Explore every episode of the podcast MeaningofLife.tv

A bizarre Washington Post column about critical theory and Immanuel Kant ... Why has Kant become a bogeyman? ... How contingent is the history of philosophy? ... Relativism vs. rationalism ... What Kant meant by the "Critique of Pure Reason" ... Steven Pinker and the problem with rationalists ... David explains what Kant actually believed ...

What part of secular-guru space (if any) does Bob occupy? ... On the origin of Bob’s theses (by means of natural selection) ... The mind-boggling mystery of consciousness ... Could evolution have a larger purpose? ... The “global brain” as the flowering of natural selection’s seed ... Saving our species by transcending some species-typical tendencies ... The algorithm of evolution as “the Logos” ... How cognitive biases get in the way of global cooperation ... The positive feeling of negative emotions (but can mindfulness feel even better?) ... Bob explains his recent writings on tribalism ... Bob: You are an expression of "the [evolutionary] Logos" ... Bob’s latent-functionality theory of epiphenomenal consciousness ... Does evolution steer us toward greater alignment with moral truth? ... On the “panoramic specificity” of Bob’s dharma ...

Remembering Michael Brooks ... The existential stakes of enlightenment ... Overcoming the affective dimension of cognitive bias ... Bringing broader awareness to the concept of cognitive bias ... Cognitive bias and the roots of war ... The folly of feedback loops ... Quelling our primitive retributive impulses ... Taking a mulligan in your meditation practice ... Focusing on the hindrances ... Can you fail at meditation? ...

A plea to the weary to return to the Woke Wars ... Who is James Lindsay? ... Lindsay's book, Cynical Theories ... Lindsay's other critiques of wokeness ... The religion of wokeness, the religion of anti-wokeness ... Lindsay jumps on the Trump train (starts shoveling coal) ... The anti-semitism thing ... David: In a way, Lindsay is on the side of BLM ...

Oliver's new book, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals ... Oliver outlines “compatibilism,” the idea that free will and determinism can coexist ... Bob: Everyone should be a free will agnostic ... The occasionally dramatic consequences of arguments against free will ... Would determinism require us to reform our approach to criminal justice? ... A (possible) quantum hack for free will vs. determinism ... Bob thinks compatibilism is bullshit ... ... ... but Oliver tries to persuade him there's something to it ... Oliver: No position on free will and determinism is free of contradiction ...

John's recent bout of fever-induced hallucinations ... Does math actually help you understand QM? ... What experiments in QM have and have not verified ... John: All interpretations of QM are bad ... What do we want from science? ... "An operating system for reality" ...

Disavowing the naturalistic fallacy ... Why “sex” may not mean what you think it means ... Did evolution make women “choosier” about sex partners than men? ... Haggling over the price of sperm and eggs ... Agustín: Empirical studies complicate evolutionary psychology’s theoretical models ... The evolutionary significance of non-reproductive sex ... Why are males bigger than females in our species? ... Looking at pornography (for insights into human evolution) ... Are male and female sexual jealousy systematically different? ...

Sabine inspires John's quantum experiment ... Sabine previews her book-in-progress ... Isn't quantum mechanics non-deterministic? ... Is consciousness conserved? ... John and Sabine tangle over free will ... Physics creationism ... Will quantum mechanics be replaced? ...

Oliver’s new book, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals ... Why is it so hard to accept the limits of our productivity? ... Prioritizing mindfully ... Heideggerian time management ... Finding value in even "meaningless" work ... Reducing the lure of distractions ... Ten tools for embracing your finitude ... Five (pretty intense) questions for reflection ...

Josh's aversion to the term "guru" ... Explaining the explain/excuse conflation ... The (possible) evolutionary origins of (biased) arguing ... Are humans mismatched to their modern environment? ... Building strengths vs. addressing deficiencies ... Defusing attribution error ... Making cognitive empathy cool ... Using meditation to strengthen cognitive empathy ... The mythical side of Bob ... Rationalists, effective altruists, and other possible fellow travelers ...

Agustín on what he was and wasn’t saying in his controversial Science piece on Darwin ... What is biological anthropology? ... What social media critiques of Agustín’s editorial missed ... Untangling Darwin’s attitudes toward race and genocide ... Darwin’s worries about his theory’s acceptance ... What do female gibbons want? ... Agustín: Commonly used racial categories are unscientific ... The changing rules for competition among males ... Okay, so should we cancel Darwin or not? ...

Will science ever absorb the arts and humanities? ... Why Phil wrote a book about quantum mechanics ... Knowing quantum math doesn’t necessarily help ... Is "information” the key to quantum mechanics? ... What quantum computing can and can’t do ... The weirdness and arbitrariness of existence ...

