Closer To Truth

This holiday season, support Closer To Truth with a tax-deductible donation of any amount.   What is intelligence, and how is AI emergence a natural consequence of evolution? In his book "What Is Intelligence?" and in this conversation, Google's Blaise Agüera y Arcas takes up the idea that prediction is fundamental not only to intelligence and the brain but to life itself, and explores the wide-ranging implications. These include radical new perspectives on the computational properties of living systems, the evolutionary and social origins of intelligence, the relationship between models and reality, entropy and the nature of time, the meaning of free will, the problem of consciousness, and the ethics of machine intelligence.   Blaise Agüera y Arcas is a VP/Fellow at Google, where he is the CTO of Technology & Society, and the founder of Paradigms of Intelligence, an organization dedicated to fundamental AI research. He is the author of Who Are We Now?, and his research has included work on privacy-preserving machine learning, on-device AI, large language models, and human identity.

Giving Tuesday is around the corner! Make a donation to Closer To Truth to help us continue exploring the world's deepest questions without the need for paywalls.   How do diverse religions/traditions treat the “person,” present status and afterlife future? Buddhism’s no self. Hinduism’s soul illuminating the mind. Prior lives in Eastern and African traditions. Body and soul, resurrection and judgment, in Abrahamic traditions.   Featuring interviews with Jay Garfield, Yang Xiao, Oludamini Ogunnaike, Imran Aijaz, Andrew Loke, and Swami Medhananda.

Make a donation to help Closer To Truth continue exploring the world's deepest questions without the need for paywalls.   The Ruliad is a term that Stephen Wolfram developed, which he describes as the entangled limit of everything that is computationally possible, the result of following all possible computational rules in all possible ways.   Stephen Wolfram is a British-American computer scientist, physicist, and businessman. He is known for his work in computer algebra and theoretical physics. In 2012, he was named a fellow of the American Mathematical Society. He is the founder and CEO of the software company Wolfram Research, where he works as chief designer of Mathematica and the Wolfram Alpha answer engine.

This giving season, contribute what you can to help Closer To Truth continue exploring the world's deepest questions.     Concepts of God/deities/ultimates in diverse, non-Western religions/traditions: Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, African. Is God/deities a “person?” Islam’s one transcendent God. Hinduism’s many schools: personal, impersonal, both. Buddhism’s no God but many deities.     Featuring interviews with Hamza Yusuf, Mohammed Saleh Zarepour, Oludamini Ogunnaike, Swami Medhananda, Venerable Dr. Yifa, and Yujin Nagasawa.

Support the show with a tax-deductible donation of any amount so we can continue exploring the world's biggest questions without the need for paywalls.   When the long-awaited day dawns and the aliens finally arrive on Earth, they might eat us and destroy the planet―or, just maybe, they might share the secrets of the Universe with us. When that time comes, will we be able to cross the communication barrier to beg for our lives? If the aliens do hold out those precious jewels of knowledge, will we even be able to grasp them? Professor Daniel Whiteson and Warner explode what we thought we knew about talking to our cosmic neighbors―and even science itself―by asking and answering questions both lighthearted and profound.   Whiteson's book, Do Aliens Speak Physics?: And Other Questions about Science and the Nature of Reality, is available for purchase now.

Make a donation to Closer To Truth to help us continue exploring the world's deepest questions without the need for paywalls.   What happens after we die? Is there life after death? If so, what kind of life? From heaven and hell to systems and cycles of reincarnation, we explore Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, Judaism, and Chinese traditions, as well as Christianity.   Featuring interviews with Hamza Yusuf, Carol Zaleski, Tao Jiang, Andrew Loke, and Yujin Nagasawa.  

Make a donation to Closer To Truth to help us continue exploring the world's deepest questions without the need for paywalls.     How do different religions/traditions address consciousness, our inner mental awareness? Is consciousness ultimate, as in Eastern traditions, or created by God, as in Abrahamic traditions? If ultimate, what is the relationship between personal and cosmic consciousness?     Featuring interviews with Jay Garfield, Swami Medhananda, Franklin Perkins, Swami Sarvapriyananda, Hamza Yusuf, and Aaron Segal.

Make a donation to Closer To Truth to help us continue exploring the world's deepest questions without the need for paywalls: https://shorturl.at/OnyRq   In the first two installments of a brand new, six-part interview series with Nobel Laureate Sir Roger Penrose, we explore his approach to the deep nature of reality. Trace the intellectual and scientific history of each of his major contributions to the fields of science and philosophy, the challenges he faced, the criticisms he received, and his overarching reflections today. Additionally, discover how Penrose thinks about physics and hear his contrarian view of the foundations of quantum mechanics.    Sir Roger Penrose is an English mathematician, mathematical physicist, philosopher of science, and Nobel Laureate in Physics. He is Emeritus Rouse Ball Professor of Mathematics at the University of Oxford, an emeritus fellow of Wadham College, Oxford, and an honorary fellow of St John's College, Cambridge, and University College London. Penrose has contributed significantly to the mathematical physics of general relativity and cosmology.

Contribute what you can to help Closer To Truth continue exploring the world's deepest questions without the need for paywalls.   Mathematics is like nothing else. The truths of math seem to be unrelated to anything else—independent of human beings, independent of the universe. The sum of 2 + 3 = 5 cannot not be true; this means that 3 + 2 = 5 would be true even if there were never any human beings, even if there were never a universe! When then, deeply, is mathematics?     Featuring interviews with Max Tegmark, Scott Aaronson, Mark Balaguer, Silvia Jonas, Gregory Benford, and Karen Uhlenbeck.

Make a donation to Closer To Truth to help us continue exploring the world's deepest questions without the need for paywalls.   Global Philosophy of Religion seeks diverse views and fresh ways of thinking from different religions/traditions about Ultimate Questions: God, consciousness, person/self, evil/suffering, afterlife/reincarnation, world to come. It does not avoid hard differences; it celebrates them.   Featuring interviews with Yujin Nagasawa, Swami Sarvapriyananda, Venerable Dr. Yifa, Tao Jiang, Hamza Yusuf, Aaron Segal, Oludamini Ogunnaike, and Helen De Cruz.