Dear Closer To Truth Members:
Closer To Truth (CTT) is my life passion. All CTT that I do, from planning and researching to hosting and writing, is a joy. It is a privilege to serve the global CTT community; it is your interest and engagement that makes CTT possible and I never forget it.
A special joy is this end-of-the-year message. It is my pleasure and my responsibility to report to you what CTT has accomplished in 2024 (retrospectively) and what CTT hopes to accomplish in 2025 (prospectively).
Allow me to start with my personal satisfaction—that in our fractious and often dispiriting world, although CTT members come from just about every country on earth and may be divided by nationality, ethnicity, religion, race, etc., all are united by common interest, indeed by fervent interest, in CTT’s ultimate questions of cosmic existence and human sentience.
Consciousness generates fascination worldwide. Consciousness is a prime CTT theme and 2024 was a CTT consciousness year. I published a comprehensive article on theories of consciousness, derived in part from CTT’s 25 years of interviews and TV episodes: “A Landscape of Consciousness” (I describe “Landscape” here).
We were thrilled to film CTT Consciousness in Rome with leaders of materialism/neurobiology, dualism, panpsychism, idealism—and we also explored the conundrum of AI consciousness. The discussions were profound and the settings magnificent. CTT co-creator/producer/director Peter Getzels and I can’t wait for you to see CTT’s “Landscape of Consciousness” TV episodes and ~115 videos.
CTT is all about content and 2024 was a high-content year.
We completed CTT’s largest series, “Philosophy of Biology”—13 CTT TV episodes and ~250 CTT videos. How can philosophy advance biology? How can biology influence philosophy? We ask how life on earth came to be as it is, and how humans came to be as we are? How does evolution really work? How do reductionism and emergence relate? What is human nature? We address biologically based issues: sex/gender, race, cognition, culture, morality, healthcare, religion, extraterrestrial life, alien intelligences, and more.
Appreciating CTT’s increasingly global, increasingly diverse audiences, we produced “Eastern Traditions and the Big Questions”, highlighting Buddhism, Hinduism, Chinese philosophy (Daoism, Confucianism), Shintoism—five CTT TV episodes and more than 100 videos. What is world? What is reality? The human person? Evil and suffering? Our ultimate future?
CTT Chats in 2024 presented many new books, including: philosopher and AI theorist Nick Bostrom on Deep Utopia; physicist Sean Carroll on Quanta and Fields, philosopher Helen De Cruz on Wonderstruck; physicist and Templeton Prize winner Marcelo Gleiser on The Blind Spot; and astrobiologist Sara Imari Walker on Life As No One Knows It.
A CTT Chat highlight is an in-depth, multi-session retrospective with philosopher of religion Richard Swinburne on 14 on his core topics from his almost 60-year career, including The Existence of God, The Coherence of Theism, the mind-body problem (substance dualism), and the problem of evil (coming in 2025).
In 2024, CTT YouTube subscribers hit 625,000 and total CTT podcast downloads exceeded 1.3 million.
For 2025, while we’re excited to create fresh CTT content in cosmos, life, mind and meaning, we seek to develop AI-related offerings that would enable you to engage and use the “CTT way of thinking.” CTT-AI is coming!
Peter Getzels, our dedicated CTT team, and I wish you, our increasingly global CTT community, a happy and healthy new year. It is our vision, and our hope, that CTT’s ‘deepest questions and greatest thinkers’ can continue to cross cultures and build bridges.
Again, our appreciation to all of you.
All best,
Robert