Science & the Big Questions

Finding Hope When Everything Feels Hopeless

The Wall Street Journal

Topics: Agency Emotion Hope Optimism Resilience

We Learn Faster When We Aren’t Told What Choices to Make

The way we decide may even give insight into delusional thinking.

Scientific American

Topics: Agency Belief Bias Cognition Decision-Making Learning

3 Ways to Leverage Boredom and Change Your Life

Bored out of your mind? Here are three tricks to use that feeling to your advantage.

Inverse

Topics: Agency Meaning Purpose

The Real Reason We’re Afraid of Robots

Humanity’s worries about being outsmarted and overthrown by omnipotent man-made automatons is much older than computer technology.

Los Angeles Times

Topics: Agency Bias Technology

The Threat of Boredom Is a Call to Action

We typically try to avoid boredom. But in trying to outrun boredom, we risk failing to heed its call.

Behavioral Scientist

Topics: Agency Purpose

Does Moral Responsibility Require Free Will?

Closer To Truth

Topics: Agency Alfred Mele Determinism Free Will Morality Self-Control

The Neuroscience of Free Will: A Q&A with Robyn Repko Waller

Blending philosophy and neuroscience in unraveling the mysteries of free will.

Beautiful Minds, Scientific American

Topics: Agency Free Will Scott Barry Kaufman

Can Neuroscience Understand Free Will?

Perhaps free will won’t forever be an issue philosophers mull over for a lifetime.

Nautilus

Topics: Agency Determinism Free Will Morality

First Things First: The Physics of Causality

Why do we remember the past and not the future? Untangling the connections between cause and effect, choice, and entropy.

FQXi

Topics: Agency Information Nature of Time

The Urgency of Agency

Our consciousness gets in the way of thinking about evolution.

Life, Unbounded, Scientific American

Topics: Agency Evolutionary Mechanisms Evolutionary Theory Extraterrestrial Life Origin of Life

There’s No Such Thing as Free Will

But we’re better off believing in it anyway.

The Atlantic

Topics: Agency Determinism Free Will Meaning Morality

Yes, Determinists, There Is Free Will

You make choices even if your atoms don’t.

Nautilus

Topics: Agency Decision-Making Determinism Free Will Metaphysics

Free Will Is Not Going Away

Many neuroscientists and some philosophers consider free will to be an illusion, but the situation is not so simple.

Institute for Cross-Disciplinary Engagement

Topics: Agency Free Will Marcelo Gleiser

The Free Will Project: An Interview with Santiago Amaya and Manuel Vargas

Research into free will, responsibility, and agency.

APA Blog

Topics: Agency Free Will Metaphysics Morality

The “Bias Blind Spot” Just Replicated (“Everyone Else Is More Biased Than Me”)

Prasad Chandrashekar, Siu Kit Yeung, and colleagues report reproducing the original study.

British Psychological Society Research Digest

Topics: Agency Bias Free Will

Why Mortality Makes Us Free

The heart of spiritual life can not be found in nirvana or heaven, but in the mutual recognition that this life is our ultimate purpose.

The Stone, The New York Times

Topics: Agency Morality Purpose Spirituality

Feeling Anxious? It’s Not Just You, It’s Our Philosophical Era of Neuroexistentialism

This contemporary angst arises from the growing body of knowledge that shows the existence we experience is a result of neural processes.

Quartz

Topics: Agency Determinism Free Will Meaning Morality Naturalism Purpose

How Does Your Brain Construct Your Conscious Reality?

Your brain hallucinates your conscious reality.

TED Radio Hour

Topics: Agency Consciousness Reality

How Much Control Do You Really Have Over Your Actions? These Brain Regions Provide Clues

Neuroscientists are beginning to pinpoint the regions of the brain involved in the perception of free will.

Science

Topics: Agency Free Will

Believing Addiction Reduces Free Will May Hamper Efforts To Quit

Telling people they cannot control addictive behaviors may discourage them from trying to control addictive behaviors, thereby needlessly prolonging addiction.

Science Trends

Topics: Agency Free Will

The Believing Brain

The human brain has a compulsion to attribute meaning to what happens in our lives through a belief system.

All In The Mind, ABC Radio National

Topics: Agency Belief Brian Greene Cognition Meaning Spirituality