Sublime

personal identity to exist, there has to be a personalized prior history, a thread of autobiographical memories, a remembered past and a projected future.

“The dreaming mind,” Dunne observed, “is a master-hand at tacking false interpretations on to everything it perceives.”

those thoughts are real, and interact according to the same rules that the realist says govern the interaction of objects.

We feel and take for granted that selves and things are as real as they seem to be,

his philosophical idealism

Iris Murdoch’s words: “Man is a creature who makes pictures of himself and then comes to resemble the picture.”

everything made of matter, including brains, may bear the traces of their entanglements in both directions across time.

Action is inseparable from perception.

Past philosophers have taken this observation and run with it, arguing that minds and brains are fundamentally distinct and separate phenomena. This is the view the philosopher Gilbert Ryle called “the dogma of the Ghost in the Machine.”1 But modern scientists and philosophers who have rejected dualism haven’t necessarily replaced it with a better