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Full-length Replay: Penn State at Wisconsin
The Penn State Lady Lions visit the Wisconsin Badgers for a Big Ten conference matchup.
Worlds Smallest Steam Machine Packs 32GB RAM & VRR
Build a tiny SteamOS Steam Machine rig powered by Ryzen 7840U and Radeon 780M, so you get steady 1080p play without thermal throttling.
10 Of The Coolest New Gadgets You'll Want For Your Desk
These cool gadgets can help turn a standard workstation into a setup that gets you excited to start your day.
Texarkana, Arkansas, could finalize entertainment district changes Monday
TEXARKANA, Ark. -- Modifying the entertainment district is on the agenda for the first meeting of the year for the city's Board of Directors.
NFL expert picks for Panthers vs. Buccaneers in Week 18
Here's who the experts are picking to win Saturday's huge NFC South showdown between the Panthers and Buccaneers . . .
Apple Announces New Fitness+ Workout Programs, Strava Challenge, and More
Apple today announced a number of updates to Apple Fitness+ and activity with the Apple Watch. The key announcements include: New Year limited-edition award: Users can win the award by closing all three Activity Rings for seven days in a row in January. "Quit Quitting" Strava challenge: Available in Strava throughout January, users who log 12 workouts anytime in the month will win an Apple Watch badge in the app.
Exclusive: Dell set to revive XPS laptops at CES 2026
Dell XPS laptops return at CES 2026 Dell has not officially confirmed a return of the XPS badge, but the idea is back on the radar ahead of CES 2026.
The Galaxy Z Roll 5G: Samsung’s Boldest Move Yet
Discover the Samsung Galaxy Z Roll 5G with its rollable display, advanced camera, and powerful hardware. The future of smartphones is here.
ENTERTAINMENT: Clinton Center 2026 lineup includes Cornel West
Cornel West, democratic socialist philosopher in the progressive Christian tradition, according to a news release, and Robert P. George, a Roman Catholic and a conservative legal scholar, will jointly present a Kumpuris Distinguished Lecture.
The Best Gadgets of December 2025
The end of the holiday season is a precursor to a weird, wacky, and chaotic 2026.
The Best Gadgets and Hi-Fi Releases of 2025
A countdown of the year's most important tech and gadget releases, including new gear from Apple, Hasselblad and more.
My New Year’s Resolutions For Every Wisconsin Team
What do we need to see from every Badgers team in 2025?
In Memoriam: All the tech that died in 2025
Join us in saying goodbye (or good riddance) to these apps, gadgets, and software.
ENTERTAINMENT NOTES: Mosaic Templars Cultural Center to celebrate Kwanzaa
The weeklong cultural holiday was created in 1966 to honor Black American heritage and to celebrate seven core principles known as the Nguzo Saba. Each day highlights one principle; Dec. 31 recognizes Kuumba, or Creativity.
Why Apple’s Foldable iPhone Could Crush the Competition
Discover Apple’s first foldable iPhone with a 7.7-inch display, Touch ID, and tablet-first functionality. A game-changer in foldable tech!
Badgers lose top returning tight end to the transfer portal
The Badgers will be down one of their upperclassmen tight ends.
Canopy Northwest Arkansas expo in Fayetteville puts focus on immigrants pursuing business dreams
FAYETTEVILLE -- Businesses ranging from makers of homemade jams and jellies to major home renovators lined the walls at Canopy Northwest Arkansas' immigrant-owned business expo.
Gard: Badgers bench has to meet the standard
Wisconsin’s bench has underwhelmed this year.
5 Cool New Gadgets That Use Your PC's Extra USB Ports
Your PCs USB ports can do more than support a keyboard, mouse, or portable drive. A monitor light bar, foot pedal, or mug warmer are some of the other options.
ENTERTAINMENT: Museum sets sessions for kids; Steinway honors piano teacher
The Rogers Historical Museum and the Rogers Public Library are offering "Museum and Me," an hour-long, free, once-a-month program at the museum for children 3-5 that helps foster interest in history, reading and museums.
ENTERTAINMENT: Quartet programs holiday music for Candlelight Concert
The rotating-member Listeso String Quartet drives a sleigh-ful of Christmas music, illuminated by thousands of candles, for a Candlelight Concert, 6:30 p.m. Saturday at the Albert Pike Memorial Center
Where Wisconsin falls in latest USA TODAY Sports coaches poll
Wisconsin basketball remains on the outside of the USA TODAY Sports men's basketball coaches poll after the latest week of results.
Threads adds new communities, tests badges for highly engaged members
Threads, which has more than 150 million daily active users, adds more communities to its platform.
Wisconsin offers wide receiver in the transfer portal
The Badgers are looking into transfer portal wide receivers.
ENTERTAINMENT: Repertory Theatre celebrates Christmas season
Little Rock's Arkansas Repertory Theatre celebrates the Christmas season with "Holiday Radio, Live at The Rep" and the Second North American tour production of the musical "Mrs. Doubtfire" sweeps the Baum Walker Hall stage at Fayetteville's Walton Arts Center.
