The Philosophy of Time and Self

It is common to think about social media use in terms of social 'rewards' such as 'Likes', which compel us to keep posting in pursuit of a rewarding dopamine hit. But what scientific evidence is there for these claims? In her talk, Georgia discusses how the strategies humans have evolved for pursuing social rewards may produce mental health vulnerabilities in a world changed by social media. Georgia presents her research using mathematical models to characterise reward-pursuing social media behaviour, and shows how this approach could help us understand individual differences in social media use.

Stuff happens. It’s hard to think of a more general description of reality. We think of the universe as beginning in the past and evolving towards the future. However, despite its centrality to our understanding of the world, this picture of time is surprisingly poorly motivated by physics. This talk sets out the various ways physics suggests time is fundamentally directionless, with no distinction between earlier and later, and no direction in which reality unfolds. Dr Matt Farr suggests that this picture is not as radical as it sounds, and offer a philosophical understanding of directionless time.