Collections

at least on some level, to actually feel separate, you must also actually feel connected, for how can you be separate from something that you are not

There is nothing more beautiful than a formal system with axioms that are perfectly internally consistent. Such systems can be right, and they can be

The thing about time was that no matter how Violet had changed on the outside, on the inside she had remained every age she ever was.

She stepped back and examined its scale. Space evoked emotion in the same way an open landscape squeezed a heart. It set the mind to wonder, gave reve

Recovering memory is more like picking up shards of your past. But even that can be beautiful, because they can be reassembled as a mosaic, which, as

I learned that it takes a special kind of vision to truly appreciate what it means to exist.

It is through seeing the invisible, hearing the inaudible, and feeling the untouchable that humans imagine, predict, and infer. The problem is that hu

She had never been too tired to paint. She would have to update her will. She hadn’t looked at it since Richard died. “What

Scholars quickly set about organizing the new mental environment by clipping their favorite passages from books and assembling them into huge tomes—fl

That direct engagement with the self, with no fear of shame or abandonment, no struggling to please others, is what makes isolation feel restorative a

'you could say stories are an especially useful storage format, a type of compression, and consciousness is the program that unpacks it.'

The great question of the Anth: What happens next?

Every narrative that we construct is predicated on the assumption of causality. Causality is the reason for constructing narratives in the first place

"There's no use going to school unless your final destination is the library."

ape hangers

But Quentin believed in reading as a lifeline to the past—to the store of experience that made the foundation of our species. By assembling our though

Here are some thinking prompts you can use while reading: • How could I put this in my own words? • How do I know this is true? • How can this b

on the one hand, thoughts are expressed on behalf of an integrated nameable self and, therefore, seem to be ‘my’ thoughts; on the other hand, the fact

regardless of its content, the thinking process presupposes the identity of the thinker, and thereby imposes the parameters of selfhood on whatever it

to the extent that we are identified as a ‘self’, we are merely a performance of the possibilities latent in language.

The experience of self is as real as any other conscious experience, such as pain or pleasure. What is illusory, as emphasized by Buddhism, is the ide

We must resist the temptation to drift along, reacting to whatever happens to us next, and deliberately select targets, from activities to relationshi

Mind, as defined earlier, is one way of referring to the active production and display of images arising from actual perception or from memory recall

Consciousness is a distinctive state of mind, but the words “consciousness” and “mind” are often used as if they were synonymous and corresponded to t

Maybe consciousness is our way of condensing existence into a shareable form.

boggle. It is said that 'the mind boggles' (meaning an extreme state of incredulity, or rejection of a situation or idea). Nothing but minds can boggl

Consciousness is a distinctive state of mind, but the words “consciousness” and “mind” are often used as if they were synonymous and corresponded to t

We form new concepts without limit by stringing together what we already know or nesting one concept within another. In fact, some suggest that consci

This liberalism relies upon the idea that consciousness is not a thing but an activity; that its elemental constituent is not some soul-like substance

For all its chilled-out associations, the attempt to be here now is therefore still another instrumentalist attempt to use the present moment purely a

Considerable evidence suggests that ADHD is associated with atypical activity in the prefrontal cortex.

Political corruption, instability, and conflict are the natural results of the abandonment of reason.

The ideals of the Enlightenment are products of human reason, but they always struggle with other strands of human nature: loyalty to tribe, deference

The Enlightenment principle that we can apply reason and sympathy to enhance human flourishing may seem obvious, trite, old-fashioned. I wrote this bo

Unreasonable distributions of wealth have always turned their fire on reason.

If there’s anything the Enlightenment thinkers had in common, it was an insistence that we energetically apply the standard of reason to understanding

The Enlightenment principle that we can apply reason and sympathy to enhance human flourishing may seem obvious, trite, old-fashioned. I wrote this bo

The Enlightenment was a scene of intellectual conflict that drew upon utterly foreign cultures in the ancient world and in the New World to destabiliz

In short, it is not that there is a right way and wrong way to learn. It’s that there are different strategies, each uniquely suited to capturing a pa

Today, self-creation is no longer something some of us can do to set ourselves apart from the people we see as the masses, the crowd, or ‘la foule.’ I

You see, I have always found it difficult to understand that in fact one can only be oneself. Who else could you be? Changeability and hypocrisy and p

But maybe this is who he really is, maybe we go through life never actually being ourselves, mostly never being ourselves. Maybe we spend most of our

That direct engagement with the self, with no fear of shame or abandonment, no struggling to please others, is what makes isolation feel restorative a

Works of art, Hoel contends, are artificial dreams that serve the same function: "Just like dreams, fictions and art keep us from overfitting our perc

Like nibbling on a magic mushroom, turning an art eye on reality makes you feel as if the world is performing just for you.

We're drawn to artwork that subtly deviates from our predictions of the world-"Too much prediction error is unpleasant or even disturbing; none or too

Following Julie's lead, I'd started viewing the everyday the way I looked at art—with an extra beat, with an inquisitive eye, with a willingness to li