Big Think · 实时热榜

I need to move on and find my field plots, but pausing here has caused my feet to sink. They are now completely buried by peat; only my shins remain visible. I shift my weight from side to side and point my toes to break the suction, releasing a loud squelching retort and sending tiny bubbles to the surface. Walking through boglands requires a marriage of physical and mental strength. My footsteps push deep into soft ground, causing pools of dark cold water to rise over my boots. With no physica

“A 1960s American retro-futurist city street. A zombie outbreak has just erupted. The city has freshly emerged from battle, wearing the stillness that follows combat. It’s high summer, the sun directly overhead. Cold War, space-age streamlining: rounded, science-fiction domes. Chaos everywhere — wrecked vintage cars, scattered newspapers, blood on the pavement, storefronts from another decade. Zombie corpses litter the street. The leisure of the setting sits in violent contrast to the dead.” The

After witnessing the horrors of World War I, the naturalist Henry Beston retreated to a tiny cabin on the dunes of Cape Cod in search of a peace that human civilization had shattered. There, watching the birds and creatures around him, he began to question humanity’s place in the natural world. In 1928, he wrote that animals “are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time.” Nearly a century later, science is revealing just how

A while back, I was at a party in London where a friend introduced me to an actress who had just been in a big theater production. I was excited to talk with her. Throughout our conversation, she asked brilliant questions, and I enjoyed answering them. She was great at making people feel seen and important. But whenever I asked her something back, with real curiosity about her life, she gave a brief, polite answer and turned the spotlight back on me: “But enough about me, tell me more about you.

Could removing light be a key to discovering who you really are? That’s one idea behind dark retreats*, an experience that’s about as close to a complete sensory deprivation chamber as you can get. Participants spend extended periods in total darkness, stripping away the inputs and distractions of everyday life. Andrew Holecek, an interdisciplinary scholar-practitioner in Tibetan Buddhism and other nondual wisdom traditions, believes in the transformative power of dark retreats. Holecek says in

Is today’s AI conscious? Philosopher Ned Block says no, and he’s not alone in finding the question harder than it looks. In this Mini Philosophy live conversation, Block, Silver Professor of Philosophy at New York University, joins Jonny Thomson to discuss whether consciousness depends on computation alone or requires particular physical processes. Block draws a line between phenomenal consciousness (what an experience feels like) and access consciousness (information broadcast across the mind’s

In 1936, a shipyard worker in Hamburg kept his arms folded while hundreds of men around him raised theirs for Hitler. Luke Burgis, author of Wanting and The One in the 99, wants to know what it takes to become that person, and he traces the answer back to the family. Drawing on psychiatrist Murray Bowen’s distinction between the solid self and the pseudo self, Burgis shows how anxiety and opinion pass through groups by contagion, and how our screens have multiplied the crowds we have to stand wi

For decades, atheists have used one move to dismantle the case for God: swap in an evil one and show that the arguments work just as well. Philosopher Jack Symes was convinced by it, and was 50,000 words into a book defending atheism when he noticed that the exercise kept tipping toward goodness. He threw out the manuscript and started over. This video Beyond religion and atheism: The secret third answer to big questions is featured on Big Think .

One of the greatest open questions in all of the Universe today is just how abundant intelligent alien life is right at this very moment. We can imagine that extraterrestrial intelligence is common, and that the Milky Way is swarming with civilizations — thousands or even millions of them — just as intellectually advanced or even more technologically advanced than we are. Alternatively, we could be uncommon, where only a scarce few civilizations ever come into existence within the galaxy, and wh

Although Albert Einstein is a legendary figure in science for a large number of reasons — including E = mc² , the photoelectric effect, and the notion that the speed of light is a constant for everyone — his most enduring discovery is also the least understood: his theory of gravitation, general relativity . Before Einstein, we thought of gravitation in Newtonian terms: that everything in the Universe that has a mass instantaneously attracts every other mass, dependent on the value of their mass