MachineMachine /stream

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That headline flashed to all corners of the media universe this month. Of course, we don't know whether a universe has corners. Truth is, we don't know much about the…

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Good sense is the most fairly distributed commodity in the world, Descartes once quipped, because nobody thinks he needs any more of it than he already has. A neat illustration…

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Hard Atheism or What Shall I Name This Column? Hold onto your hats, folks. Although it is perhaps fitting that the actual day on which I sit here at my…

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Imagine being a slave in ancient Rome. Now remember being one. The second task, unlike the first, is crazy. If, as I’m guessing, you never were a slave in ancient…

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“It's not my fault. Communication error has occurred,” my computer pleads with me in a voice of lady Victoria. First it excuses itself, then urges me to pay attention, to…

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Now available for free online: The Mind's I: Fantasies and reflections on self and soul (ISBN 0-553-34584-2) is a 1981 book composed and arranged by Douglas R. Hofstadter and Daniel…

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You may have heard of determinism, the theory that absolutely everything that happens is causally determined to happen exactly as it does by what has already gone before — right…

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In an influential article in the Annual Review of Neuroscience, Joshua Gold of the University of Pennsylvania and Michael Shadlen of the University of Washington sum up experiments aimed at…

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Let's get one thing straight: Agnosticism is not some kind of weak-tea atheism. Agnosticism is not atheism or theism. It is radical skepticism, doubt in the possibility of certainty, opposition…

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There’s a struggle inside the brain of David Eagleman for the soul of David Eagleman. That is, there might be such a struggle if Eagleman’s brain believed that Eagleman had…

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It may sound like the plot of a Dan Brown novel, but an academic at the University of Manchester claims to have cracked a mathematical and musical code in the…

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The film critic Roger Ebert’s recent comments about video games and their potential as art, and especially the immense stir the comments caused on discussion forums all over the internet,…

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A science historian at The University of Manchester has cracked "The Plato Code" - the long disputed secret messages hidden in the great philosopher's writings. Plato was the Einstein of…

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We are all here to speak about the virtue of masters. I wrote a work called The Ignorant Master. Therefore it falls to me to defend on this subject the…

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In 2006 Stacy Snyder, a 25-year-old student at Millersville University in Pennsylvania, was denied a teaching degree just days before graduation. University officials had discovered a photo of her, captioned…

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Analytic philosophy has a complex history of more than one hundred years and this movement is so variegated that it can hardly be characterized by a single feature. Most of…

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The belief that humanity makes moral progress depends upon a wilful ignorance of history. It also depends upon a wilful ignorance of oneself – a refusal to recognise the extent…

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Warning: The ideas expressed here may be dangerous. For this year's list, we walked right past the usual suspects and went looking for trouble. We wanted radicals, heretics, agitators—big thinkers…

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Warning: The ideas expressed here may be dangerous. For this year's list, we walked right past the usual suspects and went looking for trouble. We wanted radicals, heretics, agitators—big thinkers…

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At the age of 17 he began dissecting corpses from the church graveyard. Between the years 1508 and 1512 he painted the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in Rome. Michelangelo…

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I think I am very close to concluding that this whole “New Atheism” movement is only a passing fad—not the cultural watershed its purveyors imagine it to be, but simply…

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Then there is the odd privilege of existence as a coherent self, the ability to speak the word “I” and mean by it a richly individual history of experience, perception,…

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Zombies are “characters” in the sense recently revived by the critic Aaron Kunin—they are a type whose existence extends beyond any one work or even medium. This is why we…

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...we all make use of paradigms in our work, but do we really know what a paradigm is, and what does it mean to use a paradigm in philosophy, in…

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Orwell leaves us with a list of simple rules: * Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print. * Never…