26 March 2025
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Nov 1, 2019 —
Robert Wright & Preston Greene
- Why many intelligent people think we’re living in a simulation
- The philosophical argument that you’re probably not real
- How cosmic rays might (and might not) reveal that reality is fake
- Preston’s dire warning against trying to determine if we’re in a simulation
- Is the simulation hypothesis non-falsifiable?
- Is “the simulation” just religion for atheists?
TAGS atheism | cosmology | death | history | philosophy | physics | religion | science | technology | the future
Oct 21, 2019 —
Robert Wright & Nicholas Diakopoulos
- Nick’s new book, Automating the News
- Why Nick is not an alarmist about the automation of journalism
- The types of journalism jobs that algorithms can’t replace
- Successful collaborations between human journalists and machines
- The perils of algorithmic fact-checking
- Nick’s current research
- Bob hopes for a bot that can assign blame for international law violations
- Can the power of Twitter bots be used for good?
Oct 18, 2019 —
Robert Wright & John Horgan
- What is scientism, and who is doing it?
- Postmodernism and whether science just tells “stories”
- John criticizes the “ideological fervor” of evolutionary psychology
- The hubris of scientists in the ’80s and ’90s
- Has science reached its fundamental limits in trying to explain consciousness?
- John wins his Nobel Prize “long bet” on string theory
- The various corrupting influences on scientists
- A brief debate on higher purpose
TAGS atheism | cognitive science | Daniel Dennett | evolution | mind-body problem | physics | religion | science
Sep 1, 2019 —
Robert Wright & Alexander Wendt
- Why Alex shifted from international relations to quantum physics
- Alex: “We are walking wave functions”
- Do the origins of consciousness and free will lie in the wave collapse?
- Quantum decision theory and human irrationality
- The advantage of viewing humanity as quantum rather than classical
- How a nation-state is like a quantum state
- Alex: Language is best understood quantumly
- The possibility of collective consciousness
Aug 26, 2019 —
John Horgan & Frederick Crews
- How Frederick became a Freudian and then an anti-Freudian
- Frederick: Psychoanalysis is the Metamucil of the intellectuals
- The politics of anti-Freudianism
- Why has Freud persisted in the public imagination?
- Frederick psychoanalyzes John
- Repressed memories as a Freudian legacy
- Frederick’s new book, Freud: The Making of an Illusion
May 21, 2019 —
Robert Wright & David Sloan Wilson
- David’s new book, This View of Life
- In what sense, if any, could evolution be conscious?
- The need to complete the Darwinian revolution
- An evolutionary psychology discussion makes Bob tape his mouth shut
- How successful groups avert the tragedy of the commons
- Convergent cultural evolution
- David: Evolution shows that neither laissez faire nor centralized planning works
- A preview of the coming Bob vs. David showdown over group selection
Apr 30, 2019 —
Robert Wright & Luke Kemp
TAGS climate change | cosmology | death | history | meditation | science | technology | the future | violence
Apr 23, 2019 —
Robert Wright & Richard Wrangham
- Richard’s new book, The Goodness Paradox
- Why Jane Goodall’s view of chimpanzees took a turn for the darker
- Proactive violence (a human specialty) vs. reactive violence
- Richard’s “execution hypothesis” for how early humans dealt with violent males
- Bob offers an alternative explanation for the domestication of our species
- How our cousins the bonobos became nicer than our cousins the chimps
- Richard’s explanation for the evolution of moral sense
- Is war a part of human nature?
Jan 15, 2019 —
Aryeh Cohen-Wade & Alice Robb
- Alice’s new book, Why We Dream
- All the wrong ways we used to think about dreams
- The unusual discovery of REM sleep
- When scientists thought dreams were a paranormal gateway
- Alice describes participating in a “dream group”
- What do events in dreams really mean?
- Why do we have nightmares?
- How to get started with lucid dreaming
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 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
TAGS Buddhism | Christianity | consciousness | human nature | meditation | psychology | religion | science | spirituality
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 10, 2018 —
Colin Pugh & Daniel Pinchbeck
TAGS climate change | consciousness | drugs | history | human nature | meditation | mysticism | psychology | science | spirituality | the future
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
TAGS atheism | Buddhism | Christianity | consciousness | ethics | evolution | free will | human nature | mind-body problem | philosophy | psychology | religion | science
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
Sep 20, 2018 —
Nikita Petrov & John Horgan
- John’s new book, Mind-Body Problems, is free online
- “What are we really, what can we be, and what should we be?”
