It’s commonly cited that undergraduates are significantly smarter than average, with IQs ranging from 115 to 130. But as a team of Canadian researchers showed in a recently published meta-analysis, that “fact” is woefully out of date.

Conducted by first author Bob Uttl, a psychologist and faculty member at Mount Royal University, and his co-authors Victoria Violo and Lacey Gibson, the meta-analysis aggregated numerous studies measuring college students’ IQs conducted between 1939 and 2022. The results showed that undergraduates’ IQs have steadily fallen from roughly 119 to a mean of 102 today — just slightly above the population average of 100. In short, undergraduates are now no more intelligent on average than members of the general population.

Rising educational attainment

This finding is interesting for a couple of reasons. First, the decrease in undergraduates’ IQs sharply contrasts with the long-observed “Flynn effect,” which describes how IQ scores among the general public have been steadily rising over time. In 1984, James Flynn published a paper showing that Americans’ IQs had risen by about three points per decade over the prior 46 years — an increase that Flynn found was not attributable to recalibrations of IQ tests, which are performed roughly every 15 years. His finding has since been replicated by other researchers, and the climb in IQs appears to have mostly continued (though there are signs it may have reversed in the first two decades of the 21st century).

The recent findings also reflect the notion that being accepted to college today no longer requires the intelligence that it used to — or at least the sort of intelligence measured by an IQ test. While useful, IQ tests are not definitive measures of intelligence. After all, intelligence comes in a variety of forms beyond what questions on a test can reveal.

“The decline in students’ IQ is a necessary consequence of increasing educational attainment over the last 80 years,” the researchers commented. “Today, graduating from university is more common than completing high school in the 1940s.”

As a college degree has been increasingly portrayed as the ticket to a lucrative job and a comfortable middle-class life, a greater proportion of young adults has been attending. Abetting this process are readily attainable government student loans.

But there’s a potential problem with this open door to academia. According to statistics from the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center, only 58% of students manage to attain their degrees within six years. What’s more, the rate of dropping out is negatively linked with IQ — the lower an undergraduate’s IQ, the more likely it is that they will leave college without a degree, potentially saddled with debt. One influential study showed that for white American undergraduates with an IQ only slightly above average, their chance of graduating is essentially 50-50.

Does putting students through such a consequential coin flip benefit them or the academic institutions providing them with a college experience? Over the years, observers have widely opined that colleges have grown more akin to corporations, selling shots at degrees (and a better life) to young, naive consumers. In 1980, the inflation-adjusted price to attend a four-year college full-time was $10,231 annually, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. Thirty years later, the price increased to $28,775. Long gone are the days when universities were vaunted places of learning for inquiring minds. Now, they function more like big business.

It’s a good thing that college is no longer reserved solely for the brilliant and privileged, but swinging the pendulum too far in the other direction also has consequences.

The value of a degree

“Universities and professors need to realize that students are no longer extraordinary but merely average, and have to adjust curricula and academic standards,” the researchers wrote. This means “employers can no longer rely on applicants with university degrees to be more capable or smarter than those without degrees.”

The decline in undergraduate IQs might just be another indication that the worth of a college degree has been hollowed out over time. Ironically, as it became a baseline for employment, a degree has become increasingly meaningless as more people attain it. But rather than aiming for more advanced degrees to set themselves apart, potential students wary of burdensome student debt are increasingly shying away from higher education altogether. Undergraduate enrollment in U.S. colleges has fallen from 16.6 million in 2015 to 14.4 million in 2021.

Last year, for the first time, the Wall Street Journal-NORC poll showed that 56% of Americans think attending college is not worth the cost. Just a decade ago 53% responded that it was worth it. Skepticism is strongest among people ages 18 to 34, meaning that individuals of college age are now the most dubious.

This article Undergraduates’ average IQ has fallen 17 points since 1939. Here’s why. is featured on Big Think.

It’s a fundamental part of human nature to invent different ways of seeing the world. Our cultural, historical, and personal upbringing all play their part, providing concepts and belief structures that act as a lens through which we interpret reality. A small boy, hundreds of years ago, would look out into a dark forest and hear monsters prowling within. A medieval mother would open the windows and buy fragrant flowers because she thought that bad air was what sickened her child.

Today, those born into a Western intellectual tradition (at least those of us outside of physics departments) most often see time as linear. Just as we all divide and sort the world according to us, time is no different. A life has a beginning and an end. In so much of how we understand the world, time is bookended by two final points. Everything exists along a line with “before” at one end and “after” at the other. At the middle of that line lies us — reading this sentence.

But why is it that our conception of time — only one possible worldview — came to dominate so much of our understanding (especially in the Western intellectual tradition)?

A confusion in time

For once, it didn’t all begin with the Ancient Greeks. In fact, the Greek philosophers had some of their best, and most heated, debates about what time was. Antiphon believed time didn’t “exist” but rather was a concept to measure the world (something Kant would substantiate some 2,000 years later). Parmenides and Zeno (of the paradoxes) saw time as an illusion. Their argument was that since time meant everything must change, and since there were at least some things (like mental representations) that didn’t change, time cannot exist.

The only person who really saw time as a thing that had a “beginning” was Plato, who thought time was created by the Creator (what this Creator was doing before time is, quite frankly, a riddle). Plato’s view was only one, and not necessarily a popular one. Even his student, Aristotle, thought time wasn’t an independent thing but only a relational concept between objects.

But all that mattered was that the Christians loved Plato. The early Christian Church Fathers quickly realized that their account of creation and the Biblical account of the Last Judgement could map really well onto this linear view of time.

Heirs to Christian thought

So, we cannot find any definitive or universally accepted account of time — let alone linear time — in Ancient Greece. For that, we needed some kind of “beginning” and “end” to the line of time. We needed, in short, Genesis and Judgement Day.

A lot of the Bible is about suffering. It’s about the exile, persecution, and attempted genocide of the Jewish people. There are stories of martyrs and saints thrown to lions. What good, then, was a God if he couldn’t protect his people? And what justice is there to the idea that your oppressors get away with it unscathed? The answer came in the idea of Judgement Day — a final “end of days” apocalypse where sinners are punished, and the holy are rewarded.

Not only was Judgement Day a balm to all this suffering, but it also acted to structure the entire universe. Time was not some illusion, nor was it an infinite cycle. Rather, it was a deliberate narrative, written and overseen by God — our God. He had a plan, and “today” is only one step along the way He laid out for us. The Church Fathers and various councils that were charged with putting together the official, orthodox Bible knew very well they were laying out a story like every other: It begins, the characters grow and change in the middle, and it ends.

Sacred Time

The implications of this view — that God has created the universe with a narrative in mind — is that everything happens for a reason. It sets us up to believe there’s order in the madness and purpose in the chaos. This idea, called “Sacred Time,” gave meaning to Christians and is something that still infuses how we see the world. There are many reasons to be optimistic about the future, but the default position that “modern means better” is one that owes itself very much to a Christian view of time.

As theologian Martin Palmer puts it, “a huge amount of social philosophy, socialism, and Marxism throughout the 19th and 20th centuries belongs to the notion that history is inexorably moving towards a better world. This utopia/apocalypse tension is one that, to this day, shapes the social policy of socialist parties around the world.”

In short, when we say, “things will work out alright in the end,” there’s a lot hinging on that word: end.

Time is change

If you try to strip away all the ideological baggage with which we’re born, there’s not much that points toward linear time. The sun will rise and fall. Winter will pass and come back around with snowy regularity. History repeats itself. It’s why, across so much of human history, time is not viewed as a finite, closed line, but an infinite, repeating circle.

The Maya and Inca mythologies heavily featured cyclical and never-ending stories. In Indian philosophy, the “wheel of time” (Kalachakra) sees the ages of the universe come around over and over again. The Greek Stoics (and, later, Friedrich Nietzsche) offered a version of “eternal recurrence” — where this world, and this reality, would come around again, exactly the same way.

Of course, time is a hugely complex issue, and one which even today we’re having to unravel (I recommend reading this for a primer on the science of time). But, philosophically and phenomenologically, Aristotle hit the nail on the head. As Carlo Rovelli explains in his book, The Order of Time, “Time, as Aristotle suggested, is the measure of change; different variables can be chosen to measure that change, and none of these has all the characteristics of time as we experience it. But this does not alter the fact that the world is in a ceaseless process of change.”

The world changes. Be it an illusion or real, linear, or cyclical, change happens. Maybe time is just the language we use to try to explain that.

This article A brief history of (linear) time is featured on Big Think.

You’re thirsty so you reach for a glass of water. It’s either a freely chosen action or the inevitable result of the laws of nature, depending on who you ask. Do we have free will? The question is ancient—and vexing. Everyone seems to have pondered it, and many seem quite certain of the answer, which is typically either “yes” or “absolutely not.”

One scientist in the “absolutely not” camp is Robert Sapolsky. In his new book, Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will, the primatologist and Stanford professor of neurology spells out why we can’t possibly have free will. Why do we behave one way and not another? Why do we choose Brand A over Brand B, or vote for Candidate X over Candidate Y? Not because we have free will, but because every act and thought are the product of “cumulative biological and environmental luck.”

Sapolsky tells readers that the “biology over which you had no control, interacting with the environment over which you had no control, made you you.” That is to say, “everything in your childhood, starting with how you were mothered within minutes of birth, was influenced by culture, which means as well by the centuries of ecological factors that influenced what kind of culture your ancestors invented, and by the evolutionary pressures that molded the species you belong to.”

Sapolsky brings the same combination of earthy directness and literary flourish that marked his earlier books, including Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers, about the biology of stress, to this latest work. To summarize his point of view in Determined, he writes, “Or as Maria sings in The Sound of Music, ‘Nothing comes from nothing, nothing ever could.’”

The affable, bushy-bearded Sapolsky is now in his mid 60s. During our recent interview over Zoom, I was on the lookout for any inconsistency; anything that might suggest that deep down he admits we really do make decisions, as many of us surely feel. But he was prepared and stuck to his guns.

I had no issue with the first part of his argument—that cultural, genetic, and environmental factors influence our lives, and nudge us in certain directions. But how could those factors dictate what we say or do in each moment? He turned the question back on me.

“Why do you value that question?” he said. “Why did you wind up being a person who would be interviewing somebody about this subject? That wouldn’t have happened, for instance, if you had been raised with intestinal parasites in the middle of Niger.”

To most people, Sapolsky said, free will is apparent in real time, for every action you perform. “You ask, ‘Did you intend to do it? Did you realize you could have done something else? That you had options?’ Most people’s intuitive sense is the answers are yes, and so you have demonstrated free will. But that’s like trying to evaluate a movie by only seeing the last three minutes of it. When you ask, ‘Where did intent come from?’, everything from one second to a million years before comes into play. That leads inevitably to the conclusion that there’s no free will. Because no matter how much you try, you can’t intend to intend something. You can’t will yourself to have willpower. You can’t think of what you’re going to think of next. It’s simply not possible.”

The way Sapolsky sees it, you can’t escape the biological and cultural forces and environmental factors that preceded you and shaped you. “There’s not a crack anywhere in there to shoehorn in free will,” he said. “When you look at every contemporary argument for free will that’s not invoking God or fairy dust or something, at some point, one must assume a step that bypasses the antecedent causes. But that violates the laws of how neurons work, atoms work, and universes work. Your life is nothing but that: everything that came before.”

Many scientists and philosophers beg to differ. Prominent among them is Kevin Mitchell, a neuroscientist at Trinity College in Dublin. In his new book, Free Agents: How Evolution Gave Us Free Will, Mitchell argues that although we’re shaped by our biology, it’s that very biology that made us, over the course of billions of years of evolution, into free agents. Even the earliest and most primitive creatures had some capacity to control their destinies. When a single-celled organism moves toward a food source, or away from danger, it has entered, however meekly, into a new world of agency and freedom. Simple organisms, Mitchell writes, “infer what is out in the world” and “make holistic decisions to adapt their internal dynamics and select appropriate actions.” He adds: “This represents a wholly different type of causation from anything seen before in the universe.”

A dozen years younger than Sapolsky, and with a less voluminous beard, Mitchell was born near Philadelphia but grew up in Ireland; he then returned to the United States for grad school and a postdoc, before heading back to Dublin. That accounts for his “all over the place” accent, he told me.

In a universe where the mindless laws of nature push bits of matter around, it might indeed seem miraculous that free will—agency—can emerge. As I made my way through Free Agents, I thought of a New Yorker cartoon where two scientists are at a blackboard filled with equations. In the middle, instead of an equation, the first scientist has written, “Then a miracle occurs.” The second guy says to him, “I think you should be more explicit here in step two.”

But emerge it does, according to Mitchell, and he’s adamant that there is nothing miraculous about it. Rather, in living creatures like us, freedom is enabled by the underlying biology.

But couldn’t biology itself be beyond our control? In their books, both Sapolsky and Mitchell refer to the work of neuroscientist Benjamin Libet. In the 1980s, Libet conducted a series of experiments that appeared to show that electrical activity in the brain could be detected several hundred milliseconds before the subject became aware of making a decision—suggesting, to some, that the brain itself must be doing the “deciding,” with the conscious mind following along after the fact. Libet’s experiments were, and remain, controversial; even so, they left many people wondering if free will must be an illusion.

Mitchell doesn’t buy it. Yes, there are physical and chemical processes operating within the brain—how could there not be?—but that does nothing to take away our freedom, he says. “It comes down to the idea that if we can find the machinery inside the brain that is active when we’re making a decision, then maybe decision making just is being done causally by that machinery,” he told me. “I don’t think that view is right, because I think you can have a completely different view, which is, yes, there is some machinery that we use to make decisions; but it’s machinery we use to make decisions. We’re making the decisions.”

For Mitchell, decision-making did not start with human beings. Rather, it can be traced back to the first simple organisms that flourished hundreds of millions or even billions of years ago. “I wanted to take an evolutionary approach to this problem,” he said.

This represents a wholly different type of causation.

Evolution, Mitchell said, favors organisms that have some ability to make their way in the world. “They need to know what’s out in the world, and what to do about it.” Creatures evolved the ability to sense, and the ability to act, based on those sensations. They were evaluating (in some primitive manner) which action was likely to prolong their survival. “Even bacteria do this,” Mitchell said. Humans merely do this in a more sophisticated manner.

“We see what’s out in the world, gauge our internal state—bacteria do that too—and, given those things, given my beliefs about the world, and my own state at the moment, and my goals, we ask, ‘What should I do? What’s my range of options? How can I choose one of them and inhibit all the others?’”

Over the course of evolution, creatures with more sophisticated decision-making abilities appeared. “Those capacities got more elaborate, and more sophisticated, which led to organisms with greater and greater agency, with more control,” Mitchell said. “They have a greater range of possible actions; they have more flexible behavior.”

As creatures evolved more sophisticated ways to respond to their environments, they began to plan over longer time-scales. “They have a cognitive horizon that gets broader and broader through evolution,” Mitchell said. “And that means that they have greater causal autonomy. They’re not pushed around by every immediate thing in the environment. They can think about things that haven’t happened yet. And they can direct their actions toward things in the future, sometimes, for us, decades in the future.”

No magic, no miracles—just a capacity for decision making passed down to us over the eons from much simpler creatures, thanks to natural selection.

What’s fascinating is Sapolsky and Mitchell have dived into essentially the same scientific and philosophical literature about free will and yet surfaced with opposing conclusions. Can one be declared more right than the other?

To my mind, Mitchell seems to be on the right track. We really do make decisions, and that ability to make decisions has evolved over the eons. Simple creatures make simple decisions (“a possible food source—must move in that direction!”) and complex creatures make complex decisions (“I don’t like the candidate’s flat-tax proposal, but I like where he stands on offshore wind energy”). A determinist might insist that whatever we do, we do because of what came before. For simple creatures, that’s a fair position. A paramecium’s “decisions” happen more or less on autopilot. But for complex creatures like us, our actions depend on conscious decisions; for Mitchell, we are in the driver’s seat. 

Mitchell’s view finds support in the work of physicist Jenann Ismael of Johns Hopkins University. Physicists, of course, have long debated how the laws of nature work, and whether those laws, right down to the behavior of elementary particles, do or do not allow for free will. In her 2016 book, How Physics Makes Us Free, Ismael lays out a position broadly aligned with Mitchell’s. Yes, the past paves the way for the present, which in turn shapes the future—but humans are not mere bystanders in this process. “It’s me that gets to decide, in the here and now, how the past bears on the future,” she told me in an interview.

Ismael agrees that we are influenced by what has come before—but as she sees it, those experiences inform rather than constrain our decisions. “From the noisy accidents of my life, I’ve extracted hopes, dreams, priorities, and visions,” she said. “When I’m deciding what to do, I sort through those things and make decisions about which of those get to bear on the future.”

Free will is the ultimate philosophical whack-a-mole.

And yet some of Sapolsky’s arguments are also convincing. He, too, has physicists on his side. In her 2022 book Existential Physics, physicist Sabine Hossenfelder writes that the idea of free will is incoherent. “For your will to be free, it shouldn’t be caused by anything else. But if it wasn’t caused by anything—if it’s an ‘uncaused cause,’ as Friedrich Nietzsche put it—then it wasn’t caused by you, regardless of just what you mean by you. As Nietzsche summed it up, it’s ‘the best self-contradiction that has been conceived so far.’ I’m with Nietzsche.”

For Sapolsky, recognizing that individuals are shaped by their past offers a blueprint for a more just society. Sapolsky believes we shouldn’t praise people for accomplishments they achieved largely because of a string of advantages that helped them throughout their lives; and he argues—correctly, I would say—that it’s wrong to condemn those who are struggling, merely because of the many disadvantages they have faced.

Consider a neurosurgeon and a criminal. The neurosurgeon “is not a better human because circumstances produced someone with the capacity to be a competent neurosurgeon,” Sapolsky told me. “And the other person is not a worse human because circumstances produced someone who is going to be violently impulsive in certain circumstances.”

At the same time, I can’t help wondering: If individuals don’t have the freedom to choose, how can courts or legislatures or whole societies have it? If freedom is an illusion, it might seem that an idea like “advocating for judicial reform” is rendered meaningless, too. How can one do anything other than what we’re supposedly determined to do? In Sapolsky’s view, although we can’t change the world, we can be changed by the world.

“Things change enormously!” Sapolsky said. “We don’t keep slaves anymore. We put on a sweater today because it’s cooler than it was yesterday. Someone who used to be a white supremacist now regrets it and works for tolerance. We get gummed up thinking we’re seeing free will. We have this incorrect belief that we have chosen to change ourselves. The white supremacist didn’t wake up one day and say, ‘Hey, it’s about time I stopped being a white supremacist.’ He was changed by circumstances.”

So how did these two very clever scholars end up with such different views? I think the answer is they targeted different facets of the free will puzzle. Sapolsky is worried we overestimate how much freedom we have by failing to take into account the biological, sociological, and environmental forces that have made us who we are. And he’s right: We should take those forces into account.

But he may have pushed the argument to the extreme, imagining that these restrictions on free will leave no room for any freedom at all. Sure, the fact that my dad loved playing folk songs on the piano when I was growing up probably increased the odds that I’d enjoy “Hey Jude” as an adult—but did my past really dictate, down to the second, when I might reach for that glass of water?

Mitchell, meanwhile, is focused on “rescuing” free will from a seemingly deterministic universe. This rescue operation (which gets bogged down in physics) is not necessary; philosophers have long argued that we can have the sort of freedom that matters regardless of what our atoms and molecules are doing. At the end of the day, one can’t pick a winner between Sapolsky and Mitchell any more than we can pick a winner between the New York Mets and the New York Rangers—they’re not playing the same game.

Even though Sapolsky and Mitchell cover a lot of ground, questions remain. One might wonder how to quantify those biological and cultural forces that anchor Sapolsky’s thesis. How might one prove that they allow for no freedom at all? And for Mitchell, who struggles to reconcile the workings of complex creatures such as humans with the underlying physics: How, exactly, do things like minds and agency arise from inanimate matter?

These two books show just how wide the problem of free will is. And because the problem can be approached in so many ways, we can be sure it’s not going away anytime soon. As Ismael told a lecture audience in Toronto recently, the puzzle of free will is the ultimate philosophical whack-a-mole.

“When you tease out one thread of argument that’s supposed to lead to the conclusion that there is no free will … people say ‘No, no, that’s not what I meant by free will,’ or, ‘the problem’s not over there, it’s over here,” she told me. “And they give you a different argument, or they give you a different conception of free will. So every time you nail down one of them, you get something else coming up where people say, ‘no, no, the real argument is over here.’”

This article Yes, we have free will. No, we absolutely do not. is featured on Big Think.

In the spring term of 1939, the University of Cambridge offered two distinct courses on “Foundations of Mathematics” — an intellectual extravagance of sorts. However, there was little danger of waste, even less of redundancy: the two lecturers, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Alan Turing, were each known to go their own ways.

