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IT IS ALMOST IMPOSSIBLE SYSTEMATICALLY TO CONSTITUTE A NATURAL MORAL LAW. NATURE HAS NO PRINCIPLES. SHE FURNISHES US WITH NO REASON TO BELIEVE THAT HUMAN LIFE IS TO BE RESPECTED. NATURE, IN HER INDIFFERENCE, MAKES NO DISTINCTION BETWEEN GOOD AND EVIL. —ANATOLE FRANCE
People, he reflected, were like frogs: take something out of their visual field, and they’d just—forget it.
pareidolia.
EITHER WAR IS OBSOLETE, OR MEN ARE. —R. BUCKMINSTER FULLER
people have an unfortunate habit of assuming they understand the reality just because they understood the analogy.
TO HIMSELF EVERYONE IS IMMORTAL; HE MAY KNOW THAT HE IS GOING TO DIE, BUT HE CAN NEVER KNOW THAT HE IS DEAD. —SAMUEL BUTLER
“It’s not a fairy tale, Dan. I believe in a creative force beyond the physical realm. I believe it gave rise to all life. You can’t blame it for all the horrible shit that’s been done in its name.”
Good parasites are invisible; the best are indispensable. Gut bacteria, chloroplasts, mitochondria: all parasites, once. All invisible in the shadow of vaster beings. Now their hosts can’t live without them.
All those gut feelings, right or wrong, that had kept the breed alive on the Pleistocene savanna—and they were wrong, so much of the time. False negatives, false positives, the moral algebra of fat men pushed in front of onrushing trolleys. The strident emotional belief that children made you happy, even when all the data pointed to misery. The high-amplitude fear of sharks and dark-skinned snipers who would never kill you; indifference to all the toxins and pesticides that could. The mind was so rotten with misrepresentation that in some cases it literally had to be damaged before it could
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Hell, rationality itself—the exalted Human ability to reason—hadn’t evolved in the pursuit of truth but simply to win arguments, to gain control: to bend others, by means logical or sophistic, to your will.
Truth had never been a priority. If believing a lie kept the genes proliferating, the system would believe that lie with all its heart.
“Dan, you gotta let go of this whole self thing. Identity changes by the second, you turn into someone else every time a new thought rewires your brain. You’re already a different person than you were ten minutes ago.”
THE INTUITIVE MIND IS A SACRED GIFT AND THE RATIONAL MIND IS A FAITHFUL SERVANT. WE HAVE CREATED A SOCIETY THAT HONORS THE SERVANT AND HAS FORGOTTEN THE GIFT. —ALBERT EINSTEIN (APOCRYPHAL)
Long before art and science and philosophy arose, consciousness had but one function: not to merely implement motor commands, but to mediate between commands in opposition.
A neuron didn’t know whether it fired in response to a scent or a symphony. Brain cells weren’t intelligent; only brains were. And brain cells weren’t even the lower limit. The origins of thought were buried so deep they predated multicellular life itself: neurotransmitters in choanoflagellates, potassium ion gates in Monosiga. I am a colony of microbes talking to itself,
48 If you’re interested and you’ve got ninety minutes to spare, I’d strongly recommend Robert Sapolsky’s brilliant lecture on the evolutionary and neurological roots of religious belief.49
