We’ve all tried to win an argument by laying down some strong statistics to prove that we’re right. But cognitive neuroscientist Tali Sharot discusses the limitations of information in changing people’s beliefs. In fact, intelligent people are likely to manipulate data to align with their pre-existing beliefs. That’s when your super smart statistics start to backfire.

In one experiment, providing more extreme data to both believers and skeptics resulted in increased polarization rather than consensus. Brain scans reveal that when two people disagree, the brain seems to “switch off,” not encoding the opposing views. 

In a study at UCLA aiming to convince parents to vaccinate, directly refuting the autism link wasn’t effective. Instead, shifting the focus to the purpose of vaccines – protecting against deadly diseases like measles – was more persuasive. The key is identifying a shared objective or common motive, as seen with the mutual concern for children’s health, rather than emphasizing divisive points.

This video Facts don’t win fights — but this can is featured on Big Think.

The future is coming, whether we’re ready or not. Physicist Sean Carroll, planetary scientist Nina Lanza, and futurist Kevin Kelly are three brilliant minds who have spent their careers studying how time has affected the Earth — and Kmele is on a mission to understand their findings. 

Part of understanding what we know includes identifying the things we don’t know; this way, we can keep our minds open to new discoveries and ideas. 

What is it really like to be a theoretical physicist, who only works with ideas? How does philosophy underline the progress we’ve made as a society? And, finally, what is humanity’s role in the future, and what can we do to make sure our lives have meaning? Find out this, and much, much more, in the last episode of Dispatches from The Well.

This video How should we be thinking about the future? is featured on Big Think.

In this episode of Dispatches from The Well, Kmele Foster continues his search for the meaning of life inside the minds of some of the world’s most creative visionaries. 

Godfrey Reggio revolutionized film with his experimental documentaries. Steve Albini is preserving the spirit of music by committing to analog recording. Fred Armisen turned his creativity into a career by combining his passion for music and comedy. Kmele sat down with each of these creators and asked them about the “why” behind their existence. 

From sitting behind the camera to stepping in front of it, these artists have found meaning in their lives by committing to the things that, in simple terms, are the most fun. Join us as we explore the perspectives of these “rebellious creatives” in episode six of Dispatches from The Well.

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We’re diving deep into the “hard problem of consciousness.” Kmele combines the perspectives of five different scientists, philosophers, and spiritual leaders to approach one of humanity’s most pressing questions: what is consciousness?

In the AI age, the question of consciousness is more prevalent than ever. Is every single thing in the universe self-aware? What does it actually mean to be conscious? Are our bodies really just a vessel for our thoughts? Kmele asks these questions, and many more, in the most thought-provoking episode yet. This is Dispatches from The Well.

This video Consciousness: Not just a problem for philosophers is featured on Big Think.

In the fourth episode of Dispatches from The Well, our host Kmele Foster unravels the significance of storytelling in the human experience. From the profound words of psychologist Dan McAdams to the life stories shared by renowned conservationist Jane Goodall and actor Terry Crews, we delve deep into the art of narrative creation. 

We set out to explore how we craft narratives to make sense of our past, present, and future, forging our identities and purpose along the way. Join us as we contemplate the timeless question: Are we the stories we tell? 

This episode invites you to ponder the intricate tapestry of existence, where storytelling serves as the compass guiding our journey through the enigmatic cosmos. 

This video Stories: How humanity makes its meaning is featured on Big Think.

Complexity arises in any system in which multiple agents interact and adapt to one another and their environments. Examples of these complex systems include the nervous system, the Internet, ecosystems, economies, cities, and civilizations.

Complexity science explores all of those systems, and more. And at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico, the globe’s smartest minds are researching across disciplines, cultures, and schools of thought to answer the biggest questions in science and philosophy.

Our host Kmele Foster stepped into the Santa Fe Institute — renowned for its collaborative environment of vast disciplines and schools of thought — to speak with some of the most eccentric and genius minds in our world today.

This video A playground for geniuses: Inside the Santa Fe Institute is featured on Big Think.

According to Fermilab’s Bonnie Fleming, the pursuit of scientific understanding is “daunting in an inspiring way.” What makes it daunting? The seemingly infinite number of questions, with their potentially inaccessible answers.

In this episode of Dispatches from The Well, host Kmele Foster tours the grounds of America’s legendary particle accelerator to discover how exploring the mysteries at the heart of particle physics help us better understand some of the most profound mysteries of our universe.

This video Finding the secret of human existence in an atom-smasher is featured on Big Think.

Why are we here? What is our purpose? Are any of our scientific efforts actually adding up to important revelations? Does understanding our cosmic origins really contribute to humanity as a whole?

We know what it’s like to be “street-level,” to understand our cities, our social behaviors, our day-to-day lives — but what happens if we look up? How does our understanding of humanity change when we raise our attention to the space beyond our skylines?

These are the questions that our host Kmele Foster is exploring in this episode of The Well podcast. Helping Kmele along the way is Sean Dougherty, the director of ALMA Observatory in Northern Chile, home of Earth’s darkest skies and 50% of the world’s megatelecopes.

If the answers to humanity’s questions are written in the stars, this observatory might be the one to translate them.

This video Finding meaning in the darkest sky on earth is featured on Big Think.

Po-Shen Loh is an International Mathematical Olympiad coach, and he challenges the notion that some people are inherently “not math people.” He believes that every one has the potential to understand mathematics, as long as they start with the desire to learn.

A unique aspect of mathematics is its reliance on a sequence of dependent concepts. Unlike subjects such as history, where concepts are broader and less interdependent, math involves a deeper chain of connected ideas. This makes the learning process fragile; missing a single concept can disrupt comprehension due to the interlinked nature of mathematical ideas.

Loh draws a comparison with a train journey: If there is a gap in the track (a missing concept), the train cannot proceed. He suggests a personalized learning approach, allowing individuals to learn at their own pace in order to fill gaps in understanding. With this approach, anyone can excel in math — and even find it easier than other subjects.

This video Unlock your inner math genius, in 4 minutes is featured on Big Think.

“Resilience” is being able to withstand hardship. “Antifragility” goes one step further. The term, first coined by author Nassim Taleb, describes systems or entities that don’t just withstand adversity, but actually benefit and grow stronger from it.

In many ways, antifragility is central to our physical health and development. Bones, for example, get stronger when subjected to stress, and the immune system requires exposure to threats in order to develop properly.

We can also curate mental antifragility to enhance our lives, find happiness, and develop lifelong learning. From Jonathan Haidt to Derren Brown, this video explores the multitude of ways that we can think about antifragility, and how we can use it to better our lives.

This video How to master antifragility for a happier life is featured on Big Think.

There is a deep debate that has been going on for centuries in the world of science and philosophy, a debate that some might call a war. It revolves around the nature of consciousness and the self, and with recent advances in artificial intelligence, the topic is more relevant than ever.

The central question is: Do we really have an intrinsic, unified “self,” or is it just an illusion created by the brain? (In this article for Big Think, Chris Niebauer argues that there is no self.) Tied up with this question is another question, one that perhaps has a bit more obvious practical importance. Do we actually control our thoughts and actions, or are they just outcomes set in stone by an entirely predetermined universe?

