“What profit, I ask, has anyone gained from their profound meditations?”

As he spoke, it seemed to me that he was being rocketed upward by the power of his own vision, into the highest reaches of space, watching the earth become smaller and smaller until it shrank into a single pixel. Arendt once referred to the view of the earth from space as the “Archimedean point,” drawing on the popular anecdote that Archimedes once

The more I read about theories of mind, the more I’ve come to see my interior life as a hall of mirrors, capable of all kinds of tricks and sleights of hand.

The world contained in this data does not operate according to the neat Newtonian rules of cause and effect but spirals into the baffling complexity of chaos theory, wherein everything is connected to everything else and even small changes have widespread repercussions. Or rather, this is the world that had always been there, lurking beyond our

For Weber, disenchantment was not merely an ontological hollowing-out—the realization that there are no spirits hiding in rocks or souls lurking in bodies—nor was it the simple fact that the universe could be reduced to causal mechanisms. The true trauma of disenchantment is that the world, as seen through the lens of modern science, is devoid of

What makes transhumanism so compelling is that it promises to restore through science the transcendent—and essentially religious—hopes that science itself obliterated.

“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

Intellectual obsessions never really end; they can only be transposed.

“Nobody thinks, ‘Well, if we do a simulation of a rainstorm, we’re all going to get wet,’ ” he said. “And similarly, a computer simulation of consciousness isn’t thereby conscious.”