Sublime

Why do we have this weird mental architecture? As hominid brains tripled in size over the last 5 million years, developing language and a vastly improved ability to reason, why did we evolve an inner lawyer, rather than an inner judge or scientist? Wouldn’t it have been most adaptive for our ancestors to figure out the truth, the real truth about w

Since humans are already universal explainers and constructors, they can already transcend their parochial origins, so there can be no such thing as a superhuman mind as such. There can only be further automation, allowing the existing kind of human thinking to be carried out faster, and with more working memory, and delegating ‘perspiration’ phase

For most of astronomer Carl Sagan’s career, he was skeptical of the idea that consciousness could exist outside the brain, arguing (like many mainstream materialist scientists) that consciousness arises from brain activity: “[The brain’s] workings—what we sometimes call mind—are a consequence of its anatomy and physiology, and nothing more.”54

Unless such recourse to science, as the sole arbiter of collective truth, is thoroughly misplaced when we come to matters of mind or consciousness. For consciousness is a quintessentially quicksilver phenomenon, impossible to isolate and pin down.

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

People feel (or presume) an authorship of their thoughts and actions that is illusory.

Marvin Minsky went so far as to argue that we should view human cognition as a “society of mind,”

At first, an Earth-wide census was collected where almost everybody, no matter how wild or speculative, had their opinions heard. Some, the linguists, noticed that the problem was very similar to what the psychologist William James once posed for language. How, in a written sentence, asked James, does one know where the words end and the sentence b