Common wisdom says we have a self and that self is the source of our free will, but the subject of the self is riddled with paradoxes. Because the mind has been categorized as something “nonphysical,” its definition alone places the self outside of physical cause-and-effect, and beyond the scope of science. However, as with many philosophical quandaries that involve the proposal of a thesis and the emergence of a counter-thesis (or antithesis, in the words of Hegel), a synthesis often emerges, reconciling seemingly disparate views into a more coherent and sensible perspective.

Thesis: The reality of the self

The first formal argument for the existence of a self was laid out by the philosopher René Descartes in the 17th century. With his famous statement, “Cogito, ergo sum” — which roughly translates to, “I think, therefore I am” — Descartes anchored the existence of the self in the act of cognition. For him, the very act of thinking was incontrovertible proof of the existence of the self.

Armed with this proclamation, the father of modern Western philosophy laid out a theory of reality known as substance dualism. This philosophy posits that there are two distinct types of “substances” that make up existence: the mental and the physical, which correspond to the mind and the body (and the rest of the physical world). The mind controls the body through intentional thought, and it animates the material system by giving it agency, volition, and free choice.

Everyday experience seems to confirm Descartes’ thesis. We are not like inanimate objects — we are animated by our desire to pursue goals, driven by our dreams. While the behavior of a nonliving system is predictable with Newton’s laws, animal behavior is complex, adaptable, and largely unpredictable. This agency is most pronounced in humans due to our awareness of ourselves as conscious entities. Such self-awareness creates a new level of freedom in our choices, such that they are not always dictated entirely by our emotions and instincts.

But to understand this stance in isolation from the religious and cultural context of the time would be to overlook a profound piece of the puzzle. Descartes’ philosophy resonated deeply with Christian theology, because in his framework, the conscious mind is equivalent to the soul or spirit. The soul not only serves as the seat of consciousness and morality but is also believed to survive physical death. By arguing that the mind was a distinct entity from the physical body, mostly detached from the mechanistic processes of the brain, many saw Descartes’ dualism as providing a philosophical grounding for Christian beliefs about the nature of the soul.

As scientific understanding progressed, there was growing discomfort with Cartesian dualism. The Enlightenment era, with its emphasis on reason, empiricism, and skepticism of traditional authority, led to challenges not just to specific doctrines, but also to the broader intermingling of science and religion. To many thinkers of the time, the dualistic notions of an immaterial mind or soul seemed to be relics of religious dogma, which had no place in a rational, scientific worldview.

Antithesis: The self is an illusion

Early skepticism of substance dualism emerged before neuroscience and psychology were even proper fields of study, because the notion of an immaterial mind distinct from the body seemed at odds with the general mechanistic understanding of causality that existed since Newton. According to the concept known as the “causal closure” of the universe, every physical event that happens in the world is determined by prior physical events. This deterministic worldview raises the question: If every action, emotion, or thought we experience is predetermined by a set sequence of causes and effects, where is the room for an independent entity called the “self” to truly exist?

Out of this line of reasoning, philosophies that denied the existence of minds emerged known as reductionism, eliminative materialism, and illusionism. These stances suggest that what we perceive as the activity of a conscious self can be completely reduced to material processes in the brain. This line of reasoning was introduced by the philosopher David Hume centuries ago, but is championed in an empirically updated form by neuro-philosophers like Patricia Churchland, Daniel Dennett, and Keith Frankish. Instead, what exists is a bundle of transient experiences, but no core self that binds them.

However, underlying this scientific skepticism was also an ideological shift. Reductionism can be thought of as the antithesis or critique of the concepts of a premodern worldview. The rejection of the self was motivated by a hidden agenda to rid science of any ideas that remotely felt supernatural or religious. Since the self seemed intertwined with the idea of a soul, scientific pushback on ideological grounds was inevitable, and from that point on, findings from neuroscience and psychology were interpreted through a reductionist lens. The fact that scientists could not identify a localized region that precisely corresponded to the self seemed to verify the belief that it is an “illusion,” though to most people that statement has little meaning, if any.

This reductionist ideology recently found an ally in what is called “nondual” Eastern philosophy. According to this quasi-mystical doctrine, embracing the idea that we aren’t our thoughts or ego can lead to a more compassionate world — one free of self-blame and blame toward others. If none of us are in control of our actions or thoughts, then punishment is pointless and immoral. By not placing undue importance on the self, individuals might find themselves more attuned to the interconnected nature of existence, shifting toward a holistic worldview where “we’re all in this together.”

However, there’s a dark side to this denial of the self, and it’s extremely troubling to those who think about this stuff deeply. If we have no self and no control over our thoughts and actions, then we are slaves to a billiard ball universe, trapped in a nihilistic nightmare in which we cannot change our fate or the fate of humanity. For those who take the hardline reductionist stance seriously, this can lead to cognitive dissonance, and in rarer cases, crippling depression or psychosis. 

Thankfully, as with many ostensibly unresolvable philosophical quandaries, a synthesis emerges, reconciling seemingly disparate views into a more unified and sensible perspective.

Synthesis: The self as an informational entity

While the self might not be a material entity that you can hold in your hand, there’s a growing mountain of empirical evidence suggesting it is a very real phenomenon with a measurable physical correlate that emerges from the intricate dance of cognitive processes within the brain. New cutting-edge theories of consciousness like Global Workspace Theory, Integrated World Modeling Theory, and the Inner Screen Hypothesis are reviving the idea of a Cartesian theater of experience that is viewed by a subject with control and causal power.

Douglas Hofstadter, cognitive scientist and author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning book Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (1979), argues that the self emerges in those systems that have the capacity to represent or model the world and themselves. This creates a self-referential feedback loop whereby cognition reflects upon itself, producing a nexus of experience and control. Processes like recurrent feedback loops lay the foundation for the emergence of consciousness and, by extension, the sense of a personal self.

In the decades since that idea was proposed, modern neuroscience and psychology have provided neuroanatomical and behavioral support for the loop hypothesis. Research investigating the brain networks known as the cortical midline structures (CMS) and the default mode network (DMN) is providing insights into how the self may emerge from self-modeling processes in the brain. Self-modeling refers to when the brain, which naturally constructs a mental model of the world, models itself as an agent with a mind. The DMN includes the CMS, so they can be thought of as part of the same core computational module, though the networks are associated with subtly different functions. They both consist of well-studied brain regions like the medial prefrontal cortex and the posterior and anterior cingulate cortex.

The cortical midline structures are consistently active during tasks related to self-awareness and introspection. The DMN is a network of brain regions that exhibit increased activity when the mind is engaged in internally directed processes, such as daydreaming, self-reflection, and contemplating the future. These processes involve the continuous integration and updating of information about one’s physical body, personal history, and emotional states, leading to the construction of a dynamic and subjective sense of self. A plethora of peer-reviewed studies have linked this network to self-awareness and self-related thought. We can now actually see the neural attractors of electrical activity that correspond to these conscious and self-reflective states, so the physical structure of the informational entity we call the self is coming to be known in detail.

