Closer To Truth
Seyyed Hossein Nasr - Arguing God from Being?
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Why is an observer a critical part of quantum physics? What does it mean to be an observer? Does the act of observation affect what exists and what happens in the external world? Why is observation in the quantum world still a mystery?
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Seth Lloyd is a professor of mechanical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He refers to himself as a “quantum mechanic”.
Closer To Truth, hosted by Robert Lawrence Kuhn and directed by Peter Getzels, presents the world’s greatest thinkers exploring humanity’s deepest questions. Discover fundamental issues of existence. Engage new and diverse ways of thinking. Appreciate intense debates. Share your own opinions. Seek your own answers.
Science is humankind’s magnificent achievement, the way of thinking to discern facts and truths and to reject errors and myths. But how to understand the scientific method itself and what is it really that science is learning? That’s the role of philosophy. For example, when science discerns ‘regularities’ in nature, are these ‘laws’ of nature?
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Closer To Truth, hosted by Robert Lawrence Kuhn and directed by Peter Getzels, presents the world’s greatest thinkers exploring humanity’s deepest questions. Discover fundamental issues of existence. Engage new and diverse ways of thinking. Appreciate intense debates. Share your own opinions. Seek your own answers.
What’s the relationship between our brains and our consciousness, between the physical stuff in our skulls and the mental experiences in our minds? Much rides on the answer. Are human beings purely physical? Evolved at random and destined to die, extinguished forever? Or are we something more? A spirit or a soul, with existence beyond?
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Alva Noë is Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley. The main focus of his work is the theory of perception and consciousness. In addition to these problems in cognitive science and the philosophy of mind, he is interested in phenomenology, the theory of art, Wittgenstein, and the origins of analytic philosophy.
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Closer To Truth, hosted by Robert Lawrence Kuhn and directed by Peter Getzels, presents the world’s greatest thinkers exploring humanity’s deepest questions. Discover fundamental issues of existence. Engage new and diverse ways of thinking. Appreciate intense debates. Share your own opinions. Seek your own answers.
Here’s the ultimate question: What if it were true that everything always and forever had been ‘nothing’? Imagine that not a single thing ever existed–not emptiness, not blankness, not even the existence of emptiness, or the meaning of blankness. If you can image that, now ask yourself: why is there anything at all?
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John Andrew Leslie is a Canadian philosopher who focuses on explaining the world’s existence. He is University Professor Emeritus at the University of Guelph, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.
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Closer To Truth, hosted by Robert Lawrence Kuhn and directed by Peter Getzels, presents the world’s greatest thinkers exploring humanity’s deepest questions. Discover fundamental issues of existence. Engage new and diverse ways of thinking. Appreciate intense debates. Share your own opinions. Seek your own answers.
Many theologians take angels and demons seriously. Why? Certainly, most human beings believe in angels and demons. Anecdotal cases are legion. Certainly, such nonphysical beings, in one form or another, populate most of the world’s religions. But angels and demons seem out of place, anachronistic, in our modern world. Is there anything here we should take seriously?
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Dean Radin is a researcher and author in the field of parapsychology. He is also co-editor-in-chief of the journal Explore: The Journal of Science and Healing.
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Closer To Truth, hosted by Robert Lawrence Kuhn and directed by Peter Getzels, presents the world’s greatest thinkers exploring humanity’s deepest questions. Discover fundamental issues of existence. Engage new and diverse ways of thinking. Appreciate intense debates. Share your own opinions. Seek your own answers.
What remarkable discoveries are being made in cosmology! Cosmologists now develop credible theories about the beginning and end of our universe and theory-based speculations about vast numbers of multiple universes. But does the cosmos have a reason? Could revolutionary ideas support some kind of ‘universal reason’? The bar is set high, and it is OK to say no.
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Stephen Wolfram is the creator of Mathematica, Wolfram|Alpha, and the Wolfram Language; the author of A New Kind of Science; and the founder and CEO of Wolfram Research. Over the course of nearly four decades, he has been a pioneer in the development and application of computational thinking—and has been responsible for many discoveries, inventions and innovations in science, technology and business.
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Closer To Truth, hosted by Robert Lawrence Kuhn and directed by Peter Getzels, presents the world’s greatest thinkers exploring humanity’s deepest questions. Discover fundamental issues of existence. Engage new and diverse ways of thinking. Appreciate intense debates. Share your own opinions. Seek your own answers.
How has inner experience radically emerged from cosmic dust? How has our vibrant private awareness developed in what seems to be a wholly physical universe? Is consciousness only an accident of biology? Or does consciousness have deeper meaning? We best be careful not to come to final conclusions based on early science.
