Tanya Luhrmann is the Albert Ray Lang Professor of Anthropology at Stanford. Her fieldwork has covered ritual magicians in England, homeless and psychotic women on the streets of Chicago, and evangelical Christians who train themselves to hear God speak back. When God Talks Back was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and won the $100,000 Grawemeyer Award in Religion. She is currently writing a book called Voices.

We cover:

• Why the college class that most disturbs a young believer’s faith often isn’t biology

• Two phrases Tanya keeps separate: “is real” and “feels real”

• Tanya: “I’m guessing that Sam Harris may be more committed to not being religious than many people who sit in a church pew are committed to God being real.”

• Gandalf, Middle-earth, and how people hold fict…

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Here is every guest who has appeared on Theories of Everything podcast. Each name links to the best episode to start with; other appearances follow in parentheses, where “with” names a co-guest, “on” names another solo conversation, and Λ joins the guests of a multi-guest “theolocution” episode.

Enjoy and feel free to share.

• A. H. Almaas on the Diamond Approach, Depth Psychology, and Awakening

• Aaron Schurger on the Readiness Potential and Neuroscience of Free Will

• Abhay Ashtekar on Loop Quantum Cosmology and the Quantum Bounce

• Adrian Owen on Covert Consciousness in Vegetative Patients

• Aephraim Steinberg on Negative Time in Quantum Optics

• Alex Honnold on Free Solo Climbing and Fear and Risk Assessment

• Alfonso Martinez Arias on Cell-Centric Biology and Morphogenesis

• Amanda Gefter on QBism and the Measurement Problem

• Anand Vaidya on Analytic and Indian Philosophy (also his lecture on Moral Standing of AI)

• Andrés Gómez Emilsson on the Binding Problem and Valence and Well-Being (also on Modeling Psychedelic Perception)

• Anil Seth on Perception as Controlled Hallucination (also with Michael Levin)

• Anna Ciaunica on Embodied Selfhood (with Michael Levin)

• Anna Lembke on Addiction and the Dopamine System (also with Karl Friston)

• Anthony Metivier on Memory Techniques and Memory and Intelligence

• Avi Loeb on the Search for Extraterrestrial Technosignatures

• Avshalom Elitzur on the Reality of Becoming and Retrocausation

• Barry Loewer on the Metaphysics of Laws of Nature (with Eddy Chen)

• Bas van Fraassen on Constructive Empiricism and the Limits of Language

• Becca Tarnas on Jung’s Red Book and Tolkien’s Mythology

• Ben Goertzel on Artificial General Intelligence (also with Joscha Bach)

• Bernardo Kastrup on Analytic Idealism and the Mind at Large (also with John Vervaeke (Meta-Consciousness), John Vervaeke (Mind Uploading), Sabine Hossenfelder, Chris Langan, Donald Hoffman Λ Susan Schneider, Susan Blackmore, Tim Maudlin)

• Brian Greene on Cosmic Topology and Signals to the Past

• Brian Keating on Experimental Physics and Falsification (also with Lee Cronin)

• Bryan Johnson on the Blueprint Longevity Protocol

• Carissa Véliz on the Ethics of Privacy

• Carlo Rovelli on Relational Quantum Mechanics (also on Testing Loop Quantum Gravity)

• Carlos Montemayor on Consciousness in Nonverbal Beings (with Claudia Passos Λ Garrett Mindt)

• Chiara Marletto on Constructor Theory and the Physics of Information (also with Vlatko Vedral)

• Chris Fields on the Meta-Hard Problem of Consciousness (with Karl Friston Λ Michael Levin)

• Chris Langan on the Cognitive Theoretic Model of the Universe (also with Bernardo Kastrup)

• Claudia de Rham on Massive Gravity (also on Dynamical Dark Energy)

• Claudia Passos on Infant Consciousness (with Carlos Montemayor Λ Garrett Mindt)

• Colin McLarty on the Life of Alexander Grothendieck and Topos Theory

• Cumrun Vafa on the Dark Dimension Proposal and the Swampland Program

• Daniel Dennett on Free Will as Self-Controlled Agency

• Daniel Schmachtenberger on the Metacrisis and Existential Risk from AI

• David Bentley Hart on the Problem of Evil

• David Bessis on the Nature of Mathematical Objects

• David Chalmers on the Simulation Hypothesis (also with Scott Aaronson; and on Machine Consciousness, Quantum Simulation Hypothesis)

• David Deutsch on the Multiverse and Support for Fundamental Research

• David Hand on Dark Data and Missing-Data Bias

• David Kaiser on Primordial Black Holes and Cosmic Inflation

• David Robson on the Expectation Effect and the Limits of IQ

• David Sloan Wilson on Multilevel Selection Theory

• David Wallace on the Many-Worlds Interpretation (also with Emily Adlam)

• David Wolpert on No Free Lunch Theorems (also on Algorithmic Information Theory)

• Denis Noble on the Third Way of Evolution (also on The Central Dogma)

• Dennis McKenna on Ethnopharmacology and Indigenous Plant Medicine

• Diana Pasulka on Religious Studies and UAP Belief

• Dick Bond on Early Universe Cosmology and the Cosmic Web

• Donald Hoffman on the Interface Theory of Perception (also with Joscha Bach, John Vervaeke, Bernardo Kastrup Λ Susan Schneider, Philip Goff, Stephen Wolfram)

• Dror Bar Natan on Knot Theory and Finite Type Invariants

• Eddy Chen on the Laws of Nature and Minimal Primitivism (with Barry Loewer)

• Edward Frenkel on the Langlands Program (also on Axioms and Infinity)

• Elan Barenholtz on Language as an Autonomous System (also with William Hahn (AI in Medicine), William Hahn (Language and Thought))

• Emily Adlam on Laws as Global Constraints (also with Jacob Barandes, David Wallace)

• Emily Riehl on Category Theory and Infinity Categories

• Eric Weinstein on Geometric Unity and the 14-dim Metric Bundle (also on Academia and Incentives)

• Erik Verlinde on Entropic Gravity and Emergent Spacetime

• Eva Miranda on Geometric Quantization (also on Undecidable Fluid Flows)

• Fay Dowker on Causal Set Theory and Discrete Spacetime

• Felix Finster on Causal Fermion Systems and the Dirac Sea

• Frank Yang on Meditation and Nonduality

• Frederic Schuller on Constructive Gravity

• Gabriele Carcassi on the Assumptions of Physics Project and Reverse Physics

• Garrett Lisi on the E8 Unification Model

• Garrett Mindt on Consciousness in Infants and Animals (with Carlos Montemayor Λ Claudia Passos)

• Garry Nolan on the Scientific Study of UAP Reports

• Geoffrey Hinton on Existential Risk from Advanced AI

• George Ellis on Top-Down Causation and the Limits of Reductionism

• George Musser on the Twin Hard Problems of Mind and Matter

• Gerard ’t Hooft on Deterministic Foundations for Quantum Mechanics

• Ginestra Bianconi on Gravity from Entropy

• Graham Priest on Paraconsistent Logic

• Greg Kondrak on the Voynich Manuscript and the Dorabella Cipher

• Gregory Chaitin on Algorithmic Information Theory and Metabiology (also on Academic Bureaucracy, Publish-or-Perish and Scientific Creativity, Stagnation in Fundamental Research)

• Harry Collins on the Sociology of Scientific Discovery

• Hartmut Neven on Consciousness and Quantum Superposition

• Harvey Friedman on Reverse Mathematics and Tangible Incompleteness

• Iain McGilchrist on Hemispheric Modes of Attention (also with John Vervaeke; and on Hemispheric Worldviews, Selfhood and the Loss of Meaning)

• Ivette Fuentes on Experimental Approaches to Quantum Gravity (also with Roger Penrose; and on Relativistic Quantum Information)

• J.B. Manchak on Unknowability Theorems in General Relativity

• Jacob Barandes on Indivisible Stochastic Processes (also with Manolis Kellis, Scott Aaronson, Emily Adlam; and on Indivisible Stochastic Processes and Philosophical Physics, Bell’s Theorem and Nonlocality, The Markovian Assumption)

• Jacob Tsimerman on AI and the Future of Mathematical Research

• James Robert Brown on Thought Experiments in Physics

• Janna Levin on Klein Bottle Compactification

• Jeffrey Mishlove on Parapsychology and the Experimental Study of Psi

• Jenann Ismael on Free Will and Determinism

• Jennifer Nagel on Epistemology and the Nature of Knowledge

• Jenny Wagner on Gravitational Lensing

• Jesse Michels on Perennialism and Ways of Knowing

• John Donoghue on Effective Field Theory and Quantum Gravity

• John Moffat on Modified Gravity and Alternatives to Dark Matter

• John Norton on Indeterminism in Newtonian Mechanics

• John Vervaeke on the Meaning Crisis and Four Kinds of Knowing (also with Bernardo Kastrup (Meta-Consciousness), Bernardo Kastrup (Mind Uploading), Joscha Bach, Iain McGilchrist, Donald Hoffman; and on Relational Ontology)

• Jonathan Blow on Video Games as Systems for Understanding

• Jonathan Gorard on the Wolfram Physics Project and Hypergraph Dynamics

• Jonathan Oppenheim on Post-Quantum Classical Gravity (also on Decoherence and Diffusion)

• Jonathan Pageau on the Symbolic Structure of Reality (also on Modern Art and Myth)

