A tightly formal argument for incompatibilism: if determinism is true, our present acts are the necessary consequence of the distant past plus the laws of nature — neither of which is ‘up to us’ — so our present acts are not ‘up to us’ either, however things feel from the inside.
The direct challenge to perennialism: holds that there is no “pure,” unmediated mystical experience at all — every mystical experience is actively shaped, from the moment it occurs, by the mystic’s pre-existing language, concepts, expectations, and cultural and religious background.
Holds that past, present, and future are all equally real, laid out together in a single four-dimensional ‘block’ of spacetime — meaning the flow of time from present to future is a feature of human perception rather than of the universe itself.
A neuroscience framework proposing that the quality and richness of a conscious state tracks the entropy, or disorder, of brain activity — with ordinary adult waking consciousness a relatively low-entropy, tightly regulated state, and psychedelic and other altered states a shift toward a less constrained, higher-entropy “primary” state, correlating with reduced activity in the brain’s default mode network and the subjective experience often described as “ego dissolution.”
A middle position holding that the past and present are real, but the future does not yet exist at all — reality is a spacetime ‘block’ that is continuously growing as new moments come into being at its leading edge, the present.
A landmark, carefully controlled clinical study finding that psilocybin, administered in a supportive clinical research setting, could reliably occasion experiences meeting standard psychological criteria for a “complete” mystical experience — comparable in structure to those reported in spontaneous religious and contemplative contexts — with many participants rating it among the most personally and spiritually significant experiences of their lives at long-term follow-up.
A probabilistic framework for estimating the number of communicating civilizations in the galaxy, multiplying factors like star formation rate, the fraction of stars with planets, and the fraction that develop intelligent, communicating life.
A body of experimental work using EEG and fMRI to look for the brain’s decision-making process before a person becomes consciously aware of “deciding” — used as an empirical stress-test for the whole free will debate rather than a philosophical position in itself.
An interdisciplinary research program using brain-imaging technology to study what happens in the brain during prayer, meditation, and other religious or spiritual practices — including studies of Tibetan Buddhist meditators and Franciscan nuns in prayer showing consistent, measurable changes in brain regions associated with attention and spatial orientation.
Argues that complex life requires an improbable conjunction of astronomical and geological circumstances, making simple microbial life plausibly common but complex or intelligent life exceedingly rare in the universe.