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DemystifySci is Dr. Michael Shilo DeLay and Dr. Anastasia Bendebury. Together they untangle complex theories of nature, making analysis accessible through conversations with exceptional thinkers. Each week they interview a new theorist about the ideas that are going to rewrite our understanding of the world. Power them via Patreon: @demystifysci
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Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, we all know that. But Dr. Christopher French, professor of Anomalistic Psychology at the University of London, might know it more than the rest of us - he’s spent his career in pursuit of tangible evidence for all kinds of paranormal beliefs. Extrasensory perception, telepathy, dowsing - and has come up with little proof that these phenomena occur - but has not lost the skeptical spark that leaves all possibilities on the table.
Along the way, he became interested in the question of cognition - how do people come to believe in magical phenomena? Did they feel the appeal of motivated reasoning, or did it take them by surprise? Proof and disproof don’t seem to have much of an effect in this world of metaphysical beliefs, since cognition doesn’t depend on facts - it’s much more about emotions, tribal associations, and the way that humans *want* the world to be, rather than how it *is.*
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Dr. French Twitter: https://twitter.com/chriscfrench
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Dr. French Articles on Anomalistic Psychology: https://www.theguardian.com/profile/chris-french
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#Science #Power #Futurism
Medical mystery Wim Hof has put his body to the test, and the science is in: belief is really good for you. Especially if you learn to use the power of your mind (and lungs) to control your immune system. But what’s going on? How is it that your mind, a part of you that doesn’t even seem to have a physical location, shapes reality? How can thoughts have such a huge influence on everything from your immune system, to how likely you are to die in the next decade?
Join us as we sit down with University of Radboud Immunologist Matthijs Kox and figure out the ways in which the mind affects medical outcomes, and why training yourself to overcome what the brain and body want can mean the difference between success and tragedy.
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Dr. Kox Website: https://www.radboudumc.nl/en/people/matthijs-kox
Dr. Kox Publications: https://publons.com/researcher/2362625/matthijs-kox/
Dr. Kox Study on Wim Hof: https://www.pnas.org/content/111/20/7379
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#WimHof #ConsciousControl #MindOverMatter
There are two opposing forces that steer the course of consensus science - quality of thought on one hand, and narrative control on the other. When you’re pushing the limits of human technological ability, should you be worried that modern science is about power? This is a conversation with Jeremy Rys, @Alienscientist on YouTube, about what happens when you hang out on the cutting edge of engineering outside the institutions.
Jeremy has grown a community centered around doing just that - and has started a lab that builds and tests various propulsion prototypes to see what gems may have fallen through the cracks of history. Extreme patience rewards the seeker, for even the most far-out ideas will produce the occasional pearl of wisdom. If researchers on the cutting edge dismissed everything ever labeled as “pseudoscience,” maps of the universe would probably still have Earth at their center.
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#Science #Power #Futurism
Propaganda, strongmen, and authoritarianism are mainstays across the authoritarian-liberatrian boundary, marked by a lack of democratic and free elections, a codified hostility towards threat to the social order, a lack of accountability, and religious party loyalism. ªº¬˚∆≤≥≤≥ Join the mailing list http://eepurl.com/gRUCZL ≤≥≤≥∆˚¬ºª
Widespread lockdowns have triggered fears that the world is taking a turn towards authoritarian rule, a government system that’s marked by a lack of democratic and free elections, a codified hostility towards threat to the social order, a lack of accountability, and party loyalists at every turn.
The 20th century despots were very effective at playing on endemic frustrations during long periods of economic hardships. Hitler came to power during the interwar period where Germany was dealing with extreme social instability following reparation-driven hyperinflation. A damaged information ecology, where levels of mistrust and conspiratorial thinking go through the roof, reinforces a want to be ruled by someone who promises answers. They want an economic and social liferaft, not nuance.
Living in fear causes a cascading reaction that activates the fight-or-flight response at a constant level, which means that people’s brains actually change - we lose our ability to make well-reasoned, emotionally discharged decisions. Instead, everything becomes reactive, a panicked stormy attempt to get out ahead of the problem that they can’t get a clear perspective on.
