Showing titles in Philosophy

THE #1 NATIONAL BESTSELLER One of the world’s most beloved writers and New York Times bestselling author of A Walk in the Woods and The Body takes his ultimate journey—into the most intriguing and intractable questions that science seeks to answer. “Brims with strange and amazing facts...

Something has gone wrong with the world—and deep down, we all feel it. Science describes how the universe works, but it cannot explain why it was made or what it was meant to be. From the first words of Genesis to the mysteries of modern physics, this audiobook uncovers the hidden order behind existence—a design that has been forgotten, distorted, and denied.

As a botanist and professor of plant ecology, Robin Wall Kimmerer has spent a career learning how to ask questions of nature using the tools of science. As a Potawatomi woman, she learned from elders, family, and history that the Potawatomi, as well as a majority of other cultures indigenous to this land, consider plants and animals to be our oldest teachers.

You are not your brain. For more than three centuries, science has assumed that consciousness is produced by the brain—that your thoughts, awareness, and identity are nothing more than neural activity. But what if that assumption is wrong? At a time when AI researchers are asking whether machines might become conscious, this book presents a bold, evidence-based argument: AI can’t be conscious—because consciousness doesn’t come from computation at all. Instead, growing scientific evidence suggests something far more radical: Consciousness may be fundamental to reality itself. If ...

What is time, really—and why does it seem to flow? In this short essay, Stephen Wolfram explores time not as a coordinate or backdrop but as something generated by the ongoing computation of the universe itself. Drawing on ideas from his Physics Project, he explains how the passage of time—our experience of one moment giving way to the next—arises from the limits of what observers like us can compute. We can't see the future all at once; we have to compute it step by step.

Take a tour through the Bible with pastor-teacher John MacArthur—unleashing God's truth, one verse at a time.TM The MacArthur Daily Bible takes a portion of the Old Testament, New Testament, Psalms, and Proverbs for each day of the year, with daily comments that guide and inform you as you...

How can we make intelligent decisions about our increasingly technology-driven lives if we don’t understand the difference between the myths of pseudoscience and the testable hypotheses of science? Pulitzer Prize-winning author and distinguished astronomer Carl Sagan argues that scientific thinking is critical not only to the pursuit of truth but to the very well-being of our democratic institutions.

From one of our leading chroniclers of the intersection of innovation and capitalism, a landmark reckoning—based on unprecedented access—with one of the world’s most brilliant and driven tech visionaries, and his game-changing company Even by the standard of a tech industry stacked with...

The science of emotion is in the midst of a revolution on par with the discovery of relativity in physics and natural selection in biology. Leading the charge is psychologist and neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett, whose research overturns the long-standing belief that emotions are automatic, universal, and hardwired in different brain regions. Instead, Barrett shows, we construct each instance of emotion through a unique interplay of brain, body, and culture.

By most popular accounts, the universe started with a bang some 13.8 billion years ago. But what happened before the Big Bang? And how do we know it happened at all? Here prominent cosmologist Niayesh Afshordi and science communicator Phil Halper offer a tour of the peculiar possibilities: bouncing and cyclic universes, time loops, creations from nothing, multiverses, black hole births, string theories, and holograms. Along the way, they offer both a call for new physics and a riveting story of scientific debate.

A fresh, charming, socially conscious tour of the mysteries of space-time, from the award-winning author of The Disordered Cosmos In her highly acclaimed debut, distinguished cosmologist and particle physicist Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein shared with her audience an abiding sense of wonder at...

Discover magazine recently called Richard Dawkins "Darwin's Rottweiler" for his fierce and effective defense of evolution. Prospect magazine voted him among the top three public intellectuals in the world (along with Umberto Eco and Noam Chomsky). Now Dawkins turns his considerable intellect on religion, denouncing its faulty logic and the suffering it causes.

Where do we learn math: From rules in a textbook? From logic and deduction? Not really, according to mathematician Eugenia Cheng: we learn it from human curiosity—most importantly, from asking questions. This may come as a surprise to those who think that math is about finding the one right answer, or those who were told that the “dumb” question they asked just proved they were bad at math. But Cheng shows why people who ask questions like “Why does 1 + 1 = 2?” are at the very heart of the search for mathematical truth.

In Understanding Artificial Intelligence: Of Minds and Machines, philosopher Patrick Grim traces the story of AI from ancient legends to the neural networks behind today’s breakthroughs. You see how modern systems became so powerful so quickly. You also explore the very meaning of “intelligence,” discovering how modern AI succeeds by drawing on three resources: vast datasets that let systems learn from examples; deep-learning architectures loosely modeled on the brain’s layers; and feedback loops that help models refine their behavior.

From one of the world’s most celebrated intellectuals, a “fascinating” (Financial Times), brilliantly insightful work that explains how we think about each other’s thoughts about each other’s thoughts, ad infinitum. It sounds impossible, but “superlatively gifted science writer”...

Enter the mysterious world of sixteenth-century science, where astronomers and alchemists shared laboratories. In 1543, Nicolaus Copernicus declared the earth revolved around the Sun, overturning centuries of scholastic presumption. A new age was coming into view—one guided by observation...

A bold and all-embracing exploration of the nature and progress of knowledge from one of today's great thinkers. Throughout history, mankind has struggled to understand life's mysteries, from the mundane to the seemingly miraculous. In this important new book, David Deutsch, an award-winning pioneer in the field of quantum computation, argues that explanations have a fundamental place in the universe.

The Blind Spot goes where no science book goes, urging us to create a new scientific culture that views ourselves both as an expression of nature and as a source of nature's self-understanding, so that humanity can flourish in the new millennium.

What is Now? This immediate moment, what we're experiencing right now . . . it bathes us like air, or gravity. Yet when we try to grasp this quality, to scrutinize it or bring it into focus, it vanishes, slipping through our fingers like a dream. And worse, according to the most trusted models of physics, Now doesn't even exist. If all this is so, then what, exactly, are we experiencing? How do we carve out time, sensation, self, and meaning from a blank, Now-less canvas?

The now-classic Metaphors We Live By changed our understanding of metaphor and its role in language and the mind. Metaphor, authors George Lakoff and Mark Johnson explain, is a fundamental mechanism of mind, one that allows us to use what we know about our physical and social experience to provide understanding of countless other subjects. Because such metaphors structure our most basic understandings of our experience, they are "metaphors we live by"—metaphors that can shape our perceptions and actions without our ever noticing them.