Helgoland

Every time that something solid is put into doubt or dismantled, something else opens up and allows us to see further than we could before. Watching what appeared to be as solid as rock melt into air makes lighter, it seems to me, the transitory and bittersweet flowing of our lives.

is for this reason, I think, that everything we have been able to accomplish over the centuries has been achieved in a network of exchanges, collaborating. This is why the politics of collaboration is so much more sensible and effective than the politics of competition …

The best description of reality that we have found is in terms of events that weave a web of interactions. ‘Entities’ are nothing other than ephemeral nodes in this web. Their properties are not determined until the moment of these interactions; they exist only in relation to something else. Everything is what it is only with respect to something e

What I see, in other words, is not a reproduction of the external world. It is what I expect, corrected by what I can grasp. The relevant input is not that which confirms what we already know, but that which contradicts our expectations.

What would be the point of sending towards the brain signals that do nothing but confirm what it already knows? Information technology uses similar techniques to compress files of images: instead of putting into the memory the colour of all the pixels, it stores information only on where the colours change: less information, but enough to reconstru

So images from around us do not travel from the eyes to the brain – only news of discrepancies regarding what the brain expects do.

We do not love in order to live: we live because we love.

This is the meaning of culture: an endless dialogue that enriches us by feeding on experiences, knowledge and, above all, exchanges.

from an Absolute. I believe that one of the greatest mistakes made by human beings is to want certainties when trying to understand something. The search for knowledge is not nourished by certainty: it is nourished by a radical absence of certainty.