Do we inhabit a multiverse? Do we have free will? What is love? Is evolution directional? There are no simple answers to life’s biggest questions, and that’s why they’re the questions occupying the world’s brightest minds. Together, let's learn from them. Welcome to The Well, a publication by the John Templeton Foundation and Big Think.
“You see, math is one of these strange subjects for which the concepts are chained in sequences of dependencies…
When you have long chains, there are very few starting points, very few things I need to memorize. I don’t need to memorize, for example, all these things in history such as, when was the War of 1812? Well, actually, I know that one because that’s a math fact, it was 1812, but I can’t tell you a lot of other facts which are just purely memorized. In mathematics, you have very few that you memorize, and the rest you deduce as you go through, and this chain of deductions is actually what’s critical.“
“Common wisdom says we have a self and that self is the source of our free will, but...
the subject of the self is riddled with paradoxes. Because the mind has been categorized as something “nonphysical,” its definition alone places the self outside of physical cause-and-effect, and beyond the scope of science. However, as with many philosophical quandaries that involve the proposal of a thesis and the emergence of a counter-thesis (or antithesis, in the words of Hegel), a synthesis often emerges, reconciling seemingly disparate views into a more coherent and sensible perspective.”
