Sunday, April 12, 2015

Interstellar and the Meaning of Human Life (Video)

As promised in an earlier post, here is a link to a video of my talk, "Interstellar and the Meaning of Human Life." (You can also watch it below).  Thanks to Robert Austin Kippes for recording it and uploading it to YouTube!  And thanks to Dr. Talia Welsh for mentioning this blog in her introduction!  The video runs about 54 minutes, including discussion.  Enjoy!



You can also see a report on it from our campus news channel (the report on my talk starts about 4:18).



The talk seems to have been received well.  I'm not sure whether I convinced anyone to take our courses or to become philosophy majors, but I can report that I had a lot of fun talking to about 50 or 60 people about Interstellar and philosophy!  And now through the magic of the internet, I can discuss it even more!

See here and here for my blog posts on earlier attempts to think through these issues (minus my arguments about the meaning of death, which was new material added to the talk).

What do you think?  Are death and extinction always bad?  Will the human race survive forever?  Would we want to?


1 comment:

  1. I just discovered two interesting articles on Interstellar. The first, "Interstellar and Philosophy" by Lance Belluomini, focuses on the ethics of colonizing other planets: http://andphilosophy.com/2014/12/11/interstellar-and-philosophy/. The second, "Interstellar, Causal Loops, and Saving Humanity" by David Kyle Johnson, focuses on the issue of causal loops, which is one of my favorite things in the movie (I mentioned it in the Q&A in the video): https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/plato-pop/201411/interstellar-causal-loops-and-saving-humanity.

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