Ludwig Wittgenstein was turning fifty, an expat professor of philosophy in Cambridge. Alan Turing had not yet reached his thirties. He was a fellow at King’s College who now held his first lecture course, for the modest fee of 20 British pounds. His topic was the “foundations” in the classical sense, as understood by modern mathematicians: meaning axioms and logic. In the wake of [David] Hilbert and [Kurt] Gödel, Turing had electrified the field with his seminal paper on computation and the decision problem. Here was a worthy successor to the Cambridge trio of [Bertrand] Russell, [Alfred North] Whitehead, and [Frank] Ramsey, who had done so much of the groundwork.

Wittgenstein went after a different game. He had no truck with the usual spiel that mathematicians dished out to each other about the foundations of their science, perhaps even fooling themselves to believe it. Wittgenstein was from Vienna, and as little inclined to take words at their face value as Sigmund Freud or Karl Kraus. Wittgenstein wanted to know what mathematicians really do.

Everything in Wittgenstein’s biography is spectacular. His father was a steel baron and patron of the arts, Habsburg’s answer to Andrew Carnegie. Ludwig grew up in a palace, as the youngest of eight. He started out in aeronautics at a time when the conquest of the air took wing. In 1912, however, the uncommonly intense young engineer switched tracks and enrolled in the University of Cambridge for philosophy. His teachers were Bertrand Russell and George W. Moore, the heralds of analytical philosophy. Within a few months, they took down his dictations on logic. Shortly after, he retired to an isolated hut in Norway to pursue his thoughts undisturbed.

When World War I started, Wittgenstein volunteered for the Austrian Army. In between spells at the front, he finished his Logical-Philosophical Treatise, coolly stating in the preface that he considered its truth to be “unassailable and definitive.” After the catastrophic defeat of the Central Powers and a one-year spell in an Italian POW camp near Monte Cassino, he returned to forlorn, destitute Vienna, and donated his vast inheritance to his surviving siblings (three of his brothers had taken their lives). He earned his living as a teacher, at elementary schools located in the backwoods of Lower Austria. His booklet, renamed Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, appeared after agonizing delays.

Wittgenstein was done with philosophy. Hadn’t he solved the problems, in their essentials? Refusing to engage with busybodies, he snubbed the persistent attempts of the Vienna Circle, that avant-garde group of philosophers and mathematicians, to get close to him and soak up his words.

As a teacher, Wittgenstein was highly motivated, but prone to fits of classroom rage: slapping his pupils, or pulling their hair, their ears, whatever came to hand. His career was brought to an abrupt end when he knocked out an eleven-year-old. A chastened Wittgenstein returned to Vienna after six years of school service. Next, he named himself an architect and directed the construction of a modernistic town house for his sister. And at last, having finished with the workers and craftsmen, he condescended to meetings with select members of the Vienna Circle. Some turned out to be worth talking to. It gradually transpired that there was still something left to do in philosophy.

In 1929, now aged forty, Wittgenstein took the train back to Cambridge and submitted his Tractatus for a PhD. Some time before, he had claimed that nobody can do philosophy for more than ten years. Nearer to the truth is that nobody can do without philosophy for more than ten years. All through the 1930s, Wittgenstein wrote and discussed tirelessly, in Cambridge, in Vienna, or back in his old Norwegian hut, but he published nothing. This did not stop the University of Cambridge from appointing him to a chair in philosophy. They knew a legend when they met one.

Only a handful of select disciples were allowed to see Professor Wittgenstein. The rest were kept at bay. “In certain circles,” wrote Ernest Nagel, a young philosopher from the United States, “the existence of Wittgenstein is debated with as much ingenuity as the historicity of Christ has been disputed in others.” Those who wished to attend his lectures had to undergo an interview with Wittgenstein. Nagel was turned down: Wittgenstein said that he wanted no tourists. Turing, however, was accepted: Wittgenstein could make use of a mathematician who was unafraid to come out of his corner and take it. This is how Turing came to stand answer to Wittgenstein for all that had gone wrong with the foundations of mathematics, be it set theory, formal systems, or metamathematics.

Here is a sample of their exchanges:

Wittgenstein asked Turing: “How many numerals have you learned to write down?”

Turing, sensing what was to come, replied cagily: “Well, if I was not here, I would say countably infinite!”

Wittgenstein: “How wonderful—to learn infinitely many numerals, and in so short a time!” And with Turing still so young!

Turing conceded: “I see your point!”

Wittgenstein: “I have no point!”

And so it went on.

Like all the other students, Turing had had to promise beforehand never to skip any of Wittgenstein’s classes (of which there were two per week). On March 19, 1939, however, Turing excused himself. Wittgenstein was nettled, acidly remarking:

Unfortunately Turing will be away from the next lecture, and therefore that lecture will have to be somewhat parenthetical. For it is no good my getting the rest to agree to something that Turing would not agree to.

Turing took it without flinching. He knew how to keep mum. For some time already, he had been earmarked by the British Secret Service. Sometimes he had to leave Cambridge to follow ultra-secret courses on cryptanalysis. Everyone knew that war loomed around the corner, and MI6 was worried about Germany’s military cipher. Turing’s former PhD advisor Max Newman had brought up his name. It proved a brilliant hunch. The two of them would eventually devise some of the first proto-computers, rattling dinosaurs of machinery, to decode German top-secret messages.

By 1939, however, Alan Turing had only conceived a purely hypothetical computer to investigate the limits of formal systems. The abstruse automaton would play an important role in his lectures on foundations. In the wake of Godel’s demonstration of undecidable mathematical propositions, these last ten years had seen breathtaking progress.

Forever the contrarian, Wittgenstein saw things in a completely different light. He explicitly stated: “My task is not to speak on Godel’s proofs etc. but to speak past them.” These last ten years, for him, had been taken up with establishing the philosophy of language.

Wittgenstein’s guiding rule was: “The meaning of a word is its use in the language” (though only “for a large class of cases”). To examine that use more closely, he had devised the method of language games, “to bring into prominence the fact that the speaking of language is part of an activity, of a form of life.” His task, as a philosopher of mathematics, was to describe these games, not to explain them. Games have rules, and players need not always be aware of them. Wittgenstein wanted to uncover them, patiently, one by one. He did not share the view that there lurked a seamless entity behind what is called “mathematics.” Instead, he spoke of the “colorful medley” of mathematics. Just as astronomy deals with a wide variety of phenomena (planets, radio waves, galaxies, dark matter) that have little in common except being out there in the sky, so mathematics cannot be reduced to a single object or a single method. It is a motley.

This article Turing and Wittgenstein: An entanglement of math and philosophy is featured on Big Think.

You may want to put down your coffee and finish your cornflakes; this thought experiment isn’t for everyone. It comes from a paper recently published in the Journal of Controversial Ideas and written by the pseudonymous philosopher Fira Bensto. It’s a story about Alice and her dog.

“Alice self-describes as being in a romantic relationship with her dog. She cares a lot about his well-being and strives to ensure that his needs are fulfilled. They often sleep together; he likes to be caressed, and she finds it pleasant to gently rub herself on him. Sometimes, when her dog is sexually aroused and tries to hump her leg, she undresses and lets him [copulate]. This is gratifying for both of them.”

When your eyebrows finally lower and your gawping mouth closes again, there’s a question to consider: What is wrong with Alice’s story? Yes, canophilia might not be your thing, but if it’s Alice’s, what philosophical reason have we to deny her and her dog such pleasure?

This debate has come to light recently because Peter Singer, the famous philosopher at Princeton University, has come out encouraging people to read Bensto’s paper. It must be said that Singer has not endorsed the article. While a founding co-editor of the journal, he has explicitly said that the promotion or publication of a piece does not mean he necessarily agrees with it. (Although his public response was oddly ambiguous.)

Here, we will dive into two related questions: Is having sex with animals always wrong, and are there some things that go beyond a philosopher’s understanding of right and wrong?

Debating pleasure and consent

There are three elements to Bensto’s argument. They are:

• Zoophilia does not cause harm but invites pleasure.
• Zoophilia can involve a degree of meaningful consent.
• The principal reasons for disallowing zoophilia come from non-moral, anthropomorphic grounds.

To defend the first argument, Bensto argues that while some zoophilia does certainly harm animals, there equally might be “positive evidence that the animal is having a pleasant experience.” When a sexual act does “not seem to cause any pain, bodily damage, or psychological distress to an animal,” we would need other grounds for forbidding it.

The only other reasonable ground, Bensto attests, has to do with consent. Even if bodily pleasure is apparent, when we’re dealing with sexual ethics, we need to guarantee consent.

That leads to Bensto’s second argument. He argues that animals can express consent or dissent toward sexual interactions through behavioral cues, challenging the notion that they are incapable of such communication. If you held out some food for a deer to eat and it ate it, you can take this as a “choice” — or consent. The same is true for sexual behaviors.

“When it comes to sex, there is a wide range of species- and individual-dependent cues that indicate consent,” Bensto writes.

Does the moral world revolve around us?

Bensto’s arguments about animal consent are mostly underpinned by his claim that we ought not to wrongly project human understandings of “consent” onto animals. For example, philosophers of consent have cited many necessary requirements for consensual activity. Bensto picks out three: The agents need a degree of free will, they need to be fully informed about the decision, and there needs to be as close to an equal balance of power as possible. In all three cases, according to each of their criteria for consent, animals cannot be said to have consented.

For Bensto, though, these criteria wrongly anthropomorphize consent. Consent can and does exist in the animal world. Dogs choose to respond to your call. A deer consents to eat food from your hand. Yes, animals cannot consent to sex in the same way as humans, but there is consent. What’s more, our notions of “power dynamics” and “power inequalities” are things that exist only in a human social world. Unless more is done to flesh out what is meant by power inequalities from an animal’s perspective, then the notion remains limited to the human level. All of this is to say that we should consider the sexual consent of an animal’s understanding of sex.

Down the philosophical rabbit hole

Bensto’s paper is cleverly argued. It’s philosophically sound and makes some great points. But in its pages lies a curious psychological phenomenon: When you spend a lot of time in the esoteric nooks of an academic paper or topic, you start to think differently. It’s as if your eyes have gotten used to the dark, and when someone turns on the lights, it’s blinding and painful. The same is true for a lot of “controversial” ideas. They are initially convincing and hard to rebut, yet they leave you with a bitter aftertaste of sophistry.

Our moral compass is not exclusively, nor even predominantly, defined by rational philosophizing. The laws that govern society are even less so. As the journalist Auron MacIntyre argues, this is not always a bad thing because rationality “is not the only way in which we interact with society.” MacIntyre discusses the issue in terms of “moral prejudices,” which establish taboos for certain things. It might be hard to philosophically disallow necrophilia, cannibalism, zoophilia, and sibling incest, but our collective prejudices have little trouble doing so. (What’s more, it could also be argued that these aren’t purely socially constructed, considering some of our prejudices and taboos likely stem from natural disgust responses, a psychological system that humans evolved to help avoid pathogens.)

A popular position is to say, “Well, let’s disregard prejudices; they’re the superstitious nonsense that fueled witch hunts and the Dark Ages.” MacIntyre’s point, though, is that these prejudices — formed through cultural, historical, and emotional contexts — act as bulwarks against moral chaos. Our moral norms are not argued in papers; they have been developed over millennia. Just because we cannot immediately see the point of something does not mean we should burn it down. Often “moral barriers are placed there for a reason and are placed well ahead of the actual danger.”

That bitter aftertaste of sophistry is not a primitive hangover to be ignored. It’s a tool that’s served us well. Yes, it is not always right. Prejudices and traditions can be things of oppression and bigotry. But we should still pay them good heed.

This article A revolting thought experiment tests the limits of philosophical exploration is featured on Big Think.

Taoism (also written Daoism) is a religion, philosophy, and set of practices that arose in ancient China. Established by the semi-legendary Lao Tzu, and the slightly better accounted for Zhuangzi, its various forms can lay claim to millions of followers around the world.

Yet, many aspects of Taoism remain poorly understood. While most philosophies can become watered down as they are popularly dispersed, Taoism gets the worst of it. This ancient school of thought is often reduced to little more than “go with the flow, bro.” It can even be treated as so abstract that there’s nothing practical to be gleaned from it. Here, we’ll go over four life lessons from Taoism that you can use every day.

Before we begin, a word of warning about, well, words. As a philosophy, Taoism is extremely skeptical of language. The first line in the Tao Te Ching is “The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao. / The name that can be named is not the eternal name.” As such, anything written here will be a little bit wrong because it is written. (Sorry about that.)

The Way is right in front of you

As mentioned, philosophical Taoism can seem terribly abstract. The Tao Te Ching contains paradoxical and seemingly contradictory lines that can baffle even careful readers. It is easy to suppose that this is a philosophy for hermits living on mountains or, at the very least, those who can afford long sabbaticals from society.

Not so. Understanding how the world works is a key part of Taoism, and that requires engaging with it. Large parts of the Tao Te Ching are specifically concerned with how to govern societies in accordance with the Tao — something that is difficult to do if you’ve abandoned civilization.

The Tao, in its purest form, is the unifying, all-pervasive essence of reality. Situations evolve following the Tao. The more you understand it, the more you can understand the cause-and-effect relationships that connect everything, as well as how your actions factor in.

Even if you aren’t the ruler of an ancient Chinese state, there is still practical advice to be had here. For instance, suppose you’re going into an important meeting. How you interact with others will have major effects on whether it is successful. If you go in and express anger, frustration, and rage, you’re probably going to wreck the meeting. On the other hand, if you take the Taoist view that flexibility is strength and act justly, mildly, and compassionately, you create the atmosphere necessary to facilitate more favorable outcomes.

While it would seem like you didn’t do as much in the second story, your understanding of the connections between actions, people, and effects allowed you to act with the Tao, which is to the benefit of everyone.

Be spontaneous

Zhuangzi, the second most important thinker in Taoism after Lao Tzu, explains that the path to “spontaneity” is to be found in rigorous practice and study.

Consider, Zhuangzi asks, the allegory of the butcher. The butcher has been working in his trade for decades and can now cut meat perfectly without thinking about it. In fact, he handles the meat with such skill that he has not had to sharpen his knife for years. How did he reach this level? Simple, he spent decades honing his craft.

For Zhuangzi, “spontaneous” does not mean “random.” It instead refers to how the butcher has come to understand his craft so well that he instinctively grasps what must be done. He can act without conscious effort and still finds himself following the Tao.

This ability is not limited to sages or professionals. Most people are familiar with the sensation of not having to think about what they are doing as they practice their hobbies, play sports, or drive along a familiar road. Zhuangzi points to this as a source of joy and a way of enjoying even the most mundane parts of life.

Take a broad perspective

Many philosophies encourage people to see beyond themselves. Taoism agrees but adds that the human perspective is fairly limited. After all, if the Tao is everything, why would the human perspective have a monopoly on truth?

Zhuangzi explains this again through allegory. Many of his stories take the point-of-views of animals and use the same language used to tell stories about humans. In his famous butterfly dream, the Chinese philosopher dreams he is a butterfly without any awareness that he is human. He flutters about from flower to flower until he awakens and realizes he is in reality a man who dreamed himself to be a butterfly. The tale is meant to explore the subjectivity and elusiveness of reality.

While other stories are more obviously metaphorical, the choice of using animal protagonists is deliberate. Zhuangzi is making the important point that breaking out of your limited perspective can provide new insights and a better understanding of the world around you.

This idea can be viewed in contrast to Confucian beliefs, which firmly place humans in the center of the material world. This strikes Taoist thinkers as misguided. Instead, Taoist thought provides a way to understand your place in a larger whole that goes far beyond human society.

Practice wu-wei (by not practicing it)

Wu-wei roughly means “inaction” or “effortless action.” It is one of the better-known aspects of Taoism, but not always the best understood.

The idea, according to philosopher Edward Slingerland, is to “try not to try.” It is being able to intuitively know what to do in a situation and to do it without spending cognitive energy (much like Zhuangzi’s butcher). In many ways, it can be thought of as a flow state for things we don’t often associate with flow states.

But it also goes beyond that. A person acting with wu-wei would be acting in harmony with the Tao. Action that seems “natural” but that goes against the cycles of the universe would not count.

There are several proposals on how to do this. The earliest Taoists suggested dropping out and returning to a simple life. The philosopher Mencius hybridized Confucian ideas with Taoist ones and argued that wu-wei existed but needed a little encouragement.

So don’t worry if you have to try at these lessons before they become more effortless. It’s not easy.

This article 4 practical life lessons from Taoism is featured on Big Think.

There has never been such a widespread and stringent lockdown as the one for COVID. There was some kind of social distancing for the Spanish Flu after World War I and localized lockdowns during Ebola outbreaks in West Africa, but there is no recorded precedent for the majority of the world following quarantine policies. Before the vaccination rollout, COVID was estimated to kill roughly 1.4% of those infected, with the immunocompromised and elderly at far greater risk. This means that the vast majority of people in the world went into lockdown to help protect a minority of their societies.

Lockdown harmed a lot of people in a lot of ways. Everyone felt the brunt of its isolation. But not everyone was harmed to the same degree. Hundreds of millions of students fell behind in school — and many remain behind. In a recent paper published in Politics, Philosophy, and Economics, the philosopher Kal Kalewold argues that the lockdown disproportionately impacted younger age groups.

This led Kalewold to ask a controversial question: Given the young were least at risk from COVID but likeliest to suffer from the effects of the lockdown, do the elderly owe the young compensation? Kalewold elaborated on his position to Big Think.

Intergenerational compensation

Kalewold presents an argument that the elderly do owe the young some form of compensation. His logic is as follows:

States were morally justified in imposing lockdowns. As Kalewold told Big Think, “Lockdowns were a medically and morally appropriate anti-contagion policy, given the nature of the sort of epidemiological threat COVID-19 posed.” Policymakers must consider the costs and benefits of laws, and the lockdown’s benefits outweighed the costs.

Lockdown policies shifted the burden of harm and loss due to COVID from the elderly to the young. In other words, a non-lockdown world would have harmed the elderly disproportionately. Lockdown, though, transferred the harm to the young.

How so? As Kalewold put it, “The nature of school closures, not just in educational attainment but in socialization, the displacement to industries like leisure, hospitality, and retail — these disproportionately impact younger age groups… There was a certain kind of double disadvantage, right? The young must first bear the costs of it and also then pay for the cleanup.”

Kalewold does not deny the elderly were also harmed by the lockdown; they were isolated and lived in an enhanced state of fear of the disease. But these were lesser harms than the young endured.

If harm is shifted from A to B, then A has a duty to compensate B. In ethics and law, there is an expression called “moral remainder.” This is where, if you harm or take something from someone, there is an imbalance that needs restitution. If I take coffee from the office kitchen, I need to put some back. If I harm you, I need to compensate for that. In this case, when the young sacrificed themselves for the elderly, even if done voluntarily, it resulted in a moral remainder. As Kalewold put it, “Just because a cost is permissibly imposed doesn’t mean that there is no duty to compensate.”

Therefore, the elderly have a duty to compensate the young.

Precedent and practicalities

Kalewold’s argument is compelling. It’s hard exactly to see which premise is wrong, and the conclusion certainly follows from the premises. The question of compensation and “moral remainders” is perhaps up for the most scrutiny, but Kalewold’s case is certainly sensible. The biggest issue with the argument is more practical than philosophical. Here, we might raise three questions.

First, is there any precedent for compensation of this sort? Kalewold told Big Think that COVID was a “one-off shock,” and that even faced with the likelihood of a future epidemic, “It won’t have the same epidemiological characteristics that COVID has. Maybe it will be one that severely harms children and young adults as the Spanish Flu did.” How, then, are we to find historical precedent for what he is suggesting? While there are cases of compensation for layoffs and displaced workers following trade deals, Kalewold says, “A really successful case of this being done is the American GI bill.” This was compensation that acted “as a kind of expression of gratitude for the millions and millions of returning soldiers who bore this extraordinary burden, even though it was their duty to bear the burden.” Something like this has been done before.

Second, how would a government enact such a compensatory policy? After all, “the young” are not a homogenous blob, and “the elderly” in most countries are not sitting on mountains of gold to be taxed. Kalewold suggests: “I think a wealth tax and a progressive intergenerational transfer. We would want to draw mostly from the elderly rich, right? Not just the elderly, not people who are surviving on state pensions or something like that, but those who hold a substantial stock of wealth.”

Finally, even if we agree to such a compensatory tax, how can we best “benefit the young”? The answer is to focus most on the areas hardest hit by the lockdown, such as education. It might mean getting rid of tuition fees or improving funding for higher education. Kalewold also suggests investing the money in future-centric policies such as “financing a better green transition” and “improving infrastructure that’ll benefit young workers.”

Residual problems

The argument is compelling, and while many issues are difficult, they are resolvable. This is not to say Kalewold’s argument will convince everyone. It could be that such generational taxes risk undermining social cohesion. Kalewold told us that he felt there was already certain intergenerational tension, and this policy could make it worse. What’s more, while the COVID lockdown was certainly a “one-off shock,” could it not be argued that previous generations (that is, today’s elderly) disproportionately endured hardships of their own in their youth, such as rationing and wartime bombing?