- Robert Trivers, an evolutionary biologist with an affinity for violence
- Douglas Hofstadter, a playful writer, but a melancholic person
- Why ex-materialist Christof Koch embraced panpsychism
- How losing a daughter made Stuart Kaufman study the paranormal
- Story time! Nikita and John exchange psychedelic tales
TAGS biology | cognitive science | consciousness | enlightenment | evolution | human nature | meditation | mind-body problem | philosophy | psychology | religion | science | spirituality
Jul 29, 2018 —
Aryeh Cohen-Wade & Katie Herzog
- What Katie saw at the Jordan Peterson roadshow
- Is Peterson peddling bunkum?
- Katie defends Peterson against charges of racism
- Peterson’s views on gender: traditionalist, sexist, or misogynist?
- Peterson as a holy fool
- Jesse Singal’s controversial Atlantic cover story on detransitioning
- Is the media telling the wrong stories about trans people?
Jul 13, 2018 —
Robert Wright & Thomas Metzinger
TAGS Buddhism | cognitive science | democracy | human nature | meditation | philosophy | politics | psychology | science | self
Jul 11, 2018 —
Robert Wright & Michael Shermer
- Michael’s controversial Scientific American column on the “final mysterians”
- Bob’s thought experiment about God and quantum mechanics
- The split among philosophers over the free will question
- Revisiting Thomas Nagel’s famous essay, “What is it like to be a bat?”
- What’s a harder problem, God or consciousness?
- What laws should govern a colony on Mars?
- Michael reports from inside the Intellectual Dark Web
- Deconstructing Jordan Peterson’s appeal
- Bob: Life is hard and religion can help
TAGS consciousness | Daniel Dennett | free will | Islam | New Atheists | philosophy | physics | religion | Richard Dawkins | science
Jul 6, 2018 —
Robert Wright & John Haught
- John’s book, The New Cosmic Story
- Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and cosmic evolution
- What it means to say that “God is more Omega than Alpha”
- John: We live in an “awakening universe”
- Putting religion in cosmic context
- Does “rightness” exist apart from human judgment?
- Why John takes comfort in the “unfinishedness” of the universe
- Alfred North Whitehead’s influence on John’s worldview
- Why John rejects Perennialism
Jun 11, 2018 —
Robert Wright & Adam Frank
- Adam’s new book, Light of the Stars: Alien Worlds and the Fate of the Earth
- Adam: Climate change is a civilizational inevitability
- How many planets are in our galaxy? Guess again. It’s more than that.
- How pessimists about the existence of extraterrestrial life became optimists
- Why haven’t we heard from any aliens?
- Does fighting climate change require spiritual change?
- Why the Gaia hypothesis isn’t new-age hooey
- The theoretical archaeology of exo-civilizations
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
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
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
Dec 16, 2017 —
Robert Wright & John Horgan
- The pervasiveness of sexual harassment
- Human nature according to Socrates, the Google memo guy, and Bob
- Are gendered behavioral differences innate or learned?
- John: Scientists keep trying, and failing, to discern the roots of human behavior
- Can you be both enlightened—in the Buddhist sense—and immoral
- Sexual harassment in science and philosophy
Jun 6, 2017 —
Daniel Kaufman & Massimo Pigliucci
- “Purpose” in science and morality
- What Aristotle thought about purpose in nature
- Why asking “what is it for?” makes sense in biology but not other sciences
- Does form dictate function?
- Is there a “law” of morality?
- The paths to human flourishing
- Why a “scientific” approach to ethics à la Sam Harris doesn’t work
May 22, 2017 —
Robert Wright & Jay Van Bavel
- The partisanship that bolsters Trump
- Jay’s favorite experiments on the psychology of tribalism
- Is the anti-Trump movement its own worst enemy?
- What’s going on in Trump’s brain?
- How a sports fan’s brain warps reality
- Is there hope for overcoming our tribal psychology?
- Want a retweet? Stoke moral outrage.
TAGS cognitive science | democracy | Donald Trump | moral imagination | psychology | science | tribalism
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