I’ve come to the conclusion—and some of you may have heard me say this before—that culture is not your friend. That’s the final conclusion. This came to me a few months ago when I had my yearly physical, and as I was buttoning up my doctor said to me, “You know, in the nineteenth century, most people your age were dead.” And I realized that this wa... See more

Conspiracy theory is a kind of epistemological cartoon about reality. I mean, isn’t it so simple to believe that things are run by the Greys, and that all we have to do is trade sufficient fetal tissue to them and we can solve our technological problems. Or, isn’t it comforting to believe that the Jews are behind everything, or the Communist Party,... See more

Not to get too philosophical here, but for positivist philosophers everything that is important—color, feeling, taste, tone, ambition, apprehension, appetition—these things are called secondary qualities. In other words, they’re peripheral. They arise at a lower level of understanding. They are somehow determined by the presence of the animal body ... See more