In weaving together these threads, a new understanding of the nature of the mind emerges. The self, while not a material entity in the traditional sense of the word, is both real and detectable. Taking psychedelics can temporarily dissolve this structure, creating an ecstatic sense of interconnection with the external world, but at the same time proving that the structure exists. If the sense of self can dissolve and subsequently reappear, it underscores its existence — the very fact that it can waver and return implies a certain tangibility.

The self is real

The argument for the existence of the self is not just rooted in common sense and everyday experience, it is also supported by the latest research and theories in cognitive neuroscience. Whether it’s the introspective exercises of meditation and creative imagination, or the mappings of the neural correlates of consciousness and cognitive control, the self finds affirmation at every turn. A robust sense of self is crucial for ideal human experience, as it can have significant effects on mental health and moral reasoning. It allows individuals to make sense of the world, take responsibility, make value-based decisions, and connect meaningfully with others.

From this new synthesis, we see that the debate over the existence of the self isn’t just a pointless game of philosophical ping-pong. It has profound implications for our understanding of ourselves, morality, and the very fabric of reality.

This article Actually, neuroscience suggests “the self” is real is featured on Big Think.

From a young age, society teaches us to avoid expressing uncertainty: Saying, “I don’t know,” is a hallmark of failure and shame throughout our formative school years. But former professional poker player Annie Duke contends that admitting uncertainty reflects a more accurate understanding of reality.

Not only does being certain provide a false sense of security, it can close our minds to new information, hinder the fair calibration of our beliefs, and inhibit fruitful collaboration. Duke also highlights the crucial difference between confidence and certainty: while the former can be beneficial in specific contexts, like facing an opponent in poker, the latter can lead to overconfidence and hubris.

Duke argues that acknowledging uncertainty invites collaboration, as individuals actively seek out diverse opinions to form a comprehensive understanding. In contrast, certainty can limit learning and growth, potentially becoming a real obstacle to success.

This video Why being uncertain is a hidden strength is featured on Big Think.

Emily Chamlee-Wright discusses the principles of great conversations: humility, critical thinking, and sympathetic listening.

Humility, not just deference to expertise, involves recognizing the complexity of the world and our own limited perspectives, promoting openness to learning from others. Critical thinking, identifying gaps in logic and evidence, enriches discussions by fostering depth and analytical engagement. Sympathetic listening involves understanding others’ viewpoints without immediate critique, encouraging empathy and respectful exploration.

By embracing these principles, conversations become spaces for mutual learning, enriched perspectives, and meaningful exchanges that bridge differing viewpoints.

This video 3 key principles for great conversation is featured on Big Think.

NASA astronomer Michelle Thaller talks about a heavy subject matter: neutron stars. These dead stars are so dense that just one teaspoonful of neutron star matter would equal the mass of Mount Everest.

Two neutron stars in orbit around each other will eventually collide, and when they do, they create ripples in the fabric of spacetime. Thanks to LIGO, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, scientists can detect these gravitational ripples by detecting disturbances in laser light.

Albert Einstein correctly predicted the existence of gravitational waves in his theory of general relativity, 100 years before astrophysicists first detected them.

This video When neutron stars collide is featured on Big Think.

In January 1818, Mary Shelley anonymously published a strange little novel that would eventually make her world-famous. Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus is the story of a scientist, Victor Frankenstein, who is driven by an unrelenting “thirst for knowledge,” an ambition to penetrate the secrets of nature, heaven, and Earth. He works tirelessly to engineer a sentient being who, upon coming alive, is hideous to him. Realizing with horror that his plan has gone awry, Frankenstein flees his creature who in turn angrily chases him to the end of the Earth and finally destroys him at the novel’s end.

Shelley’s dystopian tale has managed to stay relevant since its publication. It has a riddling, Zen koan-like quality that has edified and entertained readers for centuries, inspiring a range of interpretations. Recently, it has been making appearances in the heated debates over generative artificial intelligence, where it often is evoked as a cautionary tale about the dangers of scientific overreach. Some worry that in pursuing technologies like AI, we are recklessly consigning our species to Victor Frankenstein’s tragic fate. Our wonderchildren, our miraculous machines, might ultimately destroy us. This fear is an expression of what science fiction writer Isaac Asimov once called the “Frankenstein complex,” a Luddite fear of robots.

Strangely, it’s not only Luddites expressing such fears today; it is also some of the people who are most aggressively at the forefront of technological innovation. Elon Musk seemed to have had Mary Shelley’s story in mind when he warned a World Government Summit in Dubai in 2017 that sometimes “a scientist will get so engrossed in their work that they don’t really realize the ramifications of what they’re doing.”

But Frankenstein, thankfully, offers much more than a warning about robots. It is a rich and sober account of human error, a testament to life’s mystery, and a dramatic illustration of the redeeming roles of humility and affection. It encourages us to awaken to and love the small piece of reality we inhabit — “To see,” as William Blake put it, “a World in a Grain of Sand.” As the AI revolutionary tide carries us along into what may be a “transhuman” future, it can continue to show us who we are, have been, and might be in an unfolding reality that always surprises and exceeds human designs.

The principle of life

Shelley wrote Frankenstein in response to a challenge issued by her friend the poet Lord Byron after a late-night discussion about the “principle of life.” The Scientific Revolution was well underway by then, and her group of friends had gathered around a fire one summer night by the shores of Lake Geneva, as rain pummeled the rooftops and lightning electrified the skies, to probe the mysterious nature of this thing they — and we — call life. What is its principle, they wondered? Can life be manufactured out of nothing, or even, say, out of a corpse? Could humans be life’s creators?

The men talked and Shelley, still a teenage girl, sat and quietly listened. She had an important perspective to contribute to the conversation, however, a knowledge about the origins of life that bore directly on their discussions. She had, after all, given birth to a child who had died a couple of weeks after birth, and, a year later, she had birthed a second child who survived. Her mother, the Enlightenment thinker Mary Wollstonecraft, had died of puerperal fever shortly after her own birth, and that death had long haunted her. The “principle of life” was for her more than an abstract philosophical topic. It had been intimately, powerfully, and tenuously experienced in her own physical body. To gestate a new life was empowering; to lose a child, or to struggle to sustain one, was humbling.

Unfortunately, the men did not enlist her opinion on such a weighty topic. She remained a mere fly on the wall during their discussions, but the wheels in her head were turning. In the days, weeks, and months that followed, she responded to Byron’s prompt by writing her Gothic novel. Frankenstein would eclipse in popularity, enduring relevance, and prescience anything those men ever wrote.

We are as gods

Shelley was a believing Christian, and she begins the novel with an assertion which reads at first like a religious rejection of science: “Supremely frightful would be the effect of any human endeavor to mock the stupendous mechanism of the Creator of the world.” But she also understood that science is not the only ways humans have tried to play God. Childbirth is also a God-like activity, undertaken without God-like powers. Childbirth is divine, but it is also marred by human hubris and failure.

This was not an entirely novel interpretation; it was rooted, in fact, in Scripture. In Genesis, Eve had been enticed by the serpent’s tantalizing promise: “When you eat of [the fruit] your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” God in turn retaliated: “In pain you shall bring forth children,” he tells Eve. Childbirth is the cursed consequence of Eve’s quest for God-like knowledge, and it is only possible after the fall. Eve’s descendants learn to live with this curse, to even see in it a hopeful promise of fruitful multiplication.  

