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.
Even though the outside world has not changed, your brain dynamically presents different interpretations.
When you die, you are grieved by all the atoms of which you were composed. They hung together for years, whether in sheets of skin or communities of spleen. With your death they do not die. Instead, they part ways, moving off in their separate directions, mourning the loss of a special time they shared together, haunted by the feeling that they were once playing parts in something larger than themselves.
Instead of trying to produce a program to simulate the adult mind, why not rather try to produce one which simulates the child’s?” – Alan Turing, 1950.
This is what consciousness does: it sets the goals, and the rest of the system learns how to meet them.
You become who you are not because of what grows in your brain, but because of what is removed.
Social pain – such as that resulting from exclusion – activates the same brain regions as physical pain.
Why do we play our parts so earnestly? Why don’t we go on strike and blow the cover of the truth? One factor is the sincerity in the face of your lover: her life of unexpected reactive emotion, her heartfelt belief in chance and spontaneity. You’re slave to that gorgeous earnestness in her eyes, her engagement with a world of possibility.
And God consoles Himself with the thought that all creation necessarily ends in this: Creators, powerless, fleeing from the things they have wrought.
So not only is our perception of the world a construction that does not accurately represent the outside, but we additionally have the false impression of a full, rich picture when in fact we see only what we need to know, and no more.
Many of us like to believe that all adults possess the same capacity to make sound choices. It’s a nice idea, but it’s wrong.
Or that babies will mimic an adult sticking out her tongue, a feat requiring a sophisticated ability to translate vision into motor action.
We can’t help but simulate others, connect with others, care about others, because we’re hardwired to be social creatures.
People tend to love reflections of themselves in others.
Every four months your red blood cells are entirely replaced, for instance, and your skin cells are replaced every few weeks. Within about seven years every atom in your body will be replaced by other atoms. Physically, you are constantly a new you.
On the flip side, they found that negative psychological factors like loneliness, anxiety, depression, and proneness to psychological distress were related to more rapid cognitive decline. Positive traits like conscientiousness, purpose in life, and keeping busy were protective.
The enemy of memory isn’t time; it’s other memories. Each new event needs to establish new relationships among a finite number of neurons. The surprise is that a faded memory doesn’t seem faded to you. You feel, or at least assume, that the full picture is there.
The Babylonian Talmud contains a passage in the same spirit: “In came wine, out went a secret.” It later advises, “In three things is a man revealed: in his wine goblet, in his purse, and in his wrath.
Arthur C. Clarke was fond of pointing out that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
What is the position of your tongue in your mouth? Once you are asked the question you can answer it – but presumably you were not aware of the answer until you asked yourself. The brain generally does not need to know most things; it merely knows how to go out and retrieve the data. It computes on a need-to-know basis.
Brains are in the business of gathering information and steering behavior appropriately. It doesn’t matter whether consciousness is involved in the decision making. And most of the time, it’s not.