We began to travel backward in time to understand causation, and forward in time to make predictions.

The eerie certainty we have of existing as separate creatures in a world full of things that are not us, our ability to create abstract symbolic representations of our mental states and use language to communicate these interior states of mind—all

And it was not a technical innovation that set us on the present course, but an idea. That was the radically transformative idea that the universe and all that exists is no more and no less than the material effect of material causes.

Our ancestors, on the other hand, communicated through language and gesture, song and dance. They led rich interior lives, creating ideas, images, and wholly imagined realities that shaped their interior worlds just as deftly as their tools made clothes to keep them warm and huts to shelter them.

This is the moral hazard Socrates warned against—that by alienating our knowledge, making it “external to us,” we have bought an immense measure of power over the world at the expense of having power over ourselves.

Creativity flows from the suspended state of mind in which knowledge is nothing and attention is everything.

Because imagination is memory in the future tense.

First, as we learn more about the processes by which the past manufactures the future, we will use that knowledge to accelerate the growth of digital infrastructure, provide more secure stewardship of collective and personal memory, and reduce the risk of losing our past. Second, we will gain understanding of the complex processes by which Nature o

This is memory’s task of retrospection, to integrate the knowledge that we have, to impute a sense of cause and effect to the events in our lives, and to offer a sense of meaning.