The Inside-Out
“It is a profound and necessary truth,” Robert Oppenheimer would say, “that the deep things in science are not found because they are useful; they are found because it was possible to find them.”
Richard Rhodes • Making of the Atomic Bomb
To figure that out, we have to get good at seeing human thinking in 3D.
Tim Urban • Page Not Found — Wait But Why
Because time and space are so central to consciousness, explaining how we experience them may also help to crack the broader puzzle of why we experience anything at all. Unlike most other experiences we have, our sensations of time and space can be analyzed.
The various illusions and distortions of perception help with that analysis—they are not fai
... See moreGeorge Musser • Putting Ourselves Back in the Equation
An image enters your pupil, gets inverted by your lens, hits your retina, and creates a spatial pattern. This pattern gets relayed to your brain. People tend to think that there’s a little upside-down picture of the world going into your visual areas, but that’s not how it works. There is no picture. It’s not an image anymore. Fundamentally, it is
... See moreSandra Blakeslee • On Intelligence
“Outside is pure energy and colorless substance. All of the rest happens through the mechanism of our senses. Our eyes see just a small fraction of the light in the world. It is a trick to make a colored world, which does not exist outside of human beings.”