Hanna BAKHASH > Hanna's Quotes

“Indeed, contemporary adaptationists should question why they feel it is necessary to explain all of nature with a single powerful theory or process. Is the desire for scientific unification simply the ghost of monotheism lurking within contemporary scientific explanation? This is another implication of Darwin’s really dangerous idea.”
― Richard O. Prum, The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin's Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World - and Us

“Within Darwin’s argument for mate choice in Descent was another revolutionary idea: that animals are not merely subject to the extrinsic forces of ecological competition, predation, climate, geography, and so on that create natural selection. Rather, animals can play a distinct and vital role in their own evolution through their sexual and social choices. Whenever the opportunity evolves to enact sexual preferences through mate choice, a new and distinctively aesthetic evolutionary phenomenon occurs.”
― Richard O. Prum, The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin's Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World - and Us

“Desire for beauty will endure and undermine the desire for truth.”
― Richard O. Prum, The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin's Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World—And Us

“An old man says to his grandson: ‘There’s a fight going on inside me. It’s a terrible fight between two wolves. One is evil–angry, greedy, jealous, arrogant, and cowardly. The other is good–peaceful, loving, modest, generous, honest, and trustworthy. These two wolves are also fighting within you, and inside every other person too.’ After a moment, the boy asks, ‘Which wolf will win?’ The old man smiles. ‘The one you feed.’ 3”
― Rutger Bregman, Humankind: A Hopeful History

“So what is this radical idea? That most people, deep down, are pretty decent.”
― Rutger Bregman, Humankind: A Hopeful History – from the presenter of the 2025 BBC ‘Moral Revolution’ Reith lectures

“Imagine for a moment that a new drug comes on the market. It’s super-addictive, and in no time everyone’s hooked. Scientists investigate and soon conclude that the drug causes, I quote, ‘a misperception of risk, anxiety, lower mood levels, learned helplessness, contempt and hostility towards others, and desensitization'......That drug is the news.”
― Rutger Bregman, Humankind: A Hopeful History

“One good way to understand a complex system is to disturb it and then see what happens.”
― Michael Pollan, How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence

“You go deep enough or far out enough in consciousness and you will bump into the sacred. It’s not something we generate; it’s something out there waiting to be discovered. And this reliably happens to nonbelievers as well as believers.” Second, that, whether occasioned by drugs or other means, these experiences of mystical consciousness are in all likelihood the primal basis of religion.”
― Michael Pollan, How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence

“Normal waking consciousness feels perfectly transparent, and yet it is less a window on reality than the product of our imaginations-a kind of controlled hallucination.”
― Michael Pollan, How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence

“Our task in life consists precisely in a form of letting go of fear and expectations, an attempt to purely give oneself to the impact of the present.”
― Michael Pollan, How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence

“I think of childhood as the R&D stage of the species, concerned exclusively with learning and exploring. We adults are production and marketing.”
― Michael Pollan, How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence

“Our experience of consciousness is so intrinsic to who we are, we rarely notice that something mysterious is going on. Consciousness is experience itself, and it is therefore easy to miss the profound question staring us in the face in each moment: Why would any collection of matter in the universe be conscious?”
― Annaka Harris, Conscious: A Brief Guide to the Fundamental Mystery of the Mind

“the truth of my situation: I’m floating around the universe on this giant sphere—suspended here by gravity and going for a ride.”
― Annaka Harris, Conscious: A Brief Guide to the Fundamental Mystery of the Mind

“Why do certain configurations of matter cause that matter to light up with awareness?”
― Annaka Harris, Conscious: A Brief Guide to the Fundamental Mystery of the Mind

“I was once at an event where my friend and meditation teacher Joseph Goldstein was asked if he believed we have free will. He answered the question with arresting clarity when he said that he couldn’t even figure out what the term could possibly mean. What does it mean to have a will that is free from the cause-and-effect relationships of the universe? As he gestured with his hands dancing above him in the air, trying to point to this imaginary free will, he asked, “How can we even try to picture such a will floating about?”
― Annaka Harris, Conscious: A Brief Guide to the Fundamental Mystery of the Mind

“The claim is just the opposite—that if consciousness exists as a fundamental property, complex systems, built from that-which-is-already-streaming -consciousness, could eventually give rise to physical structures such as human minds.”
― Annaka Harris, Conscious: A Brief Guide to the Fundamental Mystery of the Mind