Even if we do not accept the idea of material compensation, the elderly probably do owe the young something — perhaps at the very least a sincere “thank you.”

This article Philosopher tells us why the elderly owe the young compensation for the COVID lockdowns is featured on Big Think.

When you are dying, you are placed in a hospice. Often, this is a real, brick-and-mortar hospice with palliative care and psychological support. At other times, though, the hospice is a metaphorical one. The terminally ill are ignored by those too awkward or scared to face them. They are told not to work or exert themselves in the slightest. The dying exist as ghosts and live in the hinge space between society and “on the way out.” When you’re told you’re going to die, you become invisible.

This has led the philosopher Phillip Reed to coin the expression “terminalism.” For Reed, terminalism “is discrimination against the dying, or treating the terminally ill worse than they would expect to be treated if they were not dying.” In other words, it involves treating those in a hospice — literally or metaphorically — as second-class citizens.

Here we look at three examples of terminalism and consider to what extent, if at all, it can be justified.

How quickly are you dying?

It’s both trite and existentially invigorating to say, “We are all dying.” If life is seen in terms of a finite number of heartbeats, we are all ticking our way to the grave. But if we are to discuss the rights of the terminally ill, we need to define “dying” a bit more closely. Reed discounts those who are likely to die in the extremely short-term; there is little to be said about discrimination against someone on an operating table or who is bleeding out on a battlefield.

Reed argues that those who will die imminently are not “socially salient,” which is to say that their state of dying will not be long enough to affect social relationships, social norms, or legal attitudes. As he puts it, “because membership in the group is, by definition, extremely short-lived, it cannot play a role in a wide range of social contexts for any one person.”

Therefore, if we are talking about discrimination as a social phenomenon, we have to talk about those who have been terminally ill for long enough to experience some kind of discrimination. Reed more or less settles on the established legal position of the U.S. and many in the West, in which “terminally ill” is defined as anyone who will die in the next six months from an illness.

Everyday terminalism

In an article for the Journal of Medical Ethics, Reed goes on to list examples of terminalism in our legal and social systems. Here, we look at three.

Too expensive to bother. If you want to receive hospice care, which is overwhelmingly palliative, you have to be in the last six months of your life. Yet, if you receive hospice care, you will stop taking (or not be offered) life-prolonging drugs, even when those drugs have palliative effects. Why bother wasting money extending someone’s life when their death is inevitable? What’s more, 78% of American hospices turn away patients requiring high-cost care. But, as Reed says, “There is a strong social consensus that people should not be denied necessary medical care simply based on the cost, and yet this happens regularly for the dying (at least if they also need hospice care).”

Allocation protocols. During COVID, most hospital systems developed rules of allocation for life-saving drugs and apparatuses. Those who were dying were at the bottom of the list. When an institution is suffering from limited healthcare resources, such as organs for transplant, they will often be biased against the terminally ill. Reed criticizes protocols that prioritize life extension over quality of life, as they implicitly undervalue the immediate needs of dying patients.

“Right to try” laws. While these laws ostensibly empower terminally ill patients to access experimental treatments, they also highlight a paradox. They grant a certain freedom only when the patient has been deemed beyond the help of conventional medicine, potentially relegating them to the status of test subjects when traditional care options are exhausted.

Reed suggests a useful thought experiment to highlight the prejudices in each case. He writes: “It is easy to see the discrimination if we change the eligibility criteria to another socially salient group: if we said that [the above applied] exclusively for racial minorities or trans people, the message would be that we do not care about protecting racial minorities or trans people.” We do not care about protecting the dying.

Justifying terminalism

Reed believes that a lot of people will find it somewhat ridiculous to call these instances a kind of discrimination. When presented with limited resources, surely it’s better to focus on those who have longer to live? In other words, isn’t it okay to value longevity over the moribund?

Reed calls this a structural “terminalist prejudice,” with little philosophical justification for it. He argues that “many of us tend to think, explicitly or implicitly, that a worthwhile life involves both the kind of life that has a future and also enables a person to ‘contribute meaningfully’ to society.”

We don’t want to see ourselves as cruel or prejudiced. We don’t want to accept that we are privately and socially devaluing human life based on our terminalist biases. Dying people are human beings as well. They have brothers and sisters; sons and daughters; or wives and husbands. They read books, watch TV, talk, laugh, and reminisce. If all humans have rights, the dying have rights, too. They are valuable in themselves, not for some abstract, unknown “contribution” they might make. As Reed puts it, “The reason that terminalism matters is that dying persons matter.”

This article “Terminalism” — discrimination against the dying — is the unseen prejudice of our times is featured on Big Think.

When ChatGPT was launched to the public a little under a year ago, users were amazed by the AI chatbot’s knowledge, conversation skills, and writing ability. After being prompted by a human user, the large language model generates replies by predicting what word should follow the previous one, taking into consideration the prompt, all the prior words, and its vast training from information available on the internet.

With this formula, ChatGPT can create apparently “thoughtful,” coherent, and well-written content. Many onlookers were soon predicting that high school and college students would use the AI to write their essays for them. At the time these prognostications were made, however, it wasn’t clear whether essays created by ChatGPT were actually superior to those penned by students.

Students vs. AI

We now have strong evidence that they are. In a new study published in the journal Scientific Reports, researchers in the faculty of computer science and mathematics at the University of Passau in Germany provided 111 high school teachers in Germany each with six essays to rate. The teachers were told to use a scale from zero to six to rate each essay for topic and completeness, logic and composition, expressiveness and comprehensiveness, language mastery, complexity, vocabulary and text linking, and language constructs.

Unbeknownst to the teachers, some of the essays were penned by real students aged 16 to 18 while others were generated by ChatGPT-3.5 or ChatGPT-4, the latter being more advanced. The essays were all “argumentative,” requiring students (or AIs) to think critically about a topic, then establish a position and support it with evidence. In total, the teachers rated 270 essays across 90 topics.

When the researchers tallied the results, they found that ChatGPT clearly outperformed the students across all the criteria. Student essays received an average score of 3.69 out of 6, while ChatGPT-3.5 scored 4.36 and ChatGPT-4 scored 4.68. (The researchers only examined high school students; it is likely that college students would have performed better.)

Interestingly, the researchers noticed that ChatGPT had some very robotic writing ticks. For example, every one of the AI-written essays began the concluding paragraph with the phrase “in conclusion.” The introductory sentences universally started with a general statement using the main concepts of the essay topics.

“Although this corresponds to the general structure that is sought after for argumentative essays, it is striking to see that the ChatGPT models are so rigid,” the authors commented.

ChatGPT as a learning tool

Such tendencies could allow educators to identify AI-created works handed in ostensibly as human-crafted and penalize students accordingly. But the researchers think such a push to maintain the education status quo by excluding AIs like ChatGPT would be a missed opportunity. As AI models improve and increasingly make certain human efforts obsolete, why not instead refocus education toward more modern pursuits that are more appropriate for this undeniably tech-driven era?

“Advanced chatbots could be used as powerful classroom aids that make lessons more interactive, teach students media literacy, generate personalized lesson plans, save teachers time on admin, and more,” Will Douglas Heaven wrote for MIT Technology Review earlier this year.

Heaven interviewed an educator whose exploits are highly applicable in light of the current study. While she previously required her students to write argumentative essays, instead, she now asks her students to have ChatGPT generate them. Students are then tasked with editing the work and assessing the AI’s arguments, considering their effectiveness on specific audiences. Students then turn in a rewrite.

Like a calculator, but for essays

The University of Passau researchers think that ChatGPT should not be viewed as a cheating tool but rather as “the new calculator,” which took a lot of the grunt work out of math. Students should be extensively taught to write in class but then eventually permitted to utilize ChatGPT once they have attained sufficient mastery. They can then correct, stylize, and hone the AI’s work.

“Our results provide a strong indication that the fear many teaching professionals have is warranted: the way students do homework and teachers assess it needs to change in a world of generative AI models,” the researchers wrote.

Fear of change is natural, but it regularly passes with time. ChatGPT may finally be the impetus that brings about long overdue changes in education, transforming it from a system that revolves around memorizing and regurgitating facts to one that teaches logic, reasoning, and critical thinking. Education often treats students like robots instead of humans. Instead maybe we should leave the robotic work to AI.

This article Students use calculators to do math. Let them use ChatGPT to write is featured on Big Think.

At the end of his life, Herman Melville (author of Moby-Dick) wrote a book called The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade. The novel is set aboard a steamboat and is a collection of vignettes involving conmen, cheats, and chumps. In Melville’s world, people are divided into three kinds: trusting dupes, suspicious cynics, and hustlers. You do not have to read The Confidence-Man to know how it ends — the gullible come last. They get chewed up and spat out. Any dupe with money will, you can be sure of it, soon be poor.

Humans lie all of the time. You’ve probably lied quite recently, considering most of us lie around 30 times a day. Lying is one of the most important tricks we have to get an advantage over each other. And so, human communication often involves a kind of arms race. People will try to deceive you, and you will develop tools to call their bluff. People will try to sell you something, and you will learn to smell a rat.

This led some philosophers and psychologists to coin the idea of “epistemic vigilance.” Epistemic vigilance is the argument that we possess an arsenal of tools to identify and call out lies. In a seminal paper on the topic, Sperber et al. argued that “humans have a suite of cognitive mechanisms for epistemic vigilance, targeted at the risk of being misinformed by others.” We have a built-in lie detector.

But according to one recent paper, it’s time to call BS on our BS detectors.

The argument for epistemic vigilance

There are two strands to the argument for epistemic vigilance. The first is that adults are constantly calibrating how reliable we consider others to be. We tend to be a “truth default” species, which means we assume most people at least start out as being honest. Over time, if someone tells a lie or gets something wrong, we calibrate our epistemic vigilance. We say, “Okay, Alex clearly knows nothing about soccer, so I’m not going to ask him again.”

The second observation is that children learn very early whom to trust or not trust. The psychologist Pascal Boyer observed that infants “seem to be sensitive to the difference between expert and novice agents. Later, toddlers use cues of competence to judge different individuals’ utterances, and mistrust those who have been wrong in previous instances, or those who seem determined to exploit others.”

The argument therefore goes that humans are born with a certain skill or vigilance for seeking truth over falsity. We have epistemic vigilance.

A logical misstep

The philosopher Joseph Shieber thinks that something’s wrong here. He does not dispute the fact that we are vigilant — the evidence seems to point that way — but he does dispute calling this epistemic vigilance.

The problem is that humans have been shown, again and again, to be especially bad at telling truth from falsehood. As Shieber puts it, “Despite many decades of research, the findings are remarkably consistent in demonstrating that humans are quite poor at deception detection.” If we have a built-in lie detector, it’s hugely inaccurate, often turned off, and usually distracted by other things.

We also aren’t very good at telling whether someone is competent. Two studies — from 1996 and 2005 — showed how people use non-epistemic factors to determine whether someone is good at their job. We wrongly think that someone with the right face is competent, or that someone who walks, talks, and holds themselves a certain way can reveal their ability. In reality, none of these factors reliably account for competence or trustworthiness.

The Nietzsche Thesis

So, we are left with two facts. We are vigilant about what people are saying, but our vigilance is not based on epistemic grounds. So, what kind of vigilance is it?

For that, Shieber coined the expression “The Nietzsche Thesis.” He argues that “our goal in conversation is not primarily to acquire truthful information… [but] self-presentation.” In other words, we accept or reject statements based on utilitarian goals, not on their truthfulness. In Nietzsche’s words, we will accept and look for truth only when it has “pleasant, life-preserving consequences.” Conversely, we are hostile “to potentially harmful and destructive truths.” We do not have epistemic vigilance, but a Machiavellian one.

There is one important observation about modern society that might lend credence to Shiber’s ideas: the popularity of conspiracy theories and echo-chamber nonsense. If epistemic vigilance were true, we would all be fact-checking and dismissing conspiracists all the time. But we don’t. When a charismatic or compelling speaker delivers a statement, we accept it much more often based on Machiavellian lines. I will nod along if others nod along. I will accept it if it preserves my social status.

Shieber’s thesis raises huge questions not only for philosophy but also for law: If people aren’t wired for the truth, then how reliable is testimony? It’s also an important point to remember in our interactions with each other as well as in what we read, hear, or see online. It’s good to remember that we are both very bad at, and little concerned with, the truth. Far more often, we’re concerned with other, non-epistemic, things.

This article The “Nietzsche Thesis”: Why we don’t really care about truth is featured on Big Think.

Copyright © 2022 by Brian Thomas Swimme, from Cosmogenesis: An Unveiling of the Expanding Universe. Excerpted by permission of Counterpoint Press.

I had just finished my lecture on Einstein’s special theory of relativity. The mathematical equations for one of his basic ideas, the so-called invariance of the space-time interval, filled the blackboards. I still had twenty minutes to spare. Perhaps I had galloped through the details too fast. I tended to overprepare for this course since it was loaded with some of the best students on campus, including Oona Fitzgerald who had scored a perfect 1600 on her SATs. 

We were on the fourth floor of Thompson Hall, which had earned the nickname “the Boeing complex” because of the close relationship the corporation had established with the Departments of Chemistry, Physics, and Mathematics. Over the years, a significant number of professors and students had worked there. The Seattle-based company had funded part of Thompson Hall’s construction when the demand to maintain the university’s English Gothic architecture had led to extraordinary cost overruns. 

I could have ended the class right there. My quota of chalk had already been transformed into the mathematical equations I had written out. I dropped the three leftover stubs into the wire-mesh holder at the corner of the blackboard and opened the class for questions. Oona Fitzgerald raised her hand, her round, freckled face beaming. “What’s the meaning of life?” she asked. This evoked some tentative laughter, and she smiled as if she might be joking. But after glancing around, she faced me again and waited. It would have been simple enough to avoid her question with a light remark, but I wanted to honor her sincerity. The bit of courage I needed came when I remembered Dr. Barker’s response to the same question I myself had asked a few years earlier in my quantum mechanics course. His irritated reply—“Science doesn’t deal with meaning”—left me feeling foolish. As if no real scientist would ask such a question. Only an amateurish pretender. Years later, and his words were still with me. 

As I leaned back on my desk and reflected on Oona’s question, the strangest feeling arose. The students could see I had taken the question to heart. The mood in the room shifted. A tingling grew inside me. It was as if, unknown to me, I had been waiting for this, and yet I felt like a criminal faced with a forbidden act, something that should be avoided but that was too alluring to ignore. 

I told the students what I thought was an important truth, that almost none of us knew our true identity. Just as amazing, we forgot that we did not know our true identity. This strange situation came from the tiny worlds in which we lived. We thought of ourselves as Americans or Chinese, as Republicans or Democrats, as believers or atheists. Each of those identities might be true, but each is secondary truth. There is a deeper truth. We are universe. The universe made us. In a most primordial way, we are cosmological beings. 

Then I said it. 

“To take this in, you need to ride inside the mathematical symbols.” 

I did not know what I meant by saying you need to ride inside the mathematical symbols. I just said it. 

“Begin with the primal light discovered in 1964 by Penzias and Wilson. This light, this cosmic microwave background radiation, arrives here from all directions. We know that each of these photons comes from a place near the origin of the cosmos, so if we trace these particles of light backward we are led to the birthplace of the universe. Which means, since this light comes from all directions, that we have discovered our origin in a colossal sphere of light. This colossal sphere, fourteen billion light-years away from us in every direction, is the origin of our universe. And thus the origin of each of us.” 

I held out my arms as if clutching a gigantic ball. 

“We can speculate about what came before this colossal sphere, but I want to stick with the facts physicists have discovered. The empirical evidence points to a time fourteen billion years ago when our universe consisted of a colossal sphere made of light as well as the primal atoms of hydrogen and helium. That colossal sphere transformed itself into the stars and galaxies and everything else in the known universe.” 

I came to my answer to Oona’s question. 

“As this sphere moves forward in time, it evolves under the action of expansion and contraction. That is, as the sphere continues to expand, particular subsets are pulled together via the attraction of gravity. This dual action of expansion and contraction set in motion the creativity that has given rise to every existing entity in the universe. 

“If you want to know the meaning of life, look at your hand. Energy flows through your skin and bones without which you would freeze to stone. That flow of energy in your hand came from the beginning of time. Your hand grew out of the colossal sphere like a flower rising up from topsoil. No one in the history of humanity knew that the expansion and contraction of the universe transformed primal atoms into stars and galaxies. Nor did any person know the quantum field theory and the general theory of relativity that govern this sphere of light. None of the sages or kings had the slightest notion of any of this, but now we know the mathematical dynamics by which the universe brought itself forth. Those same dynamics are coursing through us. The universe’s creativity is happening now. The exact same dynamics are at work. Our bodies churn with creativity rooted in the beginning of time.” 

I stopped. I had worked myself into a trance. The words I had conjured up to explain things boomeranged back on me. In that moment, I felt the simple truth more deeply than I ever had in the past. I was the colossal sphere. All of us were. We were rooted in the cosmic microwave radiation. We were the primal atoms speaking of our fourteen-billion-year existence. 

Oona Fitzgerald sat in the first row. I did not want to make her feel self-conscious so I avoided looking at her, but now it occurred to me she was Catholic. Did any of this disturb her religious faith? The students watched in silence. I knew something had happened. A strange intuition arose. This universe—held together by mathematical structures—was breathing me. But this thought too slipped away. 

The ending buzzer pulled me back. My ordinary consciousness reappeared and took control. Students gathered their books, dumped them into their backpacks, and left the classroom. Hadn’t the world changed? I felt foolish, embarrassed. Attending to my lecture notes, shuffling them this way and that, I pretended to be too busy to look up. 

As the students filed out, Oona came over, smiling. She wore a simple yellow dress. 

“I’ve decided to change my major. Because of your course,” she said. 

“Really? You mean to physics?” 

She nodded. 

I was astounded. She was abandoning her musical career? I knew how important music was for her because she had badgered me for a month until I agreed to attend the fall show where she played a violin solo. After the concert, I met her family members, all of them proud of her musical competence and hard work. Had she spoken with her family about this? Was this a good decision? What had I done? 

She attempted to say more but stuttered. She stepped toward the door and, turning back, said: “I love this! I would love to learn this. It’s so, I don’t know . . .” 

Students shuffled up and down the hallway behind her. She shook her head and walked to the door. I thought of calling her back but had nothing to say. 

This article A student asked her cosmology professor the meaning of life. Here was his response. is featured on Big Think.

While it is common to imagine scientists working alone in their labs like latter-day wizards in their tower, science today is a vast group effort done by people who live and work in societies. What they can research is determined, in part, by the conditions in their society.

Advances in social and political philosophy helped prevent some scientists who upset the established order from being executed, clearing the way for ideas that would improve the world. Comparing science before and after the rise of ideological tolerance in the West is like comparing the darkest night to the brightest day.

Science before tolerance

If there is one thing that concerns the reactionary members of an age’s establishment, it is experimentation. Even thought experiments, a favorite tool of science and philosophy, are considered dangerous in some circles. In a time before social and political philosophy established the ideas of tolerance, pluralism, and liberalism, being too outspoken with nonconformist viewpoints could be a death sentence.

To illustrate this, consider the case of the heliocentric theory in the early modern era. While it is easy to overstate the difficulties between the scientific and religious establishments — and many historians think we do — this example provides fascinating insights into what happens when the social philosophy of the day rejects tolerance for new ideas.

For instance, Copernicus only saw the first copy of his book on the heliocentric model on his deathbed. Even then, he purposefully made it so technical as to limit the possible controversy and included an introduction expressing that it could be read as a mathematical model without connection to the reality of the cosmos. While this strategy worked for him — the Inquisition never got to him — some of his supporters would be less lucky.

Giordano Bruno was both less tactful and less fortunate. He has the distinction of managing to irritate the Calvinist, Lutheran, Anglican, and Catholic establishments of 16th-century Europe with his stances regarding Copernicus’ model, the possibility of an infinite universe, and the likelihood of other worlds housing life. Secular authorities turned him over to the Roman Inquisition, who burned him at the stake over his heretical viewpoints.

More famous is the case of Galileo Galilei, who was “vehemently suspect of heresy” for his support of heliocentrism. He spent the remainder of his life under house arrest. All of his writings were banned. Most humiliatingly, the court forced him to “abjure, curse and detest” his scientific stances. In fact, Rene Descartes decided not to publish his book The World, which explained the cosmos in heliocentric terms, in light of how Galileo was treated.

The idea that the Earth moves around the Sun eventually caught on. However, this was not the end of scientists taking steps to keep themselves safe when researching topics of dubious legality. Even Isaac Newton had to avoid prying eyes peeking at his vast collection of alchemy work, which was probably heretical. His stances on Christianity were also unconventional enough to have warranted additional caution.

In Newton’s lifetime, however, the idea of tolerance as not merely sound policy but sound philosophy began its rise.

The rise and benefits of tolerance

A limited tolerance for dissent was the norm for most of human history. Even historical societies that seem more open to us today had rather narrow limits. In ancient Athens, for example, Anaxagoras of Clazomenae argued the sun was not a god. He narrowly avoided execution for this heinous crime by fleeing into exile. Socrates was not so lucky and received a death sentence for allegedly believing in strange gods.

