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Posts published in “Scientific Curmudgeon”

Can Meditation Make Us Nicer?

My friend Robert Wright recently gave a terrific talk here at Stevens about his bestseller Why Buddhism Is True. He argues that Buddhism has correctly diagnosed humanity’s problem.

Who Invented the Mind-Body Problem?

I’ve been writing for decades about the mind-body problem, the deepest of all mysteries. And yet, only recently have I realized that few people outside philosophy and mind-related scientific fields are familiar with the phrase “mind-body problem.”

The Weirdness of Weirdness

I’ve been brooding over weirdness lately. To me, the world and everything in it is weird, and weirdest of all are the clumps of matter that can contemplate themselves and think, “Weird!”

Is Science Infinite?

Can science keep giving us profound insights into the world forever? Or will it inevitably bump up against limits? David Deutsch, an iconoclastic British physicist, made the case for boundlessness in his 2011 book The Beginning of Infinity.