Philosophers and scientists have always kept close company. Look back far enough, and it’s hard to tell where one ends and the other begins. 

Before we had instruments to measure reality, we had to reason our way into it, but that intellectual lineage is what eventually gave us the scientific method. As technology advanced and the scope for observation expanded, specializations splintered off from philosophy to reconstitute as the sciences. 

Astronomy cleared the sky of deities and showed us a universe governed by gravity, not gods. Geography mapped a not-so-flat Earth, then geology dated it, stratifying earthly time in isotopes and sedimentary layers. Physics folded time into space, and with it, reimagined us not as beings apart from nature, but as a continuation of its energy and mass. We are not, as Pink Floyd suggested, “lost souls swimming in a fishbowl.” We are matter, muddling our way through life in relativistic motion. 

Now, in the 21st century, science is tracing a map through the other great unknown: the mind.

Advances in biophotonics and neuroimaging have brought us closer than ever to a material picture of the mind, but the questions we’re now brushing up against aren’t melting away under empirical gaze. Instead, neuroscience has wandered back to philosophy’s front door, testing the limits of its most durable questions. 

1. Free will

In the early 19th century, French physicist Pierre-Simon Laplace imagined the Universe as clockwork, each gear turning in obedience to natural law. He conceived of a demon who, knowing the position and momentum of every particle, could predict the future with perfect accuracy. This thought experiment crystallizes classical determinism: a world where there is no freedom, only inevitability. 

Modern neuroscience can feel like Laplace’s demon in biological dress; if thoughts and actions arise from the physical machinery of the brain, are we anything more than cogs in the same cosmic clock?

Stanford neurobiologist Robert Sapolsky presses that case in Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will. The deterministic nature of our neural universe, he writes, is a totalizing argument against free will. Every act is an inevitable output of prior conditions — from genes to stress to social context. Even the air in the room, he notes, subtly alters our behavior. 

Some cases seem to justify his position. In Our Brains, Our Selves, Oxford neurologist Masud Husain tells the stories of patients who were dramatically reshaped by disease and injury. One such patient, David, developed profound apathy after a stroke damaged circuits that link the frontal lobes with the basal ganglia — structures heavily involved in motivation and action. He was awake, aware, and physically capable, yet the inner spark seemed gone. Neurologists call this syndrome abulia, the loss of will. Before treatment, others had to prompt him repeatedly to do even simple actions, but a simple dopamine-boosting medication restored David to his former ambitious self. Whether the drug restored free will is a philosophical question. What the case makes hard to deny is that whatever we call will — free or not — depends largely on the health of a few cubic centimetres of tissue and the concentration of a particular neurotransmitter.

Legal systems, psychiatry, and ethics all operate on a sliding scale of agency. Courts distinguish between crimes committed under premeditation and those committed under psychosis, for example. 

This graded scaffold of responsibility sits more comfortably with the compatibilist view that determinism and free will can coexist. Philosopher and cognitive scientist Daniel Dennett has argued that freedom and responsibility arise from acting according to your own motives. The obvious objection is never far behind: “But where do those motives come from? Who chose them?” 

This line of reasoning recurs endlessly in free-will debates — a philosophical whack-a-mole of causes causing causes. There’s a metaphor for this impasse: turtles all the way down. The phrase comes from a folk tale in which a scientist explains that the Earth orbits the Sun. A woman in the audience objects, “That’s nonsense, young man. The world rests on the back of a giant turtle.” When asked what the turtle stands on, she replies, “It’s turtles all the way down.”

One way out of this infinite regress is to stop sprinting back to the beginning of time and instead pay attention to what actually happens in the here-and-now of a living brain. 

The past shapes us, but shaping is not the same as puppeteering. Causality is the medium in which agency emerges; it is a precondition of free will. A creature that could not be influenced by its history or environment would also be a creature that could not learn, plan, or take advice. In a very literal sense, you need causes in order to become the kind of system that can weigh options at all. As Dennett puts it, “the past does not control you; it causes you, but it does not control you.” Even the studies Sapolsky cites to illustrate biological and contextual determinism rely on statistics. They deal in distributions and averages, not one-to-one inevitabilities. For all practical purposes, brains and behavior must be described probabilistically.

Brains are not like the simple physical systems that populate a physics textbook. It is not a swinging pendulum, an ideal gas, or a neat circuit with a fixed input-output table. It’s a vast, nonlinear, adaptive network. Billions of neurons — each with thousands of synapses — form feedback-rich loops that are constantly being reshaped. When those neurons interact, their collective behavior no longer resembles a simple chain of causes. 

At any moment, different coalitions of neurons can temporarily synchronise, form a functional team to guide perception or action, and then dissolve again. Neuroscientists describe this as a metastable system; it doesn’t lock into one pattern and stay there. The brain’s activity wanders across a landscape of possible patterns. Some regions of that landscape are attractors, preferred configurations the system tends to fall into. Others are ridges or passes that allow transitions between those attractors. 

All of this is, of course, shaped by genetics and experience, but it doesn’t behave like a simple line of dominoes. Within this probabilistic terrain, neural circuits don’t dictate a single inescapable fate so much as bias the odds. Given your current state — your mood, your level of fatigue, the cues in the room — some patterns of activity are more likely to ignite than others. Causality constrains the menu of possibilities, but it does not pre-write the exact sequence of states you will traverse. This is where Laplace’s demon starts to lose its nerve.

Since the underlying dynamics are nonlinear, small differences in timing or input can, in the right conditions, be amplified into very different outcomes. Dynamical systems theorists call this sensitive dependence on initial conditions. In the brain, that sensitivity shows up at the boundary between competing options, where tiny fluctuations — an extra spike here, a few milliseconds’ delay there — can bias which attractor wins out. That isn’t indeterminism magically giving birth to freedom; rather, it is sensitivity placed where control signals can matter. It’s a thoroughly material feature of the brain’s organization that leaves the door to something like free will open a crack.

A decision does not require some magical breaking of the causal chain. It is a reconfiguration of the system’s dynamics: a shift in which neural coalition comes to dominate, a redirection of probabilistic flow through a lawful network. In theory, any non-zero degree of agency could be sufficient to move the needle.

To call this free will may stretch the term, but it captures a naturalistic form of agency, the ability of a physical system to use its own internal organization and history to navigate its causal possibilities. Neural computation operates squarely within the laws of physics. No synaptic transmission outruns light; no action potential violates Maxwell’s equations. Yet the brain transforms these laws into degrees of freedom. Brains are neither pure dice nor pure clockwork; they sit somewhere in between. That in-between space may be where whatever is worth salvaging under the name “free will” actually lives.

2. The existentialist crisis of meaning 

Existentialism emerged from the collapse of theological certainty. In the 18^th and 19^th centuries, God was dead, or dying, and humanity found itself cut loose from the moral scaffolding that had once anchored its world. In the vacuum that followed, early existentialist thinkers such as Søren Kierkegaard and later Friedrich Nietzsche rejected the idea that reason alone could replace what had been lost.

By the mid-20^th century, after two world wars and the horror of Auschwitz, reason itself had come to look like a false idol. Writing amid the ruins of postwar Paris, second-wave existentialists Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir found that both religious and secular systems of moral governance had crumbled under the weight of human brutality. What remained was the individual, alone with the burden of choosing.

For a paper-knife, Sartre explains, “essence precedes existence.” Its maker conceives its purpose first; only then is the knife brought into being. Humans have no such luck, however. We give knives their purpose, but who gives purpose to us? According to Sartre and many other existentialists, we do. Since meaning is not given, it must therefore arise from how we live and act in the world.

Albert Camus, writing a few years later, found this project misguided. The very hunger for meaning was the problem, he argued. The mismatch between that yearning and the Universe’s indifference is what he called l’absurde. Any attempt to reconcile this impossible correspondence was, for Camus, “philosophical suicide.” According to his view, we must live for “the struggle itself,”  in full awareness of its futility. 

Today, existentialism has entered a third phase — a movement philosophers Owen Flanagan and Gregg Caruso call neuroexistentialism. If consciousness is “the hard problem” in mind science, then “the really hard problem,” writes Flanagan, is explaining how subjective significance can arise in a purely material brain. His answer — eudaimonistic naturalism — suggests meaning can be studied empirically, by examining what allows human beings to flourish.

I don’t necessarily disagree. However, looking at it from my perspective turns this question slightly on its axis. Meaning, I would argue, is not something we elect to create; it’s something that happens to us. To be conscious at all is to translate sensation into experience. The brain cannot help but impose coherence on the flux of sensory data — stitching cause to effect, moment to moment — because that is the mechanism by which it constructs and perceives reality. 

At Northwestern University, researchers asked volunteers to write about the past or future, imagining themselves in the experience. Whether the scenes they pictured were joyful or sad didn’t seem to matter — the very act of temporal simulation increased their reported sense of meaning. And the greater detail they imagined into the experience, the stronger the effect, on average. This suggests meaning is dialogical, emerging when engaged in process. The very act of being alive to our experience, and to time’s unfolding, appears to feed some part of our existential hunger, which, don’t forget, is the brain’s fault in the first place. 

The brain constructs our hunger for meaning, just as it conceives of meaning in the first place. Nobody else experiences meaning, aside from, perhaps, some other intelligent creatures whose existential despair remains private. Meaning has always been a brain-made construct. It was ours to begin with.

Seen this way, Camus’ absurd takes on a new texture. The Universe is unfeeling because, of course it is. It’s the very environment from which feeling emerged. It provided a world of sensations, and then organisms evolved to feel them — spawning abilities to help them navigate material reality and, crucially, survive inside it. For what other reason could we have awoken, were it not for evolutionary pressures that privileged the survival of reality-sensing organisms? Absurdity is simply the natural condition of consciousness awakened from unresponsive matter.

We are, whether we like it or not, phenomenological creatures. However we define it, meaning is ultimately a felt sense of coherence and value, not a fact about the world but a relation to it. This shifts the existential task. Meaning isn’t something to be manufactured ex nihilo, but a felt sense that arises when we feed the brain the kinds of patterns and environments it reliably metabolises into a sense of coherence. Which is not unlike the eudaimonistic naturalism Owen Flanagan suggested. I did tell you I don’t necessarily disagree. 

3. The self

If you follow the trail of 20th-century philosophers chasing the self, what strikes you is how restlessly the thing keeps moving. Martin Heidegger moved it out of the skull and into the world. In his view, selfhood is expressed in what you do, what you care about, and how your life is organized under the awareness of mortality, or “being toward death.”

Maurice Merleau‑Ponty tightened the focus from world to flesh, describing selfhood as a lived body. For him, the self isn’t a story you tell, but a pre-reflective feeling of mineness braided into perception and movement. 

Derek Parfit located it in something more abstract: in the continuing causal organization of mental life. He arrived at this conclusion via a thought experiment. Imagine your brain is divided and transplanted into two new bodies. Which one is you? Parfit argues that identity, as we imagine it, can’t do the job we want it to, because identity can’t branch. Psychological continuity, however, can — and that, he thinks, is what really grounds your concern about the future. You plan ahead, assuming that your future self will remember your past, carry your intentions forward, and feel the consequences of what you do now. After the transplant, your life continues in two streams, and what you care about is present in both. So perhaps, Parfit suggests, “you” can survive as two.

Above, we have three different answers to the same question: Where does the ‘I’ live? At the turn of the millennium, a new candidate was discovered. 

When you let your attention drift inward — to your past, your future, your inner monologue — the default mode network (DMN) kicks into gear. Neurologist Marcus Raichle first noticed it when certain midline areas would hum to life when his volunteers were waiting idly in the scanner between trials. Mind-wandering was the first function linked to this network. Since then, the DMN has been implicated in autobiographical memory, rumination, and self-referential thinking — exactly the sort of heavy lifting you’d expect from a narrative self-system.

When that network is perturbed, the felt shape of the self can change. Under psychedelics, the DMN becomes less internally coherent. As its activity falls away, so too does the bounded, narrating self — a state referred to as ego dissolution. At the same time, sensation and emotion flood more freely into awareness. Experience can feel more immediate and emotionally saturated, as if the editorial voice has gone quiet and the world has rushed in.

Depersonalization looks like the bleak mirror image. Here, DMN hubs chatter away, but their links to salience and interoceptive networks are weakened. The part of the brain that keeps up a running commentary about “me” is still humming, sometimes even overactive, but its conversation partners in the body and emotional brain have gone quiet. Patients describe feeling like a spectator sealed behind glass. They know who they are, and they remember the events of their lives. What’s missing is the felt mineness of experience. 

Depersonalization exposes the limits of what Parfit’s psychological continuity can explain. Continuity may be enough to ground the forward flow of memory, intention, and character, but it is not sufficient for the phenomenology of selfhood. In depersonalization, the continuer persists; the mineness does not. 

Experience is not a faithful readout of external reality, or of internal viscera; it’s the brain’s best Bayesian explanation of viscerosensory inputs. You can’t see your pupils dilate; you often can’t place a visceral shift precisely in space or time. That forces the brain to lean heavily on estimation models, making guesses that help it to integrate interoceptive signals — like heart rate, breathing, and temperature — with sensory feedback from the external world. 

In depersonalization, the system appears to down-weight those interoceptive signals, treating them as noisy and uninformative. The DMN keeps rehearsing the script of the self, but it’s no longer anchored to the visceral stream coming up from the body. From the inside, that feels like your life continuing in theory while someone else does the living.

The brain is ultimately an organ of regulation, which is why cognitive neuroscientist Anil Seth describes us as “beast machines.” We are biological control systems first, reflective narrators only later. Nervous systems arrive late in evolutionary history, appearing as specialized gadgets for helping bodies anticipate and avoid trouble. Perception and action evolved in service of keeping the body alive, and so our experiences are never really disembodied. 

Merleau‑Ponty was onto something, it seems.

Still, Seth relocates the self once more. He’s proposed that conscious selfhood arises from the brain’s role as a prediction-driven control system for the body. Feeling like a self, he argues, is the brain’s best effort to wrangle body, narrative, and world into a coherent stance. Selfhood lives in the connective tissue that binds story to sensation.

Psychedelics and depersonalization are instructive precisely because they pry those agreements apart.  One loosens the narrator while flooding the body; the other preserves the narrator while muting ownership.

The primary project of a living system is not to understand the world; it is to avoid dying in it. Perception, action, memory, and even our hunger for meaning are elaborations of that basic constraint. The brain is not made of celestial material. It is tissue and salt water, warmed, fed, and continuously informed by the rest of the organism. 

A brain removed from a body is not a mind; it is a rapidly failing organ. 

Inside the organism that feeds it, the brain becomes a dynamical system that can model its own future, argue with itself about responsibility, suffer the absence of meaning, and feel like someone rather than something. We perceive the world and ourselves because of, not in spite of, being “beast machines.” 

Editor’s note: This article was updated on 1/5/26 to correct a description of how Kierkegaard and Nietzsche thought about reason as a replacement for religious sources of meaning.

This article 3 philosophical debates from the 20th century that neuroscience is reshaping is featured on Big Think.

It’s the spring of 1951. As the Korean War escalates and the world engages in scandalized debate over Julius and Ethel Rosenberg’s recent conviction for espionage, students at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania are gathering in small groups to take part in what they believe to be a vision test. They’re shown three lines of obviously different lengths and asked which one matches a target line. Unaware that they’re participating in a psychology experiment overseen by the social psychologist Solomon Asch, the subjects don’t realize that everyone else in their group has been instructed to give the wrong answer. 

The task is simple — one line clearly matches the target while the other two clearly don’t. Yet when everyone in the room says otherwise, the students begin to doubt what they see. Such is the power of conformity, which Asch had designed the test to measure, that 75% of participants go along with an obviously false consensus at least once. They override their own judgment in the face of certainty from the group. 

This was a complex dynamic in 1951; today, it is even more so. Asch’s “majority” is now a cultural force whose atmospheric pressure we endlessly encounter online. Causes célèbres and ideological trends often shift faster than our capacity to gain a deep understanding of the issues involved, yet we’re incentivized to align ourselves with the prevailing view and signal accordingly. Of course, as in Asch’s experiment, the “majority” we react to can be an illusion that causes us to equate the loudest voices with authority. 

We inherit our ideas about morality, duty, and truth from the people around us.

Asch watched the immense power of consensus in action, learning that most of us prefer to risk being wrong rather than oppose the majority. His experiment posed a question with no moral or political stakes. When we feel pressured to jump on a bandwagon that does carry moral stakes, we are incentivized to conform to the moral worldview of others. The pressure to agree often works in this quiet, invisible way. There is no overt force or threat, merely the felt vulnerability of setting oneself apart. The discomfort of wondering whether we’ll face consequences for holding the “wrong” view, or for simply refraining from broadcasting the “right” one. Amid all this is the doubt Asch’s students also experienced — how likely is it that we could be right when the majority insists we’re not? 

This uneasy place is where the philosopher John Stuart Mill encourages us all to live, if we can bear to. Writing in On Liberty almost a century before Asch told his subjects he was testing their vision rather than their impulse to conform, Mill warned that Victorian society, and societies to come, would share a force toward conformity that he described as “the tyranny of prevailing opinion.” His concern was not the laws but the norms we live by, and the subtle but powerful ways that communities discourage us from deviating. 

While On Liberty is often read as a defence of free speech, it’s more fundamentally a defence of independent thought. We inherit our ideas about morality, duty, and truth from the people around us. When we grow up, we gravitate toward social groups and settings that mirror our views and experience implicit pressure to conform to social conventions. This has its benefits — it prevents most of us from taking a video call on speaker in the library — but it limits us, too. Mill worried that in Victorian Britain, as now, we are prone to internalizing the dominant narrative about how best to think and live until our judgment is replaced by imitation. This is what the students at Swarthmore College did when they were shown two lines that didn’t match and insisted that they did.

Mill was concerned that when we avoid the friction of nonconformity, we have no way of knowing whether our views are chosen or passively absorbed from our environment. We may, he wrote, “think [ourselves] free but [we] choose what is customary in preference to [our] inclination until it does not occur to [us] to have any inclination except for what is customary.” Asch’s subjects weren’t especially foolish or cowardly. They were ordinary people responding to pressure by setting aside their agency. 

We don’t even have to actively disagree to be interpreted as failing to conform.

Since Asch’s study, psychologists have mapped related biases. Through the false consensus effect, we overestimate the extent to which others share our views. This is our tendency to think “everyone” believes X because the people in our immediate group said they believe X. Pluralistic ignorance describes a “collective illusion” in which a group seems to hold a consensus opinion, even though, in private, most people don’t hold that opinion; they just go along with it because they mistakenly believe everyone else genuinely believes it. Even in the face of outward certainty, we seem to experience private doubt. 

Mill’s test of an independent mind involves taking ownership of that doubt and voicing it. We should feel encouraged, he suggests, when our friends look at us skeptically, or the WhatsApp group chat goes quiet when we politely disagree. Friction is not proof that our views are right, but it is proof that they’re being tested. Without this resistance, we can’t know whether our views are really our own, arrived at for sound, defensible reasons. Willingness to expose ourselves to this discomfort — this vulnerability — Mill tells us, is a form of discipline. To understand our beliefs, we should seriously entertain opposing ones.

We don’t even have to actively disagree to be interpreted as failing to conform. One of the most contested forms of nonconformity in our time is something quite different: having no opinion at all. This isn’t passive disengagement, but the deliberate refusal to declare a position on whatever issue is currently dominating the public conversation, whether it’s a geopolitical conflict, a viral controversy, or the black Instagram squares of 2020. This pressure to declare we’re “on side” with whatever is currently capturing the news cycle evokes Asch’s experiment. An implied majority treats silence as complicity, and the result is that we’re encouraged to perform agreement even when we’re uncertain, uninformed, or just exhausted by the constant cycle of one issue being the only moral question that seems to matter before it passes from notice and the “majority” moves on. In an environment like this, choosing not to speak can be as nonconformist, and perhaps even as difficult, as open dissent.

No doubt some of the Asch experiment subjects chuckled on their way out the door, once the ruse had been explained to them. Others, probably, were unsettled by how readily they yielded to “the tyranny of prevailing opinion.” This discomfort, Mill tells us, is good. It is the seed of independent thought.

This article The illusion of consensus is powerful. Here’s why you should fight it. is featured on Big Think.

Activism is a spectrum with two extremes. At one end, you have the Purists. These are uncompromising, evangelical idealists who will never meet in the middle and will fight until total victory is won. At the other end, you have the Pragmatists. These are morally flexible bureaucrats who will give a little to get a little, even if it means sacrificing the bigger prize. Most activists will fall somewhere along this spectrum, but with significant clusters at either end.

If you are an outsider looking in, activism can seem a mess. Thousands of environmentalists, each demanding a different thing. Hundreds of anti-war campaigners, all chanting their own slogans. And when it looks like the left hand is trying to cut the right hand off, it’s tempting to assume the entire mission is doomed. But that tension between idealism and compromise isn’t necessarily a sign of failure. The push and pull between Purists and Pragmatists is what makes activism work.

Some people hold signs. Some write policies. Some get arrested. Some get invited to Downing Street. So, what separates the Pragmatists and Purists, and why do we need them both?

The difference between progress and perfection

What is the point of activism?

This isn’t a trolling, faux-ignorant attempt to belittle the efforts of those trying to make the world better. It’s the first question anyone needs to answer if they actually want to make the world better. On the face of it, it’s obvious: an activist is someone who wants to change how things work. They want the government to adopt a new law or to scrap an old one. They want corporations to do more of X and less of Y. They want the public to think about this thing more than that thing.

In one way, Pragmatists and Purists want the same thing. They will meet in the same townhall, are members of the same Facebook group, and might have read the same books. But the key difference between the two groups is measured in how they define success, and under that lies moral philosophy.

Pragmatists see progress in terms of raw numbers. Purists see it in terms of an absolute criterion.

A Pragmatist will often define success in terms of a scale — “make the legal system fairer,” “reduce inequality,” or “increase awareness.” These activists work to the beat of comparative adjectives: more, better, safer, happier, fairer, etc. A Pragmatist will never “win” because there will always be more to do, but they will also have greater success because it’s relatively easy to make the world even a bit safer, happier, better, etc.

It makes sense, then, that Pragmatism is often tied to a consequentialist philosophy — it can measure the good or bad of something by the numbers. If more people are better off today than yesterday, that’s a good thing. If more people are worse off, that’s a bad thing. Numbers make success. And so, if a Pragmatist is hoping to make the world 100% better, but is only offered a choice between a 10% improvement or no improvement at all, they will always take the 10%.

Purists don’t settle for incremental gains. They define success in terms of an absolute result: all women over 18 should get the vote, slavery must be abolished, the war has to end, and so on. It’s much harder to compromise on absolute, defined criteria like this because compromise looks like a loss. Sometimes, this pure absolutism might be tied to a philosophical or religious position — for example, religious commandments rarely allow wiggle room. 

These days, most readers will agree there is no “acceptable” amount of slavery or marital rape. These are always, everywhere, and forever wrong. Similarly, Purists believe there is no compromise position on certain issues. The only success criterion is this specific thing, and anything else is a moral failure.

And so, on one level, the battle lines between the Purists and Pragmatists are waged on philosophical grounds: Pragmatists see progress in terms of raw numbers or a measurable outcome ticking upward, and Purists will see it in terms of an absolute criterion.

The world of tomorrow and the people of today

The goal of most activists — whether Purists or Pragmatists — is to achieve lasting change, helping not just the people of today, but the people of tomorrow, too. 

In 1984, the British philosopher Derek Parfit wrote a book called Reasons and Persons, where he laid out the basic ideas of “longtermism,” a philosophical position that says when we weigh up the good or bad of our actions, we shouldn’t consider only the billions of people alive today but also the billions and billions who’ve yet to be born. 

Thinking long-term forces both Pragmatists and Purists to grapple with the unintended consequences of their approaches.

If you were an abolitionist in the 18th century and the president or prime minister said, “Okay, we’ll ban the slave trade for children if you back down,” would you take the deal? As a Pragmatist, this might seem like a win: You would be saving countless children worldwide from misery. But the move might also entrench a system that continues to treat adults as property — possibly delaying full abolition for decades. A Purist would immediately shoot down the offer. This might accelerate the abolition of slavery entirely, but until that day, children would continue to suffer from its harms.

Suddenly, the moral equation becomes very complicated. It isn’t about absolutism vs. consequentialism, but longtermism vs. presentism.

The spectrum itself wins

If Parfit is right, and we have a moral obligation to the future as much as today, then activists ought to be most concerned with changing systems, laws, and institutions to achieve their ultimate goals. And in reality, you often need both Purists and Pragmatists to enact this kind of change.

Purist William Lloyd Garrison burned the Constitution in 1854, calling it “a covenant with death.” His moral absolutism horrified many — but it also forced the U.S. to confront slavery’s depravity. Within 11 years, the 13th Amendment abolished it. When the Women’s Social and Political Union smashed windows in 1912 to demand equal voting rights, their militancy pushed suffragists into the mainstream. By 1918, Pragmatists had a win: Women over 30 could vote. Full equality followed a decade later. In 1961, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee’s jail-ins dramatized injustice so starkly that Pragmatist Martin Luther King Jr.’s negotiations no longer looked radical but reasonable.

Purists’ moral defiance draws attention that Pragmatists can use to move policy — even if it doesn’t happen as fast as the Purists want or all at once, change happens.

The Purist calls out the moral horror. The Pragmatist makes the change possible. 

Today, you can see the same pattern playing out. Climate activists glue themselves to roads while policy negotiators haggle over carbon targets in Dubai. Factory farming abolitionists call for an end to animal agriculture altogether, while those pushing for animal welfare reforms work to make the system less cruel. Protesters block arms shipments as diplomats broker ceasefires. It’s easy to call one side naïve and the other cowardly, but each depends on the other: The Purist calls out the moral horror. The Pragmatist makes the change possible. 

Activism is messy. There is no one-size answer that can hope to explain the complicated socio-historical factors that lead to change finally happening. In some ways, the history of activism is a classic case of survivorship bias — we look at the success stories, create a narrative, and ignore the inconvenient counter examples. We might say that change needs both Purists and Pragmatists, but can equally point to cases when both hamstrung the other.

For example, the “Purists” of the Weather Underground and all the radical movements of the ‘60s and ‘70s accomplished virtually nothing with their department store bombings and cop slayings. If anything, their bombings made middle America hate them and leftist movements. Likewise, in the early 20th century, Samuel Gompers and the American Federation of Labor deliberately restricted the labor movement to skilled, largely white, male craft workers. This was framed as strategic pragmatism to keep goals narrow, avoid large-scale confrontation, and win incremental improvements. Stay respectable in the eyes of business and the state, and you will get things done. But it’s been argued that this cautious pragmatism set back the formation of broader industrial unions, fragmented worker solidarity, and enabled existing racist and sexist policies.

Progress is not a straight road but a winding, incoherent network of paths that kind of moves forward eventually. The only thing we can say is that activism involves lots of different elements, made up of different people, with different tactics. We need brave, bold, intelligent individuals and a fertile socio-economic ground in which to work. Activism is messy. And yet, in this messy arithmetic of moral courage, what emerges — slowly, unevenly — is something a bit better than it was before.

This article How Pragmatists and Purists work together to change the world is featured on Big Think.

Narcissistic traits are pretty common — most of us enjoy a little admiration or praise, feel stung by criticism sometimes, and spend our adolescence nursing a secret belief that maybe we might be special, actually. In moderation, these personality traits bolster the self-regard we need to function in the world. They don’t necessarily make you a “narcissist” — someone with narcissistic personality disorder (NPD), a rare condition marked by grandiosity, preoccupation with power and status, lack of empathy, arrogance, and a pattern of exploitation. Feeling mistreated after your annual performance review or forgetting to message your friend back are not grounds for a clinical diagnosis. They’re just ordinary human experiences.

“Narcissist” once clearly referred explicitly to this clinical categorization. Now, we borrow this value-laden word to pathologize people who disappoint or irritate us, turning it into cultural shorthand for standard-issue thoughtlessness, selfishness, and poor behavior online. By plucking technical language from one domain and applying it in another, we blur the boundary between describing reality and augmenting it. The result is that words we use in this way carry distinct associations but no longer clear meanings, and they can lose their utility in the process.

Conceptual stretching

In 1970, political theorist Giovanni Sartori described this drift of meaning as “conceptual stretching.” Sartori argued that it occurs when words or phrases move too far from the conditions that originally anchored them. They become gradually devalued, retaining their emotional and moral charge while losing clarity. In everyday use, “narcissist” moved from a clinical diagnosis to a sort of lifestyle judgment, yet it retains the moral seriousness — and social stigma — that we often associate with a mental health disorder. When we call someone a narcissist, we aren’t making a clinical diagnosis. We’re borrowing a term from one sphere and stretching it to perform a different function in another — in this case, to elevate the seriousness of our moral judgment.

Conceptual stretching is all around us. “Health and wellness” could denote either a harmoniously functioning human body or marketing copy for a dubious collagen supplement. A luxury foot cream is branded “sustainable” because a part of the tube is made from recycled plastic, and on social media, “authenticity” has become a buzzword for people who make their living from constructing the very profitable optics of an aspirational life.

Conceptual stretching shapes politics, too. It’s why a fourth-wave feminist can call sex work “empowerment,” while a second-wave feminist calls it “exploitation,” with each sure that theirs is the truer feminism. The term “sex work” itself sits on what psychologist Steven Pinker calls the euphemism treadmill – the cycle of replacing words for stigmatized concepts (like prostitution) with new ones in an attempt to shed their social or moral baggage. As Pinker notes, this generally doesn’t work: The new word simply inherits the same associations as the old one.

While the euphemism treadmill swaps the label for a steady concept, conceptual stretching keeps the label but blurs the concept. It’s why “woke” shifted from an adjective signifying awareness and denoting a certain approach to social justice issues in the 2010s to a punchline. Within a decade, “woke” went from having a relatively clear and fixed meaning to becoming such an unstable and contested concept that it collapsed under the weight of competing interpretations. Conceptual stretching rendered the word incoherent — once it can mean anything, it effectively means nothing.

Sartori was picking up a thread that has run through the history of philosophy. Aristotle considered definition to be the foundation of understanding; Wittgenstein warned us that “the meaning of a word is its use in the language,” dependent on the context in which it is used. Philosophers have long worried about what can happen when concepts develop leaky boundaries. After all, how we use words shapes how we think — when our language loses clarity, so too do the ideas we try to convey. If we describe a tricky job interview as “traumatic,” or speech we don’t approve of as a form of “violence,” we don’t have these clear and strong terms to unequivocally name the instances and contexts they technically describe. 

Descriptive vs. normative

Conceptual stretching isn’t always negative. Descriptive stretching happens when a term’s scope is broadened to account for new realities. It’s an evolution rather than a deformation. Words like “environment” or “community” can be stretched without undermining the integrity of the original concept. A community can be both a shared location and a shared identity. 

Normative stretching works differently. It’s about persuading rather than describing, and putting the language we use to moral or ideological work. If I call the colleague who reheated salmon in the office microwave “a narcissist,” I’m making a moral statement about their behavior and elevating their admittedly uncollegial fish reheating beyond the level of everyday transgression. 

If a dictatorship calls itself a democracy, or a metaphorical erasure is phrased in the language of a literal one, language ceases to be about conveying a reality but creating a rival one. The idea of cultural or linguistic “genocide” borrows from Raphael Lemkin’s original definition of a genocide as a form of deliberate extermination of a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group. To elevate the seriousness of a scenario that, while plausibly a form of “erasure,” doesn’t quite fit the totalizing concept that Lemkin coined as “genocide” in 1944, is to open the term’s technical meaning to debate. Meaning is stretched and becomes blurrier as concepts without a clear relationship are grouped as like cases. Normative stretching tends to corrode meaning, while descriptive stretching can refine our language by extending clarity. 

The German-American philosopher Eric Voegelin, who fled Austria when it was annexed by the Nazis in 1938, described the process by which ideas fall victim to the language used to express them as “deformation.” He was interested in how ideologies that emerge in response to real phenomena become detached from reality; concepts lose their relationship to what they once referred to, and the distinction between a symbol and the thing it symbolizes is lost. When a symbol no longer represents reality but begins to replace it, he argued, we lose the capacity to differentiate slogans from truth. Our reality becomes distorted by language rather than described by it.

This is the danger of conceptual stretching in our cultural moment. Online, virality is more powerful than veracity. The vaguer and more emotionally resonant words are, the more attention they capture in our digital landscape. While conceptual stretching can feel like an evolution of new ideas, it often acts as a substitute. We distort old terms to fit new phenomena they don’t quite apply to, and we lose something of our connection to reality in the process. The luxury foot cream isn’t actually sustainable. Your annoying aunt probably isn’t a narcissist (though maybe check with a psychiatrist). The country without free elections isn’t really a democracy. Conceptual stretching might obliterate clarity, but it also reveals where we need to recover it.

This article From “woke” to “traumatic”: How useful terms become empty buzzwords is featured on Big Think.

I remember working on my book and catching myself mid-paragraph. I’d just finished a sentence that felt particularly satisfying to write and paused to ask: Why does this feel so good?

The answer wasn’t flattering. What I’d written sounded smart, but it wasn’t clear. I realized I’d been unconsciously filtering ideas through “does this make me look clever?” instead of “will this help the reader?”

Once I noticed I was optimizing for the wrong outcome, I could change it. I started asking different questions: Is this clear? Will this example actually land? What am I assuming the reader already knows?

That shift — becoming aware of how I was evaluating my own work — changed how I approached the rest of the book.

This kind of self-observation is what researchers call metacognition, and it’s useful far beyond writing. While most people learn by trying things and seeing what happens, metacognition lets you get better at the learning process itself. Instead of just collecting experiences, you improve how you interpret them.

How your brain normally learns

Your brain is constantly making predictions. It expects certain outcomes; you act on those expectations, see what happens, and then update your mental model. Touch something hot, feel pain, remember that hot things hurt. Message someone, get no response, assume they’re not interested. This cycle runs automatically, usually without conscious thought.

