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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The Humanities - The Heart of the Matter

We all like to make fun of English majors (and humanities students in general) from time to time (which is fine, no one should be exempt from a little mockery every now and then). The usual charge is that odious, unenlightened, ignorant, superficial, condescending question: what is a humanities major good for? Such a question implies that the only real value of an education is instrumental: what kind of job is it going to lead to? But this point...

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Franz Kafka - The Metamorphosis

130 years ago today, in a world which no longer could be seriously understood as the effect or providence of the deliberate choice of a deity with a comprehensible, or even a coherent plan, one of the first men to viscerally understand and feel the essence of the absurdity of existence was born. His name was Franz Kafka. You may have heard of him...Though not a philosopher himself, Kafka has become a literary icon and an inspiration to many philosophers,...

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Malcolm Gradwell - Her Way

What do you do when your best friend decides to marry someone who crushes his spirit, who loves him only on condition that he not be himself, who takes his sine qua non away from him, who makes him feel ashamed of the very things for which most people love him?Well, if you're Malcolm Gladwell, apparently what you do is write a little ditty about it and perform it with your friends at the wedding reception :)Most awkward wedding ever...

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Philosophers are no longer allowed at summer camp

When it comes to the question of the metaphysics of diachronic personal identity (the question of whether you are the same person at different times), philosophers, such as John Locke, David Hume, Derek Parfit, David Lewis and others, have come up with a plethora of absolutely fascinating and disturbing thought experiments. The idea is that these intuition pumps should help us get clearer on the concept and its logical implications so we can test...

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Filibustering to Abort the Abortion Bill

When the Texas Senate wanted to pass a new abortion bill that would severely restrict abortion guidelines and ban abortions after 20 weeks, Senator Wendy Davis decided to literally stand up for women's right to make their own reproductive health choices by filibustering the bill for 13 hours in what has quickly become a national sensation that has galvanized liberal support from all corners of the nation.Of course, conservatives are furious about...

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The Punishable Perils of Plagiarism

As we've seen before (in a case in which a professor discovered a massive collective case of cheating), academic dishonesty is a serious and growing problem. What most cheaters don't always realize, however (especially those who engage in plagiarism), is the paradoxical nature of cheating: those who need to do it are usually not clever enough to know how to do it well enough to get away with it, and those who could get away with it are smart enough...

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The Examined Life

While defending himself against his accusers (at least in Plato's Apology), Socrates uttered a sentence that has captured the essence of philosophy and that has reverberated through the centuries: "The unexamined life is not worth living."More than two thousand years later, now that we live in a society that's technologically advanced and that has benefited from the lessons learned through science and history, is there any need to question our most...

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Blowing the Whistle on Whistleblowers

Whistleblowing and information leaks have been spearheading news headlines recently. Among the highest profile cases in America we've had Bradley Manning and, most recently, Edward Snowden. Many have jumped on the character assassination wagon, calling them traitors, cowards, and a lot of other things, even calling for their heads!, all of which tends to distract from the more pressing issue: the information leaked, what it tells us about the sources...

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What Is Evolution and Natural Selection?

I don't know if it's by design or circumstance, but (apart from the religious and ideological elements) part of the resistance to evolution has to do with the fact that a number of related but distinct concepts are normally conflated with each other, so that if you disagree with one, you automatically assume that you must disagree with all of them. For instance, many people confuse natural selection with evolution, and think of them as interchangeable...

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Buy Starschmucks, Attack God?

Apparently evangelical Christian and right-wing conservative 'historian' David Barton and I have something in common: we kind of hate Starschmucks. Our reasons, however, differ. My antagonism is based on the condescending pretentiousness of the brand and many of its 'baristas,' and on the fact they have driven many humble mom-n-pop coffee shops into the ground. Barton's problem, however, is that StarBucks believes in marriage equality.It's typical...

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Hunters Are Pussies

There, I said it. You have probably seen what hunters like to do, right? Once they've killed some "game," they like to take pictures of themselves next to the dead carcass before mounting it as a trophy on their walls for the world to see and admire. Future generations are going to think of us the way we think today about slave owners: as a bunch of ignorant assholes...But here's the thing: this wasn't a fair fight. In fact, it wasn't a fight at...

