Today, most scientists agree that the universe began with the "Big Bang". But why did the Big Bang occur in the first place? What gave rise to the conditions required for the Big Bang to kickstart our universe? Why is there something rather than nothing?
When compared with the possibility of a silent, empty, nothingness, the existence of a universe as rich and expansive as ours seems staggering. Surely it would have been much simpler for there to have just been nothingness.
In this episode, we'll look at the best theories put forward by scientists, religious thinkers, and philosophers, as to why anything exists at all.
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Sam Rickless is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, San Diego, where he’s created a brand new course entitled ‘The Meaning of Life’. In many ways, Sam's course gets right to the heart of what Searching For It is all about: Sam teaches his students about Schopenhauer, Sartre, Buddhist philosophy, and much more.
In this episode, Sam and I will discuss the lessons he's learned from thinking about the meaning of life, the results of his students' "experiments in living", as well as his thoughts on Camus, Nagel, and Wolf.
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Philosophers have spent millennia pondering the question of life's meaning. Kierkegaard grounded the meaning of life in a passionate belief in God, Sartre declared that we're each free to create our own meaning, while Camus and Nagel deny that we could ever come to know life's meaning.
But, if you ask Susan Wolf, each of these philosophers are beating a dead horse. Life has no meaning and that's that. But so what? In Meaning in Life and Why it Matters, Wolf argues that we should abandon our quest for the meaning of life, and refocus our efforts on living meaningful lives. Tune into this month's episode to find out how we can continue to live meaningful lives in a world devoid of meaning.
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According to Albert Camus, the absurd is the "one truly serious philosophical problem". In fact, Camus was so concerned by the notion of the absurd that he wrote an essay investigating whether or not we should commit suicide in the face of it. But in the words of Thomas Nagel, Camus' attitude towards the absurd is "romantic and slightly self-pitying". According to Nagel, all we need in order to respond to the absurdity of human life is irony and a good sense of humour.
Tune in to this episode of Searching For It to learn why Nagel describes human existence as absurd, and despite the dramatics of Camus, why it doesn't really matter.
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Back to the Future, Interstellar, The Terminator - we've all been guilty of enjoying a good time travel flick at one point or another. But more recently, time travel has been taken out of Hollywood and placed under the inquisitive philosophers' lens. Stepping beyond science fiction and fantasy, philosophers have uncovered a hidden trove of tantalising thought experiments and mind-bending paradoxes.
Tune into this episode to learn about causal loops, the Grandfather Paradox, closed timelike curves, and to investigate whether time travel really is a possibility.
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Peter Singer is an Australian philosopher who has dedicated his life and his career to reducing the suffering of animals and tackling global poverty. In 2005 Singer was listed as one of Time Magazine's 100 Most Influential People, and by 2014 Singer had encouraged more than 17,000 people to publicly pledge a percentage of their income to effective charities. Why, then, has Singer been derided as a 'Nazi', and spent decades facing protests and cancelled talks across the world?
In this special guest appearance, Peter and I will discuss the moral obligations that we face to give money to effective charities, the backlash that Peter has faced to his work, and the state of cancel culture in 2020. We'll also talk about Peter's recent research into the oldest novel ever written, and his support for the animal rights movement.
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Ancient civilizations all across the world have spent centuries searching for the secret to immortality, launching quests to seek the elixir of life and the philosopher's stone. While their efforts proved unfruitful, advances in modern-day science are illuminating new and exciting pathways towards life-extension. But, as companies emerge pledging to raise the dead through cryonics and mind uploading, we find ourselves faced with fundamental philosophical questions regarding the nature of consciousness and the concept of personal identity. Tune in to dive deep into these philosophical mysteries and discover whether life extension is truly as enticing as it appears.
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According to scientists' best estimates, there are likely a great number of intelligent civilizations in the Milky Way galaxy, and many more throughout the rest of the observable universe. But if that's the case, where is everybody?
Maybe homo sapiens are the first of many intelligent civilizations that will one day explore the universe. Maybe intelligent life is more improbable than we'd thought. Or maybe aliens are really out there, but we haven't found them just yet.
Scientists and big thinkers have spent decades trying to get to the bottom of the Fermi Paradox, but they're yet to get to the bottom of this cosmic mystery. In this episode, we'll find out why many scientists predict that the universe is teeming with intelligent life, why we're still waiting for contact, and the ways in which our answers might radically alter the long-term prospects of the human race.
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The idea that we are living inside a simulation used to be little more than the brainwave of pot-smoking teenagers and people who took The Matrix a bit too seriously. But since the early 2000s, the tide has started to change.
In 2003, Nick Bostrom published a paper arguing that if we accept a reasonable set of assumptions, we are almost certainly living in a simulation. To this day, philosophers and physicists alike have failed to find a good reason to reject this staggering conclusion. Could it really be the case that our universe is no more than code in the computer of some highly advanced civilization? And, if Bostrom is right, what effect might this discovery have upon our lives?
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"Happiness lies always in the future, or else in the past, and the present may be compared to a small, dark cloud driven by the wind over the sunny plain; in front of and behind the cloud everything is bright, only it itself always casts a shadow. Consequently, the present is always inadequate, but the future uncertain, and the past irrecoverable.”
Schopenhauer paints a bleak, unforgiving picture of the human condition. Yet, Schopenhauer identifies a path away from the relentless suffering that consumes us all, and towards salvation. In this episode, we'll explore why Schopenhauer is so disillusioned by our very existence, and whether a better life is within our grasp.
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