In the past entries we have examined three types of ‘abnormal’ psychic experiences that have surely had an important role in the creation and diffusion of the idea of an ‘immaterial soul’ that contains our personal identity, and that can be ‘separated’ from our physical bodies, obviously including the possibility of surviving the biological death […]
The article Weaponized Health Communication: Twitter Bots and Russian Trolls Amplify the Vaccine Debate , published in 2018 , affirms that, despite the great potential of social networks to disseminate objective information, they are often abused in order to disseminate content that may harm health. A direct consequence of the exposure of social network users […]
In the past entry we examined how “out-of-body experiences” (OBEs) might have an influence in the belief in a “soul” separated from the body. Now we shall take a look to the other two types of “abnormal” psychological experiences that are surely related to that belief: “near-death experiences” (NDEs) and “mystical experiences” (MEs). Near-death experiences […]
During the second half of the 80s, when no one knew those years would become the Soviet Union’s last, Mikhail Gorbachev attempted some economic reforms without much success. Less than one decade earlier, in 1978, Deng Xiaoping started a series of reforms that secured not only economic growth, but also the rule of Chinese communist […]
The division of past and future In Part 1 of this series, we presented the empirical fact that under extreme circumstances, a certain observer’s past can be in another observer’s future. To explain this, we introduced the network of cause and consequence relations as the fixed background structure of reality. This network constitutes Spacetime. Causality […]
The idea that human beings are composed by two kind of ‘substances’, a material body and a spiritual mind, or soul, is probably as old as modern human beings, and has certainly insufflated most of the world religions, as well as a big number of philosophical theories about human nature. Even non-religious people admit in […]
Darwin’s great breakthrough was that of finding the only one explanation of the great variety and complexity we find in the living world, which is compatible with the fact that the matter and energy of which living beings are made of can only do what they do because of purely physical mechanisms. There is only […]
It is generally considered that equality of opportunities means equal access to education and health. When the society considers that some goods like school and vaccines must be consumed by everyone, economists define them as “merit goods”, which deserve a special treatment, as in the case of public goods or goods that cause consumption externalities […]
The term “innovation” has been ubiquitous for decades in many areas of European society. Since Lisbon 2000—and even earlier—the European Union has promoted policies to drive innovation with the intention of restoring to Europe the economic leadership it has undoubtedly lost. Two decades later, we are close to Horizon 2020—at least chronologically speaking. Within the […]
T here are two major impossibility theorems in social choice: Arrow’s theorem (1951) : the only system to aggregate individual preferences into social preferences (e.g., a voting mechanism) that satisfies the properties of transitivity, monotonicity and independence of irrelevant alternatives for all possible individual preferences is the dictatorial system. Gibbard–Satterthwaite’ theorem (1973) : any voting […]