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Daniel Dennett - Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking

After a long and distinguished career in philosophy of mind, cognitive science, evolution and artificial intelligence, philosopher Daniel Dennett has picked up a number of mental tools along the way to help him reason his way through various interesting and thought-provoking conceptual puzzles and questions.And nice guy that he is, he has taken the time to write a whole book about them to share with the rest of the world. These intuition pumps can...

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Walt Whitman - Song of Myself

The poetic style of free verse was born from the iconoclastic mind of Walt Whitman, an American poet who embodied the concepts of individualism and defiance to his core.On the one hand, the invention of free verse made it possible for geniuses such as William Butler Yeats, T.S. Elliot, Wallace Stevens and Thomas Hardy to explore and harvest a fascinating literary space previously uncharted. On the other hand, and because of its apparent lack of constraint,...

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Lucretius - De Rerum Natura - Matter and Void

In his fascinating book, The Swerve, Stephen Greenblatt tells the gripping story of the rediscovery, during the Middle Ages, of one of the philosophical masterpieces of the Classical period in Rome: Lucretius' De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things), an epic exploration and development of Epicurus' materialist, empiricist and soteriologically hedonistic philosophy, all set to the most beautiful of Latin poetry.Greenblatt shows how the Christian...

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Jon Stewart Pwns Bill O'Reilly on Profiling... and Math

We all know that Bill O'Reilly is a petulant, loud-mouth who bullies and yells at people he disagrees with (even when they are invited guests in his show), and it's kind of hilarious to watch him and Rush Limbaugh go at it every now and then, but I'm starting to wonder whether the Jon Stewart vs Bill O'Reilly little debates and repartees are fair... I mean, Papa Bear is like five feet taller, a lot louder, always willing to make up straw man arguments,...

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Dogs vs. Hyenas - Chew On This!

I've never been one to like hyenas. I don't know if I find it ignoble to rely on great numbers to bring down a great beast, or if it's guilt by association, since usually where there's vultures there's probably hyenas (or is it the other way around?), or if their preposterously high levels of testosterone (especially in the females) feels somehow emasculating, or if they're just ugly as all hell... but either way I find them repulsive.That's not...

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Richard Feynman on the Scientific Method

When it comes to backward, mystical, conspiratorial, pseudoscientific thinking, I'm actually pretty forgiving of people in the past: apart from  a small intellectual elite, most people didn't always have the technological and conceptual tools necessary to separate reasonable ideas from the bat-shit crazy. Today, however, when we have such easy access to the accumulated knowledge and wisdom humanity has accrued over the past few thousand years,...

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Sea of Faith - Soren Kierkegaard

Among the many theologians and religious philosophers that have become famous throughout history, the most interesting, enjoyable, thought-provoking and challenging has got to be the Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard (whose 200th birthday is being celebrated this week).Wielding Hegel's dialectic method, Kierkegaard set out both to refute Hegel's conclusions, and to simultaneously defend and to problematize the question of faith and the meaning...

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'Science' of the Gaps

If you're not familiar with the logical fallacy of the God of the gaps, here's roughly how it works: there is some phenomenon or process you can't explain (for whatever reason), but instead of being honest about your own lack of understanding, you simply jump to the conclusion that "God did it." In other words, you use God as the "explanation" for the gaps in our knowledge.Three problems should be immediately obvious. First, you can't just make up...

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Stephen Colbert - The Word: Medical Leave

As political philosopher Michael Sandel has argued in the past (as in this video and in this article from The Atlantic), when we turn from a market economy to a market society, we have taken a decidedly wrong turn... Instead of valuing people as persons with dignity and worthy of respect and consideration, with goals and projects that may have meaningful, intrinsic, emotional or educational value, we start to see everything (and everyone) around...

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Viktor Frankl on Those Who Survived The Holocaust and Those Who Did Not

I just finished reading Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning. I'm not sure anyone can read that book without getting knots in one's throat and/or getting teary-eyed...The book isn't so much an account of events that took place during the Holocaust, but of the individual, subjective experiences of those who were sent to concentration camps, what they had to endure, what happened to their minds and bodies, and the life-or-death dilemmas they had...

