Hazel Barnes, who translated the whole of Sartre’s Being and Nothingness into English, also presented a ten part (thirty minutes per episode) television series for National Public Educational Television called Self Encounter: A Study in Existentialism. I first read about this in Barnes’ autobiography, The Story I Tell Myself, and I later wrote about it in Documentaries Worth Watching in 2010.

At the time I first wrote about it this series was thought to be entirely lost, the original tapes having been reported recorded over.

“A large number of people wrote in to ask if tapes could be purchased for…

During the last three days of March I participated in an online conference held by NoRCEL (Network of Researchers on the Chemical Evolution of Life), “How did it all begin…?” The virtual conference included a presentation by Lowell Gustafson of the IBHA, “The Origins of Life within Big History: Meanings for Humanity.” I gave the final presentation of the event, “How many branches on the tree of life?” I had previously met one of the coordinators of NoRCEL, Sohan Jheeta, in Milan in 2019 when I had participated in the IBHA event organized by Claudio Maccone, and Sohan suggested that…

If we think of institutions at all, we usually assume that they were created to serve a particular purpose, even if they are flawed in fulfilling this purpose. Carroll Quigley postulated the social process of the “institutionalization of the instrument,” according to which institutions are created as instruments to attain a particular end, but these instruments are then transformed into self-serving institutions that are increasingly poor instruments because their purpose shifts from fulfilling its instrumental purpose to fulfilling a self-defined institutional role. …

In Intrinsically Arithemetical Realities and in R.I.P. Derek Parfit, I quoted a passage from Parfit that anticipated the study of existential risks:

I believe that if we destroy mankind, as we now can, this outcome will be much worse than most people think. Compare three outcomes:

1. Peace.

2. A nuclear war that kills 99 per cent of the world’s existing population.

3. A nuclear war that kills 100 per cent.

2 would be worse than 1, and 3 would be worse than 2. Which is the greater of these two differences? Most people believe that the greater difference is…

In many posts I have discussed the idea of scientific civilization, while I have also discussed the idea of a science of civilization (cf., e.g., Thought Experiment on a Science of Civilization and On a Science of Civilization and its Associated Technologies), and these two ideas — scientific civilization and a science of civilization — are connected in an important way. A truly scientific civilization that takes science as its central project will continuously expand the scope of science until it eventually means that a science of civilization takes shape in the form of a reflexive scientific theory of scientific…

Science as an institution today consists of colleges and universities, which are in part funded by government money that is parceled out in the form of grants and loans, decided upon by numerous committees (themselves institutions in turn), which money is often funneled through additional committees once it arrives at a given institution. (It is well known among academics that one must attempt to get a grant twice the size that one needs, since the institution is going to take half of it.) …

“The Red Pill” has become a pervasive metaphor since the 1999 film The Matrix, in which the protagonist is offered a choice between taking a red pill and a blue pill. The red pill has come to signify difficult and unpleasant truths, while the blue pill has come to signify the comfortable and comforting lies with which most people are pacified.

There is a relationship between the idea of the red pill and Vaclav Havel’s conception of “living in truth.” An individual may not be able to change a dishonest society, but one can still choose to live in truth…

An interesting twentieth century perspective on the expansion of scientific knowledge was provided by Harlow Shapley:

“After seven years of work with large instruments on questions concerning the globular star clusters — their structure, relationships, stellar content — I realized that we were relatively more ignorant about them than when I had started my investigation. I had added more to the unknown than to the known.” (Harlow Shapley, The View from a Distant Star, p. 17)

This is clearly a tendentious way to characterize the results of scientific research. Shapley noted that, “…we were relatively more ignorant about [globular star…