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Robert Lloyd Saucy was an American Biblical scholar and professor of systematic theology.
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Closer To Truth, hosted by Robert Lawrence Kuhn and directed by Peter Getzels, presents the world’s greatest thinkers exploring humanity’s deepest questions. Discover fundamental issues of existence. Engage new and diverse ways of thinking. Appreciate intense debates. Share your own opinions. Seek your own answers.
The cosmos is vast, the largest stuff that exists. Particles are tiny, the smallest stuff that exists. Yet the particles compose the cosmos; there is nothing in the cosmos other than the particles, and the fields and forces that are associated with them. How does the whole system composed of cosmos and particles work?
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Steven Weinberg is an American theoretical physicist and Nobel laureate in Physics for his contributions to the unification of the weak force and electromagnetic interaction between elementary particles.
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Closer To Truth, hosted by Robert Lawrence Kuhn and directed by Peter Getzels, presents the world’s greatest thinkers exploring humanity’s deepest questions. Discover fundamental issues of existence. Engage new and diverse ways of thinking. Appreciate intense debates. Share your own opinions. Seek your own answers.
How to explain our inner awareness that is at once most common and most mysterious? Traditional explanations focus at the level of neuron and neuronal circuits in the brain. But little real progress has motivated some to look much deeper, into the laws of physics — information theory, quantum mechanics, even postulating new laws of physics.
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Sean Carroll is Homewood Professor of Natural Philosophy at Johns Hopkins University and fractal faculty at the Santa Fe Institute. His research focuses on fundamental physics and cosmology.
Closer To Truth, hosted by Robert Lawrence Kuhn and directed by Peter Getzels, presents the world’s greatest thinkers exploring humanity’s deepest questions. Discover fundamental issues of existence. Engage new and diverse ways of thinking. Appreciate intense debates. Share your own opinions. Seek your own answers.
The stunning realization that there may be multiple universes has progressed from speculative metaphysics (or science fiction) to serious theoretical cosmology to data-rich observational cosmology to majority-accepted conventional wisdom. Yet challenges remain and questions abound.
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Carlo Rovelli is an Italian theoretical physicist at Centre de Physique Theorique de Luminy.
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Closer To Truth, hosted by Robert Lawrence Kuhn and directed by Peter Getzels, presents the world’s greatest thinkers exploring humanity’s deepest questions. Discover fundamental issues of existence. Engage new and diverse ways of thinking. Appreciate intense debates. Share your own opinions. Seek your own answers.
The God debate is not a game. ‘Is there a Creator God?’ is a serious question. If God exists, what can we know about God? Can an infinite God be accessible to finite humans? Can we inquire of God’s essences and traits? What are all the ways that God could be? Or could not be? We discover different beliefs of different kinds of Gods.
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Mahmoud Ayoub was born in 1938 in south Lebanon. Upon completion of his education, he has authored a number of books in English and Arabic in the area of Islam and Inter-religious dialogue.
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Closer To Truth, hosted by Robert Lawrence Kuhn and directed by Peter Getzels, presents the world’s greatest thinkers exploring humanity’s deepest questions. Discover fundamental issues of existence. Engage new and diverse ways of thinking. Appreciate intense debates. Share your own opinions. Seek your own answers.
How is it possible that mushy masses of brain cells, passing chemicals and shooting sparks, can cause mental sensations and subjective feelings? How can brain chemistry and electricity be ‘about’ things? Can physical activities literally be mental activities? Physical and mental activities seem so radically different.
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Alva Noë is Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley. The main focus of his work is the theory of perception and consciousness. In addition to these problems in cognitive science and the philosophy of mind, he is interested in phenomenology, the theory of art, Wittgenstein, and the origins of analytic philosophy.
Shop Closer To Truth merch and support the show with your purchase: bit.ly/3P2ogje
Closer To Truth, hosted by Robert Lawrence Kuhn and directed by Peter Getzels, presents the world’s greatest thinkers exploring humanity’s deepest questions. Discover fundamental issues of existence. Engage new and diverse ways of thinking. Appreciate intense debates. Share your own opinions. Seek your own answers.
If consciousness is 100% physical, we would have to conclude that the same kind of consciousness that we experience as humans can be generated by non-biological entities (eventually). Conversely, if non-biological consciousness would somehow, someday, prove impossible, then consciousness would have to embed some nonphysical aspect. But how would we ever know?
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Warren S. Brown is founder and previous director of the Lee Edward Travis Research Institute at the Fuller Theological Seminary and Professor of Psychology in the Graduate School of Psychology. He is also a previous member of the UCLA Brain Research Institute.
