“The biggest concern is that we might one day create conscious machines: sentient beings with beliefs, desires and, most morally pressing, the capacity to suffer,” write psychologist Paul Bloom and…
Tag:
thoughts on life
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Given that the universe, and life on earth, unfolds in seamless wholeness, how did nature make such a mistake as man? And has evolution provided us a way out of…
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The winter rains came late this year in California. A series of storms this spring have made the land verdant beyond belief. Sitting on the lip of the narrow gorge…
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There’s a new installation on roof of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, “a spare and unsettling sculpture” according to the New York Times of two huge creatures—a…
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The search for life on other planets is intensifying. A field that was dismissed as fringe science two decades ago is now closing in from different angles on the question…
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In the early 1980’s, after 15 years of intensive philosophical inquiry into the question of how human disorder could evolve out of the natural order, I had a shattering experience…
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At bottom, “localism is the belief that communities can and should find solutions to their own particular problems, within their own particular contexts.” The seeming irrefutability of this idea is…
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When “2001, A Space Odyssey,” came out in 1968, I was in the 10th grade at a small Catholic high school in Michigan. Like many boys of my generation, I…