Understanding how brains produce consciousness is one of the great scientific challenges of our age. Some philosophers argue that consciousness is something “extra,” beyond the physical workings of the brain. Others think that if we persist in our standard scientific methods, our questions about consciousness will eventually be answered. And some even suggest that the mystery is so deep, it will never be solved. Decades have been spent trying to explain consciousness from within our current scientific paradigm, but little progress has been made. Now, Philip Goff offers an exciting alternative that could pave the way forward. Rooted in an analysis of the philosophical underpinnings of modern science and based on the early twentieth-century work of Arthur Eddington and Bertrand Russell, Goff makes the case for panpsychism, a theory which posits that consciousness is not confined to biological entities but is a fundamental feature of all physical matter — from subatomic particles to the human brain. In Galileo’s Error, he has provided the first step on a new path to the final theory of human consciousness. Shermer and Goff discuss: the problem Galileo’s approach to science solved, Galileo’s error in solving the consciousness problem, that is the qualitative, Dualism, Monism, Panpsychism, Material Monism, Mind Monism, and Idealism, hard problem of consciousness defined, how consciousness is at the bottom of reality, why science cannot discover the ultimate nature of reality, Model Dependent Realism, philosophy, and science, Arthur Stanley Eddington and Bertrand Russell build panpsychism back into science, philosophical zombies and the “other minds problem,” free will, determinism, compatibilism, and panpsychism, objective moral values and science, fine tuning and the multiverse, and implications of panpsychism for attitudes toward nature and the meaning of life. Philip Goff is a philosopher who teaches at Durham University. He is the author of Consciousness and Fundamental Reality and has published more than 40 academic papers. His writing has also appeared in many newspapers and magazines, including The Guardian and The Times Literary Supplement, and he has guest-edited an issue of Philosophy Now. He lives in Durham, England.

The provocative thesis of Break It Up is simple: The United States has never lived up to its name—and never will. The disunionist impulse may have found its greatest expression in the Civil War, but as Break It Up shows, the seduction of secession wasn’t limited to the South or the 19thcentury. It was there at our founding and has never gone away. Investigative journalist Richard Kreitner takes readers on a revolutionary journey through American history, revealing the power and persistence of disunion movements in every era and region. Each New England town after Plymouth was a secession from another; the 13 colonies viewed their Union as a means to the end of securing independence, not an end in itself; George Washington feared separatism west of the Alleghenies; Aaron Burr schemed to set up a new empire; John Quincy Adams brought a Massachusetts town’s petition for dissolving the United States to the floor of Congress; and abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison denounced the Constitution as a pro-slavery pact with the devil. From the “cold civil war” that pits partisans against one another to the modern secession movements in California and Texas, the divisions that threaten to tear America apart today have centuries-old roots in the earliest days of our Republic. Richly researched and persuasively argued, Break It Up will help readers make fresh sense of our fractured age. Shermer and Kreitner discuss: what happens if Trump loses the 2020 election and refuses to leave, the possibility of the secession of California, Oregon and Washington, States rights vs. Federal power in issues like climate change, abortion, health care, etc., how Native American tribes and nations governed themselves and what the colonists learned from them, how the 1st colonial revolution was fought not to create a federation but to destroy one when Boston rebelled against the Crown-backed Dominion of New England, separatists movements throughout our history, Aaron Burr’s attempts to create a new nation he would head, spread of slavery to the west and Jefferson’s fear that it sounded like a “fire bell in the night,” why John Quincy Adams introduced a petition demanding the dissolution of the U.S.: If the day should ever come, (may Heaven avert it,) when the affection of the people of these states shall be alienated from each other; when the fraternal spirit shall give away to cold indifference, or collisions of interest shall fester into hatred, far better will it be for the people of the disunited states, to part in friendship from each other, than to be held together by constraint. how Southern states initially sought to expand the union of slave holding states, not secession, why reconstruction failed, the Civil War of the 1960s, Brexit, Texit, and Calexit, Russia support for American secessionist movements, James Madison’s observation (in Federalist Paper No. 51) about the problem all human groups/tribes/nations must solve: But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself. Kreitner’s summation of America’s irrepressible conflict “The ‘irrepressible conflict’ was not just between North and South, freedom and slavery; it reflected something even deeper. The truly ‘irrepressible’ conflict was between union and disunion, whose forces bringing American together and those tearing them apart.” Richard Kreitner is a contributing writer to The Nation. He is the author of Booked: A Traveler’s Guide to Literary Locations Around the World. A graduate of McGill University, he has also written for The New York Times, Slate, Salon, The Baffler, Raritan, The Forward, and the Boston Globe. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and daughter.

