Robert Lawrence Kuhn on "A Landscape of Consciousness"

Support Closer To Truth with a tax-deductible donation of any amount to help us continue exploring in the new year.   Closer To Truth host Robert Lawrence Kuhn recently published an extensive new article titled "A Landscape of Consciousness: Toward a taxonomy of explanations and implications". The paper covers the field of consciousness studies in its entirety as well as the consequences of consciousness including artificial intelligence (AI), life after death, and virtual immortality.   Read Kuhn's article on the Closer To Truth website.   Robert Lawrence Kuhn, PhD., is the co-creator, executive producer, writer, and host of Closer To Truth, the PBS/public television series on Cosmos, Life, Mind, and Meaning that presents leading scientists, philosophers, and creative thinkers discussing the fundamental questions of existence. He recently published an extensive article—"A Landscape of Consciousness: Toward a taxonomy of explanations and implications"—covering the field of consciousness studies in its entirety.

Support Closer To Truth this season with a tax-deductible donation. Your contributions directly fuels a new year of exploring life's biggest questions.   If God exists, did God create everything? Did God create out of literally "nothing"? Suppose there was no beginning to the cosmos, just the universe going through endless cycles, what then? And what about "abstract objects" like logic and numbers, which seem to exist without any cause and no creator?   Featuring interviews with William Craig, Robert Russell, John Polkinghorne, and Brian Leftow.

Support Closer To Truth this holiday season with a tax-deductible donation of any amount. Your contribution directly fuels our exploration of life's biggest questions with new contributors and differing perspectives. Give today.   Time seems natural and absolute: the flow of moments one following another from the unknown past to the knife's edge present to the unknowable future. But this is not so. Einstein shocked the world by showing that time was "relative." What's the latest about time?   Featuring interviews with Gregory Benford, Kip Thorne, Nima Arkani-Hamed, and Lee Smolin.

Donate to Closer To Truth and help us continue producing thought-provoking interviews with experts across the globe.   All who affirm that God does exist should examine the strong attacks of those who conclude that God does not exist, and then assess the sharp counterattacks of scholarly believers. Belief in God is too important to be determined by cultural circumstances.   Featuring interviews with Susan Blackmore, Peter Atkins, Alvin Plantinga, and Steven Weinberg.   You can watch the full episode on our YouTube channel here.

Donate to Closer To Truth this holiday season to help us keep our content free and without paywalls.   Galaxies and clusters of galaxies, untold billions of them, adorn the cosmos. How did such large-scale structure of the universe come about?   Featuring interviews with John Richard Gott III, Abraham Loeb, George Smoot, and Saul Perlmutter.

Donate to Closer To Truth and help us keep our content free and without paywalls: https://shorturl.at/OnyRq   Are human beings purely physical? Evolved at random and destined to die, extinguished forever? Or are we something more? A spirit or a soul, with existence beyond? What's the relationship between our brains and our consciousness, between the stuff in our skulls and the essence in our minds?   Featuring interviews with Ned Block, Dean Zimmerman, Colin McGinn, Charles Tart, and Henry Stapp.

Make a donation of any amount to help us continue exploring the world's deepest questions with new and exciting thinkers.   Astrobiologist and theoretical physicist Sara Imari Walker shares an intriguing new scientific theory that explains what life is and how it emerges. What is life? This is among the most difficult open problems in science, right up there with the nature of consciousness and the existence of matter. All the definitions we have fall short. None help us understand how life originates or the full range of possibilities for what life on other planets might look like.   Walker's latest book Life As No One Knows It: The Physics of Life's Emergence, is available for purchase now.   Sara Imari Walker is an astrobiologist and theoretical physicist interested in the origin of life and discovering alien life on other worlds. She is deputy director of the Beyond Center for Fundamental Concepts in Science and a professor in the School of Earth and Space Exploration at Arizona State University. She is also a fellow of the Berggruen Institute and a member of the external faculty at the Santa Fe Institute. She is the recipient of the Stanley L. Miller Early-Career Award for her research on the origin of life, and her research team at ASU is internationally regarded as being among the leading labs aiming to build a fundamental theory for understanding what life is.   Watch more Closer To Truth Chats here.

Support Closer To Truth and help us continue exploring the world's deepest questions with a donation of any amount.   Renowned biologist Richard Dawkins discusses his views on topics including philosophy of biology, evolution, atheism and religion, extraterrestrial life, and human and animal culture.  Richard Dawkins is a British evolutionary biologist, zoologist, science communicator, and author. He is one of the world’s most eminent writers and thinkers of our time, and a major contributor to the public understanding of the science of evolution. He is currently an emeritus fellow of New College, Oxford, and a Fellow of the Royal Society and of the Royal Society of Literature.

Make a donation of any amount to help support Closer To Truth: https://shorturl.at/OnyRq   Whether extra-terrestrial intelligences exist has profound implications for human religion. We are either alone or not alone in the universe, but no matter the ultimate answer, theists and atheists will each mold that answer, alone or not alone, to fit their opposing worldviews.   Featuring interviews with Steven Dick, Russell Stannard, Paul Davies, Robin Collins, and Douglas Vakoch.   Closer to Truth presents the world’s greatest thinkers exploring humanity’s deepest questions. Discover fundamental issues of existence. Engage new and diverse ways of thinking. Appreciate intense debates. Share your own opinions. Seek your own answers.

Donate to Closer To Truth and help us keep our content free and without paywalls: https://shorturl.at/OnyRq   Harvard and MIT's influential humanist chaplain Greg Epstein discusses his new book, Tech Agnostic: How Technology Became the World's Most Powerful Religion, and Why It Desperately Needs a Reformation. In our tumultuous era of religious extremism and rampant capitalism, Tech Agnostic offers a new path forward, where we maintain enough critical distance to remember that all that glitters is not gold—nor is it God.   Greg M. Epstein serves as Humanist Chaplain at Harvard & MIT, where he advises students, faculty, and staff members on ethical and existential concerns from a humanist perspective. He was TechCrunch's first “ethicist in residence” and has been called “a symbol of the transition in how Americans relate to organized religion” (The Conversation). He is also the author of the New York Times-bestselling book Good Without God.