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Political power and profitable trades in the US Congress
The debate over whether US members of Congress should be allowed to trade individual stocks has become a mainstream policy concern. This column uses data on every US congressional stock trade from 1995 to 2021 to reveal that while rank-and-file members do not systematically beat the market, once some of them assume leadership positions their portfolios start to look very different and outperform those of regular members. The pattern raises uncomfortable questions about how political power, corporate access, and personal wealth interact.
Arizona city unanimously rejects AI data center after residents' outcry
The Chandler, Arizona, city council unanimously voted against clearing the way to allow for construction of an artificial intelligence data center
Want To Know What The Last 2 Minutes Before Being Swallowed By A Volcanic Eruption Look Like? Now You Can
RIP Camera V3.
California braces for disaster as Congress fails to come to a deal on health care plans
Insurance premiums for nearly 2 million Californians are almost certain to spike in a matter of weeks as a fractured Congress allows federal subsidies for some customers to expire.
House GOP axes $645M from funds aiding infrastructure, children, vets
House Republicans invoked a rarely used tool that allows a committee to deny administration requests to carry over funding from one year to the next.
Rockets hope return of Alperen Sengun spurs success vs. Clippers
The quirky scheduling gap courtesy of the NBA Cup allowed the Houston Rockets a respite and provided an opportunity for early-season reflection.
More A than I: Testing for Large Language Model Plagiarism in Political Science -
More A than I: Testing for Large Language Model Plagiarism in Political Science By Robert Keener, The University of Tennessee This article shows how the sudden introduction of large language models (LLMs) has allowed a [...]
Launching this spring, a new graduate certificate will allow UF students to explore their passion for sports media
Last year, Jada Ross, a UF journalism major on the sports and media track, found herself on a coverage team for the 124th U.S Open. There, despite being the youngest reporter in attendance and the only woman in the group, she was given the opportunity to ask the first postgame interview question to Ludvig Åberg, a Swedish professional golfer.
I Watched Science Change the World. Here's What Could Stop It.
As we mark the 45th anniversary of Bayh-Dole, we must remember its origins: a bipartisan solution that allowed science and taxpayer-funded research to deliver public benefits.
Supreme Court poised to strike down Watergate-era campaign finance limits
The Supreme Court's conservatives signaled they are likely to rule for Republicans and President Trump by throwing out a Watergate-era limit on campaign funding by political parties. Such a ruling could allow parties to support their candidate's campaigns with help from wealthy donors.
Sports integrity: What is it and how does gambling affect it?
Part five in a five-part series on sports betting in the U.S. since the 2018 Supreme Court decision allowing states to legalize sports betting.
Microsoft promises it will upgrade Windows 11 with better performance for gamers in 2026 — "we’re committed to making Windows the best place to play"
Windows 11 is set to gain a number of important improvements for gamers next year, all designed to allow games to run better and compete with SteamOS.
I was exhausted from constant travel, so I took a vacation where I finally let myself do nothing
After months of nonstop travel, I felt completely exhausted. So, on a recent trip to Maui, I finally allowed myself to relax and do nothing.
Penn Entertainment seeks technology-related licensing for M Resort
Penn Entertainment is seeking a Nevada license to provide it with greater flexibility to research, develop, and deploy in-house technology at the M Resort in Henderson.The M Resort has launched a new cashless wagering system, but its current licensing doesn’t allow the customization of reports
Trump accused of ‘colossal economic and national security failure’ for allowing Nvidia to sell powerful AI chips to China
Rolling coverage of the latest economic and financial news
Trump gives Nvidia the green light to sell its H200 chips in China
President Donald Trump said the US would allow Nvidia to sell its powerful H200 chips to China.
Non-Banks Are Now a Big Banking Business
Hello and welcome to the newsletter, a grab bag of daily content from the Odd Lots universe. Sometimes it's us, Joe Weisenthal and Tracy Alloway, bringing you our thoughts on the most recent developments in markets, finance and the economy. And sometimes it's contributions from our network of expert guests and sources. Whatever it is, we promise it will always be interesting.