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Closer To Truth, hosted by Robert Lawrence Kuhn and directed by Peter Getzels, presents the world’s greatest thinkers exploring humanity’s deepest questions. Discover fundamental issues of existence. Engage new and diverse ways of thinking. Appreciate intense debates. Share your own opinions. Seek your own answers.
Beginnings are momentous, the beginning of the universe especially so. How did the beginning of our universe happen? Cosmic inflation is the theory that an exponential expansion within the first tiny fraction of a second generated everything that we see, all the vast galaxies, stars and planets. What’s the evidence? What’s the meaning?
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Alexander Vilenkin is the Leonard and Jane Bernstein Professor and Director of the Institute of Cosmology at Tufts University. A theoretical physicist who has been working in the field of cosmology for 35 years, Vilenkin has written over 150 papers and is responsible for introducing the ideas of eternal inflation and quantum creation of the universe from nothing. His work in cosmic strings has been pivotal.
Subscribe to the Closer To Truth podcast for new episodes every Wednesday: https://shorturl.at/hwGP3
Closer To Truth, hosted by Robert Lawrence Kuhn and directed by Peter Getzels, presents the world’s greatest thinkers exploring humanity’s deepest questions. Discover fundamental issues of existence. Engage new and diverse ways of thinking. Appreciate intense debates. Share your own opinions. Seek your own answers.
What could life be as we don’t know it? Three transitions. Non-life to life. Life to intelligent life. Intelligent life to technological civilization. Fermi’s Paradox: with at least 10^22 planets in the universe, the evidence for alien life is zero.
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Carol Edith Cleland is an American philosopher of science and a professor of philosophy at the University of Colorado Boulder. She holds affiliations with the NASA Astrobiology Institute, the SETI Institute, and the CU Boulder Center for Astrobiology.
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Closer To Truth, hosted by Robert Lawrence Kuhn and directed by Peter Getzels, presents the world’s greatest thinkers exploring humanity’s deepest questions. Discover fundamental issues of existence. Engage new and diverse ways of thinking. Appreciate intense debates. Share your own opinions. Seek your own answers.
What are the most fundamental questions, the most penetrating questions, that we can ask of all reality? Stretch your mind. Envision all manner of things, whether in the physical world or in nonphysical realms (if such exist). Do not admit any constraints. Imagine all that can be. Ask the hardest questions.
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John Andrew Leslie is a Canadian philosopher who focuses on explaining the world’s existence. Educated at Wadham College, Oxford, he earned a BA in Psychology and Philosophy, then an MLitt in Philosophy. He is University Professor Emeritus at the University of Guelph, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.
Closer To Truth, hosted by Robert Lawrence Kuhn and directed by Peter Getzels, presents the world’s greatest thinkers exploring humanity’s deepest questions. Discover fundamental issues of existence. Engage new and diverse ways of thinking. Appreciate intense debates. Share your own opinions. Seek your own answers.
Our universe seems fine-tuned for life, with the constants of physical laws having to be within tight boundaries. Does this mean that the universe has a goal of consciousness? Is there a directedness of the universe toward consciousness? Is consciousness entirely contingent or is it something special, even a ultimate object of universal development?
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Brian David Josephson, FRS, is a Welsh physicist. He became a Nobel Prize laureate in 1973 for the prediction of the eponymous Josephson effect.
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Closer To Truth, hosted by Robert Lawrence Kuhn and directed by Peter Getzels, presents the world’s greatest thinkers exploring humanity’s deepest questions. Discover fundamental issues of existence. Engage new and diverse ways of thinking. Appreciate intense debates. Share your own opinions. Seek your own answers.
If we seek answers to ultimate questions of human existence, can science provide them? Which of them? Ultimate questions include morality and art as well as purpose or meaning of life. In other words, if science is unable to know something, is that something forever unknowable? Or are there ways of knowing beyond science? If so, why would we trust them?
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The Rev. John Charlton Polkinghorne was an English theoretical physicist, theologian, writer, and Anglican priest. He was professor of Mathematical Physics at the University of Cambridge for 11 years, after which he resigned his chair to study for the priesthood, becoming an ordained Anglican priest.
Closer To Truth, hosted by Robert Lawrence Kuhn and directed by Peter Getzels, presents the world’s greatest thinkers exploring humanity’s deepest questions. Discover fundamental issues of existence. Engage new and diverse ways of thinking. Appreciate intense debates. Share your own opinions. Seek your own answers.
To inquire whether plants are “sentient” sounds like pseudoscience but has become real science. What does a plant know? Plants can react to their environments, but can plants sense or feel? Can they remember long-term? Can they adapt and learn? Are plants intelligent? And are they in any sense aware?