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What Is Zeno's Dichotomy Paradox?

When I first introduce my students to the weirdness of philosophy and how even our most deeply-entrenched beliefs might be subject to serious questioning, I usually like to begin by posing to them Zeno's attempt to refute the idea that motion is possible (here's a fun little animation to get you started), and then continue to defend him against the objections raised by the students.This has the dual benefit of being both a nice introduction to questioning...

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Laura Snyder - The Philosophical Breakfast Club

When we think about scientists, and especially the birth of science, our minds usually go straight to Galileo, Descartes, Kepler and Newton, and then to folks like Michael Faraday, Joseph Priestly, Antoine Lavoisier, Lord Kelvin, Darwin, etc. Or maybe for some of you it goes all the way back to Thales, Democritus, Empedocles and Aristotle...What most people don't know, however, is that none of these people called themselves 'scientists.' The term...

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Monty Python - The Argument Clinic

If you've ever met or seen philosophers in action, you've probably noticed a couple of things: they're wicked smart, they're incredibly nit-picky about defining their terms (and getting others to do the same), and they love to argue.I can see why many people would find these traits off-putting—in fact, that's kind of why the Athenians sentenced Socrates to death!— but I also hope you can see why they're important, so I thought I'd share a couple...

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Ken Jennings - Watson, Jeopardy and Me

During the industrial revolution, much of the manual labor that had hitherto been done by people was suddenly taken over by machines, who were faster, more accurate, cheaper, and didn't complain about safe working conditions, fair wages, paid sick days, maternity leave, holiday pay and so on, so they replaced people, who ended up losing their jobs.Well, that's physical labor, we laughed, and thought that machines could never replace our raw brain...

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Pat Robertson - Want Miracles? Be Simple-Minded, Credulous and Uneducated

In a strange case similar to that of Benjamin Button, it seems as though Pat Robertson's senility is firmly advancing in the direction of reason, to the point that I've been wondering lately whether he's becoming one of the most interesting exponents of religious nonsense and an unexpected advocate for secularism. Well, either that or he's so far gone the deep end that he's not even trying to be ironic... Here's a case in point:Ah, those simple,...

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Kurt Vonnegut - Breakfast of Champions

If you believe in reincarnation, you could reasonably believe that Kurt Vonnegut was the reincarnated soul of Mark Twain. With their brief and minimalist styles, as well as their no-holes-barred aphorisms, these two authors managed to drive American literature to a place where substance could take a front seat in our collective consciousness in a way that's rarely accessible through other authors. In the process, they got us to question many of the...

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The Real Victims of Gun Control?

The number of gun-related deaths in America, at least compared to civilized countries, is out of control (as you can tell from the poster to the right), but when it comes to reasonable debate, somehow we just lose it.We are a freedom-loving people, or so we tell ourselves, and we get paranoid about losing the liberties that we care about, but we are also perfectly comfortable imposing our values and intruding in other people's lives when it comes...

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Physicists Confirm They Found and Killed the 'God Particle'

Virtually since the inception of its moniker, many atheists have hated the fact that the Higgs Boson, a theoretical subatomic particle thought to be responsible for attributing mass to matter, has been referred to as the "God Particle."But as The Onion reports, they may finally have reason to celebrate, as news have been revealed that physicists have finally found, and then killed, that goddamn particle...But if you actually want to get an idea of...

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"To This Day" ... for the Bullied and Beautiful

The saying goes that sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me... I've broken my bones before, a couple of ribs, but there are forms of pain that are orders of magnitude worse, and which leave scars that last much longer, but that no one can see because they are not branded in your body; they are branded in your memory and soul...Despite the amazing things that we have in this world, and despite the amazing things people...

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Wealth Inequality in America

If you consider the difference between what people think is the distribution of wealth in America vs what they consider the ideal distribution vs the actual distribution... you'd be flabbergasted...The Occupy Wall Street movement tried to raise awareness about the fact that the bottom 99% of Americans have to live under the oppression, greed and corruption of the top 1%.If you need to visualize these ratios in order to get a better sense of what's...

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