• Jordan Peterson on Truth and Self-Deception and Definition of God

• Joscha Bach on Consciousness as a Simulated Self (also with John Vervaeke, Donald Hoffman, Michael Levin, Ben Goertzel, Karl Friston)

• Joseph Conlon on String Theory’s Evidential Status (with Peter Woit)

• Juan Maldacena on the AdS/CFT Correspondence and ER=EPR and Wormholes

• Julian Barbour on Shape Dynamics and the Arrow of Time (also on Emergent Quantum Mechanics)

• Karl Friston on the Free Energy Principle and Markov Blankets (also with Chris Fields Λ Michael Levin, Joscha Bach, Anna Lembke, Michael Levin; and on The Free Energy Principle across Physics, Biology and Psychology, Bayesian Mechanics)

• Kevin Knuth on the Scientific Study of UAP Reports

• Latham Boyle on the CPT-Symmetric Universe and the Arrow of Time

• Lawrence Krauss on the Origin of the Universe

• Lee Cronin on Assembly Theory and the Origin of Life (with Brian Keating; and on Terrence Howard’s Chemistry and Periodic-Table Claims)

• Lee Smolin on Time Realism and Loop Quantum Gravity

• Leo Gura on Radical Idealism and Infinite Consciousness (also on Ego Death)

• Leonard Susskind on de Sitter Space and Quantum Gravity

• Lilian Dindo on Acceptance and Commitment Therapy

• Manolis Kellis on Genome Regulation and Evolution as Tinkering (also with Jacob Barandes)

• Maria Violaris on Quantum No-Go Theorems and Bell’s Theorem

• Mark Bailey on Disinformation and Democratic Stability

• Matt O’Dowd on the Limits of Reductionism

• Matt Segall on Whitehead’s Process Philosophy and Panpsychism

• Matthieu Pageau on the Symbolic Interpretation of Biblical Narrative

• Max Tegmark on the Expanding Domain of Physics

• Merel Kindt on Memory Reconsolidation

• Michael Levin on Basal Cognition and Bioelectricity (also with Chris Fields Λ Karl Friston, Joscha Bach, Anna Ciaunica, Karl Friston, Anil Seth; and on Morphogenesis and Regeneration, Anthrobots and Embryonic Signaling, The Anatomical Compiler)

• Michael Lynch on Epistemic Agency and Truth and Democracy

• Mithuna Yoganathan on Restricted Models of Quantum Computation

• Nathan Myhrvold on Geoengineering and Solar Radiation Management

• Nathaniel Kahn on the James Webb Space Telescope on IMAX

• Neil deGrasse Tyson on Standards of Evidence for UFO Claims

• Neil Turok on the Mirror Universe Hypothesis (also on Unification and Conformal Symmetry, Critiquing the Multiverse, Black Holes as Mirrors, Quadratic Quantum Gravity)

• Nick Lane on the Origins of Life and Bioenergetics and Mitochondria

• Nicolas Gisin on Indeterminism and Free Will and Superdeterminism

• Nikita Nekrasov on the Foundations of Quantum Field Theory

• Nir Lahav on the Relativistic Theory of Consciousness

• Noam Chomsky on Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorems (also on Politics of the Left, Morality and Free Will, Language and Thought, Science and Pseudoscience, Reference and Universal Grammar, Mathematical Realism and Qualia, Deep Learning and Cognition, Introspection and AI)

• Norman Wildberger on the Foundations of Mathematics

• Peter Godfrey-Smith on Octopus Cognition and the Evolution of Minds

• Peter Woit on Critiques of String Theory (also with Joseph Conlon; and on Real and Imaginary Time)

• Philip Goff on Cosmopsychism and Cosmic Purpose and Fine-Tuning (with Donald Hoffman)

• Philip Mannheim on Conformal Gravity

• Raphaël Liogier on the Origins of Scientific Inquiry (also on Transcendence Beyond Materialism)

• Rebecca Goldstein on Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorems

• Renato Renner on the Frauchiger-Renner Thought Experiment

• Richard Borcherds on Monstrous Moonshine and the Monster Group (also on E8 and Modular Forms)

• Richard Dolan on the History of UFO Sightings

• Richard Haier on the Neuroscience of Intelligence

• Richard Wolff on Marxian Economics and the Labor Theory of Value

• Robert Lawrence Kuhn on Closer to Truth and Absolute Truth and Faith

• Robert Sapolsky on Determinism and the Case Against Free Will

• Robert Spekkens on the Epistemic View of Quantum States

• Robin Hanson on the Great Filter and Grabby Aliens

• Roger Penrose on Twistor Theory and Conformal Cyclic Cosmology (also with Ivette Fuentes; and on Non-Computational Consciousness)

• Roman Yampolskiy on AI Safety and the Limits of Control

• Roy Baumeister on Free Will as a Continuum

• Rupert Sheldrake on Morphic Resonance and the Extended Mind (also on Limits of Materialism)

• Rupert Spira on Nonduality and the Direct Path

• Ruth Kastner on the Transactional Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics

• Sabine Hossenfelder on Stagnation in Fundamental Physics (also with Bernardo Kastrup; and on Superfluid Dark Matter)

• Salvatore Pais on the Nature of Gravity and the Planck Force (with Stephon Alexander)

• Sam Vaknin on Narcissistic Personality Disorder

• Sara Walker on Assembly Theory and the Origin of Life

• Scott Aaronson on Computational Complexity and Quantum Computing (also with David Chalmers, Jacob Barandes; and on AI Safety and Alignment, Simulation Hypothesis)

• Sean Carroll on the Holographic Principle and Quantum Gravity

• Simon Saunders on the Nature of Time and the Everett Interpretation

• Slavoj Žižek on the Nature of Freedom and Hegelian Dialectics

• Stephen Wolfram on the Computational Universe and the Ruliad (also with Donald Hoffman; and on Consciousness and Infinity, Observer Theory, Computational Experiments and Tool-Building)

• Stephon Alexander on the Autodidactic Universe and Evolving Laws of Physics (also with Salvatore Pais)

• Steven Gubka on the Epistemology of Large Language Models

• Steven Pinker on Enlightenment Values and Free Speech on Campus

• Stuart Hameroff on Orch OR and Quantum Computation in Microtubules (also on Consciousness Before Life)

• Stuart Kauffman on Complexity Theory and Open-Ended Evolution

• Subir Sarkar on Dark Energy and Cosmic Acceleration

• Susan Blackmore on Illusionism and the Hard Problem of Consciousness (with Bernardo Kastrup)

• Susan Schneider on Machine Consciousness and the Future of Mind (with Bernardo Kastrup Λ Donald Hoffman)

• Tammy Peterson on Illness and Recovery, Prayer, and Meditation

• Ted Jacobson on Gravity as an Emergent Phenomenon

• Terrence Deacon on Peircean Semiotics and the Grounding of Symbols

• Thomas Campbell on My Big TOE and Reality as a Virtual Simulation (also on Out-of-Body Experiences)

• Tim Maudlin on Bell’s Theorem and Nonlocality (also with Tim Palmer, Bernardo Kastrup; and on Einstein, EPR, and Bell)

• Tim Palmer on the Cosmological Invariant Set Postulate (also with Tim Maudlin)

• Timothy Williamson on Vagueness and the Sorites Paradox

• Tyler Cowen on the Economics of Tariffs

• Urs Schreiber on Category Theory as a Foundation for Physics

• Vitaly Vanchurin on the Universe as a Neural Network

• Vlatko Vedral on Gravitationally Induced Entanglement (with Chiara Marletto)

• Wayne Myrvold on the Second Law of Thermodynamics

• William Hahn on the Hierarchy of Consciousness (also with Elan Barenholtz (AI in Medicine), Elan Barenholtz (Language and Thought); and on Info Hazards)

• Wolfgang Smith on the Quantum Measurement Problem and Vertical Causation (also on Vedic and Christian Paths)

• Yakir Aharonov on the Two-State Vector Formalism and Weak Measurement

• Yang-Hui He on the Murmuration Conjecture (also on Calabi-Yau Manifolds)

• Zubin Damania on Nondualism and the Constructed Self

Thank you for reading.

—Curt Jaimungal

PS: Consider becoming a paying member on this Substack. This is how I earn a living, as I’m directly reader-supported. Moreover, you’ll get a slew of exclusive content such as early access to full podcasts. If you like the free content, you’ll love the members-only content.

Tim Maudlin is Professor of Philosophy at New York University, founder and director of the John Bell Institute for the Foundations of Physics.

Part One stopped just short of the theorem on purpose, since Tim’s position is that you cannot understand Bell until you understand EPR. This is Act Three. Part Three is still to come.

We cover:

• The philosopher who found the hole in von Neumann’s impossibility proof, decades before Bell did

• Much discussion about Many Worlds, and whether it gets to keep locality

• Bell on reading David Bohm’s 1952 papers: In 1952, I saw the impossible done.

• Why Bell wanted the pilot wave taught in textbooks: to show that vagueness, subjectivity, and indeterminism are not forced on us by experimental facts, but by deliberate theoretical choice.

• Three presuppositions go into the proof, and Tim’s insistence that there is no fourth

• Bell takes the EPR…

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Adrian Owen is Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience and Imaging at Western University in London, Ontario, in the departments of psychology and of physiology and pharmacology. He was made an OBE in 2019 for services to scientific research.

