Ancient Rome was a wildly diverse and exotic place. As I tell the students in my college classes, if you want to get a feel for what Rome was like, watch Star Wars.

Consciousness is the felt quality of experience. When you see a wave cresting on a beach, smell the aroma of freshly baked bread, or feel the pain of stubbing your toe, you are having conscious experience.

Humans may not be Earth’s most intelligent beings for much longer: the world champions of chess, Go, and Jeopardy! are now all AIs. Given the rapid pace of progress in AI, many predict that it could advance to human-level intelligence within the next several decades.

Democracy establishes relationships of political equality, ones in which citizens equally share authority over what they do together and respect one another as equals.

Adam Smith is best known today as the founder of modern economics, but he was also an uncommonly brilliant philosopher who was especially interested in the perennial question of how to live a good life. 

It’s a story we can’t stop telling ourselves. Once, humans were benighted by superstition and irrationality, but then the Greeks invented reason. Later, the Enlightenment enshrined rationality as the supreme value. Discovering that reason is the defining feature of our species, we named ourselves the “rational animal.”