135 | Shadi Bartsch on Plato, Vergil, Confucius, and Modernity
In our postmodern world, studying the classics of ancient Greece and Rome can seem quaint at best, downright repressive at worst. (We are talking about works by dead white men, after all.) Do we still...
22 Feb 20211h 20min
AMA | February 2021
Welcome to the February 2021 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also the ones asking the questions). This month is in what has been the conventional ...
17 Feb 20212h 53min
134 | Robert Sapolsky on Why We Behave the Way We Do
A common argument against free will is that human behavior is not freely chosen, but rather determined by a number of factors. So what are those factors, anyway? There's no one better equipped to answ...
15 Feb 20211h 28min
133 | Ziya Tong on Realities We Don't See
It's a truism that what we see about the world is a small fraction of all that exists. At the simplest level of physics and biology, our senses are drastically limited; we only see a narrow spectrum o...
8 Feb 20211h 37min
Bonus | AIP Oral History Interview
Here is a special bonus punishment treat for Mindscape listeners: an interview of me, by David Zierler of the American Institute of Physics's Oral History project. This is a fantastic project that col...
4 Feb 20214h 1min
132 | Michael Levin on Growth, Form, Information, and the Self
As a semi-outsider, it's fun for me to watch as a new era dawns in biology: one that adds ideas from physics, big data, computer science, and information theory to the usual biological toolkit. One of...
1 Feb 20211h 21min
131 | Avi Loeb on Taking Aliens Seriously
The possible existence of technologically advanced extraterrestrial civilizations — not just alien microbes, but cultures as advanced (or much more) than our own — is one of the most provocative quest...
25 Jan 20211h 40min
130 | Frank Wilczek on the Present and Future of Fundamental Physics
What is the world made of? How does it behave? These questions, aimed at the most basic level of reality, are the subject of fundamental physics. What counts as fundamental is somewhat contestable, bu...
18 Jan 20211h 16min
