There is a looming chasm between what your brain knows and what your mind is capable of accessing.
Our internal life and external actions are steered by biological coctails to which we have neither immediate access nor direct acquaintance.
Since we live in the heads of those who remember us, we lose control of our lives and become who they want us to be.
The conscious mind is not at the center of the action in the brain; instead, it is far out on a distant edge, hearing but whispers of the activity.
I always bounce my legs when I’m sitting.
There are an infinite number of boring things to do in science.
When we’re in a human body, we don’t care about universal collapse – instead, we care only about a meeting of the eyes, a glimpse of bare flesh, the caressing tones of a loved voice, joy, love, light, the orientation of a house plant, the shade of a paint stroke, the arrangement of hair.
I spent my adult life as a scientist, and science is, essentially, the most successful approach we have to try and understand the vast mysteries around.
What a life in science really teaches you is the vastness of our ignorance.
Love was not specified in the design of your brain; it is merely an endearing algorithm that freeloads on the leftover processing cycles.
Our reality depends on what our biology is up to.
Humans have discovered that they cannot stop Death, but at least they can spit in his drink.
All creation necessarily ends in this: Creators, powerless, fleeing from the things they have wrought.
I’m using the afterlife as a backdrop against which to explore the joys and complexities of being human – it turns out that it’s a great lens with which to understand what matters to us.
Among all the creatures of creation, the gods favor us: We are the only ones who can empathize with their problems.
Everything that creates itself upon the backs of smaller scales will by those same scales be consumed.
The missing crowds make you lonely. You begin to complain about all the people you could be meeting. But no one listens or sympathizes with you, because this is precisely what you chose when you were alive.
We believe we’re seeing the world just fine until it’s called to our attention that we’re not.
Evolve solutions; when you find a good one, don’t stop.
A mere 400 years after our fall from the center of the universe, we have experienced the fall from the center of ourselves.