Adam Gopnik on what neuroscience can tell us about our selves. Do our selves shape our brains, or do our brains shape our selves?
Year: 2013
Do we create reality by looking at it?
The reality tests. A team of physicists in Vienna has devised experiments that may answer one of the enduring riddles of science: do we create the world just by looking at it?
Does the universe exist if we’re not looking?
Physics out-Berkeleys Berkeley. Eminent physicist John Wheeler says he has only enough time left to work on one idea: that human consciousness shapes not only the present but the past as well.
Parallel worlds
Can the multiverse explain human history? “If human history turns on the tilt of the multiverse, can we still trust our ideas of achievement, progress and morality?”
Wittgenstein … a life-changing encounter
How Ludwig Wittgenstein helped Giles Fraser get over his teenage angst. “Reading Philosophical Investigations ended my fascination with my inner life and brought me to faith based on ‘I don’t knows’.”
The chipped brain & you
Chips & You: what would chips do for personal identity?
God’s problem
Holiday in Hellmouth. “God may be dead, but the question of why he permits suffering lives on.”
Cartoons about epistemology?
Crazy Epistemology. Some pretty good philosophical cartoons from The New Yorker.
God and evolution
Man vs. God. “We commissioned Karen Armstrong and Richard Dawkins to respond independently to the question “Where does evolution leave God?” Neither knew what the other would say. Here are the results.”
Are our brains wired for math?
Numbers guy. “According to Stanislas Dehaene, humans have an inbuilt ‘number sense’ capable of some basic calculations and estimates. The problems start when we learn mathematics and have to perform procedures that are anything but instinctive.”
Socratically Speaking 