This story’s contradictions riddle her characterizations. Many interpreters have condemned Frankenstein as more villainous than his murderous monster, but Shelley’s narrative resists such unilateral assignments of blame. If Frankenstein is a villain, then so is Eve, so is she, and so was her mother; they had all, despite their best intentions, failed the vulnerable lives they had made. In an 1831 introduction, Shelley called the novel itself her own “hideous progeny.” In writing it, she had also over-reached, had tried to create a universe out of her own small grain of sand. She confessed, however, an abiding affection for the book, and she bid it to “go forth and prosper,” just as God had done with his fallen creatures. 

An occultist’s ambition

Her exploration of the ethics of Frankenstein’s scientific experiment is similarly complex and subtle. Her “scientist,” to begin with, is not exactly a scientist. Victor Frankenstein is an occultist who, in his teens, had stumbled upon the work of a German Renaissance soldier and polymath who was influenced by Kabbalah, Hermeticism, and Neo-Platonism. His father and a professor advise him that he is foolishly burdening his memory with “exploded systems and useless names.” But he ignores them, preferring the forgotten alchemists’ “chimeras of boundless grandeur,” their dreams of immortality and power, to the modern natural philosophers’ more limited ambitions. 

The problem, he confesses, was that his reading of modern philosophers had left him feeling unsatisfied. In reading them, he felt like Isaac Newton who once “avowed that he felt like a child picking up shells beside the great and unexplored ocean of truth.” He wanted to wrap his arms around that whole, great ocean. Is that really such a bad thing? Haven’t we all felt that desire for wholeness? But his ambition pushed him further. “A new species,” he dreams as he labors in his workshop, “would bless me as its creator.”

It’s not this hubris alone that seals his fate, however. It is also his denial of human community. In committing himself to his ambitious goals, he isolates himself, losing physical touch with the people that had once populated his world. The happy man, he admits, is one who believes his native town is the world. But Frankenstein was intent on forsaking that native town for the world. That forsaking is echoed in his abandonment of his monster and in his negative response when his creature begs him to make him a female companion. Fearing that he will end up with two monsters and double the trouble, Frankenstein says no, again denying the claims of human affection. 

He could, of course, have embraced his failure, accepting that he had lost control, and committing himself to make the most of it, to even love the monstrosity he had made. Mary Shelley seems to have done just that when she bid her “hideous progeny” to “go forth and prosper.” Frankenstein reminded her of the people she had loved and lived among — reminded her too, perhaps, of how she had once herself been a child “picking up shells beside the great and unexplored ocean of truth.” 

The secrets of nature elude our dominion

As the debates about generative AI roil our societies, we might remember what Shelley revealed: how the secrets of nature have always eluded our dominion and defied our best intentions. “Everything,” she wrote, “must have a beginning… The Hindus give the world an elephant to support it, but they make the elephant stand upon a tortoise. Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void, but out of chaos.” It is tortoises — the strange and unruly secrets of life — all the way down.

This article Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein can illuminate the debate over generative AI is featured on Big Think.

Johann Hari received the most poignant wake-up call of his life at his local fast food joint. It was Christmas Eve 2009, and to his horror, the staff had written him a huge Christmas card, declaring Hari their “best customer.” 

It wasn’t just the realization that junk food had taken over his life that startled Hari. It was the grim reality that vast swathes of humanity are ruled by desires that only serve to make us unhappy, unhealthy, and unfulfilled. Yet we listen to those desires again and again, driving ourselves into chronic states of depression and anxiety.

Many of these damaging desires result from what Hari calls “extrinsic values” — motivations driven by external factors such as societal expectations and accelerated by advertising and social media. But we can combat extrinsic values by developing our own intrinsic values: motivations that stem from genuine joy and passion. By challenging and dismantling these “junk values,” we can alleviate the mental anguish they cause and rediscover what truly matters.

This video Un-sabotage yourself with intrinsic motivation is featured on Big Think.

Theoretical cosmologist Janna Levin discusses the dynamic interplay between theoretical and experimental physics. She highlights how physicists navigate the tension between imaginative theorizing and strict adherence to observed reality — leading to both confining approaches within known laws, and explosive creativity that has transformed our understanding of the Universe.

Levin explores questions about the nature of the cosmos, such as the possibility of multiple universes and the enigma of dark matter. She acknowledges the criticism that theoretical work on unobservable phenomena like the multiverse might not fit traditional scientific criteria, but argues that nature may not conform to human definitions.

Levin emphasizes the significance of experimental discoveries, like dark matter’s indirect detection through gravitational effects, in shaping our understanding. Ultimately, she asserts that scientific exploration challenges societal limitations, reshaping values and perspectives while underscoring the profound impact of gazing into the cosmos.

This video The weirdness of physics: Dreaming wildly with strict rules is featured on Big Think.

Theoretical cosmologist Janna Levin challenges long-held assumptions about the behavior of black holes, information conservation, and the fundamental nature of space, time, and gravity. She uses black holes to explore the physical feasibility of wormholes: theoretical passages or tunnel-like structures that connect separate points in spacetime. 

Stephen Hawking proposed that black holes emit energy, causing them to eventually evaporate — but this challenges the conservation of information. The holographic principle suggests that information is encoded on a black hole’s surface, addressing this information paradox. 

Levin metaphorically likens black holes to embroidery, woven from quantum threads. Her quantum perspective has profound implications, potentially altering our understanding of gravity and spacetime’s fundamental nature — even questioning our pursuit of a theory of everything.

This video Quantum wormholes, explained is featured on Big Think.

“Please God, make me good, but not just yet.” 

The plea by Augustine of Hippo — later, St. Augustine — was probably an ironic quip; translational accuracy has his seeking to be made chaste and celibate. His words come to mind when I hear declarations of allegiance to democratic values of justice, liberty, and equality of opportunity. Whether the plea be to God or gods — to Humanity, the State, or Law — “not just yet,” as we shall see, applies to those allegiances; to think otherwise is a self-deception. We should own up. 

The “not just yet” is sometimes a “not at all.” It is not at all possible to become celibate after years of marriage; and it is not at all possible to secure some of the values just mentioned. That is not because the securing would be “too late,” as it is in the case of celibacy, but because it is nonsense to think we have any clear idea of what constitutes those values in application.  

I tiptoe, gradually approaching that nonsense and more.

(In)equality before the law

Democratic values are praised by “the great and the good,” by political, corporate, and religious leaders, by citizens and humble thinkers. (I include myself qua the humble.) They appear in constitutions, amendments, and declarations: witness those of the U.S. and United Nations. One example is “All are equal before the law.” It is false. 

Equality before the law would require equality of representation, but certain defendants engage lawyers with expensive and erudite silver tongues whereas others, impoverished, defend themselves with stumbling incoherence. Equality before the law is also undermined by whims, prejudices, and legal interpretations, differing from judge to judge, jury to jury. It loses further credibility once we remember that many people lack resources to gain access to the law. 

