trying to see what has to be an unconscious process is like ‘trying to turn up the gas quickly enough to see how the darkness looks’, as William James memorably put it.

People who ignore science are either afraid of it, because they don’t understand it, or find its truths inconvenient. Science is a guiding light: if we put it out, we are in the dark. And precisely because it is so precious, we should be careful to guard it from ever-present dangers – exaggerated claims, models that distort, and institutional

the world is a seamless, always self-creating, self-individuating, and simultaneously self-uniting, flow that is only truly knowable as it comes to be known.

To quote Lewontin again: ‘An organism is less like a machine than it is like a language whose elements … take unique meaning from their context’. Analyses of individual words and their possibilities of meaning can be an essential first step: without a knowledge of the words, we cannot grasp the whole. But at the same time, it is only the meaning of

In an age that prides itself on being capable of resolving and clarifying every aspect of experience in such a way as to explain it, in the hope of controlling it, we are too apt, when faced with a question that cannot be answered, either to deny that the question has meaning, or to deny that the problematic entity exists, or both. It is not just

Then comes Part II. Here I address the main paths that are open to us to take in our approach to truth. I take these to be science, reason, intuition and imagination. In each case I look at the strengths and limitations attendant on them; and bring to bear philosophical and psychological evidence and argument. I also look at what is contributed in

It happened to him as it always happens to those who turn to science … simply to get an answer to an everyday question of life. Science answered thousands of other very subtle and ingenious questions … but not the one he was trying to solve.

As Richard Feynman said during his Nobel Prize acceptance speech in 1965: ‘A very great deal more truth can become known than can be proven.’ And, I might add, a very great deal more falsehood can become known than can be disproved.

A further complication is that only effortful tasks tend to register: this means that the more expert we are at something, the less we will see brain activity. An expert will show lower levels of activation than someone unfamiliar with the task: equally a part of the brain that is normally not particularly significant in a certain task may show up