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 Gets "Thank You" Update That Makes It Steam Deck Verified
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33's "Thank You" update brought it the Steam Deck Verified badge, so we take a look to see what has been improved.
Everything Greg Gard said after blowout loss to Nebraska
The Badgers had a tough day on the road on Wednesday.
2026 Flathead Valley Winter Sports Preview
The snow has fallen and the sun is officially on hiatus, which means Flathead Valley athletes are trading in their cleats and knee pads for goggles, headgear and basketball shoes. Area teams and athletes over the last few weeks have been amping up their preparation ahead of the start of the high school winter sports […]
The top 10 gadgets of 2025
A tiny sunlight emulator, a video player for your dreams and a vest for listening to trees feature in this roundup of our favourite gadgets.
Mario + Rabbids Creator Davide Soliani Announces New Platforming Game Bradley the Badger | The Game Awards 2025
Davide Soliani, the lead creator behind Mario + Rabbids games, has revealed Bradley the Badger — his first new project since leaving Ubisoft and forming a new studio.
I'm a millennial tech nerd. Here are 15 geeky gifts and gadgets I'd buy for myself!
'Tis the season to get the perfect gift. It could be for your nerdy self or even your geeky friends. I have ideas.
15 Of My Favorite Tech Gadgets Available On Amazon
See 15 essential pieces of technology that belong in any modern home or office. Find reliable, affordable gadgets reviewed by an experienced tech enthusiast.
Reddit is testing verification badges
Verified users will actually be notable figures, not just people who paid for the checkmark.
I Tried the New Android XR Smart Glasses From Google and XReal. I Didn't Expect to Be This Impressed
Google's Android XR platform and XReal's Project Aura are bringing smart glasses closer to mainstream reality, offering developers powerful tools to create practical, everyday wearable experiences that go far beyond novelty gadgets.
The next Pebble gadget is the Index 01, a ring with a microphone
It’s an easy way to talk to your phone, and potentially a way to make it do stuff. Just don’t call it an agent.
Seven RWJBarnabas Health Facilities Earn National Recognition in U.S. News & World Report’s 2026 Best Hospitals for Maternity
This year, yet another RWJBarnabas Health maternity hospital has been added to U.S. News & World Report’s 2026 list of Best Hospitals for Maternity Care - marking seven added to the ranks of High Performing.
Where Wisconsin falls in USA TODAY Sports coaches poll after 2-0 week
The Wisconsin Badgers still sit outside the USA TODAY Sports men's basketball coaches poll despite a strong week of results.
James Gilbert and Lesley J. Morrell Archives
James Gilbert and Lesley J. Morrell is a writer. PopSci.com covers a variety of topics such as science, technology, DIY, news, and gadget reviews.
2025 holiday gift ideas from Techno Claus
Who dresses as St. Nick and speaks an odd brogue? Why, it's Techno Claus (a.k.a. David Pogue)! He offers "Sunday Morning" viewers his valuable tips for the gadget lovers on your gift-giving list.
Ozark entertainment district fails to get public support, local organizations look forward
OZARK -- Community leaders are seeking suggestions on how to improve downtown Ozark now that voters have rejected the idea of an entertainment district.
41 Gadget Gifts You’ll Agree Are Worth The Splurge
Hot tip: split these pricier items with your siblings and gift your parents something awesome!
Wisconsin announces changes to 2026, 2027 football schedules
Wisconsin announced a change to its 2026 and 2027 football schedules on Friday
Engadget review recap: Dell 16 Premium, Nikon ZR, Ooni Volt 2 and more
A roundup of all the reviews published by Engadget over the last few weeks.
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.
The New York Times sues Pentagon over new rules on journalists
The news organization asked the federal court to find the policy unlawful and to reinstate its journalists' press badges
Full-length Replay: Northwestern at Wisconsin
The Badgers and Wildcats, both 5-2, kick off their Big Ten schedules by meeting in Madison, Wisc.
Chattanooga business owner faces 28 charges related to auto crimes, forgery, affecting multiple states | Chattanooga Times Free Press
A Chattanooga business owner accused of running an illegal vehicle theft and reselling operation that affected multiple states was arrested Tuesday on 28 charges while the Chattanooga Police Department and the Hamilton County Sheriff's Office executed two search warrants.
27 Science Words That Only People With Above-Average Intelligence Know The Definitions Of
Welcome back to science class. Take a seat.
Amazon Music’s 2025 Delivered is now here to compete with Spotify Wrapped
Amazon Music's 2025 Delivered introduced new badges for listeners to show off. For example, the “Headliner” badge recognizes fans who fall in the top percentage of an artist’s listeners.
Cone Health Earns National Wellbeing First Champion Distinction
Recognition highlights Cone Health’s commitment to removing stigma around mental health care for clinicians.
Candid Politics: WI Governor Candidate David Crowley
In this edition of Candid Politics, The Badger Herald took a walk along Lakeshore Path with WI Governor David Crowley. Crowley’s difficult childhood largely motivated his path toward becoming a community organizer, state representative and current Milwaukee County Executive. Watch the full video to hear about Crowley’s platform, political experience and more. Interview by George...
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.
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