The common narrative of Neanderthals is that they were a group of dullard losers whose extinction 40,000 years ago was due to smarter competition and a little of interbreeding with our own forebears. Likening someone to a Neanderthal was and, most likely, still is a top-rate anthropological insult. But, in the past few decades, Neanderthal finds have greatly contradicted our perception of the species. In Kindred, Rebecca Wragg Sykes combs through the avalanche of scientific discoveries of the species and uses her experience at the cutting-edge of Paleolithic research to share our new understanding of Neanderthals, shoving aside cliches of rag-clad brutes in an icy wasteland. She reveals them to be curious, clever connoisseurs of their world, technologically inventive and ecologically adaptable. They ranged across vast tracts of tundra and steppe, but also stalked in dappled forests and waded in the Mediterranean Sea. Above all, they were successful survivors for more than 300,000 years, during times of massive climatic upheaval. Shermer and Sykes also discuss: the nature of species and if Neanderthals and Homo sapiens are one or two species, the deep time span of Neanderthals, the wide geography of Neanderthals, how archaeologists work today to discern Neanderthal lives and minds, Neanderthal DNA and what we have learned from it, Neanderthal bodies, Neanderthal brains and minds, Neanderthal tools and what they tell us about their lives, Neanderthal hunting/caloric needs, Neanderthal art, Neanderthal sex and love and social lives, Neanderthal death, burial, afterlife beliefs, and possible religious beliefs, and extinction: what happened to the Neanderthals? Rebecca Wragg Sykes has been fascinated by the vanished worlds of the Pleistocene ice ages since childhood, and followed this interest through a career researching the most enigmatic characters of all, the Neanderthals. After a Ph.D. on the last Neanderthals living in Britain, she worked in France at the world-famous PACEA laboratory, Université de Bordeaux, on topics ranging from Neanderthal landscapes and territories in the Massif Central region of south-east France, to examining how they were the first ancient humans to produce a synthetic material and tools made of multiple parts. Alongside her academic activities, she has also earned a reputation for exceptional public engagement. The public can follow her research through a personal blog and Twitter account, and she frequently writes for the popular media, including the Scientific American and Guardian science blogs. Becky is passionate about sharing the privileged access scientists have to fascinating discoveries about the Neanderthals. She is also co-founder of the influential Trowelblazers project, which highlights women archaeologists, palaeontologists and geologists through innovative outreach and collaboration.

This classic lecture on skepticism was given by James Randi on March 22, 1992 at the inaugural session of the Distinguished Science Lecture Series hosted by Michael Shermer and presented by The Skeptics Society in California (1992–2015). The transcript for this lecture appeared in Skeptic magazine 1.1 (1992). James Randi presents an amazing first-hand analysis of astonishing claims encountered in his European visit. New-found freedoms stimulate rampant pseudoscientific practices in eastern bloc nations. With wit and wonderfully illustrative examples, Randi teaches us several lessons on the scientific investigation of unusual claims. Famed magician and investigator of paranormal claims, Randi is best selling author of The Faith Healers and Flim Flam! Randi was awarded the prestigious MacArthur Grant for his investigation of faith healers.

