Hi, everyone, I had a great conversation with Geraint F. Lewis, a Welsh astrophysicist and Professor at the University of Sydney, about some of the biggest questions in cosmology, and our understanding of the world.

We explore what the Big Bang theory tells us about the beginning of the universe, why our current understanding of physics reaches limits when we try to look further back in time, and how neutrinos could reveal secrets about the cosmos — including why matter exists at all.

We then turn to questions that go beyond cosmology. What does modern physics tell us about the nature of reality? Could consciousness emerge in an artificial system? Is human intelligence an evolutionary accident? And could AI eventually become so intelligent that we struggle to understand how it thinks?

His latest book, The Shortest History of Reality: From Plato’s Cave to the Mind-Bending Discoveries of Modern Physics — The Human Quest to Explain the World, traces humanity’s changing understanding of reality, from everyday intuition and ancient philosophy to the discoveries of modern physics. It explores the ideas that reshaped our view of existence, from Newton’s universe to the strange probabilities of quantum physics and beyond.

If you're interested in these questions, you can check out our conversation, hope you find it insightful, he's a great communicator of these ideas: https://youtu.be/38rUHEeAVHw

I want to put forward the case as Descartes as the most influential figure in science as a result of his comprehensive account of the natural world through mechanical philosophy attempting to supplant the - at the time - dominant Aristotelian conception of the natural world.

The modes of scientific explanations that we’re now familiar with are thoroughly mechanistic, if you want to ask at what point can we recognise the explanations of how the world worked as scientific, a good candidate would be the explanations of the world given by mechanical philosophers.

Consider a container of water heated by flames. Why does the water boil? A scientific account would describe how heat is transferred through molecular motion and collisions, first from the flames to the container and then to the water, increasing its temperature until it boils.

An Aristotelian account is hard to reconcile with this even as a scientific rival. He would say that the properties of fire (heat and dryness) are transferred to the water (which is cold and wet) until it is transformed by the acquiring of heat to air (hot and wet) which accounts for the steam and bubbling.

A Cartesian account recognises the rapidly moving parts of the fire and how these parts settle the parts of the kettle and water into a greater agitation. So much so that with enough movement the parts of water began to separate from each other and disperse creating water vapour.

Now this is not to say that Descartes had the modern theory of atoms (his mechanist philosophy was opposed to atomism) but we can recognise his theory as having a lot more in common with the modern scientific account than the Aristotelian. And it is a lot more specific and potentially testable. You could imagine that you might be able to falsify his account by devising an experiment in which you can show that the parts of water aren’t moving more rapidly on the small scale as the account would suggest. Meanwhile, the Aristotelian account is hard to falsify because it is not clear where or how we would find or investigate these “properties” and their transfer.

To me this is the largest difference we see in the history of natural philosophy in the kind of explanations that begin to be given for the phenomena of the natural world. I don’t think any other scientist has as much of an impact as did Descartes on what constituted an acceptable scientific account.

Thomas More's Utopia (1516) is often regarded as one of the earliest critiques of inequality and private property in European literature. Written at the dawn of capitalism, the book presents an imaginary island society where wealth is shared, poverty is abolished, and social life is organized around collective welfare rather than private profit.

From a socialist perspective, one of the most striking aspects of Utopia is More's attack on private property. He argues that greed, crime, and social misery arise because a small minority monopolizes wealth while the majority is forced into hardship. In contrast, the Utopians hold property in common, work for the benefit of society, and guarantee that everyone's basic needs are met.

At the same time, socialists should approach Utopia critically. More did not advocate workers' democracy or class struggle in the modern sense. The society he imagined remained highly regulated and hierarchical, and it included practices, such as slavery, that are fundamentally incompatible with socialist principles. The book reflects the limitations of a sixteenth-century thinker rather than a modern socialist program.

Utopia remains an important precursor to socialist thought. It challenged the idea that existing social arrangements were natural or inevitable and invited readers to imagine a society organized around cooperation rather than competition. In this sense, More helped open an intellectual tradition that would later influence utopian socialists, Marxists, and many other critics of capitalism.

