Vikington. —

Remember this when you’re considering the odds of your own existence—meaning the chances of your precise genetic combination emerging from the primordial ooze. As calculated by biologist Ali Binazir, those odds are 1 in 10 to the 2,685,000th power. That’s a one with two million, six hundred eighty five thousand zeros. It’s a number so absurdly larg

Sigmond Freud once said the more alike two cultures are, the more likely they’ll be to kill each other, for we all seem to hate most the things we find inside ourselves. That, and people with a different accent or skin color.

There’s a form of argumentation in philosophy called reductio ad absurdum, which is when you prove a premise is untenable by showing how it leads, inexorably, to contradictory and absurd conclusions.

Explain to me how your time travel works, in simple terms. If you can’t explain something in simple terms, you don’t really understand it. — What if it’s the opposite—that the moment you try to explain it, you cease to understand?

Under humorous stimuli, patients exhibited considerable activity in their dorsomedial prefrontal cortex and ventromedial prefrontal cortex, which are areas known for processing incongruity—or a juxtaposition of incompatible elements that violate our expectations. These expectations, of course, are the mental models we’ve built from our memories and

The only way to kill the ego illusion is by stripping away all the things you believe about yourself that aren’t true. So, the first gate is targeting your outer beauty.

The human lifespan, in comparison to these 13 billion years, is infinitesimally brief. While we’re here, we live as tiny, random parasites on a vast, unfeeling planet, in a vast, unfeeling universe—with no real agency or purpose, and just enough intelligence to recognize our own insignificance. When we die, which happens almost immediately, we retu

IN MAHAYANA BUDDHISM, the word sunyata is often translated as “emptiness,” but that’s intensely misleading. More helpful would be to say it’s an “emptiness of independent nature,” or the lack of any permanent, unchanging self. It’s a flat rejection of ego-centered perception. Space isn’t empty. It contains the whole universe. You can’t be rid of sp