The above defects relate to how things are. Maybe genuine equality before the law could in principle be instituted, with everyone having equal access and equally good representation, judges, and juries. Were that possible, beneficiaries of current inequalities, whatever their lip-service to equality, would, I am sure, urge “not just yet.”

Access is important for other democratic values. Consider the right to vote. Exercising that right is easy for many but for others, burdensome — for those overwhelmed or juggling poorly paid jobs, large families, ill health, and voter registration requirements. Related deceits are the claims of “free and fair elections,” “the people” having spoken, and senators insisting they had been elected to do this or that. On what bases could such claims be properly justified?

The Land of Justice

Tiptoeing further into unclarity, consider the much-loved mantra of promoting “equality of opportunity.” I present the Land of Justice. 

The Land was once akin to the U.S. and Great Britain with extremes of poverty and wealth. Children from deprived homes effectively lacked opportunities available to the well-to-do. To correct for that, the Land enabled all children to receive appropriate attention to their diverse needs, such as education, housing, and healthcare. No longer were the wealthy to secure competitive advantage for their offspring via additional tuition, serene study spaces, and cultural exchanges. Discrepancies, of course, remained in home life, so, with Plato in mind, the Land developed community upbringing, ensuring fair conditions for all.

Now, those who wave the flag of equal opportunities would not, I am sure, want equality of opportunity to go so far. The Land, though, dissatisfied with the focus solely on nurturing and environmental impingings, went further. Eyes could not be closed to nature’s unfairness in the distribution of talents. 

Some children were naturally mathematically inclined, others not; some naturally driven, others easy-going. The mantra “all fetuses are equal” led to genetic manipulations of embryos such that children developed into adults with the same high level and spread of abilities, motivations, and desires to satisfy society’s needs. That uniformity was necessary, otherwise unfairness in opportunities would have arisen: some could have been lucky, wanting and being allocated flute playing, whereas others unlucky, ending up as sewage workers. (I pass over the Land’s handling of sexual inequalities whereby currently, for example, male average longevity is lower than that of females.)

No longer are job interviews required; lotteries determine who does what with suitable rotations between jobs. No one suffers unfairly. They recognize that they are equally talented, doing what they want. None expects to be paid more than others; none disparages the work of others. 

The Land of Justice has expelled much sheer luck — good and bad — that currently exists through nature and nurture, violating fairness. True, some good fortunes and misfortunes remain — lightning strikes one, not another — and while chess games usually end in draws, distractions sometimes affect only one player, leading to exciting non-draws.

With the Land’s “equality” application so comprehensive, the individuality of individuals, the foothold, is largely lost. Providing equal opportunities requires differences in people and treatments, but also differences to remain. Which differences to erase, which to endorse? Those are grey areas. We should own up: The best we do is muddle through. Muddle also arises when I ask what sort of person I could have been — while maintaining the foothold of remaining “me.”

The Land of Justice has cast asunder values conflicting with fairness — values grounded in attachments to my loves, friends, family. Ethnicity, pronoun preferences, and linguistic infelicities ought typically to be irrelevant when the law assesses a case; matters are otherwise when romance is in the air. The Land’s justice offends a basic feature of human life, highlighted in Friedrich Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil:

“Isn’t living assessing, preferring, being unfair, being limited, wanting to be different?”

The answer is “yes,” but only so far. We should take ownership of bafflement in determining “how far” as also when values of autonomy, liberty, and authenticity are in play. 

We are surrounded by a cacophony of opinions, discussions, and advertisements. The observations here may be benignly thought-provoking in contrast to shrieking newspaper headlines, but what constitutes readers’ resultant “authentic” beliefs and desires? Corporate promotions, teasing us into unhealthy foods, drinks, and gambling ways, are often welcomed — part of a “free society” in which people (with money) are at liberty to buy as they choose — yet governmental urgings for healthier living are condemned as the “nanny state” undermining free choice.

Joy entails suffering

Allow me to widen the need to “own up.” Here is Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra: 

“Have you ever said Yes to a single joy? O my friends, then you said Yes too to all woe. All things are entangled, ensnared, enamored.”

Much of what we enjoy is delivered courtesy of considerable suffering: children in the Congo scraping cobalt for lithium-ion batteries; seamstresses in squalid sweatshops producing fashionable clothing; animals caged in awful conditions. That goes on right now. We try to forget. For some, the focus is past injustices; hence, I add: It is all very well to pull down statues and rename buildings, showing outrage at earlier racisms, horrors, and slavery, but far more owning-up is needed. Today’s outraged cannot escape the benefits of infrastructures, institutions, and wealth derived from man’s past inhumanity. Protestors march on highways of exploitation.

How are we to live with ourselves, redeem ourselves, entangled as we are in the world’s history? Nietzsche wrote of the greatest burden, the “eternal recurrence,” of our lives being repeated eternally as they are, no déjà vu even. That repetition is a nonsense — any repeat “exactly the same” collapses into the original — but curiously the idea may highlight a question: How well disposed can we be to our lives, affirming them unconditionally, despite the surrounding horrors?

Simone de Beauvoir, in conversation with Simone Weil, emphasized the quest for meaning in one’s existence. Weil responded, “It’s easy to see that you’ve never gone hungry.” That should bring us up sharp. Philosophical reflection can distance us from feeling the plight of others.

Muddling through

I risk owning up to a deeper muddle. 

If we accept current understanding of our biology, then every thought, every reading of words — every smile, vibration of vocal cords, or keyboard tappings by way of response — all result from neurological changes, whimsical-like electrical impulses and chemical signals. Have we any idea how those neurological events give rise to thoughts that express sense (when they do) and not just sense but also (one hopes) sometimes truth? That baffling reflection itself is open to the same challenge — as is this expression of it.

I can offer again only that we muddle through. We should do our best, despite not knowing what in the end constitutes the best. At the very least, we should embrace humility — and own up. Karl Marx wrote:

“Perseus wore a magic cap that the monsters he hunted down might not see him. We draw the magic cap down over eyes and ears as a make-believe that there are no monsters.”

Whether it be metaphysics or morality, the political or social, we should certainly remove the cap and confront the monstrous bafflements outlined above. Whether nonsense or not, whether our beliefs, values, and actions are determined by biology or not, as dinner approaches, we still have to choose — the red dress or blue? — and act as if we are making free choices. 

And, as darkness descends and our lives meet with reflection, is it not also an act, a pretense, a deception, if we view them with satisfaction, happiness even, despite knowing of our inescapable entanglements in the horrors of the world, past, present and, no doubt, future? Can we ever be well disposed, truly so, to the world and how we live? Ought we not to own up and answer that question with a despairing “no”? Or…

Do we now pull down the cap all the more firmly, persuading ourselves that the monsters outlined in the thoughts above are all make-believe — and no “owning up” is required? 

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Clinical psychologist Lisa Miller rejects a materialist view of the brain as a factory producing thoughts. She believes that the brain might function more like an antenna — capable of sending and receiving consciousness, which holds information, love, and intelligence. In other words, consciousness can exist independently of matter.

Miller highlights scientific research that has explored this idea of shared consciousness, particularly in bonded relationships and among twins. She emphasizes the interconnectedness of humanity, where our actions and treatment of others leave lasting imprints on a collective consciousness field. 

