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Kindle Notes & Highlights
consciousness is a way of projecting all the activity in your nervous system into a simpler form.
you are more likely to believe that a statement is true if you have heard it before—whether or not it is actually true.
illusion-of-truth effect highlights the potential danger for people who are repeatedly exposed to the same religious edicts or political slogans.
“man is equally incapable of seeing the nothingness from which he emerges and the infinity in which he is engulfed.”
Almost all of our actions—from producing speech to picking up a mug of coffee—are run by alien subroutines, also known as zombie systems.
The team-of-rivals framework suggests that the best approach is to abandon the question “What’s the most clever way to solve that problem?” in favor of “Are there multiple, overlapping ways to solve that problem?”
By the way, as regards that dangerous set of genes, you’ve probably heard of them. They are summarized as the Y chromosome. If you’re a carrier, we call you a male.
After all, even a materialist universe would be mind-blowingly amazing. Imagine for a moment that we are nothing but the product of billions of years of molecules coming together and ratcheting up through natural selection, that we are composed only of highways of fluids and chemicals sliding along roadways within billions of dancing cells, that trillions of synaptic conversations hum in parallel, that this vast egglike fabric of micron-thin circuitry runs algorithms undreamt of in modern science, and that these neural programs give rise to our decision making, loves, desires, fears, and
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If our brains were simple enough to be understood, we wouldn’t be smart enough to understand them.
