Curated playlist
Concepts in metaphysics
- MindIn Old English, the word mind originally meant only memory. Over centuries it grew to cover every form of mental life.
- Value (ethics)Some values are so protected that people refuse to trade them for any benefit.
- Free willFree will asks whether blame and praise make sense if earlier causes fix every act.
- ThoughtIs thinking silent speech, a parade of images, or a quiet machine shuffling symbols?
- InformationA 2011 Science article put the start of the digital age at 2002. Digital storage first passed analogue that year.
- SoulIn 1901, a doctor put dying patients on a giant scale to weigh the soul. Duncan MacDougall claimed one lost 21.3 grams.
- TruthPhilosophers still disagree about what makes "the carrot is orange" true.
- TimePhysicists define time as what a clock reads. They chose it because other definitions tend to go in circles.
- SpaceSpace is one of the few quantities in physics that cannot be defined by anything more basic.
- EmpathyEmpathy, the ability to understand or feel what another person is feeling, began as a Greek word, empatheia, meaning physical affection or passion. That word was built from en, meaning in, and pathos, meaning passion or suffering. In…
- EvilEvil is the subject Hannah Arendt had in mind after she looked at the practices of Nazi Germany. She concluded that "the problem of evil would be the fundamental problem of postwar intellectual life in Europe." By the source's account,…
- Uncanny valleyThe uncanny valley is a hypothesis about unease, and in 2020 it helped decide the release date of the movie Sonic the Hedgehog. The first trailer drew an extremely negative audience reaction. The film was then delayed for three months so…
- TaoThe Tao, also spelled Dao and written with the Chinese character 道, is introduced in one ancient passage by an author who admits defeat before starting. "I do not know its name; I call it Tao." That line comes from Chapter 25 of the Tao Te…
- Simulation hypothesisThe simulation hypothesis, the claim that everyday reality might be a computer simulation with humans as constructs inside it, produced a startling number from Elon Musk in 2016. In an interview that year, he said he believed there was "a…