Valve Trying to Unblock Open-Source HDMI 2.1 Support on Steam Machine
Valve is reportedly attempting to persuade the HDMI Forum—the consortium responsible for HDMI development—to allow open-source support for HDMI 2.1 on Linux, enabling the standard to function without restrictions on SteamOS. When Valve launched its Steam Machine, it was listed with HDMI 2.0 support,...
The science behind failing up in corporate America
Corporate America allows certain leaders to fail upward—here's why.
JIM CLOERN: The scientist and science I mourn
By Ariel Rubissow Okamoto A man died recently who was one of my heroes. Inside his big brain lay the secrets of San Francisco Bay. In one sentence he could explain the relationships between the tiny plants drifting aimlessly in the shallows, the muscular salmon leaping upstream, and the health of the planet. He had a warm smile, a curl to his hair, a ready chuckle. But I did not know this man well. For decades he ran a monthly data […]
No essential supplies in truce: Gaza’s healthcare system broken by Israel
Israel is not allowing antibiotics, IV solutions or surgical material to enter besieged Gaza despite 2-month ceasefire.
America's economy is getting swallowed up by middlemen — and it's driving people crazy
The real winners in today's economy are the middlemen — rich intermediary companies like Walmart, Airbnb, and Lyft that connect buyers and sellers.
Chinese scientists develop promising stem cell therapy for Parkinson’s
New biotech allows ‘seeds’ planted in the brain to differentiate into new nerve cells, reshaping its neural network.
Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine vetoes bill loosening child labor laws
Ohio Republican Gov. Mike DeWine has vetoed a bill that would have loosened child labor laws, allowing 14 and 15-year-olds to work until 9 p.m.
DOT temporarily halts enforcement of Biden-era refund requirements for airline flight renumbering
DOT temporarily suspends airline refund requirements for renumbered flights, allowing carriers to change flight numbers without triggering automatic refunds.
Sayin, Mendoza or Pavia? My Heisman Trophy leader going into Championship Saturday is …
Wait, am I allowed to tell you that?
Evers vetoes nine bills, including a ban on immigrant health care
Wisconsin already doesn’t allow immigrants without legal status to access BadgerCare, which Evers noted in his veto message.
Elon Musk says Tesla FSD will allow you to text and drive in some cases. Police say don't do that.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk said Full Self-Driving now allows drivers to text and drive in certain traffic conditions. Police advise against it.
Supreme Court allows Texas to use Trump-backed congressional map in midterms
The Supreme Court on Thursday allowed Texas to use a congressional map that will boost President Donald Trump’s effort to keep Republicans in control of Congress, blocking a lower court decision that found the new boundaries were likely unconstitutional because they were drawn based on race.
WEBTOON Entertainment Inc. (WBTN): A Bull Case Theory
We came across a bullish thesis on WEBTOON Entertainment Inc. on Mispriced Assets’s Substack by Nick Nemeth. In this article, we will summarize the bulls’ thesis on WBTN. WEBTOON Entertainment Inc.’s share was trading at $13.91as of December 2nd. Webtoon Entertainment (Nasdaq: WBTN) has rapidly emerged as a global leader in digital comics, operating a mobile-first platform that allows creators—ranging from amateurs […]
What is ‘scromiting’ or CHS, condition caused by habitual marijuana use?
A vomiting disorder linked to frequent marijuana use is on the rise, prompting global health officials to allow researchers to track the condition and study it. Dubbed on social media as “scr…
Fintech firm Marquis notifies affected business after ransomware breach
Fintech firm Marquis is notifying U.S. banks and credit unions after an August ransomware attack allowed hackers to access files containing customer data, according to a company filing on Tuesday.
Critical RSC Bugs in React and Next.js Allow Unauthenticated Remote Code Execution
Critical RSC flaws in React and Next.js enable unauthenticated remote code execution; users should update to patched versions now.
Stop propping up sickness and start propping up health
The COVID-era subsidies have resulted in increased federal spending with little to no improvement in health outcomes, and Congress should allow them to expire as scheduled to encourage competition,…
Ivory Coast allow Ndicka to stay for Como match
Roma will need a strong showing to secure the three points for the match against Como on Monday, December 15th at 8:45 PM. Gian Piero Gasperini will have to contend with absences due to the Africa Cup...
Why jail access to Pakistan’s Imran Khan has caused a political storm
Jailed former prime minister was finally allowed to meet his sister, Uzma Khanum, on Tuesday, following protests.
