Book Review: The Spell of the Sensuous by David Abram

I really do consider this a truly paradigm-shifting book even though I didn’t buy into all of the assumptions written here. Author David Abram admits that even though there might not be any ‘literal truth’ to the animistic claims of indigenous cultures, he says this is irrelevant because for Abram truths can be ‘literal’ only…

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The Impact of Learning Critical Thinking and Ethics From an Early Age

Critical thinking is a skills-based subject, as opposed to a content-based subject. The majority of what kids learn at school is content-based and little (if anything) is taught about how to think critically. You will have to wait until AS/A Levels until studying critical thinking becomes a subject option and even then only a handful…

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In Defence of Philosophical Materialism

Physicalism is a philosophical position which asserts that everything that exists is physical. This philosophy is commonly referred to as materialism, which has a distinct definition, but I will use these terms – as well as ‘physical’ and ‘material’ –  interchangeably for the sake of this discussion. The physicalist outlook is contested by many in the ‘psychedelic’…

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Biocentrism: Robert Lanza’s Controversial View of the Universe

The ‘biocentric universe’, also known as ‘biocentrism’, was a concept proposed in 2007 by Dr Robert Lanza, who works in the fields of regenerative medicine and biology. The biocentric hypothesis states that life and consciousness are fundamental to the nature of the universe – life creates the universe and not the other way around. From…

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The Implications of Fully Immersive Virtual Reality

The whole concept of virtual reality – especially full immersion in a virtual, artificial world – has been a favourite topic of many science fiction writers. The idea has also featured in many speculative and philosophical questions, such as: What is reality? How do we distinguish reality from illusion? And so on. Loosely defined, virtual…

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