The Terrors of Sleep Paralysis

Imagine living in medieval times, when weird and unexplained phenomena, especially those related to strange subjective experiences (such as feeling that you're being suffocated by demons in your sleep), were seen as indications and evidence of malevolent spiritual forces at work. In the famous Bull of 1484, for instance, Pope Innocent VIII (don't you love the irony of these names?) declared that:members of both sexes do not avoid to have intercourse...

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Shooting an AK-47 Underwater

Here in the US, we seem to be obsessed with guns, with our right to own them, and with the ridiculous fear that the government is going to try to take them away from us. Predictably, the people who are most vociferous on the issue are not exactly luminaries and scholars with a solid understanding of constitutional law and jurisprudence, which is really putting it mildly and generously...But since this is a blog dedicated (for the most part) to sharing...

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John Searle - Our Shared Condition: Consciousness

Studying consciousness is notoriously difficult, and until only the last couple of decades, very few intellectuals (apart from philosophers and psychologists) dared to even think about how to try to understand it. But with the rise of new disciplines and technologies, consciousness is starting to become the hot topic among academics. One of the problems, however, is that we don't yet quite have a theory about what consciousness is, and without an...

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Brian Cox - Wonders of Life - Expanding Universe

Our knowledge of the world comes from our experience of the world. And our experience is based on our sensory apparatus, but how do our senses work? What is it about the physical laws of the universe that make it possible for creatures like us to perceive anything at all?In the following documentary, Brian Cox visits some interesting animals in the US (giant catfish, glowing scorpions, mantis shrimp and octopi, among others) to explore and understand...

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Flatland - Exploring Other Dimensions

Plato's myth of the cave is an allegory that tries to make the point that there may be more to reality than meets the eye, that our experience is simply of a very limited and lowly aspect of reality. Given the knowledge and technology of the time, Plato's use of puppets and shadows in his ancient writing is brilliant in conveying the difference between the real and the apparent, but in the 1800's, Edwin Abbott took this idea much further, and in...

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Open Access Explained, PhD Comics Style

As biological creatures, we are very adaptable. If we notice that some background condition remains relatively stable, we tend to ignore it after a while. On the one hand, this makes perfect sense, since we can't afford to devote all of our energy and attention resources to things that are unlikely to affect us in sudden ways. On the other hand, this makes us very susceptible to the status quo bias (failing to recognize better alternatives; failing...

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Louis CK - If God Came Back...

After God created the heavens and the earth, he thought to himself:Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let him have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth. Traditionally, this has been understood to mean that God created everything for the benefit of humans, and at the expense of everything and everyone...

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