Mary Martin

Is it more important to reform existing social networks or to work to build new ones?

Today’s values have allowed us to totally miss the point that the climate crisis is a moral failing. American values are strongly materialistic, anthropocentric, individualistic, and contempocentric. Consumerism and materialism seek to meet human needs, even non-material ones, through ever-increasing purchase of goods and services. Consumption is t... See more

While the same laws of physics reign over Earth’s smallest and largest species, the balance of forces shifts with size. Intermolecular forces flex beneath the feet of water striders on a pond, capillary forces shoot water impossibly upward through a plant’s thin roots, and electrostatic forces can ensnare any oppositely charged flecks that lie in t... See more

One problem is that consciousness means different things to different people. For example, some researchers focus on the subjective experience — what it is like to be you or me. Others study its function — cognitive processes and behaviours enabled by being conscious. These differences muddy attempts to compare ideas.

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).

The striking paradox is that science tells us both that we’re peripheral in the cosmic scheme of things and that we’re central to the reality we uncover. Unless we understand how this paradox arises and what it means, we’ll never be able to understand science as a human activity, and we’ll keep defaulting to a view of nature as something to gain ma... See more

However, many people may not realize that during the last few years of his life Maslow believed self-transcendence, not self-actualization, was the pinnacle of human needs. What's more, it's difficult to find any evidence that he ever actually represented his theory as a pyramid .