Latest episode
E24 Why Is There Something Rather Than Nothing?
"Even if there was nothing, you still wouldn't be satisfied!"
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
E23 GUEST: Sam Rickless on Philosophy and the Meaning of Life
The meaning of life, meaningful lives - what does it all mean?
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.
E22 Wolf: Meaningful Lives in a World Devoid of Meaning
A fresh take on an ancient question
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.
E21 Nagel and the Absurd
Does it matter that nothing matters?
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".
E20 The Philosophy of Time Travel
Causal loops, the grandfather paradox, closed timelike curves, and much more!
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
E19 GUEST: Peter Singer on Morality, Meaning, and Cancel Culture
A special guest appearance from "the most influential ethicist alive"
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
E18 Life Extension: Cryonics and Mind Uploading
Who wants to live forever?
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.
E17 The Fermi Paradox
"The only thing that scares me more than aliens is the idea that there aren't any aliens"
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
E16 Why We Are Living Inside a Simulation and Why We Should Care
The blue pill or the red pill?
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
E15 The Pessimism of Schopenhauer
The cause of suffering and the path to salvation
"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.”