The United States today is hopelessly polarized; the political Right and Left have hardened into rigid and deeply antagonistic camps, preventing any sort of progress. Amid the bickering and inertia, the promise of the 1960s—when we came together as a nation to fight for equality and universal justice—remains unfulfilled. As Shelby Steele reveals in Shame, the roots of this impasse can be traced back to that decade of protest, when in the act of uncovering and dismantling our national hypocrisies—racism, sexism, militarism—liberals internalized the idea that there was something inauthentic, if not evil, in the America character. Since then, liberalism has been wholly concerned with redeeming modern America from the sins of the past, and has derived its political legitimacy from the premise of a morally bankrupt America. The result has been a half-century of well-intentioned but ineffective social programs, such as Affirmative Action. Steele reveals that not only have these programs failed, but they have in almost every case actively harmed America’s minorities and poor. Ultimately, Steele argues, post-60s liberalism has utterly failed to achieve its stated aim: true equality. Liberals, intending to atone for our past sins, have ironically perpetuated the exploitation of this country’s least fortunate citizens. Approaching political polarization from a wholly new perspective, Steele offers a rigorous critique of the failures of liberalism and a cogent argument for the relevance and power of conservatism. Shermer and Steele discuss: 30th anniversary of his book The Content of Our Character, and what has changed in race relations in America in those 30 years? Steele’s response to President Johnson’s famous quote: “Freedom is not enough. You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him; bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, ‘you are free to compete with all the others,’ and still justly believe that you have been completely fair.” why “The promised land guarantees nothing. It is only an opportunity, not a deliverance.”, literal truths vs. poetic truths and power: “What actually happened was that liberalism turned to poetic truth when America’s past sins were no longer literally true enough to support liberal policies and the liberal claim on power. The poetic truth of black victimization seeks to compensate for America’s moral evolution. It tries to keep alive the justification for liberal power even as that justification has been greatly nullified by America’s moral development.”   political correctness is the enforcement arm of poetic truth, black families & fatherless homes, white guilt, race fatigue, reparations, anti-racism, achievement gap, Princeton racism letter, race and IQ, SAT tests, BLM and the nuclear family, training and sensitivity programs. Shermer and Steele also discuss his new film, produced with his son Eli Steele, titled What Killed Michael Brown? Steele: “We human beings never use race except as a means to power. Race is never an end. It is always a means, and it has no role in human affairs except as a corruption.” “America’s original sin is not slavery. It is simply the use of race as a means to power. Whether for good or ill, race is a corruption. Always. And it always turns one group into the convenience of another group.” “Liberalism’s great sin was to steal responsibility for black problems away from black people, leaving them vulnerable to destructive social forces, such as the drug epidemic of the 70s and 80s. It was the suffering of blacks that justified liberalism’s demand for power, but this only relegates blacks to permanent victimhood and alienates them from the power to uplift themselves.” Shelby Steele is the Robert J. and Marion E. Oster Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution. Winner of the Bradley Prize and a National Humanities Medal and the author of the National Book Critics Circle award-winning The Content of Our Character, Steele lives in the Central Coast of California.

In this special episode of the Science Salon Podcast, Michael Shermer catches up with Douglas Murray one year after the publication of his bestselling book The Madness of Crowds, which was featured in Science Salon # 87 in October 2019. Murray’s book is now out in paperback with an Afterword update on all that has happened the past year, one of the most momentous in living memory. Shermer and Murray discuss: why he wasn’t “cancelled” after The Madness of Crowds was published and became a bestseller, what people should do if they’re cancelled, shamed, mobbed, or accused of being racist, misogynist, transphobic, or bigoted and they know they’re not, how to fight back against wokeness, political correctness, and identity politics, updates on the featured topics in The Madness of Crowds: gay, women, race, trans, J.K. Rowling and “people who menstruate” (if only there was a single word for that phrase), statues and why some people want them taken down (Lord Nelson may be next…find out why), why leftists think everyone (except them) are racists and why they’re really making these accusations, why we should be suspect of the motives of social justice warriors (who are anti-social, against justice, and not warriors), Michael Brown, George Floyd, and police violence, white fragility, white guilt, BLM, and anti-racism, corporate sensitivity training programs and why they’re really being conducted, what could happen after the 2020 election, depending on who wins, and comparing 2020 to 1968, and what the future holds for Western culture. In The Madness of Crowds Douglas Murray investigates the dangers of “woke” culture and the rise of identity politics. In lively, razor-sharp prose he examines the most controversial issues of our moment: sexuality, gender, technology and race, with interludes on the Marxist foundations of “wokeness”, the impact of tech and how, in an increasingly online culture, we must relearn the ability to forgive. One of the few writers who dares to counter the prevailing view and question the dramatic changes in our society — from gender reassignment for children to the impact of transgender rights on women — Murray’s penetrating book clears a path of sanity through the fog of our modern predicament. Douglas Murray is a regular columnist for both the Spectator and Standpoint and writes frequently for a variety of other publications, including the Sunday Times and Wall Street Journal. A prolific debater, Douglas has spoken on a variety of prominent platforms, including at the British and European Parliaments and the White House.