NCAA rescinds rule allowing student-athletes to bet on professional sports
The NCAA backpedaled on a previously-approved rule change that would have allowed student-athletes and athletic department staff, including those at the College, to bet on professional sports. NCAA membership voted to reject the change on Nov. 21. Although the governing bodies of all three divisions initially voted to approve the change in October, the Division...
New entertainment district allows locals to browse and booze in fast-growing Alabama city
Patrons will be able to drink from 11 a.m. to 11 p.m. Monday through Saturday.
Cleveland Clinic eCoaching Program Shows Promise for PsA-Related Mental Health
Immune Strength ecoaching allows users to take charge of their mental wellness through self-guided modules and support from health coaches.
After a Witcher-free decade, CDPR still promises three sequels in six years
CD Projekt Red says shift to Unreal Engine allows for more rapid development.
Mayor Villalobos intensifies effort to confront ongoing issues in McAllen’s Entertainment District
McAllen’s Entertainment and Cultural Overlay District, commonly known as the 17th Street entertainment district, was created in 2005 to allow bars, clubs, and music venues to operate under special permits with added safety requirements.
Science must move from materialism to mystery
Theoretical physicist and neuroscientist Àlex Gómez-Marín argues that modern science has become trapped in a framework that mistakes matter for the whole of reality. In this wide-ranging interview, Gómez-Marín challenges the foundations of materialism, defends the scientific study of near-death experiences, and calls for a new type of science grounded in mystery and a renewed sense of the sacred. He suggests that abandoning materialism could open the door to a deeper understanding of consciousness, death, and the purpose of human existence. Simon Custer: You are both a theoretical physicist and a neuroscientist, and you have also been fiercely critical of materialist theories of mind and consciousness. What do you think the ultimate nature of reality is?Àlex Gómez-Marín: I don't know what the ultimate nature of reality is, but what I try to first assess is whether the stories that they [mainstream science] have told us about it are right, or maybe whether there are other alternatives. That's why I've been a fierce critic of materialism. As a scientist, I realized that they had sold us this idea that to be a good scientist you also had to subscribe to many other -isms, like materialism, reductionism, and even secularism. And so first I think one needs to unmount these -isms, and then, as is happening today in consciousness studies, we have a huge landscape where there isn't only one game in town, the idea that matter is the only thing that really exists. But because we are studying the hard problem of consciousness, it may be the case that other views of reality, like idealism, or even dualism, or other theories like dual aspect monism... these are philosophical ideas that now, I think, have room in science to be taken seriously. How does something like materialism relate to dualism or idealism? What is materialism in the first place?Well, materialism is the philosophical position that matter is the only really ‘real’ thing in the universe. And I think that worked kind of well because science started 400 years ago and Galileo made that split, I call it the foundational wound. It was a great business move.He said, let's start doing science on that portion of reality that lends itself more easily to mathematization and measurement. So, for some reason, the solidity of this table or the movement of planets lend themselves very well to this foundational idea of science. But as time went on, 400 years later, we realized that we had forgotten the other side, which is what really matters.What really matters is pain, is love, is feelings, sensation, consciousness, which is very hard to define, but very intimate. We all know what it is. It's that thing that disappears when we go into deep sleep and comes back in the morning. SUGGESTED VIEWING On the edges of knowledge With Michael Shermer, Rupert Sheldrake, Güneş Taylor It's what it is like to be, as Nagel said. It's the feeling of being alive. So, materialism is good to study certain things, but then when it ossifies into this ideology and then is dressed like science, now it's preventing us from understanding these key questions that are really that everybody wants to know.Why are we here? Why do we feel reality? Where do we go when we die? And so we need other ways. We need pluralism. I'm only asking for having more options on the table and taking them seriously. Why does materialism fail to explain consciousness? For example, if you were to lobotomize me, I would not be a functional human being. What do you say to someone who might think that materialism adequately explains the mind?Well, here we could speak about different things. We could talk about physics or about neuroscience. I happen to have training with both.For instance, for neuroscientists, 99% of them, I'm not included in that portion, believe that the brain can only be a productive organ. It's an organ that somehow, somewhere, consciousness emerges. It's like a lamp. And then something happens, magic happens, and then consciousness emerges.That's the position you need to be if you're a materialist because if the only really ‘real’ thing is matter, then you need to say, just give us some more time and money and we'll figure out how mind emerges