A mind at rest can provide inner peace and insight. But, from the perspective of neuroscience, we can never truly figure out what it means for the brain to “rest” this way. Are you too preoccupied with work or other stress in life right now? Let’s practice a bit of…

S. Hussain Ather reviews David Chalmers’ “Reality+: Virtual Worlds and the Problems of Philosophy,” in which realities, like brains, become more real the more virtual they become. You’ve heard of reality, the world we live in every day. But what about Reality+, the one that Australian Philosopher David Chalmers discusses…

David Chalmers (2022). Reality+: Virtual Worlds and the Problems of Philosophy. W.W. Norton (book). Trigger Warning: mentions of potentially unsettling acts. S. Hussain Ather is a Google Summer of Code scholar. In “Reality+: Virtual Worlds and the Problems of Philosophy,” Philosopher David Chalmers discusses ethical and moral issues related to…

Imagine you run a business selling shoes online and wanted to monitor how your competitors price their products. You could spend hours a day clicking through page after page or write a script for a web bot, an automated piece of software that keeps track a site’s updates. …

Brains are only like computers in a specific abstract sense. We can take apart this analogy in the context of the brain-computer analogy to determine knowledge for philosophy, neuroscience, artificial intelligence, and other research areas. It’s very harmful in many ways to treat the nervous system as the hardware in…

Cartoonist Randall Munroe shares satirical advice about the world for anyone curious. The creator of the popular webcomic xkcd has come up with solutions to life’s problems. Results may vary.

Short answer: thinking. Why? Turning to analytic philosophy, you’ll find reasons stretching across consciousness and souls in why thinking makes us special. Evolutionary scientists explain how cognition and the ability to reflect, contemplate and ponder let humans overcome obstacles and struggle against nature. Thought transcending the surroundings of the world…

It’s easy to think of cognition and emotion as separate from one another, but research in cognitive science and neuroscience have suggested the two are more closely linked than we’d like to believe. Cognition can be defined as activities related to thought processes that let us gain knowledge about the…

With every tick of the clock I awake, escape the shock as I exit the dark of my dreams, as Jung would remark. Yet not understood. They say time flies. With age, the days feel shorter. Life speeds up, and it doesn’t slow down. The years start coming, and they…