Why Thought Suppression is Counter-Productive: How pushing a thought out of consciousness can bring it back with a vengeance. [Via]
posted by homunculus on May 22, 2009 - 39 comments

Beyond the Reach of God. Thought experiments involving the God-universe and the Nature-universe, the Turing-complete Game of Life, and a lot of insightful back-and-forth in the comment section, to boot. One of the most interesting and thought-provoking essays I've read on the Internet in a very long time, by Eliezer Yudkowsky on his blog, Overcoming Bias (via).
posted by WCityMike on Oct 9, 2008 - 64 comments

Twilight of the Books - What will life be like if people stop reading? [more inside]
posted by Gyan on Dec 18, 2007 - 88 comments

Recursion and Human Thought - Why the Piraha don't have numbers
posted by Gyan on Jun 13, 2007 - 47 comments

An autistic woman "speaks" her language, then ours. (YouTube) "My language is not about designing words or even visual symbols for people to interpret. It is about being in a constant conversation with every aspect of my environment, reacting physically to all parts of my surroundings." [more inside]
posted by maudlin on Jan 25, 2007 - 170 comments

Vegetative Patient 'Communicates' Sort of.
posted by MarshallPoe on Sep 8, 2006 - 25 comments

The Meaning of Life according to various rather famous people (Dennett, Fukuyama, etc). I'm watching the Dennett video at the moment and it starts rather weakly, but, by midway through, is rolling along nicely. With topics like "being good without god" and "the anthropic principle" it struck me as relevant to a couple of recent askmefi threads.
Dennett: [pause] i guess i'll say it again, more slowly...
(oh, and the player interface is rather delicate - give it time to load and click play a few times...)
posted by andrew cooke on Oct 1, 2004 - 17 comments

Interactive Philosophy Games :: Construct a God, explore your morals, take a new look at what it means to be alive, plus Shakespeare vs. Britney Spears. Or, you can just read it for the articles.
posted by anastasiav on May 10, 2004 - 13 comments

Classic Feminist Writings : an archive
posted by anastasiav on Oct 2, 2003 - 34 comments

Iakov Levi analyzes history and literature using a very Freudian approach.
Some highlights:
Pinocchio - The Puberty Rite of a Puppet
Medusa, the Female Genital and the Nazis
Killing God: From the Assassination of Moses to the Murder of Rabin
Without Borders: The Borderline Case of United Europe
::warning! geocities links!::
posted by anastasiav on Sep 18, 2003 - 3 comments

Stephen Wolfram: A New Kind of Science - From the publisher's summary, "Starting from a collection of simple computer experiments — illustrated in the book by striking computer graphics — Wolfram shows how their unexpected results force a whole new way of looking at the operation of our universe." May be big. Thoughts?
posted by paladin on Oct 29, 2001 - 26 comments

How Culture Molds Habits is a fascinating article. Read this article, tally another point for nurture. I've long thought this was true, but Nisbett's supposedly gathered rather a lot of data proving it is so. The article raises some interesting parts of the study, but I think the ramifications bear some considering. I'd be interested in reading the full study when it's published, but I haven't a clue where to get the Psychological Review. And can you imagine what the advertising execs will do with this stuff? Ads tailored to the way you think. Wheee. It does, of course, raise some fun questions about religion and politics.
posted by fable on Aug 8, 2000 - 4 comments