25 | David Chalmers on Consciousness, the Hard Problem, and Living in a Simulation
The "Easy Problems" of consciousness have to do with how the brain takes in information, thinks about it, and turns it into action. The "Hard Problem," on the other hand, is the task of explaining our...
3 Dec 20181h 22min
24 | Kip Thorne on Gravitational Waves, Time Travel, and Interstellar
I remember vividly hosting a colloquium speaker, about fifteen years ago, who talked about the LIGO gravitational-wave observatory, which had just started taking data. Comparing where they were to whe...
26 Nov 20181h 19min
23 | Lisa Aziz-Zadeh on Embodied Cognition, Mirror Neurons, and Empathy
Brains are important things; they're where thinking happens. Or are they? The theory of "embodied cognition" posits that it's better to think of thinking as something that takes place in the body as a...
19 Nov 20181h 7min
22 | Joe Walston on Conservation, Urbanization, and the Way We Live on Earth
There's no question that human activity is causing enormous changes on our planet's environment, from deforestation to mass extinction to climate change. But perhaps there is a tiny cause for optimism...
12 Nov 20181h 28min
21 | Alex Rosenberg on Naturalism, History, and Theory of Mind
We humans love to tell ourselves stories about why things happened the way they did; if the stories are sufficiently serious, we label this activity "history." Part of getting history right is simply ...
5 Nov 20181h 20min
20 | Scott Derrickson on Cinema, Blockbusters, Horror, and Mystery
Special Halloween edition? Scott Derrickson is a film-lover first and a director second, but he's been quite successful at the latter -- you may know him as the director and co-writer of Marvel's Doct...
29 Okt 20181h 23min
19 | Tyler Cowen on Maximizing Growth and Thinking for the Future
Economics, like other sciences (social and otherwise), is about what the world does; but it's natural for economists to occasionally wander out into the question of what we should do as we live in the...
22 Okt 201859min
18 | Clifford Johnson on What's So Great About Superstring Theory
String theory is a speculative and highly technical proposal for uniting the known forces of nature, including gravity, under a single quantum-mechanical framework. This doesn't seem like a recipe for...
15 Okt 20181h 12min