In 2006 he put a woman diagnosed as being in a vegetative state into an fMRI scanner and asked her to imagine playing tennis. She did, and the parts of her brain that plan large upper-body movements lit up. In the twenty years since, he says, several thousand behaviorally non-responsive patients have been found to be aware. He wrote Into the Gray Zone about that work, and a new book, Think Before You Think, came out on August 4th.

We cover:

• How often a “vegetative” diagnosis turns out to be wrong

• Kate, the 1997 patient, on what the scan changed for her: “The day that you scanned me, I went from being a thing

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Peter Godfrey-Smith is Professor in the School of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Sydney, and taught previously at Stanford, Harvard, and the CUNY Graduate Center. He is the author of Other Minds, Metazoa, and Living on Earth. His Darwinian Populations and Natural Selection won the Lakatos Award in 2010.

• Something like two-thirds of an octopus’s neurons are outside its central brain, in the arms

• What a severed octopus arm can still do, and what a severed human arm can’t

• Peter on viruses: “Is a virus alive? I think the right response to that question is: It’s not a good question.”

• Why he expects the concept of mind to go the way the concept of life already went

• Where he parts ways with Stanislas Dehaene on how much you can be conscious of at once

• Anthropic’s global-workspace finding inside Claude, and what Dehaene made of it

• Chalmers, in Reality+, gives the simulation hypothesis at least 25%. Peter thinks that is much too high.

• I proposed…

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So, under my recent YouTube post about the upcoming Mark Solms podcast, a commenter reasonably raised everyone’s favorite biological objection to brain-bound minds: the butterfly.

That is, if consciousness and/or memory is brain based, then how does that explain the humble self effacing (literally) caterpillar who turns entirely to soup, yet the adult remembers its larval life? If the hardware scrambled beyond recognition, then what the heck is doing the remembering?

I did some searching and found that this folklore is present basically everywhere in pop sci. For instance:

• The New York Almanack tells readers the caterpillar “releases enzymes which dissolve its body. All of it.” Closer inspection shows the article walks itself back a paragraph later.

• Scientific American’s explainer softens its own “dissolve all of its tissues” two sentences after writing it. But guess which sentence gets excerpted.

What do butterflies and gluons have in common?

Let’s think about this soupness. Most larval muscle destroys itself on cue and breaks into drifting fragments the literature apparently calls sarcolytes. (Yes, I also had to look that up)

Much of the digestive tract of the caterpillar goes with it, and the freed molecules feed the adult butterfly. It would be nice if we, mere mortals, could substitute liquefying our gut with liposuction, but the gods aren’t so kind.

But notice that I focused on the digestive tract. I didn’t say “all of it” because not all of the caterpillar becomes soup-like.

You may also hear a juicier version: the caterpillar’s immune system attacks the would-be butterfly cells and kills them until it’s overwhelmed. But no such battle appears in the developmental literature! Much of the adult grows from imaginal discs, cell pockets set aside back in the embryo. Immune cells do show up, but as the cleanup crew for tissue already dismantling itself on hormonal orders.

This isn’t the Walking Dead. The brain was never on the menu. Most larval neurons persist, the fly anatomy finds, and the mushroom-body cells (the insect’s smell-learning hub) prune their larval branches and regrow adult ones from the same cell bodies. The organ sits there throughout, bathed in the broth that used to be muscle. Sounds somehow hot actually.

The wiring is another matter. A few years ago, James Truman’s team mapped the fly’s larval memory circuits through the pupal stage (the one where it’s a shelly thing) and found none of those connections on the far side.

The cells stay while the talk between them is rebuilt. Whatever carries a crossing memory (synapses off the map, or cargo inside the persisting cells?) is an open debate, as far as I know.

The Moth Man

Three biologists at Georgetown (Douglas Blackiston, Elena Silva Casey, and Martha Weiss) trained hornworm caterpillars to avoid a smell by pairing it with electric shock. Hornworms become moths, not butterflies, but the rebuild is pretty much the same. Afterward, the moths still avoided the smell.

The obvious objection is that the smell just clung to the shell and the moth sniffed leftovers like how your clothes smell when you come from your parents place. No. Scrubbing the shell didn’t wash the memory out, and perfuming untrained pupae didn’t plant a memory.

If you train a caterpillar too young, the moth doesn’t remember anything. However, if you train it in its last caterpillar stage, the moth remembers. Why? Well, apparently the early memory sits in a brain part the rebuild tears down, while the late one sits in a part that survives.

Weiss puts the myth as follows: “the larva essentially turns to soup and its components are entirely rebuilt as a butterfly.” Michael Levin retells the experiment on TOE.

Whatever it is that carries the memory through the soup, it seems to only be carried because the brain is carried. Remembering, then, has something to do with neurons, and nothing here supports a free-floating mind.

Note. I’m not saying free-floating minds are impossible. I’m saying that the soup argument (is that what we’re calling it?) is not one that supports Descartes.

The “total‑soup → memories are a non‑physical” chronicle is a tall tale. Much of the caterpillar indeed becomes soup, but certain neural structures actually persist through the metamorphosis. Thus, rather than this goopy transformation to a butterfly serving as evidence toward some form of soup‑like consciousness or non‑neural consciousness, it actually serves as evidence that consciousness has something to do with neurons, or at least that memories have something to do with neurons.

Btw, what does the pupa feel in there, exactly? Do they feel anything? I’m saving that for Mark Solms, who thinks consciousness starts deeper than the cortex: raw feeling from the brainstem… Stay tuned for that.

Thank you for reading. So, what do you think about the ideas in this post? Leave a comment / share if you like.

—Curt Jaimungal

PS: Consider becoming a paying member on this Substack. This is how I earn a living, as I’m directly reader-supported. Moreover, you’ll get a slew of exclusive content such as early access to full podcasts. If you like the free content, you’ll love the members-only content.

PPS: I read The Economist and find their coverage of science, AI, and global affairs genuinely excellent. If you’d like to try it, my link gets you a huge discount. They don’t partner with just any podcast. In fact, I believe TOE is the only podcast they consistently partner with, thus you get a special 35% discount not offered anywhere else.

PPPS: If there’s something you want me to ask Solms (about brainstems or about dissolved caterpillars), say so in the comments.

Jacob Tsimerman is a professor of mathematics at the University of Toronto and one of the four winners of the 2026 Fields Medal, awarded in July at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Philadelphia. He is the first mathematician based at a Canadian institution to win it (even more, it’s Toronto! So that’s pretty darn cool).

He finished his undergraduate degree at Toronto at 18, took a perfect score at the 2004 International Mathematical Olympiad, and did his PhD at Princeton under Peter Sarnak. The medal recognizes his role in making o-minimality a central method in arithmetic and complex algebraic geometry, and his part in proving Griffiths’ conjecture and the André-Oort conjecture. He is taking leave from Toronto to join OpenAI’s AI safety team.

We cover:

• Why math is being automated faster than things that look easier

• He spent about 12 years on the André-Oort conjecture and abo…

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In 1913 Jung began recording the visionary experiences he worked with through active imagination. At the same time, before he had written any of his stories, Tolkien was filling a sketchbook he called The Book of Ishness with images carrying titles like Beyond.

We cover:

• Jung and Tolkien both drew a red eye. Tolkien’s is the Eye of Sauron. Jung’s is what he calls the eye of the evil one.

• Jung, frightened and pushing back, tells the prophet Elijah and his blind daughter Salome that they are symbols. Their reply: You can call us symbols if you want in the same way that you could call your fellow human beings symb…

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Super excited for this one.

These are Acts One and Two of a three-part arc, and they stand on their own: 1905, the 1927 Solvay Conference, the 1935 EPR paper, and the moment Schrödinger reaches for a new word and coins entanglement.

Bell’s theorem is Act Three, recorded separately, so you will not find the theorem itself here.

We cover:

• How quantum theory actually started

• What is EPR really

• An objection from the 1927 Solvay Conference that even people who work on this rarely encounter

• The God-does-not-play-dice story looks different afterward. On Tim’s reading, indeterminism was never Einstein’s deepest complaint, and Pauli said as much to Max Born in 1954, in a line Bell later quoted: It seemed to me as if you…

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Here’s the stupidly terrifying Standard Model Lagrangian. I’m using Q = T₃ + Y. Generation indices are suppressed (matter repeats in three copies) and to save space, the displayed expression is its classical part (prior to one’s quantum daddy):

Making sense of the above is more straightforward once you ask a question a vibe coder wouldn’t ask, but a programmer would: what is the type of each symbol?

What I mean is that physicists reuse ψ for four mathematical objects, with context being what disambiguates them. You may look at the above and think “well, where is Schrödinger’s wave function?” for instance. We’ll get to that. (Above, ψ goes by χ.)

For now, let’s take a look row by row.

The first row is the force fields. G is the strong force, W the weak force, B a relative of electromagnetism. Quantize them and you get “bosons”: the gluons and W’s, plus (after W and B mix) the Z and photon. Each −¼(…)² piece tells one force field how to so-call “ripple across” spacetime and, for G and W, interact with itself.

The second row is matter, plus the Higgs. The Σ sums over the matter fields: electrons, quarks, neutrinos. χ is my placeholder for fermion fields often called ψ. The last two entries let the Higgs move and give it its Mexican-hat potential V(H), respectively.

The third row is how matter gets its mass, after symmetry breaking. Each term binds two matter fields to the Higgs.

Let’s study one specific term

A great question to ask yourself in philosophy / math / physics is, “what is the smallest amount that you need to know such that when you understand this one case, you understand the majority of the rest?” In other words, for which relatively elementary case do you get the largest bang for your comprehension-buck?

