Specifically, Kant wrote, we can picture reality as being consistent and continuous, or as being broken into discrete chunks, and we can make perfectly logical and coherent arguments supporting both conclusions even though those conclusions explicitly contradict each other. This happens because we assume something about reality that only comes into

a fabricated continuity of our own design.

without a perception, and never can observe anything but the perception.”[26] Like Knutzen staring into the heavens and mistaking the comet he sees there for the one he expected to find, when we believe that our impressions belong to a self, we falsely project an expected unity on a disjointed and random series of impressions.

There is no such thing as a law of nature; we are trapped forever in our subjective impressions, and believing otherwise is pure delusion.

Like Kant before him, he also discovered that the conceit of slowing time down to a single frame, honing the moment of an observation to a pure present, destroys the observation itself. The closer we look, the more the present vanishes from our grasp.

The soul or consciousness, in fact, is nothing but the unity of a sense of self over time, the bare fact that to perceive and then to articulate our perceptions something must connect from this very instant to another, and another after that.

It is we who create the problem, Borges realized, by the very way we imagine the race. We attribute to Achilles and to the tortoise (as we do to ourselves and indeed to all objects) a persistence in time and space. When we slice time and space into the infinitesimal chunks that Achilles and the tortoise have to cross, we simultaneously impose on th

Jorge Luis Borges, Immanuel Kant, and Werner Heisenberg shared an uncommon immunity to the temptation to think they knew God’s secret plan. Each in his own way resisted the urge to project essential aspects of how human beings experience reality onto reality itself, independent of how we know it.

According to Hume, absolutely everything we know about the world comes from our senses. Not only does this mean we can easily be wrong about what we think we know; even worse, we have no basis to suppose that such “certainties” as Isaac Newton’s laws of motion are anything other than habits we’ve acquired through repeated exposure to similar impres