This system is fast and efficient, but it has problems.

The biggest issue is that your automatic learning system often focuses on the wrong signals. It’s easily skewed by recent events, your mood, and invisible biases.

Worse, it can’t examine itself. It can’t tell whether it’s actually learning the correct lessons from experience. It’s like trying to see your own face without a mirror.

The overlooked skill that helps you learn faster

When you pause to ask, “How confident am I about this?” or “What’s the basis for my reasoning?” you’re doing something qualitatively different from automatic thinking: You’re observing your own mind at work.

Metacognition means “thinking about thinking.” Instead of just learning from what happens, you pay attention to how you’re learning.

Research suggests that people who regularly check their confidence become better at distinguishing between what they know and what they only think they know, and as a result develop a sharper sense of their own understanding.

For instance, a chess master doesn’t just analyze positions — they analyze their analysis. They notice when they’re being drawn to flashy moves or letting emotion cloud their judgment. A surgeon notices when fatigue or overconfidence might affect their decisions.

This self-monitoring helps experts catch problems in real time, rather than waiting for results to show what went wrong, meaning they can adjust their approach while still in the middle of a task.

How to build a smarter feedback loop

Metacognition isn’t just about awareness; it’s about improving how you think. The good news is that you can train it. Practices you can try include:

• Explain things to yourself. When learning something new, don’t just read or listen. Ask yourself why it makes sense and how it connects to what you already know.
• Study your mistakes. If something goes wrong, resist moving on too quickly. Instead, dig into what happened: What was I thinking? Where did my reasoning break down? What was I assuming? What would I do differently?
• Think out loud. When solving a problem or making a decision, narrate your thought process. Speak (or write) what you’re thinking as you think it. This makes your invisible reasoning visible so you can examine it.
• Check your confidence. Notice how sure you feel when making a decision. Consider whether your confidence comes from solid evidence or gut feeling, and what information you might be missing.
• Notice your thoughts. Just like in mindfulness meditation, simply observe your mental processes without judgment. You don’t need to meditate for hours; even a few minutes of paying attention to your thinking can be helpful.

Above all, stay curious about how your mind works. Notice when problems feel easy or hard, when your motivation goes up or down, and when you make the same kinds of mistakes.

And the next time you’re learning something, solving a problem, or making a decision, ask: How am I approaching this? What am I assuming? How confident should I actually be? These metacognitive questions, if asked regularly, can change not just what you think but how you think.

This article Want to be a better learner? Start by noticing how you think. is featured on Big Think.

Here’s a curious fact that often slips by unnoticed: Philosophers rarely change their minds. Across the history of the discipline, you could count on two hands those who openly revised their positions on major questions. 

This is surprising, given philosophy’s very nature. It thrives on debate, supplying endless reasons to question one’s stance. Philosopher Will Buckingham once remarked that, if reasoned dialogue worked as we might expect, philosophers would be shifting their views “with a quicksilver frequency that would put the rest of us to shame.” After all, in a world teeming with critical colleagues and formidable counterarguments, one might imagine minds constantly turning over. The ideal philosopher, we assume, would be supple, guided by evidence, and willing to follow arguments wherever they lead — embodying the Socratic lesson that recognizing one’s fallibility is the beginning of wisdom. As Alexandra Plakias has noted, philosophical about-faces should not scandalize us; they should be honored.

Hilary Putnam, one of the 20th century’s most influential philosophers, stood out as a rare figure who treated changing his mind as a virtue rather than a failing. He even defended it openly, presenting self-revision as a mark of intellectual honesty. In 1988, in the introduction to his major work Representation and Reality, he performed one of his most striking turnarounds: renouncing functionalism, the computational model of mind he had once advanced. Anticipating disapproval, he asked why colleagues treated this habit as a flaw. Perhaps, Putnam quipped, he erred more often — while “other philosophers don’t change their minds because they simply never make mistakes.” For him, obstinacy was far worse than correction.

So, why does intellectual stubbornness so often carry the day? Buckingham suggests it begins with the sheer effort that philosophers pour into their arguments. To see that carefully constructed edifice topple like a house of cards is painful enough — even worse when a lifetime’s reputation is bound up with it. Safer, then, to keep loosing arrows at others’ positions rather than one’s own. Yet the culture of philosophy adds to the pressure. Sticking faithfully to a theory is praised as strength, a badge of consistency. In an age enthralled by certainty and being right, reversal is branded weakness. Little wonder that a philosopher who changes course invites surprise, suspicion, and sometimes the hostility of old friends.

Still, the history of ideas contains flashes of intellectual heroism: the nerve to renounce even one’s most celebrated beliefs in deference to truth. Psychologist Peter C. Hill observes that while many dismiss such reversals as flip-flopping, the simple act of saying “I was wrong” can signal resilience, modesty, and openness. In a discipline built on unrelenting argument and daring questions, the ability to shift course in light of stronger reasoning is not weakness but a philosopher’s deepest obligation. Such episodes remind us that philosophy, at its best, thrives on receptivity and the humility to change direction.

Even in antiquity, some thinkers embodied this courage. Timocrates of Lampsacus broke with his mentor Epicurus, denouncing the very school he had once embraced. His brother Metrodorus struck back with a fiery polemic, Against Timocrates. Dionysius of Heraclea, caught in a health crisis, abandoned Stoicism for the pleasures of the Cyrenaics — only to be branded a traitor by former allies who saw his change of heart as proof of weakness.

From these early renegades, we now turn to five later cases of “radical reversal”: Augustine, Kant, Marx, Wittgenstein, and Simone Weil. These were no youthful missteps corrected with time, but towering thinkers at the height of their powers overturning their own hard-won systems. Each held fast to a worldview until a crisis or revelation broke it apart. Instead of clinging tighter, they leapt into new terrain — often at steep personal cost.

St. Augustine: From cosmic puppets to the grip of grace

Augustine of Hippo (354–430) altered his philosophical course twice — and each time with seismic force. Long before he was canonized as a saint, he was a restless, brilliant young mind absorbed in a very different creed. For nine years, he devoted himself to Manichaeism, a Persian religion now vanished from history. Its vision was stark: the Universe locked in perpetual war between Light and Darkness, good and evil. In this scheme, free will was feeble, and sin could be blamed on dark forces inhabiting the body. Augustine rose quickly, dazzling as a public advocate, trading arguments with Christians and skeptics alike. Yet his private life told another story: “in love with love,” he clung to pleasure, kept a concubine, fathered a son — and reasoned it all away as the work of Darkness.

In his late twenties, Augustine entered a season of turmoil. Doubts about Manichaean cosmology grew sharper, and he slowly drew back from the dualists. For three unsettled years, he searched for a philosophy that could steady his restless mind — testing skepticism, exploring Neoplatonism, and weighing Christian teachings, already entertaining the notion of free will. Outwardly, he taught rhetoric; inwardly, he wrestled. He had parted from his mistress, reluctantly accepted an arranged marriage, and spent months in semi-monastic retreat with friends. 

Then came the turning point. Weeping helplessly beneath a fig tree, he heard a child’s voice chanting, “Take up and read.” Opening the New Testament at random, he was seized by a sudden clarity: a light of serenity that dissolved doubt and gave him strength to renounce his old life.

In the summer of 386, Augustine embraced Christianity with dramatic finality, abandoning his career as an imperial rhetoric teacher and a never-realized arranged marriage. Yet this was not the last reversal. The great struggle of his thought — the tension between free will and grace — would occupy him for the rest of his life. Early in his Christian journey, eager to refute Manichaean fatalism, he championed human freedom. In On Free Choice of the Will, he argued that evil arises from the misuse of choice, not from some rival deity, and that responsibility lies with us. Sin, he insisted, cannot be laid at the feet of cosmic powers.

But over time, Augustine’s position shifted radically, driven by new opponents. The British monk Pelagius taught that humans could reach salvation unaided, by sheer moral effort. Alarmed, Augustine hardened his doctrine of grace, becoming its great theorist. By the end of his life, he insisted that without God’s unearned gift, humans are powerless to do good; even the first steps of faith depend on grace. His prayer — “Give what you command, and command what you will” — captures this conviction. Critics accused him of veering back toward Manichaean determinism. Augustine countered with nuance: free will exists, but is helpless without grace. His revisions shaped centuries of debate.

Kant: From rationalist dreams to critical awakening

Few intellectual shifts have reshaped Western thought as profoundly as Immanuel Kant’s break with the rationalist metaphysics of his youth. His career divides neatly in two: the pre-critical years, ending in 1770, and the critical period, beginning in 1781 with the Critiques that would redirect philosophy itself. Who would have expected that this measured, provincial professor — methodically rehearsing inherited dogmas — would one day upend them? In his early work, Kant embraced German rationalism, convinced that pure reason could prove God’s existence and the soul’s immortality. Yet beneath his confidence stirred unease: How much could reason truly claim as certain?

Kant’s breakthrough began as an intellectual and existential crisis. Immersed in the writings of the Scottish skeptic David Hume in the 1760s, he felt as though Hume had broken into his “dogmatic slumber,” shattering his faith in the unchecked power of pure reason. Hume’s piercing doubts about metaphysics forced Kant to see that he had been accepting, without question, comfortable assumptions — that reason could grasp causation, the cosmos, even God’s nature. Hume made him face the possibility that much of metaphysics was, in his phrase, “sophistry and illusion.”

The shock was profound. In midlife, Kant resolved to start again. He withdrew from publishing for over a decade — his so-called “silent period” — to rebuild philosophy from the ground up. Friends noticed he stopped frequenting social clubs, absorbed instead in solitary reflection. He later joked that the effort cost him his health, though he lived on, remarkably, to the age of 80.

In 1781, Kant stepped back onto the stage with the Critique of Pure Reason, a book he likened to a “Copernican revolution” in philosophy: shifting the center of knowledge from the world to the mind that knows it. No longer was the mind a passive mirror of reality. Instead, reality always appeared through the architecture of our perception. Space and time were not floating entities but the lenses through which anything can be seen at all. Cause and effect were not properties of objects but the laws our understanding uses to link events. From this radical view, we never grasp “things-in-themselves,” reality as it exists apart from us, but we can know appearances with certainty, since they are shaped in consistent ways by our faculties.

This was the birth of his “critical philosophy.” Questions the younger Kant had answered glibly were now declared insoluble. He had changed his mind about the mind itself — recognizing that truth required admitting where reason must stop. The Critique is dense, often desperate, as Kant tried to salvage what was vital in metaphysics while exposing its illusions. The book was met coolly; colleagues clung to the old certainties he dismantled. Yet Kant pressed on. With his later Critiques, he secured his overhaul. Modern philosophy begins here, at the boundary of what reason can know.

Marx: From romantic fire to the machinery of revolution

Karl Marx’s thought (1818–1883) turned with the force of a revolution, from youthful idealism to hard materialism — a shift so stark that scholars later spoke of a “young” and a “mature” Marx. In the 1840s, the young Marx, nourished by Enlightenment humanism and German Idealism, wrote with urgency about human “alienation” and the dream of fulfillment in a freer world. He pictured communism as the recovery of our “species-being,” where the human essence could finally blossom, unshackled from capitalist estrangement. Humanity stood at the heart of his vision. A fiery revolutionary in spirit, he still trusted reasoned critique to spark transformation.

Within a few short years, Marx underwent a profound conversion. Two shocks set it in motion. The first came through journalism, where he confronted the raw edges of social life: censorship, peasant misery, unjust laws. One case seared him — poor villagers punished for collecting fallen wood in aristocrats’ forests. What the wealthy dismissed as theft was, for the poor, survival. Encounters like these pulled him from “pure politics” toward economics and socialism. Abstract philosophy, he realized, could not explain or mend such wounds; he must plunge deeper into reality. With some irony, he would later recall in an 1859 preface that journalism had landed him “in the embarrassing position of having to discuss what is known as material interests.”

The second shock was intellectual: socialist and materialist ideas pouring in from contemporaries like Ludwig Feuerbach and, above all, Friedrich Engels. Engels persuaded the skeptical Marx that the working class was history’s true engine. By 1845, Marx was scorning his colleagues for floating in the clouds. At the same time, he was redefining human beings as products of social and class conditions rather than carriers of a timeless essence. In The German Ideology, he and Engels wrote that they had to “settle accounts with our former philosophical conscience,” leaving behind speculative habits. The break was so decisive that he never published his early manuscripts, judging them naïve.

The mature Marx changed his mind about how to change the world. That turn laid the foundation for Capital. The young Marx, still speaking the language of humanist ideals, gave way to the older Marx, who dissected capitalism with the scalpel of science. History, he now argued, advanced through material forces and class conflict, not lofty visions. Capitalism would not crumble before appeals to conscience; it would collapse only under the weight of its own contradictions, giving way to revolution when conditions ripened. Where the youthful Marx sketched utopias, the mature Marx turned to economics and praxis.

The cost of this shift was immense. Colleagues accused him of betraying philosophy; the Prussian state drove him into exile. He paid with career, homeland, comfort, enduring poverty, illness, and loss. Yet he stood firm, remembered for saying that “to leave error unrefuted is to encourage intellectual immorality.”

Wittgenstein: From logical perfection to living language

Ludwig Wittgenstein is the poster boy of philosophical shifts. In 1921, he published the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, a dense treatise declaring that the world is made of facts mirrored in logical propositions, and whatever cannot be so expressed must be met with silence. Its final line — “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent” — sealed its austere vision. Convinced he had solved every riddle, Wittgenstein quit philosophy, calling his work “unassailable and definitive.” Then came the drama: He gave away his fortune, abandoned Cambridge for a village schoolhouse, and wrestled with guilt and depression, living in a fever of intellectual aimlessness.

Doubts soon began to gnaw at Wittgenstein’s certainty. The first crack came in 1923, when the young mathematician Frank Ramsey pointed out that the Tractatus couldn’t explain something as simple as why “a point in the visual field cannot be both red and blue.” The contradiction didn’t arise from logic, Ramsey argued, but from the texture of reality itself. Wittgenstein tried to patch the flaw, only to see the critique cut straight to the heart of his theory. The strain of rethinking left him at times feeling close to madness. 

A few years later came the decisive blow: his conversations with Italian economist Piero Sraffa. In one famous moment, Sraffa brushed his chin in a Neapolitan “I don’t care” gesture and asked, “What logical form does that have?” Wittgenstein was floored. He later compared Sraffa’s influence to mining a stubborn ore vein — backbreaking work, yet rich with transformative discoveries.

After nearly nine “lost years,” Wittgenstein returned to Cambridge determined to confront what he called his own “grave mistakes.” The result was his second masterpiece, Philosophical Investigations, published after his death in 1953 — a book that flatly contradicted the Tractatus. Philosopher Lee Braver described the shift as “as radical as the move from modern to post-modern philosophy.” Gone was the dream that language could map the structure of reality. Instead, Wittgenstein came to see language as a mirror of us — woven into our practices, our habits, our forms of life. Meaning was no longer fixed by logic but by use, like Sraffa’s tossed-off chin-brush that baffled him.

The attempt to build a perfect logical language, he now warned, lures philosophers into illusions; the Tractatus itself was guilty of that folly. He even likened it to a faulty clock — impressive in design, useless in function.

That act of intellectual self-destruction bewildered some, yet over time it gave Wittgenstein a prophetic aura: the rare thinker who dared to scrap his own masterpiece in search of truth.

Simone Weil: From world revolution to soul revelation 

Simone Weil may be the clearest portrait of a thinker who kept abandoning certainties in pursuit of higher truth. Born in 1909, she seemed to thrive on extremes: brilliant scholar, factory hand, political agitator, soldier, and finally a mystic flirting with sainthood. Her first identity was as a Marxist radical. Refusing the comforts of academia, she threw herself into workers’ lives, earning the nickname “The Red Virgin.” She gave away her income, joined protests, and labored incognito in factories — an ordeal that nearly destroyed her health. Her early essays, written through a Marxian lens, proclaimed revolutionary socialism as justice’s true path.

Yet Weil would not surrender her conscience to any creed. By the late 1930s, she was already revisiting her Marxian commitments, prying at their weak joints. What disturbed her most was Marx’s faith in history’s “laws,” the promise that the proletariat’s victory was inevitable. To her, this smelled of dogma no less than the Church’s certainties. Reality, she insisted, was tangled, tragic, never on a track to utopia. She also saw in communist movements the seeds of tyranny, where liberators might become new masters. Thus, she drifted into heresy on the left, holding truth above every party banner.

Then, the deeper upheaval: mysticism. In 1938, during Holy Week at the Benedictine monastery of Solesmes, Gregorian chant pierced her like light through armor, filling her with a joy so pure it seemed divine. Later, hearing George Herbert’s Love (III), she wrote, she felt “Christ himself came down and took possession of me.”

This was her point of no return: The ardent materialist and champion of the oppressed had fallen in love with God — specifically, the God on the Cross. Weil’s thought took on a new radiance, shaped by Christian-Platonist mysticism, though she never formally converted. She wrote of “decreation,” the undoing of self so that divine love might flow through. Her compassion became so uncompromising that it reached even enemies, and she treated affliction not as meaningless pain but as a doorway into God’s presence. The political revolution she once craved now seemed too small; what was needed was a revolution in the soul, wrought by grace.

In wartime exile, she wove her two great loves — justice and God — into one vocation. She volunteered for perilous missions, filled her notebooks with blazing insight, and restricted her food to the rations of those under occupation. The discipline consumed her; she died in 1943 at just 34. Even then, each reversal in her short life was, for her, an ascent — driven by an unyielding hunger for absolute truth and goodness, crowned at last in God.

Why great minds change their own

Philosophy often glorifies the builders of grand systems — the bold architects of thought who draw sweeping maps of reality. Yet no less worthy are the moments of self-correction, when a thinker dares to undo what once seemed certain. Conviction is not stubbornness. The greater strength lies in saying: “I have learned something that overturns my earlier belief, and I choose truth over pride.” Such reversals do not diminish a philosopher; they make them greater. We remember Wittgenstein not only for the Tractatus or the Investigations, but for the story of a mind unafraid to dismantle its own certainties.

These examples remind us that true critical thinking begins at home. To interrogate our own assumptions, to stay open when experience, dialogue, or suffering presses against us — that is philosophy at its deepest. Thought is not a finished edifice; it is a living journey. The greatest minds advanced by transcending themselves, sometimes carrying within them the drama of two philosophers at war.

In our polarized age, where doubt is mocked as weakness, their lesson is urgent. Can we welcome change in our own thinking — even delight in it? To do so is to join philosophy’s oldest vow: a fearless love of truth.

This article 5 great thinkers who rejected their own ideas is featured on Big Think.

My earliest lessons in observation came not from a laboratory but in the living room, with my father in his tuxedo and top hat. To everyone else, he was “Big Ed,” a larger-than-life physician who was a magician, an archer, a raconteur, and much else. By day, he mesmerized patients with his easy confidence; by night, he dazzled guests with sleight-of-hand, conjuring coins from behind ears or producing endless scarves from his sleeve. To me, he was both healer and illusionist, a scientist and showman.

When your father is a magician, what do you believe? As a child, the boundary between real and unreal was porous. I wanted to believe in the rabbit pulled from a hat, the floating light bulb, the miraculous escapes. But even as a boy, I began to notice the seams: the telltale flash of a hidden card, the tiny bulge in his sleeve where the coin waited. What others applauded as mystery became for me a problem waiting to be solved.

If a trick fooled me, I made it my job to discover how.

It was not cynicism so much as curiosity that drove me. I learned that every illusion, no matter how beguiling, had a mechanism beneath it. Magic was an invitation to look closer, to ask: How does this really work?

That question — posed again and again in my childhood — propelled my apprenticeship in science. I became my father’s assistant, carrying props, rehearsing patter, acting as the straight man. But I was also his skeptic. If a trick fooled me, I made it my job to discover how. When he succeeded, I applauded; when I found the secret, I felt the satisfaction of uncovering a law of nature.

From illusion I learned skepticism, and from skepticism, a demand for evidence. It was not enough for something to merely look true. I wanted to know the actuality that lay underneath.

That questioning attitude extended beyond the stage. Growing up in the 1950s, the world outside our house was already steeped in performance: Cold War drills at school, cocktail parties where adults wore masks of cheer while anxieties ran deep, a culture addicted to appearances. My father, a physician in the golden age of tranquilizers, was the embodiment of contradictions — capable of genuine healing but also of grandiose self-invention.

It was in this crucible of illusion and reality that I began to form my own identity, not only as a son but as a budding scientist. If magic depended on deception, then science seemed the greater magic still, because it depended on asking the right questions and letting evidence answer.

By the time I reached adolescence, I had begun my own crude “experiments.” I timed how long a match would burn in different conditions, weighed the contents of my chemistry set before and after reactions, charted the night sky from our New Jersey backyard. None of this was formal science, but it carried the same spirit as pulling apart my father’s tricks: looking beneath appearances, testing hunches, insisting that truth is not what dazzles but what endures.

The deeper I went, the more I saw parallels between magic and the mind. A magician misdirects attention; so too does the brain. A conjurer exploits expectation; so does perception. Illusion, whether on stage or in the cortex, depends on our willingness to fill in the gaps, to accept appearances at face value.

Later, as a neurologist, I would return to these early lessons when studying synesthesia and the quirks of perception. Patients told me that numbers and letters had colors, or that tastes evoked shapes. For decades, science dismissed reports like these as fantasy. But I had been raised to treat appearances with suspicion and testimony with care. The boy who once peered into his father’s sleeves to see what was hidden became the man who listened attentively and openly when patients described hidden worlds of perception.

Magic had taught me that the improbable might still have an explanation — if only one was willing to look hard enough.

And so I came to believe that the real wonder is not in the disappearing coin or the vanishing dove. The real wonder is in the human mind that constructs reality from fragments, that can be fooled by a flourish, but that can also be illuminated by experiment. My father taught me to vanish before I learned to appear. Science taught me to appear without vanishing — to stand by evidence, to let truth emerge even when it contradicted the spectacle.

To this day, when I step into a lecture hall or clinic, I carry both inheritances: the magician’s sense of wonder and the scientist’s demand for proof. If illusion taught me skepticism, science gave me faith — not in appearances, but in inquiry itself.

What is broken can be made whole, and what seems impossible can be understood. That is the greatest trick I ever learned, and it has nothing to do with rabbits or hats.

This article When your father is a magician, what do you believe? is featured on Big Think.

At a time when most philosophers were confined to their offices or lecturing to shrinking pools of students, Daniel Dennett was extraordinary — a rockstar philosopher with a rockstar beard and, perhaps most uniquely, a deep sense of kindness. Known as one of the “Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse,” he rose to fame along with Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens as a leading thinker who sought naturalistic explanations for the supernatural. While his fellow horsemen focused mostly on superstition and organized religion, Dennett was always more concerned with the mind.

He didn’t have much patience for parapsychological things like out-of-body experiences or telepathy, but neither did he have much time for the notion of first-personhood. Much of Dennett’s career was spent defanging what David Chalmers would call “the hard problem of consciousness” — how can we explain subjective experience in a world of scientific naturalism?

Dennett was a scientific naturalist, and he didn’t see a problem at all. He spent a portion of his early academic life studying under another great, famous naturalist, Gilbert Ryle, who was renowned for coining the expression “the ghost in the machine.” It’s the idea that there is some kind of supernatural essence to our consciousness that cannot otherwise be explained. Descartes argued that humans are composed of two substances: res extensa (bodily extension) and res cogitans (mind). To Ryle, this was nonsense — a superstitious euphemism to explain something we hadn’t figured out. It was a “ghost in the machine.”

Dennett devoted his res cogitans to undermining the idea of some first-personal, qualia-like, other substance. His work can be well understood as a bridge between evolutionary psychology and modern neuroscience. Dennett argued that consciousness was a byproduct of other cognitive processes that appeared much earlier in our evolutionary story. Basic causal instincts, like a plant turning to the Sun, developed into “rudimentary intentionality,” he wrote, like, for example, when a hawk circles its prey. Give it a few more millennia, and this intentionality will sprout consciousness, he argued. There’s nothing religious about it. There’s nothing panpsychist about it. Mindedness is no more wonderful than the brain it emerges from. But for Dennett, the brain was a source of immense wonder.

Whether or not you agree with him, Dennett is always worth reading, always worth watching, and Big Think is lucky to be one of the last to record his brilliance.

What follows is a lightly edited transcript of a Big Think video interview with Dennett, which was recorded in 2012.

What is consciousness?

Most people think consciousness, whatever it is, is just supercalifragilisticexpialidocious. It’s something so wonderful that we have to almost divide the universe in two to make room for it, setting it on one side by itself. I understand why they think that, but I think it’s just wrong. Consciousness is wonderful, but it is not a miracle. I like to compare it with magic because stage magic is not “magic.” It’s a bunch of tricks. We’re now learning what those tricks are, how they fit together, and why consciousness seems to be so much more. 

For many people, the idea that consciousness is a set of tricks is offensive or repugnant. They view it as a kind of assault on their dignity or their specialness. And I think that’s a prime mistake. If you think that way, you’re going to systematically ignore important paths of exploration and research. You’re going to hold out for mystery — for more specialness. Some people just can’t help themselves. They can’t or won’t take seriously the idea that consciousness is an amazing collection of almost mundane tricks in the brain. And they say, “I just can’t imagine it!” I say, “No, you won’t imagine it. You can imagine it. You’re just not trying.”

What scares people about this idea?

I think the hidden agenda — or often not so hidden agenda — is a concern about free will. People are worried that if we have a mechanistic theory of consciousness, this will show that, “Oh my gosh, we don’t have free will, and life has no meaning, and so I can’t be responsible for my best or worst deeds.” To me, that doesn’t follow. But people fear that it would. It rattles them. It deflects them from taking this idea seriously because they really don’t want it to be true. 

My approach is to challenge that. Everything you want or should want in the way of free will, you can have in this picture. Sure, there are some traditional notions of free will that turn out to be impossible in this view. That’s tough. But why do you want them? They are not important. They are simply ill-founded desires. You can still have the varieties of free will that are worth wanting, so take a deep breath and relax. Let’s figure out how it’s done. 

Why do you consider this the only freedom that really matters?

For billions of years on this planet, there was life but no free will. The difference is not in physics — it has nothing to do with determinism or indeterminism. It ultimately has to do with biology, particularly evolutionary biology. Over billions of years, increasingly greater competences evolved. The cognitive competence of, say, a dolphin or a chimpanzee is hugely superior to the competence of a lobster or a starfish. But humans dwarf the competence of a dolphin or a chimpanzee. And there’s an entirely naturalistic story to tell about how we reached this competence. It’s this power that sets us apart from every other species. The key to it is that we don’t simply act for reasons. We represent our reasons to ourselves and to others. We can ask somebody, “Why did you do that?” And while the fact that they can answer is a very simple and everyday phenomenon, it is key. It is the key to responsibility.

In fact, the word “responsibility” sort of wears its meaning on its sleeve. We are responsible because we can respond to challenges to our reasons. Why? Because we act for reasons that we consciously represent to ourselves. This is what gives us the power and the obligation to think ahead, to anticipate, to see the consequences of our actions, and to share our wisdom with each other. No other species can do anything like it. And because we can share our wisdom, we have a special responsibility. We have the power, and that’s what gives us the obligation. It is what makes us free in a way that, say, no bird is free.

Check out our full interview with Daniel Dennett below:

This article was updated on August 25, 2025, to more clearly indicate that the second half of this article is a lightly edited transcript of a 2012 Big Think video interview with Daniel Dennett.

This article Daniel Dennett: Consciousness is no miracle. It’s a magic trick. is featured on Big Think.

“We know almost nothing about how to even define consciousness, Stephen,” my unenthused colleague, astrophysicist Ethan Siegel, says when I tell him we’re planning this special issue. Ethan, I hate to admit, is right. 

Consciousness remains one of the hardest problems in science and philosophy. To give you a quick idea: A paper published this year in Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews spent 20,000 words surveying the state of five prominent theories of consciousness. Then the authors posed a concluding question: “So, what are we left with?” The answer largely boiled down to disagreement between the theories, even on the most basic questions, such as what consciousness is and what a theory should even aim to explain. And that paper only covered a handful of mainstream theories, omitting the more far-out ideas, like the notion that even a pebble, sunflower, or garden hose may contain a trace of consciousness.

It’s a maddening puzzle, especially when you consider all the phenomena we can define and measure. Just last year, scientists observed the most distant galaxy on record, capturing light that’s been traveling for nearly the entire age of the universe. We can peer into the farthest reaches of space, and yet our inner cosmos remains a black box to science. From the inside, however, we know consciousness intimately. It’s there in every answer to the question, “What is it like?” What is it like to see the color red? To feel your feet burn on hot sand, then run into the ocean? To smell garlic and herbs sautéed in a pan? To hear your daughter laugh? The best we can do is sketch the answers to those questions. But explaining exactly how — or, maybe more tantalizingly, why — consciousness arises continues to elude us. 

So consider Big Think’s first-ever print issue on consciousness to be our humble attempt not to solve grand mysteries but to illuminate their edges, exploring some of the most provocative questions, discoveries, and research in consciousness studies and beyond. Inside, neuroscientist Anil Seth investigates the ways machines and living creatures process time, revealing a fundamental difference between the two that may forever keep conscious AI out of reach. The author Annaka Harris makes the case for why our common intuitions about consciousness are all wrong. Neuroscientist Erik Hoel offers an inside look into the surprisingly contentious “consciousness wars” and their implications for the future of the field. All that and much, much more.

After you read the issue, I hope you’ll pause for one extra second the next time you catch your reflection in the mirror while brushing your teeth, struck by that uncanny realization that, somehow, everything you know and feel is being conjured within the three pounds of matter resting just behind your eyes. And then, like Ethan, you go on about your day.

This article A letter from the editor is featured on Big Think.

A lone figure stands at the edge of the Universe and hurls a spear into the unknown, only to find the edge wasn’t an edge after all. A demon tells a chronically ill person that every moment of their life — every high, every hardship — will repeat forever, exactly as it is. A 16-year-old boy tries to travel alongside a beam of light, hoping to catch up, but no matter how fast he goes, it never slows. Someone is offered the chance to live in a simulated paradise, but there’s a catch: Once inside, they’ll forget it isn’t real. And a human falls in love with a consciousness that has no body, no boundaries, and no need for them.

All five scenarios are drawn from what is classically termed thought experiments. They range from Lucretius’ spear flung at the edge of the Universe — one of the earliest on record (1st century BCE) — to the vision of eternal recurrence that gripped the chronically ill Nietzsche. From Einstein’s boyhood attempt to chase a beam of light, to Robert Nozick’s 1974 Experience Machine. And even to a sci-fi film: Spike Jonze’s Her, a tale of futile, aching love between a man and a bodiless mind.

The essential practice of a thought experiment is deceptively simple: picture a situation in the imagination, let it run its course — or intervene in some way — then watch what happens and draw a conclusion. In that sense, it’s not so different from a lab experiment, where researchers set the stage and observe what unfolds. The aim of these often fantastical scenarios is just as serious: to test, stretch, or even shatter our intuitions about how the world works. 

The key difference? Everything takes place in the mind’s inner chamber. In this mental laboratory, as Peg Tittle writes in her book What If?, experiments rely on hypothetical reasoning — or, more simply, asking “what if?” Not as idle play, but as a sharp instrument for exploring reality.

What makes thought experiments so irresistible isn’t simply that they take place entirely in the mind, free from the constraints of physics, ethics, money, or technology. It’s the strange thrill that “we seem able to get a grip on nature just by thinking.” That heady possibility has drawn philosophers and scientists for millennia. 

The ancient Greeks had no word for it, but the Pre-Socratics pioneered thought experimentation as a sharp intellectual tool, practiced with flair and dedication. The goal was always the same: to defend one’s theory and dismantle the claims of an opponent. When Zeno of Elea dreamed up his odd race between swift Achilles and a plodding tortoise, he was standing guard over Parmenides’ vision of reality. That both Zeno’s paradox and Lucretius’ flying spear were eventually disproven reminds us how far — and how fallibly — the mind can run on imagination alone.

Imagining what isn’t

In science, thought experiments aren’t just side notes — they’re part of the main event. Philosopher Martin Cohen, in Wittgenstein’s Beetle and Other Thought-Experiments, argues that modern science rests on surprisingly humble foundations: a handful of imagined scenarios. Picture Galileo’s falling bodies, Newton’s spinning bucket, or the cannonball orbiting Earth. These mental sketches, Cohen insists, are “no more elementary, say, than Einstein’s Theory of Relativity.” 

Without thought experiments, relativity and quantum mechanics might never have taken shape. Einstein’s elevator and train, Schrödinger’s cat, Heisenberg’s microscope—each reveals the philosophical edge behind the equations. Einstein, famously, had no lab. With no machines or mountains of data, he built theories out of imagination alone. For most scientists, thought experiments served to test or visualize. For Einstein, they created reality. Fiction became fact. His mental models predicted time dilation, gravitational lensing, and the speed of light. And beyond him, thought experiments ripple across biology, mathematics, and physics — igniting, as Thomas Kuhn observed, revolutions in how we see the world. 

The term “thought experiment” didn’t enter philosophy until 1811, when Hans-Christian Ørsted used it to describe the mental testing of a theory by imagining a scenario. Still, the phrase barely stirred until the 1980s, making it, by philosophical standards, practically newborn. 

Yet thought experiments have been part of philosophy from the start. Ethics, philosophy of mind, and language all lean heavily on them, perhaps even more than science does. Imagine philosophy without Plato’s cave, Wittgenstein’s beetle, Foot’s trolley problem, Putnam’s brain in a vat, or Searle’s Chinese room. And outside the Western canon, there are others — like Avicenna’s flying man — equally bold. 

These aren’t incidental illustrations; they often define the argument itself. One textbook, Doing Philosophy, introduces students to the entire field not through dry exposition, but entirely through thought experiments — those iridescent, electric-bright candies that burst into view right when you’re about to drown in abstraction.