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Daniel Chamovitz is an American-born plant geneticist and the 7th President of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Beer-Sheva, Israel.
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Closer To Truth, hosted by Robert Lawrence Kuhn and directed by Peter Getzels, presents the world’s greatest thinkers exploring humanity’s deepest questions. Discover fundamental issues of existence. Engage new and diverse ways of thinking. Appreciate intense debates. Share your own opinions. Seek your own answers.
Only about consciousness can we be 100 percent sure. That consciousness exists almost everyone agrees. What consciousness means—that’s where arguments and disputations arise. Must consciousness have ‘meaning’? Or can consciousness be a random accident, selected by evolution, the ‘foam on the waves’ of brain activity. But consciousness seems so radically vital.
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Ned Block is an American philosopher working in the field of the philosophy of mind who has made important contributions to matters of consciousness and cognitive science.
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Closer To Truth, hosted by Robert Lawrence Kuhn and directed by Peter Getzels, presents the world’s greatest thinkers exploring humanity’s deepest questions. Discover fundamental issues of existence. Engage new and diverse ways of thinking. Appreciate intense debates. Share your own opinions. Seek your own answers.
If all that exists—everything imaginable, physical and nonphysical—is ‘something’. Why is there ‘something’ rather than ‘nothing’? Wouldn’t ‘nothing’ be simpler than any sort of ‘something’? It’s a haunting wonderment. It’s the biggest possible question. Why is there anything at all? There must be an answer. But who can know it?
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Willem Bernard Drees is professor of philosophy of the humanities at Tilburg University in the Netherlands. He was the editor-in-chief of Zygon Journal of Religion & Science, and professor of philosophy of religion at Leiden University, the Netherlands.
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Closer To Truth, hosted by Robert Lawrence Kuhn and directed by Peter Getzels, presents the world’s greatest thinkers exploring humanity’s deepest questions. Discover fundamental issues of existence. Engage new and diverse ways of thinking. Appreciate intense debates. Share your own opinions. Seek your own answers.
Free will is a classic and perennial problem in philosophy. It is a probe of profound issues of how the world works as well as how the mind works. What are the primary issues of free will? What are the opposing views? Can philosophical analysis help? What are the philosophical challenges? What is the current state of play?
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Peter Ulric Tse is Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience in the department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Dartmouth College. He holds a BA from Dartmouth in Mathematics and Physics, and a PhD in Experimental Psychology from Harvard University.
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Closer To Truth, hosted by Robert Lawrence Kuhn and directed by Peter Getzels, presents the world’s greatest thinkers exploring humanity’s deepest questions. Discover fundamental issues of existence. Engage new and diverse ways of thinking. Appreciate intense debates. Share your own opinions. Seek your own answers.
That the universe is ‘fine-tuned’ is generally not controversial. The laws of physics have to be ‘just so’ for anything we know, including ourselves, to exist. But why this is so and what this may mean is highly controversial. Coincidence and wildly good fortune? Multiple universes with anthropic selection? A Creator God (in one form or another)?
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Nick Bostrom is a Swedish-born philosopher with a background in theoretical physics, computational neuroscience, logic, and artificial intelligence, as well as philosophy. He is the most-cited professional philosopher in the world under the age of 50.
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Closer To Truth, hosted by Robert Lawrence Kuhn and directed by Peter Getzels, presents the world’s greatest thinkers exploring humanity’s deepest questions. Discover fundamental issues of existence. Engage new and diverse ways of thinking. Appreciate intense debates. Share your own opinions. Seek your own answers.
What happens after we die? Is there life after death? If so, what kind of life? From heaven and hell to systems and cycles of reincarnation, we explore Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, Judaism, and Chinese traditions, as well as Christianity.
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Hamza Yusuf Hanson currently serves as president of Zaytuna College in Berkeley, California, the first accredited Muslim liberal arts college in the United States. He also serves as vice-president for the Global Center for Guidance and Renewal.
Closer To Truth, hosted by Robert Lawrence Kuhn and directed by Peter Getzels, presents the world’s greatest thinkers exploring humanity’s deepest questions. Discover fundamental issues of existence. Engage new and diverse ways of thinking. Appreciate intense debates. Share your own opinions. Seek your own answers.
Everything we know, everything we think, comes from our brain. How do brains manage this remarkable feat? What principles do brains use? Do all brains work similarly? How to account for differences among species and among individuals? Are brains our window to reality, seeing what truly exists? Or are we bound by brains, mental slaves of the meat in our heads?
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Michael M. Merzenich is a Professor Emeritus Neuroscientist at the University of California, San Francisco. He attended the University of Portland in Portland, Oregon earning his Bachelor of Science.