Over the subsequent centuries, societies have slowly grown more tolerant. American philosopher John Rawls argued that the European Wars of Religion directly caused the rise of tolerance as a philosophical stance and political policy. He reasoned this was because many states failed to achieve religious homogeny through force and had to accept the presence of religious minorities.

Philosopher John Locke, working at the same time as Newton, forcefully argued for religious tolerance in his works. He is generally considered one of the first philosophers to argue for liberalism. Other enlightenment philosophers would follow in his footsteps. Even Rousseau, a French-speaking philosopher whose works can be read as either liberal or proto-totalitarian, maintained that most religious and ideological differences must be tolerated.

It took some time for their ideas to reach the arenas of policy and culture, yet progress followed nonetheless. In the 19th century, John Stuart Mill — himself denied the right to study at Oxford or Cambridge due to being a religious nonconformist — argued for wide levels of tolerance and civil rights in On Liberty. He pointed out how vital a sense of freedom was for intellectual progress of all kinds when he wrote:

“Persons of genius, it is true, are, and are always likely to be, a small minority; but in order to have them, it is necessary to preserve the soil in which they grow. Genius can only breathe freely in an atmosphere of freedom.”

Mill continues to argue that individuals must be protected from those looking to limit their ability to experiment in their lives so long as they aren’t hurting anybody else.

His ideas on how to support genius and progress are supported by history. In his book The Geography of Genius, Eric Weiner argues that many of the locations associated with clusters of genius in world history were able to attract brilliant, unconventional, and often eccentric minds through openness to new ideas and tolerance for seemingly heretical views. While we would consider many of these places intolerant by modern standards, such as ancient Athens, they proved extremely open-minded for their time.

It is difficult to imagine that many scientific advances of the last 150 years, among them Darwinian evolution, relativity, and quantum mechanics, would have made much progress without the support of arguments for allowing new worldviews and experimentation. While there is still much to be done, scientists with well-reasoned arguments or unorthodox lifestyles aren’t being persecuted anymore.

Modern memory lapses

Of course, like science, philosophy is a process. Societies have experimented with many ideas, and sometimes intolerant ones become vogue. When this happens, experimentation of all kinds, both personal and scientific, can be dangerous. There are plenty of examples of scientists enduring state-sponsored persecution within living memory. The worst have tended to be in authoritarian societies.

The most terrifying case might be that of the Soviet Union and its state-sponsored campaign known as Lysenkoism. This approach agriculture rejected genetics and natural selection in favor of a more Marxist understanding of inheritable traits. It was nonsense, but nonsense that struck a chord with Stalin, who endorsed the teaching. As in other areas of Soviet life, Stalin further endorsed going after dissenters.

Estimates of the number of biologists fired, imprisoned, or shot for objecting to the theory center around 3,000. During Lysenkoism’s reign, Soviet agricultural yields fell — at least partly due to the bizarre suggestions given to farmers — exacerbating famines that led to millions of deaths. The Soviet government also had periods where it denounced pedology, statistics, and cybernetics for ideological reasons.

Not to be outdone, factions in Nazi Germany actively denounced a great deal of modern physics as “Jewish science.” Debate continues on how severely the campaign impacted German attempts to build the atomic bomb. What is undeniable is that the persecution of the Jews drove many great minds out of Germany and severely impacted the quality of German research for years.

Then there’s the United States, where distortions of science for political ends are a matter of public record. The opinions of many atomic scientists in the 1950s led them to the unemployment line. Teaching evolution was illegal in some states as late as 1967 and remains controversial in others to this day. Universities in Florida are beginning to have difficulty keeping academics or finding new ones due to the political climate.

Science took off once philosophers began arguing against killing those who disagreed with orthodoxy. It is a lesson humanity has needed to be taught more than once. We must work so that we don’t have to learn it again.

This article How advances in philosophy made the world safer for scientists is featured on Big Think.

Two men stand by a hangar in a small airfield at night. One is in a police officer’s uniform, the other dressed as a civilian. They talk tensely while, in the background, a small plane is taxiing to the runway. Suddenly, a vehicle pulls up and a man in a military uniform gets out. He and the police officer talk tensely; the military man begins to make a phone call; the civilian shoots him, killing him. A vehicle full of police pulls up abruptly, the police emerging rapidly. The police officer speaks to them as they retrieve the body. They depart as abruptly, with the body but not the shooter. The police officer and the civilian watch the plane take off and then walk off together.

What’s going on? A criminal act obviously occurred—from the care with which the civilian aimed, he clearly intended to shoot the man. A terrible act, compounded further by the man’s remorseless air—this was cold-blooded murder, depraved indifference. It is puzzling, though, that the police officer made no attempt to apprehend him. Possibilities come to mind, none good. Perhaps the officer has been blackmailed by the civilian to look the other way. Maybe all the police who appeared on the scene are corrupt, in the pocket of some drug cartel. Or perhaps the police officer is actually an impostor. One can’t be certain, but it’s clear that this was a scene of intent-filled corruption and lawless violence, the police officer and the civilian exemplars of humans at their worst. That’s for sure. 

Intent features heavily in issues about moral responsibility: Did the person intend to act as she did? When exactly was the intent formed? Did she know that she could have done otherwise? Did she feel a sense of ownership of her intent? These are pivotal issues to philosophers, legal scholars, psychologists, and neurobiologists. In fact, a huge percentage of the research done concerning the free-will debate revolves around intent, often microscopically examining the role of intent in the seconds before a behavior happens. Entire conferences, edited volumes, careers, have been spent on those few seconds. 

Nevertheless, all this is ultimately irrelevant to deciding that there’s no free will. This is because this approach misses 99 percent of the story by not asking the key question: And where did that intent come from in the first place? This is so important because, as we will see, while it sure may seem at times that we are free to do as we intend, we are never free to intend what we intend. Maintaining belief in free will by failing to ask that question can be heartless and immoral and is as myopic as believing that all you need to know to assess a movie is to watch its final three minutes. Without that larger perspective, understanding the features and consequences of intent doesn’t amount to a hill of beans. 

Let’s start off with William Henry Harrison, ninth president of the United States, remembered only for idiotically insisting on giving a record-long two-hour inauguration speech in the freezing cold in January 1841, without coat or hat; he caught pneumonia and died a month later, the first president to die in office and the shortest presidential term.

With that in place, think about William Henry Harrison. But first, we’re going to stick electrodes all over your scalp for an electroencephalogram (EEG), to observe the waves of neuronal excitation generated by your cortex when you’re thinking of Bill. 

Now don’t think of Harrison—think about anything else—as we continue recording your EEG. Good, well done. Now don’t think about Harrison, but plan to think about him whenever you want a little while later, and push this button the instant you do. Oh, also, keep an eye on the second hand on this clock and note when you chose to think about Harrison. We’re also going to wire up your hand with recording electrodes to detect precisely when you start the pushing; meanwhile, the EEG will detect when neurons that command those muscles to push the button start to activate. And this is what we find out: those neurons had already activated before you thought you were first freely choosing to start pushing the button. 

But the experimental design of this study isn’t perfect, because of its nonspecificity—we may have just learned what’s happening in your brain when it is generically doing something, as opposed to doing this particular something. Let’s switch instead to your choosing between doing A and doing B. William Henry Harrison sits down to some typhoid-riddled burgers and fries, and he asks for ketchup. If you decide he would have pronounced it “ketch-up,” immediately push this button with your left hand; if it was “cats-up,” push this other button with your right. Don’t think about his pronunciation of ketchup right now; just look at the clock and tell us the instant you chose which button to push. And you get the same answer—the neurons responsible for whichever hand pushes the button activate before you consciously formed your choice. 

Let’s do something fancier now than looking at brain waves, since EEG reflects the activity of hundreds of millions of neurons at a time, making it hard to know what’s happening in particular brain regions. Thanks to a grant from the WHH Foundation, we’ve bought a neuroimaging system and will do functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) of your brain while you do the task—this will tell us about activity in each individual brain region at the same time. The results show clearly, once again, that particular regions have “decided” which button to push before you believe you consciously and freely chose. Up to ten seconds before, in fact. 

Eh, forget about fMRI and the images it produces, where a single pixel’s signal reflects the activity of about half a million neurons. Instead, we’re going to drill holes in your head and then stick electrodes into your brain to monitor the activity of individual neurons; using this approach, once again, we can tell if you’ll go for “ketch-up” or “cats-up” from the activity of neurons before you believe you decided. 

These are the basic approaches and findings in a monumental series of studies that have produced a monumental shitstorm as to whether they demonstrate that free will is a myth. These are the core findings in virtually every debate about what neuroscience can tell us on the subject. And I think that at the end of the day, these studies are irrelevant. 

This article Why the free will debate hinges on intent is featured on Big Think.

Earlier this month, the consciousness science community erupted into chaos. An open letter, signed by 124 researchers—some specializing in consciousness and others not—made the provocative claim that one of the most widely discussed theories in the field, Integrated Information Theory (IIT), should be considered “pseudoscience.” The uproar that followed sent consciousness social media into a doom spiral of accusation and recrimination, with the fallout covered in Nature, New Scientist, and elsewhere.

Calling something pseudoscience is pretty much the strongest criticism one can make of a theory. It’s a move that should never be taken lightly, especially when more than 100 influential scientists and philosophers do it all at once.

The open letter justified the charge primarily on the grounds that IIT has “commitments” to panpsychism—the idea that consciousness is fundamental and ubiquitous—and that the theory “as a whole” may not be empirically testable. A subsequent piece by one of the lead authors of the letter, Hakwan Lau, reframed the charge somewhat: that the claims made for IIT by its proponents and the wider media are not supported by empirical evidence.

IIT is a consciousness-first, rather than a brain-first approach.

The brainchild of neuroscientist Giulio Tononi, IIT has been around for quite some time. Back in the late 1990s, Tononi published a paper in Science with the Nobel Laureate Gerald Edelman, linking consciousness to mathematical measures of complexity. This paper, which made a lasting impression on me, sowed the seeds of what later became IIT. Tononi published his first outline of the theory itself in 2004 and it has been evolving ever since, with the latest version—IIT 4.0—appearing earlier this year.

The theory’s counterintuitive and deeply mathematical nature has always attracted controversy and criticism—including from myself and my colleagues—but it has certainly become prominent in consciousness science. A survey conducted at the main conference in the field—the annual meeting of the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness—found that nearly half of respondents considered it “definitely promising” or “probably promising,” and researchers in the field regularly identify it as one of four main theoretical approaches to consciousness. (The philosopher Tim Bayne and I did just this in our recent review paper on theories of consciousness for Nature Reviews Neuroscience.)

The theory behind IIT is not simple: It turns the standard neuroscientific game—in which consciousness is proposed to emerge from neural activity in the brain—upside down. It takes as its starting point the identification of certain features that must be shared by all conscious experiences, and then asks what properties a physical system (like a brain) must have in order for these features to be present. It is a consciousness-first, rather than a brain-first approach.

According to IIT, two features that are essential to any conscious experience are “integration” and “information.” The reasoning is that every conscious experience is unified, “all of a piece,” and that every experience also conveys a large amount of information. Cashing out this claim through the machinery of IIT leads to its central proposal, which is that consciousness is present whenever and wherever a system is more than the sum of its parts—in a highly specific, mathematically precise way.

In IIT, the amount of consciousness a system has is tracked by a mathematical quantity called Phi, and, according to the theory, wherever there is non-zero Phi, there will be consciousness, at least to some degree. This implies a restricted form of panpsychism, since instances of non-zero Phi can be found beyond brains, and even in non-biological systems. Some very simple systems can be conscious according to IIT, such as grids of inactive electronic circuitry in a computing device—though the kind of consciousness involved may be very minimal. But many other things—whether simple or complex—will lack consciousness entirely, because they don’t integrate information in the right way. For example, according to IIT, things like tables and chairs wouldn’t be conscious, and neither would artificial intelligence systems in which signals can only flow in one direction.

ontroversial and counterintuitive it may be, but is IIT pseudoscience? A very general definition of science is the systematic study of natural phenomena through observation, description, theory, and experiment. Scientific theories should be testable, responsive to evidence, and have predictive and explanatory power. A very general definition of pseudoscience is work that claims to be scientific, but falls short in some significant way or ways. Molecular biology and particle physics are examples of science, while homeopathy and astrology are examples of pseudoscience—they are not supported by experimental evidence, and lack any plausible mechanism by which they might operate.

The panpsychist implications of IIT are certainly strange. Full-blown panpsychism is a philosophical, metaphysical position, and as such is not open to empirical testing. It is also rather antithetical to science as we know it, which is generally materialist. But although IIT implies a version of panpsychism, it is not equivalent to panpsychism. Arguing against panpsychism, as I have done, therefore does not mean arguing against IIT. The fact that a theory can have strange, perhaps untestable consequences, does not mean that it is pseudoscientific. It may be enough for other aspects of the theory to be testable. This happens without controversy in other areas of science. In physics, general relativity implies untestable things, like singularities, while being eminently testable in other ways.

It turns the standard neuroscientific game upside down.

This leads to the second objection of the letter writers: that IIT “as a whole” may be untestable. This seems to appeal to Karl Popper’s falsificationist philosophy of science, in which a theory could be called pseudoscientific if it cannot be experimentally falsified. But this sets the bar very high, since experimental methods are always improving, and theories can adapt and change over time and still have explanatory and predictive value even if aspects of them remain beyond experimental reach. (Evolutionary theory provides a good example. Core aspects of the theory, such as the mechanisms underlying inheritance, only became testable long after the theory was first developed.)

Other philosophies of science could be applied here instead. I’ve always preferred Imre Lakatos’ views, in which a research program (which usually extends beyond a theory) is productive if, over time, it generates testable predictions which have explanatory and predictive power. If a research program does not do this, then it is degenerate and will gradually fade away. This view of science is more accommodating to the ebb and flow of ideas, and also to the possibility that some aspects—perhaps even core elements—of a scientific theory may remain unfalsifiable. Quantum mechanics, for example, is highly productive, even though nobody can figure out how to experimentally test its various interpretations (or even what they really mean).

From a Lakatosian perspective, IIT squarely qualifies as science. Its core principles are indeed very difficult to test—the same could be said for other leading theories, too—but many testable predictions do follow from IIT. Some of these predictions also follow from other theories, but others definitely do not. As these predictions are put to the test in increasingly sophisticated experiments, we will see whether IIT is productive or degenerate. Right now, it is far too early to say.

An ongoing series of “adversarial collaborations” in consciousness science are particularly interesting for understanding the testability of IIT. These collaborations pit theories against each other using experiments designed so that the theories predict different outcomes. I’ve written about the first of these collaborations elsewhere, and am involved in (though not funded by) a second. Although these collaborations are unlikely to land a decisive blow against any of the theories concerned, they are doing excellent, rigorous work, and are undoubtedly driving the field forward.

The third objection voiced by IIT opponents—that the evidence base for IIT does not support the claims made by its proponents and the wider media—is worth paying attention to, but it doesn’t justify the charge either. It is certainly very important for researchers to avoid over-claiming and over-promoting, but if they do—and one can argue back-and-forth about whether this is the case for IIT—it doesn’t mean the underlying research is pseudoscience. So long as it satisfies the criteria for science, it is science, whether appropriately communicated or not.

I believe IIT meets the criteria necessary for science: It sets out to explain a natural phenomenon using a rigorous theoretical approach, one that generates testable predictions that have the potential for explanatory and predictive power.

easserting the scientific status of IIT matters for reasons that extend beyond its specific pros and cons as a theory. It matters firstly because of the outward impression. The motivation behind the open letter was to ensure the long-term health of consciousness science through a surgical strike against the perceived oversized influence of IIT. But it could have the opposite effect. Outsiders may lose trust in a field that can’t seem to sort out science from pseudoscience among its own leading theories.

Such perceptions could be disastrous, given how hard consciousness researchers have worked to establish the field’s well-deserved legitimacy. Levels of funding, the ability to attract smart young researchers into the field, and the potential for consciousness research to make a positive impact in the world could all be threatened.

But there is something even more fundamental at stake here, which is the right to be wrong.

The statistician George Box is often quoted with saying that “all models are wrong, but some are useful.” In fact what he said, in a 1987 book, was “Remember that all models are wrong; the practical question is how wrong do they have to be to not be useful.”

The theory is indeed a bit bonkers, but it could be on the right track.

IIT is very likely wrong. It may well be more wrong than other leading theories of consciousness, which are also likely to be wrong. It may be even more wrong than my own theory (which is very different from IIT). But even if it is very wrong, it can still be very useful.

IIT can be usefully wrong firstly because it can inspire related ideas. I’ve worked on some of these with my colleagues under the banner of “weak IIT,” which gives up some theoretical ambition for gains in empirical applicability. The influential work by Marcello Massimini and his group on measuring the level of consciousness in brain-injured patients was also inspired by early versions of IIT (although these results are compatible with other theories as well). And there is plenty more valuable research out there, as well as up and coming work, that has been inspired to some degree by the theory—the same is true for the other leading theories, too.

The second reason may be even more important, and is the one I really want to underline here. It is precisely the challenging, counterintuitive nature of IIT that ought to be valued, even if the theory itself turns out to be empirically wrong. Although consciousness science has made huge strides, a deep sense of mystery persists about the nature of consciousness and its relation to brains, bodies, and the physical world in general.  Even if we overestimate the difficulties involved, which I think we do, it seems unlikely that we’ll arrive at a satisfactory scientific account of consciousness without some radically creative thinking.

If we banish IIT to the wastelands of pseudoscience, dismissing it in part because of its strangeness, we risk stifling exactly the kind of creative thinking that we may need. The theory is indeed a bit bonkers, but it is a brave attempt to say something genuinely new. And who knows, it could even be on the right track.

So let’s not merely reject the charge of pseudoscience. Instead let’s celebrate what is weird and unusual about it, while making sure to not over-hype or over-claim. As long as theories remain within the bounds of the scientific method, they have every right to be wrong.

This article The worth of wild ideas is featured on Big Think.

The dance with death has long intrigued humanity, and it could be argued that our awareness of our own mortality is what sets us apart from other animals. Albert Camus, the existentialist philosopher, once wrote, “Real generosity towards the future lies in giving all to the present.” But what if the present extended indefinitely, or forever? The idea of immortality, while beguiling, presents its own labyrinth of philosophical dilemmas. So let’s take a look at these five thought-provoking challenges of eternal existence and uncover the profound intricacies of a life without end.

What is death?

You might think that humans have the definition of death covered, but the idea of immortality can make the definition of death fuzzy. Death is typically defined as the irreversible end of biological functions needed to sustain life. From a legal point of view, brain death is often treated as this “point of no return.” This legal line has little bearing on the increasing number of things machines allow the body to do despite brain death. Things get more confusing when you define immortality in terms of life. We haven’t nailed that down either. 

So, if immortality is life after death, then a contradiction appears to arise. Death is the end of the road, so how can you keep going? As discussed in a later section, attempts to avoid this by tying death to the end of the physical body, but not of existence, create their own problems. Attempts to keep the physical body going forever have yet to bear fruit.

The difficulties still exist when discussing technological approaches to cheating the Grim Reaper. For example, the field of cryonics seeks to freeze the dead and thaw them out later when medical science may have advanced to a point where they can be resurrected. However, if it is possible to undo death in this way, then we can’t define it as “the undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveler returns.”

If this is the case, were the frozen people ever dead? Are they dead now if they will be alive later? 

What is immortality, anyway?

If we’re still debating what life and death are, how can we decide what immortality is? Many conceptions of immortality still involve death. In these models, only part of a person lives on after the rest of them dies. Does it make sense to say that only part of a person is immortal?

Most ideas of an afterlife are fairly explicit about how you have to die, sometimes in the proper way. However, immortality is sometimes a separate concept, suggesting an unending existence. Not all versions of the afterlife imply eternity. For instance, in Buddhism, achieving enlightenment can end the cycle of reincarnation, suggesting that souls don’t remain immortal forever. So, does this mean souls were never truly immortal to begin with?

Modern technology doesn’t duck this problem, either. Life extension through better medicine or slower aging merely delays the end. Is it immortality if you are just indefinitely delaying death? Or is that just “morality plus”? 

What gets to live forever?

The problem of identity is another major problem for immortality. What does it mean to say that a person lives forever? The idea of immortality is less appealing if the person who cheats death is not the same individual before and after the cheating. What makes you you? Can that part of you live forever?

If your body defines you, or even part of it, like your brain, then eternal life gets complicated. All known human bodies have declined and decayed. While science has reanimated pigs, a route to doing this for people isn’t quite here yet. Even if it were, the break in consciousness between death and reanimation raises important questions. Does that break mean it isn’t really immortality? Does that affect the identity of the reanimated person?

Other ideas accept that the body is doomed to death and suggest that a part of our essence is immaterial and immortal. This is often referred to as a “soul.” If the soul is the important part of our identity, then the rest of us — mind and body — can die without our “real” selves having to die. However, the soul is immaterial and said to be difficult to detect or interact with, so we can’t be sure that you will always have the same one you were born with, or that you even have one at all. In any case, few philosophers support the idea of souls anymore. 