Utopia is not a socialist blueprint, but it is a foundational work in the history of anti-capitalist and egalitarian thinking. Its enduring value lies in its insistence that another world is possible.

Alexander the Great (Alexandre le Grand) reached far beyond the confines of historical biography, emerging as one of the most versatile and ubiquitous figures in medieval Western European literature. The legendary narratives that coalesced around him after his death preserved more than just his military victories; they captured a life reframed by supernatural encounters, explorations of uncharted lands, famed intellect, open-handed generosity, and an unyielding drive to test the boundaries of human knowledge.

Much of this literary tradition flows from the Alexander Romance attributed to Pseudo-Callisthenes, compiled in the early centuries of the Common Era. By Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages, this narrative material entered Western Europe through key Latin adaptations: Julius Valerius’s Res Gestae Alexandri Macedonis, its ninth-century Epitome, and the widely circulated eleventh-century Historia de Preliis.

From the twelfth century onward, Alexander took on a distinctly contemporary resonance in Western vernaculars. No longer treated merely as an ancient ruler from the distant past, he was absorbed into the medieval framework of chivalry, courtly culture, political legitimacy, princely pedagogy, and Christian moralizing. As the historical Macedonian faded, a literary archetype took his place—one onto which medieval Europe could project its own ideals, anxieties, and political ambitions.

Catalog Notes:

FOUCAULT (Michel). Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Paris: Gallimard, 1975, 8°, 318 pp., paperback (softcover, cover slightly worn, spine browned and stained). First edition (not on large-format paper). Press copy featuring an autographed dedication by Michel Foucault to Jean-Pierre and Marie-Odile Faye.

According to the English language wiki in this book Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (French: Surveiller et punir – Naissance de la prison) is a 1975 book by French philosopher Michel Foucault. It is an analysis of the social and theoretical mechanisms behind the changes that occurred in Western penal systems during the modern age based on historical documents from France. Foucault argues that prison did not become the principal form of punishment just because of the humanitarian concerns of reformists. He traces the cultural shifts that led to the predominance of prison via the body and power. Prison is used by the "disciplines" – new technological powers that can also be found, according to Foucault, in places such as schools, hospitals, and military barracks

Read the full wiki at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discipline_and_Punish#:\~:text=Discipline%20and%20Punish%3A%20The%20Birth,%E2%80%93%20Naissance%20de%20la%20prison&text=)%20is%20a%201975%20book,on%20historical%20documents%20from%20France

A Contest?

Evolutionist is science and statistic based system that focuses on bettering human lives and helping mankind to pursuit advance on technology, philosophy and human right. It encourages human ambitious and unity to its followers. Its main goals is to help educate vast majority, encourage self improvement, fight corruption. Alter society to create a united, morally guided and equity communities . That's a simple description of my system. If you want to know more, you can join my discord or ask me to type in mor info later on this sever. Btw, thanks to anybody bother to read this and i hope you would join me to better improve this system because feedback is a key to my system in my opinion.

This article outlines how connections between neo-Nazism and moder Satanism have existed within modern Satanism almost from its beginning in the 1960s, and continues up to this day. (warning: annoying captcha)
https://escholarship.org/uc/item/1f57w08f

Most accounts say the game is "about 2,000 years old" and was invented by the 13th-century Marathi saint Jnaneshwar (Gyandev) to teach children about karma. Neither claim has a source older than the 19th century.

What the surviving evidence shows:

- The game's ancestor, gyan chaupar, is known from painted charts. Jacob Schmidt-Madsen catalogued nearly 150 of them for his 2019 PhD at the University of Copenhagen ("The Game of Knowledge", open access).

- The oldest chart that can be dated with confidence was painted in Lucknow around 1780-82 for Richard Johnson and is now in the British Library (Johnson Album 5, no. 8).

- A Jain chart dated 1735/36, treated as the oldest since Andrew Topsfield reported it in 1985, "must now be regarded with skepticism". Its wear is uniform instead of concentrated where pieces actually move, and a near-identical chart of obviously later date shares the same feature (Schmidt-Madsen 2019, pp. 37 and 78).

