DE Weekly: Creativity, Greene, & Until the End of Time
A little over a year ago, I read a great book by American physicist Brian Greene, a professor of physics and mathematics at Columbia University, called Until the End of Time. The book explores the history of the universe from its beginnings to its eventual heat death, with a special focus on life and consciousness in the in between.
For someone who has little to no knowledge of universe-level physics (but who still has a wild fascination with such topics), I really enjoyed this book; Greene does a fantastic job explaining complex scientific processes with the reader and making sense of the material.
DE Weekly: Consciousness, Faith, & Free Will
The major question the existentialists sought to answer was, “What is the meaning of life?” Complementary to that question is another: does life even have meaning? Of course, they weren’t the first philosophers to ask this question. People had been thinking about this for thousands of years before them.
There are a lot of different ways to approach the potentiality of a grand, overarching meaning to life itself. Existentialism attempted to ground meaning in what we can actually see; it placed our perception above all else and used it to explain what might give each of our lives meaning.
DE Weekly: Chalmers, Descartes, & The Hard Problem
There are easy problems and there are hard problems. In life, the hard problems seem to permeate generations and stump even the most prolific philosophers. Existentialism deals, in large part, with mostly “hard” problems.
There is perhaps no such harder “problem” as consciousness. It’s so hard, in fact, that it’s sometimes referred to as “the hard problem of consciousness”, or even just “the hard problem”.