What can these mental exercises actually do for us, philosophically? They’re not mere clarifying examples designed to prove a point. Thought experiments ask unsettling questions, reveal contradictions, highlight sloppy reasoning, or make us rethink what we thought we knew. They can defend a theory or quietly pull it apart. Like real experiments, they stress-test ideas. They flip assumptions on their head, untangle old problems, or make us see problems we didn’t know were there. As Peg Tittle suggests, the best way in is to ask: What is this thought experiment trying to do?

But why imagine wild, impossible scenarios instead of offering elegant arguments? As Julian Baggini writes, “reason without imagination is sterile.” Thought experiments pull us from abstract logic into felt experience. Whether the scenario is possible doesn’t matter. What matters is what it reveals in the realm of ideas — how we think, judge, and reason. They stretch concepts to the edge: If an idea fails under extreme conditions, maybe it fails altogether. 

Take Thomas Nagel. To challenge the view that not knowing life’s meaning makes it absurd, he imagined creatures who revealed to us that our purpose is to become food for other species, forcing us to ask whether any answer to that question would ever truly satisfy us. Sometimes it’s by conjuring what isn’t — what has never been and couldn’t be — that we begin to understand what is, or what ought to be.

Still, there may be untapped power in what thought experiments can do for us. As we’ve seen, they pull philosophy down from the clouds, away from abstract argument and into vivid scenarios, whether wildly sci-fi or eerily plausible. They require a sensory hook — something seen, felt, or heard. More than illustrate, they provoke. They ask us to respond. That, perhaps, is the heart of their deeper potential: transformation. 

Some thought experiments, if truly wrestled with, can act like inner detonations. They not only refine how we think but also shake how we live. That may be why ethicists return to them: even the strangest ones often touch real moral dilemmas. They show that philosophy, at its best, shifts our grip on life itself.

Mind games, perspective flips, inner quakes

Philosophers have offered many ways to sort the wide and wondrous range of thought experiments, from the roles they play to how they reveal cracks in what we take as given. But there’s another, less conventional lens: one that focuses on their potential to stir, disrupt, or even redirect our inner lives. Through this view, a new map emerges. Let me introduce three distinct types of thought experiments: Clarifiers, Shifters, and Transformers.

Clarifiers are philosophy’s precision tools — deployed to test concepts, expose flaws, and sharpen definitions. They bring clarity, not upheaval, offering a clean, striking glimpse into an idea’s structure without demanding a shift in worldview.

Consider John Searle’s Chinese Room, built to spotlight the limits of AI. A man sits inside, matching Chinese characters using an English rulebook. He follows the rules so well that outsiders believe he understands Chinese, though he’s never learned a word. The image sticks. This is what AI might do: manipulate symbols flawlessly, with no grasp of meaning. Syntax humming along, semantics absent. The point lands. You see something you hadn’t before. The concept clicks into place. Not a revelation, but a real clarification.

Shifters are architects of new vantage points. These thought experiments unsettle habits of mind, stretch the imagination, and tilt the frame through which we view reality. They tweak perception, shift angles — but stop short of demanding a deep personal overhaul.

Consider Thomas Nagel’s bat. Picture yourself hanging in a cave, wrapped in wings, seeing nothing, sensing everything through bursts of sonar. You’re not pretending to be a bat — you’re trying to be the bat, from the inside. But something blocks you. Its world remains sealed. The bat’s experience resists translation. And that failure does something. It humbles. It reveals the limits of your empathy. You begin to suspect that even your own inner life is partially veiled — and that the gap between minds is wider than it seems.

Transformers are philosophy’s psychedelics. These rare thought experiments ask for more than analysis — they press us to confront existence, question identity, and reevaluate what we live for. They run us through edge scenarios that expose hidden tensions: the desire for eternal life, the pursuit of endless pleasure. They’re not riddles to solve, but invitations to step into. Better called life experiments, they leave us changed. Consider Albert Camus’ Sisyphus. He is condemned to push a heavy rock up a mountain, only to watch it roll back down forever. At first, he rails, despairs, pleads. Then comes stillness. He opens his eyes, touches the stone, and whispers: This is mine. You feel the weight of your own life differently. You stop fleeing. You choose. And in the very act of choosing, something unexpected appears — joy, uninvited, waiting right where you are.

A Transformer is always potentially life-altering, though not always treated that way. Some thought experiments were born with transformation in their bones — crafted by philosophers who lived their questions. For them, philosophy was no armchair affair. Thinking was a practice of being. But others came from analytic traditions, forged as crisp tools for testing logic or clarity. They weren’t meant to shake the soul. Still, in the right hands, they change shape. They become something else — depending on how we meet them.

The key lies in how we enter the scenario. Transformation begins when we stop treating the experiment as an object of analysis and begin living it from within. Zen kōans offer a kindred approach: non-Western thought experiments meant to derail ordinary thinking and open the gates of direct experience. You don’t study the person dangling from a branch by their teeth; you become that person. You inhabit their urgency. In the same way, to grasp Camus’ Sisyphus, you must feel the stone, the slope, the repetition. Not as metaphor. As lived truth. That’s when the experiment begins to work on you.

3 life experiments that won’t let go

Let’s briefly inhabit three interwoven Transformers. The first — Nietzsche’s 1881 Eternal Recurrence — is a life test by design, echoing Camus’ Sisyphus. The next two began as Clarifiers: Bernard Williams’s 1973 Makropulos Case and Nozick’s 1974 Experience Machine. We’ll retell them to make abstraction felt and lived.

Nietzsche’s Eternal Recurrence. “What if a demon crept up to you in your loneliest moment and whispered: this life—as you live it now—you will live again, and again, and again, in every detail, forever?” For Nietzsche, this wasn’t a mere provocation. It was, he claimed, “the most scientific of all hypotheses.” If the Universe contains finite energy, but time is boundless, then every combination of events must recur. No escape, no variation, no redemption. Not a Groundhog Day with do-overs — the exact same life, repeated eternally. Could you bear it? Could you embrace it? Nietzsche thought most would recoil. But the strong—the “overhuman” — would say yes. They would live in such a way that nothing needed to be undone.

Now step into the moment — not as an observer, but as the one hearing the demon’s whisper. This isn’t about believing in eternal recurrence. It’s a way of magnifying life, stretching it across eternity to confront your bond with it. Take a clear, unsentimental look at your life as it is. Face every resistance — your unease with past failures, your struggle with the present, your unspoken craving for an elsewhere: a softer future, an afterlife, a transcendent escape. For a moment, shut all exits. Refuse the promise of redemption beyond this life. Let yourself feel the weight of living it again. Choose a day — perhaps today — and ask: Could I live this exact day eternally? Was it mine, or did I move through it half-asleep? If each moment echoes forever, every choice becomes a lasting act of affirmation or refusal. 

Return to the demon’s challenge not as punishment, but as orientation. This practice does not ask for ease; it asks for presence. It calls you to stop delaying your aliveness, and shape a life you could meet again, with eyes open. In that “yes,” the distance between you and your life begins to dissolve.

Williams’s Makropulos Case. Elina Makropulos has lived for over 300 years. Her father, a 16th-century court physician, gave her an experimental elixir of life when she was young. At first, she welcomed it. But over time, lovers vanished, friendships withered, and purpose drained away. By age 342, she feels nothing but numbness. “In the end,” she says, “it is the same — singing or silence.” Joy is a distant echo; nothing moves her. When offered the elixir again, she declines. In choosing death, her life recovers a kind of shape.

Bernard Williams turned this scenario — borrowed from Karel Čapek’s 1922 play The Makropulos Affair — into a powerful argument against the desirability of immortality. Without death, he argued, meaning collapses. Time loses its urgency. The very idea of “wasting time” disappears. And with it, the drive to live it well.

Now inhabit this life-experiment: Imagine yourself 342 years old, indestructible, untouched by time. You’ve outlived lovers, children, cities. You’ve known every kind of joy, exhausted every human experience. And still, the horizon offers more — endless days to create, travel, fall in love again. But something has withered. You drift. Projects go unfinished. Without urgency, nothing holds weight. Everything is postponable, and so nothing feels real. The truth begins to surface: More time was never the answer. Even infinity slips through your fingers.

And with that, the shape of life begins to return. You realize: What created meaning wasn’t time’s abundance, but its edge. Deadlines, endings, the pressure to choose — they made your days vivid. Mortality carves time into significance. Without it, there are no stakes, no story, no love that matters. Let this imaginary immortality guide you back into your finite life. What would change if you knew time was running out? Because it is. And that’s your chance — not to have more life, but to live the one you have like it means everything.

Nozick’s Experience Machine. Imagine a device that lets you live any life you choose — writing a masterpiece, falling in love, basking in applause. Neuropsychologists wire your brain so precisely that every sensation feels real. Meanwhile, your body floats in a tank, electrodes humming. You select your experiences two years at a time, and when the cycle ends, you’re briefly awakened to choose again, never knowing it’s all artificial. Life inside feels seamless, perfectly tailored to your desires. So why hesitate? Because something in us resists. Robert Nozick offered this thought experiment to expose that resistance. If happiness were all we wanted, we’d enter without a second thought. But we want to live in touch with what’s real—to act, to respond, to be someone in the world, not simply feel as though we are. What matters isn’t only how life feels from the inside, but that it’s ours, shaped in contact with reality.

Now picture yourself before the consent form, deciding whether to sign or shred. Two futures unfold: in one, the real world, with its sharp edges, improbable hopes, and the fragile ache of meaning; in the other, the Experience Machine, where success is guaranteed, every desire satisfied, every sensation tuned to delight. No pain, no failure, no loose ends. Just bliss. And once immersed, you won’t remember it’s designed. You’ll believe it’s real. Perhaps you’re tired. Perhaps the thought of no more disappointment tempts you. Perhaps you wonder: If I feel happy, what else matters?

But a question stirs — sharp, persistent: Would pleasure without truth feel hollow, even if I didn’t know it was false? You begin to crave friction. Consequences. A life not engineered, but lived. You want your joy to be earned, your suffering to be real. You feel the metallic chill of the machine’s promise — its sterility beneath the sweetness. To walk away is to begin. The life that greets you is flawed, unresolved, irreplaceable. You choose presence over perfection: not safety, but significance; not bliss, but contact.

Philosophy’s return to life 

While stepping into the worlds of these three thought experiments — now better seen as life experiments — two things may have stood out. First, though crafted by rigorous philosophers, each could easily double as the premise for a science fiction film. This isn’t accidental. In recent decades, philosophers have increasingly embraced novels and films — The Matrix, Her, and many others — as rich philosophical terrains. Science fiction, in particular, has emerged as a kind of cinematic thought experiment, exploring alternate realities to press questions about consciousness, identity, and existence. 

The three Transformer examples do just that: They lead us elsewhere only to bring us back with new eyes. As we descend from each scenario, we return more awake to the life we already inhabit, more willing to bear its sorrows, limits, and truth.

That second insight, this reentry, is their quiet revolution: Philosophy doesn’t need to remain abstract. Thought experiments can walk alongside us, animating our inner lives. They aren’t merely tools of reason — they are instruments of reflection. At their best, they revive philosophy’s oldest purpose: not thinking for its own sake, but thinking that informs how we live.

This article The thought experiments that test your life, not your logic is featured on Big Think.

Since the birth of modern cosmology in the 1920s, we’ve been bombarded with discoveries so staggering they border on the surreal. There are more than 2 trillion galaxies in the observable Universe. The gold in our jewelry was forged in the cataclysmic collision of neutron stars. We can now detect the faint afterglow of light emitted when the Universe was just 380,000 years old. Ninety-five percent of the cosmos — dark matter and dark energy — remains an open riddle. And the atoms in our bodies were once inside stars that died in spectacular explosions. 

These aren’t just astronomical facts — they are fragments of our own story. And yet, the cosmos stays strangely “over there,” like a brilliant mural we’re not sure how to enter. These revelations strike us with intellectual awe, but remain oddly weightless, precisely because they are too inconceivable to hold. What, after all, can a single human mind do in the face of such scales?

Yet a growing number of cosmologists and astrophysicists stare at the same data and begin to see the mural itself. Not a cold inventory of matter and laws, but a dynamic, unfolding narrative — a cosmos in process. What emerges is not just a chain of events, but a developmental arc rich with interiority. 

In this story, humans are not incidental bystanders but participants in a sweeping evolutionary drama. It begins 13.8 billion years ago and arrives, improbably, on a small rocky planet in a quiet galactic suburb, where stellar remnants arranged themselves into life — then into minds capable of awe and inquiry. Telescopes, satellites, and equations became the instruments of those minds. And through us, the Universe crossed a threshold: It began, for the first time, to contemplate itself.

But this doesn’t end here, not even with this remarkable cosmic achievement. After a long, dizzying hangover from the Copernican revolution, which cast humanity from the center of the Universe into a vast wilderness of exile and homelessness, some cosmologists and astrophysicists now believe the Universe speaks to us. Not just through awe-striking facts and elegant explanations, but through a meaningful, transformative story. A story that, if we learn to listen, could reshape human identity, experience, meaning, and ethics. 

Some even suggest it may offer the key to humanity’s next evolutionary step. A few go further still: They envision a new, science-based wisdom tradition — one that moves beyond the old divide between a science that tells us how things work and a religion that tells us why they matter. A path where insight and meaning might finally converge.

Whether the unfolding story of the Universe could one day become a fact-based, non-dogmatic path of wisdom is still a bold — perhaps premature — question. For anything to shape and transform human lives as religion or ancient philosophy once did, it must offer more than knowledge. It needs a tale of origin, belonging, and purpose; a vision of the human ideal; a compass for how to live, love, suffer, and die; practices that deepen the inner life; and moments of encounter with what transcends us. 

Yet the five cosmologists and astrophysicists interviewed by Big Think — Alan Lightman, Marcelo Gleiser, Nahum Arav, Brian Swimme, and Joel Primack (with his co-author, philosopher Nancy Ellen Abrams) — gesture toward how, for some, peering into the vast reaches of scientific discovery might begin to stir the outlines of such a path. In their own ways, they speak of a new kind of intimate, almost sacred experience opened by the cosmic view; of a meaning drawn not from myth but from matter; of ethics born from our entanglement with all life — and of a science that, one day, may ripen into wisdom.

The stars are our ancestors

Wisdom traditions have long turned to the cosmos for orientation. The Stoics, for instance, practiced star-gazing and inner visualizations to dissolve the self into the whole — to inhabit a view from above where human affairs shrink into proportion. In his Meditations, Marcus Aurelius urges us to see the Universe as one living being, with a single soul, and to “run alongside the stars,” allowing their silent courses to cleanse us of the dust and turmoil clinging to life on the ground.

A more provocative question is whether modern cosmology might deepen our felt communion with the Universe, and even offer new forms of mind-altering experience. Brian Swimme, professor at the California Institute of Integral Studies, has developed meditative practices grounded in evolutionary cosmology. One of the most striking appears in his book The Hidden Heart of the Cosmos. 

To enter the new story of the expanding Universe, he suggests we begin by altering our habitual orientation. Lie on your back in an open space at night, beneath the Milky Way. Then, imaginatively free yourself from 70 million years of upright perspective. Picture the Earth floating in space — but this time, place yourself on the bottom side of the globe. Now gaze down into the sky. The stars are not above you. They are far, far below. And yet, you do not fall. Suspended by Earth’s gravity, you hover in the galactic deep. In that moment of reversal, you cease to be a human looking out at the stars — and become, for a moment, the Milky Way reflecting on itself from within.

“There are deep experiences one can have within this cosmological framework that amount to revelation,” Brian Swimme tells Big Think. “What’s revealed is a new way of being human. A new way of being Brian. These experiences are so powerful you realize — that just changed my life.” For 50 years, he says, the time-developmental nature of the Universe has kept blowing his mind. “Sometimes my mind can rest in the facts of cosmology, and then suddenly I’ll see from a different angle — and the awe comes rushing in again.”

Swimme lives this awe. Take stellar nucleosynthesis: the discovery that our atoms were forged in ancient stars. “We have to take that in,” he says. “The stars aren’t ‘out there’ — they’re something like mothers. They made us.” When we look at the night sky, we’re not just perceiving distant lights — we’re watching the process that built our bodies, our nervous systems, and the very consciousness now reflecting on them. The stars made our minds, and now our minds look back. “The Universe has turned back on itself,” Swimme says. “When we gaze at the stars, we’re looking at the process that is looking.”

He recalls a childhood moment that would take on deeper meaning years later: standing on a beach, peering into the eye of a dead fish. At the time, he was simply a curious boy, wondering how the eye connected to the brain. But decades later, as a scientist studying evolution, the memory returned — this time, charged with revelation. He realized the brain he was using to study the fish had itself evolved from fish. “I wasn’t looking at a separate creature. I was looking at something that had given birth to me.” In that instant, the boundary between subject and object dissolved. The dualism was gone.

Restoring the emotional core of science

Swimme is not alone in experiencing a direct, awe-filled connection between cosmological discovery and inner life. Astrophysicist Nahum Arav recalls a moment etched in memory: At 14, fresh from an amateur astronomy course, he stepped into his parents’ backyard with a star map in hand. “I started identifying these stars and these constellations,” he tells Big Think. “This was one of the most spiritual experiences in my life because I felt so connected to the Universe around me.” 

That sense of intimacy didn’t fade — it deepened as his scientific understanding grew. “For me, the more I understand the details, the more I’m fascinated, and the more I’m at awe to the beauty and magic of nature — even if it sounds paradoxical, because I do it very rationally, scientifically, and empirically based.” Like Swimme, he often reflects on the cosmic origin of our bodies: “All of the elements we are made of were produced in the crucible of very massive stars.” For Arav, that fact alone is spiritual. “I feel one with the Universe… I consider the stars and constellations my friends in the sky.”

Physicists Alan Lightman and Joel Primack echo similar sentiments. In Searching for Stars on an Island in Maine, Lightman recalls a summer night alone in a small boat, lying back under a sky ablaze with stars. In that stillness, he felt his sense of self dissolve — a “cosmic merging event,” as he calls it. “A grand and eternal unity, a hint of something absolute and immaterial.” Though he doubts scientific facts can directly induce such states, he believes they can inspire them. “An understanding of the scientific and material basis for sunsets, lightning, and the rings of Saturn,” he says, “only enhances my awe.” Primack, co-developer of the Cold Dark Matter model, speaks of a different kind of transcendence: the awe that comes when a complex calculation turns out to be true. “You feel,” he says, “as if God is speaking to you.” Such moments, for him, are “as fulfilling, satisfying, profound, and transformative as a religious experience.”

But what about those of us who can’t hear God in the click of equations? Physicist Joel Primack and his co-author Nancy Ellen Abrams believe awe can still be made accessible — through art, symbolism, and guided meditations, which they offer in The View from the Center of the Universe. Swimme also believes such breakthroughs are possible, but only with practices that engage imagination, contemplation, and deep remembrance — much like the inner disciplines cultivated in monasteries or ancient Chinese schools of thought. “We need to invent educational processes that evoke a new kind of human being,” he says. For him, cosmological awareness is a kind of modern rosary: a meditation on fish, stars, and the brain reflecting back on them. 

Physicist Marcelo Gleiser agrees, but stresses that everything depends on how the story is told. “Reason is the tool, not the inspiration,” he says. “The mystical connection has inspired scientists for centuries — but modern science often strips out that emotional core.” To restore it, we must go beyond the cerebral. “I’d suggest cosmos bathing,” he says. “A deep exposure to the night sky — not just learning what is what, but communing with the vastness — can open doors of perception. I’ve guided many such encounters. It works.”

A narrative based on belonging 

But awe alone doesn’t carry us far. Can the immense data of cosmology form a story vivid enough to reshape how we see ourselves, where we find meaning, and how we live? In The Dawn of a Mindful Universe, Marcelo Gleiser suggests the facts are already in place; what’s missing is the imaginative frame. “The same story,” he says, “can be told in many different ways.” What’s needed is to stop stripping the scientific narrative of its emotional undertow — to preserve its rigor, yes, but to welcome back the sense of wonder it once carried. Then something long buried begins to shine through. “The modern cosmological story tells us that there is no separation between us and the world, or even between us and the cosmos at large.” The shift is radical. We move beyond the Western script of dominion — “we own nature” — into a narrative of belonging, from the Big Bang to the living thread of Earthly life.

Beyond restoring the long-lost feeling of enchantment, what these five scientists — and others like them — seem to be doing is taking the dry facts, dazzling as they are, and following them to their ultimate conclusion. “Millions of humans devoted themselves to this hard work of tracking things in terms of empirical knowledge,” says Brian Swimme, “and so we have amazing data now about the Universe.” But at some point, he insists, we must harvest from this vast record its philosophical, ethical, and personal meaning — to reach “understanding that goes beyond just the data.” 

That, he says, is when the Universe begins to speak. “We’ve come out of that process and, through ever-deepening complexity, arrived at the ability to understand how it all took place. The Universe, in the form of humans, is now understanding its infancy, its adolescence, and its later stages. We are the place where the whole sequence has become aware of itself.”

“We really need to make use of this empirical knowledge and understand how it can help us in our own lives. How do we grow from it?” asks philosopher of science Nancy Ellen Abrams, speaking with her co-author Joel Primack. “It’s just like with medicine — we don’t make the discoveries, but we get the benefit when we’re sick.” A few thousand people, she notes, have learned to think about the Universe as a whole, based on evidence, not myth. “What people can do with this is reevaluate what we are as human beings.” 

That begins, they suggest, with embracing the scale of billions of years — not just as backdrop, but as the substance of our very identity. “We are not a package of organs inside skin,” Abrams says. “We are an embodiment of the history of the Universe, literally history embodied in an incredibly emergent phenomenon here.” Seen this way, our lives gain meaning from deep time.

Then comes a second, profound implication — one that Primack and Abrams believe may be cosmology’s greatest gift. For tens of thousands of years, every culture had a shared story of the Universe. “It gave them a bonding with everyone else in their tribe,” Abrams says, “that ‘we’ share this story.” But since the 17th century, science and religion went their separate ways — and our collective picture shattered. “Every religion has its own picture,” she notes. “It’s one reason there’s so much conflict.” Now, for the first time, cosmology offers a story of human origins that is evidence-based and universally true. “We have the same story.” If we could agree on that scale, they believe, we might finally build unity on shared cosmic ground.

Not resources, but relatives

Another message rising from astronomy’s quiet data is that we might be the first intelligence of our kind in the galaxy. “We could be the seeds of intelligence in the galaxy,” says Nancy Ellen Abrams. “We are actually the brain of the Earth. We’re the only ones who can think about this, and we’re the only ones who have any data to base it on.” There may be aliens, or there may not — but we must act as if we are the first. “We really should think of humanity as the hottest startup ever. We have an obligation to the Universe to keep going. Humanity is the self-consciousness of the cosmos. Understanding this would give people a much better sense of why we need to protect our species.”

All the discussants agree: Though we’ve been cast out of our old cosmic throne, the staggering rarity of life — and of conscious beings like us — pushes us toward a new ethic of Earthly belonging. Alan Lightman traces the arc. Our atoms were born in stars, he notes, which means “we are all connected in a profound way; we all came from the same place — not only us on Earth, but all living things throughout the cosmos.” And life itself? “Less than one billionth of one billionth” of the Universe’s matter — “like one grain of sand on the Gobi desert.” Such rarity reshapes how we see ourselves. “We living things of high intelligence,” he adds, “are the only way the Universe can observe itself and comment on itself.” That brings, he says, “a moral and spiritual obligation.” Marcelo Gleiser calls it biocentrism: an ethic that re-sacralizes Earth, centers all life, and reconnects us with the truth native wisdom always knew — kill nature, and we die too.

Swimme wholeheartedly affirms this biocentric turn. “The universe’s new story,” he says, “is a powerful way out of the dualism that is causing us so much sorrow and anguish.” In modern industrial thinking, the Earth is reduced to a gravel pit, a hardware store of “resources.” But that worldview is cracking. What’s emerging instead is a deeper recognition. “These aren’t resources,” Swimme insists. “They’re all relatives.” From that perspective, reverence replaces extraction. “It’s very difficult to be cruel to another living creature once you know it took 14 billion years to bring this about.” 

Abrams draws a political lesson from cosmology’s vast timeline: If we can grasp a Universe billions of years old, we can also begin to care about the far future. That caring, she says, must now become planetary. “This is the first time that it’s been actually possible to think cosmically and act globally. Not even religion on Earth teaches us how to do that. But that’s what we need now.”

A new path to wisdom

This raises a daring question: Could the Universe’s unfolding story — told with feeling and followed to its depths — offer something as soul-shaping as religion does, or once did? Not a new creed or a NASA-built cathedral, but a shared framework of meaning rooted in evidence: a way to live with reverence, belonging, and cosmic purpose. 

Surprisingly, Swimme, Arav, Gleiser, and Primack don’t shy away. Swimme believes science itself is at a turning point. “The old dualism is breaking down,” he says. “It’s no longer a viable way of understanding things.” From Pythagoras’s mathematical science to Newton’s mechanistic model, each era redefined our worldview. Now, Swimme envisions science evolving into a “wisdom form” — not to replace religion, but to enrich it. Earlier cultures, he notes, glimpsed these truths spiritually; science now arrives at them empirically. “There’s a real synergy,” he says. “This new cosmological science won’t erase religion — but it may help shape a new way of being human.”

For Nahum Arav, science isn’t stealing spirituality’s thunder — it’s reinventing it. Rooted in our evolutionary kinship with the cosmos, this new form of wonder doesn’t lean on divine scripts or afterlives, but on something even more astonishing: the real story. Traditional religions, he says, offered a Darwinian advantage. They gave our ancestors comfort, certainty, and a reason to carry on. “But in the last 500 years,” Arav notes, “we’ve gained a rational framework to understand the Universe — and for me, that framework is deeply spiritual.”

Science evolves, he admits, which can make it feel less grounding. Yet the saga it tells — the 13.8-billion-year journey from stardust to self-awareness — is, for him, “far richer and more fascinating than anything we ever imagined.” He’s not alone. “A significant fraction of scientists,” Arav observes, “find that science itself now fulfills their spiritual needs.” Perhaps, in this age of evidence, meaning is finally being reborn from fact.

This article 5 scientists on finding meaning in our Universe’s 13.8-billion-year story is featured on Big Think.

Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677) was a philosopher of the Dutch Golden Age when advances in mathematics and the sciences expanded and flourished. Spinoza’s tumultuous rise as a philosopher came after a long battle with his traditional Jewish faith — having been raised in and harshly excommunicated by the Sephardic community in Amsterdam. Spinoza’s excommunication came in response to his Tractatus Theological-Politicus (Theological-Political Treatise), one of the first significant instances of biblical criticism written and widely published in the West. And while this earned Spinoza the reputation of heresy and atheism, Spinoza believed that he was far from either. Rather, his view was that the system of philosophy and theology he created — purely through his reasoning faculties — could make humanity more rational, moral, and happy if followed.

Spinoza’s intellectual journey largely began in the way most of us remain for quite a long time —and for some, it endures until death, which is an existentially terrifying thought. In his first work, Tractatus de Intellectus Emendatione (Treatise on the Improvement of the Understanding), almost autobiographically, Spinoza communicates the existential realization that much of what our ordinary waking life amounts to is entirely pointless and that the things most of us desire are futile to strive after. After all, at the end of the day, what really is the point of momentary pleasure-seeking, honors, and riches, other than to satisfy one’s vanity? Deep down, these things do not truly matter all that much, and when they inevitably vanish, our pleasure does too.

Spinoza warns against a substandard life

Most importantly, another realization he expressed is that human beings are not wholly at the wheel in their decision-making abilities. We often consciously act against our best interest, or as Spinoza puts it, we often see the good but choose the bad anyway. This is because our emotions control us far more than we control them, and these usually are not the sort of emotions we would otherwise want guiding us. Consider, for instance, how things play out when you act in accordance with whatever your hatred, anxiety, or indiscriminate dopamine systems tell you. We are very often — perhaps, primarily — in the grip of our passions and act, not because we have thought things through, but because we “felt like it.” As a result, the outcomes of our decisions are substandard — even by our own standards! — which often accumulate into a substandard life. Each of us idiosyncratically has an exemplary way of being and acting, and such substandard decisions prevent us from acting in accordance with our best selves.

Clearly, each of us has the capacity to envision a life that we wish we had — a life that is respectable and fulfilling to usand valuable to others as well. These are not material or practical desires but spiritual ones. Yet, most of us, for the most part, fall short of this ideal. Existentially and empirically, these are true claims about what it is and means to be a human. If that is the case, what are we to do about it? Is there really any other question worth asking than that? Of course not! We can, nonetheless, consult Spinoza for his masterpiece entitled Ethics, which in large part attempts to resolve this existential dilemma.

Surely, we have all seen the antithesis to Spinoza’s average human being. There are unquestionably rational actors who act according to their own and everyone else’s best interests. And in doing so, they lead happy and healthy lives. What separates such a person from the rest? Are they innately like that? Or did they cultivate some skill that most of us simply have not heard of?

Spinoza believed that responsible and joyous sages, who act according to reason unprompted, do exist, but he also thought that the population of such sages was negligible. As for the rest of us, something needs to be cultivated, but what and how?

“To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, or even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as to live according to its dictates,” said Henry David Thoreau. But what does it mean to love wisdom as to live according to its dictates? And how can one go about following Thoreau’s philosophical way? Why do we, as a species, have such a strong proclivity toward actions, beliefs, and passions like jealousy, resentment, ingratitude, chauvinism, spitefulness, and hatred? And why is it so hard for us to break free of these all-too-human tendencies?

What Spinoza says is the root of our problem

Spinoza believes the primary problem is a lack of understanding. Our “bondage,” as Spinoza calls it, fundamentally arises due to a significant ignorance regarding the nature of reality. And because of this ignorance, we become vulnerable to external causes that negatively affect our psychology. What about reality are we ignorant of that is holding us back? Several things.

For instance, Spinoza believes that reality is deterministic — a notion that might be corroborated by modern physics — and therefore, free will is an illusion. We readily believe that there is an intentional order to existence — whether that consists of God’s plan or Marxist dialectics, we are generally convinced that there are calculated and considered reasons for all phenomena. Instead, Spinoza instructs us to understand that we, and everything else, are the product of an infinite chain of causes. We hear contemporary versions of this scientifically, for instance: After the Big Bang, stars arose, which eventually led to planets and biological life. All of this did not happen because someone or something intended or wanted it to, but rather, it did so from the very necessity of the laws of nature. We are not in the grips of our emotions because we are bad people; rather, it is simply the result of natural happenstance. But, more often than not, we fail to realize this and live our lives believing that we are bad people, which is false. Replacing falsities of this sort with their antithetical truths is what Spinoza believes to be the solution to our initial existential dilemma.

We need to accept the fact that there are external causes — like biology, culture, and socio-economic factors — which are far more powerful than us and which limit our power to act and think in the ways we otherwise would wish to. And all of this acts in conjunction with our general inability to regulate our emotions, causing us to live second-rate lives. Fundamentally, realizing this is the first step to resolving our bondage.

Liberation through embracing the truth of reality

According to Spinoza, when a true idea replaces a false one, our involvement in thought and action increases. Thus, realizing the truth of reality — that our emotions and externalities mainly control us — will, in a way, light a fire under one’s belly to take more steps towards liberation.

The next is self-love. And Spinoza’s definition of self-love is quite simple: it brings about feelings of joy in oneself through recognizing oneself — not an emotion or an externality — as the cause of an action or thought. How do we know we were such a cause? We acted and thought, but we did so in a way that brought us closer to our ideal idiosyncratic way of being. The idea here is that the more you act in that way, the more capable of self-love you will become.

Such self-love significantly entails self-preservation — to take care of your own needs before attending to anyone else. And these “needs” are not the same thing as your “wants.” Rather, this means to genuinely take care of yourself by absorbing yourself in what you are interested in and making an imperative of cultivating and maintaining your physical and mental health. Striving to strengthen the strongest and most significant aspects of yourself is what Spinoza calls “virtue.” To act in your rational self-interest — to become the best person you can be, rather than a dogmatic libertarian — is Spinozistic virtue. “Blessedness” is the satisfaction of mind which follows from virtue.

But, blessedness is not the end of the story. What shall we do about other people? Living in isolation is not an option. We are, for better or worse, stuck with one another. Spinoza believes that we cannot help but want the same for others once we have achieved virtue. This is not the same thing as saying, “Look at me. I am a writer, and I’m in shape, so you should do the same.” It would not make sense if everyone’s tangible ends were unified; not only would this be impractical, but it would require force, which is antithetical to virtue itself.

Instead, we should want for others the good we have attained through our understanding: namely, the ability to act and think in a way that facilitates the creation of our distinctive ideal. The point is that this differs for everyone. If everyone were to attain virtue in this manner, we would all become more useful to one another. If, for instance, everyone gets to work in the occupation best suited to their individual aptitudes, needs, and interests, we would have a much more cooperative and competent workforce. Not to mention, more of us would experience “blessedness,” allowing for more peaceful and joyous cohabitation among individuals.

Modern neuroscience and psychology vindicate Spinoza’s beliefs on ethics, knowledge, and human psychology. We are primarily self-referential and absorbed in uncontrolled and unconscious emotions. And, through the pursuit of meaning, character development, self-determination, and self-preservation, we can overcome our natural proclivities, resulting in a much more wisely lived and self-actualized life.

Spinoza ends Ethics recognizing the difficulty of attaining virtue:

“If the way I have shown to lead to these things now seems very hard, still, it can be found. And of course, what is found so rarely must be hard. For if salvation were at hand, and could be found without great effort, how could nearly everyone neglect it? But all things excellent are as difficult as they are rare.”

It is unlikely that most — let alone many — of us will attain the Spinozistic ideal. But it is difficult to argue against its desirability. Perhaps we ought to pursue it notwithstanding its improbable attainment.

This article What Spinoza can teach us about living a great life is featured on Big Think.

In 1964, the German journalist Günter Gaus opened his interview with Hannah Arendt by asking about the experience of being a woman philosopher in a profession still largely shaped by men. But Arendt threw him off course straightaway. She objected, calmly but firmly, that she wasn’t a philosopher at all — that she didn’t belong to the circle of philosophers. 