“In his research, Chamovitz discovered which genes are responsible for a plant’s ability to determine whether it’s in the dark or the light, and these genes, it turns out, are also part of human DNA. In animals, these same genes regulate responses to light and are involved in “the timing of cell division, the axonal growth of neurons, and the proper functioning of the immune system.” Analogous mechanisms exist in plants for detecting sounds, scents, and location, and even for forming memories.”
― Annaka Harris, Conscious: A Brief Guide to the Fundamental Mystery of the Mind

“After all, an infant is composed of particles indistinguishable from those swirling around in the sun. The particles that compose your body were once the ingredients of countless stars in our universe’s past. They traveled for billions of years to land here—in this particular configuration that is you—and are now reading this book. Imagine following the life of these particles from their first appearance in space-time to the very moment they became arranged in such a way as to start experiencing something.”
― Annaka Harris, Conscious: A Brief Guide to the Fundamental Mystery of the Mind

“This book is devoted to shaking up our everyday assumptions about the world we live in. Some facts are so important and so counterintuitive (matter is mostly made up of empty space; the earth is a spinning sphere in one of billions of solar systems in our galaxy; microscopic organisms cause disease; and so on) that we need to recall them again and again, until they finally permeate our culture and become the foundation for new thinking. The fundamental mysteriousness of consciousness, a subject deeply perplexing to philosophers and scientists alike, holds a special place among such facts. My goal in writing this book is to pass along the exhilaration that comes from discovering just how surprising consciousness is.”
― Annaka Harris, Conscious: A Brief Guide to the Fundamental Mystery of the Mind

“being on the earth doesn’t separate us from the rest of the universe; indeed, we are and have always been in outer space.”
― Annaka Harris, Conscious: A Brief Guide to the Fundamental Mystery of the Mind

“Although nothing about its confirmation supports (or provides any evidence for) theories about consciousness, it helps us understand the analogous proposition in panpsychism—that perhaps consciousness is another property of matter, or of the universe itself, that we have yet to discover.”
― Annaka Harris, Conscious: A Brief Guide to the Fundamental Mystery of the Mind

“Additionally, when scientists assume they have bypassed the hard problem by describing consciousness as an emergent property—that is, a complex phenomenon not predicted by the constituent parts—they are changing the subject. All emergent phenomena—like ant colonies, snowflakes, and waves—are still descriptions of matter and how it behaves as witnessed from the outside.6 What a collection of matter is like from the inside and whether or not there is an experience associated with it is something the term “emergence” doesn’t cover. Calling consciousness an emergent phenomenon doesn’t actually explain anything, because to the observer, matter is behaving as it always does. If some matter has experience and some doesn’t (and some emergent phenomena entail experience and some don’t), the concept of emergence as it is traditionally used in science simply doesn’t explain consciousness.”
― Annaka Harris, Conscious: A Brief Guide to the Fundamental Mystery of the Mind

“Why do certain configurations of matter cause that matter to light up with awareness”
― Annaka Harris, Conscious: A Brief Guide to the Fundamental Mystery of the Mind

“How could something appear out of nothing?3 Likewise, how does felt experience arise out of nonsentient matter?”
― Annaka Harris, Conscious: A Brief Guide to the Fundamental Mystery of the Mind

“Galen Strawson makes a similar point by turning the mystery of consciousness on its head. He argues that consciousness is in fact the only thing in the universe that is not a mystery—in the sense that it is the only thing we truly understand firsthand.”
― Annaka Harris, Conscious: A Brief Guide to the Fundamental Mystery of the Mind

“our subjective sense of time sits at the center of a perfect storm of unsolved scientific mysteries: consciousness, free will, relativity, quantum mechanics, and the nature of time.2”
― Annaka Harris, Conscious: A Brief Guide to the Fundamental Mystery of the Mind

“We're all hallucinating all the time; when we agree about our hallucinations, we call it "reality".”
― Anil Seth

“Human consciousness is just a tiny region in a vast space of possible consciousnesses.”
― Anil Seth

“It may seem as though the self—your self—is the “thing” that does the perceiving. But this is not how things are. The self is another perception, another controlled hallucination, though of a very special kind.”
― Anil Seth, Being You: A New Science of Consciousness

“We don’t perceive the world as it is, we perceive it as it is useful for us to do so.”
― Anil Seth, Being You: A New Science of Consciousness