Not 42, The REAL Meaning of Life the Universe, and Everything

8 Episodes

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Ep 1 The Absolute Truth

2022-09-0516:57

Send us a textThis episode will introduce the podcasts and try to define Truth. Knowing what is true is a topical and much debated question, but I will show that there is an absolute truth, which I am going to call the Omnitruth, but how much can we know about it? Even if there isn't much about the Omnitruth that we can know to be absolutely true, I will argue that we can still know the most likely explanation for what Truth might be if we use current scientific knowledge. When we do this, in...

Ep 2 What You Didn't Know You Knew

2022-09-1218:48

Send us a textThe natural world around us is highly organised. You can see evidence for this around you all the time. The scientific community seem to be settled on the thought that this is because life on earth evolved, mainly, under the influence of Darwinian natural selection. But what is the evidence that evolution happened? Can anyone plausibly deny that it happened and, if so, how? And, more importantly, if we did evolve alongside other animals, does this mean that we need to fundamenta...

Ep 3 The Nova Point

2022-09-1930:13

Send us a textTime for the Big One?What was special about the intriguing and mysterious creature I've called Nova? When did she live? What was she like? And could she really have fundamentally changed our universe?This episode makes the claim that Nova was the first living thing to cross a vitally important threshold in our evolutionary history: the Awareness Horizon, and suggests that an awareness horizon view of the universe profoundly changes the way we must think about what it is to...

Ep 4 The Consciousness Problem

2022-09-2621:52

Send us a textWhat happened when Nova crossed the Awareness Horizon? What is awareness, and how does it relate to consciousness?The enormous complexity of advanced brains, like ours, makes understanding consciousness an incredibly difficult task. This episode will provide a brief overview of how the human brain works and consider some of the proposals scientists, and philosophers have made about what consciousness is.What did you think? You can send me a quick text using the link at the top o...

Ep 5 When David met Jane

2022-10-0326:17

Send us a textThis episode includes the deeply moving story of a special meeting: a meeting between David and Jane.This was a hugely important event that happened in Africa in the 1960s and it began the process of developing a new way of thinking about what it is to be a feeling creature like a human being. Could there be such a thing as a non-human person, if so why, and what does this mean for the way we think about being human?What did you think? You can send me a quick text using the link...

Ep 6 Diving into Deep Nature

2022-10-1020:43

Send us a textIf we evolved, we must be animals. But what kind of animal?All animal species have their own genetically predisposed pattern of behaviour. In other words, each species has its own "Deep Nature". In this episode we look at the behaviour of a small number of animal species to work out how and why each animal behaves as it does, so that we can go on, in future episodes to discover what kind of deep nature our own species might have.This episode includes adult content.What did you t...

Ep 7 Putin, Patriotism and Peacocks

2022-10-1725:29

Send us a textIn our society, we think of human beings being, primarily, the product of our upbringing, experience and environment, but if we know other advanced animals have a deep nature, and we evolved as a species of animal, it seems inescapable that our species must have a deep nature too. This episode will consider what our deep nature might be by contrasting it to that of other closely related species. It also considers whether aspects of human behaviour like patrioti...

Ep 8 The Road's end - Or the End of the Road?

2022-10-2447:38

Send us a textThis episode will consider where an awareness horizon view of the universe must ultimately take us. In previous episodes we have considered how things are. In this one, now that we have much of the evidence in place, we can start to ask how things should be.Could our deep nature have a bearing on the way we think as human beings? In this context we return to the "God" question, to ask how likely it is that God might exist. Leaving another Big Question looming: During the long hi...

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Not 42, The REAL Meaning of Life the Universe, and Everything