or is produced from matter. There are many philosophically sophisticated ways of criticizing this.Now there's another option, which is the brain as a permissive organ. This was said by William James more than 100 years ago.Now then the brain wouldn't be like this machine, like for instance, a heat engine whose smoke is consciousness, which is what we would have in the first big model, the productive model. But in the permissive model, the brain would be a kind of a filter. And so the brain would still have a very important role in consciousness, but it wouldn't be a productive role.It would be permissive, much like a filter or much like a prism which would receive light. And - I'm speaking metaphorically - it would receive the light of the mind and then it could reflect it and refract it.Now, with these two big options on the table, I think we can make progress into what I call the edges of consciousness, which are all these experiences, weird experiences that many people have, but we don't talk about enough, like near-death experiences, precognitive dreams, synchronicities. These experiences are very important for humans and they have a place in the permissive hypothesis and they are literally impossible in the productive hypothesis. So that's yet one more reason to explore alternatives to materialism. There may be anecdotal evidence for near-death experiences, but is there robust evidence that would be accepted by the majority of scientists who subscribe to the scientific method?Sure. And the plural of anecdotes, someone said, is data.And there's a lot of data. Actually, this year is the 50th anniversary, half a century, since Dr. Raymond Moody realized that we have two ears and one mouth and started listening to what his patients had to say about their experiences while they were clinically dead.The heart had stopped, breathing had stopped in these patients. These patients would come back and tell him these amazing stories that some people may say are hallucinations, but for the patients were hyper-real, like seeing light at the end of the tunnels, seeing deceased family members waiting for them, feeling bliss.___I would say the evidence suggests that the mind can survive the death of activity of the brain.___And so he and others started taking them seriously and writing their accounts down. And then you can do a science based on that material of experience that people have. Now, on the more objective side, more recently people have started to measure what's going on in the brain when people are clinically dead and brought back. This has opened a proper field of study, which is near-death studies.Evidence is a difficult word, because sometimes people think that when you say evidence, this is just the final proof. Evidence is like in a jury. You bring testimony, you bring pieces of data that point in one direction or another.I would say the evidence suggests that the mind can survive the death of activity of the brain. When brains are broken or shut off, there can still be mind going on. And that's revolutionary.That would entail that when we die, it's not game over, which, by the way, is the thesis of materialism. If consciousness survives, materialism dies. It's game over for materialism if something of us continues after we die. Do you think that there is mental continuity after death?Well, I think so, and I believe so, and I could also say I may have experienced it myself, because four years ago I had a near-death experience. I was in the hospital, I lost a lot of blood, and I saw those beings at the end of the tunnel, three beings, and there was yellow light. I was in a well, I was looking upwards, and I hadn't read about NDEs by then, but when I came back from this experience, I decided I would try to integrate this also in my professional life. Not just my personal life, of course, but my professional life as a physicist and as a neuroscientist. So I may have had the experience of glimpses of what an afterlife would be, and I'm not ashamed to say it in this way, and then one can do science of it, and then one can do philosophy of it.One can think about what -isms we were discussing, what views on reality would allow those experiences to be really ‘real,’ as opposed to, well, poor guy, the brain was kind of broken, it must have been a hallucination. Do you have a view about whether individuality or “the ego” persists after death, or whether we sort of merge into some sort of cosmic consciousness instead?I don't know, but my view would be along those lines you're suggesting. I think we could speak about a kind of universal mind, and then the problem is not how we emerge from matter, but how we fragment from a more holistic consciousness into these individual eddies and then when we die, this kind of dissipates.But I'm not sure. For instance, idealism would promote that view, but then what would survive of us after these eddies just vanish and become again the big Consciousness, I'm not sure what that would be. I don't know for sure, but I would tell you I believe something of us survives.And there are other lines of research, not just near-death experience, that can address this really hard question of survival. For instance, there are children who remember previous lives. This was studied by Ian Stevenson at the University of Virginia for more than 50 years.___Research takes place within a selection mechanism that also sometimes reinforces things that are not very scientific.