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“In old age we should wish still to have passions strong enough to prevent us turning in on ourselves.” We live in a culture that dreads the entropic inevitability of growing older, treats it like a disease to be cured with potions and regimens, anesthetizes it with botox and silence, somehow forgetting that to grow…

“Songs are like rivers: each follows its own course, yet all flow to the sea, from which everything came.” “A rough sound was polished until it became a smoother sound, which was polished until it became music,” the poet Mark Strand wrote in his ode to the enchantment of music. Music is the most indescribable…

Post on “The Vector Grounding Problem” for the Brains Blog Dimitri Coelho Mollo & Raphaël Millière We first preprinted “The Vector Grounding Problem” in April 2023, about four months after the release of ChatGPT. By that point, large language models (LLMs) had started to capture the attention of philosophers, but …

As Stephen Colbert’s current show winds down after being terminated, seemingly at the command of the Trump regime, I thought I’d look back at an episode of the Colbert Report. Campbell Brown appeared on the July 31, 2014 episode of the Colbert Report to promote her Partnership for Educational Justice filing a legal complaint in…

One of the commonest and most corrosive human reflexes is to react to helplessness with anger. We do it in our personal lives and we do it in our political lives. We are living through a time of uncommon helplessness and uncertainty, touching every aspect of our lives, and in such times another reflex is…

How do we come to understand a grandparent—and a family’s values—when we only get those stories secondhand?

Schools have learned to talk about belonging. But a student can belong and still feel their absence would go unnoticed. Here is why mattering is the piece we keep missing.

Few things hurt more than having your accomplishments dismissed by those you love. Psychology offers insight into why it happens.

What do the strange pain-relieving and healing that can take place under hypnosis tell us about consciousness? Perhaps consciousness is more than just brain activity.