Science, Philosophy and Spirituality
A description of what motivated me to develop a 12-part course for u3a, covering our common reality, the shaping of the modern world, and issues facing the modern world.
Read More
Category: Philosophy
Don’t Just Look Up – Pay Attention
Netflix’s new satirical science fiction film, Don’t Look Up, set viewing records when it started streaming on Christmas Eve in 2021. It lampoons government, political and media indifference to a catastrophic threat to the survival of homo sapiens, but unsurprisingly offers no diagnosis for how humanity got itself into such a dire state. Coincidentally, Iain McGilchrist’s magisterial new book The Matter with Things was published just six weeks before the movie, and it offers a vision based in well-researched neuroscience of how humanity could return to a better way of living.
Read More
The Human Predicament
Homo Sapiens has been hugely successful as a species. We may have evolved from...
Read More
Harnessing Diversity
Homo sapiens has been hugely successful as a species. We may have evolved from other animals, but with the development of self-aware consciousness, we’ve transcended the limits of purely biological evolution. Through our unique abilities we’ve created the Anthropocene epoch on earth, full of amazing technological and artistic achievements. But in the process, we’ve brought about an ecological crisis that threatens the planet with serious damage and our own species with extinction. No, not the current pandemic, but rather the whole nexus of challenges that include climate change, habitat loss, biodiversity loss, environmental pollution, overuse of resources and growing inequality. What you might call the “human predicament”.
Read More