If you are anything like me, you are feeling a general uneasiness as we enter Advent. We’re still isolated and beginning to ponder the likelihood of a virtual (or at least socially distanced) Christmas Eve. How can we remember when we are not gathered, telling the stories of young Mary and John the Baptist? What is lost when we don’t light candles and sing Silent Night, Holy Night?
Closer to Truth is a television series that asks leading thinkers to consider humanity’s deepest questions. Host Robert Lawrence Kuhn interviews people from a range of academic disciplines on diverse topics in three major categories — cosmos, consciousness, and meaning.
This year will be different for many of us, perhaps unlike any other. Maybe, the only familiar part of this Thanksgiving will be the memories of past holidays spent together.
Fortunately, in this pandemic-defined year, such memories can be a powerful part of how we cope and maintain hope amidst all the changes.
This week, we return to the What kind of God…? theme and ask: What kind of God would create a world and creatures so dependent on memory?
This 90-minute documentary examines free will from scientific, philosophical, and theological viewpoints. Without providing definitive answers, it takes on the deep questions of morality, autonomy, and accountability.
We often link brain power to intelligence or some innate talent. Things like memory, creativity, mathematical ability certainly are amazing capacities of the human brain. But I think the most amazing thing the brain does is change. It’s the power of those synapses and neurons and axons to recreate the pathways necessary for change.
Can our senses be trusted? “Scientists are working to understand the nature of subjective experience and whether or not expectation or motivation might actually result in different representations of sensory information in our brains.”