From the day her daughter was born, science journalist Marta Zaraska fretted about what she and her family were eating. She fasted, considered adopting the keto diet, and ran a half-marathon. She bought goji berries and chia seeds and ate organic food. But then her research brought her to read countless scientific papers and to interview dozens of experts in various fields of study, including molecular biochemistry, epidemiology and neuroscience. What Marta discovered shattered her long-held beliefs about aging and longevity. A strong support network of family and friends, she learned, lowers mortality risk by about 45 percent, while exercise only lowers it by about 23 percent. Volunteering your free time lowers it by 22 percent or so, while certain health fads like turmeric haven’t been shown to help at all. These revelations led Marta Zaraska to a simple conclusion: In addition to healthy nutrition and physical activity, deepening friendships, practicing empathy and contemplating your purpose in life can improve your lifespan. Shermer and Zaraska also discuss: diet, nutrition, and supplements: what works, what doesn’t, and what about meat? exercise: how much, what type, and when? the causal mechanisms behind how relationships and marriage effect health, how friendships and community affect longevity, how religion makes people healthier and longer lived, why we need others and why handshakes and hugs will return after COVID-19, the harmful effects of loneliness and isolation, the deleterious effects of stress, and how leading a purposeful and meaningful life leads to longevity. Marta Zaraska is a Canadian-Polish science journalist. She has written about nutrition and psychology for the Washington Post, Scientific American, The Atlantic, The Los Angeles Times, New Scientist, and several other publications. She is the author of Meathooked: The History and Science of Our 2.5-Million-Year Obsession with Meat (Basic Books, 2016), which has been translated into Japanese, Korean, simplified Chinese, Spanish and Polish, and chosen by the journal Nature as one of “the best science picks” in March 2016. Meathookedhas also been praised in The Wall Street Journal, Discover Magazine, Time, The Washington Post, Kirkus Reviews, Natural History Magazine, etc. She has also contributed a chapter to the recently published The Reducetarian Solution (TarcherPerigee, 2017) alongside Mark Bittman, Michael Shermer, and Peter Singer.

There’s a war against truth and if we don’t win it, intellectual freedom will be a casualty. The West’s commitment to freedom, reason, and true liberalism has never been more seriously threatened than it is today by the stifling forces of political correctness. Dr. Gad Saad exposes the bad ideas—what he calls “idea pathogens”—that are killing common sense and rational debate. Incubated in our universities and spread through the tyranny of political correctness, these ideas are endangering our most basic freedoms—including freedom of thought and speech. The danger is grave, but as Dr. Saad shows, politically correct dogma is riddled with logical fallacies. We have powerful weapons to fight back with—if we have the courage to use them. A provocative guide to defending reason and intellectual freedom and a battle cry for the preservation of our fundamental rights, The Parasitic Mind will be the most controversial and talked-about book of the year. Shermer and Saad discuss: which idea pathogens are the most dangerous, the analogy between biological and ideological parasites, the origin of political correctness and how it was corrupted, identity politics and how it perpetrates bigotry, racism, and misogyny, the psychology of victimhood status (why would anyone want to be a victim?), virtue signaling and why it isn’t virtuous, why social justice is injustice, social justice warriors as sneaky fuckers, the corruption of postmodernism, which began as a form of rational skepticism, Islamophobia, diversity, inclusion and equity, safe spaces, microaggressions, trigger warnings, What is liberalism, anyway? the paradox of tolerance, the dual search for freedom and truth, free speech as the foundation of all other rights, Ostrich Parasitic Syndrome, Collective Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy, nomological networks of cumulative evidence in the quest for truth, and how big a problem are we really facing? Gad Saad, Ph.D. (Montreal, Canada), host of the popular YouTube show The Saad Truth and blogger for Psychology Today, is a professor of marketing at the John Molson School of Business at Concordia University. He holds the Concordia University Research Chair in Evolutionary Behavioral Sciences and Darwinian Consumption and is the author of The Evolutionary Bases of Consumption, plus numerous scientific papers.