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Defining effective altruism ... Rob explains the meaning of ‘80,000 Hours’ ... Should young people dedicate their careers to fighting climate change? ... The Apocalypse Aversion Project ... How cognitive biases fuel tribalism ... Bob: We need a psychological revolution ... Are external threats the best way to bring people together? ... The balance between surveillance and public safety ... Bob: Let's retire the word 'apologist' ... Making rationality cool ... Rob challenges Bob to find flaws in "The Moral Animal" ...

Josh tries to help Bob retool his meditation practice ... Identifying the purpose of your practice ... What to do when your mind wanders ... Tuning your mind ... The Four Rs ... Can mindfulness help us bolster our courage? ... Learning to tolerate blowback from your tribe ... Suffering and the psychology of tribalism ... Developing a non-zero-sum relationship with your own mind ... So you say you've been called a neofascist... ...

The value of defying your tribe ... Egocentric bias and attribution error ... The thin line between between courage and acting like an asshole ... Why do we punish people for unintentional transgressions? ... To understand all is to forgive all … ... … but forgiveness won’t get you retweets ... Are people’s politics as irrational as they seem? ... William James’ preternatural insight into human psychology ... Should the Philip Roth biography have been pulled? ... Reliving the worst day of your life ...

John’s new book, Circling the Elephant: A Comparative Theology of Religious Diversity ... John’s early religious sensibility ... The Advaita Vedanta tradition in Hinduism ... Grappling with the human predicament ... Approaches to ultimate reality ... John’s brush with non-dualistic experience ... Why John doesn’t consider himself a perennialist ... Touching the infinite elephant ...

Erik's new novel, The Revelations ... How Erik became a writer and a neuroscientist ... Erik defends integrated information theory ... The agnosticism of the novelist ... Should the mind-body problem have a single solutions? ...

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Who you callin' bodhisattva? ... Outlining the Apocalypse Aversion Project ... How meditation can make us better global citizens ... Why we need “cognitive crampons” ... Transcend and include ... The varieties of meditative experience ... Achieving micro-enlightenment ... The benefits of confronting your dark side ... Building a cognitively empathetic grassroots movement ...

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Why Tim became a philosopher ... John gets entangled in superposition ... Tim explains Bell’s Theorem with diagrams ... Tim rejects shutting up and calculating ... Will quantum computers lead to a better quantum theory? ...

Distinguishing between the numinous and the noumenal ... Kant’s religious vision ... The Copernican revolution in philosophy ... What, if anything, does the Buddhist idea of emptiness have to do with Kant? ... The transcendental status of space and time ... Can the Matrix help us understand Kant? ... Distinguishing between the noumenal and the phenomenal ... Can we transcend our phenomenal experience of the world? ...

What got Frank his Nobel Prize ... Frank's new book, Fundamentals: Ten Keys to Reality ... Solving the mystery of dark matter ... Can quantum physics make sense? ... Frank: Mind emerges from matter, not the other way around ... Can you love an automaton? ... Complementarity as scientific concept and everyday attitude ... How Frank's Catholic upbringing influenced his scientific thinking ... Is reality an algorithm? ... The limits of human intelligence ...

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Rob and Kevin make small talk ... Kevin describes and laments the grade economy ... What's the relationship between grades and learning? ... Bryan Caplan's "The Case Against Education" and how it has traumatized Rob ... Unschooling ... If schools suck so much, how did Rob and Kevin learn? ...

A new home for Sophia ... The (latest) defenestration of Kathleen Stock ... How sincere are pro-trans rights public intellectuals? ... Justin Weinberg's essay on the Kathleen Stock incident ... David: "It's the squishy middles that are gonna kill us" ... Dan: deplatforming people on social media is effectively censorship ... The death of public discourse and the rise of Trump ... How consensus crumbles ... David: we should get rid of the harm principle ...

Do you need math to grok quantum mechanics? ... Adam's quibble with Nils Bohr ... Explaining David Bohm’s pilot-wave model ... Defending the many-worlds hypothesis ... Are quantum mechanics and consciousness entangled? ... Will science ever explain the world? ...

Continuing “the Dharma of Bob” ... The evolutionary logic of cognitive biases ... Attribution error, or why your enemies seem so damn evil ... Zero-sum biases in a non-zero-sum world ... Bob fixes social media ... How cognitive biases have shaped perceptions of the Capitol riot ... The psychology of tribalism and the BLM protests ...

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Is spacetime obsolete? ... Quantum spookiness explained! ... Black holes and the big bang are spooky too. ... What preceded space and time? ... Is physics just poetry with math? ... George’s next book: how mind relates to matter ...