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Posts published in “Scientific Curmudgeon”

Optimism for a dark time

Through most of my youth, I was a pessimist. My Mom called me Eeyore, after the gloomy donkey in Winnie the Pooh.

Talking about mental illness

The mind-body problem is the deepest mystery of existence. Narrowly speaking, it asks how a brain — a mere chunk of matter, a bundle of quarks and electrons — makes a mind.

My Go-To Arguments for Free Will

I often dwell on free will as the new year begins, and my resolutions (quit caffeine, again, start meditating, again) are already wavering

Is science becoming decadent?

As World War I wound down, German scholar Oswald Spengler argued in The Decline of the West that civilizations, like organisms, pass through a natural life cycle.