For the standard model, I think it’s this term below. Most other terms become a small tweak on this one. Let’s look at the slice of the Σ describing the right-handed electron, e_R (treat right-handed as a label).

It’s like the term of Sauron. One term to read them all. Now let’s do that type check:

• e_R(x) hands you a list of numbers at each spacetime point (a spinor): a field like the electromagnetic field, but tracking spin.

• ē_R is that same field flipped into a conjugated row. This way, row × matrices × column gives one number. (its jargon name is the “Dirac adjoint”)

• γ^μ are four fixed matrices, one per spacetime direction (that’s what μ counts); they make spin spinny.

• D_μ is the interesting one. You may be used to ∂_μ, which is about how something changes as you move (in our case, a field). The “D” is indicating that it’s the ordinary partial derivative plus the “connection” that I talked about here in this post on principal bundles. In full, Dμe_R = (∂μ + ig′YB_μ)e_R where that inserted B_μ is the interaction / connection, and g′ sets its strength.

e_R has no color charge, nor weak-isospin charge, thus the gluon and W attachments switch off.

From the above, everything else in that jumbled mess is pretty much just a tweak away. For instance:

• A quark’s term is the same sandwich; quarks carry color, so D_μ there is actually a different D_μ than the one that acts on the electron section, but it’s shorter to give it the same symbol. Inside the difference is that it’s not just the B field amending the regular partial derivative).

• The Higgs term (D_μH)†D^μH repeats the replace-∂-with-D move for the Higgs; the † is the row-flip again, and no spin means no γ’s.

• The −¼(…)² terms are basically asking “how do you change?” but now to the force fields themselves.

• The Yukawa row has no derivative: each term is matter × Higgs × matter, scaled by strength dials Y (yes, another Y). H̃ is a companion H that lets up-type quarks join, but I don’t understand this part enough to say more competently about it.

• h.c. stands for Hermitian conjugate, which is a mirror copy of the three terms before it, with every flip undone (rows back to columns, i to −i). The reason you have to do this is that each Yukawa term on its own behaves like a complex number, and a Lagrangian is supposed to be real. Same trick as with ordinary numbers: 3 + 4i isn’t real, but add its mirror 3 − 4i and you get 6, which is. So for L̄_L Y_e H e_R, the +h.c. it just adds ē_R Y_e† H† L_L, and the pair sums to something real. Of course, the true reason for doing this is that it survives predictions of data, but that goes without saying...

  • Technically you could have just written Re(something) to extract the real part, like you do in ordinary complex analysis. This is how I would have chosen to write it if I was in charge of the world.

    • *after multiplying by 2.

Okay, now what?

Most people like to gawk at the jumbled mess and talk about how the universe is complicated, or they’ll take the route of putting it on a cup and talking about how simple the universe is.

But what each avoids is what the heck you do with this Lagrangian (density) after you write it down.

What has been written above can be interpreted classically, or “quantumly.” The most direct quantum path taught is the path integral.

This means you see 𝓛 as eating the fields at each spacetime point and outputting a number. You add up all those numbers across your entire spacetime manifold.

Then, for each of these configurations comes a complex phase, and you add up all of these complex numbers for each configuration you allow in your domain.

Dude, where’s my wavefunction?

Sometimes physicists write ψ for four different objects:

1. In one-particle quantum mechanics, ψ(x) is the wavefunction: the amplitude for finding the particle at x. That is the Schrödinger object you were looking for. It actually never appears above!

2. In the Lagrangian, ψ(x) (my χ) is a classical field: an input to the machine above. Likewise, it carries no (direct) probability meaning.

3. After quantization the field becomes an operator, ψ̂(x), which creates and destroys particles. The hat usually gets dropped and some blame half the confusion on that, but the field was not a quantum state to begin with.

4. The state is |Ψ⟩ (bracket notation for “a state”). If you want a wavefunction, in the Schrodinger schema, it’s a wave “functional” (not a function) over entire field configurations.

Thank you for reading. So, what do you think about the ideas in this post? Leave a comment / share if you like.

—Curt Jaimungal

PS: Consider becoming a paying member on this Substack. This is how I earn a living, as I’m directly reader-supported. Moreover, you’ll get a slew of exclusive content such as early access to full podcasts. If you like the free content, you’ll love the members-only content.

PPS: I read The Economist and find their coverage of science, AI, and global affairs genuinely excellent. If you’d like to try it, my link gets you a huge discount. They don’t partner with just any podcast. In fact, I believe TOE is the only podcast they consistently partner with, thus you get a special 35% discount not offered anywhere else.

They share almost every technical premise, and end up on opposite sides anyway.

We cover:

• Why many-worlds may be self-undermining. In Emily’s words, it doesn’t make sense to believe an interpretation of quantum mechanics which says we shouldn’t believe quantum mechanics.

• Relational quantum mechanics keeps collapsing back into Everett. Emily says she asked Rovelli and Di Biagio directly, Isn’t this just Everett?, and her recounting of their conclusion is well, yes, essentially.

• The measurement problem’s revenge on shared reality: on the relational view, Emily warns, there are no absolute… observer independent facts, so there may be no fact of the matter that you and I share a world at all.

• The Costanza observer (yes, after Seinfeld’s …

Read more

Sigmund Freud urged his readers to think more kindly about thought-transference.

Bertrand Russell said that a five-minute “mystic illumination” transformed him for life, while also calling part of the experience delusive.

None of those above became a conventional “believer.” If you’re reading this, you most likely aren’t conventional either.

Of course, the famous names prove nothing by themselves.

Some were atheists who believed in objective value. Some were scientific skeptics who prayed. Some entertained telepathy while rejecting religion. Others thought physics was real but woefully incomplete.

What Does “Rationalist” Mean?

A note on the word rationalist. I use it broadly, for the scientists, mathematicians, skeptics, and analytic philosophers that we tend to file under the hardnosed analytic type: that is, the people we assume leave no room for God, spirit, or purpose.

A couple of the names here (Nietzsche, Marx) are no one’s idea of a rationalist but I’m including them anyway.

The entries below don’t all make the same sort of claim. Instead, they include settled beliefs, possibilities taken seriously, limits placed on science, religious language used without theism, dated phases, recollections, and even later-rejected positions.

Every entry below is tied to a primary text where one is accessible, or identified explicitly as a recollection, reported interview, translation, or later reconstruction. Where the surrounding context changes the apparent meaning, I’ve tried to include it.

The figures quoted are:

• Nima Arkani-Hamed

• A. J. Ayer

• Hans Berger

• Susan Blackmore

• C. D. Broad

• Georg Cantor

• Rudolf Carnap

• Nancy Cartwright

• Noam Chomsky

• Francis Crick

• Charles Darwin

• Richard Dawkins

• John Dewey

• Paul Dirac

• Theodosius Dobzhansky

• Ronald Dworkin

• Freeman Dyson

• John C. Eccles

• Albert Einstein

• Richard Feynman

• Antony Flew

• Sigmund Freud

• Martin Gardner

• Kurt Gödel

• Stephen Jay Gould

• Jürgen Habermas

• J. B. S. Haldane

• G. H. Hardy

• Sam Harris

• Harry Houdini

• Fred Hoyle

• Thomas Henry Huxley

• Stuart Kauffman

• Michael Levin

• Karl Marx

• Peter Medawar

• John Stuart Mill

• Iris Murdoch

• Thomas Nagel

• Isaac Newton

• Friedrich Nietzsche

• Wolfgang Pauli

• Wilder Penfield

• Roger Penrose

• Max Planck

• Karl Popper

• Hilary Putnam

• Srinivasa Ramanujan

• Carl Rogers

• George John Romanes

• Bertrand Russell

• Carl Sagan

• Erwin Schrödinger

• John Searle

• Michael Shermer

• Alan Turing

• John von Neumann

• Alfred Russel Wallace

• Eugene Wigner

• Edward Witten

• Ludwig Wittgenstein

• Sewall Wright

Nima Arkani-Hamed

“I’m an atheist ... I don’t believe in God. I do, however, think that instead of worshipping a vast and unknowable God, we can devote ourselves to this slow unveiling of the vastness of truth in all of its glory.”

Nima Arkani-Hamed, “The Morality of Fundamental Physics”, Cornell University, 21 April 2016, 04:26 and 1:19:19–1:20:31.

Context: Arkani-Hamed remains an atheist, as far as I know. His claim is that the pursuit of physical and mathematical truth can supply awe, meaning, and an invariant, rough sort of moral code, serving some functions religion has served without requiring belief in God.

A. J. Ayer

“My experiences have weakened, not my belief that there is no life after death, but my inflexible attitude towards that belief.”

A. J. Ayer, “Postscript to a Postmortem”, The Spectator, 15 October 1988, p. 13.

Context: Ayer was correcting his first report of a near-death experience. He remained an atheist and continued to believe death ended him. What changed was his certainty that the alternative deserved no serious consideration.

Hans Berger

“This is a case of spontaneous telepathy in which at a time of mortal danger ... I transmitted my thoughts, while my sister ... acted as the receiver.”

Hans Berger, Psyche (Jena: Gustav Fischer, 1940), pp. 5–6; trans. Pierre Gloor, Hans Berger on the Electroencephalogram of Man (Elsevier, 1969); quoted in Jonna Brenninkmeijer, “Brainwaves and psyches: A genealogy of an extended self”, History of the Human Sciences 28, no. 3 (2015): 115–133.

