MULTIVERSES

Christof Koch is a pioneering neuroscientist and one of the most prominent advocates of a scientific approach to consciousness. He has spent decades working at the intersection of neuroscience, philo…

Infinity may seem simple, just the absence of limits. But the closer we examine it, the more it unravels into paradox and mystery. Can some infinities be larger than others? How can an infinite hotel…

Mind-wandering is often dismissed as a distraction, an idle drift away from productive thought. But what if this spontaneous movement of the mind is not just a quirk of cognition but a fundamental fe…

Scientific discoveries can often be codified in simple laws, neatly stated in textbooks with directions on applying them. But the enterprise of science is embedded in society. It depends on individua…

AI can do many things equally well as humans: such as writing plausible prose or answering exam questions. In certain domains, AI goes far beyond human capabilities — playing chess for instance.

We mi…

There is no consensus on what minds are, but there is plenty of agreement on where they can be found: in humans. Yet human consciousness may account for only a small proportion of the consciousness o…

Things happen. Or they don’t. How then should we make sense of claims that something might happen?

If all these claims do is express doubt, then the puzzle can be easily resolved. But if the claims ca…

The launch of ChatGPT was a "Sputnik moment". In making tangible decades of progress it shot AI to the fore of public consciousness. This attention is accelerating AI development as dollars are poure…

Physics helps get stuff done. Its application has put rockets in space, semiconductors in phones, and eclipses on calendars. 

For some philosophers, this is all physics offers. It is a mere instrument…

It can be tempting to consider language and thought as inextricably linked. As such we might conclude that LLM's human-like capabilities for manipulating language indicate a corresponding level of th…

Words. (Huh? Yeah!) What are they good for? Absolutely everything.

At least this was the view of some philosophers early in the 20th century, that the world was bounded by language. ("The limits of my…

Music may be magical. But it is also rooted in the material world. As such it can be the subject of empirical inquiry. 

How does what we are told of a performer influence our appreciation of the perfo…

If all my beliefs are correct, could I still be prejudiced?

Philosophers have spent a lot of time thinking about knowledge. But their efforts have focussed on only certain questions. What makes it suc…

Why do whales live longer than hummingbirds? What makes megacities more energy efficient than towns? Is the rate of technological innovation sustainable? 

 Though apparently disparate the answer to th…

It's easy to recognize the potential of incremental advances — more efficient cars or faster computer chips for instance. But when a genuinely new technology emerges, often even its creators are unaw…

Are philosophy and science entirely different paradigms for thinking about the world? Or should we think of them as continuous: overlapping in their concerns and complementary in their tools?

David Pa…

Why do men do less housework? What happens when an apology is offered? What are we looking for when we ask for advice?

These are the sorts of problems drawn from everyday experience that Paulina Sliwa…

Life. What is it? How did it start? Is it unique to Earth, rare or abundantly distributed throughout the universe?

While biology has made great strides in the last two hundred years, these foundationa…

Many animals play. But why? 

Play has emerged in species as distinct as rats, turtles, and octopi although they are separated by hundreds of millions of years of evolution. 

While some behaviors —  hun…

Language is the ultimate Lego. With it, we can take simple elements and construct them into an edifice of meaning. Its power is not only in mapping signs to concepts but in that individual words can …