___It's amazing research. He went all over the world, especially in the East, and collected all these case studies, all these stories. In plural, these were data of kids, very young age, who would describe up to 40 items that then he could go and verify.There was no internet. There was really no way the kid could know. Why would the kid say that when I was living in this other body and I was a woman and that's how my house would look like or that's how I would die, right? Again, there is evidence, not proof, but there's evidence not only that something weird and interesting is happening as we cross the threshold, but also when we come back to this life.Scientists should not be afraid of studying this, but they are because there's stigma. There's usually stigma upon the enigma, and this is so unfortunate. And one of the reasons is because of the ideology of materialism, because those things cannot be possible. What is wrong with the politics of science such that they have generated this stigma?So many things. Science is a human activity to begin with.So it falls prey to all our passions and ego and greed. That's one thing. Science is a job for the good and for the bad.You need to get a salary. You need to get grants. Research takes place within a selection mechanism that also sometimes reinforces things that are not very scientific.And then, we didn't have time to unpack this, but science for many years become entangled, as I was suggesting before, to other -isms, materialism, secularism. So anything that smells like the afterlife, people may think has to do with God, and then they freak out.Anything that suggests that there's something about the mind that may not need a physical material substrate to exist, it smells like non-materialism. So, all these -isms are ideologically blocking that kind of research, and then there are all these sociopolitical constraints as to what should be studied and what shouldn't be studied.I call it the backstage of science. Sometimes we scientists or science communicators seem to speak as if the data is the only thing that matters. We say, well, data and theory.But then there's a third leg of this stool, which is all the politics that goes behind the scenes. And we often don't speak about this, and it's quite vicious and petty, and it's very real. Why is materialism so attractive to most scientists?Well, an easy answer is because we've grown up with it.It's what the educational system promotes, and that's what you hear when you go to university. So it's like growing in a culture. It feels like the air in which you breathe.So it's very hard to begin with to detect, well, maybe there's another alternative. Maybe there are other ways of doing science, other environments in which one could do science. That's one reason.And other reasons maybe are more profound, and I'm not qualified to explain them, but I could say, looking at this 400-year history of science, since it started around 1623 with Galileo's book The Assayer, that science went and coupled with all what's going on in the West.And so the fall of religion, you could say, and science presented us this new alternative that then could be coupled very well with other -isms, and this idea of growth, and then science losing its good twin brother, which was philosophy. There's a whole natural history of science starting as philosophy, kind of emancipating or breaking out from philosophy, and then marrying technology, and then marrying other social systems.From that point of view, materialism is a very convenient idea to propose. There were attempts, like the German idealists tried to do a more romantic science. But no, the idea prevailed, like Francis Bacon said: You should pursue nature through all her corners, he said, and make her spill her secrets.Our attitude towards nature in the science that dominates is very much reflecting how we treat nature in our society, in our culture, like a resource to extract secrets by force and then dominate it. How is materialism related to the notions of growth and progress? What's wrong with having a productive citizenry?This is another very interesting and very difficult question to answer.But there's this recent book coming out by Paul Kingsnorth. In it, he explains this idea of the machine and this idea of progress. And this, again, this conflation of more is better, of we need to go forward always, and convincing us that the way to do that is to continually extract more from nature. But because we don't have the religious context anymore, because God is dead, then what do we have? We have what we can do as humans with our own gadgets.It's kind of the story of the Promethean fire. We will just build anything to make ourselves God.A good example today is transhumanism. Transhumanism is this pseudo-religion dressed in technoscientific language whose goal is very religious. They promise immortality, they promise redemption, they promise transformation of the entire natural world, but it's done by human means through technology. Are you suggesting that we can't have ethics without religion?Well, we should have ethics with or without religion. That's another pruning that has happened in science. We say, forget about aesthetics, although some physicists still think that beautiful means probably true, and forget about politics. We pretend there's no backstage of science, and even let's forget about ethics.___Science needs to be in the service of mankind.