Mary Martin

we now have growing reasons to suspect that agency is a genuine natural phenomenon. Biology could stop being so coy about it if only we had a proper theory of how it arises. Unfortunately, no such thing currently exists, but there’s increasing optimism that a theory of agency can be found – and, moreover, that it’s not necessarily unique to living ... See more

Memories are not a true or false picture of the past; they are a Monet lily pond.

Novel technologies like artificial intelligence or neurotechnology are expected to have social implications in the future. As they are in the early stages of development, it is challenging to identify potential negative impacts that they might have on society. Typically, assessing these effects relies on experts, and while this is essential, there ... See more

intelligence has inadvertently become a ‘human success’-shaped cookie cutter we squish onto other species. Switching from baking to sports metaphors, we could say that everyone else – animals, amoebas, AIs and aliens – has to play the game on a field that we have laid out, according to rules that we have established and proven ourselves extremely c... See more

For instance, studies on meditators have shown that their somatosensory perception is more sensitive to subtle internal sensations, potentially leading to both enhanced detection of bodily signals and misinterpretation of these signals (Mylius et al., 2023).

If my hypothesis is right then consciousness exists in a broader quantum field-based system and biological death is only a transition point that we could potentially interrupt on a quantum level and transfer consciousness. Consciousness may not die in a classical sense but could exist in a temporally distributed state, hinting at the possibility of... See more

when an army of trauma counsellors descended upon the nation after the tsunami of 2004, the University of Colombo pleaded with them to cease seeing suffering as traumatisation as it was undermining people’s resilience. Sri Lanka happens to top the charts for wellbeing in the ‘The Mental State of the World in 2023’ report despite such denial of the ... See more