Despite the novelty of your democratic experiment, it seems possible that you humans will live to improve it. Political tolerance is one way of finding your way to strength. There has to be an open exchange of ideas and interpretations. If you find that there are voices being silenced, you must fight to make room for their careful, public analysis, lest your satisfaction at their absence be the weakness in your armor.
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#Strongmen #Authoritarianism #Dictators
Environmentalism, equality, gun laws, lockdowns, these are all areas where people are interested in doing the RIGHT thing, but end up with very different ideas of what that looks like. ªº¬˚∆≤≥≤≥ Join the mailing list http://eepurl.com/gRUCZL ≤≥≤≥∆˚¬ºª
Though it might not look like it on the surface, most of the problems in the human world today are all about how to tell the difference between wrong and right - but most people don’t spend a ton of time trying to figure out if their definitions of those words make sense.
What happens is that a lot of people, when they start to think about the difference between right and wrong, conflate legality and morality. It’s a reasonable confusion - there have been thousands of years of empire on Earth, all of which have asserted that rules about good and bad behavior originate from a supernatural authority, rather than from the individual. But in the modern democratic age, it doesn’t make much sense to look to laws for moral guidance when you’re the ones expected to build the laws of the future.
In the absence of a trustworthy top-down source - whether that’s an institution, God, or nature itself - individuals have to take on the heavy mantle of moral reasoning for themselves. It can be hard, in an atomized isolating world to make sense of this responsibility. The Western world is one of the most permissive societies in the history of your species and it might feel impossible to establish the difference between right and wrong.
In building a moral framework, you really have to look out for motivated reasoning, which means that if you reeeeeaaaally want to do something, it’s going to be really easy to convince yourself that it’s morally okay. That’s because reason is a post-hoc justification that animals generally give to their actions after the fact. As David Hume, one of Kant’s contemporaries argued, reason is slave to the passions.
Remember, the ethical and legal system in which you live right now isn’t the best version of the world - it’s just the latest greatest adaptation in the aftermath of the church, the rise of reason and nation, and the emergence of the individual. What comes next, humans?
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#Moralpsychology #Morality #ScienceofCulture
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Metaphysics, Spirituality, Science of Consciousness,
Empiricism as the dominant way of knowing the world optimized technological progress, but also alienated humans because it often avoids the spiritual, motivational realm of biology beyond atoms crashing into one another.
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When it comes to Human science these days, all explanations eventually come back to physics. And while the mathematical convolutions of quantum theory and fluid dynamics can make humans better engineers, physics alone can’t address the emergent properties of biology: Why do you want what you want? Where does the human capacity for transcendent experience come from? What is religion, and why has it been so central to all of human history?
One possible explanation is that many phenomena cannot be reduced to pure physical mechanics. Birth, death, will, meaning, and love can’t be totally encompassed by a volumetric description of atoms drifting between synapses… which suggests that physicalist science can’t possibly yield answers to all of life’s questions. This doesn’t discount the contribution of a materialist worldview to humans’ technological development, but it does suggest a more integrated perspective is necessary.
Problem is, even with your ability to smash atoms together and your impressive technological advancements, you humans are no closer to answering the question of how to get along, or how to avoid cyclic social unrest… and perhaps it’s time to consider that the kind of science that will actually be able to deal with these questions will have to integrate the deep history of spirituality throughout your species’ Earthly history.
All of us animals live in a world that is impure and imperfect, and each of us must rise above that stain on a daily basis in order to keep from descending into an impenetrable darkness. Finding a language to scientifically address the transcendent might be the only way to find your way back to forgiving yourselves.
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#SpiritualEconomy #Consciousness #ScienceofCulture
Why would governments and corporations alike be interested in destabilizing society?
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Well, it depends on who’s responsible. A state like China, Russia, or Saudia Arabia might be interested in seeing the United States self-immolate to clear the way for their agendas on a global scale. Remember, Rome fell to civil war before being conquered from beyond its walls.
Then there's transnational and domestic actors, who can take many different forms: everyone from coal to big tech is very, very concerned with controlling public narratives. Why? To out-compete one another!
