So I've been a little busy the last couple of weeks, but we've still been recording episodes of the podcast. For episode 52 we chatted with psychologist and thanatologist (fannytologist?) Cal Cooper. Cal wrote to me way back when he was a budding schoolboy, asking about parapsychology, and we've remained …
Anyone that knows me personally, soon learns that I find true crime fascinating. I always have. I spent many an hour as a child reading the horrific tales of serial killers, with tears of complete and utter terror streaming down my face. Part morbid-curiosity, part intrigue. Sherlock Holmes was a …
I came across an interesting argument in a book edited by soon-to-be-podcast-guest Jeffrey A. Schaler. The book (Peter Singer Under Fire) is on the philosophy of Peter Singer, with whom I am in a great deal of agreement it seems. However, stimulating this post is the question of vegetarianism, and …
[Is this a story, a poem, an echo from the future, a euology, a suicide note, a manifesto, a hate mail?]
Cancer doesn’t care about evolving. Cancer doesn’t care about your genetic predispositions. Cancer is going to grow and consume your body, unless you fight it. You both …
So one of the questions that I frequently raise on The Existential Files, is whether life is worth living. I think it is important that this question is not about whether one should kill oneself or not (though I agree with Camus, that that is an important consideration unto itself …
When my youngest brother Eddie died in 2015, I quadrupled my shoe collection overnight. Despite our inside legs being inches different (I got the brains and he got the height and the beauty), our shoe sizes were fortuitously similar. We shared a taste for converse trainers, and so there seemed …
Let's begin this post with two quotes. The first is one of my favourites, from Darwin's The Descent of Man:
It is a more significant fact that a female zebra would not admit the addresses of a male ass until he was painted so as to resemble a zebra, and …
So talking about computer games, I have just finished playing the game Soma and thought I would discuss some of the issues it raises. [Warning: spoilers ahead!] In the game you begin as Simon, a man afflicted with some kind of brain tumour. He agrees to take part in some …
I saw a piece in the tech news this week that I couldn't pass up mentioning. I've had a bit of a love/hate relationship with video games. I've played them since I was a kid, and getting my Amiga 500+ for Christmas one year was one of the defining …
Continuing this series of posts examining identity fluidity, I was chatting with Jacob Isler, who runs a YouTube channel devoted to tulpamancy (he's also a psychology undergrad). I was interested in his experiences of multiplicity (or plurality) of consciousness. Anyway, Jacob kinda criticised my model, so I thought I would …