David Hume, in a turn surprisingly similar to ideas put forward by the Buddha 2,000 years prior, argued that there was no enduring self but rather a bundle of ever-changing perceptions. If they are right, then there is no “self,” and it certainly can’t overcome death. However, a “person” who endures after death might share all of your memories and be psychologically continuous with you. This might be “good enough” for some people. 

Which of these is right, and how can we say a person who exists after the body’s death is the same person? Are any of them correct? This is also a problem for the technological approaches to immortality. If a person is dead and frozen for 200 years, are they the same person when they are thawed out? There is a big gap to explain. If a brain is uploaded to a computer, is the person in the machine really the same person that used to have a body? If there are such things as souls, what are they doing during these activities? 

What are we made of?

In the previous section, the problem of what aspect of us endures raises another question: What are we made of that could last forever? One of the more enduring questions in modern philosophy is the debate between dualism and materialism: Is the mind a separate substance from the body? It plays a central role in any discussion of immortality. 

The dualists, influenced by Rene Descartes, argue that the mind and the body are two separate substances. In this view, the mind is often thought of as something not quite material. While exactly how dualism might work is still debated, it creates the possibility of a nonmaterial mind — perhaps analogous to a soul — existing and perhaps enduring after the end of the body. 

However, dualism is decidedly unfashionable these days. The most common home for those opposed to dualism is materialism. This school holds that the mind is identical to or at least directly related to the brain. Your consciousness is material by extension. 

Materialism leaves fewer spaces for immortality than alternative theories. If the brain is doomed to death and our minds are in our brains, how can we possibly have immortality? If we aren’t fully material beings, how do we work? On the other hand, a dualist version of immortality has problems. If souls are immaterial and can’t interact with anything, then what good is soul-based immortality? Floating around until the end of time, unable to interact with anything, seems like a fate worse than death. 

Weak arguments

Despite the abovementioned problems, many thinkers have tried to craft arguments for why immortality must exist. Unfortunately, few of them are convincing. The Western and Eastern religious arguments tend to rely on faith. What these enjoy in popularity, they lack in robustness. As philosophy relies on reason rather than faith, it has to look elsewhere for the validation of immortality or an afterlife. 

Plato recounts several arguments for immortality he credited to Socrates. However, they all rely on agreeing to his view of the cosmos, including a belief in The Forms. Very few take that notion seriously anymore. Several philosophers, including Kant, have argued that believing in immortality through an afterlife is beneficial. However, the fact that a belief has benefits does not say anything about whether the contents of that belief exist in “objective” reality. Given that most philosophers these days don’t take dualism seriously, the idea of getting past the material death of the body through nonphysical means is a bit of a dead end. 

Moving from arguments to empirical data doesn’t help. The atheistic philosopher A.J. Ayer had a near-death experience similar to those reported by others. This suggested to him that death might not be the end of consciousness. However, he maintained that he didn’t think any particular route to immortality was probable. While parapsychologists might argue that evidence for immortality or an afterlife exists, mainstream science disagrees. While you can debate what science is and argue that parapsychology is waiting for a paradigm shift to validate it in the eyes of other fields, those hoping to get around death shouldn’t hold their breath. 

We simply have no good arguments or evidence for living forever — a concept we can’t entirely define anyway. Don’t be too depressed. You have the rest of your life to ponder the question (and, just maybe, an indefinitely long time after). 

This article 5 philosophical problems with immortality is featured on Big Think.

We are all much more scared of terrorism than we used to be. In the U.S., about one in three people are worried about being the victim of a terrorist attack. In Europe, terrorism consistently makes it onto lists of people’s biggest concerns, and it was Europeans’ #1 concern in 2016 and 2017. Even if people aren’t in “terror,” they are anxious about it, and their behaviors have adapted to this anxiety. Most people believe life has permanently changed since 9/11. For Israelis, life may have permanently changed following the events of October 7, 2023.

How justified is this fear of terrorism? One line of argument is that it’s not justified at all.

It claims there are bigger and far more dangerous threats to our everyday lives. For example, in Europe, you are 50 times more likely to die in a bike accident, 85 times more likely to die in a heat wave, and over 4,000 times more likely to die in a car crash than die from an act of terrorism. According to this line of reasoning, our fear of terrorism is engineered by a sensationalist media and psychological biases. A sober risk assessment shows us that fear of terrorism is irrational.

But, according to a new paper by philosopher Eran Fish, the fear of terrorism is not unreasonable at all. There are perfectly justifiable reasons for why we should fear terrorists more than car crashes.

Fear of randomness

The first line of Fish’s argument stems from the idea that we are justified in fearing things that have an element of danger that is random and non-discriminate. For instance, imagine that tomorrow, your government brought in a death lottery. Every day, the government would put everyone’s names through a randomly generated system and pick out one person. That person would then be executed. It would be rational to worry about this lottery. It would be reasonable to watch every night on TV and be scared. (This is the plot of a short story called “The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson.)

For Fish, the same is true for terrorism. As he puts it, “Unlike some other forms of violent crime, terrorism typically targets a random group of people… Anyone could just as well be next.” Terrorists deliberately target anyone, anywhere to spread terror in the general population instead of limiting their attacks to military or government targets. Terrorism is, at least to the everyday person, a random death lottery.

Compare this, though, with car accidents. Yes, far more people die from them. But in this case, a person’s life is put at risk because of a specific choice they made. We know the risk, and we get in the car anyway. That makes a big psychological and philosophical difference.

Fear of preventable atrocities

Fish’s second line of argument is that terrorism is an intentional act that can be prevented. Car crashes are accidents. While heart disease and cancer make up more than 50% of all deaths worldwide (which is far, far more than the deaths caused by terrorism), these aren’t entirely preventable. Someday, you’re going to die of something — might as well be cancer. Natural deaths are a natural part of life.

But this isn’t the case for terrorism. Nobody believes that getting blown up at a coffee shop is a natural part of life. Instead, terrorism is a matter of security, and the problem — extremism — is seen as resolvable.

Fear of societal insecurity

Fish’s third line of argument is that it is reasonable to fear insecurity, particularly when the people you put in charge of protecting you (namely, the government) fail to do so.

For Thomas Hobbes, a state’s primary purpose is to provide or prevent things that individuals cannot. We pool our personal sovereignty and hand over our private liberty so the state machinery can do things in our interest. In Hobbes’ view, the first role of an authority is security, like keeping us safe from a foreign invasion. On the flip side, the state cannot prevent medical deaths and car crashes; besides, they are at least partially the individual’s responsibility.

Justified fear

Fish concludes, then, that it is entirely reasonable to fear death from terrorism more than other causes of death: They shouldn’t be happening at all.

This article We are told not to fear terrorism. But there are 3 reasons why we should is featured on Big Think.

The West had been in East Asia for hundreds of years in the form of the Dutch East India Company, among other trading companies, but, in the late 19th century, they turned up with guns and warships. They booted down the door to Japan, locked by the Tokugawa Shogunate’s policy of isolationism (sakoku) for more than 250 years, because they wanted to “trade.” Of course, the agreements they came to were hardly fair and, in later decades, came to be referred to as “unequal treaties” (fu byōdō jōyaku). 

They did not just take from Japan, though: Westerners also brought philosophy with them. Nishi Amane invented a Japanese neologism for philosophy (tetsugaku) in 1874, the Chinese characters for which were also used in Korea (cheolhak) and China (zhexue). The Japanese themselves rapidly began learning English, French, and German to make sense of imported philosophical texts, and many were sent by the government to Europe to study there.

Faced with this new thing called “philosophy,” the public intellectual Nakae Chōmin realized in 1901 that, “from antiquity to the present day, there has never been any philosophy in Japan.” Other Japanese intellectuals followed suit and, even a century later, it is still the mainstream position. Philosophy departments in Japanese universities teach the history and contemporary problematics of Western philosophy in a curriculum that has been characterized as “De-Kan-Sho,” referring to Descartes, Kant, and Schopenhauer who constitute its central (sometimes only) components. Asian intellectual history, on the other hand, is studied in departments of regional studies, religion, history, and literature. This has been the case since the establishment of the Japanese university system by Katō Hiroyuki in 1877 and has not changed since.

Japan defies the Eurocentric narrative

Why, though, was the long history of Japanese thought not characterized as philosophy? Here’s a widely accepted way of looking at the problem of “world philosophies,” of which Japanese philosophy is of course an example: When Europe colonized the world and came across foreign systems of thought, they denied that it was philosophy because, firstly, the natives did not have a word for philosophy, so because they could not identify themselves as philosophers, they weren’t philosophers; secondly, philosophy was just too great and noble a thing to suggest that mere colonies could have it, and to equate the mighty intellectual history of Europe with that of some unknown backwater simply would not do. European colonizers were just too arrogant and ignorant to even begin to consider that there might be philosophy outside of Europe. Then, after the Second World War, when all the empires began to fall, scholars all over the world scrambled to appoint their national intellectual histories to the position of philosophy to prove that they were just as good as their once colonizers. 

Clearly, Japan doesn’t fit that mold. If the reason why many non-European traditions have been excluded from being considered “proper” philosophy is ignorance of those cultures, as, for example, Jonny Thomson claims, then why are the most avid deniers of the existence of Japanese philosophy the Japanese? 

There have been some attempts to make the Japanese fit this narrative, however. The Japanologist Thomas P. Kasulis argues that it is because they are “intellectually and culturally colonized” that the Japanese deny that they have philosophy. He, like many others, believes that the Japanese were tricked in the modern period into holding the Eurocentric picture that “European philosophy” is essentially a truism because only the Europeans could transcend their cultural and linguistic particularities in search of universal truth. Academic claimants to this position maintain that Western arrogance dovetails with Japanese deference, citing the “self-colonizing mission” of some intellectuals to “Escape Asia and Enter Europe.”

However, not only were they never colonized by the West, the Japanese also never saw philosophy as an accolade or some kind of demonstration of intellectual equality. When the door to Japan was kicked open at the end of the 19th century, the Japanese had to modernize at an astonishing rate and therefore wanted the West’s technology — that is, their weapons  — but they didn’t want anything to do with Western culture, which they eschewed in a great burst of national pride that even turned quite insidious (that is, xenophobic) in the 20th century with the ultranationalist ideology of State Shintō. So, far from idolizing Western culture, the Japanese actually vilified it. 

Homegrown arguments against “Japanese philosophy”

The Japanese had other reasons for denying that their thought was philosophy. One reason is that you might say, like Watanabe Jirō and Jacques Derrida, that pure philosophy is Western because it originated in the West and the very concept of philosophy (philosophia) is Greek, so Japanese thought (shisō) is not philosophy because it is something different (that is, non-Western), not something worse — which is a point labored by Ikuta Chōkō. 

Another possible reason is that Japanese philosophy is too religious. Nishimura Shigeki thought that Buddhism oversteps the bounds of reason to preach about hell and paradise. In contrast, he thought, philosophy is an investigation of the truths of the universe from the ground up, and as such has no use for founders or scriptures or anything like expedient means. In other words, philosophy does not rely on argument by authority, whereas religion (shūkyō), and with it Japanese intellectual history, is inherently dogmatic, which runs contrary to the essence of philosophy.

The best reason, though, for denying Japanese philosophy was stated by Sakamoto Hyakudai in 1993: “Everything is imported, imitated,” he said. He thought, like many Japanese, that since Buddhism and Confucianism had come from China in the sixth century, modern philosophy from Europe in the late 19th century, and Shintō never had anything philosophical about it to begin with, the logical conclusion was that Japan was left with nothing that could be called Japanese philosophy. The earliest Western Japanologists thought the same. The reason British Japanologist Basil Hall Chamberlain gave for why the Japanese never had a philosophy of their own was that they formerly bowed down before the shrine of Confucius or of Wang Yangming, and now bow down before the shrine of Herbert Spencer or of Nietzsche. Their so-called philosophers, he thought, had been mere expositors of imported ideas.

Pick up the spear

The Japanese, then, have several good reasons for rejecting Japanese philosophy. Nevertheless, they are wrong to do so, but it doesn’t have anything to do with colonialism. We can start to get an idea of why this is by looking at yet another Japanese perspective on their own philosophy. 

Most Japanese believed that philosophy came to Japan in the modern period in the form of Western philosophy. However, some also argued that a native Japanese philosophy developed at the same time. Thinkers like Nakamura Yūjirō, Shimomura Toratarō, and Takahashi Satomi began to argue that Nishida Kitarō — father of the Kyoto School — had become Japan’s first philosopher because he synthesized Western and Eastern thought together and created something new out of the synthesis. Funayama Shin’ichi wrote in 1959 that, with Nishida, Japan’s philosophy moved to a stage of originality. Even Nishida himself thought that what makes Japanese philosophy Japanese was its dynamic Japanization of Western philosophy; dynamic, because it also involved the Westernization of Japanese philosophy. He wasn’t arrogant enough to call himself the father of Japanese philosophy on that basis, but he might as well have.

The same can be said for premodern Japanese philosophy. Confucianism and Buddhism came from China but, just as Western philosophy had been Japanized once on Japanese soil, so too had these traditions evolved over the centuries, taking on a Japanese character. Moreover, this naturalization process is not unique to Japanese philosophy: Nietzsche said that “nothing would be sillier than to claim a native development for the Greeks. On the contrary, they invariably absorbed other living cultures,” including, he thinks, those of the Orient. What the Greeks did that was so admirable, he says, was “to pick up the spear and throw it onward from the point where others had left it.” This is a point also made by philosopher Tanaka Ōdō who says that, though it may at first glance seem that Japan has only imitated foreign philosophical traditions, these foreign countries, just like Japan, have also had to make efforts for practical and aesthetic reasons to modify and transform mythologies, histories, customs, and systems of government formed in completely different lands. 

Footnotes to Confucius and the Buddha

In fact, many Japanese have argued that it’s Japan’s ability to do this so well that defines its national character. Japan possesses what Ishida Ichirō called the “amazing power of cultural synthesis” and what Nishida Kitarō called a “musical culture” without fixed form whose excellence lies in “taking in foreign cultures as they are and transforming itself.” An equally important 20th-century Japanese philosopher, Watsuji Tetsurō said that Japanese culture has layers, and it is the coexistence of them, rather than the replacement of one with another, that characterizes Japanese culture. 

All this suggests that we need to change how we understand “philosophy.” It didn’t just pop up in ancient Greece with Thales of Miletus or Socrates as your philosophy course might suggest. On the contrary, there was a tangle of intellectual currents under the surface out of which the earliest philosophers came, and out of which new philosophies developed in different regions. But that doesn’t mean that they are any less original or any less philosophical. Alfred North Whitehead famously remarked that “the safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists in a series of footnotes to Plato.” Similarly, Eastern philosophy relates in the same way to Confucius and the Buddha. 

If there is no such thing as Japanese philosophy because it was imported, does that mean that there is no such thing as European philosophy too?

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Some of the world’s oldest surviving texts are dedicated to philosophy. In many ways, no school of philosophy ever fully dies, as a good idea can endure over millennia. On the other hand, there are plenty of schools of thought in which nobody seems to claim membership anymore. Here, we look at five schools of thought that died out, and whether we can see any trace of their intellectual legacy today.

Mohism

Mohism is one of the many philosophies that arose in China during the “Hundred Schools of Thought” era. Named after the Chinese thinker Mo Di (also known as Mozi), the school was once large enough to compete with Confucianism. Much like Confucius, Mozi traveled around the various Chinese states spreading his ideas. He had a similar lack of success in getting a government to accept them wholesale. However, his followers were well-organized and highly regarded for their skills in statecraft, philosophy, and the building of defensive fortifications. 

Many of Mohism’s ideas are recorded in a text named Mozi, which is traditionally attributed to the school’s founder. In its 30 chapters, 21 of which survive, the author argues for meritocracy in government, extending compassion to others, frugality, peace, and a utilitarian approach to the public good. The text is, infamously, much less poetic than other works of Chinese philosophy. 

Mohism has the distinction of being the first known consequentialist school of philosophy. However, while Mohism argued for utilitarian calculations when making ethical choices, it did not argue for the option that maximized total happiness. Instead, Mohist thinkers argued for benefits to the community, particularly in the form of order, wealth, and population growth. Like other Chinese philosophies at the time, it is easy to see how this was geared toward rulers. 

Importantly, the school argues that compassion should be impartial. While the exact implications of this are still debated, the notion of not putting yourself or those close to you above others when deciding what to do is the key to Mohist thought. This was in direct contrast to Confucian thought. Other members of the school worked on logic problems, mathematics, and theories of knowledge. 

The school’s decline came with the unification of China. This led to a reduction in the need for the specialties of its scholars, particularly fortification building. Despite the end of the school, many of its ideas, particularly meritocracy, lived on in Confucianism. The philosophy of Legalism also borrowed ideas from Mozi. The Mohist idea of universal love was also used to explain the Buddhist dedication to compassion when it arrived in China. 

The Cyrenaics

The Cyrenaic school is named for the city of Cyrene in Libya. The school’s founder, a one-time follower of Socrates named Aristippus the Elder, hailed from there. Passing his ideas onto his daughter, the school’s ideas would be codified by his grandson Aristippus the Younger. In many ways, the school is a bit of a caricature of Ancient Greek thought and its philosophers.

The Cyrenaics were especially skeptical. They argued that the only knowledge we have is that of our own experiences. But while we can be sure of those experiences, we cannot know anything about the things that cause those experiences, they argued. Importantly, this includes anything about the outside world. This also means we cannot know if others have similar experiences to us. This lack of information ties directly into their view of the good life. 

Aristippus, perhaps remembering Socrates’ ability to party, argued that pleasure — not happiness — was the highest good in life. After all, according to their skepticism, the only thing we really have are our experiences. Why not make them pleasant ones? 

Recalling how Socrates argued that pleasure was a part of living a good life, the Cyrenaics took that idea and ran with it. They argued that physical pleasure was more important than mental pleasure and that achieving it now was much better than getting it later. While they admitted some concern for others, even this tied back to benefit for the self: Friendship was viewed as a self-interested enterprise, meaning you only have friends for what they can do for you. Later Cyrenaic thinkers would go so far as to argue that using virtue to reach a good life, the goal of many Greek schools, was impossible.  

The school produced a number of offshoots before eventually being eclipsed by the more moderate hedonism proffered by the school of Epicureanism.  

Cynicism

A philosophy known for its extremism, it is easy to understand why nobody claims to be a Cynic philosopher anymore. Founded by Antisthenes, another student of Socrates, the school’s most famous teacher was Diogenes of Sinope. The Cynics were the greatest example of the Hellenistic idea of a philosopher who lived their ideals. Diogenes famously lived part of his life in a barrel, had few possessions, and aimed to live as closely to nature as possible.

Their extreme asceticism is tied to the Cynic ethical system. As opposed to the Cyrenaic rejection of virtue, the Cynics argued for living for virtue alone. This was to be achieved by living as closely in tune with nature as possible. Living a simple life — dedicated to virtue, and devoid of that which was not needed — is the goal of any true Cynic. Culture and convention often get in the way of this kind of living. Therefore, Diogenes made a point of mocking convention whenever he could.

The Cynics also developed the idea of cosmopolitanism, the notion that a person’s loyalty is to humanity rather than to wherever they live. Given how vital and restricted citizenship was in Ancient Greece, this was a bold stance. By rejecting duties to the state, the Cynics further freed themselves to live according to virtue alone and to spend time understanding their relationship to the cosmos. 

The Stoics were influenced by the Cynics. Several major ideas in Stoicism can be viewed as toned-down versions of what they argued. The Stoic philosophers admitted this influence. Epictetus went so far as to say that living as the Cynics did was admirable, but too difficult for most people. Several ancient Stoic works include the Cynic philosophers on lists of Stoic Sages to be admired and emulated.

Transcendentalism

The first American school of philosophy and literature, transcendentalism was a movement based in New England. It included a number of writers and thinkers. The two most important were Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. Influenced by such diverse elements as Kantian philosophy, the British Romantic movement, and New England Unitarianism, the school focused on subjects such as beauty, the ideal, and the individual’s place in an industrializing world. 

Its takes on individualism are still relatively radical. When arrested for refusing to pay the poll tax, Thoreau wrote “Resistance to Civil Government,” also known as “Civil Disobedience.” It explores the right and duty of individuals to refuse to cooperate with a government that acts against their conscience. In his case, he objected to the idea of his money going to finance the invasion of Mexico. Thoreau would also write Walden, where he praises living alone near the titular lake and questions many assumptions about the good life. Emerson had related views, writing on the need for self-reliance and, despite his involvement in some reformist groups, arguing that the individual was still the basis of change. 

This individualism extended to the spiritual and epistemological realms as well. Emerson argued that individual intuition and revelation were the answer to both religious skepticism and modern calls for a more empirical approach to religion, as exemplified in the Unitarian movement. This manifested in many forms for the thinkers in this school. 