Does the universe have a speed limit? If not, some effects could happen at the same instant as the actions that caused them — and some effects, ludicrously, might even happen before their causes. By one hundred years ago, it seemed clear that the speed of light was the fastest possible speed. Causality was safe. And then quantum mechanics happened, introducing spooky connections that seemed to circumvent the law of cause and effect. Inspired by the new physics, psychologist Carl Jung and physicist Wolfgang Pauli explored a concept called synchronicity, a weird phenomenon they thought could link events without causes. Synchronicity tells that sprawling tale of insight and creativity, and asks where these ideas — some plain crazy, and others crazy powerful — are taking the human story next. Shermer and Halpern discuss: Model-Dependent Realism, the idea from Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow that our understanding of nature depends on the model we apply to it, and that we cannot define science as an asymptotic curve toward Truth, from Newton to Einstein to Quantum Physics, Platonic ideals/idealism, Is the universe mathematical? Where/what are “laws of nature”? What is gravity? What is causality and how is it determined? quantum entanglement and what it says about our understanding of causality, Bell’s inequality, backward causality, Hume’s “constant conjunction” definition of causality and it’s limitations, Hume’s “counterfactual” theory of causality, Bogus mechanisms of causality: impetus, ether, energy fields, ESP, The friendship of Wolfgang Pauli and Carl Jung, Jungian archetypes and how scientists think about them, God, religion, and spirituality. Paul Halpern is a professor of physics at the University of the Sciences in Philadelphia and the author of sixteen popular science books, including The Quantum Labyrinth and Einstein’s Dice and Schrödinger’s Cat. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship and is a fellow of the American Physical Society. He lives near Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

WEIRD: Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic. Unlike much of the world today, and most people who have ever lived, WEIRD people are highly individualistic, self-obsessed, control-oriented, nonconformist, and analytical. They focus on themselves — their attributes, accomplishments, and aspirations — over their relationships and social roles. How did WEIRD populations become so psychologically distinct? What role did these psychological differences play in the industrial revolution and the global expansion of Europe during the last few centuries? To answer these questions Joseph Henrich draws on anthropology, psychology, economics, and evolutionary biology. He illuminates the origins and evolution of family structures, marriage, and religion, and the profound impact these cultural transformations had on human psychology. Mapping these shifts through ancient history and late antiquity, Henrich reveals that the most fundamental institutions of kinship and marriage changed dramatically under pressure from the Roman Catholic Church. It was these changes that gave rise to the WEIRD psychology that would coevolve with impersonal markets, occupational specialization, and free competition — laying the foundation for the modern world. Shermer and Henrich discuss: psychology textbooks that “now purport to be about ‘Psychology’ or ‘Social Psychology’ need to be retitled something like ‘The Cultural Psychology of Late 20th Century Americans’,” Darwin’s Dictum: “How odd it is that anyone should not see that all observations must be for or against some view if it is to be of any service.” What views Henrich is writing for and against, evolutionary psychology and the search for human universals in the context of his thesis that WEIRD cultures are so different, Max Weber’s book The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, and how his thesis holds up under modern studies, a 2×2 grid analysis of his thesis (what about the exceptions?): Cell 1: Catholic/Protestant Influence + WEIRD characteristics Cell 2: Catholic/Protestant Influence + non-WEIRD characteristics Cell 3: Non-Catholic/Protestant Influence + WEIRD characteristics Cell 4: Non-Catholic/Protestant Influence + non-WEIRD characteristics the problem of overdetermining the past (so many theories explaining history: Jared Diamond’s geographic models, Ian Morris’ War: What is it Good For?, Matt Ridley’s The Evolution of Everything: How New Ideas Emerge (ideas having sex), Robin Dunbar’s Grooming, Gossip, and the Evolution of Language, economic historian Gregory Clark’s A Farewell to Alms, Benjamin Friedman’s Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, Rodney Stark’s The Victory of Reason: How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism, and Western Success, normative vs. descriptive accounts of human behavior polygamy vs. monogamy, 1st cousin marriages? conformity, shame and guilt, illusions, loss aversion, cognitive dissonance, confirmation bias, superstitions, religion doesn’t have to be true to be useful, national differences in cultural psychology (for example: Italy a loose culture, Germany a tight culture), origin of writing and literacy rates, origin of religion and its purpose(s), the “Big Gods” theory of religion’s origin, the purpose of religious rituals and food taboos, families and kin, kin selection, group selection, meaning and happiness in non-WEIRD cultures, “Then you get Westerners who are like ‘I’m an individual ape on a pale blue dot in the middle of a giant black space” and “What does it all mean?’”, physical differences: “WEIRD people have flat feet, impoverished microbiomes, high rates of myopia and unnaturally low levels of exposure to parasites like helminths, which may increase their risk of heart disease and allergies.”, and When we colonize Mars and become a spacefaring species, what should we take with us from what we’ve learned about human history and psychology? Joseph Henrich is an anthropologist and the author of The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter, among other books. He is the chair of the Department of Human Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University, where his research focuses on evolutionary approaches to psychology, decision-making, and culture.