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Closer To Truth, hosted by Robert Lawrence Kuhn and directed by Peter Getzels, presents the world’s greatest thinkers exploring humanity’s deepest questions. Discover fundamental issues of existence. Engage new and diverse ways of thinking. Appreciate intense debates. Share your own opinions. Seek your own answers.
We feel as if our consciousness is unified—we integrate sight, sound, all the senses. Our minds feel as an indivisible whole. But eye or brain injury can alter or eliminate sight. A stroke can destroy subtle aspects of language capacity—you can write and not speak, speak and not write. The brain is compartmentalized. So is unified consciousness an illusion?
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Christof Koch is an American neuroscientist best known for his work on the neural bases of consciousness. He is the President and Chief Scientific Officer of the Allen Institute of Brain Science in Seattle.
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Closer To Truth, hosted by Robert Lawrence Kuhn and directed by Peter Getzels, presents the world’s greatest thinkers exploring humanity’s deepest questions. Discover fundamental issues of existence. Engage new and diverse ways of thinking. Appreciate intense debates. Share your own opinions. Seek your own answers.
Some scientists claim that the universe did not have a beginning. Some theologians contend that the universe did not need a beginning. Yet the universe is expanding, and so run the movie in reverse and there seems to be a beginning. What stakes are riding on whether the universe had a beginning?
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Alexander Vilenkin is the Leonard and Jane Bernstein Professor and Director of the Institute of Cosmology at Tufts University. A theoretical physicist who has been working in the field of cosmology for 35 years, Vilenkin has written over 150 papers and is responsible for introducing the ideas of eternal inflation and quantum creation of the universe from nothing. His work in cosmic strings has been pivotal.
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Closer To Truth, hosted by Robert Lawrence Kuhn and directed by Peter Getzels, presents the world’s greatest thinkers exploring humanity’s deepest questions. Discover fundamental issues of existence. Engage new and diverse ways of thinking. Appreciate intense debates. Share your own opinions. Seek your own answers.
How do Buddhism, Chinese traditions, and Hinduism address Final Things—eschatology—life after death and the ultimate transformation of the world? What are reincarnation and non-dual pure consciousness in Hinduism? What are rebirth and Nirvana in Buddhism?
Featuring interviews with Swami Sarvapriyananda, Swami Medhananda, Jay Garfield, Franklin Perkins, and Tao Jiang.
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Closer To Truth, hosted by Robert Lawrence Kuhn and directed by Peter Getzels, presents the world’s greatest thinkers exploring humanity’s deepest questions. Discover fundamental issues of existence. Engage new and diverse ways of thinking. Appreciate intense debates. Share your own opinions. Seek your own answers.
Free will is a perennial conundrum. The ‘Big Questions in Free Will’ project brought together scientists, philosophers and theologians in a novel interdisciplinary initiative to develop new data and catalyze innovative ways of thinking. Here are the concluding thoughts of some of the participants. Has progress been made?
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Thalia Wheatley is currently an associate professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Dartmouth College in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences.
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Closer To Truth, hosted by Robert Lawrence Kuhn and directed by Peter Getzels, presents the world’s greatest thinkers exploring humanity’s deepest questions. Discover fundamental issues of existence. Engage new and diverse ways of thinking. Appreciate intense debates. Share your own opinions. Seek your own answers.
Sexual questions abound. What is “normal” sexual behavior vs. multiple variations? How to appreciate LGBTQ+ issues? What can be learned from sex in animal models that is relevant for human sexuality? A philosophical perspective can provide clarity.
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John A. Dupré is a British philosopher of science. He is the director of Egenis, the Centre for the Study of Life Sciences, and professor of philosophy at the University of Exeter.
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Closer To Truth, hosted by Robert Lawrence Kuhn and directed by Peter Getzels, presents the world’s greatest thinkers exploring humanity’s deepest questions. Discover fundamental issues of existence. Engage new and diverse ways of thinking. Appreciate intense debates. Share your own opinions. Seek your own answers.
Could information be the stuff of which everything is made? Information seems so abstract, not a substance or a thing, so how could it be the building blocks of reality? There are ways and reasons how information can literally be reality, some scientists claim, and their ideas are revolutionary.
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Andrew Briggs is Professor of Nanomaterials at the University of Oxford. He is Fellow of St Anne’s College, Fellow of Wolfson College, Fellow of the Institute of Physics, Honorary Fellow of the Royal Microscopical Society, and Member of International Society for Science and Religion and Academia Europaea.
Closer To Truth, hosted by Robert Lawrence Kuhn and directed by Peter Getzels, presents the world’s greatest thinkers exploring humanity’s deepest questions. Discover fundamental issues of existence. Engage new and diverse ways of thinking. Appreciate intense debates. Share your own opinions. Seek your own answers.