Emerson, who was both the leading thinker of the school and a consistent objector to the idea he was in it, thought the movement was running out of steam by 1850. The journal The Dial, which was edited by Emerson and came to be the primary publisher for many Transcendentalist writers, shut down in 1844. Later revivals featured different subject matter. While the lack of a grand philosophical theory probably limited the long-term survival of the school, its ideas continue to inspire thinkers from the existentialists- especially Martin Buber, to those looking for modern takes on Hinduism.

Logical positivism

The last school on this list is the most recent. Perhaps better described as a movement within analytic philosophy, logical positivism managed to attract some of the world’s most notable modern philosophers. Spearheaded by “The Vienna Circle,” it would attract names like Bertrand Russell, A.J. Ayer, and Ludwig Wittgenstein.

Logical positivism’s project can be best described as an attempt to bring the idea of verificationism — the idea that a statement is only true if it is a tautology or if it is empirically verifiable — to philosophy. This idea, often associated with Rudolf Carnap, leaves metaphysics, ethics, and aesthetics meaningless. It also raises serious questions about what counts as science. 

Wittgenstein would attempt to solve nearly all philosophical problems by solving semantic problems. His book that claimed to do that, Tractatus, was celebrated in the Vienna Circle, even if they didn’t fully agree with it. Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead attempted to reduce all mathematics to logic in Principia Mathematica — part of the larger goal of breaking down the world into quantified units of logical meaning. 

Unfortunately, logical positivism ended up a dead end. After World War II, many of its key goals had yet to be reached, and a new generation of philosophers was taking aim at the work they had done. Former supporters and fellow travelers like Wittgenstein began to change their minds. Wittgenstein’s second and final philosophy book is a 180-degree turn from Tractatus. Bertrand Russell questioned whether Principia Mathematica would endure as a useful work and lamented that it was still too steeped in Indo-European language. Philosopher A.J. Ayer, an early English-speaking supporter of logical positivism, later said that “nearly all of it was false.” Nevertheless, the school was very important for a brief time and influenced a great deal of analytic philosophy. 

If nothing else, logical positivism’s story proves that philosophers can admit when they are wrong. 

This article 5 schools of philosophy that died out is featured on Big Think.

Thomas Aquinas is one of the most famous theologians and philosophers in history. His mammoth work, Summa Theologica, weighed in at nearly two million words and it came to define Christian theology and ethics.

Aquinas devoted an entire section of this book to the topic of virginity, arguing that it was even better than marriage and that celibacy was one of the greatest virtues. His Italian family, so desperate for little brother Thomas to have sex, devised a plan to lock the one-day saint in a tower with a prostitute. In an outraged reply, Aquinas lifted aloft a fire-lit torch and chased the woman around the room. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Aquinas died a virgin.

His thoughts on sex beg the question: Why has virginity, or chastity, been such a holy virtue? Conversely, why was sex viewed as bad, and can we find a philosophy of promiscuity?

Logos and eros

Sex is fun. A lot of people like sex. When you have an orgasm, you experience an intense rush of dopamine, oxytocin, and endorphins. Sex is often represented as the ultimate worldly pleasure. It’s a physiological explosion of gratification that overwhelms the mind with one simple idea and one idea alone: This is amazing. It pushes out all other thoughts and all other mental processes to focus on a delightful, carnal moment. In the sweaty, panting, passionate thrill of sex, humans are at their most animalistic. They abandon their higher faculties and revel in the base.

As the late Robin Williams put it, “See, the problem is that God gives men a brain and a penis, and only enough blood to run one at a time.” If you were a medieval, Christian saint-to-be, this poses a bit of a problem. The early Church fathers were the heirs of Plato, and, like the Platonists, they believed the physical world of sensation was to be spurned. Material concerns and earthly pleasures were distractions — little more than titillating baubles to tempt you from the path. But what path was that?

For Plato, it was logos, which is rational meditation. For the Christian Church, the mark of a good, virtuous life was contemplation and prayer. It was about faith. The problem? When you’re fornicating, you’re rarely thinking of God. As Aquinas puts it, “The end which renders virginity praiseworthy is that one may have leisure for Divine things.” In Question 152, titled “Virginity,” Aquinas compares virgins to martyrs. He observes that both groups surrender their bodies — and forego bodily pleasure — for the supreme goal of cleaving to God.

Sex is bad, then, because it reduces our higher faculties and indulges our animalistic impulses. The promiscuous person, for Aquinas, is bad not because sex is bad, but because it debases them.

Pleasure like no other

Today, our sexual laws and ethics are less defined by religious beliefs. We also are less likely to care for and lionize the “rational mind” as much as Plato or Aquinas did. In a post-war, post-modern world, reason has no privileged position over emotions, intuition, or other ways of knowing.

So, in the wake of the sexual revolution, sex experienced a rebranding. It was no longer about procreation, or about having (or needing) any romantic or loving significance, at all. From the 1960s onward, sex could be seen as a pleasure like no other, more analogous to a fine dining experience. Sex is enjoyable, no doubt, but it’s no more a “sin” than eating a steak or drinking an aged wine. As the philosopher David Benatar puts it, “condemning sexual promiscuity would be as ridiculous as condemning “‘casual gastronomy,’ ‘eating around,’ or ‘culinary promiscuity’.”

For Benatar, there is an inconsistency in logic here. He argues that if sex is a pleasure no different in kind to food or going to the theater, then why do we still view rape as such a terrible crime? Rape often gets similar prison sentences to murder. However, if we view sex like any other pleasure — like eating — why do we view it as such an evil? Benatar puts it like this, “Raping somebody for whom sex has as little significance … as eating a tomato, would be like forcing somebody to eat a tomato.”

Rape is evil. It’s justly seen as one of the worst crimes humans can commit. The fact that most societies see this as true is, for Benatar, a sign we view sex as more than “just another pleasure.”

The problems with sex

The question underpinning an acceptance of sexual promiscuity boils down to how significantly you classify the act of sex. We do not have to accept Aquinas’ position to appreciate Benatar’s: Sex is different from other pleasures like food or a movie.

There are two problems when we talk about sex and sexual ethics. The first is that there are many types of sex: Sometimes it’s for love, sometimes it’s for pleasure, and sometimes it can be deliberately (and unromantically) for procreation. Sometimes it’s all three. Other everyday pleasures are not so complex and so any attempt to philosophize about sex will first have to wade through a lot of categorical work.

The second problem is cultural. There is no uniform consensus about sex or sexual behavior. The glutton and hedonist are far more socially accepted than the slut or the libertine (not to mention how disproportionately negative these are for women compared to men). There is a far broader scale of acceptability when it comes to sex than almost any other type of pleasure.

The philosophy of sex is a new and unestablished discipline. As such, it’s going through a kind of recalibration period. For centuries, it was considered either a foregone conclusion or just plain uninteresting. Today, it’s neither. There are a lot of questions for philosophers to grapple with.

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The best kind of science fiction is philosophy. Yes, lasers and teleporters are cool, but science fiction asks big questions. It imagines alternate worlds and exaggerated scenarios. It presents you with “What would life be like” thought experiments. The Matrix is about knowledge and truth, and Star Trek asks how we should form a perfect society. Gattaca considers reproductive ethics, and Starship Troopers is about just war theory. Isaac Asimov‘s rules for robots are more important than ever. Science fiction, when it’s done well, stays in your head for a long time.

One of the most popular subgenres of science fiction features apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic worlds. The Walking Dead ran for 11 seasons, and The Hunger Games has four movies. World War Z sold 15 million copies worldwide, and Station Eleven has won numerous awards. Here, we examine the deeper, philosophical question behind common apocalyptic ideas.

Who do we save?

When Worlds Collide is about a cosmic catastrophe, and the people of Earth plan for their imminent extinction. A rogue star has been spotted, and it’s set to destroy our planet. Similar storylines are also found in Deep Impact, 2012, and The Mist. In each case, humanity is left with only enough resources to save a small portion of the entire race. Who, then, do we save?

According to Immanuel Kant, all rational agents have the same right to life and free choice as anyone else. No one is to be treated as a means to an end but as valuable in themselves. For Kant, then, a lottery system (as in Deep Impact) would likely be the best. For utilitarians, we should save the ones who will provide future humanity with the best outcomes: the doctors, engineers, and the most accomplished. In reality, the world is almost certainly Nietzschean. The Übermensch of our time — the generals and government officials — will be first on the spaceships. It’s not even a secret that if there were a nuclear war, it’s the politicians who would get first place in the vaults and bunkers.

How shall we rebuild society?

Post-apocalyptic fiction almost always features a portion of society rebuilding and reconstructing a world from the dusty and deserted remnants. The Walking Dead and Fallout feature pockets of very different gangs or tribes that reestablish drastically different communities. But one of the bestselling examples of this is The Stand, where post-apocalyptic America is divided into the goodies in Nebraska and the baddies in Las Vegas. These scenarios raise a powerful question: How would we build society if we could start from scratch? It’s something that would make a good podcast.

This echoes a well-known thought experiment from John Rawls known as the “original position.” Essentially, it asks us to imagine that you were transported to a new society, but you didn’t know at all what class, age, or sex you would be or how much wealth you would have. How would you engineer the structures and prejudices of that society to maximize your chances of being happy and fulfilled? What post-apocalyptic world would be fairest to everyone?

To what extent should we try to control nature?

One of the defining characteristics of Homo sapiens’ success is our ability to control, tame, or push back against nature. We cut and burned down forests, we dammed rivers to stop floods, and we domesticated livestock. And yet, a lot of science fiction is based on scenarios where humans have gone too far, resulting in genetically engineered monstrosities or climate catastrophe. All of which raises the question: To what extent should we try to control nature?

It is naïve to assume we shouldn’t control nature at all. Antibiotics, air conditioning, and structural engineering all involve us manipulating the natural order of things. They involve killing and destroying. Francis Bacon and René Descartes saw controlling nature as essential to civilization. It was about the rational controlling the irrational; it was order from chaos. When the first humans cut down a clearing in the forest to build homes, this was no doubt true. But there comes a tipping point: a point when damaging nature also damages humanity. Apocalyptic fiction is a great tool to examine when and where that point comes.

What matters when you’re the last person alive?

28 Days Later opens with a lonely, confused man wandering the empty streets of London. Here is a man left alone in one of the busiest cities in the world. Oryx and Crake, I Am Legend, and Wall-E all feature characters fending for themselves in a barren, eerily silent world. They all raise an existentially important question: Does anything matter more than our relationships?

At first glance, a post-apocalyptic world seems pretty fun. No bosses, no queues, and no financial worries. You can drive the fastest cars, live in the biggest mansions, and binge on all the Dom Pérignon you want. But after that, what? What do you do?

One of the most powerful stories to explore this idea is Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. This features a father and son wandering a desolate, cold landscape. They’re not alone; there are bandits and horrors, but all that matters is the two of them and the love they have for each other. When the world is on fire, and there’s both everything and nothing to do, what matters most? It’s the people you love.

When real-life adventurer Christopher McCandless died alone in an abandoned bus in Alaska, his journal contained the line, “Happiness is only real when shared.” Without other people, what is the point of anything?

This article Apocalypse philosophy: What science fiction teaches us about existence is featured on Big Think.

China is the cradle of the world’s most ancient continuous civilization. Boasting over 4,000 years of documented history, Chinese thought and philosophy offer a wealth of insights. Luckily for us, as in Western philosophy, a few key texts have exerted influence over the rest. Here, we spotlight five texts that have shaped Chinese thought, and more recently gained an international audience.

I Ching — Traditional 

The I Ching, also known as The Book of Changes, dates back to the 10th century BCE. The author is unknown. However, some traditions name Fu Xi as the author of the first section and the Duke of Zhou as the author of the second. The author of the commentaries known as the Ten Wings is traditionally listed as Confucius.

Much of the I Ching is oriented toward divination. In traditional practices, diviners used a specific method involving yarrow stalks, where a series of selections and divisions of the stalks led to the determination of either a broken or unbroken line; a broken line signifies yin, while an unbroken line represents yang. Through this ritual, a sequence of six lines is generated, forming a hexagram. With 64 possible hexagrams in total, each conveys a distinct meaning and insight. (In contemporary practices, coin flips have become a more common alternative to the yarrow stalks for generating these lines.) The commentaries within the book posit that these hexagrams mirror the shifts in the cosmological cycles of the Universe.

It may seem strange to include a book on divination on a list of the most influential works in philosophy, but Chinese intellectuals have long considered the I Ching to be an important text. Han Dynasty scholars tried to sync their system of government to the cosmological system outlined in the text. Confucius referred to his copy so often it required regular upkeep. Zhu Xi argued that it could be used to give depth to moral questions that Confucian ethics could then answer. Its importance in political philosophy only ended with the 1911 revolution, which overthrew the dynastic system of government. 

Its influence in the West is perhaps more interesting. The German mathematician and philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz argued it proved the universality of binary number systems and God’s existence. The German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel disagreed with him and argued against binary systems being able to express much of anything. More recently, the Danish physicist Niels Bohr borrowed from it when devising the principle of complementarity in quantum mechanics. 

Tao Te Ching — Laozi

The Tao Te Ching is a foundational text in Taoism. It is traditionally credited to the semi-legendary Laozi. However, modern scholars increasingly believe it compiles existing ideas from early Taoism into a single text. A series of short, often seemingly paradoxical statements, it is an introduction to the Tao and a system of virtues. 

While the Tao that can be spoken (or written) about is not the true Tao, I will still attempt to explain what the book describes here. The Tao is the fundamental nature underpinning all of reality. As Laozi puts it:

“Since before time and space were, the Tao is. It is beyond is and is not. How do I know this is true? I look inside myself and see.” 

Laozi repeatedly praises emptiness as the source of creative power. This gives some meaning to his tendency to describe the Tao by what it is not. The book’s first half explores Tao, while the second focuses more on virtue. Both sections contain advice for rulers of ancient Chinese states. 

Highly poetic, the text can be difficult to decipher and seems to purposefully encourage differing interpretations and understandings. Several points are generally agreed upon, however. Laozi praises the virtue of naturalness and encourages the reader to live in harmony with Tao. He also praises “Wu-Wei,” often translated as “effortless action.” At the individual level, it can be considered “not-forcing” and allows a person to understand the world more deeply.

China produced many schools of thought and Taoism is grouped with Buddhism and Confucianism as the three most influential. The key Taoist works were included on official lists of “classics” to be studied by anyone hoping to become a government official in imperial China. This was the case even when the other two schools were enjoying much more favor among the literati. As a religion, it boasts millions of self-identifying followers and nearly a billion more who practice some elements of the religion.

Beyond its influence on Taoism and other Chinese philosophical movements, it has affected Western thought. Most interestingly, anarchists and libertarians of all colors admire the book. Murray Rothbard called Laozi the first libertarian. Ursula Le Guin, a fan of left-wing anarchist thought, produced a new edition of the text and incorporated its ideas into her utopian fiction. Leo Tolstoy, an anarchist pacifist, also enjoyed Laozi’s work and expanded on it. 

The Art of War — Sun Tzu

The Art of War is a treatise on military strategy attributed to the Chinese military general Sun Tzu. While his existence is still debated, he is reported to have been a general during the Spring and Autumn period, which lasted from about 770 to 481 BCE. The book attributed to him is undeniably one of the most important military texts ever composed. 

The 13 chapters of the book cover different areas of military strategy, including preparing for battle, attacking, using spies, and the specific use cases of fire in combat. Of course, not every tidbit in the text is purely military strategy. Many of its ideas are applicable in other fields. For example, one of the most widely referenced bits is:

“The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.”

This has obvious applications in many other areas of life, from business to sports. The Taoist influence on Sun Tzu is highly evident here: He often uses Laozi’s style and seems to imply that a great general will have much in common with a well-practiced Taoist. 

In addition to being a widely studied classic and a test subject for those taking military service tests in imperial China, the book is still considered a primer on strategic thought. Despite its age, it continues to influence modern warfare. American General Douglas McArthur kept a copy on his desk. General Võ Nguyên Giáp of the People’s Army of Vietnam applied its teachings in his victories over the French and Americans. The book is also allegedly a favorite of intelligence agents.

Analects — Confucius 

Confucius is by far the most important philosopher in Chinese history and, by extension, one of the most influential philosophers in world history. Analects is a collection of his sayings and teachings gathered by his students, providing one of the best looks at the teaching style and wisdom of one of the greatest minds in the history of philosophy.  

Like the Tao Te Ching, Analects consists of many short passages. Famously, many begin with the phrase “Confucius said” or “The master said,” depending on the translation. Much like Laozi’s work, Analects does not entirely consist of direct statements on what Confucius thinks is right or wrong but often includes short stories giving insights into his system of thought. For example, one section on the value of human life is phrased:

“The stable being burned down, when he (Confucius) was at court, on his return he said, ‘Has any man been hurt?’ He did not ask about the horses.”

His system of ethics centers around building up virtue (Ren) and becoming a “superior person” (Junzi). (Big Think has covered these ideas before.)

The influence of Confucius’ teachings cannot be overstated. While he claimed to be promoting existing ideas, the ideas he advanced eventually became canon. Anyone hoping to get a government job had to pass a civil service exam, an idea he refined, centered around his teachings and other related texts. Each book on this list was included at some point or another. Confucian thought, often viewed as a religious system named “Confucianism,” eventually became China’s leading system of thought. Some commentators have gone so far as to suggest that even modern Chinese communism is best viewed as Confucian thought with a red coat of paint.

In the West, his ideas first arrived during the early years of the Enlightenment. Both Voltaire and Leibniz were fans of his work. Voltaire considered his ideas on meritocratic government particularly revolutionary. The idea that civil servants should have to pass civics tests before taking office existed before Confucian thought arrived in Europe, but modern civil service systems were often directly inspired by the Chinese system.

Mencius — Mencius

The self-titled work of the second greatest Confucian thinker, Mencius — also known as Mengzi — was the Plato to Confucius’ Socrates. Born roughly a century after Confucius’ death, Mengzi was raised by his widowed mother. Her efforts to provide him with the environment needed to be a great scholar made her noteworthy among women in ancient China. 

In his book, commonly called Mencius, he expands on the ideas of Confucius and introduces new concepts that became influential in their own right. Unlike the short, choppy nature of the Analects, Mencius’ work often takes the form of dialogues in which ideas are debated and explained.

He introduced the idea that human nature is good to Confucian thought. However, he maintained that we are all born with these “sprouts” of virtue that must be cultivated through a proper environment and education to be fully actualized. These sprouts correspond to what we might call the cardinal virtues of his system: benevolence (rén), righteousness (yì), wisdom (zhì), and propriety (lĭ). For example, while all people have an innate sense of compassion, only through proper education, reflection, and a proper environment will a person develop the virtue of benevolence. In this way, education is used to express innate traits. As he puts it:

“He who exerts his mind to the utmost knows his nature.”

In this, we can see an interesting overlap between the Confucian ideal of self-development through education and the Taoist notion of returning to the original self. Mengzi also argued it was important to take a critical stance on every text, going so far as to argue:

“It would be better not to have the books than to believe everything in them.”

While Confucius could not impact policy after leaving office and taking up philosophy, Mencius is thought to have had some influence. Mencius’ views on Confucius would become something akin to the gospel.

When Neo-Confucianism developed in the Song Dynasty, his ideas would be codified and placed alongside the works of Confucius as classics. However, Western translators initially dismissed his works in favor of the original works of Confucius, limiting his impact elsewhere. Today, with the revival of Confucian thought, his ideas on virtue ethics are being reconsidered, especially as an alternative to Aristotle. His ideas on moral development are also being reconsidered.

This article 5 philosophy books that shaped Chinese thought is featured on Big Think.

You will die. No matter how powerful you are, how hard you pray, or how sophisticated nanotechnology becomes, you will die. The vast majority of people can see their death approaching. We have a lot of time to think about it. Yet, death remains a great mystery — the veil behind which no one can peek.

Given how terrifying and unknown death is, it’s no wonder we talk about it a lot. It’s not too ridiculous to suppose that almost all the world’s religions are, to some degree, a response to death. Most of our philosophies are, too. In 2020, Big Think interviewed some big names in academia. They gave us their answers to the “What happens after we die?” question.

Here, we explore some of their responses.

Existential uncertainty

Bertrand Russell, an atheist, was once asked what he would say if, when he died, he came face to face with God. Russell replied, “[I would say] ‘Sir, why did you not give me better evidence?’”

If you’re coming at religion from a scientist’s mindset, there’s not much to say. There’s really no evidence either way. We have neither verifiable testimony nor falsifiable claims. When you’re entirely stuck on a physical plane, you cannot say much about the metaphysical one. As Sam Harris says, “I don’t know what happens after the physical brain dies…I don’t think anyone does know.”

The only fact we do know is that we will die. And it’s this fact that, for Bill Nye, is so important. Because we do not know what happens after death, and because we’re faced with the possibility it might be nothing, we turn to life with a kind of vital energy. Death’s approach gives impetus to our mortal existence. As Nye puts it, “It’s what makes us go. And it’s what makes you try to accomplish things … All of [our decisions] are driven by the limited length of life we have.”

