Skeptic

In the foreword to Why We Believe in God(s): A Concise Guide to the Science of Faith, Richard Dawkins invites us to take an imaginative journey back thousands of years in human history, to a moment in Africa when we are a small hunter-gatherer hominin wandering in search of food. Suddenly, he hears a noise in the tall grass around him. That ancestor of ours faced ...

Consciousness is often defined as “what it’s like to be something,” inspired by the philosopher Thomas Nagel’s 1974 classic paper, “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” As he explained the problem: “An organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that it is like to be that organism—something that it is like for the organism.”

It has now been over 30 years since Australian philosopher David Chalmers posed the “Hard Problem of Consciousness,” one that has intrigued philosophers of mind, neuroscientists, and psychologists ever since.

Following a public lecture I gave in 2005 at the L.A. Public Library, I was buttonholed by a documentary filmmaker with ambitions of exposing the conspiracy behind 9/11.

“You mean the conspiracy by Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda to attack the United States?” I asked rhetorically, knowing what was to come.

“That’s what they want you to believe,” he sa...

Stand at the edge of the Grand Canyon and something happens in your chest that a photograph can never capture. See a celebrity in person and they seem lit from within, even when you know better. Fall in love and the other person briefly stops being a person and becomes a kind of doorway. Walk into an old cathedral, or a stadium before kickoff, and the atmosphere seems to c...