A new look at an indeterminate world. Many very interesting articles about uncertainty … what we can know, how we can know it, and the degree to which we can know it.
P2: What can I know?
Color … appearance or reality?
Color … an example of the reasons philosophers have tried to figure out how, if at all, we can distinguish appearance and reality.
Descartes’ bones
A skeletal history of the conflict between faith and reason. “Alas, poor Descartes: meditations on a well-traveled skull.” More here.
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?”
God’s problem
Holiday in Hellmouth. “God may be dead, but the question of why he permits suffering lives on.”
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 