What is it about science and theology that grips people so emotionally, as during a war, such that each is committed to his or her viewpoint (which often are sharply opposed to one another)? Each is fighting for its predominance, if not for its life: religion from being marginalized, science from being politically contained.
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Saul Perlmutter is an American astrophysicist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and a Professor of Physics at the University of California, Berkeley.
Closer To Truth, hosted by Robert Lawrence Kuhn and directed by Peter Getzels, presents the world’s greatest thinkers exploring humanity’s deepest questions. Discover fundamental issues of existence. Engage new and diverse ways of thinking. Appreciate intense debates. Share your own opinions. Seek your own answers.
Here’s the ultimate question: what if it were true that everything always and forever had been ‘nothing’? Imagine that not a single thing ever existed–not emptiness, not blankness, not even the existence of emptiness, or the meaning of blankness. If you can image that, now ask yourself: why is there anything at all?
For more information on this topic, visit Andrew Loke's website: https://shorturl.at/bce7h
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Dr. Andrew Ter Ern Loke is an Associate Professor in the Department of Religion and Philosophy at Hong Kong Baptist University and an elected Fellow of the prestigious International Society for Science and Religion.
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Closer To Truth, hosted by Robert Lawrence Kuhn and directed by Peter Getzels, presents the world’s greatest thinkers exploring humanity’s deepest questions. Discover fundamental issues of existence. Engage new and diverse ways of thinking. Appreciate intense debates. Share your own opinions. Seek your own answers.
Assuming that the fine-tuning of our universe is real, what would it mean? Scientists, philosophers, even theologians weigh in, spinning the fine-tuning story to support their own worldviews. But philosophers have a higher calling here: they need to apply rigorous thinking and analytical methods to discern deep issues and implications.
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Tim Maudlin is a philosopher of science and a Professor of Philosophy at New York University.
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Closer To Truth, hosted by Robert Lawrence Kuhn and directed by Peter Getzels, presents the world’s greatest thinkers exploring humanity’s deepest questions. Discover fundamental issues of existence. Engage new and diverse ways of thinking. Appreciate intense debates. Share your own opinions. Seek your own answers.
How do Buddhism, Chinese traditions, and Hinduism address the ultimate essence of all things, the ground of being? What are transcendence, oneness, interconnectivity, ineffability? Compare Dao in Daoism to Brahman in Hinduism. Compare Wu in Daoism with Emptiness in Buddhism. Does God fit in?
Featuring interviews with Swami Sarvapriyananda, Swami Medhananda, Jay Garfield, Franklin Perkins, and Tao Jiang.
Explore all videos on Eastern Traditions: https://shorturl.at/agM69
Host Robert Lawrence Kuhn takes viewers on an intriguing global journey into cutting-edge labs, magnificent libraries, hidden gardens, and revered sanctuaries in order to discover state-of-the-art ideas and make them real and relevant.
Closer To Truth, hosted by Robert Lawrence Kuhn and directed by Peter Getzels, presents the world’s greatest thinkers exploring humanity’s deepest questions. Discover fundamental issues of existence. Engage new and diverse ways of thinking. Appreciate intense debates. Share your own opinions. Seek your own answers.
Consciousness is what we can know best and explain least. It is the inner subjective experience of what it feels like to see red or smell garlic or hear Beethoven. Consciousness has intrigued and baffled philosophers. To begin, we must define and describe consciousness. What to include in a complete definition and description of consciousness?
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Subhash Kak is Regents Professor of Computer Science Department at Oklahoma State University in Stillwater.
Watch more videos on the mysteries of consciousness: https://shorturl.at/Edppt
Closer To Truth, hosted by Robert Lawrence Kuhn and directed by Peter Getzels, presents the world’s greatest thinkers exploring humanity’s deepest questions. Discover fundamental issues of existence. Engage new and diverse ways of thinking. Appreciate intense debates. Share your own opinions. Seek your own answers.
What does it mean to have an ‘afterlife’? Are there different kinds of afterlives? What would it feel like to be in an afterlife? If one samples the various afterlives on offer from the world’s multitudinous religions, one would be forgiven for being confused. Here’s the core question: If there is a an afterlife, do individual personalities persist?
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David Shatz is the Ronald P. Stanton University Professor of Philosophy, Ethics, and Religious Thought at Yeshiva University and editor of The Torah u-Madda Journal, a journal devoted to the interaction between Judaism and general culture.