For Nye, Rob Bell, and Michael Shermer, life after death is a mystery, but with that comes an existential rush to get things done. It lets you appreciate the time you have more.

Time is a landscape

Astronomer Michelle Thaller uses Einstein to give us a screenplay that’s just waiting for Christopher Nolan. For Thaller, you are already dead. At least, you’re dead from a certain point of view. As she puts it, “Einstein believed that you, right now, had been dead for trillions of years; that you haven’t been born yet; that everything that’s happened to you, if you could get the right perspective on the universe, you could see all at once.”

Although it’s old news to anyone inside physics departments, time isn’t linear. It’s not even a thing, really. Time is all about your location and the speed of light. If you alter those two variables, you can look at the past and see the future. Einstein believed that space-time was a substance created at the Big Bang, and every point along that continuum is just as real as the “present.” You, reading this, happen to exist on one point on that surface. But that’s no more real than any other.

So, from one point of view, you’re already dead. You haven’t been born. Or you have to relive this minute over and over and over again like some Nietzschean nightmare.

Life is not biology

The third category is either techno-optimism or techno-dystopia, depending on your preferences. This idea might sound like science fiction: Imagine uploading yourself to the immortal cloud (and hoping no unfortunate intern accidentally unplugs the power supply).

For theoretical physicist Michio Kaku, in the near future, “Everything known about you can be digitized.” Your memories, your personality, your quirks, and your entire neural network can be uploaded or saved somewhere forever. Your body will age, your organs will stop working, and your body will break down. But in this new digital afterlife, you can talk with your descendants. You can live digitally.

There are a lot of problems with this. There are just as many unknowns as death itself. We still don’t know what consciousness is, let alone if we can reproduce it. What’s more, as the French philosopher Merleau-Ponty knew, our bodies are not fleshy tools to dispose of at will. Our existence is embodied. Our entire being exists only in a physical body. It’s hard to imagine what Kaku’s immortality would look like. As Bill Nye asks, “Do you want to be stuck in an Apple product the rest of your life, or do you want to be stuck in a Microsoft product? It’s a tough call.”

I’m not sure it’s that tough, Bill. I’ll take Thaller’s version of Groundhog Day, I think.

This article We asked Big Thinkers: “Is there life after death?” Here’s what they said. is featured on Big Think.

We live in stark times. Across the world, nations are colored by intensifying rancor and hostility. A sharp tableau of deepening division and civic unrest rises against a backdrop of mounting political authoritarianism. Even long-standing democracies are proving vulnerable to threat or dissolution. Political, racial, ethnic, religious, and sectarian conflicts wage again or anew, while global arms traders, regional drug cartels, and every platform for local and international organized crime continue to profit. War refugees, climate migrants, and weary travelers of all stripes face outright persecution and hidden indignities. In many places, the poor grow poorer, while indigenous peoples experience continued suppression and denigration, if not protracted extermination. Tribal lands are newly stolen, occupied, or spoiled; ancient rites are desecrated and lifeways dishonored; and ancestors are disrespected or forgotten — all while our planet’s life-giving forests burn unmitigated and its rivers and oceans grow steadily more toxic. Traumatized persons haunt traumatized landscapes.

Yet, however dire, these realities need not be read as signs of certain apocalypse. We belong to a living planetary system — a living, thriving cosmos — that is self-organizing and self-healing. Humans are not apart from nature; we are of nature. Regardless of humanity’s current condition, we are never truly separate or even solely individual; we are members of a radical, co-evolving whole. Pearls in Indra’s net, we belong to and arise from the “great distributive lattice,” the elegant cosmic web of causal interdependence.

Consider these things: the impossibly delicate watermeal, a flowering aquatic plant smaller than a grain of rice, is rootless and free floating. Yet, it can locate and connect with just one or even thousands of its own kind, as well as with tiny plants of other species, to form life-sustaining mats across the surface of a placid duck pond. And this: the simple, humble mushroom, which sends its delicate fibers (mycelia) deep into the ground in a widely arcing radius. By casting a net from these tiny probing filaments, the fungus links itself to the roots of nearby plants, trees, and other fungi — and in the process connects each to the other. This organic “internet” produces a symbiotic mechanism for communication, water location, nutrient exchange, and mutual defense against infection, infestation, and disease. 

The presence of fungal mycelia allows nearby trees to communicate across distances, alerting other trees, even those of different species, to the presence of invading insects, thereby signaling the production of biochemical repellent defenses. Almost magically, trees use mycelia to transfer essential nitrogen, carbon, and phosphorous, sustaining the life and health of not only those trees but the entire local ecosystem of plants, insects, animals, and even humans.

Perhaps more astonishingly, fungal mycelia have proven to be cheap, abundant, and powerful natural remediators of many types of toxins left behind in soil and wastewater: heavy metals, petroleum fuels, pesticides, herbicides, pharmaceuticals, personal care products, dyes, and even plastics. Fungal mycelia naturally break down offending pollutants, creating cleaner, safer, healthier land and water.

If a life-form the size of a pinhead (the watermeal) or one seemingly as simple as a mushroom can reach out to other species to do any or all of these things — self-organize, connect, communicate, assist, protect, defend, heal, and restore — why couldn’t humans? After all, we too belong to nature. Perhaps each of these qualities (and many more) are imbued in us — inbuilt characteristics of what it means to be alive on this particular planet, orbiting this particular star, in this particular galaxy. Perhaps intelligent interdependence is our natural, even sacred, endowment, one we can lean into, enhance, and strengthen in service of our own species, and all others.

After all, the refusal to honor our interdependence and enact healthy and sustained relations have caused no end of suffering. If the underlying challenge of climate change (or any other wicked or systemic social problem) can be traced to human disrelation — a state of being out of accordance with nature, ourselves, and other humans — then I propose it to be a fundamentally spiritual problem, as much as an environmental, scientific, technological, cultural, psychological, economic, or historical one. 

To construct an adequate or sufficiently innovative response to the challenge, we must think holistically. It is time to bridge East and West, to marry the wisdom of our ancient and longstanding spiritual traditions to the revelations of contemporary science. As we bring the power of scientific insight to bear on our understanding of modern social ills, we may amplify our capacity to integrate that information with the rich awakening practices of consciousness offered by our world’s mystical traditions. In this way, we may awaken to and further develop our most intrinsic biological gifts: the powers to self-organize, connect, communicate, assist, protect, defend, heal, and restore.

This article What humanity can learn from the “internet” of mushrooms is featured on Big Think.

Martin Heidegger was a Nazi. He was not a Nazi in the “I dislike his views” kind of way; he was a card-carrying and loyal member of the German National Socialist Party. You can find highly antisemitic statements in the notebooks he kept from 1930 to 1940. And yet, Heidegger is still considered one of the most significant continental philosophers of the 20th century. Jean-Paul Sartre, who was vehemently anti-Nazi, idolized Heidegger’s ideas. Sartre’s magnum opus, Being and Nothingness, is an homage to Heidegger’s Being and Time. Sartre, a member of the Paris resistance, loved Heidegger: a Nazi. Was he wrong to do so?

The problem is not limited to Heidegger. Aristotle was racist and sexist, and he defended slavery. David Hume argued that black people are naturally inferior to whites. Gottlob Frege made antisemitic comments, and Wittgenstein was unashamedly forthright in his sexist ones. Recently, it was Kant’s turn to be exposed. It’s unsurprising, given that the German once wrote, “Humanity has achieved its greatest perfection in the white race.” In various essays, Kant repeats and returns to various distasteful and unarguably racist views.

That’s six of the biggest names in philosophy, each with more than enough evidence with which to hang them. If we look only a little bit deeper, Plato (sexist), René Descartes (tortured animals), John Locke (invested in the slave trade), Jean-Jacques Rousseau (also sexist), Voltaire (slavery again), G.W.F. Hegel (racist), Thomas Jefferson (slavery and racism), and Friedrich Nietzsche (antisemitic) all have a Halloween party’s worth of skeletons in their closet.

So, how are we to go on doing philosophy when the entire syllabus has been redacted or blacklisted? Can we “cancel” a person who died two centuries years ago? Should we?

Conceptual isolation

Michael B. Gill is a philosopher at Edinburgh University, a university grappling with “What to do about Hume?” Gill has limited sympathy for canceling important philosophers. But that doesn’t mean he thinks the answer is to ignore the problematic things those philosophers said. Instead, Gill argues for something called conceptual isolation. Conceptual isolation is where “Philosophers’ racist views may not infect all their philosophical conclusions.” When we talk about the history of science, it seems ridiculous to discount the findings of Galileo, Newton, or Euler, because they, too, had problematic prejudices. We treat science without the scientists. Why not do the same with philosophers?

Let’s take Hume as an example. Hume’s critique of causality, religion, and ethics are some of the most persuasive, well-argued philosophical arguments, and we still grapple with them today. As Gill argues, they are “free of the infection of Hume’s anti-black racism,” as much as “astronomy, physics, and mathematics.” Philosophy, like these other disciplines, concerns arguments and reason. So, at least sometimes, it’s fair to deal only with the ideas and not the person.

None of this is to ignore, downplay, or hide various philosophers’ prejudices. Gill talks about the “division of labor” within academia. One scholar can write about Hume’s causation while another can write about his racism. One philosopher can spend a lifetime defending Aristotelian virtue ethics, while another can showcase the darker side of ancient Greek philosophy. Doing philosophy doesn’t excuse the philosopher, and there’s more than enough philosophy to go around.

When the infection spreads

Of course, the great thing about philosophy is that it is not solely concerned with a priori truths, logical axioms, or rational conclusions. It’s about politics and ethics. It’s about what it means to be a human being. Heidegger’s work is all about the everyday human experience, for example. And when you’re dealing with these kinds of things, it’s not so easy to ringfence a philosopher’s opinion elsewhere in their works. We can look at two examples: John Locke and Immanuel Kant.

Locke wrote extensively about property rights. For Locke, when you “mix your labor” (i.e., cultivate) with some land, it becomes a part of you. Therefore, you have a right to that land. Locke’s philosophy is about land ownership, property rights, and the rule of law. In short, it’s a universalized version of 17th-century England. Here, though, we cannot disregard Locke’s racist views. If you believe, as he did, that non-Europeans are naturally inferior to white Europeans, when you encounter their views, you will be inclined to disregard them. So, when the native Americans failed to cultivate their land in the same way the British colonists did, Locke felt no compunction in saying, “Well, this land doesn’t belong to you.” Locke’s racism can’t be detached from his philosophy.

So, too, with Kant. Kant wrote extensively about cosmopolitanism. He argued for a “brotherhood of nations” and a “federation of republics” based on respect, reason, and free trade. In this world, there would be no wars since everyone would soon realize the costs of war far outweigh the benefits. That all sounds great. That is until you consider his views on white superiority. When Kant argues Africans are born into manual labor and slavery, you wonder what place they take in his brotherhood of nations. When he claims that Europeans are intellectually and morally superior to all other races, you do wonder about who sits at the table of his “federation of republics.”

Warts and all

So, as always with philosophy, it’s complicated. Philosophy, as a discipline, straddles the divide between science and humanity. At times, it looks like abstract theory. At other times, it’s about the hearts and minds of everyday people. So, it’s hard to conclude either way about how far we should disregard a person’s prejudices (in fact, there are often good reasons to do so).

What we should not do is “cancel” any philosophy. We shouldn’t bowdlerize philosophers’ works or strike these important names from the curriculum. It’s likely impossible, anyway. Philosophy is rarely isolated to one name, and philosophers’ ideas will not stop with their death (or cancellation). Kantian ideas are everywhere. They have “infected” almost all continental philosophy since he wrote his great works. Much better, instead, to recognize the brilliant stuff while calling out the reprehensible. If philosophy is to carry on at all, as with almost all humanities, we have to look at thinkers, warts, and all.

This article “Kantcelling” philosophers: Should we study thinkers with problematic views? is featured on Big Think.

Trigger warnings on college campuses have been controversial since they became more common and attracted public attention in the mid-2010s. Proponents argue that these statements, intended to help individuals prepare for or avoid potentially traumatizing content, make classrooms safe for students. Critics contend that they stifle free speech, coddle students, and backfire by exacerbating negative reactions.

Students are also divided on them. “It really disrupts the flow,” one anonymous medical student expressed to researchers as part of a qualitative study published last year. “People start thinking; ‘Oh, do I need to be upset about this?'”

“I think it benefits people who do not know that things are upsetting,” another said. “It might actually give them insight to their feelings and then signposting them to support services.”

Data supports the critics

Scientists have now had time to examine trigger warnings through controlled experiments, and their findings broadly support critics’ points. Last month, a trio of psychologists affiliated with Flinders University and Harvard University published a meta-analysis aggregating all the recent scientific papers on the topic to answer four questions:

“First, do trigger warnings change emotional reactions in response to material? Second, do trigger warnings increase the avoidance of warned-of material? Third, do trigger warnings have any effects on anticipatory emotions before seeing material (e.g., anxiety)? And fourth, do trigger warnings change educational outcomes (i.e., the comprehension of warned-of material)?”

The reviewers turned up 12 studies published since 2018 that attempted to answer those queries. In almost all of them, experimenters exposed subjects to photographs, videos, or written passages. Some participants were given a content warning beforehand, while others were not.

When the studies’ results were pooled together, the researchers found that trigger warnings had no effect on subjects’ emotional responses to the material, did not make them likelier to avoid it, and had little to no effect on participants’ comprehension. They did, however, slightly increase subjects’ anxiety prior to being exposed to the material.

Taken together, the results indicate that trigger warnings are “fruitless,” the researchers wrote. “Trigger warnings typically warn people about the distressing reactions they may have but do not explain how to reduce these reactions,” they added.

A trigger warning for trigger warnings

In a systematic review published late last year, a team of Australian scientists reached similar conclusions after scrutinizing the available research. “In our review of 20 peer-reviewed studies, published between 2010 and 2020, we found that trigger warnings can inflame existing stressors and exacerbate maladaptive behaviors, both of which can undermine students’ autonomy and their ability to cope with potential distress,” they wrote.

Expressing some nuance, the authors noted that trigger warnings can “be a valuable tool for assisting with the management and reduction of trauma exposure” for students with a history of particularly scarring experiences. At the same time, however, students should be taught skills to boost their mental resilience and to cope with potentially traumatic content.

“Relying solely on trigger warnings, especially as a disingenuous gesture of trauma awareness, does more harm than good,” they wrote, echoing a key gripe from the other research team.

Despite their apparent ineffectiveness, trigger warnings appear to be here to stay in higher education. At least half of professors reported using them in an NPR survey conducted in 2016, the latest year for which such data is available. And students increasingly seem to expect them. According to a 2022 survey conducted in the UK, 86% of undergraduates support their use, up from 68% in 2016.

This article Harvard study shows that trigger warnings are fruitless and anxiety-inducing is featured on Big Think.

For Julian Huxley, science was spiritual. The biologist, brother of the novelist Aldous Huxley and grandson of “Darwin’s Bulldog” Thomas Henry Huxley, thought evolutionary ideas hinted at humanity’s destiny: to safeguard the future of life on Earth and, by learning more about ourselves and the universe, expand the possibilities of humanity’s potential. 

Rejecting the idea of the supernatural gave him enormous “spiritual relief,” he wrote in his 1927 book Religion Without Revelation. Understanding reality scientifically was a religious endeavor. Part of what it meant to be spiritual, he wrote, was:

the contemplation of our own selves and human nature, the miracle of its existence as a product of natural evolution, the amazing fact that a man is a mere portion of the common and universal substance of the world, but so organized as to be able to know truth, will the control of nature, aspire to goodness, and experience unutterable beauty.

Scientists today are finding Huxley was on to something. In a new paper, researchers found that, for some people, scientific ideas stir spiritual feelings of wonder and connection, which, they say, can offer psychological benefits similar to religious spirituality, like an increased sense of well-being and life satisfaction. And, on top of that, when scientific ideas inform people’s sense of spirituality, they come away with a better understanding of science. “Although science and religion differ in many ways,” the researchers write, their findings across three studies indicate that those human enterprises “share a capacity for spirituality through feelings of awe, coherence, and meaning in life.”

Spirituality of science reflects an attitude toward science not captured by belief or interest in science.

Jesse Preston, a psychologist at the University of Warwick, where she studies the nature of belief and what makes beliefs meaningful, led the research alongside a couple colleagues. What motivated the study, the researchers write, was their sense that psychologists were overlooking the spiritual side of science, focusing more on scientific understanding and trust in science. Of course, scientists have long attested to the cosmic feelings of significance science can spark in their lives. Einstein thought the highest religious feeling arises from recognizing the lawful harmony of the world. Preston and her colleagues offer a more contemporaryexample, from astronomer Carl Sagan: “When we recognize our place in an immensity of light years and in the passage of ages, when we grasp the intricacy, beauty and subtlety of life, then that soaring feeling, that sense of elation and humility combined, is surely spiritual.”

In their first study, the researchers introduced a scale to measure people’s levels of scientific spirituality. They had 500 participants, roughly the same amount of men and women in their mid-30s, answer 10 survey questions, on a scale of 1 to 7 (from strongly disagree to strongly agree) that gauge people’s degree of transcendent emotion, meaning, and connection through science. The resulting scale assesses the “spiritual relationship to science along three themes,” the researchers write—emotional elevation (“thinking about science brings me deep joy”), meaning (“there is an order to science that transcends human thinking”), and connection (“all things are connected through science”). 

The scale strongly correlated with other science attitudes the researchers measured, like “interest in science” and “belief in science.” But only the spirituality of science scale, the researchers found, showed positive relationships with feelings of awe and spirituality. “This divergence suggests that spirituality of science reflects a unique attitude toward science that is not captured by belief or interest in science,” they write, “but which is characterized by its unique associations with awe and spirituality.”

Their second study, involving a similarly sized batch of participants who identified as atheist or agnostic, assessed people’s levels of well-being and life satisfaction. The results, they write, “illustrate the important psychological benefits of using science as a source of spirituality, beyond just belief in science.” A third smaller study found that participants’ levels of scientific spirituality predicted correct responses to questions about scientific subjects such as black holes. The idea is that spirituality of science “may promote science learning through stronger engagement with the material,” the researchers write. 

“The majesty of grand scientific theories and their implications for understanding the nature of ourselves and the universe,” the researchers conclude, may be “particularly adept in eliciting the sense of coherence underlying spirituality.” 

Or, as Julian Huxley put it, finding “holiness in reality.”

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Carlos comes back from work and it’s late — so late that as he pulls his car into the drive he sees every room in the house is dark. His job is working him to the bone. He feels like he never sees his family anymore. Carlos bought his daughter a toy from her favorite TV show last week. She smiled. But later his wife tells him that his daughter hasn’t watched that show for months. Carlos feels like the important things in his life are slipping away.

Far away in another home, Jess is plucking gray hairs in the mirror. It’s become a ritual. As she’s squinting in the mirror, she sees herself. She doesn’t just look at herself. She sees herself. She sees a middle-aged woman with deeper wrinkles than yesterday and more gray hairs than she can pluck. She sighs. What’s the point? she thinks. We all get old one way or another. Jess plucks another hair.

There’s something familiar in both Carlos and Jess, and their stories will resonate with a lot of people. What connects Carlos and Jess, as well as almost all sages and scholars in history, is something called saṃvega: a Buddhist word for a disquieting emotion. It is a feeling most of us will have experienced at some point, but we might not have called it by that name. So, what does saṃvega mean?

Thus spoke Marx’s Godot

Saṃvega is hard to define but it pops up again and again in philosophical literature. It might be called angst, absurdity, ennui, dissatisfaction, alienation, or existential dread. Saṃvega is that sense of unease that comes on when you think everything is pointless. It’s when you feel like a fool — doing foolish things, in a foolish way — to a crowd that’s laughing at you. Saṃvega is when you sense that there’s something more to the Universe you’re not quite tapping into — as if you’re dancing around some deeper and more meaningful truth that’s always just out of reach.

Have you ever worked incredibly hard for a long time toward a goal only to find out that, once you’ve accomplished it, things feel a bit flat? That is saṃvega. Have you ever looked back at a stage in your life and thought, Wow, what a waste? That is saṃvega. Do you ever feel like everyone is just pretending and you’re just playing along? Saṃvega.

Saṃvega is a mountain with many sides. It is there when Karl Marx talks about the alienation of workers from their work. It is in Friedrich Nietzsche’s angry tirade against the social and moral norms of our time. You can find it in Samuel Beckett’s play about two men, idling away and prattling around, as they’re waiting for Godot. It is there in Jean-Paul Sartre’s ideas about bad faith, Albert Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus, Augustine’s City of God, and Siddhartha Gautama’s peek over the pleasure garden’s wall. Saṃvega is all about looking for something more.

The disease with many doctors

In Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich, the titular character exemplifies saṃvega. Ivan Ilyich is a man on his deathbed, with only pain and regrets for company. He looks back on a life of decorum and propriety, where every major step in his life was to look good and to meet expectations. Ivan has doctor after doctor come to visit him, each with a different remedy, and each offering a different hope.