Bad actors to weaponize pessimism by creating exhaustion in the face of global problems. This can decrease voter turnout, decimate political organizing, and can ensure the status quo keeps purring along unchallenged.
These days, the biggest threat hanging over conflicting people’s heads isn’t mutually assured destruction by way of nuclear warheads - it’s an online battle for the heart and soul of the global populace.
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Subscribe and ask for notifications if you want to gear up to fight the declining spiritual economy, the appeal of moral relativism, and the unending appeal of strongmen… and beyond that, we’ve lined up even more conversations about space colonialism, paranormal psychology, and the ever mystified nature of consciousness.
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#cyberwarfare #misinformation #propaganda
Depressed, anxious, and not sure why? This is the story of how your love of creature comforts may be at the root of your problems - and what the science of Wim Hof says you can do about it.
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This is neurohacking at it’s finest - no need to buy anything, pay for courses, or even leave your house. If you’ve cleaned your room and made your bed, embracing the cold is the next step for building the iron discipline that’s absolutely necessary in your quest to make the world a better place.
In the interview that follows this episode we talk at length with Dr. Vaibhav Diwadkar, Wayne State neuropsychiatrist who’s been mapping the deep-brain changes that happen during meditation, deep breathing, and exposure to cold. It doesn’t happen overnight, but it looks like regularly overcoming your emotional aversion to unpleasant tasks can actually change the way you react to everything else that life throws at you.
Subscribe to stay up on what’s next - moral psychology, the economy of spirit, space agriculture, and more Wim Hof Science!
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#wimhof #breathwork #mindfulness
Earth’s online evolution - Technological explosions weather spiritual implosions...
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Like all ecosystems, the community that’s emerged on the internet requires a diversity of species to be optimally functional - and that threatened by the big tech monoculture emerging on Earth these days. To figure out what’s going on, we go back to the 1960s when it all started, and trace the explosion of online existence since then. Our conversation with Evan Bailyn, a 17-year veteran of getting websites to the front page of Google, considers what exactly the future of the internet might look like. His experience with the inner workings of the search behemoth leads us to a fascinating conversation about the things you won’t find on Google, the strange nature of niche radicalization, and what - if anything - is going to replace the big three that dominate the online world today.
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UCB biologist, Dr. Daniel Pauly on what breaks a scientific argument, the fate of your future seafood, and the limits of controlling one’s environment.
This conversation with Dr. Pauly, spanned many topics - ecology, how change is simultaneously difficult yet necessary, the political situation on Earth, and the strange nature of the human animal. Somewhere in there, we even tried to reckon with the non-material aspects of biology, and how futile it is to treat humans as nothing more than a stack of inanimate atoms. But more than anything else, the trio circled around the tricky question of starting points in science. How can we navigate to an explanation, if we aren’t sure of the phenomenon itself? Take, for example, the Earth’s focus on the causal relationship between man-made CO2 and global temperatures. This assumption about carbon dioxide then leads scientists to the conclusion that reducing its emission will ultimately stabilize the climate. But what if Earthlings have made a mistake, and managing CO2 is a necessary - rather than sufficient condition, for maintaining the wellbeing of the planet? What if there are other, equally insidious threats to humans and their habitat, like pesticides, industrial waste, single-use plastics, or overconsumption? Currently, the conversation about carbon dioxide is totalizing, with only one correct answer - that industrial interventions are necessary to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, and that the planet’s climate must be stabilized and prevented from further change. This is one of those cases where getting where you want to go, rather than just getting somewhere, requires more than a mastery of logic. It also requires a careful evaluation of that first assumption - much like navigating by the north star requires actually knowing the north star. When our ability to correctly estimate a reliable starting point is compromised - either by time, politics, or belief - it becomes almost impossible to reach a robust conclusion about anything - whether it’s orienteering, the fate of the climate, or what to have for breakfast. In the case of science, the systematic process by which we understand material existence, our conclusions can only be sturdy only if we start by considering all of the possibilities. If one refuses to consider a possibility because it complicates a political message or undermines a belief system, no amount of logic can lead to understanding.
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