Gaus, visibly baffled, kept pressing. After all, Arendt was steeped in the German philosophical tradition. She had studied directly under Martin Heidegger and Karl Jaspers, towering minds of the 20th century. She had authored celebrated works like The Origins of Totalitarianism and The Human Condition, books that pulsed with the intellectual energy of Socrates, Kant, Hegel, and Husserl. Why would a thinker so deeply rooted in that lineage disown the title so many believed she had earned, and instead call herself a political theorist? Yet Arendt held her ground and brought the exchange to a close with a single, unmistakable line: “I’ve said goodbye to philosophy once and for all.”

We know for a fact that Arendt’s rebellion against the title hasn’t helped much in how she’s remembered. She’s still catalogued as a philosopher, like it or not. But the deeper we go into her mental terrain, the more this refusal becomes a key to unlocking her unusual style of thinking. It wasn’t pedantry about academic categories. It was a stance, a positioning in the world, a life-statement around which her entire, well, philosophy revolved. Arendt’s story and her life of the mind, as we’ll see, spark an urgent inquiry: What is thinking, what is it for, what does it mean to truly engage in it, and what should critical thinking dare to be?

To really grasp Arendt’s way of thinking, we have to follow her not just through ideas, but through events — both personal and historical. Her thought didn’t unfold in the sterile hush of a philosopher’s study. It moved through exile, crisis, collapse. It took shape in the whirlwind of early 20th-century Europe. This already hints at a kind of thinking that refuses to float above the world. Her transformation wasn’t sparked by some private revelation, detached from context. That would be more typical of the abstract thinkers she sought to distance herself from. Arendt’s thinking was forged where history pressed hardest — messy, public, and unavoidably real.

The hidden king in the realm of thinking

Hannah Arendt’s ambivalence toward philosophy first showed itself in her bond with the thinker who shaped her most directly: Martin Heidegger. Their meeting at the University of Marburg was nothing short of electrifying — so much so that it sparked a secret four-year affair between the 35-year-old married professor and his 18-year-old Jewish student. 

But Arendt wasn’t the only one spellbound. In 1924, Heidegger was, in her words, “the hidden king [who] reigned in the realm of thinking.” Students crammed into his lectures, drawn by the rumor that, once again, “thinking has come to life.” For many, it felt like a spiritual event: “There exists a teacher; one can perhaps learn to think.” Decades later, Arendt captured what had been ignited in those early years. Thinking, she wrote, as pure activity, can become a passion — not one that rules or oppresses, but one that quietly arranges and prevails through all other capacities and gifts.

However, Arendt gradually realized that her passion for thinking didn’t sit easily with the idea of “thinking as pure activity” — a notion that, in many ways, defines philosophy itself. Over time, she began to step back from the kind of introspection she saw in Heidegger: a brilliance sealed off from the world, absorbed in itself. The more she developed her own path, the more this self-enclosed mental orbit unsettled her. It seemed to her marked by “absolute egoism, a radical separation from all its fellows.” Thought, in this mode, spun in circles, oblivious to the world it no longer touched. 

Her interest shifted. She turned to Heidegger’s teacher, Edmund Husserl, who had quietly called for a revolution: “Back to the things themselves!” At Heidelberg, guided by Karl Jaspers, she experienced a turning point. “Philosophizing is real,” she wrote, “as it pervades an individual life at a given moment.” Introspection, by contrast, isolated the soul and numbed it to the call of the world. It made the inner self seem like everything. Looking back, Arendt saw it clearly: the pull inward had once enchanted her — but it was a youthful error she had outgrown.

Although not causally linked, Heidegger’s open support of the Nazis seemed to confirm a painful insight Arendt had already begun to form: that deep philosophical thought does not necessarily lead to moral clarity or engagement with the world. Heidegger himself admitted as much: “Thinking does not endow us directly with the power to act.” This disconnection between thought and action left a lasting mark on Arendt. She came to see the two as separate realms, with no inherent bridge between them. 

Twenty years after their break, she forgave Heidegger and renewed their friendship, which lasted until her death in 1975. But she never returned to the belief that thinking could — or should — remain within the purity of philosophy. That belief had belonged to her youth, to her master’s world. Now, stripped of the shelter of introspection, she began walking a new path: away from abstraction, toward a thinking rooted in the world itself.

The moment one ceases to be a bystander

Arendt’s final transformation didn’t come from a book or a mentor — it came from history itself, crashing into her life. The “bad outside world,” which once seemed distant and theoretical, now broke through and, in her words, “molested” her thinking, forcing her into a kind of engagement she had never imagined. 

As she told Günter Gaus, her early disinterest in politics and history began to crumble in the early 1930s, as the Nazi party rose to power and her patience wore thin with intellectuals who responded with silence and sterile speculation. The turning point came in 1933, after the Reichstag fire and the wave of arrests that followed. With people disappearing into Gestapo cellars and camps, she said, “It was such a shock to me that ever after I felt responsible.”

That political awakening was soon joined by a personal one. As “general political realities transformed themselves into personal destiny,” Arendt discovered that many of her intellectual friends were collaborating. “This wave of cooperation,” she recalled, “made you feel surrounded by an empty space.” From that moment on, she vowed: “Never again!” No more detachment, no more “history of ideas.” Abstract reflection, she realized, could become a form of complicity.

This was when thinking met action. Though she had been considering emigration, Arendt chose to stay. She opened her Berlin apartment to those fleeing the regime. For the first time, she felt satisfaction not from thinking, but from doing. That moment of resistance would become the seed of her most original political insights.

Losing faith in the moral integrity of thinkers, Arendt began searching elsewhere for an understanding of evil — and for the conditions under which right judgment and action might arise in the world. This marked her entry into the political domain, where she adopted a clear political and historical stance. For her, philosophy had failed. It ignored the very heart of human existence: man as an acting being. Its obsession with metaphysical speculation left it unequipped to speak meaningfully to the world of politics, where people meet, judge, and act.

For a time, Arendt left the realm of thought altogether. She fled to Paris and threw herself into anti-war, pro-Jewish, and Zionist efforts. She began to think in collective rather than individual terms. “When one is attacked as a Jew,” she realized, “one must defend oneself as a Jew.” 

Her identity, once private, was now political. She rejected the self-centered lens of psychology and began telling her story from within a shared historical “we.” The individual, she came to believe, was shaped by the time, place, and people into which they were born. The problems of human life were never just personal — they were structural. They were political.

For Arendt, any real change — any genuine renewal — had to take place within the political sphere. A movement that failed to enter the arena of public action, that never translated its ideals into tangible goals, would remain inert. To act in this world, one had to show up where history is made.

The birth of active thinking 

Thinking comes in many forms. There’s the idle, drifting kind: daydreams and mental wanderings. There’s the philosopher’s retreat into weightless ideas, forgetting the world entirely. There’s the academic mode that dissects arguments and hunts for logical flaws. But Arendt pointed to something else: active thinking, a form of thought that stays awake to the world and prepares us to live in it. 

For her, thinking wasn’t escape; it was engagement. To think actively is already to act — to take responsibility, to stay present, to judge with care. Arendt didn’t abandon the life of the mind. She simply asked it to do more. She pulled thinking down from the philosopher’s ivory tower and set it walking beside us, in history, in crisis, in life.

Arendt took her first bold step toward uniting thought and action after fleeing Nazi-occupied France and finding refuge in the United States. In The Origins of Totalitarianism, she explored the machinery of terror under Nazism and Stalinism, revealing how totalitarianism doesn’t just dominate — it destroys the conditions for thinking. 

People don’t need to be forced into submission; they can slip into thoughtlessness all on their own. For Arendt, politics wasn’t about officials negotiating in back rooms. It was the shared space where people think, judge, and act together. And when that space collapses, evil thrives. Her answer? Not party-led democracy, but participatory councils — spontaneous, grassroots assemblies where people take responsibility without handing it off to leaders or institutions.

In The Human Condition, Arendt sharpened her critique of philosophy’s retreat from the world. Philosophy and politics, once entwined in Ancient Greece, had grown apart. Thought drifted upward into abstraction, while the world below burned. Philosophers, she argued, prized detachment — valuing contemplation over action, passivity over participation. Since Socrates, there had been a quiet disdain for politics among thinkers, who sought to protect philosophy from worldly interference. 

“Thinking,” she wrote, “aims at and ends in contemplation… and contemplation is not an activity but a passivity.” Arendt wanted something else: to bring thought back down to earth, to make it move, respond, and act — especially in a world scarred by war, terror, and political catastrophe.

In Arendt’s time, the wreckage left by Stalinism and Nazism seemed to spell the “end of ideology” — and with it, the end of the intellectual’s role. But Arendt wasn’t ready to give up on thinking. She wanted to stitch thought and action back together, to reunite the philosopher and the citizen. Real thinking, she believed, could ignite real change — if it stayed close to human affairs. 

That was the promise of the vita activa: the life of public action, where people speak, judge, and begin anew. Unlike labor or work, action creates the unexpected. But Arendt worried that this space of freedom was shrinking, eclipsed by a managed “social realm” and withdrawn into private, contemplative corners.

Look closer, and beneath Arendt’s political ideas lies something more intimate: a philosophy of love. Her original title for The Human Condition was Amor Mundi — love of the world — a direct challenge to the old tradition of contemptus mundi. For Arendt, truth didn’t live in solitude but in the spaces between people. Thinking was never a private monologue; it was always relational, always a conversation with the world. Her faith rested not in grand theories, but in “the uncertain, flickering, and often weak light” kindled by human lives. 

Later, in The Life of the Mind, she turned inward — not to retreat, but to map the terrain of thinking, judging, and willing. These, like the branches of a just government, should balance and check one another. To Arendt, being with oneself in honest dialogue was a political act. Thinking prepared us to face the world as it is — messy, factual, shared. To meet it clearly and to judge well, was nothing less than an act of love.

Eichmann as a metaphor

Arendt wanted to rescue thinking from the hands of professional philosophers and return it to individuals — to make it an active, living capacity. In times when moral structures collapse, she believed, free thinking must become our last resort. No ideology could guide us — only the inner question: Would I be able to live with myself after this? 

For Arendt, morality was born in that solitary dialogue, where past experience is shaped into meaning and stories are made to be shared. Thinking, she wrote, allows people to strike roots — so they aren’t swept away by whatever comes. But those who lose this capacity become dangerous. Her most controversial example was Adolf Eichmann, whose trial she covered for The New Yorker.

Until then, Arendt had examined evil in theory — totalitarianism as a system. But Eichmann’s trial gave her a chance to observe it up close. Like many, she expected a monster. “Evil, we have learned, is something demonic,” she wrote. Instead, she found a man with no depth at all. “Struck by the manifest shallowness in the doer,” she saw not hatred, but a chilling vacancy — a man who never realized what he was doing. 

Eichmann wasn’t stupid; he had simply stopped thinking. Watching him, Arendt revised her idea of “radical evil.” It wasn’t some dark force — it was the absence of thought. The banality of evil was her warning: When we silence our inner dialogue, we become dangerously easy to command.

“One thing is certain,” Arendt wrote, “everyone could decide for himself to be either good or evil in Auschwitz.” But Eichmann had shut down the very faculties that make such a choice possible. He had no motives beyond careerism, no independent thought — only a robotic loyalty to orders. By testifying that he merely followed another’s will, he declared himself not a person at all. With no self, there could be no guilt — and no one left to forgive. 

Many found Arendt’s tone cold, but she believed judgment required clarity, not outrage. This, for her, marked the beginning of a new political morality: We are ethically bound to think, to judge, to resist evil not with ideology, but with reflection. And to those who avoid judgment out of modesty or fear, she had a stark reply: “If you say to yourself in such matters: who am I to judge?—you are already lost.”

The banality of thoughtlessness

These days, many complain their minds are too “active” — but what they mean is that their thoughts are noisy, restless, tangled in worry and frustration. Meditation and breathing techniques promise relief, and mental quietude can be a balm. But Arendt would urge caution: Don’t confuse mental noise with real thinking. The danger, she wrote, is “this absence of thinking — which is so ordinary an experience in our everyday life, where we have hardly the time, let alone the inclination, to stop and think.” Most of what we call thinking, she shows, is just mental drifting. 

Psychology agrees: The brain prefers minimal effort, coasting on “cognitive ease.” Quick feels true. Lazy feels right. But this comfort-seeking mind makes shallow judgments and follows crowds. Arendt’s red flag is clear: When we stop thinking for ourselves, we surrender the very core of our humanity — not to evil ideas, but to no ideas at all.

While everyone today likes to see themselves as “individuals,” Arendt reminds us that true individuality begins with volitional thinking. Without it, we fall prey to the “bandwagon effect” — doing what others do, adopting beliefs because they’re popular, not because we’ve thought them through. This isn’t just how evil sneaks in, she warns; it’s how goodness can grow stale. Even noble ideas — like “Love thy neighbor” — can become rote, repeated without reflection. 

For Arendt, all ideologies, even the best-intentioned ones, lull the mind into passivity. Once we “take a position,” we often stop thinking altogether. That’s why she rejected both liberal and conservative labels, to the dismay of her activist friends. She also refused to tell others what to think. Real freedom, she believed, lies in thinking freshly, again and again. And shaking off ideology isn’t enough — it leaves us with the far harder task: to judge for ourselves, moment by moment, what is right to do.

We might read Arendt’s lessons from World War II and think we would have judged rightly, acted bravely, resisted the tide. But her diagnosis is sharper: The absence of thinking — ordinary, habitual, unnoticed — is what makes silent complicity possible. This insight speaks directly to today’s chaos: ideology calcifying, truth fragmenting, AI outsourcing judgment, politics polarizing, and minds lulled by passive scrolling. Are we really thinking — or just reacting, repeating, drifting? 

Arendt calls us not to hush the inner voice but to turn it up — to let our inner dialogue interrupt the trance of conformity. This kind of thinking isn’t retreat; it’s moral readiness. As she asked after witnessing Eichmann’s trial, “Might the problem of good and evil… be connected with our faculty of thought?” Con-science — to know with and by myself — demands that we think. For only those who hear themselves think can feel a bad conscience. And only those who feel it still stand a chance of remaining human.

This article Why Hannah Arendt left philosophy behind to face the world is featured on Big Think.

Let’s travel back in time for a moment, to 1903. Rainer Maria Rilke, an Austrian poet, was broke. Even worse, he worried that he had run out of ideas. At twenty-seven, he had already written more than a dozen books, though he had little traditional “success” to show for them. Penniless in Paris, the poet received a letter in February 1903. It sparked a correspondence that would later influence the lives of thousands around the world, including such varied figures as Marilyn Monroe, Konrad Zuse (the inventor of the programmable computer), Dustin Hoffman, and Lady Gaga. 

The writer of this crucial letter, Franz Kappus, was a nineteen-year-old enrolled in a military academy, an aspiring poet, and a fanboy of sorts. Kappus was asking the older poet to help him navigate the mounting uncertainty of life. In his third missive, the religiously conservative Kappus interrogated Rilke about whether sexual love was a sin, asking forbearance if he had rambled. He concluded, “I only wanted to share just one of the many questions leading their lonely existence in my soul.” 

What’s unusual about Rilke’s response, and what has made it so enduring all these years later, is that he did not suggest that he had answers, nor that Kappus should seek them out. Instead, Rilke wrote, “I want to ask you, dear sir, as best I can, to have patience about everything that is still unresolved in your heart; try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms, like books written in a truly foreign language. Don’t look for the answers now: they cannot be given to you yet because you cannot yet live them, and what matters is to live everything. For now, live the questions. If you do, then maybe, gradually, without your realizing it, some far-off day you will live your way into the answer.”

Rilke was not explicit about what he meant by living the questions, but I’ve come to define his response as a strategy to break through the paralysis of uncertainty. It’s a method of truth-seeking that is less interested in a final answer and more in the search for it, can find along the way. Characterized by patience and openness to new ideas, those who live the questions crave the experience of continuous discovery, rather than a specific outcome. In his letter, Rilke converted what we might think of as wallowing—the static discomfort of being unsure—into authoritative action. He imbued the act of patiently holding a question with a sense of momentum, vibrancy, and vitality. 

These lines—“try to love the questions themselves,” “live the questions”—felt familiar and foreign to me at the same time. They comforted and challenged me. They piqued my curiosity because loving the questions felt decidedly different from embracing uncertainty. The idea of embracing uncertainty not only felt impossible to me, as I considered the potential dissolution of my marriage and my future career; it also seemed out of reach for so many other people dealing with their own uncertain experiences. Consider someone waiting to hear whether their cancer has come back, someone uncertain about the results of genetic testing on their unborn baby, someone not sure they’ll walk again after an accident. “Embrace uncertainty” is the mother of all platitudes. 

Rilke’s emphasis on love, however, felt more realistic, more attainable. Love, after all, is hard work. It’s often painful. In some situations, the object of your desire may act in ways that feel insensitive, aloof, or uncaring. They may seem unrecognizable from the person you fell for. In those moments, part of loving them is to be curious about why they’re acting that way and to listen to their response even when you’d rather throw up your hands. 

Embedded in this method of living is a recognition that it isn’t always easy, that you may not want to love your questions, though you still must live with and commit to them. By continually returning to your biggest questions about relationships, meaning, purpose, and identity, you keep an important set of conversations alive: conversations with yourself, with those around you, and with the world. 

But let’s come back to earth for a moment. This was a nice idea, in theory. Still, I wondered: Is it really possible to love the questions of our lives—particularly the most painful and significant ones? What does a life of living the questions look and feel like? And what can we all learn from the people and communities following this path? 

Throughout these pages, you’ll meet many others who have taken a radically different approach to how they commune with uncertainty. And here, I’ll offer an important caveat. Many authors have defined frameworks and offered up methods to guide readers toward decisions with resolve. But in this book I suggest that we should hold answers at bay—at least for the most significant questions in our lives, and at least for a little while. In the spirit of Rilke, we can learn to avoid the addictive appeal of fast, easy answers. Loving the questions is a practice that’s seldom pursued, challenging to sustain, and utterly transformational. 

Defining “The Questions” There’s probably a question nagging at you right now: What questions are we talking about here? The field of possible questions to love is vast. How do we distinguish among questions as varied as “Should I date this person?,” “How can I be happier?,” “Where should I live?,” and “Who am I becoming?”

Throughout this book, I’ll encourage us to think about all of the questions in our life like parts of a fruit tree. 

PEACHES: Some questions are like fruit that ripens and can eventually be picked. These questions fall into the answerable category. There are short-term answerable questions; think about these as fruit that ripens relatively quickly, like a peach. These are the questions that, over a short period of time, get resolved—questions like “Will I get the job?” 

PAWPAWS: It takes a pawpaw tree five to seven years to grow its tangy, yellowish-green fruit. These, then, represent long-term answerable questions. Pawpaw questions eventually bear the fruit of an answer, but the time horizons are longer. For instance, you might question whether you should stay in a relationship, whether a new fertility treatment will help you get pregnant, or whether you’ll end up liking a career change.

HEARTWOOD: Other questions are more like the inner wood of the tree. The purpose of heartwood is to help the tree with balance, stability, and security. Heartwood questions are the ones that stay with you throughout your life. Though they’re fundamentally unanswerable in a permanent way, they are your lifelong companions, helping you return to a sense of equilibrium. Think about questions like “Who am I?” and “How do I live a life of meaning and purpose?” 

DEAD LEAVES: Finally, there are questions that do not ripen into answers and that we do not want to carry with us. These are the questions we eventually need to release. They no longer nourish us and are often questions about past decisions that drive patterns of rumination and suffering. These might be questions that emerge from regrets, about why relationships ended, about wanting closure that won’t come: “Why didn’t I just take that job?” “Why did we break up?” “What if I had just done it all differently?” If a question isn’t helping you grow and move forward, it’s time to let it go.

This article The 1903 letter that’s helped countless people embrace the unknown is featured on Big Think.

In our data-driven age, everything seems designed to hand us solutions. Every day, Google processes a staggering 13.7 billion searches — nearly 5 trillion a year. Amid the growing sea of AI chatbots, ChatGPT alone handles more than a billion inquiries daily. Surrounded by this avalanche of answers, we charge forward toward certainties, rarely pausing to notice the quiet but powerful moment before — the moment we pose a question. Though we ask questions all day long, they have become little more than automatic triggers for retrieving information, their real potential flattened by our fixation on quick answers.

Philosopher Lani Watson, whose lifelong passion is the philosophy of questions, believes that if we want to understand and enhance the role that questions play in our lives, we should start by asking: What is a question? She suggests looking at its function — what does a question do? What do we do with questions? Once we start paying attention, we find them everywhere. Questions thread through our conversations, drive our curiosity, and shape our focus. They help us discover, communicate, show care, express ourselves, challenge others, debate, inspire, and even engage in small talk — sometimes just to be heard. Watson sees them as essential tools for both individuals and society, a way to seek out and access the information we need to make the right decisions. To her, a question is simply “an information-seeking act.”

But are questions nothing more than shovels, digging up the most efficient answers? Even Watson wouldn’t go that far. After all, she notes, not every question comes with a neat, tidy answer. Some are asked with no expectation of a response. Others have no answer at all. In short, questions don’t exist for answers — they stand on their own. This idea isn’t new. In 1929, Felix S. Cohen explored it in his now-classic essay, “What Is a Question?” He argued that questions aren’t just the starting line of thought, useful only for reaching the finish. In philosophy, he pointed out, questions tend to matter more than answers.

“Those who have formulated the world’s problems have more often deserved the name ‘philosopher’ than those who have settled them,” he wrote — a statement that calls to mind giants like Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, and Paul Feyerabend, whose questions still rattle in our minds today.

It’s surprising, then, that philosophers, history’s great questioners, have rarely stopped to ask what questions really are. Philosophy, after all, is built on questions. Watson finds this particularly perplexing in the case of Socrates. If anyone embodied the spirit of inquiry, it was he. Plato’s dialogues paint a portrait of a man so devoted to questioning that his famous declaration — “the unexamined life is not worth living” — still echoes across more than 2,400 years later. He was willing to drink the hemlock rather than abandon the life of philosophical exploration, conducted through what would later be called the Socratic Method. And yet, in all of Plato’s sprawling dialogues, Socrates never once pauses to examine the very thing he built his life around — the nature and power of questions themselves.

Questioning questions

The long silence of philosophers on this ultimate meta-question has been broken here and there. In recent decades, a few have dared to confront questions directly, most notably Jaakko Hintikka with his “interrogative model of inquiry.” Yet even these efforts remain bound to logic and language, treating questions as mere servants of their answers. But is that all they are? 

A vast landscape of inquiry stretches before us, brimming with questions that invite us to reconsider the nature of questioning itself. Where do philosophical questions come from? What is the relationship between the questioning mind and the question it poses? How does one approach questions philosophically? Can a question be right or wrong? Are there questions to which there are no answers that are still worth asking? Do questions exist only to fetch knowledge, or do they shape us in ways beyond their answers? What if their greatest power isn’t in resolution, but in transformation?  

Look deeper, and it becomes impossible to ignore: Life itself is an open question, a vast cosmic riddle. This fundamental uncertainty has driven both philosophy and science since the dawn of human thought. Despite libraries filled with brilliant answers, we continue asking life’s deepest questions — some awaiting discovery, others possibly forever unanswerable. Perhaps when we stop demanding answers and let the question mark stand in all its raw mystery, we uncover something profound — an untapped force capable of expanding our minds and reimagining the way we engage with life itself. 

Fortunately, we can turn to philosophical and mystical traditions that have thrived on a steady diet of questions. Two stand out for making questioning an active force of transformation. First, in ancient Greece, Socrates mastered the art of relentless inquiry — his probing and often maddening questions captured in Plato’s Socratic Dialogues. Centuries later, across the world in Japan, the Rinzai school of Zen took a very different approach, using kōans — puzzling, riddle-like questions meant to jolt students into sudden insight. Fast forward to the 20th century, and another thinker joins the question club: Jiddu Krishnamurti, whose meditative inquiries revolved around questions that weren’t meant to be answered at all.

Each of these traditions placed questions at the heart of the master-disciple exchange, a process Plato called psychagogy — the guidance of the soul. But what makes them truly fascinating is their refusal to treat questions as mere tools for getting answers. Only Krishnamurti spoke directly about the mystical power of questioning, yet all three traditions saw questions as self-standing forces — sparks capable of setting the mind and heart on fire. Let’s take a closer look at how they did it.

Socrates: Questions that cleanse the soul

Most philosophers agree: Socrates had a method. In fact, it wasn’t his theories that made him legendary — it was the method itself, his greatest and most enduring achievement. His razor-sharp, unsettling conversations were so electrifying that they sparked a movement of imitators after his death, gave birth to a new literary genre, and became the backbone of philosophical training in Plato’s Academy.

But crack open Plato’s dense dialogues, and you’ll notice two distinct kinds of conversations. One, likely truer to the historical Socrates, shows him provoking young men to question their deepest convictions, never handing down moral lessons or pushing his own beliefs. Scholars call these early dialogues, where Plato still honored Socrates’ restless spirit. The key difference? With Socrates, questions led to open-ended inquiry and embraced not-knowing. With Plato, they became rhetorical steps toward absolute conclusions. No wonder Michel Meyer mourned that “questioning died with Socrates.”

Socrates didn’t just use questions — his very method was questioning, an inquiry built entirely on question-answer exchanges in the pursuit of truth. As Plato writes in Crito, Socrates was “accustomed to proceed by question and answer.” With nothing to teach, defend, or preach, he simply asked, never offering answers himself. The aim: Elenkhos — refutation. His questions weren’t stepping stones to knowledge; they were wrecking balls, smashing through false beliefs and exposing illusions of certainty.

Unlike the sophists, who proudly sold their students polished answers, Socrates did the opposite: He unraveled confidence, turning convictions into fragile questions. To him, philosophy wasn’t about settling down with answers but staying alive in the restlessness of inquiry. He’d begin with a simple question— “What is pious?” — and let the discussant’s own words guide the conversation. But soon, his questions would tighten like a noose. By the end, his companion, tangled in contradictions, would stand speechless — humbled, unmoored, and realizing they knew far less than they had ever imagined.

At first glance, Socrates’ ultimate aim seems to be aporia — intellectual bewilderment. The word itself means without passage, a state best captured by Meno’s exasperated confession after Socrates dismantles his definition of virtue: “Both my mind and my tongue are numb, and I have no answer to give you.”

Philosophers remain divided on whether Socrates’ questioning leads to truth or merely traps his interlocutors in open-ended uncertainty. Are his questions meant only to disorient, leaving his discussants stranded in aporia? And if so, how does this serve his greater purpose as a philosopher? Does he believe questioning can lead to knowledge at all? Although Socrates presents himself as an equal participant in the inquiry, he knows exactly where the conversation is headed. Aporia is not an accidental dead end — but is it a genuine step toward wisdom, or just a clever way to humble his opponent?

Here lies a marvelous realization: Socrates wasn’t just a skeptic with no beliefs of his own. He saw his method as a sacred duty to Apollo. And unless we assume Apollo was merely interested in humiliating mortals, we can conclude that Socrates’ goal wasn’t to tear down but to rebuild. His questioning was a kind of intellectual cleansing, shaking people awake from their dogmatic slumbers into genuine curiosity.

This is vividly illustrated in Sophist, where Socrates likens his approach to doctors who clear the body of obstructions before nourishing it. The same applies to the soul — it cannot absorb real learning until false opinions are purged. Aporia isn’t a dead end but a breakthrough, a jolt into self-reflection. Socrates isn’t trying to humiliate; he’s midwifing the mind, helping us rediscover the dormant wisdom within. The numbness of aporia is a sign that real thinking has finally begun.

Zen Kōan: Hanging over a precipice

In the 12th century, a dramatic rift split Chinese Buddhism into two traditions. One embraced silent illumination, advocating seated meditation (now known as Japanese zazen). The other prescribed intense focus on a gōng’àn, later called a kōan, a striking phrase or enigmatic statement believed to trigger a climactic breakthrough.

Kōans, literally “public announcements,” aren’t random brain teasers. They are brief yet powerful exchanges, often drawn from Zen masters’ discourse records. Originally responses to disciples’ questions, they later morphed into riddles meant to bewilder and awaken. A kōan is like a fuse of insight — stare at it long enough, and it just might detonate, shattering the “calculating mind” in an instant.

Trying to decipher a kōan logically is an exercise in frustration. By design, it resists any rational link between its words and meaning. But to assume its purpose is simply to stun the novice is to miss something deeper. The language of the kōan may seem nonsensical, but it earnestly conveys the essence of Zen. 

Zen does not answer questions — it demands direct realization. One must speak only what can be spoken and embody what cannot. So when Master Chao-chou is asked whether a dog has Buddha-nature and responds with Wu! (“not” or “none”), he isn’t negating Buddha-nature. He’s cutting through dogma, urging us to find it in the raw immediacy of life itself.

D. T. Suzuki, in The Zen Koan as a Means of Attaining Enlightenment, devotes many pages to the dizzying journey of a Zen student grappling with the riddle assigned by their master. The master remains the relentless questioner, placing the full burden of response on the student’s shoulders. There is no hand-holding — only pressure. The master intensifies the disciple’s psychic tension, demanding they immerse themselves in the kōan day and night, pushing them toward a crisis of transformation.

Initially, the student desperately tries to find rational connections, but the dialogue with the master quickly shatters such efforts. Their mind condenses into a single, all-encompassing ball of doubt, wholly fixated on the kōan. Every thought, whether sitting or standing, walking or lying, must orbit around it. Speculation is useless; the kōan must become tasteless, devoid of any intellectual foothold. Eventually, this mental strain drives the student into profound disorientation, as if hanging over a precipice — a state of erasure, restlessness, and an inexplicable, growing joy.

This disorientation signals the final breakthrough. If the student fully experiences the psychological deadlock, the seemingly insurmountable wall shatters, and the kōan dissolves—not by logic, but by awakening. The answer is not learned; it reproduces the master’s state of consciousness within the student’s entire being.

Descriptions of this realization are strikingly poetic: the sudden illumination of the Buddha-mind, a light that reveals the Dharma in every grain of dust; the ecstatic taste of true knowledge, like drinking from an endless spring; or the sensation of one’s brain splintering upon realizing the truth was always there. As Tai-Hui declared, all scriptures are mere commentaries upon that one electrifying cry: “Ah, this!” The answer isn’t spoken—it’s shown. A kōan like “What is the sound of one hand clapping?” isn’t solved by thought, but by hearing the answer beyond words.

Jiddu Krishnamurti: The answer is in the question

If anyone could rival Socrates in turning questioning into an art form, it was Jiddu Krishnamurti. In a randomly selected public dialogue from 1967, I counted — yes, personally! — 192 question marks in Krishnamurti’s words. His discussants, who started as the questioners, barely managed 23 before realizing they had become the ones answering.

In his public lectures, especially during Q&A sessions when audiences expected solid answers, Krishnamurti defied their expectations. In 1982, he opened one such session with a simple yet profound question: “Do questions need answers, or are there only questions?” To him, what mattered wasn’t the answer but how one meets the question. Instead of chasing solutions, he urged people to observe their own reactions — the impulse to escape, to latch onto easy conclusions. A question, fully met, becomes a mirror reflecting the mind itself. Rather than resolving questions, Krishnamurti invited his audience to step inside them, to probe with hesitation and without preconceptions. “The answer is in the question,” he insisted. A year earlier, he had warned against using questions only in times of distress. Instead, he saw a questioning mind as a constant force — one that disrupts the brain’s craving for security and opens the door to deeper insight.

Krishnamurti’s insatiably questioning mind was on full display when a small group gathered to ask the 86-year-old about the nature of God. But instead of playing the role of a traditional guru, he shifted the focus entirely, not to answers, but to how one approaches a question. For Krishnamurti, What is God? was unanswerable — he neither knew nor believed one ever could. So rather than theorizing, he turned the inquiry inward: Can the mind stand completely free of past knowledge, meeting the unknown without seeking refuge in beliefs? He called this a cleansing act.

One participant remarked that questions like Do you believe in God? act like sugar for ants — the mind leaps at them, conditioned to respond. But Krishnamurti resisted this reflex. When a question is held in full awareness, without rushing to conclusions, something remarkable happens — it opens the mind to an untapped wellspring of wisdom, energy, and liberating power.

This was the stance Krishnamurti sought to instill in anyone engaging with him. Like Socrates, his dialogues followed a rapid cycle of questioning and rejection, with a single question looping back, pressing forward, refusing to dissolve. 

Ask him something — say, “What is the nature of fear?” — and he’d immediately hand the question back, not as an inquiry to be solved, but as a mirror reflecting the mind’s scripted reactions. Anyone tempted to offer an answer would quickly realize their mistake. Krishnamurti did two things at once: He insisted on the urgency of the question while simultaneously blocking every attempt at resolution.

He left no escape. Thought itself — the very tool we rely on for inquiry — was exposed as inadequate. The pressure built. The usual reflexes faltered. Held in place without an outlet, the mind’s scattered energy gathered, condensed, and intensified — until, suddenly, a break. The mind, no longer seeking closure, was fully awake, open, and alive in the presence of the question itself.

Living with questions

From Classical Greece to the 20th century, these three approaches chart a radically different path for questions — one that refuses the comfort of answers, theories, or neatly packaged concepts. Instead, they throw us, the seekers, back on ourselves, demanding that we take full responsibility for our own awakening.

Questions, in their hands, become purifiers of mind and soul, stripping away conditioned responses, false knowledge, and ingrained biases. They don’t lead the mind forward; they trap it in a dead-end, shutting off every escape route until the only way out is inward. But they don’t break just to leave one in ruins — they clear the ground for something new to emerge.

Their hope? To snap us out of our philosophical slumber, strip away illusions, and set us on a path of genuine inquiry. Sometimes, in their sheer force, these questions even pull us beyond the limits of thought itself, offering glimpses of a truth that can only be lived.