Context: The experience helped motivate Berger’s search for physical signs of psychic energy, which led to the first human EEG. EEG didn’t establish telepathy; Berger’s scientific discovery resulted from a causal interpretation that remains unsupported.

Susan Blackmore

“I nonetheless became convinced that my spirit, or soul, or astral body, had left my physical body …”

Susan Blackmore, “Solo Science: Going It Alone”, Intelligent Life, Autumn 2008, pp. 102–106.

Context: Blackmore is a reverse trajectory. A vivid out-of-body experience made her a paranormal believer and sent her into parapsychology. Repeated failures and methodological problems changed her mind. She later called the process an “anti-conversion” and became a leading skeptic.

C. D. Broad

“I should be slightly more annoyed than surprised if I should find myself in some sense persisting immediately after the death of my present body.”

C. D. Broad, Lectures on Psychical Research, 1962, p. 430; passage indexed by the Society for Psychical Research.

Context: Broad was a religious skeptic and one of Cambridge’s leading analytic philosophers. He regarded survival as a serious possibility, not an established fact.

Georg Cantor

“I entertain no doubts as to the truth of the transfinites, which I have recognized with God’s help and which, in their diversity, I have studied for more than twenty years.”

“But now I thank God, the all-wise and all-good, that He always denied me the fulfillment of this wish ... for He thereby constrained me, through a deeper penetration into theology, to serve Him and His Holy Roman Catholic Church better than I have been able with my exclusive preoccupation with mathematics.”

Georg Cantor, letters to Ignatius Jeiler (Whitsuntide 1888) and to Charles Hermite (January 1894), translated in Joseph W. Dauben, Georg Cantor: His Mathematics and Philosophy of the Infinite, Harvard University Press, 1979, p. 147; his correspondence with Cardinal Franzelin on the Absolute Infinite is at p. 145.

Context: These are Cantor’s own words, from his letters, and they express a settled lifelong conviction rather than a passing remark. He believed transfinite set theory had been shown to him “with God’s help,” corresponded for years with Catholic theologians, and at times cast himself as God’s reporter. He was careful, though, to separate the two infinities: the Absolute Infinite he reserved for God alone, while his transfinite numbers were created and mathematical, a distinction he used to answer Cardinal Franzelin’s worry that the theory verged on pantheism. His theology was his motivation and his metaphysics, not his proof; set theory is accepted today on mathematical grounds, wholly independent of the beliefs that inspired it.

Rudolf Carnap

“The question of the existence and explanation of the alleged parapsychological phenomena was an important scientific problem.”

Rudolf Carnap, “Intellectual Autobiography”, in Paul Arthur Schilpp, ed., The Philosophy of Rudolf Carnap, Open Court, 1963, p. 25.

“We ... defended the right to examine objectively and scientifically all processes or alleged processes.”

Carnap, “Intellectual Autobiography,” pp. 22–23.

Context: Carnap withheld belief in séances and spirits. The architect of logical empiricism defended parapsychology as an intelligible empirical question rather than dismissing it by definition.

Nancy Cartwright

“For all we know, most of what occurs in nature occurs by hap, subject to no law at all.”

Nancy Cartwright, The Dappled World: A Study of the Boundaries of Science, Cambridge University Press, 1999, p. 1.

“The laws that describe this world are a patchwork, not a pyramid.”

Cartwright, The Dappled World, p. 1.

Context: Cartwright accepts science while denying the inference from physics succeeding in specially organized domains to physics universally governing everything in one closed deductive system.

Noam Chomsky

“My hunch ... is that the answer to the riddle of free will lies in the domain of potential science that the human mind can never master.”

Noam Chomsky, “Things No Amount of Learning Can Teach”, interview with John Gliedman, Omni, November 1983.

“We have a body of scientific knowledge that simply doesn’t appear to connect with the problem of free will in any way.”

Chomsky, “Things No Amount of Learning Can Teach”.

Context: Chomsky appeals to neither a soul nor quantum indeterminacy. His stranger claim is that free will may have a scientific explanation that human cognitive architecture makes permanently inaccessible to us.

Francis Crick

“How it will all turn out remains to be seen. The Astonishing Hypothesis may be proved correct. Alternatively, some view closer to the religious one may become more plausible.”

Francis Crick, The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul, Scribner, 1994, p. 263.

Context: Crick’s book argues that mental life depends on neuronal activity. He continued by allowing a third possibility: a new view unlike both crude materialism and religion. This is a statement of falsifiability, not evidence that he privately rejected his own hypothesis. In a 1973 Icarus paper with Leslie Orgel and in his 1981 book Life Itself, Crick also floated ‘directed panspermia,’ the hypothesis that the first microorganisms may have been deliberately sent to Earth by an advanced extraterrestrial civilization; he offered it as a serious if avowedly speculative conjecture prompted by the difficulty of explaining life’s origin, stressing that the evidence could not yet judge it.

Charles Darwin

“When thus reflecting I feel compelled to look to a First Cause having an intelligent mind ... and I deserve to be called a Theist.”

Charles Darwin, The Autobiography of Charles Darwin 1809–1882, restored ed. Nora Barlow, 1958, pp. 92–93.

“This conclusion was strong in my mind about the time, as far as I can remember, when I wrote the Origin of Species.”

Darwin, Autobiography, p. 93.

Context: Darwin immediately says this conviction gradually weakened. Late in life he generally described himself as agnostic. The quotation documents a position he held near the writing of Origin, not his final verdict.

Richard Dawkins

“We, alone on earth, can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators.”

Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, Oxford University Press, 1976, concluding sentence of the first edition.

“As an academic scientist I am a passionate Darwinian ... I am a passionate anti-Darwinian when it comes to politics and how we should conduct our human affairs.”

Richard Dawkins, A Devil’s Chaplain, Houghton Mifflin, 2003, title essay.

Context: Dawkins insists our capacity to rebel against our genetic programming is itself a human achievement. He rejects the idea that evolutionary explanation determines human value or tells us what we ought to become.

John Dewey

“One reason why personally I think it fitting to use the word ‘God’ to denote that uniting of the ideal and actual ... lies in the fact that aggressive atheism seems to me to have something in common with traditional supernaturalism.”

John Dewey, A Common Faith, Yale University Press, 1934, pp. 51–52.

Context: Dewey rejected supernatural theism. He nevertheless defended religious experience and deliberately retained “God” for the active union of ideal possibilities with actual human life.

Paul Dirac

“One could perhaps describe the situation by saying that God is a mathematician of a very high order.”

Paul Dirac, “The Evolution of the Physicist’s Picture of Nature”, Scientific American 208, no. 5, May 1963, pp. 45–53.

Context: Dirac was famously hostile to religion. The opening qualifier matters: this is his metaphor for the extraordinary mathematical order of physical theory, not a confession of theism.

Theodosius Dobzhansky

“I am a creationist and an evolutionist. Evolution is God’s, or Nature’s method of creation.”

Theodosius Dobzhansky, “Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution”, The American Biology Teacher 35, no. 3, 1973, p. 129.

Context: Dobzhansky was raised in the Russian Orthodox tradition and remained religious throughout his life, though his student and biographer Francisco Ayala records that he rejected belief in a personal God and in an afterlife. He was a central architect of the modern evolutionary synthesis. His “creationism” meant ongoing theistic evolution, not young-earth creationism or rejection of common descent.

Ronald Dworkin

“Religion, we should say, does not necessarily mean a belief in God.”

Ronald Dworkin, “Religion Without God”, The New York Review of Books, 4 April 2013.

“The religious attitude accepts the full, independent reality of value.”

Dworkin, “Religion Without God.”

“…human life has objective meaning or importance.”

Dworkin, “Religion Without God.”

Context: Dworkin was an atheist. He used “religious” for commitment to objective value, the intrinsic importance of a life lived well, and the sublimity of nature.

Freeman Dyson

“I claim that paranormal phenomena may really exist but may not be accessible to scientific investigation.”

Freeman Dyson, “One in a Million”, The New York Review of Books, 25 March 2004.

Context: Dyson accepted that controlled attempts to establish telepathy and ESP had failed. He called real but scientifically inaccessible paranormal phenomena a hypothesis, said he was not claiming it was true, and judged it tenable and plausible. His proposed incompatibility between strong emotion and controlled testing was speculation, not an experimental result.

John C. Eccles

“I maintain that the human mystery is incredibly demeaned by scientific reductionism, with its claim in promissory materialism to account eventually for all of the spiritual world in terms of patterns of neuronal activity.”

John C. Eccles, Evolution of the Brain: Creation of the Self, Routledge, 1989, p. 241.

Context: Eccles won the Nobel Prize for discovering how signals cross the synapse, and here the working neurophysiologist argues that reductive materialism cannot account for the unified conscious self. “Promissory materialism,” a phrase from his long collaboration with Karl Popper, names the IOU that neuroscience will eventually explain all of mind in neural terms; Eccles called believing it a superstition. His own dualist alternative, a non-material self that acts on the brain, has little support among today’s neuroscientists, while the explanatory gap he pressed remains a live problem. He is marking a limit of reduction, not claiming to have located a soul.

Albert Einstein

“The results of the telepathic experiments ... stand surely far beyond those which a nature investigator holds to be thinkable.”

Albert Einstein, preface to Upton Sinclair, Mental Radio, 1930, p. ix.