___Scientists, when they become more like engineers, they're just thinking how to make things work so that they can go to the moon, go to Mars, make machines that think, but they don't think whether that's a good idea.And also consider metaphysics. Many scientists for a long time pretended, and maybe that comes from the stream of positivisms, that really one doesn't need metaphysics at all, except that materialism is always the metaphysics running the system.You see, it's not just ethics. It's the pruning of all of these, you could say, five main legs of philosophy that just makes a kind of unconscious science, a science that doesn't really know what it's doing. It's doing it very well locally, but it just doesn't know what it's doing globally. Do you think science has to have an ultimate vision and purpose behind it for it to be effective or for it to be meaningful and transformative?Yes, a way I would say that is that science needs to be in the service of mankind. And it hasn't been that. And we can see it through, you know, when we discovered the secrets of the atom, and all of a sudden, the Manhattan Project, and then we create nuclear weapons.And now we're trying to crack how machines may think, and now we're creating this mess, right? So science needs to be in service of mankind, not in service of a few ideas that maybe want to make more money or just dominate upon nature. What about planes, trains, automobiles, and modern medicine? Hasn't science served mankind by helping us develop those technologies?Yes and no. I see where you're going, and it's fair.I came here by plane, and it's a blessing. When I almost died, the surgeons did their job, and they saved my life. But these two forced choices between Luddites and Silicon Valley types, I think, of course, it's a false dichotomy.Progress, in a way, it's good, but we often don't speak about the dark side of the moon. We say the great things that progress has brought, and we don't speak about the disasters, the side effects that it has come with, and the same when we promise new technologies. We tend to think that any technology is great, that email is going to save us so much time because we don't need to write letters and send them anymore.Is that true? I spend so many hours a week writing emails. Let's just say there are great things about it and bad things about it. People like Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker, for example, argue that we've made moral progress over time because of the Enlightenment. Do you think that's totally wrong-headed?I think he's emphasizing a side of the moon, and he does that very well, and you can find tons of plots where there's a slope going up and say it's great. But I think he should also tell the not-so-friendly story.But if your ideology is just to resist and continue to explain that the Enlightenment is the best thing ever and reason is the best thing ever… this feels to me like you're worshipping these abstractions.I'm very critical of it and also of these, again, science communicators and scientists that say, Oh, science says, in the name of science, experts say. It's like, come on, let's be careful because we can shoot ourselves in the foot by putting forth to the people an image of science that we know is not really true. Recently there's been a resurgence of spirituality and of people who say that they're spiritual but not religious, especially in the United States. If materialism is going away, what is going to fill that gap? Are we going to return to traditional religion? Do you see that being connected with the rise of the political right?I'm not a fortune teller, so I don't know what's going to happen. But, yeah, we could say we're in this post-materialist age and even post-secular age. One cannot come back to the past, but maybe just to contact with the roots is a good idea.What do I mean by that? I think we need to do a science 2.0, a science that says thank you to Galileo and thank you to materialism, but we need to reinvent even a new kind of scientific method. We need to do so in a culture where we realize humans cannot thrive in a vacuum where there's this idea that the sacred has to be removed.Now, how do we do that without bringing in back all the vices of religion? I don't know. I'm from a Catholic country.Here we are in England, so there are differences and interreligious dialogue has always been a challenge. But I think maybe a way of putting it is: after all these conflicts and branchings I was quickly alluding to, science from philosophy and then also from religion, now there's a time of reconciliation perhaps and maybe debates in the proper sense, like exchange of ideas in service of learning and getting into something higher than both poles. We need science to talk to religious people and it's interesting when people say they're spiritual and not religious.I think this is just a way of saying, no, I don't want to go back, I want to go forward. But at the end of the day, religions have offered us practices and grounding that we now desperately need. Everybody can and should just meditate or pray or do whatever they want, but we're in a crisis and it's time for reconciliation. What do you say to critics that say you are merely projecting our need for meaning onto a fundamentally indifferent universe?Yeah, I know that the typical science communicator says something like this. But we're not projecting. Human beings feed on meaning.It's the other way around. If you're a materialist, because the only thing that there is is matter, all that comes next, free will, consciousness, meaning, this is a kind of illusion that we need to explain.They're just craving for meaning, but there isn't really for them. I would also like to remind my materialist friends that for decades, if not centuries, they've said in the name of science, we know that this and this and this doesn't really exist. I think now they sense they're forced to say, well, actually, we don't know. We've been saying, for instance, that there's nothing after you die, and now probably they need to admit that they don't know the answer.