- The earliest written mention is a donation to the Royal Asiatic Society, recorded in the Asiatic Journal of May 1831.

Schmidt-Madsen concludes that the game was probably invented in western India in the late 17th or early 18th century, possibly by a single person, and that its race-track format may have been borrowed from games like the European game of the goose.

The Jnaneshwar story first appears in Marathi sources of 1872 and 1886. It isn't alone: a Sufi tradition credits Ibn al-Arabi and a related Tibetan game is credited to Sakya Pandita, all 13th-century figures. Three traditions, three different founders, none attested from the time.

What I find interesting is how this works as an idea: a game about the soul's progress acquires a saint as its author, and the modern web turns the saint into a date.

Full write-up with sources: https://en.quantumgame.love/guide/how-old-is-snakes-and-ladders.html

Disclosure: I build an online version of the game, which is why I went looking.

In translating Hieronymus Emser's 1523 book against Luther's New Testament into English, I keep getting stopped by how modern his translation rules sound.

A translator, he says, "ought not merely to draw one sense out of another, as the paraphrasts do, but must pay attention to every word, letter, stroke and dot." When Luther expands a passage, Emser calls that "the work of an interpreter, not a translator." Elsewhere he simply says, "Let the reader judge."

These are a polemicist's rules, used to argue his own case. But the questions remain familiar: how closely should a translation follow its source, where does explanation become interpretation, and how much should the reader be shown?

With a deliberately rough source text, would you preserve the roughness or smooth it?

Disclosure: I translated Emser's 1523 book into English.

Hi everyone,

I've been researching the history and events that led us to modern AI, from the early pioneers to some of the latest figures in the field.

At first, this was just a personal project. As an engineer, I wanted to understand the history behind the technology I was getting into and expand my knowledge of the ideas, people, and discoveries that shaped it.

But at some point, I thought the research might be worth turning into a documentary and sharing it with other people.

Originally, I was planning to use historical images and public-domain footage for the storytelling. Then I came up with the idea of representing much of the story through pixel art instead. I thought it could give the documentary its own visual identity while making some of these complex ideas more interesting and accessible.

I'm planning to release the documentary by the end of November. The research is almost finished, and the events and stories are based on books, academic papers, and other reliable historical sources. The part that takes the most time now is creating all the pixel art and animations.

I'm working on this full-time, and since I don't currently have another source of income, I decided to launch a small Kickstarter campaign to help me dedicate the time necessary to finish it.

Honestly, I feel a little uncomfortable asking people to support something like this, but I don't really see another way to complete it in a reasonable amount of time without having to put the project on hold.

You can find the trailer on my YouTube channel, where the finished documentary will be released

And if you'd like to support the project, the Kickstarter is here.

Thank you for taking the time to read this. If you have any questions, suggestions, or even recommendations for things I should look into, I'd genuinely love to hear them. And hopefully Reddit doesn't delete the post lol.

Hey guys,
I’m drafting a PhD proposal in intellectual history and I feel a tad lost.
If I were doing economic history, it feels way easier to know where to look. But for the history of ideas, how do I know which archives and sources to use apart from the main, famous books that are already sitting on every library shelf?
I feel like PhD proposal needs clarity and narrowness, but since I haven't been to the archives yet, how am I supposed to know which specific sources I'm even expected to find and analyze?
For those who survived the proposal stage: what do "archival sources" actually look like for a famous thinker/idea, and how do you strategically pick a concrete archive box to write about before you've even been there?

Thanks!

ABSTRACT

In this interview ahead of his keynote at the online conference “Religion, Politics, and Cognitive Warfare: Information, Interpretation, Conspiracy, and the Struggle for Reality,” Jason Ānanda Josephson Storm speaks with Carl Raschke about the argument of The Genealogy of Genealogy, in which a once-insurgent critical method hardens into academic routine and is turned against itself in favor of a “metamodern historiography” that reunites history with philosophy. Storm defends his account of postmodernism as a taught paradigm rather than a caricature of Derrida or Foucault, revisits the claim of The Myth of Disenchantment that reason was never purified of magic, and traces how the mid-century cybernetic picture of mind as information processing made cognition technically legible and therefore militarily tractable. Moving through Jim Channon’s First Earth Battalion, Michael Aquino’s MindWar, Byung-Chul Han’s psychopolitics, and the ethics of collective attention, the conversation closes on the fate of knowledge production and the university under hyper-scaled digitization and AI.

