Nick Bostrom is a Swedish philosopher who teaches at the University of Oxford. His areas of interest include the Simulation Hypothesis (that reality is a computer simulation run by a hyper-advanced ‘post-human’ civilisation) and the ethics of human enhancement (the ethical issues surrounding improving human capacities through science and technology). He is a proponent of…
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Having control of one’s body and one’s mind – also called self-ownership – is, I believe, the most basic human right anyone can have. Mill summed up it nicely in On Liberty: “Over one’s mind and over one’s body the individual is sovereign” – although he did (rightly so) allow for exceptions involving actions which…
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Lucid dreaming is the practice of being aware that you are dreaming. People want to lucid dream in order to gain greater control over the dream space. There is also some evidence that lucid dreaming can have various mental health benefits. Lucid dreaming was not scientifically investigated until 1978; however, the first documentation of lucid…
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‘Nothing’ is a tricky concept to think about and it is as much a philosophical problem as it is a scientific problem. The question “Why is there something rather than nothing?” has been tackled by different philosophers in different ways. Parmenides, the ancient Greek philosopher, stated that “nothing comes from nothing” which means for something…
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Max Tegmark is a Swedish-American cosmologist. He has made important contributions to physics, such as measuring dark matter and increasing of understanding of how light in the early universe informs the Big Bang model. He currently teaches at MIT and has proposed his own Theory of Everything (TOE). This Theory of Everything is also known…
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