Like Ivan, saṃvega is a disease with a great many remedies. These solutions or cures for saṃvega are known as pasada. Broadly, these pasadas fall into four categories:

Religious: As a Buddhist word, it should be no surprise Buddhism offers an answer. For Buddhists, saṃvega is not a bad thing. In fact, it’s the start of the road to wisdom. That feeling of dissatisfaction with the mortal, fleeting, and impermanent world is a hint. It’s a messenger of the spirit and its resolution comes in the Four Noble Truths. But it need not be Buddhism. All religions welcome and offer answers to saṃvega. If we’re never happy in the material world, perhaps true meaning lies elsewhere?

Existentialism: When Nietzsche took his iconoclastic sledgehammer to all the many values, norms, and traditions we chain ourselves to, he didn’t just walk smugly back into his hermitic cave. Instead, he argued we each need to reinvent our values. Only after we have destroyed the old, oppressive edifices can we rebuild a world as we want. For existentialists after Nietzsche, saṃvega acts as the creative destruction or existential nudge we need to create our own meaning and live a life according to what we want.

Absurdity: If you like your saṃvega French and heavy with cigarette smoke, Camus is your man. In his books, Camus unpacks the problem of saṃvega. Everything is pointless. Everyone dies. Nothing we do, say, or think will matter in the grand sweep of the Universe’s story. His solution? Mocking rebellion. When the Man gets you down, the best response is to laugh and get on with things. There’s no hope, no afterlife, and no meaning. But we can still have a laugh along the way.

Nihilism: Nihilists are those who not only experience saṃvega but breathe it in. Nihilists recognize the pointlessness of it all and give no value to anything whatsoever. They have no solutions to saṃvega. They will shrug and tell you to get over it. It is hard to imagine anyone, still alive, being an actual nihilist. Most people have something to live for.

Saṃvega is a great word because, as with a lot of philosophy, it gives a name to something a lot of people know. And the more you know, the better you are equipped to deal with it.

This article Saṃvega: The urgent realization that you need a more meaningful life is featured on Big Think.

Books possess a unique magic: With only ink and paper, they can communicate thoughts from a person who is separated from you by thousands of years and unfathomable cultural space. For some particularly original thinkers, this has allowed mere fragments of text to influence the course of human thought for thousands of years. The following seven influential philosophy books have helped shape the intellectual history of the Western world and, more recently, the entire planet.

Dialogue of Pessimism — Unknown author

Ancient Greece is the culture most associated with philosophy. However, it is wrong to think that nobody else studied it. Plato himself wrote about Egypt’s long philosophical history, for example. Unfortunately, however, there is precious little surviving philosophy that originated across the rest of the Mediterranean and Mesopotamian worlds. 

One of the surviving texts is the Dialogue of Pessimism. It exists in two similar forms: one Assyrian and one Babylonian. While parts of both are fragmentary, it is the best-preserved example of Mesopotamian “wisdom texts.” Framed as a dialogue between two characters, an Aristocrat and his Slave, the text consists of the Aristocrat proposing ideas for things to do to the Slave, who provides good reasons for them. The Aristocrat then proposes opposing ideas, yet the Slave is just as easily able to defend those. The last few lines reflect on the absurdity of life. Many interpretations of this exist. Some suggest it is a precursor to modern existentialist thought, particularly that of Camus or Søren Kierkegaard. It is easy to see that from the final lines of the text: 

“Slave, listen to me!
Here I am, master, here I am! 
What then is good? To have my neck and yours broken, or to be thrown into the river, is that good? 
Who is so tall as to ascend to heaven? Who is so broad as to encompass the entire world? 
 O well, slave! I will kill you and send you first! 
 Yes, but my master would certainly not survive me for three days!”

Babylonian thought is so foundational that its influence is often overlooked. We still use Babylonian units to measure time. Their astronomers laid the foundations for both modern astronomy and science itself. And it is speculated that many Greek thinkers, such as Thales, were influenced by Babylonian thought. The Dialogue of Pessimism is thought to have influenced biblical texts, particularly Ecclesiastes, and can be viewed as a forerunner of Plato’s Socratic Dialogues. 

Poems — Xenophanes

The first pre-Socratic philosopher with a considerable amount of extant writing samples for us to review is Xenophanes. Unlike many of his contemporaries, he wrote many different books and poems. Enough fragments of his work survive to give us something beyond later commentary. While a full picture of his thoughts is impossible to form, what does exist demonstrates why he was one of the most influential pre-Socratic philosophers. 

Xenophanes is principally known for his theology. He argued that common conceptions about the gods in the Greek world were mistaken. His view of God was spherical: lacking human traits, and perhaps directly identifiable with the Universe. While there is some debate around his exact wording, he may have been the first Western monotheist, or arguably even pantheist. He mused that humans tended to give their gods familiar traits:

“Thracians that theirs are blue-eyed and red-haired. But if horses or oxen or lions had hands or could draw with their hands and accomplish such works as men, horses would draw the figures of the gods as similar to horses, and the oxen as similar to oxen, and they would make the bodies of the sort which each of them had.”

His principal philosophical legacy lies in his approach to epistemology and skepticism. While he argued for the existence of objective truths, he doubted the ability of humans to ascertain them. He noted that our beliefs were limited by our knowledge and used this as evidence for how little we can truly know:

 “If god had not made yellow honey [we] would think that figs were much sweeter.”

The skeptics of the ancient world would claim him as a critical influence. However, recent interpretations lean toward Xenophanes’ warning against dogmatic approaches or claims to certainty rather than a hard-line skeptic position. In either case, his writings are among the first to consider the problem of how we can claim to know anything — a problem people still grapple with today. 

On Nature — Parmenides

Parmenides is one of the most important ancient philosophers you’ve never heard about. Working in Elea, a Greek colony in what is now southern Italy, he wrote a single book that exists only in fragmented quotations and later authors’ commentaries. Through these, he has impacted virtually all subsequent Western philosophy. 

While the name was probably a later invention — On Nature was a commonly applied name for works describing the Universe — Parmenides’ poem is one of the most important texts in Greek philosophy. In it, he invented metaphysics and contributed to logic by laying out his arguments with deductive rigor. Unlike his predecessors — famed for arguing that the world was made of a single, physical element — Parmenides argued that the world is a single, unchanging substance and that our notions of motion, change, creation, and destruction are all mistaken. The world we interact with is not the “true” reality but only a set of appearances. He also maintains that empty space is impossible since the idea of “nothing” is contradictory. 

 In his words:

 “…the only routes of inquiry that are for thinking: the one, that it is and that it is not possible for it not to be, is the path of Persuasion (for it attends upon Truth), the other, that it is not and that it is right that it not be, this indeed I declare to you to be a path entirely unable to be investigated: For neither can you know what is not (for it is not to be accomplished) nor can you declare it. For the same thing is for thinking and for being.”

Parmenides’ legacy is vast. His work directly influenced Plato, who argued that the world we engage with is a mere copy of the world of “forms.” Through Plato, Parmenides impacted nearly all of subsequent Western philosophy. His ideas on time and space continue to influence modern debates. 

Discourses of Epictetus — Flavius Arrian 

Epictetus was a Stoic philosopher in the Roman Empire during the second century. Born in what is now Turkey, he was enslaved and owned by Emperor Nero’s secretary at one point. While in servitude, he began receiving an education in Stoic philosophy from Musonius Rufus. After his freedom was restored, he was banished to Greece, where he founded a well-regarded school. Known for teaching Stoicism as a way of life rather than just a pure philosophy, he was well-known in his day — some sources suggest he was more famous than Plato was during his lifetime. 

Discourses is a series of polished notes from post-lecture discussions. It was likely written by his student, Flavius Arrian. While the exact length of the original text remains unknown, some sources suggest there were eight books in the complete set. Today we have four. These cover a wide range of topics relatable to anyone at any time and present Stoicism as a guide to life rather than a dry philosophy. One of the more famous quotes expresses why a person should bother to study at all:

 “For on these matters we should not trust the multitude who say that none ought to be educated but the free, but rather to philosophers, who say that the educated alone are free.”

Discourses is one of the earliest records we have of the thoughts of a Stoic thinker. Marcus Aurelius held it in high regard and quoted it in Meditations. It was also the source for The Handbook, an introduction to Stoic philosophy aimed at popular audiences, also likely penned by Arrian. This book has proven popular, especially during increases in the popularity of Stoic thought.

Republic — Plato

Plato’s Republic is arguably one of the most famous works in philosophy. Framed as a discussion between Socrates and several others about the nature of justice, it provides us with some of the most enduring philosophical arguments and images. 

Socrates addresses the idea of justice by analogy, using the concept of a “just city” to understand how justice impacts the soul. His perfect city has attracted a great deal of attention over the millennia. Along the way, he considers how acquiring knowledge is like leaving a dark cave, what exactly love is, the differences between reality and the world we engage with, and what would happen if you gave a man a magic ring that turned him invisible. 

Many lines from Republic have become widely known. One particularly famous example is:

“The punishment which the wise suffer who refuse to take part in the government, is to live under the government of worse men.”

The influence of Republic cannot be overstated. It has influenced thinkers from Plato’s student Aristotle to those working in the field today. It remains the most widely read book at American Universities. The “utopia” it describes has been used as a framework for the eponymous book. It has also been argued, but not proven, that Plato’s Ring of Gyges may have influenced Tolkien’s One Ring. 

The Nicomachean Ethics — Aristotle

One of the most important books on ethics ever written — The Nicomachean Ethics — is Aristotle’s attempt to determine what the good life is and how to live it. 

His answer is a system of virtue ethics. His notion of virtue is that of a median point between two vices. For example, courage is seen as the midpoint between the vices of rashness and cowardice. Exactly what these things look like at the moment will vary, meaning that virtue requires serious study, practice, and work. He admits this and goes so far as to suggest that a good life requires making habits of the virtues so they can be practiced regularly. This is entirely needed, because, as he puts it:

“…one swallow does not make a summer, nor does one day; and so too one day, or a short time, does not make a man blessed and happy.”

While other systems eclipsed Aristotelian Ethics in popularity, virtue ethics is currently enjoying a major resurgence in popularity. Philosophers are reconsidering virtue ethics to avoid the problems in utilitarian and deontological ethical systems. 

Lives and Opinions of the Eminent Philosophers — Diogenes Laërtius

The last inclusion on this list is the strangest. The Lives and Opinions of the Eminent Philosophers is a text by Diogenes Laërtius, written in the 3rd century C.E. The book covers many famous Greek philosophers’ personal lives and ideas. Modern scholars tend to agree that it is not the most reliable source, that its author tends to focus on minor details to the detriment of telling us what his subjects thought, and that the contradictions in it make it clear that parts of it must be wrong.

While on its own merits, the book might be considered of limited value, it’s crucial when considering the loss of many primary ancient texts. Diogenes Laërtius documented the lives and thoughts of Greek philosophers without much critique, offering a likely unbiased glimpse into their worlds. Our modern understanding of many Greek philosophers owes much to this text, making it indispensable in the study of ancient thought.

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There’s a well-known legend that says that somewhere deep beneath Northern California’s 14,179-foot-tall Mount Shasta is a complex of tunnels and a hidden city called Telos, the ancient “City of Light” for the Lemurians. They were the residents of the mythical lost continent of Lemuria, which met its demise under the waves of the Pacific (or the Indian Ocean, depending on who you ask) thousands of years ago. Lemurians believed to have survived the catastrophe are said to have settled in Telos, and over the years their offspring have been sporadically reported wandering around the area: seven-feet-tall, with long flowy hair, often clad in sandals and white robes.

Lemurians aren’t the only unusual figures said to inhabit this stand-alone stratovolcano, easily seen from Interstate 5, about 60 miles south of the Oregon border. Mount Shasta is believed to be a home base for the Lizard People, too, reptilian humanoids that also reside underground. The mountain is a hotbed of UFO sightings, one of the most recent of which occurred in February 2020. (It was a saucer-shaped lenticular cloud.) In fact, the mountain is associated with so many otherworldly, paranormal, and mythical beings—in addition to long-established Native American traditions—that it’s almost like a who’s who of metaphysics. It has attracted a legion of followers over the years, including “Poet of the Sierras” Joaquin Miller and naturalist John Muir, as well as fringe religious organizations such as the Ascended Masters, who believe that they’re enlightened beings existing in higher dimensions. What is it about this mountain in particular that inspires so much belief?

“There’s a lot about Mount Shasta, and volcanoes in general, that are difficult to explain,” says Andrew Calvert, scientist-in-charge at the California Volcano Observatory, “and when you’re having difficulty explaining something, you try and understand it.” Calvert has studied Shasta’s eruptive history since 2001. “It’s such a complicated and rich history,” he says, “and Shasta itself is also very visually powerful. These qualities build on each other to make it a profound place for a lot of people—geologists, spirituality seekers … even San Francisco tech folks, and hunters and gatherers from 10,000 years ago. It’s one that can have a really strong effect on your psyche.”

Mount Shasta is one of the most prominent of all the Cascade volcanoes, an arc that runs from southwestern British Columbia to Northern California, and includes Washington’s Mount Rainier and Oregon’s Mount Hood, among others. “It’s so steep and so tall that it even creates its own weather,” says Calvert. This includes the spaceship-looking lenticular clouds that tend to form around the mountain, created, he says, “by a humid air mass that hits the volcano, and then has to go up a little bit to cool off.” But they only contribute to Shasta’s supernatural allure, along with its ice-clad peak, steaming fumaroles, and shape-shifting surface that’s being constantly broken down and rebuilt by ice, water, wind, and debris. The mountain also sits about 15 miles or so west of the standard arc line of the other Cascade volcanoes—a move that took place about 700,000 years ago. “We don’t really have a good explanation for why it moved out there,” Calvert says, a statement that seems to make Mount Shasta’s mysteries appear more otherworldly by the minute.

The Mount Shasta spiritual legacy goes far deeper than contemporary myths and sightings. For Native Americans in particular, the mountain is a sacred place, straddling the territories of the Shasta, Wintu, Achumawi, Atsugewi, and Modoc tribes, which can date their lineages back to a time when eruptions actually took place there. (Its last eruption, says Calvert, was a little over 3,000 years ago.)

“Shasta is where G’mokumk, the creator, resided and the original bones of the Modoc people are placed,” says Taylor Tupper, a Modoc Indian of the Klamath Tribes, raised in the Klamath Basin just north of Shasta. “I always bring offerings such as water or tobacco when I visit,” she says, “because I never want to come to the mountain in a bad way.”

But Tupper knows that there’s more to Shasta than that, even. “We’d be silly to think that we’re the only ones here in this vast universe,” she says, pointing out that the volcano is also home to the matah kagmi, the Modoc word for Bigfoot, which are known as the “keepers of the woods.” “Bigfoot have been in existence as long as our people have,” says Tupper. “I haven’t seen them myself, but maybe I wasn’t chosen to see them. I have different gifts.”

An orthophoto mosaic overlayed on a topographic map reveals some of Mount Shasta’s volcanic history. (ERTHYGY/CC BY-SA 4.0)

As does Phillip Dawson, a California Volcano Observatory geophysicist who has spent nearly four decades looking at how volcanoes work, listening to the noises of their magmatic and fluid processes (which he calls “talking”), and interpreting those signals in terms of physical processes. He studies volcanoes in a strictly scientific way, but also admits that “like the vast dimensions of this universe, there are unlimited interpretations of place.” So wherever he’s working, he finds out about the local spirits or gods, “and then I ask for their forbearance as I try to understand what they’re saying,” he says. “I guess that means I’m hedging my bets.”

Shasta is an entirely different beast for Dawson, however, because it’s also home. “I grew up in the city of Shasta,” he says. “My father was a geology professor at the College of the Siskiyous in nearby Weed, and for years he cotaught a course called the History and Geology of Siskiyou County alongside history professor Jim Ray. I’d drive around with them and my dad would wave his arms about the geology of the county and Ray would tell how those features and humans interacted over time.”

This has taught Dawson a lot about ways physical processes can inspire belief, from the metaphysical, such as Es Vedrà, Spain, a solitary limestone island that’s said to be an energy vortex of healing, to the traditional, such as Uluru, a massive sandstone monolith in the Australian Outback that’s sacred to Aboriginal Australians. But it’s volcanoes that Dawson can speak to best. “I’ve worked in many different places and almost always if you stop and listen people will tell stories about their volcanoes,” he says. “Almost inevitably, people tend to ascribe their violent processes to some kind of god or spirit, because they’re just not understandable, and this in turn comes out in oral histories.” Even in that context, Shasta is different, says Dawson. “You’ll find that people who are just traipsing through the area get stuck here,” he says. “The mountain is just so incredible for them. There’s so much energy [at Shasta], trying to figure out what it all means I think is a lifetime job.”

It’s why Tupper says she leaves people to their own beliefs about Shasta as well: spiritual, metaphysical, or simply on another plane. “People always ask me about UFOs and such, and I say I’m not going to go poking around in others’ business. Every place you go is sacred or special to someone or something, or was at some point. Treat it all with respect and your spirit will be in tune with nature and the creator, and you won’t be going against spiritual law. If you are going against it, nature will let you know.”

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You’ve been invited to dinner at a friend’s house where they’ve prepared a lovely beef bourguignon. You all sit down at your places, ladle out your portions, and get to work. Halfway through dinner, you suddenly notice something odd has happened to the person sitting across from you: She has completely stopped talking. What’s more, she is staring at you with the dead eyes of a Halloween mannequin.

“Are you alright?” you ask, a touch nervously. She starts sharply as if you’ve broken her reverie.

“Oh, sorry,” she says. “I’m trying mindful eating. I’m focusing on every bite.”

Unless you’ve been living on the Moon for the last ten years, you have probably heard of mindfulness. Schools and companies worldwide have been riding high on the mindfulness wave. Mindfulness apps get millions of downloads and mindfulness coaches are paid millions of dollars. People swear by its efficacy.

The problem, though, is that mindfulness is a building constructed on shaky foundations. According to Odysseus Stone from the University of Copenhagen, mindfulness makes three big philosophical errors.

1. Not all thoughts are equal

If you’ve ever experienced some guided mindfulness, you likely heard something like this: “Imagine your thoughts are like cars, and you are watching them pass. Here comes a thought. There goes the thought. Do not pause for too long on any thought. Let them come, notice them, and then let them go.” Mindfulness is all about not attaching too closely to any one thought. It’s about acknowledging thoughts but not indulging them.

But is this right? Sometimes this strategy is undoubtedly good. Losing sleep over a presentation you have in the morning or obsessing over a dentist appointment is silly. But other times our thoughts are not things to take lightly. As Stone writes: “Take, for example, feelings of anger that we might have about the policy decisions of the Danish government. Is it beneficial to view such emotions as if they are passing clouds in the sky with little importance or relation to reality?” In other words, sometimes our thoughts and feelings are vitally important. They help us navigate the world and tell us the best way to behave. After all, it’s a foolhardy person who isn’t a little bit scared of venomous snakes.

2. Your attention is not only yours

The second key element to mindfulness is that you need to take control of your attention. It is built on the idea that we have supreme power over how and what we focus on. Our minds are like a spotlight, and we are the spotlight operators. We choose to focus on our anxieties. We choose to dwell on the negative.

The problem, though, is that this is a vastly oversimplified view of the psychology of attention. Attention is often beyond your control. It might be that some wizened Shaolin monk can ignore everything the world throws at him, but the vast majority of people cannot. Attention is a social problem. Consider smartphones, for instance. Yes, you can choose not to buy a smartphone, but a world without smartphones is a world with different implications regarding our collective attention. The 1990s had a different attention economy. As Stone puts it: “According to some philosophers and cognitive scientists… Our attention is highly dependent on our embodiment, and is embedded in a material and social context.”

3. It is impossible to “seize the day”

The third dubious piece of mindfulness wisdom is the idea that we should live in the moment and seize the day. Focus on the now, and spend as little time as is practically possible on the past or the future. The problem, though, is that the idea of “now” doesn’t actually exist in how we experience the world.

As the French philosopher Henri Bergson knew, we do not experience time like some calendar or clock. We do not live “in” the current hour. Instead, we live according to duration. Time is constantly moving forward, and it makes no sense to talk about a “now” without reference to both the before and the after. Human psychology depends on the wealth of experience, memory, and learned behaviors from the past. All of our actions and thoughts are framed by a concern for the future. In Stone’s words: “If our experiences and actions are to be coherent and to make sense and make sense to us, they will have to refer to our past and future in one way or the other.”

The baby in the bathwater

Of course, none of this is to say mindfulness is bad. There’s a reason millions of people around the world practice it. There’s a reason people chew their beef bourguignon with peculiar intensity. It works. For the vast majority of the trivial worries in our lives, letting go of thoughts is sound wisdom. Taking greater control and responsibility for what you give your attention to is great advice. And spending less time dwelling on the past or worrying about the future will probably make you more relaxed.

As with almost all philosophy and self-help fads, moderation and sensible application is key.

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