Miller wants to redefine how we understand human consciousness and interconnectedness. This view of our minds has implications for fields such as psychology, neuroscience, and spirituality. By recognizing our shared consciousness, we can live a less lonely and more mindful shared existence.

This video What is shared consciousness? is featured on Big Think.

There’s a pursuit of simplicity and unification in theoretical physics, aiming for a single mathematical law to unify quantum mechanics and gravity: a theory of everything. But while other forces have been successfully unified, gravity resists integration — casting doubt on the likelihood of ever unlocking the mother of all theories.

As physicist Janna Levin explains, black holes, with their strong spacetime curvature, provide insights into this challenge. Levin draws parallels to mathematicians’ incompleteness theorems, noting the inherent limitations in such an overarching theory. 

Acknowledging the complexity of the endeavor, Levin emphasizes the need to embrace and explore gravity’s enigmatic nature. In doing so, the pursuit of unification might still yield profound insights, even if a comprehensive theory of everything remains elusive.

This video The problem with the theory of everything is featured on Big Think.

Developmental biologist Michael Levin proposes an alternative approach to regenerative medicine: one that involves communicating with cells to trigger changes in tissues. He envisions a future where biomedicine relies less on chemistry and looks more like behavioral science.

By leveraging the native competencies of cells, Levin thinks researchers can achieve complex outcomes without micromanagement. He demonstrates this through the regeneration of frog legs by simply nudging cells toward the regenerative state.

Levin introduces “xenobots,” bio-robots formed by self-assembling frog skin cells. These xenobots are key to the regenerative medicine of the future, with the potential to create solutions for birth defects, reprogramming tumors, and even creating new organs. Levin emphasizes the moral imperative to pursue this research to address pressing medical needs.

This video Biohacking our way to health is featured on Big Think.

Black holes should be thought of as “empty places” rather than “dense objects.” While they are indeed formed from incredibly dense objects (collapsed stars), the black hole itself is nothing.

Black holes could have played a crucial role in the emergence of life. Ironically, the Solar System is in orbit around a supermassive black hole located in the center of our Milky Way galaxy. And one day, we might fall into a black hole.

If you were out in space exploring and you didn’t realize you were coming upon a black hole, you would not notice that anything terrible was about to happen. Eventually, however, you would succumb to a terrifying fate.

This video A 9-minute journey inside a black hole is featured on Big Think.

The concept of the “self” has long been considered philosophically significant: a foundation for exploring who we are and why we’re here. But where does the self begin?

Developmental biologist Michael Levin explores this question, explaining how the “self” is constantly being constructed and created, starting in the early moments of embryogenesis. 

Levin argues against binary categorizations of selfhood, emphasizing that it is a continuous phenomenon with no sharp lines between different stages of development. Using the example of self-organizing cells in the formation of the embryo, Levin also asserts that the self is not a singular entity — rather, it is a collection of structures working together toward a specific goal.

This video The science of the “self” is featured on Big Think.

Lisa Miller asserts that we are suffering epidemic levels of loneliness, but humans are inherently connected through shared consciousness and spirituality.

In a personal story about her cousin, she details the transformative power of collective spiritual practices.

Scientific research underscores the tangible impact of spirituality on our lives, revealing our deep interconnectedness with all life and reinforcing the idea that we are never truly alone.

This video The false reality of loneliness is featured on Big Think.

Clinical psychologist Lisa Miller discusses the loss of “spiritual pluralism” in the U.S., caused by the removal of religion from the public square in the last 40 years. This, she says, led to the spiritually disconnected society we live in today, where many young adults lack a strong spiritual core.

Alongside this spiritual decline has been an uptick in diseases of despair: alcoholism, addiction, and suicide. However, Lisa suggests that we may be on the brink of a spiritual renaissance, with people waking up to the importance of spiritual exploration and connection in a world that demands rationality and productivity. 

Lisa identifies three crucial stages of spiritual emergence in life: emerging adulthood, midlife, and elderhood, during which individuals experience growth and a hunger to love more deeply and contribute with meaning. Miller emphasizes the significance of reconnecting with spirituality and understanding ourselves more profoundly to lead fulfilling and purposeful lives.

This video How we lost collective spirituality — and why we need it back is featured on Big Think.

Watching dusk fall can be an act of resistance — against the absurd idea that every second must be spent usefully, against thinking in black and white, against the addiction to growth that dominates our lives. A short hour of producing or consuming nothing, not chasing likes or responses. Simply sitting and watching darkness rise, lines blur, and daily life as it unravels.

Dusking, it is called. A verb stemming from a time when people preferred to leave the lights off as long as possible and wait for darkness in the early evening. It was a way to save energy but also, most importantly, a communal end to the day. A tiny rite of passage in which work was released and rest began.

The rise and fall of dusking

It was a woman late in her 80s who taught me that dusk is not only a natural phase of the day but also an activity. She was walking along on one of the night walks I regularly organize. Initially, I was worried about her participation — she looked somewhat frail and the walks take place in a dark forest full of loose branches — but this octogenarian moved along the paths supple as a song. “I’m used to some darkness,” she told me afterwards. “I’ve spent a lifetime ‘dusking’.” In response to my puzzled look, she explained to me what dusking meant. On the farm where she grew up, she, her parents, and three sisters would sit at the window after sunset to watch the night take over. It was the coziest moment of the day, she remembered. “Something I always looked forward to.”

I pictured it, six people from large to small, united in a calm ritual as their planet turned away from its giant sun. It seemed too romantic to be true. At home, I looked it up. I have not (yet) been able to find official research on the art of dusking, but after some on- and offline asking around, it turns out that in the last century it was indeed a familiar pastime, which was gradually lost with the rise of electric light.

With so many lamps at our disposal, who would sit around waiting for colors to fade? Wasted hours. And besides, why sit back at a time of mass extinction, sea-level rise, and societal crises? There’s no time to waste! But two days of dusking converted me. I advocate a revival of sitting and waiting.

A time to do nothing

For starters, because it doesn’t produce anything. At least, not money, followers, or muscle mass. The idea that everything we do should somehow pay off is exactly the mindset we need to get rid of.

It is bizarre how much our societies cling to the myth of eternal economic growth. Even at the last climate summit in Glasgow in 2021 — where world leaders finally stressed the seriousness of the matter for once and yet fell short in their decisions — there was constant talk of the growth potential of a sustainable economy. Apparently, keeping our world livable must also pay off. That growth sometimes requires slowing down, or even dying, is not part of our myth. Nor that our obsession with “more” causes degradation and loss and is in most cases exactly the opposite of growing. When it comes to growth, we need a fundamental change in mindset. We have to start giving up on things. Repair what is broken. Prefer the autumn forest nearby to the beach in Bali.

Of course, this does not apply to everyone in the same way. People in countries like mine, The Netherlands, also live with little, but the vast majority of Western European people have a footprint five times larger than that of the average Ethiopian. 

