Appeals to intuitions have something suspect about them. Intuitions can vary from person to person, and even those that seem least assailable sometimes lead us astray, as the paradoxes of set theory demonstrated. Mathematicians of the last century, in their attempts to formalize mathematics, tried to eliminate all appeals to ...

There has been a recent explosion of writing by neuroscientists and psychologists about how "science shows us" that we don't have free will. The problem with this work is that it confuses several quite different issues. Once we sort it out, we find that there have been in fact some ...

Brian Christian is the author of The Most Human Human: What Talking with Computers Teaches Us About What It Means to Be Alive. His writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Wired, The Wall Street Journal, Gizmodo, and The Guardian.

Each year Turing Test sponsors confer the title of "Most Human ...

Both demographically and ecologically, humans are a remarkably successful species. This success is generally attributed to our capacity for culture. But how did our species’ extraordinary cultural capabilities evolve from its roots in animal social learning and tradition? In this seminar I will provide a provisional answer. After characterizing contemporary ...

After a brief review of earlier cross-cultural research on warfare, I turn to more recent research focusing on eastern Africa, a region frequently plagued with subsistence uncertainty as well as violence. In that research, we explore whether resource unpredictability and chronic scarcities predict higher warfare frequencies, more taking of resources, ...