Subscribe to the Closer To Truth podcast for new episodes every Wednesday: https://shorturl.at/hwGP3
Closer To Truth, hosted by Robert Lawrence Kuhn and directed by Peter Getzels, presents the world’s greatest thinkers exploring humanity’s deepest questions. Discover fundamental issues of existence. Engage new and diverse ways of thinking. Appreciate intense debates. Share your own opinions. Seek your own answers.
Quantum theory is very strange. No act is wholly sure. Everything works by probabilities, described by a wave function. But what is a wave function? One theory is that every possibility is in fact a real world of sorts. This is the Many Worlds interpretation of Hugh Everett and what it claims boggles the brain. You can’t imagine how many worlds there would be.
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The Revd Dr. Rodney Holder was Course Director of the Faraday Institute from its inception in 2006 until 2013, and remains a Bye Fellow of St. Edmund’s College and a Faraday Associate.
Closer To Truth, hosted by Robert Lawrence Kuhn and directed by Peter Getzels, presents the world’s greatest thinkers exploring humanity’s deepest questions. Discover fundamental issues of existence. Engage new and diverse ways of thinking. Appreciate intense debates. Share your own opinions. Seek your own answers.
What are anti-realists and why do they deny objective reality? What we know of the world must come through our senses and be processed by our brains. Both can be unreliable; illusions can fool our senses and illness or injury can disrupt our brains. Therefore, can we ever be sure that anything outside ourselves is truly what it seems?
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Rebecca Newberger Goldstein is an American philosopher, novelist, and public intellectual. Goldstein is a MacArthur Fellow, and has received the National Humanities Medal and the National Jewish Book Award.
Closer To Truth, hosted by Robert Lawrence Kuhn and directed by Peter Getzels, presents the world’s greatest thinkers exploring humanity’s deepest questions. Discover fundamental issues of existence. Engage new and diverse ways of thinking. Appreciate intense debates. Share your own opinions. Seek your own answers.
Emergence is how the world works differently at various levels or hierarchies of organization. It’s what happens when the whole becomes more than the sum of all its parts. Emergence operates at all levels, from physics to chemistry to biology to psychology to sociology. The powers of emergence are stunning.
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Ian Graeme Barbour was an American scholar on the relationship between science and religion. According to the Public Broadcasting Service, his mid-1960s Issues in Science and Religion "has been credited with literally creating the contemporary field of science and religion".
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Closer To Truth, hosted by Robert Lawrence Kuhn and directed by Peter Getzels, presents the world’s greatest thinkers exploring humanity’s deepest questions. Discover fundamental issues of existence. Engage new and diverse ways of thinking. Appreciate intense debates. Share your own opinions. Seek your own answers.
Free will seems the simplest of notions. Why then is free will so vexing to philosophers? Here’s why: no one knows how free will works! Science, seemingly, permits no ‘gaps’—’joints’ in the structure of the world—in which free will can operate. The brain seems like an all-physical system working according to physical laws. How then a will that’s fully free?
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Eran Zaidel is Professor Emeritus of Behavioral Neuroscience and of Cognition in the Department of Psychology at UCLA, and a member of UCLA’s Brain Research Institute.
Subscribe to the Closer To Truth podcast on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen: https://shorturl.at/hwGP3
Closer To Truth, hosted by Robert Lawrence Kuhn and directed by Peter Getzels, presents the world’s greatest thinkers exploring humanity’s deepest questions. Discover fundamental issues of existence. Engage new and diverse ways of thinking. Appreciate intense debates. Share your own opinions. Seek your own answers.
Brian Thomas Swimme is a professor at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco where he teaches evolutionary cosmology to graduate students in the philosophy, cosmology, and consciousness program. His upcoming book, "The Story of the Noosphere", will be published in October: amzn.to/3K8cYrR
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Closer To Truth, hosted by Robert Lawrence Kuhn and directed by Peter Getzels, presents the world’s greatest thinkers exploring humanity’s deepest questions. Discover fundamental issues of existence. Engage new and diverse ways of thinking. Appreciate intense debates. Share your own opinions. Seek your own answers.
Ask the most fundamental questions; make the most penetrating inquires; probe the deep essence of existence. Push boundaries. Search the foundations of reality. Imagine all that may exist in physics and cosmology, even beyond current understanding. Then ask how such ultimate questions may change over time.
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Fred Adams is a professor of physics at the University of Michigan. His work is in the general area of theoretical astrophysics with a focus on the study of star formation and cosmology.
Watch more videos on the mystery of existence: https://shorturl.at/4EQAU
Closer To Truth, hosted by Robert Lawrence Kuhn and directed by Peter Getzels, presents the world’s greatest thinkers exploring humanity’s deepest questions. Discover fundamental issues of existence. Engage new and diverse ways of thinking. Appreciate intense debates. Share your own opinions. Seek your own answers.
