Philosophy
47 ideas, each explained on one page with a 60-second lesson you can play right there.
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AI Alignment
AI alignment steers artificial intelligence toward human goals rather than unintended shortcuts like reward hacking and strategic deception.
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Anthropic principle
The anthropic principle explains that we observe physical constants suitable for life because observers cannot exist in a universe without them.
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Artificial consciousness
Artificial consciousness is the idea that a non-biological machine or artificial intelligence could have subjective, inner experiences.
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Artificial General Intelligence (AGI)
Artificial general intelligence is hypothetical software that can learn, reason, and solve novel problems across any domain without reprogramming.
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Authority bias
Authority bias is the tendency to assume an opinion or order is accurate simply because it comes from an authority figure.
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Benjamin Libet
Benjamin Libet was an American neuroscientist who studied human consciousness at the University of California, San Francisco.
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Block Universe
The block universe theory treats time as a fourth dimension where past, present, and future events are all equally real and fixed.
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Cato the Younger
Cato the Younger was an influential, uncompromising Roman senator and Stoic philosopher during the fall of the Roman Republic.
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Chinese Room
John Searle's thought experiment showing that a computer running a program can mimic human conversation without understanding it.
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Cold reading
Cold reading uses high-probability guesses and subtle body language cues to make strangers reveal their own details while believing the reader knew them.
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Compatibilism
Compatibilism is the belief that free will and determinism can exist together without contradiction.
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Copernican Principle
The Copernican principle states that Earth occupies an average position in space and that humans are not privileged observers of the universe.
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Determinism
Determinism is the philosophical view that every event is the inevitable result of preceding events and the laws of nature.
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Drake Equation
The Drake equation is a mathematical formula that estimates how many active, communicative alien civilizations exist in our galaxy.
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Dream interpretation
Dream interpretation is the process of assigning meaning to the images and stories experienced during sleep.
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Epictetus
Epictetus was a Greek Stoic philosopher who taught that suffering comes from trying to control external events rather than our own actions.
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Eudaimonia
Eudaimonia is an ancient Greek term for the highest human good, commonly understood as human flourishing or living well.
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Fatalism
Fatalism is the philosophical doctrine that all events are fixed by fate, leaving humans powerless to change their future outcomes.
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Fermi Paradox
The Fermi paradox exposes the clash between the high statistical odds of alien life across billions of stars and our complete lack of evidence for it.
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Freudian Unconscious
The Freudian unconscious is the part of the mind holding hidden thoughts, drives, and memories that a person cannot inspect directly.
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Gaius Musonius Rufus
Gaius Musonius Rufus was a 1st-century Roman Stoic philosopher who taught Epictetus and advocated equal philosophical education for women.
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Great Filter
The Great Filter argues that an evolutionary barrier makes advanced life rare.
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Hedonic treadmill
Learn what the hedonic treadmill is, how psychological adaptation restores our happiness set point, and why big life events rarely change our mood forever.
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Hedonism
Hedonism is a family of philosophical ideas built on the claim that pleasure is the primary good and pain is the primary bad.
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Id, ego and superego
The id, ego, and superego are three interacting parts of the mind that Sigmund Freud proposed to explain internal conflict.
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Ikigai
Ikigai is a Japanese concept that refers to a person's reason for living or what makes life feel worth it.
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Laplace's Demon
Laplace's Demon is a thought experiment about a hypothetical intellect that knows the exact position and motion of every particle in existence.
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Libertarianism (metaphysics)
Metaphysical libertarianism is the philosophical view that free will exists and is logically incompatible with a deterministic universe.
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Marcus Aurelius
Marcus Aurelius was a Roman emperor and Stoic philosopher who governed the Roman Empire from 161 to 180 AD.
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Meditations
Marcus Aurelius wrote Meditations as a private journal of Stoic reflections while running the Roman Empire and leading military campaigns.
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Moravec's Paradox
Moravec's paradox shows why computers excel at complex logic like chess but struggle with basic human skills like vision and walking.
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Narcissism
Narcissism is a self-centered personality style marked by an excessive preoccupation with oneself and one's own needs, often at the expense of others.
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Nostalgia
Nostalgia is a bittersweet emotional longing for past events, people, or places that cannot be recovered.
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Oedipus complex
Sigmund Freud defined the Oedipus complex as childhood desire for one parent and rivalry with the other, shaping adult conscience and neurosis.
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Panspermia
Panspermia is the scientific hypothesis that microscopic life originated elsewhere and spreads across the universe inside rocks and comets.
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Paradox of hedonism
The paradox of hedonism is the observation that deliberately chasing pleasure often prevents you from experiencing it.
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Psychoanalysis
Psychoanalysis is a talk therapy and theory of mind founded by Sigmund Freud to uncover unconscious drives, defense mechanisms, and resistance.
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Psychosexual development
Sigmund Freud proposed that adult personality stems from how children resolve bodily conflicts across five distinct psychosexual stages.
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Rare Earth hypothesis
The Rare Earth hypothesis argues that simple life may be common, but complex, multicellular life requires an extremely rare set of circumstances.
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Reinforcement
Reinforcement is any consequence that increases the future rate of a behavior.
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Self-Control Self-control is the ability to regulate your thoughts, emotions, and behavior when facing immediate temptations and impulses.
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Seneca the Younger Seneca the Younger was a Roman Stoic philosopher, dramatist, and imperial advisor who managed Emperor Nero while writing major moral texts.
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Sigmund Freud
Sigmund Freud founded psychoanalysis, explaining how unconscious desires, dreams, and slips of the tongue shape human behavior.
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Subjective well-being
Subjective well-being measures personal evaluations of life through emotional moods, life satisfaction, and meaning rather than external wealth.
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Technological singularity
The technological singularity is a hypothetical event where self-improving AI triggers rapid, runaway intelligence growth beyond human control.
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Turing Test
Alan Turing replaced the question of machine thinking with a test: can a computer converse well enough through text to pass as human?
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Zeno of Citium
Zeno of Citium was a Hellenistic philosopher from Cyprus who founded the Stoic school of philosophy around 300 BC.