Sublime

as the neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett notes, “Scientific evidence shows that what we see, hear, touch, taste, and smell are largely simulations of the world, not reactions to it.”

Perhaps the universe itself is a massive social network of conscious agents that experience, decide, and act. If so, consciousness does not arise from matter; this is a big claim that we will explore in detail. Instead, matter and spacetime arise from consciousness—as a perceptual interface.

As Ludwig Wittgenstein said in Philosophical Investigations, “philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language.”

When we examine consciousness up close, it starts to look a bit like the quantum realm. Memories pop in and out of our minds like subatomic particles. Images and sounds tunnel through our senses. Perception, we find, is suffused throughout with uncertainties that would make Heisenberg blush. There's no denying that the brain is up to some pretty

If someone takes a new shape, in what way can we still speak of them as the same person they were before?

We tend to think of the artist’s work as the output. The real work of the artist is a way of being in the world.

But, as Nagel knew, there are also things “about the world and life and ourselves that cannot be adequately understood from a maximally objective standpoint” but only from deep in the mud of the everyday mind. Among these are absorptions, immersions, and ecstasies of all sorts, for what is sometimes called a “flow state” involves an entirely

But for our commonsense notions of human agency and morality to hold, it seems that our actions cannot be merely lawful products of our biology, our conditioning, or anything else that might lead others to predict them.