The Blind Spot argues we need to reform our scientific worldview to return human experience - consciousness - to its proper, central place in science, and that the deliverances of consciousness stand as a corrective to untenable scientific ambitions of objectivity. "Direct experience" presents reality in ways that must take precedence over scientific abstractions. In part 1 of this review, I suggest that such reform is unnecessary since science and experience - different sorts of world models - are not inherently in competition, and that the ideal of trans-human objectivity remains a worthy goal of science even if we can't take a God's-eye perspective on reality.

Behavioral biologist Robert Sapolsky shows why causal determinism is key to understanding ourselves and how its acceptance can contribute to moral progress.

In interviews with leading philosophers and scientists, Jack Symes provides us with an entertaining and informative tour of consciousness studies.

A 2021 talk for Keele University & The Royal Institute of Philosophy

Does consciousness emerge as a physical property of mind systems? That there is as yet no story of emergence puts pressure on physicalism.

Pinker is a conditional, rational optimist, not a Panglossian, about the prospects for continued global economic and moral progress. There is much we need to do, and can do, if we set our minds to it, to advance human flourishing and protect against existential threats. Besides making the rational case for science and reason itself, his book offers guidance on defending and augmenting the success we’ve achieved on multiple fronts, economic, political, and social. Hope for the human project is justified if we act on behalf of, and on the basis of, the Enlightenment ideals that Pinker argues account for our progress thus far.

Colors are real, just not locatable in the physical world they help to represent.

An excellent paper by Yonatan Fishman, Dept. of Neurology, Albert Einstein College of Medicine, answering in the affirmative.

The Einsteinian 4-dimensional "block universe" has somewhat discomfiting implications for free will.

An essay response to Sam Harris's Moral Landscape Challenge, in which he invited readers to prove his thesis about science-based moral realism wrong.

Widely accepted physical theory says that all events, past, present and future, coexist in four dimensional spacetime. How can we have control if the future is fixed?

Raymond Tallis and “neuro-determinism.” Tallis expresses a common worry that's surfacing more often as neuroscience reveals the material workings of even our highest capacities.

A Joshua Greene talk at the Harvard Science Center.

The View From the Center of the Universe is quite different from most volumes on cosmology. Its goal is not primarily to present an overview of contemporary scientific cosmological thought, but rather to urge readers to adopt a type of naturalistic religion.

There's no need to resort to pseudo-science to defend our humanity or discover life's significance. The physical world is the marvelously sufficient basis for our highest capacities, including the capacity to discover meaning in a wholly natural universe.

Comments on a talk by George Ellis, winner of the 2004 Templeton prize.

Mainstream science supports a physicalist understanding of human beings and their behavior which challenges traditional notions of self and free will.  But a fully naturalistic, science-based view of ourselves nevertheless provides a robust basis for morality, while pointing the way toward humane revisions in our responsibility practices.

An article published in Free Inquiry (link is external), Spring 2002.

Will materialism demoralize us, or will we continue to find meaning in our personal and social lives, even though life itself is understood to be a mechanism?