The Marginalian
The Marginalian

Reads tagged with “TED-Ed”

The Boltzmann Brain Paradox: An Animated Thought Experiment About the Hallucination of Reality
The Boltzmann Brain Paradox: An Animated Thought Experiment About the Hallucination of Reality

A pleasingly disorienting foray into the fundamental perplexity of life.

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The Handle on the Door to a New World: Poet Jane Hirshfield on the Magic and Power of Metaphor, Animated
The Handle on the Door to a New World: Poet Jane Hirshfield on the Magic and Power of Metaphor, Animated

“A metaphor is language that simultaneously creates and solves its own riddle; within that minute explosion of mind is both expansion and release… It is how the mind instructs itself in a more complex seeing.”

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Stephen Hawking’s Black Hole Information Paradox: An Animated Explanation of the Greatest Unsolved Challenge to Our Understanding of Reality
Stephen Hawking’s Black Hole Information Paradox: An Animated Explanation of the Greatest Unsolved Challenge to Our Understanding of Reality

Reconciling the science of the very large with the science of the very small, with a sidewise possibility that everything we experience as reality is a holographic projection.

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Our Smallness and the Cosmic Scale: How Big the Universe Is Relative to Us, Animated
Our Smallness and the Cosmic Scale: How Big the Universe Is Relative to Us, Animated

A humbling celestial reflection on what enlarges the minuteness of human life with meaning against the vast backdrop of the universe.

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The Evolution of the Book, Animated
The Evolution of the Book, Animated

From stretched animal skins to metal alloys to pixels, an inquiry into what makes a book.

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Mary’s Room: An Animated Inquiry into the Limits of Knowledge and the Mystery of Consciousness
Mary’s Room: An Animated Inquiry into the Limits of Knowledge and the Mystery of Consciousness

The gasp beyond fact, contouring the central question of what it is like to be you.

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How Memory Makes Us and Breaks Truth: The Rashomon Effect and the Science of How Memories Form and Falter in the Brain
How Memory Makes Us and Breaks Truth: The Rashomon Effect and the Science of How Memories Form and Falter in the Brain

“We are our memory… that chimerical museum of shifting shapes, that pile of broken mirrors.”

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Between Sinew and Spirit: Are You a Body with a Mind or a Mind with a Body?
Between Sinew and Spirit: Are You a Body with a Mind or a Mind with a Body?

An animated journey to the center of the self.

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Why Do We Love? An Animated Inquiry Into Romance by Philosopher Skye Cleary
Why Do We Love? An Animated Inquiry Into Romance by Philosopher Skye Cleary

“Love is a passion to be chosen and mastered, not sacrificed to.”

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The Ship of Theseus: A Brilliant Ancient Thought Experiment Exploring What Makes You You
The Ship of Theseus: A Brilliant Ancient Thought Experiment Exploring What Makes You You

“Which you is ‘who’? The person you are today? Five years ago? Who you’ll be in fifty years? And when is ‘am’? This week? Today? This hour? This second? And which aspect of you is ‘I’? Are you your physical body? Your thoughts and feelings? Your actions?”

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