Tolle Lege!.

This was an extraordinarily good lecture series. The science that explains the best way of thinking about the problem was always at the center of the lecture. I had not realize that most of my readings about science and philosophy had met at the intersection of metaphysics so nicely until I listened to this series. I will end up getting a book on metaphysics because I can't find any more on this topic at audible. For me, I hate reading and it's a real compliment to this lecturer because I'm even willing to read a book on the topic because of this lecture. I wish the author had more lectures or even a book out there but I can't seem to find any at Amazon.

There wasn't a single topic that he talked about that I didn't find exciting. He starts off by talking about the mind body dichotomy and what this means for the soul. He doesn't mince words. The soul comes about mostly from just silly propositions (and is not fundamental to Christianity until after 300 A.D.), but he says repeatedly in the series just because it is a silly argument doesn't necessarily mean the proposition is faulty. He doesn't miss a single argument on what consciousness is and gives all reasonable hypotheses their due.

He looks at all the classic proofs for the existence of God (ontological, design, morality, first cause) and pretty much shows why they are silly. Now days, instead of 'by design', because Darwin has completely eviscerated those arguments, they talk about 'fine tuning' instead. The fine tuning arguments are the hardest to refute because they are the hardest to explain without understanding a bunch of physics. He does a fairly nice job.

After looking at the mind he delves into the nature of the physical reality. Why Einstein is so important for our understanding about space and time and what does free will really mean and is time fundamental or an emergent property? Einstein takes time out of the universe (with his block universe) and space has no substance (unlike Newton and his bucket of water) and all is relational.

The best way to look at this lecture series is not as a pointless set of discussions about esoteric matters on reality, but as a summary of the best thoughts on how multiple experts understand the world. He really got into quantum physics and discusses why it is so weird (measurement problem, entanglement, double split experiment, ...), and he gives the best summary on Bell's experiment I've heard and tells why there are no hidden variables explaining 'spooky action as a distance' and what entanglement is.

Make no mistake about it. There is some references to long ago dead philosopher's, but this lecture is at the cutting edge of science and it would be a rare listener who would not learn some science that they did not already know from this lecture.