Category: Science
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The Trauma of the Infinite
In a recent post examining notions of time and our relationship to it, Peter Rollins concluded: Instead of the eternal being simply the ongoing now (the pagan notion), this understanding sees the eternal as the dwelling in all three registers. This is nothing less than the combining of past, present and future into a mass…
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Better Living Through Chemistry? Love, Depression and Pharmacology
Last night I went to see The Effect at the National Theatre, a new play by Lucy Prebble, who made waves with her previous piece ENRON. (It ‘stars’ Billie Piper, who I’d not seen on stage before but – just as an aside – her performance confirmed so much that I’d heard: she’s a very…
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‘Either God exists, or one must accept mystery.’ | Incompleteness and Limits of Truth
Some complex ideas in this post, but I think rich rewards if you’re willing to persevere… Catching up on some old episodes of Radiolab (a brilliant podcast, if you’re not already on it) I came across the above section in the programme about loops. In it, the presenters discuss the idea of statements that…
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All In The Mind? Thoughts on Identity and Neuroscience
Tweeted about this piece earlier today, but wanted to flag up and reflect further on Henry Marsh’s piece in Granta, detailing his neurosurgical work operating on a tumour in a pineal gland. The pineal gland is buried deep within the brain, and is thus only reached after a perilous journey through the physical matter that…
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A Very Modern Decathlon: Who Would Win the ‘Whole Person’ Olympic Gold?
One of the things I liked about Tom Wolfe’s novel I Am Charlotte Simmons is the journey that one of the main characters, Jojo, takes, from ‘dumb college jock’ to athletic student of philosophy. It’s an arc that’s not that uncommon: the pursuit of excellence in sport requires careful reflection on the self; top…
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The Moon is the Beginning of all Religion…
‘I looked and looked but I didn’t see God.’ – Yuri Gagarin ‘That transcendentalism by which all men live has primarily much the position of the sun in the sky. We are conscious of it as of a kind of splendid confusion; it is something both shining and shapeless, at once a blaze and a…