Mystery

A wonderful area for speculative academic work is the unknowable. These days religious

subjects are in disfavor, but there are still plenty of good topics. The nature of

consciousness, the workings of the brain, the origin of aggression, the origin of language, the

origin of life on earth, SETI and life on other worlds... this is all great stuff. Wond... See more

But to be human is not to have answers. It is to have questions—and to live with them. The machines can’t do that for us. Not now, not ever.

And so, at last, we can return—seriously, earnestly—to the reinvention of the humanities, and of humanistic education itself. We can return to what was always the heart of the matter—the lived experience of exi... See more

Perhaps what we need is art that is suggestive but not prescriptive, unashamedly mysterious, not didactic. Indeed, this is what art is uniquely able to do—seeking in places that reason and knowledge can’t reach, beyond the sacred, beyond the descriptive and beyond the coded world of technology. Perhaps we need this role more than ever, these spaces

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The deeper into this you go, the weirder and more inexplicable it gets. Many experiences literally transcend or obviate language in their nature. After a certain point of undeniably real inexplicable absurdity, you give up trying to come up with "rational explanations" for things, and go with the flow. Part of the beauty of all of the woo-sploratio... See more

So we have reached a paradox: The commitment to a totally scientific view of the world has led to theories that may be unscientific, according to Popper’s definition of science. In a sense, the miracle believers and the miracle nonbelievers have found a bit of common ground. This is not to say that the transcendent experience of miraculous phenomen

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