Sublime

The Big Idea, the conceptual breakthrough of the last thirty years of psychology, is that the brain is a kind of computer. That’s the basis of the new field of cognitive science. Of course, we don’t know just what kind of computer the brain is. Certainly it’s very different from any of the actual computers we have now.

The past is a mental construct generated by subjective, intellectual models of reality fed with subjective memories and present perceptions. It isn’t anywhere out there but an internal myth meant to give context to present perceptions. Thus, there can be no explanatory truths.

Ego is no more than this: identification with form, which primarily means thought forms.

“TRUTH with capital letters!” Nietzsche exclaimed. “I forget, Josef, that scientists have still to learn that TRUTH, too, is an illusion—but an illusion without which we can’t survive.

When you know yourself only through content, you will also think you know what is good or bad for you. You

proven that readers regard an author and an audience a speaker as more intelligent the more clear and to the point their expressions are (Oppenheimer 2006).

After all, experience is the only reality we can ever know and it is integral to who or what we are.

Either our wills are determined by prior causes and we are not responsible for them, or they are the product of chance and we are not responsible for them.