“I did it without revealing my lack of conviction ... I admit frankly my skepticism in respect to all such beliefs and theories.”

Einstein, letter to Jan Ehrenwald, 13 May 1946; reproduced with permission of the Einstein estate in Martin Gardner, “Einstein and ESP,” The Zetetic, Fall/Winter 1977, p. 55.

Context: Einstein supplied the 1930 preface from friendship and later clarified that it concealed his lack of conviction. The pair shows how an authentic quotation can imply a belief the speaker denied holding.

Richard Feynman

“I can find no better expression of my beliefs of morality ... than is in that encyclical.”

Feynman, The Meaning of It All, Perseus, 1998, lecture 3, discussing Pope John XXIII’s Pacem in Terris.

Context: Feynman didn’t accept the encyclical’s divine grounding. He still considered conventional religious belief logically consistent with science and thought a papal text expressed his morality better than anything else he knew.

There’s also this one below from Feynman:

Western civilization, it seems to me, stands by two great heritages. One is the scientific spirit of adventure – the adventure into the unknown, an unknown which must be recognized as being unknown in order to be explored; the demand that the unanswerable mysteries of the universe remain unanswered; the attitude that all is uncertain; to summarize it – the humility of the intellect. The other great heritage is Christian ethics – the basis of action on love, the brotherhood of all men, the value of the individual – the humility of the spirit.

These two heritages are logically, thoroughly consistent. But logic is not all; one needs one’s heart to follow an idea. If people are going back to religion, what are they going back to? Is the modern church a place to give comfort to a man who doubts God‑more, one who disbelieves in God? Is the modern church a place to give comfort and encouragement to the value of such doubts? So far, have we not drawn strength and comfort to maintain the one or the other of these consistent heritages in a way which attacks the values of the other? Is this unavoidable? How can we draw inspiration to support these two pillars of western civilization so that they may stand together in full vigor, mutually unafraid? Is this not the central problem of our time?

Antony Flew

“The case for an Aristotelian God who has the characteristics of power and also intelligence, is now much stronger than it ever was before.”

Antony Flew, interview with Gary Habermas, “My Pilgrimage from Atheism to Theism”, Philosophia Christi 6, no. 2, 2004, pp. 197–211.

Context: Flew had spent half a century as one of philosophy’s most prominent defenders of atheism. His late position was deism, not Christianity: he continued to reject revelation, resurrection, divine moral governance, and personal survival. Later coauthored presentations of his conversion generated legitimate concerns about assistance and declining health, so this entry rests on his direct 2004 interview rather than the 2007 book.

Sigmund Freud

“I must urge you to have kindlier thoughts on the objective possibility of thought-transference and at the same time of telepathy as well.”

Sigmund Freud, “Dreams and Occultism,” New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, lecture XXX, trans. James Strachey, Standard Edition vol. 22, 1964, pp. 54–55.

Freud described his position as not being entirely convinced but prepared to be convinced.

Freud, “Dreams and Occultism.”

Context: Freud dismissed most occult reports and imagined telepathy, if real, as an unknown natural process. But he didn’t dismiss thought-transference as impossible or merely fraudulent.

Martin Gardner

“I believe in a personal god, and I believe in an afterlife, and I believe in prayer, but I don’t believe in any established religion.”

Martin Gardner, Cambridge University Press interview, 2008.

“There’s no empirical evidence for it, and no logical proof, but the possibility is open.”

Gardner, Cambridge University Press interview, discussing survival after death.

Context: Gardner spent much of his career exposing pseudoscience and paranormal fraud. He described his theism as hope and faith, conceded that atheists had stronger arguments, and claimed no evidence for his belief.

Kurt Gödel

“My theory is rationalistic, idealistic, optimistic, and theological.”

Kurt Gödel, recorded by Hao Wang in A Logical Journey: From Gödel to Philosophy, MIT Press, 1996, pp. 8–9.

“My own religion is more similar to the religion of the churches.”

Gödel, recorded by Wang, A Logical Journey, pp. 152–153.

“If the world is rationally constructed and has meaning, then there must be such a thing [as an afterlife] ... But I am convinced of this, independently of any theology.”

Gödel, letter to his mother Marianne, 23 July 1961, translated in Wang, A Logical Journey, pp. 105–108; discussed in “Why Gödel Believed in the Afterlife”.

Context: The first two statements are Hao Wang’s notes of private conversations rather than Gödel’s published philosophy. The afterlife passage comes from Gödel’s own private letter to his mother. These are genuine theological commitments, but they do not follow from his incompleteness theorems. Separately, Gödel worked out a formal modal-logic proof of God’s existence, a modern revival of the Anselm and Leibniz ontological argument, which he kept private, showed to the logician Dana Scott in 1970, and which appeared in print only after his death in his Collected Works, Vol. III (Oxford University Press, 1995); it was a deliberate exercise in logic.

Stephen Jay Gould

“Science simply cannot ... adjudicate the issue of God’s possible superintendence of nature. We neither affirm nor deny it; we simply can’t comment on it as scientists.”

Stephen Jay Gould, “Impeaching a Self-Appointed Judge,” Scientific American 267, no. 1, July 1992, pp. 118–121; developed in “Nonoverlapping Magisteria”, 1997.

Context: Gould was an agnostic. His controversial NOMA principle assigned empirical facts to science and questions of ultimate meaning and moral value to religion and the humanities. Richard Dawkins explicitly rejected this division.

Jürgen Habermas

Secular society “need not cut itself off from the important resources of spiritual explanations.”

Jürgen Habermas, “Faith and Knowledge”, Peace Prize of the German Book Trade address, 14 October 2001.

The secular side should “retain a feeling for the articulative power of religious discourse.”

Habermas, “Faith and Knowledge.”

Context: Habermas remained a postmetaphysical thinker and methodological atheist. He argued that secular reason may lose moral meanings if it refuses to learn from religious language.

J. B. S. Haldane

“It seems to me immensely unlikely that mind is a mere by-product of matter.”

J. B. S. Haldane, “When I Am Dead”, Possible Worlds and Other Essays, 1927, pp. 209–210.

“It seems to me quite as probable that it will lose its limitations and be merged into an infinite mind ... which I have reason to suspect probably exists behind nature.”

Haldane, “When I Am Dead,” pp. 209–210.

“The data of the mystical consciousness can usefully supplement those of the mind in its normal state.”

Haldane, “Possible Worlds”, p. 286.

Context: Haldane rejected most mediumistic testimony and remained agnostic about personal survival. He also thought materialism, Christianity, theosophy, and Kantianism were all too simple.

G. H. Hardy

“I believe that mathematical reality lies outside us, that our function is to discover or observe it.”

G. H. Hardy, A Mathematician’s Apology, Cambridge University Press, 1940, section 22.

Context: Hardy was a combative atheist. His mathematical Platonism affirms a nonphysical domain that mathematicians discover rather than invent; it makes no theistic claim.

Sam Harris

“There is more to understanding the human condition than science and secular culture generally admit.”

Sam Harris, Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion, Simon & Schuster, 2014, chapter 1.

“Jesus, the Buddha, Lao Tzu, and the other saints and sages of history had not all been epileptics, schizophrenics, or frauds.”

Harris, Waking Up, chapter 1.

Context: Harris continued to condemn religious doctrines he considered false. His concession is experiential: contemplative traditions may contain important psychological truths that ordinary secular culture overlooks.

Harry Houdini

“I too would have parted gladly with a large share of my earthly possessions for the solace of one word from my loved departed ...”

“... after twenty-five years of ardent research and endeavor I declare that nothing has been revealed to convince me that intercommunication has been established between the Spirits of the departed and those still in the flesh.”

Harry Houdini, A Magician Among the Spirits, Harper & Brothers, 1924, Introduction.

Context: Houdini is a reverse trajectory. Grief drew him toward the séance room, above all the hope of hearing from his adored late mother, and he publicly offered rewards to any medium who could produce a genuine phenomenon under test. After roughly twenty-five years of investigation he concluded that every medium he examined was fraudulent. He did not claim to have proven survival impossible, only that nothing in his long inquiry had established contact with the dead; the openness and the verdict both belong on the record.

Fred Hoyle

“A common sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a superintellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as with chemistry and biology.”

Fred Hoyle, “The Universe: Past and Present Reflections”, Engineering and Science 45, no. 2, November 1981, p. 12.

Context: Hoyle’s inference combined nuclear fine-tuning with his heterodox ideas about cosmic life and panspermia. He did not become a Christian, and his biological claims were not accepted by mainstream science. The surprise is that an atheist astronomer inferred a superintellect, not that physics established one.

Thomas Henry Huxley

How consciousness arises from irritated nervous tissue “is just as unaccountable as the appearance of the Djin when Aladdin rubbed his lamp.”

Thomas Henry Huxley, Lessons in Elementary Physiology, Macmillan, 1866, p. 193.

Context: “Darwin’s bulldog” later removed the Djin comparison but retained the substantive claim that consciousness was as unaccountable as any ultimate fact of nature. The analogy marks an explanatory gap, not belief in supernatural beings.

Stuart Kauffman

“With agency came values, meaning, and doing, all of which are as real in the universe as particles in motion.”

Stuart Kauffman, Reinventing the Sacred, Basic Books, 2008, preface, pp. ix–xi.

“A couple in love walking along the banks of the Seine are, in real fact, a couple in love ... not mere particles in motion.”

Kauffman, Reinventing the Sacred.