However, more than anything, these extraordinary paths invite us to fall in love with the very presence of questions. Instead of treating them as unsettling shadows of the unknown, problems to be solved and set aside, we can learn to welcome them—to let them simmer, unfold, and shape us.

It is not just about asking well-crafted questions; it is about holding them in a way that transforms us, making full use of their mind-altering power — not in pursuit of immediate answers, but of deeper, truer insight. A mind that lives with questions is not lost; it is awake, alive, and endlessly expanding. As physicist Richard Feynman put it, “It’s much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers that might be wrong.”

This article The hidden power of unanswerable questions is featured on Big Think.

Western philosophy has long had a habit of drawing a tight circle around itself, declaring that true philosophy happens only within its borders. For centuries, some of its most influential thinkers have dismissed the idea that deep, rigorous thought could flourish outside the West. Immanuel Kant, speaking from his desk in Königsberg, didn’t mince words: “Philosophy is not to be found in the whole Orient.” Two centuries later, Martin Heidegger doubled down, as if time had done nothing to widen the circle. He argued that calling it Western-European philosophy was redundant—after all, he claimed, “philosophy is Greek in its nature.” Even in 2001, long after global intellectual exchange had become the norm, Jacques Derrida left his Chinese hosts stunned when he declared that “Philosophy is something of European form” and that “China does not have any philosophy, only thought.”

These bold declarations might seem, at first glance, extreme or outdated relics of another era. But take a closer look at the standard Bachelor’s degree in Philosophy, and you’ll hear their echo loud and clear. The curriculum offers a highly selective menu: a grand tour through Ancient Greek, Medieval, Modern, and Contemporary European thought—seasoned generously with Kant, spiced with Descartes, and served with a side of Wittgenstein. Want to venture beyond Europe? Unless you’re at one of the rare experimental universities, you’ll need to stray from the philosophy department altogether and enroll in a specialized Asian Studies program just to glimpse the intellectual traditions of half the world.

That doesn’t mean cross-cultural philosophy is entirely missing. Books and articles on Asian traditions exist, but they tend to be written by specialists—philosophers determined to bridge worlds that academia prefers to keep apart. And history isn’t completely one-sided. Arthur Schopenhauer, the 19th-century German philosopher, stands out as an outlier. He didn’t just dabble in Eastern thought—he devoured it, ranking the Buddha and the Upanishads right alongside Plato and Kant as humanity’s greatest intellectual achievements. One can imagine the raised eyebrows of his European peers.

But these exceptions barely make a dent in the bigger picture. As philosopher Jonardon Ganeri puts it, modern philosophy has a “dark secret”—a lingering fear of perspectives beyond the Western canon. Rather than welcoming non-Western traditions into the conversation, philosophy departments quietly sweep them aside, tucking them into Religious Studies as if they’ve taken a wrong turn and ended up in the wrong building.

Philosopher Bryan Van Norden knows this exclusion all too well. In Taking Back Philosophy, he recalls how a professor reacted when he incorporated non-Western thought into his dissertation. The response wasn’t an argument—it was a gentle shove toward the exit. Perhaps Religious Studies would be more suitable, the professor mused. Or maybe another department, one where “ethnic studies” would be, well, more appropriate.

This doesn’t read like Kant! 

The real question is: is there any good reason to keep things the way they are? Philosophy, of all fields, prides itself on logic and rationality—so shouldn’t we expect a solid argument? Yet, according to Bryan Van Norden, the uncomfortable truth is much simpler: racism. He points out that philosophy’s “almost monolithically white” curriculum, which presents nearly all great philosophers as white men, isn’t just an accident. It’s part of “a broader pattern of xenophobic, chauvinistic, nationalistic, and racist efforts to separate ‘us’ from ‘them.’”  At the very least, Van Norden, along with philosopher Jay Garfield, suggests that philosophy departments should own up to what they’re actually teaching. If they refuse to engage with non-Western traditions, the most honest thing they could do is stop pretending and rebrand as “Departments of European and American Philosophy.”

Reality, however, is more layered than simply calling it racism. The counterarguments, to be fair, aren’t without merit. After all, there is something we can call the European philosophical tradition—a vast and intricate web of ideas that has been spinning for ages. Alfred North Whitehead once quipped that Western philosophy is “a series of footnotes to Plato.” That might be overstating it, but the essence rings true: philosophy doesn’t unfold in a vacuum. It’s a long-running dialogue, a chain reaction of questions and rebuttals stretching across generations. Even the most revolutionary ideas don’t materialize out of thin air; they spark from the embers of past thinkers, including those who lived and died centuries ago. When philosophers engage with one another, they aren’t starting from scratch—they rely on a shared intellectual landscape, drawing from familiar texts, referencing a common heritage, and speaking a philosophical language they all understand.

The same could be said of the great philosophical traditions of China and India. Buddhist philosophy unfolds like an epic conversation, an intricate dialogue spanning over 2,500 years, tracing its lineage back to the Buddha’s earliest teachings. Hindu philosophy, on the other hand, is a slow and meticulous layering of thought, building upon the near-eternal foundations of the Vedas and the Upanishads. These traditions don’t exist in isolation, of course—ideas leak in, perspectives seep through. But at its core, each remains an internal dialogue, a vast intellectual world with its own gravity, making it difficult for outsiders to simply jump in midstream.

The barriers go beyond language. It’s not just about learning Classical Chinese or Sanskrit; it’s about navigating a dense labyrinth of reference points. Just as understanding Kant is easier when one is familiar with Descartes, Leibniz, and Hume, diving into Chinese philosophy requires more than just picking up Zhu Xi—it means going back to Mengzi, Confucius, and beyond. Engaging with these traditions isn’t as simple as adding a few readings to a syllabus. It demands an immersion so deep that even mastering a single philosopher can take a lifetime. I should know—I spent four long, painstaking years trying to get Jiddu Krishnamurti right.

Also, maybe Van Norden’s professor had a point. If Eastern philosophies are so deeply embedded in religious traditions, can we really be shocked when academia sidelines them into Religious Studies? Hinduism, Buddhism, and Confucianism are not just schools of thought—they’re living traditions, intertwined with meditation, rituals, and mystical practices. It’s no surprise they don’t fit neatly into the frameworks of Western philosophy. 

Some even argue that insisting they do is intellectual imperialism. Who says these traditions ever sought validation as “philosophy”? Maybe their thinkers would be amused watching scholars wrestle to fit them into the academic mold. Are we forcing too hard to prove they “measure up”? Philosopher James Apple suggests a different approach: rather than making them mirror our expectations, we should let them define themselves. That doesn’t diminish them—it honors them for what they truly are.

And this brings us to the greatest barrier of all: for those raised in the incubators of modern academia, many non-Western texts simply don’t look like philosophy. Their cryptic style resists the clean, state-of-the-art argumentation found in prestigious Western journals. They might take the form of riddle-like poetry, sprawling narratives, or intricate metaphors—a far cry from the structured, step-by-step reasoning that Western philosophers are trained to expect. For someone conditioned to seek a polished, carefully crafted argument, this kind of territory can feel too wild to explore.

Of course, not every text with deep ideas is automatically philosophy. Are thought-provoking films or insightful poems philosophy? Philosopher Costica Bradatan warns against drawing rigid lines, asking, “How can we tell, as we let ourselves be absorbed by a Sufi poem, where poetry ends and philosophy begins?” But this feels too loose. Surely, some boundary must exist. Otherwise, what separates philosophy from someone’s musings on social media? As Stafford Betty argues, there must be at least a minimal attempt at rational explanation—a belief that logic, coherence, and careful justification can help us evaluate reality and build a meaningful understanding of the world.

As you can see, as soon as we start nudging philosophy’s cultural barriers, something fascinating happens—the question grows larger, more dizzying: What is philosophy, anyway? In fact, this has been one of philosophy’s most endlessly debated questions. Why? Because philosophy is fluid. Lift a stone, and you’ll find it—lurking in unexpected places, taking countless forms.

So whether we should tear down philosophy’s Berlin Wall and let East and West finally merge depends entirely on what we think philosophy is—and what it’s for. If it’s not just a Greek invention but, at its core, a love of wisdom, then it’s far more than the refined art of argumentation. It’s every way in which human minds awaken to truth. And perhaps, deep down, that’s the real fear of philosophy departments: non-Western thought might not just join the conversation—it might change it entirely.

Ideas don’t carry passports

In recent years, a growing movement of philosophers—once again, all from the Eastern side of the wall—has grown tired of the polite academic game of “dialogue between cultures.” Instead of carefully tiptoeing around philosophy’s dividing wall, they’ve grabbed their pickaxes and started hacking away at it. But they’re not merely dismantling barriers; they’re questioning whether the divide should have existed in the first place. Is there really such a thing as Eastern or Western philosophy, or is that nothing more than a convenient myth? 

Historian Peter K. J. Park argues that the idea of philosophy as a Greek-born, self-contained tradition is a relatively new and highly political invention. In his book Africa, Asia, and the History of Philosophy, he notes that in the 18th century, most scholars believed philosophy began in India or Africa—or that both gave it to Greece. It was only later, with Immanuel Kant and his followers pulling the strings, that history was rewritten as a neatly packaged Greek-to-Kant success story—relegating all other traditions to the category of “religion.”

If philosophy’s Eurocentric story can be unraveled with the same determination that wove it, then the future imagined by Jay Garfield and Bryan Van Norden might not be so far off. They picture a world where Confucius stands alongside Kant in every syllabus, where students debate the Bhagavad Gita as often as The Republic. In this future, Avicenna’s Flying Man soars just as high as Putnam’s Brain-in-a-Vat—not as an obscure relic, but as a vital piece of the philosophical puzzle.

Van Norden calls this “Multicultural Philosophy,” but this isn’t just about thinkers lobbing ideas over a wall because they can’t meet in the same space. It’s about dismantling the wall entirely—realizing that truth is best found through a global conversation between the world’s great philosophical traditions. This vision isn’t new; it has surfaced throughout history, occasionally landing in the right minds. Thomas Aquinas is one example. In 13th-century Paris, he urged students steeped in Platonized Christianity to expand their perspectives—not only by reading Aristotle, but by engaging with Jewish and Muslim philosophers.

Jonardon Ganeri pushes this even further with “Cosmopolitan Philosophy.” He rejects the idea that cultures are sealed-off worlds. There’s no singular “Indian philosophy” or “Greek philosophy”—only individuals thinking, questioning, and shaping ideas. Cultural boundaries, he argues, don’t matter because ideas don’t carry passports. Instead of dividing philosophy by geography, students should simply engage with great minds, wherever they emerge.

One of the strongest points made by post-Western philosophers is that many revered Western texts don’t fit the mold of “philosophy” either. Why does the Bhagavad Gita leave philosophers uneasy, while Parmenides’ cryptic poem On Nature gets a free pass? Neither follows conventional argumentation—they simply had a different idea of what reasoning looks like. And what about Nietzsche’s wild and unstructured Thus Spoke Zarathustra or Wittgenstein’s disjointed Philosophical Investigations? If logical perfection is the standard, Western texts hardly hold up to scrutiny. Even Aristotle and Descartes can be contradictory, murky, or unconvincing. Yet, as Van Norden puts it: When philosophers encounter a difficult passage in non-European texts, they “roll their eyes and throw up their hands in frustration.” And let’s not pretend Western philosophy is all dry logic—it thrives on myths and allegories. Just look at Plato’s cave or Socrates’ vivid tale of the Underworld before his death.

Push a little further, and the East-West divide starts to dissolve. As Pierre Hadot and other historians have shown, when philosophy took its first bold steps in the Axial Age, it wasn’t fixated on rigid argumentation but on transformation—a way of life, not just an intellectual pursuit. Greek, Roman, Buddhist, and Confucian thinkers alike acted as guides to living, wrestling with the same essential question: How should one live? If modern Western philosophy flows directly from Greco-Roman thought, then why does the East-West divide still feel so vast? And if both Socrates and Nāgārjuna used questioning to shatter assumptions and spark new ways of thinking, why is only one of them a fixture in philosophy departments today?

It seems that by surviving on a strict diet of pure argument, modern academic philosophy has lost its ability to digest anything outside its own traditions. If we only search for the familiar step-by-step logic we expect, we risk blinding ourselves to philosophies that may, in some ways, surpass our own. There isn’t just one way to do philosophy. What matters is whether a thinker genuinely labors to build a coherent metaphysical, logical, and ethical vision. And anyone who has ventured beyond the Western canon can attest: non-Western philosophies contain “huge philosophical riches”—overflowing with insights that challenge, stretch, and reshape the mind. Dismissing them as “not real philosophy” isn’t an intellectual stance—it’s a mix of unfamiliarity and reflexive bias.

“Philosophy must diversify or die”

So, what happens when non-Western philosophies don’t just knock, but push the floodgates of the Western canon wide open? For one, long-overlooked traditions—from Upaniṣadic dialogues to Confucian ethics—might shake the dust off Descartes and Sartre, injecting profound insights into questions that Western philosophy has been wrestling with for ages. What if alternative approaches to ethics, consciousness, or political thought have been waiting just beyond the syllabus, offering solutions that Western thought hasn’t even considered?

Philosophers across cultures have tackled the same fundamental dilemmas—in ethics, metaphysics, logic, and language—often with perspectives that break free from familiar molds. Their unconventional reasoning isn’t a weakness; it might be precisely what’s needed to jolt philosophy out of its intellectual echo chamber. Has Western thought been running in place for centuries, simply because it refuses to step outside itself?

As Alasdair MacIntyre argues, any pursuit of truth demands encounters with rival, incommensurable viewpoints. Philosopher Mark Siderits calls this “fusion philosophy”—a cross-cultural approach that blends the best of global traditions to tackle deep problems. Take analytic thinkers, who break ideas into components, and holistic thinkers, who see the whole before the parts. Maybe these aren’t opposing styles at all—but two pieces of a puzzle that, once combined, could push philosophy beyond its old boundaries.

One of the most fascinating ways so-called Eastern philosophies are shaking up Western thought is by rethinking logic itself. Since Aristotle, most Western philosophers have treated contradictions as deal-breakers. But across Asia, thinkers have long been more willing to wrestle with paradox. Nāgārjuna’s Catuṣkoṭi (tetralemma) doesn’t reject binary logic—it stretches it—arguing that a proposition can be true, false, both, or neither. In other words, reality doesn’t always fit neatly into either-or categories. Daoist thought takes a similar approach, as seen in the Dao De Jing’s claim that “being and non-being generate each other.”

Modern logicians are starting to pay attention. Paraconsistent logic treats contradictions as potentially meaningful rather than dead ends, while dialetheism (“two-way truth”) holds that some contradictions are simply… true. Philosopher Graham Priest applies this idea to Buddhism, arguing that the self both exists (as an experience) and doesn’t exist (as an illusion). It also gives a fresh perspective on the mind-bending Liar Paradox: “This sentence is false.” Classical logic short-circuits trying to make sense of it—if it’s true, then it’s false, and if it’s false, then it’s true. But dialetheism simply nods and says, “Why not both?” Accepting the contradiction keeps reasoning intact instead of spiraling into absurdity.

While mainstream logic still resists contradictions, some philosophers are beginning to see paradox not as a breakdown of reason—but as a doorway to deeper insight. What was once dismissed as mystical nonsense is now being explored as an alternative way of seeing reality. Maybe contradictions aren’t obstacles to truth. Maybe they’re the key to seeing beyond it.

But there’s an even more urgent reason to let non-Western philosophies shake up the curriculum. Beyond introducing new voices, alternative vocabularies, and fresh approaches to philosophy’s most stubborn riddles, they might break modern philosophy’s addiction to extreme abstraction. Just as mindfulness revolutionized Western therapy, extra-European traditions could restore overlooked dimensions of wisdom—intuition, lived experience, practice, and even meditation. Philosophy wasn’t always an intellectual chess game; it was a way of being.

Most philosophers agree that philosophy is born in dialogue. So why keep the conversation locked inside the same walls? Students looking for meaning—and anyone questioning whether philosophy still matters—deserve more than a closed loop of scholars citing each other. If philosophy keeps shrinking its scope, why should anyone turn to it for answers? This is why Garfield and Van Norden warn, “Philosophy must diversify or die.” When we stop insisting philosophy must always look a certain way and open the door with humility, we make it, as Costica Bradatan puts it, “a richer, more sophisticated, and more relevant affair.”

This article Is philosophy too Western for its own good? is featured on Big Think.

We’re incessantly bombarded with information — from media sources, influencers, advertisers, AI assistants, co-workers, and more. Do you ever feel like there is too much to handle? As if the din makes it difficult to settle your mind, determine truth from falsehood, or even make simple decisions?

Timothy Caulfield, a leading science communicator and the research director of the Health Law Institute at the University of Alberta, admits to suffering from information overload as well. Still, it’s his job to wade into the media muck and suss out what’s real from what’s full of misinformation. For that, Caulfield relies on science.

“Well done and trustworthy science is the essential guidepost for our chaotic information ecosystem. Without it, we are lost,” he writes in his new book, The Certainty Illusion: What You Don’t Know and Why It Matters.

But science is frequently exploited and misused to pull the wool over our eyes. Other fundamental guideposts, such as our sense of goodness and the opinions of others, can also be twisted through deceit. In The Certainty Illusion, Caulfield’s aim is to expose how those guideposts get corrupted and to help readers rebuild and protect them.

Big Think recently spoke with Caulfield about his new book, his many years of combating misinformation, and his favorite Star Wars movies. What follows is a transcript of our interview, edited for length and clarity.

Big Think: You argue that three main illusions fool us: the science illusion, the goodness illusion, and the opinion illusion. Can you briefly describe these?

Caulfield: The science illusion is this idea that because science is viewed — I think rightly — as the best way to understand our world, its value has increased. Moreover, our craving for clarity and certainty has increased the value of scientific language. 

In the book, I joke about how The Enlightenment has won — but mostly as a brand, not necessarily in substance. Everyone says “my product has more science” or “is scientifically proven.” Because science is so valuable in the current marketplace of ideas and attention economy, it gets manipulated. It’s the illusion of science, not real science.

The goodness illusion goes to the core of a lot of important themes in the book. Because our information environment is so chaotic and noisy, we crave clarity and certainty. We want clear signals about doing what’s right for ourselves, our family, and our community. The market knows that, so it provides us with these signals. Health halos are the best example, words like organic, natural, and non-GMO. [These] are meant to be a shortcut for decision-making and make it easier for us to take a path towards goodness — even though the illusion of goodness doesn’t really represent what the science says, which is invariably more complicated and nuanced.

Lastly, the opinion illusion. We crave expert advice; therefore, opinions have been commodified and marketized and weaponized. One of the best examples are the reviews we see online. I picked that topic because everyone can relate to it and it feels less weighty, but it is a big issue! Trillions of dollars in the world economy are nudged by reviews. Because opinions are so valuable, they are being manipulated. It is a good example of the forces in our information environment that are deluding us. We want clarity. We want truth. But it’s rigged to deceive.

Big Think: You write that it’s getting more difficult for us to be certain about anything, even though we have access to more information and opinions than ever before. At the same time, social media algorithms and self-selected media sources feed us information that conforms to our beliefs.

Do you also think this unprecedented information-sorting machine makes it easier for people to feel more certain than ever?

Caulfield: Spot on. So many entities want to give the impression of certainty and make you feel like you’re certain. There is some research to suggest that humans crave that. That’s one of the reasons that conspiracy theories take off. We want order in our world, and sometimes, especially in science, things are just uncertain or random. There’s no magical force that provides that certainty. 

There is an ongoing tension in our information environment. On the one hand, the algorithms are rigged to play to our rage, emotions, and cognitive biases in ways that confirm preconceived notions — to provide that sense of certainty. But it’s an illusion! They are constantly trying to destabilize us, to create distrust. 

In some ways, there’s this intention to play with the uncertainty out there. We know that social media companies are making money off misinformation. A lot of studies have shown this. Rage, misinformation, things that play to your negativity bias — they’re gonna get more clicks and be shared more frequently.

Big Think: Can you explain what you mean by “scienceploitation”?

Caulfield: “Scienceploitation” is taking a genuinely exciting area of science and exploiting it to sell products, brands, even ideology. Historically, it’s not new. One of the best examples is when radioactivity burst onto the scene. We started to see radioactive products [like makeup] being rolled out. We know it’s a strategy that works and works well. 

Fast forward to now: It’s accelerated. It’s everywhere, absolutely everywhere, especially in the health, beauty, and wellness space. You even see influencers online using science-y terms like “quantum” to support absurd ideas. You sprinkle in that science-y language, and it has a big impact.

Big Think: What is an egregious example of scienceploitation today?

Caulfield: Stem cells is a good one because the phrase has taken on a life of its own. It now represents “cutting edge,” “exciting,” “regeneration,” etc. Despite all the hype and excitement, very few stem cell interventions truly work, yet clinics everywhere are selling unproven stem cell therapies. There are skin creams and shampoos that use the phrase. 

My other favorite example of scienceploitation is the microbiome. Maybe just seven or eight years ago, most people would only be vaguely aware of what the microbiome is. Now it’s everywhere. People just assume it’s a signal for “good for you” even though the science doesn’t support that. 

List any big science movement, and you’ll see an adjacent scienceploitation industry.

Big Think: You write that humans process an estimated 74 gigabytes of information every day. Neuro­scientists Sabine Heim and Andreas Keil noted that 500 years ago, “74 gigabytes of information would be what a highly educated person consumed in a lifetime, through books and stories.” I’ve never seen our era of information overload quantified in such a clear way. 

How can our brains possibly keep up with this bombardment of data? Evolutionarily, it seems we’re generations behind.

Caulfield: I don’t think [our brains] can. A recent study shows that 74% of shared headlines on social media aren’t clicked through. That is a product of how noisy our information environment is. People are searching for simple paths through this noise, and that need is being exploited.

Big Think: Did you learn anything from writing The Certainty Illusion that surprised you?

Caulfield: I was surprised at the data behind online reviews. I didn’t realize there was this rich literature. I found it fascinating. I was surprised by what the research said about how incredibly persuasive online reviews are. People trust these reviews more than they do their family and friends.

I love this quote from a comedian who made a fake restaurant. He said that people trust a review more than the food in their own mouths. 

Big Think: I’ve covered a lot of pseudoscience in my career, but you’ve explored more hokum than me. Even I was flabbergasted by your account of watching a woman get apple stem cells injected into her skin as a beauty treatment. Does anything stand out?

Caulfield: Oh my gosh, so much. Drinking urine is a big one. I stood next to a guy who — hot off the tap — filled up a bottle of urine while I was interviewing him and chugged it.

Big Think: What was the supposed benefit of that?

Caulfield: It’s supposed to help your masculinity and increase your testosterone. Tasting it is also supposed to let you know if you’re eating properly. He was naked when he did it, by the way, which added to the ambience. Completely absurd.

I’ve gone to so many of these different kinds of providers all over the world. I’ve had the opportunity to try different alternative therapies and wellness routines. I’ve found that almost without exception, it’s been a positive experience. I think that’s important to know. I get it. Often it feels good. I definitely get the idea of the “placebo theater,” and my experiences in the conventional system have not been great. I think I’m much more open-minded to it now.

Big Think: Early in your book, you share a personal story about a man who angrily confronted you after you gave a public lecture about the spread of health misinformation. “Science is full of shit,” he told you. How did you handle that situation then?

Caulfield: I started rolling out more studies. That’s not always a good idea … 

Big Think: That’s funny. He just told you “science is full of shit,” and you started rolling out more science.

Caulfield: Right? I study science communication. I know about the deficit model! I know that bombarding people with more facts won’t cut it. 

I give a lot of public lectures, and for some reason, this one stood out. I can remember him walking away, not satisfied with what I said. I can remember that. It really did hit me.

Big Think: If you had a chance again with this gentleman, what would you do differently? I’m sure you’ve thought about it.

Caulfield: I would try to talk about the nature of scientific inquiry — why science is “full of shit” and why I think these studies are more credible. 

It also speaks to the idea of a body of evidence, scientific consensus, and what consensus is. It’s not a memo that comes from the Star Chamber or big pharma or biotech. It’s messy. It’s contested. It’s always evolving. It’s thousands of independent studies kind of pointing in a particular direction. 

So, I think the world needs more scientific literacy on those topics and the inherent nature of how messy science is and how hard it is. I think that also helps people guard against hype, overpromise, and scienceploitation.

Big Think: In many ways, your book comes off as an evidence-based self-help book, guiding readers how to suss out good information amidst all the static and noise. In my opinion, many self-help books are a waste of time, touting outright pseudoscience or spreading armchair psychology nonsense. Your book refreshingly does neither of those things! I’m curious if you share my sentiment. If so, any thoughts on why so many self-help books are BS?

Caulfield: I totally agree with you about self-help books and about the whole self-improvement industry. I find it extremely frustrating. It’s trying to provide overly simplistic solutions to fantastically complex human problems, and they do use pseudo-profound bullshit too often. That happens in the whole wellness industry. They really are exploiting people’s desire for clarity and certainty. 

Big Think: At the end, you offer an in-depth list of steps we can take to suss out good information in a time of information chaos. If you could pick out one tip — because people like self-help books — that we could adopt quickly, what would it be?

Caulfield: The power of “the pause.” Gordon Pennycook and David Rand from MIT, who I interviewed for the book, have done interesting work that shows if you just pause for a moment when you see something on social media or online in-general, it really makes a difference. It’s not perfect, but it moves the needle. 

Big Think: Now, the real meat and potatoes: In the book, you snuck in your ranking of the Star Wars movies. “Correct answer: 5, 4, 7, 8, 6, 3, 9, 2, 1,” you wrote. I won’t ask you to justify each one, so I’ll simply ask why you rank The Phantom Menace in last place rather than The Rise of Skywalker, which is the worst in my mind.

Caulfield: I don’t take this list lightly. My 28-year-old son is a radiologist and a Star Wars scholar. He agrees with you. But the Jar Jar Binks thing in Episode 1 … I just can’t get past that. I also can’t get past how clunky it feels. Episode 9 is terrible, although it has some impressive visuals and moments.

I think it’s more controversial that I put Episode 8 in front of Episode 6. I know the Ewoks represent the Viet Cong defeating the United States, but it just ruined the vibe and tone of the series. I also think Episode 3 is great. I could arguably bump it up, but I am open to this debate!

This article Exploring the wild and disturbing world of “scienceploitation” is featured on Big Think.

Chapter 5, Section 1: Solutionism

On September 7, 1898, at a theater in Bristol, a distinguished English scientist gave a speech to an audience of thousands of men and women in formal dress.¹ The scientist was Sir William Crookes—physicist, chemist, discoverer of the element thallium, and inventor of the Crookes tube. It was the annual meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, and Crookes was its incoming president. Traditionally, the president’s inaugural speech focused on the accomplishments of the previous year—and so the audience was unprepared for what they were about to hear. Knowing that the speech would be publicized in the press, Crookes had a different agenda for the evening. He used his platform to issue a dire warning:

England, he said, and all Europe, was at risk of running out of food.

Europe’s population was growing rapidly, and agriculture had to grow rapidly to feed it. In previous decades, that growth had come from a large expansion of the land under cultivation, especially in the great American prairies. But land is finite, and Crookes saw it running out. The world had been explored and all the arable lands discovered. Britain itself depended on imports for most of its grain, but the grain exporters of the world would soon require all they could produce just to keep up with their own population growth. Crookes devoted a large part of his argument to surveying every major wheat-growing region of the world for its capacity to expand; he apologized to the audience in advance for boring them with statistics. If all of them maxed out their wheat-growing capacity, given the average yield at the time of 12.7 bushels per acre, population growth would outpace wheat after 1931.

Other than land, the only hope to increase production was through greater yields. If wheat yields could be raised to 20 bushels/acre, that alone would feed another thirty years of population growth. And yield could be increased with fertilizer: citing experiments with sodium nitrate on wheat fields, he calculated that the requisite increase would be 12 million tons annually.

But this only pushed the problem back one step, because nitrates, like land, were a limited resource. Crookes surveyed all potential sources of nitrogen fertilizer: coal distillation, seabird guano, Chilean saltpeter, even human sewage (it was an “unspeakable,” “barbaric” waste, he said, to flush all that good manure out to sea). Only the Chilean nitrate fields could supply fertilizer on a global scale, and at the time the exports were only 1.2 million tons, one-tenth of Crookes’s target figure. Worse, the Chilean fields were due to be exhausted within a few decades, as had already happened to the guano deposits on nearby islands. If fertilizer consumption were expanded on the scale Crookes proposed, those fields would run out in years.

Crookes did not mince words: Europe was in “deadly peril.” Wheat was a “colossal problem,” an “impending catastrophe,” and a “life-and-death question.” He said up front that people might find him “alarmist.” The speech, later expanded into a book, created a sensation, and Crookes was “assailed with criticism.”² “There has been much experience of these discussions since the time of Malthus,” complained one weary critic, but the predicted crises do not materialize. Resource limits are too distant and uncertain, he said; we should avoid making precise forecasts about them.³ Critics pointed out that wheat isn’t our only food, that land use could be reallocated, and that farmers could better adapt their methods to the soil and the climate, especially in America.⁴ But Crookes insisted that his argument was “founded on stubborn facts.” He didn’t claim that his predictions were precise, or that synthetic fertilizer was the only solution. But the magnitude of the problem demanded more than marginal land reallocation or farming improvements.

In some ways, Crookes sounded like a modern environmentalist. He chided the world for depending on markets and taking growth for granted, when arable land is “strictly limited.” He criticized the “culpably extravagant” use of fertilizer, warning that humanity was “drawing on the earth’s capital, and our drafts will not perpetually be honored.” If he had sounded his alarm in the 1960s, the moral would have been the risks of “overpopulation” and the “limits to growth.” The call to action would have been to slow growth and reduce consumption.

But this was the Victorian era, the height of Enlightenment optimism for science and technology, and Crookes had no such plans. He had intended his speech to take “the form of a warning rather than of a prophecy.”⁵ In the face of a crisis, he called not for retreat or surrender, but for a vigorous advance. He called for solutions.

“It is the chemist who must come to the rescue,” he said. “It is through the laboratory that starvation may ultimately be turned into plenty. … Before we are in the grip of actual dearth the chemist will step in and postpone the day of famine to so distant a period that we and our sons and grandsons may legitimately live without undue solicitude for the future.”

The nitrogen that crops need, he pointed out, is abundant in the atmosphere. The only problem is that plants can’t use nitrogen gas (N₂). For plant metabolism, nitrogen has to be converted into other forms, such as nitrate salts or ammonia, a process called “fixation.” This happens in nature, but only very slowly, which limits wild plant growth.

Crookes called on the chemists of the world to develop artificial nitrogen fixation, essentially to synthesize fertilizer from air. He even outlined an approach to the problem using electricity. Given the price of electricity at the time, with sufficient economies of scale, he estimated that artificial fertilizer would be cheaper than natural fertilizer imported from Chile. And the new hydroelectric power plant at Niagara alone, he thought, would suffice to produce the required volumes.

Crookes painted an inspiring picture of an ambitious goal, a scientific grand challenge: “one of the great discoveries awaiting the ingenuity of chemists,” and one which was not merely of academic interest, but “vital to the progress of civilized humanity.” And he thought the solution was “clearly within view.” His alarmism was a contingent one, based on the facts of the situation; when the facts changed, the alarm could end.

This wouldn’t solve the problem forever, but Crookes was content that “[t]he future can take care of itself.” If we could stave it off for a generation or two, then “we may safely leave our successors to grapple” with the food problem when it arises again. He said this not with the evasive shame that comes from kicking the can down the road, but with the confidence of a man who believed in progress. He was sure that in a generation’s time we would have even more scientific knowledge, technological infrastructure, and surplus wealth to deal with any problems that arise.

The world managed to stave off the wheat problem for some time. 1931, the year Crookes thought might see the first wheat shortage, produced a record crop—and it happened for reasons neither Crookes nor his critics foresaw. It was partly from an increase in yields, but even more from what Crookes thought unlikely: an increase in acreage. This was due in part to new varieties of wheat with improvements such as drought resistance. It was also due to mechanization using the internal combustion engine, which brought powered tractors into the fields in large numbers for the first time. When fields become cheaper to work, it becomes profitable to bring marginally-yielding fields under cultivation, increasing effective land area for agriculture.⁶ 

But even though his forecast was inexact, Crookes was essentially correct—about both the problem and the solution. The world was running out of fertilizer, and desperately needed an alternative. And the solution was, in fact, artificial nitrogen fixation. By 1913 the chemist Fritz Haber and the industrialist Carl Bosch had developed an industrial-scale process to use nitrogen and hydrogen gas to synthesize ammonia, a precursor of fertilizer. By 1925, the Haber-Bosch process was already creating 36% of the world’s nitrogen fertilizer; today that share is over 99%.⁷ It is now one of the world’s most crucial industrial processes, consuming around 1% of total world energy usage; without it, billions of those alive today would starve.⁸ The chemist, as Crookes foretold, did come to the rescue.

So, was Crookes an optimist or a pessimist?

He was pessimistic, even “alarmist,” about the problem—but he was optimistic about the solution. One might argue that he was realistic about the problem, since he was correct. But by the same logic, he was realistic about the solution, too.

One observer captured the paradox by commenting that “the Briton … constantly predicts disaster and never believes in it. He is a confirmed pessimist in words, and an inveterate optimist in deeds.”⁹ Or, as another writer put it in a different context, Crookes combined “pessimism of the intellect” with “optimism of the will.”¹⁰ 

One lesson of the wheat problem is that optimism vs. pessimism can be a false dichotomy. We need to fully acknowledge problems, while vigorously pursuing solutions. Call it “solutionism.”

Both optimism and pessimism can be blind. Blind optimism becomes complacency, a denial that problems even exist. Blind pessimism becomes defeatism, a denial that solutions are possible. Both types of blindness encourage passivity, when what is needed is action.

