Guest Post: What Is It Like To Be A Thermostat?
An excerpt from The Conscious Mind, by David Chalmers

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… if experience is truly a fundamental property, it seems natural for it to be widespread. Certainly all the other fundamental properties that we know about occur even in simple systems, and throughout the universe…

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Guest Post: The User Illusion
An Excerpt from The User Illusion: Cutting Consciousness Down To Size
By Tor Norretranders

Tree Grass CloudsThe fact is that every single second, millions of bits of information flood in through our senses. But our consciousness processes only perhaps forty bits a second – at most. Millions and millions of bits are condensed to a conscious experience that contains practically no information at all…
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What Is A Field?
Contributing editor to Scientific American Magazine, George Musser, explains how physicists think about the universe using the fundamental concept of “the field”.

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Click here to watch the video

 

Between The Folds
I just saw this wonderful documentary. Somehow I missed it when it released in 2008… For those of you who haven’t seen it, I highly recommend it!

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Between The Folds

My Favorite 2013 TED Talks #1

There were so many extraordinary 2013 TED talks, it’s going to be hard to keep my list down to 10 this year. I’m excited to be able to share #1 today — Dan Pallotta’s talk just went up! I think it has the power to do something that is rare in human life: change people’s minds. I’ll post the others as they become available. Enjoy!

Dan Pallotta

 

 

Click here to watch Dan Pallotta’s TED Talk,
The Way We Think About Charity Is Dead Wrong

 

Guest Post: What Is Consciousness?
Here is an excerpt from a fascinating conversation between psychologist, Susan Blackmore and philosopher, David Chalmers, in the book Conversations On Consciousness, by Susan Blackmore:

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I think someone could know all the physical facts about the world and still not know about consciousness. So if the relationship between brain processes and conscious experience isn’t one of reduction, what is it?
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