Full disclosure-this is an interview with me. A long time member of this subreddit. But I think I'm talking about stuff folks might be interested in here. If that isn't cool, feel free to downvote. If you have questions, I'll circle back. Perhaps tomorrow.

Alexander the Great has been part of literary and historical memory for more than twenty-three centuries. His story travelled across an extraordinary geographical and linguistic range, eventually appearing in more than thirty-five languages. Yet the Alexander who survived this long journey was not always the same Alexander who conquered the Persian Empire. In different periods and places, he became a king, a philosopher, a prophet, a defender of the faithful, and even a figure connected with the end of the world. The historical Alexander provided the starting point, but later traditions repeatedly changed what could be done with his story.

Athens Lost explores how Jesus replaced Socratic inquiry with apocalyptic resignation and how this reshaped Western morality for the worse. 

Athens Lost: Jesus and the Great Regression of the Western Mind

Our time does indeed rhyme with the period of the "Prison Notebooks." The trick is to learn from history and find a better way. Easier said than done.

Coins featuring Alexander the Great/Heracles are among the most popular coins of the Hellenistic period. They were minted countless times throughout nearly the entire Alexander the Great empire. Due to their large number and wide distribution, we can observe different variations of the same motif. In particular, there are multiple styles even within Anatolia/Asia Minor.

But I have to say that what strikes me as the strangest are the motifs on the Carian coins. I’m not sure if it’s because it’s my homeland that they caught my attention so much, but I was quite curious as to why the depictions of Alexander are so plump. After doing a bit of research, I came across some interesting interpretations. Still, I noticed that the motifs on some coins aren’t just plump—they’re so different that they could even be described as “shapeless.”

What do you think?

Every popular account of Snakes and Ladders says the same thing: a version was introduced in Victorian England in 1892, usually credited to Jaques of London. Jaques say it on their own site. Newspapers, quiz pages and blogs repeat it.

I went looking for the document behind it and found an edit instead.

Wikipedia revision 171487114, 14 November 2007, 18:50 UTC, edit summary "Changes made in History section". The line added: "Impressed by the ideals behind the game, a newer version was introduced in Victorian England in 1892, possibly by John Jaques of Jaques of London." No reference attached. The "possibly by John Jaques" half was later deleted from the article; the date stayed behind, detached from the claim it belonged to. Nineteen years on, a hedge written by one editor is quoted as established fact.

The date itself turns out to be fine — it just belongs to someone else. There is a real 1892 English board: registered by F. H. Ayers of London, design registration 200682, held by the V&A as MISC.8-1974, with the same number in the National Archives design register. No Jaques board of 1892 appears in any catalogue or register I could find; the earliest dated Jaques example is c1900, in the John Johnson Collection at the Bodleian.

What interests me here is less the games history than the mechanism. An unsourced hedge, once it enters a high-authority page, gets copied without its hedge — the qualifier is the first thing to go, because it is the least quotable part of the sentence. Then the origin of the copy disappears, and the claim starts to look independently attested precisely because it appears in many places at once.

There is a newer turn of the same screw. James Masters of Traditional Games, one of the compilers of a database of Victorian game registrations, tells me the pattern now runs through AI summaries: state a correction inside a long sentence, and the model reads the false half as the assertion and cites your page in support of the thing you were refuting. It has happened to his pages twice. Refutations now have to be written defensively, in short flat sentences, or they feed what they were meant to kill.

Full write-up with the sources: https://en.quantumgame.love/guide/who-invented-snakes-and-ladders.html

Disclosure: that page is mine, and I do run an online version of the Indian original, so I am not a neutral party on the underlying game. The archival records are checkable independently of me, which is rather the point.