In Crookes’s day, there were plenty of complacent optimists, such as the gentleman who hand-waved away the problem, saying that we simply shouldn’t attempt precise forecasts, and called it “unfortunate” that Crookes’s suggestion of atmospheric nitrogen fixation, which was of purely scientific interest, “should have been appended to an alarmist statistical paper.”¹¹ At the time, there were far fewer defeatist pessimists. But two generations later, the wheat problem would return with a vengeance. This time, it would arrive in a very different and much more defeatist cultural atmosphere. But once again, it would show that the dichotomy is false and the solutionists are right.

In the 1960s, world population growth hit a peak of 2.3%.¹² Mortality rates, especially among children, had been drastically reduced by humanity’s triumph over infectious disease. But birth rates had not yet declined, and so the population grew—as did fears of “overpopulation.” Many observers feared that world agricultural production would not keep up. Some of the most famous alarmists (whom we already met briefly in Chapter 3, but who are worth a closer examination now), were Paul and Anne Erhlich, with their 1968 book The Population Bomb.

Picturing a baby as a literal deadly weapon is about the most anti-natalist imagery I can imagine.

The defeatism was on display from the very first sentence:

The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate…¹³

Since they saw no solutions to feed the growing population, the drastic measures were required to curtail it:

We must have population control at home, hopefully through a system of incentives and penalties, but by compulsion if voluntary methods fail. We must use our political power to push other countries into programs which combine agricultural development and population control.¹⁴ [emphasis added] 

They proposed a Department of Population and Environment which “should be set up with the power to take whatever steps are necessary to establish a reasonable population size in the United States.”¹⁵ What steps? “One plan often mentioned involves the addition of temporary sterilants to water supplies or staple food.”¹⁶ But if you’re appalled by this, “rest easy… The option isn’t even open to us, thanks to the criminal inadequacy of biomedical research in this area.” In other words, what the Ehrlichs thought was criminal was not the act of adding sterilants to the water supply, but the fact that we don’t yet have the technology to do so.

Another book, Famine 1975! (complete with exclamation point in the title), similarly warned: “Catastrophe is foredoomed. … The famines are inevitable.”¹⁷ Frustrated with what they saw as an irresponsible lack of population control in some poor countries, the authors proposed a system of “triage” to avoid the “aimless frittering away” of our food on countries that “can’t be saved,” such as India, Haiti, and Egypt.¹⁸ The Ehrlichs endorsed this idea,¹⁹ again, even to the point of oppressive measures:

When [Indian PM Chandrasekhar] suggested sterilizing all Indian males with three or more children, we should have applied pressure on the Indian government to go ahead with the plan.… Coercion? Perhaps, but coercion in a good cause.²⁰

Charles Mann describes what happened next:

The results of the campaigns were ghastly. Millions of women were sterilized, often coercively, sometimes illegally, frequently in unsafe conditions, in Mexico, Bolivia, Peru, Indonesia, Bangladesh, and, especially, India. In the 1970s and 1980s the Indian government, then led by Indira Gandhi and her son Sanjay, embraced policies that in many states required sterilization for men and women to obtain water, electricity, ration cards, medical care, and pay raises. Teachers could expel students from school if their parents weren’t sterilized. More than 8 million men and women were sterilized in 1975 alone. (“At long last,” World Bank head Robert McNamara remarked, “India is moving to effectively address its population problem.”) All the while, the same programs were pushing birth control with equal vigor. In Egypt, Tunisia, Pakistan, South Korea, and Taiwan, health workers’ salaries were, in a system that invited abuse, dictated by the number of IUDs they inserted into women.²¹

And China, of course, adopted the one-child policy in 1980:

Tens of millions—possibly 100 million—of coerced abortions occurred, often in poor conditions that led to infection, sterility, and even death. Millions more women were forced to insert IUDs or be sterilized.²²

None of it could ever be enough for Paul Ehrlich. He had decided up front that the battle is lost, that solutions are impossible. In 1970, he said:

When you reach a point where you realize further efforts will be futile, you may as well look after yourself and your friends and enjoy what little time you have left. That point for me is 1972.²³

But the battle was not lost. Catastrophe had not been foredoomed. The “inevitable” famines did not strike. And not because of falling birth rates, which made only a small difference to the population trajectory of countries like India and Pakistan in those decades.²⁴ As in 1898, so in 1968: the solutionist approach to a fast-growing population is to increase agricultural productivity.

By the 1960s, the fertilizer problem had been solved, by Haber-Bosch. But other problems remained. One was stem rust, a fungus that plagues wheat and can destroy entire harvests. There was no way to immunize crops against rust, no way to prevent its spread once it had taken hold, and no cure: the onset of rust was a death sentence for wheat. But sometimes, here and there in a rust outbreak, a plant would be unaffected, seemingly immune. And so there was the glimmer of a strategy: find these plants and use them to breed rust-resistant varieties.

A program to do this for Mexico, funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, was run by the intrepid researcher Norman Borlaug. He began with little funding, almost no equipment or staff, and not much support from management. He and a few assistants worked tirelessly, planting and inspecting hundreds of thousands of stalks from tens of thousands of varieties of wheat.²⁵ They cross-bred plants with promising characteristics, working without modern genetic tools, collecting and distributing pollen by hand in order to mate the plants.²⁶

Eventually, they created a promising handful of varieties. Not only were they resistant to multiple strains of rust, they were also relatively insensitive to daylight, a rare quality that let them grow at any latitude. This meant that the seeds could be distributed to many regions, allowing the program to scale. Further, the new breeds grew vigorously given large amounts of fertilizer.²⁷

In fact, they were too vigorous: the stalks grew so tall, and the heads so large, that the plants began to topple over, a problem known to farmers as “lodging.” So Borlaug and his team kept working, cross-breeding their wheat with varieties that had shorter stalks. This not only prevented lodging, but increased grain yield, since less of the plant’s energy and nutrients went into creating straw: a kilogram of nitrogen fertilizer produced only an additional 10 kg of grain in the old tall-strawed varieties, but 20–25 kg in the new ones.²⁸ They kept adding resistance to new strains of rust that were just emerging. And when their highly productive, short-stalked, disease-resistant plants turned out to have shriveled, low-protein seeds that made bad flour, they bred for better flour quality too.²⁹

By 1968, the year of the Ehrlichs’ Population Bomb, Borlaug could report that Mexican wheat yields had more than tripled, from 760 pounds per acre to almost 2,500.³⁰ It was also succeeding in India and Pakistan. “The first season they grew so much wheat they had no place to store it all,” reported one journalist after interviewing farmers in India. “They closed the schools early and filled them full of grain.” One farmer told another reporter, “This was a miracle. It totally changed our lives.”³¹ From 1968 to today, daily calorie supply per person has increased 20% in Pakistan and 28% in India, even as their combined population has almost tripled.³² Borlaug’s work is estimated to have saved hundreds of millions of people from famine; even if that estimate is off by a factor of ten, he would still be one of humanity’s greatest benefactors.³³ He won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970.

Borlaug was never satisfied, knowing that even if we can always find solutions, all solutions are temporary. In his Nobel speech, he acknowledged that the revolution he brought about “has not transformed the world into Utopia,” and when we consider that half the world was still undernourished, “no room is left for complacency.” Eternal vigilance, it seems, is the price of progress. He warned: “Most people still fail to comprehend the magnitude and menace of the ‘Population Monster.’” Still, he advocated an inspiring, ambitious goal, a grand challenge: to eradicate hunger. And he remained “optimistic for the future of mankind.”³⁴

Ehrlich, in contrast, remains defeatist to this day. Unlike Crookes, whose alarmism was contingent, Ehrlich’s alarmism is based on his view of the universe and of human nature, and thus impervious to facts. In a 2009 retrospective on his book, he only barely manages to admit that it got anything wrong: “Perhaps the most serious flaw in The Bomb was that it was much too optimistic about the future.”³⁵ (!) And in a 50th-anniversary interview, he became an apologist for China’s “one child” policy, saying it “was not as coercive as it was painted over here.”³⁶

The contrast is stark. Ehrlich’s defeatism spread hysteria and encouraged authoritarian oppression. Crookes’s and Borlaug’s solutionism created wealth out of poverty and saved lives.

To be continued in part 2.

I previously told a version of this story in an article for the MIT Technology Review. Some of the description of overpopulation doomerism was adapted from this thread.

1. Crookes, “Address of the President;” Hager, The Alchemy of Air, 3. Unless otherwise cited, all quotations from Crookes are taken from this speech.
2. “Science and Food Supply;” Atkinson, “The Wheat Problem Again;” Crookes, The Wheat Problem, Preface, vi.
3. Giffen, “The Wheat Problem.”
4. Review of Crookes, “The Wheat Problem, Revised.”
5. Crookes, The Wheat Problem, Preface, xi.
6. Enfield, “The World’s Wheat Situation.”
7. Smil, Enriching the Earth, 245.
8. Hager, The Alchemy of Air, 271.
9. Crookes, The Wheat Problem, 82.
10. These phrases originated with Romain Rolland and were popularized by Antonio Gramsci. Fisher, Romain Rolland and the Politics of Intellectual Engagement, 88.
11. Giffen, “Wheat Problem.”
12. “Population Growth Rate.”
13. Ehrlich, The Population Bomb, xi.
14. Population Bomb, xi.
15. Population Bomb, 138.
16. Population Bomb, 135.
17. Paddock, Famine 1975!, 9.
18. Famine 1975!, 205, 222.
19. Population Bomb, 161.
20. Population Bomb, 166.
21. Mann, The Wizard and the Prophet, 399.
22. Wizard and Prophet, 400.
23. Look Magazine, 1970, quoted in Commoner, “Response.”
24. For example: India’s birth rate fell from 42.9 per 1000 in 1960 to 32.6 in 1990. If it had stayed constant at the 1960 level for those three decades, India’s total population in 1990 would have been 956 million, only 10% higher than the actual figure of 865 million. My calculations are in this spreadsheet, based on input data from Our World in Data’s Population and Demography Data Explorer. Pakistan had similarly modest declines in population growth rate, as did many other countries mentioned in the excerpt from Mann, with the possible exception of China.
25. Wizard and Prophet, 129.
26. Wizard and Prophet, 138.
27. Wizard and Prophet, 145.
28. Borlaug, “The Green Revolution, Peace, and Humanity.”
29. Wizard and Prophet, 150.
30. Wizard and Prophet, 154.
31. Wizard and Prophet, 438.
32. “Daily Supply of Calories per Person;” “Population.”
33. Easterbrook, “Forgotten Benefactor of Humanity.”
34. Borlaug, “Green Revolution.”
35. Ehrlich, Paul and Ann, “The Population Bomb Revisited.”
36. Paul Ehrlich, interview by Greg Dalton, “The Population Bomb, 50 Years Later.”

For The Techno-Humanist Manifesto’s complete bibliography, visit The Roots of Progress.

This article Blind optimism is not a cure for blind pessimism is featured on Big Think.

Earlier this year, I spoke with the writer, investor, and influencer Sahil Bloom about his new book, The 5 Types of Wealth. This was back in the foggy post-holiday — that time of year when most people are staggering back to work, gingerly opening emails, and spending a good deal of the day talking with colleagues over coffee.

Bloom is not. He’s started the year at a full sprint. He’s finishing up the media rounds for his new book with days crammed full of podcasts, interviews, and signing events. And while Bloom gave the socially obligatory puff of the cheeks, he wasn’t unhappy with all this busyness. This wasn’t someone forced to do something or resentful of how he “has” to spend his time. Everything Bloom is doing — including talking with me — is a deliberate and consciously chosen allocation of his time. It’s a decision about what he wants his life to be.

“The first section of my book is time wealth,” he says. “The reason that one is first is for a very specific purpose, which is that time is what unlocks all of the other things. When you have the freedom, when you have time wealth — the ability to choose how you spend your time, who you spend it with, what you spend it on, and when you trade it for other things — that’s what enables you to then decide which areas you want to focus on or prioritize during this season of life.”

Types of wealth

The main hypothesis of Bloom’s book is that if we’re to be happy in life, we have to answer one question: What does wealth mean to me? What does success mean to me? As Bloom puts it:

“The entire ethos of the book is that you will never feel successful unless you create your own definition of success. And if you blindly follow the definition of wealth and success that the world has handed you, you will just be chasing whatever ‘more’ you’ve convinced yourself is the thing that will give you happiness. And that is really what The 5 Types of Wealth is all about. It’s a book to help you redefine what a wealthy life looks like, what success looks like to you, based on the pillars that truly contribute to a fulfilling, happy existence. That includes money, but it is not solely defined by money. It also includes these other things in your life.”

There are three key arguments behind Bloom’s position. First, a happy and fulfilling life is about defining what “wealthy” means for each of us. Second, history and philosophy reveal, very broadly, five types of wealth — or five ways to define wealth. And third, we cannot devote ourselves fully to all five definitions of wealth. The sheer fact of our mortality means we can only ever be “wealthy” in one way at a time. So, happiness requires us to first define what wealth means and then consciously commit our time to becoming that type of wealthy individual.

The seasonality of life

Bloom’s book is not about extremes. It is not about becoming a certain type of person. We do not commit to a “type of wealth” and then suddenly emerge as a cookie-cutter archetype. There is no “Business Person Archetype,” “Family Person Archetype,” or “Sporty Person Archetype.” Instead, we must devote our time to the many and varied aspects of life. And, as philosophers have been saying for millennia, this is about balance. It’s not one or the other. It’s not excess or deficiency; not yin or yang. It’s a combination of everything. It’s spending time today on this and time tomorrow on that.

And that last point led Bloom and I to discuss seasonality. How and where you spend your time — and what you define as a “wealthy” life — will not be the same throughout your entire existence. Just as there is no one way to define “wealth” for every human living, there is also no one way to define “wealth” within a single life.

“The concept of seasons is essential to the whole book because what you prioritize or focus on during any one season will change. So maybe I’m in my 20s and early 30s, and I’m in a season of foundation building, and I really want to lean into building financial wealth during that season. Well, time wealth allows you to deploy most of your energy into financial wealth. Now, I might be in my 40s, and I have young children, and I want to really prioritize relationships with my partner, with my children. So, I’m going to really lean into social wealth.”

The philosophy of seasons is an old one, and poets, philosophers, and sages have written about it for millennia. But Bloom’s point takes on a fresh edge in modernity because so many of the painful comparisons we make are between different seasons of life. So many of the arguments and debates we have with each other — and ourselves — stem from different starting points. An elderly person might rebuke a young professional for working late, while someone focused heavily on their family might sneer at people who take hours of their day to exercise or train.

Seen from Bloom’s interpretation, this is as ridiculous as summer ridiculing winter, or the Sun mocking the Moon. Everyone you meet will be living in their own season. They have their own foundational accounts of “wealth.” The trick to life is to find the season in which you feel most at home and appreciate the joy that comes with it. The falling leaves of autumn are not any less beautiful than the first snowdrops of spring. One type of wealth is no greater than another.

This article The “5 Types of Wealth”: Why you’re wealthier than you think is featured on Big Think.

The idea that we might have cosmic neighbors has captivated the human imagination for decades. It’s not just sci-fi enthusiasts who ponder the possibility of extraterrestrial intelligence (ETI) — the general public seems to lean strongly toward the belief that we’re not alone. Columbia University Professor David Kipping often finds that, when discussing astronomy and the potential for life elsewhere in the Universe, people almost universally insist, “Surely we can’t be the only ones!” And who can blame them? With billions of galaxies, each teeming with stars and planets, the odds of life existing only here, on this pale blue dot, seem impossibly slim. Many scientists and media personalities reinforce this idea, turning the conversation from “if” life exists to “when” we’ll find it and “what” it might look like. In this atmosphere of excitement and speculation, the anticipation of meeting another intelligent species feels almost inevitable — unless, of course, you believe the aliens are already here.

The “crowded Universe scenario” has a way of pulling at our intuition, echoing some of the simplest yet most profound philosophical ideas. Occam’s razor nudges us toward the notion that “life out there” is the easiest explanation — it just feels right. The principle of mediocrity chimes in, reminding us that our little corner of existence is probably not all that unique. And the Copernican principle gives a knowing nudge, sweeping away humanity’s old, self-centered fantasy of cosmic importance. To believe we’re alone in this vast, wild expanse feels not only improbable but strangely outdated, like clinging to some universal map where Earth is still at the center. Perhaps it’s this same wonder that Carl Sagan so beautifully captured in his novel Contact, a tale imagining humanity’s first encounter with intelligent life beyond Earth. “All those billions of worlds going to waste, lifeless, barren?” he asks. “Intelligent beings growing up only in this obscure corner of an incomprehensibly vast Universe?” The film adaptation, if anything, sharpened the sentiment: “The Universe is a pretty big place. If it’s just us, seems like an awful waste of space.”

But this belief in cosmic neighbors isn’t just about intuition — it’s grounded in science that sparks both curiosity and awe. With the discovery of exoplanets, we’ve learned that our galaxy overflows with diversity: Billions of planets orbit stars in the so-called habitable zone, where conditions might support liquid water. Once, Earth’s oceans seemed unique; now, hidden seas on moons like Europa and Enceladus suggest that watery worlds may not be so rare after all. On Earth, life has proven to be remarkably resilient, thriving in boiling volcanic vents, acidic lakes, and even radioactive wastelands — extremes that stretch the imagination of where life could exist. Alien organisms might evolve in entirely different ways, shaped by biochemistries we can’t yet conceive. 

And while the silence of the cosmos might seem deafening, it’s worth remembering that our search has barely begun. In cosmic terms, we’ve only just learned to listen, with future technologies poised to open entirely new windows into the Universe. Statistically, the odds seem undeniable: With trillions of stars and untold planets, how could life not emerge elsewhere? Even the discovery of a humble microbe on a distant world would be revolutionary, reminding us that Earth’s story is but one chapter in the Universe’s endless possibilities.

However, these thrilling reasons for scientific excitement shouldn’t distract us from a sobering truth: This is still a leap of faith. The question of whether we are alone remains one of science’s greatest enigmas. As Professor David Kipping aptly points out, the data paints a tantalizing picture — just as compatible with a Universe brimming with life as it is with one where we stand solitary under the stars. To insist there must be life out there, he reminds us, is to trade evidence for optimism. The most honest answer to this cosmic mystery is a simple, awe-filled: “We don’t know.”

Why might we be alone? The answer begins with life’s improbable beginnings. Abiogenesis — the process by which life sparks from non-life — may be so unlikely that Earth represents a singular triumph in an otherwise barren cosmos. Even under ideal conditions, life doesn’t simply spring forth; no experiment has succeeded in replicating it. Earth’s unique circumstances — a stabilizing Moon, plate tectonics, and precisely the right chemical mix — might be one in a trillion. Evolution adds yet another filter: While microbial life could be common, the leap to intelligent beings may require an almost comical series of accidents and near-catastrophes. If our evolution is a cosmic lottery, the Universe might be full of unclaimed tickets. For all its billions of stars and planets, the cosmos might remain overwhelmingly empty of thinking, dreaming life.

And even if other civilizations exist, we may be forever separated by the vastness of space and time. Our attempts to listen to the stars have met only with haunting silence. Civilizations might arise and vanish like sparks, flickering out long before their signals could traverse the galactic void. The distances are staggering — light itself takes millennia to cross the nearest stars — and our technology for interstellar travel is more fiction than fact. To make matters worse, the Universe’s accelerating expansion drags galaxies further apart, locking us into a kind of cosmic isolation. In the grandest sense, we might be effectively alone — adrift in a magnificent yet uncaring sea of stars, waving a signal no one will ever see.

Despite all our searching and knocking on cosmic doors, we may be utterly alone — effectively or actually — and for now, that’s the reality we inhabit. Futurist John Michael Godier observed that true solitude in the Universe can never be proven; we could discover alien life and know we’re not alone, but we’ll never confirm that we are, trapped as we are within the observable Universe’s shimmering bubble. What if, after centuries, our telescopes find no alien biospheres, no technosignatures, just an unbroken cosmic silence? As Arthur C. Clarke said, either we’re alone or we’re not, and both are terrifying. To make sense of this profound solitude, philosophy might just hold the key.

Homeless in infinity

At first glance, the idea of cosmic solitude feels distant, buried beneath the noise of our overpopulated and chaotic lives. Who has time to dwell on universal loneliness while grappling with earthly troubles? Yet, this silence looms in the background of our collective psyche, a shadowy “what if” that quietly gnaws at us. If reflective self-consciousness is unique — or tragically rare — in an empty cosmos, the implications are staggering, shaping our identity with a mix of awe, anxiety, and alienation.

On one hand, this solitude feels like the ultimate cosmic compliment. Imagine: Earth as the crown jewel of existence, the one magical place where the Universe perceives itself. If we are alone, our existence transcends probability; it’s a miracle that defies imagination. As astrophysicist Howard Smith puts it, we become rare, precious, and cosmically significant. We are singularities — impossible odds made real.

But this extraordinary uniqueness comes with a haunting loneliness. In a Universe so vast and dark, we would be the sole voice in an eternal void, singing to no audience, pondering whether our reality is even real. This isn’t just unsettling — it’s profoundly disorienting, forcing us to wrestle with the paradox of being both cosmic unicorns and solitary wanderers.

Some philosophers trace humanity’s cosmic loneliness back to the moment we were unceremoniously dethroned by the Copernican revolution. Philosopher Avi Sagi likens it to a cosmic eviction notice: One day, Earth was the Universe’s cozy, central hearth, and the next, we were lost within an infinite wilderness. Martin Buber captured this existential displacement as “being homeless in infinity.” Stripped of a story where the cosmos revolved around us, we found ourselves unanchored, isolated, and dwarfed by limitless horizons.

As if to twist the knife, each scientific breakthrough only deepened our sense of alienation. Discovering the Universe’s sheer scale — its billions of galaxies and unthinkable distances — didn’t bring answers; it emphasized the improbable nature of our reflective awareness on this small, rocky planet. Carl Sagan’s famous musings in Pale Blue Dot summed it up: Earth, a “lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark,” shines like a faint ember in a sea of silent, indifferent stars.

It’s a bittersweet paradox: We are stardust, built from the same elements as the galaxies, yet we feel exiled from them. The Copernican revolution left a scar on the human psyche, severing us from the anthropocentric warmth of old. Now, we are suspended between nostalgia for a Universe that cared and the chilling beauty of one that doesn’t.

Avi Sagi points out that the Copernican revolution did more than shift our cosmic understanding; it exiled humanity into an existential loneliness that Nietzsche, Sartre, and Camus grappled with long before we began straining to hear the Universe’s whispers. While most of us are familiar with everyday loneliness — miscommunication, shallow connections, or the ache of isolation — the existentialists dug deeper, unearthing a profound cosmic solitude, a disconnection seemingly stitched into the very fabric of existence.

Nietzsche, heralding the death of God, envisioned a Universe stripped of divine purpose — a vast, untethered expanse where humanity drifted without anchor. For him, the void wasn’t merely empty; it was a cold, relentless reminder that the cosmos had ceased to be our home. Only the bravest, he believed, could confront this frigid indifference and forge meaning from the abyss. Camus, writing amid Fermi’s “Great Silence,” likened this loneliness to a cosmic cry swallowed by an unyielding quiet. In The Myth of Sisyphus, he described humanity as strangers in an unanswering Universe, caught in the painful chasm between our hunger for meaning and the world’s silent refusal. Sartre, meanwhile, saw the Universe as a brute, meaningless expanse. He argued that humanity is both free and imprisoned — isolated beings who fill existence with roles and distractions, yet remain adrift. Even among others, Sartre warned, we are existential castaways, forever marooned.

But even Sartre, with his stark view of relationships, admitted that without others, we’d collapse into sheer nothingness. Loneliness, at its heart, isn’t merely the absence of people — it’s the aching hollow left by the lack of meaningful, intimate connection. Humanity, as the lone inhabitant of a seemingly empty cosmic neighborhood, feels this absence acutely. We learn who we are through others; they hold up a mirror to our existence. Imagine, for a moment, being the only person on Earth. No comparisons, no dialogue—just your voice, echoing endlessly into the silence. How would your sense of self survive?

Sure, Earth teems with magnificent life, but animals and plants don’t return our reflective gaze. Discovering bacteria on Mars might excite scientists, but it wouldn’t ease this deeper longing. True solace lies in finding another consciousness — someone to share, challenge, and uncover the mysteries of existence with. In our wildest dreams, another civilization might hold answers we’ve yet to even fathom. Could they reveal something we’ve missed about the Universe’s meaning? Or perhaps, about our own?

For much of human history, we didn’t see ourselves as alone. We filled the cosmos with gods, monsters, and mythical beings — companions to banish the terrifying emptiness. Even today, for many, the void is softened by theology, populated with angels, demons, or spirits. Philosopher John McGraw notes that when humans endure prolonged isolation, they often conjure faces and figures to stave off solitude. Perhaps our modern science fiction, with its imagined aliens and sentient machines, serves the same purpose — a way to fill the silence with something resembling connection.

Science fiction’s thought experiments delve into this need for “others.” Per Schelde argues that aliens and AIs are modern echoes of ancient trolls, elves, and ogres. These beings thrived in a time when untamed forests and mysterious landscapes inspired wonder. Now, with nature “tamed,” space has become the new wilderness — its uncharted galaxies brimming with imagined monsters and otherworldly entities.

Philosophically, definitions rely on contrast — on the presence of an “other” to reflect and define us. In our current condition, bereft of a reflective consciousness to mirror us, science fiction may serve as a means to transcend our anthropocentric view. Aliens and AIs challenge the boundaries of human existence, forcing us to reconsider what it means to be human. As philosopher Mark Rowlands suggests, their stark otherness becomes a mirror: When we stare at aliens or machines, we’re really looking at ourselves. Films like Blade Runner and Spielberg’s A.I. Artificial Intelligence don’t just explore replicants and robots — they probe the essence of humanity.

This yearning for an “other” might also explain our obsession with AI. Could our pursuit of general AI — capable of mirroring human thought — be a subconscious response to the terrifying possibility that we are utterly alone? Perhaps these creations are not just technological marvels but a collective attempt to share the burden of our cosmic solitude, to find company in the vast, vacant Universe — even if we have to build it ourselves.

What makes the emptiness bearable

So, here’s the rather unremarkable sci-fi thought experiment posed: Humanity, after 500 years of searching, concludes that the Universe is resolutely neighbor-free. No thrilling alien encounters, no grand galactic conversations. Just us, and maybe a few Martian microbes. What then? And what about now, as we reckon with our present cosmic solitude? For guidance, we return to the existentialists, those daring explorers of loneliness who wrestled with isolation like no others.

Solitude, they remind us, isn’t purely a burden. It holds a strange, haunting beauty. If we learn to make peace with this universal silence, as eerie as it first feels, it can reveal a deeper sense of belonging — a cosmic intimacy. Emptiness doesn’t have to end in alienation.

Camus saw this in The Myth of Sisyphus: By embracing the strangeness of both ourselves and the Universe, we discover an odd closeness. Mind and cosmos become, as he wrote, brothers in mystery, bathing in the same unknowable silence. Even Sisyphus, eternally rolling his stone, found a way to make a home in homelessness. In a Universe stripped of masters, the myriad voices of Earth rise to fill the quiet. Each atom of his stone, each flake of the mountain, becomes its own world — rich, strange, and enough.

Facing cosmic loneliness head-on might be our most empowering choice. If we are truly alone — no reflective, self-conscious extraterrestrial companions as far as we can tell — it’s time to stop waiting and embrace this Universe as ours. Constantly yearning for other life forms or hoping for redemption from this solitude risks avoiding responsibility. Would a bustling galactic neighborhood really make our existence more meaningful? Philosopher Thomas Nagel argues that even a role in some grand cosmic enterprise might fail to give us what we truly seek. In the end, with or without the fireworks of “others,” we are the naked human, standing in an unfathomable Universe, with no one to make choices for us.

This stark reality isn’t a burden — it’s a call to embrace the beauty and wonder around us. Whether or not other life exists, the cosmos is our home. This is an invitation to reclaim the Universe — not as a home we’ve lost, but one we’ve yet to fully inhabit. Nietzsche envisioned our cosmic loneliness as a chance to transform Earth into a home worthy of the fully human and superhuman. Carl Sagan’s Contact echoes this: “It’s already here. It’s inside everything. You don’t have to leave your planet to find it.” Our task begins with supreme reverence for Earth’s uniqueness, deeper humility, and a compassionate duty to protect this fragile, miraculous world.

The rarity of life — and especially self-reflective consciousness — makes Earth a dazzling gem in the cosmic void, deserving unparalleled respect. This realization needn’t fill us with dread but rather a profound sense of awe and responsibility. If we are truly alone, we’re not just one of the Universe’s many expressions of life; we are its singular voice, its sole witness. Our minds and hearts would be the Universe’s precious instruments, perceiving its beauty and mystery.

Astronomer David Kipping captures this poignantly: “Lost in the dark, a singular candle holding back the empty void of thoughtlessness, what a responsibility it is then to be alive.” Picture this: Earth, a steadfast flame, flickering alone in a sea of barren worlds. “You could travel for a billion light-years,” Kipping notes, “and see nothing but lifeless planets.” If that’s true, then every single one of us is a part of something spectacular — uniquely irreplaceable.

Every one of us — and all of us together. Perhaps being alone together is the key to discovering true human solidarity. Borrowing from Camus one final time, when we accept the possibility of a quiet, vacant Universe, we stop looking up and start looking around. We see the brothers and sisters who share this cosmic solitude, and in that recognition, we find the seeds of compassion — a strange and profound form of love.

Embracing life as the only necessary good, we can expand our love for existence to all that lives. Overwhelmed by the same strangeness, we realize that we, fated to share this silent cosmos, must create a home on Earth, rooted in solidarity and care. As the alien in Contact beautifully puts it: “In all our searching, the only thing we’ve found that makes the emptiness bearable is each other.” In this shared connection, we transform cosmic emptiness into purpose, meaning, and love.

This article What if we’re alone? The philosophical paradox of a lifeless cosmos is featured on Big Think.

In a series of experiments described in Science Magazine in 2011, a trio of researchers found evidence to support a sneaking suspicion bubbling up in the minds of many Google aficionados: Frequent users of internet search engines didn’t retain information gleaned through online sleuthing as well as individuals who learned information offline. As the scientists posited, it was almost as if people and their computers were becoming “interconnected systems,” with basic memory functions delegated to search engines.

Over the ensuing years, this “Google effect” has taken on a new moniker: “digital amnesia.” It’s the tendency to forget information that can be found readily online via search engines. After all, why would the brain waste resources storing information available at the click of a button? Instead, people better recall how to access the information.

Google is now the most trafficked website in the world, and the internet itself is the definitive repository of human knowledge. If the brains of Googlers and their invaluable search engine were interconnected back then, they’ve essentially merged now. The myriad effects are up for speculation.

Now, artificial intelligence is here to supplement — or even supplant — human cognition, potentially redefining and broadening digital amnesia. From digital assistants to ChatGPT to Google Search’s AI Overview, AI is planning our days, doing our work, and answering our questions. In essence, it is thinking for us. Will this new relationship reshape how we think and behave? Research is underway, with much of the focus on critical thinking.

AI is increasingly thinking for us

Critical thinking is the ability to analyze, evaluate, and synthesize information to make reasoned decisions. People who rate highly in scientific measures of critical thinking get better grades in school, are more adept at their jobs, and are less susceptible to manipulation.

Critical thinking can seem nebulous and insignificant, but that impression couldn’t be farther from reality. For example, when you compare different loan terms for a house or scrutinize car insurance rates, you’re thinking critically. When you dig into the meaning of a poem, book, or work of art, you’re thinking critically. When you plan out your busy day to be optimally time efficient, you’re thinking critically.

Here’s the thing: AI can do all of those tasks for you and more, quite proficiently. And its use is increasingly mainstream. Since launching in 2022, ChatGPT has rocketed to become the ninth most trafficked website and the fourth most popular app on iPhone. The AI tool has 300 million weekly active users and 123.5 million daily active users as of early January.

People frequently utilize AI to craft emails, plan travel, get financial advice, summarize texts, and prepare for job interviews. According to a 2024 Pew Research poll, roughly half of Americans said they use AI at least several times a week, while a recent survey found that virtually all Americans use products that contain AI (even though two-thirds don’t realize it).

Companies offering AI assistants sell them as productivity boosters. They argue that tasking them with humdrum mental chores and queries frees up users’ time and cognitive resources, which they can then spend on other, more creative, and innovative pursuits. The idea makes intuitive sense and has backing in the scientific literature. According to cognitive load theory, the human cognitive system has limited capacity. So reducing cognitive load can enhance learning and performance.

Atrophied critical thinking

Habitually offloading cognitive tasks to AI could backfire, however. As AI has grown more commonplace in everyday life, psychologists theorize that it reduces users’ engagement in deep, reflective thinking, causing their critical thinking skills to atrophy over time.

Professor Dr. Michael Gerlich, Head of the Center for Strategic Corporate Foresight and Sustainability at the Swiss Business School, is one of the researchers studying this risk.

“If individuals use the cognitive resources freed up by AI for innovative tasks, the promise holds,” he told Big Think. “However, my research and related studies suggest that many users channel these resources into passive consumption, driven by AI-enhanced content curation. This trend aligns with findings on digital dependence, where the convenience of AI fosters a feedback loop that prioritizes entertainment over critical engagement.”

In other words, when AI frees up users’ cognitive resources, they typically don’t use their extra time and brain power to problem-solve or create. Rather, they tune out by watching Netflix or perusing social media — content served up by AI algorithms.

In Gerlich’s most recent research, published January 3rd in the journal Societies, he surveyed 666 participants in the UK on their AI tool use and also measured their critical thinking skills with oft-used, scientifically validated assessments of critical thinking.

Gerlich found a very strong negative correlation between subjects’ use of AI tools and their critical thinking skills. The higher their usage, the lower their skills. Younger participants tended to be more dependent on AI tools compared to older participants. Education was associated with greater critical thinking skills and attenuated AI’s negative effect.

Many participants suspected that AI was hampering their ability to think critically.