Consciousness is the great mystery of inner awareness. Where does it exist? Humans, obviously. Animals? Which animals? Chimps, elephants, dolphins, dogs? Termites, snails, amoeba, bacteria? What about non-biological intelligences like supercomputers of the future? The question probes the deep nature of consciousness.
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Scott Joel Aaronson is a theoretical computer scientist and faculty member in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science department at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His primary area of research is quantum computing and computational complexity theory more generally.
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Closer To Truth, hosted by Robert Lawrence Kuhn and directed by Peter Getzels, presents the world’s greatest thinkers exploring humanity’s deepest questions. Discover fundamental issues of existence. Engage new and diverse ways of thinking. Appreciate intense debates. Share your own opinions. Seek your own answers.
How do Buddhism, Chinese traditions, and Hinduism address the perennial problems of suffering, ethics, ritual and contemplative practices? Why is suffering so important in Buddhism? Why karma in Hinduism? Why systems of nature in Chinese traditions?
Featuring interviews with Helen De Cruz Jay Garfield, Swami Sarvapriyananda, Swami Medhananda, Franklin Perkins, and Yang Xioa.
Explore all videos on Eastern Traditions: https://shorturl.at/agM69
Closer To Truth host Robert Lawrence Kuhn takes viewers on an intriguing global journey into cutting-edge labs, magnificent libraries, hidden gardens, and revered sanctuaries in order to discover state-of-the-art ideas and make them real and relevant.
Closer To Truth, hosted by Robert Lawrence Kuhn and directed by Peter Getzels, presents the world’s greatest thinkers exploring humanity’s deepest questions. Discover fundamental issues of existence. Engage new and diverse ways of thinking. Appreciate intense debates. Share your own opinions. Seek your own answers.
Defining death is no longer simple. Brain death can be irreversible while the heart can keep beating for years. Consider the great costs of prolonging life artificially and the great needs to harvest organs to save the living.
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Nathan H. Lents is an American scientist, author, and university professor. He has been on the faculty of John Jay College since 2006 and is currently the director of the Cell and Molecular Biology program.
Subscribe to the Closer To Truth podcast with new episodes every week: https://shorturl.at/hwGP3
Closer To Truth, hosted by Robert Lawrence Kuhn and directed by Peter Getzels, presents the world’s greatest thinkers exploring humanity’s deepest questions. Discover fundamental issues of existence. Engage new and diverse ways of thinking. Appreciate intense debates. Share your own opinions. Seek your own answers.
What are the basic components of the cosmos? At the deepest levels of reality—the particles, fields and forces of the smallest slices of existence—how does the world work? Standard model of particle physics? Quantum theory? String theory? What are these theories, how do they work, and can they work together?
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Henry Pierce Stapp is a mathematical physicist known for his work in quantum mechanics, particularly the development of axiomatic S-matrix theory, the proofs of strong nonlocality properties, and the place of free will in the "orthodox" quantum mechanics of John von Neumann.
Closer To Truth, hosted by Robert Lawrence Kuhn and directed by Peter Getzels, presents the world’s greatest thinkers exploring humanity’s deepest questions. Discover fundamental issues of existence. Engage new and diverse ways of thinking. Appreciate intense debates. Share your own opinions. Seek your own answers.
For the brain and mind to be the same thing, mind must be entirely the output of brain. This means the mind must be the brain—literally, identically. If so, then the physical world is likely all that exists. But if mind and brain are not the same thing, then what? Could there be extra stuff in the physical world? Could reality go beyond the physical?
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Robert Stickgold is an Associate Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center.
Closer To Truth, hosted by Robert Lawrence Kuhn and directed by Peter Getzels, presents the world’s greatest thinkers exploring humanity’s deepest questions. Discover fundamental issues of existence. Engage new and diverse ways of thinking. Appreciate intense debates. Share your own opinions. Seek your own answers.
Lots of things exist. But what is so absolutely fundamental in that it cannot be further reduced into anything more fundamental, but other things that exist can be reduced to it? The challenge is to discern the minimum number of basic categories that can explain the entirety of existence.
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David Chalmers is a philosopher at New York University and the Australian National University. He is Professor of Philosophy and co-director of the Center for Mind, Brain, and Consciousness at NYU, and also Professor of Philosophy at ANU.
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Closer To Truth, hosted by Robert Lawrence Kuhn and directed by Peter Getzels, presents the world’s greatest thinkers exploring humanity’s deepest questions. Discover fundamental issues of existence. Engage new and diverse ways of thinking. Appreciate intense debates. Share your own opinions. Seek your own answers.