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If you tied a rope tight around the Earth’s equator and then added a single yard of slack, would the extra material make any noticeable difference to someone standing on the ground? Yes, actually. The answer comes as a surprise to most people, but the additional bit of rope raises it high enough off the ground for our eyes to easily discern it, and our feet to easily trip over. That fact might seem trivial, but the early 20th-century philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein believed that this chasm between human intuition and physical reality revealed something important about the fallibility of our thinking. After all, if something that seems obvious to almost everyone can be totally false, what else might we be wrong about? This video from the Center for Public Philosophy at the University of California, Santa Cruz breaks down the mathematics behind Wittgenstein’s knotty example, and asks whether it should make us all feel a bit less certain about even our most deeply held beliefs.
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Mood and emotion
A century of letters captures the emotions of life in a new city, far from home
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Ageing and death
Death is a trip – how new research links near-death and DMT experiences
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Technology and the self
Adaptive technologies have helped Stephen Hawking, and many more, find their voice
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Gender and identity
‘When you’re done, you stay human!’ What gender transition means to John
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Stories and literature
Solaris and beyond – Stanisław Lem’s antidotes to the bores of American sci-fi
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Philosophy of language
For Ludwig Wittgenstein, language is a game, but not a frivolous one
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Neuroscience
The brain repurposed our sense of physical distance to understand social closeness
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Consciousness and altered states
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Art
Grotesque imagery meets religious conservatism in Hieronymus Bosch’s art
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