We can hope that future technology will continue to enable our standard of living, but if we don’t learn to see growth as a circular process, it’s just a matter of time before we’re in trouble again. Ultimately, Earth’s resources are finite; no tech-fix can change that. The only technology that’s truly useful in the long-run is our own mindset. Dusking can be a helpful practice. It is not a panacea, but it is a free and accessible exercise in not-doing and not-being — a way to detach yourself from an existence based on exhausting resources and the delusion that our reality has anything to do with a straight line upward. All you need is time and a pair of eyes.

Hello darkness, my old friend

Twilight is startling. It is a paradoxical experience; it happens so slowly that nothing seems to happen, while in the meantime everything changes. What seems solid in daylight fades in dusk. Lines soften, making things, people, and trees seem to blend together. The longer you wait to turn on the light, the more interwoven everything becomes — not a world of separate things but a hazy sketch that the imagination can easily run wild with. 

Among the “duskers” I spoke to in recent months was a woman who reads her interior magazines exclusively at dusk. When she can’t see the images sharply, she told me, her imagination takes over and populates the interiors with strange shapes and presences. In a blurred sketch, you invent your own boundaries, and there is dialogue between inner and outer worlds. Even the line between a body and its surroundings dissolves. It’s not coincidental that twilight is the time when, according to legends, a human can merge with a bat, a wolf, or the mist.

I didn’t become a werewolf on the couch in front of our living room window, but I had an experience that I also often have during my night walks. The darker it gets, the bigger the world seems to get. It’s an experience I recognized in a poem by the Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke. Paraphrased, he writes, “Fire limits the world to the circle it lights up.” He goes on:

But the darkness embraces everything:
shapes and shadows, creatures and me,
people, nations — just as they are.

In the light you exist in a place limited by sight, but in the dark you are no longer confined to your location. You drift through a boundless world with no visible beginning or end. 

What struck me most while waiting for darkness is the fact that I normally miss this big transition. It happens every day and almost never am I aware of our planet turning away from the sun. Have all the screens fragmented my attention so much that I never experience the biggest event of the day? Perhaps. But it surely also has to do with the army of electric lights that switch on as soon as the sun goes down. Night too suffers from the delusion that more is always better. In our 24-hour economy, every corner must be lit, even though the vast majority of that light is wasted, and even though it has long been proven that more light does not directly correlate with more safety, and turns out to be bad for our health and that of countless nocturnal animals.

An addiction to light

According to Japanese writer Jun’ichirō Tanizaki, addiction to electric light is part of the blueprint of Western societies. In his wonderful book In Praise of Shadows, he writes that the “progressive Westerner” is always improving his faith. “From candle to oil lamp, from oil lamp to gas lamp, from gas lamp to electric lamp — never does his quest for brighter light stop, he leaves nothing untouched to erase even the smallest shadow.” According to Tanizaki, the Westerner wants to see everything and precisely because of this, he misses out on large parts of the world. It turns him into a shallow figure with no eye for the subtle beauty that a shadow world brings. A century after Tanizaki’s writing, our light addiction has killed almost all the shadows he so praised.

When I started dusking, I turned off the lamppost in front of our house. It’s an easy job if you have the right tools. Dusk in a light-polluted city like mine, Amsterdam, is nothing compared to that in a truly dark place, but with that one lamppost dead and the lights inside off, there was some twilight. I found it quite magical to hang around in the limbo between light and dark for a small hour. I realized how used I am to seeing only the outcome of things. Processes are largely invisible in our society. Hardly anyone sees the wheat of our bread grow, fattens their own chicken, or knows the path that water traveled from its source to the pipes of the tap.

Bring back dusking

Seeing only end products gives a distorted, simplistic view of the world. It alienates us from life, seeing no longer how plants, animals, water, and air are connected in processes of which we too are a part. Twilight reminds us that we live in slow but continuous transformation — that day and night are not opposites but intertwined, and that a world with only light is a lie and the greatest change is often hidden in plain view. And all of that for free. A chair and a view is all you need.

So, it’s time to bring back the art of dusking, in which we mark the transition from work to rest every day in an hour of producing or consuming nothing. It’s a daily realization that opposites are intertwined and for a moment, just one moment, we feel the possibility of being a wolf, a bat, the mist.

This article The case for “dusking”: In a world of light and noise, embracing the dark can be healing is featured on Big Think.

Esteemed biologist Michael Levin explores a captivating biological perspective on evolution — one that’s hard for engineers to come to terms with. In their work, making random changes to a system usually makes things worse, not better. 

But evolution, on the other hand, doesn’t just produce specific solutions to specific challenges; instead, it creates what Levin calls “problem-solving machines.” These machines are made up of hierarchical biological hardware with incredible adaptability, capable of tackling various challenges without assuming specific environmental conditions.

Contrary to commonly held ideas about evolution, it doesn’t just search for the best possible physical characteristics in organisms. It also uses signals and behaviors to shape how organisms function, so when things change or get damaged, the different parts of an organism can continue to function.  From metabolic to physiological dilemmas, Levin highlights evolution’s remarkable ability to adapt.

This video Why evolution is the Picasso of science is featured on Big Think.

Michael Levin, a developmental biologist at Tufts University, challenges conventional notions of intelligence, arguing that it is inherently collective rather than individual.

Levin explains that we are collections of cells, with each cell possessing competencies developed from their evolution from unicellular organisms. This forms a multi-scale competency architecture, where each level, from cells to tissues to organs, is solving problems within their unique spaces. 

Levin emphasizes that properly recognizing intelligence, which spans different scales of existence, is vital for understanding life’s complexities. This perspective suggests a radical shift in understanding ourselves and the biological world around us.

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In the 13th century, Italian alchemists used techniques they had learned from Muslim books recently translated into Latin to isolate a remarkable substance. It was a clear liquid like water, but felt icy cold to the touch. And they were astonished to find that, when soaked into a rag, it would burn with a subtle flame while leaving the rag itself unconsumed by the fire. This elixir went by various names, most commonly aqua vitae, or the water of life. When herbs or spices were steeped in the liquid, it was believed to be a powerful medicine that enabled the active ingredients of the botanicals to be more effectively absorbed into the body. Today, we know aqua vitae as “alcohol.” However, it wasn’t until the 16th century that the word acquired this meaning, when a physician called Paracelsus applied al-kohl, an unrelated Arabic term for a fine powder, to aqua vitae. Incidentally, people still enjoy a drink made from soaking botanicals in strong spirits. It’s called gin.

Alcohol and gold

Giving alcohol a faux-Arabic name was a typical ploy by alchemists. In an effort to enhance the cachet of their books, some created Arab personas, pretending that they were actually Eastern savants. For example, around 1400, Paul of Taranto wrote under the name “Geber” to exploit some of the prestige of a legendary Muslim alchemist called Jabir ibn Hayyan. This habit of using pseudonyms has caused endless confusion for historians trying to distinguish between the Latin translations of Arabic books and original European compositions falsely ascribed to long-dead Muslim authors. That is one reason we cannot be certain who exactly first discovered alcohol.

