But we are so easily convinced! How can we trust our subjective response to other minds when we ourselves have been “hardwired” by evolution to see life everywhere we look?

“One starts as a materialist, then one becomes a dualist, then a panpsychist, and one ends up as an idealist.”

precisely my confusion about the relationship between foresight and freedom: To what extent does the act of prediction enact the very fate it foresees?

Perhaps our limited vantage as humans meant that all we could hope for were metaphors of our own making, that we would continually grasp at the shadow of absolute truths without any hope of attainment.

In 1995 the philosopher David Chalmers called this “the hard problem” of consciousness. Unlike the comparatively “easy” problems of functionality, the hard problem asks why brain processes are accompanied by first-person experience. If none of the other matter in the world is accompanied by mental qualities, then why should brain matter be any diff

“When I am absorbed in writing a novel, reality starts twisting to reflect and inform everything I’ve been thinking about in my work,” Ottessa Moshfegh notes in an essay. Virginia Woolf, writing in her diary in 1933, expressed essentially the same thing: “What an odd coincidence! that real life should provide precisely the situation I am writing ab

In order to do science, we had to translate these quantum phenomena into the language of classical physics—referring to cause and effect, space and time—accepting even as we did so that this language was necessarily metaphoric and anthropocentric.

“When it comes to understanding how things are,” he writes, “the machines may be closer to the truth than we humans ever could be.”

The true trauma of disenchantment is that the world, as seen through the lens of modern science, is devoid of intrinsic meaning.