COSMOS - Are there revolutionary discoveries yet to be made? Radical revelations and shocking secrets? Does physical reality go beyond what we know today? Far beyond?
Featuring Lawrence Krauss, Michio Kaku, Rupert Sheldrake, Paul Davies, and David Chalmers.
CONSCIOUSNESS - What is happening in our brains when we perceive and appreciate the arts? What are the neural substrates of artistic sensations, feelings and emotions? How do diverse arts affect the brain?
CONSCIOUSNESS - What is the nature of art? What makes something “art”, and why should we value it? What is aesthetics and art theory? Can philosophy of art enhance appreciation and practice of the arts?
COSMOS - How does metaphysics contribute to our understanding of the world? It asks the most profound questions: What kinds of things exist? How does causality work? Sound too abstract? How about: Does God exist? Are you a soul?
Featuring Michio Kaku, Bede Rundle, John Leslie, Richard Swinburne, and Hubert Dreyfus.
COSMOS - Call all-that-exists “something.” Why is there “something” rather than “nothing”? The question haunts me. Why is there anything at all?
Featuring Colin McGinn, Peter van Inwagen, Philip Clayton, George Lakoff, and Dean Zimmerman.
CONCIOUSNESS - Can art inform the classic mind-body problem? While the relationship between mental activity and physical brain continues to baffle (especially consciousness), can the existence and process of art provide insight?
COSMOS - Of what is reality made? What are the most basic building blocks from which the cosmos is constructed? Particles? Mass-Energy? Forces? Fields? A new candidate is ‘Information’—‘IT from BIT’.
Featuring Seth Lloyd, Sean Carroll, Raphael Bousso, Alan Guth, and Christof Koch.
CONSCIOUSNESS - What is free will? Do we have free will? The ‘Big Questions in Free Will’ project tackles these issues in a multi-year study. In Part I, scientists and philosophers research, test, and advance thinking on free will.
Featuring Alfred Mele, Galen Strawson, John Searle, Peter van Inwagen, Christof Koch, Uri Maoz, Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, Thalia Wheatley, and Peter Tse.
COSMOS - What’s the ultimate stuff of reality? What’s absolutely fundamental and non-reducible — the fewest number of categories within which every specific thing, of every general kind, can be classified?
Featuring Barry Loewer, David Albert, Luke Barnes, Raymond Tallis, and George Ellis.
COSMOS - Perhaps we cannot know the reason for the universe, if there is any. But is it even possible for the universe to have a reason? If yes, how would natural regularities and rules compare with some kind of goal or God?
Featuring Alexander Vilenkin, John Polkinghorne, Michael Shermer, Stephen Wolfram, and Stuart Kauffman.