The books attributed to “Geber” include other important breakthroughs, including the synthesis of nitric acid. This was an especially evocative discovery because it can dissolve gold. Infamously, alchemists sought to transmute base metals into gold by using a substance called the philosophers’ stone. The theory behind transmutation said that all metals were a combination of mercury and sulfur, while the philosophers’ stone itself was comprised of exceptionally purified versions of these elements. The proportion of the two ingredients determined what was produced. Alchemists assumed that metals formed in the ground over a long period and sought to use the philosophers’ stone as a catalyst to accelerate this process in the laboratory. Miners had long known that lead ores commonly contained some silver and silver ores sometimes harbored gold, which was taken as evidence that conversion from lead to the noble metals occurred naturally.

A riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma

A number of medieval alchemists were Franciscan friars. Paul of Taranto, who used the pseudonym Geber, was one. Roger Bacon was another. For them, successful transmutation required the right motivation. As Franciscans, they had taken a vow of poverty and had little interest in getting rich. Their main concern was that the end times were imminent, during which good Christians would find themselves in a war for survival with the anti-Christ. Roger Bacon thought of alchemy as a way to gain a technological edge over the enemy, so that the forces of good might prevail. Alchemists were aware that knowledge of how to create gold could be misused if it fell into the wrong hands, so they wrote in riddles and ciphers to prevent that from happening.

The apocalypse was postponed but this did nothing to dampen the appeal of alchemy. Its golden age was the 17th century, in the midst of what we call the Scientific Revolution. Enthusiasts included Sir Isaac Newton, as well as Robert Boyle, who successfully lobbied for the art to be legalized in 1689. It had been banned in England three centuries earlier over concerns that alchemists could thwart the royal monopoly to mint gold and silver coins.

Despite the support of respected thinkers like Newton and Boyle, alchemy went into a sudden and terminal decline after 1700. The mass of books and manuscripts left behind, written for those in the know and making little sense to later readers, led to a misunderstanding of what the craft was about. Nineteenth-century scholars interpreted alchemical writings as being allegories. Transmutation from lead into gold was read as a metaphor for a spiritual quest whereby the alchemist sought to purify his soul. This was an understandable error given that alchemical writings could be expressed in poetry, puzzles, and emblematic diagrams. Once the art of deciphering these texts was lost, it made sense to assume they were expressing higher truths rather than practical instructions.

Alchemical medicine

In recent years, researchers have uncovered the empirical substance beneath the opaque language of alchemy. Lawrence Principe, an academic chemist as well as a historian, has painstakingly recreated the processes in the old texts, achieving results that often appear exactly as their authors described even when these seem impossible to modern science. But there is a catch: the alchemists didn’t always understand what they were doing, so Principe has to use modern chemical analysis to show what is really happening. He presents several examples showing that alchemists were meticulous observers and great experimentalists in his book The Secrets of Alchemy. For instance, using a text called The Triumphal Chariot of Antimony, that appeared around 1604 under the pseudonym Basil Valentine, Principe attempted to generate a medicine called “sulfur of antimony.”

Antimony is a dull and toxic metal, which was believed to have therapeutic effects with the right dosage. Valentine described a process whereby antimony ore could be purified of its noxious elements, thereby making it safe to consume while preserving its medicinal efficacy. Healing had long been part of the repertoire of alchemy, and physicians inspired by Paracelsus established a school to rival the traditional followers of the ancient Greek doctor Galen.

Principe decided to try out the method for making antimony non-toxic, which would be near-miraculous given the laws of chemistry. Initially, he had a marked lack of success. He started by roasting antimony sulfide, the naturally occurring ore, and then melted the resulting oxides. Valentine claimed this produced a yellow, glassy substance, but Principe just obtained a grey lump. Then he realized he was using modern samples rather than the unrefined materials that Valentine had to employ. Sourcing some impure antimony ore from Eastern Europe, Principe repeated the procedure and created beautiful amber-colored crystals exactly as described in The Triumphal Chariot of Antimony. It turned out that, unbeknownst to Valentine, the ore was contaminated with iron, and this was responsible for the desired outcome.

The yellow glass was just an intermediate step. As he continued to follow Valentine’s recipe, Principe found he had to match exactly the conditions under which the alchemist worked. In that way, he was eventually able to produce Valentine’s “sulfur of antimony,” which was not poisonous and, indeed, had a slightly sweet taste. However, on analysis, it turned out that the material contained no antimony at all. The laboratory processes had washed it all away, such that the resulting “medicine” was actually iron acetate, entirely made up of impurities picked up during its manufacture. While non-toxic, this substance has no medicinal applications we are aware of.

The philosophy of alchemy

Principe’s work has proved that the alchemists were fine empirical investigators. Despite being expressed in code, their instructions set out the information required to replicate their work. Unfortunately, alchemists lacked an accurate conceptual framework to comprehend what they were doing. Metals are not made of mercury tinctured with sulfur, and transmutation to gold is impossible outside a nuclear reactor. Furthermore, alchemists looked upon nature holistically. This led them to identify many correspondences in the world, such as between the seven visible planets in the heavens, the seven traditionally recognized metals, and various parts of the body. These links between the microcosm and the macrocosm — between celestial and mundane things — pointed to a purposeful universe but were, nonetheless, seen as entirely natural. Alchemy wasn’t magic.

Despite the deficiencies of their theories, the endless trials and errors of the alchemists handed down an important legacy to modern chemistry, including the isolation and description of substances such as ethanol, sulfuric and nitric acid, zinc, and phosphorus. Techniques like distillation, condensation, and calcination, as well as the apparatus to carry them out, were first perfected by alchemists. Not only that, but phlogiston, the principle of combustion that was a centerpiece of 18th-century chemistry, was a direct descendant of alchemical sulfur. It was Joseph Priestley’s unsuccessful attempts to prove the existence of phlogiston that led him to isolate oxygen in 1774.

Why alchemy was doomed

So, how did alchemy get such a bad rap? Partly, because it had always been associated with fraud. Although the English had prohibited alchemy on the grounds it might work, most medieval laws against it were aimed at con artists hawking “get rich quick” schemes. Honest practitioners were tarred by the same brush and weren’t helped by the fact that they couldn’t create gold either. Even when alchemists weren’t treated as criminals, they were pitied as fools wasting their money and impoverishing their families in pursuit of a hopeless quest. Its notoriety meant that chemists of the 18th century were motivated to disown alchemy even while they built on its achievements. And when science took a reductionist turn during the Enlightenment, the holistic philosophy of alchemy became something of an embarrassment.

This means there is a case for historians to rehabilitate the alchemists. We should reject the picture of them as magicians and mystics. And while there were swindlers who sold fool’s gold to the gullible, many alchemists really believed in what they were doing. However, it is as technicians and experimenters that they most deserve our respect. When so many of the methods of modern chemistry can be traced back to alchemy, their prowess in the laboratory demands recognition.

The feature of alchemy that has been most detrimental to its reputation was the habit of secrecy. Although we now know it was more grounded in practical experience than previously imagined, it was still opaque to unenlightened readers. Welcoming scrutiny is one of the great scientific virtues, allowing ideas to be criticized and experiments to be replicated. Even though modern chemistry has made remarkable progress thanks to its alchemical foundations, it needed to disown the ethos of concealment in favor of communalism, publication, and the free exchange of ideas. Ultimately, alchemy was doomed by its rejection of openness.

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