“I find myself using AI tools for almost everything — whether it’s finding a restaurant or making a quick decision at work,” one said. “It saves time, but I do wonder if I’m losing my ability to think things through as thoroughly as I used to.”

“I rely so much on AI that I don’t think I’d know how to solve certain problems without it,” another worried.

Gerlich’s findings suggest participants were correct to be concerned.

“As individuals increasingly offload cognitive tasks to AI tools, their ability to critically evaluate information, discern biases, and engage in reflective reasoning diminishes,” he wrote. “This relationship underscores the dual-edged nature of AI technology: while it enhances efficiency and convenience, it inadvertently fosters dependence, which can compromise critical thinking skills over time.”

The correct use of AI

Despite the glaring results, Gerlich made it very clear that this concerning correlation is not destiny. There are a couple of reasons. First, the finding requires further research to be fully validated.

“One potential direction is to investigate the longitudinal effects of AI tool usage on critical thinking skills over time,” he recommended. “This could involve tracking individuals’ cognitive development and AI tool usage patterns over several years to comprehensively understand the long-term impacts.

Second, he believes that how we use AI makes a huge difference. AI is fundamentally a tool, and tools can be used correctly and incorrectly.

“These results are linked with the wrong use of AI,” he told Big Think. “In my opinion, the correct use of AI can help to increase critical thinking skills.”

So how can we use AI correctly?

“AI tools like the popular large language models can be used for critical discussions and not only as an instrument that replaces one’s own work or thinking,” Gerlich said.

Generative AI is fantastic for brainstorming, showing prompters choices and ideas they might not have considered. AI can also foster critical thinking when users hone the questions they are asking to achieve desired outcomes. For example: trying to get an AI image generator to produce something that matches what you’re imagining. You have to be very clear and descriptive.

Teaching AI in schools

It’s vital for teachers to educate students about the proper use of AI assistants. Students should learn how to assess the veracity of AI responses, evaluate generative AI’s writing, and iteratively sculpt the outputs.

And, of course, students still need to learn the numerous skills that AI offers, like content analysis, writing, mathematics, and logic. Otherwise, we risk turning AI into a “black box,” Gerlich says.

“This ‘black box’ problem can reduce critical engagement and accountability, as individuals may blindly trust AI recommendations without questioning or evaluating them.”

“Educational systems should emphasize active learning, promoting exercises like argument analysis and problem-based learning,” he added. “In professional settings, creating environments where independent decision-making is valued can help maintain these skills. Engaging in reflective activities, such as journaling or debating, can also foster deeper cognitive engagement.”

A path to stagnation?

Public intellectual and author Yuval Noah Harari has opined that humans could become more and more cognitively idle with increasing AI automation, leading to programmed thinking and societal stagnation.

This dystopia isn’t implausible, Gerlich told Big Think, “particularly if AI adoption continues without parallel efforts to safeguard cognitive engagement.”

“However, this trajectory is not inevitable,” he rebutted. “Interventions, such as embedding critical thinking exercises in education and supporting ethical AI design that encourages human involvement, can counteract these trends.”

Gerlich said that integrating AI into daily life requires balance. Its benefits are too great to ignore, but we can’t unthinkingly embrace them.

“Ultimately, the choice rests with each individual: whether to take the convenient route of allowing AI to handle our critical thinking, or to preserve this essential cognitive process for ourselves.”

Still, he does harbor some pessimism.

“It is likely that a portion of society will opt for the path of least resistance.”

This article Is AI eroding our critical thinking? is featured on Big Think.

A name is a cage. It binds you to a type and casts you in this role or as that person. It shrivels your complexity and jams it into an artificial vice. A name says to the world, “This person is this thing, and this is what I’ll call it.” But no person who has ever lived is ever just one thing. Even the fullest names we give one another will capture only a tiny fraction of our depth. As Walt Whitman famously wrote, “I am large, I contain multitudes.”

The world is often unkind to this kind of Whitmanian complexity. It might be easier than ever to “be yourself,” but this implies that there is one, single “yourself” to be. It implies you have an essence — an authentic filament to who you are that defines you. So, being happy — and being modern — is to stay true to yourself.

But life is not like this. A human cannot be explained by a name or entombed under a single identity. We need a better way to understand the contradictions and diversity found within a single life. We don’t need to find the story of a life, but the many stories. For the mythologist Martin Shaw, studying the ancient, time-worn folklore of our predecessors is one of the best ways to understand ourselves and what it means to live.

Persona to presence

Growing up is a time of change. Whether you like to understand that in the neuroscientific sense of neuroplasticity or the psychoanalytic sense of identity formation, the core truth is the same: Very few people are the finished item at 16 years old. We experiment and dabble, flip and flit. We are finding our place in the world, and that necessarily involves an element of existential fidgeting. Shaw puts it like this:

“When you’re young, it’s quite important to have a fairly fluid personality because you are constantly being put in mildly or extremely threatening situations like going to school, forming friendship groups, and the rest of it. You’ve got to know that you can play well with others, and that involves persona to a degree.”

Then, you grow up. You don’t wake up in a single day as an adult. There is no signing of the grown-up charter. You just start to fossilize a bit. You move about less and stay put more often. It might be that you stop arranging to meet that group of friends or stop buying those kinds of books. You start to listen to the same bands and prefer some conversations over others. For Shaw, growing up is about recognizing and accepting limits to your persona and developing presence.

“Now, the big question, of course, is what on earth is presence? What does it mean when you say, ‘That person didn’t say much, but they had presence. I had a feeling from them.’ And interestingly for me, the people that have the most presence have often made a covenant with limit somewhere in their life. They have decided that rather than an endless pursuit of growth, they’re going to trade some of the growth for depth. And they sort of draw a circle around the areas. And most attract or are claimed by actually, rather than attracted to, as we know now.”

Committing to a temple

What does “making a covenant with limit” have to do with mythology? And what has presence got to do with fairy stories? Shaw argues that the stories we tell of heroes, gods, and little girls lost in the woods are not simply stories but rather “temples” of life — they are certain ways to live that come with a mummer’s circus of costumes, scripts, behaviors, actions, and, importantly, values.

“I always ask my students when they start to work with me, I say, ‘What temple do you serve in?’ And they, ‘Well, what do you mean?’ And I say, ‘Where do you give your libations? Creatively, philosophically, energetically, where are you hanging out? Do you hang out in a gym all the time? Are you mostly concerned with getting a pay rise? You know, and I say if you’re not happy with the temple that you’re in, how do you leave with causing minimal damage? Do you need to change your job? Do you need to make some other move in your life? So, yeah, I think it is naive to assume that all stories [are] wishing us well.’”

When Shaw says, “Not all stories are wishing you well,” his point echoes one made by philosophers, psychologists, and mythologists for millennia: How we think we want to live is not always how we should be living. We might spend all our time in the Temple of Aphrodite, clinging desperately to fading beauty and measuring happiness by sex. That might make you happy, it might not. We might sacrifice our youthful, beautiful days in homage to Hermes, the god of business and work. Some might see that as a sacrifice — a libation — well made. Others might regret it.

So, for Shaw, the wisdom found in reading stories and hearing myths is not simply that they are fun — and they can be very fun — but rather they give us a clue to the kind of life we want to live. They are messy and complicated, in the way that life actually is. They will not say, “This way and this person is the way to live,” but will present the options for us to pick. And the job of life is to recognize the temple in which we belong.

This article Choose your temple: How mythology can help you spend the time you have left is featured on Big Think.

In my early twenties, I fell headfirst into what I thought would be a grand love affair with academic philosophy. With starry eyes and a mind parched for meaning, I eagerly dove into a bachelor’s degree, sampling courses on the philosophy of religion, language, and South Asia. I naively envisioned professors as wise sages who would illuminate life’s thorny questions of identity, purpose, and meaning. Instead, my romantic notions smashed against the cold, hard reality of professors droning from papers and skimming the edges of my deepest existential yearnings. They delivered knowledge, yes — but wisdom? That precious spark was nowhere to be found. Disillusioned and aching, I abandoned my studies after just three months.

Fast forward two decades, and I returned to professional philosophy, older, wiser, and with a sober understanding: transformative teachings would need to be sought elsewhere. This time, I advanced rapidly through doctoral and postdoctoral research, mastering the demands of academia while accepting its limitations. Yet, the core of philosophy within the academy hadn’t changed. Take, for instance, a recent conference on practical philosophy. Despite my tempered expectations, I couldn’t help but hope that philosophy might finally step down from its ivory tower into the vibrant chaos of lived experience. But as the lectures began, I was once again let down. The discussions were brilliant, laden with intricate arguments and esoteric concepts, yet stubbornly tethered to the abstract. The speaker, glued to his prepared notes, never once paused to ask: What do Kant’s musings on aesthetics mean for how we experience beauty in the everyday? Or better yet, how do we live these ideas, moment by moment? It was a reminder that while philosophy is unparalleled in posing questions, it often stumbles when faced with the urgent task of applying them to life itself.

It’s not hard to imagine countless philosophy students sitting where I once sat, their brows furrowed, haunted by the same nagging question: What does any of this have to do with living? They listen to ideas meticulously stripped of life or funneled into disembodied academic papers, knowing full well that if they dared to raise a hand and ask, “How should I live?” they’d likely be met with a blank stare — or worse, a reading list.

Philosopher Bryan Van Norden captures this frustration perfectly in his book Taking Back Philosophy. He points out that contemporary academic philosophers often lose sight of philosophy’s most burning, human question: What way should one live? Instead, they risk reducing their field to what he aptly calls “intellectual masturbation.” He warns that many philosophers are consumed by self-contained intellectual puzzles, viewing the real-world implications of their research as an unwelcome intrusion. Ask them how their work impacts the world — or their own lives — and you’re more likely to get an eye-roll than an answer. What they fail to see, Van Norden argues, is their responsibility to explain why their studies matter and how philosophy might arm students for the inevitable storms of life.

For all its brilliance, academic philosophy often feels like an endless exercise in chasing its own tail — thinking about thoughts in a dazzling maze of abstraction. Instead of wrestling with life’s raw questions, it turns into research about philosophy, not the act of doing it. Here, success is measured by rigorous analysis, systematic investigation, and crafting arguments so airtight they leave no room to breathe. But for a wisdom-hungry student, this polished precision feels hollow — a sterile echo of a field that once dared to grapple with the heart of existence. Philosophy, a discipline born to confront the profound ambiguity of human life, seems to have tidied itself up so much that it’s forgotten how to get its hands dirty.

Now, with AI effortlessly churning out philosophical theories and crafting comparative essays, academic philosophy might be staring at its own existential reckoning. Philosopher Sven Nyholm put this to the test, asking ChatGPT, “What would Martin Heidegger think about the ethics of AI?” To his amazement, the AI generated a “fairly impressive short essay” on the spot. With a touch of humor and humility, Nyholm confessed that “ChatGPT did a better job than at least some — maybe even many — of the students in my classes.” He even admitted that the AI’s response might have outshined what he could have conjured up on the fly. This amusing yet unsettling anecdote, shared in 2023, came at an early stage in the evolution of large language models (LLMs). Imagine what lies ahead. In just a few years, it could become nearly impossible to distinguish between an essay authored by a seasoned academic and one seamlessly woven together by a remarkably clever machine. If AI can assemble intricate ideas from disparate schools of thought faster and more effectively than most humans, what becomes of philosophy’s proud claim to intellectual rigor?

The bold question we must ask is whether this is what philosophy was ever meant to be. Perhaps the discomfort so many feel toward modern academic philosophy exists for a good reason. Can we envision a radically different kind of philosophy — one that centers on the love of wisdom, shapes individuals, and offers practical guidance on living the good life? The good news is that we don’t have to stretch our imaginations too far. This is precisely what philosophy was when it first took root in classical Greece — and in ancient India and China, though they didn’t call it “philosophy” as we do.

Philosopher Colin McGinn recounts an enlightening pattern: When strangers learn he’s a philosopher, they instinctively assume he’s in the business of offering sage advice. These exchanges, he observes, underscore a striking truth: The kind of “knowledge of abstract theoretical matters” that preoccupies modern philosophers has little to do with the “love of wisdom” for which the field was named. In fact, McGinn argues, today’s philosophy is so far removed from its ancient roots that philosophy departments may need an entirely new name.

So, let’s journey back to the Axial Age (800–200 BCE), where philosophy began its life as a vibrant, practical pursuit — one deeply connected to living wisely. By exploring its roots, we can rediscover what philosophy once was, understand how we drifted away from it, and see how it evolved into the theory-bound field we know today.

Philosophy as transformation

When we pick up a work by a classical philosopher, we’re often holding just a sliver of their broader philosophy — like trying to understand a symphony from a single note. Take Plato, for instance. Historians widely acknowledge that his dialogues offer only a shadow of the dynamic, multifaceted philosophy he cultivated within the academy he founded. To truly grasp the essence of classical philosophical discourse, we need to let our imagination leap beyond the text. Picture a way of life where philosophy wasn’t a profession or a niche academic pursuit but a full-bodied, transformative journey aimed at a sublime existence. In this vision, rational argumentation was just one thread in a rich tapestry of practices — less an end in itself and more a tool within a broader, more profound system of living wisdom.

This realization is precisely what jolted Pierre Hadot, the celebrated French historian of philosophy. Like many others, he initially approached classical texts with modern expectations, searching for neatly packaged theories and rigorous systematic arguments. But eventually, Hadot had an epiphany: These works were never meant to compete with modern treatises. They were crafted for students already committed — or considering committing — to a way of life shaped by a philosophical school. These texts weren’t mere vessels of knowledge; they were tools for transformation, designed not to inform the mind but to form the soul.

Plutarch, the renowned Greek philosopher and historian, captured this vividly when he spoke of a “continuous philosophy,” one that reveals itself in “acts and deeds,” unfolding “at all times and in all parts, in all experiences and activities.” Consider Socrates as the quintessential example. Can we ever truly separate the philosopher from the human being who lived — and died — the way he did? Plato’s dialogues are steeped in references to Socrates’ singular presence, his deliberate choices, and his unshakable actions. These weren’t mere stylistic flourishes; they were essential to understanding Socrates’ philosophy. When he speaks, his words feel inseparable from his life — his discourse flowing as naturally as breath from the essence of his being.

In Xenophon’s Memorabilia, when pressed to stop questioning and refuting everyone and just declare what justice is, Socrates responds with a smirk-worthy retort: “I never stop showing what things are just in my opinion. If not by speech, I show it rather by deed.” With Socrates, philosophy wasn’t a lecture — it was an ongoing, walking demonstration. When we think of him, we see a man utterly fearless, shrugging off life’s so-called treasures, and famously immune to intoxication. We imagine him standing still for an entire day, lost in meditation, or calmly discussing death and immortality while sipping poison, turning even his last breath into a masterclass on how to live a life true to one’s ideals.

Socrates wasn’t a lone star in showcasing a philosophy that both speaks and lives. In truth, classical Greek philosophy thrived as a vibrant continuum — a tapestry of teaching and practice designed to transform every facet of its practitioners’ lives through committed, embodied exercises. This spirit flowed through Plato’s Academy, Epicurus’ Garden, Zeno’s Stoa, and even the less formal gatherings of the Cynics, Pyrrho, and the Skeptics. What united these diverse schools were five deeply interwoven elements: the cultivation and purification of the mind, practices that bridged the inner and outer realms of life, a foundation of argument and theory, an emphasis on embodied living, and a communal or dialogical dimension that wove people together. Even Aristotle’s Lyceum, with its scholarly penchant for knowledge and theory, wasn’t exempt. For all his intellectual rigor, Aristotle believed philosophy’s ultimate aim was nothing less than divine intellect, true happiness, sublime pleasure, freedom from worry, and a virtuous life.

Each school approached wisdom as a kind of alchemy, refining the mind to reach a specific, luminous state of being. Yet they all seemed to agree on one thing: Wisdom wasn’t just about knowing — it was about finding unshakable peace of mind. Philosophy, from this perspective, became a cure for life’s worries, anguish, and misery. The Cynics believed that human suffering sprang from the shackles of social norms and conventions, so they threw caution — and clothes! — to the wind, forging a life of shameless, fierce independence. Pyrrho, on the other hand, practiced radical indifference, training himself to stay serenely unmoved by anything life threw his way. Epicureans sought to escape the lure of false pleasures, embracing instead the sweet, simple delight of just being alive. The Stoics reached even further, striving to dissolve selfishness and live in harmony with the vast, cosmic order.

Despite their wildly different paths, all these schools shared a common thread: the journey inward. They believed peace came from clearing away the clutter — desires, fears, and distractions — and returning to something pure, natural, and true, like a restoration of the soul’s original health. Plotinus painted this with a striking metaphor: a sculptor chiseling away at a block of marble, not to add anything, but to uncover the beauty already hidden within.

The Greek philosophers weren’t indifferent to building perfectly coherent theories — many put plenty of effort into crafting arguments that aligned their thinking with the cosmic order. But for them, theory was often a means to an end: inspiring an unshakable conviction that could guide their students to live philosophy, not just think it. Their goal wasn’t to explain every detail of reality but to offer just enough clarity to support a way of life. Imagine Socrates on his deathbed, drinking the hemlock and gently persuading his distraught disciples that the soul outlives death. His reasoning wasn’t a dry intellectual exercise; it was a lived truth, meant to free their minds and strengthen their resolve.

For the ancients, philosophy was never about words alone. Wisdom had to leap off the page and into life. Truth wasn’t confined to abstract ideas — it had to be embodied, practiced, and experienced. To reach this state, daily practices were essential. Some were physical, like carefully chosen diets. Others were contemplative, like meditations that calmed the mind or rituals that ordered the emotions.

The Stoics, for instance, had stark but powerful exercises. Epictetus encouraged them to reflect on impermanence by imagining, while kissing their child, that the child might die tomorrow. They also practiced seeing life through the eyes of universal Reason, imagining the entire human world from a bird’s-eye view. The Epicureans, in their quiet retreats, meditated on simplicity — finding joy in plain food, simple clothing, and a life stripped of wealth and ambition. Plato’s Academy added its own soul-shaping practices: preparing for peaceful sleep, finding calm in misfortune, sublimating love, and even rehearsing for death.

For all these schools, action was the beating heart of philosophy. Ideas remained hollow until they were lived. The Greek philosophers had no patience for those who spun clever arguments without applying them to their own existence. A theory’s truth wasn’t proven by its logic but by how deeply it transformed life. As Blaise Pascal once observed, the writings of Plato and Aristotle were the least philosophical parts of their lives. “The most philosophical part,” he wrote, “was living simply and quietly.” 

Resurrecting the lost art of living philosophy

Philosophy’s first steps took place during the remarkable Axial Age, a time when ancient Greece, India, and China experienced a seismic shift. The world moved from mythic religions and ritual-based thinking to a new focus on human consciousness and self-knowledge. Suddenly, the gods weren’t holding all the power — humans were. For the first time, people realized they could seek answers within themselves, without relying on priests or rituals. This wasn’t just a rational awakening; it was a bold claim: The human mind could free itself. Misery wasn’t destiny — it could be unraveled through understanding. Happiness became something new: a self-reliant state, not a gift from the heavens. Schools of thought blossomed, all tied to this fresh idea that happiness and freedom were within reach. The great debates weren’t just about knowledge but about how to live, how to be free, and how to truly be happy.

So, how did philosophy drift from its roots as a way of life, becoming a detached and abstract pursuit? Pierre Hadot highlighted three key reasons. First is the timeless tendency of philosophers to seek refuge in words rather than action. Across the ages, many have found comfort in the safe world of theories, avoiding the challenging, sometimes uncomfortable, work of reshaping their own lives. Second, the rise of Christianity reshuffled the landscape entirely. Ancient spiritual exercises, once at the heart of philosophy, were absorbed into Christian practices, while philosophy itself was sidelined — reduced to a theoretical servant of theology, stripped of its practical power to transform lives. Third came the medieval university, which sealed philosophy’s fate. It turned into a technical language for specialists, a discipline more about training experts than inspiring people.

When theory and practice parted ways, humanity lost a vital kind of philosophy — a middle path that combined logic with life. Transformative philosophy wasn’t just about clarity, structure, and reason; it was about using those tools to break through to something profound. It recognized that reason had its limits, treating it not as the destination but as a springboard to liberate the human spirit, shatter rigid thinking, and open doors to entirely new ways of being. It was philosophy in action, reimagining how we experience life and culminating in wisdom through personal metamorphosis.

Today, this spirit is scattered. Self-help books and New Age practices carry the torch of practicality, while academia clings to sterile theories, too timid to explore the Stoics’ exercises or the concept-shattering force of Socratic dialogue. Yet, Western philosophy has still produced individual transformative thinkers outside academic walls who reignited the flame. Think of Nietzsche or Camus, whose fiery visions challenged people to embrace life with raw intensity and carve meaning from its chaos.

Now, with AI cranking out philosophical essays in seconds, philosophy risks fading into irrelevance if it stays locked in barren abstraction. But there’s hope — reviving transformative philosophy. Imagine philosophy returning to its roots, where it wasn’t just about thinking but about living. This is philosophy that meets life head-on, reshaping how we see, feel, and act in the world.

Picture students in philosophy departments practicing Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence, imagining living the same life over and over, learning to say “yes” to every joy and hardship. Or climbing Diotima’s ladder from Plato’s Symposium, moving step by step from earthly beauty to the sublime. These aren’t just ideas; they are experiences meant to change how we engage with life.

Why not bring these practices back into philosophy classrooms? Instead of dissecting theories in isolation, we could teach philosophies as movements of thought, action, and transformation. It’s time to reclaim what New Age spirituality and self-help have borrowed — the soul-stirring, life-altering power of philosophical exercises. A philosophy like this wouldn’t just sit on the page. It would challenge us, liberate us, and make us see the world — and ourselves — in entirely new ways. Isn’t that the philosophy we need now more than ever?

This article Philosophy has lost its transformative power. Here’s how we can revive it. is featured on Big Think.

It’s always a risky thing to make sweeping generalizations about a country, especially when you’re an outsider, but it seems to me that a great many Americans take their sports very seriously. And “football” — or American football — seems to be one of the most serious. Year after year, American football ranks as the most popular sport in the US, both in terms of school and college participation (for men) and overall viewership. So, I will need to tread carefully with this question.

The best way to cowardly duck the sport-loving vitriol is to do what philosophy loves to do: extrapolate a general point. Rather than get bogged down with the particulars of American football, I will look at dangerous or aggressive contact sports more broadly. These are sports that are both physically violent and pose a not-insignificant risk of serious injury.

First, we shall look at the most utilitarian arguments against dangerous sports from philosophers like Pamela Sailors. Second, we shall look at J.S. Russell’s (philosophically) famous paper on “The Value of Dangerous Sport” and “Children and Dangerous Sport and Recreation” where he gives two reasons why he thinks dangerous sports should not only be allowed but encouraged.

We ban smoking — why not dangerous sports?

When discussing questions like this, which live in the frontier lands between ethics and law, we invariably fall into using utilitarian terminology. Almost all governments throughout history will make their laws based on “the greatest good for the greatest number” considerations. Lawmakers and ethicists have to sit down and draw up a colossal table of pros and cons. They have to pull in psychologists, doctors, physiotherapists, and educators to ask about the benefits and drawbacks of banning dangerous sports. And, if we’re focusing on the drawbacks, there are two camps.

First, the personal. Throughout a single life, what damage does high exposure to contact sports do? Unsurprisingly, the evidence doesn’t look good. Repeated concussions and head impacts in contact sports are linked to an increased risk of cognitive decline, depression, and neurodegenerative conditions. In later life, high-intensity contact sports can cause memory and motor issues. Of course, these are statistics and probabilities, not rules — many people play dangerous sports and do not suffer long-term medical harm. But here, Sailors uses smoking as a counterexample. Smoking does not cause lung cancer in 100% of smokers. But it massively and conclusively increases the risks of lung cancer. Likewise, dangerous sports will not harm everyone who plays them. But Sailors asks, “One wonders what percentage [of death or brain damage] would be sufficient to eliminate the ‘uncertainty objection’” against banning dangerous sports for children.

The second utilitarian argument — one which Clayton seems to be arguing — is the societal one. What does widespread and encouraged participation in dangerous sports do to a culture? Sailors argues that glorifying violence in violent sports will both explicitly and tacitly glorify certain undesirable personality traits. She argues that “competitiveness, aggression, violence, and winning [at all costs]” will lead to a “culture of criminality” where men adopt an “attitude of superiority to women.” Is it really possible to encourage a young man to be violent, aggressive, and combative and then suddenly become a normal, respectful member of society? Sailors thinks not.

Russell: The skills dangerous sports give you

Even if we accept Sailors’ premise that playing dangerous sports makes you more aggressive and competitive — a claim that even she admits is empirically “inconclusive” — is that always such a bad thing? Life is very rarely a gentle stroll by a lake. It’s full of hardships, struggles, and pain. There are very real challenges that all humans face — both external ones, in the form of other people and other states, as well as internal ones, in the form of mental health crises. We need to grow up a bit. We need to learn to be resilient, strong, and, yes, aggressive at times.

In his 2007 paper, Russell expresses the point like this: “The most direct and compelling argument for including physical risk in a child’s environment is that the world is physically dangerous and a child needs to learn to navigate those dangers as quickly as possible. Thus, the complete elimination from the environment of any risk of bodily injury would arguably leave children unprepared to confront physical risks or to make sound decisions about risks in their daily lives.”

If we are to learn real-life skills, we need to step outside a bit. We need to be exposed to real risk. You only learn to deal with things when you have things to deal with. We need a society full of people who can cope.

Russell’s second point in defense of dangerous sports is how they affect individual well-being and existential discovery. We thrive after overcoming genuine danger — not through pampered, anodyne “everyone wins!” competitions. As Russell puts it in his 2005 paper:

“An important type of self-realization requires a confrontation with, and an attempt to surpass, the apparent limits of oneself…. Dangerous sport, in its best exemplars — in, say, mountain climbing or boxing or bicycle stage racing — provides one avenue for such self-affirmation by challenging one’s whole self at the limits of one’s being. It is a particularly rich avenue of realization because it forces us to confront and overcome fear of danger and to face physical threats to those things that we cannot put a value on.”

In other words, we need to push ourselves to grow, and one of the best ways to do this is through dangerous sports.

A tipping of the scales

The reason this debate is often so heated and polarizing is that both sides can be right. It’s true that letting — or even forcing — children to participate in dangerous sports risks their current and future health. It’s possibly true that those raised on a diet of competitive, aggressive machismo might make for unpleasant characters in adulthood. But it’s also true that dangerous sports are fun and often good for your mental health. They test and strengthen you. They teach you to be hardier and that you can be hardy in the future when the future demands it.

And so, Clayton, the debate hinges not so much on the philosophy or the scientific data but on our cultural values. What matters more to you? How risk-averse are you when it comes to banning or limiting dangerous activities? Most societies have decided that smoking is sufficiently dangerous that it deserves to be banned for children. So, too, are knives, alcohol, and fireworks. So, why not dangerous sports? Well, perhaps the risk: the benefit scales haven’t tipped that far yet.

So, what can we say? We can say that dangerous sports present a non-trivial risk to a child’s life. We can say that there isn’t any conclusive evidence that playing dangerous sports increases sexual assaults or any kind of criminality, actually. Beyond that, though, this one comes down to opinions and values.

This article Everyday Philosophy: Should we ban children from playing dangerous sports? is featured on Big Think.

What is a good life? And how can we chart a course towards it in our chaotic world?

Many of us long for some kind of guide to help us direct our efforts and navigate our existence. And while the details of our modern challenges may differ from those faced by people in the past, fundamental human fears, needs, and desires have not changed. We still want the same things (love, friendship, money, reputation, tranquility) and are still afraid of the same threats (hatred, poverty, sickness, pain, death). 

In light of these timeless human quests, ancient Greco-Roman philosophy continues to offer a useful and inspiring compass for navigating our own lives today, a compass that provides a sense of intentionality in a world filled with uncertainty. Ancient Greek and Roman philosophers have already done a lot of the heavy lifting when it comes to developing a coherent and useful life philosophy. Thinkers ranging from the pre-Socratics to the Neoplatonists spent countless hours considering what is the goal of life—the telos—and figuring out how to move toward it in order to be happy. Their insights can help us navigate even the most treacherous existential waters.

As distant as this ancient period of history may seem to many people, it’s very present to us. That’s because we—the authors of this piece—have put philosophical principles from ancient Greece and Rome to work in our own lives, in particular through our study and practice of Stoicism. Through our own experiences, we have found great value in that era of practical philosophizing and are eager to share these ideas with others. Although we practice Stoicism, we do not believe it is the only philosophy that fits human nature. It is therefore worth exploring how a range of ancient ideas could help us move towards a happier and more fulfilling life. 

Launching a journey to the three ports

In the course of their search for the good life, the Greco-Romans identified three major themes, and their philosophies take us to three corresponding “ports” to explore. 

The three ports are pleasure, including Cyrenaicism and Epicureanism; character, including Aristotelianism, Stoicism, Cynicism, and Platonism; and doubt, including Socraticism, Sophism, Academic Skepticism, and Pyrrhonism. Or, to put it more straightforwardly: feeling good (pleasure), being good (character), and thinking well (doubt). 

These themes encompass much of what people think of when they consider a life well lived. And if you choose to move through these ports on a philosophical journey of discovery, it makes sense to start with the most intuitive (pleasure is good) and work our way to the most surprising (doubt will set you free). 

The far edges of the Greco-Roman philosophical map also hold interesting but mysterious destinations, largely unknown territories that could be labelled (like the edges of legendary ancient maps) “Here Be Dragons.” This region contains the philosophies that offer perhaps less opportunity for modern practice, but which could leave you with some interesting ideas to ponder. The philosophical schools found here are Pythagoreanism, Megarianism, and Neoplatonism. 

Now, let’s take a quick journey through Greco-Roman thought together, briefly traveling to these three ports of call and one more far-flung territory.

The Port of Pleasure

The first port to call on during our voyage is perhaps the most obvious: pleasure. Who doesn’t want to live a pleasurable life? And who, conversely, objects to the avoidance of pain, except perhaps for a small number of masochists? Modern psychological research has accumulated a technical literature on “hedonism,” that is, the pursuit of pleasure. 

Indeed, psychologists have even identified a common problem with such pursuit, what they call the “hedonic treadmill.” This is the idea that we go after a particular pleasure, say, buying the latest shiny smartphone, because it gives us a thrill. The effect of the purchase, however, soon dissipates, and like drug addicts we resume the quest for another shiny object, in search of a repeated hedonic experience. In so doing, we put ourselves on a metaphorical treadmill that leads nowhere and that doesn’t actually make us happy. All it does is line the pockets of our corporate overlords. 

Hedonism, it seems, is a default mode for most human beings. This should not come as a surprise, since pain and pleasure are the two great motivators invented by natural selection to get animals to do what is conducive to their survival and reproduction. Think, for instance, about sex: Would you really go through all the trouble if it were not very—or at least mildly—pleasurable? As for pain, if a gash or a dislocated shoulder were not painful you might not notice before bleeding to death or finding yourself severely impaired when all of a sudden you need your arm to, say, catch a baseball.

Some of the ancient Greco-Roman hedonists were well aware of the pitfalls of “default” hedonism and crafted philosophies of life to circumvent the problems intrinsic in the instinctive, unreflective hedonism by which most people live. This effort produced two schools of thought: the Cyrenaics and the Epicureans.

The two are profoundly different: the Cyrenaics thought that the only thing that matters is immediate physical pleasure, here and now. However, they came up with practices that allow us to own our pleasures instead of our pleasures owning us, thus attempting to bypass the hedonic treadmill. The Epicureans, by contrast, deployed a more sophisticated analysis according to which absence of pain is the real prize since it generates a smooth, calm mental pleasure that is far more desirable than any trifling joy physical pleasure may bring.

The Port of Character

Next in our journey, we can leave the relatively small Port of Pleasure and enter the massive Port of Character, represented by four approaches: Aristotelianism, Stoicism, Cynicism, and Platonism. These are some of the biggest guns in Hellenism, and they offer an interesting variety of perspectives on the very concept of character, why it is relevant, and how to improve it.

In approaching this port, keep in mind that Aristotelianism, Stoicism, and Cynicism form a continuum with respect to one of their crucial tenets: the importance of virtue (which is regarded as a character trait). Aristotle took what is arguably the most commonsensical position: Happiness, in the sense of eudaimonia (that is, a life worth living) requires both virtue (which depends on character) and a number of “externals,” such as health, education, wealth, reputation, and even a bit of good looks. 

The Cynics, by contrast, adopted the most radical stance: Virtue, by itself, is both necessary and sufficient for eudaimonia. Not only that, but externals actually get in the way, and so we should renounce them as much as is feasible. Hence the Cynics’ famous “dog-like” minimalist lifestyle, which included living in the streets and flaunting social norms. 

The Stoics ended up striking a middle ground in this conceptual space: Virtue is both necessary and sufficient for a good life, just as the Cynics said. However, externals have some (indirect, secondary) value, and they are preferred, all else being equal, especially insofar as they make it possible for us to actually exercise virtue and thus improve our character.

The fourth philosophy encountered in this port, Platonism, is a very different kind of animal. In fact, it is so broad and complex that you may wish to limit your exploration. For example, you could focus on Plato’s views on how to build a just society. For Plato, this cannot be done unless we work on justice as an internal virtue: the macrocosm of society reflects the microcosm of the individual. Which means that it all goes back, once again, to character.

There are at least two possible problems with all of these approaches that you should keep in mind. First, there’s the question of what improving your character actually gets you. Pleasure is obviously desirable for most people. But the advantages of a good character are not as plain to see. To paraphrase a familiar New York saying, “Virtue and $2.90 will get you on the subway!” Having a good character doesn’t have the immediate psychological payoff for most people that pleasure does, though it does have social payoffs in terms of your reputation with others. 

