such a thing as a “bad dog”?
- What’s actually happening when your pet looks ashamed
- Aryeh and Rebecca debate whether their dog loves them
Nov 13, 2018 —
Nikita Petrov & Tanya Luhrmann
- Tanya’s “local theory of mind”
- Harry Potter, prayer, and other “cultural invitations”
- Psychotherapy in the US and witchcraft in Ghana
- American individualism and Asian interdependence
- The differences between hearing God in Ghana and the US
- The Internet as externalized imagination: Pepe and Kek
- A “hyper-real God”: having coffee with Jesus
- Thoughts, perceptions, the world, and the self
Nov 11, 2018 —
John Horgan & Rebecca Newberger Goldstein
- Rebecca’s childhood: poor, religious, and patriarchal
- How Bertrand Russell helped Rebecca lose her faith
- The problem of beauty
- When Rebecca shared a transcendent moment with a troop of baboons
- From physics to philosophy
- From philosophy to fiction
- Does art better address the mind-body problem than philosophy does?
- Reasons to feel optimistic about the world
Nov 9, 2018 —
Daniel Kaufman & David Ottlinger
- What role should guns play in a liberal society?
- What American deference to police says about authority and force
- Why we leave justice in the government’s hands
- Defining modern conservatism: Is Matt Lewis a “liberal”?
- Do pro-gun arguments consider the social contract?
- David: Do open-carriers want to live in a Mad Max movie?
- Dan: Grover Norquist’s model citizen isn’t a citizen at all
Nov 4, 2018 —
Aryeh Cohen-Wade & Brandy Jensen
- How Brandy came to write an advice column called “Ask a F*ck-Up”
- Young people’s problems: depression, alienation, loneliness
- Brandy’s central theme: the responsibilities we bear to each other
- Can “bad men” change?
- The different questions men and women ask
- Brandy: A “sex strike” would never work
- In defense of being in your own Twitter bubble
- Why are there so many depressed people on Twitter?
Nov 3, 2018 —
John Horgan & Owen Flanagan
- Owen’s transition from Catholicism to “quiet skepticism”
- The problem of evil
- The hubris of modern philosophers
- Can we live with the scientific image of man?
- The origin of the universe, life, and consciousness
- Owen: Doubt yourself
- Does philosophy lead to practical wisdom?
- Mind-altering chemicals and free will
Nov 2, 2018 —
Robert Wright & Eric Kandel
- The research on memory that won Eric the Nobel Prize
- The difference between normal memory loss and Alzheimer’s
- Eric’s new book, The Disordered Mind
- Eric’s breakthrough study of marine snails with giant nerve cells
- What it’s like to win the Nobel Prize
- Eric’s childhood escape from Nazi-ruled Vienna to America
- Why Vienna was a center of intellectual ferment in the early 20th century
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