Category: ideas

“Their study is the first to show that our ability to remember what we touch is roughly on par with our ability to remember what we see — which should surprise anyone who assumes sight is the most reliable sense.”

“For a long time, we’ve had this preconception that life is here on Earth, but the universe is dead. But maybe we should be thinking of this as a living universe. We may be relative latecomers to the game.”

“Our race radar isn’t fixed. People subconsciously identify others more strongly by how they work together than by their skin colour.”

“How does our thinking leap beyond our existing knowledge to make new ideas? The answer is that we blend multiple ideas that are already in our minds, and these blends contain new ideas that didn’t exist before.”

“In two experiments, participants (74 Princeton undergraduates in the first, 85 adults recruited online in the second) looked at a series of 80 paintings and rated the artistic merit of each on a one-to-nine scale.”

“A new kind of obesity is now looming with our information, data, and media diet. We have only scratched the surface, but there is already way too much of information available, and it is way too tasty, too cheap, and too rich.”

“So, if the answer to the question of whether reading literature makes us more moral is so obviously ‘no’, why ask it in the first place? And why did so many people show up to the event to consider the question?” Paula M.L. Moya allows as how literature helps shape what we consider to be moral in the first place.

Louise Antony: “I say ‘there is no God’ with the same confidence I say ‘there are no ghosts’ or ‘there is no magic.’ The main issue is supernaturalism – I deny that there are beings or phenomena outside the scope of natural law. That’s not to say that I think everything is within the scope of human knowledge.”

Alain de Botton: “Beneath the rage, one senses a touching belief that the problems of the world are basically solvable, it’s just they aren’t being dealt with swiftly or decisively enough for the simple reason, to which every new day provides fresh testimony, that we are ruled by crooks and idiots. The relevant insights are there, just in the wrong hands.”

Because our thoughts and actions are the products of our brains, and because what our brains do is determined by the physical state of the world and the laws of physics—perhaps with a dash of quantum randomness in the mix—there seems to be no room for choice. As the author and neuroscientist Sam Harris has put it, we are “biochemical puppets.”