Context: Kauffman rejects a creator God and proposes a natural sacred. His claim is that agency, value, and meaning are objectively real emergent features that are not replaced by particle descriptions.

Michael Levin

“I actually think that the Platonic view is more correct ... I think it’s a space of minds as well.”

Michael Levin, “Consciousness, Universal Mind, Emergence”, Theories of Everything, 16:57 and 18:04.

“The hardware does not define you.”

Levin, same interview, 37:07.

Context: Levin identifies the Platonic proposal as personal speculation, not an experimental conclusion. His laboratory claims are narrower: goals, memory, and problem-solving occur at biological scales where molecular description alone is predictively unhelpful.

Karl Marx

“Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions.”

Karl Marx, “A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: Introduction”, 1844.

“Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering.”

Marx, “Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right.”

Context: Marx proceeds to call religion the opium of the people and demands the abolition of illusory happiness. The often-omitted sentences show that he also understood religion as consolation, moral protest, and the displaced human heart of an inhuman world.

Peter Medawar

“Scientists do not speak on religion from a privileged position except insofar as those with a predilection for the Argument from Design have better opportunities than laymen to see the grandeur of the natural order of things, whatever they may make of it.”

Peter Medawar, Advice to a Young Scientist, Harper & Row, 1979, p. 31.

“That there is indeed a limit upon science is made very likely by the existence of questions that science cannot answer and that no conceivable advance of science would empower it to answer.”

Peter Medawar, The Limits of Science, Harper & Row, 1984, pp. 59–60.

Context: Medawar’s examples included “What are we all here for?” and “What is the point of living?” The Nobel immunologist was a hard rationalist who often attacked theology and pseudoscience. Yet he thought treating questions of meaning as scientific pseudoquestions discredited science.

John Stuart Mill

“…the adaptations in Nature afford a large balance of probability in favour of creation by intelligence.”

John Stuart Mill, Three Essays on Religion, “Theism,” Henry Holt, 1874, p. 174.

“Whatever else may be taken away from us by rational criticism, Christ is still left; a unique figure …”

Mill, Three Essays on Religion, p. 253.

Context: Mill called the design inference only probable and thought evolutionary explanation could weaken it. His praise of Christ concerns moral originality, not divinity, miracles, or resurrection.

Iris Murdoch

Prayer is “properly not petition, but simply an attention to God which is a form of love.”

Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good, “On ‘God’ and ‘Good’,” Routledge, 1970, p. 55.

“I shall suggest that God was (or is) a single perfect transcendent non-representable and necessarily real object of attention.”

Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good, p. 55.

Context: Murdoch rejected conventional theism. She wanted a secular moral life oriented toward a real, transcendent Good and modeled moral attention partly on prayer.

Thomas Nagel

“I want atheism to be true ... It’s that I hope there is no God!”

Thomas Nagel, The Last Word, Oxford University Press, 1997, pp. 130–131.

“I believe this is one manifestation of a fear of religion which has large and often pernicious consequences for modern intellectual life.”

Nagel, The Last Word, pp. 130–131.

Nature may contain “principles of the growth of order” that are “teleological rather than mechanistic.”

Thomas Nagel, Mind and Cosmos, Oxford University Press, 2012, introduction.

Context: Nagel remains an atheist. His point is that emotional resistance to cosmic authority can bias atheists just as desire for God can bias believers. His teleology explicitly rejects divine intervention.

Isaac Newton

“That gravity should be innate, inherent and essential to matter, so that one body may act upon another at a distance through a vacuum, without the mediation of any thing else ... is to me so great an absurdity that I believe no man who has in philosophical matters any competent faculty of thinking can ever fall into it.”

Isaac Newton, letter to Richard Bentley, 25 February 1692/3; The Newton Project, THEM00258.

Context: Newton is doubting his own theory, not abandoning it. His mathematics of gravitation stood, but he found it philosophically absurd that inert matter could act across empty space with nothing to carry the force between bodies, and he explicitly left open whether the cause was “material or immaterial.” A devout though heterodox anti-Trinitarian, he suspected a non-mechanical cause; later physics answered the puzzle differently, first with fields and then with general relativity’s curved spacetime. The passage records a great physicist’s unease about the foundations of his own success, not a claim that gravity requires the supernatural.

Friedrich Nietzsche

“If one had the smallest vestige of superstition left in one, it would hardly be possible completely to set aside the idea that one is the mere incarnation, mouthpiece, or medium of an almighty power. The idea of revelation ... describes the simple fact.”

Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, trans. Anthony M. Ludovici, “Thus Spake Zarathustra,” section 3, written 1888, p. 102.

Context: Nietzsche is describing the involuntary, ecstatic experience of composing Thus Spoke Zarathustra. “Revelation” is phenomenological language, not a claim that God dictated the work. Ecce Homo is also intentionally hyperbolic.

Wolfgang Pauli

“It would be most satisfactory of all if physis and psyche could be seen as complementary aspects of the same reality.”

Wolfgang Pauli, “The Influence of Archetypal Ideas on the Scientific Theories of Kepler”, in C. G. Jung and Wolfgang Pauli, The Interpretation of Nature and the Psyche, trans. Priscilla Silz, 1955, p. 209.

Context: Pauli spent decades corresponding with Carl Jung about dreams, archetypes, synchronicity, and a possible common ground of mind and matter. He was exploring a dual-aspect picture, not claiming that quantum mechanics proves Jungian psychology. Colleagues also spoke, half in jest, of the ‘Pauli effect,’ his reputation for making laboratory equipment fail simply by being near it; the experimentalist Otto Stern is said to have barred him from his lab over it, and Pauli, rather than only laughing it off, was willing to read such coincidences as instances of the acausal ‘synchronicity’ he studied with Jung.

Wilder Penfield

“Throughout my own scientific career I ... struggled to prove that the brain accounts for the mind. But now ... Do brain-mechanisms account for the mind?”

Wilder Penfield, The Mystery of the Mind, Princeton University Press, 1975, p. xiii.

Context: The pioneer of cortical mapping concluded that materialist monism remained an unproved hypothesis and that dualism deserved serious consideration. He didn’t claim that cortical stimulation had detected a soul.

Roger Penrose

“I think I would say that the universe has a purpose. It’s not somehow just there by chance ... I think that there is something much deeper about it.”

Roger Penrose, interviewed in Errol Morris’s documentary A Brief History of Time (1991); transcript in Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time: A Reader’s Companion, Bantam, 1992.

Context: Penrose has also said that he isn’t a believer and accepts no established religion. His deliberately open use of “purpose” doesn’t endorse a creator God.

Max Planck

“I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness.”

Max Planck, interview with J. W. N. Sullivan, “Interviews with Great Scientists, No. VI: Max Planck,” The Observer (London), 25 January 1931, p. 17.

Context: This comes from a newspaper interview, not from Planck’s physics, and nothing in quantum theory establishes it. The founder of quantum theory, and a lifelong theist who denied belief in a personal God, is stating a personal idealist metaphysics in which mind is prior to matter, closer to Berkeley or to Schrödinger’s Vedanta than to any laboratory result. It is a conviction about the starting point of all description, not a claim that observers create reality or that experiments have found consciousness inside matter. The widely circulated 1944 “Das Wesen der Materie” speech that pins a “conscious and intelligent Mind” behind all matter is a separate text the Max Planck Society’s own archive judges inauthentic, and this entry does not rest on it.

Karl Popper

“Indeterminism and free will have become part of the physical and biological sciences.”

Karl Popper, A World of Propensities, Thoemmes, 1990, pp. 17–18.

Context: Popper regarded determinism as an ideology and reality as objectively open. Indeterminism alone does not establish libertarian freedom; his conclusion depends on a broader account of propensities, emergence, and mental causation. That broader account is developed in The Self and Its Brain: An Argument for Interactionism (Springer, 1977), written with the Nobel-winning neurophysiologist John Eccles, in which Popper defends a mind-body interactionism and a self that acts on but is not reducible to the brain, and introduces the label ‘promissory materialism’ for the rival view that neuroscience will eventually explain the mind away.

Hilary Putnam

“I do believe in the reality of spiritual experience.”

Hilary Putnam, interview with Rachel Bayefsky and Erin Miller, The Yale Philosophy Review 5, 2009, pp. 91–99.

“It is a vision that illuminates my life and my way of experiencing the world. That’s not a theoretical vision. Theoretically I’m a naturalist.”

Putnam, The Yale Philosophy Review interview.

Context: Putnam was a practicing Jew who rejected God as a First Cause, rejected religious foundations for ethics, and didn’t believe in an afterlife. He distinguished lived spiritual reality from explanatory metaphysics.

Srinivasa Ramanujan

“An equation for me has no meaning unless it expresses a thought of God.”

Srinivasa Ramanujan, reported remark to a friend, quoted in Robert Kanigel, The Man Who Knew Infinity: A Life of the Genius Ramanujan, Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1991; first recorded in S. R. Ranganathan, Ramanujan: The Man and the Mathematician, Asia Publishing House, 1967, p. 88.

Context: This is a reported saying, recalled by a friend and recorded in Ranganathan’s 1967 biography rather than written by Ramanujan, and it was said to a friend, not to Hardy, as dramatizations often imply. Ramanujan was sincerely devout and credited his family goddess, Namagiri of Namakkal, with revealing formulas to him in dreams. Yet Hardy, the atheist who knew his mathematics best, judged him closer to agnostic in actual belief and called him “no mystic”; later scholars note that much of the mystical story was romanticized by others and that his results were painstakingly worked out in his notebooks. The line captures how Ramanujan spoke about his work, not evidence that mathematics is divine dictation.

