AMA | October 2024

We're pretty well-calibrated when it comes to dealing with common, everyday-level setbacks. But our brains aren't naturally equipped for dealing with unlikely but world-catastrophic disasters. Yet suc...

7 Mar 20221h 20min

Advances in technology have gradually been extending the human self beyond its biological extent, as we augment who we are with a variety of interconnected devices. There are obvious benefits to this ...

28 Feb 20221h 11min

One of the brilliant achievements of Darwin's theory of natural selection was to help explain apparently "purposeful" or "designed" aspects of biology in a purely mechanistic theory of unguided evolut...

21 Feb 20221h 25min

Artificial intelligence is everywhere around us. Deep-learning algorithms are used to classify images, suggest songs to us, and even to drive cars. But the quest to build truly "human" artificial inte...

14 Feb 20221h 24min

Welcome to the February 2022 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also the ones asking the questions). I take the large number of qu...

10 Feb 20224h 15min

Modern particle physics is a victim of its own success. We have extremely good theories — so good that it's hard to know exactly how to move beyond them, since they agree with all the experiments. Yet...

7 Feb 20221h 39min

Reality is just out there — but how we perceive reality and talk about it depends on choices we human beings make. We decide (consciously or not) to conceptualize the world in certain ways, whether it...

31 Jan 20221h 37min

A good story takes you on an emotional journey, with ups and downs along the way. Thanks to science, we can quantify that. Peter Dodds works on understanding the structure of stories and other strings...

24 Jan 20221h 16min