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We live in a time of information abundance, which far too many of us see as information overload. With the sum total of human knowledge, past and present, at our fingertips, we’re faced with a crisis of attention: which ideas should we engage with, and why? Big Think is an evolving roadmap to the best thinking on the planet — the ideas that can help you think flexibly and act decisively in a multivariate world.

A word about Big Ideas and Themes — The architecture of Big Think

Big ideas are lenses for envisioning the future. Every article and video on bigthink.com and on our learning platforms is based on an emerging “big idea” that is significant, widely relevant, and actionable. We’re sifting the noise for the questions and insights that have the power to change all of our lives, for decades to come. For example, reverse-engineering is a big idea in that the concept is increasingly useful across multiple disciplines, from education to nanotechnology.

Themes are the seven broad umbrellas under which we organize the hundreds of big ideas that populate Big Think. They include New World Order, Earth and Beyond, 21st Century Living, Going Mental, Extreme Biology, Power and Influence, and Inventing the Future.

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Transcript

Question: Could a desire for longevity be seen as an effort to better know oneself?

Critchley: One thing that you can get from looking at the history of philosophy, philosophies like Spinoza for example, is an emphasis on the present, right, and Wickenstein says somewhere, and it’s a deep remark, that the eternal life is given to those who live in the present and living in the present is the most difficult thing to do. We’re always living either in the past, which is the past of whatever, a glorious childhood or victimization and suffering, or living in a future, which is a future of, you know, when I will be rich and famous, or whatever it might be. We escape the present and you know, one of the things that philosophy can do I think is to allow one to emphasize the importance of this never-recurring transient present through which we live