Knowing what separates wakeful reality from dream states seems rather simple on its surface. After all, even if a dream feels quite real in the moment, it’s unbound from continuity and the natural laws of our (presumed) waking lives. Yet proving that you’re awake, rather than just intuiting it, has been a perilous task for philosophers across the centuries. Beginning with the ancient Chinese philosopher Zhuang Zhou’s famed butterfly dream, this TED-Ed animation tackles how thinkers from Al-Ghazali in medieval Persia, to René Descartes and Thomas Hobbes in 17th-century France and England, to neuroscientists today have approached the question of whether we can ever truly know we’re awake.
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Information and communication
Coverage of the ‘balloon boy’ hoax forms a withering indictment of for-profit news
17 minutes
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Meaning and the good life
Wander through the English countryside with two teens trying to make sense of the world
10 minutes
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Personality
A ‘dumpster archeologist’ reconstructs strangers’ stories via what they’ve discarded
14 minutes
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Meaning and the good life
A Japanese religious community makes an unlikely home in the mountains of Colorado
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Bioethics
Is it ethical to have a second child so that your first might live?
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Meaning and the good life
‘Everydayness is the enemy’ – excerpts from the existentialist novel ‘The Moviegoer’
2 minutes
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Knowledge
An Indigenous myth and a geological survey elicit two ways of knowing one place
4 minutes
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Neuroscience
Dog vision is a trendy topic, but what can we really know about how they see?
11 minutes
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Biology
An elegy for a dying microbe explores what we really mean by ‘death’
9 minutes