Mary Martin

We now know that the brain’s capacity to learn, to adapt, to change in response to experience is so fundamental that it strikes the wrong note to say that an activity (like meditation) ‘changes the brain’ as if such change is special or unusual. In fact, everything we do changes the brain on some level. Or rather, the brain is constantly changing,... See more

Maybe AI doesn’t raise the bar. Maybe it reveals how low we’ve let the bar drop. In a world where ghosting is normal and attentiveness is rare, a chatbot that listens is radical.

But the future is not a self-fulfilling prophecy - 8 billion people on this planet have a voice and that carries far more weight than one person with 8 billion dollars. We just forgot how to exercise it.

At its most basic interpretation, then,

the concept of rights for other animals entails a right to bodily integrity, autonomy, and life.

Our prospective randomized clinical trial found that MBSR was noninferior to escitalopram for the treatment of anxiety disorders. In addition, MBSR was safe and well tolerated, with fewer adverse events associated with treatment compared with escitalopram

In other words, there’s never been a better time to become an effective altruist! Get in now, while it’s still unpopular! The times when everyone fawns over us are boring and undignified. It’s only when you’re fighting off the entire world that you feel truly alive.

A popular narrative now casts all living entities as ‘machines’ built by genes, as Richard Dawkins called them. For Mayr, biology was unique among the sciences precisely because its objects of study possessed a program that encoded apparent purpose, design and agency into what they do. On this view, agency doesn’t actually manifest in the moment of... See more