Carl Rogers

“I now consider it possible that each of us is a continuing spiritual essence lasting over time, and occasionally incarnated in a human body.”

Carl Rogers, A Way of Being, Houghton Mifflin, 1980, pp. 89–90.

Context: The founder of person-centered psychotherapy said experiences surrounding his wife’s death reversed his earlier belief that death probably ended the person. His evidence was personal and included a medium, near-death reports, and reincarnation literature, not controlled clinical research.

George John Romanes

“I have since come to see that I was wrong touching what I constituted the basal argument for my negative conclusion.”

George John Romanes, Thoughts on Religion, ed. Charles Gore, Longmans, Green, 1895, p. 109.

Treating God’s existence “as if ... a merely physical problem to be solved by man’s reason alone” was itself opposed to reason.

Romanes, Thoughts on Religion, p. 101.

Context: Darwin’s protégé explicitly retracted the central negative argument of his youthful atheist book. His late notes were published posthumously and show movement toward belief, not an uncontested return to settled Anglican orthodoxy.

Bertrand Russell

“At the end of those five minutes, I had become a completely different person. For a time, a sort of mystic illumination possessed me.”

Bertrand Russell, The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell, vol. 1, chapter 6.

“The unmystical, rationalistic view of life seems to me to omit all that is most important and most beautiful.”

Russell, letter to Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson, 26 August 1902, reproduced in The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell, vol. 1, chapter 6.

Restrained mysticism contains “an element of wisdom ... which does not seem to be attainable in any other manner.”

Bertrand Russell, Mysticism and Logic, 1918.

Context: Russell remained an atheist and called his imagined access to other minds during the illumination a delusion. He nevertheless said its ethical transformation remained with him throughout his life.

Carl Sagan

“At the time of writing there are three claims in the ESP field which, in my opinion, deserve serious study.”

Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World, chapter 17, Headline edition, 1997, p. 285; authorial draft held by the Library of Congress.

Context: The three claims involved small effects on random-number generators, projected images received under mild sensory deprivation, and young children who reported apparently checkable details of previous lives. Sagan first said that most paranormal claims lacked firm support and that these three had only “some, although still dubious, experimental support.” He was calling for controlled inquiry, not endorsing ESP or reincarnation.

Erwin Schrödinger

“Consciousness cannot be accounted for in physical terms. For consciousness is absolutely fundamental.”

Erwin Schrödinger, reported interview by J. W. N. Sullivan in The Observer, 11 January 1931; reprinted via The New York Times, 8 February 1931, and in Psychic Research 25, March 1931, p. 91.

“Consciousness is a singular of which the plural is unknown.”

Erwin Schrödinger, What Is Life?, Epilogue, Cambridge University Press, 1944, p. 89.

Context: Schrödinger’s mature metaphysics was influenced by Vedanta and treated the plurality of minds as appearance. This was a philosophical commitment, not a result derived from his wave equation.

John Searle

“From the fact that consciousness is entirely accounted for causally by neuron firings ... it does not follow that consciousness is nothing but neuron firings.”

John Searle, “Why I Am Not a Property Dualist”, Journal of Consciousness Studies 9, no. 12, 2002, pp. 57–64.

“The property dualist and I are in agreement that consciousness is ontologically irreducible.”

Searle, “Why I Am Not a Property Dualist.”

Context: Searle rejects both substance and property dualism. His biological naturalism says consciousness is caused by the brain while remaining ontologically irreducible to third-person descriptions.

Michael Shermer

“I have to admit, it rocked me back on my heels and shook my skepticism to its core as well.”

Michael Shermer, “Anomalous Events That Can Shake One’s Skepticism to the Core”, Scientific American 311, no. 4, October 2014, p. 97.

Context: A broken radio belonging to Shermer’s wife’s deceased grandfather unexpectedly played during their wedding, then stopped the next day. Shermer explicitly said the episode was not scientific evidence for survival or communication with the dead. It moved him and led him to recommend open-minded agnosticism about unresolved anomalies, without changing his evidential standard or becoming evidence for survival.

Alan Turing

“When the body dies the ‘mechanism’ of the body, holding the spirit is gone and the spirit finds a new body sooner or later perhaps immediately.”

Alan Turing, “Nature of Spirit”, undated manuscript, c. April 1932; King’s College Cambridge Modern Archive, AMT/C/29.

“Unfortunately the statistical evidence, at least for telepathy, is overwhelming.”

Alan Turing, “Computing Machinery and Intelligence”, Mind 59, no. 236, 1950, pp. 453–454.

Accepting telepathy would mean that the idea of bodies moving only according to familiar physical laws “would be one of the first to go.”

Turing, “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” pp. 453–454.

Context: Turing wrote “Nature of Spirit” at nineteen while grieving Christopher Morcom; it can’t be presented as his settled mature position. His later telepathy passage was serious enough to affect the design of his imitation game, but the experimental evidence that impressed him was subsequently discredited.

John von Neumann

“So long as there is the possibility of eternal damnation for nonbelievers it is more logical to be a believer at the end.”

Von Neumann’s deathbed reasoning as reconstructed by his biographer Norman Macrae, John von Neumann, Pantheon, 1992, p. 379.

“He was of course completely agnostic all his life, and then he suddenly turned Catholic. It doesn’t agree with anything whatsoever in his attitude, outlook and thinking when he was healthy.”

Oskar Morgenstern, quoted in Steve J. Heims, John von Neumann and Norbert Wiener, MIT Press, 1980.

Context: Baptized Catholic in 1930 for his marriage and agnostic in practice ever after, von Neumann asked for a priest, Father Anselm Strittmatter, as he was dying of cancer in 1957, and framed his return as a wager. No line here is in his own hand: the wager is his biographer’s reconstruction, and the report that the sacraments brought him no peace, that he stayed terrified of death to the end, comes from the priest who attended him as recorded by a later biographer, corroborated by Paul Halmos and Eugene Wigner. Morgenstern’s counter-testimony is kept beside it because the century’s most formidable logician reasoned his way to belief and, by every account, found no comfort there.

Alfred Russel Wallace

“It is ‘spirit alone that feels, and perceives, and thinks’; though, so long as the spirit is in the body, it does so by means of the brain and nervous system.”

Alfred Russel Wallace, letter to the editor, Light, 20 June 1896, p. 298.

Context: The co-discoverer of natural selection became an outspoken spiritualist and argued that natural selection couldn’t fully explain the human mind. Darwin disagreed with him.

Eugene Wigner

“It was not possible to formulate the laws of quantum mechanics in a fully consistent way without reference to the consciousness.”

Eugene Wigner, “Remarks on the Mind-Body Question” (1961), in Symmetries and Reflections, Indiana University Press, 1967, p. 172; reprinted in John Wheeler and Wojciech Zurek, eds., Quantum Theory and Measurement, Princeton University Press, 1983, p. 169.

Context: This represents Wigner’s interpretation of measurement, not a theorem accepted by contemporary physics. He later moved away from treating consciousness as uniquely responsible for collapse, as Leslie Ballentine documented in “A Meeting with Wigner”.

Edward Witten

“I think consciousness will remain a mystery.”

Edward Witten, interview with Wim Kayzer, 1:10:29–1:12:20; transcribed by Ashutosh Jogalekar in Scientific American, 18 August 2016.

“I have a much easier time imagining how we understand the Big Bang than I have imagining how we can understand consciousness.”

Witten, interview with Wim Kayzer, 1:10:29–1:12:20.

Context: Witten expected biology and physics to explain much more about brain function. His pessimism concerned why consciousness accompanies that functioning, not whether neuroscience can progress.

Ludwig Wittgenstein

“I am not a religious man but I cannot help seeing every problem from a religious point of view.”

Maurice O’Connor Drury recalling Ludwig Wittgenstein, in Rush Rhees, ed., Recollections of Wittgenstein, Oxford University Press, 1984, p. 79.

“The Christian faith, as I see it, is a man’s refuge in this ultimate torment.”

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, ed. G. H. von Wright, trans. Peter Winch, Blackwell, 1980, p. 46, entry dated 1944.

“Religious faith and superstition are quite different. One of them results from fear and is a sort of false science. The other is a trusting.”

Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, p. 72, entry dated 1948.

Context: The first sentence is Drury’s recollection, with slightly different wording across editions. Wittgenstein’s notebooks contain belief, rejection, longing, and ambivalence. “Religious point of view” shouldn’t be converted into orthodox doctrine.

Sewall Wright

“Reality clearly consists primarily of streams of consciousness.”

Sewall Wright, “Panpsychism and Science”, in Mind in Nature, 1977.

“Emergence of mind from no mind at all is sheer magic.”

Wright, “Panpsychism and Science,” 1977.

Context: Wright was one of the principal architects of modern population genetics. He regarded panpsychism as philosophy rather than day-to-day biological method, but he defended it for most of his adult life.

None of this shows that an unusual view is true because a brilliant person held it. Nor is this a census. I went into this because I was inspired by the article here by Arthur Haswell...

Actually, the entries above point in incompatible directions. Some affirm God; others naturalize spirituality. Some defend mind beyond reduction. Some admit only an explanatory gap. Some accept paranormal claims. Of course, others reconsider and reject them.

I want to hear from you in the Substack comment section below. I read each and every response.

—Curt Jaimungal

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