Showing titles in Epistemology

Почему одни и те же факты приводят людей к противоположным выводам? Почему обсуждения не приближают к взаимопониманию? И почему вера в объективную истину может быть не менее разрушительной, чем фанатизм? «Стена невежества» — одна из самых известных и обсуждаемых книг Такэси Ёро, многолетний бестселлер в Японии. Это аудиокнига о границах человеческого понимания и об опасной иллюзии, что мы действительно знаем, как устроен мир.

What was before the universe? If space is expanding, what is it expanding into? Where did all the matter come from to form planets, stars, and oceans? What is nothing? And if none of these questions can be answered, why do we keep asking them? The Pointless Book asks the biggest questions human beings have ever conceived. The kind of questions that keep you awake at three in the morning. The kind that feel like they should have answers but never do. This book tries to answer them. It reaches for quantum physics, simulation theory, cosmology, philosophy, and religion.

A landmark of Enlightenment thought, Hume's An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding is accompanied here by two shorter works that shed light on it: A Letter from a Gentleman to His Friend in Edinburgh, Hume's response to those accusing him of atheism, of advocating extreme skepticism, and of undermining the foundations of morality; and his Abstract of A Treatise of Human Nature, which anticipates discussions developed in the Enquiry.

What does it mean to know something? Can we have confidence in our knowledge? Epistemology, the study of knowledge, can often seem like a daunting subject. And yet few topics are more basic to human life. We are inquisitive creatures by nature, and the unending quest for truth leads us to raise difficult questions about the quest itself. What are the conditions, sources, and limits of our knowledge? Do our beliefs need to be rationally justified? Can we have certainty? In this primer on epistemology, James Dew and Mark Foreman guide readers through this discipline in philosophy.

You chose breakfast this morning the same way you choose everything else. The same pattern you use to pick what to eat is the one you use to evaluate a career, assess a relationship, respond to a crisis, or judge an argument. You have one way of navigating trade-offs, and you apply it everywhere because inventing a new approach for every new situation would require resources no human mind possesses. This is not a flaw. It is the most efficient strategy available to any system operating with limited means in an unlimited world.

"Is Shakespeare Dead?" by Mark Twain is a reflective and satirical treatise on the authorship of Shakespeare’s works, written during the early 20th century. In this work, Twain grapples with long-standing debates over who truly wrote the plays attributed to Shakespeare, questioning the...

What if the biggest obstacle to knowledge is not the difficulty of finding answers—but the impossibility of asking the right questions? Every person, every scientist, every thinker operates inside an invisible prison: a cognitive frame that determines which questions they can even imagine asking. The questions outside the frame are not too hard. They do not exist. And no amount of intelligence, data, or deductive power can reach a truth that belongs to a question you cannot formulate.

Why do we recoil before we think? The grimace at decay, the shudder at contamination, the instant dismissal of an idea that threatens our worldview—these reactions arrive faster than thought, as if some ancient sentinel has already rendered judgment. In The Wisdom of Disgust, Boris Kriger reveals that this flash of rejection is far more than a primitive reflex.

What if everything you know about stress is incomplete? The pressure you feel at 3 AM, the tension before a crucial meeting, the weight of demands that seem impossible to meet—this experience is universal. But stress is not merely a human affliction. It is one manifestation of a fundamental law governing all systems capable of maintaining their existence over time.

Why does a colleague's promotion disturb us more than our own stalled career? Why do capuchin monkeys reject perfectly good food after watching another monkey receive something better? Why might artificial intelligence systems develop competitive behaviors they were never programmed to have? The Anatomy of Envy presents a unified theory of one of the most pervasive yet least understood phenomena in psychology: the disturbance that arises from perceiving oneself as disadvantaged relative to others.

What if everything you thought you knew about existence was hiding a disturbing truth? Every time you eat, you perform an act of destruction. Every breath you take requires the transformation of prior structure. Every thought in your mind has a physical cost. This is not philosophy or metaphor. It is thermodynamic law. In this groundbreaking work, Boris Kriger presents a unified theory of persistence that reveals why existence itself has a cost, and why that cost must be paid in transformed structure.

Why do empires fall? Why do startups fail? Why does micromanagement kill innovation while total freedom produces chaos? Why do some relationships flourish while others suffocate or dissolve? The answer is a law as old as the universe and as relevant as tomorrow’s headlines.

What if the world you see isn't the world that truly exists? In what's really going on in the universe?, Brian Perez takes listeners on a bold exploration of consciousness, frequency, light, sound, and the unseen layers of reality that may surround us at all times. Blending metaphysics, modern physics, ancient wisdom and personal insight, the audiobook, examines questions of humanity has asked for centuries: is reality constructed? Is consciousness fundamental? Are we limited by our senses? And what might exist just beyond our perception?

You pay for mistakes you never made. You carry guilt that was planted on your shoulders long before you had the chance to question it. You get blamed for problems created by people you will never meet. And you were trained to accept all of it without asking why. The Root of Deception exposes the design behind this quiet manipulation. Fear is crafted with precision. Shame is assigned like a tax. Blame is redirected until ordinary people absorb the damage for the system that claims to protect them.

In Gödel’s Shadow: Why No System Can Explain Itself, Boris Kriger explores one of the most unsettling discoveries of modern logic and follows its consequences far beyond mathematics. Beginning with Gödel’s incompleteness theorems, the book traces how any system capable of describing itself inevitably encounters truths it cannot justify from within. What emerges is not a technical puzzle, but a profound philosophical insight into the nature of reason, meaning, and explanation.

Why do utopian projects produce catastrophe? Why do optimized systems collapse? Why does the pursuit of perfection destroy what it seeks to perfect? In THE CASE AGAINST PERFECTION, Boris Kriger presents a revolutionary synthesis of two groundbreaking theoretical frameworks: the Law of Imperative Uncertainty and the Asymmetry of Totalizing Ideals. Drawing on information theory, complexity science, evolutionary biology, and the lessons of history, Kriger proves mathematically what philosophers have long intuited: the pursuit of terminal perfection is structurally self-defeating.

Why do we believe more than we can prove? Why does memory deceive us? Why do the most sophisticated artificial intelligence systems "hallucinate" false information? In Homo Credens, Boris Kriger reveals a profound truth about the nature of complex minds: any sufficiently complex system—whether human brain, animal cognition, or artificial intelligence—must believe far more than it can verify. This is not a limitation to be overcome but an architecture to be understood.

We live in a world that is not quite "right." The central tenet of statistical inquiry is that Observation = Truth + Error because even the most careful of scientific investigations have always been bedeviled by uncertainty. Our attempts to measure things are plagued with small errors. Our...

Radical doubt has been attempted for centuries. Every belief has been challenged, every foundation questioned, every certainty placed under suspicion. And yet, total negation has never been achieved. Something always remains. This audiobook explains why. The Law of Limit to Negation formulates a single structural principle that has been repeatedly approached but never stated as a law: negation cannot negate itself. The failure of total negation is not psychological, existential, linguistic, or metaphysical. It is operational.

You may be living in a simulation right now. Not science fiction. Not paranoia. Math. If advanced civilizations can create realistic simulations of conscious beings, and if they create billions of them, then statistically you're almost certainly in one. The odds are overwhelming. The evidence is everywhere: Quantum mechanics behaves like optimized rendering code. Physical constants are calibrated to impossible precision. Consciousness collapses probability waves. Reality glitches when you're not looking.