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+16 +5
Does Evolution Explain Religious Beliefs?
This is the eighth in a series of interviews about religion that I am conducting for The Stone. The interviewee for this installment is Michael Ruse, a professor of philosophy at Florida State University and the author of the forthcoming book “Atheism: What Everyone Needs to Know.”
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+19 +6
The Most Terrifying Thought Experiment of All Time
WARNING: Reading this article may commit you to an eternity of suffering and torment. Slender Man. Smile Dog. Goatse. These are some of the urban legends spawned by the Internet. Yet none is as all-powerful and threatening as Roko’s Basilisk.
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+15 +2
A Buddhist monk confronts Japan’s suicide culture
From time to time, Ittetsu Nemoto gets a group of suicidal people together to visit popular suicide spots, of which there are many in Japan. The best known is Aokigahara forest, the Sea of Trees, at the foot of Mt. Fuji. The forest became associated with suicide in the nineteen-sixties, after the publication of two novels by Seicho Matsumoto, and even more so after Wataru Tsurumi’s 1993 “Complete Manual of Suicide” declared it the perfect place to die.
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+17 +5
Just As Machinery Replaced Labor On The Farm, Technology Makes The Financial System Obsolete
What people perceive define what people believe. Our beliefs control our thoughts and actions. Over centuries, the sources nourishing human perceptions have expanded with evolving technology. As people's perceptions changed, so did the narratives of life and human beliefs. Historically, those who controlled the narrative controlled the way people thought and behaved.
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+17 +6
How do you know you exist? - James Zucker
How do you know you’re real? Is existence all just a big dream? Has some mad scientist duped us into simply believing that we exist? James Zucker investigates all of these questions (and more) in this mind-boggling tribute to René Descartes’s "Meditations on First Philosophy."
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+15 +2
Watch a Hand-Painted Animation of Dostoevsky’s “The Dream of a Ridiculous Man”
Published in 1864, Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground has a reputation as the first existentialist novel.
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+15 +6
Inside the mind of an ISIS fighter
To the outside world, they're a force of ruthless yet mysterious insurgents bent on terrorizing civilians and expanding Islamist rule. But as one former ISIS fighter tells CNN, the mentality goes much deeper.
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+16 +3
The Perils and Privileges of Loneliness
Loneliness is a complex and unpleasant emotional response to isolation or lack of companionship. It can be either transient or chronic, and typically includes anxiety about a lack of connectedness or communality.
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+20 +3
Timothy Morton & Hans Ulrich Obrist
An epic interview with philosopher Timothy Morton.
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+19 +3
It's On The Way: Is Your Religion Ready To Meet ET?
Proof of life beyond earth is coming.
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+22 +5
Is this life real or a simulation?
Philosophers and physicists say we might be living in a computer simulation, but how can we tell? And does it matter?
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+31 +5
The Science of Gratitude
A few months ago, I conducted an early Thanksgiving experiment on myself. I was in Reykjavik, Iceland, on a lecture trip. My morning was free, and I took it to write two pages about how lucky I am—something, I’m embarrassed to say, that I had never done before. Here is one thing I wrote: “I’m looking out at a sky that Vikings would have seen. I get to do this—me.” Writing it all down felt very good.
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+24 +3
How consciousness works. And why we believe in ghosts
Consciousness is the ‘hard problem’, the mystery that confounds science and philosophy. Has a new theory cracked it?
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+17 +1
Everlasting Glory
There are few fantasies so absurd as the idea of living on through fame. So why does immortality still beckon? "To me the only success, the only greatness, is immortality". James Dean beside the grave of an ancestor in his old hometown of Fairmount, Indiana in 1955. He died the same year, aged 24.
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+22 +8
Male Shame: The Lost Boys.
Christian leaders really want men and women to define themselves a certain way, with many men defining themselves by how not-female they are. But women are starting to redefine what it is to be female and rejecting Christianity's life scripts, sending these men into freefall.
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+21 +5
The truth about free will: Does it actually exist?
Daniel Dennett: I came to realize that many of the issues that philosophers love to talk about in the free will debates were irrelevant to anything important. There’s a bait-and-switch that goes on. I don’t think any topic is more anxiety provoking, or more genuinely interesting to everyday people, than free will But then philosophers replace the interesting issues with technical, metaphysical issues. Who cares? We can define lots of varieties of free will that you can’t have...
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+4 +1
2Chainz, a conservative icon: This is his marijuana debate with Nancy Grace
During a segment with the former prosecutor, the rapper laid out a philosophy based on personal responsibility, limited government, and hard work. If you're looking for a concise summation for a certain strain of conservatism, you could do worse than the opening bars of 2Chainz's "We Did It":
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+2 +2
The Birth of Altermodern
I received a crash course in postmodern thought during my first semester at Swarthmore College. In a lesson that was to be repeated throughout my undergraduate education, the professor opened the class by admonishing us to reject binary thinking.
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+13 +2
Philosophy and Science: Double Team?
The role of the philosopher is often open to question, especially in an age when science can appear to be the dominant form of knowledge. But there remain questions that science can perhaps never answer, and that philosophy – among other disciplines – may be better equipped to address. But rather than see philosophy and science at odds with one another, in certain fields the two are actually inextricably linked.
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+18 +2
11 Most Important Philosophical Quotations.
1. “The unexamined life is not worth living” – Socrates (470-399 BCE) His belief that we must reflect upon the life we live was partly inspired by the famous phrase inscribed at the shrine of the oracle at Delphi, “Know thyself.”
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