Category: ideas

“We might owe disgust a great debt for our manners, morals and religion - and ultimately our laws, politics and government, as the latter three can be built only on the former. Evolution got the ball rolling by making our ancestors revolted by parasites and any behaviour that exposed them to infection; then culture took over and transformed people into super-cooperators willing to abide by shared codes of conduct.”

“This is the very essence of regret – we can only regret things we think we have control over. If we had no choice, no agency, if we were but tossed about on the tides of fate, there’d be nothing to regret. And so, regret ends up being the emotional price we pay for free will.”

“This new research finds that an unexpected event also appears to clear out what you were thinking. This function of the brain served an important role when humans could be confronted with danger and needed a fight or flight response, but today it has negative consequences.”

“It’s an instruction so vague as to be fundamentally unhelpful. And in the absence of any standard measure, we’re each left to our own devices to figure out what moderation actually means. Which isn’t really a great strategy.”

“The theory suggests that consciousness arises as a solution to one of the most fundamental problems facing any nervous system: Too much information constantly flows in to be fully processed. The brain evolved increasingly sophisticated mechanisms for deeply processing a few select signals at the expense of others, and … consciousness is the ultimate result of that evolutionary sequence.”

The secret, as it turns out, comes from improv.

“The party crowd, for once, holds all the power.”

“I admire the chutzpah,. … Today, urban development lacks ambition. But you look at some of the st’ff from the 1960s, and you think: ‘Even if it didn’t work, these people were really going to do something, weren’t they?’ There was massive ambition there.”

“What I tried to do was think about the present day using the criteria we use to think about, say, the 14th century because it doesn’t seem the same as the criteria we use for looking at the culture, you know, in a normal, sort of everyday way.”