Modern philosophers have tried to argue that cultivating virtue is a “reliable bet” for flourishing, but even then they sometimes admit that you can lose that bet. Why should you take a gamble when pleasure bears immediate fruit? (Because it’s the virtuous thing to do, would reply Plato, Aristotle, the Cynics, and the Stoics.)

A second potential issue is that some modern social psychologists argue that “character” is a fiction; the empirical evidence, they say, does not support people having stable character traits, such as being “brave” or “compassionate.” Instead, situations and contexts that people find themselves in are the main drivers of human behavior. If this is true, there’s no way to build character, since there’s no such thing as character in the first place. But the issue is not settled, and defenders of the reality of character seem to be on the upswing.

The Port of Doubt

The final port in the journey through Greco-Roman philosophy is that of doubt, populated by four philosophies: “Socraticism,” Sophism, Academic Skepticism, and Pyrrhonism. Skepticism, which may be used as the umbrella term for these philosophies, has a long history that continues to this day.

In this port, you’ll encounter Socrates, the most famous ancient philosopher, who was a crucial point of reference for many skeptics, as well as for many of the philosophers we encountered earlier. Nevertheless, the Sophists, who either came before Socrates or were his contemporaries, were not “skeptical” in the way he was. In fact, Plato wrote a number of dialogues—including one that takes the title from one of the most famous Sophists, Protagoras—in which Socrates is shown locked in serious intellectual battle with one or another Sophist. 

Two other philosophies, which are most often referred to as varieties of skepticism, co-exist in this port, but they are quite different from each other: Pyrrhonism and Academic Skepticism. 

The Pyrrhonists thought that the goal of life is ataraxia, that is, tranquility of mind. And they were convinced that they had identified the path to it: epoche, or suspension of judgment. The other skeptics, known as “Academic” because they technically belonged to the tradition of Plato’s Academy (and, hence, of Socrates), agreed with many other Hellenistic schools that a good life is one of virtue. But they insisted that human beings can hardly achieve certainty on any subject matter because our senses and ability to reason are both fallible. Therefore, we have to content ourselves with tentative conclusions based on what appears most probable. 

The result, in the cases of both Academic Skepticism and Pyrrhonism, is a very humbling philosophy of life, where people go around admitting that they don’t know anything, or much of anything. It’s fair to say that we could use a bit more of that humility these days. 

Or could we? In good skeptical fashion, we can doubt even that humility and admitting ignorance can lead to a worthwhile life. While pleasure’s payoff is immediate, and character building could bring peace of mind and make the world better off, it’s not entirely clear that being skeptical has enough substance to be a full-fledged philosophy of life. Maybe it’s just a useful attitude to keep in mind. Additionally, even if you desire peace of mind, it’s not evident that skepticism is a better route to achieving that goal than, say, hedonistic Epicureanism or virtue-oriented Stoicism.

As you go forward on this journey, keep these doubts in mind. Perhaps you should be skeptical about skepticism. Or perhaps not! 

Here Be Dragons

The last leg of our journey into Hellenistic philosophy sets off into strange, uncharted waters. Supposedly, ancient maps labeled that sort of territory with hic sunt dracones (here be dragons) to indicate that unknown perils could lurk there. While the philosophies themselves may not be that dangerous, they are still somewhat unusual and little-explored in a modern context. Still, they are historically important and potentially useful today. 

The three schools of thought in this port are Pythagoreanism, Megarianism, and Neoplatonism. 

Pythagoras was incredibly famous in the ancient world, but not for the mathematical theorem you might be thinking of (which was probably discovered by one of his pupils). Stilpo and the Megarians are virtually unknown to us today, yet there was a time in Greece when everyone wanted a piece of Stilpo and regular folks were drawn to “megarize”—that is, to make logical arguments in this school’s style. As for the Neoplatonists, they had the dubious honor of being the last pagan bastion against the tide of Christianity, and one of their members, Hypatia of Alexandria, may have paid the ultimate price for it. 

Both the Pythagoreans and the Neoplatonists leaned toward what we would today call mysticism, though in very different ways and for contrasting philosophical reasons. Ancient people even thought that Pythagoras had a divine nature and went around sporting a golden thigh (believed to be a sign of godliness). And the Neoplatonist Plotinus’s soul was supposedly so great that magic spells meant to hurt him bounced off him and harmed the spell-caster instead. Moreover, his protective spirit was said to be a full-blown god. 

Stilpo, by contrast, was very much grounded in reality and one of the foremost logicians of the ancient world. He managed to influence the most successful Greco-Roman philosophical school of all time: the Stoics. Maybe this isn’t as flashy as having golden limbs or reflecting magic spells, but it still seems pretty impressive!

Since Pythagoreanism was arguably the first philosophy of life articulated by the Greco-Romans and Neoplatonism was the last one, this port spans the entire arc not just of Hellenism but of antiquity as a whole: from the sixth century BCE to the sixth century CE. This is an incredible period of well over a millennium, a time that saw the invention of philosophy and the establishment of a new tradition of writing things down for posterity. Its influence on Christianity and on Western thought more broadly is hard to overestimate. 

Your destination: a personal life philosophy

As befits any philosophical quest, we leave you with an invitation to continue questioning and exploring as you embark on your own philosophical journey.

Our advice: You’re not obliged to pick one school or approach. A thoughtful and personal practice of Greco-Roman philosophy can incorporate a judiciously eclectic range of ideas taken from different schools. In the classical era, a variety of philosophies competed for people’s attention, each one focused on different ultimate goals and a distinctive emphasis on one of our three ports. What is important, in the end, is not the orthodoxy of one set of ideas but the process of seeking a philosophy of life that fits you as an individual. 

Whether you select a specific life philosophy or create your own eclectic path, Greek and Roman philosophies can provide you with an invaluable conceptual map for how to build a life worth living. Let’s use them to make our journey the best it can be.

This article Navigate to the “three ports” of ancient philosophy to find the good life is featured on Big Think.

In 2008, University of Virginia microbiologist Martin Schwartz recalled a meeting with an old friend, one who had been a PhD student with him and had left to attend Harvard Law School instead. At one point during their meeting, he asked why she dropped out.

“She said it was because it made her feel stupid. After a couple of years of feeling stupid every day, she was ready to do something else.”

Schwartz was astonished at the answer.

“I had thought of her as one of the brightest people I knew and her subsequent career supports that view,” he wrote.

Schwartz pondered on what his good friend had told him.

“What she said bothered me. I kept thinking about it; sometime the next day, it hit me. Science makes me feel stupid too. It’s just that I’ve gotten used to it. So used to it, in fact, that I actively seek out new opportunities to feel stupid. I wouldn’t know what to do without that feeling. I even think it’s supposed to be this way.”

Science humbles even the most brilliant people, bringing them to their intellectual knees. Such is the nature of an enterprise that delves into the unknown.

Schwartz’ meeting with his friend inspired an essay: “The importance of stupidity in scientific research,” published in 2008 to the journal Cell Science. In it, he argued why it’s not only okay to feel stupid, but why it’s a necessity.

He began his explanation with a simple and true statement.

“For almost all of us, one of the reasons that we liked science in high school and college is that we were good at it.”

But unfortunately, that leaves aspiring scientists with a specious impression. Because, as most established scientists know, science is not about taking tests or getting correct answers! Even the laboratory work most students perform in high school and college is structured to reach a predetermined end. In research, the conclusion is never known at the outset. Researchers may have a strong inkling what might happen, but they don’t know for certain.

When aspiring scientists reach graduate school and doctoral programs, being correct is no longer the goal. The goal is solving problems. It’s not the same.

“A Ph.D., in which you have to do a research project, is a whole different thing,” Schwartz wrote. “For me, it was a daunting task. How could I possibly frame the questions that would lead to significant discoveries; design and interpret an experiment so that the conclusions were absolutely convincing; foresee difficulties and see ways around them, or, failing that, solve them when they occurred?”

Schwartz’ personal breakthrough came when he realized that nobody, not even the advisors he looked up to, had the answers to his problem.

“The crucial lesson was that the scope of things I didn’t know wasn’t merely vast; it was, for all practical purposes, infinite. That realization, instead of being discouraging, was liberating. If our ignorance is infinite, the only possible course of action is to muddle through as best we can.”

Muddling earned Schwartz his Ph.D, as it has for countless other students. In fact, muddling is simply what researchers do. Science is like wading through a swamp only to reach a vast unexplored ocean.

“Science involves confronting our `absolute stupidity’. That kind of stupidity is an existential fact, inherent in our efforts to push our way into the unknown,” Schwartz wrote.

He believes scientists should embrace that stupidity.

“One of the beautiful things about science is that it allows us to bumble along, getting it wrong time after time, and feel perfectly fine as long as we learn something each time. No doubt, this can be difficult for students who are accustomed to getting the answers right. No doubt, reasonable levels of confidence and emotional resilience help, but I think scientific education might do more to ease what is a very big transition: from learning what other people once discovered to making your own discoveries. The more comfortable we become with being stupid, the deeper we will wade into the unknown and the more likely we are to make big discoveries.”

In the 16 years since it was published, Schwartz’ essay has become a source of solace for despairing doctoral students, a reminder that feeling lost is a sign you’re on the right course.

This article Science makes everyone feel stupid. That’s okay! is featured on Big Think.

I used to work with someone who called me Hopscotch Jonny. Hopscotch is a popular playground game where you jump from one square to another: one leg, two legs, one leg, two legs. Hop, hop, hop. The reason I was called Hopscotch Jonny is because I spend a lot of my life occupied with fads. I live in phases. I’ll become obsessed with a topic, but five books on the subject, and then ramble on about it to anyone who will listen, boring them all. My life is consumed by a new obsession for a few months before I move on to a new thing — before I hop to the next box. My study is a jungle thanks to my pot-plant phase, my cupboard is filled with swimming artifacts from my triathlon months, and now, as I write this, my phone is nearly full of downloaded podcasts about data analysis. (Unpaid plug here, but “The Studies Show” is my far-away favorite).

So, Pratyush’s question comes at a good time for me, because I’ve come to realize that I am one of those humans who is “bad at probability.” My dad, a psychologist, used to say, “Half of people are below average intelligence, you know,” to try and teach me. But whatever your dad says is worthless until you hit 20. So, let’s dig into why I, and many people, are so bad at probability.

To do that, I will try my layman’s best to explain Bayes’ theorem and how it relates to “hunches” and “black and white.” Then, we can explore the extent to which humans actually fit the mold of the Enlightenment ideal. Are humans actually that rational? Are we meant to be?

Bayes’ theorem: The rational ideal

Bayes’ theorem is arguably the single most important thing any wannabe rational person can learn. So many of our debates and disagreements we shout about are because we don’t understand Bayes’ theorem, or how human rationality often works.

Bayes’ theorem is named after the 18th-century mathematician Thomas Bayes, and essentially, it’s a formula that asks: When you are presented with all of the evidence for something, how much should you believe it?

Bayes’ theorem teaches us that our beliefs are not fixed; they are probabilities. Our beliefs change as we weigh up new evidence against our assumptions, or our “priors.” In other words, we all carry with us certain ideas about how the world works and new evidence will challenge us. For example, somebody might believe that “smoking is safe,” that “Vitamin C prevents sickness,” or that “human activity is unrelated to climate change.” These are their priors: their existing beliefs, formed by culture, biases, and information they’ve encountered.

Now, imagine a new study that challenges one of your priors. Well, a single study might not carry enough weight to overturn your existing beliefs, but imagine the studies accumulate and eventually the scales start to tip. At some point, your prior will become less and less plausible.

Bayes’ theorem argues that being rational is not about black and white, as Pratyush pointed out. It’s not even about true or false. It’s about what’s most reasonable based on the best available evidence. But for this to work, we need as much high-quality data as possible. Without evidence, without belief-forming data, we have only our priors and biases.

Priors and biases: Why we’re not all that rational

This column is called Everyday Philosophy, not Scientific Method 101. The job here is to look at human beliefs, the human condition, and how societies work more broadly. And when we look at it from this position, Bayes’ theorem definitely hits a wall. After all, while Bayes’ theorem is a great — possibly the greatest — way to interpret data and move the dial on scientific findings, it is not the only way to account for human belief.

In our day-to-day lives, “new evidence” is rarely, if ever, a peer-reviewed, double-blind study published in a reputable academic journal. It’s an indefinable blur of personal experience, trusted testimony, background hunches, and what that guy wrote on social media last week. We could, and have, presented a heavy ledger full of “cognitive biases” or “logical fallacies.” For example, the authority bias, where we think opinions from certain authority figures count for more (even on topics outside their authority). But these biases are not unwelcome shortcomings we should always purge. They are there for a reason.

One of the best and most familiar examples of this is in Daniel Kahneman’s works, like Thinking, Fast and Slow. The human mind has evolved over hundreds of thousands of years in step with a certain environment that demands certain cognitive abilities. Over the timescale needed for evolution, very little is “pointless.” The survival of the fittest leaves little room for redundancy. These biases — these “bad at probability” mindsets — serve a purpose. For example, take the “optimism bias,” which makes us believe we’re less likely to experience negative events like illness or accidents than others are. This can boost motivation and resilience, encouraging people to take risks and strive for goals they might otherwise avoid. If every new entrepreneur fully grasped the statistical likelihood of failure, they’d probably never start. Human agency, and especially human daring, demands a high degree of risk ignorance.

Bad but good

So, I agree with you, Pratyush. I think a lot of people are bad at probabilities. We often don’t understand how things like Bayesian statistics work, nor do we appreciate how unsure so many things are. But, while being “bad at probability” might lead to flawed decisions sometimes, it’s also deeply tied to how we navigate an uncertain and messy world.

Rationality, like Bayes’ theorem, gives us an ideal to strive toward, perhaps, but our evolutionary quirks remind us that we’re still very much human.

This article Everyday Philosophy: Bad at probability? That might be a blessing. is featured on Big Think.

There are two ways to write a bestseller. The first is to imagine something truly original. You need to invent a world or coin a new idea — an idea that changes the reader. The second way is to rewrite and refresh something. You put Shakespeare in an American high school or give a modern spin to the ancient myths. And one of the most popular, and lucrative, versions of this is found in the modern self-help industry. Of course, some self-help books are original and fresh. But the bulk of it is philosophy in a new set of clothes. It’s Aristotle in podcast form, or Lao Tzu giving a TED talk.

There is nothing wrong with this. Big ideas wrapped in big words often take a lot of chewing. Almost all philosophical ideas come nested in a complex backdrop of neologisms, foreign concepts, and alternative worldviews. I used to teach Friedrich Nietzsche to 16-year-olds. Often, they really took to him. And so, I told them to go away and read On The Genealogy of Morals. They didn’t love him then. Philosophy is one of the most important disciplines in the world — it can change lives and define them. But it’s often difficult. So it makes sense that millionaires are made by explaining or condensing complex philosophical ideas for a modern ear.

The problem is that anytime you simplify, you lose nuance. If you simplify it again, you lose a bit of meaning. When you simplify it too many times, it becomes so diluted and dumbed-down that it becomes worthless. So, here are three examples where philosophy is richest at its source. Here are three books worth more than a bookshop full of self-help manuals.

Nicomachean Ethics by Aristotle

One of the hallmarks of genius is to be not thought of as a genius. It’s to create something so obvious, clear, and straightforward that when you first meet it, it feels like you knew it long before. An inventor, for example, will become rich thanks to billions of people saying, “I can’t believe no one thought about this before.” Likewise, a novelist, a writer, or an artist will create something so immersive that you often won’t see the effort in the planning, the execution, and the edits. Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics is a genius piece of work because you do not see the genius.

When I first read Aristotle as a young adult, I read it as I would any book or article. I was swept away by the argument. Everything he said seemed obvious. It felt like I was being pulled along a path, and I could imagine no other route to walk. I drew wisdom from his ideas and followed his conclusions, but I felt as if there was something far greater lurking beneath the surface. It was as if I were sailing with the breeze but beneath the sea lurked some huge, philosophical leviathan, because Aristotle’s work is so well-crafted. This was not some rushed work of an all-nighter marching to the drum of an angry editor. As the philosopher Michael Pakaluk puts it, “The density and concentration of Aristotle’s thought is difficult for a beginning student to appreciate, not least because hardly anyone else writes in this way; nearly every sentence plays a role in some argument or other, and every word plays a specific role in the sentence, as in a carefully crafted poem.”

So, what’s Aristotle’s book about? Well, the “Ethics” in his book is an older version of the word. Today, it means right and wrong — synonymous with morality. But in ancient Greece, ethics was more about a way of life. It was how you behaved and your entire character. So, Aristotle’s book is literally a guidebook or argument about how to be a human being. It’s how to live well, how to be virtuous, and, most importantly of all, how to be happy. The book starts with the question, “What’s the ultimate purpose in life?” Aristotle believes it’s eudaimonia, or profound, existential happiness. And so the entire book is a manual about how to be happy. It’s the work of decades of philosophical study and debate from one of history’s greatest minds. It says, “Okay, if happiness is the destination, how do we get there?” And the path Aristotle leads us on is an act of genius. You’ll think you’ve heard it before, but it will change how you view life.

Essays by Michel de Montaigne

There are only a handful of people in history who you can say literally started an entire genre. You could say Mary Shelley with science fiction, Jane Austen with romance novels, and J.R.R. Tolkien with modern fantasy. And the 16th-century French philosopher Michel de Montaigne is widely considered to be the father of the essay. Today, essays are everywhere. Almost all long-form, non-fiction you read online comes in essay form. There is no easy way to define a literary essay, but broadly, it’s when you explore a theme in a philosophical and contemplative style while weaving in autobiographical details and fascinating asides. Montaigne was the first to do it.

Essai in 16th-century France meant literally a “trial,” and the idea with Montaigne’s Essays was that he would take a “trial” — a question, an issue, a problem — and pen his reflections on the topic. Of course, the art of an essay comes in the degree of reflection and the style in which it’s written. A good essay needs wit, erudition, and relatability.

There are two reasons why Montaigne’s essays are such a great example of “self-help.”

The first is that Montaigne is quite literally talking us through his solutions to common problems. Here, we have a hugely intelligent human being talking about topics that are just as relevant today as they were four hundred years ago. He talks about feeling lazy, dealing with liars, and the best way to apologize. He explains the joys of solitude but the dangers of loneliness. He even gives advice on how to get a good night’s sleep. Montaigne explores over a hundred topics, with only a few being limited to his time and place.

This relatability is also what makes the Essays so helpful. Reading Montaigne’s reflections is like stretching back in time and finding someone with just as many quirks and quandaries as we have. Montaigne doesn’t seem to present himself in an especially noble or faultless way. He is happy to let it all hang out. When we read his Essays, we see a complex, whole, and flawed character but always genial, witty, and likable. Montaigne might be saying something trivial, as when he writes, “When I play with my cat, who knows whether she is amusing herself with me, or I with her?” or it could be something poignant and profound, as in his essay on the death of his best friend. But he always comes across as human — as human as you and me. James Baldwin put it perfectly when he said:

“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive.”

That’s what I get when reading Montaigne.

Dao de Jing by Lao Tzu

There are some people who are reluctant to call books like the Dao de Jing “philosophy” at all. They argue that philosophy is a narrowly defined discipline that involves premise, conclusions, and a grounding in rational discussion. If that’s how we define philosophy, then the Dao de Jing is very much not philosophy. The Dao de Jing is very different from both Aristotle and Montaigne — different from almost all academic work in the Western tradition. It’s a collection of aphorisms and pithy nuggets that are so vague it’s hard to even make sense of them at times. Not only do they refuse to give you any straight answers, but they make you question whether there even are any straight answers to be found.

But the reason it’s important to self-development is that books like the Dao de Jing appeal to an element of the human condition in a way that more rational texts cannot. I am not so strict as to say the Dao de Jing is not philosophy, but it is certainly a very different beast from most philosophy. In many ways, the Dao de Jing is closer to poetry than philosophy, but in the way that poetry can also be deeply philosophical, too. Daoist students reading the Dao de Jing would sometimes spend months reflecting on a single line from Lao Tzu’s work. They would meditate on whatever the words revealed, often sharing their interpretations — many copies of the Dao de Jing we find throughout the centuries come crammed with marginalia.

The Dao de Jing gives us two key insights. The first is to accept that some things are beyond our comprehension and will likely remain so forever. There are mystical forces and answers that cannot be labeled, but which are no less important for it. Whether you prefer to call that the Dao, fate, the unconscious, socio-economic forces, the will, or whatever, the central idea is the same: Some things exist but cannot be named.

The second is what the Dao de Jing is about. It’s about listening to these nameless forces. It’s about following the river of your life — waterfalls and rapids too, if it comes to that. Blaise Pascal once wrote, “The heart has its reasons which reason knows nothing of.” (I quote Pascal because “listen to your heart” is too saccharine and clichéd even for me.)

I do not know entirely what the Dao de Jing is about. Some of it does appear to be paradoxical nonsense. I don’t think anyone can entirely make “sense” of large portions of it. But the experience of reading the Dao de Jing — of reading any of the books in this list, come to think of it — is an act of meditative mindfulness in itself. Sometimes, the best thing about philosophy is not the ideas themselves, but the process of considering them.

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What are you? According to science, you are a collection of material particles, a complex machine, completely devoid of any inherent meaning. According to certain religions, you are a divine, conscious soul with the capacity to feel and love, imbued with meaning and cosmic significance. How did we arrive at such seemingly opposite conclusions on what it is to be a human being? The answer lies, in part, in the fact that a human being can be understood from two perspectives: the inner and the outer. From the inside, it feels a certain way to be you. Whatever you might be physically, mentally you are a conscious, feeling thing. You smell the scent of the earth after it rains; you see the glory of a sunrise; you experience feelings of great variety and depth. This is the way of knowing ourselves through direct experience, the way that mystics have explored for millennia, long before we had scientific instruments with which to study the mind. Sitting in meditation, lost in ecstatic dance, or fasting and praying for days, these explorers of inner space received profound insights into our nature and our relationship to the rest of reality.

Looking from the outside, science tells us we are physical bodies made of molecules that themselves are made of atoms, which in turn are made of subatomic particles. The material substance that forms our bodies obeys laws of physics that cannot be broken, seeming to make us clockwork automatons that merely act out the desires programmed into us by evolution. It may be awe inspiring that many of the elements of our bodies were cooked up in exploding stars or that we exist through the combined riot of billions of subatomic particles, but science has no way of accounting for this feeling of awe; consciousness and feeling do not fit into our current scientific picture of the world. The scientific method has done an incredible job of helping us to understand the outer world, but the very existence of your inner world remains a mystery to science.

When we speak of consciousness, we are speaking of the very fact of experience. Consciousness is not the voice in your head or your ability to be self-aware, although these do depend on consciousness. It is the capacity to be aware of anything at all. Imagine the taste of a ripe strawberry, the warmth of sunlight on your skin, or deep pangs of longing. These experiences, so vivid and intimate, are all manifestations of consciousness. Consciousness does not require thought or the ability to self-reflect; where there is feeling of any kind, from the experience of seeing the blue of the sky to imagining what your life will be like a decade from now, there is consciousness.

An influential definition of consciousness comes from philosopher Thomas Nagel, who suggests that we consider something to be conscious if there is “something it is like” to be that thing. For example, if I rearranged your atoms to change you into a rock, then we might presume that there would be “nothing it is like” to be the rock, which is another way of saying that rocks are not conscious. As I mixed up your atoms to turn you into a mineral object, at some point in the transition, consciousness would be extinguished, and the light of experience would go out. What about an ape or a squirrel, a termite or a bacterium? Is there “something it is like” to be them. That is, are they conscious? The challenge science faces is in understanding how our objective description of the arrangement of such physical phenomena as atoms connects to the subjective qualitative experience of consciousness, of it being like something to be that thing—of experiential feeling itself.

We can think of consciousness as being like a simulation. When you have the experience of seeing a rainbow, the rainbow exists in your simulation of the world, your consciousness, not in the physical world itself. We know there is no colorful arched physical structure in the objective description of the world in such moments. You experience certain things in your simulation of the world around you, and I experience something different. To understand consciousness, we must explain why you and I simulate the world around us and what leads to the content of our simulations being different. Computers are capable of simulating things, however, yet we do not necessarily think that this makes them conscious, which takes us to the core of the mystery of consciousness. Why isn’t our simulation just a physical procedure that occurs in the dark? Why do our brains not simply function like a computer and physically process the necessary information without the added experience? A computer can analyze the same visual signals that give you the conscious experience of seeing a rainbow with no need for the experience. Why, in our case, are the lights on? Why is your simulation illuminated, and what is the source of this illumination?

This quality of illumination is known as awareness, and it lies at the core of consciousness. Another way to think about awareness is as knowingness. When there is an experience of the taste of banana, there is the knowing of that taste. When you perform an act unconsciously, there is no experiential knowing of that act having occurred. To fully explain this inner simulation that we call consciousness, we must account for this mysterious quality of awareness that results in the simulation actually being experienced rather than merely operating in the dark through blind, unconscious mechanism.

Though there is no shortage of speculation regarding the origin and nature of consciousness, there is no consensus on where consciousness fits into the modern scientific story of the natural world. In fact, we have no generally accepted explanation of why consciousness should exist at all. Is it the product of complex animal brains like our own? Is it the fundamental nature of our reality? Could it be an illusion? Every proposal in this array of mutually contradictory positions is held by multiple prominent philosophers and scientists today. To say there’s no consensus on the issue of consciousness is an understatement.

The issue of consciousness is consequential for understanding not only our own minds but also reality itself. Reckoning with the nature of experience forces us to confront what is perhaps the most basic question that science, philosophy, and religion all try to answer: What is going on? Do we find ourselves in a clockwork universe that happened to produce some animal brains that excrete consciousness like a useless gas for no apparent reason? Are we in a matrix or some kind of simulation? Are we a dream in a cosmic mind? Taking a stance on the issue of consciousness necessarily requires us to also commit to a stance on the nature of reality. Consciousness theories and their associated worldviews are a package deal.

In this book, I lay out a way of thinking about consciousness that I previously published in the Journal of Consciousness Studies as the living mirror theory of consciousness. The core claim is that life and consciousness are fundamentally linked—we do not experience primarily because we have brains; we experience because we are alive. The brain is certainly involved in human consciousness but as a secondary player to the life process. The evolution of the brain is not what brought consciousness into existence; the emergence of life did. The brain merely elaborates the contents of experience to admittedly dizzying heights in our species.

The living mirror theory is entirely aligned with the scientific perspective, being influenced by Darwinian theory, thermodynamics, complexity theory, biophysics, and contemporary neuroscience. As is typical when we gain scientific insight, accepting a theory comes with many interesting and sometimes counterintuitive implications. Darwinian evolution tells us that, due to the continuity of the web of life, we share an ancestor with a banana. The Copernican revolution in astrophysics led us to the realization that, rather than being at the center of the universe, “we live on an insignificant planet of a humdrum star lost in a galaxy tucked away in some forgotten corner of a universe in which there are far more galaxies than people,” as astrophysicist Carl Sagan put it. The living mirror theory comes with its own surprising implications for what we are.

For the theory to make sense, I must frame it within a compelling worldview. The current dominant worldview in science, in which only the material particles of physics are thought to truly exist, has left us facing a dead end when it comes to thinking about consciousness. To make sense of consciousness, we must first examine and dismantle the flawed assumptions in this predominant scientific worldview. Only then can a new understanding of our inner world and its place in reality come into focus, reconciling the scientific and religious perspectives on the question of what we are.

While the domain of spirituality and religion understandably makes some scientifically minded people uncomfortable, I believe there are valuable insights into our existential situation to be found in these traditions. In particular, there appears to be a mystical core to many religions that reflects a fundamental insight that people have found compelling throughout time: that we are not truly separate from the world around us and that we are in fact deeply at home in existence. In religious traditions, this is typically not something that one discovers by studying the world around us but instead through conscious experience itself. It seems to me that a deep understanding of this experience is an antidote to our current assumptions that block us from understanding consciousness.

I use the term nondual naturalism for the secular-spiritual worldview I present. Nondual refers to the insight that reality is not fundamentally split into subject and object, mind and matter, but is instead whole. Naturalism refers to a scientific perspective on reality that does not accept the existence of supernatural phenomena but instead relies on philosophy and science to map out a consistent picture of the universe, one in which the world around us contains its own explanations. The combination of the two perspectives results in a worldview in which a subset of core spiritual experiences that are in alignment with scientific findings are held to be valid. These include feeling oneself to be fully part of nature (as Darwin showed us we are) and discovering that the self is not an entity with its own independent existence; rather, one’s sense of being a separate self is a psychological experience (as modern neuroscience also claims).

Finally, a note on terminology. This book deals with the central fact of our existence, that there is an experience happening. When I use such terms as consciousness, experience, subjectivity, feeling, sentience, or mind, I always refer to this simple and readily apparent fact. The feeling of touch on your skin, experiencing the scent of coffee, your perception of a beautiful landscape scene—these subjective events should not exist according to our current scientific picture of the world, and it is these phenomena that I address when I use the term consciousness, as well as these related terms. The term awareness is reserved for the core characteristic of consciousness by which the content of experience is illuminated in order to differentiate between this and the specific contents of consciousness. This all is unpacked throughout this book. I include a glossary of key terms to help keep track of the different theories and terms of art used in later chapters.

In writing this book, I am driven by more than an intellectual curiosity into the nature of consciousness. It seems to me that, at this moment, our dominant global culture is confused and lost. There is so much unnecessary suffering in the world that is caused by both our relation to ourselves and to the natural world, and it is my hope that, through greater understanding of ourselves and our place in existence, we will be able to navigate more effectively to a world with less suffering. For this reason, I have written this book to be accessible to a general audience, as well as to academics in fields relevant to consciousness. Science, when wielded wisely, can function as a light in the dark in this quest, leading us toward truth. Through greater understanding of ourselves and our situation, I hope we can move collectively in the direction of ever greater peace, both inner and outer. Even if this book fails to move us in this direction, I deeply appreciate your coming on this journey with me. 

This article The “living mirror” theory: Why all living organisms may have consciousness is featured on Big Think.

There are two ways I could approach Lizz’s question. At first, I thought she wanted me to explain the nature of reality to a six-year-old. Not quite an “explain it like I’m five” approach, but also not that much different. Big Think is an intelligent publication for curious and mature individuals. Heck, we even have a product called Explain It Like I’m Smart, deliberately intended to push back against the incessant dumbing down of online content. So, I’m sorry, Lizz, today I’m going to explain it like you’re smart and leave the talking to your daughter in your hands.

After all, this isn’t an especially easy topic. It gets to the heart of an entire area of philosophy — one of the oldest, in fact: metaphysics. Metaphysics is a broad category. On the one hand, it’s about God and religion. Poltergeists, jinn, and the Ghost of Christmas Past all count as metaphysical entities. But, for our purposes today, metaphysics is also about the substance that may or may not underpin perception. It’s about what lies behind the veil of sensation and what makes something “real” or not.

To answer the question more fully, I reached out to the philosopher Graham Harman at the Southern California Institute of Architecture for his thoughts. Harman is somewhat of a philosophical bigwig when it comes to “realness,” and so I hope his ideas give Lizz something fun to pass on to her daughter.

What realness isn’t

I suspect that if you asked most people “What is real?” their first answer would be based on some variation of materialism. They would say it occupies space (as Descartes thought) or is made up of physical particles. We could say that a rainbow is defined by light refraction. An emotion is neurochemicals interacting in the brain at a certain time in response to a stimulus. But Harman thinks this definition is too narrow.

“There are some problems with materialism, and one of the obvious ones is mathematical objects,” he tells Big Think. “Because in some sense they’re real, and real even before the dawn of the human species. [We can] list a few exceptions that are not material, but that are still real. Some people believe in God. That’s a non-material, real thing. Fictional characters, as well. If I say ‘Hamlet,’ then everyone knows what I’m talking about, and everyone who’s read the play has some notion of what that character signifies.”

Another common way to define real is by its impact. Something is real if it affects other things or other people. God changes the lives of believers. Mathematical objects change calculations, predictions, and models. Hamlet changes how some people view the world. A rainbow causes us to smile. A fart causes us to recoil. Here, too, we have a problem.

“I think there can also be real things that don’t affect anything else right now but that might be activated by certain circumstances. So, this is about potentials. I remember during the [Balkan Wars], before the stuff got really bad, I saw a little news magazine profile of Ratko Mladić, and it called him a ‘potential war criminal’ due to his reputation for ferocity. But the war was still very early, and he hadn’t had a chance to do any of that stuff yet. And of course, later he became an actual war criminal. And so, I would say the war criminal in Mladić was there. It was just not yet activated by the opportunity presented to him by that war.”

This is where we might depart from Harman’s own position. Not everyone will agree with the idea that all potentials of an object are “real” right now. You could one day be a murderer. Is the murderer in you “real”? A raindrop might one day meet light in a certain position to create a rainbow, but does that mean the rainbow is real within the raindrops?

Irreducible Reality

There are no easy answers to all this (but if you like trying, perhaps you should consider studying philosophy at university). And it’s also at risk of losing our curious six-year-old staring at rainbows. I doubt Lizz will be sitting her daughter down to talk about the nuances of potentiality.

So, what is real? Harman defined real as “something that is not reducible to its parts. A real object would be something like water, which combines hydrogen and oxygen but adds properties that neither of those has. We call this emergence.”

For Harman, something is real if all the parts of that object work together to create something new or “emergent” that cannot be accounted for in the individual parts. A rainbow is a good example, as well. A rainbow is real because it is the emergent phenomenon of water, light, and the human eye. The human eye is not a rainbow. Water is not a rainbow. But when you put all the ingredients together, you get something real.

Harman’s definition is not about knowledge — it’s not about what we know is real or not. It’s also not a linguistic claim. It’s a metaphysical one. Rainbows might depend on the human eye, for example, to know that they’re there, but, as Harman said, “the rainbow is still not totally dependent on the mind because I can’t just say anything about it that I want. There are accurate and inaccurate descriptions of a rainbow.” In other words, there is a true or false way to describe a rainbow.

This article Everyday Philosophy: Are rainbows, farts, and emotions “real”? is featured on Big Think.