___We need to do a science 2.0, a science that says thank you to Galileo and thank you to materialism, but we need to reinvent even a new kind of scientific method.___So it's a moment to open up possibilities and also to gently but fiercely critique these claims that I think harm society. If you say in the name of science, get on with it, when your father dies, you'll never see him again. Well, what the F do you know about it? You haven't studied the literature, you haven't had any of those experiences, and basically what you're doing is you're just doing marketing on ideology. This needs to stop. Do you think that it's scarier for some people to entertain the thought that there might be life after death, compared to a materialist worldview where you just die, given that there might be consequences for unsavory behaviour?Well, death and dying is scary. It's maybe the ultimate ending. It's a limit on life, and when we're in this conquest mode, we don't like limits.And it also has, there's a shockwave backwards, so I think if you change your notion of what death is or may be, you live differently. It also has consequences, as you're saying, for the future because this is not our only goal here and we come back in whatever form. And again, different religions would say different things. I the East, they are more happy with the idea of reincarnation, and here in the West, there are other preferences. But in any case, it changes how we live, and that's really what matters.It's not about just projecting or imagining what we'll be after, but how we live now and also how we treat those who are dying. So it goes from the individual to the families, to the hospitals.Now in the near-death research I do, this has ramifications at all these levels, all the way to society.But our society is thanatophobic. It has a phobia of death. We don't want to hear about death, and this is another thing we need to put on the table and be willing to talk about it. Do you think that we might get closer to answering ultimate questions like why is there anything at all if we jettison materialism?That’s an excellent question, Simon. Two things: we should stop treating reality, I believe, as a great sudoku, as an enigma, as something that with intelligence, money, and time that we will crack and instead treat reality more like a mystery. And what you do for in front of a mystery is not to be the clever guy in a class and say “I’ll solve you” but more like “I will bow and you will transform me.”I know this sounds a bit like a scientist speaking like a mystic. But I think this reorientation is needed. In the end, we won’t crack the big questions, but they will transform us. If we free ourselves from this prison of materialism, the way we will explore these questions will be freer, more creative, and in service of mankind. Do you think exploring mystery is the reason why we are here?I think we are here because, and this pseudo-theological argument I’m making off the cuff, But the One, the Absolute, if there is such a thing, had everything except limitation. We are that absolute experiencing that contingency. It’s like an act of divine proprioception. It’s a wonderful adventure, it’s just incredible to be alive. Perhaps we have forgotten why we are here and the whole point is to experience the flesh.Let me end by saying this. I criticize materialism harshly. I bang on this dead horse, because I think it’s dead. But matter is a great mystery. So maybe my invitation is as follows: hey materialist friends, come here, let’s work on materialism 2.0! Consciousness is a mystery, but matter is also a mystery. The fact that we can have an intersubjective experience consensus, the fact that we can apply mathematics, that we can measure things... the physical world we take for granted, but it is a great mystery too.Maybe that’s related to your last question: why are we here? Why did spirit decide to incarnate? Being in the flesh may be a great thing if spirit decided to do so.Àlex Gómez-Marín, thank you very much.My pleasure.
Evansville church has a cozy relationship with GOP: Is it legal?
An Evansville church allowed its sanctuary to be used for a fundraiser to benefit a conservative group that actively works to influence the direction of the Indiana Republican Party. That's not all.
Luigi Mangione set to return to court for pretrial hearing in killing of health care CEO
The 27-year-old accused killer’s lawyers have asked the court to allow him to remain unshackled during the hearing, which could last at least a week.
Physician-led care is best prescription for health of nation
Allowing pharmacists to diagnose conditions and prescribe medications far exceeds their training and jeopardizes patient health.
Dozens of convicted sex offenders once infiltrated N.J. health care. Now they’re banned.
After outrage over a chiropractor who was allowed to keep his license, changes were made.
Bose QC Ultra Gen 2 Is WAY Better Than You (Probably) Think
Join Resolve as he breaks down why the Bose QC Ultra Gen 2 is more advanced than most of the competition in the over-ear ANC wireless headphone space, highlighting its adaptive processes and improved sound quality that allows for enough customization to make QC Ultra Gen 2 sense for almost every consumer.